Marching Together: Women, Voice and the Future We Build

March arrived quietly, catching our attention as daffodils greet us along familiar paths with a golden glint of energy. It is the month that holds International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day, inviting us to pause and consider women’s lives, the ones we see, and the ones we don’t.

On this International Women’s Day, I find myself thinking about the circles of women, all connected by a shared, often hard-won voice.

First, the pioneers. The women whose thinking shifted the ground beneath our feet, who made us see children, families and communities differently. They gave us language for equality and rights, for the understanding that care and education are not private matters but public goods. Because of them, we can imagine a fairer world. And because of them we must look beyond our own borders to our sisters in Afghanistan and Iran, who are still fighting for the right to be safe, to learn, to work, to move freely, to be visible. Their courage sharpens our responsibility.

Then there are the builders. The women beside us in our working lives who hold the line every day, creating teams, defending standards, making something out of nothing and refusing to lower expectations for children or for each other. I learned what that meant as a very young single mother in the 1980s, standing outside a childcare system that had already decided I didn’t belong. Later, as a social worker in Battersea, I met mother after mother in the same place, full of hope for their children and full of ideas for their own futures, but locked out by cost, by scarcity, by low expectations. It was never about a lack of love or effort. It was about structures that did not see them. That experience never left me. It is why I decided to create the London Early Years Foundation because childcare is not a convenience, it is a question of justice. When you support a mother, you alter the trajectory of a child’s life. Change enough children’s lives and you begin to change society itself.

Finally is the quiet power. The nursery teacher who notices everything. The apprentice finding her confidence. The grandmother who holds a family together when a son is in prison. The mother who reads one more story at the end of an exhausting day and, in doing so, builds a bridge into her child’s future. Leadership lived rather than labelled. Voices that are not always loud, but always transformative.

These circles overlap and hold each other up. Their voices travel further than we think. Solidarity is not an abstract idea. It is what we do with the freedoms we have , speaking when it would be easier to stay quiet, voting, challenging, leading, and making sure the doors we have pushed open do not close behind us.

March also holds Mother’s Day, and with it comes the complicated way we talk about motherhood. For all our progress, motherhood is still too often treated as a problem to be managed, a gap in a CV, a cost to an employer, a personal choice to be squeezed around the edges of economic life. Yet we know from our work and from our communities that mothers are powerful agents of change. When mothers are supported to work, to study, to connect and to lead their children’s learning, the impact ripples outwards across generations.

This is why good childcare matters so much. Not as a policy offer, but as a statement about what and who we value. To be a mother, if you choose to be one, should never mean stepping away from your own future. It should mean stepping into a society that recognises care as collective, that invests in the Early Years, and that understands social justice begins with the youngest children and the women who hold them.

So, this International Women’s Day I am saying thank you to the pioneers, the builders and the quiet power. And I am asking myself whether I am the kind of leader who makes it easier for the next woman to stay, to grow and to lead. Because that is how change happens: not in a single moment, but in the steady movement of many voices together.

March arrives as a season. But it is also a verb.

A reminder that progress is something we do side by side across communities, across generations, across borders.

So let us keep marching.

For the women who came before us.

For the women beside us.

For the women still finding their voice.

And for the children whose futures depend on all of ours.

Let us never take for granted the freedoms we enjoy, or imagine they belong only to those of us lucky enough to live in democracies. They are not a Western privilege. They are a shared human hope and they survive only if we use our voices, together, to protect them.

I was honoured to be invited to record a short message for listeners of Akash Radio broadcasting on West London DAB to celebrate International Women’s Day. Tune in here: https://www.akashradio.co.uk/