Marking 8 March each year as International Women’s Day is considered a “strong call to action” for the neglected gender, a representative of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, or UN Women, said.

“Gender equality is a question of power. It’s a political issue. We live in a male-dominated world with a male-dominated culture,” UN resident coordinator in the Philippines Gustavo Gonzales said.

“We celebrate, but we also recognize the enormous obstacles that women face from structural discrimination, marginalization, violence to cascading crises that affect them first and, worse, to the denial of their autonomy and rights over their bodies and lives,” said Gonzales during the International Women’s Day celebration on Friday hosted by the Philippine Commission on Women.

Women, he underlined, live in a world where they “enjoy less than two-thirds of the legal rights available to men.”

He said that women, for instance, have a greater risk of being injured in a car accident because seats and safety belts are designed for men.

Further, “women have a higher fatality rate from heart attacks because diagnostic tools are designed for default men,” he added.

With women holding just 26 percent of artificial intelligence jobs, Gonzales said it’s not surprising that many of the algorithms are biased toward men.

“Every time we ensure a gender balance composition at the government level, in business corporations, in local government units, the academe, cultural and sports associations, in international organizations like the UN, we are not just fixing a long overdue political balance, but we are building more inclusive, just, and sustainable societies,” Gonzales said.

Gender pay gap

Worldwide, he said, a woman earns 77 cents for each dollar a man earns.

Citing research by the World Economic Forum, Gonzales said that closing the gender pay gap will take until 2055 at the current pace.

“The gender pay gap is one of the reasons why 70 percent of the world’s poor are women and girls,” he noted.

He added that the gap is “another reason 12 billion women and girls render unpaid care work around the world every day.”

In some communities, women can spend 14 hours daily cooking, cleaning, fetching water, and caring for children and the elderly.