My love-hate relationship with International Women's Day

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with International Women's Day. Yep, I've said what I know many women are actually thinking.

On one hand, it's good in that it celebrates women and helps to showcase who we are, what we do and our achievements.?

But there is a huge cloud when the organisation that perpetuates to run International Women's Day or at least has the main website domain, doesn’t clearly say who they are, where the money's going, and who's running it all itself.

If you look at the actual website, the theme this year #embraceequity is very, very light. ?I’ll share some posts where people have talked about this issue so well. Marsha Ramroop FRSA FIEDP has a post here and Anna Dewar Gully with her post here and Angela Priestly wrote a brilliant article worth reading here.

Today our social feeds will be flooded with women hugging ourselves, but this ignores the main much wider systemic issues that should be being addressed to really instigate change in women’s lives. ??

If your firm is championing IWD use the theme suggested by the UN as they are an open transparent organisation directly improving the lives of women.

One of the reasons I still do think International Women’s Day is still necessary is because we're still being held back. We're still facing challenges and discrimination that men just don't face.

I can think of two examples:

One where I secured an amazing piece in a national newspaper. And I went to connect with the senior-level man featured in the piece. And I looked under his LinkedIn post there was a disparaging comment about me saying: "Isn't it a shame that marketing has been featured and it's not someone with more substance". He replied to all other comments apart from that one. I did wonder. Was the lack of support due to me being a woman, being a marketer, being black or a combination of all three? Would he have been more supportive of a white male making my valid comments in that original piece? I think so.

Another example was from a family member who was due to go back to work after maternity leave. But as so often happens, her boss was ignoring her. And then all of a sudden, she got told that she was being made redundant. It hit her like a ton of bricks as she hadn't expected it at all. She asked me whether or not she should fight it legally or not. And I was honest and said to fight will cost you a lot of money and be stressful. Plus, you might not win. She had to factor that into whether or not to take them on or to sign an NDA and go quietly with a payout. Signing an NDA feels like awful advice to be giving but it’s a reality. Would she have the energy to fight a system that isn't designed to help her, that is ridiculously expensive to fight, and a system that doesn’t really want you back once you’ve had a child. Hard things to hear.

So that's why I'm in two minds about International Women's Day. I can see the point of it.

Support it but at least make it the UN #DigitALL one and make sure you acknowledge that it’s a societal issue that needs to be smashed apart.

#IWD