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The film I still haven’t seen

I don’t want to host a screening.

That is the simplest explanation for why I still have not watched No Country for Mothers, a new documentary investigating how profoundly America fails to support mothers.

I looked for screenings near me. Most of what I found were virtual events held at times that did not work for my schedule. I have a strong community of women, many of whom are deeply feminist, but not all of them want children. Not all of them necessarily want to gather to watch a documentary about motherhood. And at 16 weeks pregnant, while running a business and preparing for an enormous life transition, I honestly do not want to organize another fucking thing.

The film’s distribution strategy is intentional. No Country for Mothers is not currently available for individual viewing. Moms First, the organization behind it, wants mothers to watch together, talk in real time, and turn their private experiences into collective action. To access the film as a host, you create an event, gather attendees (the organization recommends at least five), and receive a screening code.

I understand the strategy. I even admire parts of it. Motherhood is deeply isolating, and policy change rarely begins with people sitting alone in their houses.

But I like watching documentaries alone.

I want to take in the information, process it privately, form my own opinion, and then discuss it with other people to take action. That is how I learn. That is how I engage most meaningfully with difficult ideas.

Why should I have to change how I process information to accommodate an organization that is supposed to be advocating for me?

It may seem like a small complaint about how a film was released. But the more I thought about it, the more it felt connected to something larger.

Even movements advocating for mothers can design one preferred form of participation and mistake it for universal access. And even our most progressive conversations about working mothers still seem to imagine that every working mother has an employer.

Where is the woman who employs herself?

Over the past few weeks, I have listened to Reshma Saujani, the founder of Moms First and an executive producer of the documentary, speak across podcasts about childcare, paid leave, maternal health, and the economic consequences of pushing mothers out of the workforce.

I have admired Reshma’s work for years. In an earlier essay about family planning and innovation, I described her as an orchestrator: someone connecting policy, corporate action, and cultural storytelling to address different parts of the same problem. I still believe that.

Moms First advocates for government-funded paid leave, affordable childcare, and better public systems. It has also built tools to help parents navigate state benefits. But much of its public research, language, and organizing (like much of the broader motherhood movement) continually returns to the employer-employee relationship: how employers retain mothers, how workplaces provide childcare benefits, how employees learn what they are entitled to, and what companies should do differently.

Perhaps this is why the omission surprises me so much: Reshma’s own career does not fit neatly inside a conventional employer-employee model. She is a founder and CEO, an author, a speaker, a podcast host, and someone who has built multiple organizations and bodies of work. Her professional life reflects the kind of entrepreneurial, multidisciplinary path more women are pursuing. And yet the more I hear her speak about mothers and work, the less I hear that reality reflected in the talking points. The conversation keeps returning to what employers should provide and how employees can remain in the workforce, with far less attention paid to the women already working beyond that structure.

That employer-focused work matters. It has helped make the costs of America’s care crisis harder to ignore. But it still leaves a growing category of working mothers outside the frame.

Where is the freelancer? The consultant? The creator? The small-business owner?

How about the venture-backed founder who might have raised millions for her company but still has no company-sponsored maternity leave waiting for her?

Where is the mother who is both the person giving birth and the person responsible for making payroll, retaining clients, creating revenue, and ensuring the work continues?

What happens when the mother and the employer are the same person?

My very proper maternity leave

I am currently pregnant with my first child, a baby girl (!!!!!!!!!) due January 6 (lol).

I have successfully built two businesses over the course of my career. I know how to see around corners, plan for uncertainty, and create the conditions for something to work. So when my husband and I began talking seriously about having a baby roughly a year and a half before we began baby-making, I approached maternity leave with the same instinct.

Almost immediately, I developed a slightly self-righteous need to ensure that I could take a “proper” maternity leave.

I had built businesses from the ground up. I worked hard. I was responsible. (I can do ANYTHING. OK?!!) Therefore, I was going to do whatever was necessary to give myself the three to six months completely off that I believed I was owed.

I treated it like another complex problem I could solve through preparation.

I searched California government websites. I read Reddit threads and discussion boards where other self-employed mothers compared notes about what they had done. I tried to find the version of the system that applied to me.

Here’s what I learned: California does have a Disability Insurance Elective Coverage program for self-employed people, independent contractors, and small-business owners. If you enroll early enough, it can provide disability benefits related to pregnancy and childbirth, followed by up to eight weeks of Paid Family Leave for bonding. In 2026, the maximum weekly benefit is $1,765. Benefits are based on previously reported net profits, and the current premium is 8.84% of net profit. Participants are usually required to have been in the program for at least six months before receiving benefits and generally must remain enrolled for two full calendar years.

For me, the maximum benefit would replace less than half of what I normally earn.

That does not make it meaningless. It does make it insufficient as the foundation of an actual leave plan, especially when living in Los Angeles, preparing for a new baby, and operating a business whose income cannot be separated cleanly from my participation.

The program attempts to replace a portion of lost income. It does not account for the clients I might lose, the pipeline that might slow, the relationships that need to be maintained, or the future revenue affected when the person delivering the work disappears.

And you essentially have to know about it early enough to set up systems (like payroll for yourself) before becoming pregnant to ensure you CAN enroll. Make it make sense.

So, as you might assume, the Reddit threads quickly moved from “Here is what the state offers” to “Here is how women privately compensate for what the state does not.”

That broadly included:

• Rely on your partner’s salary.

• Ask your parents, family, friends for help.

• Hire a night nurse or postpartum support.

• Build enough savings to cover the gap.

• Find a way to share overnight feeding.

• Hire an executive assistant or train someone to take your place.

• Accept that you may need to return to work earlier than you wanted.

At first, that made me fucking furious.

Was nobody else this angry? Why did self-employment seem to mean silently agreeing to absorb every financial, physical, and operational consequence of having a child?

So I started calling women.

“How the fuck did you do this?”

I reached out to self-employed women in my network who had businesses similar to mine and already had children. I got on the phone and asked them directly: How the fuck did you do this?

Nearly all of them agreed that the lack of support was insane. But what surprised me was how few had interpreted it as something they should have been protected from.

Their response was usually some version of: That is simply one of the risks you take when you work for yourself. You get the autonomy. You accept the consequences.

Some had taken two weeks completely off and then slowly returned to work. Most of those women had money for childcare, nearby family support, or both.

One had taken almost a full year away because her household could rely on her partner’s salary, although even she occasionally accepted freelance work.

Many told me that they wanted to return sooner than they had anticipated. They missed their work. They wanted to use a different part of their brains. They wanted to reconnect with the ideas, relationships, and identities that existed outside the totalizing experience of caring for a newborn.

Those conversations complicated something I had been holding very tightly.

I had equated preparedness with disappearance.

A responsible mother would create enough financial security to stop working completely. A proper maternity leave would last three to six months. Anything less would mean I had failed to plan, prioritized work too heavily, or underestimated what becoming a mother would require.

But what if I want to work?

What if returning incrementally feels better to me than vanishing and then abruptly reappearing months later?

What if some parts of my business continue, others stop, and the shape of my working life changes repeatedly as my daughter and I get to know each other?

Now that I have accepted that possibility, I have started sharing my plan with friends who are already mothers or are also expecting.

Sometimes, the response is immediate understanding: “That makes complete sense for you. You’re going to be fine.”

Other times, it is just: “Oh.”

A pause. A slight hesitation. A reaction that is not explicitly judgmental but still makes me aware that I am deviating from an accepted script.

I cannot always tell whether someone is worried about me, questioning my expectations, or simply unable to imagine wanting what I want. I am still living inside these conversations, so I do not yet have perfect language for how they make me feel.

But I can feel the gap between my decision and the version of good motherhood we have been taught to recognize.

Choice is not a number of weeks

The injustice is not that every mother cannot take the same six-month leave. The injustice is that we lack the material conditions to determine what we actually want.

Two women may both return to business as usual two weeks after giving birth. One is there because she misses her work, has recovered well, has reliable support, and genuinely wants to participate. The other is there because her savings are disappearing and rent is due.

Their calendars look identical.

The power underneath them is entirely different.

A real system of support would not dictate one correct amount of leave. It would give mothers enough financial security, accessible care, information, and flexibility to make (and remake) their own decisions.

I may believe today that I want to begin working again after two weeks and feel completely differently after giving birth. I have no fucking idea.

My recovery may be harder than expected. Breastfeeding may consume more of my body and time than I can currently comprehend. I may want more distance from work. I may want less. My baby may have needs we cannot anticipate.

The power is not in predicting the correct plan now. It is in having enough support to let the plan change without that change becoming a financial catastrophe.

The support behind my independence

I pride myself on being independent and self-sufficient, particularly in my work. Pregnancy is already forcing me to confront the limitations of that identity.

My husband and I are incredibly fortunate to have two sets of loving parents who want to be involved. To make the version of work and motherhood I am imagining possible, I have to invite them in.

I have to relinquish some control.

My parents will likely provide much of our early support, and are moving from New Jersey to California to do so. They can help with household chores, errands, food (the good fortune of my dad being a chef is not lost on me), and the countless practical tasks that make healing and caring for a newborn possible. My mom can support me as I figure out the more vulnerable things like breastfeeding, as she’s the only person who can hold space for my sharpness without personalizing it when I’m incredibly frustrated or annoyed. My husband’s parents will also come into town for 2-4 weeks at a time to help us with whatever else we cannot yet forsee.

I am exploring working with a postpartum doula whose attention can remain partly focused on me (not only the baby) and on my physical and emotional process of becoming a mother. (If you know of a good one based in Los Angeles, holler!!)

My husband receives eight weeks of paternity leave that he can divide as needed. We are considering having him take most of it upfront so that he can carry more while I gradually reconnect with work. In that process, I will need to trust him to figure it out and be ok with the job getting done differently than I might have gone about it.

The goal is not to optimize the newborn stage. It is to find our rituals, routines, systems, and flow.

The support I receive will be a major reason I can return sooner. That needs to be named honestly. I will not be doing this because I am unusually capable, disciplined, or enlightened.

I will be doing it because other people are carrying things with me.

I feel deeply lucky to have that because I know family support is not public infrastructure. A care system cannot depend on whether someone’s parents are alive, healthy, geographically close, financially stable, emotionally safe, and willing to help.

What I am actually pausing

My plan is not to shut down my business.

I expect to continue working with my existing monthly retainer clients. My research will continue. A few other special projects already underway will move forward to keep momentum.

The primary offering I will pause is my project-based, three-month advisory program. I expect to accept the final client for that work around mid-September and reopen it sometime in mid-to-late February, depending entirely on how I feel.

That is my version of leave right now. Not a complete disappearance. A reshaping.

I can imagine it partly because I have intentionally designed a business around women and gender-expansive people. When I tell my clients I am pregnant, they say:

“We will figure it out.”

“I cannot wait to meet her.”

“She can be on the calls.”

“How incredible that she gets to grow up hearing these conversations.”

I initially worried about how I would prevent motherhood from interfering with the professional environment I had created. My clients immediately imagined my daughter as part of it.

And they are fucking right.

She may grow up hearing women negotiate, build businesses, leave jobs, raise money, claim ownership, reconsider their ambitions, and create new definitions of success and ease.

She may see work as something that can harmoniously integrate with life rather than something women can only participate in by hiding the evidence that they have one.

That is a bright spot and motivator for me. It is also the product of choices I have been privileged enough to make: choosing my clients, controlling my schedule, retaining ownership of my work, and designing a culture in which motherhood is not interpreted as a loss of seriousness.

I have written before that visibility is not the same as power. Ownership is what gives us control, autonomy, and the ability to benefit from what we build. But motherhood reveals the other side of ownership. When you own the business, you also own the interruption.

There is no employer automatically continuing your salary. No HR department administering your leave. No larger operating system absorbing the effects of your absence.

Ownership gives me more control over how I work. It also leaves me responsible for privately financing nearly every condition that makes that control possible. My autonomy is not a safety net.

Some women are leaving employment, not work

When women leave conventional jobs after becoming mothers, we often describe them as leaving the workforce.

Sometimes they are. But sometimes women are not leaving work. They are leaving employment.

They are freelancing, consulting, creating intellectual property, opening studios, running companies, and assembling portfolio careers that give them more control over where, when, how, and with whom they work.

This is not a tiny edge case, although even answering how many women work this way is more complicated than it should be.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 3.8 million women working as unincorporated self-employed workers in 2025, about 5% of all employed women in nonagricultural industries. But that definition excludes self-employed women with incorporated businesses, whom the government classifies as wage-and-salary workers.

Census data offer a broader view: women owned 14.2 million American businesses in 2023, including nearly 12.9 million businesses with no paid employees. Those nonemployer businesses brought in more than $423 billion. But 2023 is only the latest year captured by this Census ownership data; it’s not a current count. Women continued to represent a significant share of new business owners after that: they started 49% of new businesses in 2024, compared with just 29% in 2019.

The Census number represents businesses rather than individual women, but the scale and trajectory are unmistakable. Millions of women are already working beyond the conventional employer-employee model, more continue to enter entrepreneurship, and even our labor statistics struggle to count them cleanly.

That invisibility carries into the motherhood conversation.

Self-employed mothers often appear only as evidence that traditional employment failed them. We count the woman who leaves her job as a workforce loss, but rarely follow what happens next, or design policy for the consultant, creator, founder, or shop owner she becomes.

Once she leaves employment, she nearly disappears from the picture.

The employer cannot be the infrastructure

I believe employers have a meaningful role to play.

They should create flexible conditions so that someone can pick up their child from school or attend a doctor’s appointment without putting her career at risk. They should ensure employees understand what public benefits and private options are available to them. They should encourage and incentivize parents to use the leave they have rather than quietly punishing them for taking it.

But “be a better employer” cannot be the foundation of America’s care system.

Employers can create better conditions within a job. Only public policy can make a meaningful floor of support travel with a person when she changes jobs, works independently, runs a company, takes contracts, or moves between several forms of work over a lifetime.

There has been meaningful progress at the state and local levels. New York City plans to launch 2,000 free childcare seats for two-year-olds across four communities in fall 2026, with the longer-term goal of expanding access citywide. New York State is also working toward pre-K access for every four-year-old by the 2028–29 school year.

Arizona’s Bright Futures initiative has made its own investments. Between July 2025 and February 2026, the state moved more than 1,500 children off its childcare-assistance waitlist. It also launched a $3 million program designed to reduce out-of-school childcare costs by as much as two-thirds for participating families during school breaks and summer months. Those gains matter, even as more than 11,000 Arizona children remain on the assistance waitlist.

