A Man Who's Worth Celebrating On Women's Day

March 8 is International Women's Day and it's celebrated worldwide to highlight women's achievements, battles, rights, and equality. And here in the Pacific, celebrations are also being planned to mark the day.

The Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), in conjunction with the Commonwealth Secretariat, is organising a series of conferences on the theme Women and HIV/AIDS. These are being hosted by Fiji.

But should we be celebrating?

Perhaps this is an opportune time to question our governments about their commitments to Pacific women. Have we made progress since the 1995 Beijing United Nations Global Conference on Women?

How much progress have Pacific Islands governments made towards gender equality or empowering women? How many governments have ratified CEDAW (Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women)? CEDAW is a global United Nations action plan.

How many countries in the Pacific have women as presidents or prime ministers? How many women are in parliament? How many women are chief executives in the private or public sectors? And how many women serve on management boards?

These are interesting questions. It will be interesting to see the responses from the various governments throughout the region. Is the commitment to women's equality just lip service?

A check with the women's bureau at the SPC about how much progress has been made since the Beijing meeting was quite interesting.

It recognised that "very little has been achieved", although "some progress (not to the extent it had hoped)" has been made.

Activist Koila Costello also agrees. "Very little has been achieved," she said. "In fact it has been a struggle to achieve this little progress." She attributed the extremely slow progress to a number of factors. These include governments' lack of commitment.

Two particular areas were identified by the SPC women's bureau where some progress had been made. One involves the setting up of national women machineries such as the ministries or departments of women; and secondly the putting in place of policies in relation to women.

But the litmus test will be to see whether these ministries and departments are given the resources‹human and financial‹to be able to implement programmes. In some countries, national offices are one-band armies without adequate resources. And what does this say about governments' commitment to women?

Just take a look at the UN Millennium Development Goals. Promoting gender equality and empowering women has again featured as one of eight goals identified by the UN Millennium Summit in 2000. This continued emphasis can only mean that this issue has not been adequately addressed.

So should we then be celebrating? Activist Costello says the celebration should go on but it should act as a wake-up call and reminder to people about the role of women (comprising some 50% of the population). That it must be elevated. "We can't keep going on as usual. We need to push for better conditions for women. We need to mainstream women's issues...that women's issues is everyone's business and not just the ministry of women's sole responsibility."

Perhaps, we could take a leaf from the Solomon Islands. There, police minister Michael Maina has issued an instruction to his police chief to ensure a 50% female/50% male recruitment drive beginning this year. His target: He wants half of his 1200-member police force to be comprised of women.

He's also doing the same to the national air carrier Solomon Airlines, where he is the chairperson and acting CEO. He is providing women in the company the necessary training to get to the top.

He says: "It might be difficult, but we're starting it. It's not lip service. We're serious about it and we're working on providing women with the necessary training and skills to get them into management positions. Women are better workers and reliable."

Now that is the sort of approach for women to celebrate this March 8th.