Celebrating Women’s History Month in 2022
March marks Women’s History Month, a time to remember the accomplishments of women throughout world and American history. However, it is also important to use this holiday as a time to view gender equality within our own social structures, especially within the workplace. Throughout the 20th century, women worked tirelessly to ensure equal pay, rights and opportunities in the workplace. Their advancements have been tremendous, yet true equity is still not universal across American industries.
This Women’s History Month, let us continue and dig into conversations about equity within our own companies, celebrating successes while addressing shortcomings. While issues of gender representation are a constant in society, let’s frame discussions this year around a theme. For 2022, the National Women’s History Museum has landed on the theme “Women Providing Healing, Promoting Hope” to help lead celebrations this year. Learn the significance of this theme, how it can frame discussions in the office, and how Impactree can serve as an invaluable tool for centralizing and customizing Women’s History Month celebrations.
Women Providing Healing, Promoting Hope
Women are essential parts of every industry, however their importance to the healthcare industry cannot be understated. Globally, women comprise 70% of the global healthcare workforce, making up 86% of all American nurses alone. When we seek medical care of any kind, there is a high likelihood we will be helped by a woman at some point during the process. This prominence became even more noteworthy during the Covid-19 pandemic, where numerous women around the world have put their health and safety at risk to care for patients afflicted with Covid-19.
With a public push to celebrate medical professionals for their essential work during the pandemic, we must celebrate the women who overwhelmingly comprise our doctors, nurses and specialists. With this in mind, 2022’s Women’s History Month theme of Women Providing Healing, Promoting Hope makes perfect sense, for we should highlight the millions of women around the country who are quite literally providing healing and hope to Americans affected by Coronavirus.
While this theme is very important to our modern reality – especially as the Omicron variant surges around the world – it may appear limiting in its abilities to frame discussions of women’s equity and rights, especially within the workplace. However, with a little reframing, 2022’s theme of Women Proving Healing, Promoting Hope can perfectly highlight inequalities in the workplace, along with providing avenues to move forward on making our workplaces truly equal.
Women’s History Month in the Workplace
Although the 2022 Women’s History Month theme is centered around women as the providers of healing and hope, we can shift our view to what healing and hope mean within our workplaces, and how a company can promote them through CSR initiatives and workplace reforms.
Viewing healing through the more general lens of health helps give context to how employers can promote health within their workforce. It has already been found that work environments that create stress and anxiety for employees have a measurable negative impact on their physical and mental health along with their productivity. However, we can zoom in further to analyze how workplaces can promote health among their female staff members.
For instance, reproductive issues are a concern unique to female employees, and more than “half the children born in the United States are born to working mothers.” There are many ways which companies can reform their practices to account for this fact, giving working mothers the best means of staying healthy. These can be as simple as limiting the amount of heavy lifting expected of pregnant women all the way to comprehensive paid maternal leave, and everything in between. Not only does this help promote the health of mothers, but lets employees know that health and safety are a company’s top priority.
Hope is a much harder concept to measure. However, there are many ways which companies can promote hope in the future of their employees. In terms of gender equality, companies can build hope among their female employees by providing opportunities for growth within their business. Issues like the gender pay gap and the dearth of women in senior level positions do not inspire hope in female employees. To do so, companies must show an honest commitment to break down old systems and conceptions which prevent many women from getting their fair share of pay and opportunity.
Promoting health and hope in female employees should be the goal of Women’s History Month, because accomplishing these goals would help to fundamentally address gender inequality in the workplace. Of course, long term results cannot be accomplished in just one month. However, by taking the conversations and ideas forged this month and turning them into lasting action, we can work toward equality on a local scale.
Impactree As a Tool For Celebrating Women’s History Month
Even within the 2022 theme for Women’s History Month, every business and organization celebrates this holiday in their own way. Customization and personalization are some of the best ways to ensure a CSR program is interesting, involving, and powerful in its implementation. With Impactree, businesses can create CSR programs which are wholly unique to their goals and purpose.
With hundreds of curated actions covering a myriad of social, political and environmental issues, Impactree allows companies to create customizable landing pages for action, displaying the causes they are passionate about for all to see. For Women’s History Month, companies can pull from the many powerful actions we have covering gender equality, healthcare, employee mental health and wellbeing, and many other facets of 2022’s theme. Not only do we provide an amazing selection of expertly curated actions, but our simple to use action creation tool lets businesses create their own custom actions tailored to their partners and purpose.
When creating theme-based CSR initiatives, Impactree simplifies the process, letting companies collect and display resources in one embeddable web page. This greatly reduces the amount of unnecessary links and pages down to one, perfect for leading company-wide celebrations, to holding sweepstakes, to engaging customers through purpose marketing, and much more.