100 Fun Facts About International Women's Day

Which fast-food chain turned its logo upside down for International Women's Day in 2018?

McDonald's. Flipped, the golden arches read as a W for women; a franchise in Lynwood, California, turned its roadside sign over and the chain did the same on its social media accounts.

The Fearless Girl statue, unveiled for International Women's Day 2017, first stood facing which New York sculpture?

Charging Bull. Its sculptor, who had once dropped the bull outside the Stock Exchange overnight without a permit, called the girl an 'advertising trick'; in 2018 she was moved there herself.

Which German socialist proposed an annual Women's Day at a 1910 conference?

Clara Zetkin. Inspired by American socialists' Woman's Day the year before, she won over delegates from 17 countries, and a million people turned out the following March.

The 1910 socialist women's conference that endorsed a Women's Day met in which city?

Copenhagen. The delegates met in a workers' hall that later became Ungdomshuset, the squatted youth house whose clearance and demolition in March 2007 set off days of rioting.

The 1910 conference that approved an International Women's Day left which detail of it undecided?

Its date. The first one, in 1911, fell on 19 March, and Americans kept theirs on the last Sunday of February for years.

Days after the first Women's Day in 1911, which disaster killed 146 workers?

Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Most of the dead were young women; workers found an exit door locked, a habit the owners blamed on theft, and the outrage pushed through new factory-safety laws.

The Petrograd women textile workers' demonstration of 8 March 1917 began which event?

February Revolution. Russia still used the Julian calendar, on which the walkout began on 23 February, so an uprising that started in March by the Western calendar carries February's name.

What slogan did Petrograd's women textile workers raise when they walked out on 8 March 1917?

Bread and Peace. They wanted an end to food shortages and to World War I; Trotsky later wrote that it had occurred to no one that Women's Day might become the first day of the revolution.

The Petrograd women's walkout of 8 March 1917 grew into a revolt that toppled which tsar a week later?

Nicholas II. He abdicated seven days after the women walked out, and the provisional government that replaced him gave Russian women the vote.

In 2019 which German state became the first to make International Women's Day a public holiday?

Berlin. The capital had fewer public holidays than any other German state, so its parliament voted to add one and picked 8 March.

Which actor launched the UN's HeForShe campaign with a 2014 speech at its New York headquarters?

Emma Watson. Newly appointed a UN Women goodwill ambassador, she sent men a 'formal invitation' to join the cause and admitted steadying her nerves by asking: if not me, who?

In which country did unions say over five million people joined a 'feminist strike' on International Women's Day 2018?

Spain. Organisers asked women to drop not just paid work but housework and childcare for the day, and the mayors of Madrid and Barcelona backed the walkout.

When China's new People's Republic made 8 March an official holiday in 1949, what were women given?

A half-day off. In 2015, though, police held five young feminists for 37 days for planning to mark the day by handing out stickers against sexual harassment on public transport.

Which war did the Soviet decree making 8 March a holiday praise women for?

World War II. The decree praised Soviet women's heroism 'at the front and at home' in what it called the Great Patriotic War, and was signed on 8 May 1965, the eve of the victory's 20th anniversary.

In 1975, the year the UN first marked International Women's Day, which city hosted its first world conference on women?

Mexico City. Women led 113 of the 133 national delegations, and at the meeting's urging the UN declared 1976 to 1985 its Decade for Women.

Which yellow flower do Italians traditionally give women on International Women's Day?

Mimosa. When Italy first marked the day nationwide in 1946, activists wanted a flower that was cheap and grew wild in the countryside, and turned down orchids as too rare and costly.

Which three colours did the Women's Social and Political Union adopt in 1908?

Purple, white and green. The scheme is credited to Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, with white for purity and green for hope, and supporters were soon wearing the colours on ribbons, badges and jewellery.

On International Women's Day 2008, Wajeha al-Huwaider posted a video of herself defying which Saudi ban on women?

Driving a car. She started inside a private compound, where women were allowed at the wheel, then turned onto the public highway on camera and asked for the ban to be lifted.

Which country observes Women's History Month in October rather than March?

Canada. October holds Persons Day, 18 October, when a 1929 appeal overturned the Supreme Court's finding that women were not 'persons' who could sit in the Senate.

Which country elected the world's first women members of parliament, 19 of them, in 1907?

Finland. Still a grand duchy under the Russian tsar, it had given all women the right both to vote and to stand for office only the year before.

