Why International Women's Day needs a rethink

What corporate feminism gets wrong

Hey folks,

Welcome, friends, to Eliza Filby’s Newsletter. Stick around and you’ll find all my latest insights, essays and research into generational evolution - helping you understand the world of our parents, ourselves and the future world of our kids.

Welcome to the 200 new subscribers in the last week. This newsletter goes out to nearly 5000 people and is growing at quite a rate. Thank you. It is an honour to grace your inbox. This normally goes out on a Wednesday but this is a special post for IWD.

Why International Women’s Day needs a complete rethink

I am writing this at 5am, trying to squeeze in newsletter writing between sewing a stuffed marine iguana to a Charles Darwin costume for World Book Day and penning a speech for a female network event in the City for International Women’s Day. 

If ever there was a sign that the feminist revolution is a long way off it’s the dual scheduling of World Book Day and International Women’s Day in the same week. Cruel, cruel world.  Am I the only one who thinks that the juxtaposition of these events raises pertinent questions about the nature of motherhood, professional success and the societal expectations that frame them in the 21st century? World Book Day generates the kind of social pressure we try to brush off but can’t avoid. We all realise that the costume is a signifier of how good a mother you are: was it a one-click purchase from Amazon or an expression of you and your child’s creativity and endless hours with a needle and thread? Does the choice of character demonstrate your child’s literary appreciation or Netflix addiction?

A similar pressure is beginning to be felt around International Women’s Day. How much does what you say or do on the 8th March say about you and your professional identity? This year, more than ever, there has been a backlash; calling for it to be cancelled, highlighting companies for their tokenism, fuelled by a legitimate desire for greater representation and rights recognised the other 364 days of the year. This fatigue is of course a sign of progress. The same scepticism rightly hangs over Black History Month and other signposted ‘diversity’ initiatives. Corporate virtue signalling may well have reached its sell-by-date. Millennial women coming through the system can sniff the hypocrisy and its lack of nuance from afar and are tuning out.

Corporate feminism was first engineered in the 1980s but reached new heights in the 1990s coinciding with the mass influx of Gen X professional women into once male-dominated spaces. Over the last ten years, with the explosion of gender pay gap reporting, DEI investment and social media, it has reached a level of intensity that some would argue is becoming anti-feminist. As the journalist Eve Livingston has noted: “Evidence shows that an increase in women business leaders has little impact on anyone but the women leaders themselves, It’s work promotion dressed up as a feminist campaign.’ 

The truth is that visible female success is so often born on the backs of unseen female labour (and often done by women of colour). Where’s the solidarity there?

This seems a rather harsh summary to me but her broader point is that economic inequality remains a significant barrier to genuine solidarity among women. How many corporate IWD initiatives include secretarial staff as well as leadership teams? Female cleaners as well as CEOs? Because the truth is that visible female success is so often born on the backs of unseen female labour (and often women of colour). In my case, literally everything I do; from being on stage, on your feed or in your inbox is to a large degree because I am able to outsource so much of my domestic labour. I have a cleaner who comes once a week, I have childcare support to help with the school run, I have a PA who answers my emails, I have a mother who helps when everything goes wrong. 

The feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ which emerged in the Second Wave Feminist movement of the seventies needs redefining and amplifying in the 2020s. It serves as a reminder that our individual experiences, and yes, female professional successes, are deeply interconnected with broader social and political structures, that are inherently unequal. International Women’s Day shouldn’t just be an opportunity for backslapping, but serve as a call to action for greater solidarity and support for all women, recognising the interconnectedness of our struggles and successes. That doesn’t mean posturing posts about your ‘life admin and domestic labour support’ on LinkedIn (or, indeed, in a newsletter) but a sustained fight for decent pay, rights and respect. 

The Reading Room

1. Which Face is AI Generated and Which one is Real - Gamifying the future of AI image generation and how we will now never know the difference. Fun game to play with your kids who will never believe anything they seen on screen ever again….

2. China produces 12 million graduates a year, workers are expected to work 9-9-6 (9am to 9pm, six days a week) and yet the youth unemployment rate remains perilously high… this is a good summary from the Atlantic Council on the continual problem of youth unemployment in China.

3. A depressing reminder of how bonkers the UK property situation is: ‘the increase in the number of properties owned by landlords in the decade after the financial crisis (2.1 million) outstripped the number of new homes the UK built (1.67 million). In other words, we built new homes – but ownership still went backwards.’ This report by the Centre for Policy Studies on prospects for the young in the UK makes for depressing reading.

4. Why are Gen Z abandoning the Pill? The tiny tablet symbolic of the Second Wave Feminist revolution, today is more likely to be associated with poor mental health, weight gain and infertility. How social media killed the contraceptive pill.

5. What happens when the workers don’t go back to work? Politico dives into how Washington has transformed since the Pandemic - and not for the better. Occupancy rates are at 17% and the city recorded its highest number of homicides since 1998. If the suburbs are full of remote workers, does that mean that inner cities are returning to their 1980s dilapidated state?

Thanks for reading,

Eliza