No, you don’t need to ‘give’ anything to ‘gain’ something this International Women’s Day.
But you might want to avoid the made-up slogan from the consulting firm that continues to exploit IWD and distract people from the real conversations UN Women hopes more of us will have in line with 8 March.
Every year, I write about the bullshit slogans being pushed as things to follow on IWD, with their meaningless alliteration and stupid hand gestures that appear out of nowhere, as if delivered from higher beings for the rest of us to embrace.
I thought we were finally done with it, as UN Women’s actual themes for IWD have been gaining more traction and edging ahead in search rankings over the past two years.
But once again the Women’s Agenda inbox is full of media pitches and event notices sharing things like “as we Give to Gain” this International Women’s Day, before yet another woman in leadership is pitched as if her work and success can’t possibly be shared to a daily women’s publication at literally any other point in the year.
And there are also plenty of emails from frustrated Women’s Agenda readers asking us to please highlight how we’re being duped, once again, by the self-appointed IWD gods of an opaque, London-based marketing firm.
From ‘Inspire Inclusion’ to ‘Embrace Equity’ and ‘push for progress’’, these slogans are purposely designed to be as meaningless as possible. They offer corporates an off ramp from morw challenging discussion, and a means to distract from the real IWD themes that typically provide a basis for more meaningful and challenging discussions that go beyond women promising to sort this shit out ourselves.
But this year’s sideshow slogan from the mystery men and women at the agency who happen to own the internationalwomensday.com URL (and can therefore profit from employer based sponsors and theme-branded IWD merch) is really taking the piss.
Give to Gain? They must surely be having a laugh.
What exactly is being implied here?
I’m imagining the meeting where they nailed this genius slogan. Because surely there had to be a meeting where people sat around with catered sandwiches and white boards congratulating their marketing slogan prowess. They did not resort to AI. There’s no way that even the earliest versions of ChatGPT could come up with a slogan this crap.
A quick image search across stock libraries reveals “give to gain” has also given us some more stupid hand actions for those corporate photo opportunities. Just search ‘International Women’s Day’.
Meanwhile, the corporate IWD website continues to get plenty of SEO love, appearing in the initial results of Google searches.
Still, this purple-branded website is a little more subtle this year, especially when it comes to its sponsors which in previous years have proudly promoted weapons manufacturers (to be fair, it’s been a good few years for intercontinental ballistic missile providers) as well as fossil fuel companies — who have faced challenges with UN Women wanting to discuss pesky issues like the gendered impacts of climate change.
But this .com — and that’s all it is, a .com — now carries even more secrecy than previous years (more on that below). There still no transparency or names listed regarding who manages the website, or who comes up with the slogan, or even where profits go.
While they’ve moved away from clear sponsors, employers can still submit video and written statements on what Give to Gain means to them, just as long as they register for their “International Women’s Day” account.
The corporate-theme hijacking of IWD first bothered me in March 2022 when UN Women’s official theme, which centred around climate change, was drowned out by calls to “break the bias” instead. Especially frustrating given Australia was experiencing significant flooding and weather events during that period. At the time, I described themes like ‘break the bias’ as weapons of mass distraction.
Here in 2026, the website still fails to include an “About Us”, rather just an “About IWD”. You still won’t find names listed, but you will see the website footer declaring the day has been
“Running since 1911”, and “IWD belongs to all groups collectively everywhere. IWD is not country, group or organisation specific”.
I first caught onto who was behind it by diving into the privacy policy for information, thanks to privacy laws requiring contact options and a physical address. There, you’ll find a generic email address and physical address as being Aurora Ventures (Europe) Limited, based in London. Aurora Ventures lists its work as including delivery of the International Women’s Day (IWD) platform and working “with stakeholders to produce an annual IWD campaign theme”.
Now, the mention of Aurora Ventures has been removed. There is no mailing address given. Rather, any questions about the privacy policy are now asked to be directed by email to [email protected]
A search on the UK’s on the data protection register reveals the company “IWD Support Ltd” was first registered in 2011.
Elsewhere, they could barely be bothered to update the website copy at all for 2026. A number of the stated “missions” for the year still feature “coming soon” text.
But they were sure to ensure that Give to Gain gets traction, infiltrating search, socials, AI and stock libraries.
Seriously, the absolute nerve of telling women to “give to gain” when the overt rollback of women’s rights is being celebrated globally, just as climate change, conflict, and technologically-enabled abuse continues to pick up steam.
To the corporate overloads determining some meaningless slogans to distract the rest of us from the real issues this IWD, what exactly are you giving? A tired-looking website, a large spend on digital marketing, and a collection bucket to profit off your stupid IWD merch with a few token bucks thrown at a couple of preferred charities?
Perhaps some sense of pride that you’ve done it again, managed to distract IWD events and efforts all over the world from jumping into deeper and more inconvenient conversations?
How about you quit the duplicity, and give back International Women’s Day?