Women's History Month Starts Tomorrow. Your Company Already Sent the Email.

TL;DR: Women's History Month starts tomorrow. Corporations are already in your inbox celebrating "trailblazing women" while actively opposing the policies that would actually help women workers. Here's how to tell the difference between a company honoring feminist history and one running a PR campaign — plus three things you can do right now that actually matter.

Okay, let's unpack this: the email arrived in my inbox on February 24th.

That's four days before Women's History Month even begins. Pink banner. Script font. "We are proud to honor the pioneering women who built the path forward." A button inviting me to "discover our commitment to women in leadership." And at the bottom, a link to buy something — because obviously.

I sat with it for a minute. Then I looked up the company's recent political donation history. (I keep a Brave tab pinned for exactly this purpose.) They'd donated to three congressional candidates who voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act in 2024. They're currently facing a class action over wage discrimination. Their median pay gap between men and women is 19 cents on the dollar — which, per their own annual report buried on page 47, they describe as "a reflection of role distribution rather than discriminatory practice."

The math isn't mathing. And I need us to talk about it before March 1st, because once the month starts, the pinkwashing machine hits full throttle, and it gets harder to see through the noise.

Where Women's History Month Actually Comes From

Here's what they don't put on the motivational quote cards: the roots of what eventually became Women's History Month are drenched in labor organizing, not brand building.

International Women's Day — March 8th, the center of the whole month — grew directly out of garment workers in New York City marching in 1908. They were demanding shorter hours, better pay, and an end to child labor. Not "a seat at the table." A living wage and the right not to be worked to death.

In 1910, Clara Zetkin proposed making it an international day of working women's solidarity at the International Socialist Women's Conference in Copenhagen. The goal wasn't to celebrate individual women's "resilience." It was to build collective power across borders so that working-class women could fight back against the bosses who profited from their labor while keeping them too exhausted and underpaid to organize.

Four years later, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 garment workers — mostly young immigrant women — because the owners had locked the exit doors to prevent "unauthorized breaks." Their deaths became a turning point for labor law in New York.

These women weren't "trailblazers" in the LinkedIn sense. They were organizers. Strikers. People who understood that power isn't given — it's taken.

Women's History Month as we know it didn't become national until 1987. By then, the labor roots were already getting airbrushed out. We were already moving toward the version where it's about celebrating individual achievement — the "first woman to" narrative — rather than the collective fight that made any of those firsts possible.

The Corporate WHM Playbook (It's Not Subtle)

Here's what the standard corporate Women's History Month looks like, because I've watched it enough years in a row that I have the script memorized:

Week 1: Email with a pink graphic. "We celebrate women." Employee spotlight series featuring the women who are already in senior positions (proof the system works, apparently).
Week 2: A panel or webinar. "Women in Leadership: The Journey." Moderator asks about "work-life balance." Nobody mentions childcare policy. Nobody mentions the wage gap in the actual building they're sitting in.
Week 3: Guest blog post from the CEO about his mother and how she taught him resilience. (I am not making this up. I have seen this happen.)
Week 4: Social media recap. "What an incredible month of inspiration." Back to regular programming March 31st.

What's missing from that playbook: anything that costs them money or power.

No mention of whether the company supports paid family leave. No data on the internal gender pay gap — not industry-wide statistics, but their own numbers, their own building. No position on the PRO Act (which would make it easier for workers to unionize). No commitment to ending forced arbitration agreements that prevent women from suing over discrimination.

(Forced arbitration, for the uninitiated: it's the clause buried in your employment contract that says if your boss harasses you, you can't sue in court — you have to go to a private arbitration process that the company chose and often pays for. It is a very effective tool for making sure women can't hold employers accountable. Many of the same companies that will email you about "honoring women this March" have this clause in their contracts. Check yours.)

The Women They Won't Put on the Quote Card

Corporate WHM loves certain women. Marie Curie. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Malala. Frida Kahlo, who spent the last decade of her life as a committed communist but whose face now sells tote bags at Target — (she would have had thoughts about that).

They don't love Crystal Lee Sutton. She was the real woman behind Norma Rae — a textile worker in North Carolina who organized her mill in the 1970s and was literally carried out of the building for it. She spent the rest of her life fighting for workers and died without health insurance. The movie won two Oscars. She got a $1.65-an-hour raise and eventually lost her job.

They don't love Dolores Huerta. She co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez and has been organizing for agricultural workers — the majority of whom are women — for over 60 years. She's 95. She's still at it. She will not be featured in your company's March spotlight.

They don't love the Bread and Roses strikers of 1912, the 20,000 women who walked off the job in Lawrence, Massachusetts when their pay was cut by 32 cents a week. Thirty-two cents. In the cold. For two months. And they won. Their slogan — "We want bread, and roses too" — was about demanding not just a living wage but dignity. The full human life. Rest, beauty, and community alongside the paycheck.

These stories don't fit the corporate narrative because they're not about individual women "leaning in" to a system. They're about groups of women deciding the system needed to change — and making it change through collective action.

How to Actually Honor Women's History Month

I'm not here to tell you to boycott every company that sends a pink email — we'd all have to stop buying groceries. But I am here to give you tools to make March mean something beyond retweeting a motivational quote.

1. Ask the question your HR department does not want you to ask.

Request your company's EEO-1 report. Public companies are required to file these with the EEOC, and they break down workforce composition by race and gender across pay bands. You can also ask HR directly: "What is the median pay gap between men and women in my department?" They may dodge. That dodge is data.

2. Read one primary source this month. Just one.

Not a book about a feminist. A book by a woman writing about labor and power. Angela Davis's Women, Race, and Class. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. Anything by bell hooks (yes, I named my dog after her — no, I am not ashamed). The Combahee River Collective Statement is four pages and free online and will reorganize your entire brain.

3. Find out where the power actually lives in your municipality.

Who is on your school board? Who is your city council member? Who appoints your labor board? These are the people making decisions about childcare access, zoning, public transit, and worker protections — the infrastructure of everyday life that disproportionately falls on women to navigate. Local over national, every time. One phone call to a local official lands harder than fifty tweets at a senator.

The Quick Action

This week, before March gets buried in pink graphics and panel discussions:

Google your employer + "gender pay gap" + "EEO-1." See what comes up. If it's nothing, that's interesting too.
Check if your employment contract has a forced arbitration clause. (Look for language about "binding arbitration" or "mandatory arbitration" in your offer letter or employee handbook.)
Text one person in your life the name Crystal Lee Sutton or Dolores Huerta and tell them to look it up. That's it. That's the whole action. History travels person to person.

Women's History Month is 31 days. The corporate emails will arrive. The LinkedIn posts will post. The motivational quote cards will quote.

And underneath all of it, if you look — you'll find the actual history. Women who didn't wait to be celebrated. Women who organized, struck, marched, and took. Women who understood that the whole bakery was the ask, not the crumbs.

We're the inheritors of that. Let's act like it.

Now, what are we doing about it?

In solidarity and with a lot of coffee,
Maya