Around the world in 5; Women This Week
In the ongoing series, Document Women highlights noteworthy news related to women and this week’s post covers November 14 to November 19.
Nigeria
This week, Women in Mining inaugurated the Girls for Mining, G4M clubs for secondary school girls in Plateau State to mentor the young girls to show interest and possibly pursue a career in the sector.
"When I look at statistics, of all the mainstream miners in Nigeria today, only 6.8 per cent are women, the remaining 94 per cent are men. So, the women in the mining sector today are a drop out of the ocean, and the few women in the sector are being edged out of the game by gender-blind laws and by misogynists. So, the number of women in the sector will keep dropping. If we do nothing to pump female miners into the sector now, the women on the ground today will all be gone someday," said National President, Engr. Janet Adeyemi.
Read more here.
Poland
This week, Barbara Skrobol spoke at a public hearing on Poland’s abortion law at the European Parliament in Brussels. Her sister-in-law, Izabela Sajbor, died of sepsis at a hospital in southern Poland after doctors refused to terminate her pregnancy after finding foetal defects, due to Poland’s stringent abortion rules.
According to an October 2022 report by the Polish newspaper Dziennik Gazeta, 52 per cent of Poles believe the new abortion rules have made them less keen to have children. This is a 45 per cent rise from last year.
Kamila Ferenc, lawyer at the Warsaw-based Foundation for Women and Family Planning (FEDERA), told Al Jazeera that since Poland’s restrictive family planning act was introduced in 1993, women have not been guaranteed their reproductive rights.
Read more here.
United Kingdom + Qatar + Iran
On Saturday, A group of 22 Iranian women played football in Westminster in a protest against their country’s regime. The women wore football kits, as well as t-shirts with the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom”.
Some dribbled while carrying the Iranian flag while others blew whistles and chanted “Mahsa Amini”, in tribute to the 22-year-old who died in custody after she was detained for allegedly failing to follow the country’s Islamic dress code.
“We are here today in London to raise awareness about the atrocities going on just a couple of hundred miles away from Qatar, ahead of the football match between Iran and England,” lawyer Leila Mansouri said at the protest match.
Read more here.
India
The Times of India reported this week that as many as 24 women were allegedly made to undergo a surgical procedure to prevent pregnancies without anaesthesia in Bihar’s Khagaria.
The patients were completely awake and were allegedly held down by doctors’ aides at the Alauli Heath Centre as they were operated on.The report noted that a tubectomy procedure requires local anaesthesia at the very least.
An inquiry has been ordered by Khagaria District Magistrate Alok Ranjan Ghosh.
Read more here.
Global
Advocates have expressed concern that women had been underrepresented at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference—or COP27—in Egypt this month.
In 2011, governments pledged to increase women’s participation in the discussions. However, a report found that less than 34 per cent of country team negotiators are female, falling from a high of 40 per cent in 2018; this is problematic because climate change disproportionately impacts girls and women.
Read more here.