Do we need an International Men's Day too?

On the occasion of International Women’s Day, we the students of Mitrataa Foundation, gathered together to celebrate this topic. Bec led the meeting with many interesting ideas on the topic of which we were not aware.

Do we need International Women's Day?



We discussed on major questions like; why should we have International Women’s Day? Is it necessary to have International Men’s Day? And other similar questions under the topic. We came to know the theme for this year is ”Make It Happen” which means if we’re planning to do something for women ,then let’s not just make a plan, let’s make it happen.

In order to get ideas on how we involve men in discussing women rights issues we were divided into 4 groups of 4 members in each group. At the end, each group came up with different ideas to involve boys, realising that if we don’t involve them in these conversations, we will not address all of the problems facing women and girls today.

We decided to vote one idea among different ideas collected by our groups and make that our ”Make it Happen” project. Through the votes we chose to run a workshop where we will each invite 2 boys or men we know (friends, brothers, fathers, uncles, teachers, tutors). We’ll show videos, play games, share experiences with the participants. Our goal is to get active participation of male participants so that they understand and experience the importance of empowering women and the power of all of us working together. We have set one committee to run this workshop, which will be run by June.



We finished the meeting by writing a letter to an important male in our lives – friends, boyfriends, brothers, teachers etc. We wanted to focus on the fact that there are good men out there too and we should not always focus on the bad ones.



It was a fun plus knowledgeable meeting. We came to know more about equality, rights and even about development. Many things were not familiar to us and we were doing many things in the name of women empowerment blindly without even knowing what actually it means. The most interesting question that’s still in my head is “If we talk about equality, why we don’t we celebrate International Men’s Day?”



Sabitri Pathak

Class 11, A Levels 

Presenting ideas for how to involve boys and men in the conversations on issues of importance to women





Writing letters to the positive male role models in our lives