International Women's Day

Every year, International Women’s Day (the organization itself) sets a campaign theme for the globally celebrated observance. This year’s theme is Accelerate Action, which encourages faster, more efficient movement toward gender equality worldwide. That is a significantly broad and complex concept, and certainly not one that can be solved in one day alone. One of the supporting areas, though, that particularly stood out to us is: supporting women and girls into leadership, decision-making, business and STEM.

One of the biggest misconceptions about any social change is that it must be loud and broad reaching to be effective. But, through research and conversations with people working towards change, we know that inspiration and motivation also come from direct contact with someone you know, or even just a name you hear of in your own community. It’s from watching your mother go back to school at the age of 40 to better her life, it’s from a teacher who encouraged you to check out engineering schools, or a female manager at your first “grownup” job that taught you how to stop apologizing for having an opinion based on your expertise.

Supporting women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields isn’t just about hiring female engineers. In fact, it's not about women in STEM-only positions at all. It’s about making space in STEM industries for every kind of role – legal, operations, finance, people, marketing, you name it. Because whatever the role, working in a STEM company poses the same set of challenges to every woman – navigating a male-dominated space (especially in leadership), the expectation to be technologically-fluent when the system doesn’t always make that accessible, and more. Often the only way that a young girl can ever see herself in one of those fields or even be inspired to get to one of those industries, is by seeing other women in one of them.

While we celebrate the women of TextNow every day, for this year’s International Women’s Day, we want to take a further moment to celebrate them by having them speak to you directly with their proudest moments and career advice. Because if there’s a chance a young girl will see it and aspire to get to the same level – accelerating her action – we’ll take it.

Keep up with more International Women's Month content for the rest of March on our LinkedIn and Instagram pages.

If you have any questions or comments, send us a note at [email protected]!