With that context in mind, it’s probably no surprise that I can’t relate to women who recoil from the word ‘feminist.’ In the last week, someone who was raped by a stranger told me she’s not a feminist; and a friend said that she “couldn’t” be a feminist because she’s a “God-fearing woman.”

I’m left wondering: how did one of the most successful civil-rights movements in modern history become a label that so many of its own beneficiaries reject?

It appears that partisan politics, academic debates, the girlboss era, the angry-Lesbian stereotype, the Karen-caricature and fifty years of cultural baggage have managed to distort an otherwise benign word. And, frankly, women have let it happen because we have been too endlessly apologetic every time the manosphere has reared its head to say we’ve gone too far and it just wants moar, moar, moar.

Let’s get clear on something: feminism, at its core, is the belief that women deserve the same social, political, economic and personal rights and opportunities as men. That’s it. It’s not a scandalous proposition. Yet here we are with a backlash so significant that thousands of young women are declaring they want to give their vote to their husbands. Excuse me, what?!

None of this happened overnight. Every generation of women who demanded our civil rights has been told, in one form or another, that she is asking too much.

The right to vote. The right to own property. Higher education. Working outside the home. Equal pay. Credit in our own names. Reproductive autonomy. Sexual freedom. Leadership opportunities. The right to work without being sexually harassed. Apparently, women have been “too much” since the dawn of time. Which is, not unironically, the historical version of what opinionated women are still told today: You’re a lot.

The demands changed. The backlash is remarkably consistent.

How to Make a Feminist the Villain

And somewhere along the way, the argument became about more than what feminists wanted. It became about what kind of woman a feminist is.

She is shrill. Angry. Unattractive. Unfeminine. Humorless. Anti-family. Anti-marriage. Anti-men. Perpetually aggrieved. Radical. The word stopped conjuring a woman asking why she couldn’t have a bank account or attend a university and began conjuring a woman you didn’t want to sit next to at a dinner party.

That distinction matters. Because attacking an idea requires you to make an argument against it. Attacking the woman who holds the idea is much easier.

Tell women often enough that those women are angry, bitter and undesirable and you create a powerful incentive to say: I’m not one of them.

And to be clear, feminism is not above criticism. The movement has its own history of exclusion and failure. Early American women’s-rights movements frequently marginalized Black women, and later feminist movements did not always adequately represent the experiences of women of color, working-class women, lesbians and others whose lives didn’t fit neatly into the priorities of predominantly white, middle-class feminism. Those criticisms aren’t attacks on feminism. They’re part of its history, and understanding them matters. Pew’s research, for example, has found that some black Americans’ ambivalence toward the feminist label is connected to a history in which their experiences were not always represented by the mainstream movement.

But there is an enormous difference between criticizing a movement for where it has fallen short and turning that movement into a caricature.

And let’s face it, it’s worked.

The opponents of feminism accomplished something remarkable: they persuaded women to enjoy the fruits of feminism while distancing themselves from the courageous women who fought for them.

Women can vote, earn degrees, build careers, own property, get divorced, control their own money, choose whether and whom to marry, and aspire to positions their grandmothers couldn’t have imagined - and still announce, almost reflexively, proudly, But I’m not a feminist.

That may be one of the most successful anti-branding campaigns in modern history.

You don’t have to persuade women that they deserve fewer rights.

You just have to persuade them that the kind of woman who fights for those rights is someone they don’t want to be.

My Mother Taught Me What Feminism Was by Not Having It

There is another reason I have such a hard time understanding women who reject the word feminist: my mother.

I saw what the absence of feminism looks like up close.

My mother grew up wanting an independent life but she did not have that choice. She grew up in a world where a woman was expected to marry, have children, serve her husband and make the best of whatever happened after that. Economic independence wasn’t assumed. Leaving wasn’t assumed. Even the idea that a woman had the right to ask, What do I want? was secondary to what was expected of her as a wife and mother.

Today, millions of women have grown up with freedoms that would have been unimaginable to women only a few generations ago. But none of this feels particularly revolutionary anymore. And maybe that’s part of the problem.

The more successful feminism became, the easier it became to forget why feminism was necessary in the first place. If you have always had these freedoms, they don’t feel like victories. They feel like life. You don’t wake up every morning grateful that you can open a bank account without your husband’s permission. You just open a bank account.

But these freedoms didn’t spontaneously appear because society gradually became nicer to women.

Women fought for them. They organized, marched and sued. They were ridiculed, arrested, ostracized and threatened. They were called hysterical, selfish, and “unladylike.” They were told they were destroying marriage, families and society itself. And then, slowly, many of the things they were ridiculed for demanding became so ordinary that we forgot anyone ever had to demand them.

My mother taught me what feminism was by not having it, which brings me back to the word.

