The invisible conditioning that keeps women broke – and who’s getting rich off the back of it
We do the work. They make the money. And we feel guilty for wanting more.
Back in my twenties, I honestly thought the battle for equality was more or less won. I called myself a feminist, but I genuinely believed feminism had more or less achieved what it set out to do. Look at me: university-educated, climbing the corporate ladder, earning decent money. The men in my office didn’t seem to be treating me differently. What glass ceiling?
God, I was naïve.
The cracks started showing when I hit my thirties. The job that was supposedly 9-to-5 turned out to be 8-to-7, often because my (male) boss kept casually asking me to do him a little favour and help him out with something the (male) client needed urgently in his inbox first thing in the morning. More and more frequently I found myself writing presentations and answering emails late at night, as I sloshed back wine to numb the boredom, resentment and anxiety.
I didn't have kids until I was in my forties, and that's when things got truly ludicrous - trying to juggle freelance consultancy with babies and sleep deprivation, while clients expected me to act like I had zero obligations in my life apart from them… and I went along with the pretence.
Next thing perimenopause hit: like having a stag party turn up unannounced to trash your house. I was still wading through potty training when the hormonal chaos began - constant rage, and overheating to the point I sometimes feared I was about to spontaneously combust. And still attempting to perform at the same relentless pace through all of it.
That's when it finally clicked: this system wasn't designed for women. Duh.
It was designed for people with wives at home.
So I did what so many of us are doing right now. I tried to escape. Retrained and qualified as a coach, as that was the part of my job I’d always enjoyed the most, and people told me I was bloody good at. It was the biggest relief to feel like I was ditching the grind and finally doing something meaningful with my life.
There was just one snag. I massively undercharged for it.
For the first 18 months, I earned 12% of my income from coaching – the work I was obsessed with – and all the rest from strategic consultancy jobs that bored me to tears. I took on a load of free clients at the beginning (good for practice hours, of course); but then pro bono work turned into a habit.
I kept undervaluing what I did, even when clients were literally telling me the coaching was life-changing.
Finally I had to give myself a proper talking-to. It's crazy-making, isn't it? I felt perfectly comfortable charging serious money for strategic work that made me want to poke my eyes out, but the work I loved? The work that was actually transforming people's lives? Nah, couldn't charge properly for that.
So why do brilliant women earn peanuts for the work they love?
I see this struggle with nearly every woman Naz and I support. Smart, sharp, skilled women who commanded chunky salaries in corporate, but the moment they start doing work that actually matters to them, they become completely tongue-tied when it comes to pricing.
Want to know how bad it is? 67% of UK women-owned businesses earn under £25,000 a year. Twenty-five grand! That's not even a living wage. Only 4% earn over £500,000.
Meanwhile, 63% of global wealth belongs to men. That's $105 trillion more than women control.
Don’t think for a minute that this is an accident. This is the system working exactly as it was designed to.
Heads you win, tails I lose
Here's what keeps us trapped: we've been programmed to think about money as a zero-sum game. It's a very masculine, patriarchal, capitalist way of thinking, and it’s absolutely everywhere we look – there's always a winner and a loser.
You can hear this in how we talk about business. It's all military metaphors: we "attack" or “target” the market, "defend" our position, "capture" customers’ attention and cash, and "launch campaigns." Business is a battlefield, the winner takes it all.
When women are working in corporate, we tend to play along with this warlike culture because it's not our company, and anyhow everyone talks this way, right? But when we start our own business, these muscular principles suddenly feel alien to us. They clash with how we've been conditioned as women: to put other people's needs first, to project needs onto them, to gently insist that yes you absolutely must have the last cookie, I couldn't possibly!
We bring this conditioning straight into our businesses. "Oh no, I feel really bad taking all that money. You have some back. You're more special than I am." That entire way of thinking: you first, me last.
We think: if I charge you fair value, then I win and you lose, and that makes me feel guilty.
So instead we compromise. We lower our prices rather than charge what we're worth.
This guilt is especially strong if your business has any aspect of helping or developing others – therapy, coaching, education, healing, caring, mentoring – because we've been told these activities are “natural” for women to do, that we love doing that stuff for free, so what makes you think you can charge for it? It's shows up as that little voice that says things like "but you're just talking to people – why should they pay for something they could get from a friend?"
Kasia Urbaniak, one of the world's most successful dominatrices and author of Unbound: A Woman's Guide to Power, describes what she calls "the fog" – the mental confusion, hesitation, and anxiety that can descend on women when we're faced with financial decisions or simply going after what we really want. She explains that this fog isn't a personal failing but social conditioning. Women have been taught for generations to doubt our own agency and prioritise being easy and "low maintenance".
The key is recognising the fog as a collective, socially conditioned experience rather than an individual flaw. Whenever you notice that familiar confusion around pricing or asking for what you want, just name it: "Oh, this is the fog." Each time you notice it, you're becoming more aware of its existence, which helps you begin to step out of it.
The $10.9 trillion worth of work we do for free
But it's not enough just to become aware of the fog around finances. The problem runs deeper still: we're all doing a staggering amount of work for free.
