Bravo Women!

 International Women’s Day: The Stories We Keep Missing

International Women’s Day rolls around every year with a familiar rhythm. There are hashtags. There are panels. Companies change their logos to for a week. Someone posts a quote about strong women, usually next to a photo of a woman climbing a mountain or staring determinedly into the middle distance.

I watch it all unfold and think: yes, but also… not quite.

Because the story we tend to tell about women is tidy. It celebrates achievement, resilience, and progress. It highlights pioneers, the followed, and glass ceilings shattered. Those stories matter. They should be told 

But they are not the whole story.

Some women are not climbing mountains - but making muffins. Some are just trying to get through a Tuesday without a system tripping them up again. Some are filling in forms that don’t quite fit their lives. Some are arguing for access to buildings that should already have been accessible. Some are explaining, again, why something that seems minor is actually a barrier.

And often, those women disappear from the celebratory narrative.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about language and accountability. My research sits in the awkward space where institutions say they value equality but struggle to recognise the ways they maintain inequality. What I have learned is simple and uncomfortable: systems rarely see the people they disadvantage.

It isn’t always deliberate. In fact, it usually isn’t. It’s quieter than that.

Policies are written for an imagined “typical” person. Processes assume certain bodies, certain lives, certain ways of moving through the world. When reality doesn’t match that template, the burden quietly shifts onto the individual.

Fill in another form. Explain yourself again. Ask nicely. Wait patiently.

If you push too hard, you risk being labelled difficult.

This is where the stories of many women sit: in the gap between official commitments to equality and the lived experience of navigating systems that were never designed with them in mind.

Add disability to the mix and the gap widens quickly.

Disabled women live at the intersection of two sets of assumptions. One about gender. One about disability. Both come with a catalogue of stereotypes: fragile, dependent, inspirational, burdensome, brave, emotional. Pick a flavour. None of them describe real people particularly well, but they shape expectations all the same.

The result is a strange contradiction. Disabled women are often highly visible as symbols — the inspirational story, the awareness campaign, the case study. Yet they remain largely invisible when decisions are made about policy, services, workplaces, and public spaces.

We are talked about more often than we are talked to.

Disabled Women are women.

So why imply we’re second-rate, half but nor fully sexy, bright, lively - SENTIENT!

International Women’s Day is a good moment to pause and ask a basic question: whose experiences count when we talk about women’s equality?

If the answer only includes women who fit neatly into existing systems, then we are not really talking about equality. We are talking about access to a structure that already works for some.

Real equality asks harder questions.

Who designed the structure in the first place?
Who does it work for?
Who keeps having to ask for adjustments just to participate?

These questions matter because progress is rarely just about adding more women into existing hierarchies. Sometimes the hierarchy itself needs examining.

Over the years, I have seen extraordinary resilience from women navigating these gaps. Women who advocate not only for themselves but for others who will come after them. Women who document problems that institutions would prefer to ignore. Women who quietly refuse to accept that exclusion is inevitable.

None of that labour is glamorous. It doesn’t make for a neat social media post. But it is the slow work that shifts culture.

And culture matters.

Most of us did not learn about disability, or gender inequality, through policy documents. We learned through stories — through television, films, books, news headlines, and casual conversations. Those stories shape what we think is normal, what we think is possible, and whose voices we expect to hear.

If the stories are narrow, our imagination becomes narrow too.

So perhaps International Women’s Day is less about celebration and more about expanding the narrative. About noticing the women whose experiences complicate the tidy version of progress.

The woman challenging a workplace policy that quietly excludes carers.
The woman pushing a university to recognise access barriers.
The woman documenting institutional failures so they cannot be quietly forgotten.

These stories rarely come with dramatic music or inspirational quotes. But they tell us something important about how change actually happens.

It happens through persistence. Through naming problems clearly. Through refusing to accept silence when harm is obvious.

And through building language that allows us to talk honestly about disadvantage, injustice, and accountability.

If there is one thing worth celebrating today, it is that collective effort — the steady, sometimes exhausting work of making systems fairer than they were yesterday.

Not perfect. Just better.

Because equality is not a moment. It is a process.

And there are still many stories left to tell.