#155: International Women’s Day 2023

Brandwatch Bulletin #155: International Women’s Day 2023

The top themes and stats from IWD 2023

10 March 2023

This week was the 113th International Women’s Day, on which we celebrated the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women.

What topics emerged in this year’s online IWD conversation?

Let’s get to it.

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Top topics for IWD 2023

We used Brandwatch Consumer Research to track the conversation relating to IWD across social media, forums, blogs, and review sites between March 3-8 2023.

Looking at the topic cloud, many conversations contained uplifting and celebratory mentions, including “achievers,” “incredible,” and “power.”

Appropriately, there was also a lot of social activism and conversation around rights, gender equality, and gender-based violence. #EritreaOutOfTigray was the fifth most popular hashtag, with many people calling for justice for victims of violence and atrocity in the Tigray region.

The word “equity” was mentioned over 57k times across 3-8 March 2023. Comparatively, “equality” was mentioned 127k times, and “rights” was mentioned 117k times.

This year’s IWD theme is #EmbraceEquity, which according to the official website, is intended to get the world talking about why “equal opportunities are no longer enough” and how, in fact, equal opportunities can “be exclusionary, rather than inclusive.”

#EmbraceEquity was the fourth most popular hashtag between March 3 and March 8, collecting over 186k mentions. In comparison, last year’s theme #BreakTheBias (focusing on forging women’s equality), did much better on social, clocking in at over 411k mentions within the same time frame.

This difference in mention volume could indicate that we tend to focus more on equality than equity. Perhaps this is because equity (the idea that everyone should get what they need rather than the same as everybody else) isn’t as clear-cut or well-known.

A bloody popular post

Interestingly, the post that generated the most engagement on Twitter on March 8 was shared from an account with a moderate number of followers (under 42k). And it’s not the words of encouragement you may expect.

The tweet represents a collage showing 12 notable female movie characters, mostly from horror, and titled “Happy International Women’s Day.”

No hashtag needed.

This unique take sparked a lot of joy among Tweeters, with many jumping on this opportunity and adding their favorite female movie characters to the thread.

Brands getting involved in the IWD celebration

Many big brands took to social to show their support of women on this day, with many acknowledging and praising their inspiring female employees.

But when looking at the numbers, fewer organizations made statements relating to International Women’s Day on Twitter this year compared to last year.

In 2022, we found 279k brand account tweets relating to IWD between 3-8 March, while in 2023, the number was 235k for the same period.

Consumers and employees demand accountability from brands on issues like workplace equality and equal pay. And brands seem to have picked up on this, with some choosing not to post empty statements and instead looking to more meaningful approaches.

It’s interesting to think about this through the lens of quality and quantity. If brands opt for meaningful actions over empty statements, perhaps having fewer branded mentions this year is a good thing.

What should we cover next?

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Brandwatch is taking a collective half day next week, so we’ll be back in two weeks.

The Brandwatch Bulletin team