IWD 2023 - I have a Problem with #EmbracingEquity
Today is International Women’s Day and it is always a pretty special time for me. It’s always been an opportunity to celebrate my peers and the women who have come before me, have led the way and those who have made sacrifices so that I can taste some sort of freedom in my womanhood.
I come from a matriarchal Jamaican family, so I understand the power and possibility of female leadership. I’ve seen the special intricacies of female networks, infrastructures and care. I grew up in a household of two adult-women; sisters who raised their children together and so from a young age I have always appreciated that there is more than one way of doing something - even when it comes to raising children. That’s a gift I cannot thank my mum and aunty for enough. Surrounded by strong aunties and a grandmother who always seemed to set the pace and family agenda (and look so damn fabulous doing so) encouraged me to be more ambitious and subconsciously resistant of feeling trapped or unfulfilled by either a career or family life - so I’ve dedicated most of my adult life trying to navigate both. Walk the tightrope between sensible and sexy, pragmatic and spontaneous, mature and youthful.
For me, March is always brings time for reflection and appreciation for women’s month, as both my mum and grandmother’s birthdays fall in March and mother’s day firmly presides in March (so it’s safe to say it’s a very expensive month for me too). But recently, I’ve been thinking about my own feminism, how it has shifted, bent and morphed over the years - maturing with age, sharpened by my own experiences and those of the women around me. Battling to be heard over the privileges I’ve been afforded, my weariness from the constant fight and my ignorance.
The theme for International Women’s Day 2023 is #EmbraceEquity. I get it, these catchy phrases and hashtags are a great way for starting conversation, are memorable and are a digestible way of focussing our efforts for International Women’s Day. I get it. However, I have issues with the concept of ‘Embracing Equity’. For those who are unfamiliar with the term equity:
Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome
Like equality, equity is not something that naturally exists in the world; something that we need to simply open our eyes and our arms to. Equity currently doesn’t structurally exist in our world and I think it’s irresponsible to give the impression that equity is easy, natural or something that can be embraced because it’s coming anyway. It’s not.
Equity has to be made, curated and worked for. It needs vigilance, thought, care and effort. It needs knowledge, buy-in and it needs to be co-created. It needs systems and infrastructure that are actively responsive and sensitive to deepening inequality and oppression. It needs to centre the lives, voices and experiences of our most marginalised and disenfranchised communities. It needs financial investment and stewardship.
Most International Women’s Day conversations are intentionally surface level, appealing mostly to middle class white women in the labour market. Increasingly leaning towards being a corporate hook for brands to market to its consumers and speaking directly to ‘she-eos’, ‘clean girl aesthetics’ and well-meaning but unproductive panel discussions. In my experience, International Women Day usually focusses on women’s value through a capitalist lens, pushing forward arguments of how productive women can be for the workplace but it rarely addresses the things that shape and impact many women’s experiences of womanhood like m/otherhood, care, sex work, refugee rights, inhumane immigration policies, health inequality, the criminal justice system, homelessness, access to gender affirming care, food justice the list goes on. Most of us are quite familiar with the term intersectionality, but in practice we fail to speak to or address the multiple, intersecting, emerging and compounding issues that impact women today.
Intersectionality is a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and create obstacles that often are not understood among conventional ways of thinking.
I’m under no impression that the intention of International Women’s Day is to solve all the world’s problems in 24 hours. I do believe there is value in having a day / month to push forward conversations, be a marker of progress and celebrate the women in our lives. However, I think we need to employ more critical themes that challenge, push and provoke real action. It’s not enough, in my opinion, to centre a very narrow version of womanhood or the female experience, we need expansive and specific experiences, infrastructure, investment and buy-in to push us all towards justice.
