It is, by now, an almost sad tradition to draw attention to Equal Pay Day every year. Since 2008, it has marked the day in the new calendar year until which women would have to work in order to earn as much as men in the same occupations did in the previous year. This year, Equal Pay Day fell on 7 March – and thus immediately before International Women’s Day, which, having been made a public holiday (in Berlin), has become an even more tempting opportunity to replace emancipatory actions with symbolic gestures.
There is something so bitter and cynical about these symbolic gestures.
Not only do women earn on average 18 percent less than men, but at the height of the Covid crisis, it was predominantly women who had to reduce their working hours to be able to look after children and those in need of care. Over the last few days, I have often wondered about the men who weeks ago infantilised a politician like Annalena Baerbock as a kind of teacher’s pet, only to suddenly praise her as a hero following her UN speech – how do these men treat their own wives in private?
Nowhere else is the private so political as when it comes to women’s issues. Perhaps that’s why a dictator like Putin allowed himself to be photographed with stewardesses from the Russian airline Aeroflot a few days before Women’s Day? Did you know that 18 days before his election as Russian president in 2000, dictator Putin made a point of visiting a weaving mill on International Women’s Day to hand red carnations to the hard-working female labourers in a flurry of camera flashes? It is still possible to win elections with such hollow symbols. Or at least generate nice pictures.
And today, too, someone will congratulate us. What are they actually congratulating us on? On women’s fight for equality and the successes we have achieved so far? On being a woman in itself? For what women contribute to society? Could the many hands being held out to us today perhaps do something, instead of just shaking ours?Yet, for a moment, I will be glad about it, too. Simply so that I can forget, at least for a moment, that I still come second in humanity, simply because I am a woman.
