She told me the truth in our session, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
She said, “Madeline, I’m not very good with the whole women’s empowerment thing. I never really had it for myself.”
This is a woman who’s spent twenty-five years in senior corporate roles. She’s been promoted, head-hunted, and trusted with multi-million-pound transformations. By every external measure, she is the woman the empowerment industry says it’s built for.
And she doesn’t trust it.
Her first manager, decades ago, took her out for lunch on her first week. Told her, “I’ve got you, I’ll protect you, don’t worry. We, women, have to look after each other in here.“
She believed her.
She walked into a meeting two months later to find that same woman had taken her work, taken the credit, taken the seat at the table that was meant to be hers, and proverbially threw her under the bus, in front of everyone.
Then there was the coach, a few years later. Yes, a coach. The one she opened up to, the one she told about her ambitions, her doubts and the politics of her team. Everything she shared in those sessions ended up, almost word for word, in the mouth of the senior leader who’d hired the coach… they were friends and had worked at a previous job together.
By the time she realised, the damage was done.
Then the outgoing female leader on her current programme told the team behind her back not to speak to my client directly. “Everything goes through me. She doesn’t know finance, she doesn’t know the programme, she’ll just muddy the water,” the outgoing leader said. My client had no idea until months later, when one of the team finally cracked and spilt the tea – you know why? Because the outgoing leader was poaching staff.
There are the smaller slights. The mentor who said she’d make introductions and never did. The peer who asked for a coffee, took two hours of advice, then went for the same role as her and didn’t tell her. The senior woman who said, “You should go for the promotion,” whilst prepping someone else for the role.
She told me, “I get on better with men now, Madeline. Which I know is mad. But that’s where I’ve found safety.”
Take a moment, as I did and sit with that.
Because if you’re a senior woman reading this and a small voice in you said, “Yes, I know exactly what she means.” I want you to know you are not alone, you are not broken, and you are not the problem.
This is what nobody wants to talk about in the women-supporting-women brigade. The truth is that the community that was supposed to support us has hurt some of us. That sisterhood has, at times, been the thing that bit the hardest. That we have been undermined more efficiently by other women than by any man.
So when somebody puts up a post about pouring into each other, lifting as we climb, we don’t share it, we scroll past it, we eye roll. Or as my client said, “It’s a load of fluff” Not because we don’t believe that the dream could be real, but because the dream of it has cost us dearly before.
I want to add something else because this has come up for me again in recent weeks.
Watch what happens when a woman writes a book about her success. Watch the pile-on. Watch how quickly the women’s empowerment chorus turns into something else when an actual woman, with an actual name, an actual book, an actual fortune she built herself, walks into the room and tells the truth about how she got there.
Suddenly, she’s too much.
Suddenly, she’s a bad mother,
A bad role model,
A bad feminist.
Suddenly, the women who post the quotes don’t want the woman who lived them.
We shout women’s empowerment until a woman empowers herself out loud, and then, we berate her for succeeding where we didn’t think we could.
This is what’s been happening to women for decades. This is why my client, brilliant, capable, tenured, sat across from me and said, “I just don’t gravitate towards it.”
So let me tell you what I think a safe space actually looks like, because I’m tired of the word being used as decoration.
A safe space is the Me4Me Luncheon, where women come to be celebrated, not corrected. Where we sit down to a meal, and you are not asked to perform, prove or pitch. Where the woman next to you is not measuring you. Where success is contagious in a good way, and nobody’s keeping score. Where we work on ourselves, share and encourage.
A safe space is The Brilliance Summit. Where sisterhood isn’t forced because nobody is being told to network, lift, share, support, they just do… whilst dancing. You see, the room has been carefully curated, and the energy is all about learning and togetherness. The women in it want to do the work and do it together. The standard is set before they walk in, and it is certainly not policed after.
A safe space is a room where a woman can claim herself in public without the room turning on her. Where she can say I built this, I earned this, I want more, and the rest of us reach for our glasses and toast her, instead of reaching for our knives.
That is what I am building. Quite deliberately so, with women I have already vetted in my heart before they sit down. Why? Because women like my client deserve somewhere to go where the women’s empowerment promise is actually kept.
I’ve held her place at the next event anyway, because I know the impact, I know what she needs, and I know that healing some of this, for her, does not happen in the corner on her own. I told her, very clearly, “You can sit next to me. I will never let anybody come for you.”
This is the work.
Ensuring that we help heal rather than harm.
If you’ve read this far and you felt it, I see you.
If you’ve been burned, you’re allowed to be cautious. If you’ve gone it alone, you’re allowed to be tired. If you’ve stopped believing in the empowerment room because the room hurt you, you’re allowed to grieve that.
And then.
When you’re ready.
There is a different room.
With my name on the door.
And I will hold your seat.
So that you can see your light and own your worth.
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