While International Women’s Day (IWD) should be a day of unification, there’s a growing chorus of women who express feelings of exclusion; from events, panels and media coverage surrounding the day.

The More Voices, More Representation campaign is on top of this lack of intersectional representation and working hard to fill the gaps.

Comprising a coalition of 25 Australian advocates and organisations, the campaign pushes to see IWD better address intersectional representation and ensure all women are recognised equally. They also want more intersectional voices to be given access to platforms at this year’s IWD.

One of the campaign’s advocates, CEO of MindTribes & Co-founder of Culturally Diverse Women, Div Pillay emphasised the need for greater representation on IWD saying, “As a migrant professional in Australia for 20 years I have never seen keynotes or panels include gender intersections on IWD without me or someone else bravely challenging the organisers to change their decisions.”

“As a practitioner in DEI, women have shared with us that hearing women and men on IWD, year on year, who do not share any lived experiences with them; makes them feel isolated, disrespected and excluded,” Pillay added.

Recently, More Voices, More Representation set out to gather additional data by conducting a national survey of 419 women, trans or gender-diverse and non-binary people.

The results signal the urgent need for increased intersectional representation with almost 7 in 10 women in Australia reporting feeling underrepresented on IWD.

This includes 97 percent of black women, 83 per cent of women of colour and 71 percent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who report feeling left out.

Other groups citing exclusion include 75 percent of immigrant and refugee women, 75 percent of people with a disability, 54 percent of people over 55 years-of-age and 79 percent of LGBTQIA+ community members.

“If Australia continues to use International Women’s Day as a means of uplifting and celebrating only the most privileged voices, then we are wasting the day’s potential,” said Hannah Diviney, one of the campaign advocates and Editor in Chief of Missing Perspectives.

The survey also asked respondents their views on how Australia could change this and make IWD more inclusive in 2023 and beyond.

Thirty-one per cent of respondents said there needs to be more women with lived experience to shed light on the issues that women face, especially women with intersectional identities.

While 20 percent suggested IWD events needed to better empower participation on panels and at events by paying Indigenous, Black, Women of Colour and non-binary folk for their labour, time and expertise.

Other suggestions included the need for corporate and political organisations to lead by example with greater representation in their leadership teams, as well as more diversity and inclusion training for event organisers, journalists and speaker bureaus.

And of course, there needs to be more diverse representation of women at events, panels and in the media leading up to and during IWD – seven percent of respondents suggested event organisers and media outlets needed mandates or something similar to help ensure these were more representative.