MUMBAI: There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with being celebrated once a year.
Women know it well. The flowers arrive, the social media posts go up, the speeches are made, and then, on March 9th, the world goes back to business as usual. The pay gap does not close overnight. The unpaid labour does not redistribute itself. The glass ceilings do not shatter simply because someone toasted to them the evening before.
And yet, Women’s Day matters. Not because a single day can carry the weight of centuries of inequity, but because it forces a pause. It demands that we look, really look, at where we are, how far we have come, and how much further we still need to go.
This year, we choose to look honestly.
The progress is real. So is the distance.
Let us begin with what is true. Women today occupy spaces that were firmly, sometimes violently, closed to them not so long ago. They lead nations. They run corporations. They command armies, argue before supreme courts, perform surgeries, write legislation, and build companies from nothing. They do all of this in a world that was not designed with them in mind.
The statistics tell a story of genuine movement. Women now make up nearly 40% of the global workforce in management positions, up from under 25% two decades ago. More women than men are enrolled in universities across most of the developed world, and that trend is spreading. Female entrepreneurship is rising in every region, from Lagos to Mumbai to São Paulo to Jakarta. The pipeline, as they say, is fuller than it has ever been.
But pipelines mean nothing if the doors at the end of them remain closed.
Globally, women still earn approximately 20% less than men for equivalent work. They hold fewer than 10% of Fortune 500 CEO positions. They perform, on average, three times as much unpaid domestic and caregiving labour as men, a figure that barely moved even through the upheaval of the pandemic years, when many assumed it might. In conflict zones and developing economies, the picture is starker still. Millions of girls remain out of school, millions of women remain without legal protection, and millions of voices remain unheard.
Progress is real. The distance remaining is equally real. Holding both truths at once is not pessimism. It is honesty. Honesty is the only foundation on which lasting change is built.
What we owe the women who came before
Every right that women exercise today, the right to vote, to own property, to choose a partner, to pursue an education, to enter a profession, to say no, was fought for. Often bitterly. Often at great personal cost. By women whose names we may not know, in rooms we will never see, in moments history did not always choose to record.
We owe them the courtesy of remembering that none of this was given. All of it was taken, demanded, argued, marched for, hunger-struck for, imprisoned for, and in some cases died for.
This is not ancient history. The first country in the world to grant women the right to vote did so in 1893. Within living memory, women in many countries could not open a bank account without a husband’s signature. Within living memory, domestic violence was considered a private matter. Within living memory, women were turned away from professions on the grounds that their nature made them unsuitable.
The women who pushed against those walls were told, as women always are, that they were asking for too much, moving too fast, being too loud. They pushed anyway. We are the beneficiaries of their refusal to be quiet.
Women’s Day is, at its best, an act of remembrance as much as celebration. It is a moment to say: we know what this cost. We know who paid it. We have not forgotten.
The invisible labour nobody counts
There is a form of women’s work that never appears in any GDP calculation, never earns a promotion, never receives a performance bonus, and is almost never publicly acknowledged. Yet without it, the entire architecture of society would collapse within weeks.
It is the labour of care.
The child raised with attention and patience. The elderly parent visited, bathed, accompanied to appointments. The home that functions as a home rather than a place where people merely sleep. The emotional labour of maintaining relationships, tracking family needs, remembering birthdays and school events and medical check-ups. The mental load, that constant background process of knowing what everyone needs before they know it themselves.
This labour falls disproportionately and overwhelmingly on women. It always has. Because it is unpaid, it is treated as though it has no value. Because it happens in private, it is treated as though it barely happens at all.
Feminist economists who have tried to quantify this work estimate that if care labour were included in national economic accounts, it would add anywhere between 10% and 39% to a country’s GDP. It is not marginal work. It is foundational work. It is the work that makes all other work possible.
This Women’s Day, if we are going to talk about women’s achievements, and we should, let us also talk about this. Let us talk about the achievements that happen in kitchens and hospital waiting rooms and school corridors and 3am wake-ups with sick children. Let us talk about the women who never made a headline but held everything together anyway.
They deserve a day too.
To the young women reading this
You are inheriting a world in which more is possible for you than for any generation of women before you. That is genuinely and meaningfully true, and you should know it.
You are also inheriting a world in which you will still be interrupted in meetings more than your male colleagues. Your confidence may sometimes be read as aggression and your ambition as selfishness. At a job interview, you may be asked about your plans for children, a question that is almost never asked of men. You may sometimes work twice as hard for the same recognition.
None of this is your fault. None of it is a reflection of your worth. None of it is inevitable.
Know your history, the women who came before you and what they endured so that you could stand where you stand. Find your community, the other women who understand without explanation what you carry. Trust your instincts. They have been trained by a lifetime of navigating a world that does not always make space for you, and they are sharper than you know.
When you reach the room, whatever room you have been working toward, do not forget to hold the door open behind you. The woman coming next is watching to see whether success changes people, or whether some people are changed by success. Be someone who holds the door.
What Accelerating Action Actually Looks Like
The theme of International Women’s Day 2026 calls for action, not reflection or celebration alone, but concrete, structural, measurable action. What does that look like in practice?
It looks like companies publishing their gender pay gap data publicly and being held accountable for closing it. It looks like parental leave policies that are genuinely equal, because when only women take leave for childcare, only women pay the career penalty for parenthood. It looks like investment committees actively seeking out female-founded companies rather than waiting for them to somehow find their way through doors that were not built for them. It looks like schools that teach girls to code, argue, lead, and take up space, not just to collaborate, accommodate, and defer.
It also looks like men, and this part is important, who actively examine the ways in which systems have advantaged them and use that advantage to dismantle rather than protect those systems. Allyship is not a posture. It is a practice. It requires something.
It looks like media, publications like ours, covering women’s achievements not as a special category and not only on March 8th, but as the ordinary, continuous news that it is. Women doing extraordinary things is not a niche story. It is simply the story of the world.
A final word
Every March 8th, this publication has the opportunity to do something small but not insignificant: pause, name, honour, and recommit.
We honour the women who fought for what we have. We name the structures that still stand between women and full equality. We recommit to the belief, and to the evidence, that a world in which women are genuinely equal is a world that is better for everyone without exception.
She has always been the story.
It is long past time the story was told right.
