Yesterday was International Women's Day. The social media output was, as every year, a mixture of genuine celebration, corporate performance, and the usual debates about whether the holiday accomplishes anything or simply provides a vehicle for brand content.
I want to say something that is not in the official programme.
Research consistently shows that women in Western countries report lower levels of happiness than they did fifty years ago, despite — or perhaps because of — the enormous expansion in their formal freedoms, economic opportunities, and legal protections over that same period. This is sometimes called the paradox of declining female happiness.
I am not going to pretend I have a complete explanation for this. It is genuinely complex. But I want to offer a thought that almost nobody in the International Women's Day conversation is willing to say.
The Thought Nobody Says
The feminist movement of the past fifty years has delivered enormous and genuine goods. The ability of women to own property, to work in any profession, to leave abusive marriages, to vote, to control their reproductive choices — these are real advances in human freedom that I support without reservation.
But the movement has also, in certain of its expressions, advanced a picture of the good life for women that looks remarkably like the picture of the good life that was constructed for men in the industrial era — career achievement, professional status, financial independence as the primary measure of success.
And it has been largely silent about whether that picture is actually what most women, given genuine freedom, would choose.
The data on female happiness is not a mystery to be solved. It is a message. A significant number of women who were told that the career-centred life was liberation have discovered that it was simply a different set of constraints. The freedom to become a partner at a law firm is not freedom if you wanted, more than anything, to be present for your children in their early years — and the economic and social architecture makes that impossible.
The Catholic Frame
The Church's teaching on the complementarity of men and women — that men and women are different, that those differences are good, that the family built on genuine complementarity is the foundational unit of human society — is deeply unfashionable. It is also, I think, closer to the truth than most public discourse is willing to acknowledge.
This does not mean women belong in the kitchen. My wife Amy is extraordinary — capable, educated, a genuine equal in every important sense. But the equality between us is not an equality of sameness. It is an equality of dignity between genuinely different persons who bring genuinely different things.
The most radical thing you can say in 2026 is that men and women are different and that this is good. That motherhood is not a consolation prize for those who could not have a career. That the building of a home and family is not less valuable than the building of a balance sheet.
I believe all of this. I believe it not as a critique of women's freedom but as a defence of a fuller understanding of what freedom actually means.
Freedom is the ability to choose what you actually want. Not what you have been told you should want.
Work with Sebastian
No business pitch today. But if any of this resonates — the question of what a genuinely free life looks like — that conversation often ends up being about much more than tax structures. Book a consultation.