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Why International Women’s Day? Women can be prime ministers, generals, ambassadors, CEOs; even conductors and composers. Why do we need International Women’s Day? One word: Afghanistan. This week the UN’s Special Reporter Richard Bennett confirmed: no girls’ education beyond primary level and women steadily being erased from public life. Worldwide, girls are twice as likely to be denied education. Women produce eighty percent of food but are ten percent more likely to starve. It’s estimated it’ll take three hundred years to end child marriage. Appalling. But what about the UK? Why do we need International Women’s Day? In an average British week, two women will be killed by their partners… and three more take their own lives because of domestic abuse. Which a quarter of women experience. Rising to over forty percent of girls fourteen to seventeen, from boyfriends. Police receive a call every thirty seconds, estimated to be only a quarter of domestic abuse. Doesn’t affect you and me? So why do we... Right at the other end of the spectrum, I had a blissfully happy and privileged childhood. And yet… I couldn’t enjoy any of the educational riches of the school my father ran: not glamorous cricket, Shakespeare plays, most painfully the world famous choir the school fed. Shocked by such restrictions my father turned the school co-ed but had no jurisdiction over the choir… which astonishingly still refuses girls today. Small surprise women conductors are far fewer. The Judeo-Christian scriptures open with a striking story of humanity’s shortsighted folly: in technical jargon, sin. As a result of which, God explains to woman, man will dominate. Of course. In a flawed world, might is right. Jesus of Nazareth turned the tables in this as so many ways. When sexual apartheid was brutal and religious rulers claimed “one who teaches his daughter teaches transgression” and “let the law be burned rather than given to a woman”, He shared His life with women and travelled with them, depended on them financially, exhorted study rather than housework and as risen Lord first appeared to a woman though her testimony was deemed worthless. No wonder Evangelical Christians like Josephine Butler championed protection for child prostitutes and argued for girls’ educational rights; by no means an historic exception. Jesus’ pupil Paul said women should learn… in words two millennia of male theologians seem to me to have twisted to say almost the opposite. Society is sexist. Perhaps always will be. There will always be a fight for peace, against poverty and for equality. Always and forever. This is why we all need International Women’s Day.