Iran & Why You Should Care About Oil Prices

Hi Sheconomist Insider 👋 It’s Thamina, Founder of The Sheconomist. This is your bi-weekly dose of celebrating the female economy where I help ambitious, purpose-driven women like yourself flip the script on money, career & wellbeing conventions so you can live life on your own terms.

TLDR:

• 👩‍💻 How to create career insurance for yourself

• 🧃 An AI community for women I just joined

• 💰 Why you should care about the price of oil

• 💜 Meet Gesche Haas, Founder of Dreamers & Doers

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🧪 Freedom Formulas

The most dangerous career advice you can follow in 2026 is: work hard and your results will speak for themselves.

45,000 tech workers have been laid off this year. Meta is cutting 20%. Block eliminated 40%. And in almost every case, the people who lost their jobs include some of the hardest workers at the company.

Hard work is not career insurance. It never was.

But that fiction was easier to maintain when companies were growing, hiring, and promoting generously. Now that things are changing, the truth is: staying employed and staying powerful require a fundamentally different strategy than just being good at your job.

I've been building a framework I think of as Career Insurance, the four things that actually protect you in uncertain times like these.

Get closer to revenue. Not metaphorically. Literally. I’ve been talking about this a lot lately and I won’t stop shutting up about it. Understand how your company makes money and make sure leadership can see the thread between your work and that number.

The layoff list is built from a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet favors roles that clearly drive revenue. If your contribution requires a three-slide explanation to connect to the P&L, you're further from safety than the employee whose impact shows up in the quarterly earnings call. This doesn't mean you need to be a salesperson. It means you need to stop letting your work be invisible to the people who decide budgets.

Build a name outside your company. Your employer should not be the only entity that knows what you're capable of. When the only proof of your talent lives inside your company's walls, your company owns your career narrative. A personal brand is an external record of your thinking, your expertise, and your reputation. It's the difference between updating your résumé in a panic and having three people reach out before you've even posted about it.

Stack cash. I know. You've heard "build an emergency fund" a thousand times. But I'm not talking about emergency preparedness. I'm talking about negotiating power. A woman with 6-12 months of runway makes different decisions in every meeting, every 1:1, every performance review.

She can push back. She can take the risk. She can leave the role that's shrinking her scope instead of clinging to it out of fear. Cash isn't just protection from a layoff. It's what makes you behave like someone who can't be easily replaced, which, paradoxically, makes you harder to replace.

Develop skills that don't need your institutional knowledge. If your most valuable skill is "navigating internal systems" or "knowing who to email to get things done," your value is chained to your employer. The skills that make you layoff-resilient are the ones any company would pay for: strategic thinking, selling ideas, analyzing data, leading without authority, building things from zero. Look at your calendar for the last month. How many hours built transferable capability, and how many built institutional knowledge that dies the day you leave?

Hard work matters. But the women who will thrive through this aren't working harder than everyone else. They're working on different things that create more long-term leverage for themselves.

❣️ Thamina’s Top Picks

👩‍💻 A free virtual event I signed up for to learn how to leverage Claude to build a robust content system

🧃 I joined this online community for women who want to learn and apply AI together - community members share lots of cool resources, events, and ideas - it’s only $18/month (if you end up joining, pls post in the referral channel that I referred you hehe)

🧴 Been really loving this skincare balm post laser resurfacing - leaves a nice “glass skin” without being greasy

🎙️ Great insights into what is currently happening in the world geopolitically and connecting Iran with Anthropic and the impact on the economy

✨ This week’s Moodboard

Post credits go to Anwesha, aestheticdiary, mindset.therapy, ✨️Living Luxe✨️

💸 Cooking up Wealth

I'm going to give you permission to care about oil prices.