Every year, International Women’s Day (IWD) is centred around a theme, and 2025 is no different. This year’s theme is the very powerful ‘Accelerate Action’.
It is positioned as a worldwide call to acknowledge strategies, resources and activities that positively impact the advancement of women in society.
What does #Accelerated Action mean for IWD?
While it is recognised that significant barriers to gender equality still exist, the best way to press forward is to understand what works and to do more of it faster. This is what ‘Accelerate Action’ is all about: providing the necessary support and resources to ensure that initiatives that work are implemented quickly and on a larger scale.
In this way, meaningful changes that empower women and promote equality can be realised. According to the International Women’s Day website, current projections indicate that at the present pace of progress, full gender parity will not be a reality until 2158, a staggering five generations from now. This prediction underpins the need for change and the choice of theme for 2025.
Focusing on the call to #AccelerateAction highlights the need to continue dismantling barriers and biases that women often encounter in different aspects of their lives, including the workplace, leadership roles, and communities. It is only by uniting together and committing to advocate and support faster progress toward gender equality, that women will finally be able to reach their full potential.
Key milestones since International Women’s Day began
Since its inception in 2011, the concept of International Women’s Day (IWD) and all that it stands far has spread far and wide. Some of the key milestones in its calendar are as follows:
1913: First observance of IWD in Russia, with socialist women organising protests and rallies demanding better working conditions, equal rights and the right to vote.
1922: Vladimir Lenin declares March 8 IWD in honour of the role women played in the Russian Revolution.
1975: United Nations marks IWD, setting 1975 as International Women’s Year.
2001: IWD website launches as a free, not-for-profit, user-generated resource hub to ‘Support the Supporters’ and grow mainstream awareness of IWD.
2003: IWD march in Mexico City on March 8 becomes one of the largest IWD events globally, with hundreds of thousands of participants. March 9 is #UNDÍASINNOSOTRAS, (A Day Without Us), where women ‘disappear’ by not going to work, school or public spaces
2005: Google launches its first IWD Google Doodle.
2019: The largest international IWD concert, ‘Global Citizen Festival: Power of Women,’ is held in New York City.
