How arguments about agency, accountability and women’s biology could revive the very workplace stereotypes women spent decades fighting.

By Kyle Patrick Smith, CEO of HRKyle Services

I’m going to ask a question that I suspect will make some people uncomfortable:

Are some women, in their effort to support other women, unintentionally setting women back in the workplace?

I believe there’s a cultural tug of war happening right now, and I’m not sure we fully appreciate its potential consequences.

The Lindsay Clancy case crystallized it for me.

Clancy killed her three young children. Her defense argued that postpartum psychosis left her not criminally responsible for those actions. After her trial ended with a hung jury, it was reported that 11 of the 12 jurors favored finding her not guilty by reason of insanity.

Outside the courtroom, Clancy has attracted a remarkable amount of support, much of it from women. Some strongly believe her postpartum condition means she should not be held criminally responsible.

And people who disagree—particularly the male juror who refused to join the other 11—have faced significant criticism.

I’m not writing this article to retry Lindsay Clancy.

I’m writing it because I think the cultural argument surrounding her case has implications that extend far beyond one courtroom.

Especially for women.

Women Fought for Decades to Be Judged as Fully Capable Adults

Think about what women have spent generations fighting against in the workplace.

She’s too emotional.

She won’t be able to handle the pressure.

What if she gets pregnant?

She has young children. Will she really be committed?

Hormones affect women differently.

Maybe we shouldn’t put her in such a stressful position.

What happens when menopause starts affecting her?

Those ideas aren’t ancient history.

They’re exactly the kinds of assumptions women have fought to eliminate from hiring, promotion, compensation and leadership decisions.

And rightly so.

Women demanded to be evaluated as individuals.

They demanded that employers stop assuming their biology determined their capabilities.

They demanded equal opportunity to lead organizations, manage crises, make consequential decisions and occupy positions carrying enormous responsibility.

They demanded agency.

They demanded equality.

And equality necessarily includes accountability.

That’s why I’m struggling with what I’m seeing today.

You Can’t Pull the Rope Both Ways Without Consequences

On one side, we’re telling employers:

Don’t make assumptions about a woman’s capabilities because of pregnancy.

Don’t assume motherhood makes her less reliable.

Don’t assume hormonal changes affect her ability to lead.

Don’t treat menopause as evidence that she can’t handle a demanding position.

Don’t assume a woman experiencing a mental-health condition can’t make consequential decisions.

Judge the individual.

Absolutely.

But then, in an extraordinarily public case, some of the same cultural voices are arguing that a condition uniquely associated with childbirth can so completely compromise a woman’s judgment and agency that she should bear no criminal responsibility for killing three children.

I’m not arguing here about whether that legal standard was met in Lindsay Clancy’s specific case.

I’m asking something bigger:

Do we understand the message we’re creating?

Because we don’t get to control where cultural ideas travel.

Employers Are Listening Too

This is where the workplace becomes important.

Employers don’t live in a separate universe.

CEOs, executives, managers and HR professionals hear these conversations.

And workplace discrimination in 2026 rarely sounds like:

“Women can’t handle leadership.”

It’s usually much more subtle.

Imagine a company choosing its next senior executive.

There are two highly qualified candidates. One is a man. One is a woman.

The position involves extraordinary pressure, long hours, constant decision-making and responsibility for thousands of employees.

The woman has young children.

Nobody says:

“She’s a woman, so let’s choose him.”

Instead, someone wonders:

“That’s an enormous amount of pressure.”

“She already has so much going on.”

“Maybe this isn’t the right time for her.”

“We don’t want to put her in a position that’s going to be overwhelming.”

“We’re actually trying to look out for her.”

And there it is.

A stereotype dressed up as compassion.

This Is the Unintended Consequence That Concerns Me

Women have worked incredibly hard to convince employers not to generalize about them based upon uniquely female experiences.

Pregnancy doesn’t define competence.

Motherhood doesn’t define commitment.

Menopause doesn’t define judgment.

Hormones don’t define temperament.

And a medical diagnosis doesn’t automatically define someone’s ability to perform a job.

Those principles matter.

But cultural messages matter too.

When some women aggressively promote the idea that a female-specific condition can remove another woman’s agency—even to the point of eliminating criminal responsibility for extraordinarily consequential behavior—they need to consider the second-order effects of that argument.

Because someone making a hiring or promotion decision may hear something entirely different:

Women can become unpredictable because of childbirth.

Women with young children carry additional risk.

Women’s hormones can dramatically affect their judgment.

Women may respond differently under extreme stress.

Of course those are unfair generalizations.

That’s exactly my point.

Women spent decades fighting them.

Why would we want to give them new life?

Support Doesn’t Require Abandoning Accountability

There’s something else about this conversation that bothers me.

Disagreeing with a woman isn’t attacking women.

Holding a woman accountable isn’t misogyny.

Questioning an argument involving a woman isn’t evidence that someone lacks compassion.

And a man disagreeing with women about a woman’s accountability doesn’t automatically make his opinion illegitimate.

Yet increasingly, difficult conversations about women can become framed in precisely those terms.

That’s counterproductive.

Equality means women get to succeed.

Women get to fail.

Women get to make brilliant decisions.

Women get to make terrible decisions.

Women deserve compassion.

Women deserve accommodation when legally and appropriately required.

And women can be held accountable.

That’s what treating women as fully autonomous adults actually looks like.

Women Should Be Leading This Conversation

This is why I think women themselves should be particularly concerned about where this goes.

Supporting women is important.

But supporting women cannot mean automatically defending women.

Those aren’t the same thing.

There is nothing pro-woman about creating a cultural expectation that women should be judged by a different standard of agency or accountability.

And there is certainly nothing pro-woman about reinforcing the idea that women’s biology makes their judgment inherently less predictable.

Women fought too hard to escape those assumptions.

The workplace finally—although certainly imperfectly—has moved toward judging women as individuals rather than treating pregnancy, motherhood, hormones or family responsibilities as proxies for competence.

We should be extraordinarily careful about anything that moves that backward.

Equality Has to Include Accountability

Here’s where I ultimately land.

I don’t know what was happening inside Lindsay Clancy’s mind when she killed her children. Neither do the people arguing about this case on social media.

That’s why we have medical experts, evidence, judges and juries.

But I do know this:

The cultural conversation we’re having around her case matters.

When some women argue that supporting women requires accepting diminished agency because of a female-specific condition—and attack people, including men, who question that conclusion—they may believe they’re advancing compassion.

I worry they’re inadvertently advancing something else.

An old idea that women have spent generations trying to defeat:

That women’s biology makes them fundamentally different when it comes to judgment, pressure, responsibility and accountability.

Employers should never make that assumption.

But we shouldn’t pretend employers aren’t exposed to the cultural messages surrounding them.

That’s the tug of war nobody is talking about.

Women deserve compassion.

Women deserve appropriate accommodations.

Women deserve equal opportunity.

Women deserve to be judged as individuals.

And women deserve to be viewed as fully capable adults responsible for their decisions—unless the evidence in an individual case establishes otherwise.

Because equality without accountability isn’t equality.

And if our efforts to protect women ultimately give employers another reason to question women’s capacity, reliability or judgment, women won’t have moved forward.

They’ll have been pulled backward.

And the cruel irony may be that some of the people pulling hardest on the rope believed they were helping women all along.