Women Have Surrendered Enough

When I told friends I was working on something that includes the word “feminist,” many recoiled in horror. One said: “Julia, you can’t do that! You’ll be mocked and criticized.” USE A DIFFERENT WORD, they said.

I suppose there is an argument to be made that feminism has accumulated so much baggage that perhaps we should simply move on. Call it equality. Humanism. Egalitarianism. Women’s empowerment. Find some newer, friendlier word that doesn’t make people uncomfortable.

No.

Abandoning the word doesn’t correct the caricature. It rewards it. It says that the people who spent decades turning feminist into an insult ultimately get to decide what the word means. I find it candidly abhorrent.

Feminism isn’t a political party. It doesn’t require women to agree about every issue, vote the same way, live the same way, raise their children the same way or even particularly like one another. There are feminists whose politics I disagree with. There are feminists whose behavior I find appalling. There are undoubtedly women who call themselves feminists who hate men.

So what?

We don’t typically define an entire belief system by its most obnoxious adherents. A woman behaving badly while calling herself a feminist no more changes the definition of feminism than a man behaving badly changes the definition of democracy.

So, I’m uninterested in a new word.

I’m committed to reclaiming this one.

I want women to say I’m a feminist without immediately adding a “however, comma.” Without but I love men. Without but I’m not one of those feminists. Without rushing to reassure everyone in the room that we’re reasonable or pleasant or fun at parties.

Feminism doesn’t need a new name. We need to take the original word back.

• I am a feminist because I believe a little girl should grow up knowing that her life belongs to her.

• I am a feminist because generations of women fought like hell so that my life would contain choices theirs did not.

• And I am a feminist because I want the girls coming behind us to inherit choices we haven’t even won yet.

That’s feminism. And the more you tell me I’ll be burned at the stake for it, the more I will double-down because it will just become clearer that surrendering the word was always patriarchy’s point. Burn, baby, burn!

*𝗜𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗱𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝘄𝗼𝗺𝗮𝗻, 𝗸𝗲𝗲𝗽 𝗶𝘁 𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴. Not every opinion needs to be voiced, especially if it adds to the noise.
*𝗙𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻. As investors, operators, and consumers — capital is power. Direct it intentionally.
*𝗛𝗶𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. Don’t default to the same profile. Expand the aperture.
*𝗚𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝘁, 𝗹𝗼𝘂𝗱𝗹𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗹𝘆. Don’t let contributions get absorbed or reassigned.
*𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗿𝘂𝗽𝘁 𝗯𝗶𝗮𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲. In meetings, in feedback, in performance reviews - say something.
*𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼𝗻𝗲. Focus on substance. Women shouldn’t have to package truth to make it palatable.
*𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. Collaboration scales impact; isolation protects the status quo.

Being female is draining enough - and managing the invisibility of being a middle-aged one is even more absurd. But once we are done pretending it's something to endure and instead something to fight, the more likely we are to disrupt a system that counts on our silence

.

At first I thought it was disturbing. But the answer, I think, is for everyday citizens to laugh off their techno-fascist bllsh*t for the saber rattling it is and reject it as nonsense. The idea that a software company believes it has a right to call for my sons to die in some forever war - that its company will benefit from - is ludicrous. Never mind the faux intellectualism - starting with the title, it reads like something a cartoon villain would say in a Marvel movie.

Women are 50% of the country, and we can no longer be treated as passive participants in decisions that shape both our economic future and our children’s lives. We already drive the majority of consumer spending, and within the next decade will control an unprecedented share of wealth. And the idea that we will sit quietly by and sacrifice ourselves to a future designed by a handful of unaccountable men is delusional.

Now, maybe, our current reality has you disbelieving women can control our destiny. I get it. The daily headlines are exhausting and demoralizing. But the most effective movements are born when times are bad. I mean, why bother when nothing is at stake? Women must find our fight and band together to push back against the increasingly bleak picture of the manosphere. Because despite what the news tell us, most men are not evil. They simply are not.

My final, most controversial idea, is to recognize the patriarchy's rules were never neutral, so how about we start using their weapons against them? The most obvious one has to do with appearance. I don't need to tell you that women are judged endlessly for our looks.

So, here I go: Alex Karp needs a haircut badly and he should really try harder not to jump up and down like a pinball or brag about killing civilians when he speaks - it's unbefitting of a CEO. And Peter Thiel should look into why his skin glistens like he just walked out of a sauna.

See how rude this is? Do you feel how uncomfortable you are? And potentially even offended? I don't know the answer but women need to start fighting fire-with-fire because playing nice hasn’t exactly worked.

In late January, I sued Citibank, alleging harassment and a weaponized HR division that uses interrogation tactics intended to trap employees in compromising statements that can later be used against them (among other questionable techniques). A long way of saying institutional misogyny.

