Why International Women’s Day should be about more than just wearing an ‘I’m a feminist’ T-shirt
As you might be guessing from the many promotional emails, or your hairdresser advertising deals, tomorrow is International Women’s Day. Women, you may have had it rough with pay inequality, sexual harassment and that whole systemic discrimination thing, but today is your day to get your hair done with a £10 discount.
I’ll be ignoring the day this year. There was a time when I would mention International Women’s Day and people would look confused. In fact, it wasn’t even that many years ago.
Nowadays, I’m bombarded with ads for slogan T-shirts and feminist necklaces and exploitative PR pitches urging me to express solidarity with other women by shopping from late February onwards.
The irony that International Women’s Day began as an initiative of the Socialist Party of America to honour the 1908 garment workers’ strike in New York seems lost on them. The founding foremothers are likely spinning in their graves.
March 8 used to be a day to celebrate women’s achievements. But, like Black Friday, Christmas, Mother’s Day and even Halloween, Women’s Day has been picked up as just another opportunity to sell us things in the name of feminism.
The other very bad thing is that they now get to partially control the narrative and the message surrounding the day.
This year, there’s a spate of ‘networking’ opportunities for business women for just the cost of lunch at a decent hotel. There are dinners and a ‘cocktail masterclass’ for £25, where you will get to meet other women who wear heels to work.
Then, there are the make-up brands and fashion labels that want us to give them our money, too. But what good is buying an ‘I’m a feminist’ T-shirt when a company doesn’t pay its female workers as much as its men?
I’m not saying that businesses shouldn’t mark International Women’s Day. But, employers, it isn’t your day to celebrate unless you are actually doing something to improve women’s lives.
Look at yourself. What kind of employer are you?
Is there a gender pay gap in your organisation? Are you promoting women?
Do you offer flexible working options to mothers? Would you consider spending some of your profits on an onsite creche?
All organisations can make a commitment to get better. But there is nothing worse than companies trying to jump on a feminist-branded bandwagon without making real, on-the-ground steps to improving working conditions for their female employees and pushing for wider change across its industry.
It’s easy to pretend, to talk the right talk, but the words are meaningless unless you are doing something about it.
Your actions throughout the year will say more about you than your tiny wishes on this UN-identified day.
If you are a sexist organisation, a tweet about Women’s Day, however multi-coloured and deep, won’t magically transform you into a feminist brand.
Putting the colour pink on anything you can and putting the word ‘empowerment’ before a product does not further women’s cause.
Free drinks for women (a complimentary negroni won’t narrow the pay-gap), or telling us that this might be a good day to book a girls’ weekend, is just riding the coat-tails. And it’s tacky. Just stop.
Aside from the commercialism, there’s a sharp bang of elitism about the day, as so many of the events are ticketed networking opportunities for well-off women.
It would be wonderful to assume that the day was a celebration of all women, or that every woman is an equal in modern feminism, but that just isn’t true.
So, while we celebrate the progress women continue to make in a world that has pressed us down for so long, the victory lap is often bittersweet when I consider who is being dismissed, or left out of that conversation.
This year, don’t buy a necklace with the word ‘feminist’ engraved on it; think of the women who broke oppressive structures. Alone, or with other women, these are all good ways to spend this day.
Or, for that matter, any other day.