I've Never Been More Excited To Be A Woman

By Chelsea Stoll

At the end of March, I had one of those opportunities that feels like it was put in your way by something bigger than chance. A local group of professional women asked me to keynote their March meeting, with a focus on Women’s History Month.

What you may not know is that I spend a lot of my free time learning about how women have led throughout history. Somewhere along the way, I also became a pretty strong feminist. And what I’ve discovered, over and over again, is that women have been demonstrating compassionate leadership in powerful roles throughout history - especially during times of great social change - but they were rarely recognized for their role in the story.

So when this opportunity came up, I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about. It felt like a chance to bring those two things together—my work in compassionate leadership and my curiosity about women’s history—and share it in a way that might land for other people too. I want to share it with all of you.

There are moments in time when something shifts. Not all at once, and not always loudly, but steadily enough that, if you’re paying attention, you can feel it. I believe we are in one of those moments now.

And I’ll say it clearly: I’ve never been more excited to be a woman. 

Not because everything is perfect, and not because the work is done, but because, for the first time in history, something that has always existed is finally being matched with something new—resources, access, and influence.

At Compassionate Leaders Circle, we talk about the 7 C’s of compassionate leadership: compassion, confidence, collaboration, curiosity, civility, contemplation, and courage. But at the center of all of it is compassion— preventing and alleviating the suffering of others. Women have a unique ability to respond compassionately, through both innate and learned behaviors, which has been instrumental in social change.

It’s noticing when something isn’t right, caring enough not to look away, and choosing to do something about it.

And the more I’ve studied this, the more I’ve realized something that feels both obvious and easy to overlook: women have been practicing this kind of leadership for a very long time. Not always with recognition. Not always with resources. But consistently. Women have been standing alongside all the great heroes of history, doing the emotional labor, while going unnoticed.

When I started looking at history through this lens, I wasn’t trying to prove a point. I was trying to understand what I was seeing. And what I found… was everywhere and undeniable. 

I found Jane Addams, not just studying inequality, but moving into it—living alongside people in Chicago and building Hull House with the community, not for it.

I found Ida B. Wells standing in the middle of a movement that didn’t fully include her, choosing not to step back but to step forward anyway.

I found Eleanor Roosevelt traveling the country, listening to people most leaders never met, and carrying those stories into the White House.

I found Mary McLeod Bethune making sure those stories reflected the realities of Black communities, while Frances Perkins turned that understanding into policy that still shapes how we live and work today.

And then I found women like Ella Baker and Septima Clark—who weren’t always the ones at the podium, but were building the foundation that made the movement possible in the first place. Teaching. Mentoring. Organizing. Sustaining.

At some point, it stopped feeling like a collection of examples and became a pattern.

Unrest. Compassion. Action. Power. Change.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

In every moment where something wasn’t working, where people were hurting, or systems were failing, someone chose to care. And then someone chose to act. And more often than not, women were already doing that work.

Sometimes visibly, but often invisibly, women held communities together, built trust, and listened to the stories of those affected.  Doing the emotional labor that keeps things moving when everything feels uncertain.

And here’s what really stayed with me: for most of history, that leadership existed without equal access to power. Without capital. Without platforms. Without a real seat at the table. And yet the work still got done.  Which makes what we’re seeing now feel even more significant. 

Because something is shifting.

Women now earn more college degrees than men in the United States. We influence or control the majority of consumer spending. Women-owned businesses are one of the fastest-growing parts of our economy. And over the next decade, trillions of dollars will transfer into women's hands.

That’s not just progress. It’s a shift in influence. A shift in who gets to decide what happens next.

And there’s another side of this moment that we have to be honest about.

Because while women are rising in so many ways, we are also still navigating systems that haven’t quite caught up. Over the past two years, the gender pay gap has widened again. Today, women earn about 81 cents for every dollar a man earns—and for Black and Latina women, that gap is even wider. That’s not just a statistic—it’s the quiet math women are doing every day to make things work.

At the same time, even with years of investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion, progress for women hasn’t been consistent. Women are still less likely to be promoted into leadership, and many are carrying the invisible work of mentoring, supporting, and helping organizations “do better”—work that often goes unrecognized. So this moment holds both truths at once: progress—and pressure. Opportunity—and inequity.

And it leads to a realization I keep coming back to: Compassion was never absent. It was just under-resourced.

We’re already starting to see what happens when that changes. We see it in women like Melinda French Gates, who is thinking deeply about where resources can create long-term, systemic change—not just short-term impact.

We see it in MacKenzie Scott, who has reimagined philanthropy by moving resources quickly and trusting people on the ground to know what their communities need.

This isn’t just generosity. It’s a different way of thinking about power—and how it moves.

But this moment isn’t about a few extraordinary women. It’s about all of us.

Because most of us don’t wake up thinking about changing the world. We wake up thinking about what’s in front of us—our families, our work, our responsibilities. And for a long time, I think we’ve told ourselves that those things are separate from impact.

But they’re not. That’s exactly where it begins.

Change doesn’t start at scale. It starts with attention and intention.

It might look like gathering a small group of women to support something together. For example, if you have kids on a sports team, gather the moms for a community service project. You could even ask the coach to use one practice each season to give back.  That equates to tens of hours of service from one team over one practice! 

 It might be using your voice at work to advocate for something that matters. It might be lifting up another woman—sharing her work, opening a door, making sure she’s seen. It might be giving your time, even when it feels limited. 

Or it might be something even simpler—paying attention to what moves you and choosing not to ignore it.

That moment—the one where you think, “Someone should do something about this”—might be yours to carry.

If history has shown us anything, it’s that when systems stop working for people, people don’t stay quiet. They organize. They build. They lead. And women have always been at the center of that movement.

The moment we’re in now—marked by rapid technological change, rising mental health challenges, and growing social tension—is not unfamiliar. It’s the kind of moment that has always preceded change.

The difference now is that more women than ever have the ability to shape what comes next.

The women who came before us didn’t start with everything. They started with something they couldn’t ignore. Something they cared about. Something they chose to act on.

And that’s still where change begins.

I’ve never been more excited to be a woman. Not because the work is easy, but because the leadership we have always carried is finally being matched with the power to expand it.

The question isn’t whether women can lead change. We already have. The question is—what will we do with the power we have now?