Women and stress - Time to end lip service on equality

The generation of women approaching the end of their professional careers have seen changes in how society, the workplace and politics regard and facilitate women that their mothers could only have dreamt of.

Their grandmothers could hardly have imagined these sweeping and profound changes in how today’s women shape and drive society. Yet, as event after event, report after report and, most importantly, election after election prove, there is a long way to go before we can say we have reached a point that might be considered equitable, ideal, or even acceptable in how women are supported inside or outside of the home.

The Tuam revelations highlighted a legacy that did not celebrate women, rather the opposite, and any conversation about how women are to be better honoured and cherished by society cannot but be influenced by that story. Those horrors remind us that once dominant social mores were not so very far removed from a form of persecution. This horrible and shaming history should be harnessed to bring the kind of change that would make this society a far better place for everyone, especially women trying to do more than is expected of them — primarily by themselves.