Skip to footer

International Women's Day: How it's celebrated around the globe

International Women's Day has served for more than a century as a day to honor the achievements of women globally. Here are some ways people are celebrating:

7. United States and Canada

  • By Whitney Eulich Staff writer

The Canadian government's theme for IWD this year is "Strong Women, Strong Canada." Many celebrations are focused on honoring women who live in rural communities. "In rural and remote areas, women make up approximately 45% of the labor force, but significant gaps still exist between women and men in labor force participation rates, employment rates and income," reads a statement on the government's Status of Women Canada website. Events in honor of IWD include speakers, networking opportunities, and a Tahitian dance performance. 

IWD is commemorated on the computer screens of people across the world as US-based Google honors women through its "Google Doodle." The logo, which shows up when using the Google search engine, incorporates the universal symbol for female as a stand in for the first G, and the use of the color violet visually echoes the official logo for Women's Day.

Progress Watch:

+ The proportion of women in the US Congress increased from 11 to 17 percent between 1997 and 2010.

– The pay gap between men and women is 23 percent in the US and 28 percent in Canada, according to UN Women. The gap is even larger for African American and Latina women in the US, between 39 and 48 percent.

7 of 7
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.