International Women’s Day 2021 may have to be celebrated virtually this year but with its theme of Choose to Challenge it’s highlighting the many inequalities that the last year has shown still exist for women all around the world.
In Ireland too, though you may not always see it, there are many different experiences of being a woman. Here seven Irish women describe their experiences of being a woman in Ireland today.
Ola Mustapha
Ola Mustapha is an advocate and studying for an MA in Gender, Globalisation and Rights.
To be honest, I feel women should just be celebrated all day, all year, every time. I don’t set aside one day to celebrate women, I celebrate them every day, all year long. We do a lot of things. We should get credit for that.
As a woman living in Direct Provision I do have a different view of International Women’s Day. To be honest, I think the deliberate attempt to disenfranchise people and render them powerless such that they have no control over their lives, they have no control over how they embark on their journey in a foreign land, I think it puts you into this box where you are unsure if you actually want to be a part of this society, or if you made the right choice.
But I would also have had a different experience to other women who are in Direct Provision. It was easy for me to navigate my way around the system and break out of that. Other women wouldn’t have had that tenacity and that zeal to challenge these policies that puts them in shackles.
I just put it under this umbrella of this system is preparing me for life out there. That way, I’m able to convince myself that this is a temporary thing, but then it’s not so temporary anymore, because this is my seventh year in Direct Provision.
We keep pushing and showing the people who are in corridors of power that behind every ID number, there are real people whose lives are impacted by your policies. But I don’t think marginalised people should be doing the challenging.
I, as a Black person, shouldn’t be the one telling a white person how you should treat me. You should, as a human being, know how to treat a fellow human.
If we as women have to be the ones challenging and demanding our rights and our healthcare it makes you question if those in power are truly human, do they know how it feels to be in a vulnerable situation.
Ireland has this thing of saying that we are a progressive country, but I think Ireland is still the most conservative country you can ever think of. The change comes, but it only comes when all hell is let loose. The world is evolving, and I think as humans, we should evolve with what is going on around the world and not be stuck to how it used to be. Our children are watching.
I would say that from 2019 people have been getting more involved with the direct provision system and talking more about the Traveller community and talking more about disability. I came here 2014, and I used to feel that people just an attitude of it’s not my problem. Why should it be? Now people know, and they are now aware of all these things that is going on, and all the underline problems with this system.
What’s your favourite thing about being a woman?
Let me start with my kids. The fact that I can look into the eyes of these tiny humans and say I made these gorgeous, tiny little people and I’m responsible for their lives until they’re well able to take care of themselves.
The fact that I can stand up to the toxic masculinity that has been suffocating me all this while, and I can say to them, ‘no, intelligence and brains and whatever are not gender specific. I’m a woman, I can do whatever I like’. The fact that I can look at other women and identify with their pains and their struggles. Being a woman is like a sisterhood.
Kate McGrew
Kate McGrew is a sex worker, an artist and a director of Sex Workers Alliance Ireland (SWAI). She is working on a new show called WhoreCore that was programmed for Dublin Fringe 2020 and has a book coming out with Mercier Press later this year.
International Women’s Day means everything to me. I’m just constantly brainstorming on the really big questions, on what it is that women need to do strategically and tactically to not only improve our material existence in society but to really be able to recognise our agency and our empowerment, where it stands and where it lies. I feel like right now is a good time, there is space for women to be unapologetic about our decisions, our drives, and our desires.
Being a director of SWAI and being a sex worker is very much a woman’s rights issue. Part of that puzzle is that we have to acknowledge a couple of things about the sex industry. One of them is that there were a lot of men working in the sex industry. We need to recognise that the way that we frame the matter of sex work around women and what is right for women, can move into a space that is infantilising and paternalistic towards women. Because often we’re making difficult decisions for ourselves. What that means is that we’re sort of saying, ‘Oh the men can take care of themselves, but the women can’t’.
Women do have the strength to do the work, to make great change. I think that is really needed at this time because there is a lot of understandable processing of what it has been like to be a woman forever that is really touching on the reality of us having been oppressed and victimized. But it would be helpful for us to move past perceiving gender equality as a war. As much as #menaretrash is fine, it’s really not serious or practical or effective, it’s obstructive.
