Women's Challenges Quotes

Society is notoriously stupid in its failure to harness the wisdom of older women in everything from television to politics, family life to boardrooms, and here is one reminiscing with honesty and realism about women's particular challenge: to create our professional and financial structures in the same period as our peak fertility.

It's a very scary time for a lot of people; they feel scared to speak up. There's so much controversy even speaking up about politics to begin with. People try to discredit you at every single corner, especially if you're a woman. So it's hard as an artist to really speak up about this kind of stuff when you're trying to be successful and have a career.

If you're a woman, just make a freaking good movie. I don't believe in the women who say, 'It's too hard, I'm getting shot down.'

The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years - responses to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters - stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of discontinuity (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks take me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.

I think we have some amazing leaders. But then we have some leaders who turn a blind eye to things that contribute negatively to a really difficult culture for women.

Becoming Miss Universe made me realize that women worldwide face the same challenges daily, such as various forms of violence and crime, physical and emotional abuse, and toxic relationships, among others.

Full time politics is a difficult road. Most women have a home and children to attend to. Whether you're in Glasgow or Ohio. it's tough for women.

At least through most of the 1960s, I basically lived in a man's world, hardly speaking to a woman all day except to the secretaries. But I was almost totally unaware of myself as an oddity and had no comprehension of the difficulties faced by working women in our organization and elsewhere.

I do believe in teamwork, and I think it's very important, especially for a woman, because if you don't have a good team, then you cannot step out if you need to.

It is harder for women, perhaps to be 'one-pointed,' much harder for them to clear space around whatever it is they want to do beyond household chores and family life. Their lives are fragmented... the cry not so much for a 'a room of one's own' as time of one's own. Conflict become acute, whatever it may be about, when there is no margin left on any day in which to try at least to resolve it.

Women have to be a lot smarter and brighter and have to work a lot harder to prepare themselves. They have to watch what they do and how they behave. It's not a free world yet.

Over the years, I've learnt how to strike a balance between both my lives and give quality time to my passion as well as to my family. Yes, it is tiring at times, and every working woman goes through the phase.

Girls have to be toughened so they can survive a world that presses harder on women.

And that is a hard route for a woman to come through. There's still a lot of roles that have to be conformed to. It's quite an old fashioned environment in a lot of ways.

Believe me, I recognize the cultural and anatomical challenges and respect the sacrifices women make in order to balance family and a career, or family with no career, or career with no family.

Everything's harder for women: harder to start, to stay employed, to run a life with a family.

Hollywood is hard on women.

I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.

Something happens in the middle when women are in their 30s, and we can start with an array of things that happen, whether it is - you hope this doesn't exist any longer - but overt discrimination; whether it's subtle gender discrimination, which absolutely does exist among men and women; whether it's the fact that it gets hard to juggle at that point children, housework, etc. But people still have to go home and cook the dinner and clean the dishes and get the beds made and so on. And so, for a whole bunch of reasons, women tend to fall out in their 30s still today.

Success is hard in general for most women. We now have such busy lives, and we're told we can do everything - you know, we can have the relationship and the marriage and the kids and the career.

I by no means intend to simplify the challenges women face in any culture. Women are marginalized in all cultures in my opinion, some in more extreme ways than others.

When I wrote 'Lean In,' some people argue that I did not spend enough time writing about the difficulties women face when they don't have a partner. They were right.

For a woman to go out alone into architecture is still very, very hard. It's still a man's world.

Traditionally, women have a lot of different roles in society. It is very difficult to balance all these roles and at the same time to compete with men. A leading, successful woman has to put in much bigger efforts to be more competent and faster, more dynamic and organized, than a successful man.

The hardest thing about being a woman is different for everyone. For me, it's the mirage of 'having it all' somewhere off in the distance. I think in many ways you do have to choose.