International Women’s Day had good intentions once. Now it’s a corporate circus, an AI-generated mess, and a missed opportunity.
March heralds in the first tentative sunny days of spring. It also heralds in an influx of emails clogging inboxes and posts on social media promoting International Women’s Day. It may shock you, but as the editor of a feminist magazine, I kind of hate it. Now, don’t get me wrong when I say that in principle I can naturally get behind a date in the calendar that makes the world actually pay attention to women’s issues, but IWD just isn’t about that anymore. A quick scroll through the absolute hellscape that is LinkedIn will show you that it has become the day for corporate grandstanding and paying lip service to women and their issues, all while actually doing nothing practical to address real-world problems that still define the lives and experiences of women.
Hollow themes and ideals
Two rival bodies set the tone for International Women’s Day: the eponymous charity that trademarks IWD’s name and UN Women. Both organisations miss the mark with how they set their respective themes for the day. The UN’s theme this year is ‘Rights, Justice, Action‘, which at an initial glance may seem to be on the money for a conversation about women and what they need. The issue is that it is so vague, paving over any real, practical conversation with the broadest of ideals. Yes, women deserve and need rights, justice, and freedom, but this looks different around the world, and it fails to zero in on the actual root causes of why women currently do not have access to equal rights, meaningful justice, or personal freedoms in many parts of the world.
More egregious is the International Women’s Day charity’s theme, #GiveToGain. Truly, this is a deeply tone-deaf approach to fostering a practical and nuanced conversation about how to best support the cause of gender parity around the world. This theme creates a concerning binary that places some women as ‘givers’ and others as ‘recipients’. They aim to raise a conversation about how poverty impacts women globally, but fail to acknowledge that this is a deeply complex issue with a myriad of causes that are dependent upon context.
In their own words, their theme is described in the following way:
“Give To Gain emphasizes the power of reciprocity and support. When people, organizations, and communities give generously, opportunities and support for women increase.”
At the core of the issue with the ‘give to gain’ theme is the idea that we are focusing on the action rather than the cause. It ignores the fact that financial giving is only one part of a much broader collection of tools that are going to help women around the world. Wealth inequality is a global issue that disproportionately impacts women. This is true in the most developed nations and the poorest nations. In the midst of a global cost of living crisis, the theme of ‘give to gain’ feels very tone deaf and very ignorant of the current climate. It also feels like a very hollow idea about charitable giving when the reality is that problems that women face go far beyond wealth inequality in a vacuum.
The issues that women face are structural, institutional, and cultural. One of the symptoms of this is wealth inequality. These issues stem from deep-seated structural patriarchy that is woven into every single aspect of society. Misogyny is baked into the foundations of governments, religions, institutions, and cultures. As Mona Eltahawy succinctly puts it, sexism is inherent in the state, the street, and the home. Focusing on any one of the tangible threats women face, such as the online manosphere, human trafficking, labour exploitation, sexual violence, disproportionate impacts from war and conflict, legal oppressions, or climate change, would be far more practical and meaningful than the non-committal prattle of either of the offered themes this year.
I also take issue with the concept of giving to gain something. The idea that we should just throw some money out there (which, as a charity that depends on corporate sponsorships and merch sales, is 100% their goal) to fix gender inequality is lacking. The theme frames it as something that is also not good for the sake of actually helping another woman, but good for your own ego. Naturally, this idea is subtextual and not literal, but it demonstrates the serious lack of care taken in directing a global conversation about solidarity and sisterhood, which feels very shallow and very misguided to me. If you want to have a conversation about sisterhood, you need to have a conversation about intersectionality and about far more than just the idea that throwing money at a problem is how you solve it.
