Leading article: A chance to reflect on how much is still to be done

It is almost a century now since the first national women's day was declared in the United States. An international women's day has been held in one form or another almost ever since. For decades, it languished as a ritualistic day of champagne and roses for women in the communist bloc - scant compensation for the other 364 days of political invisibility, false promises and interminable queuing for necessities.

Liberated from its adverse ideological baggage with the demise of communism, it has been increasingly embraced in the rich world as a day of celebration, appeals and agitation. It is a day on which women expect a hearing for their causes - and a day for everyone to reflect on how much remains to be done.

After so long, it is depressing to report that there is probably no country in the world - not even in socially enlightened Scandinavia - where "women's issues" have ceased to exist because real gender equality has been achieved. It is easy for other European women to look enviously at Norway, where all companies must have at least two women on their boards by the end of this year. That there was felt to be a need for legislation and quotas even here, however, is a sad comment on how little progress was possible without them.

Beside the vast and lethal inequalities between the sexes that exist in much of the less developed world, of course, women in the rich countries have it easy. In many countries, there is a daily struggle for survival. If, for the most part, it is the men who go to fight, it is the women who fetch the water, put food on the table and nourish the children. Failure to produce a child, or a male child, can be a capital offence.

It is hard to know where to begin in the litany of suffering that afflicts the "second sex" in those many countries where men rule as of right. Enforced marriage; the iniquitous dowry system which turns a blind eye to the murder of unsatisfactory wives; female circumcision; the killing of girl babies that was the immoral by-product of China's one-child policy in rural areas: these are matters of life and death. Girls - for it is more often girls than boys - are sold into prostitution and trafficked across frontiers for profit. Girls are a lower priority for health care than boys, and lower still for education. These are disadvantages that cannot be rectified in one generation - although, as we are seeing with the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan - access to health care and education are gains that can be reversed almost overnight.

It is right that we in the rich countries should campaign for women's rights in those countries where they enjoy few. But as the reports we publish today show, there is no room for complacency here either. Domestic violence remains an intractable problem, as does rape. With greater social freedom, women are exposed to more risk. Discussion in this country about tightening the definition of women's consent to sex is a direct result of the advantage that some men have taken.

The conservative religious climate in parts of the United States threatens to set women's rights back half a century if access to abortion is endangered, as it is now in South Dakota. The imposition by the US of a ban on foreign aid funding for birth control abroad has been among the most regressive policies of this administration. Nor should the work and pay gap - wider in Britain than in most industrialised economies - be trivialised. Work and pay constitute a gauge of a society's values and evidence of continuing inequality.

As an occasion for celebration or campaigning, International Women's Day has come a long way from its modest start. But it will not have come far enough until women themselves declare it redundant because equality has been achieved.

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