All of the above are meaningful wins. I’m not arguing otherwise.

They are also still targeted programs, phased expansions, and limited pools of funding. They are not a coherent care system that follows people across geographies, income levels, and ways of working.

Sweden offers a clearer picture of the scale of support I am imagining.

For each child, Swedish parents can receive 480 days of parental benefit. For 390 of those days, compensation is tied to income; the remaining 90 are paid at a fixed minimum rate. Someone earning the equivalent of $100,000 a year would hit Sweden’s benefit cap and receive roughly $3,900 per month before tax if claiming seven days a week. It’s not full income replacement, but a much more substantial public floor of support.

Parents can share the days, spread them over time, and combine them with a partial return to work. Self-employed parents are explicitly included, with benefits calculated from business income. Childcare is part of the same public architecture: preschool fees are capped according to household income across Sweden’s municipalities rather than left entirely to the private market.

The point is not that Sweden has solved every challenge facing parents, or that its model would translate perfectly to American culture and systems. It is that caregiving is treated as a shared public responsibility rather than an accommodation a particularly generous employer may choose to provide.

That is the scale of imagination America still lacks.

We do not need one excellent employer here, one free childcare initiative there, or another temporary program families must live in the right place and meet the right criteria to access.

We need a system built around the reality that people will move between employment, entrepreneurship, caregiving, and different levels of participation in paid work, and that support should move with them.

But before we even determine the perfect policy solution, the first intervention may be embarrassingly basic: Count us. Study us. Invite us into the room.

Stop treating self-employed mothers as an exceptional category to be added after the primary policy has already been designed.

Ask what paid leave means for a freelancer whose income changes every month.

Ask what business continuity looks like for a consultant whose clients hired her specifically.

Ask what support a creator needs when her image, voice, or presence is the product.

Ask what happens when a startup founder can technically take leave but remains legally and financially responsible for the company.

Ask what childcare means for someone without a fixed schedule, physical workplace, or predictable workday.

Then we can reverse-engineer the policies that cover the most ground: portable benefits, more accessible public income replacement, childcare support untethered from employers, partial and gradual leave structures, and programs that recognize that losing business momentum is different from missing a paycheck.

Last year, at the start of my family-planning journey, I wrote that our healthcare, childcare, and retirement systems were still designed around full-time W-2 employment even as more people built independent and multidisciplinary working lives. I called it designing for a disappearing context.

Now that mismatch is growing inside my own body. My daughter is due in less than six months. I do not yet know exactly how motherhood will change my relationship with my work.

What I do know? I want room to discover the answer.

The assignment: stop accepting exclusion as the cost of independence

If there is one thing I want you to keep coming back to, it is this:

Leave asks: How long can I stop working?
Infrastructure asks: What support makes that choice possible?
Ownership asks: What do I control?
Optionality asks: Can my plan change without everything collapsing?

Those are not the same questions. And because they are not the same questions, two mothers can make the exact same decision from entirely different positions of power.

A woman may return to work after two weeks because she wants to. Another may return because she has no savings, paid leave, family support, or realistic alternative.

A woman may take six months away because that is what her body and family need. Another may stay away because childcare would cost more than she earns.

The timeline alone tells us almost nothing. What matters is whether the mother had meaningful choices.

That is why the assignment is not to create one ideal version of maternity leave. It is to build enough public infrastructure that women can determine what care, recovery, work, and family formation should look like for them.

For self-employed mothers and parents, that begins by refusing to treat our exclusion as an inevitable trade-off for autonomy.

If you are formally or informally building a business, considering parenthood, or already navigating it, start by getting brutally honest about what is making your choices possible.

Ask yourself:

What would I choose if money were not deciding for me?

Which parts of my work could pause, continue, or be reshaped?

What support would allow me to change my mind after birth without destabilizing my income or business?

How much of my plan depends on savings, a partner’s salary, unpaid family labor, or help I can afford to purchase privately?

What happened, or what do I expect to happen, to my income, clients, pipeline, and momentum when I became a parent?

Where have I accepted “that is just the cost of working for yourself” without asking who designed that cost, who benefits from it, and why we continue to treat it as inevitable?

Document the unpolished answers. Focus on the actual economics. The benefits you could access. The income you lost. The help you relied on. The choices you made freely and the ones money made for you.

Share that information with other self-employed parents instead of putting a triumphant return-to-work post on a pedestal. Compare what each of you needed, what the state provided, what you had to finance privately, and what nearly broke. That is what I asked for, and those conversations changed both my plan and my understanding of the problem.

Lastly, take the pattern somewhere it can no longer be dismissed as an individual failure.

Ask motherhood organizations why freelancers, consultants, creators, founders, and small-business owners are missing from their research and advocacy. Ask journalists to stop describing every woman who leaves a job as though she has left economic life altogether. Ask legislators to name self-employed parents explicitly in paid-leave and childcare proposals. Submit testimony. Contact your representatives. Join a local coalition. Bring the numbers, stories, and contradictions with you.

Employers have an assignment too: make sure workers understand the public benefits available to them, create conditions that do not punish caregiving, and recognize that some employees may eventually move into self-employment.

Policymakers have an even more fundamental one: stop designing leave as though an employer will always be there to administer it.

The point is: We do not need every self-employed mother to arrive with a fully formed policy solution. We need enough of us to make the same absence impossible to ignore.

Hi! I’m Tori Lazar.

I’m a restaurant kid at heart turned executive coach and business advisor. I believe you shouldn’t have to trade yourself to succeed, so I build models of power that don’t require that cost.

Learn more about what that looks like in practice and how to work together here: Website, LinkedIn

The visibility economy is not saving women

It is batshit crazy to me how much of the women’s leadership world is still organized around visibility.

Be more visible. Build your influence. Find your voice. Show up authentically. Tell your story. Join the room. Build community. Get around powerful women.

And to be clear, none of those things are inherently bad. Visibility matters. Influence matters. Voice matters. Community matters. Purpose matters. I have built entire parts of my life and work around all of them.

But they are not the same as power.

They are not the same as wealth.

They are not the same as ownership.

And they are definitely not the same as optionality.

That distinction matters because A LOT of women are being sold the wrong sequence. We are being told that if we become visible enough, influential enough, authentic enough, networked enough, and polished enough, power will eventually find us. Maybe a promotion. Maybe a raise. Maybe a book deal. Maybe a board seat. Maybe a brand partnership. Maybe the right person in the right room finally recognizing our brilliance and inviting us into something bigger.

Sometimes that happens. But more often, visibility becomes another performance treadmill. You get seen, but not paid. Invited, but not resourced. Platformed, but not protected. Praised, but not promoted. Included, but not given terms. Celebrated, but not made an owner.

And that is the part I want us to get much more honest about.

Visibility and influence are useful tools. They can create access, momentum, trust, and social proof. They can open doors. They can help people understand what you stand for. They can make your work easier to recognize.

But ownership and optionality are what create sustained power and wealth.

Anybody telling you otherwise is either confused, selling you something, or invested in keeping you dependent on the same systems they claim to be helping you transcend.

What the feed keeps selling us

There is an entire ecosystem right now built around helping women become more visible: coaching programs, memberships, masterminds, networking groups, thought leadership courses, influence accelerators, authenticity frameworks, personal brand intensives.

Again, some of these are valuable. Some are led by people with integrity. Some create real connection, clarity, and opportunity.

But the pattern I’m fatigued by is this: too many of them stop at being seen.

They teach women how to package themselves, position themselves, narrate themselves, and make themselves more legible to power. But far fewer teach women how to own more.

More equity. More IP. More terms. More pricing power. More decision rights. More distribution. More audience. More financial runway. More leverage outside one employer, one client, one platform, one gatekeeper, or one room.

That is a very different conversation.

And I think part of the reason we avoid it is because visibility still feels socially acceptable in a way power does not.

Women are allowed to want impact. We are allowed to want purpose. We are allowed to want community. We are allowed to want influence, especially if we frame it as service.

But wanting power? Wanting wealth? Wanting ownership? Wanting enough optionality that we can leave rooms, reject bad terms, say no without panic, and build without constantly asking for permission?

That still makes people uncomfortable.

Sometimes it even makes us uncomfortable.

The Reese Witherspoon moment I can’t stop thinking about

The other day, I was watching Emily Chang’s The Circuit episode with Reese Witherspoon, and there was a moment I have not been able to stop thinking about.

Emily asked Reese about the power she now holds in the literary and book IP ecosystem. The point was basically: Reese’s Book Club can move markets. It can turn books into bestsellers, screen adaptations, production opportunities, and cultural events.

And Reese, whom I deeply admire, got visibly uncomfortable with the word power. She said she has a tricky relationship with it and thinks of it more as influence.

I understood the impulse immediately.

Because influence sounds softer. Influence sounds relational. Influence sounds generous. Influence sounds less threatening. Influence sounds like shining a light, not holding a lever.

But that is exactly what made the moment so revealing to me.

Because Reese Witherspoon is not just influential. SHE IS POWERFUL.

She built Hello Sunshine around a structural insight: women were reading the books, buying the books, discussing the books, recommending the books, and showing up for stories centered on women, but Hollywood was still treating those stories like a niche.

So she built infrastructure around that gap.

A book club. A production company. A content pipeline. A trusted recommendation engine. A market signal. A distribution advantage. A wealth-building vehicle.

That is not just influence. That is ownership turned into leverage. That is taste turned into infrastructure. That is cultural trust turned into enterprise value.

And this is where I want women to stop flinching.

Power and wealth are not inherently bad. The problem is not that too many people have power and wealth. The problem is that too many cruel, extractive, dishonest, and emotionally bankrupt people have power and wealth.

If good people keep outsourcing power to people who are more comfortable holding it, then we should not be surprised when the systems around us keep reflecting their values.

The answer is not to stay pure by staying powerless.

The answer is to become the kind of person who can hold power without becoming extractive.

The answer is more good people with money, leverage, ownership, and decision-making authority. Especially women. Especially women who understand care, complexity, interdependence, and long-term consequence. Especially women who do not want to replicate the systems that harmed them and others, but also refuse to romanticize powerlessness as morality.

Visibility is an accelerant. Ownership is the architecture.

This is the sequence I think we need to understand better: visibility is most powerful after you have something for it to compound.

Visibility can accelerate a business. Visibility can drive demand to an owned channel. Visibility can increase the value of IP. Visibility can attract aligned investors, clients, partners, buyers, readers, and collaborators. Visibility can create negotiating leverage when there is already something structural underneath it.

But visibility without ownership is mostly extraction.

It makes you useful to other people’s platforms. You create engagement for the event. You add credibility to the panel. You bring warmth to the community. You lend your face to the campaign. You make the room feel more diverse, inclusive, and interesting. You become proof that the system works, even if the terms never materially change for you.

That is not power.

That is unpaid infrastructure.

This is where I think Emma Grede offers a useful contrast. During her book launch, she used visibility and influence beautifully. She made herself highly visible for a specific moment in time, but that visibility was not floating in the air. It was connected to IP (her book and podcast, Start With Yourself and Aspire), businesses (Good American, SKIMS, Safely, Off Season, etc.), channels, ownership, authority, and a much larger economic ecosystem she had already built.

That is the difference between visibility as performance and visibility as leverage.

One feeds the algorithm.

The other feeds the asset.

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“Being in the room” is not the same as having power in the room

One of the most seductive lies in women’s professional spaces is that proximity is the same as power.

Be in the room. Join the group. Get around the table. Surround yourself with successful women. Network up. Build community.

Again, not wrong. But incomplete.

Emma Grede writes about this with truly commendable honesty in her book, especially the way business access can get blurred with social belonging until women start to believe they need the right friends, the right rooms, or the imprimatur of the right “sorority” to make it. Her point, as I read it, is not that relationships do not matter. They obviously do. It is that networking is not the same thing as building a network of people who help you get shit done.

Because the actual question is not only: Are you in the room?

It is: What can you do once you are there?

Can you change the terms? Can you move budget? Can you shape strategy? Can you say no without losing everything? Can you leave and still be okay? Can you bring other people with you? Can you turn the relationship into revenue, access, protection, or possibility? Can you retain something from the value you helped create?

If the answer is no, then you may have access. But you do not yet have power.

And I think a lot of what gets marketed to women as “community” is really access theater. A “social media sorority,” as Emma put it. A proximity machine. A room full of warm feelings and vague possibility, but no clear mechanism for creating wealth, protection, deal flow, shared infrastructure, or decision-making power.

That does not mean connection is meaningless. It means connection has to be designed with more rigor.

I do not go to most events anymore unless I know why I am going. Am I going to meet a potential client? A referral partner? A mentor? A collaborator? A service provider my clients may need? A person whose thinking will sharpen mine? A tactical skill or insight I cannot get from a podcast, article, or book?

If I cannot answer that, I do not go.

Not because I am anti-community. Because I am pro-discernment.

And because time is not the only cost. Attention is a cost. Energy is a cost. False possibility is a cost.

Women are already overpaying for access to rooms that do not materially change their lives.

We do not need more of that.

We need sharper filters.

What ownership can look like if you are not a founder

I think one reason this conversation gets flattened is because ownership is often treated like founder language.

Cap tables. Equity. IP. Companies. Exits. Acquisitions.

Yes, that is ownership. But it is not the only version.

If you work inside a company, ownership can look like equity or stock options that actually mean something. It can look like clear attribution for original IP you created. It can look like a role with budget authority, not just responsibility. It can look like a compensation package tied to upside, not just effort. It can look like a title that reflects decision-making power, not optics. It can look like contract language that protects your work, relationships, and future options.

If you are a creator, consultant, coach, strategist, operator, or executive, ownership can look like owning your frameworks, your audience, your distribution, your methodology, your client relationships, your data, your research, your creative archives, or your ability to turn expertise into products, workshops, licensing, advisory, or paid speaking.

If you are in a high-powered job, optionality can look like advising one or two companies on the side. It can look like building a paid speaking practice. It can look like creating a small body of IP around your expertise. It can look like investing intentionally. It can look like joining boards or advisory councils. It can look like maintaining enough financial runway to negotiate without desperation. It can look like developing a reputation for a specific kind of problem-solving that can travel beyond your current employer.

This is the point: ownership and optionality are not only for entrepreneurs.

They are for anyone who does not want their entire future dependent on one institution’s willingness to value them correctly.

Why women distrust ease

There is another layer here that I think we need to name.

Many women have been trained to distrust ease.