I think things are better now than they have been, but I am concerned about the inability to recognise that things are better.
Again, I think that’s a key thing that’s missing in this moment that can push us out of the space of only being the victims and always being on the back foot. It was interesting when we won Repeal. Everybody had just had Pluralistic Ignorance, as in, before the Referendum, it seemed everyone quietly thought they might be alone in thinking Repeal might be good, but then when the vote happened, it revealed that many, many people were thinking that! I
think - to a degree - it is the same with sex work, that more people than we realise think sex workers should be able to get on with their lives and be safe.
Young feminists, particularly, they understand absolutely that the sex worker rights issue is a workers' rights issue, it’s a labour issue.
What’s your favourite thing about being a woman?
My favourite part about being a woman is that I think it’s this sneaky secret that men act like they run the world, but women really do. I kind of enjoy that role, I have to admit.
Aoife Martin
Aoife Martin is a trans woman and activist and writes a column for TheJournal.ie.
Funnily enough, International Women’s Day is actually the anniversary of when I first came out to some of my friends. That was entirely by accident, I didn’t plan it that way. So, in one sense, it’s a memorable anniversary but in another sense, I think it’s an occasion to mark.
It’s important to recognise women for everything they do and everything that they’ve been through, especially in this country. I know we’ve come a long way in the last few years, but we still have a long way to go when you look at the mother and baby homes and how women and girls have been treated here since the foundation of the state. Women still aren’t equal and there are plenty of places around the world where they’re not equal at all. I think it’s important to recognise that and to mark it.
It’s important to me in that I feel included in International Women’s Day. Anytime people Tweet me and wish me Happy International Women’s Day, that’s nice. It’s nice to feel yourself included and to feel part of that. I feel privileged to be included.
I think things have improved in the last ten years in this country - obviously with Repeal the Eighth and with marriage equality and it has improved for LGBTQ+ women too. I think social media is a great leveller and it’s given women a voice where they never had one before.
It’s allowed them to connect with people who come from similar backgrounds and who come from similar political and social persuasions. People are much, much more aware of the inequalities in the system. We talk about manels all the time, people now say ‘hold on a second, why aren’t there more women on this panel; why are there five men and one woman or all men and no women?’ People are starting to notice the inequalities and comment more.
But it is usually women calling inequality out. It’s usually women who have to shout the loudest. I think it’s always people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and from minority, and diverse backgrounds who have to shout to be heard in this society. We all have our own privileges, we have white privilege or cis privilege, or whatever privilege we have and I think we need to recognise that and use our voices to speak for those who don’t have the same privileges that we have.
Being a trans woman has given me a voice where I never had a voice before. Prior to transitioning I would never have dreamed of being on a panel or even being included in this piece or all the things I’ve done since I transitioned. It has given me that voice.
What’s your favourite thing about being a woman?
The best thing about being a woman is the friendship of other women. By a long shot, the people who have supported me most are cis women. They have listened to me and supported me and defended me. I feel blessed.
Pamela Connolly
Pamela Connolly is the vocalist and bassist of the band Pillow Queens.
I think International Women’s Day is one of those things that has to be given a day so people can stop and think, whereas really it should be every day. I think it’s an honour to be able to appreciate, not just the people who have made gigantic strides in terms of how women have excelled over the years, but the women who are just doing the true gritty work - the carers, the nurses, the doctors, the cleaners. They’re the people that should be appreciated every day.
I’d say, obviously, there are things that all women take on, but I guess my experience as a queer woman would be different to the experience of a Black woman, or an upper-middle-class woman, and it’s those kind of differences and these experiences that I think maybe International Women’s Day should make the effort to highlight.
In our industry, we’re considered perhaps a niche act because we are all queer women, but while we really do embrace it and we’re quite proud of it, as we go on, we’re making sure that we’re considered for the masses, we’re not just for queer women. We’re for Joe down the road.
The music industry has improved so much, actually it’s not really the industry itself that has changed, just the acts within it.
Going through my Spotify or when I think of the other musicians I interact with, the majority of them are women. There’s this huge groundswell of women, and queer women, in the Irish music industry that are doing so well.
