(Image: Zennie/Private Media)

Last Wednesday, amid the myriad corporate bluster filling my inbox attempting to align anything and everything with International Women’s Day (IWD), I received a press release that took my breath away. 

The Council of Australian Tour Operators (CATO) proudly announced that Visit Saudi was the official sponsor of its “sell-out” IWD event. 

Yes, the same Saudi Arabia where — despite recent limited legal changes that ended the ban on women driving and made some small amendments to the oppressive guardianship law — women still must obtain a male guardian’s permission to get married, leave prison, or obtain some forms of sexual and reproductive healthcare. 

And yes, the same Saudi Arabia where male guardians can bring legal action against women for “disobedience” and being absent from home. 

And yes, the same Saudi Arabia that in 2018 launched a crackdown on women’s rights activists ahead of making those modest changes to the guardianship laws, including lifting the ban on driving. 

Loujain al-Hathloul was among a dozen women who were arrested, and while she was released in 2021, she remains barred from travel and has a suspended sentence of nearly three years on charges that define her women’s rights activism as crimes under Saudi Arabia’s terrorism legislation. 

Charming. 

On, and then off

All this came up just last month when the same Visit Saudi was announced as the official sponsor of the 2023 Women’s World Cup. Women’s and human rights campaigners, understandably, broke out in hives. The Australian and New Zealand football organisations sought “urgent” clarification from FIFA over the deal and everyone cried “Sportwashing!” 

Yet here we are, just a month later, and some bright spark at CATO thought it was a great idea for Visit Saudi to sponsor an IWD lunch. Even worse, the press release said the quiet part out loud, making it very clear that a leading Australian tourism industry peak body thought it should play an active role in pink-washing Saudi Arabia’s women’s rights record. And on IWD! 

“Tourism plays a major role in change within any society, and as Australia’s peak industry body for the land-supply sector CATO has a role to support the education and understanding of these changes,” the press release said.

Hmmm, “education” about which “changes” exactly? Will that “education” include details of the plight of al-Hathloul and that of too many other women in Saudi Arabia today? 

I have seen a lot of IWD clangers in my time — ranging from the McFeminist inverted W from McDonald’s to the launch of a range of pink beers — but this one really takes the pink cupcake. It’s the high-water mark of the trend towards the corporate takeover of IWD, and it should shock us all out of a sense of complacency and embolden us to bring the day back to first principles. 

I have a reputation for being a tad bit grumpy about IWD — and I have said much of this before — but here we go again. 

Fighting the good fight

While I appreciate the good intentions of those who founded the day at the turn of the century, in recent years I have watched in horror as it has strayed further and further away from its radical feminist roots.

Australia’s first International Women’s Day was in 1928 in Sydney. It was organised by the Militant Women’s Movement, which called for equal pay for equal work, an eight-hour working day for shop girls, and paid leave. But more recently focus on the discrimination and structural barriers that negatively impact women’s lives — and how we can collectively tackle them — has not featured prominently on too many IWD events’ agendas. 

Instead we have been called upon to mark — or “celebrate” — the day with a corporate morning tea featuring an “inspirational” woman speaker whose hallmark moves are derived from the kind of faux, lean-in empowerment feminism that I rage against in my book Leaning Out. 

We won’t give you true equality, but here, have some rosy-hued baked items and let’s all power pose. It’s white blazers at dawn!

To add insult to injury, big corporations increasingly trespassed on this tiny morsel of ground — the one day a year we were meant to be talking about “women’s issues” –, co-opting IWD to sell faux empowerment.

And now there’s a faux, corporate IWD website based in the UK run by some opaque “gender venture capital” group — what the insert expletive is that? — seeking to hijack IWD from UN Women, a United Nations entity working for gender equality and empowering women.

Indulge me in a small but important detour to this diatribe. UN Women established the official observance of IWD more than four decades ago, and it’s the body that traditionally sets the theme. It also hosts official IWD events, with the proceeds going to UN Women’s grassroots work around the world. That’s a bit more what the real deal is supposed to look like.  

Instead, the gender venture capitalists want us all to give ourselves a little hug on IWD (no really, that’s what they want us to do …. and post it on social media in order to signify that we’re “embracing equity”). I’m with Professor Lisa Harvey Smith, Australia’s ambassador for women in STEM, who took to Twitter last month to say: “Honestly, if I see anyone I know posing like this on #IWD, I’m not sure whether we can still be friends.” 

Given all this, it was only a matter of time before we landed at a farcical end point. Enter Saudi Arabia and CATO. 

“It’s pretty ridiculous and very out of touch,” Holly Galbraith, the co-founder of Women in Tourism said. “There’s a lot of freedoms Saudi Arabian women still don’t have today, and that hasn’t changed.” 

“It’s pretty clear Saudi Arabia will sponsor anyone who will have them,” said Professor Justine Nolan, director of the Australian Human Rights Institute. “We’ve had sportwashing, greenwashing and now pinkwashing.” 

On, and then off… again

CATO issued another press release late last Thursday (interestingly shortly after receiving my email asking a series of questions about the wisdom of this sponsorship) announcing that the sponsorship had been withdrawn. 

We accept misreading this situation, despite our best intentions, and apologise for any distress this matter has caused our industry colleagues and our board.

“If we can’t even get to a point where the sponsors align with the meaning of these IWD events, it really makes you wonder why we are having these events at all,” Nolan said. 

Indeed.