We trust struggle more than structure. We trust exhaustion more than support. We trust being overextended more than being well-leveraged. We trust the version of ourselves who is proving, perfecting, attending, posting, helping, absorbing, and giving.

We are much less comfortable with the version of ourselves who says: I want better terms. I want more upside. I want to own the thing I built. I want to be paid for the value I create. I want enough money that I can walk away. I want power, and I want to use it well.

This is the pattern I cannot unsee in my work.

I started my practice assuming failure was the defining challenge for ambitious women. How do we recover from failure? How do we metabolize rejection? How do we rebuild after layoffs, public missteps, bad partnerships, or professional disappointment?

That question still matters. It always will.

But over time, I realized something more precise: the deeper fear for many high-performing women is not failure. It is success without the familiar process of self-erasure.

Not because they doubt their ability to succeed. Many of them have already succeeded on paper. They have built the résumé, earned the title, grown the business, gained the visibility, and still learned to associate success with strain, over-functioning, emotional labor, adaptation, and chronic self-override.

So when success starts to feel more aligned, natural, owned, or easeful, they do not always trust it.

They have been taught, implicitly and explicitly, that success must be hard to be real and costly to be worthy.

That is where the visibility conversation becomes dangerous. Because if visibility becomes another place where women perform effort to prove legitimacy, we have not actually changed the system. We have just moved the self-extraction onto a more public stage.

What I’m building instead

This is why I am developing the Regenerative Power Design Framework™, an original leadership system and body of IP behind my coaching, advisory, research, and public-facing work here at Where Light Lives.

The framework is built around one central question: How do high-performing women and gender-expansive leaders build power without losing themselves?

More specifically: How do they protect the source of their work (their energy, judgment, lived experience, intuition, and distinct perspective) while codifying clarity into operating rhythms, business architecture, and owned assets that give back more than they take?

Because most leadership systems still assume the leader is an infinite resource.

I do not.

Leadership breaks down when the source of the work is depleted, not when ambition is too high.

The Regenerative Power Design Framework™ helps leaders stop confusing self-extraction with ambition and start designing power that can actually hold. It is not a confidence framework. It is not a personal branding framework. It is not another way to become more visible while quietly staying overextended.

It is a design system for building power with more ownership, optionality, clarity, and durability.

The framework moves through six interdependent domains.

Vision Clarity helps leaders define what they are actually building toward, so growth stops being vague, inherited, or reactive.

Source Integrity protects the internal conditions that make sustainable leadership possible, turning needs, values, and self-respect into strategic infrastructure instead of soft afterthoughts.

Self-Definition clarifies how a leader creates value and what makes them uniquely difficult to replace, so they stop flattening themselves into generic competence.

Decision Architecture designs a repeatable way to make clean, strategic decisions without outsourcing authority.

Opportunity Creation turns internal clarity into external momentum, access, buy-in, and support.

Endurance Without Self-Erasure helps leaders move through difficulty without turning adversity into identity damage or overextraction.

Put more simply: it helps people convert clarity into structure, insight into assets, and ambition into power that gives back more than it takes.

This is also what I’m building through my research.

Where Light Lives is not just a newsletter. It is my public-facing research and storytelling platform for developing these ideas in real time with my brilliant apprentice and research partner, Karina Khan (who you’ll be hearing from and seeing more of soon). I describe it as a signal intelligence platform built on the belief that power is designed long before it is visible. Through essays, case studies, cultural analysis, and research-in-progress dispatches, I am decoding the terms, rooms, narratives, incentives, and systems shaping women’s leadership, health, economic power, ownership, and technological futures.

That matters because there is a gap in the broader field.

There are major corporate research initiatives on women and work, but a lot of that work is institutionally flattened. Case in point: Lean In x McKinsey & Company’s Women in the Workplace report. It tells us what is happening to women inside existing systems, but it rarely studies the lived, strategic, emotional, and infrastructural experience of building power within and beyond those systems.

It rarely asks: How are women AND gender-expansive folks reallocating ambition? How are they protecting authorship? How are they creating leverage? How are they using technology? How are they navigating visibility? How are they refusing extractive definitions of success while still wanting wealth, ownership, authority, and power?

Those are the questions I care about.

Because the future of leadership will not only be shaped by who gets promoted, funded, platformed, or invited to speak. It will be shaped by who owns the terms, who protects the source of their work, who builds infrastructure around their insight, and who has enough optionality to stop mistaking self-erasure for ambition.

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The assignment: stop confusing the spotlight for the structure

If there is one thing I want you to keep coming back to for now, it is this:

Visibility asks: Can they see me?
Influence asks: Can I shape what they think?
Ownership asks: What do I control?
Optionality asks: What choices do I have?

Those are not the same questions. And because they are not the same questions, they produce very different lives.

A woman with visibility may be admired and still underpaid. A woman with influence may be respected and still overextended. A woman with community may be surrounded and still financially fragile.

But a woman with ownership and optionality has room to move. She can negotiate. She can leave. She can rest. She can reinvest. She can take a creative risk. She can tell the truth. She can choose alignment over proximity. She can stop accepting crumbs dressed up as opportunity.

That is why the assignment is not simply to become more visible. It is to make visibility work in service of something more durable.

So, if you are building a career, company, platform, body of work, or leadership path right now, ask yourself:

What do I own that can compound?

Where am I creating value without retaining enough of it?

What terms need to change for this opportunity to be worth my time?

Where am I mistaking access for leverage?

Which relationships actually help me get things done, and which ones only make me feel adjacent to power?

What am I building that can create money, freedom, or decision-making power over time?

Where am I performing effort because ease still feels unsafe?

What would optionality look like in this season of my life?

Your answer does not have to be dramatic. It might be equity. It might be a licensing agreement. It might be a paid speaking rate. It might be an advisory role. It might be a cleaner contract. It might be an owned newsletter, podcast, research archive, methodology, or workshop. It might be finally charging for the thing everyone keeps asking you to give away for free. It might be asking for budget authority instead of accepting another visibility-based leadership title with no real power attached. It might be declining the panel and spending that time building the thing the panel would have only let you talk about.

The point is not to disappear.

The point is to stop being visible in ways that do not build anything durable underneath you.

We need more women building power they can keep. And then using it to make the world less brutal for everyone else.

Hi! I’m Tori Lazar.

I’m a restaurant kid at heart turned executive coach and business advisor. I believe you shouldn’t have to trade yourself to succeed, so I build models of power that don’t require that cost.

Learn more about what that looks like in practice and how to work together here: Website, LinkedIn

What the headline suggests

Let me start by saying this: the discourse around Inside the Manosphere is not wrong. But after spending the last 3–4 weeks reading my way through the commentary, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: it’s incomplete. Or maybe more precisely, the parts that could make it more complete aren’t nearly as visible, accessible, or easy to find.

Yes, the men at the center of this ecosystem are disturbing.
Yes, the worldview is cruel.
Yes, the content is misogynistic, manipulative, and often engineered to provoke rather than persuade.

And yes, many of the reactions to the documentary surfaced real blind spots.

Some argued the film spent too much time trying to understand the men and not enough time with the women and girls most harmed by them. Others pointed out that what looks like heterosexual posturing is often men performing worth for other men. Another critique I found especially useful called out how little the documentary grappled with the manosphere within the cultural context of Black America and Black heterosexual male identity.

All true.

But what made me pause was not only what the documentary showed. It was what some of the commentary did with it after the credits rolled.

IMO, too much of it got packaged like a hot take.

Calling the manosphere “girlboss 2.0” may feel rhetorically efficient, but it collapses crucial differences in both structure and consequence. Girlboss culture had real problems. It was exploitative, hollow, individualistic, and often sold liberation through branding. But it did not organize women around the abuse, control, and dehumanization of men. It did not build a pipeline into real-world violence.

And calling these men “gay” as a joke does not sharpen the analysis either. If the real insight is that this ecosystem is often men performing for men, seeking validation from men, and building worlds where women are props rather than people, then say that. But using queerness as the punchline only drags the conversation back into the same lazy gender logic it is supposedly trying to critique.

These are examples of what feels off to me.

There’s a lot of can you believe this?
Far less what now?

What is actually happening

I think too much of the discourse still treats the manosphere primarily as a content problem, a messaging problem, or a masculinity problem.

It’s all of those things… But it’s also an organizing machine. That’s the part that keeps getting missed.

If the manosphere were only a cluster of bad opinions, it would be easier to contain. The harder truth is that it functions like a distribution system plus a monetization funnel. It scales even when individual figures are exposed, mocked, banned, or discredited, which isn’t accidental.

This ecosystem understands how to create a sense of belonging quickly. It understands status. It understands low-friction participation. It understands repetition. It understands how to make young men feel seen, recruited, and useful. And it understands how to turn all of that into a self-replicating media machine.

One of the clearest examples of that logic is clipping, the practice of taking someone else’s long-form content and turning it into shorter, shareable segments distributed by an outsourced army of editors whose incentives are aligned with reach. Clavicular is a relevant case study, but the underlying playbook is bigger: Joe Rogan used clipping to expand his reach, Andrew Tate used clipping to power his rise, and MrBeast has reportedly built an enormous clipper ecosystem of his own. Different rhetoric, different brands, same lesson: distributed clip networks are now part of how modern influence scales.

That’s why the multi-level marketing comparison can be useful structurally, even if the “girlboss 2.0” comparison is not. What matters here is not just the grift. It’s the operational design.

Once you understand the manosphere as infrastructure, and as more than ideology, the question changes.

It’s no longer: How do we critique this?

It’s: What are we building that is equally intentional in the opposite direction?

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What the real story underneath may be

The real story underneath may be that the manosphere has grown not simply because boys are angry, lonely, or susceptible, but because it offers something dangerously coherent.

A map.
A hierarchy.
A language.
An enemy.
A script for belonging.
A system for repeating all of it.

That’s why dismissing it as pathetic, ridiculous, or aesthetically embarrassing only gets us so far. Even when the jokes are funny, humor does not build a counterweight, which is why I kept coming back to the same question while reading all of this: What the fuck are we doing about the manosphere?

Not just what do we think about it.
Not just can we decode its aesthetics.
Not just can we name its harms.

What are we actually building and organizing together in response?

Because one of the more haunting throughlines in the documentary was not just the extremism. It was the emptiness underneath it.

The absence of steadiness.
The absence of trusted care.
The absence of emotionally responsible models of masculinity.
The absence of love in the home.

That does not excuse what these boys become… But it does tell us something about why the ecosystem works.

If the manosphere is offering belonging, identity, status, and initiation, then our counteroffer cannot be only moral condemnation.

It has to offer better belonging.

Better identity.
Better initiation.
Better proof that care is not weakness and connection is not emasculation.

What the counteroffer starts to look like

This is the point where critique has to become construction.

If the manosphere’s advantage is not just ideology but infrastructure (repetition, belonging, initiation, and low-friction participation), then the real question is what kinds of structures can compete with that logic without reproducing its cruelty.

So I asked myself a more useful question: Could I think of any examples that might actually guide a counteroffer?

Luckily, I had the foresight to know I’d need to chase the doom spiral of Inside the Manosphere with something more life-giving, so I planned a little double-feature night in and followed it with Masaka Kids: A Rhythm Within—a documentary short set inside Masaka Kids Africana, a Ugandan home and dance community for more than 30 orphaned and vulnerable children, where music, rhythm, and collective creation are used to build confidence, joy, and belonging.

What I found there was unexpectedly clarifying: rhythm, repetition, group identity, creation, public joy, and shared meaning. It showed me that many of the same social mechanics that make toxic ecosystems sticky can also be organized in service of care, creativity, and connection.

That’s what I was looking for, whether I had language for it yet or not. Not a wholesome distraction. Evidence. Evidence that belonging can be built differently. That identity can be shaped differently. The same forces that help harmful systems spread can also be organized toward something more life-giving.

And yes, I’m fully aware this is not representative of all orphanages. That’s not what I’m arguing. I’m saying the film offers a useful framework, or at least a glimpse, of what it can look like when the social mechanics of belonging are organized in a joyful direction.

Other life-giving examples I’ve collected so far point to a similar pattern.

Daughters is not just a documentary about fathers in prison and daughters preparing for a dance. It’s a document of what structured reconnection can make possible when grief, absence, and longing are not left to rot in silence. The film follows four girls preparing for a special daddy-daughter dance with their incarcerated fathers as part of a fatherhood program in a Washington, D.C. jail, and the impact campaign extends beyond viewing into donations, watch parties, and the broader Date With Dad program.

The Dads is a documentary short that follows five fathers of trans children, alongside Dennis Shepard, on a fishing trip where they talk openly about fatherhood, brotherhood, fear, and love. What makes it so useful in this context is that it offers another visible model of masculinity organized around care instead of dominance, and around relational courage instead of control.

Secret school programs for girls in Afghanistan make clear that what’s being built there is not just resistance, but organized care: a clandestine network of five underground schools, 28 teachers, and around 1,000 students, where classes move from home to home, girls leave one by one to avoid suspicion, and the classroom becomes not just a place to study, but a place to feel safe enough to laugh, dream, and keep going. What moved me most was that these girls are not framed as passive recipients of hope. They are active participants in a system of learning, protection, and mutual persistence being built in real time.

I also recently discovered Radical Futures (thanks to my client, Ariba Jahan), which pushes this logic one step further. The studio describes its work as using story, speculation, and physical artifacts to help teams navigate what’s ending and what’s struggling to be born. Its “Artifacts from the Future” project imagines the mundane infrastructure that actually sustains community (housing deeds, wellness kits, transit passes, neighborhood governance), and its matriarchal future deck explicitly centers governance by care.

That matters because it suggests that counter-systems are not built only through intervention. They are also built through rehearsal. Through helping people practice different assumptions about authority, care, kinship, and public life before those systems fully exist.

So if the thesis here is that peaceful people need to organize as strategically as people who love domination, let these examples register as evidence rather than feel-good side notes.

Evidence that care can be designed. That belonging can be structured, and protection can be operationalized. That alternative futures can be rehearsed before they are fully real. That culture changes when networks of support become durable and embedded enough to compete—the same lesson I keep returning to in leaders like Deja Foxx.

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What this reveals about power

When we treat the manosphere as a niche internet pathology, we give ourselves permission to stay in commentary mode. But if we treat it as an organizing system, the burden shifts from reaction to design, and that changes the assignment for all of us.

For parents and caregivers, it means asking what kinds of emotional and relational infrastructure exist around the boys in your life before an algorithm becomes their loudest teacher and violence toward girls starts to feel normal.

