Owning my feminism
I did not arrive at feminism through an argument. I arrived through life with a bit of feminine flair.
Writing this chapter showed me the gap between what I have done in my professional life and what I am doing in the rest of it. I enacted policies. I changed metrics. I used the tools my position gave me, and I used them with intention. And for a long time, I believed that was the work. What this chapter clarified is that policy-level action, real as it is, is one expression of feminist practice. Not the full definition. The harder question is what feminism looks like outside the boundaries of a job title: in the relationships I build, in how I show up for the women in my personal life, in how I spend my advocacy when no performance review is watching. I am a feminist who is still in the process of living up to what that word requires. The ownership is ongoing. Present tense. Future looking.
I am a feminist. Not just a champion of women. Not just a gender equity advocate. A feminist. I use the word with intention and without apology, because reclaiming the narrative matters, and because the people who have worked to make that word feel radical or threatening are the same people who benefit when men like me soften it into something more palatable. I am not interested in palatability. I am interested in truth.
Where it began
My mother is a lesbian. That fact alone broke every gender norm that the world around her had established before she ever said a word about it. She navigated a world that constantly made assumptions about her, moving through hardware stores, boardrooms, and parent-teacher conferences, fully aware that rooms had been arranged for someone else. And she navigated all of it with a kind of quiet ferocity that I absorbed before I had language for what I was watching. We did not sit down and have conversations about feminism. What we had was something more instructive: I watched her live. I watched what it cost to be a woman who did not perform the version of womanhood the world wanted from her. That was my first education.
The second came in college, when I began to understand social justice not as an idea, however as a practice. I was a white man and a gay man. I held oppression in one hand and advantage in the other, and the work of those years was learning to hold both honestly without letting one cancel out the other. My own experience of not belonging gave me a window. It did not give me the full view. The distance between those two things is where the work lives.
The third arrived in a theater. I sat in the audience for The Vagina Monologues for the first time, and the room shifted something in me that I had not known needed shifting. What I witnessed was raw. Women claiming their own stories, their own bodies, their own language, in front of a room full of people who had been taught to look away. I saw power being reclaimed in real time. And I understood, with a clarity I had not had before, that the world we had built was not merely designed with men in mind. It had been constructed, in many ways, to keep women out of the rooms where their own stories were being written. Those stories on stage became an editor of mine. They rewrote assumptions I had not known I was carrying. I left that theater understanding that my comfort in this world had been purchased, in part, by the discomfort of others. And that awareness carries an obligation.
What I had to overcome to own the word
Many people hear the word feminist and picture a caricature. A woman burning a bra. A protest of extremes. That image has been deliberately constructed by people who want the word to feel threatening, because a word that feels threatening is one people avoid, and a word people avoid loses its power. Bell Hooks, in Feminism Is for Everybody, argued precisely this: that dominant culture had an interest in making feminism seem fringe and radical, because those who benefit from sexist systems have everything to gain from keeping that word at arm's length. Feminism, she argued, is simply a movement to end sexist oppression. Not a lifestyle. Not a club. A commitment. (1)
Owning feminism as a man required me to decide that I was more committed to the work than to the comfort of not being associated with a word some people misunderstand. It required me to name something I had been benefiting from my entire life and to accept that naming it did not make me superior or inferior. It made me accountable. Hillary Clinton put it plainly: women's rights are human rights, and human rights are women's rights. I return to that framing often because it cuts through the resistance. It names what feminism actually is.
I will also be honest about something that made the declaration easier for me than it might be for a straight man: being gay gave some people a reason to accept my feminist identity that had nothing to do with my actual convictions. They made assumptions. They thought my sexuality explained my values. It did not. My values are mine. They were built over a lifetime of watching women navigate a world that was not designed for them, and deciding I was not willing to simply benefit from that design without working to change it.
The Women Who Taught Me
My mother comes first, and she will come up often throughout this book. She lived in defiance of a world that wanted to contain her, doing so while raising a child and building a life with intention and courage. Alongside her: Francine Corley, a Dean of Students at Rutgers, who fought for social justice while battling breast cancer and had to explain to male leadership why she needed time away for treatment, in ways her male colleagues never did. My best friend Angie, who built a legal career that was entirely, unapologetically her own and taught me that ambition in a woman is not a personality flaw. And then the women whose names are not public, who did the work without a platform and built the foundation that the visible leaders stand on. I think of them too. They are part of this story.
I also grew up inside two very different understandings of what gender could look like. My mother wore pantsuits, played both parental roles without making either smaller, and demonstrated daily that gender roles are constructions, not laws. My grandmother on my father's side, whom we called Granny, never held a paid job of her own and nonetheless commanded the full respect of everyone around her. She ran the books for the family farm. She led the PTA. She stretched a meal for two into a feast for twelve. She was the matriarch, and nobody questioned it. What these two women showed me is that the problem was never the women. The problem was a society that wanted to tell both of them who they were allowed to be.
