Nearly no one wants to hear it. But I surmise a link between our bodies and our lives – specifically, our work lives. Especially as it pertains to power. I refer to the apparently forever gap between the number of women in positions of leadership and the number of men.* The latter continuing to outrank women everywhere, by large margins.
The evidence that women’s bodies affect them in ways that men’s do not is ubiquitous. For example, a recent article in the New York Times that focused not on how some women have a hard time getting pregnant, and not on what many women experience during pregnancy, but on what happens to women in the year after. The piece points out that during this last especially vulnerable period – the twelve months or so after a baby is born – the mother is highly unlikely to get coordinated medical attention.
Three pertinent points:
- Mental illness spikes in the months following delivery of a baby.
- Both the demands of caring for a baby and the lack of paid leave deter women from seeking medical care.
- The “dominant obstetric care model treats postpartum recovery as a brief coda to pregnancy.”** It does not address the real and sometimes urgent medical needs of women in the aftermath of having a baby.
The questions that I repeatedly pose are not directed at men. They are directed at women. At the top of the list are these: First, do you agree that many if not most women have issues relating to, for example, menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause that affect their lives at work? If yes, do you think it likely that this is one explanation, an important one, for why women are still so much less likely than men to be in top leadership roles? And third, if yes to this, do you think that anything can be done about it and if so, what?
Our continuing refusal to talk openly and honestly about how our bodies affect our lives at work, and our continuing temerity about demanding accommodation, explain more than anything else why we still are where we are. Far behind men who, years after the latest iteration of the women’s movement, still have vastly more power and authority than do we.
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*Here are some of my previous posts on the subject.
**The present post was prompted by this piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/opinion/women-childbirth-postpartum-care.html