For educators, it means treating digital literacy, emotional literacy, and identity formation as inseparable. That means teaching students how recommendation systems work, creating space to process shame, anger, and belonging in real time, and recognizing that what looks like a media-literacy problem is often also a relationship, regulation, and self-concept problem.

For media operators, founders, and cultural leaders, it means recognizing that attention is not neutral. If misogyny can be operationalized through repetition, networks, incentives, and distribution, then care, dignity, and belonging have to be built with that same level of intention.

More broadly, it means getting serious about stewardship wherever we have influence.

The manosphere has operational excellence.

It has distribution.
It has incentives.
It has consistency.

And although it pains me to say it, too much of what we call resistance still does not.

So the question I want to leave you with is not only whether the manosphere is dangerous. We know the answer to that.

It’s this: What are we building that is strong and embedded enough to replace it? And how are we designing and incentivizing peace so it feels like home for everyone?

Because if we keep treating this as a spectacle to decode instead of a system to out-organize, we’ll keep losing ground exactly where it matters most.

What the Headline Suggests

Right now, two predominant narratives are circulating simultaneously. One says women are still being shut out. Another says women just had a record year. Both can point to real numbers, which is exactly why this needs a closer read.

VC dollars are not the full story of how women build. They’re the story of what venture capital chooses to reward. A lot of people are passing that story around as if it explains everything.

It doesn’t.

And don’t get me wrong. That doesn’t mean the inequity isn’t real. It is.

But I think the conversation keeps getting narrower than it should because VC dollars have become the default scoreboard for women’s economic power when they actually tell us far more about venture capital behavior than the full range of how women are building.

That’s the part that makes me pause.

What’s Actually Happening

PitchBook’s 2025 reporting showed a record $73.6B raised by U.S. VC-backed companies with at least one female founder. It also showed that AI absorbed roughly two-thirds of those dollars, with more than $30B coming from just two companies alone: Scale AI and Anthropic.

That is not a side note. That is the story.

Because once you know that, “women founders had a record year” starts to mean something much more specific. It may be true at the very top of the market, while a much broader group of founders is still operating in a tighter, more selective environment.

The definitional nuance matters too. In these reports, “female-founded” means at least one female co-founder. Not necessarily a woman CEO. Not necessarily a woman still actively running the company. That helps explain why the progress narrative can feel both true and misleading at the same time.

And when you zoom in further, the story remains stark. In 2025, startups founded entirely by women received just 1.1% of U.S. VC dollars. Coverage citing PitchBook also notes that the share of founders receiving a first-time VC check fell from 27.7% in 2021 to 21.2% in 2025, suggesting the pipeline is tightening, not just the headlines.

But here’s the part that keeps getting lost: VC dollars measure venture capital strategy, not the full range of financing women founders are actually using.

Many women founders I work with and know well are intentionally building with blended capital stacks: angel networks, grants, early revenue, and smaller rounds to avoid unnecessary dilution, reduce noise, and protect their decision-making power. I’ve seen this logic show up firsthand with clients like Aasiyah Abdulsalam, who has been explicit about building with both growth and long-term control in mind.

Some are doing that because access is constrained. Others are doing it because protecting decision-making power matters more than raising the loudest round. Often, it’s both.

And the broader financing picture supports these insights.

• Most businesses do not start with VC at all. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s 2024 finance guide, 80% of employer businesses and 76% of nonemployer businesses use personal savings as startup capital, and unconventional sources like credit cards can play a meaningful role.

• Women’s participation in angel investing is materially higher. Women represented 39.1% of angel investors in 2024, according to the University of New Hampshire’s latest angel market report.

• Who the investor is can shape who gets funded. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that women were 2.5 times more likely than men to invest in women in informal investment contexts.

• Crowdfunding can produce a different pattern. The National Women’s Business Council’s Kickstarter case study found women were more successful on the platform even after controlling for goal amount and other campaign characteristics.

• Alternative pathways are not trivial. Federal small-business innovation grant programs operated at a meaningful scale, and non-dilutive founder ecosystems matter too, from public grant programs to targeted support through initiatives like the Cartier Women’s Initiative and the Tory Burch Foundation.

So when we use VC alone as the master metric, we are measuring one highly concentrated system and mistaking it for the whole map.

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What the Numbers Do and Don’t Tell us

What This Reveals About Power

When VC becomes the only scoreboard, it quietly teaches a very specific lesson about power.

Power = being selected by concentrated capital.

That is one version of power. Not the only one.

Power can also look like building durability early. It can look like choosing dilution more intentionally. It can look like preserving ownership, protecting decision-making authority, and reaching profitability without overexposing yourself to the priorities of a single gatekeeping system.

This is why I think the “women do more with less” conversation is often underread. We tend to frame it as a story about resilience, or even scarcity, when the more interesting signal may be economic: women-founded startups have often generated stronger revenue outcomes per dollar invested. That suggests we may be looking at a different model of capital efficiency, not just a feel-good story about grit.

My hunch is that it is more often a design story.

Once you shift the lens from “Who raised the most?” to “Who preserved the most freedom to decide?” the conversation changes.

I’d argue it gets more useful, too.

So the better question is not only why women raised less VC.

It’s also:

• Where are women building financing ecosystems that don’t rely on a single gate?

• What happens when founders optimize for optionality, not just valuation?

• What would it look like to study those shifts with the same rigor we apply to VC?

If we only measure one lane, we’ll keep misreading where power is actually moving.

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Sources Referenced

This analysis draws on reporting and research across venture, small-business finance, angel investing, crowdfunding, and non-dilutive founder support. Key sources include PitchBook’s 2025 female founders report, Inc.’s coverage of all-female teams’ 2025 share of U.S. venture dollars, the U.S. Small Business Administration’s 2024 finance FAQ, the University of New Hampshire’s 2024 angel market analysis, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s women’s entrepreneurship research, the National Women’s Business Council’s Kickstarter case study, and the U.S. Treasury’s 2025 report on the small-business financing landscape.

For the broader financing ecosystem beyond venture, I also referenced reporting on federal small-business innovation grants, as well as founder-support ecosystems like the Cartier Women’s Initiative and the Tory Burch Foundation Fellows Program.

What the Headline Suggests

“Netflix Out as Investor in Meghan Markle Brand As Ever”

It’s efficient in a way that most headlines aspire to be, closing the loop before you’ve even opened the article.

You don’t need context, structure, or detail. Just “out.”

In a single word, the outcome is assigned, the power dynamic is implied, and the conclusion is delivered: something didn’t hold, someone pulled away, something smaller was left behind.

What that framing suggests is familiar. A powerful platform backed away. A (woman) founder couldn’t sustain the relationship. A brand already positioned as soft, aesthetic, maybe a little indulgent, didn’t translate into something durable.

In some versions of the coverage, that implication is reinforced through specificity that quietly narrows the scope: a “fancy jam company.” The detail feels descriptive, but it does something more subtle. It reduces a multi-category business into something common and domestic before the reader has a chance to understand it.

By the time you reach the second paragraph, the interpretation is already in place. Not just what happened, but how seriously it should be taken.

What Is Actually Happening

What we can say, cleanly, from the record, is more precise.

On March 6, 2026, Netflix and As Ever announced they were ending their investment partnership, while emphasizing that the brand would continue independently. Both sides used nearly identical language: the brand is “ready to stand on its own,” and independence was “always intended.”

That phrasing points to structure.

At launch, the brand wasn’t positioned as a standalone product line so much as an ecosystem: a lifestyle series (With Love, Meghan), a consumer products arm tied to that content, and a broader production relationship with Netflix that still exists. These are distinct layers, even if much of the coverage collapses them into a single storyline.

An investment partnership is not the same as a content ecosystem, and neither is it the same as an ongoing production deal. In this case, it’s convenient to treat them as interchangeable because it flattens the truth.

Operationally, the business appears to have been modular from the beginning. Reporting notes that external operators handled aspects of commerce and fulfillment, suggesting the brand was never fully dependent on Netflix as its engine.

So the event itself is fairly narrow: a strategic investor exits, the brand continues, and the media relationship remains intact.

What we don’t have (because it isn’t public) is the contract. It’s possible this was a fixed-term incubation. It’s also possible that performance influenced the timing. Some coverage gestures at internal dissatisfaction or excess inventory, but those claims rely on unnamed sources and remain unverified.

The most accurate reading, for now, holds both possibilities at once: there was likely a plan, and there may have been pressure. But neither of those cleanly translates to “Netflix out.”

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How the Coverage Rewrites the Story

The distortion, if you look across outlets, isn’t usually in the facts. It’s in the framing.

The verbs. The emphasis. What gets left out.

Most of these pieces (linked at the end of this post) contain the correct information. But they don’t give it equal weight, and that imbalance is what shapes the story.

Who Is Being Misrepresented

What gets lost in that process isn’t just nuance. It’s authorship.

At launch, Netflix described its role as a strategic, passive partner in a system designed to connect content directly to commerce. That alone signals this wasn’t your average endorsement deal. But what’s largely absent from the coverage is how deliberately that system appears to have been constructed on her side.

This is a founder building across layers (content, commerce, and a broader lifestyle ecosystem designed to extend beyond both), not as separate initiatives, but as a coordinated environment.

Meghan is very intentionally building a world, rather than a single product.

Within that structure, the Netflix partnership reads less like dependency and more like timed leverage: access to distribution, accelerated visibility, credibility at launch, followed (if the system works) by independence.

Which is what makes this moment more interesting than it’s being treated. If independence was, in fact, always intended, then this isn’t a brand losing backing. It’s a founder designing a pathway to not need it.

I’d call that…success. No?

What This Reveals About Power

What’s happening here isn’t just a simplification. It’s a shift in what the story is about.

A structural business move about investment, timing, and ownership gets recast as something more personal. Not that a partnership reached its end, but that she couldn’t sustain it, that she got dropped, that it didn’t work.

Once that shift happens, the meaning of the event shifts with it. The same sequence (an investor exits, the brand continues) no longer reads as a transition. It reads as a signal that something didn’t hold, that she wasn’t good enough. Difficult. Irresponsible, even.

The platform (Netflix) comes into focus as the actor. The founder (Meghan) becomes the outcome. Strategy recedes, replaced by a simpler frame: did it work, or didn’t it?

If you return to the underlying sequence, it’s relatively straightforward. An investment partnership ends. The brand continues. The broader media deal remains intact. The structure holds. But that’s not the version that circulates most widely. What travels is the one that feels more familiar, immediate, and easier to accept in a “manosphere” dominated world.

The truth is: Nothing about the facts has changed. Only how they’ve been arranged. And that’s the part worth holding onto because stories like this don’t just describe what happened. They set expectations for what’s possible.

If a founder builds something new, something that doesn’t fit neatly into an existing category, and the story that circulates reduces it to a misstep or a mismatch, that framing doesn’t stay contained to one person. It becomes a reference point.

Not just for how this business is understood, but for how similar ambitions are evaluated going forward.

What gets reinforced is a narrower range of what success is supposed to look like, who gets to attempt it, and how much deviation is tolerated before it’s read as failure.

So the next time a story feels definitive, pause at the framing:

• What actually changed at a structural level?

• What’s being compressed into a single storyline?

• Who is positioned as the actor, and who is positioned as the outcome?

• What details are doing more work than they seem?

Once you start asking those questions, the pattern becomes harder to miss.

The gap between what happened and what gets remembered isn’t accidental. It’s produced through emphasis, omission, and repetition.

And over time, that’s how power is assigned.

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Sources Referenced

This analysis draws on reporting across general news, entertainment, and cultural commentary outlets, including ABC News, Variety, Entertainment Weekly, TheWrap, ITV, People, Page Six, New York Magazine Intelligencer, Yahoo Entertainment, and Deadline (amongst others).

I also sleuthed Reddit threads to pulse-check my own assumptions about how this type of narrative targeting impacts women’s economic power and perception. It’s worth a look.

Here’s what I’m seeing: We’re entering a new era of opportunity for women, and it’s not despite the backlash, but because the extractive systems that have shaped the last century are finally cracking under their own weight.

The most “unsexy” part is the most important: This isn’t just a vibes shift. It’s an infrastructure shift.

Backlash is loud. It’s emotional. It’s shareable. It’s easy to react to.

Infrastructure is procedural. Slower. Less cinematic. Harder to translate.

And whether we love, hate, or feel “meh” hearing this, we tend to follow what’s easy, cool, loud, or angry over what’s quietly being built in our favor.

Hear me out…

The dot I can’t unsee: women are being shamed for reducing friction.

Over the past few weeks, I started noticing a pattern.

First, I read an essay by about the uneasy upside of AI for women—the initial “ick,” followed by a quieter realization: these tools can actually reduce cognitive load and expand access to voice, visibility, and momentum… if we let them.

Then I watched a well-known woman founder get publicly critiqued for using AI to write her LinkedIn post. A commenter (also a woman!) shared that she’d rather hear her “real voice” than an LLM’s.

It wasn’t aggressive. It wasn’t a takedown. But it revealed something.

Then the founder’s response stopped me cold: “If it weren’t for AI, no post would’ve been written. These are my thoughts. I just didn’t have the capacity to edit perfectly.”

To be clear…I know this founder personally. It did sound like her. So let’s continue!

Around the same time, a client admitted she felt bad for using AI to help edit a LinkedIn post that was taking off.

That’s when the pattern clicked: Women are being subtly shamed for using AI tools that help them ship, especially tools that reduce friction around writing, visibility, and expression.

And that shame is dressed up as “authenticity.”

But if we zoom out, what’s actually happening is bigger than social media etiquette.

Women are refusing the self-sacrifice tax.

They’re choosing support.

Systems. Delegation. Leverage.

And that choice is colliding with an older cultural expectation: that women must earn success through exhaustion.

The real “ambition gap” isn’t ambition. It’s punishment.

Catalyst’s newest data is blunt: in a national survey of women who left the workforce over the past year, 42% of women who voluntarily exited said caregiving responsibilities (including childcare costs) were the strongest factor behind their decision. Lack of flexibility was also a major differentiator; women who left were more likely to have worked without flexible schedules.

But the burden isn’t evenly distributed.

Women of color, particularly Black and Latina women, are more likely to be primary or co-breadwinners in their households while also carrying disproportionate caregiving responsibilities. This shouldn’t be surprising. McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace research consistently shows that women of color experience higher rates of microaggressions, lower rates of sponsorship, and steeper promotion drop-offs at senior levels.

