Good girl game changers podcast
Season 3 - Episode 1
When the violent deaths of women in Australia reached one every four days in 2024, I asked my sons Charlie (19) and Jamie (14) to join me at a protest march. When they chose not to come, I went alone. I came home that night wound tight—fear and anger knotted in my stomach—and spilled my heartbreak all over our dining room table.
It wasn’t graceful.
Jamie began trying to explain me why men have it just as hard. And Charlie with anxious eyes, his head frantically shaking no from side-to-side, urgently cautioned: “Stop, Jamie. You can’t say that.” The look on Charlie’s face—torn between wanting to protect Jamie and trying to support me—that’s when I got it. What society’s “strong boy” expectations do to men.
When we sat down recently to talk about that night on this week’s podcast (our first for Season 3), Charlie’s honesty cracked something open. Not just for me, but maybe for all of us who find ourselves stuck in a fruitless conversation about gender.
So what was happening in our brains that night at the dinner table?
I came home flooded. I’d spent the day surrounded by grief and rage about violence against women. When Jamie tried to explain that men need protection too, I couldn’t hear him. My nervous system had read “danger”—and I was ready to fight back, defend my position, prove women were right.
Just when I most needed to listen my son, I’d lost the neurological capacity.
This is what happens when we ‘other’ groups of people—when we ride the “all men are shit” train or any other. Our brains think they’re keeping us safe by cutting us off from connection and the risk of being hurt. But instead, right when we most need to understand each other, we lose the neurological capacity to try.
Charlie saw something different. Not women’s pain versus men’s pain. Just two human beings he loved, both struggling to bridge society’s gender divide. His brain didn’t categorize ‘us versus them’, so his nervous system stayed calm, curious, and compassionate. He was able to hold space for all of us when we couldn’t.
The capacity for Charlie’s compassion lives in all of us. But we’re taught early in life to see gender first, and our shared humanity second.
For example, studies suggest by age 11, many girls have absorbed society’s “good girl” expectations—perform perfectly, please everyone, protect others by silencing yourself. Between 11 and 14, many boys absorb the “strong boy” expectations—dominate, deny your needs, disconnect from emotions except competition and anger.
Both paths lead to exhaustion, resentment, and loneliness—girls more vulnerable to violence and self-harm, boys to substance abuse and suicide. No one escapes these gender expectations unharmed.
Which led Dr. Carol Gilligan—who revolutionized the world’s understanding of gender development—to recently observe that forty years of studying gender differences helped her to realize that we’ve been asking entirely the wrong questions. When we peel back all the layers of “good girl” and “strong boy” social grooming, studies consistently discover something remarkable: a shared human hunger to be seen, valued, and accepted for who we uniquely are.
The real challenge isn’t women or men—it’s the social gender expectations designed to divide us.
Which shifts the conversation entirely. From “who has it hardest?” to “what do we all need to feel safe, seen, and valued, and how can we support each other?”
As we sat at our dinner table—Jamie feeling unheard, me feeling unseen —Charlie began to explain what it’s like navigating the world as a young man. Things I’d never thought about.
He walks six feet behind women on the street, giving them space because he understands they have no way to know if he’s safe. “I’m expected to be worse than I am,” he said. “Held at arm’s length because people can’t tell for sure.”
He started lifting weights as a teenager to protect himself from being bullied at school by other boys for being smaller. “If I’m just bigger, I’m going to be harder to deal with,” he explained. “And then I can protect people around me too.”
Listening to Charlie describe these experiences—the invisible calculations, the constant vigilance, the ways other men’s violence had shaped him—I heard it. The same exhaustion. The same loneliness. The same hunger to be seen and valued for who he is, not judged by society’s expectations of his gender.
We were living from different gender scripts, but we were caged by the same type of societal expectations.
Jamie’s question came quietly, his eyes full of tears: “Why wouldn’t I march for violence against men?” In that moment, the answer was so obvious it hurt.
We all agreed that we’d march against violence towards other people.
The question wasn’t who deserves protection more. It was how do we protect each other? What do we all need to feel safe, seen, and valued—and how do we stop letting society’s gender expectations blind us to each other’s humanity?
I wish I could say we got it right that night. But the truth is, we live in a world that constantly encourages us to ‘other’ people based on gender. Our nervous systems tend to read “danger” faster than our brains can remember we’re all stuck in the same cage of societal gender expectations.
This is why I’ve found this tool to help me ‘Reach For Gender Compassion’ isn’t just a nice idea—it’s a neurological necessity if we want to support each other.
When you catch yourself othering someone based on gender—or anything else—this practice can help you shift from judgment to curiosity, from defensiveness to care:
Breath 1 (inhale): Place both hands on your heart. “We’re each doing the best we can with what we have in this moment.”
Breath 2 (exhale): “But none of us get it right all the time.”
Breath 3 (inhale): “When I’m struggling, how do I want to be treated?”
Breath 4 (exhale): “What might this person need from me right now?”
This doesn’t mean abandoning boundaries or accountability. It means staying connected enough to see we’re all learning to navigate expectations that were never ours to begin with.
Because here’s what changes when we reach for gender compassion instead of gender warfare: we stop performing for a system that doesn’t care about our humanity. We start building the world we actually want to live in—one where everyone gets to be safe, seen, and valued for who they are, not what gender box they’re supposed to fit into.
That dinner table conversation cracked something open. Not just between me and my sons, but in how I see this whole tired debate. We’re not each other’s enemies. We’re each other’s best hope for freedom.
Listen to our full conversation with Charlie and what’s ahead for Season 3 of the podcast above.
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