The spirit of International Women’s Day needs to be revived, as gender equality has not yet been achieved.
That’s according to the director of ETHOS: The Centre for Responsible Business Enterprise Doctor Lauran McCarthy.
“I think in recent years International Women’s Day has become a bit of a marketing gimmick rather than anything substantive,” she told The Anton Savage Show.
“The fact is that we still haven’t really reached gender equality or gender equity; according to the World Economic Forum, it’s going to take another 134 years for us to reach parity worldwide.
“What we really need to do, in my opinion, is to kind of recapture the original radical roots of International Women’s Day and get rid of all this frothy marketing stuff that we see nowadays.”
Women Girl Power Feminism Equal Opportunity Concept. Image: Rawpixel Ltd / Alamy. 26 May 2016Dr McCarthy said that the day was initially brought about with the goal of securing better working conditions for women in factories.
“So, it started in New York in 1910, and it’s really connected to socialism and ironically, criticising capitalism,” she said.
“It’s about securing better working conditions for working class women in factories, it was about getting out there on the streets and protesting.”
“Then later on in 1975, the United Nations took it on and it became kind of a more annual global event like we know today.”
US pushback on diversity laws
According to Dr McCarthy, while issues like the gender pay gap are still an issue for women in Western society, more pressing concerns are the pushbacks against reproductive rights and diversity laws in the US.
“We’re seeing a pushback against diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace, DEI,” she said.
“We’ve got companies saying, ‘We no longer want to do this’, and sadly kind of buoyed by a shift to the conservative right in the States and loads of other countries in the world.”
Dr McCarthy said that research has proven that quotas and hiring targets are necessary for ensuring women and minority groups are properly represented in the workplace.
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Main image: Woman holding paper sheet with text INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY and shopping bags on green background. Image: Pixel-shot / Alamy. 14 January 2024
