Views

International Women’s Day

#ChooseToChallenge

Listen to The GOOD Download’s International Women’s Day episode HERE, where regular host Helena is joined by Nilesha Chauvet, Managing Director and Millie Karlsen, Senior Account Director for an insightful discussion around the #ChooseToChallenge theme of IWD 2021, and the recent Pain Stories & The Boob Life campaigns.

This years IWD 2021 campaign is all about raising your hand high to show you’re committed to calling out gender bias, celebrating and lifting women higher and taking action for equality because “from challenge comes change.”

We support the use of the word ‘challenge’, rooting this year’s campaign in action and encouraging people to be active in their commitment to help ‘forge a gender equal world.’ This feels like the right campaign, at the right time and that is why we are celebrating it in this fortnight’s episode.

We explore the statistics around the much-discussed gender bias in lockdown, and how the conversations and campaigns around equality need to reach further. They need to impact and get through to not just people who identify as women, but to all gender identifications in order to create real change.

The first campaign Helena, Nilesha and Millie discuss is powerful Pain Stories campaign by Bodyform, which follows the brilliant Womb Stories campaign they ran last year.

Pain Stories aims to close the gender pain gap, one story at a time and end the silence and misinformation around female pain. This push to open up the conversation across genders in such a creative, bold campaign definitely challenges and will hopefully bring about real change in women being listened to, and their pain treated with empathy.

The Boob Life launched with a brand film, and is a six-part digital content series, that aims to demystify the reality of infant feeding. It portrays an honest and inclusive look at a range of feeding methods and supports new mothers however they choose to feed. We discuss how this is a conversation that needed to be had, but there is a danger that we glorify the physical and how advertising shouldn’t perpetuate the old story tropes that can be overused in order to grab headlines.

These are just two examples in a much wider conversation, one thing that is clear within the space is that we need to start thinking about the cross over between the representation of women’s bodies, and gender equality more widely. That is where, as marketeers, we can start to push the narrative forward and look to truly challenge and create real positive change in the future.

The GOOD Download can be downloaded from HERE and is also available on Spotify and on Apple Podcasts.