The Day I Stopped Counting Women in the Room

Photo by CoWomen on Unsplash

I used to do this thing without even realizing it. Every time I walked into a lecture hall, a meeting, a hackathon, a coffee chat with recruiters, I would count. Not everyone. Just the other women.

Three. Two. One. Just me.

It was automatic, like checking the time or glancing at my phone. I never decided to do it. I just did. And somewhere along the way, I started to carry that number around with me like a small rock in my pocket.

. . .

The first time I realized I was doing it, I was at a robotics workshop in my second year. I walked in, scanned the room, felt my stomach drop a little, and sat in the back. I was not sure what I was afraid of. Nobody had said anything rude. Nobody had even looked up. But my brain had already done the math, and the math said, you do not belong here yet, so be quiet.

I spent the whole session watching. I did not ask a single question, even when I knew the answer. Especially when I knew the answer.

. . .

For a long time, I thought counting was a form of survival. I thought if I knew how outnumbered I was, I could prepare. I could speak more carefully. I could dress more carefully. I could shrink myself into something that would not rattle the room.

But here is the funny thing about shrinking. It does not make you safer. It just makes you smaller.

And the work still had to get done.

. . .

Somewhere in my third year, I took a class that changed things. Not the syllabus. The professor. She was brilliant and warm and a little scary in the best way, and when she walked into class on the first day, she did not look around to see how many women were there. She walked straight to the whiteboard and started drawing.

I remember thinking, she is not counting.

And then I thought, why am I?

. . .

I tried an experiment the next week. I walked into a group project meeting, eight people, all guys, and I decided, before I even sat down, that I would not count. I would not notice. I would not carry the rock.

It is harder than it sounds. The first few minutes, my brain kept trying to do the tally. Three, five, seven. I kept redirecting. Not today. Just work.

And then a strange thing happened. I asked the first question. I disagreed with the team lead on an architecture choice. I wrote on the shared doc without softening every sentence with "maybe" and "I think this might be wrong but." I was just there. Present. Working.

It was the best meeting I had ever had.

. . .

I will not pretend the counting is gone forever. Some rooms still catch me off guard. Some rooms still whisper to me, you are the only one, stay small. But I know the whisper now. I know what it is trying to do. And most days, I can put the rock down.

The thing is, I do not want to be a story about being the only girl in the room. I want to be a story about building something good. Writing something that works. Asking a better question. Leaving a codebase cleaner than I found it. The math can do itself.

I am here to do the work.

. . .

If you are reading this and you are doing the counting too, I want to tell you something. You are allowed to stop. You do not owe anyone the rock. You can walk in, sit down, ask the question, and just be a person in a room full of people who are trying to figure out the same thing you are.

The room does not change when you stop counting. But you do.

And honestly, that is the whole point.