International day of women - women in our society

            As said in the original post, on the 8^th of March of every year we celebrate worldwide the International Women’s Day. These celebrations are expressed in different ways: some celebrate the respect, appreciation and love towards women, men express their love for women and others celebrate women’s economic, political and social achievements.

            The general assumption states that women are naturally passive, while men are naturally active. In our opinion, full human equality can only be achieved when men and women agree that those attitudes (passive and active) are appropriated for either of them.

            Like this, we can conclude that it is very important to educate ourselves as to the basic gender differences which exist between men and women and acknowledge that the differences exist. This way, we should use our differences to improve our relationship rather than to damage it. These cognitive differences should be recognized as long as we continue to make an effort to conserve and protect feminism and equality between the genders in the process.

            Many people question themselves why is there a global day of the women and not a global day of the men, due to the fact that on the human rights law we find the equality of race, gender, religion, sexual choice. However, in our opinion, we must look at this day by another perspective - there are profound reasons based on cultural issues that backup the existence of this day.

            In the Bible, the book considered blessed by most of the world population, we talk about God - powerful, unique, omnipotent and omnipresent - as being male. Jesus, the only son of God, is also a man, just as the first human created by God was Adam and was also male (Eve was made from one of Adam's rib). Popes, bishops and priests are always men, as well as the disciples were. Physically a man has by nature more physical potential, and it can’t be disproved scientifically, thus unwittingly giving men power in ancient societies in which the intellectual was much less important than today, and was therefore also considered the most capable and strongest to be the boss/leader of a group.

            In the animal life, for example, males of most species tend to be larger and are more able-bodied than females. Therefore when in flocks the leaders are the "strongest" males of the group. With this we mean that the superiority of men over women has always been part of the culture of most societies almost always. However, especially in the West some changes have been noticed in the practice of this ideal. Women have been gaining freedom, and therefore more opportunities to show their capabilities and limitations, that were blocked previously. It is with the incentive to promote opening opportunities to women that we believe that world women's day is important to exist.

            Currently, women have different rights depending on the region of the globe they are located in. In a Western perspective, the modern women have an active professional life, without letting the domestic life become passive. We agree with teacher Jorge when he says that men and women should be partners, both professionally and at home; this way, a woman can devote more time to her profession and rise to new heights in her career. In the Eastern perspective, women aren’t free and don’t have the same rights as men – they are professionally very limited and are "forced" to devote all their time to their domestic life, stressing that men don’t share their time with this activity. In the second perspective, women and men are not equal in terms of rights, duties and employment opportunities.

            In the recent decades, with the admission of young women in universities, women have manifested themselves better than the men at the academic level, which allows us to deduce that they are who will occupy the most important positions in the future society. It’s now that the woman may be expressed at a professional level.

            Today, in our day-to-day as Portuguese citizens, we've had women in senior positions. Our own school is an example of that, where the highest position is the executive director of the county and it is occupied by a woman. Us as students deal almost daily with male and female teachers - and according to our personal experience we could not discern any differences professionally and socially between teachers of different genders.  Hence we can conclude that perhaps sex has nothing to do with professionalism in a profession of intellectual character.

Comment created and posted by:

Inês Vieira

José Freitas

Tiago Rosado