First noticed greater than 115 years in the past, it’s advanced right into a widespread celebration that honours girls previous and current who fought for gender equality and for funding female-focused charities.
It additionally seems forward: celebrating future generations of ladies and all of the unimaginable female-led actions taking place all over the world.
Underneath the brand new annual theme, organisers are inviting women and men to partake in marketing campaign efforts to boost consciousness.
Right here’s what Worldwide Girls’s Day is about and how one can get entangled on this yr’s occasion.
What’s Worldwide Girls’s Day?
Worldwide Girls’s Day (IWD) is a worldwide day celebrating the social, financial, cultural, and political achievements of ladies.
Origins in girls’s suffrage have advanced right into a day of celebration and development of ladies’s rights.
How did Worldwide Girls’s Day start?
The primary official Worldwide Girls’s Day was in 1975, when it was recognised by the United Nations (UN).
However its origins date again to 1908, when a girls’s rights march in New York Metropolis drew 15,000 folks advocating for higher pay and voting rights.
IWD was then commemorated in the USA on February 28, 1909, with international locations like Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland becoming a member of the event in 1911.
Clara Zetkin instructed the occasion be taken international on the Worldwide Convention of Working Girls in Copenhagen in 1910.
The date wasn’t formalised till a wartime strike in 1917, when Russian girls demanded “bread and peace”. 4 days into the strike, the tsar was compelled to abdicate, and the provisional authorities granted girls emancipation.
The strike started on March 8, and this turned the date that Worldwide Girls’s Day is well known.
What’s the theme this yr for Worldwide Girls’s Day?
The theme for Worldwide Girls’s Day 2026 is ‘Give to Achieve’ and is supposed to emphasize that giving time, information and assist can profit everybody.
The IWD web site says the message is easy. When folks and organisations give extra assist to girls, everybody advantages. Backing girls will not be a loss or a trade-off. It’s an funding that strengthens workplaces, communities and society as a complete.
Give To Achieve is about reciprocity. The extra alternatives, funding, mentoring and visibility girls obtain, the extra development and innovation comply with. When girls thrive, all of us rise.
Help can take many types. Donations, coaching, advocacy, sharing experience, opening doorways or just giving time. Each contribution helps construct a extra related and equal world.
What’s taking place on the day and in London?
There are many occasions taking place throughout London to mark Worldwide Girls’s Day on March 8, in addition to Girls’s Historical past Month. A few of the occasions it’s possible you’ll need to participate in embrace:
Shoreditch Town Hall: An IWD tour of the Grade II Listed constructing, recalling the tales of suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, and ladies’s rights advocates, together with Helen Taylor, and Henrietta Girling OBE.
Soho: The Her-Story Worldwide Girls’s Day Live performance is happening at The Phoenix Arts Membership, bringing collectively a mixture of musical theatre performances from girls locally.
Bishopgate: IWD pledges workshop and charity run, inviting folks to get pleasure from a “brunch-style gathering centred on generosity and intention”.
Piccadilly: Afternoon tea is being hosted at Fortnum & Mason, bringing collectively girls from all walks of life for significant conversations and fundraising.
The IWD campaign is calling for people to use this year’s hashtags and for all IWD events to include a component of women-focused fundraising.
The Worldwide Girls’s Day web site additionally contains an arsenal of free resources, together with graphics and occasion concepts so you may participate in your personal means.
Can we nonetheless want an Worldwide Girls’s Day?
The quick reply is sure.
Whereas girls’s rights and the equality narrative have excelled in some components of the world, the fact is that girls nonetheless face numerous challenges due to their gender — even within the UK.
The World Financial Discussion board beforehand claimed that gender parity is a couple of century away, which means there’s a protracted strategy to go.
The World Financial institution additionally revealed that 2.4 billion girls of working age all over the world don’t obtain equal financial alternatives in comparison with males.
This marketing campaign is as a lot for future generations as it’s for folks at present. It’s about bringing these matters to the forefront, shining a light-weight on the challenges and discovering impactful outcomes.
