International Women’s Day 2025
What is International Women’s Day?
International Women’s Day (IWD) is an annual, global celebration of women and their achievements. It’s also a reminder that there is more to do until women and girls are truly equal in our current patriarchal society. It’s a key reminder that it’s time to move from awareness to action. We need to see the bold action and suggestions from feminist organisations across the globe taken into consideration to make change happen. Gender equality is urgent. Gender equality benefits all. We can’t take any more setbacks.
#AcceleratingAction
The joy of IWD is that it can be celebrated in a multitude of ways - it doesn’t belong to one organisation and the whole premise is it is a collective movement. Every year, a theme is set that can be followed. The theme for this year focuses on Accelerating Action - looking at the ways in which we can speed up the change we need to see to achieve gender parity and equity.
Photo: IWD Our Streets Now & Superdrug 2024
#IWD2025 Our Streets Now and Tailing
The cultural change we want to see involves people understanding the day-to-day harassment that women and girls experience. And we’re pleased to be coming together for a digital launch of the short film TAILING this IWD. In this film, we see Marfa’s experience of public sexual harassment, in those less obvious ways like following and staring, that perpetuate our feelings of fear. By using a striking video to help bring this problem to life, we believe that showcasing art as a form of activism is one of the ways to bring this epidemic to the forefront to Accelerate Action.
"Marfa is the bright, bold captain of her own ship—until a stranger threatens to ruin her day. This isn’t Marfa's first time at the public sexual harassment rodeo, and she's sick of it. But if you fight fire with fire, there’s always the risk of getting burnt."‘
“I’m proud to have teamed up with Our Streets Now, an incredible team who are doing important work in awareness and education around public street harassment and how to combat it. Our hope is that Tailing sparks conversations about the grey areas of PSH—because conversation is the seed of change.”
What can you do for #IWD2025?
At Our Streets Now, we know that working in silos doesn’t work if we want to see transformational change. We’ve successfully paved the way for public sexual harassment in the UK to be classed as a crime, but we know the law alone is not enough.
Our focus is on prevention through an intersectional lens. We work to raise awareness through campaigning, educate the next generation, and change and inform policies in order to bring us all closer to gender equality. We are also aware that harassment and violence against women and girls (VAWG) affects women differently - the impacts of this include race, disability, economic status and more. Accelerating action sits at the heart of the change we are fighting for. We need less talk, more action!
