Caleb Bond: Young people just don’t care about International Women’s Day

International Women’s Day was a huge deal yesterday ... for the media. In the real world? Not so much, writes CALEB BOND.

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I AM sure you know we yesterday marked International Women’s Day. Given all the blanket media coverage, you’d be mistaken for thinking it was a big event. But out in the real world — where women are working, studying, bringing up children and generally just enjoying life — does anybody care?

Young people don’t seem to. I caught up with some friends on Tuesday night. Guess how many said, “Gee, it’s International Women’s Day tomorrow and I can’t wait”? None.

They all had real things to worry about. One complained she wasn’t doing well enough at school and another moaned about university. Standard fare. But none were revved up about supposed inequality. They were too busy getting on with life like every other teenager, regardless of gender.

It seems the only people who have any time to waste on International Women’s Day are from a narrow band of society. Those lucky enough to tune into Q & A on Monday night were treated to an all-female panel (apart from host Tony Jones, of course). Big deal.

Tony Jones hosted an all-female panel on the ABC’s Q & A on Monday.

But the ABC talked it up like it was the best thing since sliced bread. “Look at meeeee,” they more or less screamed. “We love women so much, we made a whole panel of them! Amazing!” So desperate were they to eradicate the show of masculinity that Jones introduced the excellent Josephine Cashman as “Josephine Cash”.

Otherwise the panel was predictably stacked with lefties — the version of women they want us to listen to. And, tellingly, not one of them was under the age of 30.

It was much the same on ABC Radio yesterday, when all the male hosts were booted off and replaced with aged or ageing women.

If you can only get women on air for one day out of 365, you might want to stop the tokenistic virtue signalling and look at your internal operations. But once again, where were all the young women?

Figures in recent years show the number women at university exceed men by a sizeable margin of 20 per cent. They’re more likely to be graduating from the most intellectual courses such as law, medicine and ­biology. For them, feminism is nothing but a historic movement.

The number of women at university exceed men by about one-fifth.

It’s no wonder young feminists are increasingly latching on to minute ­issues to ­resuscitate the movement.

It’s toxic identity politics and today’s young women aren’t drawn to that because they know it will only drag them down.

International Women’s Day is one of those tokenistic attempts to revive feminism. But it’s thankfully dying of natural causes.