Seven mistakes that turn International Women’s Day into culture theatre

International Women’s Day is on 8 March. In 2027 it falls on a Monday.

At some point in the run-up, thousands of organisations will start planning panels, breakfasts, workshops, inspirational speakers and social posts celebrating the brilliant women who work for them.

None of those things are bad.

But people know what it’s like to work somewhere. If the other 364 days don’t match what you say on 8 March, they’ll notice.

Your culture shows up in the everyday moments: when someone asks for flexibility, puts themselves forward for promotion, challenges a senior person in a meeting or comes back from maternity leave.

If you’re running a startup, you have an advantage. Your culture is still being set. The way you hire, promote, run meetings and handle a request for flexibility at 10 people becomes the way things are done at 100. It’s far easier to build fairness in now than to retrofit it once you’ve scaled. I saw this first-hand working in-house with an agency as it grew from 16 to 57 people across three countries. The habits set in the early days were the ones that stuck.

And it’s easier than ever to get found out. People post on LinkedIn, leave reviews on Glassdoor and sign open letters. Ask an AI chatbot what it’s like to work somewhere and it will draw on all of it. When you only have a handful of reviews, every one of them carries weight. If what you say on 8 March doesn’t match what people experience, it shows up in your employer brand, and that matters when you’re competing with bigger names for talent.

The good news is that it isn’t hard to avoid. Steer clear of these seven things.

What not to do

1. Start thinking about women in February

If the first conversation about gender equality happens because somebody has just noticed IWD is four weeks away, that’s probably the first problem.

Swap “What shall we do for IWD?” for a better question: what would we like women here to be able to say has changed by 8 March?

That might lead to an event. It might lead somewhere completely different.

In a startup, February has a habit of filling up with fundraising, launches and hiring. Ask the question now, while you still have four months to do something about the answer.

2. Try to fix the women instead of the system

I love development work, and we run a lot of it at HappyHQ.

Plenty of women do struggle with imposter syndrome and confidence at work. That makes sense when most of the people at the top still look nothing like them, the same voices get heard in meetings and the route to promotion runs through networks they aren’t part of.

A workshop on “being more confident” can help someone in the moment. On its own, it won’t change the conditions that knocked their confidence in the first place.

You need to know whether you’re dealing with skills, structure or both. Otherwise you end up asking women to get better at working inside a system that needs changing.

In a startup, the founders are the system. Who you hire first, who gets put in front of investors and big clients, and who gets the stretch roles as the team grows: those early decisions set the pattern for everything that follows.

JLR is a good example of working on the system at scale. In an industry where women are still under-represented, its employee-led Women in Engineering & Allies network runs a project tackling the barriers to women’s progression, with senior engineering leaders sponsoring each workstream. JLR says the share of women in engineering leadership has doubled since 2022.

You don’t need a network with workstreams and sponsors to apply the same thinking. Look at where women in your business are getting stuck, and fix that.

Where skills are the issue, focus on the practical stuff: landing your point in a meeting, handling a tricky conversation with a senior client or investor, presenting with impact. Things people can practise on their own material and use straight away.

3. Tell everyone how much you support women without checking whether they agree

Companies are very good at telling people what the culture is supposed to be. The interesting bit is what people experience.

Who gets promoted? Who gets the stretch opportunities? Whose ideas get picked up, and who does the invisible work? What happens when somebody asks for flexibility? What do women say to each other on the walk to the station?

That’s your culture.

And it’s easy to find out. Ask. Anonymously, if that helps people be honest.

In a team of 15, an anonymous survey can feel anything but anonymous. A short pulse survey, or conversations run by someone outside the founding team, will usually get you more honest answers.

4. Celebrate female leaders while making leadership impossible for anyone who can’t work like the people before them

You can put as many pictures of successful women on the intranet as you like. If progression still depends on being visible at certain times, travelling at short notice, taking calls whenever they come in or fitting one narrow idea of what a leader looks like, not much has changed.

Startups have their own version of this. If being seen as committed means replying to Slack at 11pm and never taking a proper holiday, the people with caring responsibilities will be the first to drop out of the running.

