Resisting the co-option of International Women’s Day
“International Women's Day, today on March 8 is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating women's equality”, according to the official website for International Women’s Day.
This year’s IWD theme is #EmbracingEquity
This year’s theme is ‘embracing equity’. IWD’s aim this year is to get the world talking about why equal opportunities aren't enough. IWD also understands that “people start from different places, so true inclusion and belonging require equitable action.”
This is because equality is when each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognises that each person has different circumstances and allocates the resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.
At Spark Insights, we embrace equity every day by ensuring that we are transparent about our pay and placing everyone on the same pay. We’re also trying to instil a non-hierarchical structure in our collective, we do this in a number of ways, but essentially all the decisions we make as a collective are made collectively. In order to ensure that everyone feels empowered to take part in the decision-making processes of the collective, everyone has equal access to company information, including our accounts, budgets, stakeholders, operations and more.
Note: when mentioning IWD, we are referring to all those who identify as women, whether you’re cisgender, transgender, or non-binary but your gender expression is femme, whether you’re gender-fluid, but your gender expression is femme.
International Women’s Day: Roots in resistance
The first recorded National Women’s Day took place in the United States on 28 February 1909. The Socialist Workers Party of America designated this day in honour of the 1908 garment workers’ strike in New York, where women protested against working conditions, according to the United Nations.
However, the movement had much earlier beginnings, having started in 1848. In retaliation to women being barred from speaking at an anti-slavery convention, white Americans Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organised a few hundred people to come together in New York in what became the country’s first women’s rights convention. Together they demanded civil, social, political and religious rights for women in a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions.
The same convention in the United States is what inspired many women to organise in Europe and in 1910, The Socialist International met in Copenhagen, Denmark to establish a Women’s Day. The idea was for it to promote international solidarity for women, advocate for women’s rights and build universal support for the movement.
A year later, in 1911, a day for women was celebrated in a number of European countries and in the United States. However, this celebration took place on 19 March, in commemoration of the revolution of 1848 and of the “Commune de Paris”. These celebrations were used as a vehicle for change. In addition to the right to vote and to hold public office, women demanded women's rights to work, vocational training and an end to discrimination on the job.
Fast forward to 1917, against the backdrop of World War 1, women in Russia chose to protest and strike for “Bread and Peace” on the last Sunday of February [which fell on 8 March on the Gregorian calendar]. Four days later, the Czar abdicated, and the provisional Government granted women the right to vote. IWD takes place on 8 March; for this exact reason, Russia had not yet adopted the Gregorian calendar, which is used today by a large majority of countries.
Intersectional feminism and enforcing the gender binary
"Intersectionality is a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and create obstacles that often are not understood among conventional ways of thinking."
Kimberlé Crenshaw
In recent years, this term has been weaponised by Conservatives and the far right. It’s also been co-opted by corporations and labelled a buzzword by many. To many Conservatives and the far right the term has come to mean “because you’re a minority, you get special treatment.” To corporations, the term seems to have replaced “diversity”, another term which has lost its way due to the use of the word without context.
As you may have gathered, a lot of the recorded history of women’s rights comes from a Eurocentric lens, and this is partly due to the whitewashing of history but also as a result of colonialism, which many campaigners say is what led to the gender binary.
In a talk discussing the role that colonisation played in establishing the gender binary Alok Vaid-Menon shared that:
“When the British invaded South Asia they institutionalised the western legal system and the western legal system relied on hereditary law in the family unit…And so a lot of scholars of this moment basically hijras, gender non-conforming people, who were outside of these British conventions of man or woman didn’t just challenge the gendered system but challenged the entire legal architecture of the colonial project so they had to be invisebalised because their way of living actually contradicted the boundaries that were being created by the colonial nation-state.”
Recorded history is often held by those in power, and as a result, we are taught history from a white Western middle-class male perspective. In the past few years, since the civil rights movement in the United States, campaigners have sought to bring the stories of people experiencing marginalisation to light.
In order to establish and embrace equity, we must first acknowledge our shared history and not repeat past mistakes, with mainstream women's rights movements often prioritising white cis middle-class women's needs.
Our feminism must be intersectional; without it, we will never embrace equity. That means adopting an intersectional lens to women's rights, understanding where women are starting from and meeting them where they are.
IWD was started by radical feminists who demanded change. Times were different as it was established during the height of the British empire, but times are different now, and that requires us to recognise that women should never have had and cannot be viewed through a singular lens.
Do girls just want to have fun?
Like with Pride, IWD has come a long way from its radical roots. IWD was about organising and having demands which were specific, which included gaining the right to vote and fighting discrimination in the workplace. Its roots were political and socialist, but nowadays we see corporations and Conservatives co-opt the movement for political and capital gain.
We know this because corporations only claim that they stand with women when it’s IWD rather than ensuring they stand with women daily. A lot of what we see during IWD is performative, and many organisations who will use the hashtag #EmbraceEquity are most likely not putting this into practice. We know this because it’s 2023 and the global pay gap continues to persist - females still make 16 per cent less of what men make globally. This gap widens even further depending on your race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and cultural and religious background.
Only in January 2023 did females form more than 10 per cent of Fortune 500 CEOs ever in our corporate history. Whilst it’s important that we have more women in leadership roles, many of the companies listed in the Fortune 500 are in industries dominated by men. This also speaks to the fact that girl-boss politics will not save us as it’s more focused on getting ahead at the expense of others rather than achieving equity for all.
A report produced by the Fawcett Society in 2021 revealed that 40 per cent of women experience sexual harassment during the course of their career, whilst racialised workers reported higher rates at 32 per cent compared to their counterparts who reported 28 per cent over the last 12 months.
IWD isn’t about pink drinks and girl-boss CEOs; it’s about dismantling the inequalities we face that have been created to keep us in place. It means fighting gender-based discrimination, domestic violence, and systemic inequality like lack of reproductive rights and child care access.
The stats do not lie.
You will recognise if corporations are being performative if they:
Conceal pay in job adverts
Do not publish gender pay gap data
Do not hold themselves accountable for tackling their gender pay gap
Only mention women’s rights on IWD
Exclude racialised, disabled and trans women, gender fluid women from the conversation.
Do not provide sanitary products for people who menstruate
Do not allow for time off or make reasonable adjustments for people who menstruate and or suffer from chronic pain and related health conditions
If they have no senior female leaders (whether they are managers or CEOs)
If they don’t provide maternity and paternity policies that support their workforce
If they don’t make reasonable adjustments for those with childcare and/or other caring responsibilities
If they don’t extend support and care to people who do not have children and/or caring responsibilities
What does embracing equity look like?
Equity starts with recognising and acknowledging people's needs. Equality is underpinned by equity. If corporations were truly invested in the well-being of women, they would involve them in every level of decision-making, down to the very architecture and design of the building. Because, guess what, even the air con in your office is based on a man's needs.
In order to reclaim IWD, women need to have a clear set of demands that they want to advocate for, and if we are talking about equity, where do we start? Because in order to gain equity, we need to dismantle the current system we live in, which has been built to preserve hierarchical structures based on gender and race.
If you’re an employer and you want to truly #EmbraceEquity you can get in touch with zoe@sparkinsights.co.uk, and we can support you in evaluating your organisation in regards to establishing equity for all employees; we do this by gathering insight through research, providing recommendations and then carrying out a series of workshops which will help implement said recommendations, as well as, providing personal coaching.
This article was written by our Brand and Engagement Lead, Zoe Daniels (They/Them).