Because I had enough industry credibility to organize press coverage in the Financial Times before filing, the story hit the media immediately. That was intentional. As a former professional journalist, I believe that if something will be discussed publicly, I would rather participate in shaping the narrative than sit back and let a $150 billion bank, known for its aggressive HR tactics, do it for me.

Of course, there’s an old saying: be careful what you wish for.

Within 24 hours, Citi sued me back in Texas, attempting to force the case into arbitration. They also had the audacity to call my response to being gaslit by their unhinged HR department, “irrational.” (Dear Citi Execs: I do believe psychologists call this “projection”; and well done with the sexist trope!)

At that point things got very loud, very fast. Between the legal maneuvering and press attention, I decided it was better not to look at socials - for weeks, lol.

Today, for the first time, I ventured a look.

To my surprise, it was fairly mild. Very few trolls. Which, frankly, was not what I expected. The criticisms that did appear were predictable.

The first was the usual chorus about my looks - the internet’s favorite fallback when a woman says something inconvenient. It’s pathetic and dumb, but also so routine that it barely registers, especially not to a 55yo post-menopausal woman.

The second critique is that I was naïve to think HR was my friend.

Let me be clear: I have never said HR is your friend. Anyone who has spent five minutes in corporate America, let alone 25 years, understands that HR exists to protect the firm. But there is still a meaningful difference between protecting the company and running what amount to internal hit jobs based on office politics.

Corporate politics have always existed. Self-interest - real or imagined - is part of every large organization. But that does not mean companies are free to invent narratives about employees or weaponize internal processes to justify decisions after the fact. There is still, at least for now, such a thing as employment law in this country.

In fact, just this week the Financial Times published a piece examining Citi’s investigative unit, CSIS, raising broader questions about how internal investigations at large institutions can be used against employees.

The third critique is that I happened to be promoting my book, Walking on Broken Glass, at the same time.

This genuinely made me laugh; a troll said I lost “credibility,” as if trolls are the arbiters of credibility in the first place.

Let’s unpack this: I was out of work for the first time in my adult life. Writing a book gave me something productive to do instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself. Had I done nothing, the narrative would have been that I was lazy or incapable of moving forward.

It’s also worth noting that my lawyers and Citi had been negotiating for fourteen months before things fell apart. The timing of the book had nothing to do with the lawsuit. It was simply a beautiful gift of The Universe - one Citi probably hates and will attempt to use against me in court, but which we can prove was a literal coincidence of timing.

But here’s the reality: none of these criticisms would have been leveled at a man.

Clearly, men who file lawsuits are not dissected for his appearance. No one would suggest he should have quietly accepted whatever happened to him, in fact he would be called “weak” if he did. And, certainly, no one would mock him for writing a book or building something new after losing his job.

He would be described as strategic. Resilient. Even brave.

Women, on the other hand, are expected to be quiet, grateful, and above all likable -even while we’re pushed out the door.

And since it’s International Women’s Day - the single most patronizing and trite day of the year - let’s zoom out for a bit.

Read more

Last night I watched Sharon and Kelly Osbourne accept an award on behalf of Ozzy. Two talented women, with serious accomplishments of their own, seemingly frozen in time and space, lauding a man who was, by any honest measure, deeply flawed.

It’s inconvenient for fans to remember that Ozzy was a serial abuser who attempted to kill his wife in 1989. That history is quietly smoothed over in death tributes - reframed as addiction, excess, or a “dark chapter.” Of course, people can change and forgiveness matters. But what strikes me isn’t whether Ozzy deserves forgiveness; it is how effortlessly he received it.

This is just yet another patriarchal hat trick: men are forgiven for everything, and women for nothing at all. Let the distance sink in.

This isn’t about morality. It’s about who absorbs consequences and who is insulated from them.

Consider Hillary Clinton, dragged before Congress not for her own misconduct but for her husband’s. She was forced to perform composure under humiliation — as if proximity itself were guilt. Meanwhile Bill Clinton served two terms, remained powerful, and was rehabilitated with startling ease. She paid the price. His discomfort was protected.

Or Monica Lewinsky, whose entire identity was flattened into a single scandal for decades. Her name became shorthand for shame, while the man with all the power continued to be treated as a statesman. His actions were contextualized; hers were frozen in amber. Forgiveness flowed upward. Consequences flowed down.

The same asymmetry shows up in pop culture. One halftime show, one moment, and Janet Jackson’s career was derailed over a faulty costume - her professionalism questioned, her character dissected. Justin Timberlake walked away unscathed, buoyed by apologies and opportunity. Same incident. Radically different outcomes.

Sports holds the mirror even closer. Serena Williams - one of the greatest athletes alive - is routinely policed for her tone, her expressions, her humanity. A single disputed call becomes a referendum on her character. Meanwhile John McEnroe built an entire persona on volcanic rage - smashing rackets, screaming at officials, melting down on live television - and was celebrated for it. “Fiery.” “Iconic.” “A rebel.” Serena would never have survived if she had behaved like him. The rules don’t change. The consequences do.

