More tears than cheers

If your friend watched you get aggressively mugged and only stood there half-heartedly saying “Stop. No.” but did nothing else to help, would you want her to throw you a birthday party afterwards? 

That’s a bit what corporations celebrating International Women’s Day (IWD) feels like right now. Women got mugged this year. No matter how you look at it, working women, and working moms in particular, were robbed. We were robbed of our sanity, our time, our careers, our potential - the list is unique and long for each and every woman. But I’m focusing on a very particular thing that was taken from us, and that was the ability to participate equally in the workforce. We weren’t at gender parity prior to 2020, but it at least felt like it was in reach. If not for us, maybe for our daughters. Certainly within a generation or two. That hope was crushed this year. The reality of COVID has devastated working women and moms. Let’s look at the highlight reel: 

• 5.4 million women have lost their jobs in the last year
• Over 2 million have left the workforce altogether 
• Working moms are 3x more likely to have lost their jobs than working dads 

I’m not usually one for signs, but International Women’s Day falling on the one year anniversary of a crushingly brutal year for working women sure does feel like a sign. Or a really sick joke. 

Maybe you didn’t realize that  IWD is coming up on Monday. It’s not a holiday I usually celebrate either. It is, however, a golden opportunity for companies. And I say golden fully intentionally. If you haven’t yet been bombarded by companies cashing in on the reputation bonus points of celebrating IWD, you soon will be. You can expect a non-stop rush of expensive ad campaigns telling you how much they care about women and support gender equality. They may even lament the major loss of women this year. Where were these companies for the last 12 months? 5.4 million women don’t get forced out of work without someone noticing.

The massive destruction of women’s careers did not happen without witnesses and enablers. It did not happen silently or secretly. It didn’t happen overnight. There weren’t 5.4 million people employed one day and gone the next. A year ago, we all thought COVID would last a few weeks at most. We diligently bought our 2 weeks of groceries and settled down for an extended snow day (or as we do here in Miami, a long hurricane party). And then it just kept going. It’s still going - and women are still losing their jobs! Yes, a lot happened quickly, but not the part where women were pushed out of the workforce. That part has been happening steadily, consistently this entire time. In fact, along with Zoom fatigue, it might be the most consistent part of the pandemic. There have been more headlines, webinars, and studies about this than I can count. It happened in plain sight with millions of people screaming about it, and still it happened. The most offensive part is that companies aren’t just telling women they’re not worth investing in, they’re telling them to fix it by themselves. You can only lean in if you’ve got something to lean against, and we’re currently leaning into a massive void.

The most painful part of all? It was preventable. There is a choice, a choice that has been made over and over again during this past year, and that choice is simple: invest in supporting and retaining your female employees, or prioritize something else. If you’re a company spending money on an IWD ad campaign, you had better be able to look in the eyes of every woman who had to leave your company this year and say ‘yes, I chose this meaningless campaign over you and your contributions to our company.’ 

To be sure, there are some things worth celebrating for women this year (first female Vice President!), but on the whole, it’s been more of a year for tears than cheers. Instead of big-bucks on glossy ad campaigns that do nothing to help actual working women, I want to celebrate with the people and the companies that invested whatever they could - dollars that could have gone to something else, time that could have been spent elsewhere, energy none of us had - into supporting working women. Those people and those employers certainly deserve to celebrate their work. For everyone else, before you celebrate IWD or the rest of Women’s History Month ask what you’ve done to celebrate women the rest of the year. How have you helped when we’ve needed it the most?

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