Wednesday 8 March was International Women's Day, an event celebrated around the world to commemorate the struggle for women's rights.

Each year, the day is an opportunity to reflect on gender issues, inequalities, and opportunities for growth. The 2017 theme focused particularly on the latter, perhaps inspired by the surge in activism we’ve seen in recent months. The theme, #BeBoldForChange, called on everyone to step up and help create a better, more inclusive world.

The call was not just for individuals. Businesses also took part in celebrating women this year, including two popular dating apps.

eHarmony in the United States is having free communication for 4 days starting Friday March 24th and running until the end of day on Monday March 27th, 2017. No coupon code is required.

For this free communication event all you need to do is create a free account on eHarmony to start receiving matches and communicate with them. For more targeted matches based on your personality you can then take the relationship questionnaire which takes about 30 minutes to complete. From then on your eHarmony matches will take the questionnaire into account and you will receive matches with singles with whom you have the best chance of creating a long and happy relationship with. During this event no credit card is required and viewing of profile photos are not included with the free trial.

eHarmony is well know for their matching algorithm which they have created based on years of research. Based on a study by Harris Interactive, eHarmony is responsible in help creating over 2 million marriages in the United States.

For more details about this popular matchmaking service please read our eHarmony review.

According to website Tech Crunch, Tinder has been offering a dating service for its most elite users for at least six months without announcing its existence.

“Tinder Select” is just as it sounds – a dating service for those Tinder users who are high profile and the most desirable, such as celebrities, supermodels and CEOs, so they can have access to date and message other high profile users and bypass the normal user matches.

But before you get excited to join and flirt with the A-listers, you can’t. Or at least most of us can’t because Tinder has to invite you first.

About Singles in America

Now in its seventh year, Match’s annual Singles in America study asks singles across the United States to share how it feels, what it looks like, and what it means to be single today. More than 5,500 singles were surveyed in 2016. Here’s what they had to say.

Gender and feminism are on everyone’s minds. The resurgence of the feminist movement isn’t just the subject of scholarly articles and fodder for celebrity interviews - it’s changing the dating landscape in 2017.

“The annual Singles in America study has once again demonstrated new emerging trends including men’s overwhelmingly positive view of feminism and feminists, in the boardroom and the bedroom,” says Dr. Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist and Chief Scientific Advisor to Match. “We’ve captured the great spring forward in gender equality.”

Cast your mind back to 2004. The year was a big one for the blossoming industry known as social media. Facebook debuted and went on to become the world’s largest social networking platform. Tagged and Hi5 also launched in 2004, and though they remained relatively under the radar, both earned significant revenue through games and paid features.

Tagged purchased Hi5 in 2011. After renaming the parent company ‘If(we)’ and changing its focus to social app development, revenue began to drop. Plans for an IPO were also dropped. Now, six years later, social discovery platform MeetMe has acquired If(we) for $60 million in cash.

There are more dating apps on the market than you could possibly count, with new ones popping up seemingly every week. Though they cover a diverse - and sometimes outright strange - range of people and interests, the vast majority are made with heterosexual couples in mind.

Winkd is a dating app based in Sydney which just launched this month. It hopes to take a different approach and join the likes of Grindr as a successful service built by putting the LGBTQ community first.

Founders Diana Kalkoul and Neda Robat-Meily, who are both queer, found themselves frustrated with the lack of inclusivity in most popular dating apps. But rather than giving up dating apps altogether, they decided to create their own.