How to Handle Being the Only Woman in the Room

Were there moments where you felt bias against you, because you are a woman and you’re a woman working in tech? So, how did you deal with that?

I did feel bias and how it came across to me is, I feel like it’s really hard because there’s not a lot of women in the workplace at my level. When I interface with someone who doesn’t yet know me, so doesn’t know, “Oh, she is my colleague,” at that point, there isn’t as much, because I’m Tracy, now, right?
When you first meet someone, is when I feel bias the most and it is because you don’t know me yet, so you’re going to use heuristics to try to understand me until I fill in the blanks for you. And those heuristics sometimes are not very favourable and sometimes you can feel they are mountains to climb. And how I often feel it is...

So, can you be a little more specific? What kind of characteristics do you think are sometimes assigned to you in a presumptuous manner?

Sure. An example of that is if I interact with someone who’s never worked with a strong female executive before, what I find sometimes is when they look at me, they will subconsciously treat me the way they treat the other women in their life. So, it could be their wife, their daughter, their sister, their mother. And so it might come across as, “I need to take care of you,” because that’s my role in these other relationships they have.
Or maybe I will make decisions and not check in with you because that’s how I do things in my life. And so I have felt that in the past and I am in tune to it, and so I have to say this is how I want you to work with me. And reset that relationship and usually you don’t get a lot of pushback, but it is a little bit extra work that I have to do in some cases. But the hardest one honestly is recognizing what is happening and learning to say gently, I am not okay with that. This is not how we will work together.