International Women’s Day has a long and varied history. There have been times when celebrating and supporting women on a single globally-identified day has been an important tradition, helping to inspire great change, even when it has involved great risk to the women who are defiantly involved. Similarly, there are times, perhaps like today, when the impact of a single day seems comparatively minimal, where we get to witness the spectacle of corporations jumping on the bandwagon to share their hollow words about how they think women are just great.
Over the last few weeks (and, indeed, in the years before now) I’ve flitted back and forth on how I, personally, feel about International Women’s Day. Considering how it’s occasionally become (at least on Twitter) synonymous with a man on Twitter talking about International Men’s Day (however well-intentioned and charitably successful that activity was). Or how corporations who don’t have gender pay parity still sing about their contributions to the day. How women are often asked to do extra, unpaid work in order to support International Women’s Day on the behalf of their employers or other companies.
At The Skeptic we don’t have any employees. We don’t even pay ourselves, as Editor or Deputy Editor. Everything that is published on our website is delivered for free, by unpaid volunteers. All the hours we spend reading and editing and delivering articles each week is done in our spare time, because we care about compassionate skepticism. And all the time our many authors dedicate to writing interesting, intelligent, thoughtful, well-researched and compassionate articles is given to us for free.
We admire and respect every single author who chooses to donate their time to us. Especially those whose time is more limited – because they are marginalised and spending time doing unpaid advocacy work for their communities (or ‘just’ working twice as hard to get half the recognition in their day-job), because they are disabled and have less energy to dedicate to the extra-curricular activities like writing for our magazine, because they are parents and need to juggle childcare with work, and the other myriad reasons that impact a person’s ability to contribute.
We don’t want to make some hollow gesture to International Women’s Day. But we would like to take the opportunity to highlight some of our wonderful authors who contribute to this space. So today we will feature three articles from women (plus this one!). We hope you enjoy them. Go share the authors some love on Twitter.
And if you’re interested in becoming one of our unpaid, but hugely appreciated, voluntary contributors – read our Write for Us page to see how you can pitch an article. We’d love to hear from you.
