We have to talk about the masks.

Not the ones we wore during a pandemic. The ones we’ve been asking women to wear for decades, in boardrooms, in meetings, in job interviews, in performance reviews, the invisible ones that say: be less of who you are and more of what we’re comfortable with.

Because here’s what 800+ conversations with women have taught me: we have never had a women problem. We have always had a systems problem. And somewhere along the way we convinced ourselves those were the same thing.

They are not.

THE PANTSUIT AND THE LIE IT REPRESENTS

Let’s talk about the pantsuit era for a second, because it’s one of the most revealing moments in modern history if you’re actually paying attention.

Women started wearing pantsuits to be taken seriously in boardrooms. To fit in. To signal to their male counterparts: I speak your language, I dress your way, I belong in this room.

And I understand why. When the room was built by men, for men, with men in mind, you do what you have to do to get through the door.

But here’s the truth nobody wants to say out loud: it was a lie. It was just another mask. Another way of asking women to contort themselves into a shape that was never theirs to begin with, just so the men in the room would feel comfortable enough to take them seriously.

Think about that for a moment. Women changing what they put on their bodies, their literal physical presentation, just to be seen as credible. Just to be heard.

Men have never been asked to do that. Not once. Not ever!

THE CONFIDENCE TRAINING INDUSTRY IS A PACIFIER

And then came the confidence training. The leadership development programs. The executive presence coaching. The entire billion-dollar industry built around the premise that if women could just be a little more assertive, a little more commanding, a little more like the men sitting across the table, then they’d finally get what they deserved.

I’m going to say something that might make some people uncomfortable: I don’t buy it, not because confidence doesn’t matter, not because leadership development isn’t valuable. If someone genuinely needs and wants those tools, they should absolutely have access to them, but when confidence training becomes the answer to systemic inequity, when we tell women to lean in instead of fixing the systems pushing them out, that’s not empowerment. That’s pacification. That’s handing someone a better pair of shoes and telling them the uneven ground is their problem to navigate.

It’s yet another way of saying: the system is fine, you’re the one who needs fixing, and women have been fed that narrative for so long that some have started to believe it. That’s the most heartbreaking part of all.

WOMEN ARE NOT MEN. NOR SHOULD THEY BE

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Here’s what I know after 800+ conversations:

Women don’t lack confidence, they lack permission.

Women don’t need to be more assertive. They need to be in rooms where their ideas aren’t immediately talked over or quietly filed away until a man says the same thing twenty minutes later and suddenly it’s genius.

Women don’t need executive presence training. They need executives who understand that presence doesn’t look one way, that it doesn’t have to sound like a man, dress like a man, or lead like a man to be powerful, credible, and worth listening to.

Women are not men. Nor should they ever be asked to behave as such. The moment we ask a woman to perform masculinity to be taken seriously, we’ve already failed her. We’ve told her that who she actually is, her communication style, her leadership approach, her way of showing up in the world, isn’t enough. Isn’t right. Isn’t welcome.

That’s not a her problem. That’s an us problem.

WHAT FIXING THE SYSTEM ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

It looks like letting women speak in meetings without being interrupted, and calling it out when they are.

It looks like mentorship that opens doors instead of training programs that teach women to knock differently.

It looks like valuing collaborative leadership instead of only rewarding the loudest voice in the room.

It looks like building cultures where women don’t have to choose between being liked and being respected, because right now, that choice is real and it’s exhausting.

It looks like men using their unearned permission to make space instead of taking it.

It looks like stopping the question “how do we fix women for this system” and starting to ask “how do we fix this system for women.”

WHY I’M THE ONE SAYING THIS

Some of you might be wondering: why is a man writing this?

Fair question.

Women have been saying this for decades. Screaming it. Writing about it. Fighting for it.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth I’ve had to sit with: men don’t listen to women the way we listen to other men. When a woman says “the system is broken,” too many men hear “she’s complaining.” When I say it, they hear “my peer is telling me something important.”

That’s not fair. That’s not right. But it’s true, and that’s exactly why I’m writing this. Not to center myself in women’s struggles, but to use whatever voice I have to translate what 800 women taught me, so the men who wouldn’t listen to them might finally hear it.

THE MASK HAS TO COME OFF

I’m not interested in a world where extraordinary women have to wear masks to be seen. Where they have to dress differently, speak differently, lead differently, and shrink themselves into shapes that were never theirs, just to earn a seat at a table they should have been building alongside us from the beginning.

The system was built without them. That’s the problem. And no amount of confidence training, pantsuit wearing, or leaning in is going to fix a foundation that was flawed from the start.

We don’t need women to fit the system, we need systems worthy of the women trying to survive them.

TO EVERY WOMAN READING THIS:

Stop accepting the message that you need to be fixed. You don’t. Demand structural change, not confidence training.

TO EVERY LEADER READING THIS:

Stop asking “how do we help women succeed in our systems?” Start asking “what’s broken about our systems that women have to navigate around?”

TO EVERY MAN READING THIS:

Your silence isn’t neutral. It’s complicit. The women in your life, your partners, daughters, colleagues, mothers, are doing their best to navigate systems you built. Systems that work for you but fail them.

It’s time we had the courage to examine our role in keeping them broken.