If using your flexible working policy damages someone’s career, people will stop using it.

Some organisations have changed how work works, with measurable results. Zurich UK started advertising every job as open to part-time, job-share or flexible working. Applications from women for management roles rose by nearly a fifth, and it hired a third more women into senior roles. That costs nothing to copy. You can write flexibility into every job ad from your very first hire.

Pan Macmillan pairs six months’ fully paid maternity leave with coaching before, during and after leave, plus mentoring from colleagues who’ve been through it. It reports keeping every mother who returned, one and two years on. You may not be able to match the leave yet, but coaching, a phased return and a colleague who’s been through it are within reach of a small business.

5. Ask women to share deeply personal stories, then do nothing with what you hear

Personal stories can be powerful. I’ve seen one senior leader talking openly about their own experience change a conversation in a way no poster ever could.

But don’t invite vulnerability to make your panel more moving. If somebody tells you what made work harder for them, what happens next?

Sports marketing agency Dark Horses did something useful with it. In 2021, while it was still independent, its CEO Melissa Robertson led an open-source menopause policy that any business could pick up, and Women in Advertising and Communications Leadership (WACL) later based its industry policy on it. Because it’s open source, any startup can download it and adapt it for free.

Small PR agency Lem-uhn, launched in 2021, gave staff ten extra days’ paid leave a year for menstruation, menopause symptoms or pregnancy loss.

You don’t need to be big to act on what you hear.

6. Make 8 March massive and 9 March exactly the same as 7 March

Big event. Great speaker. Lovely lunch. Everyone leaves feeling inspired.

Then… nothing.

One of our values at HappyHQ is Useful on Monday. If nobody does anything differently the following week, the event was a nice day out. Handily, in 2027 IWD lands on a Monday, so the test is easy: what will be different on Tuesday?

The day works best as part of something bigger: mentoring, sponsorship, manager development, clearer progression, better conversations, policy changes, or more chances for people to practise the skills they need next.

IWD can create momentum. It can’t be the whole plan.

7. Put it on a poster

I have nothing against posters.

But there’s only so much heavy lifting Canva can do.

If your pay gap, progression data, leadership team, flexibility and everyday behaviour tell one story, a beautifully designed IWD campaign telling another is unlikely to fool anyone.

In the UK, only employers with 250 or more staff have to publish their gender pay gap, so most startups won’t have to. Look at your own numbers anyway. With a small team it takes an afternoon, and a difference in pay is far easier to fix now than when it’s spread across 200 salaries.

So what should you do instead?

Start now. We use a simple approach: listen, act, share.

Listen. Talk to women in your organisation. Look at the data. Find out where people are getting stuck and what would make the biggest difference.

Act. Some of it will be structural: pay, flexibility, progression, who gets sponsored. Some will be about skills: helping people find their voice, handle difficult conversations, understand their leadership style and feel comfortable taking up space. And some will sit with managers and leaders, creating an environment where people can use those skills in the first place.

Share. Use 8 March to show what’s changed, and let the people it’s changed for do the talking.

At HappyHQ, we see the same thing across the agencies and teams we work with. The businesses that make progress work on the skills and the structure together, all year round.

The structure and the skills both matter. Neither happens in a day. For a startup, the next four months could set the culture you’ll have for the next four years.

By the time 8 March arrives, hopefully you’ve got something worth celebrating.

Going it alone takes courage. Whether you’re leaving a secure job, launching a business or taking on your consultancy role, there comes a point when you have to back yourself before you feel entirely ready.

I know that feeling. I’ve spent more than 20 years working as an employee within HR and people development roles within organisations, helping leaders navigate change and grow into their roles. But, when I set up my own leadership development and coaching business, Optability, in 2023 I experienced a few identity stumbling blocks.

On paper, I was a business owner. In my head, it took longer to feel like one.

That gap between the role you’ve stepped into and how you see yourself is something I call The Identity Gap™. And it’s particularly relevant to start up founders, who often have to become a different kind of leader as their business grows.

