Women’s Day is an official holiday in Mongolia. This day allows Mongolians to spread awareness of the underlying issues that affect women. Through speeches, conferences, television programmes, and marches, the people of Mongolia celebrate women and draw attention to the challenges that face them in a rapidly modernizing Mongolia.

In theory, it should also mean that the men of the family do the cooking and cleaning, and give their much-deserving wives, mothers, sisters and daughters a break.

Women’s Day has its origins in a protest that occurred in New York on 8th March 1857. On that day, women marched through the city, demanding better working conditions and better wages. Two years later, the women went on to create their own labor union. Afterwards, numerous other women’s protests began to take place on this day each year.

The first international women’s conference was hosted in Copenhagen in 1910, instituting an International Women’s Day. Observances spread in Europe, and then in the West in the first part of the 20th century, and then waned until the feminist movement of the 1960s took hold.