Cyprus, Cyprus, like many other countries, still has a long way to go and much to do in order to achieve real gender equality, said today the Speaker of the Parliament, Anita Demetriou and the Commissioner for the Protection of Children's Rights, Despo Michailidou-Livaniou.
Together with Elise Livadiotou, Executive Director of Financial Management and Deleveraging Activities of the Bank of Cyprus, Anita Demetriou and Despo Michaelides-Livaniou participated, on Monday afternoon, in a discussion organized by the Senate Committee for Equality of CUT, in cooperation with EuT+ (The European University of Technology), on the empowerment of women.
Saying that "under no circumstances can gender be counted as a criterion and means of evaluation", the President said that, many times, women are either downgraded, not promoted professionally, or receive any form of discrimination simply because they are women.
"And I am referring to sexist attitudes and other socially acceptable phenomena, which as a House we have provided for and some of them have been introduced into our legal arsenal and it is these that we have to deal with," she added.
Suggesting that, sometimes, women need to work "three times, four times, even five times" to prove that they deserve to be in a male-dominated environment such as the political arena, Demetriou said that "we should not be satisfied just because we have the first woman Speaker of Parliament, but we need to pave the way for more women and more young people and that is the bet we need to win as a civil society."
"We need to create the structures, infrastructure and opportunities for more women to follow in all decision-making centres," she said, noting that the numbers are disappointing, citing the example of eight women in Parliament out of a total of 56 MPs.
Underlining also the role of education, Anita Demetriou said we cannot wait another 200 years, according to research by the Political Leaders Network, to reach full equality between men and women.
For her part, the Commissioner for the Protection of Children's Rights and former judge of the Supreme Court, referred to her own experiences and the difficulties and suspicion she said she faced in her professional development.
"We are here today, after centuries of women's struggles and yet much more struggle is needed at political, legislative and all levels," she said, adding that a "personal struggle is also needed, which is an important part for every woman so that we understand our place in society and claim what we deserve."
For a woman, she continued, it takes great strength and more effort to cope with the difficulties to reach the position a man is in, and she referred to the finding, through her experience, that many women adopted male characteristics in order to succeed, such as "aggression in the fighting lawyer".
The event included a discussion with the participants, and the President of the House of Representatives presented the TEPAK "Squaring the Circle" award to Professor and Chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, Faculty of Health Sciences, Kakia Peteinou, in recognition of her distinctive development, contribution and vision.
An honorary award was also presented to Christiana Filippou, who graduated from the CTEPAK and currently teaches there, having achieved significant work in the research field of the subject.
Source: CNA
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