International Women's Day takes place this Saturday, and will be celebrated with events across the world. The theme this year? 'Inspire Change'.
Taking that notion on board, this year at HuffPost we have decided to move the conversation on. While it's all too temping to go over the same old arguments - so many of them still far from resolved - it's also time to look to the future and celebrate those paving a way for the next generation.
Over the next few days on HuffPost UK, we'll be featuring a whole range of articles and interviews that open up new conversations around women and equality. As well as in-depth features exploring women's roles in male-dominated industries such as food, STEM and politics, we'll host interviews with women who are setting a fresh agenda for 2014, many in new industries that hadn't even been conceived when IWD first started over 100 years ago.
At Le Huffington Post, you can read blogs from women entrepreneurs, female rabbis and moviemakers. At The Brasil Post, there's a pop-up newsroom with student journalists working to produce a whole menu of content around International Women's Day. In Canada, meanwhile, the HuffPost team is focusing on women in the workplace and how their careers and roles affect their relationships and family lives. And in the US, our Making It Work series profiles successful, dynamic women who are standouts in their fields, peeling back the "hows" of their work and their life, taking away lessons we can all apply to our own.
Wherever in the world you live, one of the most positive changes we've seen during IWD's history is how women have found their voice. In the past year alone, Caroline Criado-Perez's campaign to get the Bank of England to reinstate a woman on its bank notes was certainly a high point. Meanwhile, newspapers like the Guardianhave worked with campaigner Fahma Mohamed to rally against FGM, and Yas Necati has teamed up with the Telegraph to get the sex education curriculum updated.
Off the page and onto the streets, this Saturday in London will see the Million Women Rise march, as well as the Walk In Her Shoes campaign, which was orchestrated by Sylvia and Emmeline Pankhurst's descendants, Helen and Laura. We'll be covering both here on HuffPost.
While the digital revolution has played a huge part in helping mobilise women's voices, it's impossible to ignore the hideous rise in online trolling of women in the public eye that came with it. Yet, even as I type this, there's another 'but' looming... but the same women being targeted are fighting back, using the very medium their detractors do. The trolls may think they can stop women talking, but instead they are spurring them to speak even louder.
When we use our voices collectively, whether on Twitter, on the pages of a newspaper, or marching on Parliament, it's amazing what we can achieve.
As always, we want to hear your stories, too. Leave your comments below, or contact our Blog editors (ukblogteam@huffingtonpost.com) to share your thoughts on this important date in our global calendar.