Understand this: if women got paid minimum wage – minimum wage – for all the unpaid work we do, we'd contribute more than $10.9 trillion to the global economy every year. That's more than twice the size of the entire global tech industry.
Just in the US alone, women would have earned $1,500,000,000,000 for their unpaid work – back in 2019.
And that's valuing it at minimum wage! What if we actually thought raising children and caring for vulnerable people was, you know, quite important for human civilisation? What if we paid the women doing this work – whether they're doing it unpaid at home or underpaid as childcare workers, teachers, and nurses – what their work is actually worth?
Women are doing the work that quite literally keeps society functioning, and most of the time we're doing it for nothing or next to nothing.
And all this unpaid work is destroying our health. There’s an obvious physical toll, but it's the mental load that's the real killer. Women function as society’s hidden operating system, running constantly in the background: tracking logistics, managing emotions, anticipating needs, preventing disasters. Research shows that women's unpaid work hours carry more cognitive and emotional weight than men's – not only are we doing more tasks, we're often holding the entire responsibility for making sure nothing falls through the cracks.
The secret history they don't teach in school
Here's the bit none of us learned in school: this didn't happen by accident.
Silvia Federici, in her brilliant book Caliban and the Witch, shows us exactly how capitalism developed by systematically devaluing and reframing women's work. If you rewind a few centuries, women used to have their own ways of making money and supporting themselves. They grew food on common land, they were healers and midwives, they often had both knowledge and independence. But feudalism was shifting into capitalism, and capitalism needed cheap labour, so all that had to change.
First, women were kicked off the common land they'd often depended on. Suddenly, you couldn't grow your own food or make your own living – you had to own land if you wanted to feed yourself.
Then came the witch hunts. We think of them as some sort of primitive religious hysteria, but they were actually economic terrorism. Women who still had independence and/or power were targeted: the healers, the midwives, the wealthy widows, the ones who helped other women. Burn a few tens of thousands of them at the stake, and suddenly every other woman gets the message loud and clear: stay quiet, stay dependent, tow the line.
Finally, all the work women do was rebranded as "natural" and therefore carried out for free. Raising children? That’s just what women do. Caring for the sick and elderly? Hard, but luckily women naturally love that stuff. All the emotional labour that keeps families and communities functioning? Simply part of being a good woman.
And this wasn’t just cultural: it was economic. Capitalism benefits directly: it gets a workforce created, carried, birthed, fed, educated and cared for… without ever having to pay for the labour that made them.
It's genius, really. Evil, but genius.
And here's the thing: we never learned about any of this because the prevailing history is still the narrative of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. So that's the perspective we get in school. Everything and everyone else gets relegated to special little events meant to make up for it somehow – Women's History Month, Black History Month – where we teach our kids that there were actually other people who weren't white men who shaped history too, and there are a handful more of them than just the suffragettes and Rosa Parks. Who knew?
But it's still just a drop in the ocean.
That's why Federici's book is so important. It's quite dense and academic, but even if you don't fancy reading it, why not ask Perplexity or ChatGPT to summarise the key points? This is knowledge we should all have. Because once we understand that the system was deliberately built this way, and that it now runs inside us, we can start to see the exit. We can make the radical decision to stop playing by rules that were never made for us.
How to train a woman to police herself
Physical violence and confiscation of wealth and property was just the first step. Once that foundation was laid, the system became more cunning. Why burn women at the stake when you can get them to police themselves?
Elise Loehnen, in her brilliant book On Our Best Behaviour, shows us exactly how this psychological control worked. The seven deadly sins became a particularly effective way to train women to suppress their desires and deny their own needs:
Don't be proud (don't be ambitious, stay small and meek)
Don't be envious (don't want what others have)
Don't be greedy (don't want money or have expensive taste)
Don't be lustful (don't seek pleasure)
Don't be gluttonous (deny your appetite)
Don't be slothful (rest is sinful, keep serving others)
Don't be wrathful (never get angry, even when you should)
The results were stunningly effective, and still exist to this day: women have swallowed patriarchy whole, equating self-denial with goodness.
As Loehnen puts it: "How many of us are compelled in our daily lives by what we think we should do? By what we have to do? In all this caretaking, we backburner our own needs, never lending them any heat, hoping, perhaps, that someone will notice our selflessness and reciprocate by taking care of us."
We have been trained to be small, good, easy, and not to have any needs of our own. Including financial needs.
Including the need to be paid properly for our work.
The modern symptoms of ancient programming
This deep programming shows up everywhere in how many women handle money today: feeling guilty charging what we're actually worth.
And here’s another twisted thing: we'll spend money on our appearance without question because that's sanctioned by the system – the attractiveness tax is real. We'll drop £300 on highlights or botox without batting an eyelid, because maintaining our physical appearance is valued by the society we live in.
But spend £100 on therapy that could change your life? Feel guilty.
Invest in retraining? Who do you think you are?
Book a much-needed retreat? Self-indulgent.
Pay for business coaching? Maybe one day.
The system doesn't value our rest, wellbeing, personal development, financial security or mental health, so we feel bad about spending on those things.
