Truth Bomb: Why Women Need to Stop Doing and Go On Strike

From Christmas life admin to non-promotable work, women are carrying the load while men and organisations reap the benefits. This is a call for a quiet women’s strike and a 2026 Stop Doing List.

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Dear readers, I’ve just had an enforced stop, breathe, reflect.

I had stomach surgery last week. Planned, not catastrophic, but my torso looks like it has gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson, and I’m under strict instructions not to lift, carry, or do much at all.

So I’ve been horizontal, sore, and doom-scrolling TikTok and Instagram. What has been jumping off the screen are Thanksgiving posts. Woman after woman describing the same script: she plans, shops, cooks, serves, eats last, cleans up. The men turn up, eat first, watch football, sleep, and call it “family time”. WTAF!

Now it is December, and I can feel Christmas bearing down on us. I know women are reading this who are already mentally juggling gifts, food, travel, in-laws, outlaws, rosters, and everyone’s bloody feelings. On top of paid work. On top of care.

Truth Bomb: the modern economy is running a massive, organised theft of women’s time.

The Organised Theft Of Women’s Time

In Australia, women’s unpaid labour is worth about $427 billion a year, roughly a third of GDP, and none of it shows up in the national accounts. Globally, unpaid care work is valued at around US$10.8–11 trillion a year, more than three times the value of the global tech industry.

Truth Bomb: It’s telling that the very labour that enables capitalism isn’t counted in GDP.

The latest HILDA data, which falls into the “no shit, Sherlock!” category, shows that Australian women are still doing about 50% more housework than men and nearly twice as much caregiving, a pattern unchanged for two decades.

In other words, we’re working more in the paid workforce, but very little has changed in the home. So if you’re wondering why that woman in your life has got a short fuse, might be a bit cranky, and you’re walking on eggshells around her, particularly at this time of year, well, this is why. And it’s not an overreaction! It’s simple maths. She is doing too much.

Rebecca Mack ☕ whose Substack is called (not ironically) “This Woman’s Work.” had some sharp food for thought:

“How glorious would it be if mums could halve their Christmas workload by forwarding school emails to their kids’ dads and actually trusting the work would get done.”

Glorious. Also unimaginable in far too many households.

The Office Version Of The Same Scam

Then there is the office version of the same scam. Research on “non-promotable tasks” shows managers are about 50% more likely to ask women to do work that helps the organisation but not their careers, and women end up spending around 200 more hours a year on this glue work than men. If you’re a Black woman or a Woman of Colour, this is even more likely to happen to you.

Look at your workplace right now.

• Who is organising the Christmas party and team drinks?

• Who is sorting client gifts and cards?

• Who is tracking RSVPs and dietary needs, writing run sheets, tidying rooms, and making leaders look thoughtful and organised?

My bet, and I’m not a betting woman, is that this unpaid labour, which is quietly making everyone look good and feel good, is sat fairly and squarely in the laps of the women in your workplace.

What This System Does To Our Heads

And then there is what this system has done to our heads. Emma Pan posted about taking a sabbatical and discovering she had carried her corporate wiring with her. No meetings, yet the exact same relentless schedules and to-do lists. Productivity had become self-worth. Rest did not exist as a serious option.

I’ll admit, whilst I’m not retired or on a sabbatical, my life runs with military precision. If it’s not in my calendar, it does not happen! My brain just does not have the capacity to remember all of the things that I have to show up to.

Then! Yet another truth bomb comes at me as I host my final hour of power for 2025 with the members of my Lead to Soar network. One of our members, Sarah, gave me the frame that I needed: “rest is a verb” You choose it. You protect it. You treat it like work you do for yourself, not a treat you earn for being a good girl.

Truth Bomb: Rest is a verb.

In this week’s 200th episode of the show, Mel Butcher and I talked amongst other things, about why my do-not-list is now non-negotiable. And I asked women what they’re not going to do next year, rather than what they are going to put on what feels like a never-ending to-do list.

So let’s get practical AND political.

Call to (in)Action for women

Write a Stop Doing List for 2026: three columns: home, work, community.

Examples:

• I do not host, cater, and clean for every family event.

• I do not take on office housework by default.

• I do not attend meetings with no purpose or decision.

• I do not say yes because I am afraid of being disliked.

Tell the people who need to hear it. Partner. Kids. Boss. Colleagues. Then hold the line. You are not selfish. You are reclaiming stolen time.

Call to Action for Managers

Audit who is doing the non-promotable work in your team. Not once. Quarterly.

• Rotate event organisation, minutes, onboarding, the emotional labour.

• Stop describing women who say no as “not a team player”.

• Recognise and reward the work that keeps the place running, or redesign so it is shared and appropriately resourced.

If the same women’s names are on every “can you just” task, you do not have a high-performing culture. You have a gendered exploitation model.

Call to Action for Organisations

Put women’s time on the balance sheet of your gender strategy. If you are serious about equity, prove it in how you design work and who carries the load.

• Stop hiding behind “flexibility” as if it’s a gift. Track who is working flexibly, who is holding the fort on skeleton staff/mandatory shutdowns and who keeps getting quietly removed from high-value projects because everyone assumes she will need to be off sorting Christmas, school holidays, and elder care.

• Make it visible when women are doing low-status, high-importance work so men can no longer build their careers on the back of women’s invisible labour at home and at work.

• Build non-promotable work into role design, headcount, and budgets, rather than sprinkling it on the same “capable, reliable” women.

• Tie leadership KPIs and bonuses to the fair distribution of unpaid organisational work, not just revenue and engagement scores. If a leader’s team runs on one woman’s martyrdom, that is a performance issue.

If organisations are benefiting from women’s unpaid time, they are not “family friendly.” They are running a business model that depends on the exploitation of women.

Truth Bomb: women are not tired because we are weak. We are tired because the system is perfectly designed to drain us and then gaslight us about it.

I am not interested in helping women tolerate more of the intolerable. I am interested in a collective “no more”.

The women’s strike can start quietly. One Stop Doing List at a time.

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About Me

I am the unapologetically fierce, quite sweary, globally sought-after architect of workplace gender equity. I pride myself on being the go-to strategist for businesses and sports organisations ready to stop talking and start doing workplace gender equity right.

When not dismantling the barriers that hold women back, I’m joyfully working with ambitious women to build careers that soar. I do this through my award-winning book The Leadership Compass, the Lead to Soar Network, and my no-bullshit podcasts The Lead to Soar Podcast and Fed Up Club.

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