It was the day when Canada finally recognized that yes, women were equal persons to men.

Days before the country again goes to the polls in Monday’s Federal Election, Canada on Friday celebrates the 90th anniversary of one of its most seismic political days.

In 1929, a group of women referred to as the Famous Five won a historic legal challenge that saw women designated legal “persons.” The ruling meant that women could be appointed to the Senate and paved the way for women to participate more fully in politics.

The fight had been a long one — the Supreme Court of Canada had initially ruled against the quintet — and it took intervention from Britain to overrule the decision. But for some the fight was only beginning. In effect, the Persons Day ruling only applied to some women.

Many women of colour were not granted full voting rights until the late 1940s — more than 30 years after it was originally granted to women in 1916. Indigenous women, meanwhile, were excluded from voting at a federal level until 1960.

On the 90th anniversary of “persons” status in Canada, the Star spoke with leaders from across the county and asked them: How can Canada do better to execute on its 1929 promise and how far is there still to go before women can participate equally, in politics and beyond?

The interviews have been edited and condensed.

—

El Jones is a writer, speaker and advocate living in Halifax. She is the city’s former poet laureate and serves as chair of the Nancy Rowell Jackman women’s studies program at Mount Saint Vincent University.

Black people have often framed our fight for justice around the demand to be seen as human. While Canada granted “personhood” to women in 1929, of course at that time Indigenous women could not vote. Indigenous women continued to be sterilized in Canada. Segregated schools existed in Nova Scotia. Canada maintained exclusionary immigration laws that specifically limited immigration by people who weren’t white. It’s clear that while women were considered persons, this personhood only extended — and not fully — to white women.

Today, almost 40 per cent of women in federal prisons are Indigenous women. Black and Indigenous children are disproportionately represented in the child welfare system. Black girls are suspended from schools at higher rates than their peers. We barely even keep statistics on Black women in Canada to have data to even represent our experiences and conditions. We are still fighting for justice and for our humanity. We still can’t deliver clean drinking water to every community in Canada.

The struggles for justice have been led by the organizing of Black, Indigenous and women of colour, histories that are erased and neglected. From reproductive justice to transformative justice to water protection, we have been on the front lines. We are the nannies and the cleaners and the migrant workers. And yet, we still struggle for housing, for employment, to have our sexual assaults taken seriously, against policing, against poverty. We have won battles on our own, against a state that continues to do violence to us, and where the promises made to us are not fulfilled.

So what can Canada do better? We talk a lot about the need to see more representation in higher places, but my vision of liberation is not a Black woman general waging war on African women and children, a Black female corporate CEO poisoning the environment, or a Black woman prime minister deporting other Black women. To come into our full humanity we need to challenge the state structures that continue to harm, kill, imprison and deny us. How about Canada invest in affordable housing for women instead of prisons, universal child care instead of increasing the military budget, free post-secondary education instead of more weapons to the police, and give the resources to our communities to build the structures we need to thrive.

Rachel Décoste is a diversity and immigration expert based out of Ottawa.

I think one of the things that we can do in the future … is revisit this date that we celebrate the supposedly equality of women. The date we’re circling is the date that white women outside of Quebec got the right to vote. Okay, that’s great for them. But if we’re gonna really begin to address or celebrate this date, shouldn’t it be the date we all got the right to vote?

I mean the barrier for women are, in all positions of influence and power, whether it’s politics or other professions, is having the encouragement. People are just more likely to encourage men to run. The financial fortitude of taking time off work unpaid sometimes to run … It’s a huge undertaking financially. Women tend to make less money than men, so that trickles down to having less financial ability to take time off to run for office. Child rearing also kind of falls into that too. Usually the child rearing falls onto the woman in the couple. And so that’s another barrier.

So if I had a magic wand and I could fix it — I hate the word quota, but I’m going to use it — when you set targets and have punitive measures for people who don’t meet (a quota), all of a sudden you’ll find that many political parties are suddenly happy to find qualified people who are not of the dominant culture, whether it be gender or race. But until you make it a requirement where there’s a punishment for not doing it, there’s really no incentive.

Jen Agg is a Toronto-based restaurateur and author of “I Hear She’s a Real Bitch”.

Patriarchy (the water we swim in) is a barrier to everything. It needs to start with parents and continue with teachers, that boys aren’t the winning team. There are so many examples I could give, I literally wrote a whole book about it.

