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World With Women and BETC Paris asked women to set out-of-office replies promising a return in 2197
Key Takeaways
World With Women and BETC Paris launched OOO Until 2197 on 13 October 2026, the movement's day of collective action for gender equality.
Women were asked to switch on an out-of-office reply giving 14 October 2197 as their return date.
The date reflects a UN estimate that, at the current pace, equality between women and men is still 171 years away.
Elisabeth Moreno, Sarah Ourahmoune and Lucie Basch were among the public figures who activated the message, with participants sharing it on LinkedIn using #OOO2197.
Anyone who emailed certain business leaders, activists and creators on 13 October would have received an automatic reply thanking them for their message and explaining that the sender would be back on 14 October 2197, followed by the apology "Yes, 2197. Sorry for the delay." The auto reply is the centre of OOO Until 2197, a campaign from the gender equality movement World With Women and its agency BETC Paris, which stretched a single day of absence into a 171-year wait.
The number comes from the UN, which warned in September that equality between women and men is still 171 years away at the current pace, and World With Women turned that projection into the most mundane piece of office admin there is.
OOO Until 2197 gave women a ready-to-copy auto reply for 13 October, with #OOO2197 on LinkedIn
The mechanic asked women to switch on their out-of-office replies with a return date of 14 October 2197, which the campaign framed as the day they would finally come back to work, and it offered a ready-to-copy version of the message that takes seconds to set up. The suggested text reads "Thank you for your email. I am supposed to be out of office today, and back on October 14th, 2197. Yes, 2197. Sorry for the delay. The reason is simple: at the current pace, it will take another 171 years to achieve equality between women and men, according to the UN."
World With Women also asked companies to encourage their female employees to adopt the message collectively, which turned an individual auto reply into something a whole team or business could take part in, while participants were invited to share their replies on LinkedIn with the hashtag #OOO2197. To give the idea visibility on launch day, business leaders, public figures, activists and content creators switched on their messages on 13 October, including former French gender equality minister Elisabeth Moreno, Olympic boxing silver medallist Sarah Ourahmoune and entrepreneur Lucie Basch.
BETC Paris handled the creative under chief creative officer Stéphane Xiberras, with creative director Matthieu Bouilhot, copywriters Tristan Lenczner and Nicolas Richard and art directors Simon Carr and Romain Ducos, while Prose On Pixels handled production and Labo provided the sound. The 171-year figure itself comes from the UN's Gender Snapshot 2026 progress report, whose accompanying press release stated in September that "The data leaves no room for doubt: at the current pace, gender equality is still 171 years away," which gave the campaign a fresh and official number to put in every reply.
World With Women launched at ChangeNOW in March 2026 and modelled its 13 October day on Iceland in 1975
World With Women is a young movement, having launched on 30 March at the ChangeNOW summit in Paris, where Marie Eloy, Elisabeth Moreno, Sarah Ourahmoune and Gabriela Ramos were joined by around fifty other women in backing the call to put gender equality at the centre of economic and political decision-making. From the start, the founders called for a global day of mobilisation on 13 October 2026, taking inspiration from Iceland on 24 October 1975, when around nine in ten women stopped their paid and domestic work for the day.
On the day itself, women who were able to were invited to take a day of leave and join the rally in Paris at Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad, which ran from 11.30am to 3.30pm with talks, artistic performances and a collective gesture at 1pm under the line "Quand les femmes s'arrêtent, le monde s'arrête." Beyond the capital, the mobilisation reached about thirty French cities and around twenty countries, with rallies in Toulouse, Grenoble and Rennes drawing several hundred people each, and Eloy describing it as a citizens' movement and not a strike.
Turning an everyday habit into a small act of civic participation is an approach other brands have tried this year, and Patagonia did something similar when it offered customers a $100 credit for helping three people make a voting plan ahead of the US midterms. Both campaigns ask for something small that fits into an ordinary working day, and in World With Women's case the request was simply to change one setting in an email account.
The out-of-office format also meant that any reply left switched on carried the 171-year figure to whoever happened to send an email, including colleagues, clients and contacts who may never have heard of the movement. For World With Women, which went from a proposal at a Paris summit in March to its first day of action with rallies across France and abroad in October, the auto reply turned an apology most office workers write without thinking into a reminder of exactly how long the UN expects the wait for equality to be.
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