Are Women Really So Replaceable?
I watched a CEO march every employee in the company into the parking lot and fire them with a bullhorn.
All of them. Every single one. Then he started calling names.
If your name was called, you walked back into the building. You’d been “rehired.”
If your name wasn’t called, you were directed to a corner of the lot, marched through a side entrance, processed, and shown the door.
I was the consultant. I had nothing to do with it. Yet as I watched, I noticed that teams were losing key women. Far fewer men too.
That night, when I walked out of the building, a woman who’d worked for me tried to run me over with her car. Her shock was searching for an outlet and that turned out to be me.
That moment has stayed in my mind for decades. Not because of the car, though that’ll get your attention. Because of what it represented. A leader who treated people, especially women, like inventory. Disposable. Replaceable.
That was one CEO with a bullhorn.
Fast forward to April 1st of this year. Oracle fired an estimated 30,000 people with a two-sentence email at 6 a.m. No call from a manager. No meeting with HR. By the time employees finished reading, they were locked out of everything—email, Slack, files, badge systems. Gone.
Oracle’s net income was up 95% last quarter. $6.13 billion. The bullhorn CEO at least had the nerve to look people in the eye.
The disposability is staggering.
It’s hitting women like a freight train.
Women Are Hit the Hardest, Yet Again
This goes beyond billionaire tech bros cleaning house to increase their stock value. The layoffs are hitting hardest in the industries and roles where women are the workforce.
Healthcare is the largest employer in America. Eight out of ten healthcare workers are women. 88% of nurses are women. Healthcare is being gutted:
Over 51 Hospital Systems announced layoffs in 2025 alone. Hospitals are cutting nurses, closing clinics, slashing entire departments.
Medicaid just took an $800 billion cut over the next decade. Medicare is next.
That’s not a budget adjustment. That’s pulling the floor out from under the industry where women have built careers for generations.
The federal government—the nation’s largest single employer—has announced 300,000 layoffs, with 9% of its workforce eliminated by March 2026.
Women made up the majority of workers in every single department targeted for the biggest cuts.
Veterans Affairs ->64% women. Education-> 63%. Treasury->61%. HUD->59%.
Some were fired while on maternity leave. Some were told their performance was “inadequate” with no evidence required.
In tech, 45% of recent layoffs hit women. Yet women are only 26% of the workforce. The departments that go first are the departments where women work; HR, recruiting, administration, customer-facing roles.
The list keeps growing. UPS is cutting 30,000 jobs. Nestlé is eliminating 16,000. Since January 1st, over 1,600 companies have announced mass layoffs.
Overall, January 2026 saw 108,435 layoffs in the US alone, the worst January since 2009.
Nobody is safe from the disposability machine.
Men who spent decades building expertise are watching their careers end in a two-sentence email too. Seems the bro culture might be shifting to become the billionaire bro culture… we shall see.
Here’s the thing. Women aren’t just losing jobs. We’re losing every support structure that made it possible to have them in the first place.
The Squeeze
Women are feeling the squeeze from every direction at once.
DEI programs: Remember the programs that were supposed to level the playing field? Being dismantled by a significant percentage of corporations. Not all, there are still some companies with souls and common sense. Still:
79% of women believe these rollbacks will hurt their opportunities.
89% say pay equity will take a hit, as if we’d ever reached that goal.
84% expect less protection against bias and harassment.
Half of all women say the anxiety has already changed their career plans.
We’re already reverting to our old school training to play it safe, instead of reaching higher.
Remote work: The flexibility that empowered women with families to show up in the workforce at record numbers is being revoked.
Full-time in-office mandates among Fortune 500 companies nearly doubled in just six months last year.
Women’s prime-age workforce participation hit an all-time high of 78.4%. It’s already falling.
Nearly half a million women left their jobs in the first half of 2025.
Economists are already warning of another “she-cession.”
Childcare funding is drying up. Centers are closing. Costs are climbing. The infrastructure that let women work is crumbling at the exact moment women need it most.
When women get laid off? We walk away with less severance than men for the same job.
Every single door that was propped open for women over the last decade is being quietly closed. All at the same time.
If you think that’s a coincidence, I have a parking lot to show you.
The Game The Boys Club Knows
None of this is accidental.
There are rules to how this system works.
Rules about which roles are considered “essential” and which are considered overhead.
Rules about who gets protected when budgets tighten and who gets sacrificed.
Rules about whose work is visible and whose work disappears into the background until it’s gone and everything falls apart.
Rules about who’s in the club, and who’s not.
Women weren’t specifically taught their set of rules. We were taught to work harder. Prove ourselves. Believe that merit wins. Believe that we have to prove ourselves over and over and over again. For some of us, we were taught we have to put up with the bro club comments and jokes and plain old nastiness, just to have a job.
The Bottom Line
I’m not going to wrap this in a bow.
What I will say is this. After 35 years in boardrooms and war rooms and parking lots where people’s lives were detonated for a stock bump, I’ve learned one thing that changed everything for me.
You can’t win the game if the rules are stacked against you.
Step one is seeing the reality. Clearly. Understanding the truth and accepting just that No more hope springs eternal. forget the stories we’ve been told about how things are supposed to work.
They don’t work that way, if they ever did.
The second step?
We change the game.
____
I really really wanna hear from you. I am DONE with this BS. I’ve seen the cycle too many times. I’m about to start a Rebellion. How do YOU feel? What’s your take? Care to share YOUR stories?
Together we can change the rules of this game, once and for all.