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Equity at Work: Why Valuing All Strengths Is the Real Work of Equality for Women

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Stop Measuring Yourself Against a Standard That Was Never Built for You


Hello and welcome to this week's WOOT blog. This one is for every woman who has been told, implicitly or explicitly, that the way she leads, communicates or operates needs to be more like something else. More assertive. More direct. More like the people who got there before her. For anyone who has bent herself into a different shape to fit a structure that was not built for her.


Gloria Steinem reframed the whole conversation decades ago, and it is still worth repeating:

"Women are always saying, we can do anything that men can do. But men should be saying, we can do anything that women can do."

That is not a throwaway line. It is a challenge to the assumption that one kind of capability is the standard against which everyone else is measured. And it is as relevant in every working environment today as the day she said it.


Equity at Work: The Strengths That Are Still Being Undervalued


  • Empathy, emotional intelligence and collaborative decision-making are consistently ranked among the most critical leadership skills by modern organisations, and are disproportionately demonstrated by women.

  • Yet the same traits are frequently underrated in promotion and pay decisions, where traditionally assertive leadership styles continue to dominate.

  • Companies with gender-diverse leadership teams are 25% more likely to outperform their peers on profitability. The strengths are not the problem. The valuation system is.


What Steinem's Quote Really Means for Women at Work


The fight for equality has rightly centred on access: getting women into the room, onto the board, into the role, into the industry. But the next frontier is not just about presence. It is about the full recognition of what women bring when they are there. You do not need to operate like the people who went before you in order to be effective. You need to be skilled, strategic and clear about the value of your particular approach, whatever your working context.


From Proving to Establishing


There is a shift that happens when women move from trying to prove they can match a standard designed without them in mind, to simply establishing what they bring that is genuinely valuable and demonstrating it with confidence. That shift is not complacency. It is the thing Steinem was pointing at. Set your own standard and hold it.



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The Toolkit: How Women Can Own Their Strengths at Work


  1. Name Your Strengths as Strategic Assets – Are you an exceptional listener? Do you build consensus where others create conflict? Do you read a situation in ways that change outcomes? These are not soft skills. They are capabilities that make work go better for everyone. Frame them as such. 'My ability to bring a divided team to alignment reduced our project timeline by three weeks' is a fact, not a boast.


  2. Stop Apologising for How You Work – If your natural style is collaborative, considered or relationship-focused, it does not need to be defended or apologised for. It needs to be evidenced. Show the outcomes it produces. Let the results make the case.


  3. Model the Standard You Want to See – Actively credit the strengths of other women. Name them in meetings, in reviews, in conversations you are part of. When you say out loud that a colleague's empathy or strategic listening changed the outcome of a project, you shift the culture of what is valued, one conversation at a time.


  4. Find Your Equity Ally – Identify someone, of any gender, who is already in a position of influence and is committed to equitable practice. Build a genuine working relationship with them. Not for transactional benefit, but because systemic change moves faster when people with different kinds of access work together.


Scripts for the Moments That Come Up


When your approach is described as 'too soft':

"My approach produced X outcome. I am happy to walk through how."


When you are expected to work in a way that does not fit you:

"I work in a way that gets results. Here is the evidence of that."


When a colleague's contribution goes unrecognised:

"I want to make sure we name what [name] brought to that. Her ability to hold the room together was what made the outcome possible."


A Final Word


Steinem's quote is an invitation to stop competing on someone else's terms and start defining your own. Every working environment needs women who bring what they have always brought, and are finally in spaces that recognise its full value.


That change starts with you deciding your strengths are not a compromise. They are the point.



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Equity at Work for Women: FAQs


Q. What does equity at work mean for women in practice?

A. Equity at work means that different strengths, approaches and ways of working are genuinely valued, not just tolerated. For women, it means not having to suppress your natural style to fit a norm that was built without you in mind, and being recognised for the outcomes your approach produces.

A. Absolutely. Adaptability is a strength in itself. The distinction is between adapting your communication style for different contexts, which is smart, versus suppressing your core approach because it does not match a dominant norm, which is costly. Know the difference and choose deliberately.

A. Then you have two options: work to shift the culture, which takes time and allies, or find an environment that already values what you bring. Neither option is wrong. What is worth avoiding is staying indefinitely somewhere that consistently undervalues you whilst hoping it will change on its own.

A. Attach them to outcomes. Not 'I am good with people' but 'I de-escalated a client relationship that was heading towards contract termination, and we retained them for two further years.' The strength is the same. The framing makes it undeniable.

A. Exactly what Steinem suggested: actively recognise and learn from the strengths women bring. Credit them publicly. Advocate for them in promotion and pay conversations. And resist the temptation to interpret different as lesser.


 
 
 

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