UN Women, and the limitations of centring specific issues for IWD
Organisations like the United Nations have specific social and political obligations that they cannot ignore, which makes them ill-equipped to truly lead a conversation about International Women’s Day. UN Women does incredible work to track, monitor, and accurately report on situations around the world that impact women, particularly in often poorly reported or ignored areas, such as in Africa. They have specific responsibilities to maintain order within the United Nations. This means that specific issues facing women in certain countries, such as the United States, which has a significant role as one of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, cannot be approached in a constructive or meaningful way by UN Women.
Particularly in the United States right now, women are facing some of the greatest existential threats to the rights that have ever been understood in the history of America. These include tight restrictions on abortion rights. This also extends to the issues facing undocumented women, or women of perceived immigrant backgrounds, through the pogroms being led by ICE. These are real, tangible issues that we need to have global conversations about. However, because of political and social obligations that are held by the United Nations, they can’t afford to meaningfully approach them as a theme for International Women’s Day. This is even though the actions of the United States en masse are deeply misogynistic and increasingly mirror the horrors of The Handmaid’s Tale. This means that there is an uneven approach to how and why certain conversations are broached for International Women’s Day, or for major campaigns and conversations led by the organisation. It is a major issue that we cannot overstep or we cannot underplay.
I have far more sympathy for UN Women and believe they have greater potential to reform their approach than the eponymous IWD charity. Their incredible work on the ground in every corner of the globe demonstrates their genuine understanding of the real issues facing women internationally. I just want them to name the problems and use their considerable platform to actually stand on a specific issue for International Women’s Day; the theme of ‘Rights, Justice, Action’ doesn’t really say anything at all. How do we further the struggle for rights, secure justice, and take action? Whose rights are we talking about? Across the world, the nuances of women’s experiences need to be highlighted with specificity and tangible, direct sentiments.
Corporate grandstanding is not activism, it is bullshit
At the very core of my apathy for what International Women’s Day has become is the way it has become a tool for corporations to virtue signal support for the equality of women, while doing literally nothing practical to actually aid the cause. Just as we will inevitably see in June with corporations slapping rainbow flags on their logos, IWD is a launchpad for businesses to parade their supposed support for empowering women. These are businesses that often underpay the women who work for them, alleging their supposed support for a cause we know damn well they do not care about. In the late stage capitalist hell that we are living in, the guise of any morality from the corporate world would be laughable if it weren’t so thinly veiled an insult to the average person.
Personally, I would much rather see corporations say nothing instead of the regular word salad that they litter their social feeds with at this time of year. I cannot ignore the realities of corporate greed and how it actively harms women. This comes in the form of direct exploitation, such as the underpaid labour of women in developing nations that prop up business bottom lines. It also comes in the form of a corporate culture that was built by and for men, forcing women to still work twice as hard to go half as far in virtually every industry. These conversations are uncomfortable for the world of business, and so they are ignored in favour of hollow statements that ultimately mean nothing and constitute false virtue-signalling, adding to the already insufferable noise that corporations sprout to try and convince us they have any morals.
The actual principles of International Women’s Day are completely lost in the sea of noncommittal statements about empowering women or supporting opportunities for women in the workplace. It all feels very hollow when the reality is still one that is littered with stories of sexual harassment in the workplace and wage inequality. The reality is that the vast majority of businesses do not do anything to support women’s access to positions of leadership or combat the barriers present for women seeking career progression. The statements made on social media about how businesses support women and how International Women’s Day is a great opportunity to remind ourselves of the talents and abilities of women are disingenuous. It all falls very flat and is incredibly surface level.
I also think the reality is the world of business, particularly in late stage capitalism, is inherently amoral. Business is not about empowering people; it’s about making money. Liberation can never be achieved through the structures of business. Corporate greed is antithetical to the cause of social justice. Social justice hinges on prioritising the person, not the bottom line. The world of business is inherently and inextricably incapable of doing that. Any corporate grandstanding around International Women’s Day will always be just that, grandstanding. Given this reality, IWD has become a tokenistic day in the calendar, where businesses can pat themselves on the back and display their alleged values to people. Ultimately, doing so to appeal to the social sensibilities of their client base, instead of being based on genuine solidarity with the numerous challenges facing women. This feels incredibly antithetical to what International Women’s Day should be about: zeroing in on actual issues facing women across the globe.
