The Women of the Free National Movement (FNM) held a breakfast in commemoration of International Women’s Day on Saturday at its headquarters on Mackey Street. The theme of the event was ‘Count Her In: Accelerating Gender Equality Through Economic Empowerment’.
Guest speaker at the breakfast was Caline Newton who spoke to the women on matters of money management. She said, “savings, you must have savings. You must have emergency funds. You must have short term savings and you must have long term savings. Debt management, I want to put a pin right here, in the black culture we love to borrow for things, that’s consumerism. In every other culture they borrow to capitalize and when we understand that power we have in our hand and we can leverage credit, we shift from being consumers to being economically empowered.”
Newton also spoke to the earning power of women versus that of men. “Women earn $0.55 of every dollar a man earns. So if he earns $100,000, we only earn $55,000. But yet women are living longer than men by almost five years. And yet women are less likely to feel empowered or feel ready for retirement than men. And yet women, only 40% of women have a financial plan as opposed to 60% of men.”
Past and present FNM female parliamentarians were in attendance including the first female Member of Parliament, Dame Janet Bostwick and the first female Speaker of the House Of Assembly, Italia Johnson.
