International Women’s Day is a day devoted to raising awareness, reducing bias, and celebrating the achievements on women worldwide, first introduced over 100 years ago in 1911. On the 8th of March, 2024, the campaign theme is ‘Inspire Inclusion’.
One way for leaders to inspire inclusion for the women in their workforce is to first gain a better understanding of challenges women still encounter in their daily work. The following three books by celebrated women authors can help to broaden the perspectives of those who have never experienced work from a woman’s viewpoint. With these eye-opening reads, leaders can find inspiration for how they can personally begin (or continue) to create inclusive workplaces for women, and for all employees.
Stop Fixing Women: Why Building Fairer Workplaces is Everybody’s Business By Catherine Fox
Gender equality initiatives often target individuals (women) instead of systems. Women are told to learn how to negotiate, to be more assertive – but not bossy, to support each other – but to compete for limited advancement opportunities. All these recommendations put the onus on individual women to fight the system without calling out the inequality built into and reinforced by the system itself. With this well-researched and beautifully articulated work, Catherine Fox calls for accountability to be placed back where it belongs.
Governments, institutions, and organizations need to fix their systems, not the women struggling within them. Instead of asking women to become better negotiators, create transparent promotion processes that are built on performance and equitable assessment of performance, considering conditions such as the impact of career breaks.
Invisible Women By Caroline Criado Perez
With surprising example after example, Caroline Criado Perez details how the world has been designed for men, often ignoring the needs of the other roughly 50% of the population. From policy, to medical research and prescribed treatments, to technological innovations, to how to workplace is set up, all have been constructed to suit a default male. For example, women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured in a car accident, because seat belts were tested on dummies that resemble male bodies. According to Criado Perez, there is a gender data gap that exists due to a male-unless-otherwise-indicated kind of thinking, data collection that overlooks women in the household, and is even evident in the bias in the datasets used to train AI.
Through these collection of incredible statistics, this book will challenge the way you see simple, everyday items, such as mobile phones that don’t fit many women’s hands, to workplace trends that encourage presenteeism and dismiss flexibility.
The Mental Load: A Feminist Comic By Emma
The term ‘mental load’ has been attributed to French author, Emma, in her collection of comics depicted the unpaid domestic and caring labor that disproportionally falls to women as the juggle the demands of family, work, and life. This funny and thought-provoking comic book introduces a feministic perspective to the roles women are traditionally assigned both at home and at work.
At home, women often carry the mental load of remembering to buy birthday party presents for the weekend, to book the family’s dental appointments, and to ensure homework gets done before dinner. At work, women are often asked to do tasks outside of their roles, such as organizing catering or getting colleagues to sign a retirement card. While these requests or demands on women do not often come from a place of malice or ill-intention, the unconscious assumptions of how women contribute to the world perpetuate harmful stereotypes and reinforce traditional gender roles.
Inspiring Inclusion
Perspective taking can be a great catalyst for change. As we celebrate another International Women’s Day, the three books highlighted in this article can help leaders to build inclusive cultures by targeting systems and institutions when considering change initiatives, by making women visible and listening to their needs and giving them voice, and by redistributing workplace and domestic mental load to be less skewed toward women.