The Only Woman in the Room: What I Learned Wasn't to Make Myself More Like Them
For a long stretch of my career, I was the only woman in the room.
In television executive meetings, in corporate boardrooms, in the settings where business and government meet, I would often look around the table and find I was the only woman there. Many women climbing in their professional fields will recognize this scene.
When you're young, it puts pressure on you. You become acutely aware that you're "different," and then, quite naturally, you try to do one thing — make yourself more like them. Speak more forcefully, hold a harder posture, rein your emotions in tighter, work to "look like you belong in this room," so you won't be underestimated because of your gender.
I went through that phase too. But over time, I came to understand something — and it's what I most want to say today to women still in that phase: your greatest value isn't making yourself more like them. Just the opposite — it's the very thing that makes you "different."
Because when everyone in a room shares a similar background, similar thinking, even a similar way of speaking, that room has a shared blind spot — they're so alike that they miss the same thing together. And you, the only one who's different, stand precisely where you can see that blind spot.
In the meeting room, my value very often wasn't "I'm stronger than them," it was "I'm different from them." When everyone was nodding in the same direction, I'd ask a question no one thought to ask; when everyone was calculating with the same logic, I'd notice the human element everyone had skipped over. Not because I'm especially brilliant, but because I stand somewhere different from them, so I see a different landscape.
So my attitude toward being "the only woman" completely changed. I stopped treating it as a disadvantage to overcome, something to blend away, and started treating it as a position no one else had. I didn't need to become them. What I needed was to say, clearly and with conviction, what my position let me see.
This path is, of course, not without its hardships. As the only one, you often do have to give more before people will hear you out. But the point is: the solution isn't to grind yourself into the same shape as everyone else — that way you throw away your most precious thing. The solution is to turn that "difference" into the very reason they can't not listen to you.
If you, too, are often "the only woman in the room," here's what I'd say: don't rush to hide yourself inside everyone else's shape. You were placed in this position not to become a second version of them, but because this table needs a different pair of eyes.