I have been the only woman in the room so many times that I stopped counting. Not in a dramatic way. Just regularly. In meetings. On project teams. In interviews. In a group of people solving a problem. It’s not like there was a moment when I thought “well, I’ll just accept this.” It became normal. And then it became invisible, the way you stop noticing the hum of the air conditioning after a while. You just exist in the room and the fact that you’re the only woman becomes background noise, except for the moments when it’s very much foreground noise.
It starts small. You’re in a meeting and someone makes a joke that lands wrong and everyone laughs and you don’t know if you’re supposed to laugh or pretend you didn’t hear it. You say something in a meeting and nobody responds and then five minutes later a man says something similar and everyone gets excited about the idea. You read the room differently because you’re acutely aware that you’re visibly different and you’re trying to figure out if that matters.
The thing about being the only woman is that you become hyperaware. You notice everything. You notice who talks to you and who ignores you. You notice who makes eye contact and who looks past you. You notice which man automatically assumes you’re someone’s assistant or the note-taker rather than part of the meeting. You notice the moment someone realises you actually know what you’re talking about and their tone shifts. You notice which men check themselves before saying something and which ones don’t bother.
You develop strategies without even realising you’re developing strategies. I chose my words more carefully. I didn’t say things tentatively. I didn’t apologise before offering an opinion. I read the room harder before I spoke. I picked the tone that would land best: not too aggressive, not too agreeable, not too emotional, not too intellectual. Just right. There’s a sweet spot and you learn to aim for it.
You become very good at taking up space without being threatening. You laugh at jokes that aren’t funny. You don’t correct people when they say something wrong if it’s not core to the conversation. You validate other people’s ideas before you offer your own. You’re always simultaneously trying to be taken seriously and trying not to be too much of a problem.
You also learn which men are safe. The ones who will actually listen to you and treat you like a peer rather than a novelty or a problem. You navigate toward them in meetings. You’re careful around the ones who aren’t. You read the room to figure out which category each man falls into. It’s exhausting. It becomes automatic. You stop noticing you’re doing it.
The small things accumulate. Your sentence gets interrupted and you let it go instead of interrupting back because you’re acutely aware that aggressive women are not popular. You have an idea in a meeting that gets ignored and then a man says the same idea and it’s suddenly brilliant. You ask a clarifying question and someone acts like you’re being difficult or not understanding. You get credit for doing something but not credit for the intellectual work — you’re told you did a “great job,” not that you solved a hard problem. You’re in a conversation about promotions or interesting projects and you’re not in the room even though you should be, and you find out later that decisions were made after hours or in the hallway and you weren’t there.
The meeting after the meeting is real. The decisions that get made when you’re not around. The context you’re missing because you weren’t invited to the thing that happened on Friday afternoon when people were hanging out. The casual conversation where something important was decided or information shared. You’re getting strategic information from stories told weeks later instead of real-time, which means you’re always playing catch-up.
There’s also the emotional labour of it. You’re constantly aware that you’re representing not just yourself but “women in tech” or “women in this industry” or “women in leadership.” You’re not allowed to just be bad at something or have an off day because that confirms something about women. You’re not allowed to be emotional about things because emotions are what women do and you’re trying to prove you’re not like that. You’re not allowed to care about the things women care about — work-life balance, flexibility, fairness — without it being seen as soft or less serious than the things men care about.
A decade of this teaches you things. Some of them are useful. You learn resilience. You learn how to navigate systems that aren’t built for you. You learn to read people and situations incredibly quickly. You learn to be self-sufficient because you can’t always rely on support from the people around you. These are genuine skills.
Some of them are less useful. You learn to mistrust other women because they’re rare and therefore maybe threatening. You learn to soften yourself in ways that become almost compulsive. You learn to question your own judgment because it’s been discredited so many times. You learn to take up less space. You learn to make yourself smaller.
The hardest part is when you realise that even after a decade of proving yourself, of doing the job as well as anyone else, of not being “like that,” you’re still treated as slightly unusual. Still interesting as an exception. Still occasionally discounted. There’s no amount of competence that makes you just a normal person in the room. You’re the woman who does this. You’re the only woman. That’s your identity.
I don’t know if there’s a good way to be the only woman. I know there are worse ways. I know that some of the strategies I developed — not speaking up sometimes, choosing my words carefully, making myself smaller — have cost me. I know that the emotional labour of being in these rooms has taken a toll. I also know that I learned an enormous amount and became good at my job.
The thing I wish I’d understood earlier is that the problem was never me. It was never that I wasn’t confident enough or assertive enough or thick-skinned enough. The problem was that I was in systems and cultures that weren’t built for women, and then I spent ten years trying to adapt myself to fit rather than questioning why I was the one who had to adapt.
I also wish I’d understood that being the only woman is not actually a compliment. It’s not evidence that you’re special or exceptional. It’s evidence that there’s a problem with representation, and you’re just the one person who either got lucky or was stubborn enough to stick it out.
If you’re the only woman in the room right now: you’re not crazy if it feels weird. It is weird. You’re not weak if it’s exhausting. It is exhausting. You’re not wrong if it feels sometimes like you’re being treated differently. You probably are. And none of that is your fault or something you need to fix about yourself.
What might actually help is building a world where being the only woman becomes so rare that it’s noteworthy when it happens. That’s not on you to fix alone. But I’ve learned something else in that decade: when you stop being alone, everything changes. Not because you suddenly become more confident, but because the systems and cultures stop making you question whether you belong.