Every celebration of Women’s Month there will be those who will ask why it is important or flippantly wonder why there is no month for men or observance of the same intensity for men.
It is a gender debate that happens every March and, whether the questions were serious or made jokingly, they have to be answered in the hope people will be enlightened. Governments have declared March as a month of celebrating women’s achievements and empowerment and holding discussions on the challenges women continue to face.
Usually, the discussion begins with the citing of numbers and data. For example, let’s look at women and leadership in the news media. A recent analysis of the gender breakdown of top editors in a sample of 240 major online and offline news outlets in 12 different markets across five continents showed that a “clear majority of top editors across the sample are men.”
The Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford conducted the study and the findings were released on March 8, 2023, in time for the global celebration of International Women’s Day.
The study found that only 22 percent of the 180 top editors across the 240 brands covered are women, despite the fact that, on average, 40 percent of journalists in the 12 markets are women. This means there was “a lower proportion of women in top editorial roles than women in the (journalism) profession as a whole.”
Reasons for this, the study said, could be that some in the news media believe the industry is already where it needs to be in terms of gender equality, that they felt their organization was doing a “good job” when it comes to gender, or, given the many challenges faced by media, the organizations prioritize scarce resources for other issues more pressing, such as financial stability.
Why is it important to mark women’s day or month? Because women represent half of the world’s population and account for trillions of dollars in consumer spending annually, yet they are deprived of certain rights and opportunities to contribute to business and society.
To celebrate women is to bring attention to their advances (or the lack of them) in government and the corporate world, the challenges they face such as pay disparity when men get bigger salaries than women for the same job or position, the violence and abuse, and their reproductive and parental rights. Paternalistic cultures already have men holding positions of power and authority and a clamor for parity will not be the same.
A McKinsey & Company report in 2020 pointed to the relationship between diversity on executive teams and the likelihood of financial outperformance, showing that it makes business sense to be gender-diverse and that these companies tend to attract and retain talented women workers.
It is linked to how we, as a mature society, see individuals equally.