Men in the restaurant industry need to actually care about equality and a safe and reasonable work environment for women instead of pretending to. Right now it feels as though men are motivated by fear of being called out rather than an actual want of change.

Dr. Laveena Munshi is a critical care physician at Sinai Health System, University of Toronto.

We have come a long way since 1929 – but we cannot ignore the economic inequality that exists despite seemingly similar job descriptions. We cannot ignore the monotone colour of recurrent white, male leaders that remain the backdrop of our country’s history books.

I am looking forward to a future when we no longer need to dedicate a corner of a bookstore to stories of “women overcoming barriers,” where our opportunities and compensation are blind to race and gender, and where we can truly stand side by side on the same platform as our male counterparts. Nothing is beyond our capacity as women. A society of women flourishing is a society better for all.

My husband and I are in a unique position where we practise in the same field of medicine at different hospitals. He has been a motivating force behind me pursuing professional opportunities. He has done this by picking up “his share” of the childcare and household activities. We commonly joke about how he is “revered” as the “super-husband” who can skillfully balance a job and household responsibilities. Dear society: women have been doing this for years.

For many women, the expectations at work are to perform as though they do not have a family while the expectations at home are to perform as though they do not have a job. This results in artificial and unachievable standards.

Furthermore, invisible barriers such as “evening meetings/socials” — the arena for collaborating — tend to coincide with family dinner time/bedtime. The only person I’m collaborating with at 7:30 p.m. is my 5-year old and “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”. These examples are not unique to academic medicine and this privilege of uninterrupted momentum is often unrecognized. We need to rid ourselves of historic meeting times and environments that are not opportune for 50 per cent of the workforce.

Gender disparities permeate all fields — particularly medicine. Recognition and saying no to unachievable, outdated standards is the first step.

Janna Pratt is a Cree/Saulteaux labour activist. She is a Status Indian, a homeowner and taxpayer who lives in Regina, but is originally from George Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan.

First of all, Indians were not considered persons until 1967. So it wasn’t all women. Not everybody got to be a person at the same time.

I want to humanize the facts, the stacks and all the data. I want to talk about a First Nation girl who was born as a gift from the creator to a young mother and that young mother might have triggered a birth alert because she’s young, poor and uneducated and First Nation. Now this baby was born during the residential school period. She would live with her mom until she was five or six and if she was born during the ’60s scoop. She would be taken away at birth or in her younger years to be adopted out to a white family.

Today, not much has changed. There’s still a high probability that the child welfare system will apprehend the baby girl in her formative years. In Saskatchewan 85 per cent of all foster kids in the system are First Nation.

As this child grows, she will most likely spend her childhood in poverty like 50 per cent of First Nation kids. She’ll be exposed to the suicide epidemic. First Nation kids are three times more likely to commit suicide. She will want to fit in and be like other Canadian kids. But because of her background in the foster system and her maturity level, she could become vulnerable. She may be groomed at a young age, as young as 12, to seek a relationship as a way to escape her poverty. That may not be with the right person, which leads to partner violence or it can be a way to get girls groomed to work in the sex industry, especially when drugs, alcohol and addictions are introduced. Gangs may give her acceptance and a family that she was always seeking. At 18, she may have a child of her own on welfare, never attaining her Grade 12 education. She might try to work her way up. She could end up another missing or murdered Aboriginal woman.

This system doesn’t work for us. What works for us is learning our traditional way and taking back our maternal power.

We weren’t real people until 1967, so we still have some catching up to do. It was just one lifetime ago. And they expect everything for us to change so quickly, but generational trauma doesn’t work like that.

I’m a residential school survivor. The school closed in 1996. My dad went. My grandmother went, and my great-grandma. Reconciliation has helped, but the addictions are still there. The trauma is still there. But I see us getting more culturally vibrant.

Amira Elghawaby is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Ottawa.

It’s hard not to feel despondent about the state of women’s rights in Canada, 90 years after the Persons Case. Right now, one of the country’s largest provinces has stripped away the rights of countless numbers of women to both practise their faith and work in the public service. Bill 21 is Quebec’s provincial law barring any man or woman who wears a religious symbol from holding positions of authority, ranging from teachers to police officers, judges and prosecutors. While the law has impacted a number of religious communities, observers have suggested that the legislation’s real intent is to prohibit Muslim women, in particular, from wearing headscarves or face veils. “This Bill disproportionately targets women, and particularly Muslim women, impairing their equality rights and excluding them from being full participants in Québec society,” reads a statement by the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF).

