Why Women’s History Month belongs in your content calendar

Nine out of ten women say advertisers do not understand them. According to 2024 data from NielsenIQ, 91% of women felt that the brands selling to them have not made the effort to actually understand who they are, what they need, or how they live. They do not feel seen. They do not feel spoken to. They feel, at best, like an afterthought.

Which is strange. Because brands do make the effort. Every year, without fail, come the first of March, marketing departments across the world begin preparing. The briefs go out. The campaigns go up. Social media fills with pink-toned content, inspirational quotes attributed to women who changed history, short films about resilience, and copy that says, in some variation or another, that women are powerful, women are strong, women deserve more.

And then March 9th arrives. Most campaigns go quiet. The content calendars move on. And somewhere, the data like NielsenIQ’s remains unchanged.

But how did we get here? Where did this Women’s Day conversation start? To our surprise, it was not in a marketing boardroom, but on a cold February morning in New York City, over a hundred years ago.

Women who started it all

The story of International Women's Day did not begin with corporations. It began with workers.

On February 28, 1909, the Socialist Party of America organised what they called ‘Women's Day’ in New York City. It was a demonstration, not a celebration. Women who worked in factories and textile mills were demanding basic rights, better wages, shorter hours, and the right to vote. The mood was not festive. It was a revolution.

The idea of formalising a day for women workers gained momentum when it crossed the Atlantic. In August 1910, at the Second International Socialist Women's Conference in Copenhagen, a German activist and politician named Clara Zetkin put forward a proposal. She argued that working women across the world needed a unified day of recognition, not charity, not ceremony, but solidarity. There was no agreed date yet, but the proposal was approved.

The following year, in 1911, over a million people across Austria-Hungary, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland marked the first official International Women's Day on March 19. The issues on the table were employment discrimination and women's right to vote.

The date shifted to March 8 through the events of the Russian Revolution. In February 1917, which fell in early March by the Gregorian calendar, women textile workers in Petrograd walked off the job and took to the streets. They were demanding bread, an end to the war, and the fall of the Tsar. Their strike is widely credited as the spark that ignited the revolution.

In 1922, Vladimir Lenin formally declared March 8 as International Women's Day in recognition of women's role in that revolution. The United Nations officially adopted the date in 1977.

Women's History Month, as a formal observance, came later, and from a different place entirely, a local school initiative in California. In 1978, the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women organised what they called Women's History Week, timed around March 8. The idea was simple: schools were not teaching the contributions of women, and someone needed to fill that gap. The initiative spread.

A national lobbying effort followed. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued a proclamation designating the week of March 8 as National Women's History Week. By 1987, the United States Congress had expanded the observance to the full month of March, and Women's History Month was official.

From a factory floor in 1909 to a Congressional resolution in 1987, the journey to recognition took nearly eighty years. It was not a marketing decision. It was a political one, hard-won through decades of activism, documentation, and advocacy.

Eventually it entered the commercial world

It took the commercial world some time to notice. For most of the 20th century, women in advertising were not subjects of empowerment; they were subjects of domesticity. They appeared in kitchens. They marvelled at laundry detergents. They smiled next to the men who made the decisions.

The feminist movements of the 1960s and 70s forced a gradual shift. Advertisers began to see women as a growing consumer segment, not just a domestic backdrop. The ‘New Woman’ archetype emerged in advertising; she had a career, she had opinions, but she still managed the home perfectly. It was progress of a sort, though it mostly added a new set of expectations on top of the old ones.

By the early 2000s, a different kind of advertising was starting to take hold. Dove's ‘Real Beauty’ campaign, launched in 2004, broke from the convention that beauty marketing had to be aspirational and unattainable. It put ordinary women in front of the camera. It asked, openly, why beauty standards had been made so narrow. The campaign connected because it felt honest. More than two decades later, it is still cited as a reference point for what genuine engagement with female consumers can look like.

Other brands followed, like Nike's ‘Dream Crazier’, Reebok’s ‘Bruises can be good.’

Campaigns began to reflect, at least in their storytelling, the idea that women were more than what advertising had historically made them.

The NielsenIQ data is not a fringe finding. It sits alongside a broader body of research showing that, despite more than a decade of ‘femvertising’, advertising that explicitly champions women, the female consumer remains one of the most underserved demographics in marketing.

Part of the reason is a persistent tendency to think of ‘women’ as a single, uniform audience. A young professional woman in Bengaluru, a first-generation entrepreneur in Indore, and a woman managing a multi-generational household in Lucknow do not share the same challenges, the same spending patterns, or the same relationship with brands. Treating them as one entity, the empowered woman, the strong woman, the woman who has it all, is not representation. It is a projection.

Part of it is also the gap between what brands say in March and what they do the rest of the year. A campaign that celebrates women while the organisation behind it has no women in leadership, no pay equity policy, and no flexible work arrangements for mothers is not a statement of values. It is a performance. And modern consumers, particularly younger ones, are increasingly capable of telling the difference.

Shedding light on a similar pay equity policy, Generali Central Insurance has released a campaign for Women’s Day.

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Employees share their experiences. ESG disclosures are public. Board diversity data is accessible. The distance between what a company says in an advertisement and how it actually operates is, in 2026, a much smaller secret than it once was.

Why this matters beyond ethic

The business case for genuinely understanding women as consumers is not secondary to the moral one. It is, by any reasonable measure, enormous.

As per WifiTalents data, women currently control an estimated $31.8 trillion in global spending. That number is not static; it is growing. By 2030, women are projected to control 75% of discretionary spending globally.

In the UK, the economic influence of female consumers is valued at a minimum of £260 billion per year. In the United States, women make 85% of all consumer purchases and influence 80 to 85% of household buying decisions across categories.

The categories in question are not limited to what advertising has historically associated with female consumers. Women make 80% of all healthcare decisions. They drive 91% of new home purchases. They influence 65% of new car purchases. They account for 92% of vacation travel decisions. They make 93% of food purchase decisions. In financial services, 77% of women identify as the primary financial manager for their household.

In India, the picture is changing with particular speed. Gen Z women in India drive nearly half of consumer spending in fashion, beauty, and travel. They are consumers who influence household decisions, including electronics and large purchases, well before they have fully independent incomes.

Despite all of this, that gap persists. It is not a perception problem on the consumer's side. It is a strategy problem for the brand.

The month, not just the day

One of the more visible symptoms of the problem is the way brands treat March 8 as a discrete event rather than as part of a longer story.

International Women's Day is one day. Women's History Month is thirty-one. The distinction matters because the history that March is meant to acknowledge is not something that fits into a single campaign release.

For brands that are genuinely trying to engage with this period rather than mark it, the question is what happens on the other thirty days. Is there substantive content? Is there research-backed engagement? Is there any conversation happening with women inside the organisation about whether the external messaging reflects internal reality?

For advertisers and marketers building their content calendars for March and beyond, the starting point is not the campaign concept. It is the question of whether the organisation has done enough to understand the consumer it is claiming to speak to. That means research that goes beyond metros.

It means segmentation that reflects actual life stages and regional realities, not a single ‘empowered woman’ archetype. It means asking whether the women inside the organisation feel heard, because they are, as much as any advertisement, an indicator of how seriously the brand takes the values it is about to put on a billboard.

Women are not a niche audience that emerges in March and disappears in April. They are the primary purchasing influence in most major consumer categories, across most major markets, throughout the entire year. The brands that treat them as such do not need a special occasion to demonstrate it. And the brands that do not will find that a well-produced campaign, however sincere in intent, does not close a 91% gap.