International Women's Day: A Sign of Progress or Failure?

International Women’s Day: A Sign of Failure?

International Women's Day is widely celebrated each year and rightly so. This year, however, it has left me asking a different question.

What if the existence of International Women's Day is not evidence of progress but evidence of how far we still have to go and a sign of societal failure?

After more than thirty years coaching leaders, teams and companies around the world I have spent a lot of time observing how men and women interact inside systems largely designed by men.

This piece is a personal reflection on what I have learned, including a moment in my own life that forced me to look in the mirror and confront who I had become. It is also a challenge to both men and women and I would greatly value hearing what others think.

You see, I used to be one of those men who would say "What about having an International Men's Day?" and at that time in my life I meant it too. I’m aware that there is now an International Men's Day each November. The existence of it, however, does not change the mindset I was expressing then or the one I still see repeated by many men today.

I thought it was unfair that women should have a day when we as men didn't and I would be indignant, pointing out that an International Women's Day was somehow sexist and unfair because we didn't have one and so it was unbalanced.

Then I had a daughter, then a son, and my partner at the time (their mother who has subsequently become my closest friend) said twenty one words to me that changed my life.

"I hope our daughter never grows up to meet a man like you and I hope our son never grows up to become a man like you."

That was the most directly confrontational statement as I have ever received in my entire life and it was delivered not with anger but with a calm clarity that left me no room to ignore it.

It was a life changing moment for me. It caused me to look in the mirror for the very first time with my eyes wide open and I did not like what I saw. The process that started was without doubt the single most challenging, uncomfortable and hardest thing I have ever done in my entire life. Being willing to confront the fact that I was not who I thought I was, not who I presented to the world and not the calibre of man I wanted everybody else to think I was, remains the most excruciating thing I have ever experienced.

I do not write this for sympathy or to present myself as an enlightened man or the finished article (I will be a work in progress my entire life!) but because after more than three decades coaching women, men, teams and companies globally, I now see International Women's Day through very different eyes and what I see troubles me deeply.

Surely things must be better for women now?

We have had decades of progress haven't we? Equality legislation, awareness campaigns, diversity initiatives and countless International Women's Days. Surely we must be seeing real change by now.

Yet the data tells a different story.

• Around 840 million women (almost one in three globally) have experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner and this figure has barely moved in twenty years.
• In 2024 alone fifty thousand women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members, which means one woman or girl is killed by someone who claimed to love them roughly every ten minutes.
• Women globally earn around 83 cents for every dollar men earn and at the current rate of progress it will take well over a century to close that gap.
• Women make up close to half of entry level employees yet only 29 percent hold C-suite positions and for every 100 men promoted into their first management role only 81 women receive that same opportunity (that first missed promotion quietly shapes an entire career).

Progress has essentially stalled.

The uncomfortable truth

When I look now at the articles being written to celebrate International Women's Day, I find myself asking a question that may make people uncomfortable.

What if the very existence of this day is not evidence of success at all but the evidence of our collective failure?

We live in a patriarchal culture that has been set up for, designed for and built around putting men first and keeping women a distant second. Women are encouraged to celebrate being recognised for one day, one entire whole day out of 365.

This suggests that we, as men, get to have everything return to our comfortable and normal way of life for 364 days of the year and that doesn’t appear to be very balanced! In fact, offering women one day of acknowledgement while keeping 364 days structurally male dominant feels deeply insulting to me now.

Here is what I wish I could say to every woman reading this; you deserve more than a single day of recognition, you deserve safety, equal pay, equal representation and the freedom to live your lives without the violence, discrimination and systemic barriers that the data proves still exist. Why are you celebrating the crumbs rather than demanding the whole table because accepting one day implies the other 364 belong to someone else (and no in this context, having an International Men’s Day to hide behind doesn’t, in my view, mitigate everything I’ve just written).

To the men reading this

We created this system, we maintain it and we benefit from it every single day of the year. The next time you want to celebrate International Women's Day perhaps ask yourself how you have been celebrating them, recognising them, advocating for them and championing them for the previous 364 days of the year.

