International Women’s Day used to come with a certain esthetic. A celebration of past victories and a look ahead to new hopes and challenges. But this year, the vibe is women on social media, claiming Iranian heritage, dancing in celebration of US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran, even as reports circulate that bombs had killed roughly 160 schoolgirls.

Meanwhile, Western female leaders – those who regularly speak about things like feminist foreign policy and are seen as the epitome of female governance – seemed suddenly to develop an acute sensitivity about tone. Statements were measured and delicately phrased so as not to antagonize the men launching the missiles.

The question practically writes itself: how did a movement once defined by dissent become so cautious in the presence of power?

https://www.rt.com/news/634161-west-women-betrayed-feminism/?ysclid=mr6uio19gx53823040

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What Russian feminists actually want
The world was built around men, and women are tired of adapting to it

By Polina Polyakova

If you think feminism is about splitting the bill at a restaurant and insisting that women join the army, I have bad news for you. You know little about feminism, and even less about what women are actually fighting for. You also have no idea how often the modern world still works as a man’s world, one in which women are expected to adapt.

Let’s start with the home, where one of the main injustices begins. It is also one of the reasons women with families so often struggle to build careers.

I am not talking only about washing dishes or doing laundry. I mean the invisible control center that runs constantly in a woman’s head: booking the child’s dentist appointment, checking homework, soaking the beans, buying washing powder, remembering what is missing from the fridge. Across the world, women carry out around three-quarters of unpaid domestic work. This is not just cleaning and cooking. It is a constant stream of tasks that is not pinned to the fridge as a neat list, but simply lives in the back of her mind.

Career progress often depends on being able to stay late at work, or sit with your boss at a company party late into the night, discussing strategy over a few drinks. But who is at home with the children? Who picks them up from daycare? That’s right: women. They miss the chance to be treated as fully available employees because everything at home still has to be in order, and because the child has to come home on time and not go to bed alone.

In 1975, Icelandic women staged a strike that is still talked about today. One Friday, 90% of women simply did not turn up for work and did not lift a finger around the house. Men had to cope with the household chores on their own. Ready meals disappeared from supermarkets within hours. Offices filled with crying children because nursery staff were women too. Even calling someone to arrange help became difficult, because those workers were also women. After that day, many laws in Iceland were revised to improve women’s lives.

Now let’s step outside. I am a mother with a baby carriage, and the city greets me with staircases without ramps, narrow sidewalks and raised curbs that seem to ask: are you sure you want to go this way? Most buildings and streets were designed without considering that a woman might be moving through the city with a baby carriage, following a route that takes her to school, work, the clinic and the shop. This is not necessarily malicious. It is simply that the people sitting at the planning table for hours had often never pushed a baby carriage themselves.

Then I get into the car and once again feel as if I have been forgotten. For decades, crash tests were carried out using male dummies, with male body shapes and weight distributions. Engineers are not conspirators, of course. The female body is more complex to model. But the result is the same: in an identical crash, a woman may face a higher risk of serious injury because the safety systems were not calibrated for her. Perhaps it is time to put dummies with different measurements in the car.

Now imagine I have driven to the pharmacy. For a long time, medicines were tested mainly on men, while women were sidelined. After all, we have periods, hormonal fluctuations and the possibility of becoming pregnant, so how can the experiment be “pure”? As a result, women take medicines tested on a hypothetical 70-kilogram man, and doctors are sometimes genuinely surprised when the body does not react as the textbook says it should.

Even a textbook heart attack can look different in women, often appearing as tiredness, nausea or other less obvious symptoms. Meanwhile, clutching at one’s heart is treated as the standard picture, even though that is more often the male version. Add to this the fact that female physiology is still sometimes presented in textbooks as a deviation from the norm, and it becomes deeply uncomfortable. A woman as a deviation from the norm? Seriously?

I have an autoimmune condition that affects women more often than men, yet much of the research has historically been carried out on men. The condition remains poorly understood partly because studies have not always reflected the people most affected by it. The medication was not developed with women properly in mind either. It is hard not to see the irony.

Finally, a brief note on work, because maternity leave does eventually end. Uniforms and protective clothing are still often made to men’s measurements, even though women’s bodies and muscle structure are different. Poor equipment can hinder a woman’s ability to work effectively, including in professions where she may be saving lives. But who cares?

At the end of the day, feminism is not about fighting men. It is about asking the world to stop pretending that humanity consists of people of one gender, one size and one set of needs.

Women can join the army, split the bill and do all the other things people use as dismissive arguments. But the real struggle is not about proving that women can do everything men do. It is about making sure the world is organized in a way that works for both men and women.

That is a very different thing.

This article was first published by the online newspaper Gazeta.ru and was translated and edited by the RT team 

https://runewsrt.com/russia/642306-what-russian-feminists-actually-want/

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TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD Sarah Roque had been in the Army for just over four years when a man fatally shot her in the head.

