On 8th March this year, events marking International Women’s Day (IWD) were held in many countries around the world. In most countries the events have a political tone: they tend to celebrate the advances women have made towards economic, social and political equality with men, and to press for change in those areas of life where there is still progress to be made.
In other countries, meanwhile, 8th March is traditionally more about expressing an appreciation of women: it is a day on which men give presents to their wives, girlfriends and mothers, and it therefore has some similarities with St Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.
Back in 1911, the first IWD events in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland were certainly political. They were protests by women against forms of gender discrimination that would now be unthinkable in most parts of the world: almost nowhere were women allowed to vote, and Finland was the only country with any female members of a national parliament. The general expectation worldwide, across different continents and cultures, was that women would spend their lives largely in the home, devoting themselves to looking after their husbands and children. The rate of women who had paid employment was far lower than today, and when women did go out to work they typically earned very little, meaning they were economically dependent on men.
A century later, gender inequality in employment—particularly pay inequality—is still one of the hottest issues IWD tries to draw attention to: it remains common, of course, for women to earn less than men for doing exactly the same job.
Limited educational opportunities (there are many countries in which girls generally stay fewer years in school than boys) and domestic violence towards women have also been highlighted by events surrounding IWD in recent years.
And yet, as the IWD website notes, . As just one example, to return to the issue of women elected to office, the change over the last hundred years has been significant. Since 1911, when the small group of women in the Finnish parliament (nineteen of them, to be exact) were the only females in public office worldwide, the governments of more than fifty different countries have been led by women. In 2011, at least one country in every continent has a female leader, including high-profile examples such as Brazil (Dilma Rousseff), Germany (Angela Merkel) and Australia (Julia Gillard).
8. According to the passage, which of the following is true?
A. 100 years ago, women were not allowed to work outside.
B. IWD is equal to St Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day in some countries.
C. Finland was the first country with female employment.
D. Pay inequality is a hot issue for IWD.
9. Which word below is closest in meaning to the phrase “press for” in Paragraph 1?
A. prevent B. urge C. express D. want
10. Which of the following is the missing sentence in the first line of the last paragraph?
A. distinctive differences do exist between men and women
B. the achievements are beyond people’s expectations
C. there’s still a long way to go to achieve the set goals
D. alongside the ‘negatives’ there are plenty of ‘positives’
11. We can conclude from the passage that .
A. the progress in gaining equality in the last century seems to be too slow
B. the concept of equal pay for equal work is completely accepted in practice
C. much has been achieved in gender equality, but still there is space for improvement
D. one or two female leaders can’t stand for women’s social status on the whole