Why Australia's Women of Colour need to be at the forefront of International Women's Day

OPINION: As Australia marks International Women’s Day, one writer explores why Women of Colour and the topic of race can’t be left out of conversations about women’s rights.

I am a Woman of Colour. That term can look odd. 

What does ‘of colour’ mean anyway? And considering it exists in contradistinction to White women, one has to ask: isn’t White a colour?  

I moved to Australia in my 20s, but I am a brown, Indian woman from Southeast Asia. Why does that matter?  

It matters because of how much of an outsider I feel among women in Australia due to a simple, glaring factor: my race. When I appear on panels to talk about women’s issues, I find myself looking at a sea of White women, both on the stage and in the audience. 

The things we talk about - such as the gender pay gap or women’s representation - are usually couched entirely in terms of what White women are missing out on in comparison to men, despite the fact women from migrant backgrounds are more than 11 per cent less likely to be employed than White women in Australia. 

International Women’s Day will be marked in Australia on Sunday, and while events such as Sydney’s All About Women feature a diverse line-up of speakers including several Women of Colour, previous local events have included barely any or none at all. 

A White woman I once met at one of these events told me racism does not exist anymore in Australia because Waleed Aly and Miranda Tapsell are so famous. She followed that up by saying that sexism is the only real problem we have left.  

Experiences like that make me question whether Women of Colour have stories or concerns that never get heard in the mainstream. It makes me wonder why womanhood feels as though it is defined as White. Aren’t our issues also women’s issues? 

It also makes me admit that it is women themselves who are leaving us out of the conversation. And it is happening around the world. 

Only last month, Indian-American writer Saira Rao talked about how she had once been approached by a group of White women to create a feminist website that allowed women to opt-out of issues that don’t matter to them. When asked for an example of what those issues might be, the answer was “Black Lives Matter”. 

It is disheartening to see that some White women do not consider our issues to be theirs and it is painful to realise that some consider the only valid women’s concerns to be matters that impact them alone.  

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