We see from statistics what it takes to make it rich: more hours, less distractions, and no kids or relationships. Take risks and devote all your energy to it.
This formula works—if you have someone else managing your life, your health, your relationships, your household, and your emotional needs.
We say women don’t make as much as men, but we also see women excelling in school, then choosing paths that are not valued in today’s society. We see women stuck working AND doing jobs at home- most likely why they feel like they cannot sacrifice any time. If we found ways to build community support that enable her to go full in, maybe that would help. Men are stepping up at home, too, now 70% of men with responsibilities at home. But we need to look at the historical trends that got us to this point.
The Historical Reality: Legal and Social Barriers
Marriage Bars (1880s-1950s): These were formal policies that prohibited married women from working. By 1940, 87% of school boards wouldn't hire married women and 70% wouldn't retain unmarried women who married SSRNMLTnews. In 1900, only 20% of all women were "gainful workers" and just 5% of married women worked outside the home Marriage Bars: Discrimination Against Married Women Workers, 1920's to 1950's.
Legal Exclusion: Around the time the US entered World War II, it is estimated that 87% of all school boards would not hire a married woman and 70% would not retain an unmarried woman who married Women's Employment - Our World in Data. Marriage bars weren't banned until 1964 with the Civil Rights Act.
For much of written history (there was WAYYY more unwritten by the way…), women were literally considered property - unable to own land, make legal contracts, or control their own earnings. omen subjected to a fenced in house so a man could delineate his home and land and property, that included his wife and kids. we are slowly coming out of that, but not there yet.
The entire framework of success that was built on the assumption someone else handles everything else.
If we did as the Romans did- just took a bunch of warrior men and started a new city on a hill- we would notice pretty fast that there is more to just winning. Within 4 years, the main king Romulus was literally writing letters to nearby towns asking for their women. Getting many no’s, so they staged a fake festival and stole women in front of their screaming families. This is in the nationalistic poetry of the founding of Rome. The society we idolize.
We see immediately after an overt success that it is not enough. We still need to have dinner that night. We need someone to pay for everything and make things work as we dive into a passion- whether work or other.
The Inheritance Trap: How Hoarding Wealth Perpetuates Gender Inequality and Destroys What Actually Matters
There's something profoundly broken about a system that teaches us to hoard wealth into our death beds. We'd trade all our parent’s dusty trinkets in their garages for one more day of them truly enjoying life, yet our economic structure prevents exactly that kind of intergenerational support.
We gain an inheritance, if any, once we are usually at a much older age ourselves, to really need it. When our parents are old, we would wish for them to continue living in their homes, surrounded by love, being vital with energy until their last breath- enjoying life, whatever that means for them.
But we have a bigger issue here. Social security models support a system that hides wealth away until children are quite old themselves, often 60 or so, when most families really need it way earlier - more like in their 30’s.
This dysfunction reveals something deeper about why women make less money than men—and why that gap might actually be a symptom of a much larger civilizational problem.
The Inheritance Paradox
Think about the cruel irony: The generation that bought homes in their thirties is the same generation buying investment properties in their sixties, pricing out their own children and grandchildren. The people who paid their way through college working summer jobs now control wealth that could change young lives, but they're holding onto it until death—when it's too late to matter. No way can we pay our way doing the same things today- whether it is paying for college or a home.
We've created a system where help arrives precisely when it's least useful - if we get it at all. We pay for the elderly today for their past work, with little realistic expectation that this benefit will extend to us. The truth is, we just do not know. Economic predictions show this just cannot last. We are having fewer kids every generation, and our economy relies on larger population every single year to maintain itself- like a growing cancer that is not allowed to slow down.
Instead of enabling thirty-year-olds to buy homes, start businesses, or take career risks, we transfer wealth to sixty-year-olds who already have established lives. Instead of supporting young parents when childcare costs are crushing them, we leave inheritance to people whose kids are already grown.
This isn't just economically inefficient—it's morally backwards. The Romans, for all their flaws, understood something we've forgotten: even the most successful warrior society falls apart without the foundation of family and community support.
The Roman Reality Check
Speaking of Rome, let's talk about their founding myth. After Romulus and his band of warriors established their "successful" city, they quickly realized something crucial: military conquest means nothing if you can't sustain a society. Within four years, Romulus was desperately writing to neighboring communities, begging for their women. When diplomacy failed, they staged a fake festival and literally kidnapped women in front of their screaming families.
This isn't ancient history—it's a blueprint of what happens when we build success on the assumption that someone else will handle "everything else." The very society we often romanticize for its power and achievement immediately fell apart the moment they tried to function without the unpaid labor of women.
Modern corporate culture is the same Roman mistake, just with better marketing.
The Success Formula That Demands Everything
The statistics are clear about what it takes to maximize earnings:
Work more hours than everyone else
Accept no distractions (family, community, personal needs)
Take enormous risks with complete focus
Maintain geographic flexibility and availability
Accumulate uninterrupted experience
This formula works—if you have someone else managing your life, your health, your relationships, your household, and your emotional needs. For most of history, that someone else was women, who were legally prevented from participating in the economy and socially expected to provide unlimited unpaid support.
The Double Bind We've Created
Now we've removed the legal barriers (mostly), but we haven't restructured the expectations. Women enter the workforce excelling in school, demonstrating competence and ambition, and then face an impossible choice:
Option 1: Follow the traditional success formula and sacrifice family, health, and community—essentially becoming the "warrior Romans" who win everything and sustain nothing.
