Women’s financial independence is recent, and inherited beliefs about money can outlast legal change.

Success does not erase the barriers women may still face around money, authority, and power.

For women of color, money can also reflect culture, family obligation, migration, and class mobility.

The goal is not to reject inherited values, but to choose which ones still belong in our lives.

For Women’s Equality Day, I’ve been thinking about the unspoken rules women inherit about money, power, and taking up space—and just how much more complicated those rules are for women of color.

August 26 marks the 1920 certification of the 19th Amendment. It was a huge milestone, but progress didn't happen evenly. Black women faced discriminatory voting restrictions for decades after, Native American women weren't granted U.S. citizenship until 1924, and many Asian immigrant women remained entirely excluded.

I recently learned about Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, a Chinese immigrant who marched for suffrage as a teenager in New York. She spent years advocating for voting rights despite knowing Chinese exclusion laws meant she couldn't actually vote herself. That contradiction stayed with me: What does it mean to fight for a seat at a table you aren't even allowed to sit at?

Today, women have access to opportunities that Lee’s generation could not have imagined. Unfortunately, the limiting messages about what we should want, how ambitious we can be, and how much space we can take up still persists.

The Rules We........

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