The world is changing, yet alongside new opportunities for women, systemic problems remain that for decades have been perceived as personal struggles. Marina Sukhomlinova, founder of The World Organization of Women Nations Womafreesm, speaks about the need to rethink the way society approaches women’s experiences. Womafreesm is an international women’s organization that collects real data on women’s lives, identifies where systems fail to account for women, and works to develop new standards, legal initiatives, and social change.
Exclusively for Business Woman International Magazine, Marina Sukhomlinova spoke about why modern society still so often looks for the problem within women themselves, how war and displacement changed her own perspective, why women’s lives need to be measured throughout the entire life cycle, and why the future requires not simply greater support for women, but a new architecture of decision-making.
When did you first realize that the problem was not the woman herself?
At first, like many women, I tried to look for the answers within myself: what I needed to change, which character traits I needed to improve, where I needed to become stronger, where I needed to be softer, where I needed to learn to endure more, cope better, react differently, speak more appropriately, and become less tired.
From childhood, women are taught this logic: if you are struggling, it means you are not organized enough; if you are not being heard, it means you are not confident enough; if you are burned out, it means you are not managing your energy properly.
At some point, I began to notice that this logic was repeated in the lives of almost every woman. Different countries, cultures, families, levels of education, and life circumstances, yet the same question kept coming back: “What is wrong with me?” If millions of women around the world are asking themselves the same question, perhaps the problem is not with millions of women?
It became clear to me that we had spent too long treating women’s pain as a personal weakness, when very often it is a symptom of a much deeper structure. This does not mean that women do not need inner work or personal responsibility. Of course they do. But personal development cannot become a way of forcing women to adapt to a system that fails to account for the fullness of their reality.
At that moment, I truly understood for the first time: “It is not the woman who is broken; it is the architecture within which she is forced to live.”
Why do you call this humanity’s most expensive mistake?
Because the cost of this mistake cannot be measured only in money, although its economic cost is enormous as well. It is measured in lost lives, unrealized talents, silenced voices, damaged health, invisible labor, and generations of women who spent their energy not creating the world, but endlessly trying to earn the right to be accepted within it.
When a woman spends her entire life believing that the problem is within her, she directs an enormous amount of energy toward self-punishment. She does not ask why the rules are unfair; she asks why she failed to adapt to them. She does not ask why her work is not recognized; she asks why it is so difficult for her to balance everything.
We have become accustomed to calling this a personal drama, a family story, a psychological problem, an age-related crisis, maternal burnout, or female insecurity. But if we look deeper, behind each of these concepts there is often the same mechanism: women are offered ways to fix themselves instead of recognizing the defect within the system itself.
That is why I call it humanity’s most expensive mistake. It has cost us not only women’s freedom, but also the quality of decisions made without the female perspective. “When half of humanity is forced for centuries to prove its worth instead of fully participating in shaping the future, it is not only women who lose. Society as a whole loses.”
The world has changed significantly. Women have gained rights, education, political representation, and the opportunity to build careers. Don’t you think humanity is gradually correcting this mistake?
The world has indeed changed, and it would be unfair not to acknowledge that. Each generation of women has expanded the space of freedom for the next, and thanks to this, millions of girls today live in a reality that would have been impossible for their great-grandmothers.
But I think we often confuse two different processes: the expansion of rights and a change in the very model according to which the world is structured.
Culture, economics, education, medicine, the labor market, technology, and artificial intelligence continue to operate according to models that were created decades, and sometimes centuries, ago. You can renovate an old house, replace the windows, install modern lighting, and furnish it with expensive furniture, but if the foundation was originally designed for a different reality, sooner or later that will become obvious.
“A modern woman often lives in two eras simultaneously: legally, she is already free, while within the internal structure of society, she is still expected to meet expectations that were formed many generations ago.”
A woman has gained the right to build a career, but very often she has not stopped being the family’s emotional center, the invisible manager of household life, the guardian of relationships, the person who remembers, cares, organizes, smooths things over, endures — while still being expected to make it all look effortless.
So, has the modern woman not become free, but simply taken on an even greater burden?
Very often, that is exactly what happens. We expect her to be economically active, professionally successful, emotionally available, devoted to motherhood, physically attractive, psychologically resilient, socially convenient, financially independent, and internally harmonious at the same time.
If you look closely at this list, it becomes obvious: we did not reconsider the expectations. We simply added new ones.
“The main problem of the modern world, in my view, is not that women have no opportunities at all. The opportunities have appeared. The problem is that the system itself still does not recognize the full complexity of women’s lives.”
It continues to treat women as people who must independently deal with the consequences of an imperfect structure. And I am convinced that the structure itself must begin to change first. Only then will women stop feeling that they constantly have to meet someone else’s expectations.
