Story 247

On Staying in the Room — A Response to Story 242 and a Continuation of 246.

I responded in Story 246. And now let me be clear about what I am doing.

Very early in my career I was almost always the only woman in a pack of men. I was put off by women who seemed hard, guarded, unwilling to let me in, and those who acted like men. I applauded the men who supported and uplifted me, those who joked about difficult women. I stayed silent when women around me complained about how they were being treated. I was a young manager in my twenties/early thirties and I was proud to be one of the only women in the pack. I would even boast about how much I preferred working and being friends with men, because women, I told myself, were just difficult, petty and competitive.

Psychologists call this identity distancing. And the most important thing to understand about it is this: I did not know I was doing it.

It wasn’t until I made the subconscious conscious that I realized there had been no calculation, no deliberate choice. It felt like instinct. It felt like discernment. It happened in the space beneath conscious thought. Neuroscientists call this implicit processing. We are shaped by it constantly, invisibly, in ways our conscious mind never audits and rarely even sees. The preference for male friends and colleagues felt natural.
The sense of belonging with men felt like camaraderie.

Because beneath all of it, beneath the boasting, the banter, the quiet side-taking, something in me had registered, without my consent, that aligning with women who pushed back, who complained, who took up space, who acted like men, carried a cost I was not willing to pay. And so I dressed the result up as a verdict about their character, never once recognizing it as a verdict the system had handed me first.

That is what makes internalized bias so durable. It does not announce itself. It arrives wearing the clothes of your own personality and conscious thought pattern.

That verdict extended to my own mother. Like your mother, she measured me by my womb and my silence, and I resented her for it. I am child-free today in part because I refused to become what I watched her become, a woman who set aside her own great talents and ambitions while my father built a career. Today I hold deep empathy for her. My mother was a genuinely talented and educated woman who gave all of that up to raise four children and later her grandchildren. I turned her sacrifice into a judgment instead of a lesson. I praised my father for supporting my independence while punishing her for the choices the world had made for her.

My mother did not invent those expectations. She inherited them. For most of recorded history, a woman’s value was defined by her reproductive capacity and her obedience. Thomas Aquinas described woman as a defective male. These were not fringe views. They shaped education, medicine, law, and family life for a thousand years and influenced legal systems in the United States well into the twentieth century, less than a hundred years ago. My mother was taught, as her mother was taught before her, that the safest thing a woman could do was make herself useful to the structure that contained her. Betty Friedan called it the problem that has no name, the quiet suffocation of women who had done everything right and still felt they were disappearing.

This problem still exists in every institution because we carry these unconscious thoughts, inherited across generations, with us to our work and into our homes.

I did not inherit my mother’s silence. But I inherited her world. We are all heirs to these collective subconscious constructs. That is the most insidious thing the system does. It does not just limit us. It turns us against each other and convinces us that the turning is our own idea.

What I was witnessing was not women’s nature. It was a system working exactly as designed. Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s research showed that when women are isolated at the top, self-protection becomes the rational response. Generosity costs men nothing. For women, supporting another woman has historically carried real professional risk. Research confirmed they were rated as less competent for doing so. We were not competing because we are competitive. We were competing because the system handed us one life raft and told us to sort it out.

Tajfel and Turner’s social identity theory explains the rest. When a group feels its status is insecure, its members do not bond. They distance. They signal to the dominant group: I am not like them. That is not a character flaw. That is the predictable psychology of scarcity. And it is exactly the dynamic institutions depend on to prevent the collective action that would change things.

And yes, the framework has sometimes been misused. Bad actors exist in every movement. But the existence of a few dishonest claims does not erase the structural reality. Women are still paid less. Women are still pushed out. Women are still disbelieved. A few bad actors did not manufacture those facts. When we allow the exception to overshadow the pattern, we are doing the institution’s work for it.

The system is designed to have us fight amongst ourselves. I am no longer willing to be useful to it.

Here is what I am doing.

1. I understand and practice intersectionality. This fight is not only about women. It is about every person pushed to the margins by the same systems of power. Black women face compounded barriers that white women do not. LGBTIAQ+ colleagues navigate discrimination that operates on entirely different dimensions. People of color, people with disabilities, those whose class background marks them as outsiders, all face overlapping, interlocking forms of exclusion that cannot be addressed one at a time. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who gave us the framework of intersectionality, showed that when we only advocate for the most visible version of a group, we leave the most vulnerable behind. Supporting women means supporting all women. And it means showing up for every person the system has decided does not belong.

2. I believe women who have been harassed. I say so out loud and I do not let them carry it alone. Social support from colleagues is one of the strongest predictors of whether a woman recovers from workplace harassment. Organizational silence enables it to continue. I am willing to say publicly: I believe her, I support her, and I am watching how this institution responds. That tells the institution that oppression will not be quiet.

3. I sponsor, not just mentor. Mentorship gives advice. Sponsorship puts your reputation on the line for someone when they are not in the room. That is the difference between being seen and being moved forward.

4. I interrupt the interruption. Women are penalized for speaking too much while men are rewarded for the same behavior. When I see a woman cut off, I name it immediately. She was not finished. That was her idea. Small, consistent interventions shift the culture of a room over time.

5. I use my hiring power deliberately and I examine my own unconscious bias. Below 30 percent women in senior leadership, scarcity logic dominates and women compete rather than collaborate. When I have a seat at the hiring table, I use it with intention. Because we all carry biases, and the first step is being honest about that.

6. I believe the pattern and the person. Women who report are met with scrutiny men rarely face. When a woman tells me what happened to her, my question is not whether her account is perfect. It is whether it fits a pattern the data has documented a thousand times. In almost every case, it does.

7. I share what I know about pay and treatment. Pay transparency has been shown to reduce gender pay gaps significantly. Women are disproportionately subject to pay secrecy and penalized for violating it. When I can share what I know, I do.

8. Most importantly, I continue to educate myself and do the internal work. I keep reading the research on how these systems were constructed. I keep asking myself the hard questions. I keep excavating the subconscious, because the work of unlearning does not have a finish line.

I am a Citi veteran. I spent ten years there, both as a management consultant and senior manager. Citi has a woman as CEO. Jane Fraser has broken one of the most significant glass ceilings in the history of global finance. And yet the same structural dynamics persist. This is not a failure of one leader. It is evidence of how deep the system runs. A woman at the top does not automatically dismantle the culture below her. The system is larger than any individual inside it, including the one at the top. And one has to ask, did Jane get there by doing what I once did? By distancing herself, by earning her place on their terms, by becoming acceptable to the structure rather than changing it? That is not a criticism. It is a question every woman who has made it to the top deserves to sit with.

Our current administration in the United States has created an environment where institutions have felt permitted, even encouraged, to dismantle their DEI programs. While those programs were not always as effective as they should have been, they represented a commitment, however imperfect, to keeping the door open. That commitment is now being walked back. Our change cannot wait for institutions to lead it. It starts with all of us, choosing to support women, not go against them. In every room, every conversation, every decision where we have any power at all.