In honor of International Women’s Day, the Vatican hosted the first meeting of the “Women’s Consultation Group,” comprised of 37 women from a variety of backgrounds who will discuss greater representation of women in leadership at the Vatican.

CNA/EWTN News is reporting on the first meeting of the group which has been tasked by the Pontifical Council for Culture with meeting three times a year to discuss topics such as women within the male culture, religion, work and youth culture.

“I think there are many other ways, or in the future there will be many other ways in which women can be more present, more involved in the Church, especially in the Roman Curia,” member Donna Orsuto, director of the Rome-based Lay Center, told CNA, “but I think this is a very good start.”

Council president Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi admitted that like many other Vatican departments, “inside of my dicastery, I didn't have any women at the management level. They were only there in an administrative sense as secretaries.”

The group wasn’t formed to recriminate those who were angry about the lack of women, Ravasi said, nor did he want the women to be just a “cosmetic” element or only a “symbolic presence.” Instead, they are part of a consultative group which will offer “a feminine perspective” over every activity the dicastery does, including official documents.

“These women have the mission of judging, analyzing our activity, [and] above all, making suggestions,” Ravasi said at a press conference held Monday in Rome. “The dicastery is concerned with very delicate issues which, when studied by them [women], it becomes evident just how important the feminine perspective is.”

The women will be consulting on issues ranging from robotics to rare degenerative children’s illnesses as well as interreligious dialogue.

Ravasi believes that a woman's viewpoint, “can see beyond our gaze” and offers a perspective that’s different and at times unexpected.

“It's a question about interpretation, of prospective, of analysis, of judgment, above all, and also of proposal,” he said.

The 37 women come from a variety of different faith backgrounds such as Catholic, Muslim, Protestant and Jewish. They come from Italy, the United States, Ireland, Iran, Chile and Turkey. They are mothers, journalists, theologians and politicians.

For example, Stafania Brancaccio, Vice President of COELMO, a manufacturer of industrial and marine generator sets, told Rome Reports: “Today the Vatican is finally saying: 'Here are the women.' It's necessary for them to listen to us to renew this ecology that Pope Francis is striving to renew. The pope has asked for it and we are here with our point of view to renew the world."

Another member of the group, Shahrazad Houshmand, an Iranian theologian, said it’s impossible to deny that there is a still a culture of discrimination against women in the world today. “It is true that Europe has made great strides, but since there is still violence targeting gender in Italy at a statistically high level today, it means that we still live in a culture where women are believed to be at the service of men."

Insisting that the women in the group were not feminists nor exclusivists, Houshmand told Crux that discrimination against women began when man decided, for social and political reasons, and to control power, to move women aside.

“This happens in the Christian, Buddist, Jewish and Muslim worlds,” she said, adding that in this shared human experience, “the tears of a Christian woman or a Muslim woman have the same color.”

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