Navigating the Workspace Like a Man: A Woman’s Guide to Getting What You Deserve

Aya Gaballa
Nov 4 · 4 min read
Photo by Brooke Lark

Quick disclaimer: the point of this article isn’t to make unsupported generalizations or to undermine anyone’s role in the workplace. These are trends that I noticed from personal experience and the goal is simply to point them out, provide perspective, and empower women to recognize the small changes that they can make to ensure they’re fully getting what they deserve.

Over the course of my career, I’ve had the privilege of working in multiple fields and experiencing them across a variety of different cultures. I started off in a medical-related discipline, often in environments that constituted mostly of women. Then, during my post-graduate years, I entered the engineering and tech space, both of which are overwhelmingly male-dominated industries. I now spend most of my time working on projects where I am frequently the only woman on the team. If I’m not in the office, I’m attending meetings, events, or conferences where I have, on multiple occasions, been in rooms where the number of women did not exceed 5–10% of the total number of attendees.

Note: the previous statement sounds exaggerated. It’s not, I counted. 💁🏽

Regardless, when I changed careers, I encountered a sudden switch in workspace dynamics where I went from being surrounded primarily by women to having most of my colleagues be men. The result was this stark contrast window within which I began to notice all the slight differences in the way my male and female peers were navigating the grounds we shared, and coming out with juxtaposing results.

The disparities manifest in challenges that arise even before entering the workforce, from networking, job applications, interviews, and salary negotiations (a topic that is so rich it deserves its own article), to handling responsibility, asking for help, and voicing concerns. The differences span the smallest actions and reactions, and the reason they do is because they are shaped by attitudes that start building far earlier than any of us have serious considerations for jobs or careers.

See what I started noticing is that, across the board, women are more likely to settle for lower salaries and positions, even if their responsibilities entitle them to higher benefits. They’re also more likely to underestimate and undermine their abilities while talking about them, and they’re far more likely to accept what they’re presented with minimal push back. In my discussions with other women, there seems to be this underlying fear that what we’re offered at a given moment might be the best we’re going to get, and that expecting or demanding more could jeopardize what we have and risk future opportunities.

At first glance, those seem like fairly logical concerns that have nothing to do whatsoever with internalized self-worth. Yet I believe it does, because in my experience, I’ve noticed that men approach these challenges with a completely different attitude. My overarching impression is that, in general, a man navigates the workforce with an overall aura of assurance that could only stem from the engrained confidence of someone who feels like they belong. A person who feels like they don’t have to justify their presence, who knows what they’re worth and isn’t willing to settle for anything less. As a result, they’re more likely to take risks, speak their mind, and fight for what they deserve.

The majority of women I know have at one point or other expressed to me that they regularly experience imposter syndrome. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single man that has said that to me. Its not because the men I know never experience self-doubt, but because when they do, it doesn’t stem from an internalized feeling that they don’t deserve to be there. As a result, their response is usually to locate the issue and tackle it head on.

It is my understanding that these experiences women face don’t come from vacuum; they’re engrained earlier in our lives. For one, there is very little representation of women in leadership roles, 24% of global senior leadership roles are held by women at the time of me writing this article, and that number much lower if you’re a member of a minority group. On top of that young girls are made to feel like women who possess leadership qualities are “bossy” and “mean.” As a young girl, a distant family member explicitly told me once that if I exceeded a certain threshold of professional success, no man would want to marry me, and I would never have a family. Although, not everyone experiences this so explicitly, there’s a universal idea that even if successful women were to get married, they would have an incredibly difficult time balancing a family with work. After all, how many women do you know in senior leadership roles? And of those, how many are successfully balancing family and work?

It’s this self-fulfilling prophecy that keeps the cycle going and instills in women the desire to prove themselves in a place they don’t feel like they belong. It seems harmless, but it changes the dynamic in a way that dilutes a person’s ability to utilize the full capacity of recognizing their value. There is immense power in knowing your worth and not settling for anything less, it doesn’t just modify the rules, it changes the entire game.

Aya Gaballa

Written by

Medtech engineer and creative explorer

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