Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva presented this Wednesday, International Women’s Day, a package with “more than 20 actions” to end wage inequality, combat gender violence and guarantee menstrual health.
The star initiative announced by the government of the progressive president in a massive ceremony at the Planalto Palace, in Brasilia, is a bill to make equal pay a reality between men and women who perform the same function.
The text, which will have to be analyzed by Congress, provides for control mechanisms for companies and greater transparency with the aim of achieving salary equity, something provided for in current legislation, but which is not currently fulfilled.
According to the government statistics office, Brazilian women receive on average 22% less salary than men for the same job.
Another of the measures that the Executive will implement will be the “free distribution” of sanitary napkins or towels, the resumption of works to build 1,189 day care centers and the ratification of a series of international conventions in defense of women.
Less flowers and more fight once morest sexist violence
It also relaunched the Women to Live Without Violence program, from which 40 new units of the so-called Houses of Brazilian Women will be built, which provide comprehensive care to victims of sexist violence, with an investment of 372 million reais (regarding 72 million of dollars).
“Every day three women are murdered in Brazil for the fact of being women and in 2022 they became six women murdered per day. The confrontation with femicides is an urgent political fight”, affirmed the Minister for Women, Aparecida Gonçalves, at the event.
The minister also proposed a “pact with society” to combat misogyny because “contempt and hatred of women cannot be naturalized.”
“We cannot accept the fact that men on the internet make money” by promoting misogyny, “that has to stop,” he added.
Day in honor of Marielle Franco
The battery of actions also includes a plan to confront sexual and moral harassment in the federal administration, the establishment of maternity leave for elite athletes who receive government support, incentives for scientists, filmmakers and writers, and training of “more than 40,000 women in vulnerable situations”.
Likewise, it instituted the Marielle Franco Day to confront political violence of gender and race, and which will be celebrated on March 14, the day on which the Rio de Janeiro councilwoman was shot to death, in 2018, in a crime that has not yet been reported. has been fully clarified.
Lula, in power since January 1, has promised that his mandate will have a gender perspective and will be totally opposed to the previous administration of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro, who drastically reduced the budget allocated to programs to protect women, according to the unions, and was criticized for statements of a macho nature.
However, the 77-year-old former trade unionist failed to materialize parity in his cabinet of ministers, made up of 26 men and 11 women, which even so represented a historical record for a government in Brazilian democracy.
Brazil / With information Efe
