By Ayo Onikoyi

Every March, the global theater of corporate appreciation pulls back its velvet curtain. We are treated to a shimmering gallery of the “Firsts,” the “Top 40 Under 40,” and the “Glass-Ceiling Smashers.” We are told to look at these women these outliers and see in them the pinnacle of our progress.

But I am tired of the shimmering. As a woman who sits in a C-suite, I am here to argue that our obsessive celebration of the “Exceptional Woman” is not an act of empowerment. It is an act of erasure.

By centering International Women’s Day on the “Amazing Woman,” we have inadvertently codified a dangerous message: that a woman’s value is conditional upon her output, her accolades, or her proximity to traditional structures of power. We have turned a day that began as a gritty, socialist labor movement the 1908 march of needle-trade workers into a curated talent show where the only ticket to entry is excellence.

The Tyranny of the Exception

When we celebrate only the achieving woman, we participate in what Mikki Kendall describes in Hood Feminism as a failure of imagination. We focus on the “shoppers” at the top while ignoring the “laborers” at the bottom. We treat the successful woman as an “exception” to her gender, rather than a representative of it.

In her seminal work, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously imagined the life of “Shakespeare’s Sister”—a woman with all the genius of the bard but none of the opportunity. Today, we still fall into the trap of only mourning the lost genius. We forget to celebrate the sister who simply lived.

If we only celebrate the women who “transcend” their circumstances, we are subtly telling the woman who is simply surviving hers that she is invisible. We are telling the mother in the quiet corner of a village, or the junior staff member navigating her first corporate storm, that her womanhood is a waiting room for a “success” that may never come.

Storms, Sunlight, and the Right to Be

At Transactworld Digital, we recently discussed what womanhood means to us. The definitions weren’t about revenue targets or board seats. They were about the duality of carrying both storms and sunlight.

Womanhood is a dynamic, ever-changing state of being. It is the ability to be a force of impact in a community without ever needing a press release to validate it. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir noted that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” If we accept that womanhood is a process of becoming, why do we only celebrate the finish line?

The storm is just as vital as the sunlight. The struggle is as sacred as the success. When we only highlight the “sunlight” of achievement, we leave millions of women shivering in the “storms” of their everyday lives, feeling as though they have failed because they haven’t yet “smashed” anything.

The Call for Everywoman

The “Amazing Woman” narrative is a capitalist appropriation of a human right. It suggests that a woman must earn her visibility through extraordinary labor.

I don’t want to see another billboard of a woman in a power suit unless it is accompanied by a celebration of the woman in the apron, the woman in the hospital gown, the woman in the classroom, and the woman in the quiet, desperate throes of reinvention.

We must move beyond “exceptionalism.” We must celebrate the Woman Everywhere.We must celebrate her not because she is a “first,” but because she is a force. We must celebrate her not for what she does, but for who she is, We must celebrate the innovation that happens in the kitchen just as loudly as the innovation that happens in the tech hub.

If International Women’s Day is to mean anything in 2026, let it be the day we stop demanding that women be “extraordinary” just to be seen. Let us recognize that being a woman carrying the storms and the sunlight, being the dynamic, shifting foundation of our society is, in itself, the greatest achievement of all.

This shift in perspective is the true heartbeat of this year’s “Give to Gain” theme, if you ask me.

In a world obsessed with individual trophies, we must realize that giving is not a subtraction but the most powerful form of compounding growth.

When we give visibility, resources, and celebration to the “Everywoman”—not just the one on the pedestal, but also the one in the trenches we gain a foundation that is unshakable.

By giving every woman the grace to be seen in her “storms and sunlight,” we gain a collective resilience that moves us all forward.

We give the spotlight to the many to gain a future where no one is left behind.

Happy International Women’s Day to every woman, everywhere. You are enough, exactly as you ar