Has International Women’s Day Lulled Us All Into A False Sense Of Security?

This is your weekly instalment of WTF is going on because, these days, a lot can happen in a week…

The theme of International Women’s Day 2018 is ‘press for progress’. According to the day’s official website ‘there has never been a more important time to keep motivated and #PressforProgress. And with global activism for women's equality fueled by movements like #MeToo, #TimesUp and more - there is a strong global momentum striving for gender parity’.

They’re not wrong. This year marks 100 years since women we allowed to vote for the first time in this country. A century of women being permitted by men to have a say in democracy and the World Economic Forum reckons that gender parity is over 200 years away, abortion is still not as easy to access as it should be (and remains illegal in Northern Ireland), our childcare is some of the most expensive in Europe which reinforces the gender pay gap, young women are missing school because they can’t afford tampons and sanitary towels, 1 in 5 of us will experience sexual assault at some point in our lives and, according to the Office for National Statistics around 1.2 million women experienced domestic violence in the year 2016/17 (and that’s only accounting for those who reported it).

When you lay the reality of being a woman today out like that, there’s no doubt that we all need to press for progress. But how, exactly, do you do that? What does progress actually look like? What can you do to achieve progress? And, how do you know that progress is actually progress and not just a temporary win?

A few years ago, historian Emma Dabiri gave a TED talk. In it she challenged the very notion of progress as we conceive of it. ‘We have been conditioned’ she said ‘to think of progress along linear lines’. This means that we automatically think that the present day is superior to the past simply by virtue of it being ‘now’ and the past being ‘then’.

Dabiri pointed out that we are encouraged to believe that progress – whether that’s on race relations, LGBTQ rights or women’s rights – will be achieved ‘simply by the passage of time alone’. There is ‘no basis’, she said, for the idea that ‘the present is more advanced than the past’.

Is our society really any more advanced than it was in 1970 when the Equal Pay Act was passed? Did that piece of legislation do anything to change attitudes about women in the work place from the grassroots up or did it just impose a top down ruling which many have found ways around? The fact that women are still paid less than men despite that fact that we have laws in place to prevent this suggests we haven’t really come that far.

Indeed, at a glance, you’d think International Women’s Day was more a celebration of women than a reminder that we need to come together to force political change. It’s all slogan t-shirts, buzzwords, Instagram selfies with IWD hashtags and poorly pitched stunts like Brewdog’s Pink IPA for girls. Don’t get me wrong - if any of this engages people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to engage in feminism that can only be a good thing. If a selfie or a meme gets someone excited about feminism then long may it continue, if the Brewdog stunt gets even one person thinking about whether they’re being paid less than their male colleagues and emboldens them to do something about it then that’s great. But all of this somehow misses the point.

Feminism is more ubiquitous than it has ever been – it is emblazoned on mugs, used to sell us things and discussed regularly in mainstream media. This wasn’t the case even five years ago. And yet, according to polling done by Sky, people think that feminism has gone far enough. They found that 67% of Britons think feminism has either gone too far (40%) or gone as far it should go (27%). Appearances can be deceiving, seeing so much glittering, navel gazing and commercially viable feminism can distract us from the real work that needs to be done.

All of the problems that stand in the way of progress when it comes to women’s rights – inaccessible abortions, period poverty, the gender pay gap, unaffordable child care - are part of a bigger picture of late capitalist structural inequality.

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The same companies who want you to buy into their ever-so-woke advertising campaigns are also likely to declare internal gender pay gaps when they submit their figures to the government in coming weeks. The same politicians who say they care about gender equality may have voted for austerity measure which have disproportionately affected women. It’s all connected – all of the injustices that feminism is tasked with fighting are the result of broader ideological economic decisions made by a few, for the benefit a few.

We can’t just talk amongst ourselves, tagging each other in inspirational content. We have to join the dots, engage with those we disagree with and challenge the status quo.

We shouldn’t just ‘press for progress’ in the abstract, we should demand a complete structural overhaul. In her TED talk Dabiri suggested that we should look to both past civilisations and non-Western societies who saw time as cyclical and not linear.

We have gender discrimination laws, and yet women are still discriminated against. Abortion is legal, but women must still get two doctors to agree with her before she can go ahead. More and more women are entering the workplace but we don’t have free universal childcare. Perhaps we need think less about progress and more about going backwards, to revisit those battles which have clearly not been won, before we can move forwards?

There’s no point pressing on ahead if the groundwork hasn’t been done properly. It’s useless to celebrate the seeming universality of feminism when so many people think it’s visibility equals success. We can’t afford to assume that progress is inevitable if we say, do and buy all the right ‘feminist’ things. If the last 50 years are anything to go by it just isn’t.

We can buy T-shirts that tell us 'The Future Is Female' but that doesn't necessarily make it so, we actually have to do the work. Has feminism 'gone far enough'? Not even by half.

Follow Vicky on Twitter @Victoria_Spratt

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.