A Tehran women's march on 8 March 1979 became six days of protest against what?

Mandatory hijab. Ayatollah Khomeini had told women the day before to cover up at work; as the marches grew, his aides said he meant only 'modest dress', but by the early 1980s the hijab was law.

The Soviet Hujum campaign opened on Women's Day 1927 with Uzbek women called on to burn what?

Their veils. 'Hujum' means assault, and the push to end the seclusion of women across Soviet Central Asia met a violent backlash in which many women who had unveiled were attacked or killed.

Australia's first International Women's Day rally, in 1928, was held in the Domain of which city?

Sydney. Held on 25 March, the rally was organised by communist women and called for equal pay for equal work and an eight-hour day for shop girls.

Which US president proclaimed the first National Women's History Week, timed to include International Women's Day?

Jimmy Carter. The week began as a schools project in Sonoma County, California, built around 8 March; two years after it started he took it national, and in 1987 Congress stretched it to the whole month.

On International Women's Day 2012, activists in which capital opened their country's first internet café for women only?

Kabul. The young volunteers behind it wanted a place where women could go online without fear, and named it after Sahar Gul, a 15-year-old bride who had survived torture by her in-laws.

Which country was the first to grant all women the vote in national elections, in 1893?

New Zealand. Campaigners led by Kate Sheppard sent Parliament three ever-larger petitions, the last signed by nearly 32,000 women, before the governor signed the law in September 1893.

Which European country gave women the vote in national elections only in 1971, after its men approved it by referendum?

Switzerland. Its men had voted the idea down in 1959, and one canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, went on refusing women a say in local matters until a federal court overruled it in 1990.

The US Nineteenth Amendment went into effect after which state narrowly ratified it on 18 August 1920?

Tennessee. The deciding vote came from 24-year-old Harry Burn, the legislature's youngest member, who had a letter in his pocket from his mother telling him to 'be a good boy' and back the amendment.

Who became the first woman in space, flying solo aboard Vostok 6 in June 1963?

Valentina Tereshkova. A textile-factory worker with no pilot training, she was picked because she was a keen amateur parachutist, and Vostok cosmonauts had to eject and parachute to the ground.

Who became the world's first woman elected prime minister, in 1960?

Sirimavo Bandaranaike. She had never held office when her husband, Ceylon's prime minister, was assassinated in 1959; his party persuaded her to lead it and she won the election the next year.

Which African country in 2008 became the first in the world to elect a parliament with more women than men?

Rwanda. Its constitution, written after the 1994 genocide, guaranteed women 24 of the 80 seats, and they won enough of the openly contested ones to pass the halfway mark.

In which country did 90% of women stop work for a day in October 1975?

Iceland. Fathers had to take their children to work, and five years later the country chose Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the first woman anywhere to be democratically elected head of state.

Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?

Marie Curie. The 1903 physics nomination named only her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel; tipped off by a Swedish mathematician, Pierre insisted she be included, and in 1911 she won a second prize on her own.

In 1926 Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim across which stretch of water?

English Channel. Her first try, in 1925, had failed and many doubted any woman could do it; a year later she crossed faster than any man before her and came home to a ticker-tape parade in New York.

Who is the youngest Nobel laureate in history, receiving the Peace Prize at age 17?

Malala Yousafzai. At 11 she began a diary for BBC Urdu about life under the Taliban; a gunman shot her on her school bus in 2012 for speaking up for girls' schooling, and the prize came two years later.

Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai founded which tree-planting organisation?

Green Belt Movement. Maathai paid rural Kenyan women a small sum for each seedling they raised, and the groups went on to plant more than 20 million trees before her 2004 Peace Prize.

Who became the first American woman to fly in space, aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983?

Sally Ride. NASA engineers suggested packing 100 tampons for her six-day flight and offered to design a make-up kit, while reporters asked whether she wept when things went wrong.

Who became the first African-American woman in space, as a mission specialist aboard Endeavour in 1992?

Mae Jemison. Drawn to space as a girl by Nichelle Nichols's Lieutenant Uhura, she played a lieutenant herself in a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the first real astronaut on the show.

Which Japanese climber became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, in May 1975?

Junko Tabei. An avalanche buried her in her tent on the way up; dug out unconscious by Sherpa guides, she reached the top twelve days later and went on to climb the highest peak on every continent.

In 1967 Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to run which race as an officially registered competitor?

