Strong - But Not in the Way You Think

On International Women’s Day, my social media feed will be filled with women who are, in every sense of the phrase, smashing it. There will be founders and leaders, campaigners and creatives, women who have carved out space to build businesses, shape policy, create art, change culture. And I will celebrate them all, because their work and ambition matters.

But this year, I find myself thinking about a different kind of strength. I am thinking about the mums who stepped away from paid work because their child’s needs demanded it, and whose days are now shaped by care rather than career.

The women whose work begins long before sunrise and rarely ends when the lights go out. The ones whose days are shaped not by strategy meetings or growth targets, but by school emails that need careful emotional translation, by medication schedules, and by forms that ask them to prove their child’s needs again and again.

The women who have become experts in chasing, clarifying and correcting systems that rarely join up, who can recite diagnoses and dosages from memory, and who manage multi-agency communication with the diplomacy of seasoned negotiators.

From the outside, it can look as though they’re ‘not working.’ They’re not in an office whilst their children are at school, and there’s no salary appearing in their bank accounts at the end of the month.

But those hours of perceived freedom are often spent recovering from fractured nights of sleep, advocating for their child, researching, planning or preparing for meetings that will determine the shape of their future.

It is labour that is largely invisible and entirely relentless.

Strength is often measured by what we build, launch, or lead. It is associated with upward movement and visible achievement. Yet there are women using every ounce of their intelligence and stamina not to climb, but to stabilise. Using their strength to hold steady, absorbing pressure so that a vulnerable child does not have to carry it alone.

Some women build companies - but some women build safety nets. Both require resilience, strategic thinking and courage.

What is rarely acknowledged is the cost. The careers paused or quietly abandoned, the pensions that will never quite look the same, and the financial vulnerability that hums beneath everyday decisions.

There are the creative ideas that sit in notebooks or floating somewhere in the backs of minds because there is simply no bandwidth left at the end of a day spent firefighting to make them a reality. It is not a lack of ambition - it’s a redirection of it. It is choosing, again and again, to pour skill and energy into safeguarding someone else’s wellbeing.

Visibility and value are not the same thing.

Just because this work doesn’t trend or attract applause, does not make it smaller. In fact, much of our public infrastructure quietly relies on it. Unpaid carers prop up health services, education systems and social care structures that would struggle to function without them. The labour may take place around kitchen tables, in hospital waiting rooms and in bathrooms where five minutes of quiet feels like a luxury, but it is no less real for being domestic.

On International Women’s Day, I want to widen the lens just enough to include these women too. The ones who crave space to think freely and create something that belongs solely to them, but who are constantly channelling everything they have into managing sleepless nights, recurrent illness brought on by exhaustion, and advocacy they never imagined would become part of their identity. The ones who tried to do it all and discovered, through necessity rather than weakness, that something had to give.

You are not less driven because your drive is directed toward care.

You are not less capable because your competence plays out behind closed doors.

You are not less powerful because your strength is expressed through endurance rather than visibility.

Strength does not only exist in boardrooms and on stages. Sometimes it exists in the steady decision to stay, to learn, to co-ordinate, to protect, and to show up again tomorrow even when today has taken everything out of you.

This International Women’s Day, alongside the women breaking ceilings and building empires, I am celebrating the women who are holding entire worlds together in ways that few people ever fully see.

Strong - but not in the way you might expect.