This International Women’s Day comes at a tense inflection point for women in the workplace. The gender pay gap has widened two years in a row, and there’s been a wave of workplace protections rolled back under the current administration, which has been cutting discrimination enforcement, dismantling DEI requirements for federal contractors, and weakening protections in jobs that women disproportionately hold.
Activist Gloria Steinem has been at the center of the fight for women’s equality for more than six decades. For International Women’s Day, she answered questions via email on the state of women in the workplace, including where women have made progress, lost ground, and what has to change.
Here are excerpts from the thoughts she shared, lightly edited for length and clarity:
It’s International Women’s Day. I’m sure you’ve seen this day change a lot over the years. What do you want it to stand for in 2026?
It should stand for women’s equal power and political status. For instance, we live in a democracy but we’ve never had a female president. Hopefully, we will eventually be equal by sex and race, so the need for a day disappears.
You have hosted conversations in your living room for six decades. How has what women come to that room worried about changed, and how has it stayed the same?
In the sixties and seventies, women were more concerned with the civil rights movement and ending racial discrimination. Those are all still concerns, but equal access to positions of equality in government and private employment have become more possible. So has equality in marriage and in childrearing as well as same sex-marriage. It has changed with the views and power of particular presidents. For instance, Roosevelt and Clinton were more supportive of race and sex equality than were Reagan and Nixon.
What’s one thing that you thought would be solved by now, but hasn’t been?
I would have thought that our racial origins would have become less important, from the workforce to the White House. Also I would have thought that work in the home and in childrearing could have become more equal.
A lot of CEOs are privately sympathetic to gender equity, but pulling back on initiatives within their organizations to promote women as the political climate has changed. You’ve watched leaders navigate this before. What’s your advice to them at this moment?
We [are one of the few major democracies] in the world never to have had a female leader. Gender and social equity are ways to allow all human talent to be useful and to find its logical place in the workforce.
The data from our reporting is grim. Women’s participation in the labor force has slowed, men joined the labor force at three times the rate of women last year, and the gender pay gap widened for the second year in a row. What worries you most about these trends?
Obviously those are very dangerous trends that decrease democracy within American families and households. Also, this means women are doing unpaid family work at an even higher rate. This will mean the loss of the work and governmental leadership talents of more women of all races.
Nobel-winning economist Claudia Goldin proved in her work about the pay gap that it’s not about education or capability—childless men and women earn similarly. The penalty hits the moment children arrive. What has to change at work, at home, and in society to fix that?
That family is too often the birthplace of inequality. Yes, women bear children, but that could be a reason for men to take more responsibility for childcare once children are born.
We are still stereotyping too many family and workplace positions as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine,’ though all are human.
You and I sat together in your living room, along with venture capitalist Karin Klein, while you used generative AI tools for the first time. Since then we’ve worked together alongside many other female leaders to get AI into the hands of more women and to close the gender gap that exists in AI…Harvey COO Katie Burke shared in our talking circle last October that there’s a ‘bro-iness’ to hustle culture that’s ‘unnecessary and frankly unhelpful,’ and you said women are ‘operating by [men’s] rules without introducing some of ours.’ What are some rules women should be setting for how work gets done in this era?
Since women often still have a greater family role, we might insist on more childcare in the workplace, more time and place for sports, no meetings in restaurants or bars that are more accepting of men than women, more sitting in circles instead of hierarchical boardroom structure[s], and more attention to the physical safety of all employees in access[ing] our workplaces.
Note: Charter co-founder Erin Grau is an inaugural fellow of Gloria’s Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at advancing the feminist movement and preserving Steinem’s Manhattan apartment, which has been a hub for activism for nearly 60 years.