How Our Culture Teaches Young Women to Be Little Men
What We’re Not Saying & Where We Go From Here.
A few times a week, I make it a point to tune into whatever podcast or TV show is currently trending with Gen Z. It’s part research, part cultural curiosity. I want to understand what’s shaping their worldview and what they care about. Lately I’ve been listening to The Burnouts, a podcast hosted by two former Stanford roommates, one of whom happens to be Bill Gates’ daughter. The show features interviews with female founders, many of whom are also early investors in the hosts’ own startup: a personal online shopping assistant designed to find the best deal on any clothing item you're searching for.
The concept is clean, simple, and marketable and I genuinely admire their ambition. They’re in their early twenties, armed with generational wealth and access, which makes me curious how might their privilege shape the broader story of what success looks like for the next generation. What’s most compelling to me is how candid they talk about their relationship to work and the cultural scripts handed to young women today. Almost without fail, they ask every guest how they make time for their significant other. “We both have boyfriends, but we don’t have time for them,” they say.
I couldn’t help but feel empathetic for their boyfriends, sure, but also for the larger story this tells. That even when we have what we’re told to want… love, ambition, money, opportunity, we’re still negotiating for scraps of time. Time to connect, to rest, to just be. So it begs the question, who actually owns our time?
It got me thinking about all the subtle and not so subtle ways young women are socialized into becoming little men. We’re encouraged to suppress or bypass our biological rhythms, treat our bodies as obstacles to productivity, and frame our biological differences as design flaws.
Take birth control. I’m from the generation that was handed hormonal birth control (HBC) like candy. I was prescribed it in high school for hormonal acne; just one of the many reasons doctors handed it out as a catch all solution whether it’s for painful periods, irregular cycles, or the looming threat of unwanted teen pregnancy. And yes, teen pregnancy isn’t ideal and at that age, it is considered a social death sentence.
So I internalized the message that pregnancy was something to fear and avoid at all costs. I believed it was incredibly easy to get pregnant. And maybe at 16 it was. But now, as a reproductive health educator and doula, I’ve seen a different reality unfold. I’ve supported clients in their mid twenties, seemingly healthy and vibrant, who are already undergoing multiple rounds of IVF just to conceive. There’s a silence around this and the long term impacts of hormonal suppression; the disconnect so many women feel from their cycles, their fertility, their sense of timing and agency. We don’t talk about it nearly enough.
As I continued listening, the hosts shared an unsettling experience during meetings with potential investors. Several, presumably older men, asked them when they planned to have children and how that might affect their company. At just 22 years old, they were clearly taken aback. They found the question not only invasive but inappropriate and I couldn’t agree more. What struck me most was their uncertainty about how to respond. It’s as if they were being asked to navigate a complex, deeply personal decision in the context of a business conversation, and they were left to figure out how to handle it on the spot.
It made me wonder, how do we continue to play along with systems that were never designed to support us as women? What happens when we brush off discomfort, laugh off intrusive questions, or swallow our truth just to avoid rocking the boat? What if we chose to speak up (kindly but firmly) when something doesn’t feel right, would we risk losing opportunities? Or might we find ourselves redirected toward opportunities that are more in line with our values?
Our culture often illustrates empowerment as something earned by working hard, pushing through, outperforming everyone. But maybe real empowerment lives somewhere else. Maybe it shows up in how we respond in moments that challenge our sense of worth or safety and in those moments when something doesn’t sit right, we have the courage to name it. Perhaps these are moments when our future selves are quietly watching and waiting, hoping we’ll choose differently, not just for ourselves, but for what we normalize as a society.
I think about all the ways I’ve personally ignored my body, first as a young woman, and now, in my mid thirties. Staying up too late to work because productivity still feels like the most socially acceptable form of success. Pushing through the more tender phases of my cycle, those days that are begging for stillness and rest, because the world doesn’t slow down just because I need it to. Filling my calendar with tasks that demand more energy than I have to give, especially in the days leading up to my bleed. Saying yes to social events when my whole being is whispering no, because I’m afraid I might miss a connection, an opportunity or something important. So often, I’ve compromised my emotional and physical wellbeing… for what?
Then my period arrives. The fatigue, the irritability, the pain are all dismissed as annoying symptoms to manage instead of what they truly are: neon signs flashing, slow down, pay attention, listen to me. But I don’t. Because I’m scared; scared that if I stop, even for a moment, I won’t be able to pay rent or support myself and god forbid I need to ask for help from the people who love me. Because somewhere along the way, I learned that needing help is weakness, that self-sufficiency is the currency of worth, and that rest is something you earn, not something you're entitled to. So I stay on the hamster wheel, hoping that if I just keep going a little longer, maybe one day I’ll catch a break.
Then there’s technology marketed to us as the key to being more informed and in control. Take the Oura Ring. I know many women who’ve turned to it when trying to conceive. And while it can be a helpful tool, I often notice how it creates distance between a woman and her own body. It becomes easy to outsource our awareness to a device, rather than deepening an intuitive relationship with the menstrual cycle itself. We are sold the idea that it is a shortcut to understanding our health but in truth, it bypasses the very wisdom that we were never taught to trust in the first place.
The ring tends to attract women who want to conceive quickly but who’ve never really had the chance to learn about their hormonal rhythms, their ovulation, or the wisdom built into their own physiology. The data becomes a substitute for self-knowledge.
I can’t help but wonder what would it look like if young women were taught from the very beginning to understand and trust their cycles and to see their bodies not as unpredictable or inconvenient, but as an intelligent system worthy of reverence. Maybe we wouldn’t be trying to “hack” our fertility, we’d be living in relationship with it.
Photograph by Matt Bockal
I wish I had known at 22 that the way I ignored my body, dismissing its need for periodic rest, sidelining the value of meaningful relationships, and constantly pushing myself to keep up, would have a cumulative effect on my emotional, physical, and reproductive health. At 22, pregnancy feels like a distant, abstract idea. And it’s unfair that the burden of planning for something so far down the line falls almost entirely on women (more on that another time). But there are practical ways to shift the focus from short term hustle to long term well being. It starts with rejecting the capitalistic narrative that more, faster, bigger is better. Our biology simply does not support it.
Who benefits when we are disconnected from our bodies?
I’m not suggesting that all young women get off birth control, have multiple children and become tradwives; that’s not the point. What I am trying to explore is how the current narrative of female success often equates sacrifice, especially relationships, rest, and family life, with “strength”. Choosing to prioritize emotional wellbeing, connection, or even fertility is treated as a sign of weakness or a lack of ambition. From a public health perspective, this matters. When we normalize chronic stress, burnout, and disconnection in the name of capitalism, we’re not just impacting individual lives, we’re setting up entire generations to inherit the consequences.
And beneath it all, a deeper question emerges: what is the cost of designing a culture where women feel they must do it all alone?
If we want to play the long game with our health, then we need to start having these conversations. Not just in private, but in community… Because the next generation is watching and they’re counting on us to do it differently.