International Women’s Day: What is it and why do we need it?

This article was first published in 2022 and updated.

Gender equality is central to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (UN) – and a perennial item on the Secretary-General's annual priority list.

SDG5 calls for the world to "Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls" by 2030.

Empowering women can boost economies and help the peace process, believes António Guterres, but it needs to happen faster.

"We are promoting women's full and equal participation and leadership in all sectors of society, as a matter of urgency," he told the UN General Assembly, outlining the agency's priorities on 7 February 2024.

It will take another 131 years to reach gender parity, according to the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2023.

The continued fight for women’s rights is marked each year by International Women’s Day (IWD).

IWD takes place on 8 March every year.

It began life as National Women’s Day in the United States back in February 1909. The following year, at the second International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen, Denmark, women’s rights activist Clara Zetkin called for an international women’s day to give women a greater voice to further their demands for equal rights.

It was unanimously approved by the female attendees from 17 countries, including Finland’s first three women MPs. International Women’s Day was marked for the first time in March 1911 – and the date was fixed as 8 March in 1913. The UN celebrated it for the first time in 1975 and in 1996 it announced its first annual theme: "Celebrating the past, Planning for the Future".

International Women’s Day is celebrated as a national holiday by countries across the globe, with women often given flowers and gifts – and there are IWD events in major cities worldwide.

On 8 March 1914, there was a women’s suffrage march in London, calling for women’s right to vote, at which high-profile campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested.

In 2001, the internationalwomensday.com platform was launched to reignite attention for the day, celebrate women’s achievements and continue to call for gender parity.

On the centenary in 2011, sitting US President Barack Obama called for March to be known as Women’s History Month. He said: “History shows that when women and girls have access to opportunity, societies are more just, economies are more likely to prosper, and governments are more likely to serve the needs of all their people.”

Each year, there are effectively two different themes: one proposed as a campaign theme by the IWD website, which this year is #InspireInclusion, and the UN's official, which this year is "Invest in women: Accelerate progress".

UN Women and the UN's Department of Economic and Social Affairs jointly publish an annual update on the progress towards SDG5.

In the latest – Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The gender snapshot 2023 – they reveal there's an "alarming" $360 billion annual deficit in spending on gender-equality measures.

UN Women has outlined areas that need joint action to ensure women are not left behind:

Investing in women: A human rights issue

"Gender equality remains the greatest human rights challenge. Investing in women is a human rights imperative and cornerstone for building inclusive societies. Progress for women benefits us all."

Implementing gender-responsive financing

"Due to conflicts and rising fuel and food prices, recent estimates suggest that 75% of countries will curb public spending by 2025. Austerity negatively impacts women and crowds out public spending on essential public services and social protection."

Shifting to a green and caring economy

"The current economic system exacerbates poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation, disproportionately affecting women and marginalized groups. Advocates for alternative economic models propose a shift towards a green and caring economy that amplifies women’s voices."

Supporting feminist change-makers

"Feminist organizations are leading efforts to tackle women’s poverty and inequality. However, they are running on empty, receiving a meagre 0.13% of total official development assistance."

The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index 2023 found that, although the global parity score has recovered to pre-pandemic levels, "the overall rate of change has slowed down significantly".

The index benchmarks 146 countries across four key dimensions (Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival and Political Empowerment) and tracks progress towards closing gender gaps over time.

Of the four gaps tracked, Political Empowerment remains the largest, with only 22.1% closed – a 0.1 percentage point increase on 2022.

The gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity remained the second largest of the gaps, with only 60.1% closed so far (up slightly from 58% in 2022). The pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis is having a disproportionate impact on women.

The gender pay gap is the “difference between the average pay of men and women within a particular group or population” according to the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equal pay in the UK.

Each year, the charity marks Equal Pay Day in the UK, the day of the year at which women stop earning relative to men. In 2023, that date was 22 November.