About
You already know why this is anonymous.
Twenty plus years in these rooms, a lot of them as the only woman at the table. What I learned in them is a pattern, and the pattern is the reason this exists.
Sabotage you can never point to. Praise with a ceiling built into it, so you're excellent at what you're doing now and somehow never ready for the next thing. The question you can't ask without becoming difficult, which everyone in the room understands and nobody will say.
I'm not naming companies. I'm naming the thing.
Account
What this is, and what it isn't
It isn't a study and it isn't reporting. It's an account.
Some of what's here I lived. Some of it I watched happen to people I worked with. Some of it I've had confirmed by enough women in enough different buildings that I'm confident it isn't just us.
I'm wrong about things occasionally and I say so when I find out. There's a page for that.
Name
Why anonymous
Because I'd like to work again, and because most of what's worth saying about this can't be said with a name attached without becoming a story about the person who said it rather than the thing itself.
That's a real limitation and I'd rather name it than pretend otherwise. You can't check who I am. You can check whether any of it sounds like your own career.
Field Notes
Field Notes
The posts. What the pattern looks like from inside it, and where I've got it wrong.
New Field Notes land Tuesdays and Fridays.
Advice
The Cheat Sheets
The moves that worked, with the hit rates. Nothing here works every time and I'd rather tell you which ones fail.
Together
Together
Other people's accounts. Anonymous, edited only to remove anything identifying, and mostly better than mine.
Share yours
Get Loud
How you send yours. Everything goes through a pass that removes names, companies, and anything pointing at one workplace. Most submissions don't run. That's the standard, not a judgement.
The silence holds because everyone inside it assumes they're the only one. That assumption does all the work, and it's the thing this site exists to break.
I write from what I know, which is twenty years of these rooms and a lot of them as the only woman at the table. The pattern isn't only ours. Most of it lands on anyone the room made up its mind about before they spoke, and the mechanism runs the same way whatever put you in that position.
So if something here is familiar, that's the useful part. Not whether I'm right. That you're not the only one working out whether you imagined it.
You never were. You've just been positioned not to find out.