Junko Tabei summited Everest in 1975. Margaret Ann Bulkley practised surgery in the 18th century under a male identity because it was the only way. Progress in the story of women in public life has always come despite the structures around it, not because of them.
Mila Smart Semeshkina, CEO of Lectera.com, has thought carefully about what success means for women in international business — and why the concept remains more complicated than it should be. The contradiction starts with language. In most cultures, female success has historically been defined through family: a good marriage, a well-kept home, healthy children.
But they have been used to close off other possibilities, leaving professional ambition interpreted as consolation — something women turn to when the primary path has somehow failed them. The result is a double standard that persists even as individual cases prove it wrong. A successful woman today is expected to have a thriving business, a happy family, an impeccable home, and a perfect appearance — simultaneously.
Her male counterpart needs only to make his business work. What is changing — slowly but genuinely — is the understanding of what female happiness can mean. Women across the world are building lives that don’t fit inherited templates, and they are doing so publicly enough that the template itself is starting to shift.
The names Semeshkina points to span continents: Oprah Winfrey, Amal Clooney, Zaha Hadid. Chinese entrepreneurs Yang Huiyan and Fan Hongwei. Emirati politician Lubna Khalid Al Qasimi.
There is still genuine inequality to confront — in board rooms, in political structures, in the unspoken expectations that follow women into every professional space. But the direction of travel is visible. For we are women. We will meet the expectations, and then exceed them.