Responding to this year’s 2023 International Women’s Day, Foysol Choudhury MSP said: “International Women’s Day is a wonderful celebration dating back over 100 years. It is a chance to celebrate women’s achievements and raise awareness of the continued fight for equality.
“International Women’s Day highlights the ever-evolving issues women have faced: voting rights, equality in the workplace and under the law and changing social attitudes.
“It is important that we also use International Women’s Day to highlight the experience of women from a diverse range of backgrounds.
“For example, in Ukraine, we are seeing women struggle disproportionately with human trafficking when being displaced. This is something I have addressed in the Scottish Parliament’s debate marking a year of war in Ukraine.
“In 2022, I spoke to the Scottish Parliament about the importance of creating opportunities that specifically target women from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds to get involved in sport, as hostility and abuse within sport can lead to low-levels of participation from BAME women and girls.
“For International Women’s Day 2023, I spoke in the Scottish Parliament debate on Wednesday to address how women from ethnic minorities can face overlapping systems of discrimination: both racism and misogyny.
“Many women from ethnic minorities experience misogyny in different ways and we need to recognise this multiplicity of experience in order to tackle misogyny.
“I am also particularly worried about the treatment of women when wearing items such as the hijab. Many Muslim women wear these as a sign of modesty and faith, but in the UK they have been met with violence and harassment.
“I’ve even heard cases of women avoiding train stations in fear that someone would push them on to the tracks.
“International Women’s Day is a wonderful opportunity to make efforts to combat these issues.
“There are already tracks being made on some of these issues, for example Scottish Rugby recently announced a system was being put in place to allow concerns to be raised over racism and misogyny.
“This can’t be the end point, however. The commitment to these underrepresented women needs to remain a core element of all sports, and indeed all sectors, across Scotland.
“The involvement of ethnic and religious minority women to the same level as everyone else needs to happen before Scotland can confidently say it is a diverse and accepting nation with equality for all.”
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