This dynamic is pervasive - literally steeped into everything we do and see.

I live this distance as we speak. I’m in an active lawsuit against Citigroup, and I’ve watched the familiar script unfold: a woman who defends herself is labeled “toxic,” “difficult,” or “unstable,” while the institution closes ranks, defends a system irredeemably steeped in misogyny, and waits for exhaustion to do its work.

I’ve decided to reject that script outright. Defending yourself is not pathology. Naming harm is not aggression. Refusing to absorb wrongdoing in silence is not a character flaw. Never mind that the man at the center of my lawsuit has a trail of allegations about how he treats female employees a mile long, whereas my work history is squeaky clean. But when you're a woman who won't be controlled, your credibility is put on trial before the facts ever are.

On my way out of Citi’s door, I followed the same playbook men use without hesitation: ask for clarity, ask for fairness, and request a bonus in exchange for a quiet exit—a courtesy my lawyer and I have proof is usually extended to men. It was denied.

That’s not an anomaly. It’s a calculation. Women are less likely to push back, so we are treated as if we won’t.

If this cycle is ever going to end, women must stop internalizing the lie that self-protection is something to be ashamed of - and start treating it as a responsibility. I am pushing back on this nonsense deliberately and publicly, not just for myself but so more women feel free to do the same. Not heroically. Not perfectly. Just plainly. What I hope you see from me is quite bluntly a flat f*cking refusal to internalize the sexist tropes they are throwing at me. I have zero apologies for insisting on fairness, truth, and accountability.

You might take note of the fact that I am asking for my day in court, where I can showcase my receipts, whereas Citi is trying to shove me into arbitration where they get to manage, er, manipulate the outcome. They don’t want transparency, which begs the question: What are they hiding?

The system relies on women backing down to preserve male comfort.

It weakens the moment we don’t. Because patriarchy’s most effective shield is male fragility. We are conditioned to believe holding men accountable will destroy them - that consequences are too severe, that a reckoning would be cruel. Male discomfort is treated as an emergency. Female harm is treated as background noise.

But discomfort is not abuse. Accountability is not violence. Consequences are not cruelty. Also, do we not find at least some cognitive dissonance in the fact that men are supposed to be tough, while women are the “weaker” sex?!

We are expected to withstand scrutiny, humiliation, and moral judgment without breaking. And if we do break, the fracture is treated as proof that we were unfit all along. Men are allowed context. Women are assigned character.

This is why women so often end up onstage rehabilitating men’s legacies, explaining men’s actions, cushioning men from the full weight of what they’ve done. The system depends on that labor. It depends on distance - distance between men and their harm, and proximity between women and blame.

That’s also why and I wrote our book. Walking on Broken Glass is about seeing this pattern clearly - at work, in culture, and in our own conditioned instincts - and learning how to step out of it without waiting for permission. If any of this resonates, our book is for you. A field guide. A refusal. And a reminder that we don’t have to keep playing a rigged game.

If women were granted even a fraction of the grace, redemption, and selective amnesia routinely extended to deeply flawed men, entire careers - society itself - would look different. Until then, the ritual continues: men forgiven, women frozen, and a culture that insists this imbalance is normal.

Let’s stop pretending it is. And yes, I know plenty of people — women and men — will read this and decide I’m “whining” for pointing out the double standard. Meanwhile Rep. Ro Khanna is openly noting that Leon Black is alleged in the Epstein files to have raped and bitten the genitals of a 7-year-old girl, and his name is still on a building at Dartmouth. I’m drawing the contrast this starkly on purpose. I want you to be uncomfortable. Because if your first instinct is that I’m being difficult while Black is misunderstood, you’ve just proved my point.

The system is working exactly as designed.

[Disclaimer: This is my opinion, not legal fact.]

Lots of people ask how I can be “so strong” in the face of this ugly battle with my former employer. The truth is that not everyday is easy; plus, I have a remarkable husband who is my rock. But besides that, it’s important to know that I believe I was born for this fight. It’s absolutely my life coming full circle.

You see, I worked on Wall Street for twenty years before I found myself at Citi and during that time, I had what can only be described as a fairytale existence for 15 of them. I had a deeply supportive boss; lovely colleagues; and we were free to do great work in a toxic-free environment. My experience was such that before 2021, I would have told you I was almost disbelieving of most of the stories I’d heard about financial services - the boozing, sexual harassment, gaslighting, and games.

My personal history is such that I was promoted three times while pregnant or just returning from maternity leave. Yes. And was allowed to work remotely because my team was so scattered around the country that my boss knew I would have to be on a plane all the time regardless, so why not let me live where I was happy.

And here my old team sits on some of the biggest innovations in wealth management history. Execution is not an accident when people are not miserable.

