International Women’s Day 2023: Changing the Gender Narrative

This year's International Women's Day campaign theme is #EmbraceEquity, to get the world talking about why equal opportunities aren't enough. People start from different places, so true inclusion and belonging require equitable action.

For this year's contribution, we at WeRobotics and Flying Labs have chosen to organize an open discussion on how we contribute and can do more to change the gender narrative. Throughout 2022, WeRobotics Co-Founder / Co-CEO and Ashoka Fellow Sonja Betschart have been part of a collective bringing together a group of European social entrepreneurs with multiple and diverse identities. Supported and guided by an amazing team of Ashoka Europe, the group came together and decided to take action by co-creating a manifesto to change the gender narrative. 

This manifesto claims that women constitute half of humanity and recognizes Gender Equity as the ultimate goal for a peaceful, fair, and healthy world where everybody has the same rights, opportunities, and resources in all areas of their lives. While this is a work in progress, the first version of the manifesto was published in late 2022 and discussed at the Ashoka Changemaker Summit in Brussels in December 2022. 

While not intended to be final or exhaustive, this manifesto is the first proposal from European Ashoka Fellows and social entrepreneurs who aligned on the most urgent mindset shifts needed to advance gender equity. For International Women's Day 2023 (#IWD2023), we want to expand the discussion and learn how the seven pillars of the manifesto resonate with people outside of Europe. We want to challenge the pillars, and European view expressed in the manifesto and learn from leading women of the Flying Labs Network in Africa, Latin America, and Asia if and how they relate to the pillars and how they contribute to changing the gender narrative every day through their work.