Significance
The women who have everything are sometimes the loneliest. There is a reason, and a remedy.
Since the second wave told women they could want the same things men wanted (professionally) and proved it by making it largely true, ambitious women have been instructed in a single craft: how to build something that can be measured. Titles, salaries, square footage, board seats, exits, and media coverage that still feels like proof. The instruction was correct, of course. It produced a generation of women whose lives hold up under any scrutiny, our careers, our households, our children, our bodies, our philanthropic portfolios, all of it documented, all of it impressive.
The numbers tell the story with satisfying bluntness. In 1971, the year Statistics Canada began tracking women in the paid workforce in earnest, women made up roughly 37% of Canada’s working population. We were concentrated overwhelmingly in what were then called the five Cs (caring, clerical, catering, cashiering, cleaning), in fact senior management was not a category that required a women’s column. By the early 1980s, the numbers had begun to move and did so with gathering speed as the second-wave generation finished degrees and entered the workforce in numbers that had no precedent. Through the 1990s, the pipeline filled. Women outpaced men in university enrollment. Women entered law, medicine, and finance in cohorts that would have been unimaginable twenty years earlier. We earned more, managed more, owned more.
By 2001, women held roughly 38% of middle management positions at Canadian corporations and 24% of senior leadership roles. By 2021, a single working lifetime later, those numbers had moved to 42% and 31% respectively. Hourly wages grew 21% in real terms between 2006 and 2024, outpacing men’s growth over the same period.
The infrastructure of an ambitious woman’s life expanded accordingly: children raised, parents cared for, households managed, businesses built, boards joined, marathons entered, galas chaired, books written, foundations endowed. We did everything, and then we added more.
My sister once gifted me a mug that said, “Like a Boss.” Damn right. We earned that mug. We earned it ten times over.
Then in 2024, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce published its calculation that at the current rate of progress, gender parity in the Canadian boardroom will not be achieved until 2129. That was an indictment of the pace, of the resistance, of the distance still to travel. It is also, a freaking monument. The fact that there is a rate of progress to calculate in the first place, that parity is a destination that can be named and measured, that the conversation has moved from whether to when. This is the result of fifty years of the instruction; it is triumph and embarrassment at the same time.
The mug told one story. The data tells two.
According to Statistics Canada’s Canadian Social Survey, 15 percent of Canadian women reported feeling lonely always or often, compared to 11 percent of men. The Angus Reid Institute found that four in ten Canadians say they wish they had someone to talk to but don’t; among women, that figure climbs to six in ten. Women in professional life occupy a specific risk profile: high income, high independence, and structurally reduced connection. The women at the top are sometimes the loneliest.
There is a reason for this that the data doesn’t name directly. When you are powerful, you are needed. Consulted, relied upon, deferred to, sought out. You are, in the most literal sense, an asset, valued for your function, your capability, your output. This is not a complaint. It is the direct and logical consequence of having built something impressive. But being needed is not the same as being known. Being valued is not the same as being seen. And a life structured around your function, however remarkable that function is, will eventually produce a specific and rarely named loneliness: the loneliness of the most capable person in the room. The commodity of competence.
The difference between being connected and being surrounded is not always visible from the outside. But it is worth sitting with. Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s global meta-analysis found that lacking meaningful social connection carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Come on. A day!
Susan Pinker’s The Village Effect is more specific still: what protects us is not connection in the abstract (i.e not phone contact, LinkedIn, or a board meeting with fifteen people who need something from you) but face-to-face contact. The specific, warm, in-the-room kind, with people who know and are known to you.
Loneliness is not a mood, it is an unnecessary mortality risk.
The First Axis…
We have been building, for the entire duration of an ambitious life, on a single axis of value. Call it the first axis.
It is the axis along which one accumulates: capability, accomplishment, security, reputation, expertise, taste. Achievement is its principal currency — broad enough to spend in every room. Having it all means doing it all, and doing it all means that even our service, even our love, even our generosity is folded into the architecture of a life we are building to withstand scrutiny.
Purpose is in fashion. Self-care is a brand. Even happiness, in the contemporary self-help understanding, has become a first-axis pursuit: a state to be optimized like VO2 Max, or skin. We therapy-app, sleep-track, and gratitude-journal our way toward a version of interior flourishing that can be documented and refined. More, better, best self.
This is an entirely coherent project, and that is precisely the problem. When the project succeeds (when the interior does, in fact, feel like flourishing) it is still just you. The first axis cannot tell you what you are to the people standing just outside it. Generosity, presence, witness, loyalty, the ability to truly see another person: these virtues cannot be practiced alone. They require someone else to complete them. And the more fluent we become in the language of building ourselves, the easier it becomes to forget that we were always already part of something larger.
Paradox…
At some point, many of us run out of the next thing to want. Not depression. Not failure. Not hormones (though we will be told it might be any or all of these), no, something stranger: the absence of the next question.
Contemporary culture reads this as a personal failure or as a hormonal artifact, or as the inevitable hangover of a life lived at full throttle. The advice is always more of the same: pivot, rebrand, sabbatical, memoir, find your calling. The self-help shelf is the first axis applied to crisis, which is to say it offers more accumulation, more optimization, more inward excavation, when the problem is the axis itself. We are handed a sharper instrument for the wrong measurement.
What we have encountered at this moment is not a failure of imagination. It is the outer limit of the first axis, the place where that particular instrument stops being able to measure what matters. The question forming is not the familiar one: does my life feel worthwhile from the inside? It is something older and more unsettling: what am I to the people in the rooms I walk into? What do I leave when I leave? These are not first-axis questions. They belong to the second axis entirely.
The Second Axis…
The second axis is relational. It is the virtue of being able to notice and appreciate what you’re already a part of, the deliberate practice of being in relation. Not building new relationships from scratch. Deepening, noticing, and inhabiting the ones already there. Seeing the people you already move through the world with (really seeing them) and letting that change the quality of your presence.
The currency of the second axis is what happens between people when we are fully in the room. It is significance. Researchers call it mattering: the felt sense, in another person, that they are seen. Not for their function, not for what they provide, but for who they are.
Mattering turns out to be one of the strongest independent predictors of wellbeing, stronger in many studies than income or status. It predicts life satisfaction and protection against the exact kind of loneliness the data described earlier. It is distinct from achievement and from self-esteem, and it cannot be built alone: which is exactly what makes it the architecture of the second axis rather than the first.
The women showing up in the loneliness statistics are not women with no one around them. They are women who are around others constantly and still feel invisible. Needed by everyone, known by almost no one.
The rooms we occupy are structured around what we can do. Significance is structured around who we are. The distinction matters because it explains exactly how a woman can be at the centre of every room she walks into and still be lonely enough for it to register in a mortality study. And why the remedy is not more connection in the broad sense but a different quality of it. The reciprocal, face-to-face, genuinely present kind that our bodies are specifically designed for.
Significance is not charisma, warmth, or executive presence. Those are first-axis ideas. They are about how we are perceived, how our authority reads, what our power communicates. Significance runs in the other direction. It is not about the impression we make, it’s about what we leave. It is what remains in a room after the capable woman has left it.
The challenge for those of us whose reward system is built around will, effort and the deliberate closing of gaps, is that significance cannot be “achieved”. Unlike all those first axis accolades, significance accumulates the way a reputation does, sideways, over time, and in other people’s experience. In other words: it is not the woman trying to be significant who is significant. It is the woman trying to be present, genuinely, repeatedly, without agenda. She becomes significant as a byproduct of that practice. Bad news for the #GurlBoss – significance is rarely visible to the person building it.
Nobody puts that on a mug. But I would argue it is the more interesting project, and the one most of us have been circling for a while.
This is the first essay in a series on significance, presence, and an ambitious life.
Next: the practice