Meetings honouring top women achievers have been held over the past few days, leading up to today's celebration of International Women's Day.

News about women abounds these days, and International Women's Day offers a special opportunity for focusing public attention on women's accomplishments.

According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, women broke the 15 per cent barrier for the first time across all national parliaments last year. Women today comprise 15.2 per cent of the numbers of both lower and upper houses of parliament around the world.

Meanwhile, the International Labour Organization (ILO) reports women now make up a greater percentage of the global work force than ever before, accounting for 40.5 per cent of the world's workers - the highest figure ever recorded by the United Nations agency.

In China, women have also made their impact in the political and economic spheres. For instance, women now account for 20.2 per cent of the current national parliament, the National People's Congress. That figure is five percentage points above the world's average.

In Beijing, women deputies account for 30.8 per cent of the municipal people's congress. Thirty per cent is a figure widely considered to herald the point at which women are able to make a meaningful impact on the work of the parliament.

Meanwhile, many women have become energetic drivers behind the economic booms. In Donghai County of East China's Jiangsu Province, local women entrepreneurs head some 1,000 private businesses and many have grown from family workshops into joint ventures.

However, International Women's Day also provides an opportunity for sober assessment of the hurdles that continue to prevent women's social, economic and political development attaining equality with that of men.

At the international level, the IPU points out the achievements women have made through their participation in national legislatures are tempered by the fact only 14 countries have so far managed to reach the 30 per cent threshold of women in national parliaments.

According to the ILO, women account for 60 per cent of the world's 550 million "working poor."

The United Nations' Population Fund points out that women and girls have not been able to get equal access to prevention, care and treatment for AIDS/HIV, although an increasing number of them are struck down and families and communities fall apart.

In China, we actually saw a drop of 1.6 per cent in the Chinese women's participation in the current National People's Congress from the last one.

In the local village elections in Hebei, elected women village heads constituted only 7.5 per cent of the elected leaders, which number some 188,000.

As far as the right to work is concerned, women still encounter many problems.

A survey in Beijing revealed that 88 per cent of female college graduates reported experiencing gender discrimination during their job search.

Rural migrant women working in urban centres have likewise suffered from lack of proper legal protection against workplace discrimination.

Above all, gender equality is not accounted for in the country's overall evaluation of economic and social development.

The country's Statistical Communique on National Economic and Social Development in 2003, released in late February, provided additional indices on the country's environment, but there were no figures indicating what China did to achieve equality between women and men.

Then President Jiang Zemin officially announced to the world in 1995 that China had made "towards achieving equality between women and men" a national policy. But in the current school textbooks on China's national policies, the listed national policies are environmental protection, family planning, and opening to the outside world. Gender equality is missing.

But modern history has shown that social and economic progress is flawed without achieving increased political, economic and social participation from women, who make up half of the population.

And our goal of achieving a well-off society would be a paltry success without progress being made in gender equality.

All these things tell us that while we may rejoice at the fact a handful of women in the world as well as in China have broken through and accomplished great achievements, we still have harder work ahead of us to achieve gender equality in the political, economic and social spheres.

We have no reason to be complacent about what we have attained.