A friend texted me after an exhausting week at work. She’s the only woman on her team, and she’d been thinking about having a baby, so she asked her boss about parental leave. He told her the company didn’t offer paid leave but they could arrange unpaid leave and then closed with “everyone has to make sacrifices.” Then he left early for his son’s soccer game.
We laughed, because what else can you do? But the situation stung in a way so many women know by heart: the workplace was never really built for us. For decades, women were told the problem was that there weren’t enough of us in the room. Now we’re being told the problem is that there are too many. Let’s dive in.
Women Can’t Network
This past March, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sued a Coca-Cola distributor in New Hampshire for allegedly discriminating against male employees by hosting a women-only networking event. This is the first federal case targeting workplace diversity efforts in Trump’s second term. He’s testing how far the courts will go to punish gender-specific equity initiatives as part of his larger political agenda to dismantle all DEI programming.
For decades, women were locked out of the informal networks where power actually moved: the boys’ clubs built around golf outings, after-hours drinks, and those Mad Men style work trips where promotions were decided. None of that was treated as discrimination.
For decades, women were locked out of the informal networks where power actually moved.
Now, Coca-Cola is being accused of a federal violation for organizing a women’s networking event. What’s happening here is obvious: efforts to close gender gaps are being reframed as discrimination against men, the same way affirmative action was reframed as “unfair advantage” before it was gutted by the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling. We don’t know where this legal offensive will end, but we do know this: they’ll have to pry girls’ night from our cold, dead hands. Because as long as the system keeps shutting us out, we’ll keep finding ways to gather, organize and fight back.
Women Can’t Work
That same logic shows up in the workforce itself. Catalyst found that 42% of women who voluntarily left jobs said caregiving responsibilities, including childcare costs, were the main reason they exited. Because the workplace still treats caregiving like a private inconvenience instead of a structural reality.
As long as the system keeps shutting us out, we’ll keep finding ways to gather, organize and fight back.
And yet women are the ones who get blamed for the fallout. They are called less ambitious, less available, less serious, when in fact they are being pushed out by conditions the workplace refuses to change. The burden is always shifted back onto women to absorb, explain, and make impossible systems look normal.
That matters because it feeds the larger backlash. If women are always framed as the ones who cannot keep up, then demands for leave, childcare, flexibility, and safety start to sound like special treatment instead of basic fairness. In other words, the same culture that refuses to support women’s labor is the one most eager to punish women for naming the problem.
Continue reading over at the Women in America Substack.
Become a paid subscriber today. Because reproductive freedom can’t wait, and neither can we.
