Many women in China will have a half-day off of work in honor of IWD, and some employers even shower their female employees with gifts, according to CNN. In Indonesia, one local organizer is sharing a song she wrote called Lebih dari Berlian, or More than a Diamond, which celebrates Indonesian women. The idea is to have young students learn the song, and sing it together every March 8 and April 21, the date of Indonesia’s Women’s Day.
In Fiji, women’s rights organizations are bringing together young girls to talk about the importance of strong female characters in popular culture and fiction. The University of Canterbury in New Zealand, meanwhile, will host a breadth of panel discussions, open to the public, on women in the media, politics, and business to honor the date.
Progress Watch:
+ According to UN Women, nearly 20 countries and territories in the region have passed laws prohibiting domestic violence.
– More than 80 percent of women in Asia Pacific are employed in “vulnerable jobs,” like unregulated, home-based work, and the UN estimates this can cost the region close to $89 billion annually.
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.