You often use the word “architecture.” Why this particular word?
Because the word “architecture” most accurately explains what I mean. When a person enters a building, they rarely think about why the doors are located exactly where they are, why the stairs lead in a particular direction, or why the windows are positioned at a certain height.
It seems to them that the building simply exists, although in reality every line, every passage, every corner, and every source of light was once someone’s decision.
The same thing happens with society: we are born inside an already existing structure and gradually begin to perceive it not as a system of decisions, but as the natural order of things.
That is why it is important for me to speak not only about culture or social norms, but about architecture. Architecture immediately reveals the essential point: the world was designed in a particular way, and if it was designed, then it can be redesigned.
But first, we need to see the structure itself, because the greatest strength of any old architecture is that it becomes invisible to those who have lived inside it for too long.
When did this stop being simply an idea for you and become a personal responsibility?
Probably when I realized that I could no longer separate this idea from my own life. For a long time, it is possible to see your experiences as private: a difficult period, exhaustion, an age-related crisis, displacement, war, the loss of familiar support, the need to rebuild yourself in another country, in another language, and within another social reality.
The war took away more than just a familiar environment from me. It destroyed the illusion that life can be controlled if you are strong, intelligent, organized, and responsible enough.
In London, in a new reality where I had to learn again how to speak, understand, negotiate, explain, and create, I acutely felt how quickly a woman can become invisible, even when she carries enormous experience, intelligence, energy, and strength within her.
I began to understand that many women go through a similar internal experience of starting over, simply in different forms. The external circumstances are different, but the internal question is often the same: who am I if I no longer want to be the woman others expected me to be?
That was when I stopped seeing my pain as weakness. I began to see it as something else: material from which a new system of understanding could emerge.
For me, leadership did not begin with a title, the registration of an organization, or public statements. It began at the moment when I realized that what I had seen could no longer be ignored. If you have truly seen a systemic mistake, you can no longer live as if it were simply your personal drama. You either turn this knowledge into action, or you betray your own understanding.
Womafreesm became precisely that responsibility for me.
So, do you believe that the world is formulating the problem incorrectly?
Absolutely. And perhaps this is the greatest obstacle to change. When a problem is formulated incorrectly, even the most well-intentioned solutions begin moving in the wrong direction.
If we say that a woman lacks confidence, we create programs to build confidence. If we say that she lacks balance, we create courses on balance. If we say that she is burned out, we offer recovery programs.
But if the cause is not only her internal state, but the fact that the entire structure of life is built around constantly exceeding her human capacity, then all these solutions become similar to trying to treat a burn without putting out the fire.
The world too often asks: “How can we help a woman cope?” But the real question should be different: “Why does she have to cope again in the first place?”
For me, this is the boundary between old and new thinking. “Old thinking improves women so that they can endure the existing structure. New thinking analyzes the structure so that women no longer have to adapt themselves to its shape.”
If the problem is systemic, what should the solution look like?
Systems do not change because we describe them beautifully or loudly criticize them. Systems change when new language, new data, new standards, and new mechanisms for decision-making emerge.
That is why Womafreesm is not simply an organization or a movement for me. I see it as a new intellectual and institutional architecture that can move women’s experiences from the sphere of personal confession into the sphere of evidence-based power.
“Women’s pain should not remain merely a story that can be heard and forgotten. It must be transformed into data, standards, legal mechanisms, and social decisions.”
This is the logic behind the Women’s Life-Cycle Economy Index. We are launching research that aims to examine women’s lives not in fragments, but throughout the entire life cycle.
A woman does not exist only as a worker, only as a mother, only as a young body, only as an older woman, or only as a person experiencing a crisis. Her life moves through different stages, and each of them has economic, social, legal, cultural, and psychological value.
If this value is not measured, it cannot be taken into account. And if it cannot be taken into account, it will once again disappear from decision-making.
What exactly do you want to measure through the Women’s Life-Cycle Economy Index?
We want to measure what has remained scattered, invisible, and therefore politically weak for far too long.
The world has learned to measure inflation, GDP, productivity, profit, employment rates, and life expectancy, but it still does a poor job of measuring women’s lives as a complete system.
The gap has long puzzled me: humanity is capable of calculating the movement of capital with enormous precision, yet it has a much poorer understanding of the economic value of women’s invisible labor, how women’s economic vulnerability changes at different stages of life, and the price they pay for motherhood, caregiving, age, violence, discrimination, migration, war, loneliness, illness, lack of support, or exclusion from decision-making processes.
The Women’s Life-Cycle Economy Index is intended to bring women’s reality together into an evidence-based model. Not simply to say once again that women are struggling. We already know that. The purpose is to show exactly where the system fails to account for women, at which stages of the life cycle the greatest gaps emerge, which decisions are made on the basis of an incomplete picture, and which standards need to be reconsidered.
