International Women's Day
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100 free International Women's Day trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free International Women's Day trivia questions with answers. International Women's Day has been marked on 8 March for over a century, but most people know little about how it began. This quiz walks through the whole story: the 1909 Woman's Day in New York, Clara Zetkin's 1910 proposal, the Petrograd textile workers whose walkout toppled a tsar, the day's decades as a communist holiday, and its adoption by the United Nations in 1975. It also covers the traditions that grew up around it, from mimosa flowers in Italy to the purple, white and green of the suffragettes. The second half celebrates the firsts: the first woman in space, the first female prime minister and president, the first woman to run Boston, summit Everest, win a Nobel Prize and sit on the US Supreme Court. Use it for a classroom, an office event or a pub quiz on 8 March. Every answer was checked against a primary or encyclopaedic source and the source is cited under each explanation, so you can trust what you read out.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which fast-food chain turned its logo upside down for International Women's Day in 2018?
McDonald's
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.
Q 02The Fearless Girl statue, unveiled for International Women's Day 2017, first stood facing which New York sculpture?
Charging Bull
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.
Q 03Which German socialist proposed an annual Women's Day at a 1910 conference?
Clara Zetkin
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.
Q 04The 1910 socialist women's conference that endorsed a Women's Day met in which city?
Copenhagen
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.
Q 05The 1910 conference that approved an International Women's Day left which detail of it undecided?
Its date
Its date. The first one, in 1911, fell on 19 March, and Americans kept theirs on the last Sunday of February for years.
Q 06Days after the first Women's Day in 1911, which disaster killed 146 workers?
Triangle Shirtwaist fire
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.
Q 07The Petrograd women textile workers' demonstration of 8 March 1917 began which event?
February Revolution
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.
Q 08What slogan did Petrograd's women textile workers raise when they walked out on 8 March 1917?
Bread and Peace
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.
Q 09The Petrograd women's walkout of 8 March 1917 grew into a revolt that toppled which tsar a week later?
Nicholas II
Nicholas II. He abdicated seven days after the women walked out, and the provisional government that replaced him gave Russian women the vote.
Q 10In 2019 which German state became the first to make International Women's Day a public holiday?
Berlin
Berlin. The capital had fewer public holidays than any other German state, so its parliament voted to add one and picked 8 March.
Q 11Which actor launched the UN's HeForShe campaign with a 2014 speech at its New York headquarters?
Emma Watson
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?
Q 12In which country did unions say over five million people joined a 'feminist strike' on International Women's Day 2018?
Spain
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.
Q 13When China's new People's Republic made 8 March an official holiday in 1949, what were women given?
A half-day off
Q 21A Tehran women's march on 8 March 1979 became six days of protest against what?
Mandatory hijab
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.
Q 22The Soviet Hujum campaign opened on Women's Day 1927 with Uzbek women called on to burn what?
Their veils
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.
Q 23Australia's first International Women's Day rally, in 1928, was held in the Domain of which city?
Sydney
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.
Q 14Which war did the Soviet decree making 8 March a holiday praise women for?
World War II
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.
Q 15In 1975, the year the UN first marked International Women's Day, which city hosted its first world conference on women?
Mexico City
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.
Q 16Which yellow flower do Italians traditionally give women on International Women's Day?
Mimosa
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.
Q 17Which three colours did the Women's Social and Political Union adopt in 1908?
Purple, white and green
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.
Q 18On International Women's Day 2008, Wajeha al-Huwaider posted a video of herself defying which Saudi ban on women?
Driving a car
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.
Q 19Which country observes Women's History Month in October rather than March?
Canada
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.
Q 20Which country elected the world's first women members of parliament, 19 of them, in 1907?
Finland
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.
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.
Q 24Which US president proclaimed the first National Women's History Week, timed to include International Women's Day?
Jimmy Carter
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.
Q 25On International Women's Day 2012, activists in which capital opened their country's first internet café for women only?
Kabul
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.
Q 26Which country was the first to grant all women the vote in national elections, in 1893?
New Zealand
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.
Q 27Which European country gave women the vote in national elections only in 1971, after its men approved it by referendum?
Switzerland
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.
Q 28The US Nineteenth Amendment went into effect after which state narrowly ratified it on 18 August 1920?
Tennessee
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.
Q 29Who became the first woman in space, flying solo aboard Vostok 6 in June 1963?
Valentina Tereshkova
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.
Q 30Who became the world's first woman elected prime minister, in 1960?
Sirimavo Bandaranaike
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.