I will be honest with you. Until recently, I had never heard of ‘International Women of Colour’ Day. And the moment I discovered it existed annually, on March 1, the very first day of Women’s History Month, I felt something uncomfortable settle in my chest. Not just surprise. Accountability.
I know about International Women’s Day. Everyone does. It trends. It fills social media feeds, corporate email inboxes, and morning television segments. Brands slap a purple filter on their logos. Hashtags proliferate. And yet a day specifically honouring the achievements, contributions, and extraordinary resilience of women from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, a day that has existed since 1986, passes by largely in silence.
That silence is not accidental.
International Women of Colour Day was established in 1986 by the National Institute for Women of Colour (NIWC), with its inaugural event held in Washington D.C. to advance the issues facing women of colour. Nearly four decades later, it remains one of feminism’s best-kept secrets, which tells you something profound about whose story’s feminism has historically chosen to centre.
This is, at its heart, a question of intersectionality, the concept theorised by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how overlapping systems of oppression — race, gender, class, disability, sexuality — compound to create distinct and often invisible disadvantages. Women of colour do not simply experience gender discrimination and racial discrimination as two separate forces. They collide. They amplify. They create a burden that is qualitatively different from either alone.
The data from Australia makes this undeniable. Women of Colour Australia’s (WoCA) landmark 2024 Workplace Report, conducted in partnership with the Australian National University and representing more than 1,000 women of colour, found that nearly 70% had experienced discrimination at work. That figure has risen almost 10 percentage points since 2021. Of those discriminatory incidents, a staggering 93.8% were attributed to racism, nearly three in four women of colour report feeling underpaid, while 88% say they are expected to do more than their peers.
Meanwhile, Australia’s broader gender pay gap does not capture the compounded penalty of race. The national conversation about gender equality, for all its progress, too often treats “woman” as a monolith. WoCA’s research found that two in three women of colour are navigating multiple identities at work, with one in three reporting that doing so leaves them exhausted. Exhaustion not from the work itself, but from the invisible labour of simply existing in a workplace that was not designed with them in mind.
This is the reality that International Women of Colour Day was created to honour and to change. And yet it remains obscure, underfunded, and absent from the cultural calendar that millions of Australians follow. It was WoCA, the remarkable not-for-profit organisation led by founder and executive director Brenda Gaddi, and driven by the principle of ‘Women of Colour, for Women of Colour’, that brought this day to my attention. WoCA champions women of colour through education programs, community initiatives, and fierce, evidence-based advocacy. The fact that an organisation like this must work so hard to simply make a 39-year-old day of recognition visible to the mainstream is itself an indictment.
Culturally and racially marginalised women face injustices that are compounded, layered, and too often erased from feminist discourse. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, migrant women, refugee women, women whose names are mispronounced in job interviews and women whose accents are weaponised against them deserve not just a seat at the table, but a day that the world actually shows up for.
What would it take to change this? Not as much as we might think. It would take media outlets choosing to cover March 1 with the same energy they bring to March 8. It would take employers who run International Women’s Day events asking themselves honestly: whose version of womanhood are we actually celebrating? It would take governments, particularly in a multicultural nation like Australia, formally recognising not only International Women of Colour Day in their gender equality strategies, but women in colour generally.
Most importantly, it would take all of us, particularly those of us who benefit from the relative visibility of mainstream feminism, to reckon with the fact that an intersectional movement cannot be led by only some of the women it claims to represent.
Nearly forty years ago, a group of women of colour decided they would not wait for mainstream feminism to notice them. They created their own day. That act of self-determination is extraordinary and should be celebrated loudly.