International Women’s Day: Redesigning the Foundations

By Atrish Sanchez

As International Women’s Day approaches, we will rightly celebrate the progress women in Gibraltar have made. And we should.

But celebration without honesty risks mistaking progress for completion. For many women, choice is still more constrained than we like to admit, particularly when the equity to sustain it is not there.

My understanding of womanhood has sharpened over time. It has been shaped by both the women and men who raised me and shaped my life, and by my own lived experience, by the moments that have stretched and tested me, and by the realities I have had to navigate.

I grew up in a household shaped by working women. My grandmother was a domestic cleaner. My mother has worked in the public sector for as long as I can remember. If I am completely honest, I do not recall work ever being framed as empowerment. Given our modest background, it was simply the reality of life, part of survival and part of responsibility.

My parents were young when they had me. They worked very hard to ensure my brother and I had what we needed. We did not grow up with excess; we grew up with effort. And we were raised the same. There was never any suggestion that ambition belonged more naturally to him than to me. We were held to the same standards and given the same expectations and opportunities.

I also grew up seeing shared responsibility as normal. Parenting and domestic life were not assigned by default. They were shared, not ideologically but practically. It was simply how our home functioned.

Yet culturally, the language we still encounter on some occasions tells a different story.

All too often, I encounter people who kindly ask how I manage two full-time jobs, two young children and a household, and almost immediately follow it with: “Thankfully you have a husband who helps you with the kids.”

My husband is a great husband and father. He supports my career as I support his. But he does not “help” me with our children. He raises them, as I do. He shares responsibility for the household, as I do. That is not assistance. It is parenthood. There have been periods when his work demanded long hours and late nights. Yet neither of us can recall a single time when anyone has said to him “thankfully you have a wife who helps you.”

This matters because language reveals expectation, and expectation often shapes reality.

I have also experienced what constrained choice feels like.

When our younger daughter was facing significant mobility and feeding challenges, I stepped back from work because I both needed and wanted to be more present. At that time, my husband’s career required more of him. As a family, it also made practical sense.

But when you come from a modest background, when you have two young children and bills to pay, life does not pause because something difficult happens.

So, I returned to work earlier than I might have wished. Sometimes what appears to be choice is simply necessity.

Even then, my options were narrower than they might otherwise have been. The flexibility, the shared leave structures and the accessible childcare that might have supported broader decisions were not there.

After exploring every avenue, I redirected my professional path. Not because it was the ambition I had always held or what I had imagined, but because it was the path that could realistically coexist with my family’s needs at that time.

That is what constrained choice looks like. It is adjustment. It is absorbing compromise and moving forward anyway.

But not every woman has even that space to adjust.

Not every woman can work from home. Not every woman can take her child to work. Not every woman can take a child to a classroom, a clinic, a shift or a boardroom. Not every employer can accommodate that. Not every woman can reduce her hours without severe financial consequence or move sideways without affecting long-term progression.

If you can manoeuvre in that way, that is a form of equity, and it is not universally afforded. For many women, there is no room to recalibrate at all.

Even within my own constrained choice, I am acutely aware that I was not navigating the most precarious reality. Many women face circumstances that leave even less room to manoeuvre.

I was able to build on my academic background, retrain in a short period of time, enter a different sector and start again. That ability to pivot is not available to every woman.

For some, constrained choice does not lead to recalibration. It leads to stagnation.

This is why the conversation cannot remain at the level of personal resilience. When the ability to manoeuvre depends on circumstance or goodwill, we are not talking about individual strength. We are talking about structural design. Because if the foundations are uneven, progress will always depend on individual sacrifice. If the supports beneath working families are fragile, equality becomes conditional.

What we need now is to redesign the foundations so that equity is built into the system itself, not negotiated case by case, family by family.

Most families today believe in shared responsibility. The issue is rarely willingness. It is infrastructure. Equality alone is not enough. Equality treats everyone the same. Equity recognises that different circumstances require different supports, and it is equity that makes equality meaningful.

And design shapes behaviour.

This is precisely why parental leave is so fundamental to this discussion.

Across Europe, countries have been legislating for parental leave since the 1970s, when Sweden introduced the first gender-neutral parental leave scheme in 1974. Parental leave has since been recognised as a structural tool for enabling shared caregiving.

Yet in Gibraltar, statutory paid paternity leave remains absent and shared parental leave remains outstanding. When only one parent has meaningful leave, the system quietly shapes behaviour and denies families the structural space to make equitable choices for themselves, even when families believe in and yearn for equity.

Childcare and parental leave affect men as well as women. Fathers are equally impacted by limited leave structures and inaccessible childcare. These policies shape families, not only mothers. If equity is the engine of choice, inaccessible and unaffordable childcare slows that engine down.

Workplace dignity must form part of this discussion.

There has been progress in raising awareness around menopause, and that is welcome. But awareness is not enough. Menopause is a workplace health issue experienced during peak professional years. Reasonable adjustments should not depend on goodwill or sector. Support should be consistent. These conversations must include men and young boys. Sustainable change depends on shared understanding.

There is also a cultural layer that legislation alone cannot fix.

Young women today are told they can be anything. But they are also told, constantly, that they must be everything and do it flawlessly.

They are measured on competence and appearance at the same time.

A woman can be encouraged to lead and simultaneously assessed on whether she looks polished enough, soft enough or approachable enough. The standard is not only performance. It is presentation and beyond appearance lies domestic expectation.

In my political career, I have come across commentary in a party-political newspaper that focused not on policy but on my appearance, referring to my make-up and describing photographs as “pin-up” images, and suggesting that I should show more care and compassion towards those close to me rather than comment on domiciliary care policy. This message is not subtle.
The implication is moral. It suggests that before a woman speaks about public policy, she must first prove her personal credentials.

That scrutiny is rarely applied in the same way to men.

I am comfortable in who I am and in the knowledge that my choices are not contingent on the approval of others. But what message does that send to a younger woman watching?

It tells her that her competence may be weighed alongside her appearance. That her authority may be filtered through assumptions about her personal life. That before her ideas are engaged with, her aesthetics or her perceived domestic role may be evaluated. That is an additional burden to carry.

And it is precisely why, as we mark International Women’s Day, we must celebrate success, but not only one narrow version of it.

The movement must reflect all women.

Our panels should reflect the breadth of our community, not only senior professionals, but including caregivers, domestic workers, women in lower-paid sectors, stay-at-home mothers, women without children, women from the LGBTQ+ community, women with disabilities and women navigating economic hardship.

We must hear from women whose lives look different and from women whose choices are constrained now. For some, the life they have built is success precisely because it was freely chosen. That choice is not ours to measure against a narrow definition of achievement. For others, the barriers are present and real. If we do not listen, we cannot remove them.

Womanhood is not defined by the outcome of a choice. It is defined by the agency, the power and the space to make it.

Until that is backed by structural equity in law, in workplaces and in culture, the work is not finished.

Choice matters but equity determines whether that choice is real.

Atrish Sanchez is the GSD Shadow Minister for Care and Opportunity.