Women have been fighting for equal rights for generations, for the right to vote, the right to control our bodies and the right to equality in the workplace. And these battles have been hard fought, but we still have a long way to go, and our victories are under threat. Equality in the workplace — women in a range of fields from domestic work to the entertainment industry can tell you — it’s still just a dream.

January 2017 marked a new moment for women as millions gathered around the country and the world, and launched our Web 2.0 of the women’s movement. We knew President Trump’s administration wasn’t going to listen to us. But we marched to be heard not by the president or a political party, but by one another.

We’re done with asking for things to change; we’re making change ourselves.

Our capacity to listen exploded with the number of voices speaking until the cultural momentum of #MeToo became unstoppable.

And that’s when it happened. We stopped looking up, to those in power, and started looking around at the women standing beside us — from different backgrounds, working in different sectors, of different ethnicities, with different stories — and realized our strength is in our diversity not our singularity, and the power that we need to claim is our own.

We shifted from focusing on protesting laws to lifting each other up to become the lawmakers.

Read the full article on gender equality in 2018 by Ai-Jen Poo at Time