International Women’s Day began as a day of protest. In 1911, more than 1 million men and women attended rallies in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on March 19 campaigning for women’s right to vote, hold public office and work, and to put an end to gender inequality. In 2024, almost half a century after the United Nations formally marked the day for the first time, this commemoration of women has departed from its origins beyond recognition.
Now, IWD has become a powerful tool of virtue signalling for the very same institutions it was created to fight against. Its identity is currently tied to capitalism, with every corporate executive now annually racing to fill their all-white panel and find an underpaid, undervalued female employee to order or bake, serve and clean up the tray of sprinkled and frosted pink cupcakes.
The current landscape of IWD is the sanitisation of women’s issues, focusing on increasing the privileges of white women at the expense of all minority people. This superficial culture of LinkedIn posts and template emails from your chief executive (who really wants to let you know he has daughters) only serves to distract us from true exploitation and inequality.
In Gaza, pregnant women are reportedly having caesareans performed without anaesthesia and undergoing hysterectomies without pain relief due to post-birth complications. In late 2023, a United Nations agency reported that of the 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, 15% would likely experience complications either during pregnancy or birth. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war between Israel and Gaza, two-thirds of which are estimated to be women and children, according to the health ministry in the Gaza Strip.
The failures of white, corporate feminism to speak on Israel’s mass killings is as horrific as it is unsurprising.
Yesterday I read reports that a 15-year-old girl in Gaza was rescued three days after being trapped in the rubble of a building that was bulldozed by Israeli forces. I heard the story of Rania Abu Anza, who spent a decade and attempted three rounds of IVF to become pregnant with a twin boy and girl, only to see them killed at five months old after an Israeli strike hit the home of her extended family in Rafah last Saturday evening.
Your International Women’s Day is not International Women’s Day if it does not speak to these atrocities. These ticketed breakfasts with catchy phrases and vague themes will make every attempt to silence conversation that goes beyond “championing” female employees with a mimosa on the way into the room. Intersectional feminism compels us to speak about the plights of those less privileged than ourselves and our feminism is not intersectional if it fails to humanise Palestinian people.
IWD can and still should be seen as a day to love and recognise the women in our lives, to celebrate our achievements and demand our governments do more for progressing gender equality. But do not be fooled by the mission statements containing buzz words of “empowerment”, “support” and “celebration”. They are worse than silence; they operate as a distraction from the issues that should hold our central focus.
IWD should not be cancelled, it should be fixed. It is an opportunity to see beyond a breakfast and an Instagram story. Today, ask yourself: beyond this breakfast, beyond these pink cupcakes, beyond my experience of individual struggle under patriarchy, what can I do to make my feminism more intersectional? IWD must be reclaimed, clawed from the superficiality of corporations and returned back to the power of protest and advocacy.
True feminism is predicated on the belief in and the fight for the equality of all people, not white women in leadership locking the door behind them. We cannot be perfect in our feminism, but on days like today we have another chance to try, by disrupting the status quo and starting a conversation about women and children in Gaza. International Women’s Day is a call for change, not a cupcake.