This year’s theme for International Women’s Day is “Choose to Challenge”. Raise your hand to show you’re in and that you commit to choose to challenge and call out and challenge gender bias and inequality.

Today it is not unusual for especially the younger generation to be on the lookout for our subconscious “Confirmation bias”.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or value.

This bias can cloud our judgement and we need to work every day to try and spot and disarm our natural bias. Because we are not looking at the world and what is happening from a place of clarity but from a place of impaired judgement.

Confirmation bias and gender bias can easily run hand in hand and we need to challenge our thought processes and assumptions to ensure we have equality for all, both male and female.

Both sexes have a masculine and a feminine side to their personality. We need to celebrate the difference qualities and energies that masculinity and femininity bring to the table.

It’s time for both of the sexes to tap into both of these energies to allow us all to share equally in the child raising, home duties, career and caring for our elderly parents in a way that works for both parties.

Women will not get equality in the workforce until child raising is a family problem not a women’s problem. This also applies to caring for our elderly parents, housework and more.

Previous generations we encouraged to be the breadwinner and were somewhat disconnected to the family. It is wonderful to see the next generation of fathers are so much more hands on with the family. Although I still hear women saying that they are the ones carrying the mental load of the family. They are the ones remembering the vaccinations, birthday party presents, doctor’s appointments etc. Women might be able to relax and spend less time inside our head if this load was shared as well.

Let’s create a world where equality is created and celebrated by stamping out our confirmation and gender biases to make our world a fairer place for us all as we celebrate International Women’s Day 2021.