No, Women Didn’t Ruin the Workplace And We’re Tired of Taking the Blame.

Brandi Oldham
Nov 15
6 min read

Updated: Nov 15

When I saw the headline “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” (originally “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?”) posted by the New York Times on November 6th, my immediate TL;DR was pretty simple:

Blame women so I don’t have to work harder and be uncomfortable.

That’s really what’s underneath a lot of this conversation. Instead of asking hard questions about power, structures, and accountability, we keep circling back to:

Are women the problem?
Did feminism go too far?
Did women’s presence “feminize” institutions and break them?

Meanwhile, the rest of us are just trying to do our jobs, pay our bills, care for our families, and not be harassed at work.

As a career coach who works with high-achieving women and barrier breakers, I see the impact of these narratives every day. Articles like this don’t exist in a vacuum. They reinforce the idea that women’s ambitions, boundaries, and basic safety are somehow destabilizing forces – instead of normal, human needs.

Let’s talk about a few of the threads in this conversation that are…a problem.

Why Is So Much of This About Women’s Bodies?

We can’t seem to have a conversation about women in the workplace without immediately detouring into pregnancy, fertility, and motherhood.

Why is society so obsessed with women’s childbearing?
Why is my worth still tied to whether I’m a mother — how many kids I have, when I have them, and how neatly that lines up with someone else’s definition of “productivity”?
And why aren’t we asking the same questions of men? They have these families too.

Spoiler alert: My husband received better paternity leave than I did as an entrepreneur. And it mattered deeply to him. Parenting is human, not gendered.

Motherhood is a meaningful part of my life, yes, and it’s a choice I made. But it’s not the defining factor of who I am or what I contribute. It’s one part of a much bigger whole.

Yet somehow, the narrative always circles back to what women should do “in case” they want children someday.

Let me decide that. Let me ask for input when I need it. I don’t need unsolicited career advice based on someone else’s imagination of my future.

And if you actually care about families, focus on structures that support everyone:

Paid leave
Childcare
Flexible work
Healthcare
Humane workloads

Pregnancy is a healthcare concern, and honestly so is just about everything else life throws at us. Anyone, at any moment, is one health crisis away from needing flexibility and support.

So if your version of “truth-telling” about gender always lands on policing women’s bodies or limiting their choices, that’s not truth. That’s control.

“Women Just Prefer Not to Own Businesses” (…Really?)

There’s a moment in the conversation where feminization in fields like veterinary medicine is linked to women “preferring” not to own their own practices, supposedly because they don’t want the risk or hours. As a female entrepreneur to two businesses, I have so many thoughts...

Let's start with the reality of owning a business as a woman.

Until very recently, women were routinely denied equal access to credit, loans, and capital without a male cosigner.
Women are still carrying the majority of invisible labor – childcare, household management, emotional work, elder care, coordinating everyone’s lives – on top of paid work.
The default template for “successful entrepreneur” is still based on a 24/7, no-constraints, someone-else-is-doing-the-caregiving lifestyle.

It’s incredibly convenient to say, “Women just don’t want ownership,” when you’ve built a world that makes ownership far more expensive, risky, and exhausting for them.

Women aren’t less ambitious. They’re less interested in torching their health, their relationships, and their values to perform ambition the way men were historically allowed to – with a wife at home, a support system they didn’t have to manage, and a culture that assumed their time was more important.

We don’t get to ignore all of that and chalk it up to “preference.”

Push-Up Contests and the “Boys Will Be Boys” Workplace

Another example that shows up here is women objecting to testosterone-fueled environments – things like push-up contests in a high-pressure Wall Street setting – being painted as overreactions or part of the “feminization” problem.

Let’s get real:

Why the hell is a push up contest happening anyway?? Push-up contests have nothing to do with the job people were hired to do.

They are a cultural signal that says: this space is optimized for one type of body, one type of bonding, one type of power.

