The Woman We Were Taught to Be: Culture, Choice and the Courage to Redefine Ourselves
I was told, “You can’t.”
When I asked why, the answer was not that I lacked the ability. It was that if I pursued what I wanted, how would I be able to look after my family and my husband when I eventually married?
And that choice, made for me, would go on to influence much of the rest of my life—not necessarily through one single decision, but through a growing understanding of what was perceived as acceptable for a woman within the culture I had been raised in.
I had not been taught that I was entitled to freely choose. I had been taught to accept. And then to continue accepting. What a successful woman should look like. How ambitious she should sound. At what age should she stop reinventing herself. When choosing herself became something that required explanation. These expectations had been shaped over generations, reinforced through families, communities and social norms, until they could feel less like expectations and more like unquestionable truths.
For years, I accepted them too until change arrived.
I have spent much of my professional life in education, currently working as a Head of Mathematics and Science, leading teams, developing curriculum and supporting teachers. I have spent years encouraging children to question, reason, challenge assumptions and believe that they are capable of more than they initially imagined.
But myself? I had spent much of my life learning not to question the assumptions made about me. Only now, at fifty, as a Muslim woman, a divorced woman and an educational leader, have I begun to ask some of the questions I perhaps should have been encouraged to ask much earlier. Who decided what a woman is allowed to become? And perhaps even more importantly: Who taught us to ask for permission in the first place?
What happens when a woman is never told that she cannot become something, but is taught what a woman should be so ,she never thinks to ask whether she could become something else? Because sometimes the greatest barriers to women's progress are not the doors that are visibly close to us. They are the doors we have been taught not to approach.
The Invisible Curriculum
We often speak about education as the process through which children learn what they need to know. But rarely do we speak about the messages they absorb through an invisible curriculum—the lessons communicated through expectations, language, behaviour, relationships and observation.
As a girl, you learn very early what society considers acceptable.
Be kind. Be agreeable. Don’t make people uncomfortable. Look presentable. Be ambitious but remember your responsibilities. And, in some cultures, above all else, be respectable.
Accept. And be quiet.
These lessons are rarely taught explicitly but absorbed gradually. A girl begins to understand which behaviors are worthy of praise, and which receive criticism. She notices which women are admired and which are judged. She learns, sometimes without anyone ever saying it directly, what might happen if she disagrees, divorces, remains unmarried, speaks up or chooses an unconventional path. Over time, culture can become an invisible curriculum. And what begins externally can eventually become internal. We no longer need someone to tell us what we cannot do.
We tell ourselves. And that, I believe, is one of the most important conversations we need to have about women's empowerment.
When Culture Becomes Truth
By no means do I believe that culture is the enemy, nor do I believe that culture should be viewed as a cage. Culture undoubtedly gives us identity, belonging, history and connection. The challenge begins when cultural expectations are presented as truths that cannot be questioned—when traditions and social beliefs begin to carry an authority greater than the principles of the faith, they are sometimes claimed to represent.
I remember being told that I could not visit my own parents. I was told that I had to leave them behind because, once married, my family was now the family I had entered and to which I belonged. Almost thirty years later, I still remember the weight of that message. And you might think that, in almost three decades, the world would have evolved enough for such a mentality—even within a European setting—to have disappeared. Yet this is precisely why the distinction between culture and religion matters.
As a Muslim woman, I have become increasingly conscious of the difference between faith and the cultural interpretations that can sometimes surround it. There are occasions when women are told that a particular limitation is religious when, on closer examination, it may be cultural, social or simply inherited. The danger is that when a cultural expectation is rehearsed and reinforced often enough, it can begin to feel sacred. What was once cultural becomes unquestionable. What was inherited becomes truth. And what social expectation was can eventually be presented as religious obligation. So, this distinction deserves greater attention because empowerment does not require women to reject their faith, their families or their cultures. It requires women to have the intellectual freedom to distinguish between what they genuinely believe and what they have simply inherited.
When I began to make that distinction for myself, it was seen by some as rebellion. I saw it differently. It was agency. And agency is at the heart of empowerment.
The price of making that choice cost me the next 27 years. Family relationships strained, I was ostracized, misunderstood and alone. I did not belong anywhere. The reality for many women is exactly that: the fear of being labelled, misunderstood or rejected can be enough to make them abandon a choice even before making it. Empowerment is not simply about giving women opportunities, but also about developing the courage to make choices even when those choices may not be universally approved.
When a Woman's Identity Becomes a Measure of Her Relationships
My experience taught me, for a significant part of my life, that a woman's worth could become connected to her marital status. Success, for a girl, could be defined by whether she married, while a divorced woman could be viewed differently.
My choice to divorce was seen by some as diminishing my worth. I dared to put myself first—this time, before being somebody's wife, somebody's mother, daughter or sister. This time, I chose me. What do I want to become? What do I want to learn? What do I want to contribute?
These are questions that perhaps every woman deserves the freedom to ask—not because the roles of wife, mother, daughter or sister are unimportant, but because they should not be the entirety of who she is.
