On International Women’s Day, we mark 115 years of organizing, resistance, and hard-won progress for women’s rights around the globe. We honour the women who came before us, the leaders who built movements under impossible conditions, and those who lost their lives demanding dignity, safety, and equality.
This commemoration is also shaped by grief and alarm. Women’s rights are being eroded in real time. Around the world, governments and well-funded movements are working to narrow women’s autonomy, restrict access to essential healthcare, limit participation in public life, and undermine protections that once seemed settled.
The consequences are not abstract. In Afghanistan, women and girls continue to be systemically excluded from education and public life, with restrictions that endanger health and survival.
The World Health Organization reported in late 2025 that nearly one in three women globally have experienced partner or sexual violence and that progress in reducing intimate partner violence has been painfully slow. This reality is inseparable from economic inequality, insecure work, the erosion of public services, and workplaces that still fail too many women through harassment, coercion, and retaliation.
As a labour federation, we do not treat equality as symbolic. Rights are protected when they are enforced, funded, and defended at the bargaining table, in legislation, and in the daily culture of workplaces and communities. We believe and affirm that every worker has the right to a world of work free from violence and harassment, including gender-based violence.
International Women’s Day should be a celebration for women everywhere; that it is not is a warning. Progress can be reversed. Rights can be removed. Safety can be denied. When women’s rights are weakened, democracy is weakened, and the people who pay the highest price are those already facing racism, ableism, poverty, colonial violence, and discrimination based on gender identity and expression.
We honour the past by acting in the present. Join us in celebrating women on International Women’s Day by continuing this work together.