Add to that:

• Return-to-office mandates that ignore caregiving logistics.

• DEI rollbacks that narrow advancement pathways.

• Shrinking psychological safety.

• A leadership culture that still expects women to be the emotional air traffic controllers of entire teams.

So when people ask, “Why don’t women want promotions right now?” the answer isn’t mysterious. The answer is: Because the system has made ambition feel like punishment.

And women are responding with something I deeply respect: reallocation.

Toward ownership.
Toward flexibility.
Toward infrastructure and environments where performance doesn’t require self-erasure.

That’s not disengagement, no matter how some headlines frame it. That’s strategy.

If anything, the “women are leaning out” narrative serves the status quo. It keeps the story simple. It makes it sound like women are stuck, overwhelmed, exhausted, and stepping back…which is TRUE, depending on the day.

But what I’m seeing isn’t total surrender. It’s women refusing to pour ambition into systems that punish them for having it.

And yes, there’s backlash. There always is when power starts to redistribute. The noise gets louder. The reactions get theatrical. The narratives get simplified, so we feel overwhelmed enough to disengage.

I don’t buy it.

This doesn’t feel like a retreat. It feels like the big dip before the big UP. The moment the old system thrashes because it knows it’s losing leverage.

I can’t prove that in a spreadsheet YET. But I feel it in my bones.

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The shift: from “visibility as proof” → to “infrastructure as power.”

Here are the three macro patterns I think matter most right now:

1) Voice is being “unlocked” (and yes, that threatens people).

AI doesn’t make women less authentic. It makes us less bottlenecked.

For the women I work with, the real constraint is never incompetence or “not having ideas.” It’s capacity. It’s cognitive load. It’s the invisible coordination work that quietly consumes the bandwidth required to think deeply, write clearly, and build strategically.

When a tool reduces the friction between thought and output, it doesn’t replace voice, unless the person leveraging it chooses to outsource their thinking. Tools amplify intent. Used carelessly, they flatten. Used intentionally, they protect.

It’s also important to note that women are not the primary abusers of unethical AI/tech practices. We are, however, routinely asked to earn our presence through visible effort. So when friction drops, and output accelerates, what’s being protected isn’t laziness, it’s energy. It’s clarity. It’s the ability to ship without self-sacrifice.

But this shift isn’t just about writing faster.

We’re watching friction drop across multiple layers of life and work.

On one side, AI-assisted product tools and low-code platforms—from environments like Lovable to GPT-powered build workflows—are collapsing the distance between idea and prototype. A founder can move from concept to functional demo in days rather than months. A creator can validate demand before signing a distribution deal. Someone with a thesis can build proof-of-concept infrastructure without waiting for a technical cofounder or institutional permission.

That changes fundraising dynamics.
It changes risk tolerance.
It changes who gets to test before being chosen.

On the other side, tools like Ohai.ai are targeting something even more fundamental: cognitive load at home. AI household assistants that manage calendars, coordinate logistics, surface deadlines, and absorb the invisible labor of planning don’t just “save time.” They reclaim mental real estate. And reclaimed mental real estate is strategic.

Historically, women have been expected to refine more. Prepare more. Perfect more. Prove more. The struggle had to be visible. The effort had to look earned.

Now the loop is shorter: Idea becomes draft. Draft becomes prototype. Prototype becomes leverage.

Which is why I’m tracking the rise of women building spaces and structures that accelerate their work. For example, FoundHer House, an all-woman hacker house launched out of USC to support woman-led AI startups. These aren’t networking clubs. They’re leverage accelerators.

The point is: Women are using tools to convert thought into output faster, without performing struggle to prove the thought was real or worthy.

And that is a cultural threat to anyone invested in women staying small.

Because when thought becomes asset—code, audience, product, IP—it becomes power far harder to gatekeep.

2) Ownership is accelerating (even as institutions try to gatekeep it).

Despite persistent funding inequity, women are building companies, building receipts, and building leverage.

And I’m not just seeing this in reports. I’m watching it inside my own network.

Here’s the pattern:

• Early-stage founders raising capital with a clear path to profitability (not endless fundraising cycles) so they preserve exit leverage.

• Creators untethering from large media networks, trading distribution security for IP ownership and licensing power.

• Senior leaders building monetized platforms alongside corporate roles, creating audience ownership and financial stability beyond a single employer.

These moves aren’t reactive. They’re strategic.

Women are no longer optimizing solely for access. They’re optimizing for optionality.

Now zoom out.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest Business Owner Characteristics data (2023 reference year, released in 2025), women own approximately 14.2 million U.S. businesses, generating roughly $2.8 trillion in annual receipts. Women represent over 42% of nonemployer businesses (a dominant share of the solopreneur and microbusiness economy) and roughly 22% of employer firms, the larger payroll-carrying companies that tend to scale.

That distribution matters. Women are heavily represented in business formation and self-employment, but still underrepresented in scaled employer firms. Which means the upside isn’t hypothetical. It’s structural.

Now layer in formation velocity. Nearly 49% of new businesses formed in 2024 were started by women, up sharply from just under 30% in 2019. That’s not incremental growth. That’s acceleration.

Hold that next to capital allocation: according to NVCA/PitchBook, all-women founding teams continue to receive only ~1–2% of total U.S. venture capital annually—a figure that has barely changed over the past decade, even as overall VC deployment has fluctuated wildly.

And here’s the part that complicates the narrative: research consistently shows that women-led companies often generate higher revenue per dollar invested and reach profitability with less capital. In other words, the constraint isn’t performance. It’s selective allocation.

That tension is the story. Capital gatekeeping hasn’t disappeared, so women are building revenue-backed leverage instead of permission-backed valuation.

This era is less about being chosen. It’s about building outside the gate.

But there’s another layer most people overlook: NielsenIQ estimates women control over $31 trillion in global spending power and influence 70–80% of consumer purchasing decisions worldwide. So, at the exact moment women are accelerating business formation, they already influence the majority of demand.

When a demographic increasingly controls consumption, increases production, and begins protecting its terms (literally and figuratively), that’s not a fleeting trend.

That’s market power consolidating, and market power compounds.

3) Women’s health is finally being treated like an innovation frontier rather than a niche.

This is the part I’m most fired up about, because it’s where the light is becoming literal infrastructure.

For decades, women’s health has been chronically under-researched and underfunded relative to disease burden. Women were excluded from clinical trials well into the late 20th century. Conditions like endometriosis, PCOS, menopause, autoimmune disorders, and maternal morbidity were either minimized or misunderstood.

That neglect wasn’t just cultural. It was economic.

When women’s health is underfunded, women lose time.

Energy. Income. Advancement. Optionality.

Now the signals are shifting.

In 2024 (under the Biden administration), Executive Order 14120 elevated women’s health research through the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, directing federal agencies to coordinate and close long-standing research gaps. NIH materials tied to that initiative cite roughly $200 million in new interdisciplinary funding commitments in FY25, targeting historically underfunded areas including maternal health, menopause, and chronic conditions that disproportionately affect women.

Under the current administration (i.e., dumpster fire, hellscape, etc.), broader federal policy has shifted in ways that complicate the landscape, including the rollback or reframing of certain equity-focused language across agencies and renewed political volatility around reproductive health policy.

However, and this matters, Executive Order 14120 has not been formally rescinded or documented publicly as such. To my knowledge, research programs launched under it continue to operate. NIH grants already awarded remain active under multi-year funding structures. Research centers funded through longer-term commitments are still conducting studies. Data standards and reporting frameworks set in motion remain embedded within agency processes unless explicitly rewritten.

In other words, implementation intensity may evolve, messaging may shift, and adjacent policies may change, but the underlying research infrastructure has not simply disappeared.

And once research pipelines open—grants are awarded, labs staffed, and datasets built—momentum accumulates. Reversal isn’t impossible, but it becomes slower, more complex, and materially harder than rhetoric alone suggests.

Plus (!!), federal movement is no longer the only driver.

Private capital is accelerating in parallel.

The Gates Foundation (thank you, Melinda…I have my eyes on you, Bill) committed $2.5 billion through 2030 toward women’s health R&D. Venture investment in femtech and diagnostics continues to expand. States and health systems are increasingly prioritizing maternal health and reproductive outcomes independent of federal volatility.

The signal is bigger than a single administration. Women’s health is being reframed as economic infrastructure.

You can see it in the market:

• McKinsey estimates closing the women’s health gap could unlock $1 trillion in global GDP annually by 2040.

• Interest in male contraceptive trials has increased in the post-Dobbs era, signaling a cultural shift in how reproductive responsibility is distributed.

• Femtech is moving beyond cycle-tracking apps into hardware, diagnostics, and data infrastructure, including ventures like Emm, which raised $9 million to build a sensor-enabled menstrual cup designed to generate cycle-level health data that can support earlier detection and research.

• And culturally, we’re finally naming the invisible labor. Pieces like The Meteor’s reframing of the “just pump” narrative expose how reproductive labor often keeps women tethered to both biological and corporate expectations simultaneously.

This matters because women’s health innovation isn’t just healthcare.

It’s time.
It’s energy.
It’s cognitive bandwidth.
It’s earning power.
It’s self-trust.

It’s women getting to keep their ambition because their bodies are no longer treated like mysteries, inconveniences, or liabilities, but supported with better diagnostics, better research, and better policy.

When that happens, ambition doesn’t collapse under physical strain. It expands.

And expansion changes who gets to design the future.

So what’s the Bright Spot?

Even as women face targeted political backlash, the underlying terrain is shifting in our favor:

• We’re reducing friction in how we think, speak, and ship. The distance between idea and asset is collapsing. Output no longer has to be paid for in exhaustion.

• We’re reallocating ambition away from systems that punish it and toward ownership, flexibility, leverage, and optionality. The aspiration isn’t proximity to power anymore. It’s building structures that don’t require permission to participate.

• We’re watching women’s health move from cultural afterthought to economic priority. From decades of dismissal to research funding. From private suffering to policy proposals. From “just track your cycle” apps to diagnostics, devices, and clinically useful data.

This is what a new era looks like: Not perfect. Not linear. But structurally different.

The invitation: self-responsibility.

Now, the question isn’t whether this moment is real. It’s whether you’re going to participate.

Instead of: “Can I survive this?”

It’s: “Can I let this work for me?”

Here are some prompts to help you get started:

1. Where are you still “performing effort” to earn legitimacy? Where are you over-explaining, over-delivering, or over-polishing not because it strengthens the work, but because it makes your presence feel safer? What would it look like to build a system that makes your output more inevitable instead of heroic?

2. What’s one friction point you can eliminate this month without apologizing for it? That might mean AI-assisted drafting. It might mean hiring support. It might mean automating logistics, narrowing your scope, setting a firmer boundary, or finally admitting that exhaustion is not a branding strategy.

3. Zooming out: what do you want to own more of in 2026? Your time? Your IP? Your deal terms? Your audience? Your health data? Your schedule? Your equity? Your energy?

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For the thread-pullers.

• Caregiving pressure + workforce design:
  Catalyst – New data on caregiving pressures and women exiting the workforce

• Male contraception interest shift:
  STAT News – Surge in men volunteering for male birth control trials

• Women building AI infrastructure + spaces:
  USC Today – FoundHer House and women-led AI startup infrastructure

• Femtech device leap:
  TechCrunch – Emm raises $9M for smart menstrual cup device

• Women’s health research investment signals:

  McKinsey – $1T economic opportunity in closing the women’s health gap

And if you’re feeling generous: What’s a signal you’re seeing that tells you something is shifting, even if the headlines don’t reflect it?

Drop it in the comments. I’m seated.

I always think of one lunch when I think of Isata.

It was pretty early into our friendship. We were somewhere in Lower Manhattan (I think at this great little Turkish spot in Soho, if my memory serves me), and it was one of those long, unhurried lunches that stretches far beyond paying the check. I remember she was wearing bright red lipstick, radiating in that elegant, inside-out way she does.

I can’t remember exactly what the topics were, and that’s not what mattered. What mattered was how easily the conversation moved from the very serious to the very unserious, without ever feeling jarring. It was the kind of ease that tells you you’re sitting across from someone who is deeply at home in herself.

That’s why Isata has been one of the people I trust most with my sharpest questions, half-formed ideas, and biggest hopes for nearly a decade. She’s not someone I go to for quick reassurance, but for clarity—for perspective shaped by care, rigor, and restraint.

We’ve been through it together: quitting jobs, starting new ones, launching businesses, and closing chapters we thought would last longer. We’ve weathered a pandemic, cultural and political chaos, and the strange intimacy of sustaining a deep friendship almost entirely across coasts and screens. Ours is the kind of friendship that expands with time, one that doesn’t depend on constant proximity or validation, but on trust.

Over the years, what I’ve come to admire most about Isata is her quiet strength. Her integrity. Her attentiveness to the long arc. She moves without spectacle, but with extraordinary intention. She understands, deeply, that there is room for all of us to expand without it coming at someone else’s expense—a way of moving through the world that’s rarer than it should be.

So when I thought about who to spotlight next, the answer felt obvious.

There is nothing more critical to our future than the stewardship of cultural institutions and a collective reverence for artistic expression. And I genuinely cannot imagine the Studio Museum in Harlem (or any institution of this importance) being in better hands than Isata’s.

This is a case study about patience. About responsibility. About leadership that doesn’t rush the work because it understands what’s at stake.

In Her Words: Isata on the Work Behind the Work

On leading the Studio Museum in Harlem’s reopening

“Most recently, I led the multi-year marketing and communications strategy for the Studio Museum in Harlem’s grand reopening — a moment that reintroduced a legacy institution to New York City and the global art world after an extended period of closure.”

"It was as much about visibility and raising awareness of the Museum as it was about community engagement and encouraging visitation. We wanted the narrative to honor its history while positioning it for the future."

Isata describes the work as far more than a launch. It required overseeing a complex network of creative and media partners (brand and design studios, media planners, publicists, and production teams), all aligned around a single narrative vision.

“At the core of the campaign was translating the Museum’s mission into a living narrative — centering artworks from the permanent collection within the context of place, Harlem, where the Museum’s new architecture stands.”

“It was essential that this story felt coherent and grounded across every channel — from physical space to media to digital — so that audiences could immediately understand both the legacy and the evolution of the institution.”

On how long meaningful change actually takes

“In short, it took nearly three years.”

“What people see at the end is a moment — but what they don’t see is the amount of listening, alignment, and patience that happens long before anything becomes public.”

