Since the United Nations instituted it in 1975, every March 8 we celebrate International Women's Day— formerly called "Working Women's Day." This year the United Nations celebrates the day with the slogan, "The Time is Now: Rural and Urban Activists Transforming Women’s Lives, "which carries strong symbolic weight. Indeed, the day has become a vehicle for assertions that exceed the world of work. The success of this year's celebration is not so much due to more or less debatable manifestos and their concrete formulations, as it is to the fact that it capitalizes on a social feeling that has been brewing for a long time, fueled in part by the cases of gender violence seen last year, by campaigns like #Metooand #Timesup, and partly by recent initiatives in surrounding countries on wage parity. This often-buried social feeling is today expressed in the form of a popular and loud clamor that is an expression of a sense of justice with which men and women should equally engage.

The point of this day is not — and should not be— a "gender" claim. It is above all a moral claim of universal value. It is certainly not the only moral cause that deserves attention; would that we could generate a similar movement to awaken the moral conscience on issues such as human trafficking, which, while not exclusively, certainly affects many women’s lives. In any case, the equality of men and women, its repercussions on family and social life, is not- and should not be- a topic that only interests women. This is the wrong way to view the issue. By this I do not mean that identity movements have no place in social life; they undoubtedly shed light on long-buried problems, generate social awareness and catalyze collective action. However, the protagonists of the social changes we are waiting for must be men and women alike. Thus, both must be involved in joint reflection on the nature and causes of injustices identified, as well as involved in their possible solutions.

This reflection is more necessary than ever inour quickly changing times. Social transformations, changes in the configuration of society— what sociologists call morphogenesis— usually generate confusion; the world that many took for granted, as if it were a natural thing, collapses and new possibilities, new ways of living, as well as new ways of feeling and seeing things open up. The relationships between men and women, the implicit codes of conduct through which we regulate family and professional and social life, are affected by these changes. Those who confuse morality with custom are likely to get lost along the way. Though many women are still held back by the so-called "glass ceiling," women's access to education and the labor market, and the vital opportunities that have been opened up for women as a result of these changes, are not compatible with cultural inertia or the social problems that have been dragging on for centuries. These problems are frankly difficult to tolerate today, both in the area of ​​family relationships and in the world of work.

Although he himself did not draw all the necessary conclusions from his observation, Tocqueville saw that the democratic principle tends by itself to inform all aspects of social life, without exception, irremediably changing people’s expectations for life, both for men or women. The question is whether we can live up to these expectations as a society because equity in the distribution of responsibilities and benefits when building family and social life is definitively at stake. In this kind of distribution, there is one extreme— that of family life— whose relational dynamics in their most specific iteration exceed what is foreseen by the law, which responds and incorporates factors of another type and can only be born of the combined freedom of the parts. Certainly, recognizing the limits of the law in terms of personal relationships should not stop us, quite the contrary, from promoting necessary structural changes at the level of legislation in order to promote wage parity and facilitate the glass ceiling’s destruction. 

We must not forget, however, that many times real challenge is found at the level of informal culture, where gender issues and expectations are born, where networks of trust are created that open the way for men, while closing it to women, where the "cement ceiling" emerges with which some women limit themselves without need for external limitation. March 8 is a symbolic day, but facing these challenges is a long-term task that involves all of us in everyday life.