Boston Marathon. Race official Jock Semple tried to tear off her bib number mid-race; her boyfriend, a 235-pound hammer thrower, knocked him aside and she ran on to the finish.

Which tennis champion beat 55-year-old Bobby Riggs in 1973's 'Battle of the Sexes'?

Billie Jean King. Riggs had thrashed the top-ranked Margaret Court that May; four months later King, carried into the Houston Astrodome on a gold litter, beat him in straight sets.

Ada Lovelace, often called the first computer programmer, wrote her famous notes on which calculating machine?

Analytical Engine. Charles Babbage never got it built, yet her notes set out step by step how it could work through a calculation, and guessed that such a machine might handle more than numbers.

Computing pioneer Grace Hopper, who helped create COBOL, reached which rank in the US Navy?

Rear admiral. The Navy retired her as a commander in 1966, called her back the next year for what was meant to be six months, and kept her until 1986, when at 79 she was its oldest serving officer.

Which US president nominated Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, in 1981?

Ronald Reagan. He had promised during his 1980 campaign to put a woman on the Court with one of his first picks, and the Senate confirmed his choice without a single vote against.

Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director for which film?

The Hurt Locker. One of the directors she beat was her ex-husband James Cameron, nominated for Avatar, and her Iraq War drama took Best Picture from his film as well.

Benazir Bhutto was the first woman elected to head a democratic government in which Muslim-majority country?

Pakistan. She took over her father's party after the general who deposed him had him hanged in 1979, and won the election held months after that general died in a 1988 plane crash.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa's first elected female head of state, led which country?

Liberia. She trailed football star George Weah in the first round in 2005, beat him in the run-off, and twelve years later handed the presidency over to him.

Over which body of water did Amelia Earhart disappear in 1937 during her circumnavigation attempt?

Pacific Ocean. She and navigator Fred Noonan were searching for Howland Island, a tiny coral atoll 2,600 miles from their last stop, when she radioed that the plane was running out of fuel.

Kamala Harris became the first woman to hold US presidential power while Joe Biden had what?

A colonoscopy. Biden was under anaesthetic at Walter Reed hospital on 19 November 2021, so from 10:10 to 11:35 that morning the vice president was acting president.

Photo 51, an X-ray image from Rosalind Franklin's lab, revealed the structure of which molecule?

DNA. Her student Raymond Gosling took the picture and a colleague showed it to a rival team without her permission; three men shared the 1962 Nobel Prize, four years after she died at 37.

In Bulgaria and Romania, Women's Day on 8 March doubles as the local version of which celebration?

Mother's Day customs attach to 8 March in both countries, with children giving small presents to their mothers and grandmothers.

On International Women's Day 2022 Scotland's leader posthumously apologised to people, mostly women, convicted of what?

Witchcraft convictions sent accused Scots, most of them women, to their deaths between 1563 and 1736, and Nicola Sturgeon's apology answered a campaign launched two years earlier.

Since 2014, women in many countries have marked International Women's Day by jointly producing which drink?

Beer is the shared project of International Women's Collaboration Brew Day, set up to raise the profile of women brewers and to raise funds for women's causes.

On Women's Day 2018 The New York Times launched Overlooked, a series belatedly giving remarkable women what?

Obituaries of fifteen women the paper had passed over since 1851 opened the series, which admitted that the section had long been dominated by men.

A 1913 British act that freed hunger-striking suffragettes only to rearrest them was nicknamed after which animals?

Cat and mouse described how the government seemed to toy with its prisoners, and the cruelty of repeated releases and rearrests won the suffragettes public sympathy.

Which suffragette died after stepping in front of George V's horse during the 1913 Epsom Derby?

Emily Davison ducked under the rail mid-race, and her purpose remains unclear: a return rail ticket and a ticket to a dance that evening were found on her.

Which US first lady defied pressure to soften her speech at the UN women's conference in Beijing?

Hillary Clinton spoke so bluntly about abuses of women that the host country blacked the speech out on its radio and television.

Lizzie Magie designed the game that inspired Monopoly to show which group growing rich at others' expense?

Landlords gave her 1904 Landlord's Game its name, yet Magie said she earned a mere $500 from it, while Charles Darrow, who claimed Monopoly as his own idea, became a millionaire.

In 1911, the first International Women's Day marchers in Vienna carried banners honouring which uprising?

The Paris Commune of 1871 was a socialist touchstone, and that first celebration on 19 March 1911 drew over a million people in Austria-Hungary, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.

