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By Samantha Walravens
A day without work, laundry, cooking, cleaning or driving the kids to school? We’re in!
The organizers of January’s Women’s March on Washington are coordinating a new protest on March 8, International Women’s Day. They are calling on the 126 million adult women in the U.S. to participate in “A Day Without a Woman,” where women are supposed to skip work (paid and unpaid), boycott housework, cleaning and all other domestic obligations, and wear red in solidarity.
The purpose, according to the organizers, is to “recognize the enormous value that women of all backgrounds add to our socio-economic system--while receiving lower wages and experiencing greater inequities, vulnerability to discrimination, sexual harassment, and job insecurity.”
In the U.S., we take it for granted that women and men have equal access to education and jobs. But some of the actual figures show that inequality still exists. According to a 2017 AAUW report, the gender pay gap stands at 20% in the U.S.-- meaning that women working full time are paid just 80% of what men are paid. And a 2016 McKinsey/LeanIn report shows that women are less likely to get promoted and have fewer opportunities to advance their careers than their male counterparts.
Calling on women to “be invisible” for a day may send a message, but speaking at the 2017 Watermark Conference for Women last month, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Oscar-award winning actress Viola Davis suggested a different approach to help women succeed: unite and support one another. Here, Albright, Davis and other leaders share strategies to promote gender equality and help women succeed.
Women need to help each other. - Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State
"I have said this over and over again. There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other. I have said that for the last 25 years, and it came out of my own life, frankly, because we do something that we shouldn't to do each other. Women are very judgmental of each other. When I got married I was 22. I had my kids at 24, and I got bored. I wanted to go back to graduate school. The people who criticized me the most were other women saying, ‘why aren't you in the carpool line instead of in the library?’ Or they would say, “my Hollandaise sauce is so much better than yours.’ They were constantly putting me down. When I was working with Geraldine Ferraro as her foreign policy person, we were traveling around, and somebody, a housewife in Nebraska would say, 'How can she deal with Russians? I can't deal with Russians.' Well, nobody was asking her to deal with Russians. We have this kind of way of projecting our weaknesses onto other women. There is that, or what I call Queen Bee Complex. There's only one job at the top. It's going to be mine and not yours. What I had always wished was that there was another woman in the room ." (excerpt from 2017 Watermark Conference for Women)
Own your story, the good and the bad. - Viola Davis, Oscar-award winning actress
We're living in a time where women need to be united. There are forces that are disabling us ... A lot of us live our entire lives and never tap into our potential, especially us women. So what has been the secret to make something into my potential? Owning my story. Owning it. I tell my daughter every single day, I make her say a mantra. ‘My name is Genesis Tennon, and I own my story, the good and the bad.’ She's six years old, but I feel that at some point, it's just going to settle there. It's going to be a part of her DNA, because I was not the person that came into life with potential, at least that's not what I saw." (excerpt from 2017 Watermark Conference for Women)
Give mums the tech skills they need to take part in the digital revolution. - Sue Black, Founder and CEO, TechMums
“International Women's Day is a wonderful day to celebrate women everywhere and think about how far we have come, but also how far there still is to go. Finally industry and the general public are starting to accept that change needs to happen, we need to make sure that we keep driving that agenda until we reach parity. My social enterprise, #techmums, is driving change by focusing on mums. We give mums the tech skills they need to take part in the digital revolution and because they are mums we know they won't stop there. Our #techmums take their families and communities along with them, changing society for the better as they go.”
Fund more women entrepreneurs. - Sarah Kunst, Founder and CEO, Proday Media
"Secretary Clinton was before her time when she said, 'women's rights are human rights,' and until we truly have parity and equality everywhere, we need to fight for that basic fairness and commemorate the progress we've made before. To me that's the spirit of International Women's Day. We have so far to go to achieve parity in the tech industry. The numbers of women in tech and tech investing are small, the numbers of women of color are almost vanishingly small. Until we have intersectional representation and parity, tech is doomed to be in the dark ages. Funding more women at both the company and VC levels is vital and can't happen soon enough."
Support women globally through international aid, health and educational organizations. - Georgene Huang, Co-founder, Fairygodboss.com
"International Women's Day for me is really sobering because of how it forces me to think about women around the world and, frankly, how 'good' women in western, developed countries have it, relatively speaking. The health outcomes, educational opportunities and crime rates against millions of people -- who simply happen to be born girls -- is devastating. I am usually sanguine and hopeful about the direction gender equality is moving, but I think it's appropriate on International Women's Day to really focus on those women and girls who need us to be thinking about them, and to support them through international aid, health and educational organizations.
Build inclusive teams. - Adam Quinton, Founder and CEO, Lucas Point Ventures
In my view, men need to aim to become gender inclusive leaders. We (guys, that is) need to make sure we are building truly inclusive and fair teams, environments, cultures . A start point: become more aware of your own unconscious biases and be ready to (politely) call the out in others when you see them. And always be aware it is not just the right thing to do of itself, building a more inclusive environment is good for women AND men!
