SANAA, Yemen, March 8 (UPI) -- Yemeni women marked International Women's Day on Friday by asking for more educational opportunities and better health care.
Female activist Rofa Hassan said the purpose of international celebration of Women's Day is to help remind people there are human rights that still need to be met.
She said women in rural areas, for example, often have little idea of the celebration made in their name or of funds being disbursed for women's legal awareness, female literacy, and the improvement of women's health status.
For last year's International Women's Day, several Yemeni media institutions allowed a number of female journalists to take up the positions of editors and heads of the board of directors for a day. But that procedure was not repeated this year.
The number of workingwomen in regions of Yemen is as low as 20.18 percent. Although women are employed at almost 50 percent within the country's agriculture sector, women are little represented elsewhere: 0.60 percent work in the sector of steel industry, 0.40 percent in the sector of electricity and water, 0.16 percent in the sector of processed industries and 0.02 percent in the sector of finance, insurance and real estate.
An estimated 0.09 percent of Yemeni women work in the sector of administration and services, and some of them work for free.
Yemen is among countries that have ratified international women's legislation, including the International Declaration of Human Rights, the 1951 Agreement of Equality in salaries, the 1951 Agreement on Women's Political Rights and the Accord Against Women Discrimination, signed in a Beijing conference in 1995.
