IWD2026 - Keeping Real Women in Focus

You know what is a tragedy or perhaps more accurately an outrage in the run up to International Women’s Day this year? The use of an AI woman (or heavily AI’d woman) as the banner image for the #IWD2026 #givetogain site.

Call me old school, but on the very day set aside for celebrating women, why are we usurping their faces with made up ones? There are some beautiful captures of all sorts of real women on the page (link below) as you scroll, demonstrating how unnecessary the AI is. Even they are peppered with more AI imagery.

This is a trend I hate with a passion. Blurring out women.

We are also doing it to ourselves. I’ve noticed these last months an increase in women using the ‘touch up my appearance’ option on video calls, and on increasingly high settings. Men too, but more women than men. It is strange to be on the receiving end of. It looks smoothed and alien - somehow distancing. And maybe that’s the point, but closing off transparency shuts off a universe of possibilities between us.

I totally get it. Who wouldn’t want to look their best and blur off the edges of a bad night’s sleep, and of course everyone can do what they feel with no rights and wrongs from me. But do we want to get used to looking at ourselves and each other through this soft focus lens, where that becomes our normal and our aspiration? As it is for the girls and young women we coach to love themselves as they are? Next stop, toggle it on our RayBan Metas so we see everyone as we wish to see them or they wish to be seen?

That this has reached IWD in this headline way is alerting. It makes me feel like we have allowed the very system we are annually advocating to be eviscerated, to enter our domain. To scrub out real women and replace us with a synthetic version that, what, is more convenient? More amenable?

If we do that here, what do we stand upon when AI comes for our jobs, or when we need to be our ‘authentic selves’ at the board table?

Which is also to say something about power and how we can live it or give it away in the little moments as well as the big. I do not want real women to be obliterated - in a professional context, in our media, on our phones. If we let that happen we will have failed women globally. Yes, let’s put our best angle forward. Yes, let’s celebrate the best in us. No, let’s not allow women to be polished away.

Reclaim our faces, I say. Give that gift to gain.

https://www.internationalwomensday.com/Theme