Maybe it’s me but, despite the projects I’m finishing, my attention’s been taken up by the many examples of gender inequality I read about online. To be clear, I’m focusing here on male/female stuff. Don’t even get me started on the rest!
I don’t have to tell you male/female gender inequality is real.
We can measure it in pay, power, opportunity, representation, and the frankly exhausting amount of invisible work women still carry.
But there’s another inequality I’m increasingly interested in. The one that gets inside us.
Because after decades of living and working within systems largely created around male ways of operating, women can unconsciously start measuring themselves by those same standards.
Work harder, prove yourself, be productive…
AND…
Be agreeable, but not weak. Ambitious, but not threatening. Successful, but still available to everybody who needs you.
And for Goddesses’ sake, don’t get old!
It’s a bloody exhausting way to live.
So how do we navigate gender inequality without spending our lives fighting it on its own terms?
For me, a big part of the answer is standing in our own Divine Feminine power.
And I don’t mean wafting around in a kaftan waiting for the Goddess to sort out the gender pay gap! I mean reclaiming ways of knowing, being and leading that women have too often been taught to mistrust.
Intuition alongside intellect, collaboration alongside competition, rest alongside action, relationship alongside achievement. Cyclical rather than relentless productivity.
And perhaps most importantly, inner authority rather than endless external approval.
Because there comes a point, particularly in midlife, when a woman begins to realise just how much energy she has spent trying to succeed inside definitions she never consciously chose.
That realisation can be painful, but, oh my giddy aunt, it can also be freakin’ liberating!
Gender equality absolutely requires structural change. We need fair pay, fair opportunities, representation and institutions willing to examine the inequalities built into them.
But while we’re changing the structures out there, there’s another much bigger revolution available to us.
We can stop allowing those structures to define our worth.
We can stop trying to become better versions of the women the system rewards…
And become more fully the women we actually are.
Not women becoming more like men or female superiority dressed up as “empowerment,” but something much more radical…
Women standing in their own authority, their own wisdom and their own Divine Feminine power without seeking permission.
Perhaps that’s where equality really begins, woman…
That’s where equality really begins!
Love and wild warm wishes…
For midlife women feeling out of sorts, disconnected and
who’ve reached, “There has to be more to life than this!”
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