Why half the human species deserves more than a symbolic day — and why spring might be the moment women remember their power.
Last week was International Women’s Day.
Half the human species was celebrated for twenty-four hours.
Then the calendar moved on.
I didn’t write anything last week.
Not because I forgot.
Not because I don’t care.
But because I kept circling around the same question:
How did half of humanity end up with a single day?
Women are not a minority.
We are 49.7% of the global population.
Half the world.
Half the intelligence.
Half the creativity.
Half the life force of this planet.
And yet somehow…
we get a day.
This is something I have been reflecting on for years in my work and writing: the strange gap between how central women are to the functioning of the world, and how marginal our power is often treated in public life.
We are not a side note in the story of humanity.
We are half of it.
The strange thing is not the celebration
Celebrating women is beautiful.
The strange thing is the math behind the celebration.
Let’s look at the numbers.
Women represent about half of humanity, yet we do:
• More than three quarters of the world’s unpaid care work.
• Several more hours per day of domestic and caregiving labor than men globally.
• Much of the invisible labor that keeps families, communities, and societies functioning.
The world quite literally runs on women’s work, much of it unpaid, uncounted, and expected.
And even in paid work, women still earn significantly less than men on average.
Despite representing nearly half the population and contributing enormously to the global economy, women own only about one third of the world’s wealth.
And in many regions, women still face barriers to owning land, accessing credit, or inheriting property.
So the arithmetic looks something like this:
Half the population.
Most of the invisible labor.
A fraction of the wealth.
Less of the power.
And a day.
And somehow we are still told to be grateful for it.
And then there is the violence
There is another statistic that never appears in the pastel-colored graphics of International Women’s Day.
Violence.
Globally, about one in three women experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime.
One in three.
Pause on that.
Imagine sitting at a table with three women.
Statistically speaking, one of them has experienced violence.
Sometimes the violence comes from strangers.
Very often it comes from men they know: partners, family members, colleagues.
This is not a marginal issue.
It is a structural one.
So yes… celebrate women
Please do.
Celebrate the women in your life.
Your mothers.
Your daughters.
Your friends.
Your colleagues.
Your teachers.
Celebrate their intelligence, their resilience, their creativity, their stubborn refusal to disappear.
But forgive me if I cannot pretend that one day on the calendar solves anything.
Because women do not exist for one day only.
Women carry the world every day.
Women are not a minority.
Women are the origin of humanity.
Every human being who has ever lived entered the world through the body of a woman.
Every scientist, every artist, every king, every president, every philosopher, every revolutionary.
Human civilization itself is quite literally born from women.
And yet somehow the creators of humanity are still negotiating basic safety, autonomy, and respect.
We give birth to humanity.
We nurture it.
We hold communities together.
And increasingly, we are refusing to do all that quietly and disappear inside those roles.
Women are not a niche.
We are half the cosmos walking around in human bodies.
Read that again.
But perhaps the deeper question is not why we celebrate women.
The question is:
Why does a world that runs on women still struggle to respect them?
Why is half of humanity still negotiating basic safety, recognition, and autonomy?
Why are we still having these conversations in 2026?
And yet…
And yet the story of women has never been only about numbers.
Across cultures and centuries, the feminine has always been described in mythic terms:
Creators.
Mothers of worlds.
Guardians of life.
From Gaia to Isis, from Demeter to Aphrodite, the feminine was once understood as a force of nature itself: the power that births, nourishes, and regenerates life.
Somewhere along the way, that sacred understanding was replaced by a smaller story.
A story where women were expected to shrink, serve quietly, and carry the world without naming their power.
But myths have a strange way of surviving.
And every now and then, they rise again.
Something else is also true.
Across the world, women are rising.
Quietly.
Steadily.
Relentlessly.
In their work.
In their art.
In their communities.
In their refusal to shrink.
There is a feeling in the air right now.
Across the world, women are questioning structures that once seemed immovable.
Something old is cracking.
And something ancient and powerful is remembering itself.
Spring is the season when life returns.
Seeds break open.
Sap rises.
The earth remembers its fertility.
And every year, women seem to remember something too.
Not loudly.
Not all at once.
But steadily.
Across the world, women are reclaiming their voices, their bodies, their creativity, their sovereignty.
Spring has always been the season of that remembering.
In myth, Persephone rises from the underworld.
Not as the girl who descended.
But as the woman who has walked through darkness and returned with power.
Artemis walks the wild forests.
Aphrodite emerges from the sea.
Three faces of feminine power.
Three ways of returning to life.
Spring is not just a season.
It is a cycle of return.
And every year, women rise again with it.
This is why spaces where women gather matter so much.
Spaces where we pause.
Reconnect with our vitality.
Remember our power.
Not once a year. Women do not need a single day to be celebrated.
We need an ongoing practice of remembering.
And spring is the perfect moment to begin again.
This spring, I will be opening a space for women to step consciously into that rising.
The Three Gates of Spring — A Goddess Day Retreat for Renewal, Vitality & Blossoming.
A day to reconnect with the wild, creative, sovereign force that lives inside every woman.
A day to step through three mythic gateways of feminine power:
Persephone.
Artemis.
Aphrodite.
Because women do not need permission to rise.
We need spaces that help us remember.
And spring is the perfect moment to begin.
Again.
If you feel the quiet call of spring:
to pause, breathe, and reconnect with yourself in a circle of women
You are warmly invited.
More info and registration here: https://isayabelle.thrivecart.com/3ggdr/
If you know a sister, a friend, a fellow Goddess on the path who might need this reminder, feel free to share this with her.
In sisterhood,
Isaya