Every year, on the 8th of March, organisation’s social media fills with empowering quotes, filtered team photos, and carefully worded commitments to gender equality. For 24 hours, it can feel like progress is everywhere. Then the 9th arrives, and the feeds move on.
But here’s the question worth sitting with: What actually changes?
At Lancashire Women, we believe International Women’s Day matters. Deeply. But we also believe that performative gestures, what we might call ‘branding wash’, don’t just fail women. They actively harm them. And to understand why, it helps to remember what this day was always really about.
International Women’s Day was not born in a boardroom. It emerged from the struggles of working-class women at the beginning of the twentieth century: women who marched through the streets of New York in 1908 demanding safer working conditions, fair pay and the right to vote. Women who risked their livelihoods to be heard.
In 1910, Clara Zetkin, a tireless campaigner and leader of the Women’s Office for the Social Democratic Party in Germany, proposed at the International Conference of Working Women that every country should mark the same day each year. Her vision was radical and uncompromising, a universal suffrage, not the watered-down version that even some feminist organisations at the time were prepared to accept.
A year later, the Triangle Fire in New York City killed more than 140 working women, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants, and galvanised the movement further. In 1917, women in Russia went on strike for “Bread and Peace”, setting in motion a chain of events that led to the abdication of the Tsar and Russian women winning the right to vote just days later.
This was a day born of anger, solidarity, and structural demand. Not celebration for its own sake. Not branding.
Today, International Women’s Day has been co-opted by organisations using feminist slogans for marketing while doing little to address the gender inequalities that exist within their own organisations.
The damage isn’t just reputational. When a company publicly celebrates women while privately maintaining a gender pay gap, offering limited routes to senior leadership for women, or tolerating a culture where women’s voices are routinely talked over – it sends a powerful and demoralising message to the women inside that organisation: Your experience doesn’t matter enough to actually change.
There’s also a broader social cost. When mainstream IWD narratives centre successful, privileged, professional women, they erase those facing the sharpest edges of inequality: Women experiencing poverty, domestic abuse, barriers compounded by race, disability, or class. This kind of ‘corporate feminism’ doesn’t just fail to help, it trivialises the real inequalities that millions of women live with every day.
What should organisations be striving towards? The shift that matters is symbolic to structural. Some markers of genuine commitment include:
Pay transparency: Publishing the gender pay gap data and setting public targets to close it.
Year-round accountability: IWD should be a moment of renewed commitment, not the entirety of a gender equality strategy. Diversity training programmes and symbolic gestures have shown limited effectiveness on their own. What works is consistent, measurable action.
Intersectionality: A commitment to gender equality that doesn’t grapple with race, disability, socioeconomic background and other intersecting factors will only help the most privileged women and will leave everyone else behind.
Listening to lived experience: Consulting the women actually in and around your organisation, not just celebrating them.
Lancashire Women exists for the women who don’t appear in the glossy IWD posts. The women navigating poverty, trauma, and systems that were never designed with them in mind. The women Clara Zetkin was fighting for more than a century ago.
We welcome every conversation that advances gender equality but we’ll keep asking not just ‘are you celebrating women’ and ‘are you changing anything for them?’
Because that’s what this day was always meant to be for.
If you have an interest in the improvement of outcomes for women in Lancashire, we’d love you to join us at our Festival of Women on 6th November at Winter Gardens, Blackpool.
Festival of Women is a one-day conference and evening celebration to amplify the voices and experiences of women across Lancashire.
Bringing together leaders, partners and communities, the event explores the critical themes of women’s health, wealth and safety.
Find out more and book your seat here: https://lancashirewomen.org/festival-of-women-2026/
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