International Women’s Day Isn’t Only for the Women We Can See

International Women’s Day is more visible than ever, and more curated. Recognition, progress, equality are everywhere. Yet for many women, the day still feels strangely distant.

Not because they do not care, but because the version of empowerment that dominates the day can feel like a performance of success. It tends to spotlight women the world can easily see: leaders, public achievements, polished narratives, and the women who “changed the world.”

Sarah Shard, author and coach who supports women at personal turning points and reinvention, believes this is exactly why the day can miss its mark. “International Women’s Day isn’t only for the women we can see,” she says. “It should honour the women the world depends on.”

The point is not to diminish public achievement, but to widen the lens.

Because the women holding life together often do not look like a campaign. They look tired and ordinary. Their focus is survival, continuity, and care. They are not always founders or influencers with a platform, or corporate leaders fronting a transformation story, although some women are doing both. Often, they are doing the unseen work that keeps life running.

That unseen work is not a vague concept. It is measurable. UN Women estimates that women and girls perform around 16 billion hours of unpaid care work every day. The International Labour Organization has reported that 708 million women worldwide are outside the labour force because of unpaid care responsibilities.

In the UK, this “invisible labour” also has economic implications. In 2023, the Office for National Statistics estimated the value of unpaid household services at around £1.7 trillion, about 61% of GDP, the UK’s main measure of economic output.

These are not abstract figures. They describe school runs and night feeds, caring responsibilities alongside paid work, and the “second shift” that begins after the official workday ends. They describe women keeping families and businesses functioning while running on empty.

This is not about blaming brands or workplaces for showing up. It is about recognising what gets prioritised when a concept becomes highly marketable and drifts from its original purpose. International Women’s Day has roots in early 20th-century labour and women’s rights movements, but it was not formally recognised by the United Nations General Assembly until 1977.

Nearly five decades later, the story that travels fastest is the one that photographs well. Visibility becomes currency, and the day risks rewarding what is shareable over what is true: public wins, confident faces, inspiring slogans. It is easy to measure that kind of impact. It is harder to measure what happens behind closed doors, because that rarely comes with captions.

It looks like a mother running on broken sleep, still packing lunches and answering emails.
It looks like a woman juggling a job, a household, and an ageing parent’s appointments, or acting as an unpaid carer. It looks like keeping it all together for everyone else while quietly experiencing grief, illness, money pressure, divorce, or personal reinvention, with little patience for slogans that frame exhaustion as a mindset problem.

Shard traces her perspective to family history. Her mother became pregnant in her early twenties and gave up an aspiring modelling career to care for her children. For years, she worked multiple low-paid, labour-intensive jobs such as cleaning, fitting paid work around the needs of her family. Over time, she developed severe arthritis that significantly affected her mobility. Shard remembers her as the quieter presence in the background of family life. “She held so much together without being seen,” Shard says. “That’s why International Women’s Day has to include women whose strength looks ordinary.”

Shard’s grandmother offers another example. During the Second World War she worked as a lathe operator in an engineering factory supporting the war effort, something she rarely spoke of. “That’s what we do with women’s strength,” Shard says. “We treat it as expected and normal instead of honouring it.”

Shard believes this is the wider story International Women’s Day should be telling. “We have generations of women whose resilience is the shoulders we stand on,” she says. “This day should honour all of them, and the women carrying that hidden strength today too, not only the ones the world can easily see.”

International Women’s Day is often positioned as a celebration. But for many women, a more honest frame is recognition. Recognition that power is not only public. Recognition that resilience is not only a highlight reel. Recognition that survival, care, and steady endurance are forms of strength, even when they are not framed that way.

This is why International Women’s Day does not need to ask women to perform empowerment. It can do the opposite: name what already exists, celebrate the women who keep systems running, recognise care as work, and tell truer stories about the cost of holding everything together and the heavy weight many women carry quietly.

If International Women’s Day has ever felt distant, like it is for celebrities, founders, or the women with polished stories, this is the wider truth. If you are a woman, it is for you too. Not because you have a headline achievement to share, but because the world depends on the work you do, seen and unseen.

International Women’s Day, at its best, is a mirror as much as a celebration.

Sources referenced:

• FAQs: What is unpaid care work and how does it power the economy? | UN Women – Headquarters

• Unpaid care work prevents 708 million women from participating in the labour market | International Labour Organization

• From local to global economies: why women hold the key to economic security

• Household satellite account, UK: 2023 - Office for National Statistics