While the reopening moment appeared instantaneous to the public, Isata emphasizes that the real work unfolded quietly and in phases.

“2023 was largely about listening and stabilizing what was already in motion — understanding the internal rhythms of the organization, building trust with leadership, and resisting the urge to rush.”

“By late 2023, the first public-facing milestone arrived with the unveiling of a new graphic identity. In 2024, the work shifted into integration and extension. In 2025, the reopening came with a 360° campaign supported by years of strategy and coordination behind the scenes.”

On why this work is personal

“I came to this work with a deep belief in the power that lives at the intersection of art, design, and storytelling.”

"The spaces we create for artists and scholars shape, not only how culture is experienced, but how new ideas and solutions to problems inform and uplift society."

For Isata, the Studio Museum represented a rare convergence: innovative architecture layered onto an institution with profound historical weight, artistic legacy, and community meaning.

"My big insight was that so many people knew these artists but many did not know they got their start at the Studio Museum."

“It was about storytelling a lineage — honoring what has existed for decades — while making intentional room for what comes next.”

On the mindset that kept her grounded

“My greatest asset was staying anchored to the reasons why I do this work and remembering to keep an open heart.”

“That meant making decisions from a place of clarity rather than urgency, and staying connected to the values that brought me into this field in the first place.”

Isata speaks directly about choosing integrity over immediacy.

“That mindset helped me remain grounded, effective, and deliver work that I believe will outlast the moment it was created for.”

On the things people misunderstand about institutional transformation

“Organizational transformation is rarely linear, and it’s almost never glamorous — even in the art world.”

“There’s a tendency to assume that change happens through bold gestures, but more often it happens through careful, consistent decision-making over time.”

She’s clear that branding isn’t about surface-level refreshes.

“It’s not about visuals alone. It’s about who feels invited, who can see themselves reflected once they arrive, and what kind of value exchange the institution can meaningfully sustain.”

Her advice is precise and uncompromising:

“Be strategic and think long term.”

“Be clear about the story you want to tell on the other side of a big project— have discipline to accomplish the goal but allow room for the unknown"

On impact and ripple effects

“The campaign, Where Black Art Lives, is now circulating across New York and in national media.”

“What matters most to me is that it has strengthened public recognition of the Museum’s mission and the significance of the new building as a cultural home.”

Early signals include renewed audience energy, steady visitor attendance, store sales, and growing online engagement—indicators of trust being rebuilt and sustained.

“Those signals tell us that people are reconnecting — not just showing up once, but beginning to build a relationship with the institution again.”

On how others can support this work

“Support the artists in your life. Go to their shows. Buy their work. Pay them fairly.”

“So much of cultural sustainability starts at the individual level — with how we choose to show up for creative labor.”

And, of course:

“Visit (and follow) the Studio Museum in Harlem. Become a member. Buy something from the store.”

How to Right-Size Lessons from Isata’s Story to Your Own Life

Isata’s story reminds us that meaningful work is rarely loud, fast, or linear. It unfolds slowly, through care, discernment, and a deep respect for what’s being held.

Her leadership shows us that urgency is not the same as importance. That restraint can be a strategy. That stewardship (tending, protecting, and sustaining) is a form of power often overlooked in cultures obsessed with speed and scale.

What stands out most is her refusal to rush what carries history, community, and consequence. The long game isn’t passive here; it’s intentional. It’s disciplined. It’s deeply strategic.

Use the reflections below to translate Isata’s approach into your own leadership, work, and life—not as prescriptions, but as calibrations.

• On pace and trust
  Where in your work or life are you pushing for momentum when what’s actually required is listening, relationship-building, or patience? What might shift if you slowed the timeline without lowering the standard?

• On purpose over production
  When was the last time you revisited why you do the work you do—beyond outputs, titles, or visibility? What happens when purpose becomes the anchor instead of the byproduct?

• On coherence versus reactivity
  Are your decisions guided by a clear through-line, or by the pressure to respond to every new signal, opportunity, or demand? What would it look like to choose coherence over constant motion?

• On lineage and responsibility
  Whose work, values, or sacrifices are you building upon—whether acknowledged or not? How are you honoring that lineage while creating space for what needs to evolve next?

• On legacy
  When this chapter closes, what do you want people to say about how you led, not just what you achieved? What choices today are shaping that story?

Choose the prompt that resonates with you most. Focus on it for the next week—explore it in your journal, your next strategy session, or even a conversation with someone you trust.

Small reflections build up into cultural shifts. Personal lessons lead to systemic change.

Nominate Our Next Bright Spot

Know someone creating meaningful change in their community, organization, or industry? Nominate them.

Email me at tori@howtofckupwell.com with their name, a link to learn more or get in touch, and a short note on why their story deserves to be spotlighted.

In my experience, the most impactful connections still happen beyond the feed through word of mouth.

Last month, Substack hosted a live event in Los Angeles called The Hole Debate, co-hosted by Erica Chidi (Soft Boundaries) and Jessica DeFino (Flesh World). The lineup was bold: labiaplasty, menopause, GLP-1s—essentially every topic we’re taught to tiptoe around. The intention was powerful: to bring critical, under-discussed issues about women’s bodies into public view, with honesty, humor, and a little provocation.

I deeply admire their willingness to create space for complexity.

Still, watching the excitement build online, something struck me. The event promised “sparks, laughter, friction, and maybe a little clarity too.” And that last line made me pause. “But why?” I asked myself. The answer: because I wholeheartedly believe clarity rarely comes from friction alone.

What began as an opportunity for nuance started to sound, well… like a showdown, which made me wonder: when did disagreement become a performance?

It reminded me that while debate can spark awareness, it’s dialogue that sustains it.
The bright spot, to me, lives in merging the courage of The Hole Debate with the design of platforms like The Conversationalist, where founder Sophie Beren is engineering spaces for nuanced, values-based conversation, and the quiet wisdom of Jane Goodall, who’s long modeled what it means to partner, even with opponents, to protect what matters.

So that’s the question I’d like to explore and pose to you:
What if the future of discourse lives right there—in the overlap between confrontation and compassion, between conviction and connection?

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🔍 Learnings: Principles for Expanding Perspective in a Polarized World

1. Debate vs. Dialogue: What We’re Actually Optimizing For

We’re living through the golden age of the structured argument. Every platform rewards it. The snappy sound bite, the viral “gotcha,” the split-screen face-off. Even our algorithms act like referees, tallying outrage instead of insight.

But here’s the truth: debate culture has made us better at defending positions than deepening perspective. We’ve become fluent in rebuttal, but allergic to reflection.

True dialogue—the kind that changes minds—moves more slowly. It invites discomfort, asks follow-up questions, and doesn’t always end in resolution. It’s less about proving and more about probing.

🌟 Insight: The internet rewards reaction, but progress depends on the opposite.

📝 Application: Before responding to disagreement, ask: Am I seeking to understand, or to be understood first? Pause long enough for your answer to surprise you.

2. Curiosity Is a Leadership Skill

Across every system I study, from tech to politics to family design, the leaders making real progress have one thing in common: they know how to hold paradox.

They can say, I don’t know yet, without it weakening their authority. They treat tension as information. They understand that clarity is often an outcome of humility, not certainty.

In other words, they’re willing to evolve their worldview in public.

🌟 Insight: Curiosity is strategic intelligence in disguise.

📝 Application: When facing a decision, replace “What should I do?” with “What am I missing?” It turns uncertainty into data, and ego into learning.

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3. The Future of Influence Belongs to the Listeners

Platforms like The Conversationalist, founded by my friend Sophie Beren, are building exactly this kind of culture—one where listening isn’t passive, it’s participatory.

It’s slower. Less flashy. It won’t rack up the same clicks as a “debate night.”
But it’s the foundation of any future built on empathy rather than ego.

That same spirit is what inspired Olivia Owens and me to create our new podcast, Self-Centered. It’s part investigation, part reflection, part resistance to the pace and posture of modern discourse. In Episode 1, we explore what happens when we lose connection to ourselves and mistake performance for healing; in future episodes, we’ll examine how that disconnection shapes the way we relate to each other and to the systems we move through. Because if we can’t hear ourselves clearly, we’ll never learn to hear each other.

🌟 Insight: Listening is the new leverage. It builds the trust that debate erodes.

📝 Application: In your next meeting or conversation, speak last. Let silence do some of the work—and notice what you hear that you would’ve otherwise missed.

4. Beyond Winning: Reframing the Point

Most of us were trained to treat disagreement as a zero-sum game: one person wins, the other loses.

But dialogue done well isn’t a duel—it’s design. It shapes shared understanding, integrates difference, and reveals the values beneath opinion.

The point isn’t to convert, it’s to expand. Because when conversation becomes a space for expansion rather than defense, we stop debating identities and start evolving ideas.

🌟 Insight: Debate seeks victory. Dialogue seeks evolution.

📝 Application: The next time you disagree—online, at work, or at home—replace “convince me” with “teach me.” You’ll leave the conversation wiser, not just louder.

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🔗 This Might Be Related…

A few breadcrumbs for the pattern-seekers.

• The Problem with Celebrating Boys Through the Lexicon of Violence

• “It’s Hard for Me to Talk About the Climate with My Mother”

• A High School Started Offering Hikes Instead of Detentions—Teachers Are Seeing Results

🎧 Listen & Subscribe: The Self-Centered Podcast

If this topic resonates, you’ll love my new podcast, Self-Centered—a space where centering the self is the first step to rethinking the systems around us.

Episode 1: Reclaiming Our Peace in the Performance of Healing with Van Newman and Minaa B.

In our debut episode, we slow down to ask what support really looks like when productivity culture swallows self-care and “healing” turns into another thing to optimize. With guests Van Newman and Minaa B., we explore what it means to design systems that reduce the need for endurance instead of rewarding it—where rest, reflection, and repair become part of how we live and lead.

Follow and subscribe to get first access to new releases.
Next up: Redesigning Our Systems of Connection Amid the Noise of Division with Sophie Beren + Matt Klein

Why I Chose to Start Here

I’m launching this series, Bright Spot Case Studies, because I believe the most powerful lessons come from processes, not outcomes. This is my way of pulling back the curtain on women who are creating and scaling meaningful change in unexpected ways. Sharing their stories isn’t just about celebrating success; it’s about understanding how change happens, the choices, challenges, and qualities that transform possibility into impact. Each one ends with an invitation to apply those lessons to your own work, so their light becomes fuel for yours.

That’s why I wanted to begin with someone I know personally, someone further along in her career whose story embodies both strength and softness. While traveling through Costa Brava, Spain, this summer, I met my sister-in-law’s mother, Angels Bronsoms, who turned out to be exactly that.

From the start, she felt like a force of nature: uniquely feminine yet touched with eccentricism and androgyny, the kind of presence that feels like she’s holding the secrets of the universe. My sister-in-law, Ona, who works in public service at the Department of Defense, has a similar gravitas, so it didn’t surprise me. But what did surprise me was how quickly I felt connected to Angels. We bonded over our shared love of personal style and the ritual of getting dressed each day as an act of self-expression. Later, I learned more about her eclectic, pioneering career.

Angels experienced early success in radio and television in Spain, then broke into music journalism in Los Angeles, following her dream of immersing herself in the rock and punk music scene she long admired. She worked at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, helped shape Art Futura, an influential festival at the intersection of art and technology, and then took a bold leap to San Francisco in 1993 after earning a grant from the American Institute in Barcelona. There, she immersed herself in the digital revolution while juggling side jobs to stay afloat. That leap paid off in 1996, when she became the technology correspondent for El País, Spain’s leading news publication, anchoring her place in one of the most dynamic periods of cultural and technological change.

At 60, she earned a PhD in Journalism, producing groundbreaking research on gender and music that revealed how female rock artists have been systematically excluded from cultural narratives. She’s also been a mother, entrepreneur, and advocate, continuously blending personal milestones with professional reinvention.

One quote of hers has stayed with me: “There are as many feminisms as there are women.” That ethos—plural, inclusive, alive—runs through her work and life, a perspective I’m excited to share with you all.

Let’s dive in.

In Her Words: Angels on the Milestones That Shaped Her

On getting her PhD at 60 and the value of ethnographic research

“Finishing my International PhD in Journalism at 60 was not just an academic goal—it was a way of shining light on the systemic exclusion of women in music history. My research across the U.S., U.K., and Spain revealed how female rock artists were too often reduced to voices or bodies. Ethnographic research matters because it ties lived experience to structural critique, and that’s what creates urgency for change.”

On visualization as a lifelong practice

“At 25, I dreamed of going to Hollywood and working in music. Against all odds, I did it—becoming a correspondent in Los Angeles. From then on, I believed in the power of visualization. I saw it again at the Olympics, where athletes used visualization to concentrate and succeed. Every major move in my career has started with imagining it first.”

On reinvention and taking side roles seriously

“When I moved to San Francisco, I didn’t step into a glamorous role right away. I worked as a waitress in a Basque restaurant, as a secretary for Greenpeace, and as a translator just to stay afloat. Those roles weren’t distractions, they were stepping stones. They gave me resilience, access, and proximity until I became technology correspondent for El País. Sometimes the side path is the only way forward.”

On motherhood as transformation

“Becoming a mother at 35 was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. It gave me an instinct for renewal, an energy to overcome obstacles, and a deeper sense of purpose. Even after divorce, returning to Spain with my two daughters gave me the courage to launch my own PR and Press company years later. Motherhood was not a detour, it was a catalyst.”

On character as the overlooked ingredient of success

“Too often, we talk about skills and opportunities but forget the role of character. Determination, curiosity, and fearlessness are what allowed me to trek across countries chasing stories with nothing but a notebook. That drive is what keeps the work meaningful. Success is built as much on who you are as what you know.”

On mobilizing women and building confidence in the next generation

“Every network of women I’ve been part of has given me protection, support, and warmth. Mobilizing means building those networks bigger and stronger, so young girls grow up with the confidence I lacked. If they believe in themselves, they will pursue dreams, overcome obstacles, and change industries. But make no mistake: it will also require activism. The music industry and beyond still sideline women. Advocacy isn’t optional; it’s essential.”

How to Right-Size Lessons from Angels’ Story to Your Own Life

Angels’ life reminds us that a well-lived journey isn’t tidy, linear, or optimized for balance. It’s big, messy, beautiful—because it’s by her own design. She didn’t conform to the lie of the “perfect” career arc, work-life balance, or valuing money and status above all else. Instead, she followed instincts, embraced risks, and turned detours into foundations.