When I look back on old photos of when my boys were wee, I see joy and am reminded that I didn’t come home from work stressed out of my mind. Or in a panic that I had done something wrong or that a peer was behind the scenes trying to sabotage me. And, certainly, it’s unfathomable that the company’s HR department would weaponize an investigation that included planted evidence intended to make me think I was losing my mind.

Clearly that all changed when I started at Citi, which, looking back was akin to landing on Mars. I will not get into the unique brand of dysfunction over there except to say that I did try to get out very soon after I started. I was offered two heads of innovation roles at other firms, but it was during the 2023 U.S. regional bank crisis and both jobs evaporated in the midst of that chaos and COVID. I will also produce email evidence showing that I volunteered three times to be displaced because Citi was constantly undergoing riffs and, by then, it was obvious to both parties that I was not a match for their “culture.”

Nobody gets it more than me that at the end of the day, it’s just business!

But this story is not to litigate my case, it’s to share why I believe I was born for this. And it’s because my career is a miracle that I am deeply grateful for. I have a learning disability (dyscalculia) that I fought hard to overcome, and as someone who is the product of both grit and grace, I know what it means to always choose integrity over convenience.

When things went pear-shaped at Citi - the gaslighting, distortions, and weaponized HR machinery - I understood something profound: All those years of fair, healthy leadership taught me what “right” looks like. And when I finally encountered “wrong,” I couldn’t unsee it.

That’s Act Two But Act One Is Even More Interesting

That’s meant to explain the “work how and why” of me. But the life events that shaped my twenties, before I got into financial services, made me a far more lethal weapon.

I was born in Los Angeles, and from an early age I was around wealthy, older men. I was briefly engaged to the first CMO of Oracle, who is credited as the “inventor of SaaS marketing.” I dated an entertainment exec who was the money-guy behind some famous TV shows. I was friends with a group of men who would go on to become something like godfathers to AI.

I had, by most measures, an absurd amount of fun. I collected stories the way others gather souvenirs: small group dinner with Bill Gates (related to his quest to buy NBC bc he believed the future of the Internet was through TV), quiet Christmas Eve celebration with Jimmy Buffett, private planes, and a brief encounter with P. Diddy at a New Year’s Eve party in 1998, which our boys find hilarious and now embarrassing. (I passed him in a hallway, lol.)

But what all of that taught me had nothing to do with glamour or access. It showed me something less dramatic and far more useful: powerful, rich people aren’t mythical or terrifying. They’re just people. Flawed, strange, and often disappointing.

& I know this from writing our book, Walking on Broken Glass, Navigating the Aftermath of the Glass Ceiling: fear keeps most women from litigating, and understandably so. It’s an exhausting, demoralizing battle where the odds are not in your favor. Combined with the social conditioning inherent with women always believing we’ve done something “wrong” when we veer out of lane, well, the game is rigged.

But for me, I’d already seen behind the curtain—and, just like the Wizard of Oz ends up being a puny, frightened imp—so, too, are those I’m fighting now.

And then you have this…

A folk-rock musician named Dan Bern (Sony Music) wrote a song about me in 1992, when I was 21. It’s called Rome:

Julia, Julia
Where is your truck?
Where have you driven
With all of my luck?
Ah, but even old bullfighters
Their gravestones in sight
Must search till they unearth
One last bull to fight
And so it was with us
So near to the end
One last story to tell
One last hill to defend
One glance to avoid
One guitar to strum
One untruth to be told
One last song to be sung
And you, the most brilliant
Most driven, most keen
Jewel of a bastard
I ever have seen
And you and your turn
The good bitch of the Nile
So real to the end
Nothing left to defile

When I see those words on the page, there’s no distance between who I was then and who I am now. And in that regard, all of this was foretold. The instincts that carried me at 21 - the clarity, refusal to tolerate nonsense, and ability to read a room - is the same strength carrying me now.

Citi is my last bull to fight so if they’re not afraid, they should be.

In other words, do as we say and everything will be fine. Stay small.

These aren’t written rules. Doesn’t need to be. The system runs on fear.

Fear of being labeled difficult.
Fear of being called crazy.
Fear of reputational damage and very real possibility that you will be erased.

I understand strong women - like myself - don’t want to hear that but it’s true. I know because when I found myself in a toxic culture where I was unmoored and lacking context, I automatically fell in line with the patriarchy’s conditioning.

It didn’t work out - they burned me alive anyway.

And, when I decided to stand up for myself, my reality is that thousands of people who know nothing about me think I’m unhinged (a private citizen with a stellar 25-year track record), not the big bank where there is widespread evidence of serious corporate misconduct documented in articles that have nothing to do with me.

It would be hilarious except it’s not - too many talented women’s lives have been destroyed by the trope and I’m here to give it the swift kick in the a$$ it deserves.