Here is the part that might make you uncomfortable; many of you reading this will think you are one of the good guys, I know I have. You do not rape women, you do not beat your partners and so you believe you are not part of the problem.

What about the "lite sexism" though?

The locker room humour that diminishes women, the interrupting in meetings, the explaining things women already understand, the assumption that the woman in the room is the assistant not the executive, the jokes about hormones and emotions, the casual comments about appearance rather than substance, the boys' clubs that form around drinks or golf where real decisions get made. You tell yourself it is harmless, it is just banter, everyone does it, women should have a thicker skin. What you are actually doing is maintaining the very culture that allows the more extreme behaviours to exist.

In February 2026 both the US men's and women's Olympic hockey teams won gold medals at the Milan Winter Olympic Games. The women's team captain Hilary Knight became the most decorated American hockey player in history (her mother Ellen was herself an Olympic silver medalist). When President Trump called the men's locker room to congratulate them and invite them to the State of the Union, he said "I must tell you, we're going to have to bring the women's team, you do know that... I do believe I probably would be impeached." The locker room erupted in laughter.

Many of those same men had publicly spoken about supporting women's hockey, they had been through media training and had said all the right things about equality and respect. Yet in an unguarded moment when they believed they were simply among the boys, their instinctive response was to laugh at women being framed as an obligation rather than equals or champions. Knight later called it a "distasteful joke" though she was gracious enough to say the men were "in a tough spot."

That is what lite sexism looks like; men who genuinely believe they are supporters until the moment when they are caught off guard and their actual conditioning reveals itself.

The brutal reality

Women are not as safe. Women are not as equal. Women are not as protected. Women are not as free. Women are not as listened to. Women are not as included. Women are not as well paid. Women are not as valued. Women are not as believed.

As men.

In Afghanistan the Taliban systematically erase women from public life through enforced disappearance from education, employment and existence. In the United States the Trump administration dismantles decades of protections for women's economic independence, reproductive healthcare and workplace equality.

In Iran women face gender apartheid where their voices are declared sinful, their bodies controlled by law and activism against compulsory hijab punishable by death. In Poland women die in hospitals denied life-saving abortion care because doctors fear criminal prosecution under laws the UN condemned as causing "grave and systematic human rights violations."

In Russia domestic violence was decriminalised in 2017 with a 380-3 vote, making first-time beatings punishable by a fine of $88 with police telling women to stop "provoking" men.

Progress is not inevitable. In places it is being reversed.

So I return to my question

Is International Women's Day a sign of progress or a sign of failure?

I now believe the answer is the latter, a sign of our collective societal failure. For me now it is evidence that we have accepted symbolism in place of substance, that we have allowed ourselves to celebrate one day while ignoring the brutal reality of the other 364.

However it does not have to stay this way.

Real change does not happen through one day of recognition, it happens through 365 days of choosing differently. For women this means no longer accepting less than you deserve, building your voice and your power and standing fully in who you are rather than who you have been told to be. For men this means confronting the uncomfortable truth that your silence is complicity, your "lite sexism" is damaging and your belief that you are one of the good guys does not exempt you from doing the actual work of creating genuine change.

This work is hard. I know because I am doing it and I will be doing it for the rest of my life. I also know that transformation is possible when we stop defending who we have been or become and start building who we wish to become. I have spent over thirty years coaching leaders through exactly this kind of transformation and here is what I can tell you with absolute certainty; the moment we stop pretending everything is fine and start taking responsibility for what needs to change is the moment change becomes possible.

And you do not have to do this work alone.

If you are a woman who is ready to stop accepting crumbs and start claiming your full power, if you are a man who is ready to confront what you have been avoiding and step up as a genuine ally and champion, this is your invitation to begin.

Leadership gets easier when we stop getting in our own way. This Beyond Connection community is one of the bravest, most supportive, most co-elevating and mutually respectful communities I have ever encountered, which is why I prize it so highly and stay active within it years after I joined.

Let's continue to work on this together. 🙏

If this piece resonated with you, you’re very welcome to subscribe. I’ll be sharing further reflections on leadership, culture and the relationship between men and women as our world continues to change.