Bill 21 will exacerbate how Muslim women are able to engage in the workforce, not only entrenching discrimination at the state level — but signalling to all of Quebec, and even the rest of Canada, that it is acceptable to treat some women as second-class citizens because of the clothing they choose to wear.

Overall, Muslim women in Canada are already often at an economic disadvantage. Statistics Canada’s 2016 General Social Survey shows that in 2016, 56 per cent of Muslim women were employed, as compared to 66 per cent of all women. We also know that newcomers to Canada who identify as Muslim are more likely to live in low-income (under $20,000) than immigrants of other religious backgrounds.

Canadians should therefore see Bill 21 as a full attack on both religious freedoms, and on the rights of women to fully and equally participate in society. We should be working harder to remove barriers to participation for all women, not only women who fit a biased ideal of what personhood and womanhood should look like.

The Canadian Women’s Foundation marked Equal Pay Day this past April by highlighting Statistics Canada numbers which show that:

Indigenous women face a 35 per cent gender pay gap

Women with disabilities (who work part time and full time) face a 46 per cent gender pay gap

Newcomer women face a 29 per cent gender pay gap

Racialized women face a 33 per cent gender pay gap

For the Persons Case to truly have resonance today, we need to hold governments to account for inaction on these issues.

We are not truly free to participate as equal members of society until all of us are truly free to do so. Our contributions mustn’t be shortchanged, either.

Bhutila Karpoche is the Ontario Member of Provincial Parliament for Parkdale—High Park.

To better execute the 1929 promise, our laws need to reflect the intersectional experiences of diverse women. We can do that by electing more women with lived experiences of oppression as decision-makers. We can also do this by recognizing the power we have as women, when we work in solidarity to build progressive movements that are inclusive, intersectional and demand better from our elected representatives.

We also need to do better in electing women from diverse communities that reflect the population. When I was elected to the Ontario Legislature in 2018, I made history by becoming the first person of Tibetan heritage to be elected into public office in North America. My colleagues also made history: Dr. Jill Andrew (MPP for Toronto—St. Paul’s) became the first queer Black woman and Doly Begum (MPP for Scarborough Southwest) became the first woman of Bangladeshi heritage, respectively, to get elected to the Ontario Legislature.

All of us sought political office as an extension of our community activism. We won because of the deep organizing of the base, and the tremendous support of diverse communities.

However, because the current political system is not designed for certain people to hold positions of power, Black and racialized women end up working twice as hard and with the pressure to have higher academic, professional and community credentials than male counterparts, to both run and win.

We then have to operate and succeed in a system that’s not designed in our favour. We also have a responsibility to keep pushing, and to lay the groundwork for others to come after us, for our victories to not be a one-off for the history books. That takes a lot of discomfort and it takes sacrifices, but it has to be done, and we do the work daily.

We as people have to work together to build on these historic victories and remove the barriers within the political system.

Listen Chen goes by pronouns they/them/their and is an organizer with Alliance Against Displacement, which is an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial activist group. Chen’s work centres around poor and homeless communities in the suburbs of Vancouver. They grew up in Hong Kong and now live in the Vancouver area.

In terms of what I want to see that would make women’s lives better, particularly Indigenous women and poor and working-class women, what I’d like to see is a movement of people who are excluded, exploited and oppressed by Canada, to rise up and end Canada and make something better out of its ashes. It would certainly look like Indigenous sovereignty. It would look like Indigenous nations practising their economies and their cultures on their lands — and people who are not Indigenous, working cooperatively and in tandem with Indigenous nations and Indigenous practices to organize our economy in a way that serves people’s needs rather than serves profit.

The thing that comes to mind in terms of organizing with poor and homeless activists [is that] the sites that we organize often have women leaders. Women were leaders of Anita Place tent city (in Maple Ridge, B.C.) for example.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Something that would make organizing easier is abolishing supportive housing, because it’s an institution that represses people.

Supportive housing is a relatively new model of housing where the government is building these single units, sometimes modular, sometimes not, housing complexes and contracting some kind of housing service provider to staff 24/7 with workers who control who can and can’t enter.

