Okay ladies! It’s the first week of March, so you know what that means: it’s time for corporations and brands to roll out the purple carpets and put money behind women – not for salary increases or equity purposes – but rather to talk about how important International Women’s Day (IWD) is. So important, in fact, that it’s passing the real test of our capitalistic times: it’s officially becoming commodified and turned into yet another event where women are being targeted with special offers of savings for this lovely “holiday”.
Bodily autonomy and equity, not so much, but please enjoy a 10% off code for our flash sale on purple clothing, dash cams, or jewelry. Because nothing says #InspireInclusion quite like a new nail color, amirite?
International Women’s Day is a day for the world to come together to “Celebrate women’s achievement. Raise awareness about discrimination. Take action to drive gender parity. IWD belongs to everyone, everywhere. Inclusion means all IWD action is valid.”
A lovely sentiment, but we’re more than ONE HUNDRED YEARS after the first IWD, and we’re still discussing the importance of the sentiment of considering women as equal, rather than ACTING upon the sentiment – well, at least some of us are.
“I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote”
Just yesterday North Carolina’s Lt. Governor, Mark Robinson, won the GOP primary in his state, meaning he’ll be the GOP nominee for governor in November.
In 2020, the same individual was speaking at an event hosted by the Republican Women of Pitt County when he proclaimed, “I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote.” Why would he want to return to a day when women weren’t even considered human enough to warrant the right to select the people leading our country? “Because in those days we had people who fought for real social change, and they were called Republicans.” (I think it’s called political science, ladies, but can’t be sure, for I’m just a girl in the world).
Yet, somehow, in the year 2024, this man is allowed to be the nominee to govern a state for one of the primary political parties in the most powerful country in the world.
Robinson isn’t alone in his desire to roll back rights for women, and the U.S. has been doing a stellar job of that within the last five years.
This Gen X mom is livid when I think about the fact that somehow my daughters have fewer rights than I did as rights surrounding access to abortion, birth control, and health care for women continue to be decimated.
The United States isn’t alone: globally there’s been a backlash against women advancing, with numerous countries rolling back equal rights and passing laws designed to restrict the autonomy or progress of women.
According to UN Women, gender disparities are worsening. It could take another 286 years to close the global gender gaps in legal protections for women and girls.
IWD 2024: The cold, hard stats
The theme of IWD 2024 is “invest in women.” To level-set where we are today when it comes to investing in women, nothing speaks better than the data.
Stats to consider on International Women’s Day:
- Only 8% of S&P 500 CEOs are women, meaning that female representation in top positions doesn’t remotely reflect the fact that women are 50% of the US population.
- More than 340 million women and girls will still live in extreme poverty by 2030 if current trends continue, according to UN Women.
- By 2025, over 12 million girls could be prevented from finishing their education due to climate change. According to UNICEF, “Girls are the first to leave school to assist their families affected by changing climate conditions, shouldering additional household responsibilities during crises. Scarce water resources and unequal gender roles in communities force girls and women to embark on long and unsafe journeys to fetch water, while droughts and floods can make girls miss school during their periods due to the lack of water and safe toilets.”
- In half of the world’s countries, the proportion of women in senior and middle management positions was lower than 35%, and women’s share of workplace management positions will remain below parity even by 2050.
- No country is within reach of eradicating intimate partner violence.
- Nearly three out of four countries have a “very high” wage gap among science and engineering professionals in 40% of the countries.
- Women in senior positions report higher levels of exhaustion and burnout than men, with 54% vs. 41% citing exhaustion and 39% vs. 29% citing burnout – primarily because they’re also still tasked with carrying the majority of the mental load within society.
“The gender gap in power and leadership positions remains entrenched, and, at the current rate of progress, the next generation of women will still spend on average 2.3 more hours per day on unpaid care and domestic work than men.” –UN Women
Finally, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, “after accounting for differences in choice of major, the share of the gap due to occupation and industry chosen was nearly the same regardless of education level.” Meaning that the biggest factor in wage disparity is gender, full stop.
The time is now: It’s not a day dedicated to women, but rather a society dedicated to equality that’s required moving forward
In her best-seller Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis, author Ada Calhoun explains that “A typical fortysomething woman, unlike her mother or grandmother at the same age, is likely to have high-stress responsibilities coupled with major debt, no job security, and a rising cost of living. The average family caregiver is a 49-year-old woman working full-time, and more than a third of them also have children at home.”
To my fellow women, though the numbers are stark, there are still more of us in leadership positions than ever before – Gen X accounts for 51% of global leaders. We’ve got the brainpower, know-how, and abilities to drive change. Rather than positing over and over again that we deserve equality, perhaps we should organize to DEMAND it.
Rather than fearing men, perhaps they should begin to fear us and worry about the consequences of what a world without women would look like. Perhaps it’s time to do more than imagine a society where equality reigns – perhaps it is time to build it.
I’m in. Are you?