It is a sorry truth that over 100 years since the first International Women's Day women's oppression is a stark reality.

While we have the vote, the right to work, the right to education - all important reforms which women and some men fought very hard to achieve - women are still systematically discriminated against.

Oppression remains structured into work and family and has serious costs not just for women but for men and children as well.

The history of women's campaigning for equality has been one of major advance in some areas, but also of that advance constantly coming up against the boundaries of a class society which has oppression at its heart.

The evidence is there in many different ways.

Perhaps most disturbing and upsetting are the surveys on rape, sexual harassment and abuse and the daily evidence of their existence.

A report issued this week shows that a third of all women in Europe have undergone some form of physical or sexual abuse since the age of 15, with 8 per cent of those suffering abuse in the last year alone.

That third adds up to 62 million people, more than the whole population of Britain.

A new study on rape in Britain and Northern Ireland shows many young women do not always understand when they are consenting to sexual activity or not. The highly sexualised society in which we live puts vast pressure on women to look and act in certain ways, and to feel inferior if their bodies do not match up to the stereotypical images.

But there are many other hurts inflicted on women which are much less commented on and sometimes hardly noticed. The economic hurts are in a way equally shocking.

According to the Economist magazine (15 April 2006) women contributed more to world production in the 20 years from the mid 1980s than either India or China, or the growth of information technology.

But they have done so overwhelmingly on the basis of low-paid or unpaid work, working very long hours for little recognition.

And no-one talks about women's economic miracle, let alone thinking it appropriate to reward women more for this effort.

Indeed, it's the opposite.

Across Europe studies have shown that when paid working hours, hours spent in commuting to and from work and unpaid work time are all combined, women work, on average, 64 hours a week compared to the 53 hours worked by men. This can be explained by the fact that women spend 26 hours, on average, on caring activities, compared with the nine hours spent by men, even though men devote more time to paid work - 41 hours, compared with 34 hours spent by women.

So men don't just work shorter hours than women, they get paid for a greater number of them.

More women are in paid work than ever before. In Britain the latest figures show that 46.4 per cent of all workers, 14 million people, are women.

But they enter the labour market at a disadvantage. Of this 14 million, nearly six million are part-time, usually therefore in low status and low paid jobs.

Job segregation keeps "women's jobs" for the most part in the poorest paid sectors of the economy.

Many women are also underemployed, with three-quarters of a million working part-time who want to work full-time but can't find jobs.

Responsibility for domestic labour is greater for women within the family.

However, the beneficiaries of this state of affairs are not usually men.

In fact, neoliberal capitalism has drawn women into work in very large numbers, but in doing so has tried to force down wages and conditions across the whole working class.

So the gender pay gap - the difference between men's and women's wages - is widening again. Both men and women are seeing their wages cut.

Between 2008-2011 the pay gap narrowed because men's wages were falling faster than women's.

Since 2011 women's wages have fallen faster than men's.

This is a race to the bottom which is seeing the whole of the working class suffer.

Government and employers are cutting welfare and wages alike as they launch the biggest attack on the working class for generations.

While Britain has one of the highest levels of military spending in the world, it lags behind other major economies for scope and fairness of women's employment, ranked 18th out of 27 industrialised countries.

Women have achieved many advances under capitalism, but none of these can be guaranteed.

In times of crisis the capitalist class claws back spending on areas such as health and education and forces the privatised family to carry out more unpaid care in the home.

Women bear the brunt of all these attacks.

While millions of women have a daily battle against discrimination, sexism and violence, they also have to battle against a system which ensures the continued oppression of women.

This was well understood by the early socialists. International Women's Day was begun by socialist women at their international conference in Copenhagen in 1910.

March 8 was designated to be an annual celebration of working women. It was chosen to commemorate a demonstration of New York garment workers, demanding both the vote and union rights.

These workers, mostly teenagers and mostly immigrant Jewish women, fought courageously during the "uprising of the 30,000," a major strike in the winter of 1909.

Women such as the German socialist Clara Zetkin and the Russian Alexandra Kollontai played a prominent role in campaigning in the years before the first world war.

They did so on the understanding that they fought for political equality but also for economic equality, something denied to women and men from the working class.

When in February 1917 Russian women used International Women's Day demonstrations to help launch the revolution which overthrew the tsar, the economic and political demands for women's equality became closely intertwined.

When women's liberation began in the late 1960s and early '70s, these earlier traditions of women organising began to be rediscovered, International Women's Day being one of them.

Modern feminism put many of the questions of equality back on the agenda. It is increasingly clear, however, that the answers to these questions require a fundamental transformation of society which puts need, not profit, at its centre.

n Lindsey German is convener of the Stop the War Coalition.

Figures from Office of National Statistics, PwC Women in Work Index, Women's Budget Group, Labour Force Survey, European Working Conditions Survey.