I Spent Years Fighting the Patriarchy. Here's What I Know Now.

For a long time, I thought the real flex was taking down the patriarchy.  There was a fire in my soul screaming “no more of this craziness.”  I was enraged with all the statistics about gender gaps, pay gaps, minority gaps, and additional obstacles that women face when it comes to creating successful businesses.  

Here are just a few facts that created the mission to burn it all down: 

Pay gap: US women working full-time earn 81 cents for every dollar men earn — and the gap has widened for two straight years for the first time since the late 1990s. Census Bureau data show women dropped from 84 cents in 2022 to 83 in 2023 to 81 cents in 2024. Over a career, the average woman loses over $530,000 to the wage gap — nearly $800,000 for college-educated women. 

Funding gap: Of $289 billion in global VC funding in 2024, all-female founding teams received just 2.3% ($6.7 billion), while all-male teams took 83.6%. Even 2025's "record" $73.6B headline number is misleading — strip out two outlier AI mega-deals (Anthropic and Scale AI) and over $30 billion disappears, with deal counts for female founders hitting their lowest point since 2018. 

Leadership gap: Women hold just 29% of C-suite roles in 2025 — unchanged from 2024, the 11th straight year of underrepresentation at every pipeline level. The bottleneck starts early: only 93 women get promoted to manager for every 100 men.

I made it my mission to inform the world that this can no longer be acceptable.  I spoke at a global conference about “Why Women Are Meant to Lead”, which included all the comparisons and statistics about this topic.  I still love this presentation and all the data I found.  Since that presentation, I believe Will Farrell summed it up in two sentences at the Lifetime Movie Awards, stating, “What, men have been running the show since what, 10,000 BC, something like that, and we're not doing so good.  Isn't it just time for women to run the planet?”  

I started a podcast with my friend, Katie Myers, named “Sit Crooked, Talk Straight” where we further discussed the patriarchy, how long women have been suppressed and conditioned, and what we want to normalize moving forward (warning…there is a LOT of colorful language in this podcast, so listen with care and when no kids are around).  

I created content about all of these topics because I was passionate about them and still am…just from a different angle.  

As I have expanded my business, my coaching, my research, and my personal life, I have come to learn a thing or two.  As a Projector 3 / 5 in Human Design, I learn by doing and experiencing, and then I bring it into my teachings-yay for LOTS of opportunities for growth and learning (IYKYK).  

What I have come to learn is this…the REAL FLEX isn’t about taking down the patriarchy; it’s about creating the Matriarchy.  You may be wondering what that even means.  And some may already know what that means.  What I mean here is that as women, we are powerful creators, receivers, and nurturers.  What I mean is shifting societal focus away from male dominance toward community care, shared power, and equity, rather than a strict reversal where women oppress men; it redefines leadership by centering maternal values, collective decision-making, and intergenerational support.  

What I mean is that the flex here is not shaming the men in this world for also acting out of their own conditioning, but about leaning into the gift of the human condition of all doing the best we can, and seeing each and every person for what they are…another individual, who has their own struggles, their own hurts, their own pains, their own joys, their own traumatic experiences.  The universal language here is connecting through emotions.  

We all may have had different upbringings, experiences, challenges, triumphs, and one other thing is true here-we have all felt hurt, love, betrayal, pain, joy, suffering, excitement, pleasure, shame, guilt, fear, courage, sadness, happiness…I mean, I could go through the entire wheel of emotions, but I think you get it.  

Being a psychotherapist for 20 years, and going to my own therapy for longer than I care to admit, and being a lover of research, I know this is one of the most difficult beliefs and actions we can take for several reasons, mainly all connected to fear.

And here is what the data is telling us about what that fear is costing us.

#1. The Great Divide is real — and it is breaking us.

Americans increasingly see the country as more divided than at any time since the Civil War. Pew Research Center polling reveals a sharp rise in partisan hostility: in 2022, 72% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats viewed the opposing party as more immoral than other Americans — up dramatically from 47% and 35% in 2016. As of 2025, polarization was higher than at any point in recorded history, causing less collaboration and mutual understanding, with members of both parties increasingly viewing each other in an extremely negative light. And it is not just political — social ties based on class, geography, and religion have weakened, leaving political affiliation as the primary marker of identity for many Americans. We have stopped seeing each other as people. We have started seeing each other as threats.

And the cost of that is showing up in our bodies, our minds, and our communities.

#2. The loneliness epidemic is what division actually looks like in real life.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness and isolation a public health crisis, with approximately half of U.S. adults reporting they experience loneliness — and lacking connection can increase the risk of premature death as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness increases the risk of developing depression by more than double, contributes to a 29% increased risk of heart disease, a 32% increased risk of stroke, and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia in older adults. Political tension has also begun negatively impacting social relationships, with 44% of respondents in one survey reporting anxiety about holiday social interactions with family and friends. 

We are literally making ourselves sick by refusing to connect. And still — still — we are afraid to soften.

#3. Why is compassion so hard? Because our nervous system treats it like a threat.

This is where Paul Gilbert's research becomes so important. As I shared above, fear of compassion is not a personality flaw — it is a measurable, clinical phenomenon. Some individuals show resistance to feeling compassion for the self or for others, or to receiving compassion from others — and such individuals often experienced insecurity in their backgrounds and insufficient emotional support, leaving them with anxious responses to attachment or a tendency to avoid and withdraw from others. Compassion-Focused Therapy holds that emotional dysregulation manifests when the threat-based system is activated disproportionately to the contentment, safety, and soothing system — which means when the world feels dangerous, divided, and hostile, your brain is literally wired to shut compassion down as a survival response. It is not weakness. It is not apathy. It is a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do. 

But here is what we are getting wrong: the threat our nervous system is responding to is not the person across the aisle, or the man in the boardroom, or the person who voted differently than we did. The real threat — the one quietly killing us — is the disconnection itself.

And here is the plot twist that changes everything.

Compassion is consistently the most immediate driver of reductions in group prejudice — not policy, not debate, not data. Compassion. Research shows that compassion can counteract intergroup bias, reduce counter-empathetic responses, and mitigate empathic distress by shifting the focus from avoiding emotional discomfort to alleviating others' suffering — and a 2021 study found that loving kindness meditation decreased polarization between political rivals. 

Compassion is not soft. Compassion is not surrender. Compassion is the most radical, disruptive, countercultural act available to us right now.

This is not about bypassing real differences or pretending harm hasn't been done.

It's about loosening the grip of our judgments long enough to see another person's humanity — which is where transformation begins.

This is what creating the Matriarchy actually means to me. Not a reversal of power. Not trading one set of "us versus them" for another. It means leading from the most powerful force on the planet — which is the radical, research-backed, nervous-system-regulated capacity to see another human being as exactly that. A human being. Doing the best they can. With the wounds they have. Just like you.

The pay gap is real. The funding gap is real. The leadership gap is real. My fire around those statistics has not gone anywhere.

But I have learned something in 20 years of sitting across from people in their most broken, most honest, most raw moments: no one heals in an environment of shame. Not the women I work with. Not the men who conditioned them. Not the systems that shaped all of us. Shame shuts the nervous system down. And a shut-down nervous system cannot create anything new.

Love and compassion — the kind that is grounded, boundaried, and brave — that is what opens the door.

That is the real flex.

And it might just be the most important leadership skill of our time.