If your team-building, networking, or “proving yourself” rituals are designed in ways that subtly (or explicitly) exclude people based on gender, disability, age, or body type, that’s not harmless.

And when people speak up about it, that isn’t “wokeness gone wild.” That’s employees asking: Can we build a workplace that is built around me actually doing my job? Ya know, the thing you hired and are paying me to do.

The “Truth-Seeking” Trap

There’s a lot of romanticizing of “truth-seeking” in this conversation – as if women, feelings, and “wokeness” are ganging up to destroy the noble pursuit of objective reality.

The version of truth-seeking I hear described sounds like this:“I don’t want to have to think about complex dynamics or how different people experience harm. I want simple rules, clean lines, and a world where I don’t have to examine my role in anything.”

That isn’t truth-seeking. That’s comfort-seeking.

Real truth-seeking is messy.

It makes space for more information, not less.
It allows for context, power, history, and lived experience to complicate a neat story.
And it accepts that, yes, sometimes the people who’ve been harmed the most have something crucial to teach us about how systems really work.

When we talk about academic freedom or free inquiry, it shouldn’t be code for “I want to say whatever I want without pushback.” It should mean: We have full context, we stay curious, and we remain open to being wrong, to failing, and to learning more.

That is not a feminized, weak, or “woke” stance. That’s what growth looks like.

Can We Retire the Word “Woke” Already?

The way “woke” is used in this conversation is telling. It’s a catch-all insult for:

Anti-racism
Feminism
LGBTQ+ inclusion
Accountability for harassment or abuse
Basically any attempt to say, “Hey, the way we’ve been doing this might hurt people.”

Here’s the problem: “Woke” has become a lazy stand-in for, “Social change that makes me uncomfortable.”

We know from real-world experience (and yes, research) that diverse teams, inclusive cultures, and environments where people can safely speak up about harm are better – for humans and for the bottom line.

Does it get clumsy? Yes.

Do some initiatives miss the mark? Absolutely.

But that’s not proof that inclusion is the problem. It’s proof that change is hard and humans are imperfect at it. The answer is not, “Let’s go back to when we didn’t have to think about this.”

“Men and Women Aren’t Interacting Successfully” – Or Are We?

One of the closing narratives here is that men and women “aren’t interacting successfully” anymore – that we’re politically polarized, romantically disconnected, and failing to come together.

That’s a very popular talking point right now. It’s also just that – a media fueled talking point.

In my role as a career coach, I see:

Men who deeply want to be better leaders, partners, and parents.
Women who want to collaborate with men, not replace them.
Teams that work incredibly well across gender when expectations are clear, respect is non-negotiable, and power is shared more fairly.

Are there real tensions? Of course. But framing it as “the sexes can’t work together” is a political narrative, not a universal truth.

Most people I work with – men and women – want to work together. They just don’t want to do it in systems where one group has held most of the power and the other group gets blamed every time something shifts.

The Cost of Making Women Defend Their Right to Exist

What bothers me most about this whole discourse is the sheer waste of time and energy it demands from women.

Instead of:

Building better workplaces
Coaching emerging leaders
Innovating, creating, parenting, resting, designing, leading

…we are still spending hours and emotional energy defending the basic idea that our presence, safety, and autonomy at work are not the problem.

So yes, kudos to The New York Times for publishing something guaranteed to push a lot of buttons and drive engagement. Mission accomplished on that front. But I’m done giving this kind of thinking free rent in my mind.

But for many of us, reading and unpacking this kind of piece feels like déjà vu:

Here we go again. Another conversation about whether women ruined something by showing up.

I’m over it.

Imagine, for a second, what would be possible if we stopped asking whether feminism ruined the workplace and started asking:

Who benefits when we blame women instead of examining power?
How do we build systems where care, dependence, courage, and accountability are shared human responsibilities – not gendered burdens?
What could we create if women didn’t have to waste time proving we’re allowed to exist, succeed, and lead?

That’s the workplace conversation I want to be having. And frankly, it’s long overdue.