The Museum of World Religions and the Red Room Association yesterday held a salon-style panel in New Taipei City featuring discussions on the achievements of women ahead of International Women’s Day on Tuesday.
The “Changing Climates” panel invited seven Taiwanese and international speakers living in Taiwan to speak on the topics “Soft skills for today’s world” and “Changing narratives in the workplace.”
Attended by about 70 people, the event opened with a ritual for Devi, a Hindu goddess of consciousness who Indian artist Vandana Mengane said signifies feminine energy.
After the ritual, Malabika Das, a trauma-informed integrative community social worker and wellness specialist from the US said if women want men to be supportive of their empowerment, men should be provided with opportunities to develop and enhance their soft skills.
“Provide infrastructure and a space for men to be able to feel their feelings, to be in touch with themselves, to be able to do all the things that apparently women do with soft skills,” Das said.
Syeda Zehra, a Pakistani doctoral student at National Taiwan University, said she felt women were not respected enough in the field of chemistry.
She said one of the reasons was that fewer women choose to study graduate-level chemistry than men.
This causes challenges for female chemistry students, because discussions and debates always go in favor of male students, she said.
After the panel, the celebrations continued with special guest performances, including traditional Indian dancing and music, at Red Room Rendezvous in Taipei.
International Women’s Day was first held as a commemoration of a demonstration on March 8, 1917, by female textile workers in Russia’s Petrograd — now St Petersburg — which marked the beginning of Russia’s February Revolution.
Largely confined to communist countries for most of its existence, International Women’s Day has become a worldwide celebration of the cultural, political and socioeconomic achievements of women after it was recognized by the UN in 1977.
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