Her story shows us that resilience isn’t about strength at all costs. It’s about pairing rigor with intuition, ambition with care, strength with softness—and letting those qualities amplify each other. What looks like a sidestep or setback may actually be the raw material for your next breakthrough.

Use these prompts to reflect on how Angels’ lessons can relate to your personal leadership and life.

• On Reinvention
  What roles or experiences in your past felt “off-track” at the time? How could they now be reframed as stepping stones or hidden assets?

• On Visualization
  Where in your life or work could you apply visualization as a tool, not just for achievement, but for clarity and courage?

• On Research + Lived Experience
  Are you relying too much on abstract knowledge, or only on lived experience? How could integrating both give your work more depth and urgency?

• On Character
  Which qualities of character have been most essential in your journey so far? Which do you need to cultivate more intentionally?

• On Mobilization
  Where can you create or strengthen networks of support, especially with women and underrepresented voices, so that collective confidence becomes part of your impact?

Choose the prompt that resonates with you. Focus on it for the next week—explore it in your journal, your next strategy session, or even a conversation with someone you trust. Small reflections build up into cultural shifts. Personal lessons lead to systemic change.

Can’t Get Enough of Angels’ Energy? I’ve Got You

Here’s a bright spot and point of inspiration she often returns to:

“In this incredibly moving address, Madonna encourages women to recognize their own worth, support one another, and rise above the doubters and naysayers who try to hold them back. Succinctly, she also thanked those who made her journey harder, acknowledging that their challenges helped shape the woman she became. Her speech is a powerful reminder of resilience, self-belief, and solidarity among women.”

Nominate Our Next Bright Spot

Know someone creating change in their community, organization, or industry? Nominate them. Click the “Message” button below or email me at tori@howtofckupwell.com with their name, a link to learn more about/contact them, and a summary of why you believe their story should be told.

Over the last few months, I’ve been quietly beginning my own fertility and family planning journey. And despite the looming threat of an authoritarian government, I remain hopeful. I see this process as both a deeply personal milestone—one that will make my life bigger, messier, and more meaningful—and a contribution to the future I want to help build: raising a child who embodies the kind of values the world needs more of right now.

Maybe those are selfish reasons. I’m not sure. But they’re mine.

Still, mindset can only take you so far. Because here’s the truth: this is hard. It’s expensive. It’s confusing. It’s lonely. Even with supportive friends who’ve gone before me, many parts of our lives don’t align, and the insight doesn’t always translate. Nothing prepared me for how fragmented, transactional, and inaccessible our current systems are when it comes to something as foundational as starting a family.

So, I’ve been doing what I do best when I feel lost: research. And yes, there’s been a surge in femtech, VC funds focused on care infrastructure, and headlines about the childcare crisis and motherhood penalty. Yet most people on this path still feel like they’re navigating alone, or piecing together solutions that don’t quite fit. The result? A patchwork we’re expected to hold together with duct tape and hope.

That dissonance is unacceptable, but it’s more than a flaw to fix. It’s a design constraint, and a call to think bigger.

Building the future of family—of caregiving, fertility, partnership, and parenthood—was never meant to fall on one app, one fund, or one founder. It’s a cultural transformation that demands coordination across sectors: private, public, and communal. We need shared incentives, evolved narratives, and infrastructure that flexes with real life.

The leaders who will succeed here won’t just innovate. They’ll recognize their interdependence. They’ll know that even if their idea only works when everything else changes, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t pursue it. They just can’t pursue it alone.

And that’s the bright spot: a growing ecosystem of thinkers, builders, funders, and advocates who aren’t trying to “own” the narrative, but interlink their efforts to reshape it.

Leaders like Reshma Saujani and Larissa May are modeling a new kind of innovation—one that connects corporate care, public policy, and cultural storytelling. From Reshma’s advocacy for paid leave and maternal health to Larissa’s work building tools for digital well-being and helping families navigate their online lives, they’re addressing different pieces of the same cultural puzzle.

Their work reminds us: the best change-makers aren’t soloists. They’re orchestrators.

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🔍 Learnings: What the Future of Family Is Teaching Us About Interdependent Innovation

1. Coordination > Category Creation: The most promising players in the care space aren’t trying to dominate a market. They’re mapping themselves to other movements. Take VC funds like Halogen, which back not just femtech, but the entire care economy, from flexible work platforms to parental leave solutions. Or the rise of cross-sector storytelling: Reels showing dads rebalancing household labor go viral alongside investigative pieces on childcare policy and breakthroughs in breast cancer research. These aren’t isolated moments; they’re reinforcing loops that link culture, policy, and innovation.

🌟 Insight: Category creation is sexy. System coordination is sustainable.

📝 Application: What parallel efforts or policies need to succeed for your vision to have a long-term impact? Map the ecosystem and interconnected players, not just competitors. Look for shared goals and differentiating capabilities, not ownership.

2. Design With Foresight & Imagination, Not Just Fit: It’s tempting to build for what’s broken today. But real change takes years, sometimes decades, and by the time your product, policy, or movement reaches scale, the world around it will have shifted. The leaders who last aren’t just fixing the now; they’re using futures thinking to design for what’s next.

Consider the rise of the freelance majority. We’re moving toward a workforce where traditional employment is no longer the norm, yet our healthcare, childcare, and retirement systems are still built for full-time, W2 jobs. The care economy isn’t the only sector facing this mismatch. Whether you’re shaping tech, policy, or internal strategy, designing for a disappearing context is a fast track to obsolescence.

🌟 Insight: Change takes time. Designing for today’s structures can undermine tomorrow’s relevance.

📝 Application: Choose one project, product, or policy you’re leading. Is it calibrated to today’s urgency or tomorrow’s reality? What trend, demographic shift, or cultural change should shape its next iteration?

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3. Success Requires Cultural Buy-In: In The Power Pause, Neha Ruch reframes what it means to be powerful as a parent or caregiver. Ambition doesn’t disappear—it’s redefined. For many women, stepping back isn’t a retreat from their careers; it’s a conscious choice to lead differently. But that kind of cultural reframe doesn’t happen on its own. To shift hearts, minds, and long-term behavior, we need more than policy updates or product rollouts. We need emotionally resonant narratives that unite stakeholders around a shared vision—and the patience to repeat them until they stick.

🌟 Insight: Policy, product, and perception must move together—or not at all.

📝 Application: Whether you’re launching a new idea or leading internal change, ask: Have I made the emotional and cultural case, or just the logical one? Whose stories need to be told to reinforce the case and build trust?

4. Build for Relationship, Not Just Reach: Real change doesn’t come from a brilliant idea alone. It comes from ongoing, meaningful dialogue with the people you’re trying to serve. My client, Ariba Jahan, has deeply shaped how I think about this. Her work reminds me that empathy isn’t a one-time research sprint—it’s a continuous practice. Too many leaders hold a focus group once and call it listening. But if we want systems that actually work, we have to bake that listening into the way we operate every day, not just the way we launch.

Whether you’re building tech, shaping policy, or running for office, the principle is the same: your impact is only as strong as your relationships. Leaders like Reshma Saujani and Larissa May embody this, and I’d argue it’s their greatest superpower. From Girls Who Code to Moms First, Reshma’s initiatives have evolved in direct response to women’s lived realities. Through #HalfTheStory and her forthcoming app Ginko, Larissa is building tools for digital wellbeing shaped by ongoing conversations with parents, teens, and educators. Their solutions don’t just scale—they adapt, because the people they serve remain part of the process.

🌟 Insight: Sustainable innovation is relational, not transactional.

📝 Application: Where in your work have you stopped listening? What feedback loops need to be revived, restructured, or prioritized—not just during launch, but for the long arc ahead?

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🔗 This Might Be Related…

A few breadcrumbs for the pattern-seekers.

• The Work of Caring for My Daughter Will Never Be ‘Efficient’

• We’re Not Being Imaginative Enough About What The Future Could Look Like

• Women Are Getting Wealthier—And They Don't Invest the Same Way as Men

📣 Building Something Bigger Than Yourself? Let’s Architect It Together.

My private and group coaching tracks are built for systems thinkers, cross-functional leaders, internal changemakers, and founders working in complex, high-stakes environments. Whether you’re shaping culture, driving growth, or making critical decisions without a clear playbook, we’ll turn your vision into a strategic path forward, while keeping you anchored in your values, voice, and unique strengths as a woman in leadership.

🔗 Book a 30-minute consultation call to explore fit and access my service brochure.

Last call for Q3, and spots for Q4 are already filling. Early access recommended.

Crowds, signs, and viral clips still matter. But protest isn’t a strategy—it’s a spark. That’s a truth history has proven again and again, from civil rights to reproductive justice. And yet in 2025, we’re being asked to remember it differently.

In a digital world that rewards visibility, real change still depends on something deeper: infrastructure. Decentralized support networks. Local reciprocity. Young leaders who turn outrage into operating systems.

Few people embody that shift better than Deja Foxx, the 25-year-old multidisciplinary advocate for reproductive rights now running for Congress in Arizona.

In 2018, I came across a 17-second clip of Deja dismantling Senator Jeff Flake on birth-control access, while running my first business—a New York–based brand-marketing studio that specialized in community building and social-impact experiments. My instincts said: pay attention. From then on, whenever a client project aligned, I pitched partnership ideas to her Gen Z Girl Gang team and found every opportunity to amplify their work. The conversations we had opened my eyes to a different kind of leadership—one that sounded less like influencer briefs and more like civics rewired for TikTok.

None of what she’s doing now surprises me. She’s always played the long game, even when the room tried to shrink her to a Gen Z influencer headline.

Her early activism didn’t just draw headlines. It created tangible, local change. From reshaping her high school’s sex-ed policy to influencing national conversations on reproductive rights, Foxx built a reputation for showing up, speaking clearly, and making systems flinch. Now, her campaign is rooted in infrastructure: neighborhood canvass teams that double as mutual-aid hubs, policy workshops in high-school gyms, and a volunteer corps trained to mentor first-time voters as much as register them. It’s Robert Putnam’s social-capital theory—go local, go young, trade favors—translated for the next generation.

And we should all be paying attention—because her blueprint for disruption and sustainable change travels well beyond politics.

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🔍 Learnings: Turning Outrage Into Operating Systems — Four Principles You Can Apply Beyond Politics

1. From Flash Moment to Durable Mechanism: A march, a viral post, or a conference keynote can all spike attention. But Deja treats that spike like seed capital, channeling it into systems that sustain her impact. After that 17-second clip of her challenging Senator Jeff Flake ricocheted across the internet, she didn’t chase more camera time; she spun the spotlight into action. Within weeks, she’d rallied classmates to rewrite her high school’s sex-ed policy and started laying the groundwork for Gen Z Girl Gang, a peer-led network that now trains young organizers nationwide. That pattern defines her playbook: turn every headline into a hiring pipeline, every viral moment into an operating budget, every podcast invite into a volunteer training. Her work shows how momentum without machinery is a missed opportunity. It’s never about milking the moment- it’s about engineering permanence.

🌟 Insight: A flash of visibility is only valuable if it translates into structure, systems, and processes.

📝 Application: Identify one “big splash” you or your team made in the last 18 months. Where is it now? Documented SOP, recurring budget, or still sitting in a slide deck? Decide what infrastructure would make it self-financing.

2. Make Yourself Replaceable, That’s the Point: Deja’s campaign isn’t centered on a single figure—it’s structured to grow in community. Volunteers are onboarded through buddy systems, briefed in pre-canvassing prep sessions, and shown how to use tools like Reach to connect with voters. Her campaign provides walk lists, talking points, and reflection prompts, and team culture is reinforced through shared rituals like group reflections, birthday shoutouts, and communal meals. “We do this work in community,” Deja says, and she means it: across her dedicated campaign Instagram account, we see her campaign investing just as much in relational infrastructure as in political messaging. Her presence may spark momentum, but her absence doesn’t stall it. That’s the point. In a world obsessed with founders, figureheads, and personal brands, she’s making a case for systems that don’t collapse when their creator steps away. Replaceability isn’t a threat—it’s a design feature.

🌟 Insight: Real leadership isn’t about being the only one who can do it. It’s about building systems so others can do it without you.

📝 Application: List three decisions only you can make right now. Which one could live inside a playbook, template, or onboarding doc by next quarter? Replaceability isn’t a threat to your value—it’s how your vision scales.

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3. Reciprocity > Reach: In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam warns that America’s social fabric is fraying—not from lack of ambition, but from lack of meaningful reciprocity. He points to a decline in the kinds of interactions that build collective trust: shared meals, local favors, and face-to-face collaboration. Deja’s campaign operates like a living case study in rebuilding that fabric. Her team doesn’t just organize. They trade support. Grocery runs, job leads, rides to the polls, communal meals. It's politics as mutual aid, yes—but also a template for any leader trying to build something that lasts. She shows us that sustainable systems don’t start with messaging—they start with exchange. The model holds across fields: your team, your board, your collaborators. Durable buy-in starts when people experience value before being asked for output. And when that exchange is mutual, not transactional, loyalty becomes legacy.

🌟 Insight: High-trust systems are built through repeated, meaningful exchange, not reach or rhetoric.

📝 Application: Choose one group or initiative you’re leading right now. What’s one act of support you could offer that isn’t tied to performance or deliverables? Reciprocity builds the kind of trust that no incentive structure can buy.

4. Treat Range as R&D: Deja’s résumé reads less like a linear ladder and more like a constellation: Planned Parenthood fellow at 16, reproductive-justice organizer, Kamala-Harris campaign surrogate, Gen Z Girl Gang founder, digital-strategy consultant, and now congressional candidate. None of it is random. Each role sharpened a different edge—policy fluency, media storytelling, grassroots logistics, mutual-aid finance. Woven together, those edges form a toolkit that allows her to move seamlessly between Senate sound bites and TikTok voter drives. As the New York Times recently reported, this kind of interdisciplinary fluency isn’t just common among young political leaders; it’s becoming essential. The world is more complex; their skill sets are, too.

🌟 Insight: Range isn’t a detour; it’s protective R&D—diverse experiences build resilience, reveal patterns others miss, and create more adaptable, future-facing systems.

📝 Application: Map your own “side quests.” Think jobs, volunteer gigs, disciplines you’ve dabbled in. Choose one overlooked skill or contact from that list and integrate it into a current project this quarter. Range compounds when you treat it as an asset, not an accident.

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🔗 This Might Be Related…

A few breadcrumbs for the pattern-seekers.

