Against IWD

Jo Major Founder of Diversity in Recruitment & Co-Founder of Inclusive Recruitment Foundations, DEI Training for Recruiters and Hiring Managers explains why International Women’s Day is anything but inspiring or a reason to celebrate.

From twee afternoon teas to toxic power panels of majority women designed to inspire and bring us all together, all in aid of a so-called celebration of Women. No matter how you package up International Women’s Day, the entire conversation’s performative nature makes me feel rather unwell.

My dislike of everything IWD started several years ago when I was thrust a placard with some hashtag nonsense scrawled all over it and asked to participate in a photoshoot that would then be spewed all over social media.

It was a hard no for me, which was a real surprise from people across the business. I just felt something that made me feel very uncomfortable. In my opinion, women were anything but embraced, empowered, breaking bias, or whatever cheesy strapline was being used that particular year. I just knew there was zero chance of me sleepwalking into an almost comical marketing strategy designed for anything but my evolution or equality.

Interestingly, at the time, I didn’t have the language. I didn’t really truly understand how words like patriarchy and misogyny related to my lived experience. I’d never read books like Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez, Fix the System Not the Women by Laura Bates, White Women by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao, or The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart, to name but a few. I wasn’t fully aware of a system designed to keep Women just where society and its designers need them to be, and I’d sure not started my journey of learning.

Vitriolic response

These days, my somewhat vitriolic response to IWD is built on unlearning and re-learning the hard truths about Gender and Inequality and the plight of ALL Women. Seeing others who may have not stepped into the education literally sell their souls to this marketing gimmick fills me with disappointment and frustration.

We should be holding our employers, the government, institutions, and society to account by downing tools and demanding more, not grabbing the mic on panels packed full of homogenous Women to chew the fat on what it means to be a Woman, often gagged by the brands that employ us, whilst toasting ourselves with a glass of ‘bubbles’. Gosh, it’s all just so cringe!

So, what’s the alternative?

Using this as an opportunity to fully understand what our employers are doing to push for true equity and advancement of Women would be a start; refusing to ignore the gaping holes in their company’s ED&I strategies that could have genuinely contributed to their fair and equal treatment and, of course, to sense check for intersectionality, because let’s be honest, so much of this stuff favours majority identity women and those that have had the resources and privileges to smash the glass ceiling, pry themselves off the sticky floors and avoid the glass cliff edge. If we are truly in this together, then we cannot pick and choose for whom our initiatives work. In my opinion, it is either an ALL-Women approach or it is performative, simple as that.

Women’s advancement needs more than this empty annual celebration and the fake commitments of corporations. It needs activism and self-education. It requires a collective call out of the missing flexible, hybrid, part-time, and job share working arrangements, the lack of salary and bonus equality, the unfair, opaque promotions and professional advancement policies, the missing family building and family-friendly benefits, the non-existent carers leave, the zero support for mental health, periods and menopause, the lack of consideration when it comes to the vast amount of unpaid work women still have to face on top of their 40-hour working week in comparison to their male counterparts, the misogyny, sexism, bias, bullying and harassment and still happens in so many organisations, the fact that male-led suppliers, advisors and consultants are still given preference, I mean the list goes on but you’re probably depressed enough.

And if you are reading this, scratching your head because you don’t see it, I get it: the system was designed perfectly. Even right down to the search result you’ll get when you google IWD, sat behind it is a marketing agency exploiting our lack of equality to fill their pockets and the corporate need to ‘look’ like they are doing something.

I know there’s an argument that this may not be the day, the time, or the place for such perspective and honesty.

I’ll push back with if not now, then when? On what day CAN we openly demand more for ALL Women?