4 hours ago
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More than 900 people have signed an open letter to the owners of the website internationalwomensday.com demanding that it “contribute meaningfully” or step aside.
“It is our strong belief that you have been exploiting a social movement for financial gain, without addressing any of the genuine structural issues the day was founded on,” stated the letter, authored by two UK-based professionals and circulating widely on social media.
Last December, a Guardian report uncovered how a London-based marketing firm had for years operated a website that many British brands have mistakenly understood to be linked to the UN-organised celebration of International Women’s Day.
The UN has distanced itself from the site, which every year puts forward a theme for International Women’s Day that is different from the UN-selected theme to mark the day. This year’s theme is “Give to Gain.”
Belinda Jane Batt, a coach who works with mothers and one of the authors of the letter, said she had felt the need to write it after several years of witnessing the campaigning run by internationalwomensday.com.
“There was just a lot of confusion that I was seeing on all of the social media channels and in my own networks of women about this conflation of the International Women’s Day website with the movement of International Women’s Day,” she said.
“It is beginning to feel like the entire movement of International Women’s Day is being watered down and turned into this kind of almost meaningless marketing, where the words and the themes don’t actually seem to marry up with a genuine desire to advance women’s rights.”
The themes put forward by internationalwomensday.com have been picked up by British organisations including Sainsbury’s, Barclays, the University of Warwick and UCL’s school of management, some of whom have cited them as if they were the official themes.
In response to the Guardian’s reporting, the owners of internationalwomensday.com have said no one owns the movement, and its website is “one of many groups that now mark the day worldwide”. The company that operates the site is owned by Glenda Slingsby, a marketing executive. The website’s language is vague about its relationship with the UN-recognised day.
Through the years, the site has had a number of high-profile corporate partnerships, including with the London Eye, the insurance firm MetLife, BP and the accounting firm Ernst & Young.
It also sells merchandise and offers downloadable templates for purple flags to put on cupcakes.
Mo Kanjilal, the Brighton-based founder of a training company focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, signed the open letter. She said that she had been aware of internationalwomensday.com for years, and felt that it was “infantilising” the day.
“The theme they announce is always quite corporate,” she said. “Three words, kind of vacuous, making fun – in a way – of International Women’s Day. You strike a pose or do a selfie and hug yourself.”
This year’s theme, “Give to Gain,” was particularly frustrating, she said.
“We had girls killed in Iran, girls in Afghanistan that can’t go to school. In this country, six years since the death and murder of Sarah Everard, the fight for women’s rights is serious – 74,000 women a year lose their jobs through maternity discrimination. Asking us to pose and say ‘Give to Gain’ is not going to help with any of that.”
Batt said the letter was an effort to encourage the website to be more clear about its operations and its beneficiaries.
“Where is all that money going? Is any of it going to causes that are for women, for women’s advancement, for women’s rights? I think these are things that need to be made more transparent.”