Which suffragette was arrested at Charing Cross on 8 March 1914 while heading to speak in Trafalgar Square?

Sylvia Pankhurst, daughter of suffragette leader Emmeline, was seized on the very day that Germany first held its Women's Day on 8 March.

South Africa's National Women's Day honours women who marched in 1956 against the pass laws in which city?

Pretoria's Union Buildings, the seat of government, were the target, and the marchers left their petitions at the office doors of the prime minister.

India celebrates its National Women's Day on the birthday of which poet, nicknamed the Nightingale of India?

Sarojini Naidu was also the first Indian woman to preside over the Indian National Congress and, after independence, the first woman to govern an Indian state.

Laura X revived International Women's Day in the US with a 1969 march in which California university town?

Berkeley's march led to the Women's History Research Center, whose heirs later petitioned Congress to make March Women's History Month.

A debunked origin story ties International Women's Day to an 1857 New York protest by women who made what?

Garments are the product in the tale, yet researchers call the 1857 march a myth: the first Woman's Day was organised in 1909, at the suggestion of activist Theresa Malkiel.

Which Latin American former president became the first head of UN Women when the agency was created in 2010?

Michelle Bachelet ran the new agency until 2013, then went home to Chile and won the presidency a second time, and later became the UN's human rights chief.

Russia's 1917 Women's Day march fell on 8 March abroad but thirteen days earlier at home under which calendar?

Julian dating, named for Julius Caesar, ran thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar by then, and Russia only switched after the Bolsheviks took power.

Which activist began using the phrase Me Too in 2006, more than a decade before it became a viral hashtag?

Tarana Burke started Me Too as a programme for young survivors of sexual violence, and the hashtag took off in 2017 when actor Alyssa Milano urged women to tweet the words.

Which New York village hosted America's first women's rights convention, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke in 1848?

Seneca Falls delegates nearly dropped the demand for the vote until Frederick Douglass, the only African American present, argued for keeping it.

Which US state, nicknamed the Equality State, gave women the vote in 1869 while it was a territory?

Wyoming kept its women's suffrage law even when it could have jeopardised the territory's bid for statehood, and its official motto is Equal Rights.

Which suffragist was arrested for voting in the 1872 US presidential election and never paid her $100 fine?

Susan B. Anthony told the judge she would never pay a dollar of the penalty, and because he did not jail her she had no route to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Which American-born viscountess became the first woman to sit in Britain's House of Commons, in 1919?

Nancy Astor won the Plymouth seat her husband had to give up when he inherited a peerage, and she held it until 1945.

Which British newspaper coined the word suffragette in 1906 for militant campaigners for the vote?

Daily Mail journalist Charles Hands coined it for the militants, who embraced the name, hardened its g and joked that they meant to get the vote.

Which author of The Feminine Mystique became the first president of the National Organization for Women in 1966?

Betty Friedan built her 1963 bestseller on a survey of her college classmates, and in 1970 she organised the nationwide Women's Strike for Equality.

Rosa Parks's 1955 arrest for keeping her bus seat set off a boycott lasting over a year in which Alabama city?

Montgomery's boycott ended only when the Supreme Court ruled the bus segregation laws unconstitutional; Parks, a seamstress, was secretary of the local NAACP chapter.

Which author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had a daughter who went on to write Frankenstein?

Mary Wollstonecraft argued in 1792 that women only seemed inferior because they were denied education; she died eleven days after her daughter's birth.

Which existentialist philosopher wrote The Second Sex, a 1949 book the Vatican put on its list of banned works?

Simone de Beauvoir wrote it in about fourteen months, and the book became a starting point for second-wave feminism.

Women sewing machinists struck in 1968 at which carmaker's Dagenham plant, spurring Britain's Equal Pay Act?

Ford had graded the women who stitched its car seat covers as less skilled workers on lower pay, and their walkout eventually halted all car production at the plant.

Which daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru became India's first woman prime minister in 1966?

Indira Gandhi took her surname from her husband Feroze, who was no relation to the Mahatma, and she governed for most of the years until her assassination in 1984.

Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first woman prime minister, studied which subject at Oxford under Dorothy Hodgkin?

Chemistry led her to a short career as a research chemist, including a spell at a food firm reportedly developing emulsifiers for ice cream, before she became a barrister.

Isabel Perón became the first woman anywhere to hold the title of president in 1974, leading which country?

