When You're The Only Woman in The Room
A new report shows a fifth of women are the "only" woman in the room at work. At the current rate it will take two generations for women to stop being the odd one out.
A few years ago, I spent nine months as a fellow at Columbia Journalism School. Every Tuesday, I would attend a seminar at Pulitzer Hall, the prestigious training ground of a great many illustrious reporters and editors.
The seminar room was on the sixth floor of the building, but instead of taking the slow and rickety elevator I would climb the building’s well-worn stairs. More often than not, I’d linger and take note of a few dusty, seemingly forgotten, black and white class photographs mounted on the walls—snapshots of wannabe-journalists going as far back as the 1940s. I often challenged myself to see how many women’s faces I could spot. Like a game of Where’s Waldo—or Where’s Wallace perhaps—assuming Wallace was hiding there at all.
And when I did spot a woman in one of the many unnamed photographs, I wondered: Who was she? How had she fared as the obvious anomaly in the pack? Had she asserted herself and gone on to blaze a stellar career? Did she break stories that changed the world? Had she persisted despite the headwinds that surely came with being the odd (wo)man out?
For centuries women have known what it’s like to be an “only.” Dozens of press shots show Angela Merkel or Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi stoically floating in a sea of males—not unlike my one-in-several-dozen female journalism students on the stairs at Columbia. Queen Elizabeth II and Marie Curie and Ada Lovelace and Amelia Earhart certainly knew what it was like to be surrounded entirely by men.
Today, as women have made momentous strides toward closing gaps in pay and power, you might think the experience of being the only woman in the room is a thing of the past.
If only that were so.
A Common Experience
On Tuesday, research published by LeanIn.Org—the non-profit co-founded by Sheryl Sandberg—and the consulting giant McKinsey & Company in their 10th annual Women in the Workplace report, showed that one-fifth of all women in the workplace today are “onlys” for their gender—meaning they are the only woman in the room at work. Some 40% say that they are “onlys” for their race, figures that are largely unchanged since at least 2018.
When you look at the demographic makeup of the highest echelons of the corporate world, those statistics seem a lot less surprising: A mere 10.4 percent of Fortune 500 companies are currently run by women. Separate recent research from Standard & Poor’s shows that women in 2023 held just 11.8% of the approximately 15,000 C-suite roles across publicly-traded firms in the U.S., a slight decrease from a year earlier.
Indeed, other findings from the Women in the Workplace report, which draws on data from more than 280 companies employing over 10 million people across the U.S. and Canada, illustrate the fact that while women are making some strides in the economy, they are still a minority in leadership and in the places where important decisions are made.
“At the current rate of progress, it will take 48 years—or two generations—for all women to reach parity in corporate America,” the authors wrote. And in particularly grim news: “Despite progress made, commitments to gender and racial diversity are declining.”
Gaslit and Bullied
Being the only woman in a class, on a team, at an office, or in an entire company is, of course, quite lonely. We know that feeling isolated can be demotivating and depressing. As humans, we’re susceptible to in-group bias, or a tendency to give preferential treatment to those who we perceive as belonging to the same group as ourselves. It follows that the only woman on a team will be less likely than her male colleagues to get the sole promotion, even if everyone is equally qualified.
Then there’s this: Women who are “onlys” for their gender, according to the report, are about 2.6 times more likely to experience microaggressions than women who aren’t. Women who are “onlys” for their race are about 1.7 times more likely to experience microaggressions.
“Women who are “onlys” are far more likely to have their leadership abilities undermined,” Rachel Thomas, the co-founder and CEO of Lean In told me. “Onlys” are also more likely to get hurtful comments than women who work on more diverse teams.
And Alexis Krivkovich, a senior partner at McKinsey, told me that the personal toll of being an “only” can also hurt business outcomes. It’s isolating, she said, and it can come with “heightened scrutiny and worse day to day experiences,” she said. That results in employees who are less likely to take risks and less likely to propose new ideas and raise concerns, she explained.
In 2022, the author Ruchika T. Malhotra, who is also the founder of an inclusion strategy firm, in a piece for the Harvard Business Review wrote about this.
“Initially, I would feel shame for not knowing how to respond to subtle acts of exclusion (also known as microaggressions) like having my name mispronounced and my English complimented, as well as being the only woman of color in my department,” she wrote. “But soon I felt self-loathing and anxiety when I was at risk of being fired after a senior leader made a complaint about how I was difficult to work with, without giving any reasons or examples to back it up,” she added. “Having no women of color to turn to, I felt like I was living in an alternative reality.”
Malhotra eventually quit, as so many women who share her experience do, not because she was in any way weak; but because—according to her account in the Harvard Business Review—she “was broken mentally and spiritually” by the culture of the organization and its inability to foster and promote a diverse workforce.
Double Duty of the Only (Read: Extra Work)
There are other costs too.
“Onlys” are often tasked—often subtly or implicitly, but sometimes directly—with taking on the work of educating their colleagues about the importance of diversity: about how not to be racist and how not to be sexist, for example. They’re frequently asked to recruit more “diverse” candidates and asked to head up employee resource groups.
“Especially if you’re a woman of color or visibly queer, you will be burdened or assigned or expected to take on that diversity work,” Verónica Caridad Cruz Rabelo, assistant professor of management at San Francisco State University, told CNN in an interview.
What exacerbates this, is that some organizations—despite their ostensible commitments to diversity and inclusion efforts—will feel less inclined to hire a woman, and especially a woman of color, to a particular team or department if they’ve already got one. A classic case of box-checking: We’ve already made the diversity hire. What more do you want?
A Building Backlash
The Lean In and McKinsey research also found that corporate commitments to gender and racial diversity are declining. And if that’s the case, “onlys” are likely here to stay.
The research found that 78% of companies responding to this year’s survey said that gender diversity is “high priority,” down by nine percentage points from the 87% who said so in 2019. In terms of racial diversity, just 69% said that it was “high priority,” down from 77% five years ago. The data also show that individual managers’ commitments have largely stalled.
You don’t have to go too far to find real-world evidence of this: Ford, Harley-Davidson, John Deere and Molson Coors are just some of the large corporations that have announced they’re either abandoning or scaling back their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Conservative lawmakers and activists in the U.S., meanwhile, have staged efforts to introduce legislation that would defund or ban diversity efforts at universities and other public institutions.
The irony here, of course, is that it’s hard to overstate the value of what the people who are most likely to be “onlys” might contribute to an organization. Diversity of perspective—something that comes from a diversity of background and heritage—is an invaluable thing.
I’ve covered women and leadership long enough to notice when there’s only one woman in the room, or at a table, or on a panel. I’ve certainly been there myself. And sure, I feel frustrated—Are we really still talking about this?—but I’m also in awe of the resilience that’s so often on display: The sure-this-sucks-but-I’m-not-going-to-let-it-hold-me-back disposition. Time and time again, in every country and every realm of society, “onlys” have changed history. Every day they continue to do so. I’m confident that no backlash can ever change that.
Josie Cox is a journalist, author, broadcaster and public speaker. Her book, “WOMEN MONEY POWER: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality,” was released earlier this year.
Josie Cox
Josie Cox
Josie Cox
