Not All Men… But All Women

 

On International Women’s Day, I find myself reflecting on what progress has truly been made since the day was officially recognised in 1977.

On paper, the progress looks impressive. In reality, the lived experience of many women tells a different story.

Recently I was chatting with my best friend, who is also a teacher. We laughed, slightly bitterly about a small but telling detail in our classrooms. Female teachers are called Miss, while male colleagues are called Sir. Surely the true equivalent would be Ma’am.
It seems trivial, but these tiny details reveal something deeper about how women are still positioned in society.

Our conversation followed a video I watched where a woman asked her audience a simple question: How old were you when you first received unwanted attention from a man?

The question itself made my heart sink.

Because my answer was not during my teenage years, or even adolescence.
My answer was before I was ten years old.

That reality is one many women quietly recognise.

Growing up in the 1980s, I was encouraged from a very young age to choose a career that would fit around family life. My mother often spoke about the lack of time she had with me, relying on childminders and the somewhat chaotic freedom of that decade to keep me safe while she worked.

So I grew up believing that teaching would be the perfect career. It would allow me to work and raise children. My mother would be proud.

And she was.
In many ways, teaching did give me exactly that balance.

But it wasn’t until my forties that a quiet discomfort began to grow. After another pregnancy and the creeping realisation that time moves faster than we expect, I began to wonder whether I had chosen my path or whether it had been chosen for me.

I moved into adult education, which I found deeply rewarding, though rarely financially secure. I also worked for local charities.

That last job became a turning point in my life not because of the work itself, but because of how it ended.

In 2023, I was dismissed by the older men who sat on the committee that employed me. They did not even try very hard to hide their reasoning. In their own words, my problem was “domestic commitments.”

I was a mother.
A mother of a disabled child who was still going through diagnosis.

For that reason, I was dismissed from a ten-hour-a-week job paid below minimum wage, because it was assumed I would not be available 24 hours a day.

And if I knew nothing about the law at that point, I knew one thing very clearly:

This was wrong.

So I educated myself.
And I fought.

I fought for myself.
For my daughters.
For my mother, who endured decades in workplaces where she was often the smartest person in the room as an IBM programmer, yet still had to navigate the quiet humiliations of being a woman in a male world.

I fought for my right to tell the truth to a community that had been encouraged to see me as unreliable while the men behind the scenes continued to benefit from the work women like me had built.

So when I hear the phrase “not all men,” I agree.

I have worked with wonderful male colleagues.
Some have been supportive, respectful and genuinely fair.

But I have also encountered men whose behaviour was shameful some whose actions were so serious they eventually landed them in prison.

So yes, not all men.

I have a husband who is kind, supportive and loving.
But I have also had past relationships that were anything but.

I have an eldest son who I hope understands the responsibility that comes with being a good man.
But I know that some of his friends still have much to learn.

And when I think about the women in my life, my friends, colleagues, family members, every single one of them has, at some point, experienced behaviour that crossed a line.

Sometimes at work.
Sometimes within relationships.
Sometimes within their own families.

So what do I tell my daughters?

To be strong.
To know their worth.
To be selective about who they trust.
To be brave enough to choose what is right for themselves.
And above all, believe in themselves.

And what do I tell my sons?

To my eldest: be a good partner, because relationships are shared lives and shared responsibilities.
And to my youngest: simply this: be kind.

My hope for the future is not only greater awareness about equality.

My hope is for something deeper: a genuine collective desire to build a society where respect is the norm, violence is no longer tolerated, and women are free to choose their own lives without limitation.

Perhaps that sounds like a dream.

But then again, every real change in history began as one.