When Do We Get A Book For Men?

Women are already outperforming men under extraordinary circumstances

Emma Grede, Author, Start With Yourself

Let me start with myself, I have three degrees from top schools in America. I have worked for four Fortune 100 companies - PepsiCo, Cargill, BASF, DuPont - as a Chemical Engineer and Global leader. I also have four kids like Emma Grede, I showed up, every single day, for decades of a corporate career that, by every metric the system promised would reward me, should have ended with my name on a corner office door. It didn’t. Not because I lacked ambition. Not because I failed to “start with myself.” Not because I was too focused on impact and not focused enough on profit. It didn’t happen because the system was not designed for me. And no amount of individual effort changes the design of a system.

This is what Emma Grede’s book, Start With Yourself, released in April 2026 to wide acclaim and a Wall Street Journal comparison to Lean In, gets dangerously, consequentially wrong.

Women are not the problem. The unequal distribution of care is. And no book about individual ambition will fix a structural crisis. The most radical thing we can do for women right now is hand the next self-help book to a man. - Blessing Adesiyan, The Care Gap

Grede is extraordinary. Her story — dropped out of high school in East London, built her way up from paper routes and beaded bags, co-founded SKIMS, built Good American, became one of America’s wealthiest self-made women is genuinely inspiring. I do not dispute any of it. What I dispute is the prescription she draws from it: that work-life balance is “your problem, not the employer’s responsibility,” that ambition and profitability are things women need to talk about more, and that the path forward begins, and largely ends, with the individual woman deciding to want more.

Emma Grede has never, to my knowledge, worked as a corporate employee. She has always been building toward ownership, alongside a very resourceful and connected partner who invested in her. The corporate woman, the one navigating performance review committees, tokenism, the broken rung, and being the only Black woman in the conference room is not Grede’s audience. But she is writing for her anyway. And that distinction matters enormously.

Women don’t need another book telling them to do more. They need a system that stops extracting so much from them. - Blessing

Elana Meyers Taylor, Olympian

Women are already doing extraordinary things with extraordinary constraints.

Look around. Women are dominating sports, building businesses, raising the next generation, managing households, mentoring colleagues, leading DEI initiatives that their organizations will not fund properly, and showing up with credentials that exceed their male counterparts at every level of education. Women are outperforming men. They are doing all of this while earning 84 cents to the male dollar, and 69 cents if they are Black.

Women-founded companies generate 78 cents of revenue per dollar invested, compared to 31 cents for male-founded companies. Women outperform on capital efficiency by 2.5 times. And yet, of the $289 billion deployed globally in venture capital in 2024, female-only founding teams received 2.3 percent. All-male teams received 83.6 percent. That is not a confidence gap or a money mindset gap. That is structural exclusion with a price tag.

• 2.3% of global VC deployed in 2024 went to female-only founding teams (Founders Forum, 2025)

• 83.6% went to all-male teams — $241.9 billion of $289 billion total

• 2065 estimated year VC funding reaches gender parity at the current rate of 0.2% improvement per year

The Lean In and McKinsey 2025 Women in the Workplace report, the largest study of its kind, drawing on data from 124 companies and nearly 10,000 employees, found that women are less likely than men to want to be promoted. Headlines called this an “ambition gap.” The report’s own data reveals what it actually is: when women receive the same career support as men, the gap disappears entirely. This is a support deficit, not a motivation deficit. And no book about individual mindset closes a support deficit.

The infrastructure Grede has, most women will never have.

Grede says she spends roughly three hours a day with her children, a detail offered as evidence that ambitious women can have a family. What she does not say loudly enough is what makes those three hours possible: a household staff, a high-earning co-founder husband, and an ownership stake in her companies that gives her scheduling flexibility a salaried employee simply does not have. The “figure it out yourself” framework only works when you have the resources to figure it out.

According to the United Nations, women perform 76.2 percent of the world’s unpaid care work, an average of four hours and 25 minutes per day, compared to one hour and 23 minutes for men. That is three additional hours every single day that women cannot spend on their careers, their health, their rest, or their ambitions. And this holds even in so-called egalitarian marriages: wives spend more than double the time on housework as husbands and almost two hours more per week on direct caregiving. The infrastructure doesn’t eliminate the gap. It just compresses it. I know, because I was one of the women with infrastructure, and I was still carrying more.

