From Empowerment to Belonging: Why Women Don’t Need Fixing

Since I started working with women, one message keeps repeating itself, louder each year: be more confident, change your mindset, empower yourself.

There are endless workshops on imposter syndrome, confidence, and professional presence. At first, I thought this was progress. But over time, something felt off.

I began wondering: Why is empowerment always directed at women? Why do we not talk about men’s empowerment? What does this language assume about women?

Essentially, that we are not empowered, that something in us is missing and must be fixed.

The Problem with Empowerment Rhetoric

What if empowerment has become a polite way of saying: “adjust to a system that wasn’t built for you”? What if the message beneath all the well-meaning talk is simply: “toughen up to survive in a culture that rewards domination and calls it leadership”?

That’s not empowerment. That’s adaptation.

Feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser describes how capitalism’s flexible, competitive ethos has absorbed the language of feminism. Autonomy and empowerment; once collective political demands, have been reframed as individual projects of self-improvement. Within this paradigm, structural inequality disappears behind psychological vocabulary. When women burn out or feel excluded, the prescription is not organisational reform but personal resilience.

Empowerment becomes, paradoxically, an instrument of conformity.

To ask women to empower themselves inside patriarchal structures is to place responsibility on the oppressed for the conditions of their oppression. It is to confuse adaptation with emancipation.

What Feminist Coaching Actually Means

bell hooks reminds us that feminism is for everybody; not just women, and certainly not just women willing to play by rules that were never designed with their realities in mind. True feminist practice doesn’t demand that individuals contort themselves to fit oppressive systems. It demands that systems become worthy of the people within them.

This is where feminist coaching diverges from mainstream empowerment rhetoric.

Feminist coaching doesn’t say: “Here’s how to navigate a toxic culture.” It says: “Here’s what a toxic culture does to you and here’s how we work toward something different, together.”

It doesn’t individualise systemic problems. It names them. It creates space to see the water we swim in. As Sara Ahmed writes in Living a Feminist Life, feminist work is often about making visible what has been rendered invisible; the structures, expectations, and double standards that shape women’s experiences at work.

When a client tells me she feels like she’s not “leadership material,” we don’t rush to fix her confidence. We examine the definition of leadership she’s been handed. We ask: who decided that leadership looks like authority, hierarchy, decisiveness, and emotional detachment? And who benefits from that definition?

From Fixing Women to Building Belonging

The deeper task for coaching today is not (or should not be) to perfect the individual, but to create the conditions in which individuals no longer need to toughen up to belong.

Workplace belonging isn’t about teaching women to fit in. It’s about reimagining workplaces where care is treated as infrastructure, where leadership is relational rather than hierarchical, where success doesn’t demand you abandon yourself.

This matters because when we focus solely on individual empowerment, we absolve systems of accountability. We make burnout a personal failure rather than an organisational design flaw. We celebrate women who “lean in” while ignoring the structures that require them to perform resilience just to survive.

True empowerment isn’t about learning to endure more. It’s about asking the world to become a place where endurance isn’t required just to belong.

The Role of Individual Work Within Systemic Change

None of this means that individual awareness and personal work and action don’t matter. They do, but in a different way. 

Every act of self-compassion is a small revolution. Every woman who stops blaming herself and starts listening within, slowly shifts the system around her. When you recognise that the problem isn’t your lack of confidence but a culture that penalises care and rewards dominance, something shifts. You stop trying to fix yourself. You start making choices rooted in integrity rather than survival.

Individual coaching, at its best, becomes a practice of naming and re-imagining. As Paulo Freire taught, liberation begins when the oppressed name the structures that shape their lives.

But individual transformation doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Personal and systemic transformation are not separate projects but two sides of the same coin. When one woman sets a boundary, it creates permission for others. When one woman redefines success on her terms, she challenges the metrics that oppress us all. When one woman refuses to perform resilience, she exposes the system that demanded it.

This is the work: holding both the personal and the systemic. Cultivating awareness while demanding accountability. Supporting individual women while refusing to make their adaptation the end goal.

What We Practice Instead

In my coaching practice, I work at the intersection of personal and systemic; where awareness meets accountability, and individual change ripples outward into collective transformation.

This means:

• Creating space to pause and question the stories we’ve inherited
• Naming the systems that shape us before rushing to fix ourselves
• Building embodied awareness so we can tell the difference between our truth and internalised oppression
• Taking micro-actions that align with our values, not with compliance
• Redefining leadership, success, and achievement on terms that don’t require us to disappear

Because every time a woman stops adapting to survive and starts living in integrity with who she really is, the system changes a little too.

The Real Question

Perhaps the question isn’t “How do I become confident enough to succeed here?” but “What kind of culture am I building with my presence, and is it one I want to sustain?”

Perhaps true belonging starts when we stop trying to belong to systems that were never built for us, and start building ones that are.

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This is what I believe in. This is the work I do. If it resonates, I’d love to hear from you.