I also want to name what I had to unlearn. My mother used heteronormative language with me when I was young. She would reference my wife when talking about marriage. That language shaped my assumptions before I had the capacity to question them. The language spoken in a home shapes a child's internal architecture. We do not get to choose what we absorb. We do get to choose what we examine and what we release.
The ceiling I need to be honest about
I present as masculine. There is no ambiguity about my gender when I walk into a room. I am a cisgender man, and the world responds to me accordingly. That means there are things I will never understand from the inside. I will never navigate the healthcare system as a woman. I will never know what it means to have a government decide what I can and cannot do with my body. When someone fights to restrict reproductive rights, I can stand against it with everything I have, and I have. However, I will never know what it is to carry that fight inside my own body. That is a ceiling, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
What I do carry is the experience of not fitting. Being misgendered as a child because of my voice. Living as a male dancer in a society that has predetermined how boys who dance should appear. Hearing my father ask me, when I was young enough for the words to land hard, whether I was going to grow up to be a boy or a girl. I am a boy, I told him. Just because I like dancing does not make me less of a boy. That moment did not give me an equivalent to what women navigate. It gave me a doorway.
My experience as a gay man gave me a different kind of access as well. I know what it means to have a right feel suddenly conditional. That understanding is not the same as carrying a fight in your body. However, it is a doorway. And I walk through it with intention every time I show up as a feminist.
My experience as a gay man gave me a doorway, not equivalence. Through that doorway, I could see more clearly than I might otherwise what it costs a person to be measured against a norm they did not choose.
The intersectional demand
Holding white privilege and male privilege simultaneously means my feminism is required to do more than address gender in isolation. Kimberlé Crenshaw's foundational work on intersectionality established that women of color face overlapping systems of oppression that a single-axis lens, gender only, or race only, cannot capture or address. Mainstream feminism has a documented history of centering white women at the expense of that fuller truth. (2)
I am not exempt from replicating that pattern if I am not deliberate.
What deliberate looks like, in practice: I specifically seek out women of color as the first voices I consult when I am thinking through gender equity questions. Not as a courtesy. As a recognition that the fullness of what feminism requires will come from those who carry the most intersecting weight. The policy changes I have made, the conversations I have pushed, the moments I have named as problems, have been sharper because of those consultations. I do not want a feminism that centers the women already closest to power. I want one that starts where the compounding is heaviest.
What my sons need to know
I have two sons. And I want them to understand something the culture around them will sometimes try to obscure: building a more equitable world for women does not diminish them. It expands what is possible for everyone. Michael Kimmel, whose research on the performance of masculinity has documented this extensively, argues that the rigid expectations placed on men, that they do not cry, do not ask for help, do not occupy caregiving roles, harm men as deeply as they harm women. The enforcement of those norms is structural, not incidental. And dismantling them is feminist work. (3)
I want my sons to see women as the definition of leadership, the way my generation was handed a definition of leadership that wore a suit, sat at the head of a table, and almost always looked like a man. I want to hand them something different. I want them to know what leadership actually looks like: anyone with vision, courage, and the commitment to do the work.
When my former husband and I were preparing to adopt our children, we gave the boys both of our last names. We wanted it to be unquestionable that either of us could show up for them anywhere without having to prove we belonged to them. That is a feminist act. It is also a fatherhood act. In our family, those two things were never in conflict.
What I have actually done
Belief without action is aspiration. This chapter is asking for more than that. Inclusion, as I understand it, is the active force that makes belonging possible. It is the behavior that nurtures a culture where every person is empowered to contribute fully. Inclusion is the multiplier that amplifies equity and diversity into something a person can actually know in their body. Here is where I have tried to make it real.
I let other people speak first in rooms, because I know I can fill a space with my voice and I have a responsibility to ensure others' voices are in it too. When someone says something worth hearing, I amplify it. I give it back to the person who offered it. I do not take it as my own.
I have fought for women in succession planning. McKinsey's Women in the Workplace research has consistently documented what practitioners call the broken rung: the point in the career ladder where women fall off the advancement track in disproportionate numbers, not because of a single decision, however because of the invisible accumulation of smaller ones. (4) I saw that pattern in the data at a former organization before most people around me had named it. Women were being counted in our succession pipeline at rates that looked acceptable on paper. The number nobody was tracking was how many plans each person appeared on. Men routinely appeared on three or four. Women were on one. When the role they were named for got filled by someone else, their path forward closed. I presented that data. Once the organization could see the gap, it could no longer ignore it. We changed the metric. The numbers were alarming before we changed the policy. They were better after.
I have built a parental leave policy that does not assume a family looks one particular way. Birthing parent. Non-birthing parent. Sixteen weeks, fully paid, for birth, adoption, or surrogacy. When the policy was announced, several transgender colleagues reached out to say they had been considering starting a family; however, they were uncertain whether the organization would recognize them in its policies. The updated language made it unquestionable. Inclusion written into policy is not bureaucracy. It is belonging made visible.
