International Women’s Day always lands for me with a mixture of gratitude and discomfort. Gratitude, because women deserve to be celebrated: our work, our leadership, our emotional labour, our resilience, our creativity, the unseen scaffolding we hold up in homes, businesses, and communities. And discomfort, because I’m not sure our worth should be condensed into one day. It doesn’t speak to wellness.
When we centre equality on a single day, we risk turning something structural into something ceremonial. We risk applause without architecture, celebration without change. Equality cannot be symbolic – it has to be systemic.
I always say no to a “Women in Business” award. Not because I don’t value women in business – I absolutely do – but because I’m wary of separation masquerading as progress. I don’t want a side category. I want the main stage to be equal. What we really need isn’t a spotlight; it’s integration, consistency, and something less tokenistic.
The Therapy Room Tells the Truth
In the therapy room, gender politics stop being theoretical and start feeling very real on a granular level. I sit with women who are exhausted from being everything to everyone, carrying invisible loads, being the go-to person for making stuff happen. Women navigating leadership whilst quietly calculating whether they’re being “too much” or “not enough,” or calculating the risk of not doing so.
I also sit with men who feel the opposite side of the same pressure: men taught that strength means silence, resilience; that vulnerability is indulgence, softness is the enemy, and emotional literacy is optional – a nice to have. The same system that narrows women’s opportunities often narrows men’s, but we don’t celebrate that on ‘International Men’s Day’. I hope we can all agree that would be deeply reductive.
If we talk about women without talking about men, we flatten the conversation. If we talk about power without talking about culture, we miss the point. Equality is not anti-men; it is anti-limitation – and limitation hurts everyone.
In How to Grow Through What You Go Through, I wrote about the importance of allowing ourselves to be fully human: messy, contradictory, imperfect, capable of strength and softness in the same breath. That work is not gendered; it’s human.
Leadership and the Myth of Having to Prove It
As a CEO, I am aware of the unspoken rules that sometimes still run beneath the surface. The extra preparation, the double-checking, the subtle awareness of tone and presence. Wondering if I can let myself cry in front of our male MD and being afraid not of his response, but of what it means for me as a woman if I do. (Anyway, I did – and I do, and always will if I need to – and thankfully he does an impressive job of not minimising or catastrophising, just accepting. But I know he is a minority.)
These are not complaints; they are observations of reality. Progress has been made, but cultural residue lingers. And yet I don’t want my daughters, nieces, or sons to inherit the world as it is – a world where leadership is still coded as masculine and care as feminine. Where ambition is apologised for in women, or vulnerability is hidden and emotional intelligence dismissed in men.
I don’t want them to need a designated day to feel visible. I want them to live in structures that are inherently fair.
Motherhood, Aunthood, and Watching the Next Generation
I am raising children and my sister’s gorgeous nieces, who are watching closely. They are absorbing how we speak about success, how we divide domestic labour, who gets interrupted, who really holds the load, who is encouraged to take up space, and who is told to be careful and play small.
They are also watching how we respond to vulnerability: whether boys are allowed to cry without shame, whether girls are allowed to be ambitious without apology. The world they inherit will not be shaped by hashtags; it will be shaped by habits, experiences, and what happens in their own lives – who they watch and who inspires them.
So if International Women’s Day is to mean anything, it must invite us beyond performance. It needs to push us to examine:
- Pay gaps that still exist
- Emotional labour that still skews
- Leadership pipelines that still favour familiarity
- Cultural scripts that still constrain men and women differently
It must push us to change systems, not just language – not just a pretty picture of all the women we love and admire.
Everyday Equality
What would equality look like if it were truly embedded? Women’s voices do not need amplification because they are already heard. Men feel permitted to express fear or tenderness without it costing them status. Leadership is measured not by dominance, but by steadiness, relational intelligence, and being good at what you do.
Care work is valued economically and culturally. Mental health is recognised as belonging to everyone – not gendered, not stigmatised.
At Self Space, this is what we are trying to build in our own way: a culture where strength includes softness, where ambition can coexist with care, where nobody has to perform invulnerability. Not because it is Women’s Day, but because it is Tuesday.
Beyond the Applause
So yes – today, celebrate women. Promote them, pay them properly, back their businesses, mentor them, share their work. But tomorrow, keep going. Invite men into emotional fluency. Challenge the scripts that limit them too. Question the systems that reward burnout and punish care.
Equality is not about elevating one side of the scale – it is about rebuilding the scale altogether. And that work is not seasonal. It is everyday.
Where’s your head at?