Good Girl Conditioning

As Shannon Nutter and I were researching our book, several women told us they were afraid to even “like” a LinkedIn post about workplace inequity — afraid that someone senior might see it, remember it, and quietly mark them as disloyal.

Not write their own post.
Not make a comment.
Just click “like.”

Let that sink in.

Highly educated, high-earning, credentialed women — afraid of a digital thumbs-up.

From the time we are wee, women are taught that safety lives in likability. Be pleasant. Don’t be too loud, too ambitious, too certain. The “good girl” learns early that approval is protection and that stepping out of line — even subtly — can carry social cost. Over time, that conditioning doesn’t disappear; it professionalizes. It becomes tone-monitoring, over-preparing, softening language, and scanning the room for risk before expressing an opinion.

And it’s widespread.

• A 2023 Lean In / McKinsey report found that women are twice as likely as men to be described as “emotional” in performance reviews.

• Harvard research has shown that women who advocate for themselves are perceived as less likable and less hirable than men who do the same.

• A 2022 Pew study found that 42% of working women report experiencing gender-based discrimination at work, compared to 22% of men.

• Women are significantly more likely to face retaliation after reporting misconduct.

Over time, that produces something powerful: anticipatory compliance.

We don’t just respond to punishment. We expect it.

But something is shifting.

The shock and horror in the Epstein files don’t just expose individual wrongdoing. It exposes insulation. Networks. The cold-water reality is that while we’re concerned about the optics of a social media like, powerful men are elsewhere doing whatever insane thing they can conjure without expecting accountability to arrive ever.

Whatever one believes about individual actors in the Epstein situation, no one rational believes the consequences between men and women have been evenly distributed throughout history. Martha Stewart was put in jail for lying about a single personal stock trade. Meanwhile Angelo Mozilo’s fraud helped cause an $8B industry to collapse and I don’t think he was even threatened with prison time.

Women have been taught to fear social punishment for minor infractions — a raised voice, a firm boundary, a visible ambition. Meanwhile, history shows that concentrated male power faces delayed scrutiny, receives constant forgiveness, and hardly faces immediate collapse.

The double-standard is so grotesque it drives competent women to madness. Do you require the list? Zelda Fitzgerald, Frida Kahlo, Sylvia Plath, Judy Garland, Simone Weil, Anne Heche. I could go on for days.

Women will lead the way forward

It’s time to recalibrate - to admit the past does not work for the present and we are morally obligated to do something about it.

The only way out of this mess is accountability. Transparency. And collective memory. Women are uniquely positioned to get this done — not because we are morally superior, but because we have lived on the receiving end of unaccountable power for generations. We know what does and does not work.

Matriarchy, in its healthiest form, is about stewardship.

It is leadership that understands interdependence.
It is power that does not require silence to sustain itself.
It is strength that does not fear scrutiny.

“Too much” female leadership didn’t cause this mess.

Read that again before you make a snark comment about how many awful women leaders there are - I get it. My former employer is run by a woman who got a huge raise today; that irony is not lost on me.

What’s crazy is that I don’t believe she’s totally undeserving because she appears to have done a better job at the toxic mess she inherited from the ineffective men before her. Even, though, it’s my opinion she ought to look into the misogyny in her HR department.

Women need to stop apologizing and speak our truth out loud — and when enough of us stop playing it small, the game will change.

Not because we asked for equality. Because we enforced it.

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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion protected under the First Amendment.

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Women have been telling society this for centuries — and not once has it wanted to hear it.

Matriarchs are Reliable Witnesses

Women can present facts, data, witnesses, screenshots, timestamps, and receipts — and still be dismissed. We can be calm or emotional, detailed or concise, diplomatic or direct, and the reaction is the same: disbelief, minimization, doubt. This isn’t a modern problem; it’s an historical design feature. (No doubt this is where the saying, “it’s a feature, not a bug” originates from.) Put another way, the pattern we’re enduring now is the newest expression of a belief system engineered over thousands of years.

For most of recorded history, women have been considered unreliable witnesses. In ancient Greece and Rome, our testimony carried less weight. Medieval courts dismissed female accounts as emotional. Under the English common law that shaped U.S. legal systems, women were barred from testifying on issues involving property, contracts, or violence. And layered on top were biological myths: hysteria, the wandering uterus, and centuries of pseudoscience insisting women were too hormonal or fragile to be credible. These weren’t fringe ideas — they were the infrastructure of patriarchy.

And so here we are. Women are interrupted more, questioned more, and required to provide more proof than men. A man’s anger is interpreted as strength; a woman’s anger is interpreted as instability. Men are rewarded for confidence even when they’re wrong; women are penalized for accuracy when it comes with nuance. Confidence gets believed. Truth gets scrutinized. And we know it.

