Being a Woman (also these days…)

“I don’t mind living in a

world of men, since

allow me to be a woman.”

Marilyn Monroe¹

(Not in the way of disclaimerbut with regret: last week two men died who will be greatly missed. Lobo Antunes, whose books were introduced to me as a teenager by my cousin Eugénio de Oliveira’s wife, kept me company on many afternoons spent in Janas, a house where I was very happy and which I always remember with immense nostalgia, both for the many different people who always passed through the generous arms of its owner there, and for the readings, started by Memória de Elefante, which left an impression on me forever.

Nuno Morais Sarmento, a lawyer, almost always in my antipodes, a great lover of the sea, was an opponent as loyal as he was fearsome due to his undeniable intelligence and speed. Increasingly, there is the feeling that the best are abandoning us, we are leaving ourselves in the hands of burlesque characters with regrettable stories, as is, among many others, the now publicly known case of Mafalda Guerra Livermore.)

The phrase that begins these lines was uttered by one of the symbols of my adolescence. Thanks to the permanent status of sex symbolMarilyn Monroe ended up being a victim of this world where, years before, she said she didn’t care about living, thus demonstrating that, in this specific case, she was wrong.

Contrary to what underlies this statement, the world must belong to everyone, without any exception and there is no reason for gender, or indeed any other, to remain a discriminatory factor.

Among us, and between the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s, there was a bank that admittedly only hired women for secretarial positions, outright refusing their selection, for example, for positions in the hundreds of branches it opened, under the justification that there were a lot of absences due to maternity.

Not even on purpose, decades later and just two days after the renewed celebration of Women’s Day, there are still those who question the respective need².

Although the mere empirical analysis of the job market and living conditions would be enough to demonstrate that equality between men and women is still not verified in this department (as in others, please note…), a recent study by the company Randstad once again made official what is felt at every step.

In reality, without any objective explanation being presented, women’s salaries continue to be 17.3% lower than men’s, a variation that translates into around –€205 per month. This gap increases significantly in some sectors of activity, such as in the case of Health, increasing the difference gap to 29.6% and, especially, in sports and shows, where it stands at –48.5%.

At the same time that these differences are presented to us, it is stated that Portugal is the 3rd country with the highest percentage of women in so-called qualified employment, but in which only 15.7% reach management positions.

Having arrived here, several lessons can and should be learned, the first of which is that the imposition of equal pay by decree is not, and in fact has never been, effective if it is not accompanied by competent inspection and verification.

On the other hand, when we look at real cases of domestic violence, one of the issues that must really be considered is, in fact, the asymmetry of economic power between men and women, an asymmetry that does not only arise from a society that is still based, in part, on the so-called patriarchal power, but, above all, from the circumstance that, as happens in conflicts with employers, one of the parties has much more money than the other.

The third of the lessons is that Women’s Day must be celebrated, more than with the delivery of a flower in commercial establishments, on a daily basis, every day and in each home, with a true and equitable division of tasks, allowing each Woman to dedicate herself, if that is her desire, to professional life, but, equally, to rest, study and leisure.

Finally, knowing that I am expressing an opinion that is not consensual, it seems to me that, quite often, women are their own worst enemies, particularly through a lack of empathy with the problems of others, entering into a spiral of competition that, instead of making some better, drags them all into the mud.

For my part, I still wish to reach the time when the celebration of this day loses its reason for being. Despite everything, it hasn’t happened yet and, in times of precariousness, I’m not even sure it doesn’t make more and more sense.

Write without applying the new Spelling Agreement

¹Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, she was born on June 1, 1926 and died in circumstances that are still not consensual on August 4, 1962, having been a model and mainly an actress, and the roles that were imposed on her always placed her in the role of a dumb blonde, whose grace was always based on her, here consensual, absolutely stunning physical appearance, ending up being the victim of what made her famous.

²International Women’s Day began to be celebrated at the beginning of the 20th century (first demonstration on March 19, 1911, in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland in which women celebrated the first day, demanding the right to vote and better working conditions), being driven by labor and socialist movements in Europe and the USA. March 8th as a symbolic landmark was consolidated after strikes by Russian women in 1917, and was finally made official by the UN only in 1975.