Are Things Really Better For Professional Women Today?

“Things are better now.”

“It’s easier than it was when I was starting out.”

“You’re lucky you’re doing this now and not back then.”

If you’re a woman in business, you’ve heard these words. And how do they land? Do you shrug them off—or do they strike something deeper? If they make you angry, I understand. Platitudes do little to comfort us when we’re in the midst of a battle—especially one that, by some measures, we appear to be winning.

As women in business, we are no strangers to uphill battles—or to the minimizing language that follows them.

Here are the remarks I hear far too often these days.

• “Women have it easier today than our mothers or grandmothers did.”
• “We did it. Why can’t you?”

Some women—those who have found a moment of stability, or who are no longer in the thick of it—offer these words like deflated rescue buoys. But they do not help. In fact, they risk setting us back. These comments add credence to the common misconception that the fight for gender equity is behind us. They quiet our voices and shame those still struggling to be heard.

It was never about ease.

This misplaced notion confuses ease with accessibility. Nothing about womanhood is easy today—and arguably, it never has been. And ease was never the prize we fought, marched, and bled for. We fought for access, for equity, and for a seat at the table where decisions are made.

Yes, today’s women are more educated, more employed, and more independent than any generation before. But that progress on paper does not mean the struggle is over.

We aren’t better off, not in all the ways that truly matter. We placed our trust in the systems around us, and they failed us. We believed in a dream wrapped in the appearance of progress—one labeled “accessibility,” but hollow at its core. And perhaps without realizing it, we let one another down—not from a lack of love or sisterhood, but from forgetting how heavy it is to carry all of this alone.

Beyond the illusion of progress.

Many of us grew up believing we would be cherished, valued, honored, and adorned. And if you are like me, you are still passing that dream to our daughters, even as we quietly carry its weight, hoping it takes shape before they step into our shoes.

Yes, we can vote. We can open credit cards. We can even get divorced without facing total social exile. But these hard-won milestones—while worthy of celebration—do not amount to ease.

We are still navigating a world where our reproductive rights are under attack. Where a miscarriage can mean legal scrutiny or worse. Where access to affordable healthcare, comprehensive postpartum care, and paid leave remains elusive. Where raising children is seen as a private duty, not a public investment, and the right to choose is met with silence, not support, and where increasing sexual violence continues to threaten our sense of safety and autonomy.

The ability to open a credit card does not fill the void left by the absence of structural care. The right to divorce does not erase the fact that many women are still measured by their bodies and what they produce.

There is nothing easy about being a woman today. There never has been.

Unfinished by design.

We are not ungrateful, this generation of mine. We are unfinished. We are standing on the shoulders of those women who came before us, and the job isn’t done.

Let’s stop measuring progress by ease. Instead, let’s work together to build a world where the next generations do not have to fight the same battles.