• 76.2% of global unpaid care work is done by women (UN Women, 2025)

• 4 hrs 25 min average unpaid care daily for women worldwide vs. 1 hr 23 min for men (UN 2024 policy paper)

• 606 million working-age women are outside paid work entirely because of care responsibilities

• $11 trillion estimated value of global unpaid care work — 9% of world GDP — virtually all invisible in national accounts

I founded The Care Gap because I finally understood what had actually been happening to me and the women I knew. The problem was not our ambition. The problem was care, the invisible, uncompensated labor of running households, raising children, managing aging parents, and sustaining the emotional infrastructure of families, being systematically offloaded onto women and systematically excluded from every equation of professional success. Care is not a women’s issue. Care is an economic crisis. And the solution is redistribution, not more advice.

Women’s time is the most undervalued resource in the global economy. Asking them to spend more of it on hustle is not a solution. It is an extraction.

Women aren’t underfunded because they talk about impact. They’re underfunded because investors are men.

One of Grede’s most specific and widely circulated critiques of women founders is that they focus too much on impact and not enough on profitability, that they need to lead with numbers, talk like the big boys, frame their pitches in the language of returns. This is advice born from her experience as an entrepreneur who had to make that case. The evidence, however, does not support the diagnosis.

A Harvard study found that 70 percent of venture capital investors preferred pitches from male entrepreneurs, even when those pitches were word-for-word identical. VCs ask men questions about upside and growth potential. They ask women about risk mitigation and potential losses. The bias operates before a single word is spoken about profit or impact. And when surveyed with anonymity guaranteed, a methodology designed specifically to reduce social desirability bias, 26.9 percent of VCs said women’s participation in founding teams is overrated, and nearly 12 percent admitted they would not invest in women-led ventures at all.

The fix for explicit bias is not better language. The bar-and-napkin model of funding, where a Silicon Valley founder pitches a business model to a partner over drinks after a round of golf, is not a venue that most women have access to, not because they lack the language of profit, but because they are not in the bar. Silicon Valley has the lowest female VC partner rate of any major global funding hub: 13.2 percent. You cannot get money from people who are not in the room. You cannot get into the room when the room was not built for you. Telling women to pitch differently is telling them to perform better in a venue designed to exclude them.

• 70% of VCs preferred male-pitched ideas even when pitches were word-for-word identical (Harvard study)

• 26.9% of VCs, surveyed anonymously, said women’s participation in founding teams is overrated

• 11.9% admitted they would not invest in women-led ventures at all

• 78¢ revenue per dollar invested by women-founded companies vs. 31¢ for male-founded companies (BCG)

The blueprint is broken. Women are not choosing reckless abandon, we are choosing survival.

The deepest flaw in Grede’s framework, and in the Lean In paradigm she is openly compared to, is its foundational assumption: that the male model of professional success is the goal, and that women’s job is to fit themselves into it.

That model = 150 percent availability, work-life balance as a personal failure, hustle as moral virtue, face time as a proxy for commitment was designed by men who had partners managing everything else. It was not designed to coexist with pregnancy, childcare, pediatric appointments, school pickups, aging parents, or the invisible mental load of managing a household. When Grede says that asking about work-life balance in a job interview is a red flag, she is, whether she means to or not, telling women that the price of ambition is the abandonment of the rest of their lives.

Harvard Business School research found that always-on work cultures were detrimental to both men and women, but women paid a higher price, because they could not shed the second shift when they got home. Women are not underperforming in hustle culture. They are responding rationally to a system that demands twice as much from them and still rewards them less. Forty-two percent of women in corporate America report burnout. They carry the emotional labor of their workplaces, absorb the DEI work their organizations won’t fund, mentor the next generation, and go home to a household that is still, overwhelmingly, their responsibility.

Women are not choosing to work with reckless abandon, and that is not a failure of ambition. It is wisdom. Working without regard for health, family, or sustainability is not a virtue. It is a design flaw in a system built for people whose humanity was managed by someone else. The next generation of workers, male and female, is already rejecting it. They are right to.

Working with reckless abandon is not ambition. It is a design failure. Women are not failing to adopt the old model. They are already building the new one.

Black women showed up. The system moved the goalposts.

I am a Black woman. I am also the demographic this conversation most thoroughly fails when it stays at the level of individual effort.

