International Women’s Day March 2026 - NYC
4 min read
Support is something people can do privately. Advocacy is something you have to do out loud.
That distinction is the one I keep coming back to. It came from one of the panellists, Cati-Brunell Brutman, Ex-Glossier, near the start of our New York morning. DigitalGenius had gathered a room of ecommerce CX leaders for our second International Women's Day breakfast mixer, and across two panels what unfolded felt less like an event and more like an extended peer conversation about how women open doors for each other and what that work actually looks like.
I helped organize this event for the second year in a row. Last year was the first event I'd ever organized in my career, and on the day, sitting in the audience while the panels were happening, I noticed something I couldn't unsee. There wasn't a single person on those panels who looked like me, so when planning began for this year, the second panel wasn't a question. We were going to talk about how women of colour build power through community.
What real advocacy requires. Panellists kept returning to the gap between celebrating women publicly and supporting them structurally. Jenn Olsson, Associate Director of Customer Care at BaubleBar said it best: "You can say support women all day long, but if you're not actually doing it, it's defeating the purpose." The clearest moments came from panellists describing senior leaders who had advocated for them in rooms they weren't in. One CX leader, recently affected by layoffs at a beauty brand, described the experience of "people coming out of the woodwork" with introductions from women she'd met at events like this one. The visible payoff of a long invisible practice.
The cost of being the only one in the room. The second panel landed on a tension the first hadn't quite named. Chandni Bhatt, Global Head of Customer Experience at Beauty Pie, framed it as a practice, not a state to overcome. "It's a work in progress. Not a switch." I shared my own story too, of being told early in my career to change my name to "Jessica" on outbound emails because the open rates from my Caucasian colleagues were higher. I refused, got myself promoted six months later, and never looked back. The room held that alongside another panellist's softer reframe: "You're not failing because you're not shaking the table." Both were true.
The give-to-gain reframe. Ashley Harris, Senior Customer Experience Manager at Caraway Home offered the morning's most quietly radical idea. Most women in leadership, she said, pour from an empty cup. Give-to-gain doesn't only mean giving to others, or paying it forward to the next generation, but it also means giving to yourself.
I didn't leave with tidy conclusions, and that wasn't the goal. The point of the morning was the conversation itself. The panels ended with one last message for the room: "There is a community for you. You may not have found it yet. But know that it's there."
This recap is one of two from the CX Collective's International Women's Day events hosted by DigitalGenius. Special thanks to our partners at Aftership, FlavorCloud, Fuego.io, and Wyllo who made this day possible.
