Can we be honest about IWD?

March 8 has come around again. No doubt our feeds will be clogged with posts celebrating International Women’s Day (IWD). We’ll see brands pivot from promoting their products for an hour to shed some light on the women in their organisations via a GIFY (men don’t require a calendar reminder for their existence). We’ll pause to consider the statistics: (insert disparaging graph here).

We’ll lament with the women in our private circles that have carried us through our most private pain and protected our public personas— the ones we break and manufacture for the spaces around us. We’ll like posts, read words and demand to do better for ourselves, for those before us, for the generations to come.

March 9th will arrive. Posts will be posted, products shipped and meetings held.?

The world rotates. Life keeps on keeping on. So why do we stop on March 8?

It’s hard to contextualise the need for a day to reflect on women’s inequality when it’s so glaringly obvious the other 364 days of the year. The discourse surrounding this day feels spoiled because acknowledging the gender divide doesn’t seem like enough anymore. At some point, conversations about the topic feel exhaustive when the rate of change at every level is so slow.

But March 8 is here and once again, we find ourselves sitting with our team asking them: do we want to talk about IWD as a business publicly? What are your thoughts as individuals? As always, the response is mixed.

Is IWD another monetary vehicle to commodify gender equality? Has it made us think differently? Can companies change because of it? Have the men and male-identifying people in your life expressed a difference of opinion because of it?

No one has a simple answer. Neither do we.

A few weeks ago our sister company The Producers published a press release announcing three new female directors to their roster. Comments on the article began with congratulatory remarks and soon descended into critique: ‘Why do you feel the need to identify your company as female-owned?’ ‘Why can’t you just say Directors? Why do you need to call out the fact that they are female?’ ‘Aren’t we past the point of announcing women-owned businesses?’?

While others ran to their defence, the overall response echoed the complexity that International Women’s Day raises: gender is a combative topic.

Will you discuss the ‘F’ word on a day that actively encourages us to do so, or will you ignore it entirely, hoping such an omission will render the issue non-existent?

We’ve decided to dive in. To interrogate both sides. To admit we find ourselves grappling with what to do and say but nevertheless are ready and willing to talk about it. To learn and try to do something differently.?

It’s true, we are a female-owned and run production company. We are proud of this. We are one of the few production companies in Australia with a higher women-to-male ratio in-house. We don’t want to have to continually call this out, but to not to would be remiss. Regardless of your personal opinion on International Women’s Day, its existence is a sign of something more pronounced.

The reality is, it’s all our responsibility to actively make our lives, our workplaces and world a more equitable place. To take necessary steps, in any form to raise the profiles, wages, health and safety for people that make up half the population.

As content producers, the buck stops with us. It is our responsibility to diversity this industry as best and as much as we can, even if that is yes, through a media release promoting the talent, work and experiences of people who have been (and still are) overlooked comparatively to their male-counterpart— a study by the DGA’s noted: of the 896 individual directors hired to work in the 2021-22 season 34% were women and 66% were men.?

These statistics are hardly new. We are all aware of such discrepancies regardless of industry. Why they exist is multifaceted. By spotlighting some of the women within our industry, we are attempting to prove a point: female directors are talented. They are worthy of time, attention and jobs. Organisations should work to diversify their workforce and companies should actively look to diversify the storytellers they entrust to tell their narratives

And yet, despite this, we are the privileged few. We are women with autonomy, with a steady income, in a country where our access to healthcare and government support is incomparable to most. We are lucky. But it’s a lonely reality, albeit an inescapable one, to know that even the luckiest of us, still have to stand for a photo in the name of advancing a corporation’s “feminist” agenda. It's even sadder that many women of colour aren’t even given the time of day to work in such an office.

So here we are - March 8. No Instagram post, branded cupcake or solution in sight - but through the process of trying to dissect this day, maybe we are a little closer to realising as a company and as individuals what IWD can mean.? Perhaps it’s not about what we do for IWD at all. Perhaps it’s how we can make our lives and the lives of others meaningful every other day of the year through the quiet, active and persistent action. Action that doesn’t need to be glamorised. Action that needs to be normalised.