The Hour She Spent Crying On The Phone

A girlfriend of mine called me last night and cried for almost an hour. She is good at her job. Better than good. And somebody at work had just made her feel like none of that mattered.

I did not have a fix for her. I do not think there is one, not in a single phone call. But I told her the same thing I have been telling myself since I was thirty years old and walking into a steel building in heels, getting stared at by a room full of men who had already decided I was not a fit.

I told her I knew exactly what that felt like. Because I did. I still do.

I spent almost twenty years in an industry built by men, for men, and I clawed my way into rooms nobody was holding a door open for. I was underpaid more times than I can count. I was talked over, tested, second-guessed, and asked questions in a tone that made it clear the person asking had already decided what my answer was going to be worth.

There was a stretch early on where I did not know a single thing about the products I was selling. Here is how I wrote about it:

“I also knew nothing. Not the products, not the alloys, not the language. I would sit in meetings and listen to conversations that might as well have been in another language, and I had a choice. Stay quiet and pretend I understood, or ask questions and prove that I didn’t. So I asked. Constantly. And the GM had a particular way of handling my questions. He would repeat them out loud to other people. Not to answer them. To make sure everyone heard exactly what I didn’t know yet. There were nights I drove the whole way home crying.”

Years later, after I had learned the business cold, after I was carrying a whole region and sitting on national boards, the money still was not there. Here is the number that still turns my stomach when I write it down:

“While I was carrying a whole region, sitting on national boards, importing forty-thousand-pound containers and mitigating six-figure problems in my sleep, I was making sixty-five thousand dollars a year. The men around me were clearing well into six figures for less. Less scope. Less risk. Less hustle. Less results. I was doing more than most of them and getting paid a fraction of it, and I told myself the seat was worth more than the paycheck, which was true, and also exactly the kind of thing you tell yourself when you still don’t know how to value your own worth.”

It took me a long time to understand what actually changes the equation. It is not being louder. It is not being liked. It is not demanding anyone’s respect, because you cannot demand a thing like that into existence.

“Competence is the only thing that permanently changes the conversation. Not flirting. Not shrinking. Not arguing. Not demanding respect. Results. Once you become the person in the room who knows the most, who sells the most, who delivers the most, who keeps her name clean and her word good, the rest of it stops mattering. Not because the bias goes away. Because you have made yourself impossible to ignore.”

That is what I told her last night. Not that it would stop hurting. It does not stop hurting. But it stops being the whole story, if you let it.

These three passages are all from the book. There is a lot more where they came from.