Say something! About Women! Now!
But what happens after International Women's Day?
How was your International Women’s Day? It’s a day when it can be hard to ‘get it right’ and hard to know how to be in it.
Last year, if a big UK company posted about #IWD on Twitter/X, the brilliant Gender Pay Gap Bot would auto-retweet their post but with the addition of that company’s gender pay-gap stats (fed by data publicly available from gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk) to call out employers posting empty platitudes (the bot seems to have had a year off this year; no wonder it needed a rest). I hope it prompted businesses to do some real work on gender equality throughout the past twelve months, but when I googled ‘gender pay gap progress 2024’ there were no big good news stories. In fact, in England and Wales:
The current gender pay gap is 14.3 per cent* and will take at least another 20 years to close, unless progress gets massively sped up (let’s hope it doesn’t slow). *But if you’re a woman aged 50–59, the gap is 19.7 per cent; if you’re a disabled woman, the gap is 35 per cent.
The gap compounds throughout women’s lives, leading to a pension gap of 40.5 per cent
The income gap between men and women is there right from the start of women’s careers, with young women on average earning a fifth less than men of the same age
Data from: https://www.tuc.org.uk/research-analysis/reports/equal-pay-day-2024-tackling-gender-pay-gap
On International Women’s Day in years gone by, I’ve usually shared a favourite photo of my mum, my two sisters, and me – proud to know and learn from these incredible, inspiring women (the best!); proud to have a dad who has always known that my sisters and I could be whoever we wanted to be in the world and who continues to celebrate and champion everything we do. But then earlier this week, amongst a LinkedIn feed full of content along the lines of, ‘This #IWD, whatever you do, don’t do this!’, were several posts about how terrible it is to use Women’s Day to just post a pic of someone in your family who is a woman. Although this ‘don’t’ is directed at ‘big bizniz’ – any CEOs who are ‘celebrating women’ by posting a picture of their mum but not walking the talk in their own organisations – it still made me go into freeze mode about what to share yesterday. Combined with a bit of rebellious mode, I have to say, as part of me thinks every woman around the world should, for this one day, stop doing everything we’re doing and see how the world copes (spoiler alert: total global collapse).
Once I got unstuck from freeze/rebel, I thought about what frustrates me about International Women’s Day posts and what I could do differently with my own. I love the celebratory feel, and I love reading women’s stories – even when they are shared in a clumsy/careless way by some (not all) corporations. What I do not love is the scrabble: the frantic feeling that only an ‘international day of ...’ can induce. It’s a feeling of ‘Say something! About Women! Now!’
Driven by this IWD panic, I was racing to get this piece finished in a day already full of other deadlines and commitments. In my first draft, I crammed five blogs’ worth of content into a single substack post. All the time, it was like the IWD hashtag was on my shoulder going: ‘You’ve got loads to say about this! Better say it all TODAY!’.
But, then none of it felt right. When I was thinking about why, I remembered some wise words from linguist Deborah Cameron (one of my idols!) in her book Feminism & Linguistic Theory, the first book I read when I became a freelance writer/editor. She talks of how, when women try to put forward a version of the world without male bias, another problem appears:
There is a danger that in constructing the competing account, women will replicate men’s exclusion of women in a different form: some women – the most privileged – will universalise their own experience as ‘women’s experience’, and this will be false for other groups of women.
I realised I’d already fallen into the danger zone as soon as I began this post. And it is natural to centre things on our own experience (I’m going to do it again in the next sentence even). Every day, working with clients, I advocate for gender equality in the way we shape our words: challenging the default male in language, navigating the use of problematic historical sources, and ensuring that AI-produced content does not exclude women. And there is always more to do, more ways to make a difference. But in the past I haven’t really sure how to do any of this work outside of my own points of reference or how to learn more about a wider range of experiences. Then, last year (having heard about it via a women’s coworking network I’m part of called WILD), I volunteered as a UK online delegate during the Commission on the Status of Women: the UN’s largest annual gathering on gender equality and women’s empowerment. It’s a two-week session immediately following International Women’s Day that promotes women’s rights by bringing governments together to focus on how to accelerate progress on gender equality, globally. The mission is for every woman and girl to have an equal right to safety, choice, and a voice.
This year’s theme is ‘Accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective’. Economic equality is critically important, as the latest figures from the UN show:
1 in every 10 women in the world lives in extreme poverty
The number of women and girls living in conflict-affected areas has doubled since 2017; now, more than 614 million women and girls live in conflict-affected areas. In conflict areas, women are 7.7 times more likely to live in extreme poverty
At prime working age, only 61 per cent of women are in the labour force versus 90 per cent of men
Climate change is set to leave 236 million more women and girls hungry by 2030, twice as many as men (131 million) – it is accelerating persistent poverty gaps
Reading those four bullet points twice, three times, more isn’t enough for them to sink in. And I am glad to be joining CSW’s UK volunteer delegation again this year to have some dedicated space to think, listen, and share and shape ideas for action with 6,000 other gender equality advocates in the UK. We’ll be taking our learnings from the two weeks into our communities, organisations, and networks; I’ll be sharing some of them with you in a future post.
I hope you can find ways to keep advocating, celebrating, listening, and learning too, outside of the cram of a single day. But I do also hope you keep posting on 8 March each year as well, even if imperfectly, even if you’re at risk of not getting it right, even if it’s uncomfortable, because keeping International Women’s Day popular is key to keeping gender equality on government agendas. IWD is currently one of the most engaged with international days of the UN’s official observances – other most popular days include World Water Day (22 March), International Day of Peace (21 September), and International Day of Human Rights (10 December) – let’s try to keep gender equality in the spotlight.
I also urge you to look through the full calendar of official international days and weeks: https://www.un.org/en/observances/international-days-and-weeks (or, if you prefer to view it in list form: https://www.un.org/en/observances/list-days-weeks). There will be plenty in there that you care about, plenty more that you’ve not stopped to think about, and it could be the first or next step in your own journey of doing more about the issues that matter most to you.