Why work still sucks for women

And why more men, starting with me, need to speak up about it.

[Photo: Getty Images]

Work sucks for women. Not all women, but far too many. There’s the gender pay gap, where full-time working women earn 81 cents for every dollar men earn, according to the most recent data from the Census Bureau. There’s the glass ceiling that prevents women from leadership advancement, as evidenced by the fact that only 37% of leadership positions in the U.S. are held by women despite representing 47% of the workforce. Let us not forget the disproportionate harassment at work that women experience compared to men, the gender sidelining, and the exclusion from the “boys’ club.”

And if that’s not enough, there’s the additional unpaid domestic work that women are expected to do outside of the office—cooking, cleaning, and child rearing—that’s often overlooked and undervalued. That’s assuming they haven’t been displaced out of the workforce altogether, like the more than 300,000 African American women who lost employment in 2025 alone, despite being the most academically educated population in the country.

Yes, women have it bad when it comes to work, and that ain’t good. Yet these realities still persist. I say that as someone who has benefited from the injustices women have suffered at work and, for far too long, I’ve been far too quiet about it. Perhaps it’s because earlier in my career I wasn’t as aware as I should have been that they existed. Or maybe it’s because I, too, have to wrestle with the challenges of marginalization as a Black man in America, so I perceived my hands as being “too full” to fight for someone else’s equality while I’m busy fighting for my own. Or maybe I didn’t care as much because it wasn’t happening to me.

Honestly, I’m not sure which one it was or if it was a combination of them all. Whatever the case, as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King once espoused, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” And that’s exactly why we brought Stacy London on the From the Culture podcast to illuminate these wrongs and help shed light on how to make them right.   

FROM THE CULTURE is a podcast that explores the inner workings of organizational culture that enable companies to thrive, teams to win, and brands to succeed. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then this is the most important conversation in business that you aren’t having.

London is a multihyphenate—New York Times best-selling author, entrepreneur, fashion expert, and television personality as the cohost of TLC’s What Not to Wear. These days, however, she’s most passionate about advocating for women who are navigating the dynamics of midlife, when they’re often devalued once they age beyond their child-bearing years.

London is very vocal about the aforementioned struggles of women in work and the negotiations that women have to make about their identity when they walk through the office door. While there are social expectations for everyone to “get along,” she asserts, there are additional hardships that women have to endure if they have any ambition to climb the corporate ladder—hardships from which men are typically exempt.

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