What's the point of International Women's Day in 2025?

I'd love it to be obsolete, but IWD feels more important than ever.

As someone who writes about women’s history and feminism, I have surprisingly mixed feelings about International Women’s Day. Every year, I love seeing my social media flooded with the work of phenomenal, game-changing women. For me, the week around IWD is usually the busiest in my year, and I’m so grateful for the collaborations and friendships that have come out of IWD events. Much of my work revolves around classical music, and it’s very often been on IWD that I’ve encountered music by women that I’ve never heard before, as venues take the opportunity to platform little-heard works, giving them their local and sometimes world premieres.

And yet this flurry of activity only throws into sharp relief the gaps where women ought to be the rest of the year round. IWD is closer to how the industry should look as standard, not just on the 8th of March. Too often, IWD concerts constitute the majority of institutions’ annual programming of music by women. From March 9th, women seem to vanish from social media accounts that posted inspirational quotes the day before about how great women are (#IWD #fierce). Every organisation where there’s a gender pay gap, or there have been sexual abuse scandals — all of them celebrate International Women’s Day assiduously.

Until recently, it left me feeling that International Women’s Day had become, for some, a fig leaf. What does it mean to “celebrate” IWD if it does nothing more than build a flimsy, 24 hour bridge across the vast systemic inequalities that persist throughout the rest of the year? It felt like casual lip service — organisations and businesses going through the motions, ticking off their mandatory annual “support for women” box.

But this year it’s felt like the tone has shifted. Since last IWD, in the UK we’ve got an opposition leader who believes that unconscious bias is an ‘outmoded’ concept, and that maternity pay has ‘gone too far’. In the US, the new president has been blaming DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) for everything from wildfires to plane crashes, and abolished DEI activities within federal government. The ripple effects are already visible. Facebook and Amazon have rolled back their DEI programs, and now both Women’s History Month and Black History Month have disappeared from Google calendar. These aren’t trivial changes. The policies of these global companies, whose algorithms shape our daily lives, affect all of us. It feels uncomfortably like waking up in the pages of a Margaret Atwood novel.

Unbelievably, it seems as though attitudes and policies are changing to the point that visibly celebrating IWD might be both costly and worthwhile again. We still need to be shouting about the important work that women do — uplifting them, supporting them, promoting them. But now, more than ever, these visible changes need to be backed up with real, practical actions that move towards systemic change, and make it harder for women to be squeezed out and into the background.

The classical music industry illustrates perfectly why these actions are necessary, because the gender statistics here remain bleak. 81% of classical music’s highest earners are men. 66% of people working in music have experienced discrimination at work — 78% of which is committed against women. Only 7.5% of orchestral music played worldwide is written by women. Of course there are shining examples of particular institutions doing stellar work to move towards gender equity, but taken as a whole the impression is that the industry needs to be doing more, much more, to make classical music a more equitable place.

IWD posts and press releases so often focus on what institutions have already done, which is fine, but given the current climate I care even more about what these institutions are committing to do in the future. How will they reduce their gender pay gap? What systems are being put in place that allow misconduct to be reported — and for this information to be acted on quickly? Where music is concerned, what percentage of works in their next season will be written by women? What resources are they committing to ensure that their women conductors and soloists get the same level of promotion as their male counterparts? What will editors and critics be doing to make sure that women aren’t referred to patronisingly, or framed through the same tired tropes that have held women back for decades?

Over the last few years, classical musicians have been making small steps towards gender equity. If we choose it, we have the information and resources to reject the DEI backlash, double down on prioritising gender equity, and change the industry for good. To take performing music by women as an example — it used to be the case that there was little easily available public information about works by women. Historic prejudices compound over time, and the continued erasure of women from history books and refusal to publish their music meant that by the 1980s, it was difficult to programme many works written by historical women without considerable effort. But this is not the case today. Countless resources exist to introduce women composers, from the UK-based DONNE Women in Music, to Archiv Frau und Musik in Germany, and the Boulanger Initative and Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy in the USA. Google, YouTube and Spotify have made vast amounts of information available with an easy search. And if there’s information you can’t find, experts are just an email away. If you are not performing works by women today, that is a choice, and a choice that sends a very clear message about prioritisation and values.

International Men’s Day passes every year on the 19th November with little fanfare at all. It would be wonderful to get to the point where Women’s Day can do the same because women are no longer comment-worthy, and issues affecting them are always on the agenda. But we seem to be moving further away from that goal rather than closer to it. Sadly, we still need IWD. And we need to make IWD move beyond tokenism — to make it a day to reflect, to listen, and to commit to future action.

I’ll be at King’s Place in London on the 21st March for a panel on women in music hosted by EMPOWER: Women Changing Music. Join me, composer Errollyn Wallen, saxophonist Jess Gillam and singer/composer Héloïse Werner for a discussion about building collaborations and lasting change: tickets available here.

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In related news…

• I was on Jenni Murray’s new series about women composers for BBC Radio 3 this month, discussing how historical women made careers out of composing. You can catch up on the full episode, with film composer Natalie Holt, here.

• If you are a singer or conductor looking to expand your choral repertoire, I have a column dedicated to uncovering both new and old works in Choir & Organ Magazine. The latest installment features Margaret Bonds, and previous articles spotlight Avril Coleridge-Taylor, Kerry Andrew and Elizabeth Maconchy.

• I’m at Saffron Hall on 1st June with violinist Fenella Humphreys, to present a concert of violin music from QUARTET. If you fancy some fun anecdotes and phenomenal music, tickets and event information are available here.