When you’re employed, there are often structures around your development. You might have an annual appraisal, a training budget, a manager who encourages you to take a course or a clear progression route to follow. When you go it alone, those structures tend to disappear.

Nobody necessarily asks what you’ve learned this year, what skills you need to develop or where you want to be in five years. You’re responsible for finding the work, looking after clients, managing the money and keeping the business moving.

And. truthfully, professional development and continued development, can quickly slip down the list of ‘to-do’s’ – because, there are invoices to send, proposals to write and a dozen other things that feel more urgent.

But, just because nobody is arranging your continuing professional development (CPD) doesn’t mean your learning has to stop.

In fact, building a business makes learning even more important. Your business will change, your responsibilities will grow, and the person you need to be to lead it will change too.

The challenge is that development isn’t always about acquiring another qualification or adding a certificate to your LinkedIn profile. Sometimes, it starts with looking at yourself.

The business can grow faster than your self-image

Early in my career, I was promoted to lead a team of people who had previously been my peers and friends. I knew the job and understood the team, but suddenly I was responsible for having different conversations, making decisions and holding people accountable.

I was trying to be one of the team and the boss at the same time. The job had changed, but how I saw myself hadn’t caught up.

I experienced something similar when I became self-employed. Making the decision to set up a business didn’t automatically give me the confidence or identity of a business owner.

I see this pattern in founders, too.

You might launch your business because you’re brilliant at what you do. But being a talented designer, consultant, accountant or specialist doesn’t automatically prepare you to sell your services, make difficult decisions, delegate to employees or lead a growing team.

As the business develops, you have to develop with it.

If you still see yourself as the person who has to do everything, delegating can feel uncomfortable. If you believe you need to keep everyone happy, setting boundaries with clients might feel impossible. And if you don’t quite see yourself as someone who belongs in the room, you might hold back from opportunities you’re perfectly capable of taking.

These aren’t necessarily skills problems. Sometimes, they’re about the beliefs and habits that shape how we behave.

Feel the fear and do it anyway

I’m a firm believer that you don’t have to wait until you feel confident to take the next step.

We can spend a long time preparing to become the person we want to be. We can buy the books, book the course, research every possible outcome and tell ourselves we’ll start when we feel ready.

But readiness doesn’t always arrive first. Sometimes, you have to do the thing while you’re still nervous. Put yourself forward for the opportunity. Have the conversation you’ve been avoiding. Charge what your work is worth. Ask for help. Admit you don’t know something.

Each time you do, you give yourself evidence that you can handle more than you thought.

This doesn’t mean ignoring genuine risks or throwing yourself into every opportunity. It means recognising the difference between a sensible reason to wait and the discomfort of doing something unfamiliar.

As founders, we’re often so focused on building the business that we forget we’re building ourselves alongside it.

Make your development part of the job

So, how do you keep developing when nobody else is responsible for making it happen?

First, be honest about where you are now. What comes naturally to you, and what are you avoiding? What does your business need from you at this stage, rather than the stage you were at when you launched?

Second, make time to learn. That might mean formal CPD, coaching, mentoring, reading, networking and conversations with other founders or getting feedback from someone who sees your blind spots. Not every lesson needs a price tag or a certificate, but it does need your attention.

So, your next stage starts with you

Finally, put what you learn into practice. Information alone doesn’t change how we lead. We have to do something differently, reflect on what happens and keep going.

My work through Optability is rooted in behavioural psychology and explores three stages: Stepping In, understanding where you are now; Stepping Out, questioning the beliefs and habits that might be holding you back; and Stepping Up, developing a way of leading that feels both effective and authentic.

You don’t have to become somebody else. You need to grow into the person your next chapter requires and that means dedicating time in your calendar for you.

Your business will change as it grows. You might move from working alone to employing a team, from delivering every piece of work yourself to leading others, or from being the expert in your field to making decisions about the future of the company.

Each stage brings new challenges, and there isn’t a course that can prepare you for every one of them.

What matters is staying curious about yourself as well as your industry.

Feel the fear, take the next step and keep learning along the way.

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