The Workplace Version: Modern Institutions Recreate Ancient Bias

This dynamic is everywhere in the modern workplace. HR reframes misconduct as “miscommunication.” Investigators focus on tone instead of facts. A woman who’s calm is “detached,” and a woman who’s upset is “emotional.” The credibility trap is engineered to be unwinnable. And the stronger and more competent the woman is, the faster institutions label her “abrasive,” “intimidating,” or “not a team player.” Being right — and unafraid to say so — is still the most dangerous thing a woman can be.

What makes this even more absurd is that the data consistently shows women are usually the most accurate truth-tellers in the room. Women leaders outperform men in risk recognition and governance. Women investors outperform men in returns. Women whistleblowers surface ethical breaches earlier. Women see cultural cracks long before institutions do. We have always been the early-warning system — the one they ignore until the damage is too big to hide.

A Cultural Moment: The World Is Being Rewritten

But something has shifted. Women’s credibility is rising because the evidence is now impossible to bury. #MeToo. Whistleblowers. The Epstein files. Public takedowns of corporate abuse. There are too many voices, too many stories, too much documentation. Institutions still operate on patriarchal credibility rules, but the world no longer does. It’s why I believe the backlash to the Epstein tragedy will be so momentous that we’ll actually feel the center of gravity move. Literally.

Middle-aged women are done being invisible or silent. Read the room: you’re dealing with the Aniston–Garner–Lopez class of Gen X. We’ve lived long enough to see exactly what’s happening, been brave enough to call it out, and barely tasted the equality RBG fought for before watching the patriarchy claw back ground with twice the force.

I took this from a tweet yesterday: The world isn’t getting worse — it’s getting exposed. And women are the ones holding up the light. And to the many who believe now is not the time to fight because of the Trump administration’s assault on basic human rights, I’d argue that’s precisely why it’s the perfect time. The most ardent movements occur when people are pushed to our limit, not when we’re swinging fat and happy in a canopy.

Dominion, not desire, is the purest form of patriarchal power.

I’ll add one more truth — and I say this with humility because I’m not an expert but as a victim of sustained child abuse, people believe the obsession with pedophilia among powerful men is about sex. It’s not. It’s about control. It’s about entitlement, ownership, and the belief they are untouchable — that they can take what is not theirs because they assume no one will believe their prey. Read that again.

So, here’s the part that ties back to the beginning: Women must organize to make fear flow in the other direction. The Epstein files shatter the illusion that these men were operating in darkness. They are cowards. Real strength doesn’t seek out the powerless — it protects them. Predators choose targets they believe can’t fight back, can’t speak out, or won’t be believed, which tells us everything we need to know. Their violence isn’t evidence of power; it’s evidence of fear — fear of being exposed, insignificant or losing control the minute someone tells them to stop.

And when women stop being afraid, everything changes. Movements ignite. Systems shift. Power realigns. We don’t just reach par — we raise the bar.

In 2017, I was on a fintech panel in NYC talking about if banks didn’t figure out how to hyper-digitize at scale they would be irrelevant. Of course, back then, most banks were (and sadly still are) governed by Baby Boomers who, in my mind, were alarmingly stubborn about the fact that private bank clients would also always want to do business over an “old oak desk.”

At one point, the room got heated that I was wrong but a man whose first name I only recall as Derek stood up and asked how and why I was so convinced that relevance was on the line.

I replied: '“my #GenZ sons will want nothing to do with this friction.”

At lunch, Derek found me and introduced himself as a Harvard sociologist. He proceeded to explain haptic memory. Notably, he said that GenZ’s birth as the first generation to have haptics of the smartphone made them interesting and disruptive in ways people in charge don’t understand.

Baby Boomers Won’t Go Quietly. Few Understand.

He also made a prediction that will stay with me forever, the significance of which I only realized years later: “The next ten years (starting in 2018) will be the most turbulent time since WWII because the dying men in power won’t want to give it up.”

Then he said, almost ominously, “Nobody sees this coming, but it will be very dark.”

At the time, I took this conversation and wrote my TED-style talk about why Wall Street should pay attention to NextGens - I gave it at Brandeis University, Finovate and bunch of other conferences. American Banker and a few other publications covered it at the time. But where my head was then was entirely about my sons and haptics, not boomers’ grasp on power.

But all these years later, as a fierce feminist, after COVID, non-stop banter about stolen elections, Epstein insanity and a personal experience where my employer, Citibank, attempted to frame me in an HR investigation that was unbelievably, ear-bleedingly misogynistic, it’s clear Derek knew what he was talking about when he said the next decade would be turbulent.

Here we sit with Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, and Xi — four men who, in different ways, are actively destabilizing the world order. Trump is normalizing political violence and dismantling democratic norms at home. Putin is waging a war of aggression that upends decades of international security. Netanyahu is defying global consensus and weaponizing chaos to cling to power. And Xi is redrawing geopolitical boundaries through surveillance, coercion, and economic dominance. Each one is operating from a place of grievance and entitlement, rewriting rules that kept the world relatively stable for decades. Together, they’re creating a global environment where strongmen set the terms and everyone else pays the price.

