My mum died twenty years ago and I still reach for the phone sometimes to tell her things. She worked full-time, ran a home, and somehow spread cold butter on fresh bread without tearing it. I never asked her how she felt about any of it. Whether she found it fulfilling, whether it cost her something, whether there were things she wanted that she set aside for reasons I’ll never know. I wish I had asked. I know what she gave. I don’t know what she wanted, who she was outside of what she was to me, and that’s an injustice to her memory that I cannot go back and change.
My daughter is a manager in hospitality and retail. She runs teams, navigates corporate pressure, looks after her people, and thinks analytically about organisations and human dynamics in ways I find genuinely instructive. She makes decisions under real pressure and makes them well. She has a way of reading complex situations – organisational, social, political – that is precise and often sharper than my own. I learn from her. I’m proud of her, but I’m also simply interested in who she is and how she grew to be like she is.
My daughter-in-law holds a degree and a Masters and is building a career in finance and mathematical modelling. With a son of their own, her and my son are crafting their own lives in Denmark.
Most of my clients are women. They build businesses, lead strategically, make high-stakes decisions, and operate in environments that were not designed with them in mind and often still actively resist them. These systems require them to justify their authority, credibility and ambition in ways that men in equivalent positions are never asked to. That is not evidence of their exceptional endurance. It is evidence of how warped those systems are. What strikes me is not their resilience; even framing it that way puts the weight back on them. What strikes me is their rigour. Their clarity. The accuracy of their analysis. They are right about what they see, and they build from that position anyway.
My wife, who I’ve been with for fourteen years now. She thinks differently from me – in a way that challenges me directly and makes us both better. She is intellectually fearless. She interrogates received wisdom, including mine. She has a fury about injustice that is a clear-eyed moral response to things that are genuinely wrong. We bring our different and similar skills and we combine into a great team. I’m aware she is here by choice. I try to understand what that means rather than simply feeling grateful for it.
My coach and mentor. She is the clearest strategic thinker and biggest-hearted person I know. She diagnoses problems with precision, gives direct feedback without softening it into something easier to receive, and has a way of identifying the actual question – the one underneath the one being asked – that I have not encountered in many people. She is also warm. I used to separate these things in my head, as though rigour and warmth occupied different registers. They don’t. That’s not remarkable for a woman. It’s just what intellectual honesty looks like when someone isn’t performing either quality at the expense of the other.
I benefit from systems that do not serve the women around me equally. I didn’t design those systems but I have moved through the world more easily because of them.
The inequality is structural and it requires structural change. The inequity is unjust.
Better individual attitudes from men matter, but they are not the solution. They are the floor. The floor is not the goal. Women don’t need to be championed by men who have decided to be decent. What we all need are working systems that are actively equitable and which effectively call-out and change that inequity.
The work of changing those systems belongs to all the people and institutions that hold power within them and those who are impacted by them.
That change will be hard to do since the power lies mostly in the hands of men who – unconsciously or otherwise – have been cooked in the soup of how things are. As a man, it’s hard to see the inequity because I don’t experience the effects of it.
So changing this must be a team effort too.