And here's the really convoluted bit: many of us work in exactly these areas – therapy, coaching, wellness, personal development – because we think they're valuable. But for others, not for ourselves. That would be self-indulgent! We'll dedicate our careers to helping people heal and grow, then feel guilty investing in our own healing and growth. What a double bind.
It's no coincidence that women are overrepresented in caring professions that are systematically underpaid – healthcare, education, therapy, coaching, childcare. Because "good women" don't put a price on caring, and why should society value what women do “naturally”, right?
Meanwhile, we get screwed both ways with money: companies charge us more for being a woman (hello, pink tax), but we're expected to charge less because we’re women and we like being helpful like that.
The $3.7 trillion proof that women could have so much more economic clout
Want to see what can happen when a group decides to value itself? Look at the LGBTQ+ community.
Their collective purchasing power is estimated at $3.7 trillion globally. Surveys show that nearly 90% prefer to support businesses that actively support their community. Big companies are falling over themselves to look inclusive, because they know loyalty like that is worth billions.
The lesson here is understanding how collective economic power gets built. In the LGBTQ+ community, many have learned to support each other financially without guilt or hesitation. The more they back each other, the stronger they become.
Most women, though, have been conditioned differently. We’ve been trained to feel guilty about asking for money, charging fairly, or paying each other what things are worth. We bargain hunt. We shrink from claiming what we deserve. And so our collective economic power and overall wealth stays much, much smaller than it could be.
Every purchase is a vote for the world you want
The LGBTQ+ community has figured this out, as has the movement for buying from Black-owned businesses. Every purchase is a political decision: what you spend your money on, who you give your money to – it all adds up. Everything counts in large amounts.
If we're collectively spending the majority of our money on mass market products, 99% of the time we're just giving it back to the toxic system that built its power on making us handmaidens to it.
We bang on about "abundance mindset" and "manifesting what we want." But nothing changes if we're simply obediently desiring what the system has convinced us is most valuable – a shiny Mercedes, a Chanel bag. Instead we need to question that, and start tuning in to what truly has value for us, as well as how much we value each other.
I’m not saying we need to go all sackcloth and ashes. Yes, we can still have lovely things! But we need to reassess who we’re buying from.
Take Sahar Hashemi, who started By Women Built in 2022: a movement to get consumers behind women-built brands, and to help fill the £250 billion hole in female entrepreneurship in the UK. If you shop with Ocado, they have a whole section of By Women Built brands. How about buying those instead of just handing over your money to Nestlé or P&G?
This is about thinking collectively, and systemically, and realising we can exert enormous power. As Hegel described in his master-slave dialectic: the slave actually holds the power because the entire system depends on them. Without the slave, there can be no master.
What happens if we stop being handmaidens to the system?
What the world needs most right now
Finally, what if we built an economy around feminine values, instead of continuing to pretend they don't matter?
Care and connection (for ourselves, each other, the planet). Pleasure instead of endless painful grind. Collaboration instead of cut-throat competition. Creativity instead of extraction. Sustainability instead of growth at any cost. Wholeness instead of hustle.
These aren't "soft" values. They're not secondary. They’re not silly.
Truly, they're what the world desperately needs right now.
Look around: mental health crisis, loneliness epidemic, burnout everywhere, narcissist billionaires running the show, complete disconnection from each other and the planet. Governments keep throwing money at tech and extraction and platforms that make all these problems worse, while the work of care, connection and healing stays marginalised and underpaid.
We're literally watching the entire system collapse because it refuses to value what actually matters.
Start seeing money as a means of rebellion
Every time you charge properly for your work, you're redistributing wealth.
Every time you pay another woman what she's worth, you're taking political action.
Every time you buy from a woman-owned business instead of a multinational corporation, you're shifting power in our favour.
The world doesn't need more white male billionaires extracting value from everyone else. It needs women who are properly paid for the work of care, creativity, connection, healing, and sustainability. Women who create ethical products, services, and businesses. Because when we collectively choose to support these values with our money, we shift what the economy and therefore society prioritises.
The question isn't whether you're worth it. Of course you're bloody worth it.
The question is: are you ready to stop perpetuating a system that was literally designed to exploit you?
We're running a workshop on Money, Power + Your True Value on 19th June. If you're ready to explore what building a business and life that truly supports you might look like, you can sign up here. Naz and I are here to help you create a business you love, and that loves you back.
Thanks so much for reading: we’d love to hear your thoughts 👇
I think part of why women struggle to charge what they’re worth is because many of us are socialized to prioritize helping others. We want to be seen as generous, not self-serving. And while that mindset isn’t always valued in men, it’s often more socially acceptable for them to put a price on their expertise without being labeled as greedy.
I am sure I read somewhere else about the points you make here. That women were sidelined as capitalism took over, while men were brought up to be ready for war at any time - thus conditioning them out of “feminine” traits. If men cared too much they wouldn’t be ok with killing the enemy.
Caroline Criado Perez argued, in one of her newsletters, that the unpaid work that women do should be included in the calculation of GDP. Thank you for the info about Women Built, I shall look out for that. The patriarchy keeps telling us that we are the weaker sex. If a woman had the first baby and her partner had the second, there’d be a third but not a fourth. Smash the patriarchy!