Eyestorm

 Let’s not just be a storm in patriarchy’s teacup.

 Every year, on International Women’s Day, it’s the same old thing. The same polite acknowledgments that we need gender equality, but the statistics get worse, the memes get darker, the research reveals more depressing findings. 

Most people understand that women should have equal rights and opportunities. It’s easy to understand why women in Afghanistan, Sudan or Congo need to be liberated, whereas here in the UK and the western world, many think we’ve already achieved it.

We’re a modern society, they say, anyone can get an education, get a job and earn an equal salary. What’s the issue? Name one place where women aren’t equal to men in the UK?

And that’s where it stops. It’s a topical, false and very inaccurate description of women’s rights and liberation.

The Invisible Shackles

 There’s a whole layer beneath the surface of society that we’re yet to address – a dark, murky basement full of invisible shackles, still holding women back. Shackles that men won’t admit to, or simply don’t see.

Recently, a man commented on Gill Whitty-Collin’s LinkedIn posts, questioning the reality of gender inequality. He spoke about ‘innate drives’—how women supposedly seek providers, how hypergamy justifies the power imbalance, and how the lack of female representation in leadership is merely a matter of different priorities, not discrimination. He wasn’t trolling. He genuinely believed he was making a rational argument. And this, right here, is the problem.

 The Illusion of Equality

What people like him fail to understand, is women’s long and painful historical dependency on men that is still influencing our whole system. Women have been bound to the home throughout history, not always by choice, but by cultural, religious and societal traditions that made it impossible to do otherwise.

 And in prehistoric times it made sense. That men were out hunting and women were back by the campfire looking after the kids. But we’re not living like that anymore. We haven’t lived like that for a long long LONG time. Dependency on a man hunting down a mammoth for our survival is not a thing anymore.

Yet still women weren’t allowed to own property until very recently. We weren’t allowed to vote. We weren’t allowed to have bank accounts without a husband’s permission. This isn’t ancient history—this was in our friends’ and grandmothers’ lifetimes.

 Women were raised with a singular objective:

Be desirable

Be obedient

Do not disrupt the system

We were conditioned to believe that our survival depended on marrying the right man, pleasing the right people, and never demanding too much. Be quiet, submissive and it’s rude to say no. Because when your survival depends on a man providing for you, you don’t get the privilege of personal boundaries. You don’t get the luxury of choice.

Breaking Free—And The Backlash That Follows

So, when we eventually did break free, when we finally started demanding our place in the world, we were met with resistance. Some of us were met with arguments. Some of us were put right back where we came from.

So, yes, progress is happening, and we have visible acceptance of women’s rights on most accounts now. But the culture underneath; the intangible, elusive but systematic blockade of women to be equal parts in society, is still rampant.

 This is not about ‘innate drives’. This is about conditioning and control. This is about how, for centuries, women were systematically denied the opportunities that men had as their birthright. And now that we’re here, now that we are clawing our way into boardrooms, governments, and industries that were never built for us, the backlash is real.

 We have to be prepared to be offended, questioned, abused and ridiculed for doing so.

Where Are Our Male Allies? 

Those men who don’t bully, block or fight women, are our allies, and we need them to speak up for us now. We understand that this is hard. When women ask you to speak up about horrific events such as the Gisèle Pelicot case, the Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein brutalities against women and all the others who are still uncovered, you’re probably frightened that some crazy woman from your past is going to pop out and say “But hey, you made an inappropriate approach on me at that party back in 1987”. 

If this is so, do what you can, in your own way, to repair, to give back and to promote women. Please.

EyeStorm Women: More Than A Community—A Movement 

We are tired of watching women dim their own light. We’ve had enough of brilliant, capable, visionary women shrinking themselves to fit into spaces that were never designed to accommodate us.

EyeStorm Women is not just a community. It’s a movement. A movement that empowers women to be visible, to own their voices, to take up space. We do not apologize for existing. We do not ask for permission to lead.

Through our Future Women Summits, speaker workshops, and confidence training, we are building up women from underneath. It’s a holistic and very powerful journey for women to build up their self-belief and to unblock their full existential power. 

This is not just some angry feminist rant, this is not an abstract debate – it’s very real, and our coaches see it again and again. It’s a pattern of women’s lack of belief in themselves, on all levels. It’s not just women on the edge of society, it’s women right in the middle of our largest organisations and companies in the UK, including governmental organisations. And if it’s lurking in there, you can imagine what’s happening in the rest of the country.

The financial cost of women not working to their full capacity is costing this nation millions. We know now that when women are in leadership roles in companies, productivity goes up, staff are feeling safer, long-term profitability grows.

 “We cannot afford to remain complaisant” said UN general secretary in his International Women’s Day opening speech yesterday. Social norms normalise sexism and discrimination, and it’s tearing our world apart.

So why are we still asking women to make the tea? 

THE EYESTORM IMPACT PROJECT

We don’t just want men to acknowledge our fight. We want them to understand why we’re still fighting.

We need to raise our girls to make bigger demands and lay down clearer boundaries than we ever did.

We need to teach our sons that they’re not worth more than our daughters.

Change doesn’t happen from the top down.
It starts from the grassroots up.

So this International Women’s Day, we call on you not just to share the meme. It’s not enough to celebrate how far we’ve come, but we need to commit to how much further we need to go. And fast.

Today we’re launching the EyeStorm Impact Project. Where people can find inspiration and courage to take tangible action for gender equality, no matter who they are or what they do.

You can read all about it here: https://eyestorm.org.uk/impactproject/

 We are the eye of the storm, and we’re lifting women out of patriarchy’s teacup.

We are EyeStorm Women