Women’s Day | Between the Goddess and the Empty List

A Bitter Laugh

A few days ago, an image circulated across social media carrying the logo of UN Women. It promised a list of the top ten countries that had achieved gender equality. The numbering was there — 1 through 10 — but the names were not. The answer, printed in bold at the bottom: None exist.

This was not satire. It was documented fact. The UN Women Gender Snapshot 2025, drawing on data from 131 countries, confirms explicitly that not one country in the world has achieved full gender equality across the four measured indicators. Even Iceland, Norway, and Sweden — the perennial leaders of global gender indices — have closed no more than eighty percent of the gap. Not one has crossed the threshold that would allow anyone to say: we made it.

There is something both funny and deeply sad about this image. The United Nations celebrates International Women’s Day and in the same breath issues a certificate of collective failure on behalf of the entire planet. That contradiction is not merely ironic — it is an invitation to think seriously. So we will not celebrate here. We will think.

—

Women’s Day — Celebration or Confession of Failure?

March 8th was not handed to women as a gift from above. It was born from real labor struggles — women in New York factories and European streets in the early twentieth century demanding the right to strike, to vote, to work with dignity. It was a day of resistance before it became a day of congratulations.

Something has blurred along the way.

In many cultures — stretching from the Mediterranean to the depths of Asia — this day overlaps with Mother’s Day, or is presented as one and the same. There lies a quiet conflation that rarely gets named directly: celebrating a woman as a mother is a fundamentally different act from celebrating her as an independent human being. Motherhood is a profound value, but it is not the whole of a woman’s identity, and it is not the only lens through which she deserves to be seen.

When Women’s Day collapses into Mother’s Day, society says implicitly: we honor you for what you produced, not for who you are.

These same cultures that sanctify motherhood one day a year have frequently denied women the right to vote, to divorce, to work without a male guardian’s approval. The uncomfortable truth is that most major religious systems — which form the dominant layer of collective consciousness in these cultures — were constructed on an explicitly masculine rhetorical architecture. The deity is gendered male. The prophet is male. The jurist is male. The interpreter of the text is male. When men write the laws governing women, good intentions alone are insufficient guarantee of justice.

We say this not as an attack on faith, but as an anthropological observation: religion is a human phenomenon and reflects the society that produced it. Every text carries the fingerprints of those who wrote it.

Ingmar Bergman — the great Swedish director — seemed to understand this contradiction decades before the United Nations put numbers to it. In his extraordinary film Persona (1966), his protagonist does not collapse under the weight of illness or external shock. She collapses under the weight of the role expected of her — mother, wife, perfect image — until silence becomes the only honest response left. We give Bergman and this film the space they deserve in a dedicated article. (See our article: Ingmar Bergman and Persona — When the Role Goes Silent)

—

Before Patriarchy — The Suppressed Chapter

There is a phase of human history that many prefer to ignore, or to name badly. It is sometimes called the “primitive commune” — a label designed to suggest chaos and backwardness, implying that whatever came after it was necessarily more advanced and more just. The more accurate name is the matristic phase: the period when lineage was traced through the mother, when authority passed through her, and when the sacred took her form.

The archaeological record does not lie. In the basin of Mesopotamia — the cradle of earliest human civilization — excavations have uncovered statues of Ishtar and fertility goddesses in striking numbers. These figures require no symbolic decoding: a woman with full breasts nursing her children, a body that gives and sustains life. The first deity in human consciousness was female. The original creator was a mother.

This was not primitive fantasy. It was a different understanding of who holds the origin of life — and it was not necessarily wrong.

These artifacts, predating writing and organized civilization by thousands of years, pose an uncomfortable question: was the gap between the sexes narrower in that period than it is today? Or were biological differences just as present, but the social structures built upon them arranged differently — less hierarchical, or at least differently hierarchical?

No one knows with certainty when or how the shift from matristic to patriarchal organization occurred. Theories abound: the transition to settled agriculture and private property, which created pressure to identify paternal ownership; the rise of military groups that valued physical strength over reproductive capacity; long-term climate shifts that redistributed social roles. What is certain is that this transition was not a natural inevitability — it was a historical choice, with all the weight that word carries.

And what was chosen once can be chosen differently again.

—

Are the Differences Between the Sexes Real?

Yes, the differences are real. But not in the way most people wield them as arguments.

At the level of statistical averages, documented biological differences exist: hormonal, anatomical, and in some behavioral patterns. This is science, not opinion. But the fundamental error arrives when we take a group average and project it onto an individual. The variation within each sex — between one woman and another, one man and another — is wider for most traits than the variation between the sexes themselves. Every person is a point on a spectrum, not a copy of a stereotype.

