Through the Eyes of a Woman

  Who on earth came up with the idea that women should be of less value than men? As far as we can look back into history, we see women treated as less than human beings, without worth. The discrimination of women is astonishing, considering that at Creation, God created humankind in his image, as a double pack of equal worth. Of course, we know that we no longer live in the ideal world created by God and that things went terribly wrong at the outset when the first human couple decided to test their free will. Both Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit: Eve because she longed for more knowledge, and Adam, because he deliberately decided to disobey God’s command. The result was that their ideal world was destroyed. For thousands of years, we as women have suffered most under the resulting oppression and discrimination.   God’s plan, however, was to restore his human children to their original condition. The basis of our Christian religion is the plan of salvation, by which God promis

  A dozen women met in the reading circle of the Catholic parish of Heilig Kreuz in Münster in Germany in the spring of 2019 to talk about “Evangelii Gaudium”, the first Apostolic Letter of Pope Francis. They also discussed their situation as women in the Church and their daily difficulties. Without women, nothing happens in the Catholic Church. But women have no voice within church structures. “We have to do something”, they said, “more than just talk about it”. They are active in parish councils and pastoral care, supervise the preparation of the communion, and plan family worship services. But they are not allowed to baptize or receive confession. Only men who live in celibacy are allowed to do so. Even the first action caused quite a stir – a week of strikes in May 2019, during which the women did not enter a church but held their own church services outside their churches. Thus the protest initiative “Maria 2.0” was born, which calls for a change in the structures of the Catholi

  On February 15, 2021, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of Nigeria was chosen as Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO) starting March 1, 2021.   This choice is unique in several ways. Dr. Okonjo-Iweala is the first woman in this position. She is also the first African to lead the WTO. It is hard to say which is more unprecedented. History is made. Okonjo-Iweala has over three decades of experience in both private and public international financial institutions, non-governmental and non-profit organizations, and serving as finance minister of Nigeria, her home country, among numerous other roles. The appointment comes at a very difficult time, as the global economy and world trade have to grapple with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. As former board chair of Gavi, the vaccine alliance, Okonjo-Iweala is expected to try to help poor countries get access to COVID-19 vaccines. Most affluent countries are scrambling to get hold of vaccines as a way forward to opening busine

  The Swiss have a reputation of being slow on the uptake, and I am sure this is an unfair prejudice.   But still, things take longer in Switzerland. With their grassroots democracy, it just takes more time to get things done. Tradition is important and it is hard to make changes. A Swiss friend was taking me to the railway station in Zurich in her car, and she had turned on the GPS device to find the way. The deep male voice, speaking slowly in the dialect of the canton of Bern, was no great help, as she would already have passed the crossings by the time the instructions were completed. Not so useful, but amusing entertainment. Women in Switzerland were not slow in demanding the right to vote, but it took more than 100 years of tireless work to get the men in Switzerland to vote in favor of women’s suffrage. It’s not so easy to give up power and privileges. On 7 February 1971, Swiss women were finally granted the right to vote and stand for election. Democracy began for half of