THE anonymous, but mega-corporately sponsored International Women’s Day website has announced that its innocuous campaign theme for 2021 is “Choose to Challenge,” with the explanation that “a challenged world is an alert world. And from challenge comes change.” 

A bold, although somewhat meaningless statement, and, as expected, it makes an appeal to women as individuals, since as it says: “We’re all responsible for our own thoughts and actions — all day, every day. 

“We can all choose to challenge and call out gender bias and inequality. We can all choose to seek out and celebrate women’s achievements.” 

True, but this is a banal reinforcement of corporately acceptable “choice feminism.”

So what should we, as the inheritors of the real socialist feminist origins of IWD, choose to challenge and change in 2021? 

We inherit a rich tradition of collective challenge and struggle. From this we learn that it is only through our collective strength and ideological vigilance that radical change can be won.

What then should we seek to challenge and change in 2021? 

Clearly we haven’t got much to celebrate in the midst of a global pandemic, so we must choose to challenge — we have no option — protest we must, albeit not in traditional time-honoured public fora. So, what are the challenging issues?

First the Covid pandemic itself and its disproportionate effect on the lives of women. 

While it’s true that the mortality rate overall is lower for women than men (even taking ethnic disparities into account), many more women, because they are front-line workers in the NHS, care and retail sectors, are much more exposed to the virus. 

In addition the economic impact on women is disproportionate. 

According to the International Labour Organisation, women perform 76.2 per cent of total hours of unpaid care, more than three times as much as men — this has increased exponentially during the pandemic due to women’s increased caring responsibilities for elderly, vulnerable or sick adults and especially for children during prolonged school closures. 

Additionally, 40 per cent of women work part-time, many of whom will suffer loss of earnings and will not be eligible for sick pay. 

Thus the age-old conflict for women between work and home as the enduring repository of women’s super-exploitation has become even more severe during the pandemic. 

The following selected facts from Women’s Budget Group publication, Crises Collide: Women & Covid-19 (April 2020), serves to illustrate the challenges facing women. This report has been widely circulated to MPs and policy-makers.

During lockdown the misogynist aspect of women’s oppression in the domestic sphere has become shockingly apparent. 

Male violence against women in the home has increased alarmingly. 

Police figures indicate that there were over 200,000 recorded cases last year. Hundreds, if not thousands more remain unrecorded. 

At the same time government funding for women’s refuges has been reduced. 

Shocking as these figures are, violence against women worldwide is on the increase in its most deadly form — femicide.

Thus, violence against women, Covid inequity, women’s super-exploitation and oppression are all issues to be challenged and changed. 

But right now there is a very topical and pressing issue which must be challenged, even though it cannot be changed, at least not this month. 

I refer to the 2021 census. At present all households will have received an instruction to complete the 2021 census by the March 21 deadline and, of course, we should willingly comply. 

The decennial census provides vitally important statistical data for the framing of public and social policy and analysis. 

However, the data is only useful if the questions it asks elicit unambiguous answers. 

In this regard, the question asking the sex of the respondent is vital and has been required since 1841 (possibly since the first census in 1801). 

Now, in 2021, for the first time this basic question is caveated with the following guidance (in Scotland the sex question is not caveated):

“…for the first time the census in England includes a question about gender identity, asking respondents whether their gender is the same as the sex they were registered as at birth — a question designed to collect data about the size of the transgender population.” 

Fair enough, but the caveated sex question is very problematic as many women’s organisations have explained. 

So, why does this sex question matter? The authors of The Political Erasure of Sex, Jane Clare Jones and Lisa Mackenzie, argue convincingly that “without robust data on sex, it is impossible to measure and remedy the discrimination and disadvantage experienced by women on the ground of their sex … Women’s life-chances are thus substantially impacted by their sex, and it remains vital that both academics and public policymakers have access to accurate data by which to analyse, and try to mitigate, that impact.”

Women’s organisations, including Woman’s Place UK, and many experts have submitted reams of evidence to the census drafters at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) substantiating this point, but to no avail. 

The ONS, a seemingly impartial data-gathering organisation, appears to have internalised an ideology which conflates sex and gender, leading to the erasure of sex as a biological fact and a protected characteristic under the 2010 Equality Act. 

Thus, as women, while we celebrate on IWD our sisters’ struggles for women’s liberation and socialism, we must be vigilant and challenge the formal and informal ways our history has been erased and subjected to hostile political capture. 

Even more important is the clear and present danger of the erasure of our biologically recognised form as species beings — as women. 

Ideologically driven policy capture is not confined to the ONS, it has permeated all public institutions and labour movement organisations, with the honourable exception of the Communist Party. 

The price of our liberation is eternal vigilance: we must dare to struggle and dare to win.