Roque wasn’t in a war zone, and the killer wasn’t an enemy combatant. It was Wooster Rancy, a fellow soldier stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, who had gone to Walmart for trash bags on the last day Roque was seen alive in October 2024. The Army found her body in a dumpster behind the barracks.

“Even now, I still can’t believe it,” her mother, Ana Roque, told The Intercept. “That murderers could exist in one of the supposedly safest places in the country.”

A first-of-its-kind analysis by The Intercept found that in the Army, women are more likely to be killed by their fellow service members than by enemy combatants, in a reversal of the threat soldiers are trained to face. Between 2011 and August 2025, at least 41 women died by homicide in the Army — more than half of them at the hands of other service members or veterans. Using Defense Department manpower data to calculate per capita death rates, The Intercept found that active-duty Army women face a higher risk of homicide than male soldiers, the opposite of national and global trends.

In many cases, women in the Army are killed by current or former romantic partners. Over 70 percent of victims had an intimate relationship with the perpetrator at one point, and the rate of homicides among women soldiers from intimate partner violence is at least three times higher than the national average. In others, like Roque’s case, it’s unclear how male soldiers chose their victims.

“There was no connection between Sarah and Rancy. They never spoke, never texted, and their paths never crossed,” said Ana Roque. Given that Rancy was convicted of murder in February, Roque added, “I can’t complain about the prosecutors, they did their job. But my grievance is that they didn’t push to uncover the truth behind why he did it.’”

Research points to the military’s hypermasculine culture, which historically devalues women, as a contributing factor to high rates of violence against them. But the existing scholarship is insufficient, said Erin Siegal McIntyre, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has spent years digging into the hidden structures of militarized institutions.

“There’s no way to know how bad the problem really is,” Siegal McIntyre said. “There is an abysmal amount of data collected on domestic violence perpetrated by law enforcement officers, for example, many of whom are former military.”

Analyzing over 14 years of Defense Department death data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, The Intercept’s investigation is the first to compare rates of violence against women in the Army to factors like duty location, jobs, and relationships with perpetrators. The FOIA data also reveals deaths not previously announced by the Army and the Department of Defense.

Violence against women in the military also appears to take a mental toll. In addition to the 41 women who died by homicide, another 128 died by suicide, the majority of them lower-ranking enlisted soldiers. From 2011 to 2024, the last complete year of data, homicide and suicide rates for women in the Army were double their equivalents for women nationwide.

The Army doesn’t make any of this public, and the Intercept’s investigation has found flaws in what data collection currently occurs: Homicide and suicide death rates are not separated by gender or calculated per capita, preventing deeper analysis and comparison.

There’s also nothing publicly accessible on how many homicides are committed by service members, who their victims are, or where homicides occurred. The Defense Department’s annual suicide reportdoesn’t note how many of the deceased had experiences with sexual assault or harassment.

Meanwhile, systems meant to protect women are being rolled back and dismantled.

In September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminated the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. It had existed for nearly 75 years, focusing on issues including sexual harassment and assault. In January, he ordered a six-month review of women in combat roles. In April, a woman who had been a whistleblower on sexual harassment within the Army Special Operations community was accused of sharing classified information and arrested by the FBI. Hegseth has also intervened to block the promotions of women officers.

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Army denied that its protections were insufficient.

“The Army has several programs and policies to protect service members who experience sexual assault or domestic violence,” said Army spokesperson Heather Hagan.

READ MORE: https://theintercept.com/2026/06/30/army-women-death-domestic-violence-sexual-assault/

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Five weeks into 2026 and already, six women have been killed, allegedly by men who were known to them. 

So four weeks out from International Women’s Day, ending violence against women in Australia was always going to be a key agenda item as Prime Mininster Anthony Albanese and Opposition leader Sussan Ley shared a rare co-hosting moment. 

Speaking at the annual State of Gender Equality at UN Women Australia’s International Women’s Day Launch in Canberra, the two leaders shared historical wins and achievements on gender equality, but couldn’t ignore the sad reality of women’s safety. 

While Albanese could speak to a number of actions his government has taken on gender equality, in addition to progress wins on the gender pay gap and women’s workforce participation in the past couple of years, violence against women continues in 2026, just as it did in 2025. 

And the killing of women continues just as it did in 2024 when Albanese described men’s violence against women as “a national crisis”, following the murder of six people, including five women, at Westfield Bondi Junction. 

“Addressing the scourge of violence against women is about action across our society,” he said today. 

“The test for our generation, for all of us, is action and outcomes.” 

Albanese said his government are seeking to take “tougher and more targeted action against perpetrators” and to ensure financial systems can’t be used for abuse and control. He said they’re seeking courts and the legal system to “serve as instruments of justice, not trauma”.

https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/the-killings-continue-in-a-country-apparently-making-progress-on-gender-equality/

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