MANY of the key facts and figures of women's oppression remain hidden: but it is clear that just as it is widening the gulf between rich and poor, the capitalist market system has done nothing to tackle inequality between the sexes.
Twenty years ago, a world conference held in International Women's Year called on the United Nations to collect and analyse key statistics on women's health, education, employment and living conditions.
There was great resistance, and the job has been only patchily and inadequately carried out: but even the limited data available show that oppression and exploitation of women continue unabated.
In many societies women work longer hours than men: in Africa and Asia women work an average of 13 hours more each week; in Latin America six hours; in Western Europe five to six hours.
Around the world, women working outside the home earn an average of 30-40 percent less than men, with no sign of the gap reducing.
On top of domestic chores including the collection of most of the poor world's water, collecting most of its fuel, cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, shopping, bearing and caring for children, women also cultivate the majority of the food crops. in the poorer countries.
Around the world women also face discrimination in education - in some become literate - and in health and social services.
An estimated 1,500 women per day die from complications of pregnancy or childbirth, with another 300 a day dying from illegal abortions.
But the problems of inequality and oppression are not confined to the 'third world' countries.
The capitalist market system is increasingly reliant on the exploitation of low-paid part-time workers, most of them women, and the majority of them unorganised in unions.
In the Netherlands, for example two thirds of the women in the paid workforce work part-time. 500.000 women are employed on contracts of 1-10 hours a week, which leaves out of pension and social security entitlements. One Dutch woman in eight is living below the poverty line.
Brutal
A similar pattern is taking shape in Britain, with Thatcherite deregulation and the scrapping of wages councils which once stipulated legal minimum wages now coupled with a brutal onslaught on the public sector services which have traditionally employed millions of women.
The privatisation of support services in the National Health Service (cleaning, catering and laundry) and Compulsory Competitive Tendering in local government have led to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, the majority of them held by women, and to plummeting rates of pay and conditions.
Twenty years after Labour minister • Barbara Castle introduced the Equat struggles; yet torcome. remains a big and growing gulf in Britain between the pay and conditions of women, who still tend to be concentrated in the stereotype 'caring and cleaning' areas of employment, and men.
Wage-cutting
The new round of council cuts in social services and education will also hit women workers most heavily, as does the imposition of a wage-cutting 1% pay increase on nurses and professions allied to medicine, the vast majority of whom are women.
To make matters even worse, the post-Maastricht crackdown on public spending is also taking its toll on women as users of social and health services and as carers for children and adult dependents at home, and as pensioners.
While the capitalist system, centred on private profit rather than social need, continues to squeeze the working classes internationally, equal rights legislation alone can only achieve limited gains for women.
Despite the pretence of social 'equality', the exploitation of workers by employers is not embodied in any specific laws, but is perpetuated by the economic relations of capitalist society.
That's why feminism consistently carried through leads to socialist politics, to internationalism, and the fight for the overthrow of the whole, rotten system of oppression and exploitation.
And it's why socialists continue to celebrate International Women's Day as a reminder of struggles past and