International Women’s Day 2018

Jessica Juckes, ITP Assistant

It’s International Women’s Day, and also Women’s History Month in the UK.

Museums worldwide are celebrating women’s contributions today: both to our sector and to society more widely. The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is Press for Progress.

At lunch today with the visiting ITP fellows (Nelson Abiti, Uganda 2013, Omar Nasser, Palestine 2013, Chithra Kallur, India 2017), we discussed International Women’s Day: in Uganda (as well as a number of other ITP network countries), today is a national holiday. And in Italy, museums are free to enter today!

Many museums in the UK are linking their International Women’s Day events this year with the centenary of the Representation of the People Act, which gave some women in England and Wales the right to vote. At the British Museum, the day kicked off with a Facebook live stream on women in ancient Britain with Historian Bettany Hughes and BM Curator Julia Farley. On the British Museum blog today, you can read about women represented in the Museum’s collection, as chosen by female curators.

How are your museums celebrating today? And what are your museums doing to improve women’s representation and agency, in collections, audience and workforce?