She’s Not Too Much, She’s a Pathfinder

Breaking through the tape and the labels.

“She’s aggressive.”

“She’s a strong personality.”

“She’s a bit of a dictator.”

“She can be emotional sometimes.”

These are statements that have been said about me throughout my career, by men and women. 

I’ve worked for over ten years in male-dominated environments – construction, manufacturing, and now parking. Out of approximately a dozen people I directly reported to in those years, only 33% of them were women.

These women ranged on the scale of proactive to reactive managers with vastly different mantras regarding how to handle being one of the only women in the room. One was the loudest, one was the most aggressive, one was the friendliest.

I think as women, we are constantly aware of our surroundings – mentally and physically. We’re trained to be. Spot the dangers in the room. Identify the problems. Tell the right people.

But don’t be too loud about it. Don’t be too pushy. Don’t be bossy. 

I don’t watch many online videos, but one I always return to is “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In it, she says, “So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”

Women, we are told, are emotional. We can be aggressive. We can be strong-willed, stubborn. Or we’re too quiet. We’re content. We’re pliant.

I’ve sat in the back of a truck listening to male colleagues joke about how the pre-construction meeting went long because a woman ran it (even though it went 20 minutes over because of the questions being asked); I’ve been on an impromptu call with a manager telling me my work ethic was demoralizing for my colleagues (not because it was too low, but because it was too high); I’ve been in the thick of post-partum depression and stuck in a meeting with a male project manager vividly demonstrating how I needed to regulate myself with hand motions indicating the levels of positivity I should be radiating.

Adichie goes on to say, “[T]o insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

I have a history of underselling myself – I don’t like to be a barrier breaker, to stir up ruckus, or be the problem child. I like to do my job, do it well, then melt into my couch with my daughters or go for a walk with the dog. However, what I’ve taken over ten years to learn is that by not challenging those barriers, I’ve been complicit in upholding them.

I worked two jobs while taking the max load of college credits. I finished graduate school with a newborn in my lap. I learned, mastered, and became one of the highest performers on my team during a global pandemic that began three days after I started in the position. On any given day, I am balancing being a mother to two girls, a wife, a friend, a daughter, an employee, the master scheduler, a sports mom, and a travel planner.

Ilona Maher, a U.S. Olympic rugby athlete, recently sat down with an interviewer who asked her, “How do you handle Imposter Syndrome?”

Her response was (paraphrased), “Oh, I don’t have that. I’ve worked really hard to be where I am, and I think I deserve what that hard work has provided for me.”

I was floored.

Can we actually, really, truly, live in a space where we do not have to wonder if we deserve what we’ve worked for? Can we say, “I’m one of the best at what I do”, and not be labeled as narcissistic?

I think we can. That’s what Mobility Pathfinders aims to do.

That 33% of women in leadership positions live rent-free in my mind. Only one in three. There are so many reasons why this is the case, but the goal of MP is to negate so many of those reasons – financial, networking, feasible paths to move up in the organization and most crucially, the tools and support provided to know when enough is enough, to identify what you’re actually okay with remaining content with.

I’m not okay with “aggressive”, but I am assertive.

My personality may be “strong”, but at the age of 32, I was given a “name your terms” job offer where I now get to work from home and raise my children, so clearly some facet of my personality works well for me.

Perhaps I come off as a “dictator”, but I hold others accountable to the standards we agree to as a team.

Maybe what you see as “emotional” is the fact that I care – about my work and my team. 

I am not a single story. Women are not a single story. We are loud and quiet, driven and exhausted, laughing and thinking. We are sturdy and malleable. We are striving for efficiency and sanity.

We are Pathfinders.