The Women’s Parliamentary Network (WPN) Third National Conference: Gender Responsive Budgeting

In partnership with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Mission in Serbia, the Women’s Parliamentary Network (WPN) hosted the Third National Conference: Gender Responsive Budgeting, on Nov. 3, 2015, in the Serbian parliament building. The purpose of the conference was the Serbian debut of gender responsive budgeting, to be incorporated in the 2016 Budget Bill, and to encourage and empower female MPs to launch local budgetary initiatives to cater for the needs of men and women alike.

Women’s Right and a Half Pipe of Tobacco*

We women born in the second half of the twentieth century are the first generation of women ever born who had had, in advance, regulations by which we could be regarded as human beings, equal before the law as well as men. Millennia before no one thought that this could be so; nobody would think that it was irregular that men, a half of humankind, possessed all the rules and privileges, and women, another half of population, existed without any rights, but automatically acted upon men’s rules in silence, worked for men’s rules and destined to live their lives without human rights to be asked to make any decision about their own likes or dislikes in life. Commands like “Shut up, listen and work”, and “I give food to you”, were regularly used by their “masters”; oh yes, so it was.