International Women’s Day 2025 Event Recap
This year, the UN Women theme for IWD was March Forward, commemorating 30 years since the UN’s Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action for achieving gender equality.
Our first events for the year were in celebration of International Women’s Day with speakers sharing about the programs they deliver that help women reach that potential and find out how much more must be done to close the gender pay gap, ensure women’s safety, and to fairly value both paid and unpaid care work.
Events were held in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra with people joining us ONLINE as well. We are grateful to the incredible speakers in each city who shared their valuable insights on how far we’ve come in achieving gender equality in the world. Here is a recap from each city. Don’t worry if you missed it, you can also watch recordings of each event below!
Melbourne
The first WiAD event for 2025 was in celebration of International Women’s Day (8 March), which is our annual tradition, with this year’s theme being ongoing gender advocacy with the targeted tags #MarchForward and #AccelerateAction underlining that campaign.
We were very please to welcome our guest speaker Alice Ridge, who is the Senior Research, Policy & Advocacy Advisor at the International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA) and who spoke across a range of issues, starting with her own career path spending time both volunteering with and then working for ACFID, then moving onto the rate of progress of women’s rights (or lack thereof) over the 30 years since the UN Beijing Declaration (1995), and to the potential and emerging impacts around the recent pause, essentially a shutdown, of the USAID program globally, to the work being done around the essence, if not the explicit title, of Feminist Foreign Policy work.
We had a group of just under 20 very keen attendees who took the opportunity to network and exchange ideas over drinks and nibbles, before and after the main discussion, as well as actively taking the opportunity to raise questions with Alice during the session.
While there were some who had previously attended a WiAD event, it was again pleasing to see the enthusiasm and interest from those who were newcomers to our events, with the promise of returning to enjoy more events, with more featured topics and notable guest speakers.
Jill Scanlon - Melbourne City Leader
You can watch the full Melbourne event here.
Canberra
Big thanks to everyone who came along to our recent Women in Aid and Development meetup in Canberra! It was a smaller group, but that gave us a fantastic opportunity to chat openly and share our diverse experiences in the sector. We reflected on both how far we've come since Beijing, but also the need to maintain momentum and not become complacent in an everchanging world.
Huge thanks to our guest speaker, Dr Annabel Dulhunty, who openly shared the ups and downs of her career journey. Her reflections sparked some great conversations about how we can support women entering and succeeding in the development sector, and the range of roles available.
Can't wait to keep the conversation going at our next catch-up!
Emily Moreton - Canberra City Leader
Sydney
WiAD Sydney had a fantastic start to 2025 with our International Women's Day event, centered on the theme ‘March Forward.’ This year's UN Women theme celebrated 30 years since the UN’s Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action for achieving gender equality.
Joined by speakers Stav Zotalis of indigo foundation and Jayshree Manghubai of ChildFund Australia, we discussed what they have learned on their extensive career journeys, and reflected how the aid and development sector has continued to evolve regarding gender equality. When our speakers were asked to reflect on the mot significant positive changes in the sector since the Beijing Declaration, their responses perfectly summarised the key points of our discussion:
Increasing localisation of staff: to support women from a grassroots level;
Developing better understandings of power: both empowerment and power imbalances, and;
Intersectionality: acknowledging the interconnected factors alongside gender that impact women's lives.
With insightful questions and discussion from our audience, this event inspired all attendees to support women in the aid and development sector, both practitioners and recipients, to 'March Forward.'
Our sincere thanks to Stav and Jayshree for their time, and to BDO Australia for hosting our event.
Jamie-Lee McLoughlin - Sydney City Leader
You can watch the full Sydney event here.
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A massive thank you to all of our amazing speakers, all those who attended and of course, our city leaders, who so generously shared their time to ensure that all events were a success.
We cannot wait to see you all at our upcoming events in May!