Women who are in supportive housing, it keeps them isolated from their families.

Allison Gibson is a social enterprise strategist and event placemaker. She is the director of impact and operations at Paintbox Bistro in Toronto’s Regent Park community.

A simple yet important step that needs to be made is the realization of more women in leadership roles and the promotion of our ideas, collaboration and empowerment, especially in the workplace. Archaic rules and untrue biases about women still exist, and I personally love dismantling these preconceived notions with bold and unapologetic leadership. Women have the ability to be creative, entrepreneurial and engineering, while being mothers, sisters, aunts and change-makers in our communities. I particularly am interested in solutions that promote inclusion and I’d like to see more companies and organizations consulting and hiring those who are often overlooked or disregarded, as they bring fresh and unique perspectives and ideas to the table.

Social enterprise is ingrained in the fabric of my life. I strategize on employment best practices for marginalized individuals while running Canada’s first B Corporation certified catering company, restaurant and event space. Step up and support companies like Paintbox that pay living wages, hire marginalized individuals and provide opportunity that result in an improved quality of life for others. Small steps can yield massive results and I’d like to see more of my industry peers adopting this mindset going forward.

Josephine Cruz, also known as JAYEMKAYEM, is a DJ and creative consultant currently based in Toronto. She relocated from Calgary in 2015.

Obviously there has been progress made since 1929 but overall I think that Canada needs to do much better to keep their promise. There needs to be greater acceptance and recognition of the fact that inequality disproportionately affects racialized, Indigenous, differently abled, trans women and other members of the LGBTQ community. We are in the midst of a national crisis when it comes to the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women. … It’s hard to accept that “personhood” for women has been achieved with these circumstances.

For me personally, one issue is financial security. As a self-employed person in a creative field, the possibility of motherhood seems out of reach for me. There’s no maternity leave pay for DJs. I’d love to see my government come up with solutions for people like me. At the very least, I feel there should be a national childcare strategy and child services that accommodate for unconventional work schedules — like evenings and weekends when I work.

Bonnie Brayton is the national executive director of DisAbled Women’s Network of Canada, a feminist disability organization serving women and girls.

What Canadians can do differently is to recognize that Canada isn’t what they think it is. There’s a lot of people in this country that have been forgotten by the rest of Canadians who sort of sit from a place of privilege.

If you look at the human rights complaints in this country for the last five years … the majority of human rights complaints at the federal, provincial and territorial level have been disability related. More than half of all complaints. What’s really going on in Canada is that disabled people are being oppressed, disabled women are being oppressed and the rest of the country is looking away from us.

To think of of this as a day for personhood in the context of people with disabilities and especially women with disabilities — there are so many ironies around this.

Women with disabilities, in research that we’ve done recently, have been “un-gendered.” And when I say un-gendered, what I mean is in policies that affect women. We … looked at policies in Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia and the federal government. What we found over and over again was that women and girls with disabilities were either footnoted in those policies or truly un-gendered. There would be lists that would say “women, Indigenous women ... racialized women, immigrant women” — and then say people with disabilities in the same sentence. This is a full circle irony for us to think of personhood and Persons Day. Women with disabilities are un-gendered all the time into persons, but we are nowhere in terms of personhood in that sort of broad sense.

The first thing we need to see is a real commitment to representation that is meaningful by all the federal parties. (They) do not even know that one quarter of women in this country live with a disability.

Pamela Palmater is a Mi’kmaw lawyer and the chair of Indigenous governance at Ryerson University.

Obviously we’re not there (equal) yet. The prime minister, when he declared himself a feminist — it seemed to be more superficial in terms of the cabinet members. In terms of representation on the Senate or in parliament, there’s not equal participation.

I think Canada has to do a much better job of addressing the underlying root causes of why there aren’t more women in political life, especially Indigenous and racialized women. For Indigenous women especially, you’re talking about ongoing genocide. So it’s pretty hard to think about contributing to the political life of a country that is actively engaged in genocide against you. If you think about the socioeconomic inequalities of Indigenous women and racialized women in terms of lack of access to education, lack of access to health care or child care that would prevent people from having the education, the training and the experience to get the work experience needed to be considered a good candidate in political life.

