International Women’s Day was first celebrated in 1911, when more than a million women and men gathered at rallies to call for an end to discrimination. More than 100 years later, the day has become an occasion to celebrate all that women have achieved and to push for continued progress toward gender equality.
Women and girls still face discrimination. They are not safe from the threat of physical and sexual violence. They do not have equal access to education or health care. Women and girls do the majority of unpaid care work and when they work for wages, they are still likely to be underpaid. At the current rate of change, it will take 257 years to close the global gender pay gap. In the United States, women are paid about 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. The gap is even wider for women of color.
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