Choosing to challenge for International Women's Day

To celebrate today's The Irish Examiner's virtual International Women's Day 2021 event, Esther N McCarthy finds out what the theme of #choosetochallenge means to these Irish Examiner writers - and to our very special guest speaker, Vicky Phelan

Vicky Phelan will be joining the virtual audience at the Irish Examiner IWD 2021 event on March 8 from Maryland, USA, where she is receiving pioneering treatment. She continues to speak out on behalf of women with cervical cancer. Photo: Cathal Noonan

Vicky Phelan is a campaigner and activist. In April 2018, she stood outside the Four Courts and addressed the Irish public about the Cervical Check system, exposing the medical and political scandal of our times. She is currently undergoing pioneering treatment for her cancer in Maryland, USA. She is mum to Amelia and Darragh.

"We only get one life. One thing that Covid has taught us is the importance of life and how fragile it really is. An invisible airborne virus has stopped the world in its tracks and has forced many of us to ask ourselves some questions about what is really important.

Women can choose to challenge themselves by believing in themselves more and STOP comparing themselves to whoever it is they feel inadequate beside. There's always one! None of us know what goes on behind closed doors and just because Mary down the road looks like she has it all - the perfect figure, the great job, the high-achieving kids - none of us know what Mary's life is really like. So stop comparing yourself to other seemingly perfect women. Focus instead on YOU and challenge yourself every day. At work, for example, speak up at the next meeting, introduce an idea that you have been too frightened to share. What's the worst that can happen? Your boss/team won't like it. So what!

Choose to challenge the way you bring up your kids. Are you encouraging your daughter to think about careers in female-dominated careers like teaching or nursing? Don't hem in your children. How much sport is your daughter doing compared to your son? When girls do play sport, the numbers drop as soon as girls hit puberty. Why? We need to normalise periods, not only for our girls, but for boys too. My 10-year old son knows all about periods and what his older sister goes through every month. Choose to normalise conversations around body changes and body functions at home.

Alison O'Connor, Irish Examiner columnist, will join the panel of the IWD day virtual event.

Alison O'Connor is a journalist, broadcaster and author. Her most recent book "It's a Yes", co-written with the directors of the It's a Yes campaign, examines the hugely successful, female-led, Repeal the 8th campaign.

"For women all over the world the phrase “Choose to Challenge” will simply mean trying to challenge their way back to normality over the next year. Everyone has suffered in recent times, but this pandemic has disproportionately affected half the world’s population – the female half.

One of the first challenges will be to process the sheer exhaustion of what we’ve been through. The toughest battle for many women will be the effort to regain the hard-won progress in the workplace which has slipped back so far. It seemed to just happen overnight that women found themselves back at the kitchen sink, homeschooling at the kitchen table and trying to catch up on work in that same spot after the children had gone to bed.

What worries me is the knock to female confidence, the difficulty in “getting back out there” for the many who will be trying to get new jobs or come up with new ideas. I’ve just read a piece where Michelle Obama spoke about the huge self-doubt she felt before her book “Overcoming” was published. She needed to turn to h#er husband Barack for reassurance. Wow, I thought, if Michelle Obama has those kind of confidence issues, what hope for other women – especially post Covid. We all know this particular story has a happy ending. The book was a massive international bestseller. So to take a leaf out of it, as it were, what we really need to do now as women is to choose to concentrate on the positive.

Aoife Moore Irish Examiner political correspondent will join the panel of the IWD day virtual event.

Aoife Moore is the Political Correspondent for the Irish Examiner. Aoife broke the year's  biggest story in Irish politics, when 80 public figures attended a golf dinner during the height of Covid19 regulations.

"We know that the economic negative effects of Covid19 and the pandemic have affected women more harshly and that women continue to carry huge burdens in caring for others and gender disparity, whether it be in pay or job retention that are only exacerbated by the pandemic. Choose to challenge to me means calling out that this very real disparity is not good enough. These issues have always been there because women are often treated as an afterthought despite being half the population and the half that the world needs to survive.

Women are often the backbone of our communities, activist groups, local sports organisations and political organising. They are the backbone of our health service and the biggest majority of unpaid carers. We must challenge gender inequality at every turn and we must use the pandemic, which has laid bare this injustice to build on a better, more equal world for the young women and men who come behind us.

My biggest challenge this year has been being away from my friends and family while being at the coalface of an ever-changing pandemic and having to relay this information back to the public who have trusted me to do so. It means my job has become twice as hard, without supports I would previously rely on, like time away from work and around those I love."

Clodagh Finn, Irish Examiner correspondent, will join the panel of the IWD day virtual event.

Clodagh Finn is an Irish Examiner columnist and author. She is particularly interested in telling the untold stories of women in history. Her most recent book ‘Through Her Eyes’ offers 20 capsule biographies of Irish women from the Stone Age to the digital present, while ‘A Time to Risk All’ tells the story of Mary Elmes. 

"While I think we should “choose to challenge” every day of the year, it is worthwhile taking stock on International Women’s Day to reflect on all the changes that have come about because women – and men – chose to question the status quo.

There is still plenty of challenging to do, though, and this year I’ll be asking why women’s voices are still not heard in every single area of public life, from politics and business to entertainment, sport and science. As the late US Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, women belong in all the places where decisions are being made, yet just 22.5% of our TDs are women. Let’s choose to challenge that.

I’ll also be choosing to challenge the way history is written by looking back and asking not what women couldn’t do, but what they could. You’ll find – to misquote the old rhyme – they were thinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors. And more besides. Let’s shine a light on them.

As an adopted person, my greatest personal challenge in the last year was witnessing how the lived experience of those in mother and baby institutions was so undervalued by government and its apparatus.

The most recent Commission of Investigation, for instance, was set up in a way that treated the testimony of its witnesses as mere talk – and often misquoted talk, at that – rather than evidence. The Commission also used the word ‘vitriolic’ to describe adoptees’ criticism of child and family agency, Tusla. I found that moralistic and utterly deflating. It’s time to challenge the structures of restorative justice."

Derval O'Rourke, Irish Examiner food columnist will join the panel of the IWD day virtual event.

Derval O'Rourke is a three-time Olympian, a World Champion in athletics, a best-selling author and the creator of derval.ie. She is mum to Dafne and Archie. 

"When I reflect on the past year, it was about survival, getting through, trying to take care of the people within your four walls. It has been incredibly challenging, more so for women. I have two young children, I felt all of a sudden, my support systems disappeared, and I found the last year really hard. I found the identity of who does what, the roles in our house, got thrown into chaos. I'm my own boss, I can be flexible when it comes to the kids. 

But it means I get landed with most of the caring. I was trying to run the business, get all the meals on the table, figure out homeschooling. I found that stuff difficult, but we've come to a better point now. I'm better now at saying, I need time, I need to mind myself too. We as women, aren't great at saying we are a priority too. We're coming out of it, we need to be proud of ourselves. I feel now, we're turning a corner, things will get better."