The Seat at the Table I Had to Build Myself

March is Women’s History Month. And every year, I find myself in the same quiet contradiction — grateful we have it, and a little tired that we still need it.

Let me explain.

I’ve spent a majority of my career in professional services – much of which has been spent in consulting and technology — industries that have made enormous strides in *talking* about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and considerably fewer strides in actually delivering it. I’ve sat in boardrooms where I was the only woman. Not occasionally. Routinely. I’ve been in meetings where my idea landed with a thud, only to be repackaged by a male colleague five minutes later and met with enthusiastic nodding. I’ve done the mental gymnastics that most women in business know by heart: be assertive, but not too assertive. Be confident, but not arrogant. Have a voice, but make sure it doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable.

Exhausting. Genuinely exhausting.

But the moments that have stayed with me most weren’t in boardrooms. They were quieter than that — and somehow sharper.

I came back to work quickly after giving birth to my two children. Faster than many people thought I should. And I discovered, rather promptly, that this was apparently everyone’s business but mine. The raised eyebrows. The thinly veiled comments about whether I was “managing okay.” The implicit suggestion that by being present and engaged in my career, I was somehow doing motherhood wrong — or doing my job wrong — or possibly both simultaneously. It was a lose-lose framing I hadn’t agreed to, and nobody had the courtesy to tell me the rules before I started playing.

Here’s what I knew then, and know even more clearly now: you can be a mother AND a successful executive. These are not opposing forces. They are not a trade-off. They are, in fact, remarkably complementary — because if you want to develop patience, strategic thinking, crisis management, and the ability to negotiate with completely irrational stakeholders, I highly recommend small children (especially my fireball, Jordyn).

What I wish someone had said out loud back then — in a meeting room, on a stage, anywhere — is that the timeline of someone’s maternity leave, or the speed of their return, is not a performance metric. It is a personal decision. Full stop.

But here’s where it gets broader than just my story.

McKinsey’s 2025 Women in the Workplace report — the most comprehensive study of its kind, now in its eleventh year — finds that women still hold just 29% of C-suite positions in corporate America. Unchanged from 2024. Unchanged, essentially, from where we were. In technology specifically, it’s worse: women hold only 11% of executive positions, and just 15% of CIO and CTO roles across NASDAQ-100 companies. Back in my home country of Canada, the government’s own data shows that only 21% of women who hold a STEM degree are actually working in STEM fields. So the problem isn’t that women aren’t qualified. It’s that the system keeps finding ways to route them elsewhere.

And here’s the part that should give everyone pause: in 2023, for the first time in nearly two decades, women actually lost C-suite seats. Progress didn’t just stall — it reversed. That’s not a pipeline problem. That’s a culture problem, wearing a very expensive suit. It’s a retention and promotion challenge — and a structural issue that quietly tells women, at various points in their careers, that they don’t quite fit.

The motherhood piece is a significant part of that. Research consistently shows that women face a “maternal wall” in the workplace — assumptions about commitment, availability, and ambition that kick in the moment children enter the picture. Men, incidentally, often receive a “fatherhood bonus.” Same life event. Opposite professional consequences. If that doesn’t make you raise an eyebrow, I’m not sure what will.

While I was navigating all of this — the rooms I had to earn my way into twice, the credibility I had to re-establish after every leave, every transition, every time I showed up somewhere I wasn’t expected — I was also raising kids. And I made a deliberate choice about what they were going to see.

They watched me prepare for high-stakes presentations at the kitchen table. They saw me take calls from executives, negotiate, push back, and lead. They watched me lose deals and get back up. They watched me walk into rooms where I didn’t look like anyone else there — and stay anyway. I didn’t hide the hard parts, because the hard parts were the point. I wanted them to understand, in a lived and concrete way, that competence has no gender. That leadership looks like a lot of different things. That when a woman speaks, you listen — the same way you’d listen to anyone making a smart argument.

I also wanted them to understand that the absence of women in certain rooms isn’t a reflection of women’s ability. It’s a reflection of systems that were never designed with women in mind — and that those systems are worth questioning, worth changing, and worth refusing to simply accept.

The “seat at the table” metaphor gets used so often it’s practically furniture at this point. The more interesting questions are: who designed the table, who sets the agenda, and whose voice actually carries weight once everyone sits down?

Structural change is what moves the needle. Explicit promotion criteria, consistently applied. Sponsorship — not just mentorship, because mentors give advice but sponsors put their reputation on the line for you. Diverse hiring panels, not as optics, but because homogeneous panels make homogeneous choices. And leaders, at every level, willing to look honestly at their teams and ask: who’s missing here, and why?

Women’s History Month is a moment to celebrate how far we’ve come. It’s also a moment to be clear-eyed about the distance remaining — and to name, without flinching, the specific, mundane, persistent ways women are still being asked to shrink.

I think about the women coming up in their careers, and I think about the kids I raised, and I want both groups to inherit something better. Not because it’s good PR. Because organizations that reflect the full range of human talent think better, lead better, and frankly, perform better.

That’s not ideology. That’s just good business.

So this March, I’ll celebrate the women who broke ground, honour the ones still pushing, and keep building — table and all.