This morning I went for a walk with my friend Grace. We talked about body wisdom, about high-achieving women who choose to stay home as homemakers, and – as we often do – about gender equality. It got me thinking about something I’ve been sitting with for years.

I never thought much about gender equality until my early twenties, when I met my Australian boyfriend – now my husband. Back home in Poland, it simply wasn’t a conversation we had. Not because women were suppressed, but because, in a strange way, the question didn’t feel urgent. Women were revered.

A Country That Honours Women

Poland is a nation rooted in Catholic tradition, and at the heart of that tradition is Mary – the Mother of God – who was named Queen of Poland by a King John II Casimir Vasa in 1656. No one has ever questioned this. No one has campaigned to replace her with a king. There’s something quietly powerful in that.

Growing up, Women’s Day was a genuine celebration. My male cousins and uncles would come to our home and bring my mother flowers. My sister and I would receive chocolates. No one rolled their eyes. No woman felt the need to dismiss the gesture or call it tokenistic. There was real joy – and real gratitude.

And because that gratitude was expressed openly, the men felt appreciated rather than guilted. So they kept giving flowers – on birthdays, on Name Days, on Valentine’s Day – not out of obligation, but because it felt good. For everyone.

The Equality Conversation That Stopped Me Cold

When I first arrived in Australia and got to know my then-boyfriend better, I noticed something. He didn’t open doors. He didn’t help me into my jacket. Small things, maybe – but things that had always felt natural to me, like a man’s gentle acknowledgement of a woman.

When I mentioned it, his response floored me: “But you’re fighting for equality. So this is it.”

I had heard about gender equality in passing, but this was the first time it had been turned on me as an argument – as a reason not to be thoughtful or courteous. As though equality meant erasing all tenderness between men and women.

Later, when he visited my family in Poland, something shifted. He saw that the men there weren’t opening doors to prove something, or out of some patriarchal performance. It was simply a natural, warm way of being. No one felt diminished. Everyone felt good. He softened. He changed.

But then we moved back to Australia, and slowly – nature or nurture – he drifted back to old habits. Which brings me to something I think about a lot, now that we have three sons.

The Problem Isn’t Men. It’s What We’ve Taught Each Other.

I want to say something that might be unpopular: I think many Australian women carry a deep, unexamined wound around worthiness.

I’ve heard women say they “don’t like flowers.” I’ve heard men in offices proudly announce they didn’t buy their partners anything for Valentine’s Day because “she doesn’t care about that stuff.”

WHAT?! I don’t believe it.

I think many women have never been gifted flowers by their fathers. Never watched their mothers receive them with joy. So they’ve never felt worthy of that kind of tenderness. And rather than risk the hurt of not receiving, they armour up. They say they don’t want it. They mock the occasion. They talk themselves out of deserving softness.

And here’s the heartbreaking part – I’ve also heard women talk about themselves with real cruelty. A grandmother calling herself an “old bag” in front of her grandsons. What does that teach those boys about women? About age? About how to speak to the women in their lives?

Equality Doesn’t Mean Becoming Harder

When I look at what “equality” has sometimes come to mean in the culture around me, I see women becoming more like men — angrier, more aggressive, more defended – as though that is the path to parity.

But that’s not the equality I want.

I am a woman. I am beautiful. I am nurturing. I am caring. I am a creatrix – a creator of life on this earth. That is not less than anything a man is. It is extraordinary in its own right.

If we don’t start seeing ourselves that way, no one else will.

We teach people how to treat us – not through demands or fights, but through how we carry ourselves. Through how we speak about ourselves. Through the quiet confidence of a woman who knows she is worthy of kindness, of flowers, of a door held open, of being seen.

And when a man does show up with that tenderness – we can receive it with grace, and let him know it matters. Not because he’s obligated, but because appreciation is how love grows in both directions.

What I’m Trying to Give My Sons

We have three boys. Raising them in a culture where this kind of reverence is rare – where basic manners can feel like a foreign language — is one of the hardest things I navigate as a mother.

What I say to them is mostly theory if there’s no daily modelling. So I try to be the example. I try to be a woman who receives gracefully, who speaks about herself and other women with warmth, who doesn’t perform toughness as a substitute for strength.

Because real strength, I think, is softness that knows its own worth.

True equality, to me, isn’t women becoming like men, or men becoming like women. It’s both — men and women — learning to honour each other again. With flowers. With open doors. With kind words. With gratitude for the extraordinary things each brings to this world.

It starts with us, women, deciding we deserve it.

Written after a morning walk with a good friend, thinking about Poland, Australia, and everything in between.