Inclusion is the inspiration—and the aspiration—for International Women’s Day 2024
It's International Women’s Day on Friday, March 8. Though we don’t need a special day for a reason, all of us at Koala Eco want to send you amazing women and girls our affection, admiration, and thanks out there. Thank you for being leaders, workers, carers, energisers, thinkers, doers and teachers. Thank you for your endurance, friendship, resilience, humour and wisdom. And for supporting Koala Eco and our efforts to encourage meaningful connection with nature as a daily, health-giving act in everyone’s lives.
This year, IWD is championing the theme ‘Inspire inclusion.’ At a really fundamental level, women’s inclusion—in society, the economy, the workforce, education, medicine, research, politics, and government—is crucial to the well-being of the world. More than ever, the world needs the emotional intelligence and compassion that women can bring. We need your ability to multitask, get things done, deconstruct a problem and tackle it with elegant efficiency. And not get paid less while you’re doing it!
Yet the idea of inclusion is only half the story for the IWD 2024 theme. The word ‘inspire’ is a call to action for all of us. How will humankind, in all its diversity, not only make inclusion real in our homes, neighbourhoods, relationships, workplaces and cultures but also fire this desire in others? Much as we might like to, it’s hard to influence millennia-old traditions that hold women and girls back in certain environments, especially when there’s still so much to be done in our own backyards.
So, we have to start small. Maybe inclusion can be thought of as another aspect of simple old-fashioned courtesy and respect. Of making sure nobody’s left out, that everyone gets to exercise choice, and is listened to. Is treated in the way we’d like to be treated, without agenda or condescension. To quote Mahatma Ghandi ‘we but mirror the world.’ If we change, we change the world.
And women will lead the way. Happy International Women’s Day to everyone! x Jess
