Women Life Style

Virada Somswasdi, women’s rights activist is amongst the first group of women from across the world to be honored in the US government’s first International Women of Courage Award.

Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State, inaugurated the award to give accolade to the world’s female leaders.

Associate Professor Virada was among 82 women selected by US embassies around the world.

US Ambassador Ralph Boyce handed the award to Virada, the founder of the Women’s Studies Centre at Chiang Mai University. She was commended for two decades of courage and leadership.

Virada is president of the Foundation on Women, Law and Rural Development, which she established in 2000 to promote the creation of organizations to provide legal training to women from rural areas and ethnic minorities.

Presently, she is campaigning to protect women’s rights under the new Thai constitution.

Her books include ‘With Hindsight’, ‘Heading Forward’ and ‘Domestic Violence against Women: Focusing on Masculinity and the Male Perpetrators’.

She has also helped establish the Lao-Thai scholarship program on gender and health equity.

She is involved with numerous bodies, including the Asia-Pacific Coalition against Trafficking in Women and she works to increase female participation in politics across the region.

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Annette Baillie, a woman who was called neurotic and nutter for self injury, decided to write a book to raise awareness on her own condition.

Self- injury is a state in which people repeatedly injure themselves to gain emotional release. It becomes like an addiction and when the pain is just too much one yearns for that short time of ease.

And thirty-nine year old Baillie has been going through this psychiatric system since she was 19.

Annette Baillie, who is now working for the charity Self Injury Support (SIS) said,

I started to self harm because I was going through a lot of emotional pain which I found difficult to cope with but also to express to others this pain.

I wanted release from the emotional pain so much that I thought I would substitute it with physical pain.

One night in September 2004 Annette overdosed on prescribed and over-the-counter medication and ended up in the A&E department (Emergency Department).

Baillie coped up with the problem and a week later she was in the same A&E Department giving presentation about the impact of self harm to the nurses that had treated her.

This time the feedback from those nurses was positive. Seeing Annette sitting in front of them as an equal forced them to think about their attitudes and remembering her when she was in distress.

Annette was called psycho, nutter but she didn’t bothered about such attention seeking names and coped up with the problem. Self-injury left many scars on her body for which she don’t regret as they are her battle scars and that scars only kept her alive.

Annette also has been given a grant by Cumbria Community Foundation to write a book which will bring together a collection of personal stories, experiences, poems and art work. Annette and her son is also setting up a website about self-injury.

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Guess what Ashley Judd is doing these days? Well, she’s busy doing some altruistic work in the streets of Mumbai, India.

Being an ambassador of Population Services International, a Washington-based nonprofit welfare group, she is on a week long tour in the nation to disseminate awareness regarding HIV/AIDS.

She said, the empowerment of girls and women is an essential tool to preventing the HIV-AIDS emergency from exploding any further. She further added helping women understand their rights is crucial in the fight against HIV-AIDS. She believes that grass root prevention programs target women folk well.

The actress has traveled across the globe to focus attention on AIDS.

With 5.7 million infections, India has the world’s largest number of people living with HIV-AIDS. Judd is of the view that the problem is pervasive and hence must be meted out with a common solution.

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Abbie Gerry, an eleven-year-old, has created an unprecedented impact in the world of motorsport after Susie Stoddart and Katherine Legge.

The St Bees sensation has become the proud owner of the most prestigious award available to a woman in British karting.

Recently, she was honored with the British Women Racing Drivers Club Kartsport Trophy in recognition of her achievements in 2006.

Abbie was Rowrah-based Cumbria Kart Club’s highest-placed club finisher in the 2006 British Cadet Championship, finishing runner-up in Super One and 11th overall in the British title race.

The award was conferred upon her by former F1 and World Sports Car driver David Brabham at the Rockingham Motor Speedway, in Northamptonshire.

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As we look across the globe, we find more and more women are joining the work force. There’s hardly any area left where they have not left an impact yet, they are continued to be considered less in status, job security, wages, and education.

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), the number of women participating in labour markets is at its highest point, and in 2006, 1.2 billion of the 2.9 billion workers in the world were women.

However, more women than ever before are unemployed, stuck in low productivity jobs in agriculture and services or receiving less money for doing the same jobs as men.

The report asserted that women must be given the chance to work themselves and their families out of poverty through creation of decent employment opportunities. Otherwise, the process of feminization of poverty will continue and be passed on to the next generation.

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In families, where both parents work, the brunt of familial responsibilities is carried by women folk only.

Hence, workplaces all across the globe need to develop flexible policies for working moms.

Recent survey by Elle/MSNBC.com revealed that out of 60,000 people, 15% assume that their female boss are incapable to give full hundred percent to their work because of their responsibilities towards their children while 7% consider that child care duties were interfering with their male bosses’ workday.

However, at times it becomes difficult for working moms to cope up with their errands, especially when it comes to parents teachers meeting or taking the kid to a doctor in the course of work obligations.

If a female boss takes a half-day leave to fulfill her childcare duties, she might create a problem amongst her employees, who may expect a similar flexibility.

Here, Hertz, a professor of sociology at Wellesley College, intervened and said that if ‘flexibility’ is offered to them, than singletons possibly will complain that they are being unfairly burdened with shifts that are more difficult.

Experts say employers are especially likely to accommodate working parents when they are in executive positions or work in industries where it is tough to recruit qualified workers.