• Priya Parker on What We’ve Learned About Gathering Well

• ‘You’re Tough’: How Mexico’s President (Claudia Sheinbaum–A Leftist, Climate Scientist) Won Trump’s Praise

• Sinead Bovell Knows That in the Age of AI, We Should Be Preparing Kids for Life—Not Jobs

📣 Building Something Bigger Than Yourself? Let’s Architect It Together.

My group and private coaching tracks are designed for systems thinkers, cross-functional leaders, internal changemakers, and founders navigating complex environments. Whether you're shaping culture, driving growth, or making high-stakes decisions without a clear playbook, we’ll turn your vision into a strategic path forward while staying true to your values, voice, and unique strengths as a woman in leadership.

🔗 Book a 30-minute consultation call to explore fit and access my service brochure.

Spots for Q3 are filling. Early access recommended.

When women “make it,” the media celebrates the outcome with headlines featuring titles like “youngest self-made billionaire” and “unicorn founder.” But what rarely gets attention is the strategy underneath. The bold, sometimes quiet, behind-the-scenes decisions that changed everything long before anyone took notice.

Lucy Guo didn’t become one of the youngest self-made women billionaires by accident. She co-founded Scale AI, helped build the early product and raise initial funding, and then left well before the company hit its $13 billion valuation. In the process, she protected her stake and created a solid foundation to launch her next venture: Passes. It wasn’t loud. It was deliberate.

Melanie Perkins took a different path. She stayed. She pitched Canva more than 100 times, heard rejection after rejection, and never let go of her vision. Instead of chasing approval, she doubled down on traction. She held onto control of her company, scaled industry-disrupting innovation with intention, and built a platform customers couldn’t stop using until investors had no choice but to get on board.

Two different strategies. One shared truth: They didn’t just build companies—they built leverage.

That’s the flex. Not the headline. The terms.

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🔍 Learnings: Inside the Quiet Moves That Led to Loud Outcomes

1. When Vision Doesn’t Align, Exit With Equity: Lucy didn’t storm out of Scale AI; she stepped back with intention. She had a different vision for what the product should become, and when that vision no longer aligned with her co-founder’s roadmap, she made a difficult but decisive move: she left.

What’s often overlooked is how rare that is. Many founders stay in misaligned partnerships out of fear, ego, or sunk cost. Lucy didn’t. She made a values-based decision to prioritize alignment over association, and she did it without letting frustration jeopardize her long-term wealth-building potential. She left with her equity intact, turning that early stake into quiet leverage as Scale soared to a $13 billion valuation. It wasn’t a reaction—it was foresight. She exited with clarity, capital, and full ownership of her next move.

🌟 Insight: A values-aligned decision today can set up long-term returns if you have the conviction and discipline to leave on your terms and the foresight to protect your stake…even when frustration tempts you to burn it all down.

📝 Application: Are you staying in something simply because you helped build it? Revisit the cost of loyalty when it comes at the expense of alignment. What would it look like to leave with grace, clarity, and your equity intact?

2. Rejection Isn’t a Wall, It’s a Mirror: Melanie was rejected more than 100 times while trying to raise money for Canva. She wasn’t technical enough. Her idea wasn’t bold enough. She wasn’t based in Silicon Valley. Her story was the wrong shape for the system.

But instead of internalizing those no’s as personal, she treated them as data points in a live experiment. Each rejection gave her a clearer picture of investor psychology, market skepticism, and what language landed or didn’t. She rewrote her pitch, refined the story, adjusted the product-market framing, and paid close attention to who was in the room. It wasn’t just about getting better at asking; it was about figuring out how to make the value undeniable. All while staying grounded in her vision and refusing to trade early equity for quick validation.

🌟 Insight: Rejection isn’t a verdict, it’s feedback. The most effective founders or leaders know how to feel the sting without letting it reshape their self-worth. They separate critique from identity, using every 'no' to sharpen the pitch, not dull the conviction.

📝 Application: What are you learning from your no’s? How are you evolving the pitch, the audience, or the offer? How do you discern feedback that fuels growth, without compromising your vision or big bets?

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3. Wealth Doesn’t Come From Visibility, It Comes From Ownership: It’s easy to get distracted by status, titles, and optics…especially in tech (been there 🙃). But neither Lucy nor Melanie chased the spotlight (even if it still finds them). They cared more about what they retained behind the scenes. Their leverage wasn’t built in public. It was built in contracts, terms, and quiet decisions that preserved their autonomy.

Lucy negotiated her exit in a way that preserved her stake. No headlines, no drama, just sharp foresight and clear terms. She knew Scale AI's potential, even if she chose not to stay. Melanie, facing a flood of early rejections, had every reason to take easier money with more aggressive terms. But she didn’t. She waited, secured more aligned investors, and kept her cap table founder-friendly. Both of them understood this: visibility without ownership is a trap. If you’re building something others will one day want to invest in, acquire, or celebrate, make sure you still own enough of it to benefit when that moment arrives.

🌟 Insight: Visibility may earn attention, but ownership builds lasting wealth and leverage. It gives you decision-making power, insulation from volatility, and the ability to walk away with something real, regardless of the spotlight.

📝 Application: Are you optimizing for perception or autonomy? What terms have you agreed to that might limit your ability to make strategic decisions later? Revisit your cap table, contracts, or role and ask: What do I actually own here?

4. Controversy Doesn’t Have to Kill Your Credibility: Lucy has never shied away from controversy, and neither has it shied away from her. From lawsuits to online backlash surrounding her creator monetization startup, Passes, the media has often framed her as polarizing. Melanie has faced scrutiny, too. Even after building Canva into one of the world’s most valuable startups, she’s still cast as an underdog. Outlets like The Information still question her leadership, not because Canva underperformed, but due to lingering industry skepticism about how a young, non-technical woman has quietly led a $40+ billion company calmly, with conviction, and little interest in conventional power plays.

What both stories reveal is this: women in leadership are often expected to be agreeable, uncontroversial, unthreatening, and easy to define. And when they’re not, the backlash can be swift. But neither Lucy nor Melanie let external narratives dictate their trajectory. They stayed focused on product, performance, and scaling their vision with the people who mattered—team, investors, advisors, and customers—not press cycles or the noise of social media discourse.

🌟 Insight: Leading boldly will invite scrutiny, especially when you're a woman rewriting the rules. The real risk isn’t being misunderstood, but letting that misunderstanding distort your direction. If your strategy is sound and your track record clear, you don’t need to justify the path; keep walking it.

📝 Application: Where are you holding back or self-censoring to stay likable or low-risk? What’s the cost of silence or staying neutral when you have something to say or build?

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🔗 This Might Be Related…

A few breadcrumbs for the pattern-seekers.

• I’ve Been Given These Cards. Now What Do I Do With That? Blue Origin’s Heavily Criticized All-Female Flight was Amanda Nguyen’s Best Shot at Space.

• We added a Trump Tariff Surcharge—and within 48 hours, I was fielding interviews from Bloomberg, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal.

• Alencia Johnson’s Debut Book ‘Flip The Tables’ Is A Blueprint For Disruptors—And It’s Right On Time

📣 Would You Pay a Monthly Subscription for a Chatbot Trained on My IP?

Accessibility and diversification matter deeply to me, so I’m exploring creative ways to: 1) make my coaching more accessible to women who aren’t ready yet (or able) to invest in bespoke services, and 2) scale my impact through more passive channels, because let’s be honest, holding space for 15+ people’s ambitions, business models, and emotional worlds at once is hard AF.

Think: on-demand decision-making support, pitching and negotiating guidance, and real-world case studies—powered by my original, science-informed coaching toolkit.

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Would you use a chatbot that gives you access to all of the above, anytime you need it, leading to higher earning potential and stronger leverage?

There’s a transformation happening in entertainment—and it’s being led by women who aren’t just showing up, they’re taking over the blueprint. They’re done waiting for permission. They’re stepping into roles far beyond the spotlight: owning production companies, redefining narratives, creating new revenue models, and championing stories that wouldn’t have made it past the pitch room ten years ago. This isn’t just about visibility—it’s about building lasting power.

And while it might be easy to write off Hollywood as a world apart, what’s happening there actually gives us a glimpse of what’s possible everywhere else. Entertainment often sets the cultural tone. So when women start shifting power behind the scenes—from Nicole Kidman collaborating with 19 female directors to Issa Rae building a creative empire rooted in community, ownership, and cultural authenticity—it shows us a roadmap for creative leadership, economic influence, and long-term impact.

If you’re a founder, exec, or creator figuring out how to build something that lasts, this moment matters. These women are modeling what it looks like to lead with intention, to diversify without diluting, and to redefine success on your own terms. It’s not just a trend. It’s a recalibration—and it’s giving the rest of us permission to do the same.

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🔍 Learnings: How Women Are Rewriting the Rules of Power

1. Onstage vs. Backstage Presence

It’s no longer enough to be the face of the brand—you have to build what's behind it. Women like Issa Rae and Reese Witherspoon are showing us that true influence lives backstage: in ownership, executive decisions, production deals, and platform creation.

🎭 Insight: Visibility is not the same as power. Power comes from shaping the systems, not just showing up in them.

💼 Application: Whether you’re an entrepreneur, intrapreneur, or corporate leader, the question becomes: Are you visible and structurally influential? If not, what needs to shift?

2. Reinvention as Strategy, Not Retreat

Meghan Markle and Nicole Kidman offer two blueprints for strategic evolution. Markle didn’t just exit a legacy institution—she built a platform for narrative control and cultural commentary through Archewell. Kidman has sustained relevance across decades by continually shifting between roles—as actor, producer, and storyteller—while co-founding Blossom Films to champion complex narratives centered on women.

🌀 Insight: Reinvention, when done with intention, isn’t about abandoning identity—it’s about expanding it and honoring all parts of yourself.

💡 Application: What version of yourself—or your work—is ready to emerge? Are you allowing space for evolution, or clinging to a past definition of success?

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3. Know Your Audience—Then Rewrite the Room

Nikki Glaser’s Golden Globes set was a masterclass in playing to (and flipping) a traditionally gatekept crowd. Issa Rae famously tailored her HBO pitch to white male execs—without compromising her voice.

🎤 Insight: Effective storytellers know their audience intimately—but aren’t afraid to challenge them.

📣 Application: Before your next pitch, presentation, or tough conversation—ask yourself: What do they value? What do they fear? What language will land? Then shape your message to meet them where they are—and move them where you want them to go.

4. Diversification Is a Power Move, Not a Risk

Rihanna’s business empire spans beauty, fashion, and music—all infused with a consistent brand DNA. Selena Gomez has carved out space in mental health advocacy and tech without losing her cultural relevance.

🌱 Insight: Diversification doesn’t dilute a brand when it’s grounded in values. It expands your impact.

📊 Application: Are you limiting your career to one lane out of fear? What other dimensions of your work could grow your influence and income?

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5. Wealth Redistribution Through Media Ownership

Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine isn’t just a production company—it’s a wealth-building platform that prioritizes women-led stories, selling for $900M while retaining her leadership position as executive producer. Kerry Washington’s Simpson Street centers Black voices through strategic partnerships and licensing deals with Hulu, ABC, and Audible, allowing her to retain ownership and creative control.

💰 Insight: Ownership is the new power center. Media, when owned by those telling the stories, becomes a tool for redistribution—not just representation.

⚖️ Application: Even in non-media industries, the question remains: Are you building something you own—or something you rent?

6. Storytelling as a Tool for Education and Cultural Shift

Ava DuVernay’s Origin is a blueprint for “cultural leapfrogging”—using creative storytelling to bypass traditional academic gatekeeping and educate the masses. Instead of waiting for slow-moving institutions to validate complex ideas about race, caste, and inequality, DuVernay reframes them through emotionally resonant narratives that reach people where they are.

📚 Insight: Stories don’t just reflect the world—they reshape who feels seen, heard, and centered within it. Narrative power is social power.

🧠 Application: Don’t just tell stories—strategically frame them. Whether you’re pitching a project, leading a team, or building a brand, ask: What assumptions am I challenging? What values am I reinforcing? And who needs to see themselves in this narrative to feel included—or empowered?

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7. Role Clarity Is Liberation, Not Limitation

What’s striking about many of these women is their clear articulation of what they do—and what they don’t. From hiring creative directors to delegating production, they focus on their zone of genius and build teams that complement, not mirror, their strengths.

🧩 Insight: You don’t have to do it all. You have to do your part with confidence, clarity, and conviction.

👥 Application: Clear roles prevent burnout and increase scale. Where are you doing too much—and what’s the cost?

8. Reflection & Mastery Take Center Stage

In long-standing series like Actors on Actors, artists and entertainers are provided a shared forum to reveal how much of their work comes from practice, study, and deep reflection—not just charisma or raw talent.

🔁 Insight: Mastery takes time. But reflection and honoring your growth make the time worth it.

🧭 Application: Do you build in time for feedback, peer learning, or craft refinement? Or are you stuck in go-mode without pause?

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9. Heritage & Industrial Traditions as Foundations for the Future

From Beyoncé’s homage to Black Southern culture in her Renaissance album to Ava’s use of historical texts and archives, there’s power in reclaiming and recontextualizing our roots. These women aren’t just innovating—they’re integrating.

🧬 Insight: Innovation doesn’t mean erasure. It often requires deep roots to grow new branches.

🌍 Application: What parts of your history or community have shaped your values—and how can they inform your future moves?

🔗 Quick Links: For the Curious & Discerning

• Cultural Leapfrogging: Swiping Past Tradition​

• Matt Klein on Navigating Cultural Influence

• Issa Rae Teaches Creating Outside the Lines​

• Nicole Kidman on Her Female Director Pledge

• Meghan Markle Silences Critics After As Ever Sells Out in an Hour

• Did Nikki Glaser Make the 2025 Golden Globes Good Again?

• Selena Gomez Doesn’t Mind Being Compared to Rihanna

• How Reese Witherspoon Earned Billions from Content Creation​

• Kerry Washington On The Messaging Of Her Simpson Street Productions

• Ava Duvernay’s Origin 101: A Learning Companion

• Variety Studio’s Actors on Actors

• Beyoncé's 'Renaissance' Shocks Some Life Into a Culture Gone Inert

📣 CTA: Ready to Lead with More Strategy, Substance, and Self-Trust?

Explore my private and group coaching tracks designed for women leading in high-stakes, high-impact roles—from brand-building and fundraising to executive presence and team dynamics.

🔗 Book a 30-minute consultation call to receive my full service brochure.

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