“Please permit me to congratulate you with the International Day of Women!” Thirty years ago, when I was living in the former Soviet Union, this was a common exclamation on 8 March, accompanied perhaps by a slight, barely perceptible bow from the waist. As a woman, you were expected to blush and acknowledge the warmth of the greeting. Boxes of chocolates and bunches of carnations would appear out of nowhere. The most optimistic and exuberant bearers of these post-Soviet greetings might attempt a kiss on the hand. (Yes, even in 1994, not 1894.) As a tradition, it seemed bizarre, quaint and euphemistic, covering up a multitude of unspoken inequalities: “Za prekrasnykh dam! To the magnificent ladies! Thanks so much for being a woman. May I celebrate your beauty and hereby gift you a day off from making me a sandwich?”
If you had asked me at the time whether anyone would ever “celebrate” International Women’s Day in countries with no history of Communism, let alone in the UK, I would have laughed. Yet 30 years on, here we are. And the euphemisms are beyond deafening. Over the past decade, 8 March has acquired a hashtag (#IWD), become the source of memes and content fodder for social media, sparked a million corporate breakfasts, and generated boundless opportunities for female-targeted marketing campaigns. Barely have you recovered from “Galentine’s” (the rebranding of Valentine’s Day in order to expand the consumer base) than you’re shouting, “Invest in women! Accelerate progress!” (This is the official UN-sponsored motto of IWD 2024.)
Every year there is also an accompanying, mildly exasperated backlash as international women everywhere wonder how this came about and how and why they are meant to be celebrating and accelerating themselves and/or others. It’s a confusion that makes sense when you remember that the concept originates from the Socialist Party of America in 1909 and had its roots in activism and calls for women’s suffrage. But the connection to protest and outrage has long since been lost.
Or has it? However cheesy it may sound, we do need to “invest in women”. This year the most striking phenomenon I’ve noticed around International Women’s Day is women complaining on LinkedIn that they have been asked to speak for free at “empowering” events marking International Women’s Day. It’s good that women are moaning about this because the hypocrisy is so striking. This phenomenon encapsulates the downside to 8 March: “Let’s host an event interrogating the pay gap. Unfortunately we don’t have a budget to pay anyone to talk about it.”
The problem is, International Women’s Day is in some ways just another unpaid shift. Arlie Hochschild coined the term “the second shift” in 1989 to describe the work women put in when they come home from the first shift: the cooking, cleaning and household chores. But there are other shifts too, including unpaid care work (which women do at a rate of two to three times more than men, according to the OECD) and, of course, the always free-at-source emotional labour of making sure everyone else is OK. Being asked to give a pro bono presentation on International Women’s Day about why International Women’s Day is still necessary…? That comes in at around unpaid shift number seven.
“Let’s host an event interrogating the pay gap. Unfortunately we don’t have a budget to pay anyone to talk about it.”
For all these self-contradicting reasons, I’m sorry to say that International Women’s Day is more necessary than ever. It is an opportunity to point out the seemingly irreconcilable conflict that has grown up around women’s issues: that we’re supposed to be “over” arguing for certain rights and that questioning inequality has become boring and complicated. And yet all the data points to the fact that progress is often slowing down or being reversed. Feminism is in desperate need of some kind of rebrand, one that allows as many human beings as possible to band together and examine exactly what we mean when we talk about equality and fairness, even if (and especially if) we have opposing and competing views about the details.
We are living through a period of intense cognitive dissonance. We are fed the idea that we live in a post-feminist era where we’re beyond stereotypes and bias. But all around us we see the hallmarks of the very basic opposite: women are still paid worse; men are less likely to be primary school teachers or nursery carers; most surgeons are still men. A government official can still say of his female colleague that he has been “dodging stilettos from that c*nt.” (Dominic Cummings’ words on senior civil servant Helen MacNamara, as revealed in the Covid-19 inquiry.) Many pockets of life are still like something out of the 1950s. To paraphrase the message of Angela Saini’s The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule: it’s hard for us to live with the proof of how we all uphold both internalised sexism and the comforts of patriarchy. We wish it were different, sometimes we pretend it’s different – but really it’s not. The one thing International Women’s Day might be good for is exposing that fact. Just please permit me to ask that we give the comradely carnations and marketing messages a rest.
Viv Groskop is a comedian and author of the forthcoming memoir “One Ukrainian Summer” (Bonnier, May 2024)
