The Biology of Becoming, Part VIII: Play to Win

There is a sentence I keep returning to when I think about women and money, women and entrepreneurship, and women and access. And why all three relationships still seem so stuck, even now, even after decades of progress, even after women have entered boardrooms, built businesses, outperformed in classrooms, inherited more wealth, created more wealth, and demonstrated in every measurable way that capability was never the issue.

The sentence is this:

Women do not struggle with money because they are bad at it – they struggle because money has too often been taught, timed, priced, rewarded, discussed and structured as though the course of a woman’s life was a footnote instead of half the species.

That distinction matters, because the moment we miss it, we tend to turn it into an anecdotal conversation about self-improvement and personality, instead of systemic one about value and access.

And the data, inconvenient and persistent as it is, keeps pointing in the same direction. In Canada, women still earn about 88 cents for every dollar earned by men, and among prime working-age adults the ratio is 89 cents on the dollar. The gap has narrowed, yes, but narrowed still doesn’t mean closed, and over time a gap like that does not merely affect lifestyle in the moment. It dramatically affects a person’s ability to compound gains, to have relatable risk capacity, retirement security, and a deeply rooted sense of freedom.

At the level of entrepreneurship, the pattern repeats in a slightly different costume. The share of majority women-owned small and medium-sized enterprises in Canada rose from 15.6% in 2017 to 17.8% in 2023, which is real progress, and women are equal owners in another 17.2% of SMEs. But women entrepreneurs still tend to request less capital, rely more on personal savings and friends and family, and receive slightly lower approval rates from financial institutions. In other words, I’m proud to report they are entering the arena, but still doing so with lighter armour and fewer sponsors.

I can completely relate to this, and yet I know just how fortunate I was. When I was just 30 years old, I applied for and was granted the largest loan I’ll ever get, which to this day is the most money I’ve ever borrowed and ever will. Two things are interesting about this to me:

• I was granted the loan because I was already documented as the sole successor to my father’s established business and used the loan to buy his business from him. We collectively had the support of the parent company behind us to effectively underwrite the loan, and his business was a known quantity. Read this as: I had two old world sponsors that illuminated this bridge for me to cross from being a young woman in the old world, to being a young woman in the old world with money, ownership and access. And –

• Even though I consider the figure associated with this loan to be huge, it would not seem huge to many if not most male business owners. In a sense, I am aware that I can only push so far in one lifetime, because as a gender we are just learning how to iteratively think bigger and bigger to claim money, ownership and access based on what we care about, and what we’re genuinely excellent at. Still, in my head the words of Robert Frost play on repeat:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.

I chose the one less travelled.

And that has made all the difference.”

So when I say “Play to win,” what do I mean?

Well, I mean a lot of things. But first, I do not mean women need to become harder, colder, louder, more performatively aggressive, or more willing to contort themselves into business models that were designed around male earning patterns, male time horizons, and male-coded assumptions about risk.

I mean something more precise.

I mean women need to understand the game they are in, the biology they bring to it, the stories they have inherited about who gets to wield money without apology, and the market structures that still quietly punish certain kinds of female success while pretending to celebrate it.

Because the truth is, women are still not yet trying to build wealth in a neutral environment. They are doing so in an environment that still carries old code. Some women have cracked the code and crossed the bridge, and they like me aim to lead others who wish, to do the same. But the old code is still highly pervasive in how we think, operate and co-operate.

Yet still, there are men like my father and companies like the one I still work for to this day, who have the ability to help illuminate that bridge and create more money, ownership and access for women. And guess what happens when they do that? An estimated bump of 20% in global GDP is what would happen. More on that later. But for now suffice it to say, it’s worth the time and attention to do this together: we need to redefine what it means to play, and just as importantly, what it means to win.

The False Story

The laziest explanation for women’s financial hesitation is that women are emotional, under-confident, too risk averse, too relational, too cautious, too nice, too conflict-avoidant, too unsure of themselves to fully claim wealth, ambition, or scale.

I find this explanation both boring and biologically incomplete. First, because it confuses a response with a flaw. And second, because it ignores the obvious question: if women are so naturally unsuited to money and enterprise, why do we repeatedly see them outperforming in so many of the underlying capabilities that money and enterprise require – discipline, long-horizon thinking, pattern recognition, collaboration, resourcefulness, and the management of complexity?

So no, I don’t think the issue is that women lack the traits needed to build wealth. If they did, we wouldn’t have been able to do so in so many instances. I think the issue is that for so long women in general have been conditioned to relate to those traits differently, and that the old system and its old guards have too often mistaken that conditioning for destiny.

