March is Women's History Month, and if you're in marketing, you know what that means: Every brand on earth suddenly discovers they have deep feelings about gender equity. Cue the Instagram carousels featuring girl boss quotes in a millennial pink sans-serif. Roll the commemorative product launches. Prep the press release about "celebrating women."

Obviously, Women's History Month deserves to be recognized. The stories of women who fought, built, created, and persevered deserve to be told. But most brands aren't actually telling those stories. They're slapping a pink filter on their existing content and calling it allyship.

That's not marketing, y’all. That's pinkwashing, and it's extra-crispy annoying.

What Even Is Pinkwashing?

Pinkwashing is when brands perform support for women — through campaigns, imagery, or messaging — without actually backing it up with meaningful action. It's the corporate equivalent of that friend who posts a black square on Instagram during a crisis and then never mentions it again.

You've seen it:

• Companies that run "Women in Leadership" campaigns but have zero women on their executive team

• Brands that sell pink products in March and donate 1% to "women's causes" (Which ones? Who knows!)

• Financial institutions celebrating women entrepreneurs while offering them worse loan terms than male counterparts

• That one company that posts about equal pay while actively fighting pay transparency legislation

It's rainbow capitalism's older, more passive-aggressive sister. And just like performative Pride Month participation, consumers can smell it from a mile away.

Why This Makes Me Want to Flip a Table

I've spent a big chunk of my career helping brands tell authentic stories. When I say "authentic," I don't mean "slap the word 'authentic' in your mission statement and hope for the best." I mean stories that are true. Stories backed by action, sustained by consistency, and reflected in every part of how a company operates.

Pinkwashing undermines that. It cheapens the real work that needs to be done. And worse? It insults the intelligence of the very women these brands claim to be celebrating.

Because women aren't stupid. We notice when your "girl boss" campaign features exclusively thin, white, conventionally attractive women in their twenties. We see that your "breaking barriers" content shows women in soft-focus pastels, not the messy, complicated, rage-fueled reality of actually breaking barriers. We clock the fact that you posted about the gender wage gap on March 8th and then went radio silent for the other 364 days of the year.

You want to honor women? Great. Start by treating us like we have functioning bullshit detectors.

The Anatomy of Authentic Women-Centered Marketing

So what does the real thing look like? Let's get specific, because vague platitudes about "doing better" won't cut it.

1. Walk the Walk Before You Talk the Talk

Before you launch any campaign celebrating women, audit your actual practices:

The Hard Questions:

• What percentage of your leadership team is women? Women of color? Women with disabilities?

• Do you have pay equity? Not "we're working toward it" — do you have it right now?

• Does your parental leave policy support all caregivers, or just mothers?

• Are your employee resource groups actually resourced, or are they unpaid emotional labor?

• Do you promote women at the same rate as men? What does your retention data say?

If you can't answer these questions with data, maybe you don’t want to post that pic of pink balloons in your lobby on March 1st.

2. Show, Don't Tell

Your competitors are slapping an inspirational quote overlay on a stock photo of a woman gazing thoughtfully into the distance. You don’t want to do that. You want to be awesome.

Instead, you could:

• Highlight real women in your organization doing interesting work (and pay them for their time and story)

• Share specific policy changes you've made and the outcomes

• Platform women-owned suppliers or partners you work with

• Create content that solves actual problems women face in your industry

Notice what's missing from this list? Pastel gradients. Empowerment buzzwords. Generic "you go girl" energy.

3. Embrace the Messy Middle

Authentic women-centered marketing acknowledges complexity. Women aren't a monolith. We're not all girlboss CEO types crushing it in blazers (though some of us are, and that's cool too). We're also:

• Tired

• Angry about systems that don't serve us

• Navigating caregiving responsibilities

• Dealing with ageism, racism, ableism, and a thousand other intersecting realities

• Making hard choices with imperfect options

Your marketing should reflect that reality. If every woman in your campaign looks like she just stepped out of a Goop editorial, you're doing it wrong.

4. Make It Year-Round

Here's a wild idea: What if you marketed to and about women all the time? Revolutionary, I know.

Women aren't a niche demographic. We're half the population. We control or influence 85% of consumer purchases. We're your customers, your employees, your stakeholders. Treating us like a seasonal campaign is insulting. If you can only muster energy to think about gender equity one month a year, you're not actually committed to it.

Case Study: How NOT to Do This

Here’s some notes on a real campaign I saw once upon a time (details changed to protect the guilty). A financial services company launched a Women's History Month initiative featuring a sleek landing page with inspiring quotes, a hashtag, and purple-pink branding everywhere. Sounds fine, right? Except:

• Their C-suite was 90% men

• They'd recently settled a gender discrimination lawsuit

• The "women" they highlighted were exclusively white and under 40

• The campaign ran March 1-31 and then... crickets

That's not celebrating women. That's using women as set dressing for your brand refresh. And it's gross.

What Good Looks Like

Okay, enough griping. Let's talk about how to get it right. What do women really want to see?

• A company that sponsors scholarships for women in underrepresented fields and then hires those women when they graduate

• A brand that features women entrepreneurs in their campaigns and also offers them concrete resources

• An organization that talks about work-life balance and actually has real family leave and flexible scheduling

Action. Consistency. Specificity. Follow-through. Those are the things that make women open our wallets.

Your Pinkwashing Audit Checklist

Before you hit publish on that Women's History Month content, run through this checklist. Yep, it’s free. You’re welcome.

Internal Reality Check:

• Can we back up every claim in this campaign with data about our own practices?

• Have we involved actual women (especially women of color, disabled women, LGBTQ+ women) in creating this?

• Does our visual representation show diverse ages, races, body types, and abilities?

• Would this campaign make sense any other month of the year, or does it only exist because March?

• Are we asking women to work for exposure/inspiration rather than paying them?

• Did we start working on this in December?

Content Audit:

• Does this solve a real problem or just make us feel good?

• Have we moved beyond generic empowerment language to say something specific?

• If we removed the pink filter and the calendar, would this still be meaningful content?

• Are we listening to feedback, or just broadcasting?

If you can't check most of these boxes, it might be time to sit this one out.

The Bottom Line

Please don’t think I’m saying you can't create Women's History Month content. I'm saying that if you're going to do it, do it right. Do it honestly. Do it in a way that respects the intelligence and humanity of the women you're trying to reach.

Why? Because performative allyship doesn't just fail to help — it actively sucks. It sets a low bar for what "supporting women" looks like. It lets companies check a box without doing the hard work of actual change. And it insults everyone who's putting in real effort to build more equitable organizations. (Speaking of, have you read Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations? Put it in your eyeholes and thank me later.)

Women don't need your pink ribbon. We need your payroll data. We need your promotion policies. We need you to show up when it's not trending, when there's no hashtag, when it's just Wednesday in July and you have to make the right choice even though nobody's watching.

So this March, consider this: Instead of launching a campaign about women, what if you launched a commitment to women? What if you spent the month auditing your practices, talking to your employees, and making real changes? And what if you made those changes permanent, not seasonal?

That would be something worth celebrating. And you wouldn't even need a pink logo to do it.

At Origin & Oak Creative, we help brands build authentic, culturally competent communication strategies that go beyond surface-level gestures. If you're ready to move from performative to purposeful, let's talk.