History gives us countless examples of how rough power transitions can be when the old guard believes it’s going down: the fall of European monarchies, industrial barons resisting labor reform, the backlash to civil rights, analog industries fighting digital disruption, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Church resisting the Reformation, even the early wave of #MeToo.

We are witnessing the same pattern play out again — the turbulence that comes when an old power structure realizes its grip isn’t permanent. These transitions are always messy, emotional, and full of backlash. But they are also a sign that something new is forming underneath the noise.

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The claims I finally forced myself to say out loud were already embarrassing to me because of their nature. That never seemed to matter. Being pushed out of a job I excelled at and loved 18 months ago was humiliating and destabilizing. Nobody cared. And when I asserted my rights and asked for my 2024 bonus — which was, in my opinion, denied out of sheer cruelty — still nobody cared. Never mind that it jeopardized our ability to keep our sensitive middle son in the costly school that meets his unique needs.

Mentorship or Manipulation?

The out-of-context emails I sent on my way out - the polite, deferential ones - are being treated like some kind of revelation. They aren’t. They’re evidence of how groomed and gaslit I was. And despite what the salacious headlines imply, when I say “grooming,” it wasn’t actual sex. My case is not about sexual harassment in the way most think of it. What I describe is the corporate version, which, in my experience involves psychological predation: creating a hostile work environment where powerful men build professional women up with nonstop praise, access, and performative mentorship - cultivating absolute loyalty - only to weaponize HR against them the moment those women become inconvenient. It’s a cycle of elevation and betrayal that reinforces a toxic culture and shields the very men who enable it.

The end result is a reality that plays fast and loose with women’s careers, which has downstream effects on our LIVES. Remember, this is not just about me. Dozens of talented women have been forced out of Citi since 2023 - many of whom were primary earners. Many who still can’t find work, despite exceptional résumés - because ageism, sexism, and (thanks to this administration) overt racism is alive and well. Does anyone feel bad for them? Or are we still pretending single mothers can simply “figure it out” while we blame them for even existing, without ever shaming the absent partner who was at least 50% complicit in the birth of a child.

What exactly are we doing?

Our society bends over backwards to cushion powerful men from discomfort while women who did everything right - worked hard, excelled, delivered results - are tossed aside without hesitation. Then punished again for daring to tell the truth. It’s why most women never seek justice. We accept the reality society has conditioned us to internalize - that a diminished life is somehow better than speaking up.

Trust me I know - my phone has been ringing off the hook with women whose lives have been devastated. One couldn’t stop sobbing yesterday, seven years after her “event.” Another, the primary earner, told me her family would be better off if she killed herself so her husband and daughter could get the insurance money. Yet one more has been out of work for months thanks to a takedown but can’t bring herself to tell her sister in Asia because their entire family name will be humiliated and she’s concerned her father won’t survive the news.

Is this hard to read? It should be. Don’t look away. It makes me choke with rage and is why I mustered the agency to fight back.

If Epstein’s Reach Isn’t a Wakeup Call Nothing Will Be

The latest release of the Epstein files, which is incongruously more depraved than the last, is a grim reminder that powerful men are constantly protected, their choices rationalized and forgiven, while their victims are left to navigate stigma and disbelief. We see this movie over and over.

Apparently, we can’t seem to quit the habit that lets us scrutinize women’s behavior under a forensic-grade microscope while handing men the benefit of the doubt. In a system this rigged, it’s hard to see how women are ever supposed to reach par let alone win.

The world must reckon with the fact that its long-standing trust in male leadership hasn’t earned the reverence it’s been given. Men have shown, repeatedly, that they’re not inherently better stewards of power. And if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that women are not the instability risk — male supremacy is.

Where do we go from here?

I don’t purport to have all the answers. This is a multi-faceted, multi-generational problem that won’t shake down easily. For starters, though, I believe we need more women in meaningful leadership positions. Not simply because it’s good for business but we’re a safeguard against rot. And, yes, of course women can be bad actors; the irony of my own situation where a female CEO is in charge is not lost on me. But her aside, we’ve never had women in power at scale, in numbers large enough or sustained enough to even know what a world with gender-balanced leadership looks like. That’s the point.

The only place that has embraced women leaders at any scale are New Zealand and Norway, and it’s no coincidence they consistently rank among the best places to live in the world. Intentional gender balance in political leadership and corporate governance has created a society that invests in families, education, and long-term stability — the stuff that actually makes nations strong.

Women leading at scale works. Let’s all channel Melinda Gates’ words to make this Epstein moment the reckoning we desperately need. Something has to change - not quietly, or in a DEI slide deck, but in the actual systems that decide who gets protected and who gets discarded.