IWD: Femvertising gone wrong

Edition 99

Mar 10, 2024

Happy Mother’s Day, whether you are a mom to a human, a dog, cat, hamster, any assorted mammal, reptile, fish or plant! You survived another year, so make sure you reward yourself with a glass of your favourite beverage and five minutes of ‘Me Time’!

If you won the jackpot of flowers, cards and breakfast in bed today courtesy your family, partner or spouse, congratulations! You’ll probably have to wait another year or till the next birthday, anniversary or International Women’s Day to feel special and seen again!

Or it may all be bundled into Mother’s Day which is just 2 days after IWD. Convenient, no?

If I hear the phrase ‘empower women’ again I might just shoot myself. It reeks of the same platitudes we’ve come to expect every year. This year’s doozies include Pepsi’s ground-breaking campaign called “She is PepsiCo”, where the company is rebranded its trucks with the names and faces of honourees. Equal pay might be better.

Ford’s ‘Dear Car Girl’ campaign aimed to reshape public perceptions of the brand by emphasizing its commitment to being a brand for women. Calling us ‘girl’ might not be the way. But let’s cut Ford some slack. Last year they tried subverting a cliche with their “tongue-in-cheek” campaign entitled ‘The Ford Explorer Men’s Only Edition.’

If only you could see me roll my eyes!

Dove this year teamed up with Drew Barrymore to launch #TheFaceof10, a campaign that advocates for beauty as a source of happiness, not anxiety for tweens slapping on all that anti-aging retinol cream and make up. It might be more helpful to help make social media a safer space for young people, or perhaps just not airbrush their regular models?

And who can forget Burger King’s 2021 faux pax in the UK with the cliche subversion - “Women belong in the kitchen” - a tweet and an advertisement on IWD that raised enough eyebrows that they had to pull the ad. That one was purportedly about raising awareness about the lack of women in the restaurant trade. But you and I know, somewhere someone told the copywriter - get eyeballs on this campaign!

Et’ Voila the IWD corporate formula: pink backdrops Controversy = eyeballs and all the wrong kind of femvertising for the company’s diversity policy.

Using a cliche to fight a cliche, doesn’t work. Actual policies do. But that would be too real. Imagine a world where we advertise equal pay, zero pink tax, human rights, rather than a pink everything one day/one week activation?

Every year I wonder what refugee, labour organizer, and journalist Theresa Malkiel who in 1909 thought up National Women’s Day in the United States, or German socialist organizer Clara Zetkin, who made it a radical global event - International Women’s Day (IWD) on March 8th, 1911, would think of the hash tagged, cliche ridden, femvertising celebrations of today. I’m guessing not much. Read more about the origins of IWD at National Geographic

It turns out I’m not the only cynical woman out there. (It feels so good to have company!)

This year, more than others I noticed so many women who’ve actually fought the good fight, choose to revert their IWD to Malkiel and Zetkin’s radical roots. Some celebrated each other in smaller, intimate groups and others raised their voices at real protests and marches.

After all, IWD was created as a day for women to have their voices heard. From protesting World War 1, to triggering the Russian Revolution; from protesting food shortages to demanding voting rights - we banded together to save the world from itself.

This year more than most, it feels like many (well, those without publicists) chose to shun product sponsored ‘empowerment’ panels, keynotes and stages, from Austin to Hong Kong which have predictably become celebrity platforms purportedly celebrating women overcoming bias and challenges. I’m guessing all the requests to speak for free and share the travails of ethnic and gendered difficulties haven’t help the femvertising industry recruit the actual leaders making impact.

Indeed this year’s hashtag was more incongruous than most years, which doesn’t help. #InspireInclusion has simply underscored the irony of the permacrisis world, we as women must navigate.

Here’s a roundup of this week’s news that underscores my point:

I literally saw red with the first story!

Seeing Red at Red Bull

F1’s Redbill team took the decision to suspend a female employee who raised allegations of “inappropriate, coercive behaviour” against team boss Christian Horner (husband to Spice Girl Geri Horner).

That they chose to do so without being transparent about their “internal investigation,” announce it a day before IWD and the launch of the second season of the all-female racing series F1 Academy, during the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix (a country definitely known for its record on women’s rights) and underscore the decision by making the accused give a statement on why we all need to move on, rather than clarify why the woman was suspended — tells you how much we have progressed in the world of Western sport and racing. Let’s not even go down the road of discussing women’s sports in the developing world. Read more at The Independent

Women & the Irish Kitchen

Ireland’s citizens decided they don’t want to redefine women’s role in society in a twin referendum held this week. The first referendum was to loosen the language around defining ‘marriage’ and the second was to expand and redefine carers in a family, which since the 1800s have been defined in Ireland’s constitution as ‘women.’ The Irish government had campaigned for 'yes' votes to both amendments, saying the changes would get rid of sexist language, recognise family care and extend protection to more families. They obviously did a bang-up job of getting that message across!

