International Women's Day

This blip has cost me £1:50; there is no expense spared by this Lady to find a blip for International Women's Day. I would never have imagined 'The Scotsman' newspaper rebranding today's issue of its paper in celebration.

While we in the west have much to celebrate in equalising the genders over the last 100 years, the same cannot be said of the majority of the women in other cultures where they seem to be considered only as breeding machines with little or no autonomy, hidden behind all encompassing garb and only allowed out in the company of a male relation.

Although most of the hard work on behalf of the woman's lot was accomplished by brave suffragettes like Emily Pankhurst over a hundred years ago, things have improved immeasurably since I was a student, when women like me found it hard to get jobs in the scientific industry and certainly at a lower pay than the male students they had sat and studied with for 4 years, could not get mortgages in their own name, and were forced to resign from certain jobs when they got married.

Now many women in the west seem to have it all in every sense, fantastic jobs, husbands, families to look after and households to run as well. The majority of men have the jobs and the families but not necessarily the rest, and so perhaps we still have some way to go.
While celebrating what they have achieved, today's young women also seem to have unprecedented stress levels.