Canada has to specifically target the barriers. They (government) have to address racism in society, which has to be done I think primarily through public education. They failed miserably on educating the public, on taking an active role on women and women’s contributions — and especially Indigenous women and racialized women and their contributions — so that people see them as contributors and as political leaders.

Emily Mills is the founder of How She Hustles, a network for diverse women and the Startup & Slay digital series, which shines the spotlight on diverse women entrepreneurs.

The history of the Persons Case was about so much, but a lot of it was around, for example, political engagement, and based on my work with How She Hustles and this upcoming Start Up And Slay video series I’m hoping that more women from different lived experiences can be full participants in the business sector, in business in Canada.

So many women have aspirations to be entrepreneurs and successful business leaders, but there are still barriers and not everyone experiences barriers in the same way.

My hope is that whether it comes down to funding opportunities, opportunities for women to share their stories, opportunities for them to get support for them to grow their businesses, opportunities to make decisions as leaders in start-up spaces or business more broadly, women of colour, mothers, people from Indigenous communities, people [of all] gender identities, people with disabilities, people with different lived experiences — all of those people need to be part of the leadership of the business community.

And I think in order for us to really fulfill our promise that women are seen as persons, women have to be seen as persons in the business sector and have to be meaningfully included in this work.

Aisha Khaja is a senior policy analyst, founder of the Canadian chapter of CharityWeek, and former TV host of “Let the Quran Speak”.

We need to do better as a society to ensure women who go on maternity leave have the same level of opportunities as other women and men who may not have to take on such a responsibility. In other words, if a woman goes on maternity leave, we should create spaces for women in workplaces if they want to participate and engage at an intellectual level. While early year centres are great, some women are looking for spaces (with their babies) to continue to give back and play a role in society. Right now, these spaces are extremely difficult to find, especially for me as a new mom with an 8-month-old baby.

As a woman, it can be overwhelming to be in the media. As a former TV host, I’ve received a lot of criticism over the years of how I carried myself. Having support systems and training opportunities in place that provide a space to network and connect with other women, to navigate these spaces while not losing confidence is extremely important.

Y Vy Truong is a librarian and co-founder of Joss Paper Library, a community library in Vancouver’s Chinatown that focuses on self-published work by members of the Asian diaspora.

As a second generation Vietnamese settler, this (1929) promise did not have people like myself in mind, particularly as a person of colour. But that is to also say, as a cis woman, I understand what my privileges are in society and I think that what Canada can do better is to include trans women into the conversation on how their rights are always questioned in society and how we need to better protect the rights of trans folks.

Toronto Public Library is enabling particular communities to use the space in the library to promote hate speech against trans women and I, as a librarian, really cannot tolerate that. Particularly because we can’t just say or have posters and stickers that say libraries are trans inclusive when obviously we are not. When we think about libraries we think of them as public spaces where anyone is welcome. But at the same time, we have to question who are the people who are allowed to come into these spaces and actively question the livelihoods and ongoing violence of marginalized people, specifically trans folks.

Petra Kassun-Mutch is an entrepreneur and founder of Liisbeth, a media platform for feminist entrepreneurs.

Let’s stop thinking “Add x% women and stir” is enough. We can start by realizing that inviting white and BIPOC women, gender queer and trans people to participate in a broken political system based on 5000-year-old patriarchial, white settler values and ideas is not going to work. Those principles no longer resonate in a climate challenged world where we have nine billion people trying to figure out how to thrive.

If we want change, diversity (and not just in terms of race or gender, but also in terms of diversity of thought) and new ideas coming from our house of representatives, we need to re-design our electoral systems. We need to promote and embrace activists — instead of marginalize them — as a source of important new ideas. We also need to make it safe for those who have experienced oppression and outright physical harm as a result of their gender, race or religion to run for office. People who have experienced harm due to racism or misogny or homophobia. For example, women (1 in 5) who have experienced harrassment or gender-baed violence who then find themselves routinely the targets of online harrassment and physical threats, or women who serve as primary caretakers in a family of limited means, will naturally shy away from even considering running for office.

​We have incubators and accelerators for just about everything — except supports like this for people who wish to serve the public as an elected representative. I would like to see well-funded, nonpartisan civic incubator and accelerator programs with a diversity manadate spring up across the country,​​​ which teach people with ideas how to run for office, raise money and how government works. ​

I would like our innovation spend and investment in start up ecosystems to support feminist enterprises, feminist entrepreneurs and gendered innovation.

