Gloria Steinem's Legacy for Women in the Workplace

Gloria Steinem passed away this week at her home in Manhattan, aged 92. For more than half a century, her work helped millions of women build a sense of self-worth at home, at work and in public life, and she became one of the most recognisable figures in the fight for women's equality. Her story is also, in many ways, a version of the one we tell at One Loud Voice: about courage, curiosity and the belief that women get further together than alone.

It's easy to forget she didn't start out looking for any of this.

An unlikely beginning

Steinem grew up moving constantly with her family, and didn't complete a full year of settled schooling until sixth grade. As a child, her dream wasn't activism. It was to become a Rockette, one of the famous high-kicking dancers at New York's Radio City Music Hall. When her parents divorced around the time she turned ten, she spent years caring for her mother instead, an experience that shaped much of what came after.

She read voraciously to make up for the gaps in her schooling, went on to graduate from college with honours, and built a career as a journalist in New York. Political reporting was what she actually wanted to do. Editors had other plans, assigning her celebrity interviews and fashion writing instead, since a woman covering politics simply wasn't taken seriously at the time. It's a question worth sitting with even now: who gets to decide what women are capable of?

The moment that changed everything

It took until she was in her mid-thirties for something to truly click into place. In 1969, while reporting on a gathering where women spoke openly about their own experiences with abortion, then illegal, something shifted. She would later describe it as the moment she stopped observing the movement and became part of it.

Two years later, she co-founded Ms. magazine. Nothing quite like it had existed before: a national, mainstream magazine where every part, from the writing to the ownership, sat entirely in women's hands. It put subjects most publications wouldn't touch on the cover, including abortion and domestic violence, at a time when few women's magazines discussed anything beyond homemaking. The first issue sold out its 300,000 copies in eight days. Sceptics had predicted it wouldn't last six months.

There wasn't even a widely used word for sexual harassment when Steinem started this work. Without one, there was no way to challenge it. 

Publishing subjects other magazines wouldn't touch, in the face of sceptics who expected it to fail within months, is exactly what we mean when we talk about being fearless and authentic. We built One Loud Voice on the same belief: that naming a problem honestly, even when it's uncomfortable, is the first real step toward changing it.

Reimagining what already existed

Steinem and the women she worked with weren't interested in doing a slightly better version of what already existed. Traditional women's magazines at the time were largely filled with grooming advice and tips for meeting a husband. Ms. was something else entirely: a magazine that treated women's lives, careers and politics as worth serious coverage in their own right.

That instinct to question a norm rather than simply work within it is the same curiosity and willingness to reimagine that we try to bring to our own work with mid-career women. The workplace as it stands wasn't built with them in mind either. Like Steinem, we think it's worth asking why, and building something different, which is part of why we designed the Thrive Community around connection, confidence and capability rather than around fitting women into a system that was never built for them.

Confidence as the starting point

The confidence she projected in public wasn't the whole picture. Privately, she struggled with self-esteem for much of her life, and public speaking filled her with dread long before she ever got comfortable at a podium. As she put it herself, "self-esteem isn't everything — it's just that there's nothing without it." Confidence doesn't fix a broken system on its own. But it's what makes a woman more likely to question that system in the first place.

It's a simple idea, but a powerful one, and it sits close to the heart of what we do at One Loud Voice. Confidence is one of the three things we build our entire community around, alongside connection and capability. Through the Thrive Community, we work with mid-career women at exactly the stage where confidence is tested the most, helping them build the self-belief that opens the door to promotion, sponsorship, visibility and leadership.

Built with others, not alone

Steinem never worked as a solitary figure, however the media chose to frame her. Ms. magazine itself began in her living room, where she and a small team of women editors met to plan it long before it ever reached a newsstand. She was known to resist being cast as the movement's sole spokesperson, seeing the work instead as something built collectively, apartment by apartment, city by city.

In a separate 2016 interview with Reuters, she put a version of that same belief into her own words: society doesn't have to work like a hierarchy, she said, it can work like a circle, because "we are linked, we are not ranked."

It's a collaborative, inclusive way of seeing the world, and it's one we've built our own community around. In Thrive, no one member is meant to carry the whole weight of another woman's progress. It's shared, the way Steinem always believed real change had to be.

A life that never slowed down

Steinem kept writing and speaking well into her nineties, with a new book, An Unexpected Life, scheduled for publication this month. In her book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, she wrote that she had little interest in passing on her torch. She preferred to keep hold of it and use it to help others light their own.

Why this matters to us at One Loud Voice

Steinem's activism was political, spanning decades of campaigning, writing and organising for legislative and social change. What matters most to us isn't the politics. It's the outcome she spent her life working toward: women who are seen, heard, paid fairly and free to lead. That sits at the centre of our mission, and it's exactly what we try to build with every member of the Thrive Community, especially at the sticky middle, the stage where so many careers stall.

The fearlessness to name a problem, the curiosity to imagine something better, the belief that women get there together rather than alone: it's a version of the same conviction that built One Loud Voice, decades after Steinem first put it into words and action.

If her story resonates with you, join the 1LV Thrive Community and connect with mid-career women navigating the same stage she spent her life fighting for.