World
Gender equality eight decades away: UN
Mexico City: Gender equality is a goal that will take another 80 years to achieve and the youth are the driving force behind the change, a United Nations official has said.
Ana Guezmes Garcia, UN Women’s representative in Mexico, a UN agency for women’s affairs, was speaking at a campaign “HeForShe”, which aims to give men a larger role in the struggle for gender equality on Wednesday, as per reported.
Despite progress in securing more rights for women, “equality in practice has not been achieved,” said Guezmes when addressing at least 500 students and professors at the capital’s private Iberoamerican University, the first institute of higher learning in Mexico and the second in Latin America to officially join the campaign.
“UN Women is concerned about educational segregation” for Mexico, said Guezmes. “We want there to be more women scientists and more male nurses or caretakers. We have to work more on that and break the stereotypes,” she said.
“We are wasting enormous talent and an enormous opportunity,” said Guezmes, considering few women serve in Mexico’s public sector, and few men participate in domestic work, despite reforms in the labour law.
The employment outlook for youth in Mexico is bleak and the disparity between women and men is one of the largest in Latin America, with 42 percent of employment rate for women and 76 percent for men, she said.
The “HeforShe” campaign is a solidarity movement to promote gender equality by bringing “one half of humanity in support of the other half of humanity, for the benefit of all”, said the official website of the organisation.
Shanghai’s rich middle class is leading a wave of online dissent over the strict and prolonged lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country. Chinese internet censorship is struggling as patience is wearing thin in many urban centers, coming up with creative forms of online protests.
Social Media Posts Revealing Lockdown Tension in Shanghai
Drawn-out lockdowns are nothing new in China as authorities insist with the nation’s zero-Covid policy since the start of the pandemic. Currently over This time around, however, metropolitan areas like Shanghai are increasingly difficult to keep quiet, given that its more than 25 million residents have seen weeks of total isolation along with food shortages and many other service interruptions.
Dozens of towns and reportedly over 300 million Chinese citizens have been affected by lockdowns of different severity. As expected, urban netizens have been most outspoken over their difficulties by finding creative ways to get around state censorship and bans placed on topics, news comments and spontaneous campaigns.
Shanghai residents have been using mobile proxies and hijacking seemingly unrelated hashtags to talk about healthcare issues, delivery failures and the overall severity of their situation. The “positive energy” that the Chinese government wants to transmit during the recent prolonged series of lockdowns does not come naturally to those counting food supplies and online censors are working hard to filter words, trending topics and undesired social media sharing.
WeChat groups and message threads are under constant monitoring. Posts questioning the zero-Covid approach have been quickly deleted, including by leading Chinese health experts like Dr. Zhong Nanshan. Video footage is soon censored and protests and investigations are quickly made to disappear.
Where this has not worked, officials have exposed banners with warnings and outright threats like “watch your own mouth or face punishment”, while drones have been patrolling the city skies. Yet, if anything, this has led to further tensions and unspoken confrontation with Shanghai’s educated and affluent middle class.
Creative Online Solutions Harnessing Civic Energy
Announcements by Chinese social media that they would be publishing the IP addresses of users who “spread rumors” have not helped either. Tech industry research has shown that much of Asia’s tech-savvy population has a habit of using mobile proxies and other privacy tools, quickly finding workarounds to browse the internet freely and talk to the world about the hottest topics.
The sheer volume of forbidden posts is already a challenge for the very censorship system, experts explain. Unable to track all trending hashtags, state workers overlook topics that speak about the US, Ukraine or other popular news. Linking human rights elsewhere to their situation, Chinese online dissidents establish their informal channels and “hijack” the conversation to share personal or publicly relevant information about the Covid suppression in their town.
Sarcastic and satirical posts still dominate. Others hope to evade the censors by replacing words from famous poems or the national anthem. One thing is certain – social media, when harnessed with the right creativity, has proven its ability to mount pressure on the government in even some of the most strictly controlled tech environments like China.
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