Which means if we are going to talk about women and wealth honestly, we need to stop moralizing and start biologizing. And once we’ve done that, we need to stop individualizing and start systematizing.

Interestingly, the earliest version of the phrase “Play to win” in my life was from a subliminal programming cassette tape my parents bought me when I was 10 years old. Sixty minutes of Enya-style music with a quiet subtle voice underneath reciting positive messages of confidence and motivation. In a way, this cassette tape cut through the morality of what could have been a script where I thought about myself as a girl who wasn’t as capable as a boy may have been, and instead spoke directly to my subconscious about the biology of goals and motivation. And between that and the systematized access that the loan gave me when the time was right, the rules by which I could play and win were upgraded.

So why do I still catch myself thinking small?

The Brain That Wants the Known Self

One of the most useful ideas in this entire series has been the recognition that the brain is not primarily designed for becoming, but for prediction. It is constantly constructing a model of who you are, how you behave, what is safe, what is dangerous, and what happens next. That model conserves energy. It reduces uncertainty. It keeps the organism coherent. You’ve already seen this in the larger arc of The Biology of Becoming: ancient nervous systems are still trying to navigate modern volatility, attention traps, and accelerating identity demands with software built for a much slower world.

Now consider what happens when a woman begins to act outside the role her nervous system – and often her culture – has long assigned to her. Let’s imagine she starts charging more. She asks for capital. She says she wants ownership or control. She admits she wants scale. She refuses to downplay ambition in order to remain more digestible.

To a purely rational observer, these are strategic acts. But to the nervous system, they can feel like prediction errors. And prediction errors do not announce themselves as good things. There is no internal “high five” that happens when I think about doing any of these things. Instead, they bring me discomfort, self-consciousness, an immediate need to second-guess, retreat, soften or apologize.

This is not because I’m in adequate. I can and should be able and allowed to do any of those things above. It’s not because of in adequacy that I don’t, it’s because of identity friction.

And if you layer on top of that a social world in which women have long been rewarded for being accommodating, relational, selfless, and supportive of male ambition, but far less consistently rewarded for unapologetically backing their own, then you begin to see why money and entrepreneurship, access and exponential growth can feel metabolically expensive even for highly capable women.

Somewhere along the way, many women learned that there was social safety in liking men, supporting men, building around men, and making men feel central to the operating system. But far less instruction went into interpreting their own ambition, investing in their own power, and taking their own ideas seriously enough to fund them. The pattern is not absolute, and it has certainly evolved as humanity has. Yet this old code is still deeply ingrained in our nervous system, in our social operating system, and within the heart of hearts of many women. And it’s actually perfect that it is, because if we are solving for abundance, then this is not an equation we can write with women alone, but where the equation is just as much from Mars as it is from Venus.

What My Guests Have Been Saying, From Different Angles

One of the reasons I wanted this essay in the series is because when I listen back across conversations with women like Kristine Beese, Saijal Patel, and Eleanor Beaton, I don’t hear three separate conversations. I hear one problem described from three highly useful angles.

Kristine Beese’s work makes the first point with unusual clarity: women’s financial lives are not simply smaller versions of men’s, and financial planning that treats them as though they are gender-neutral often misses the point. She has said plainly that women need to treat their financial futures differently than men because their life cycles, earning trajectories, career interruptions, caregiving realities, and longevity risks are different, and because the wealth gap reflects that difference all the way through. Mic drop.

Saijal Patel’s work illuminates the second angle, which is that women do not merely need information, they need direct, frank, judgment-free conversations about money that many were historically excluded from. Her emphasis on financial literacy, ownership, and not waiting for permission points toward something many advisors still underestimate: money confidence often grows through conversation and repetition, not through one perfect educational moment. Double mic-drop.

And Eleanor Beaton sharpens the third angle, which is that ambition itself remains underdeveloped terrain for many women entrepreneurs not because women lack desire, but because they have been undercapitalized in leverage, socialized to underinvest in themselves, and taught to confuse exhaustion with not being serious enough. That’s three mic drops.

Eleanor’s language about leverage, assets, and explicit ambition gets us closer to the structural heart of the matter. I know any chance I get to spend time with any of these women, I feel gratified by their observations and fortified to use them to contribute to change at scale.

If I had to compress all three into a single diagnosis, it would be this:

• Kristine says the model for building wealth is incomplete.
• Saijal says the level of conversation is inadequate.
• Eleanor says the framework for growth is undercapitalized.

