A women’s day in 2020 only helps maintain status quo on equality

Once a day to acknowledge the struggles of our female forebearers, March 8 has since been hijacked by trope-riddled marketing campaigns

Has International Women’s Day become an outdated concept?

A day to celebrate environmental protection and sustainability? Absolutely on board. A designated day to commemorate those who are blind, deaf or dealing with mental illness? Let's have it. I'm even partial to a whole 24 hours dedicated to pizza.

But one to publicly champion a sex that makes up almost half of the population via trope-riddled marketing? Down with your pink drinks and spa deals.

Wake up and smell the equality, guys – it's 2020 and by giving us one single day where we are permitted to celebrate all things feminine, are we not, by proxy, giving the other 364 days of the year to the men? Do we really need another reason to acknowledge the existence of the patriarchy? And worse still, does that day have to be marked with condescending discounts and blush-pink-themed PR stunts?

Surely our forebears – the suffragettes and the manual labourers toiling away – wouldn't have approved of their legacy of florist coupons and themed chocolates.

By its very nature, this was a day that once stood for the fight for equal rights and against unfair working conditions for women. It was a day to champion an oppressed community. A public call to arms for women, and men, to ensure that the imbalance would be redressed.

And so it did. Women's rights have come a long way since the early 1900s.

That was, perhaps, the earliest incarnation of the International Women’s Day, now celebrated around the world on March 8. It was 1909, and the Socialist Party of America had decided to crown National Woman’s Day as an opportunity to honour a strike by garment workers in New York the year before, where women protested against harsh working conditions.

This was followed by a huge protest and strike by women in Russia in 1917, which began the woman's suffrage movement in the country. That protest fell on March 8. (Granted, advancements in women's rights had already leapt ahead elsewhere, such as New Zealand, which had already granted women the right to vote 25 years earlier. Yes, I'm a smug Kiwi.)

That date stuck six decades later, when it became a global marker of female empowerment, and the United Nations celebrated its first official International Women's Day on March 8, 1975, a year that was known as International Women's Year. Two years later, it passed a resolution to proclaim that member states should have their own UN Day for Women's Rights and International Peace. And so, at its core, the notion of the day was grounded in good intentions. It was a collaborative effort to ensure the female voice was heard at a time when misogyny was commonplace. But somewhere along the line, it lost its way. We forgot to adapt International Women's Day to the 21st century. And a marketing executive decided it would be the perfect opportunity to tout a cheap spa day, or a flower coupon or a dinner deal. And that idea caught on. I'll go out on a limb here and assume the UN isn't thrilled that its celebration has been hijacked by condescending tag lines and fluorescent drinks to make a quick buck.

In essence, International Women's Day has become an outdated concept that has been commandeered by the PR industry. And condensing the achievements of an entire sex down to a 24-hour block is really undermining what we are now capable of.

In essence, International Women's Day has become an outdated concept that has been commandeered by the PR industry. 

But don't get me wrong, nobody is arguing that the equality fight is over, so the day isn't entirely a moot point. The harsh reality of a world in which women are not afforded the same rights and opportunities as men still very much exists – in the wage gap, in countries where women are oppressed, in that reality star Donald Trump became president before a woman did, to name but a few. But can't we work towards a future where we publicly champion the stories of women every day, instead of making a concerted effort to do so on only one day a year? Why should this need to be a concerted effort? After all, according to the UN's own guidelines, "International Women's Day is an occasion to celebrate the progress made towards achieving gender equality and women's empowerment but also to critically reflect on those accomplishments and strive for a greater momentum towards gender equality worldwide."

In short: going for a cheap massage is not closing the wage gap any more than purchasing a three-course dinner is educating underprivileged girls in an underdeveloped country.

So, what's the solution? Well, falling short of actually achieving equality, perhaps the simple answer is to abolish International Women's Day altogether. How about letting all that female empowerment escape the shackles of its 24-hour time limit and permeate everyday life?

Or perhaps instead, in 2020, we all join forces and make a concentrated effort to ensure the voices of men are properly heard on International Men’s Day, on November 19. Why, dear readers, are we not more aware that this day exists? Surely because it is simply the status quo, rather than the lack of free blue cocktails and golf discounts.