Martin Luther King said that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Likewise, inequality, in any of its manifestations, is a threat to equality as the supreme value among the rights of the human being, manifested where it manifests itself.
On March 8, we continue to commemorate Women’s Day throughout the world because inequalities between men and women remain throughout the world, and gender gaps continue to show that the progress that has been made is insufficient or, at least, is paving the way with an exasperating slowness.
In our environment, the measures promoted by the Government of Spain in recent years, especially in economic and social matters such as the increase of the interprofessional minimum wage, labor reform or the minimum vital income, have mainly benefited women.
This confirms that the gap is still great and much remains to be done to achieve real and effective equality between women and men in terms of employment, care, glass ceilings, access to the labour market, entrepreneurship, parity in decision-making, salaries or visibility in the world of culture and science.
In our land, in Castilla-La Mancha, many women suffer, in addition, double discrimination due to their status as women and the challenges they face in the rural world, strongly masculinized, with depopulation as one of the main threats.
The Government of Spain is facing all these challenges, but there are those who intend to return to the past and reverse the conquests of the feminist struggle. There are those who even deny gender violence - the most abject manifestation of inequality - and try to break the consensus that has cost us so much. They are far-right political actors who have come to the institutions through electoral pacts and who have the capacity for management and decision-making, jeopardising the progress made in recent years and thereby removing the very foundations of our democracy. Before them we will always be those who have a firm democratic conviction based on equality, freedom and social justice.
“The extension of women’s rights is the basic principle of all social progress,” writes Charles Fourier. This is what feminism and the struggle of the 8M that we are commemorating today consists of, in an inclusive, dynamic, progressive and transformative movement. And that is why I consider myself a feminist, because in its agenda is the achievement of a society where men and women have the same opportunities to develop our life project, our professional goals, our personal desires and our capacities and skills in a context of freedom and tolerance, without guardianship, without discrimination.
Live on March 8th!
Live the fight for equality!
Miracles Tolón Jaime
Delegate of the Government of Spain in Castilla-La Mancha