And because I believe all three are right, women are still too often asked to master money inside systems that were never designed to consider their actual lives.

The Cost of Playing Nice in an Exponential Economy

This is where the neuroscience and the economics really begin to spark fire.

The modern economy says be visible, decisive, opportunistic, scalable, and always on. Meanwhile, the social script many women inherited says be warm, pleasing, modest, collaborative, but not threatening, competent but not too self-possessed, ambitious but never at the expense of others, and available across an astonishing number of emotional and domestic fronts all at once. (That was a run on sentence because I, as a woman running the modern social script, often feel like I myself am living a ‘run on life’.)

Then we act surprised when women hesitate, need to ask questions, question someone else’s position, demand not to be taken advantage of, pause to make sure the outcome will benefit not just themselves but all of those other populations they are responsible for. Hesitation, in this context, is not irrational it’s a sign of operational coherence. It’s the woman acting based on her installed code in a world where it has become physically impossible to do so.

But there’s a price for stepping outside of this code. When ambition carries a social penalty, risk does not feel like risk alone, it feels like identity exposure. When caregiving and invisible labour eat into time and energy, investing in a business or portfolio is not just a matter of arithmetic, it’s a bandwidth problem. When earnings are lower, interrupted, or nonlinear because of those unpaid caregiving and invisible labour “sabbaticals”, wealth-building systems which require uninterrupted accumulation feel like pushing water up a wall.

And now we have added technological acceleration to all of it. In earlier chapters I have argued that the last fifteen to twenty years compressed time, intensified comparison, and forced identity expansion at a pace ancient brains were never designed to metabolize comfortably. That pressure is real for everyone. But for women, who have long practiced multidimensional role-shifting under social scrutiny, this pressure isn’t just new, it’s new AND it’s amplified.

This is why I resist the shallow suggestion that women simply need more confidence. Confidence is often downstream of action, and action is downstream of whether the body is running code that the identity perceives as safe enough to repeat. So if we back that up and look at it from the other direction:

• first, we need the biology to accept new code that is known by the identity as “safe to repeat” (i.e. the cassette tape),
• then we need to practice actions within the new framework where these codes are sponsored, supported, and commonplace (i.e. business and the bank loan),
• and THEN confidence about money, ownership and access will present themselves.

In other words, many women are not waiting for confidence because they are weak. They are waiting because their nervous systems have learned, often correctly, that there are social and structural costs to taking up more room.

The Polgár Sisters and the Case Against Destiny

Somehow I managed to get this far into the essay before introducing the pièce de la resistance, one of the most incredible stories I know when the conversation turns lazy and someone begins hinting, politely or otherwise, that perhaps women just aren’t cut out to build real wealth. That they aren’t built for the same forms of strategic competition, dominance, or sustained intellectual aggression that drive success in fields like finance, investing, leadership, entrepreneurship… or chess.

The Polgár sisters make a stunning mockery of that argument.

Raised in Hungary by their father, László Polgár, who believed that “geniuses are made, not born,” Susan, Sofia, and Judit Polgár were trained intensively in chess from early childhood and rose with astonishing speed into the highest levels of international competition. This is such a terrific case example because they literally had everything to gain, almost no distractions, and their earlier victories coincided with the fall of The Berlin Wall. It’s a writer’s dream when it comes to metaphor. Oh, and if you don’t already know, international chess before the Polgár sisters was 1100% “men only, women need not apply, please stand outside this is only for men,” male dominated.

The youngest of the three, Judit Polgár, became the only woman ever ranked in the world top ten overall, not merely among women. What the family demonstrated was not that girls are magical, but that a supposedly male domain looked very different when the central authority figure in a girl’s life never once suggested she did not belong there.

That matters.

Because what the Polgár sisters got from their father was not merely training, they inherited from him an identity environment.

There was no ambient story in the home that chess was not for girls. No slow drip of “be careful not to intimidate.” No hidden curriculum suggesting that their intelligence should remain socially digestible. Their father gave them a form of psychological permission that many women never receive in money, business, leadership, or public ambition.

So when people look at outcomes and call them natural, I want to ask: natural under what conditions? Women were never the problem. The conditions under which they were asked to become were.

And so if you remember anything about this essay, remember this: yes, I do think allyship from men matters here – especially fathers, but also spouses, mentors, teammates and colleagues.

Fathers often shape a daughter’s first internal map of power, permission, money, effort, and what kinds of rooms she is allowed to enter without apology. We can build an argument for markets and institutions later, and we should, but many identity economies start much earlier than the labour market. They start in the home, in the stories children hear about what belongs to them, and the purview within which they can play. 

