The corporate rebranding of International Women’s Day (IWD), as a time for cupcakes and celebration, couldn’t be further from the day’s revolutionary roots, or any meaningful discussion of women’s liberation. Now we’re even told, by one of the world’s most prominent IWD websites, "Equality is not a women's issue, it's a business issue" — as if the improvement of women’s lot is only valuable insofar as it can advance capital accumulation.

If you search for "International Women’s Day" online, your top result is unlikely to be a site explaining the socialist origins of IWD and its strong connection to the fight for workers' rights. You’re also unlikely to see any prominent acknowledgement that IWD was established as an official observance day by the United Nations more than four decades ago.

What you’ll probably find is internationalwomensday.com — a site set up by a private "gender capital management" entity and one often (mis)taken as the authority on IWD. Here, the fight for women’s rights is sold as a set of wristbands and colourful bunting for your office event.

This version of IWD deftly avoids confronting the devastation that neoliberal capitalist expansion has wrought on the lives of women across the world, and its coupling with new and old forms of colonialism and sexism to the detriment of the most marginalised and disadvantaged women, globally. And it negates any discussion of the nature of power under patriarchy, and how relations of power between women and men might be genuinely transformed.



