Why work still sucks for women
Work sucks for women. Not all women, but far too many. There’s the gender pay gap, where full-time working women earn 81 cents for every dollar men earn, according to the most recent data from the Census Bureau. There’s the glass ceiling that prevents women from leadership advancement, as evidenced by the fact that only 37% of leadership positions in the U.S. are held by women despite representing 47% of the workforce. Let us not forget the disproportionate harassment at work that women experience compared to men, the gender sidelining, and the exclusion from the “boys’ club.”
And if that’s not enough, there’s the additional unpaid domestic work that women are expected to do outside of the office—cooking, cleaning, and child rearing—that’s often overlooked and undervalued. That’s assuming they haven’t been displaced out of the workforce altogether, like the more than 300,000 African American women who lost employment in 2025 alone, despite being the most academically educated population in the country.
Yes, women have it bad when it comes to work, and that ain’t good. Yet these realities still persist. I say that as someone who has benefited from the injustices women have suffered at work and, for far too long, I’ve been far too quiet about it. Perhaps it’s because earlier in my career I wasn’t as aware as I should have been that they existed. Or maybe it’s because I, too, have to wrestle with the challenges of marginalization as a Black man in America, so I perceived my hands as being “too full” to fight for someone else’s equality while I’m busy fighting for my own. Or maybe I didn’t care as much because it wasn’t happening to me.
Honestly, I’m not sure which one it was or if it was a combination of them all. Whatever the case, as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King once espoused, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” And that’s exactly why we brought Stacy London on the From the Culture podcast to illuminate these wrongs and help shed light on how to make them right.
London is a multihyphenate—New York Times best-selling author, entrepreneur, fashion expert, and television personality as the cohost of TLC’s What Not to Wear. These days, however, she’s most passionate about advocating for women who are navigating the dynamics of midlife, when they’re often devalued once they age beyond their child-bearing years.
London is very vocal about the aforementioned struggles of women in work and the negotiations that women have to make about their identity when they walk through the office door. While there are social expectations for everyone to “get along,” she asserts, there are additional hardships that women have to endure if they have any ambition to climb the corporate ladder—hardships from which men are typically exempt.
During our conversation with London, I kept hearing America Ferrera’s monologue from the Barbie movie play over and over again in mind: “You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line.” This is the patriarchy, the social system where men hold the majority of power, privilege, and control in society, and it sucks. Not just for women, but for all of us.
Beyond MLK’s moral note about the importance of rooting out injustice, the patriarchy demands harmful expectations of masculine norms, which often restrict emotional development and promote mental health concerns among men. As a proof point, look no further than the loneliness epidemic we’re experiencing in young men who fall prey to the misguidance of the manosphere.
Like most things that are socially constructed, London argues that the system is the way it is because that’s the way it’s been. But that’s not how it has to be. As she underscores in our conversation on the pod, things can be different if we invest the effort to see to them differently. She, like other feminists, has maintained the tradition of calling out injustices to women and taking the subsequent actions necessary to right the wrongs.
In most cases, it starts by helping people see the world through a reality that is not their own—and that’s why we had London on. That’s why I’m writing this article. That’s why even though, admittedly, I was late to the feminism party, I’m now handing out invitations for others to join. I do all this to help others who were once like me see it differently so that we all might benefit, in work and in life more broadly. Because yes, injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.
Check out our full interview with Stacy London here.