If men stopped providing for women tomorrow, many women would be in serious trouble.
Before you get offended, let’s zoom out and look at the wider picture.
Despite increasing female participation in the workforce, men still make up the majority of primary breadwinners in many families. In households where women are stay-at-home wives or earn significantly less, men’s financial withdrawal would lead to immediate hardship. Children would suffer the most.
Men also dominate global ownership of businesses and large employers. They hire both men and women. If men stopped hiring women tomorrow, millions of women would lose their livelihoods within months.
In many families, especially in Africa and Asia, parents and siblings rely heavily on first sons or wealthy sons for financial support. If those sons stopped sending money home, entire extended families would face financial collapse.
And then there’s the quieter form of dependence: A woman enters a relationship, and her boyfriend puts her on a monthly allowance. Slowly, without realizing it, she becomes economically dependent. What feels like generosity becomes leverage.
This reality tells us something uncomfortable but important:Â Women are still economically tied to men in far more ways than we admit.
Why this dependence exists
This dependence exists for two main reasons:Â conditioning and unequal financial access.
1. Conditioning: The “Feminine Energy” Lie
From childhood, many girls are taught, explicitly or subtly, that certain forms of work are “masculine” and incompatible with femininity.
Women are warned that ambition, stress, or financial dominance will strip them of their “feminine energy.”
This is one of the most damaging lies women have been sold.
Women are capable, yet many are discouraged from entering demanding or high-paying fields.
It’s only recently that more women have entered the tech industry. For decades, the field was intentionally framed as a male domain, and that legacy persists in our current workforce distribution. Even today, women are often concentrated in “adjacent” or “softer” areas — roles like no-code development, project coordination, content strategy, and customer support. Meanwhile, men continue to dominate the high-leverage technical cores: programming, systems engineering, cybersecurity, blockchain development, and the rapidly advancing frontier of artificial intelligence.
However, this disparity is a social construct, not a historical constant. To understand why women are in the “softer” areas today, we must look at the historical framing that shifted the industry’s foundations:
- The 1960s-70s (The Era of Female Pioneers): In the early days of computing, programming was actually dominated by women. It was viewed as “meticulous work” akin to secretarial duties or complex knitting. Figures like the “human computers” at NASA and the ENIAC programmers proved that the foundational logic of software was originally a female-led discipline.
- The 1984 Shift (The Marketing Pivot) : Everything changed with the rise of the personal computer. In the mid-80s, tech companies began marketing PCs almost exclusively as toys for boys and tools for men. This created a cultural narrative that “computers are for boys,” leading to a sharp decline in women choosing Computer Science degrees — a trend the industry is still struggling to reverse forty years later.
The same pattern appears in finance and emerging industries. Cryptocurrency, blockchain, and quantitative finance are male-dominated not because women lack intelligence, but because women are socially conditioned to admire men who do these things rather than becoming experts themselves.
I see this constantly. Women celebrating their boyfriend’s crypto portfolio or their brother’s tech startup, but never building their own.
2. Unequal Access: Structural Barriers to Capital
Beyond conditioning, there is unequal access to financial opportunity — a core concern highlighted by UN Women.
Women receive significantly less funding than men for businesses and startups. Female entrepreneurs face greater scrutiny, sexualization, and skepticism when seeking capital. Many are mocked or dismissed simply for asking for equal opportunity.
As a result, women often gravitate toward industries that are considered “easier” or more traditionally feminine, not because they are incapable of more, but because those spaces feel safer and more accessible.
What needs to change
This must change, and it requires action on multiple fronts.
1. Re-Educate Daughters
Parents need to start re-educating their daughters.
There is no such thing as a masculine way of making money.
Financial success does not require brute strength. It requires skill, access, confidence, and opportunity.
If a man can do it, a woman can do it.
Stop telling girls that tech is “too hard” or finance is “too complicated” or entrepreneurship is “too risky.”
Start teaching them that their brains are capable of mastering any field, and that economic independence isn’t optional. It’s essential.
2. Stop Self-Limiting
Women need to stop limiting themselves to a narrow range of acceptable ambitions.
Our brains are capable of far more than we have been encouraged to believe.
I’ve watched too many intelligent women avoid high-paying fields because they were told those fields “aren’t for them.”
That ends now.
If you’re interested in tech — learn to code.
If you’re curious about finance — learn to invest.
If you want to start a business — go after serious funding, not just “passion projects” that barely break even.
Your ambition is not a threat to your femininity. It’s the foundation of your freedom.
3. Women Must Fund Each Other
Finally, women must rethink how money circulates among us.
Men pool resources. They fund each other’s ideas. They share opportunities. They build networks of wealth.
Women, on the other hand, often save privately, invest individually, and struggle alone.
Money does not circulate within female networks the same way, and as a result, female poverty continues to rise.
This has to change.
When I see a woman start a business, I want to see other women investing in it, not just cheering from the sidelines.
When a woman shares a financial opportunity, I want to see women taking action, not just saving the post for “someday.”
We need to build wealth together, not just individually.
Why this matters
Economic dependence is the root of almost every form of gender inequality.
You can’t leave an abusive relationship if you’re broke.
You can’t negotiate for partnership if you need his paycheck.
You can’t make independent choices if your survival depends on someone else’s generosity.
Financial independence is beyond fairness.
It’s about survival, freedom, and power.
And until more women have it, the cycle continues.
We need change, and it begins with:
- Recognizing how deep economic dependence runs
- Teaching daughters that no field is off-limits
- Women funding and supporting each other economically
- Refusing to inherit beliefs that were never rooted in truth
The work starts now.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Alicia Razuri on Unsplash
