Is Celebrating International Women’s Day Enough?

International Women’s Day (IWD) began in 1909 following a series of women’s suffrage movement protests in the United States, and it has since become an internationally recognized occasion for celebrating the efforts of the past and planning for the future. On this IWD, we have been recognizing and celebrating women for over a century. This year, the focus of the international campaign was “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world,” and the theme was “Choose to Challenge.”

The occasion celebrates the social, economic, cultural, and political efforts and accomplishments of those who identify as women. Over the last year, women worldwide have stood at the forefront of the COVID-19 crisis and have helped the world recover from the impacts of the pandemic. These women have creative and critical services, serving as online educators, scientists, caregivers, innovators, community organizers, healthcare workers, and national leaders fighting the spread on the frontlines. Some of the massive contributions they have made have carried the crux of the pandemic’s weight and have been celebrated on this year’s IWD. Yet, despite all the many amazing steps toward a world without gender bias that are evident, we are still witnessing women experiencing the gender wage gap, discrimination, disparity in overall equity, and social judgment, to name just a few.

In fact, women make up 70% of the global health workforce, and a vast majority of the countries that have been successful in effectively combating the virus are led by women, including New Zealand, Slovakia, Iceland, Germany, Finland, Ethiopia, and Denmark. Despite these exemplary achievements, women’s efforts are still less recognized than men’s, their work underpaid, and they are underrepresented in leadership—to this date women only hold Heads of State and Government positions in 20 countries worldwide. 

Although International Women’s Day has been celebrated for over a century, heralding women’s achievements and bringing to light the continuing disparity and gender inequality women still endure, we can’t help but question: is this enough? When we celebrate and acknowledge the success, value, power, and accomplishment of women-only once annually, it raises the question: what difference can we make if we were to treat the remaining 364 days of the year like IWD?

This is the very question Janelle Bostock, CEO of Australia’s largest and longest-standing women-in-business organization—Women’s Network Australia—is raising.

“If we were all to take just a small portion of the awareness and effort we make on International Women’s Day into our daily mode of operation, and carry this with us into our circle of friends, our workplaces, our businesses, and our communities, just imagine what impact each of us could bring about...Like anything else we might want in life, we can not rely on a single day to bring about the cultural change we want to see in society,” says Bostock. 

While it is a struggle for women to gain equal rights and opportunities, gender equality is truly a job for everybody. After all, we are all products of our circumstances and the lingering sentiments of generations past, and so we carry forward what we are taught. It will take time for a society that has a strong history of patriarchal leadership to grow into a more modern one that upholds gender equality as one of its core values.

“For us at the Women’s Network, we aim to champion women, their achievements, their lessons, and share their stories not just on IWD but every day of the year. We endeavor to create opportunities for women to be seen, heard and supported in their pursuits with the aim to do our bit toward gender equality,” says Bostock. 

However, IWD has different connotations from a POC perspective. Modern feminism is sometimes guilty of leaving out and forgetting those who were marginalized. Statistics show women from a POC background are routinely faced with racialized sexism in the workplace, paid less, and are more likely to struggle with issues of domestic abuse, with things getting even bleaker when it comes to trans women and trans women of color. For International Women's Day to truly work and affect change, feminism needs to be fully intersectional.

Intersectionality is defined as “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.”  Intersectionality goes hand-in-hand with equity and recognizes that every woman has a different experience. 

A problem of today is people idolizing history’s most celebrated “feminists”: white women, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg whose feminism wasn’t remotely intersectional as they ultimately only fought for white women’s rights. We must recognize that these women were not true feminists and we must hold them and ourselves accountable for including POC in feminism—if we don’t then it’s not intersectional. And, if our feminism isn’t intersectional, it isn’t feminism.

Ultimately, if we were all to take it upon ourselves to bring International Women’s Day into our everyday lives, into our own circles and networks, imagine what achievements we could be celebrating a year from now on IWD 2022.

by ABBY SULLIVAN