Built
The day after International Women's Day. What nobody posts about.
Yesterday was International Women’s Day.
You probably saw a few posts. The floral bouquets. The brunch photos. The captions about celebrating the women in your life. And then, right on schedule, the other posts — the ones reminding everyone that this day is supposed to be serious. That it’s about inequality, labor movements, voting rights, and the long list of rights women still don’t have.
Becca Bloom wrote a sharp piece about this yesterday. She’s right. Both sides are correct. Celebration and seriousness have always coexisted in women’s history. That tension isn’t a contradiction. It’s the whole story.
But I want to talk about the day after.
There are women I want to tell you about.
Ann McLaughlin Korologos and her husband Tom were clients of my pet care business. Our team cared for who they loved — two yellow Labs named Sam and Winston.
Secretary of Labor under Reagan. Confirmed by the United States Senate 94 to 0. Chair of RAND. Chair of the Aspen Institute. Board member of Microsoft, Fannie Mae, and Kellogg. She received the President’s Citizen Medal from Ronald Reagan himself.
She was the kind of woman who walked into every room already having done the work — and the room knew it. She owned an art gallery in Basalt, kept horses, and according to everyone who knew her, was three steps ahead of the room without anyone realizing it.
Ann passed away in 2023. Tom not long after.
When she left her post as Secretary of Labor, her successor was Elizabeth Dole. The first time in American history that one woman had directly replaced another qualified woman from the same party in the same Cabinet seat. Ann didn’t just hold the door open. She handed it off.
I know Elizabeth Dole. Not from a distance. During her presidential campaign, I had the opportunity to be in the car with her — more than once. The curtain was down. And the woman I got to know — gracious, kind, exactly who she presented to the world — was the same in private as she was in public. That kind of integrity is rarer than people think.
The press wrote about how she looked. They called her a novelty. She was polling second in the nation.
That wasn’t ancient history. That was 1999.
Here’s what doesn’t make the posts.
The women who built things while the world was busy arguing about whether they belonged. The women who were sharp, exacting, difficult, and brilliant — and got called every name in the book for it. The women who pioneered methods now used around the world, whose names most people couldn’t tell you.
One of them saved my life.
Twelve hours on an operating table. Seven of them in active surgery.
There was a war room. Literally — a room where her team used 3D modeling to map what they were dealing with. They would go in. Dissect millimeter by millimeter for hours. Hit a dead end. Come back out, reconfigure, and go back in. Again and again. The mass was intricately woven around my pulmonary vein. Every move had consequences. One wrong decision and I lose the entire lung. Another wrong decision and I don’t come home at all.
She and two other surgeons, each renowned in their own right, worked in meticulous dissection. What preoperative imaging hadn’t fully revealed, they discovered when they got inside. What they thought was a straightforward removal became something else entirely. The mass hadn’t just attached. It had woven itself in, strangling surrounding structures, explaining six episodes of pneumonia over two prior years that had never made sense until that moment.
I’m alive because she didn’t flinch.
She has pioneered surgical techniques now used and taught around the world. Her methods have saved lives she will never meet. Her work lives in operating rooms on multiple continents.
Her bedside manner? Horrible.
Cold. Blunt. Not warm. Not soft. Not the kind of doctor who holds your hand and explains things gently. She told me what she needed to tell me, and she left.
And I have never been more grateful for a woman in my life.
Here’s what I’ve learned about women like her.
We get read wrong. Constantly.
The sharpness that looks like arrogance is precision. The bluntness that feels like coldness is focus. The edge that gets called difficult is the same edge that keeps people alive — in operating rooms, in boardrooms, in every room where the stakes were high and the welcome was conditional.
Women have had to be twice as good to get half the credit. That’s not a slogan. That’s a job description that got handed down through generations without anyone writing it on paper.
Think about what it took just to get here.
American women couldn’t vote until 1920. In Afghanistan today, they technically can — and practically can’t. The Taliban’s return in 2021 stripped women of rights they legally held. Male guardians required for travel. Violence at polling stations. The law says one thing. The street says something else entirely. In Pakistan, Nigeria, and across regions where Sharia law governs daily life, the gap between the legal right and the lived reality is wide enough to swallow a generation.
Having the right on paper and having the right in practice are two entirely different things.
Before 1974, a woman in the United States couldn’t get a credit card in her own name. Before 1988 — 1988 — she couldn’t take out a business loan without a male relative signing off on it. Husband. Father. Brother. The Women’s Business Ownership Act changed that. It was signed into law the year some of the women reading this were born.
Let that land.
Sara Blakely had the idea for Spanx in the late 1990s. She spent two years hearing no from every manufacturer she approached. She launched in 2000 with $5,000. Twelve years after women gained the legal right to get a business loan without a man’s signature. She built a billion-dollar company on an idea, $5,000, and a law that had only existed for twelve years.
My sister-in-law says it plainly: you can have it all. Just not at the same time. That’s not defeat. That’s the real math. The version that doesn’t get put on a motivational poster because it’s too honest and too true and too useful to fit in a caption.
And yet.
Anastasia Soare arrived in Los Angeles from communist Romania in 1989 with little English and almost no money. She learned English by watching Oprah on television. She had studied the Golden Ratio in art school — a mathematical principle of balance and proportion used by Leonardo da Vinci — and realized it could be applied to eyebrows. The salon she worked in didn’t believe it was a viable standalone service. In 1992 she rented her own room. Her brand peaked at a $3 billion valuation. Oprah and Michelle Obama call her the Queen of Eyebrows. Years after learning English from Oprah’s show, she shaped Oprah’s eyebrows on that same show.
Nobody saw it coming. She did.
Since 2015, the number of self-made female billionaires has jumped 81%. Their combined wealth now tops $1.7 trillion. Women-owned businesses represent 42% of all businesses in America, employing over 10 million people. Women now earn 58% of college degrees in the United States. More than half of medical school students are women.
Not because the doors were open. Because women got very good at opening doors.
That takes courage.
I built a company from zero to seven figures while fighting for my life. Literally fighting — the kind that happens in a war room with 3D models and three surgeons mapping a mass that had decided to weave itself around your pulmonary vein.
I’ve sat in rooms where I was sized up by my appearance, my hair, everything except what I actually knew. I’ve watched women get dismissed, talked over, and underestimated by people who would have benefited enormously from paying attention.
The women who made it through those rooms didn’t do it by softening their edges. They did it by being so undeniably good that the room had no choice but to adjust.
That’s what my surgeon did in medicine.
That’s what Ann did in Washington.
That’s what women have been doing in every field, for a very long time.
Here’s what I know about the women reading this.
Some of you have an idea. A business, a pivot, a next step you haven’t said out loud yet because the room didn’t feel safe enough or the timing didn’t feel right or you’re not sure it deserves air yet.
It deserves air.
The women who came before us didn’t fight for the right to get a business loan so that our ideas could stay quiet. They fought so we could walk into a room, sit at the table, and build something real.
If you’re ready to talk it through — to have someone sit across from you and be a genuine sounding board for what you’re building — that’s exactly what I do.
The first step is just saying it out loud.
A small group of founding members get access to everything — including me. That window is still open, but not for long.
Yesterday was International Women’s Day.
Today is the day after.
The flowers are on the table. The posts have scrolled past. The world is moving on.
But the women who are building right now — the ones in the OR at 6am, the ones running payroll, the ones who kept building when the room wasn’t ready for them — they didn’t stop yesterday and they’re not stopping today.
Becca said it best: go do the work that actually changes the next chapter.
Build something undeniable.
If this resonated, subscribe to The Jenn Files. I write about business, money, resilience, and grit — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken.
Nailed it and thank you