International Women’s Day (8 March) arrives each year with flowers, hashtags, panel discussions and corporate emails carefully drafted to celebrate resilience.
We celebrate strength. We celebrate progress. We celebrate “how far we have come.” And yet there is something uneasy about celebration when the burdens remain so unevenly distributed.
Because women do not merely work. They carry. They carry institutions. They carry households. They carry histories. They carry expectations that are so normalised that we rarely stop to name them.
And in naming them, we might begin to see what we have long chosen not to see.
The quiet architecture of gendered labour
In many workplaces, women are still expected to be the emotional regulators of the room. The ones who smooth conflict. The ones who remember birthdays. The ones who check in when someone is struggling. The ones who take notes. The ones who ensure the meeting feels “balanced.”
These acts are rarely written into job descriptions. They are simply assumed.
When a man asserts himself, he is decisive. When a woman asserts herself, she risks being described as “difficult.” When a man withdraws emotionally, he is focused. When a woman does so, she is asked whether she is coping.
In recent research on women living with chronic illness, I have seen how these expectations intensify rather than soften when a woman’s body does not conform to workplace ideals of endurance and composure. Workplaces are not neutral spaces. They are structured around assumptions of stability, predictability and uninterrupted productivity. When women must “perform wellness” to remain credible, gendered expectations merge with ableist ones.
The architecture of expectation is subtle. It does not shout. It whispers. It shapes behaviour through repetition.
Over time it becomes normal. And what is normal is rarely interrogated.
The myth of universal womanhood
But perhaps the greatest disservice of our public conversations is that we often speak of “women” as though they exist outside of history, race, class, disability, geography and culture.
As though womanhood is a single experience. It is not.
The woman navigating a boardroom in Sandton does not carry the same weight as the woman navigating a factory floor, or a clinic queue, or a township classroom. The Black woman navigating corporate leadership does not experience gender in isolation from race. The woman with a disability does not experience gender separate from accessibility. The working-class mother does not experience ambition separate from survival.
Intersectionality is not a fashionable theory. It is a lived reality.
As part of the broader study mentioned earlier, we also explored experiences of work and invisibility and found that inclusion is rarely guaranteed by policy alone. It is relational. It is contingent. It depends on trust, managerial discretion and everyday interactions that either affirm or quietly erode credibility.
When we celebrate women in leadership without asking which women are able to enter, and which must over-perform simply to remain, we flatten complexity into comfort. When we celebrate “women’s advancement” without asking which women are advancing and which remain structurally excluded, we risk mistaking visibility for equality.
The double and triple shift
Many women leave the workplace only to begin another shift at home.
Care work remains stubbornly gendered. The invisible labour of planning meals, scheduling appointments, remembering school requirements, managing elderly parents and maintaining emotional stability within families — this labour does not disappear when women enter formal employment.
It expands.
The professional woman is expected to excel, but not neglect. To lead, but not intimidate. To achieve, but not at the cost of domestic harmony.
The bar is not merely higher. It is wider.
And for women whose economic reality does not allow the outsourcing of care, the burden intensifies.
Our research also reveals how some women must manage fluctuating health in silence, fearing that disclosure will mark them as unreliable. They live what we have described as a fragile “contingent coherence” — holding together professional identity, bodily unpredictability and relational credibility, often without institutional recognition.
We speak of “work-life balance” as though life were an optional hobby. For many women, life is the second and sometimes third job.
The cost of adaptation
There is also the quiet cost of constant adaptation.
Many women learn early how to modulate their voice. How to soften their tone. How to dress in ways that command respect without appearing threatening. How to navigate male-dominated spaces without drawing too much attention to their difference.
Adaptation is a survival skill. But survival is not freedom.
In professional environments built around an “ideal worker” who is endlessly available and emotionally contained, women often internalise the need to over-perform simply to avoid doubt. When illness, race, disability or class intersect with gender, this performance becomes more demanding still.
The workplace often rewards conformity to an inherited norm. Those who resemble that norm move more easily. Those who do not must work twice: once at their role and once at being acceptable.
This labour is invisible. Yet it shapes careers profoundly.
Representation is not enough
We have made progress in representation. More women sit at executive tables. More women occupy academic posts. More women lead institutions.
And this matters.
But representation alone does not dismantle structure. If the structures themselves remain calibrated to expectations built around uninterrupted productivity, aesthetic composure and bodily stability, then inclusion becomes conditional.
The woman who succeeds often does so by absorbing exceptional strain.
The system remains intact. And the celebration feels premature.
Listening more deeply
Perhaps this International Women’s Day requires less performance and more listening.
Listening to the woman who feels invisible in meetings despite her qualifications. Listening to the woman who is told she is “too ambitious.”
Listening to the woman whose race and gender make her hyper-visible and simultaneously unheard. Listening to the woman who must choose between professional advancement and family stability because the system was not designed with her in mind. Listening to the woman who carries disability into spaces that were not built for her body.
Listening without defensiveness. Listening without rushing to solutions. Listening long enough to recognise that inclusion is not a static achievement but an ongoing relational practice — one sustained by trust, responsiveness and ethical proximity.
The work ahead
If we are serious about gender equality, we must move beyond celebration into structural honesty.
This means interrogating pay disparities, yes. But it also means examining informal expectations.
It means rethinking how leadership is defined. It means redistributing care work, not merely praising women for managing it heroically.
It means asking why flexibility policies often carry stigma. It means recognising that not all women begin from the same starting line and that some must constantly prove they are “well enough,” “strong enough,” or “stable enough” to belong.
Equality cannot mean that some women are permitted entry into systems that remain hostile to others.
Justice requires redesign. And redesign requires discomfort.
A different kind of commemoration
International Women’s Day should not merely be a day of applause. It should be a day of reckoning.
A day on which we examine the invisible labour that sustains our institutions. A day on which we acknowledge that intersectionality is not academic jargon but lived complexity. A day on which we resist the temptation to speak of “women” as a singular category detached from race, class, disability and geography.
It should be a day on which we ask ourselves not whether women are strong enough — they have always been strong enough — but whether our workplaces are courageous enough to change.
Because the question is no longer whether women can carry the weight. The question is why they are still expected to carry so much of it alone.
Professor Armand Bam is the head of social impact and the PGDip in NPO Leadership Development at Stellenbosch Business School.
International Women’s Day should not merely be a day of applause. It should be a day of reckoning. A day on which we examine the invisible labour that sustains our institutions.
