Politics

Rallies, races held across east Asia to demand women’s rights

Bangkok/Tokyo/Hong Kong, Mar 8 (EFE).- Women’s Day was marked across east Asia with rallies, runs, and other events on Friday.

In Bangkok, hundreds of women demonstrated in the historic center of the city to call for better labor protection and to double maternity leave to six months, a proposal that was debated the day before in Parliament.

In the streets of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, thousands of people wearing pink T-shirts took part in a 10-kilometer run to show their support for women’s rights.

“The government has set the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls as a priority,” Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet said in a speech Thursday night.

Other capital cities in southeast Asia, including Jakarta, Manila and Hanoi, also held rallies, where demonstrators called for changes in laws to increase protection for female victims of gender-based violence.

“Today’s women can wait no longer. Violence against them must end now,” the Philippine Commission on Women stressed in a statement.

Meanwhile, social media accounts in Myanmar – which has been plunged into chaos since the 2021 military coup – splashed purple across their profiles in a campaign to denounce “sexual harassment, exploitation and gender-based violence,” while the National Unity Government (NUG), the pro-democracy opposition and government in exile, celebrated the women fighting against the military regime.

Pink was chosen for a metro stop in New Delhi, the Indian capital,to pay tribute to the women who work for the country’s railway services.

In Japan, although in recent years Women’s Day has had a smaller following than in other countries, several demonstrations were organized on Friday. In Tokyo, the Women’s March was called to show “opposition to gender discrimination and violence”.

Japan ranks 125th out of 146 countries in the latest gender gap report of the World Economic Forum, being one of the worst rated in Asia, along with Myanmar, due to the lack of laws protecting equal pay and punishing sexual harassment in the workplace.

The event went relatively unnoticed in China, where the official press largely ignored it.

Any space dedicated to the subject was in less than encouraging terms, with the ‘China Daily’ reporting how “women transform their lives through physical exercise”.

Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, one of the region’s financial hubs, the stock exchange operator appointed its first female chief executive, Bonnie Chan, a significant step in promoting gender equality in industry leadership positions. EFE

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