Google is celebrating International Women's Day with a homepage doodle featuring footage of women from around the world including the education rights campaigner Malala Yousafzai and the British businesswoman and charity worker, Camila Batmanghelidjh.

The search engine's creative team put together the doodle, which features 27 female chromosomes and a video package with the faces of more than 100 women as well as a musical soundtrack from the Belgian-Congolese vocal group Zap Mama. Others who make an appearance include the President of Lithuania, Dalia Grybauskaitė.

The doodle was designed by Google with the intention of providing "a glimpse" of what some women across the world are doing and to focus in a positive way on their lives.

International Women's Day has been observed since in the early 1900s, a time of turbulence in the industrialized world that saw booming population growth and the rise of radical ideologies. The first National Woman's Day (NWD) in the US was observed across the United States on 28 February, 1909.

Clara Zetkin, a German Social Democrat, tabled the idea of an International Women's Day in 1910 during an international conference on women's rights in Copenhagen.

The day is being marked in a variety of ways in countries around the world, from Afghanistan to Zambia. In the UK male presenters are to be banished from BBC Radio 1 for 39 hours this weekend to celebrate International Women's Day.