2023
March
08
Wednesday

Monitor Daily Podcast

March 08, 2023
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Sara Miller Llana
Americas Bureau Chief

Spanish feminism was one of the first stories I covered for the Monitor as a foreign reporter. I will never forget what one leader told me then, 20 years ago: that while most Western women had been gaining ground in the women’s liberation movement, Spanish women had been living under dictatorship, so they were now in overdrive and, in her view, had “sprinted ahead” of their peers. I returned to that thought when, in my small world, I was seeing my friends from home start to have babies and leave careers, while the Spanish friends I was making (including my future husband) were not dreaming of anything but a two-career household. Were Spanish women more “feminist”?   

As a foreign correspondent, you do tend to notice the differences between your own culture and that of other places first. And the Monitor has reported on the many gains for women globally, from universal preschool in France (when I was a Paris-based correspondent, my husband and I were happy participants) to protections for murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada, to protests against femicides in Latin America. 

But having had the privilege of interviewing women in over 40 countries throughout my career, I also have started to more profoundly understand how much common ground we share, even as we live under vastly different systems. That was clear covering the fallout from the #MeToo movement around the world in 2017 and 2018. And hard-fought legal achievements can be quickly lost at any point in time for anyone. That was never clearer to me than last year when I was the lead reporter for a piece, based on the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, on the history of global feminist movements and reproductive rights.   

On this International Women’s Day, the protests taking place in repressive regimes around the globe might seem far away and foreign to most. But women today fighting to defy a dress code, to speak their minds, or to protest a war are essentially fighting for the same things all women want: equality, justice, freedom, and safety in every sense.   

These are the shared values we aim to express in our Monitor coverage.


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Today's stories

And why we wrote them

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor
A company of Ukrainian tanks, hidden in a forest in a stand-by position, includes many captured Russian models like this "trophy" T-80, in the Donetsk region of the Donbas, Ukraine, Feb. 21, 2023. Ukrainian forces have largely fended off attempted Russian advances throughout the winter, while they wait for promised Western-made tanks and other military equipment.

What does it take to win a war? In a tour of Ukraine’s eastern front after a year of conflict, fighters say they still have determination and hope. What they need is more and better weapons.

In the battle for Latino political loyalties, liberals are trying to catch up with conservatives in using talk radio to influence voters – and to counter what they are calling a problematic rise in “misinformation.”

Commentary

Eli Ade/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures
Michael B. Jordan stars as Adonis Creed in "Creed III." Our columnist suggests that the film is more than a movie about two Black men fighting each other.

“Creed III” is more than a movie about two Black men tirelessly fighting each other. It offers a deeper, and deeply needed, view of manhood.

Essay

Mark Humphrey/AP/File
Birds, including a bright red male cardinal, gather at a feeder in Nashville, Tennessee, in winter. Birds may come to depend on a human-provided source of food.

Surviving winter can feel like a solitary affair. But our essayist finds delight in maintaining his bird feeder. On one frigid day, the chore proves unexpectedly life-giving.


The Monitor's View

In a few weeks, Japanese companies will start disclosing their wage and salary levels under a new law designed to reduce a gender pay gap of 22%. The law is one of several taking effect this year around the globe in response to a stall in achieving pay equality. Yet despite the slow progress, a mental and cultural shift may be happening anyway, hastening equality in the workplace more than shaming or cajoling might.

In much of the corporate world, leadership has become less about biological sex and more about a blending of qualities associated with masculine or feminine. This shift presumes all individuals have a capacity to express such qualities.

“It is vital to balance masculine and feminine leadership styles within organizations,” notes Christophe Martinot, a Barcelona-based leadership consultant with Seeding Energy. “The idea of Feminine Leadership is not intended to create a binary opposition between men and women,” but to recognize that masculine and feminine qualities are not a matter of biology.

That idea is embedded in an observation in The Economist’s latest glass-ceiling index, an annual survey of women in the workplace published Monday. It found that “where fathers take parental leave, mothers tend to return to the labour market, female empowerment is higher and the earnings gap between men and women is lower.”

Such role reversals were hard to imagine in even the most progressive societies a generation ago. Now they yield quantifiable benefits. According to a survey of 163 multinational companies over a 13-year period, Harvard Business Review found that “firms with more women in senior positions are more profitable, more socially responsible, and provide safer, higher-quality customer experiences.”

A study by the business schools at Columbia, Stanford, and Duke universities found that “when women are in power, there is no longer a semantic tradeoff between likeability and strong leadership – shattering the myth that women can’t be both capable and kind.” “Breaking down gender norms,” the study observed, “increased women’s confidence and advancement into positions of power.”

It is unclear if laws compelling wage transparency will result in more equitable work employment between men and women. That uplift already rests on an active recognition that talent and worth are neither defined nor limited by physical identity.


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

As we commemorate International Women’s Day, we can support the ongoing progress toward gender equality by understanding each person’s full expression of both masculine and feminine qualities, given and maintained by God.


Viewfinder

Sunday Alamba/AP
Women attend an International Women's Day celebration at the Mobolaji Johnson Arena in Lagos, Nigeria, March 8, 2023. The color purple, associated with the day, represents dignity and justice. The first International Women's Day was held in 1911 in Europe. The United Nations recognized the day, which now spans the globe, in 1975 and became its central sponsor.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thanks for joining us. Please come back tomorrow, when we’ll have an in-depth report from Texas, where rural residents are both deeply conservative and committed to their public schools. What will happen as school choice expands in the state?

More issues

2023
March
08
Wednesday
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