Then comes the harder question: how much of what we measure as sex difference is biological, and how much was built by upbringing and social expectation? When we raise girls toward caution, care, and deference, and boys toward risk, initiative, and stoicism — then measure the differences between them and call the results “natural” — we are not measuring nature. We are measuring what we built.

Fear, aggression, care, ambition — these are human traits distributed across all of us. Their distribution follows the contours of what culture has permitted, not what biology alone has prescribed.

The conclusion that frustrates both sides equally: differences exist in part, but exaggerating them or using them to construct hierarchy is a cultural choice, not a biological necessity.

—

### Eliminating Differences or Eliminating Hierarchy?

A persistent confusion runs through equality debates. One camp argues that equality means proving women and men are identical in every measurable way. The opposing camp insists that acknowledging any difference justifies discrimination. Both positions rest on a false premise.

Equality does not mean sameness. It means that rights and their denial are not built on the basis of sex. A man who is calmer than average, a woman who is bolder than average — both fall outside the stereotype assigned to their sex, and both deserve to be treated as who they actually are, not as who they were expected to be.

Forcing the erasure of difference in any direction produces results that are doubtful and often counterproductive. Nature does not dissolve — it gets redirected. And redirecting it is precisely what humans have been doing for thousands of years, whenever they chose culture over instinct in the service of building more just and stable communities.

—

Nature Is More Flexible Than Our Laws

The rigid binary — male or female, this or that — is a useful simplification for social organization, but it does not describe nature as it actually is.

In the biological world, the picture is far richer than any human culture has been willing to admit. Some organisms reproduce with no sexual partner at all. Others carry both sexes simultaneously, choosing their reproductive mode based on circumstance — when a partner is scarce or danger presses, they produce from themselves. Some species undergo spontaneous sex change during their lifespan, responding to the needs of the group.

Diverse sexual behavior is documented across most species capable of sexual reproduction. It is not a rare aberration — it is a recurring pattern across a wide spectrum of life.

In humans specifically, the behavioral and psychological sexual spectrum is far broader than any legal or religious system has ever acknowledged. This is not moral disorder — it is biological reality. Every human being, however conventional their behavior, carries in the deeper layers of their psychology some portion of the full human range.

Sexual diversity is not a deviation from nature — it is part of nature’s evolutionary logic. Attempting to eliminate it from an entire society is a debt the natural order collects in its own time and in its own way.

A precise distinction is necessary here. Humans are the only species to have developed a cerebral cortex capable of framing and redirecting instinct rather than simply obeying it. This capacity is what made civilization possible. When human cultures suppressed sexual attraction between close relatives, they were not defying nature — they were using a higher natural tool, intelligence and culture, to override a lower instinct. That choice moved human societies forward in a meaningful way.

The critical difference is between necessary framing — protecting the vulnerable, organizing communal life — and wholesale social suppression: pursuing consenting adults for private choices that harm no one. The former is civilization. The latter is fear dressed as virtue.

—

Where Are We Going?

The list is still empty. But an empty list is not evidence of impossibility — it is evidence of failure, and failure can be corrected.

The real question is not whether women are equal to men. The question is: why does that still need answering in 2025? Why does the best the world can offer still produce a blank where names should be?

Returning to the matristic period is not the solution, and nostalgia for the past is not a road forward. But examining that period reveals something essential: the patriarchal hierarchy was never an eternal inevitability. It was a historical choice, made at a particular moment, for reasons connected to economics and military organization and property — not to any natural law that cannot be questioned. What human beings chose once, under specific conditions, they can choose differently under different ones.

History demonstrates that humans are capable of dismantling social structures that once seemed immovable as mountains. Slavery was “natural” across entire civilizations for centuries, then it ended. Legal racial segregation seemed inevitable until it seemed absurd. Every major transformation began with a small and honest question: why this, exactly?

We are not asking for utopia. We are asking for something simpler and deeper at the same time: societies that do not convert differences into verdicts, that do not convert variation into hierarchy. Societies that assess a person by who they are, not by what they were born.

The empty list is an invitation to humility before the scale of what remains undone. But it is also an implicit acknowledgment that the path is possible — because humanity has tried other arrangements, and has known societies with greater balance. Hope is not romantic illusion. It is a conclusion drawn from history: what the human species has made, it can remake.

International Women’s Day will remain an incomplete celebration as long as the list stays blank. But it is a useful reminder that the struggle is unfinished and the question unanswered. And that, in itself, is worth marking — not because the road is short, but because holidays do not build real equality. Work builds it. Awareness builds it. And the courageous question builds it.

—

References:
[1] UN Women — Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The Gender Snapshot 2025
[2] World Economic Forum — Global Gender Gap Report 2024
[3] Marija Gimbutas — The Language of the Goddess
[4] Frans de Waal — Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist
[5] Ingmar Bergman — Persona, 1966