When I was 12 years old, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. It was always one of two careers, a writer or being in the Armed Forces – Navy, specifically. Ideally, if I could combine them both, I thought I’d be set for life.  My career choices were just that — mine. I wasn’t influenced or pushed into any particular avenue or endeavour by anyone. Well, so I thought, or was led to believe.

 

In 2026 retrospect, I was raised in an era where female career choices were not really choices, but were a selection provided by the patriarchal society wrapped up in a box, tied with a bow. As young girls embarking on womanhood, we had to choose from the contents of the box we were gifted, with the card usually saying, “Girls can do anything.” What it should have said is “Girls can do anything — within the fences.”

 

International Women’s Day is celebrated worldwide in many countries in different ways. It is a public holiday in Eastern Europe, Asia, and some African nations. In Western countries, Britain and North America, it is not. I don’t know why.  The day has been recognized since the early 1900s and was officially marked by the United Nations in 1975. In 2022, when I wrote the first version of this article, the theme was #BreaktheBias. In 2026, it’s #GivetoGain.

 

“It is a global day to recognize and celebrate women’s and girls’ social, economic, cultural and political achievements. It’s also a time to raise awareness of the progress made toward achieving gender equality and the work remaining to be done,” the Government of Canada website dedicated to women and gender equality states.

 

Ahhhh… equality – a word with so much power. During my formative years in the 1980s and 1990s, I was raised on the adage that women were equal. I never questioned it. My parents told me this. I believed it. My teachers at my all-girls school told me this. I believed it. My girlfriends all lived and believed this. We were going to live a life of female empowerment. But, in 1988, I learned I had been deceived all my life by a message that wasn’t complete. One that was like a sick tree trunk, needing a decision: cut down or heal and nurture back to health. The results could go either way.

 

When I signed up for the New Zealand Navy at 17, there were two girls in the regional intake testing and interviews who made the cut. Myself, and one other in a room of perhaps 15 males, also vying for positions in the nautical forces. I can’t remember the other girl’s name now, so I’ll call her Kaha. It’s the Maori word for strength and persistence.

 

We spent the lunch hours and breaks together over the weeks of preliminary intake. I told her I was applying for a position in the communications division. She told me she was applying for a hydrographer position.  My eyes went wide, I inhaled my breath, and I pointed out to her that was a position on board a ship. I asked, did she really want to be in the Navy? How much did she really want to be in the Navy, selecting a job choice that was not an option? She responded with just a smile. She already knew what I was saying because she had previously been denied – three times. Three selection processes. Three intakes, just to be cut at the finish line because she was a woman. She was adamant that’s what she was going to do, so she was trying again for a fourth time.  In that day and time, women were not permitted to serve on board  New Zealand Navy ships, but “there will come a day…” she said to me.

 

I was so determined to be a “career woman” that I chose a career path within the parameters of what I was told, as a girl, I was “allowed” to choose. I never thought to apply for anything outside of that beautiful box. I chose from that box I had been “gifted” because it was a “privilege”.  Kaha chose to step outside that box, to ignore the patriarchal parameters and assert herself as a true equal. She wanted to show that she could do anything, that women could do anything —even outside the fences.

 

I lost touch with her after those initial sessions. I was accepted into the Navy, and our paths went separate ways. However, her message has influenced my life and continues to influence me forty years on.

I ran into her a couple of years later when I was studying media at college, as I pushed my daughter’s stroller through our hometown mall. Kaha was on shore leave and visiting her family. I was so proud to know she was one of the first women in New Zealand to be accepted in her “chosen” career field and “allowed” to serve on board a ship. It was that fourth time, that fourth intake, that fourth dash for the finish line that she finally crossed. We chatted about our lives and how our paths crossed and diverged. We joked about how something as natural and straightforward as women’s hygiene had turned a staid male institution upside down in a frenzy because of female presence on ship. She opened the gate that had kept so many of us fenced in.

 

She pushed that traditional boundary and made way for women to be equal in a male-dominated industry. She understood, better than I did at the time, that women truly could do anything. My eyes were opened to the fact that even in Western society, as late as the early 1990s, while women were being told they could do anything, they were really being told they could do anything within the “choices” provided to them by society.

 

Thankfully, the ideals and values about women’s abilities and contributions have strengthened and developed into foundations in our society and communities today. The fences are coming down, biases are being broken, and many parameters have been removed. Those boxes with bows, prettied up with ribbons, have been ripped open so young women can really have a choice and be equal. There is still work to do, efforts women can give so others can gain. That is what International Women’s Day means to me.

 

The theme #GivetoGain means to me that role models like Kaha gave their essence, their belief in themselves, to show and pave the way for sisters to reach a world that lay outside those fences. A world where equality is now free for all women to gain.