​We often talk about the green economy. Initaitives like buy local to keep money in our communities. But we rarely talk about Canada’s $1B feminist economy made up of women, LGBTQIA2S, nonbinary, trans support organizations, plus intersectional feminist values-led business leaders, sole-preneurs and entrepreneurs of all genders innovating and experimenting.

I would like to see MBA programs teach students about feminism and other social movements like Marxism and civil rights. If we want future business leaders to lead differently, it has to start by building empathy and an understanding that if 99 per cent of a country’s people and children of all genders can’t thrive, business can’t thrive either.

Khadija Zafar is an educator, mother and caregiver for her son with special needs, and an advocate for accessibility.

Although Canada has come far to make changes and to right its wrongs, there are many things that still need to change.

Many times, people have judged me and discriminated against me for how I look or dress because they do not taken the time to learn about who I am as a person. However, many individuals have taken chances and given me opportunities that I am very thankful for so all I ask for is for other Canadians to be accepting of us, our identity and values.

So, for those individuals who see me and others like me as oppressed and illiterate, you need to reflect on yourself and your inner ideas that are in conflict. I can assure you, we are many things, and wear many hats, with many important responsibilities. I am a mother, a grad student pursuing my Masters, and an active advocate for disability awareness and inclusion. I expect to be treated with respect, dignity and honour, just as I do to others.

As a mother of an individual with special needs, life in general has not been easy, and it’s not because of having a child with severe disability, but the lack of services causing hardship to give my son a good quality of life.

Even though Canada is a lot better than many places in the world when it comes to rights of individuals with disabilities, we can improve on many things.

People with disabilities should not have to worry about choosing where to go and where not to go just because there are no services available such as ramps, elevators, wide lanes, braille or accessible transportation. Which is why it is time we push for a change for people with special needs, just like women pushed for years and years to fight for their rights to be even considered humans.

Mona Fortier is the first female MP for Ottawa—Vanier. Her expertise falls in the areas of health care, education, job creation and francophone affairs.

Over the past decade we have seen a push from society and political parties to engage more women in meaningful ways, because we know that when we elect more women, we get more inclusive policies. Personally, having been the first woman elected in Ottawa—Vanier, there have been times when I have had to fight to have my voice heard in the community. I strongly believe that women need to be key players in developing effective policies at all levels of government that represent the racial and gender diversity of our country.

For me, youth are also a big factor in motivating change and encouraging diversity. It has been extremely rewarding to participate in youth events and events for women leaders. It is inspiring to see how the young leaders of today have the knowledge, strength, and sheer determination to share their views and continue to push forward, for the betterment of today and tomorrow. Their voices are able to greatly influence the inclusivity of politics and policies. That is why it is so important to create spaces where youth can feel empowered to engage with their communities and all levels of government.

As a mother of three teenagers, finding a balance between work and family life has been a silent challenge that I have been navigating. We need to do more to ensure that parliamentarians are able to play many roles, such as their role as a parent in addition to being a Member of Parliament.

Last year, the first female cabinet minister in Canadian history gave birth to a baby boy while in office. We are on track to making the House of Commons more family-friendly and I think that that could be one of our biggest advances in the next four years. By providing a workspace that is conducive to the different lifestyles of Members of Parliament, we can encourage more people to run for office. That is sure to attract a diverse set of minds to the political sphere and ensure a more inclusive Parliament.

Farrah Khan is an educator, frontline sexual violence worker and policy advisor with two decades of experience addressing gender equity. Her company Possiblity Seeds just released Courage to Act: Developing a National Framework to Address and Prevent Gender-Based Violence on Post-Secondary Campuses in Canada.

It was not until the 1960s that all women including Indigenous women in Canada had the right to vote. This is a good reminder that the celebration of “Persons Day” is flawed as not all of us were seen as people even by women that were supposed to be our allies.

We still need to do so much more to ensure that all women feel that they can participate in political life including universal childcare, addressing the gender wage gap (not just based on gender but also race), affirming gender and sexual human rights and addressing the vitriol that is used to harass women candidates.

What I see as one of the most pressing issues for women in 2019 is gender-based violence. The country I want ensures that all women, especially those on the margins, when faced with violence, have access to justice, safety and culturally safe community programs.