International Women’s Day 2024: Voices of Innovation and Equality

Each year, we globally celebrate International Women’s Day, an occasion dedicated to advocating for gender equality and the well-being of women everywhere. This year the theme is a powerful call to action: Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress!

This year, as highlighted by the United Nations, we’re urged to concentrate our efforts on five crucial areas:

• Investing in women, recognising it as a fundamental human rights issue
• Eradicating poverty
• Adopting gender-responsive financing
• Transitioning towards a green economy and a caring society
• Empowering feminist change-makers

In celebration of unity and empowerment, this week we’ve launched IWD special episodes of Igniting Change, featuring extraordinary women making waves across various sectors. From exploring diversity in tech and its impact on social initiatives to discussing inclusivity, sexual health, and the essence of the modern feminist movement, these International Women’s Day conversations are not to be missed!

Brittany: I think when we think about STEM fields, technology, another scientific field, it can’t just be a certain group of people, whether that’s gender or race or other identity categories. We benefit so much from having women and people of color, people from low-income backgrounds, in all industries, but I think, especially industries like technology that are so prolific, right, we all use technology in different ways in our daily lives and if those are only being built and designed by a certain group of people that just limits their utility for others.

Nicole: It’s absolutely important for women, for people of color, for trans folks, non-binary folks, to be encouraged to engage in tech. It has been a patriarchal industry for a long time and has been underrepresented consistently. What we’ve seen in having folks in leadership roles and guiding the stories of our products, we have greater diversity and better products that are serving users in the way that they need to be served. So ultimately, anyone who is impacted by the tech industry and emerging technology, which is everybody, should be represented in technology and among those who are doing the research, who are looking at the data, who are making and shaping products and implementing these technologies.

Amina: I think civic space and restrictions and patriarchy go hand in hand, and I think we are seeing it disproportionately affecting women, especially from historically oppressed backgrounds in the global south, and we can counter this by creating safe, diverse, active like civic space. We want a space where feminist movements can thrive, that allows for equal, safe, and meaningful participation at all levels, whether it’s in the home, in the streets, or in decision-making spaces, like, having the meaningful participation, I think, this is the most important thing. 

Amina then breaks it down into these four main areas:

• One, governments and major funders need to make a political choice and they have to have the political will to fund and support gender justice. We always put our money where we think is most important, and so far we have seen that gender justice is not a priority because of how little funded it is.

• The second is around really supporting and going beyond the individual empowerment of women and, for more NGO establishments. Those who are directly affected are the first to try and change the reality, and most of the time they do it without any kind of support or any kind of backing. So it’s about recognising their leadership. It’s about giving them the tools, the resources to drive policy change, to engage in meaningfully creating solutions for their realities and experiences, and capturing that information in a very systematic and sometimes also really important, gender-disaggregated data so that we can analyse, we can be informed when we are putting, whether it’s money or resources allocation, to evidence-based information. 

• Really trying to hold on and safeguard and protect the laws that are already progressive, and gender progressive in particular, and trying to eliminate all laws that restrict or criminalise the work that human rights defenders or feminist and queer movements do.

• Ensuring there is a secure and enabling environment. So, coming back to my first point, and making sure that women human rights defenders are protected, they’re supported and their legitimacy is recognised.

Brittany: There are two things I would say … One is to get experience and that could be through things like internships and entry-level jobs, but also things like a class project or a volunteer opportunity.

And then the second I would say is to just be curious and follow your curiosities. I think some of the best jobs I’ve had in my career are jobs that if you had asked me, like two years prior, I didn’t even know existed.

Nicole: There are two skills that I would bring to this space. One is curiosity, be interested in the world and stay curious. The other piece is resilience, which we see in the world that I live in a lot, serving not only the technology side but the work and making a change in the world, because when you’re building products, as you know, failure and iteration become essential to making good work, right, and feeling good about trying something, it not working, and trying again, and having the skill in your own self to think about the world like that. 

Amina: When we advocate for funding, we’re not asking just for mere cash, we’re asking for resources that enable us to break the chains of our current financial systems. 

It’s not charity, it’s not, like, give us grants to do some activities, that’s not what we’re asking for. You know, money, the money accumulated by governments, by corporations, by billionaires has been taken from the backs of women, girls, and gender diverse and non-binary people And it is exploiting their labour and product productivity to keep them in low-paid and precarious jobs, with no access to resources and whether it’s, public services or social protection, or, shouldering the, the responsibilities of unpaid care work, struggling to make, you know, make ends meet. We are talking about making positive policy choices around resources and financing, rather than prioritising, for example, military budgets.

Brittany: There are just so many massive social problems that, as a global community, need to be addressed. We need women, we need people, who’ve been historically excluded from these conversations to be part of those design processes.

Brittany also talks about CARE Nepal’s app Go Nisha Go, which is a digital role-playing game for teenagers that deals with contraception, becoming sexually active, and other ‘taboo topics’ to help safely educate and encourage young people to think about the outcomes of different choices.

Nicole: Well, this one’s hard for me because this is my bread and butter. This is what Planned Parenthood’s tech teams do and have the great luck of being on an incredible team for our digital products folks and working with incredible people across the national office. I’m so grateful for the diversity there and their passion curiosity and resilience and tackling great societal change and challenges, and I have a few examples of products that I think I want to lift today.

Nicole continues to delve into more detail on innovations that have helped to empower PPFA’s patients and users with the information and healthcare expertise they need. These examples were: 

• The Planned Parenthood Direct app
• Planned Parenthood Live Chat Program

Roo Sexual Education Chatbot

Amina: I’ll give one of my favorite quotes by June Jordan, which I think rings true today as it did when she wrote it. She says…