Women's Issues

Of course women can’t flourish in a system that needs us as support pillars for someone else’s building. We’re here to prop it up, not to live in it. This is not a place that was built for us to thrive.

I hesitated because a series of unearned racial and social-class privileges makes my experience of American womanhood an overrepresented outlier, but also because I worried any woman who says she does things just because it feels good sounds entitled and not appropriately—and femininely—deferential and self-effacing.

Across the board, women are on a gerbil wheel, running to catch up—to their own expectations, to outside ideals, to men—and never quite making it.

If we focus on what makes women’s lives happier, healthier, better, more fulfilling, and more pleasurable, many other progressive goals will naturally follow, and we will have a new language with which to frame and advocate for issues of fundamental fairness and egalitarianism.

In order to be fair, these decisions must also be made in a context where men and women have genuinely equal opportunities: there is nothing fair about a situation in which women “choose” to take on the bulk of unpaid care work because they face discrimination at work or in education, as has so often been the case.

This pattern of devaluing women’s work—whether the type of work or the monetary value of the work—is an example of patriarchy: a general system that values men and their contributions more than it values women and their contributions.

Women are also asked to do more undervalued admin work than their male colleagues32 – and they say yes, because they are penalised for being ‘unlikeable’ if they say no. (This is a problem across a range of workplaces: women, and in particular ethnic minority women, do the ‘housekeeping’ – taking notes, getting the coffee, cleaning up after

Because in this rarefied world there is an unspoken but widely understood logic: girls are valuable; women are not.