text: Diana Stanciu
illustration: Raluca Cozmi
!TW: TO MENTION
Although we live in the 21st century, the year of grace 2023, our country still has a few steps to climb in order to reach gender equality.
As women we face misogyny from an early age in schools, high schools, universities, at work, on the street, sometimes in our own homes.
We live in a country where 55% of the Romanian respondents of the special Eurobarometer on gender violence carried out in the summer of 2016 believe that sexual abuse can be justified by: alcohol and drug consumption, wearing clothes considered "provocative or sexy", the victim of willingly going home with someone; also within the same Eurobarometer, 1 out of 5 Romanians would not even want rape to be illegal.
The same country where courts rule that underage girls have consensually had sex with much older men. Also here, even in the heart of the Capital, men on the terrace give notes to women just passing by.
Romanian patriarchal society asks women "not to lose their jewels" (an often used expression, referring to virginity) before marriage, but men still expect women to behave exactly like adult movie actresses in the bedroom , blamed in turn for the work they do.
Do you have another sexual orientation?: "You haven't given your due yet..."
Do you choose your career at the expense of starting a family?: "The man is the one who has to produce."
Do you strongly support your ideas and conceptions?: "You are hysterical".
There are probably hundreds of examples that could be pointed out, but maybe we can look a little bit and what has improved, right?
According to the gender equality index for the year 2022, which I talked about previously, Romania holds the highest position in the power domain, the decisional-social subdomain. Romania has the highest score in the field of health (70.4 points) thanks to performances in the sub-domains of access (96.0 points) and health status (89.2 points). But both areas need improvement. And since 2019, our country's score has improved the most in the field of money (+1.1 points). Developments are also observed in the sub-domains of the economic situation (+1.4 points) and financial resources (+0.7 points), which facilitated this change. In the sub-domain of the economic situation, Romania rose from 25th to 24th place.
Romania's total score is 53.7 points, approximately 14.9 points below the European Union score.
It is clear that our country still has to progress, but we cannot deny its progress.
Sources:
A young man raped a 13-year-old girl in a park. Judge: "He's too young to go to jail!"
(94) PICK UP ARTISTS IN ROMANIA – YouTube
Romania | 2022 | Gender Equality Index | European Institute for Gender Equality
References:
English 
Română 
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