International Women's Day - is it worth celebrating?

With International Women's Day fast approaching, we’ve been thinking about how we use it to celebrate our community and engage more women and businesses into the work we do...but without playing into the commercial tokenism that it can often bring out. 

There is growing disgruntlement with IWD and businesses making a big splash for 1 day of the year, whilst upholding many of the barriers women face in real equality for the other 364 - gender pay gaps, motherhood penalties, patriarchal systems…the list goes on. 

The interesting shift in International Women’s Day

The gender pay bot has been doing the rounds for the last few years, which helped to highlight the lack of actual action backing up the flurry of posts and events wrapped up in a pink bow.

Our social feeds fill with messages of ‘empowerment’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘celebration’, but these sentiments don’t reflect the reality we live in:

• Women represent 1 in 4 C-suite leaders, and women of colour just 1 in 16

• Women’s median hourly pay is less than men’s at 77% of UK companies

• Currently, women retire with a third less in private pension savings than men due to inequalities int the workplace and the knock on effect of caring responsibilites

This year, we have already to see some interesting conversation on LinkedIn questioning the value of International Women’s Day: 

Amy Kean talks about IWD as our ‘Capitalist Feminist Christmas’!

Lee Chambers explores the motivation behind the internationalwomensday.com site and whether the commercialisation around the day has diluted the impact to make some meaningful change.cture…

The bigger picture…

We work with clients on a year round basis addresses two things:

1. How businesses can support more women to rise into senior positions within the workplace; AND 

2. How businesses can maintain the support, engagement and development of these women when they are there. 

Find out more about this work on our website .

We passionately believe in the value of having a blend of leaders at the top who think differently, bring different lived experiences and can offer unique perspectives to each other…and more women anchored in their authenticity, confidence and vibrancy will contribute towards this. This is why we get out of bed in the morning!

Here are some questions we’ve been posing to our client partners as part of the role we play in both supporting their activity whilst providing gentle challenge:

• What are the key focuses for your organisation when it comes to gender equality?

• How will any activity you do avoid tokenism and really act as a platform to drive meaningful positive change?

• What year round activity do you have in place to support your events / IWD activity?

• How do you intend to engage more men into this conversation / activity? 

We’d encourage you to think about how any IWD activity going on in your business is reflected through these lenses too!

So what does IWD look like for us?

All that said, here at TVH we do believe that IWD is an opportunity - the time of the year where the noise surrounding the day can be used for good - both to drive home the continued need for change and to really celebrate the women we are lucky enough to work with and alongside. 

We are running an event again this year - not focussed on a theme or heavy conversation, but celebrating and connecting some of our wonderful women in our network and experiencing the JOY of being a woman!

So International Women’s Day - in our eyes, a chance to celebrate the work done all year round to make the world more inclusive.