WOMEN took to the streets of cities across Europe, Africa, South America and elsewhere to mark International Women’s Day with demands for ending inequality and gender-based violence.

On the Asian side of Istanbul, Turkey’s biggest city, a rally in Kadikoy saw members of dozens of women’s groups listen to speeches, dance and sing in the spring sunshine.

The colourful protest was overseen by a large police presence, including officers in riot gear and a water cannon truck.

Protesters pushed back against the idea of women’s role being confined to marriage and motherhood, carrying banners reading “Family will not bind us to life” and “We will not be sacrificed to the family.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2021 withdrew Turkey from a European treaty, dubbed the Istanbul Convention, that protects women from domestic violence. Turkish rights group We Will Stop Femicides Platform says that 394 women were killed by men in 2024.

“There is bullying at work, pressure from husbands and fathers at home and pressure from patriarchal society. We demand that this pressure be reduced even further,” Yaz Gulgun said.

In Poland, activists opened a centre across from the parliament building in Warsaw where women can go to have abortions with pills, either alone or with other women.

Opening the centre on International Women’s Day across from the legislature was a symbolic challenge to authorities in the traditionally Roman Catholic nation, which has one of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws.

From Athens to Madrid, Paris, Munich, Zurich and Belgrade and in many more cities across the continent, women marched to demand an end to treatment as second-class citizens in society, politics, family and at work.

In Madrid, protesters held up big hand-drawn pictures depicting Gisele Pelicot, the woman who was drugged by her now ex-husband in France over the course of a decade so that she could be raped by dozens of men while unconscious.

Ms Pelicot has become a symbol for women all over Europe in the fight against sexual violence.

Thousands of women marched in the capital Skopje and several other cities in North Macedonia to raise their voices for economic, political and social equality for women.

Organisers said only about 28 per cent of women in the country own property and in rural areas only 5 per cent, mostly widows, have property in their name.

Only 18 out of 100 women surveyed in rural areas responded that their parents divided family property equally between the brother and sister. “The rest were gender discriminated against within their family,” they said.

In Russia, the women’s day celebrations had a more official tone, with honour guard soldiers presenting yellow tulips to girls and women during a celebration in St Petersburg.

In Berlin, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called for stronger efforts to achieve equality and warned against tendencies to roll back progress already made.

“Globally, we are seeing populist parties trying to create the impression that equality is something like a fixed idea of progressive forces,” he said.

He gave an example of “large tech companies that have long prided themselves on their modernity and are now, at the behest of a new American administration, setting up diversity programmes and raving about a new ‘masculine energy’ in companies and society.”

In Nigeria’s capital, Lagos, thousands of women gathered at the Mobolaji Johnson Stadium, dancing and signing and celebrating their womanhood. Many were dressed in purple, the traditional colour of the women’s liberation movement.

In South America, some of the marches were organised by groups protesting the killings of women known as femicide.

Hundreds of women in Ecuador marched through the streets of Quito to steady drumbeats and held signs that opposed violence and the patriarchal system.

“Justice for our daughters!” some demonstrators yelled in support of women slain in recent years.

In Bolivia, thousands of women began marching late on Friday, with some scrawling graffiti on the walls of courthouses demanding that their rights be respected and denouncing impunity in femicides, with less than half of those cases reaching a sentencing.