Option 2: Choose paths that value human connection, sustainability, and meaning—fields like education, social work, healthcare, and nonprofit work that society desperately needs but financially undervalues.
Meanwhile, even when women choose Option 1, they're still expected to carry the emotional and practical load of household management. Recent data shows that even in "egalitarian marriages" where both spouses contribute equally to income, women still spend more than double the time on housework and significantly more time on childcare.
The Missing Infrastructure
Here's what's maddening: We know how to solve this. Community support systems, affordable childcare, flexible work arrangements, and genuine partnership in domestic responsibilities would enable anyone—regardless of gender—to pursue ambitious goals without sacrificing family or health.
But we don't build these systems because the people with the power to create change are the ones who succeeded under the old model. They accumulated wealth by following the traditional formula, and they can't see (or don't care) that their success depended on a foundation of unpaid female labor that's no longer available or acceptable.
The Corporate Capture Problem
The situation gets worse when you consider who's actually making policy decisions. Big food companies, pharmaceutical corporations, and other massive entities with paid lobbyists lining government halls—these are the voices shaping how our society works. They benefit from a stressed, overworked population with limited time for community building, political engagement, or alternative economic models.
The people who could change things—successful women who understand both traditional success and its limitations—face an impossible choice: sacrifice their own families to maybe help other hypothetical families, or focus on their immediate community and let the broken system continue.
This is why the "we need more women at the top" argument, while true, misses something crucial: asking individuals to sacrifice their most meaningful relationships for the theoretical benefit of strangers isn't sustainable or fair.
The Real Reason for the Pay Gap
So why do men make more money? Not because they're more capable, more intelligent, or more deserving. The historical data is clear:
1. Legal Exclusion: For most of written history, women were literally property, prevented from owning land, making contracts, or controlling earnings. Marriage bars formally prohibited married women from working until 1964.
2. Role Inheritance: Even after legal barriers fell, social expectations remained. Women are still expected to be primary caregivers and household managers, even when working full-time.
3. System Design: The entire framework of "success" was built assuming someone else handles life maintenance. When women entered the workforce, no one redesigned work culture to account for the fact that life maintenance still needs to happen.
4. Value Distortion: We financially devalue the work that sustains society—education, healthcare, social services, environmental protection—while overvaluing work that extracts wealth or manipulates markets.
The Generational Wealth Trap
The inheritance system compounds these problems. Wealth concentrates among older generations who no longer need career-building support, while younger generations struggle with costs their parents never faced. Student debt, housing prices, and childcare costs that consume 30-50% of income were simply not realities for previous generations.
When wealth finally transfers through inheritance, it's usually too late to enable the kind of risk-taking and community building that creates meaningful change. A thirty-year-old with financial security can start a business, buy a home, or take time for family. A sixty-year-old inheriting wealth is already past the life stage where it would enable different choices.
The Community Solution
But here's what gives me hope: The solution isn't more individual sacrifice or better personal optimization. It's rebuilding community support systems that make ambitious career pursuit compatible with human flourishing.
Imagine communities where:
Childcare is shared and affordable
Elder care is a community responsibility, not an individual burden
Small businesses are supported and celebrated
Work schedules accommodate family needs
Success is measured by community wellbeing, not just individual accumulation
These aren't utopian fantasies—they're policies that work in many developed countries and existed in various forms throughout human history.
The Path Forward
Real change requires recognizing that the current system isn't broken—it's working exactly as designed, just for a very small group of people. The Roman model of winner-takes-all, supported by invisible labor, always collapses because it's fundamentally unsustainable.
The most successful societies throughout history have been those that enable talent development across the entire population while maintaining strong community bonds. That means:
1. Restructuring Work: Flexible schedules, remote options, and genuinely equal parental leave that make career advancement compatible with family involvement.
2. Community Investment: Public goods like childcare, healthcare, and education that reduce individual family burdens and enable more people to take career risks.
3. Wealth Circulation: Systems that move resources to younger generations when they can most benefit from them, rather than hoarding wealth until death.
4. Value Realignment: Paying sustainable wages for work that sustains society—teaching, caregiving, environmental protection, community building.
5. Political Reform: Campaign finance and lobbying reforms that give communities more voice than corporations in shaping policy.
The Choice We Face
We can continue with the current model: a few people accumulate vast wealth by sacrificing relationships and community, while most people struggle in systems designed to extract their labor and limit their choices. This path leads to the Roman endpoint—apparent success that collapses because it's built on unsustainable foundations.
Or we can choose a different model: one that enables ambitious people to build meaningful careers while participating in family and community life. This isn't about lowering standards or accepting mediocrity—it's about creating systems that support human flourishing at scale.
The women choosing work-life balance over wealth maximization aren't failing—they're modeling what sustainable success actually looks like. The question is whether we'll build economic and social systems that support that wisdom or continue demanding that people choose between professional achievement and everything else that makes life worth living.
As Scottie Scheffler discovered at the pinnacle of individual success, winning everything doesn't satisfy if you lose what actually matters. Maybe it's time to design a civilization that doesn't require that choice in the first place.
The inheritance we should want to leave isn't money hoarded until death—it's communities and systems that enable every generation to thrive while they're young enough to enjoy it. That's the kind of wealth that actually multiplies when you give it away.