At one of my jobs, a small startup running on ambition and very little else, I didn’t have an office of my own. What I had instead was a private washroom, not because of rank or privilege, but because I was the only woman in the company. It was an odd distinction, the sort of fact that seemed amusing until you considered it for more than a moment.

In the two decades of working in hi-tech, I have sat through countless meetings and conferences. More often than not, I have looked around the room, real or virtual, and found myself to be the only woman there. After a while, what strikes you is not the rarity of the experience but its persistence, the way something can feel both familiar and surprising at the same time. The rooms changed, the companies changed, the titles associated with my name changed, but that particular detail remained remarkably constant.

I mention these experiences not to establish expertise, but simply to explain where I am standing as I write. A career spent mostly in rooms full of men taught me certain things, though not always the things I expected to learn. I would never claim to have solved the puzzle of how to succeed in a male-dominated field. Most days I am still figuring it out myself. What I do have are observations gathered over many years, lessons learned through trial and error, and a few convictions that have remained steady. If sharing them proves useful to someone else, then it is worth the effort. More than that, I hope these thoughts become part of a larger conversation, one where we can exchange experiences, challenge assumptions, and offer one another something practical to carry forward.

Early in my career, I fell in love with a programming language called Smalltalk. It appealed to me in the way certain books appeal to a reader at exactly the right moment. It seemed to reveal a more intuitive way of thinking about the world. That fascination took me to a conference where Adele Goldberg, one of Smalltalk’s original creators, was speaking.

I don’t remember the details of her talk nearly as clearly as I remember seeing her in a hallway between sessions. We passed one another going in opposite directions, strangers sharing a few seconds of the same space. Yet something about her stayed with me. She moved with an ease that was impossible to miss. Not arrogance, not performance. Simply the quiet certainty of someone who knew she belonged exactly where she was. There was confidence in her presence that you could sense.

Looking back, I realize what impressed me was the absence of apology. She carried herself as though the question of whether she deserved to be there had already been settled long ago. If anyone doubted it, that was their concern, not hers.

She never knew I existed. We never spoke. She was simply moving through her day, on her way to wherever she needed to be. But that brief glimpse had an effect on me that lasted for years. Whenever I found myself shrinking in a room, or feeling the need to justify my presence, I would conjure her image in my mind. I would remember that hallway and the confidence she seemed to wear as naturally as a coat.

Over time, I developed a private instruction for myself: show up the way Adele showed up. Stop apologizing for taking up space in a field you love. Stop waiting for permission. Stop rehearsing arguments for why you deserve a seat at the table. The work should speak for itself. The rest is noise. None of this apologizing for existing in the place I loved. None of the begging for acceptance. None of the: “If you give me a chance, I will prove to you ….”. Forget that!  And so, whenever I needed courage, I would call that image back to mind and try, not to become Adele Goldberg, but to carry a little of that same certainty into the room with me.

Twenty years later, I found myself in a very different role. I was managing a team of nine engineers and inheriting a project that was in serious trouble. Some things had changed over the years; some had not. Once again, I was the only woman on the team.

One afternoon I scheduled a remote meeting to sort through the growing list of problems and begin charting a path forward. I was sitting at the dining room table at home. My son was in the next room, though I didn’t know until later that he had been listening to the conversation.

When the meeting ended, I walked into the kitchen for a glass of water. My son looked at me with a mixture of disbelief and concern.

“How are you so calm?” he asked. “Why aren’t you walking in a big ball of rage all the time?”

He went on to describe what he had heard. People interrupting me. Mansplain things to me I already knew. Ignoring suggestions until someone else repeated them. Dismissing ideas and then circling back to them later as if they had appeared from nowhere. What struck him most was that I was the manager. I was the most senior person in the meeting, and yet, from his perspective, that seemed to make very little difference.

“If this is how they treat you,” he said, “I can’t imagine how they would treat a junior woman joining the team.”

“I feel angry and I wasn’t even in the meeting.” He concluded.

I laughed, not because he was wrong, but because what he was hearing was so familiar to me. “This is nothing,” I told him. “I’ve experienced much worse. Give it two months. They’ll come around.”

At the time, that may have sounded overly confident. But experience had taught me that respect is rarely won through force and almost never through indignation. People are more likely to listen when they feel heard themselves.

So that became the work. Not proving I was the smartest person in the room. Not insisting on my authority. Instead, I focused on building a team culture where everyone was expected to listen, where ideas were evaluated on their merit rather than the title attached to them, and where even the most junior engineer knew their perspective mattered.

Two months later, our meetings felt entirely different. Conversations were collaborative. People listened to one another. Good ideas could come from anywhere, and increasingly they did. The project recovered, the team found its footing, and the respect that had once seemed uncertain became effortless.

Looking back, I think that was the real victory. Not that the team learned to listen to me, but that they learned to listen to one another. The project was saved by many people working together. My role was simply to create the conditions in which that became possible.

Over the years, many of the experiences I had navigating the technology industry found their way into my novel All the Shoes. Fiction gave me a place to explore some of the questions I carried with me and some of the lessons I learned the long way around. If you are looking for a little encouragement, or simply the company of someone who has wrestled with similar challenges, I hope you will give it a read.

There is also something else I want to say, because I suspect someone needs to hear it.

Whatever field you have chosen for yourself, there is a place for you in it.

There will be moments when you question that. There will be people who underestimate you, explain your expertise back to you, overlook your contributions, or make you feel as though you are standing outside a door waiting for permission to enter. Those experiences can be discouraging. They can also be exhausting.

But one day, often much later than you expect, you will look back at the ground you have covered and see something different. You will see the path you made for yourself. You will see obstacles that once seemed impossible and realize they taught you resilience. You will see problems you solved, relationships you built, and accomplishments that no one can take away from you. Most of all, you will feel a quiet pride in the person you became along the way.

If you cannot see that future yet, that is all right. Most of us cannot. We are too busy putting one foot in front of the other. But it is there nonetheless, waiting for you. If you can’t believe in yourself. Believe me, until you can.

For many years, I resisted the idea that my identity had anything to do with my success. I wanted my work to stand on its own. Now I see things differently. I am not successful despite being a woman. The experiences that came with being a woman shaped the way I lead, the way I solve problems, and the way I understand people. Being a woman is my advantage.

I bring my whole self to my work. Intellect matters, of course, but it is not the only tool we possess. There is also empathy, intuition, curiosity, persistence, and the ability to see connections that others miss. I have never believed those qualities make us weaker professionals. If anything, they make us better ones.

The older I get, the less interested I am in choosing between heart and mind. The best work, the most meaningful work, asks for both.

And if I have learned anything from the years I spent wondering whether I belonged, it is this: belonging is not something granted by other people. It is something you claim for yourself. Once you understand that, everything changes.