Let’s start off with the good news: Gisele Pelicot has been awarded the number one spot in the Independent’s 50 most influential women of 2025. The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is ‘accelerate action’; in view of current projections that gender equality will not be achieved until 2158 at the existing rate of progress.
Pelicot undoubtedly deserves the top spot. Due to her brave public testimony, dozens of perpetrators of male violence have been convicted. International awareness of the dark web, and sexual violence against older women, has been raised.
However, as I scrolled down to find Kate Middleton, Rachel Reeves and – I kid you not – Kemi Badenoch occupying 2nd, 3rd and 4th place in the Independent’s list, I wondered if I’d slept through March and woken up on April Fool’s Day.
Independent’s 50 most influential women: surely a joke?
It’s not easy to feel optimistic about gender equality in this political climate. Violence against women and girls is increasing, workplace equality is tanking, and women in Afghanistan are banned from speaking or showing their faces in public.
We certainly need to do something but, with all due respect, I’m not sure that trad wife multi-millionaire Kate Middleton – a literal Princess – is going to lead us out of this mess.
While even Meghan Markle concedes that Kate is essentially a ‘good person’, as the suffragettes knew all too well – centuries of women being ‘good’ and ‘well behaved’ has never led to women receiving an equal share of social, political, and economic power.
I’m struggling to recall an occasion in the past two decades when Kate Middleton, the epitome of white aristocratic privilege, has used her power to effect real change for disadvantaged women. She sits at the top of an archaic institution that embodies feudalism, colonialism, and the patriarchy, and she is one of the few women who benefits from the status quo.
Rachel Reeves, aka the Iron Chancellor, isn’t doing too badly out of the capitalist status quo either.
She went down a storm at Davos with her pledge to help multimillionaires evade tax and her willingness to make life even harder for homeless women, disabled women, and single mothers – all to balance some imaginary books.
Let’s be clear: Rachel Reeves is not a champion for working class and marginalised women, and our desperately under-funded public services will continue to suffer while she remains at the helm.
Kate, Rachel, and Kemi: the worst of the worst?
Kemi Badenoch is no feminist ally either.
While she opens the Independent’s sleek, corporate-style IWD short video by stressing the importance of ‘equality of opportunity’, it’s worth clarifying that she is talking about the ‘opportunity’ that disadvantaged women have to compete for jobs with Oxbridge-educated white men.
Sadly, these ‘opportunities’ have done almost nothing to shift the gender income and wealth gap, or the number of women being killed by male partners or family members. Kemi’s keenness to deport Black and brown refugee women and girls to unsafe countries, and withdraw from human rights treaties, reveals where her true interests lie.
To be fair to the Independent, Kate, Rachel and Kemi are extremely influential, and that’s precisely the problem we’re up against. They represent loyalty and obedience to a system of ultra-capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy that threatens the human rights of women everywhere.
The Independent: more clear-eyed realism, less loyalty and obedience
This all sounds terribly bleak, but truly, if we really want to dismantle systemic oppression against women, we need clear-eyed realism, and we need ordinary women and men to join grassroots movements.
We can use our people power to show that we won’t stand for sexism in 2025.
There are smaller things we can do too.
The UK is full of feminist icons, but they’re probably not sitting in a Palace or the House of Commons. I’m fairly sure there’s a true feminist icon in your neighbourhood: maybe she lives on your street, or even in your house.
This International Women’s Day, we should let these women know that we see them, their struggle isn’t in vain, and we’ve got their back.
Featured image via screengrab
This post was originally published on Canary.