Women are invited to meet on the Dr. Arnaldo Avenue Bridge in Sao Paola, Brazil, this year, as part of a global effort, fittingly called “Join Me on the Bridge,” to bring women and men together to call for peace and equality. Last year, 75,000 people stood on 464 bridges in 70 countries, according to the organizer’s website.
Almost 60 percent of high-skilled jobs in Jamaica are held by women, according to the British newspaper The Independent on Sunday. This includes positions in politics and business, and makes Jamaica home of the highest women-to-high-skilled-job ratio. One women’s rights activist plans to hand out cards and candy to women in the workplace in Jamaica to honor IWD and women’s achievements in her country.
In Mexico – where scores of journalists have been killed since 1992, and five journalists were murdered in 2011 alone, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists – an international literary organization is leading an effort to raise awareness of the risks women writers face in the region. Efforts include writing Mexican authorities and assembling obituaries of female writers who were killed in Mexico.
Progress Watch:
+ Some 53 percent of women in the region are active labor force participants.
– The gender pay gap in Latin America and the Caribbean, largely in synch with global trends, results in females receiving up to 40 percent less in compensation than males.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