Don't women need identities that are not entirely relational?
At fifty, a woman should not be asking whether she has missed her opportunity. She should be asking: What opportunity have I not yet considered?
Intersectionality: there is no single female experience
At fifty, does age matter? Yes. But perhaps not in the way we have been taught to think about it. At fifty, you are expected to have achieved certain things, settled into your life, prioritized your family and perhaps even begun to step aside forgetting that there is still YOU, alive!
Age is only one part of the story. A woman's experience is also shaped by her culture, religion, education, socioeconomic circumstances, marital status, profession and family expectations. These identities intersect, influencing both the opportunities available to her and the expectations placed upon her. There can be no single definition of the “empowered woman.” Perhaps true empowerment is simply allowing women to define success for themselves. Not society's definition. Not their families. Not their employer's.
Their own.
When Presence Is Not Enough
There is another, less visible barrier to women's leadership: who gets to be seen?
Epistemic injustice describes what happens when someone's knowledge, judgement or experience is given less credibility because of assumptions about who they are. I earned my seat at the table, but that did not always mean my knowledge, experience or authority were recognized. Whether sitting among women or men, I have at times felt unseen and unheard. Simply put, presence does not always mean influence.
And this is where my own experience becomes impossible to separate from the subject.
I am fifty. I am a woman, a Muslim, divorced and an educational leader. I have experienced the tension between personal ambition and the expectations placed around me. Yet I also stand at a point in my life where I have greater professional confidence, self-awareness and clarity than I did when I was younger. I know more about leadership, people, resilience, failure and, perhaps most importantly, myself. So why should fifty be interpreted as a conclusion rather than a continuation? Why should reinvention be reserved for the young? I am who I am. There is no expiry date on ambition.
The internal revolution
But there is a difficult truth here: changing what we believe about ourselves is only part of the revolution. There are two layers to empowerment: external and internal. External empowerment asks what barriers organizations and societies are creating. Internal empowerment asks what limitations we have absorbed so deeply that we now reproduce them ourselves.
For me, I thought empowerment was about being confident, speaking up and taking risks. I believed that if I worked on myself, changed my mindset and developed enough self-belief, the world would be there for the taking. But when I did those things, I found that the environment could still punish me for doing so. I was made to feel that I wasn't good enough, that I didn't fit, and that no matter what I brought to the table, it was somehow not enough.
That experience taught me something I had not fully understood before: empowerment has to be both personal and institutional. Women need to recognize what they are capable of, but organizations also need to examine what they believe women are capable of. We cannot tell women to change their mindset while leaving the environment that limits them unchanged.
So, What Does This Mean for Leadership?
The answer, for me, is simple. Women need mentors, but they also need sponsors. They need opportunities, but they also need people willing to open doors. They need representation, but they also need influence.
My door was opened here. I am on this platform because someone heard me and was willing to give me an opportunity—regardless of my gender, ethnicity, age, religion or marital status. Someone was willing to look beyond the labels and see what I could bring to the table.
Most importantly, I believe true leadership is about taking care of others and understanding why we need to do this on a much greater scale. When someone opens a door for you, it creates an opportunity. But when leaders consistently recognize potential in others, regardless of who they are or where they come from, they begin to create something much bigger: a culture where people feel seen, heard and valued.
Perhaps that is what we should be asking ourselves as leaders. Not simply, “Who has made it through the door?” but “Who am I willing to open the door for?”
Changing the Story We Inherited —
As an educator, I cannot separate this conversation from education. If we want different women leaders in twenty years, we need different messages to girls today. Girls need to know that mathematics, science, technology, leadership, critical thinking and ambition belong to them, and so does the right to question. Boys need to see women as leaders, experts and decision-makers, and understand that confidence in a girl is not disrespect and leadership is not inherently male. If culture is an invisible curriculum, schools have a responsibility to examine what that curriculum is teaching—whose voices we value, whose ideas we listen to and what behaviours we reward.
Perhaps, after everything, I have come to see empowerment differently. I no longer think it means giving women permission, because permission implies that someone else has the authority to grant it. It is about recognising the agency we already possess: the confidence to question, the courage to choose and the freedom to distinguish between what we genuinely believe and what we have simply inherited. Choosing yourself does not mean rejecting everyone else. Sometimes it simply means refusing to disappear within the expectations of others.
There is still much work to do. Organizations have a responsibility to remove structural barriers, but we also need to question the stories women have inherited about themselves. Who told you that you were too old? Was that ambition selfish? That your worth depended upon marriage? That your voice was too loud? And perhaps the most important question: Do you still believe them?
At fifty, I have perspective. I know that some limits placed around women are structural, some cultural, and some eventually become internal. My journey into leadership has become a question of agency, voice and choice—of what happens when a woman stops measuring her potential against the expectations of others. The goal of women's empowerment should not simply be to give women a seat at the table, but to create women who feel entitled to speak, are heard when they do, and are confident enough to reshape the world they inherit.