Now, I wouldn’t say that it’s been wholly embraced. You look at the statistics when it comes to non-male Irish acts on radio and it’s absolutely shameful.
It’s mad when you think about the talent that is coming out of the country at the moment in such a vast field of music. As a more alternative rock band, we don’t expect to be played on the more poppy stations, but we have amazing pop musicians that aren’t male in this country and they’re just not getting the play that they deserve, and not being able to reach out to the audiences will absolutely fall in love with them, given the chance.
Radio, for some reason is static when it comes to that change. I don’t really understand why because everything else is changing around them. They’re going to be left behind.
What’s your favourite thing about being a woman?
It’s a small thing but you know when you go into the bathroom on a night out? As you get older, making friends is the hardest thing in the world and then you go to a bathroom for like five minutes and suddenly you’re gushing your life story to someone you’ve just met and you probably have nothing in common with. You say ‘I’ll be back in 10 minutes with a pint of water, you’ll be fine. What’s your name again?’ It’s a small thing but I’d say that would be a tiny highlight.
Rosemarie Maughan
Rosemarie Maughan is a Mincéir Beoir and the national Traveller accommodation policy officer with the Irish Travellers Movement.
I suppose for me International Women’s Day brings attention to the fact that as women we’re still struggling as women for our rights, whether it’s for equal pay or our right to be in the politics, and to draw attention to gender inequalities that we have within our country.
I suppose that also, it’s a bit frustrating for me to talk as a woman as well because sometimes it just brings more attention to my books about the hierarchy of woman’s rights within Ireland. We hear a lot about it in the mainstream media about the gender gap in pay, the lack of women participation within politics, but if you take a step back further and break that down, where are the black women in politics?
Break it down even further, then where are the Traveller women within politics? We’re so blessed that Eileen Flynn is the first Minceir Beoir senator, but that had to come about from a nomination, and if that nomination didn’t come forth then we wouldn’t have a Traveller woman senator.
As a Traveller woman I would see the Choose to Challenge theme in a different way to other people.
I think we must choose to challenge women in the general population for not including us within feminist spaces, for not bringing our voice to the forefront.
I think it’s so important that women who have privilege, that have water, who have a home, who have their culture recognized and respected, who have an education, who have employment, that you don’t forget the most vulnerable women within your society. If you look at Irish Travellers, only 1% of us make it to third-level education.
That’s a striking statistic. If you look at our life expectancy, we die 12 years younger than our settler counterparts and only 3% of us make it to the age of 65.
It’s like myself as a human rights activist. I don’t just try to bring other Travellers along with me, I try to bring other oppressed women or men that are from maybe the Black community, the Muslim community, the disability community, artistic community. We’re trying to adjust this fight in all fights. We need to fight it together and if one woman is losing, all women are losing, that’s the way I see it.
What’s your favourite thing about being a woman?
I think that I’ve been blessed with the gift of being a mother. I’ve given birth to my two beautiful children and am raising them to be people that will be part of the change within our country and the world, being accepted for their diversity and spreading love rather than hate. I’m also blessed as well that I was born a Traveller woman because it gives me a real insight.
Some people might see it as a negative coming from an oppressed community, but it’s really given me an insight and the education of a lifetime. It’s given me empathy and a passion for human rights in a broader sense. It’s actually my lived experience that shaped me to be the human right activist that I am and I’m not quite sure if that would have happened if I was born a settled woman.
Hazel Chu
Hazel Chu is Lord Mayor of Dublin and Chairperson of the Green Party
For me International Women’s Day means community. I didn’t get involved in IWD or even know a lot about it until I started talking to a lot of women who were involved. I see it as a time where we need to highlight the inequalities, how we’re progressing with them and how we’re making things better.
I’ve had a lot of abuse and I guess I was slightly naïve or hopeful that it would only be online. When I got my first phone call of someone breathing down the phone at me in a murky manner I was there with my child, with my baby in the corner, going, ‘what the hell?. Then they called again, and they called again. It was five times in a row before I called the guards. You have a feeling of not being secure. That’s what a lot of women feel.
