This morning I checked my email, just to find out I had received several International Women's Day emails from various brands. One, in particular, made me emit a strange, snorting sound - something in between a laugh and an affronted grunt. The email was offering me a discount for a manicure. Because, you know, you might have dirt under your nails after spending the last few centuries digging your way out from under patriarchy.

Here is a general tip: if your business profits from the standards imposed on women by society, that is fine. Businesses are not people with consciousnesses. But marketing teams are. Please abstain from communications on this specific day of the year, or, at least, have the decency to not lean on the struggle of women throughout history for your comms. To clarify - this is not a celebratory day when we all drink champagne and have pillow fights. This is a day when we acknowledge hundreds of years of hustling to obtain the right to vote, the right to education, the right to not be sexually harassed (OK we are still working on that one) and other freedoms and rights that edge us ever closer to that priviledged space of unquestioned existence currently held primarily by white men. We do not want flowers and free shipping, we want equality.

If equality isn't truly one of the core values of your brand, you have no business communicating explicitly on these issues. You do, however, always have a responsibility to look at everything you put out in the public space, or directly in someone's inbox, and reflect on if you are are a part of the problem. Manicures in themselves are (fairly) neutral - how you choose to communicate about them is not.

Here are 4 things you should be doing (and that will improve your business, as well*):

1. Review your core values - are they implicit in the supression of women? Maybe you can tweek them to, well, not be. You can sell me lipstick without insinuating that I am nothing but red lips for the male gaze, and you can sell shower gel to men without implying that manliness is equal to having drone women swoon around you. Be smarter than that.
2. Review your segmentation and targeting - is it relevant to attribute certain properties to  target purely on the base of gender? Or are there smarter ways to make sure you are relevant, such as rational/emotional drivers, interests, income brackets?
3. Review your messaging - just make sure you're not actually offending your intended audience. This sounds like a given, but given the amount of distasteful and insulting messages that reach me in my inbox, my Instagram feed, in public spaces, it is clearly not. 
4. Read. Or watch Youtube, if you prefer. Find out about the male gaze and the sexualisation of the female body in society. Learn about the causality between dehumanization and abuse. Consider how representation and gender stereotyping affects our minds and our society. 

Here is a little something to get you started: