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.
