A 2023 International Women's Day promotion in Frankfurt, Germany (Image: AP/Michael Probst)

Over the years, International Women’s Day has been like a tone-deaf symphony, with corporations and governments taking the brave step of turning their branding pink and touting their feminist “SHEdentials” with scant regard for the effect of the actual work they do.

As Crikey covered earlier this week, this year gave us an all-timer, with the Council of Australian Tour Operators (CATO) proudly announcing that tourism body Visit Saudi was the official sponsor of its “sell-out” IWD event. It was eventually changed after a public backlash.

We note that the CATO event going ahead is themed “embrace equity”, which is the theme promoted by internationalwomensday.com, the website put together by advertising company Aurora Ventures. Aurora Ventures is the leader of the corporate takeover of International Women’s Day, giving companies such as Serco, BP and Lockheed Martin a vague catchphrase that looks great on a cupcake. (The official UN theme this year is slightly less catchy but more specific: “Cracking the code: innovation for a gender-equal future”.)

Shout out, too, to Forbes, holding an International Women’s Day summit in the United Arab Emirates — featuring such luminaries as Hillary Clinton and Gloria Steinem. You may recall that UAE Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum is alleged to have had two of his daughters kidnapped abroad and returned to Dubai when they tried to live independent lives overseas. (A UK court, on the balance of probabilities, found he had orchestrated the abductions and confinement.)

We’d love to be able to simply mock the cringe of Hershey’s releasing “HER for SHE” chocolate bars in Canada, but as one of the five women featured in the accompanying ad happens to be trans, leading to an avalanche of horrific abuse from the usual obsessives, that seems like the least of our worries.

But mostly corporations appear to have been a bit more careful in their comms around the day. Regardless, here are a couple of our all-time favourites:

  • Along with a McDonald’s in California flipping its arches from an M into a W, 2018 had Johnnie Walker becoming Jane for an entire month.
  • Also in 2018, the University of Western Australia alumni podcast opted to make episode one of its podcasts celebrating IWD an interview with EY consultant Aaron Dixon, who is essentially what an AI image generator would come up with if you typed “UWA graduate” into it:
  • Former Liberal MP Dave Sharma, before he was taken in the great teal purge of 2022, thought that March 2021 was a good moment in history to tweet a picture of himself marking “a day when we strive to improve the respect, dignity and equality for every woman, everywhere” by handing out pretty flowers to random women at a shopping centre.

    This took some nerve, coming as it did at the height of the Brittany Higgins scandal and the reckoning over the horrific treatment of women in Parliament.
  • Possibly the all-time great in clanging, faux-feminist failure is pen manufacturer Bic. You may remember its wonderful 2012 innovation: pens “for her” — pink, naturally, and “designed to fit comfortably in a woman’s hand” — which wasn’t even for anything, just a standard product Bic thought people would like.

    Three years later, Bic marked South Africa’s National Women’s Day with a post “empowering” women by advising them to: “Look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, work like a boss.” Learning a lesson from that, the next year it sent its “for her” pens (yep, they didn’t stop making them or anything!) to various businesses in the UK with completely predictable results.