Like the evolution of St Patrick's Day from a few miserable floats down Main Street to a three-day extravaganza, International Women's Day has ballooned into a weekend of festivities, with speeches from the Taoiseach and Tánaiste, power breakfasts in five-star hotels and a Women's Concert at the NCH.
Corporate Ireland's co-opting of March 8 is open to criticism, but it would be more palatable if it were matched by serious gains in equality.
Compared to 50 or even 20 years ago, women are more visible in public life, but elsewhere the march of progress goes backwards.
From February's successful relaunch of Playboy magazine, complete with nude Bunnies, Playmates and racy content, to the ubiquity of the so called 'naked dress' at the Oscar after-parties, it seems that naff, misogynistic or anachronistic representations of women are back in fashion and women are sex objects once again.
Forty-year-old Olivia Wilde, a successful actress, producer and mother of two, exposed her knickers in the manner of a desperate reality TV star looking for a break.
Zoe Kravitz wasn't even wearing underwear, as the cutout on the derrière of her black dress revealed. Yet no male actor, young or old, felt the need to display their naked bodies.
Are women answering some primal urge to present as arm candy, objectified by the male gaze, or is semi-nudity just a pragmatic response to an industry that values female sex appeal above all else?
Smiley Stevens, Playboy's creative director, might give us a clue as she enthuses about the mag's rebirth. 'I think that the reaction has been amazing and super positive. We were kind of testing the waters a little bit - seeing, you know, what the appetite was like...
'It definitely feels like there is an appetite for Playboy to come back and push boundaries again,' she added.
Sing Hallelujah. Is this what Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington fought for, or Emmeline Pankhurst in the UK?
Or so that a movie about prostitutes, or 'sex workers' as they are more politely known - an orgy of flesh and violence devoid of comment about the risks these women run with their health and safety - would clean up at the 2025 Oscars?
Anora follows in the footsteps of Pretty Woman by sanitising the 'oldest profession' as a potentially canny career move for a woman. The success of the Julia Roberts and Richard Gere star vehicle saw an influx of impressionable young women into LA to try their hand at streetwalking. Will Anora's legacy also be to swell the ranks of the sex industry?
An Ipsos survey across 30 countries to mark International Women's Day shows that young men have more negative views of gender equality than older generations, and that many believe they're being discriminated against.
But what have the devoted followers of Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson to rail about in a world that serves up women on decorative platters, entrenching antediluvian 'Me Tarzan, You Jane' gender roles?
What have they to fear from the modern trend where domestic life, embodied by the so-called Trad Wife busily bottling preserves, is held up as the ultimate in female accomplishment? These could be signs that society is returning to their version of a prelapsarian idyll, where men were men and women were taken.
Far from female empowerment going too far and emasculating men, it hasn't gone far enough.