Black women ask for promotions at the same rate as white men. For every 100 men promoted to manager, 58 Black women are promoted, despite equal ambition, equal rates of asking, and in many cases superior credentials. Black women are three to four times as likely as white women to be subjected to disrespectful and othering behavior at work. They are more likely than any other group of employees to carry DEI labor that falls outside their formal job description, to speak out against bias and discrimination, and to experience retaliation for doing so. In 2024, 61 percent of Black women said their race had played a role in missing out on an opportunity to advance, up from 45 percent in 2018. The problem is getting worse, not better, regardless of what any individual Black woman does with her mindset.

In 2020, companies hired Black women into leadership at unprecedented rates, and placed many of them on what researchers call the “glass cliff,” appointing them to lead failing organizations during periods of crisis, handing them impossible mandates with inadequate support, and setting them up to fail in ways that then became evidence of a “leadership gap.” They showed up. The system moved the goalposts. Then it called the outcome proof of a deficit.

By 2025, Black women’s unemployment had risen every single month since January while white women’s held steady, a divergence that tracks directly with the rollback of DEI programs across both government and private sector. The combined share of venture capital for Black and Latina women founders had fallen back below one percent. The Fearless Fund, a small firm specifically backing Black women-owned businesses, was mired in a lawsuit accusing its grant program of discrimination. The system was sending a message: show up and we will change the rules. Show up anyway and we will sue you for trying.

• 58 Black women promoted to manager for every 100 men promoted, despite equal promotion-seeking rates

• 61% of Black women say race played a role in missing out on an opportunity to advance in 2024 (up from 45% in 2018)

• 69¢ Black women earn per dollar compared to white men — $900,000 lost over a 40-year career

• <1% of all VC received by Black and Latina women founders combined

The individual is not the lever. The system is.

The most dangerous thing about an advice framework that centers the individual is what it erases: the evidence that structural change, not individual improvement, is what actually moves the numbers.

France implemented a public co-investment quota requiring 30 percent female founder investment for VC funds seeking public co-investment. The result: a 35 percent increase in female founder funding. Finland, with the highest rate of female VC decision-making, leads the world with 30 percent of VC going to female founders. Iceland made parental leave non-transferable, use it or lose it, regardless of gender and equalized domestic labor within a single generation. Not a campaign. Not a book. Not an exhortation to start with themselves. A policy. A structural intervention. A change to the system.

The 30-year average for all-female founder VC share is 2.4 percent. It did not improve during the Lean In era. It did not improve during the girlboss era. It did not improve when women talked more about profit, pitched harder, dressed differently, softened their voices, or read the books they were handed. It moved when women were in the rooms where decisions are made. The fix was structural. It was always structural.

Companies are currently rolling back the structural tools that actually work: flexible and remote work, formal sponsorship programs, targeted career development, and DEI staff. These are not being cut because women didn’t start with themselves. They are being cut because the commitment to equity was never deep enough to survive political pressure. And flexible work, the policy that research most consistently links to better outcomes for women is being eliminated precisely as women who built their lives around it are being told to return to offices that were never designed for their full humanity.

If the problem is you, the system doesn’t have to change. The system is the problem. It always was.

I spent decades in Fortune 100 companies. I showed up. I performed. I mentored. I advocated. I never got the corner office. And when I finally stopped asking what I was doing wrong, I found the answer: I wasn’t doing anything wrong. The corner office was not designed for someone who also runs a home. The path to it was not built for someone who carries the weight of care. The standard of success was not designed for someone who looks like me.

Emma Grede has built something extraordinary. I respect her journey enormously. But her advice start with yourself, own your ambition, don’t ask about work-life balance is advice for a world in which the structural barriers to women’s advancement have already been removed. We do not live in that world. Not yet.

Until we do, the most radical, data-backed, high-return thing we can do for women is not give them another book. It is give them their time back. Redistribute the care. Change the systems. Put women in the rooms where funding decisions are made. Build workplaces that measure output, not availability. And save the advice about individual ambition for the people who most need to hear it: the men who are not yet showing up at home.

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Blessing Adesiyan is a chemical engineer, climate and care economist, Editor-In-Chief of The Care Gap and the Founder and Chief Care Officer of Caring Africa, advancing care as essential economic infrastructure through systems change, policy, and investment.