It’s sometime after midnight on a Monday morning when Zach unlocks his phone and starts scrolling for something to bet on. He’s 26, tucked into his childhood bed at his parents’ house in Washington, D.C. He moved back in after a stin…
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.
Errands, Target runs, tennis games, and even flying to Europe—these are just some of the things employees have done while taking “soft off days.”
The idea of taking soft off days, in which you use a work day to do just about anything else, has bec…
Professional workdays are full, fast, and designed for productivity, not recovery. In Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, 80% of global workers said they don’t have enough time or energy to do their work, and workers were interrupted about every two mi…
In 2025—not long after Trump fired off executive orders that targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the workplace—the Justice Department announced the Civil Rights Fraud Initiative. Its purpose was to investigate companies and aca…
As Jennifer Harris, director of the Economy and Society Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has recently pointed out, we are at a particularly fraught moment. Rising inequality means that fewer people have spending power, creating …
Over the past few years, words that once had no place in workplace conversations have slowly entered HR agendas: menstruation, endometriosis, perimenopause, menopause, breast cancer and—more slowly—male andropause or prostate cancer. These are not passing trends. They signal a deeper shift in how we understand work and the people who do it.
For decades, work was designed around a fiction, that of the “neutral” worker, an abstract individual assumed to be fully available, consistent, rational, and unaffected by bodily constraints. But this neutrality was never real. As Caroline Criado Perez has shown in her brilliant book Invisible Women, many systems and environments have been designed around a male body treated as the default. And that includes workplaces. Hence, the implicit expectation is that women adapt to a model never designed for them, to organizational structures, as well as tools and equipment.
Yet people do not leave their bodies at the door when they enter the workplace. Hormonal cycles, pregnancy, postpartum recovery, menopause, and andropause are not “private” issues without professional consequences. They affect energy levels, cognitive load, availability, and sometimes long-term career trajectories. Their historical invisibility has come at a huge cost (albeit largely ignored) both for individuals and for organizations.
It is essential to note that gendered health is not only about biological differences. It also reveals how work itself is structured. Women, for example, experience higher rates of musculoskeletal disorders, partly because they are overrepresented in repetitive jobs and are more likely to carry a disproportionate share of unpaid caregiving and domestic labor. Work is never experienced in isolation. It is embedded in real lives, with cumulative fatigue, constraints, and vulnerabilities. Gendered health, in that sense, sits at the intersection of biology and the sociology of work.
Persistent taboos
Taboos are slowly shifting. Menstruation, endometriosis, and menopause are more visible in public debate than they were a decade ago. Yet in many organizations, silence remains the norm. Many women remain cautious about speaking openly, all too aware of the risk of being reduced to sexist stereotypes.
Male themes are as invisible if not more. Andropause, i.e. the gradual testosterone decline associated with aging, is less socially recognized than menopause. Its invisibility reinforces the myth that only women’s bodies are a “problem”. In reality, aging affects everyone. As workforces age and careers extend, organizations are increasingly confronted with more diverse, uneven, and non-linear health trajectories.
There is a structural tension here. Acknowledging gendered health can trigger unintended consequences. It can reinforce bias by framing women as less stable. In some cases, even well-designed policies—such as leave for endometriosis or pregnancy loss—are underused because employees fear stigma. In cultures that remain implicitly sexist, formal rights do not automatically translate into real usage.
A more universal approach is required
This is why a purely category-based approach has its limitations. A more effective lens may be a more universal approach to vulnerability. Rather than segmenting workers into fixed groups (“women,” “seniors,” “caregivers”), it may be more accurate to focus on life “moments”. Work lives are punctuated by predictable and unpredictable disruptions: disease, grief, separation, caregiving responsibilities, burnout, recovery periods. These situations are widespread and recurrent. Today, a majority of workers are caregivers in one way or another. And there will be more and more of them with population aging. At the same time, careers lengthen and transitions multiply. Therefore the stable, continuous and homogeneous industrial model of work no longer reflects reality.
This is where the idea of universal design comes in handy. Originally developed in disability studies, it proposes designing systems starting from the most constrained users. In practice, what improves accessibility for people with disabilities often improves usability for everyone. Applied to work, this logic invites us to rethink schedules, career paths, flexibility, and recovery periods—not as exceptions, but as structural features. The goal is robustness through inclusivity.
And we need to think differently about age
All this also requires revisiting how we think about age. Behind gendered health lies another blind spot: ageism. We still tend to treat chronological age as a proxy for capability. Yet age is a weak indicator of health, energy, or engagement. With longer life expectancy, variation within age groups is widening. A 60-year-old worker may be fully capable—or significantly constrained. The average says increasingly little.
Long term the model of the “ideal worker” is unsustainable. This fully available, always-healthy, unencumbered employee has never been representative of reality. But demographic change is making this fiction even less viable. Organizations should now be managing diversity of conditions as a structural norm.
That’s why gendered health is not a niche topic. It is an entry point into a broader question: how durable is work as currently designed? Recognizing bodies, ages, and life moments is the very condition for organizational resilience.
Warren Buffett is seldom wrong, especially regarding investment and innovation. As most of us know, the Oracle of Omaha offers wisdom that goes beyond industries, generations, and cultures.
And that wisdom, even if it seems…
According to Wells Fargo’s recent Money Study, 64% of parents with Gen Z children say their 18- to 28-year-old kids still rely on them for financial support—whether it’s for housing or other expenses.
Of the 3,773 U.S. adults surveyed at the …
It seems that change and volatility are the only things that are certain when it comes to the labor market. Jobs and professions that once seemed ‘stable’ are not immune to the forces of artificial intelligence and other technological adva…