As long as women’s experiences exist only as individual stories, they are easy to dismiss. But when millions of voices are transformed into data, they stop being mere noise. They become the basis for new policies, social standards, corporate decisions, research, and a new language through which society describes women.
You speak not only about the Index, but also about the Principle of Equal Consideration. What does it mean?
The Principle of Equal Consideration is based on a very simple idea: fairness does not always mean treating everyone identically.
Sometimes identical treatment creates injustice because people live in different conditions, move through different biological, social, and economic cycles, and carry different invisible burdens.
The Principle of Equal Consideration means that decisions affecting women’s lives cannot be made without fully taking into account women’s life cycles, invisible labor, physical reality, motherhood, age, risks of violence, economic vulnerability, and the social burdens that have for too long been considered simply natural.
This is not a demand for special treatment. “It is a demand for accuracy.” If a decision affects women, women’s reality must be included in the very model on which that decision is based.
For me, the Equal Consideration Standard is a natural continuation of the Women’s Life-Cycle Economy Index. The Index shows where women are not being taken into account. The Standard should help governments, companies, universities, international organizations, and technological systems identify this “blind spot” in their decisions.
And this is where I see the future: not in endlessly asking the world to be kinder to women, but in creating tools that make ignoring women’s reality a sign of intellectual and institutional incompetence.
So, for you, the issue of women is no longer an issue concerning women alone?
Exactly. And this is probably the most important thing I would like to convey.
When we talk about women, many people still perceive it as a conversation about one social group. But a woman is not a group. She is half of humanity.
Therefore, when we talk about the need to take women’s reality into account, we are not talking about privileges. We are talking about accuracy. About humanity’s ability to see the world as it really is, rather than as it has become accustomed to describing it.
“It is impossible to build a sustainable future if it is designed on data that reflects only part of the human experience.”
The past asked: “What place should women occupy in the world?” The future, it seems to me, will ask a completely different question: “What should the world look like if we finally begin to build it while taking into account the experiences of all people, rather than only some of them?”
This is where the next chapter of human history begins. And it is for this next chapter that Womafreesm is being created today.
How do you think the understanding of women’s leadership should change in the coming years?
I think, first and foremost, women leaders must stop being exceptions who constantly have to prove that they deserve their place.
Today, a strong woman often finds herself in a strange trap: she needs to be tough enough to be respected, but soft enough not to intimidate people; successful enough to be listened to, but cautious enough not to be called overly ambitious.
This is not leadership. It is a constant attempt to navigate a system of contradictory expectations in which women are judged not only by their results, but also by how comfortably they display their strength.
I think the coming years must change this perspective. Women’s leadership does not have to disguise itself as a male standard in order to be recognized as serious. It can be strategic, profound, intuitive, systemic, maternal, spiritual, economic, political, or technological. These are not mutually exclusive qualities, but different forms of strength.
For me, the woman leader of the future is not someone who received permission to enter an old system and learned to play by its rules better than everyone else. She is a woman capable of seeing which rules no longer correspond to reality and who has the inner honesty not to follow them simply because they provide status.
True leadership begins not with a position or public recognition, but with responsibility for what you have already seen.
That is why Womafreesm is directly connected to leadership for me. We are not talking only about women’s rights, but about a new quality of women’s presence in the world. About the moment when a woman stops asking for permission to be heard and begins creating the language, data, standards, and institutions that make it impossible to ignore her.
If, many years from now, a woman living in a different world reads this interview, what would you want her to understand about our time?
I would like her to see our time not only through its achievements, but also through its greatest blind spot.
We have created artificial intelligence, flown into space, managed global markets, and spoken about the future as if we had almost learned how to predict it. And yet we still do not fully understand the lives of half of humanity.
Every era eventually reveals itself to the future through what it failed to notice. What seems natural to contemporaries is sometimes viewed by later generations with astonishment: how could decisions about the world be made without taking into account those who give birth, raise children, care, work, age, heal, lose, endure, create, save, and carry such a significant part of human life?
I want the philosophy of Womafreesm to become the beginning of a different perspective, a different maturity, and a different way of thinking about humanity.
True progress does not begin when the world becomes faster, richer, or more technologically advanced. It begins when the world finally starts seeing what it has pushed to the margins for far too long.
I do not think my task is to make women stronger. Women have never been weak. My task is different: to help create a world that no longer needs to diminish women in order to preserve its old form.
And if one day humanity learns to make decisions by seeing women not as exceptions, not as problems, not as additions, and not as resources, but as an equal part of human reality itself, then the 21st century will be remembered not only as the century of technology.
It will be remembered as the century in which the world first began to see itself as a whole.
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Photo: from the subject’s archive