What I’ve received, what it cost, and what I owe.
Every year on International Women’s Day, I watch the internet fill with celebrations, statistics, and speeches. Most of them are true. Many of them are important. And nearly all of them leave me asking the same quiet question:
But what are we actually going to do?
This year, the theme is Give to Gain. And I want to take it seriously, not as an aspiration, but as an accounting exercise.
A ledger is a record of transactions. Debits and credits. What came in, what went out, what remains. I’ve been thinking about what mine looks like. The real one, not the polished version, and I want to share it, because I think we talk too generally about generosity and not specifically enough about the mechanics of how women actually rise.
Here is what I know to be true: I did not get here alone. Not even close.
WHAT WAS GIVEN TO ME
I was given a name in a room I wasn’t in. More than once.
I was given a rate, an actual number, by a woman who understood that information hoarding is a form of gatekeeping, whether we intend it or not.
I was given time by senior women who had no professional obligation to sit with me, think with me, or tell me the truth about what they saw in me and where I was getting in my own way.
I was given access. To networks, to conversations, to stages and tables where my presence was made possible by someone who used their credibility to vouch for mine before mine had fully formed.
I was given the gift of being seen before I could fully see myself. That particular gift is underrated. When someone believes in your capability with a specificity and conviction that precedes your own, it rewires something. It expands the frame of what you believe you’re allowed to attempt.
These are not small things. They are the architecture of a career.
WHAT GIVING HAS COST ME
I want to be honest here because the narrative around generosity is often too clean.
Giving has sometimes cost me. Not always, not fatally, but enough to notice.
I have shared opportunities and watched them go to someone else. I have invested time in people who disappeared when they no longer needed the investment. I have opened doors and not been thanked. I have been generous in ways that were not reciprocated, not acknowledged, not remembered.
I am telling you this not to complain about it, but because I think the sanitized version of giving does us a disservice. It sets up an expectation of neat returns and warm outcomes that real life does not always deliver.
The women I most admire gave anyway. They gave strategically, yes, but they gave with a generosity that didn’t depend on the outcome being what they hoped. They understood something I am still learning: that the giving is the point. The gain is systemic, not always personal. When you give a woman a genuine foothold, the return may not come back to you directly. It may come back three degrees away, a decade later, in a form you can’t trace. That’s not a bad investment. That’s how ecosystems are built.
WHAT I OWE
I owe mentorship. Real mentorship, the kind that is inconvenient, that requires presence and honesty, not just cheerful encouragement. The kind where you tell someone what you actually see, including the uncomfortable parts.
I owe information. The rates I know. The rooms I’ve been in. The lessons that cost me to learn. These should not sit privately with me as competitive advantage. They should move.
I owe my credibility. When I know someone is ready for an opportunity, I should say so, in the rooms where it matters, whether they know I’m doing it or not.
I owe my skills to work that matters beyond a fee. I run a consulting practice, and I am proud of the commercial work I do. I am also proud of the work I do because it should be done, because there are initiatives and communities and causes where the gap between impact and resources is bridged by people willing to bring what they have to what is needed. I owe that. And I am committed to it.
I owe the next woman an honest account of what this actually looks like, not the highlight reel, not the curated success story, but the real texture of building something: the doubt, the recalibration, the long stretches before the momentum, and the fact that it is worth it.
THE INVITATION
I am passing this ledger on.
Today, I’m asking several women I respect and admire to share their own entries, what was given to them, what they’ve given that cost something, and what they’re committing to give forward.
Not because it’s IWD. But because Give to Gain is only a theme until we make it a practice.
What’s in your ledger?