Per RTÉ reporting : “The Care referendum has returned the highest ever percentage no vote of people who voted in Irish referendum history.
The referendum on the 40th amendment to the constitution was rejected with 73.93% of people who voted choosing to vote against it.
The separate Family referendum was also rejected, with 67.69% of people voting against it.”

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The Iranian pot calls the kettle black

This one almost made me cry with the sheer hypocrisy of male leaders using the most vulnerable women on the planet as political pawns. As if they didn’t have enough to deal with surviving wars and aggression, while protecting themselves and their children.

The spokesperson for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Nasser Kanaani decided IWD was the perfect day to stand up for women’s rights in Palestine (yes, I am being sarcastic!).

Citing the Gaza Health Ministry numbers of around 9,000 dead women - He posted on X: “This year's International Women's Day is dedicated to honouring the courage of the women and daughters of Palestine, providing a platform for the worldwide denouncement of the barbaric Israeli regime.” He then went on to underscore the need for the removal of the Zionist regime from UN Commission on the Status of Women. Read more at Tehran Times

The Iranian championing of women would’ve been totally believable if they hadn’t been clamping down on women’s rights for a few decades or violently squashing protests since Mahsa Amini’s death. Amnesty International’s latest report is pretty damning.

Per Amnesty International’s report released ahead of IWD last week, the Iranian regime is waging a draconian campaign against women to enforce compulsory veiling laws through surveillance and mass car confiscations.

Testimonies from 46 individuals – 41 women, including a trans woman, one girl and four men – collected by Amnesty International in February 2024, coupled with a review of official documents including court verdicts and prosecution orders, indicate that a plethora of state agencies are involved in persecuting women and girls for simply exercising their rights to bodily autonomy and freedom of expression and belief.

The list of countries where women’s rights are moving backward in time, is a depressingly long one. But to keep fighting the good fight we need some positive stories, and we have one!

Abortion - Chère it’s a Constitutional Right!

France enshrined abortion rights into its constitution this week. It becomes the first country in the world to do so with polls showing around 80% of French people back the fact that abortion is legal.

With this move France has drawn a line in the sand for the anti-abortion movement which has in the past years gained traction in Europe from funding seemingly pouring in from the United States. Read more about the money trail at Politico

With this constitutional change as a flag bearer, French President Emmanuel Macron said on IWD that he wants the European Union to guarantee the right to an abortion in its Charter of Fundamental Rights. How this plays out in EU member states like Malta, Poland, Ireland etc where conservative, orthodox and catholic values have prevailed, remains to be seen. Read more at Euronews

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Reality check

But that story ratio above (bad news vs good), to me reiterates that cliched themes and a once-a-year focus on “celebrating women” in companies, governments, civil society juxtaposed with the reality of us women being dragged, kicking and screaming, back to the 19th century (and in some places the 17^th century) reeks of femvertising gone wrong.

We may have Brooke Shields and Megan Markle talk about bias and breaking barriers on the stages of South by Southwest. We may we cheer the “empowering” female C-suiters in the west. We privileged few may turn our nose up and fight the “female” tag in our titles – we are doing in falling for that femvertising is failing to see our numbers globally ticking down or staying still.

Here are the ILO’s data sets on ‘what’s holding women back’, if you think I’m being a Debbie Downer:
Global Labour Force Participation Men: 72% Women: 47%
Global Unemployment Rate for women: 20%
In 2016, ILO and Gallup teamed up to ask women across the globe if they preferred to work in paid jobs, care for their families, or do both. The data showed that a staggering 70% of women – regardless of their employment status – prefer to work in paid jobs.
Many people believe it is unacceptable for a woman to have a paid job outside the home: 20% of men and 14% of women globally, to be exact.

But let’s be fair to the corporate honchos many of whom don’t really believe in inclusion anyway.

The politics of DE&I are rolling back world-wide. It is on its last legs even in land of the free and brave. After years of publicising women’s “empowerment” they made us believe women’s rights worldwide had progressed leaps and bounds. That’s some serious femvertising impact. But the follow through on all the US lawsuits clearly show even those vocal American companies never really had their heart in it. Read more at Fortune.

Even the UN seems to have fallen prey to the femvertising trend. UN secretary general António Guterres hosted the IWD #InspireInclusion launch of a plan to boost “empowerment of women and girls” around the world. Considering the meeting to unveil the details of a plan to invest in women and girls was in the United States, it was not surprising that the entire high-profile event was moderated by a prominent television presenter.

The irony? It was a man, NBC’s Richard Lui. I guess even on IWD, a qualified and prominent female broadcast journalist/presenter/anchor could not be found in all of the continental United States.

It is after all so much easier to make a post, an advert, host a “female empowerment” pop up, invite a speaker and throw some “inspiration” our way once a year. (I am always amazed at how we seem to dig up a huge number of women leaders for stories and profiles on IWD, but not a mention or a peep about them/their work the rest of the year!)

The Chief Brief