Hey, won’t the situation change if one of the parents is out of this rat race competition. Hmm... will have to think about that!

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The British armed services will now allow Gurkha women to join the Gurkha battalions. The decision has come on March 8, the Intenational Women’s Day. Gurkha women will be recruited from 2009, army officials said.

They will serve as engineers, signallers, logisticians and medics as women in the rest of the army do.

Gurkhas have formed one of the valiant units in the British Army ever since they began to be recruited in early nineteenth century to serve as soldiers in the British Indian Army. They have seen action in various parts of the world, including places like Iraq and Cyprus.

These ethnic Nepalese fighters have fought many important wars in the past and significantly contributed to victory. Their legendary valour and resilience are greatly appreciated. It is said that a Gurkha with a Kukhri is unbeatable. Kukhri is the curved knife taditionally worn by Gurkhas as a part of their garment.

The Gurkha soldiers continued to serve the British Army even after the British left the Indian shores on India becoming independent in 1947.

But, there were some anomalies in their salaries and pensions in the British Army. They earned less in comparison to their British counter-parts. The present changes in the rules will end the disparity between Gurkhas and other British soldiers, though the Gurkha soldiers who retired before 1997 are not benefitted by the new rules.

Gurkhas will continue to be recruited in Nepal as usual and will remain Nepalese citizens. After five years of service they will be free to transfer to other branches of the armed forces. They will have the choice of returning to Nepal or settling in the UK on retirement. The Gurkhas in service have welcomed the new rules.

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March 8, marks, the International Women’s Day, a day that is celebrated each year particularly, is a time for asserting women’s political and social rights and for reviewing the progress made by women.

If we look around, we find there’s hardly any arena left where women have not made any unprecedented progress yet, their condition is deplorable.

8th March 2007 marks the 150-year anniversary of a garment factory workers’ strike in New York City the first recorded organized action by working women anywhere in the world. The women were campaigning for better working conditions and equal rights.

United Nations 2007 Theme

The United Nation’s theme for International Women’s Day 2007 is Ending Impunity for Violence Against Women and Girls. Despite the many leaps and bounds that many countries have made in stopping violence against women and girls, it still exists.

The evidence, worldwide, is chilling and not to be ignored or forgotten. This year, the United Nation’s theme for International Women’s Day is based on ending this violence.

If we take a quick look across the globe, we find:

1. Women going in for self-immolation in Afghanistan.

2. Growing practice of women executions by Shiite Militias in Iraq.

3. Sexual violence is mounting in Darfur.

4. Graph of domestic violence escalating in Korea.

5. No end to violence against women in Pakistan.

6. ‘Honor Killings’, a deep-seated tradition in Turkey.

7. Monster of domestic violence engulfing women in Mozambique.

8. Women stuck in the labyrinth of family violence in New Zealand.

9. Domestic abuse, silent killer of women in Vietnam.

10. Status of women in Taiwan is still grim.

11. Violence against women escalates, despite an end to war in Angola.

12. Violence against women plaguing Algeria.

13. Deplorable plight of women in Syria.

14. Domestic violence in South Asia, tolerating the intolerable.

15. Women abuse, a distressing sight in Maldives.

16. Women victims of violence in Rome.

17. Escalating graph of women abuse in Canada.

18. Discrimination persists in workplace, despite the ranks have changed for women in Japan.

Bottom line

Media discuss the issue continuously but has it really affected the target audience that is the question.

However, I can say that there is at least awareness of the problem and with awareness will come a higher sensitivity and less tolerance towards those who commit these kinds of crimes.

Various NGOs and organizations are committed to work for the cause at various national and international levels. We are hopeful that the numbers of women killed/abused will recede even more in the upcoming years.

Lately, astronaut Lisa Nowak has been fired from NASA, a month after she was charged with trying to kidnap a woman she regarded as her romantic rival for the affections of a space shuttle pilot.

Her dismissal did not reflect the space agency’s belief in her guilt or innocence instead the agency lacked an administrative system to handle the allegations.

Since, Nowak was a naval officer on assignment to NASA, rather than the organization’s civil servant so she would be returned to the military.

She would be assigned to the staff at the Chief of Naval Air Training in Corpus Christi, Texas, starting in two weeks. Navy Cmdr. Lydia Robertson said she didn’t know what specific job Nowak would be doing.

It was the first time NASA has publicly fired an astronaut and she being the first active astronaut to be charged with a felony.

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Valentina Tereshkova, who pioneers amongst the female astronauts celebrated her 70th birthday on Tuesday and asserted that she still dreams of flying to Mars - even on a one-way ticket. Hey that’s cool!

She earned name in history books by spending 71 hours in orbit in June 1963. She was then twenty-five years of age. Her trip to space on Soviet Vostok spacecraft was able to score propaganda points for the Soviet Union in its Cold War space rivalry with the United States.

She came from a very humble family her father was a minor peasant. Thus, her journey gave her wide acclaim and she became an idol for young Soviet women.

President Vladimir Putin invited her to his residence near Moscow to celebrate her birthday. And stated that her flight remained an inspiration for the resurgent Russia of today.

After the collapse of Soviet Union, she vanished from public life and presently heads an obscure international cooperation association under the auspices of the foreign ministry and takes part in private projects helping orphans.

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