Stop Timing Women

In our Leading Out Loud (Even If It’s Awkward) series, Sarah Toledo, College Director Principal, explores those unchosen timelines women face and why it’s time to rewrite them.

In a recent women’s network session, we explored the idea of timelines, the unchosen timelines that somehow end up becoming an expectation. You know the ones. The timelines that behave a bit like an overly familiar colleague who will not stop offering unsolicited advice, chasing you down the corridor, tick-list in hand, announcing that “You’re running out of time…” For everything apparently.

As I listened to more than thirty brilliant, funny, thoughtful women talk about the ways they have been told, explicitly or implicitly, that they are somehow lacking because they have not followed a timeline they never agreed to, something landed for me. Harder than expected.

The idea that we are somehow late to our own lives is so normalised we barely even notice it anymore. Until, of course, you wake up at three in the morning sweating, because your brain has decided to give you a recap what’s not done yet. Thanks for that.

It shows up everywhere, family conversations, workplace cultures, 2am doom scrolling, school reunions, comments from strangers. Plus our internal narrator’s who somehow know exactly how to hit hardest. Surveys consistently show that around nine in ten women feel pressured to meet traditional life timelines, even when those timelines do not fit the lives they want or the realities they’re navigating.

Amidst this brilliant, vulnerable, hilarious discussion, we kept circling back to one central question: late according to whom, exactly? Who is this time keeping authority figure, wielding a stopwatch and a clipboard? Who decided they get to call the shots?

When we tried to dig into this, It turned out to be not one thing at all. It’s a bizarre blend of outdated patriarchal norms, generational expectations, sibling competitiveness, the 1950s career model, social media comparison traps, well-meaning aunties, LinkedIn humblebrags, workplace assumptions, and that colleague married with two children and a mortgage by 27. Good for her, genuinely, but she isn’t the required standard.

We absorb all of this without noticing, and suddenly find ourselves measuring our lives against timelines we never signed up for. It is like being handed a script for a play we did not audition for and then being told off for missing our cues. No wonder so many women walk around feeling perpetually exhausted and perpetually late, at this point I’d like to formally request to opt out.

Let us talk about that script for a moment. Spoiler alert, it was never written for women. You know the plot. Grow up, get an education, secure a stable job, meet a partner, buy a house, have children, get promoted on time and then apparently sail smoothly forward and upward forever. It is almost adorable, in a wildly unrealistic way.

Because this script only works if you never have a career break, never shoulder the domestic load, never care for children, parents, partners, pets or anyone, never experience culture, community, health, grief or joy, and definitely never have the audacity to change your mind (about anything). Essentially, if you live a life that does not resemble an actual human woman’s.

Women’s careers and lives are rarely linear. They are dynamic and layered, sometimes chaotic, often beautiful., always evolving. The whole concept, when you really sit with it, is just another way of policing women’s lives. A soft, socially acceptable form of control. It nudges us toward the ‘’typical’’

path, and the more I write about this, the more convinced I am that the word typical should be retired entirely.

This timeline trap becomes a no-win scenario. Too ambitious too early and it is “Who does she think she is?” Too ambitious too late and it becomes “Why bother now? designed so that women fail by default.

When women internalise these messages, because how could we not, the result is not motivation. It is pressure, guilt, shame, second guessing, rushed decisions, quiet resentment, and that persistent, gnawing feeling that we are trying to catch up with… what, exactly? Something. Someone. Everyone. It becomes an endless race with no finish line.

So the next time that familiar feeling sneaks up on you, the “I should have done this by now,” the “I am behind,” the “everyone else is miles ahead” feeling, pause and ask yourself one small question, behind according to whom?

When you sit with that question, things begin to unravel, in the best possible way. Are you behind according to a cultural expectation from thirty years ago? A family norm that does not suit the life you are building? A workplace structure designed around uninterrupted male careers? A social media feed curated within an inch of its life? A younger version of yourself who had absolutely no idea what adulthood would actually look like?

Most of the pressure is not actually yours. You did not choose it, ask for it, or agree to it. So if the timeline never belonged to you, then being late on it means nothing. It is like being late for a meeting you were never invited to.

Reclaiming your pace, your rhythm, your seasons is one of the most quietly radical things a woman can do.. Your timeline is not a deadline. It is a landscape. That you get to move through it at whatever speed makes sense for the person you are becoming.

For those of us working in leadership, this is not just personal reflection. It is a structural reality check. I felt that deeply in our session personally,, but also as someone surrounded by brilliant women who deserve workplaces that do not quietly punish them for living real lives. It made me ask myself what I am doing to help, and what I need to do better.

CIPD research shows that 43% of women step out of full-time work at some point because care work becomes incompatible with rigid workplace structures. Yet only around one in ten organisations actually track how caring responsibilities affect progression, which means most systems are blind to the very barriers women are navigating.

Women are also 1.5 times more likely than men to say they are judged for taking career breaks, and only 28% of women feel their organisation’s promotion processes are transparent. Globally, women perform 2.3 times more unpaid care work than men.

It is no surprise, then, that so many women feel behind. Because organisations are still measuring success by timelines that should have been retired decades ago. We have inherited models of achievement and progression that assume uninterrupted availability, identical capacity every year, relentless pace and a complete absence of the messiness of real life.

In reality, many women step in and out of work to manage caring responsibilities, with around 550,000 professional women in the UK currently on career breaks for care-related reasons. ONS data shows women still do around 60 percent more unpaid care work than men. The problem is not that women are falling behind, it is that the frameworks assessing them were never designed to reflect their lives.

So what if we rewrote the rules? What if progression did not penalise pauses or pivots? What if careers that twist and restart were recognised as valid, even brilliant? What if age loaded language disappeared from performance conversations entirely? What if talent processes recognised that different seasons bring different capacities? What if pace flexibility became a right, not something women must earn or apologise for?

We cannot fix this overnight. But we can name it. We can celebrate milestones that actually matter to the individuals that reach them. We can cheer for women who hit their goals early, or late, or not at all because they are content in their own lane. We can share our stories, our scenic routes, our second acts, the times we stepped off the path entirely.

The script is outdated. The talent is not. It is time organisations caught up.

If you do one thing today, let it be this. Give yourself permission to release the idea that you should be anywhere other than exactly where you are. If no one has told you this recently, or ever, let me be the one.

You are not late. You are not off track. You are not missing the window. You are right on time for a life that is yours.

And honestly, that is the only timeline that ever mattered.