The Challenges of Being the Only Woman in the Room

You’re obviously very successful now, but as with everybody, we always have some bumps in the road and some challenges. What were the challenges that came for you with trying to break into a male dominated field?

I think the toughest moments sort of fall into buckets where I’ve just felt alone. Even going through sort of education in a computer science field or early days of my career, there have been many moments where it felt like nobody would be available who can understand some of the frustrations I was having or the challenges I was facing.
So, I think it’s those moments of being alone that jump out to me as some challenges. Moments where I felt like I’ll always be a bit behind and I’d have to sort of play catch up or put in a ton of extra work just to get to the same level as some of my peers.

Can you give us a specific example of that, Sandy, like a moment where perhaps you felt alone or you felt like you had to play catch up to your peers?

I think one that jumps out is in one of our consulting projects and engagements, there are sort of a whole host of solutions and a whole host of problems we were trying to come up with a solution for. And there I am trying to think through, yes, there are a lot of technology implications, but let’s also be mindful of people and how this change might affect them.
We need to invest the right amount in understanding their needs, bringing them along on the journey, and in a room full of folks where that wasn’t sort of valued as much, they focused on, “Hey, let’s just think about the technical solution. You’re making it to be sort of much more of a people thing. Let’s focus on the technology.”
Like, well, people are important. I think we should care about how people are going to feel about changes that we’re rolling out to them. How can we help them adopt and change their sort of behaviors that we need them to? They felt a bit alone. You’re like, “Well, why am I the only one standing up for something like this? We should be thinking about this as part of our success measures. We should be thinking about this as a core component of defining what the value is that we’re offering.”
It’s examples like that where it felt like, okay, no one’s going to stand up with me on this or advocate for this with me. So how much do I continue to push and at what point do I say I need more help or I can’t do this. And then it sometimes creeps into just self-doubt. Okay, maybe it is not important if I’m the only person thinking about this a certain way.