What We Can Do Individually

Once we see the problem more clearly, the response becomes less sentimental and more strategic. Individually, women need something sturdier than encouragement. They need reps. Here are a few of my favourite such reps:

1. They need to name what money is actually for, because clarity reduces noise and gives dopamine a direction to organize around. That’s a lesson we’ve already established in this series: wealth-building starts with reducing the mismatch between attention and intention. It’s also a way of activating their propensity for creation which is hardwired, and associating it with a strong wealth outcome.

2. They need to normalize talking about money out loud, because silence keeps money emotional, mysterious, and easier to outsource. This is a matter women need to start keeping in-house if they want the kind of freedom that is possible from money, ownership and access.

3. They need to automate more than they negotiate, especially early on, because systems beat mood, and there are too many chapters in a woman’s life biologically to rely on willpower or energy. It needs to be programmed in from as early an age as possible that money, ownership and access are part of their identity environment, and that designing a life based on a system to build wealth is their place to play.

4. They need to iteratively build self-trust in smaller learning loops: investing before they feel fully ready, pricing with less apology, asking better questions, tolerating more visibility, and understanding that like competence often precedes confidence, not the other way around.

5. They need to distinguish between fear that signals true danger and fear that signals expansion.

6. And they need to stop assuming the next level of wealth requires becoming a fundamentally different person. It doesn’t.

More often, it requires allowing the strategic, disciplined, pattern-recognizing self that was always there to finally take the lead. Heavy weights don’t get lighter you just get stronger, so investing the time, energy and attention will always lead you to the money.

And What Markets Must Do

Individual action alone is not enough, because women can probably self-improve their way out of structural design problems, but it would be a heck of a lot more efficient if the system was upgraded at the same time. The system in which we operate, call that “the markets,” also has some important work to do, too.

Financial products and advisory models need to be built around nonlinear earning paths, longevity, caregiving interruptions, and the realities of women’s health and time, rather than around the fantasy that the male career arc is neutral. Might there be a financial product or registered savings plan that values procreation by allowing for tax deferred savings periods before life events like a new baby or eldercare leave?

Lenders need to examine how risk, collateral, and creditworthiness are being assessed, especially when women entrepreneurs continue to rely more on personal savings and smaller financing requests while receiving slightly lower approval rates. I failed to mention – I was lucky when I received my bank loan that I had a house to serve up a personal guarantee with. Had I not, the loan might not have happened. Was it necessary? Honestly it was overkill. Given the strength of the business I was buying which was evident on paper, that should not have mattered. I could have ended up on that other road after all.

Education systems need to teach girls, earlier and more explicitly, that money is not a character test. It is a tool, it is a language, and it is a lever. It turns out, in this day and age anyways, money is not about math it’s about feelings. Language and feelings are a highly productive gateway for new taking action based on other new lines of code.

Employers and institutions need to understand that integration matters: if we continue rewarding only visible performance while quietly extracting from the time, energy, and attention women use to make families, teams, and communities function, then the wealth gap will continue wearing a thousand respectable disguises.

And the market as a whole needs to stop treating this as a niche issue. The upside is enormous. As I touched on earlier, the World Bank and World Economic Forum-linked estimates suggest that closing gender gaps in employment and entrepreneurship could lift global GDP by about 20%, while broader advances in gender equality could add trillions more. This is not a side quest. It is an economic growth strategy hiding in plain sight.

When women struggle financially, the loss is not private, it’s civilizational.

Play to Win

So after all that then, what does it mean to “Play to win”?

If it’s me who’s saying it, it does not mean playing like men.

It means understanding why the game has felt costly, learning to read both your biology and the market more clearly, refusing to mistake structural friction for personal deficiency, and building from there. If we don’t do the work to write new code and act on new code, nothing will change.

It means raising daughters and sons inside identity environments where women are not merely admired for being supportive of male ambition, but are expected to possess and finance ambition of their own. In my own kids and step kids and their partners, I see the glimmers of partnership of a new kind, and I absolutely fan those flames because think of the high-flow lives they will get to experience if everyone is creating, growing, accessing and building?

It means designing markets that recognize women not as edge cases, but as central economic actors, and helping more women understand that wealth is not only about money. It is also about time, energy, attention, and the freedom to choose under less duress.

And it means this: if women have already been biologically and psychologically cross-trained to hold complexity, to navigate contradiction, to survive identity expansion under pressure, then the future of wealth creation should not merely include them.

It should be built with them.