International Women's Day: Give to Gain
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- 5 min read
#TheYouthWorkCommonRoom #InternationalWomensDay #IWD2026 #GivetoGain #YWCR #March8 #genderequality #balancethescales #youthwork #informaleducation #womenineducation #womensupportingwomen
International Women’s Day gave me an excuse – and a responsibility – to step back, make space, and listen to a group of women youth workers in a way that felt both ordinary and quietly radical. What follows is a reflection on what can happen when we treat dialogue itself as practice, and listening as a form of International Women’s Day “giving” that allows us, and our work, to gain.
The task was simple on paper: bring together a group of women youth workers, invite them to talk about International Women’s Day, and see what surfaces.
Whilst perhaps aiming for a campaign, resource, output or a perfect slogan; in reality, I was aiming for a space where the group could name what this day stirs up – pride, fatigue, anger, hope, and everything in between, including rage baiting apparently as an expression.
With some discussions that were grounded in personal/professional realities and acknowledging the lived youth work moments that clearly keep individuals anchored in practice, not abstraction. This opportunity to explore realities through dialogue was a compulsive stand out.
What struck me first was how quickly the room shifted once it was clear this was a space for women workers to speak as whole people, not just as professionals delivering on a task, and definitively not just because a man has asked it. The task was adjusted, re-designed, ownership was taken and the conversation begins..
Stories came that rarely make it into the learning environment, supervision notes or team meetings: the everyday calculations about self in practice, indeed society, the accumulated micro‑dismissals in multi‑agency meetings, while still being expected to “crack on”. In this environment, “safe space” didn’t mean easy or comfortable; it meant being able to risk saying the unsayable without having to tidy it up for anyone else’s benefit. There was laughter as well as anger, relief as well as frustration – a reminder that safety in informal education is often about the freedom to be complicated and contradictory, not just “OK”.
Across the conversation, three layers of experience kept weaving through each other.
• The obvious: the visible inequalities everyone can point to – pay gaps, representation, policy rhetoric that still hasn’t caught up with women’s realities in youth work and beyond.
• The perpetual: the ongoing, grinding labour of navigating sexist assumptions, holding boundaries, and doing the “extra” emotional and organisational work that rarely appears in job descriptions.
• The hidden: the things even close colleagues might not know – personal histories of violence, the cost of constantly adapting to stay “palatable” in professional spaces, the quiet rage at how often young women’s safety is left to individual workers to manage rather than systems to change.
Hearing these layers side‑by‑side underlined how International Women’s Day is never just one day’s story (not my words).
It is the latest point in a long, overlapping set of narratives – some celebrated publicly, many carried privately and silently – that shape how women show up as youth workers, colleagues, carers, and community members.
As an invisible facilitator, my most important task was to get out of the way. I was given permission to listen to the conversation that was recorded. In doing so, I was reminded that listening, done with intention, is not a passive act; it is a form of practice that can redistribute power, even briefly.
Several women spoke about the gendered realities of their work with other women who “get it” without needing everything explained.
That sense of mutual recognition – of not having to justify or downplay experience – is itself a resource, strengthening confidence and sharpening analysis for when the group go back into mixed or male‑dominated spaces.
For me, the learning sat in at least three places:
• Noticing how much analysis is already present in workers’ everyday stories when we treat those stories as knowledge, not just anecdotes.
• Recognising that my role is often to create and defend the conditions for these conversations, rather than to lead them to a neat conclusion.
• Accepting that some of the most important shifts are internal: a new language, a reframed memory, a clearer sense that collectivism brings results.
Having been recalled to class and then closing the session, with a strong sense of gratitude and responsibility. Gratitude for the trust shown in naming experiences that could be painful, political, and deeply personal; responsibility because once you have heard those stories, you cannot pretend not to know.
It is a privilege to sit as listener to such a range of women’s experiences – the joyful and the weary, the resistant and the hopeful, the fiercely public and the carefully hidden.
That privilege brings a personal call to action: to use my position in The Youth Work Common Room, and in youth work education more broadly, to keep making room for women’s voices to lead the analysis, shape the questions, and define what meaningful “Give to Gain” looks like in our field.
The activity created more questions than perhaps answers and as instructed, the words as questions follow for each of us to consider;
Why are there separate expectations for young men and young women?
Why is there a ‘man-made line of acceptable for young women that is divided in relation to expectations?
Isn’t it sad that young women has to bury themselves away, because of societies expectations of them?
With a current focus on resilience, shouldn’t we be removing the barriers that cause the need for resilience for young women?
Should we be questioning society about the divide, rather than encouraging young women to accept?
Why do we promote the questioning of some things rather than others, the focus on individual ‘issues’ not the bigger structural issues?
Are we as adults focusing on resilience on topics that are not what young women experiencing?
Do we open our own feminist agenda in our work? Is this meeting young people where they are?
What does gender mean to young people and how does contemporary thinking and fluidity impact on the discussions?
How much do we project our own values in discussions?
At what point can we celebrate change?
Is the role of the youth worker more about enabling young women to be able to challenge injustice as a tool set, rather than ‘education’ about equality?
Should we have more emphasis in schools to be more conscious about the ideas sent out regarding gender justice?
Where is the place and space that youth workers can challenge schools about challenges that young women experience?
Ultimately, If International Women’s Day is about “Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls”, the learning calls us to turn listening into action by creating and shaping spaces where women workers and the young women we work alongside can speak freely, be fully themselves, name injustice and know that their words will not only be heard, but carried forward into how we design, lead and defend youth work and actively influencing the practice we build together.
Thank You Rosie, Charlotte, Becky, Gemma, Anna, Becky, Lauren, Sally
#TheYouthWorkCommonRoom #InternationalWomensDay #IWD2026 #GivetoGain #YWCR #March8 #genderequality #balancethescales #youthwork #informaleducation #womenineducation #womensupportingwomen