Be Bold For Change — International Women’s Day 9th March

When I was 18 I wrote a letter to Tony Blair about the Iraq War and my thoughts towards it. My frustration, my disappointment, all passionately scrawled into a hand-written letter. I remember that girl who knew she had a right to speak up about decisions that had been made on other’s behalves that she disagreed with. Fast forward to the last couple of years and I feel like I have found that voice again.

International Women’s Day is about being bold for change. Feeling disenfranchised at times should not make you feel less able to speak up, it should push us more to do it. When we think about feminism, as a term, we all have conflicted opinions of what it means. Only a few days ago, Emma Watson was criticised for showing her body as a direct contradiction of her ‘feminist’ views. When you google feminism today, a range of Emma Watson related rants and arguments appear; ‘feminism is dead’ screams a headline, ‘feminism isn’t an act or a mind-state’, ‘feminism is a mantra’, a Facebook group of ‘Women against feminism’ comes up. And these were just a selection of my own echo-chamber results!

At Dentsu Aegis Network UK&I, we have done a lot over the last years to be bold for change and face, head on, the ambiguities to the word ‘feminism’. Just recently, in our Unconscious Bias training, we were asked if we — as men and women — were feminists. It began as an awkward moment of raising hands and looking around at our neighbours. Some still felt that the word feminism was not representative of equality for both sexes. Some felt it was archaic. Some felt it was a given. When you have a word that tries to umbrella over a multitude of view-points, visions and frustrations, it isn’t easy for a one-size fits all to work. We had an open, valuable discussion on all of these opinions in our training and found that our views mainly converged, but not over lexicon.

So being bold for change isn’t about setting a ‘mantra’ or pushing one’s views on others or by defining equality by simply having a word for it, it is about encouraging open, brave conversation around equality for women and men. You can’t have one without the other. This in turn should hopefully lead to the demystifying of the word ‘feminism’ or maybe even a redefinition. Being bold for change is, as Louise Lang, Head of Client Management at mcgarrybowen, brilliantly put, ‘being the transmitters’ in everyday discussions that open up thinking and challenges to equality in opportunity for women and men. It is undeniably important that we as a communications industry, set the standard of doing just that; communicating with egalitarianism in mind. Not spending countless words on arguing with ourselves and setting rules and mandates over what defines a feminist.

My pledge to be bold for change to #ConquerTheDivide is to challenge those rules and mandates wherever I encounter them, to encourage all different voices and to speak up and stand up for true equality and inclusion.

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