She Was There All Along
—

In February 1909, in the streets of New York City, women gathered to make a simple and radical demand: to be seen.

That was the first National Women's Day. It grew, decade by decade, into something larger and more insistent, carried forward by the particular kind of persistence that belongs to people who have been asking for the same thing for a very long time and have not yet been heard. By 1975, the United Nations had formally recognised International Women's Day. By 1977, the General Assembly had invited its member states to mark the 8th of March as an official day for women's rights and world peace. The date became a marker on the global calendar. But the question it was always really asking had not changed since that first gathering more than a century ago.

When will we fully understand what women actually are to us?

I want to try to answer that honestly, not with statistics or declarations, but with the kind of directness that the subject deserves.

No meaningful goal in any life, any family, any organisation, or any community has ever been accomplished by one person or one gender alone. This is not a courtesy to offer. It is simply true. Women are not a supporting cast in the story of human progress. They are half of it, in every era, in every culture, in every corner of the world, whether or not the record has always chosen to show it. The communities that understand this most deeply, where trust and respect and genuine inclusion are not aspirational values but daily practices, are the communities that function most fully and most humanly. The ones that do not carry the cost of that in ways both visible and invisible, sometimes for generations.

And yet, in 2026, the distance between what we know and what we practice remains uncomfortably wide.

We are living through a moment in which the world is carrying a great deal. Armed conflicts in multiple regions have displaced families, shattered communities, and placed ordinary people in the path of extraordinary suffering. The years of the pandemic, which reshaped so much of how we live and work and relate to each other, have left their mark in ways we are still understanding. In every one of these crises, in every conflict zone and every overwhelmed hospital and every community trying to hold itself together under impossible pressure, women have been present. Not only as victims of what is happening, though many have been that too. But as nurses working through exhaustion to keep patients alive. As aid workers staying behind to reach the families that could not leave. As mothers holding their households together when everything around them was falling apart. As leaders, in uniform and out of it, making decisions that most people will never know about and that made survival possible for others.

That woman who refused to evacuate while her husband served on the front line and instead stayed to deliver food and medicine to trapped children and families, I have not been able to forget her. She represents something that I do not think can be adequately captured in the language of duty or heroism, though both words apply. She represents a quality that I have seen in women throughout my life, in different forms and in different circumstances, a quality of giving that does not seem to require an audience or a reward. It simply continues, because the need is there and she is there, and for her that is reason enough.

I want to say something about the women who have shaped my own life, because this day asks for that kind of honesty.

My mother. My sister. The friends who have offered wisdom when I needed it and patience when I deserved neither. The colleagues who contributed more than their titles ever acknowledged. Every woman who at some point offered me support, a word, a perspective, an act of quiet kindness that I may not have thanked properly at the time. These are not abstract figures in a tribute. They are specific people whose presence in my life made things possible that would not otherwise have been possible. I carry that with genuine gratitude.

Women are, I believe, one of the greatest gifts given to humanity. Not in the diminishing sense of a gift that is received passively, but in the active sense of a presence that transforms whatever it touches. She is the mother who shapes a child's understanding of what love looks like in practice. She is the sister who tells you the truth when you need to hear it. She is the partner who makes the shared life more than either person could have built alone. She is the colleague who raises the quality of everything around her. She is the leader who brings to her role a particular combination of strength and sensitivity that the role almost always needs and does not always know how to ask for.

Giving, in its deepest form, seems to live in women naturally. I do not say this to confine them to a role. I say it because it is what I have observed across a lifetime of paying attention, and I think it deserves to be named rather than simply assumed.

What I want to say to every man reading this is straightforward.

Respecting the women in your life is not a gesture reserved for the 8th of March. It is not a declaration to be made on a special occasion and then quietly set aside. It is a daily practice, expressed in the cooperation you bring to a shared space, the attention you give to what she is actually carrying, the partnership you offer rather than simply expect. If she is your partner, show her through your actions that the home you share is a place where she does not have to fight for her dignity. If she is your colleague, advocate for the value she brings as clearly as you would advocate for your own. If she is your mother or your sister or your friend, let her know, specifically and without waiting for the right moment, what her presence has meant.

I do not believe in the category of good person or bad person as fixed identities. I believe in actions, and in the choices we make daily about how to treat the people around us. Those choices, accumulated over time, are what we actually are.

And if we are honest about what those choices have too often looked like toward women, individually and collectively, there is more work to do.

The awareness is growing. The conversation is wider and more honest than it has ever been. But awareness without changed behaviour is simply a more comfortable form of the same old blindness.

So on this day, and on every day that follows, let us do more than acknowledge what women give.

Let us be worthy of it.

To every mother, sister, daughter, partner, friend, colleague, and stranger whose quiet courage has held some part of this world together: thank you. Not only today. But today, especially, and with everything I mean.

"Love for others what you love for yourself. It is the most joyful feeling ever."