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International Women's Day: Feminist movement or gender-washing machine?

Inclusive Sustainability: 2025 Campaign

Professor Laura J. Spence and Dr Lauren McCarthy

04 March 2025

There is no doubt that gender inequality is a global problem that impacts the lives of us all.

And yet, instead of moving forward, we’re watching progress unravel before our eyes.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives are being scaled back, the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to widen the gap, and in countries like Afghanistan, there are renewed restrictions on all aspects of women’s lives. Meanwhile, reproductive rights are under attack, rolling back decades of hard-won progress.

Look away from the media headlines for long enough to dive into the data, and the statistics are equally horrifying. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2024, which covers 146 economies, it will take 134 years before there is full gender equality, with educational parity likely to be achieved long before economic, health and political equality.

Looking ahead: Our new study on gender equality and IWD

What can be done? As academics, we are attempting to unpick the complexities of this problem through a new study that investigates gender equality in business, and the place of International Women’s Day (IWD).

In our research, we return to the feminist roots of IWD. We’re advocating for increased scrutiny of corporate feminist movements and greater accountability for organisations engaging in ‘gender-washing’ (a new form of marketing hypocrisy).

Below is a summary of our findings so far, as well as seven insights that could help businesses commit to IWD without compromising their authenticity.

IWD as a gender-washing machine

We are all responsible for gender equality. While it is hopefully a truism that our concern about gender equality should be universal and enacted every day, IWD is arguably an opportunity for us all, including business, to take stock and reflect on gender equality.

However, from a corporate perspective, the marketing opportunities of IWD seem to have taken over. This has been dubbed as ‘gender-washing’, where progress on gender is masked by glossy platitudes, misleading branding, misguided celebratory gimmicks (IWD cupcake anyone?), and the claim to legitimacy through questionable association with non-governmental organisations.

Based on our ongoing research, we would urge caution about how businesses engage with #IWD. They risk misdirecting their efforts and doing more harm than good in progress towards gender equality, rather than addressing inequalities and investing in substantive change and improvement.

The question of legitimacy: IWD.com

Before exploring how businesses can meaningfully engage with IWD, it is crucial to examine the authenticity of the movement’s digital presence.

According to Companies House, the company behind the website www.internationalwomens day.com is a private limited business, owned and run by a web portal company registered in the UK. The company has no apparent connection to the feminist movement from which Women’s Day originally sprang and runs a campaign (unilaterally proposing a theme each year), which is entirely in parallel to UNWomen’s more substantive version of Women’s Day.

When looking for IWD inspiration, vigilance is needed, and a quick google of IWD might appear to offer a quick fix of handy branding but be misleading.

A brief history of International Women's Day

Whilst the IWD website has no clear information on its governance or origins, the original Woman’s Day can be traced back to the women’s suffrage socialist movement in New York.

From there, it spread to European countries in the twentieth century (Kaplan, 1988). There have been other related initiatives such as the ‘Wages for Housework’ campaigns, and women’s strikes in even the more gender equal locations, such as Iceland (first in 1975, and more recently in 2024, when the Icelandic Prime Minister also stayed at home). Women in The Global South, indigenous communities, and women of colour have long upheld traditions of women’s activism.

In short, there is a far richer tapestry to understanding commitment to gender equality than jumping unreflectively on a corporate IWD bandwagon. Doing so risks a naïve understanding of the ingrained inequalities enacted and reproduced by business, a tick box mentality, and a lost opportunity for business to make a positive contribution to gender equality.

How can businesses approach IWD?

Based on our initial research, we’ve put together seven suggestions to help businesses highlight their commitment to gender equality:

1) Mean it. The marketing budget for IWD should be a tiny fraction of your resource commitment to gender equality. How does your social media message complement rather than lead your gender equality commitment?

2) Be gender inclusive and intersectional. There are 5 billion women. Implying that a single category is representative of them all is a serious own goal. Understand your organisation, customers and communities and respond to their intersecting characteristics, class, race, abilities, nation, sexuality, among others.

3) It is about fixing the system, not fixing the women. Gender equality is not about changing women to fit in with the existing norms of business. This just emphasises women as an ‘other category’. What is needed is redrawing of the systems and structures of business.

4) Gender equality is not just for women. Women can’t achieve gender equality single-handedly. Allies are needed, and men too will benefit from a more equitable world.

5) If you need inspiration, look to UNWomen for your reference points. Pay attention to conversations around International Women’s Day which are focused on the issues rather than marketing expertise. UNWomen offer a good starting point for IWD.

6) Collective, contextual, and connected responsibility for gender equality. While a designated lead may be needed to give legitimacy to help keep pushing for change, responsibility for gender equality needs to be actively collective and connected to the work-related community. Better still, learn from your own context and the experiences of your colleagues and stakeholders.

7) Ultimately, do the work, don’t buy the logo. Pursue gender equality with integrity, throughout your organisation and with your stakeholders as a standing agenda item, not an annual marketing campaign.

Whilst caution is needed for businesses when approaching IWD, there is hope in using the day as an anchor to affect real change within an organisation and beyond. All progress is positive, and we hope that meaningful steps are taken that this International Women’s Day to reinforce gender equality for all for the other 364 days too.

Want to be part of our IWD research?

As we develop our research around IWD, we would love to hear about your experiences of IWD – whether positive or negative. We are especially interested in context-specific experiences from both the global north and south.

Please get in touch if you are willing and able to share your experiences of IWD: IWDresearch@kcl.ac.uk

Professor Laura J. Spence is Professor of Business Ethics & Sustainability. A Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, she is a member of the Centre for Sustainable Business at King’s Business School. She is an expert on the social and ethical aspects of business in relation to global challenges such as social injustice, climate change, and inequalities.

Dr Lauren McCarthy is a Reader in Corporate Social Responsibility and Director of ETHOS: The Centre for Responsible Enterprise at Bayes Business School. Her research explores the relationship between business, gender and responsibility, particularly in global supply chains. Lauren is also interested in how feminist movements interact with the private sector.