I have ensured that organizations I have led covered abortion access and travel costs when states restricted care, because a right that cannot be exercised in practice is not a right. It is a promise with an asterisk. I have given a friend a safe place to stay when she was leaving an abusive relationship. I have been the person a young family member called when she found out she was pregnant as a teenager. I told her I loved her. I told her it was her decision. My job was not to have a position. My job was to make sure she knew she had one.
What I have not done well enough
There was a moment early in my career when I watched a male leader discredit the women on his team, repeatedly, in front of everyone. I did not speak up. I was new. I was worried about my own position. I let my fear of the consequences to myself outweigh my responsibility to the people being harmed. The cost of speaking up is almost always smaller than I think it is in the moment when I am deciding whether to do it. Almost always. Not always. And I want to honor the reality that for people without the economic cushion I eventually built, the calculation is genuinely harder. I do not get to universalize my courage.
There was also a moment when a female colleague told me she was being subjected to sexist behavior by a leader. I became angry. I wanted to intervene immediately, directly, forcefully. What I was doing, without understanding it, was taking the agency away from her. I was making her pain mine to resolve. And she had to stop me.
Christopher, she said. I am not telling you this so you will fight my battle. I am telling you this because I need help figuring out how to move forward. I want to be in the driver's seat.
That stopped me. And it should have. I knew in my body what she was naming. I had experienced it myself: sharing a moment of discrimination and watching someone rush to make my pain their cause rather than give me space to navigate it on my own terms. I had done to her exactly what I had hated having done to me. True allyship was sitting down, listening, and helping her think through her own next steps. She wanted to document the behavior and file a complaint when she was ready. She understood her financial reality and her timeline in ways I did not. I was ready to have the man fired. She was navigating her life. Those are not the same thing.
True allyship is not self-appointment. The person most affected by the harm gets to decide how it is addressed. My job is to be useful on her terms, not heroic on my own.
The word itself
Feminism is the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes. That is what it means. Not the burning of bras. Not the erasure of men. Not a zero-sum redistribution of advantage. And owning it as a man is itself an act of disruption, because it becomes slightly harder for those who have tried to make it a pejorative to maintain that framing when men who do not fit their caricature claim the word publicly and without apology.
In corporate rooms, in faith communities, in political spaces, I have encountered the resistance. And my response is consistent: I am not going to use a different word to make you more comfortable with an idea that is simply true. Women deserve equitable access to opportunity. Trans and nonbinary people deserve to see themselves in the policies that govern their lives. Caregiving is not a gendered responsibility. Women with disabilities carry the compounding weight of gender and ableism simultaneously, a reality that belongs in every conversation about gender equity, and one I will explore further when this book turns to the chapter dedicated to accessibility. These are not radical positions. They are human ones. And I will keep calling them by their right name.
What I am asking of you
If you are a man reading this, I am not asking you to feel guilty. Guilt is not useful if it stops at feeling. I am asking you to sponsor women. In your community. In your civic life. In the political arena. Use whatever access and influence you have to make sure women's voices are in the rooms making decisions that affect everyone's lives. Do this because it is right, not because the faces of the women you love have made inequality visible to you. That is a starting point. Let it push you toward something more durable.
If you are a woman reading this, I want you to know that I value what you bring, not just to the workplace, though there, too. This chapter asks me to make sure it shows up in my personal life, not just in the professional spaces where I have held a title and a mandate. I am making that commitment here, in writing, because accountability requires a witness.
I am still here. Still claiming the word. Still doing the work. Staying quiet, staying comfortable, staying on the side of the people who benefit from a world that does not serve everyone equally, is not a version of myself I am willing to be.
Reflection
Feminism is not a position statement. It is a practice. These questions are designed to help you examine both.
Where did your understanding of gender roles come from, and what have you actively chosen to keep or release? Think about the messages absorbed at home, in school, in faith communities, and in the media. Consider which of those messages still shape decisions you make today without your full awareness.
Who are the women who have most shaped your leadership, your values, or your understanding of what is possible? Name them. Describe what they showed you. Consider whether they know the impact they have had, and whether there is something to do about that.
When have you witnessed gender-based harm and remained silent? What stopped you, and what would you do differently? This question is not an indictment. It is an inventory. The point is clarity, not guilt.
Where does your advocacy for gender equity live outside your professional role? If the answer is thin, that is useful information. What would it look like to expand it?
What is one system, policy, or practice in your immediate sphere of influence that disadvantages women or gender-marginalized people? What would it take to change it? Name one. Start there. Advocacy that cannot name a specific target is aspiration without traction.
Sources
bell hooks. Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. South End Press, 2000.
Kimberlé Crenshaw. "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color." Stanford Law Review, 1991.
Michael Kimmel. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. Free Press, 1996. See also Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. Harper, 2008.
McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.org. Women in the Workplace. Annual report. See leanin.org/women-in-the-workplace for current edition.
Original publish date: 03/26/2026