You can’t help women with AI slop
It’s particularly interesting, or rather disturbing, that the organisations that are leading the charge for International Women’s Day talk about things like giving to women or respecting their rights and freedoms, while using AI. On the landing pages for the websites of both organisations that lead the theming and conversation around IWD, there are clear uses of AI. Specifically, they use generative AI text and AI images. AI is an environmental and social evil. It is something that is actively and continuously degrading social fabric through stealing art and devaluing the impact and the importance of human labour and human creativity. The pressures for water required to support mammoth AI data centres are also further damaging our planet. As we know, environmental issues impact women disproportionately to how they impact men.
The concept of using AI to build your theming and your messaging around International Women’s Day is frankly dystopian. It is not only frustrating, but it is a blatant insult to women. A quick use of AI detectors found that the text on both the UN Women and International Women’s Day charity homepages was between 21 and 28% AI generated. AI text detection tools also tend to underestimate the volume of AI content in a given piece of writing, meaning there is reasonable cause to suspect a higher percentage of AI slop than what was detected. If generative AI is genuinely being used, which we heavily suspect it is, it raises major red flags about the efficacy of the organisations leading the IWD conversation.
This is not only concerning in the macro, using a tool that is known to be awful for the planet. In the micro, you’re actively taking opportunities away from a woman who could have written that copy herself. When the organisation International Women’s Day wants to talk about the idea that you can give to gain, we have to question how much they believe this themselves when there is clearly a lack of desire to internally give opportunities to women creatives instead of generative AI. It feels very antithetical to the alleged ‘give to gain’ message. It makes one question: is there any genuine motivation behind what they preach? It makes me question the validity or the intentionality of what they’re actually doing.
The IWD content competition complex
For those of us involved in activist content creation, International Women’s Day has a secondary impact that furthers my irritations with it in its current state. The competition it breeds for meaningful activists to engage in is very damaging. Algorithms favour content that can appeal to the most eyes, which means that the content that rides the wave of virtual conversation about IWD every year is the least impactful and most palatable. Activism isn’t supposed to be comfortable. Essential to change is a little discomfort. Instead, the slacktivism we see on IWD is infuriatingly comfortable and reeks of corporate-safe girlboss sentiments that do not do anything to push feminist conversations forward. Perhaps most fitting to explain it is our editor-in-chief, Ellie Macieira-Fielding:
“I think the intention of International Women’s Day is good, and I think for many years it has been an incredibly important day. In no way do I want to belittle any awareness, community or success that has come out of it. But I feel as though we have strayed from its pure origins. I think as the editor of an online feminist media outlet, I’m in a unique position to view its operations from the inside out, and in recent years, what I have seen disheartens me. As I scroll through my social feeds, I can’t help but see the activists, content creators and organisations within our own community competing against each other for the loudest, most ‘important’ content.
“I fear we have moved from a collaborative outreach approach, where action and meaning come first, standing side by side in protests and community spaces, and instead we are fostering a new era of empty buzzwords and clickbait. Many people still believe clickbait looks like a Buzzfeed quiz, but actually, within our community, it looks more like: ‘If you’re not terrified, you’re not paying attention’ etc. The foundation of its lexicon is built on guilt to demand people’s attention and clicks. As time has gone on and creators have gotten more creative in how they command people’s attention, the stakes get higher. They run out of time and mental energy to keep up, and now many have turned to AI to help churn out more content faster. And what you are now left with is a feed full of meaningless jargon and anxiety-inducing statements. But nothing is actually being done. Until we start treating the online world as a real environment, this problem will only get worse, and when it affects the most important and socially impactful communities on the internet, you know shit has gotten bad.”
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