Story 242

The cause of women has reached another level since the #metoo movement. It’s causing me to consider my own position in this “battle” for equity.

I have been a defender of those treated unjustly very early on in my life. It stands to reason that I would want to support women who are unfairly treated wholeheartedly.

Yet, I haven’t been able to do so.

Not because I doubt that the dynamics are real — the sidelining, the reputational sabotage, the HR process deployed as a weapon rather than a safeguard. They are recognizable to most senior women in financial services.

I find myself keeping a distance, and I have to sit with that honestly — because I know exactly what that distancing means, I have experienced it myself and it isn’t comfortable.

I am writing this post for the women who have been quietly sitting with exactly this discomfort — trying to figure out how they feel about these issues, and sort out what to do about them.

I want to be transparent about where some of my complexity comes from, because I think it is more common than we admit.

My own mother considered me a failed woman for not having children. She spent her adult life holding a quiet, persistent grudge against her children for preventing her from having the career she had wanted — she directed it at us.

In primary school I was told to sit with my legs closed — that was proper for a girl — and not to run around, because that was what boys did. I remember thinking, with complete clarity: I wish I were a boy. It seemed so much more free.

In my adult life, both at work and at home, I have received more support from men than from women. My father and my grandfather never made me feel lesser. But women would tear each other down.

I think many of us carry these histories, and they shape how we respond to this moment — and we are not always aware of that.

As a society we have internalized a way of being that no longer fits what we want or who we are. But internalized codes do not release easily.

They have shaped our language, our instincts, our relationships for generations. That is not an excuse for inaction. It is context for why this is taking so long, and why some of us are still working out where we stand.

We need to remember that when someone makes a stand, it is because a line has been crossed for them. The stakes are high and they know it. It takes real courage to speak publicly.

Because we carry all of this, we owe it to each other to listen when someone does find the courage to speak. we should extend each other grace precisely because none of us arrived at this moment clean.

Here is the catch-22 we are in.

Staying quiet changes nothing. We know that. But speaking loudly, publicly, repeatedly — that triggers its own set of dismissals. Too aggressive. Too much. Doesn’t know when to stand down. And suddenly the message gets buried under the delivery, and we have lost the room before we’ve made the argument.

The harder truth is that this register of complaint exists partly because quieter ones were ignored. When institutions fail to acknowledge, when nothing moves — some people fight louder. It is a predictable response to being unheard.

There is a practical argument here too: when companies eliminate the people who speak up rather than address what they are saying, they do not solve the problem. They create a larger one. A person who has nothing left to lose, and no internal channel left to trust, becomes something the institution can no longer manage. The suppression strategy is also a losing strategy.

One of the issues is that we are also fighting in an environment where the gender framework has been overused, and in some cases misused, by the very people who claimed to wield it in good faith.

That has cost all of us. It has made legitimate claims harder to land.

So here we are. Too quiet and we’re invisible. Too loud and we’re dismissed. The system, it turns out, doesn’t have a preferred volume for complaints it should be committed to resolve.

I am writing this because I believe many women — like me — are still in the process of working out how they feel about all of this. It is not a failure. It is honest.

What I do know is that I would like to hear how other women are navigating this.

I do not know what to do differently.

The path forward, if there is one, is more likely to emerge from our collective experience than from any single voice.

If you have thoughts — especially if they are complicated — I would like to hear how you are navigating this.