The Reason You Need To Stand Up For Women In Meetings
Stop commiserating or passively standing by, and start actively supporting.
Here’s the situation: I’m in a meeting with my coworker, Liz, our boss, and a few other members of our small team. Liz is explaining to us why she wants to put a process in place for new signups to our SaaS product. It’s a sensible suggestion, but our boss is reluctant. Here is Liz’s chance to sway him.
She says, looking at the table, “I’m probably just being over-procedural like normal, but I feel like it’s kind of important that we have something like a process for newcomers?”
Our boss doesn’t look convinced.
She continues, “I just think… if we have a set order of operations now, it’ll be easier when we start to get big — not that we couldn’t manage even then, but it would definitely be a little simpler, don’t you think?”
Silence reigns in the room.
As a woman, it’s hard in business. We’re told to be more assertive, but not too assertive. Be humble, but confident. Speak up, but not too much.
So when my colleague Liz was speaking up there, even though to my boss it looked like unprofessional floundering, I recognized the classic symptoms of “speaking while female.”
