This year, March 8, the date that internationally marks the struggle of working women, occurs in the context of a deepening social crisis, throughout the world, but also in Portugal, in the lives of women.
By: Marina Perez
Wage gaps worsen with inflation
In 2020, the wage gap between men and women in Portugal was, according to Eurostat, 13.3%. It is as if, at the end of a year of work, the women had worked 48 hours without pay. In February of this year, the ACT notified more than 1,500 companies for persisting in these wage gaps.
Receiving lower wages, women are particularly affected by rising prices and the housing crisis, many of them supporting entire families. Much more affected are racialized and immigrant women, often in precarious jobs in cleaning, catering, and hotels, where they don’t even have a contract.
Violence, a dead end
Hostages of this precariousness and of income that costs more than the minimum wage, women who suffer situations of domestic violence face immense obstacles to break the cycles of violence, when the Government cares little about guaranteeing effective public policies to combat this violence. Black and immigrant women suffer even more violence from the state, with increasing police brutality hitting their children and themselves. That is the case of Claudia Simoes, victim of racist attacks by a police officer, who three years later will be brought to trial as if she were the aggressor.
Destruction of the SNS attacks women
The truth is that the Government of the Socialist Party (PS), committed to the interests of the factions and the European Union, cares little about the lives of women.
The same is seen in the lack of investment in the SNS National Health System which, among other things, today results in a scandalous alternate closure of the maternity hospital because the insufficient number of doctors does not make it possible to ensure gynecologic and obstetric emergency appointments. The Government says that it is studying provisional alternatives – but does not speak of the necessary investment in the SNS. And also in this context that more and more women denounce cases of obstetric violence – often discriminatory against racialized and migrant women.
16 years of the legalization of abortion in Portugal
On February 11 of this year, the 16th anniversary of the referendum that approved the legalization of the voluntary interruption of pregnancy IVG (for its acronym in Portuguese) was completed. The legalization of IVG was a very important advance, reducing in Portugal the dangerous clandestine abortions that kill countless women around the world, mainly poor, racialized, migrant women and in situations of social vulnerability.
Several obstacles to the effective exercise of the right to abortion persist: women still face stigma, the obligation of “reflection” periods (which can turn into pressure not to have an abortion) and the short time in which You can request a legal abortion (just 10 weeks). And not only that: in 2022, the General Directorate of Health even announced that it would penalize family doctors who perform an abortion on patients, having backed down due to the bad impact caused by the news. But the alert remains: we must defend the right and fight to do it with everything!
The fight for women’s rights is against the Costa Government
In the fight for women’s rights, we cannot place any hope in this government, which unloads the cost of the economic crisis of the capitalists on the shoulders of the most exploited and oppressed sectors of the working class.
On this March 8, it is necessary to follow the example of teachers and education workers, who in recent months organized a historic strike in Portugal, with the largest demonstrations seen in recent years in the country: it is necessary take to the streets fighting for the rights of working women.