I posted a question in a women’s business group recently. I asked whether there was business language that irked people because it diminished businesses run by women. Side hustle. Extra income. That kind of thing.
A man replied. His comment was thoughtful, well-written, and completely beside the point I was making. He said that a lot of women minimise what they’re building because calling it a side hustle feels safer than admitting they actually want freedom and ownership. Words matter, he said. The way we describe what we’re building usually reflects what we believe we deserve from it.
Fine. Not wrong, exactly. But I looked at his profile. His brand is built around a single premise: he helps women say what they really mean under pressure.
I asked him why he targets women as his clients, and what specific experience or knowledge he has that specifically benefits women.
He hasn’t answered yet. I’m not holding my breath.
There’s a difference between serving a group and making their deficits your niche.
I serve women and trans people. I want the benefit of what I do to flow to them. I’m not fishing for trans clients by claiming special insight into trans experience — I just want them to know the door is open. Those are different things.
What this man is doing is different again. He hasn’t just decided that women are welcome at his table. He’s built a brand on a claim about women — that they have a specific problem with saying what they mean under pressure — and positioned himself as the solution to that problem.
That’s not an open door. That’s a product built on a named deficit. And the named deficit is gendered.
Women already know what they mean.
This is the part that actually made me angry.
“I help women say what they really mean under pressure” contains an assumption so embedded it almost slips past: that women don’t already know what they mean. That there’s something locked inside them that needs unlocking. That under pressure, women’s communication breaks down in a particular way that requires specialist intervention.
Nobody is building a brand around helping men say what they really mean under pressure. Because self-expression under pressure is not framed as a men’s problem. The deficit is assigned to women specifically. And then someone — in this case, a man — builds a business around fixing it.
56% of women have experienced mansplaining at work, leaving them feeling undervalued and less likely to speak up. — Forbes, 2024
This is the same mechanism as diet culture. Name a problem in a specific body. Sell the fix. The fact that the problem being named is women’s voices rather than women’s bodies doesn’t make it less of the same thing.
The gendered niche deserves scrutiny.
I am not saying men cannot work with women. I am not saying that a man cannot have genuine insight, useful skills, or something real to offer a woman running a business. None of that is the point.
The point is that building a brand specifically around women’s presumed deficits — women’s inability to speak up, women’s tendency to minimise, what women “really mean” — is a significant claim. It says: I have identified something wrong with women, I understand it, and I can fix it.
Anyone making that claim deserves to be asked what specifically qualifies them to name this as a women’s problem. What experience do they have of being a woman under pressure? What research informs the framing? What have they learned from women themselves that led them to this position, rather than to the more obvious observation that the systems creating pressure for women are worth examining?
These are not hostile questions. They’re the questions you’d ask anyone who had built a niche around a group’s experience rather than a skill set. The answers should be specific. If they’re not, the niche isn’t built on expertise. It’s built on a market.
The market being women is not neutral.
Women are an enormous and underserved market. There is money in positioning yourself as someone who understands them, helps them, unlocks them. This is not a conspiracy — it’s just how markets work. But it means that “I serve women” has become a positioning statement that can be adopted without the substance behind it, because the demand is real and the scrutiny is low.
The scrutiny should be higher.
Not because men are automatically suspect. Because the claim being made — that you have special insight into women’s experience, communication, psychology, or capacity — is a large claim, and large claims require evidence. Especially when the claim involves a group that has spent considerable time being told by people outside that group what their problem is and how to fix it.
The question I asked Steve was not rhetorical. It’s the question worth asking anyone whose niche is built on a group’s presumed deficit rather than a genuine skill.
Why you? What do you actually know? And who told you this was the problem?
If this made you think — or argue with me — I want to know. DM me on Instagram, find me in the Facebook group, or drop an email to janelle@buildwithmatriarch.com.