You Keep It All Together—And Who Acknowledges Your Work?

International Women's Day 2025: How Invisible Labor Upholds Systems That Refuse to Count It.

Mar 08, 2025

Celebrating the strength, resilience, and unseen labor of women across the world. International Women’s Day is a reminder that the work that sustains society deserves recognition, respect, and justice. Art by Jay Siegmann & Midjourney, 2022.

International Women’s Day has always been about work.

Not the kind that makes headlines, not the kind that corporations celebrate, not the kind that governments acknowledge when they pass symbolic resolutions. It is about the work that happens quietly, necessarily, constantly. The kind that makes everything function, yet rarely gets counted as leadership.

Systems rely on this work.

They depend on it. They are built on it.

And they have been designed to ensure it remains invisible.

Cultural narratives reinforce the idea that caregiving and maintenance work are 'natural' roles rather than labor deserving of compensation. Economic structures ensure that industries dominated by women—education, domestic work, care services—are consistently underpaid, undervalued, and excluded from discussions of power and progress. Institutional policies uphold these disparities by failing to recognize unpaid labor as the foundation of economies, by making access to financial independence more difficult, and by setting legal precedents that prioritize productivity over humanity.

This invisibility is not accidental.

It is engineered to sustain a system that profits from free labor while keeping those who perform it dependent, compliant, and replaceable.

The unpaid, unrecognized labor of women and those socialized as women has always been the silent infrastructure that keeps everything running. It is not an accident that caregiving, emotional labor, coordination, and maintenance are expected but never truly valued. It is by design that this work is treated as a given rather than as an achievement, that it is absorbed into the background rather than counted as leadership.

Who Benefits? Who Profits?

The system depends on this work remaining unnoticed because the moment it becomes visible, the questions start:

Who benefits from this arrangement?
Who is free to focus on ambition, innovation, or self-interest precisely because someone else is keeping everything functioning?
Who is granted authority, and who is simply expected to ensure things do not collapse?
Beyond that—who profits?
Who controls the financial structures that ensure cheap labor remains cheap?
Who writes the policies that keep certain kinds of work underpaid or unpaid entirely?
Who decides which industries flourish and which are stripped of resources?

Women’s unpaid labor has always been the backbone of economies, from domestic work to caregiving to the invisible maintenance of every workplace, movement, and social structure.

Without this labor, the entire system would collapse.

Patterns of Exploitation: Then and Now

This is not new.

Exploitation has always functioned this way. From the forced labor camps of history to the underpaid, undervalued workers of today, the same pattern repeats: those with power extract the maximum amount of work from those with the least agency. Women and children have always been the most easily exploited, the most readily discarded, and the least likely to be granted ownership over their own survival.

Even in places of the worst human suffering, from Buchenwald to today’s sweatshops, the hierarchy remains the same.

Women and female children were placed at the lowest rung, used as disposable labor, subjected to the worst conditions, and denied even the meager autonomy that male prisoners sometimes negotiated.

They were stripped of dignity first, because their bodies, their endurance, and their suffering were seen as resources to be extracted, whether through physical labor, reproductive control, or outright violence.

Some might argue that these extreme examples are far removed from modern workplaces.

At first glance, they seem like entirely different worlds.

And the mechanisms remain eerily familiar. Today, the same logic persists under different names. The global economy thrives on exploited labor, from sweatshops to domestic work, from care industries to underpaid service jobs.

Women remain the backbone of this hidden economy, expected to work harder for less, to carry entire industries without ever being acknowledged as the foundation they are. When the system no longer has use for them, they are discarded—retirement without security, workplaces without protections, entire careers spent in invisibility.

And yet, despite all of this, women keep going.

Not because they are resigned to it, but because survival demands it. And in that persistence, in that quiet refusal to let everything fall apart, there is something powerful.

The system relies on invisibility, and every act of recognition—every moment that makes this work undeniable—chips away at its foundation.

Wild Lion*esses Pride by Jay resonates? Share it with someone who could use a fresh perspective on life’s journey.

Responsibility Without Recognition

I have watched this play out in movements, in workplaces, in activism, in everyday life.

There is always the work that is seen and the work that is expected. The people who are credited for shaping the world, and the ones who make sure the world keeps turning. And these are rarely the same people.

I have lived this.

I have been in spaces where things needed to be done, and I stepped in because I could. Because I saw the gaps, because I understood what was required, because someone had to.

And I have seen how quickly that work was taken for granted. How easily responsibility was handed over without recognition, how authority was given elsewhere, how the structure itself remained unchanged.

That is the pattern. That is the design.

Training for Compliance

This structure that keeps women doing the work while leaving financial and structural control elsewhere is not accidental.

It is not just about bad habits. It is the direct extension of how boys and girls have been trained for centuries.

Boys were taught that the world belonged to them—that their decisions shaped reality, that their leadership was expected. They were handed financial control, public authority, and the confidence to move through life knowing their voices mattered.

Girls? Girls were raised to adapt. To maintain. To be prepared to take responsibility for whatever men did not want to deal with. They were trained to be the support system, the caregivers, the ones who kept everything running without expecting recognition.

The Rollback Was Never a Surprise

In the U.S., abortion rights—something once thought unshakable—are already gone in many states. In Germany, abortion is still criminalized, merely tolerated under certain conditions. The pressure for women to return to the home, to prioritize motherhood, to be economically dependent is rising again.

The expectation that women should submit to a structure that does not serve them has not disappeared. It has only been waiting for the right moment to reassert itself.

And when control alone is not enough? Then comes the enforcement.

The normalization of coercion, of violence, of entitlement. The insistence that a woman’s body is not fully her own. The demand that she endure whatever is done to her because it is her place to endure it.

The message that submission is safety, that obedience is the only way to survive.

This Is Not About Blame—It Is About Recognition and Change

Before anything changes, before we talk about what to do differently, I think we have to talk about awareness.

These structures do not persist because individuals make bad choices. They persist because they are deeply ingrained in how we think about labor, about leadership, about power.

Because even those of us who challenge these patterns on a structural level often fail to see how they shape our daily lives.

So here is the real question: If we are talking about change, what exactly do we need to change?

Can the system be reformed, or does it need to be dismantled entirely?
What would it look like to structure leadership, work, and recognition differently?
Where do we start—at the level of laws, or in the quiet moments where expectations are reinforced?

International Women’s Day is not about celebrating progress that does not exist.

It is about exposing what remains unchanged, what is still demanded, what has always been taken for granted.

It is about asking the questions that make systems visible—so we can decide, once and for all, what needs to be done about them.

Glad your are walking bedside me on this path.

❤️ If you find this piece meaningful, consider clicking the heart at the top or bottom of the post. It helps others discover this newsletter and brightens my day.