How to celebrate your gal pals on International Women’s Day

International Women’s Day is right around the corner, and what better way to celebrate than with your best gal pals?

Celebrated annually on 8 March, this global holiday champions women of all walks of life, and more specifically, the women’s rights movement that continues to fight for the freedoms many women enjoy today. From gender equality to reproductive rights, this holiday celebrates how far women have come and have to go.

There are many ways to celebrate womankind with your friends, including taking the time to honour female trailblazers who broke the glass ceiling as well as cutting loose and enjoying the sisterhood you’ve created with your gals.

You and your crew can paint the town red, and go on a little bar crawl to all the places offering cheap drinks in honour of the holiday, or hit the dancefloor at your favourite club and boogie the night away. If you like to sing your heart out, whether you’re good at it or not, another great way to bond with your gal pals is to head to a karaoke bar and rent out a room to sing some tunes. Bonus points if you and your crew pay homage to pop powerhouses like Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé, celebrating some of the most savvy female artists of our era.

You can also get your girls together to make some art at your local wine bar with paint-and-sip night, there’s nothing better than letting your creativity run wild over a canvas while indulging in a glass of vino or two. Oftentimes, there are also regular, sober paint nights as well as opportunities to explore different artistic mediums like taking a ceramics or sculpting class together. The best thing about making art with friends - with or without substances - is that you’re in a supportive, fun-loving environment, which is one of the best parts of sisterhood.

If you want to keep things chill with a cosy night in, try having a movie night spotlighting the works of female filmmakers, who are disproportionately underrepresented in cinema, but have slowly been shrinking the gender gap.

If you and your friends are trying to catch up on this year’s Oscar-nominated films, Celine Song’s bittersweet romance Past Lives and Justine Triet’s alpine courtroom drama Anatomy of The Fall are definite must-watches. You can also have a double feature with popular films from 2023 such as Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster Barbie or Sofia Coppola’s moving biopic Priscilla, both of which examine girlhood and what it means to be a woman in different ways.

You can also mix things up by not making female filmmakers the movie night theme, and instead, put the focus on female-centric narratives. Doing this opens up to films like Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things - also an Oscar nominee but male-directed - which follows the coming-of-age story of Emma Stone’s Frankenstein-eque character Bella Baxter. Poor Things would be another film that would be perfect for a double feature with Barbie due to their similar themes of female autonomy and awakening.

There’s also the added idea of having a more traditional, chick flick night including rom-com classics like Clueless and Bridget Jones’ Diary as well as girl power comedies like Legally Blonde and Mean Girls. These movies are almost always crowd-pleasers and perfect for a girl’s night in.

If you aren’t able to hang out with your girlfriends on International Women’s Day, you need not worry since March is also recognised as Women’s History Month, so you have a whole month to celebrate.