(And What We Should Be Building Instead)
Every March, something predictable happens.
Inboxes fill up. LinkedIn lights up with posts about glass ceilings and gender pay gaps. Companies roll out their International Women's Day panels, their breakfast briefings, their carefully curated highlight reels of female achievement. For 24 hours, being an ambitious woman feels like the most celebrated thing in the world.
And then it's the 9th of March, and nothing has changed.
If you've noticed yourself feeling more exhausted by IWD than energised by it, you're not alone. A growing number of women are calling out the performative nature of the day, not because they don't care about gender equality, but because they care about it too much to watch it be reduced to a sponsored post and a panel of four women saying the same things they said last year.
The same thing is happening with women's networking more broadly. And it's worth asking why.
This piece was partly sparked by something Amy Kean wrote this IWD that stopped me in my tracks. If you don't already follow her Substack, Weirdism, you should. Go and read her piece in full: Gisèle Pelicot proved that women don't need a leader: we just need rage. Then come back. Or don't come back. Honestly, just read Amy's piece. It's that good.
Still here? Good. Let's talk.
The weight we keep putting on women
Amy's piece centres on Gisèle Pelicot and the dangerous habit we have of putting extraordinary women on pedestals and expecting them to solve our problems for us.
Pelicot's case shook the world. The fact that 51 ordinary men, men with wives, children, and regular jobs, were able to drug and rape her repeatedly and almost get away with it forced a reckoning that many of us had been waiting for. When Pelicot chose to waive anonymity in court, she became a symbol of extraordinary courage. Two thousand people gave her a standing ovation at the Royal Festival Hall, Amy among them.
But as Amy argues so powerfully, we cannot ask Pelicot to lead the charge. She never asked for any of this. In Amy's words, Pelicot is "a hero, but a reluctant one." Making her the figurehead of a feminist movement is a way of outsourcing our own responsibility to act.
Amy also references journalist Megha Mohan, whose research on matriarchal and matrilineal communities across the world shows that leaderless structures work. Less ego. Less hierarchy. Community as the focus rather than power. Mohan's argument, as Amy recounts it: "Now is the time for a revolt. We need to do this, urgently, but we don't need a leader."
And Amy's own conclusion, which I keep coming back to: "We don't need leaders, we need curators. We need energisers. We don't need leaders, we need equal actors sprinting in the same direction."
That's a description of community. Real community. And it's exactly what's missing from most women's networking.
The problem with most women's networking
Walk into the average women's networking event and you'll find a room of impressive people doing an impressive job of pretending to be less impressive than they are.
There's a lot of smiling. A lot of business cards. A lot of "what do you do?" and circling the room trying to find the one person you actually want to talk to. You leave with a stack of LinkedIn connections you'll never message and a vague sense that you should have stayed home.
The format is borrowed from corporate networking, which was designed by and for a different kind of professional culture entirely. It optimises for breadth over depth. It rewards performance over authenticity. It puts the burden on individuals to extract value from a room, rather than creating conditions where value emerges naturally.
For a lot of women, it just doesn't work. Not because they're doing it wrong. Because the format itself is wrong.
Why IWD has started to feel like the same problem
International Women's Day should be a moment of genuine reflection and collective action. At its best, it still is.
But somewhere along the way, it became a marketing opportunity. Brands that spend the other 364 days of the year paying women less, promoting men faster, and ignoring the structural barriers their female employees face will spend the 8th of March posting about breaking the bias. It's not just hollow. It's actively counterproductive, because it lets organisations perform progress without doing the work of making it.
Slapping a female lens on a broken format doesn't fix the format.
What actually works
Nine years of building Wildflowers has taught us one thing above everything else: women don't need more networking opportunities. They need better ones.
The events that have changed things for our members haven't been the ones with the most impressive speaker lineups or the biggest rooms. They've been the supper clubs where eight women sat around a table for three hours and said things they'd never said out loud at work. The panels where the most powerful moment wasn't the keynote but the conversation that started in the queue for the bathroom afterwards. The WhatsApp thread where someone posted at 11pm about a difficult decision and woke up to forty responses from women who'd been there.
What those moments have in common is depth over breadth. Small over large. Honesty over performance.
Real community isn't built in a room of a hundred people with name badges. It's built in smaller, repeated interactions where people feel safe enough to be actual human beings rather than their professional highlights reel.
The things that change when community is real
We've watched women find business partners through Wildflowers. Get jobs. Leave jobs. Navigate redundancy, divorce, grief, and the particular exhaustion of being the only woman in the room at work.
None of that came from a keynote speech. It came from relationships built over time in spaces that prioritised connection over content.
That's not something you can manufacture in a one-off IWD event. It takes consistency, trust, and a genuine commitment to the people in the room rather than the optics of having them there.
What we actually need from IWD
This isn't an argument for abandoning International Women's Day. It's an argument for taking it seriously enough to do more than mark it.
As Amy writes, Gisèle Pelicot's courage has given us something real. It's made a lot of us angry. And anger, directed properly, is the most useful emotion there is. Our job is to make that anger last, and turn it into something. Not to put Pelicot in charge of doing it for us.
The conversations worth having on the 8th of March are the ones that continue on the 9th, the 10th, and every day after that. The communities worth building are the ones that show up when it's not a news hook. The networking worth doing is the kind that doesn't feel like networking at all.
If you're tired of the performative version, you're not being ungrateful. You're being honest about what you actually need.
And what most of us actually need is pretty simple. A room where we can be real. People who will still be there in six months. Something that lasts beyond a hashtag.
That's what we've been building at Wildflowers since 2016. Not a network. A collective.
There's a difference. And once you've felt it, you can't go back.
Go and read Amy's piece
Seriously. Everything I've quoted here is just a fragment of a much longer, much more powerful argument. Amy Kean is a psychosociologist, a writer, and one of the sharpest thinkers on gender, culture, and what it means to be human right now.
Her IWD piece, "Gisèle Pelicot proved that women don't need a leader: we just need rage," is on her Substack, Weirdism. Subscribe while you're there. You won't regret it.
Read Amy's piece here
Wildflowers of London is an award-winning collective of 900+ professional women in London. We bring women together through supper clubs, panels, workshops, and socials designed around genuine connection. Free to join. Find out more at wildflowersldn.com
