Is My Woman’s Body An Asset or a Curse?

Thinking about how I might feel grateful for a lifetime of hormones in my career and in my life

We’re teeing up our thoughts for next month’s newsletter topic wherein I’m going to try to wrap my brain around something said brain has refused to figure out for my entire life: 

Is my woman’s body an asset or a curse to my career? My life?

Yes, this one’s personal (for all of us), and your thoughts are very welcome in the comments below as I think this through.

If the topic interests you beyond the headline, here are a few of the resources Jennifer and I have been exploring to try to make sense of things: 

• Stop Calling Women Hormonal(!) (NYTimes)

• How Hormones Influence Being a Woman in the Workplace (MBody)

• Meet Your Hormones (Yale)

• Breaking the Mold: Thriving as a Woman in a Workplace Built for Men (InPower Coaching)

• Women's Hormones: The Main Culprits for Changes in Your Health? (Moreland OB/GYN)

• The hormone curse: How women suffer untold misery, and ways you can help your patients have a higher quality of life (International Conference on Women's Health, Obstetrics and Female Reproductive System)

• Why We Know So Little About Women’s Health (AAMC)

• How the Printing Press Ignited Europe’s Deadly Witch-Hunt Frenzy (Noösphere)

• The Clitoris, Uncovered: An Intimate History (Scientific American)

• The Biochemistry of Belief (PMC)

• Association of menstrual cycle phase with the core components of empathy  (Science Direct)

• Gender differences in emotion perception and self-reported emotional intelligence: A test of the emotion sensitivity hypothesis (Nat’l Library of Medicine)

• Aggression in Women: Behavior, Brain and Hormones (Research)

• The Relationships Among Testosterone, Cortisol, and Cognitive Control of Emotion as Underlying Mechanisms of Emotional Intelligence of 10- to 11-Year-Old Children (Nat’l Library of Medicine)

Note the above data is inconclusive on the question I posed, which doesn’t make it easier to wrap my brain around what I truly think on the topic. 

And also, to be clear, some of these articles–written to “help” women–just pissed me off instead. I’ll try not to make the next newsletter a rant…but I might rant a little. 😇

Here’s something interesting that came from this research: my researcher Jennifer’s observation when we were digging through stuff like this: “When gathering academic research studies, I noted that around 2015, the research on this topic seemed to dry up, garnering fewer studies.”

Look out for next month’s newsletter to learn my theory on why that might be the case, and what some of the research since 2015 has shown.

Enjoy, and let me know in the comments or chat if you have any questions or thoughts about this topic (or ideas for new ones!) We’ll try to address them in next month’s Mastermind! 

Dana Theus
Executive Coach
InPowerCoaching.com