Argentina's vice president, a former nightclub dancer, stepped up when her husband Juan Perón died in office, and the military removed her in a 1976 coup.

Which widow of an assassinated senator was swept to the Philippine presidency by the 1986 People Power protests?

Corazon Aquino had spent most of her husband's career as a housewife raising their children, and she took office with no prior political experience.

Which Prague-born diplomat became the first woman to serve as US Secretary of State, in 1997?

Madeleine Albright arrived in America as an eleven-year-old refugee, and learned of her family's Jewish ancestry only after taking office.

Frances Perkins became the first woman in a US presidential cabinet in 1933, heading which department?

Labor was hers for twelve years, longer than any other secretary, and she helped design the Social Security Act of 1935.

Which former US first lady chaired the UN commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

Eleanor Roosevelt, widowed in 1945, became the first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights the following year and oversaw the drafting.

Which Montana politician became the first woman elected to the US Congress, in 1916?

Jeannette Rankin was the sole member of Congress to vote against declaring war on Japan in 1941, having also opposed entering the European conflict in 1917.

Which future Supreme Court justice co-founded the ACLU's Women's Rights Project?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued six sex-discrimination cases before the court she later joined, winning five of them.

Which African capital hosted the 1985 UN conference that closed the Decade for Women?

Nairobi drew more than 15,000 people, and the conference concluded that the decade's goals had not been met, so reviews were extended to the year 2000.

While researching her doctorate in 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the first known example of which objects?

Pulsars proved to be rapidly rotating neutron stars, and the 1974 Nobel Prize for the find went to her supervisor Antony Hewish, not to her.

Which astronaut refused to fly his 1962 orbital mission until Katherine Johnson had checked the computer's numbers?

John Glenn trusted the NASA mathematician over the new electronic computers, and her story reached a wide audience in the 2016 film Hidden Figures.

Which Hollywood star co-invented a frequency-hopping radio system whose principles are used in Bluetooth?

Hedy Lamarr devised it with composer George Antheil to stop enemies jamming radio-guided torpedoes, but the US Navy turned the idea down and it was suggested she sell war bonds instead.

Which physicist helped explain nuclear fission but was left out of the 1944 Nobel Prize awarded to Otto Hahn?

Lise Meitner worked out the physics with her nephew Otto Frisch, who borrowed the word fission from biology, and she was nominated for Nobel Prizes dozens of times without winning.

Florence Nightingale earned the nickname the Lady with the Lamp while organising nurses during which war?

The Crimean War made her famous, but she was also a pioneering statistician who used a rose-shaped diagram, a cousin of the pie chart, to argue for sanitary reform.

Which 14-year-old gymnast was awarded the first perfect 10 in Olympic history at the 1976 Montreal Games?

Nadia Comaneci's bars routine caught out the scoreboard maker, which had been told a 10 was impossible and had not programmed its display to show one.

Journalist Nellie Bly circled the globe in 72 days in 1889–90 to beat the record of which fictional traveller?

Phileas Fogg, hero of Jules Verne's novel, took eighty days; Bly had earlier made her name by feigning insanity to expose conditions inside a New York asylum.

Which author of Beloved became the first Black woman of any nationality to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Toni Morrison won the 1993 prize five years after Beloved earned her a Pulitzer, having earlier been the first Black woman senior fiction editor at Random House.

Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman to win which top prize in mathematics, in 2014?

Fields Medal judges cited her work on the geometry of Riemann surfaces; as a teenager she had twice won gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad, once with a perfect score.

Which Wall Street stockbroker became the first woman nominated for US president, in 1872?

Victoria Woodhull was arrested on obscenity charges a few days before the vote, and at 34 she would have been too young to take office anyway.

Stephanie Kwolek invented which DuPont fibre, five times stronger than steel by weight, while seeking lighter tyres?

Kevlar grew out of her 1960s search for a light fibre to replace the steel in tyres, and it went on into firefighters' boots, hockey sticks and armoured cars.

Which animals did Jane Goodall watch making tools at Gombe, overturning the belief that only humans did so?

Chimpanzees stripped the leaves from twigs to fish termites out of their mounds, and Goodall gave her subjects names such as David Greybeard.

Tu Youyou won a 2015 Nobel Prize for extracting artemisinin from sweet wormwood, a treatment for which disease?

Malaria was felling soldiers in the Vietnam War when her secret project began in 1967, and a fourth-century text gave her the idea of extracting the drug cold.