‘I can’t do this anymore’ says a girl who’s not only going to do it but do it well.

She reaches her limit, convinced she can’t go any further and then she does. She writes the essay, cleans the house, folds the washing, and wakes up to do it again. It’s not an exception but a pattern that runs quietly through communities, workplaces, and homes, most clearly in the women who raised us. For them, determination isn’t a choice; it’s survival, and somehow, it still turns into excellence.

The numbers reflect this reality. According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, women have outnumbered men in higher education for years. In 2024, they made up 57.3% of graduates, 603,840 women in total, and were more likely to complete their studies and earn a first or upper second-class degree. Eighty-one percent of female graduates achieved top classifications, compared to seventy-six percent of male gradutes.

But academic success tells only part of the story. After graduation, men are still more likely to enter highly skilled employment or further study. Data from the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that male graduates earn around 9% more than female graduates one year after finishing university. A decade later, that gap widens to 31%. The pattern emerges early: women graduate in greater numbers, perform better academically, enter a labour market that rewards them unequally, and yet still build remarkable careers.

This determination extends far beyond education. The UK Community Life Survey shows that women volunteer informally at higher rates than men, even though formal volunteering is equal between genders. The quiet work of community-building, checking on neighbours, organising support networks, often falls to women, layered on top of their professional and domestic responsibilities.

Growing up watching this creates something complex. It isn’t taught directly, but absorbed: that exhaustion is normal, that juggling the impossible is expected, and that saying you can’t do it all is just the first step before doing it all anyway. You watch your mother work full time, raise children, maintain a household, maybe return to education, all while holding together more than seems humanly possible. The message isn’t explicit, but it’s inherited.

Tressie McMillan Cottom captures this dynamic in Thick, her essays on navigating systems not built for you. She writes about the calculations Black women make to be taken seriously, the extra labour required just to access the opportunities others receive automatically. Cottom doesn’t present this as inspirational, but as a tax: an ongoing cost of existing in structures designed to exclude.

The statistics on higher education only confirm what was never in doubt, women’s capability. They graduate at higher rates, achieve better grades, and consistently demonstrate academic excellence. Yet this excellence rarely translates into equal workplace outcomes. The system recognises women’s achievements through credentials but undermines them through compensation. The response has often been to work harder, achieve more, and prove capability repeatedly, as if the issue were personal effort rather than institutional design. There’s something moving about watching women persist despite barriers. But there’s also something troubling about why those barriers persist at all. If capability determined success, the data would tell a different story. Women outperform men academically and contribute profoundly to communities, yet the rewards remain unequal. The numbers make it clear: the problem isn’t merit, but structure.

Our mothers modelled persistence because survival demanded it. They worked multiple jobs, raised children, maintained households, returned to education, and built community networks while being excluded from formal power. Their determination wasn’t a choice, it was necessity. Admiring it is natural; inheriting it as expectation is another matter. There’s an unspoken pressure to manage the same impossibilities, to treat exhaustion as normal, to continue the cycle simply because that’s what’s always been done.

But perhaps the lesson isn’t in the endurance itself, it’s in what that endurance reveals. Women graduate more, achieve higher grades, and contribute endlessly, all while earning less and carrying greater burdens. They succeed despite inequity, not because of it. As Audre Lorde wrote in Sister Outsider, strength can become weaponised against those expected to embody it. When survival requires constant resilience, resilience gets mistaken for inevitability. The ability to endure becomes an excuse not to fix what makes endurance necessary.

Today’s generation of women continues this pattern while also questioning it. They are graduating, building careers, raising families, and contributing to their communities, while asking whether resilience must always look like exhaustion. Whether success must require self-sacrifice. Whether determination must mean acceptance of unequal terms.

The data is consistent: women make up 57.3% of higher education graduates. They achieve better grades. Yet a year after graduation, men earn 9% more, and ten years later, 31% more. Women volunteer more, contribute more, and still receive less. The contradiction couldn’t be clearer.

Perhaps the story isn’t about how women keep doing everything despite obstacles, but about why those obstacles remain. A society that demands twice the work for half the recognition doesn’t have a talent gap, it has a design flaw. Resilience may be admirable, but it shouldn’t be required for basic equity.The mothers who managed impossible workloads did it because they had to, not to inspire. Survival left no alternatives. Learning from their determination doesn’t mean inheriting their exhaustion. Admiration should spark transformation, not repetition. The question isn’t how they did it, but why they had to.

Women have always been capable. The evidence is overwhelming, graduation rates, academic results, professional success. The real question is what they should be expected to sacrifice to prove it, and why exhaustion is still treated as normal. The pattern of saying “I can’t” and then doing it anyway isn’t proof of innate resilience, it’s evidence of limited choice. It exists because stopping wasn’t an option. Recognising this doesn’t mean accepting it for the next generation.

Women will continue to achieve. But perhaps true progress lies in changing the conditions that make relentless endurance the norm. Maybe determination won’t always mean pushing past the breaking point. Maybe saying “I can’t” will one day be met with understanding, not expectation. And maybe strength will be measured not by how much women can endure, but by how much less they have to.

Written by Vanessa Twerefou