Songfacts®:

• The best known "woman" song from Chaka Khan's debut album, Chaka, is the lead single, "I'm Every Woman," but there's another as well: "A Woman In A Man's World." The song finds Chaka explaining how hard she has to work to get by in a world - and industry - dominated by men. Like many songs from a feminist perspective, it was written by guys - the team of Andrew Kastner and Larry John McNally, who wrote another song on the album as well, "Sleep On It."
  
  "I'm Every Woman" was written by Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, but Ashford wrote the lyric.
• The song's co-writer Larry John McNally was in the early stages of his career and got a shot of inspiration after watching the Chaka album come together. It was helmed by Arif Mardin, who also worked with Aretha Franklin.
  
  "Watching Chaka and producer Arif Mardin at work was amazing," McNally told Songfacts. "This was my first time being invited to participate in something at that level. That level, of course being the highest it gets in pop music. The band was Richard Tee on piano, Hamish Stuart and Steve Ferrone from Average White Band, who were kings in New York at that time, Anthony Jackson on bass, and more, working at the legendary Atlantic Studios. At one point in the recording of a song I'd co-written, 'A Woman In A Man's World,' Arif walked out to the piano and said that he felt the song needed a bridge. He sat down and wrote something, and then let Richard Tee put his gospel voodoo on it. In reality he should have taken songwriting credit, but Arif was a true gentleman."