I don’t think we should separate the abuse from International Women’s Day. I think it’s something to be highlighted. There’s the celebration element of it all, where we honour the amazing women that keep things going every day - the retail staff, the frontline workers and the carers. It hasn’t escaped anyone’s attention that women get stuck with the majority of caring and now during a pandemic, it’s more obvious.
We do need to celebrate those things, but we also need to highlight that there’s a lot of shittiness going on. Be it misogyny, be it racial discrimination and not least domestic violence. I think International Women’s Day should also be about supporting and protecting the vulnerable within the community of women.
As mum to a little girl, I go through phases of being hopeful for her future.
There are times I look at her and I’m just delighted that there is a whole range of really great inspirational role models in Ireland that she can look up to and that she can go, ‘right, I can do anything.’ Then sometimes, I look at her at night and cry when she’s asleep.
Oh God, that sounds depressing, but particularly on days where things have been bad here or something has happened in terms of the abuse and I’ll get a bit teary because I worry that if I’m getting this shit so bad now, what will happen to her in 10 years’ time. Will she look in the mirror like I did and think ‘I wish I wasn’t yellow. I wish I looked the same as everyone’? There’s a lot of things people can change about themselves. Being coloured is sadly not one of them. It took me a while to learn that lesson when I was younger. It took me a good long time to understand that differences are to be celebrated.
What is your favourite thing about being a woman?
Shoes! Is that bad? I’m not associating women directly with just shoes, but that was the first thought that came into my head. When I used to work two jobs, I would always buy shoes, and sometimes I didn’t even have anywhere fancy to wear them. Now I’m just attached to my red Reebok runners because that’s what I wear all them all the time.
Louise Bruton
Louise Bruton is a journalist and DJ
More often than not, I find that International Women’s Day is when women are mostly invited to speak. I personally get more invited to speak on panels when it comes to Diversity Week or Women’s Week, but in recent years I’ve been saying no a lot because I think it has become commercialised in quite a bad way.
A lot of the attention that you get in the run-up to the day, you just don’t get that the rest of the year. I wish there was a way to kind of shake people into realising this. Have a nice little uprising or something.
It happens in exactly the same way that the commercialisation of Pride does, where a lot of money is put into tat. There’ll be ridiculous feather boas from Tesco or that kind of thing. I think that that’s what’s happening with International Women’s Day, where you might see a lot of brands hopping onto it, putting a lot of money into PR packages, and you think, that money could actually be spent better by maybe increasing the fee of the women that you’ve invited to speak, because a lot of the time you’ll be told there’s no budget. Very big eye roll there. Maybe you should be using that money to actually increase diversity all year round rather than investing it in tat.
If I am brought on these panels, it’s to speak about disability and about having a wheelchair, but my work is pop culture and music. People are just looking at the obvious thing, but once you look at the bigger picture, it’s that I am a music journalist.
I think there’s a huge problem in Irish feminism with intersectionality. That does rear its head annually with International Women’s Day, where you can see very good-intentioned people trying to fill this diverse panel, but they find they are struggling to find the names because it’s not on their minds the rest of the year.
In the last year or two in Ireland we have been doing a better job at addressing this problem but I think a lot of the people who are leading the charge need to pick up the pace because younger people are so much more aware of equality.
There has definitely been an improvement for women in recent years. When you look at things broadly you think, yes, we’ve achieved a lot. Women can be CEOs, but then when you go down person-to-person, I think that this is where the problem is. Personal responsibility and one-on-one interactions can often be dismissed. Again, that brings it back to the tokenism. I think that’s why it has been very difficult for a lot of women in Ireland to accept that they’re not doing all that they can in terms of inviting more people to sit at the table with them.
What’s your favourite thing about being a woman?
I think the way things have developed lately is that there is no specific way to play being a woman.
That’s quite nice, and that is something that needs to creep into mainstream media, so there isn’t just one definitive type of womanhood shown. You know it is possible that women can like arts and culture and music, and it is possible that women are into tech and women are into sport.
A lot of the time I think that a lot of women’s media does veer towards the more traditional form of women like fashion, beauty and Kate Middleton. That’s what I like about it, that we are breaking away from that stereotype but, again, a lot of other people have to catch up to that.
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