IWD 2024 - Tea parties, culture and women

Happy International Women’s Day 2024!!!

We had an email at work earlier this week with some “ideas of how to celebrate IWD” and one of them was:

“Host a tea party”

A  f****ing tea party.  What? 

Break that one down for me.....

IWD is so important because there is so much that has got better, and there is still so much to do.  Gender pay gap, hiring and recruitment biases, inequal attention on how women look, age, act …  there is so much of a conversation still to be had.

Yesterday I was in a group talking about the cultural norms in the UK around ‘showing off’.   How culturally triggering it is, how the cultural norm has then been for others to want to cut them down – tall poppy syndrome.  And how much more it has applied to women.  Women have been taught to play small, play down their achievements, be modest and humble, preferably self- critical in the face of praise and compliments.

Culturally we Brits don’t like ‘showing off’ because we want achievement and advancement to be based on merit, and merit speaks for itself.  It's the egalitarian within us. Achievements don't need to be pointed out.  If you 'showing off' and pointing it out, there is a cultural belief that you’re looking for external recognition rather than letting your merit speak.

Which is probably why I am so triggered by companies who ‘show off’ in how they celebrate women.  My cultural bias is telling me this means they’re looking for external recognition rather than doing the internal work for equality, and letting that work speak for itself.

And yet, in cultures like the UK we have taken the desire not to ‘show off’ seriously, particularly as women, within our own internal narratives.  On a personal level, how much do you let your merits speak for themselves - to you?  How often do you acknowledge to yourself – ‘yes I’m good at that’ or ‘yes I do that well’?  How does it make you feel to even think of doing that?

When your focus is an internal audit of your abilities, your merits and strengths, that is not ‘showing off’.  That is owning your value and worth.  And the more you own it to yourself, the more comfortably it sits with you.  The more comfortably it sits with you, the more the merit of it speaks for itself. 

What is the impact, the ripple effect of more women owning their value and worth, allowing their merits to speak for themselves?  Not showing off, but sitting comfortably within their own internal narratives, building up that belief and knowing of that truth.

On IWD 2024, what if we celebrated with an internal audit of what we can own of our own merits?  And allowed ourselves to really sit fully, freely and powerfully within those merits, allowed that energy of knowing, owning, valuing to grow within us?

In 2024, I see and hear women doing this more and more, I see and hear this cultural tide turning. Women speaking powerfully of themselves and other women, celebrating themselves and owning their merits. And that is worth celebrating!

Because the more we allow in ourselves, the more we allow in other people. When we allow ourselves to own what we can do, we feel more ease and enjoyment when others do the same.

So in this energy of ownership, self celebration, does a tea party really fit?

That most gentile, refined, inauthentic and small of parties?!?!

No.  So here are some suggestions for celebrating IWD:

Host a FREE party

A C party (for celebration)

A BE ME party

Happy International Women’s Day. What are you celebrating about yourself?