~by Haley Lynn Gray~
“You’re pregnant… again?”
Ten years on, those words still echo. I had just told my manager I was expecting my third child, and apparently I’d crossed some invisible line. When I explained I’d need private space to pump milk once the baby arrived, she asked: “How long are you going to do that?”
I had a good career and real opportunities. I was also swimming against a great many unspoken undercurrents.
The boardroom arithmetic
I would look around the table and realise I was the only woman among sixty men.
I was one of two female managers in my third-line organisation, and one of very few women in leadership anywhere in the building. Not because women weren’t capable of the work — the building was full of capable women — but because something between the entry level and that table was filtering them out.
That filter is made of a hundred small moments. A remark about a third pregnancy. A question about how long you intend to keep pumping. The assumption that your commitment is now provisional.
The double standard nobody states out loud
We talk constantly about how women balance career, children, marriage and home. You rarely hear the same conversation about men.
A man with children in a leadership position is described as a good family man. The same facts, applied to a woman, become a question about her availability.
And the leadership behaviours that serve men well tend to backfire on women. Direct, firm and vocal earns a man “strong leader” and a woman something considerably less printable — which is not a coincidence, it’s the mechanism working as designed.
What I concluded
Two things, and I still hold both.
Women have to learn to lead in an environment that judges us differently — not by imitating men, which doesn’t work, but by understanding the terrain accurately and deciding what to do about it. Warm and immovable, in my experience.
And we have to support each other properly. That means giving each other permission to be powerful without the name-calling — including the version women do to other women, which is real and which costs us more than anything men do.
Which is why this exists
I built Leadership Girl on a straightforward idea: women lead well when they’re properly trained and thoughtfully guided, and there was nowhere obvious to get that.
Not encouragement — information, honest peers, and somebody willing to say the real number out loud. The same conviction built a network that now runs to 77,000 women.
And if you’re the manager
Because someone reading this is the person in my manager’s chair.
A pregnancy is news, not a problem. “Congratulations” is the entire correct response.
Pumping is a legal right and an ordinary requirement. Provide the space without commentary, and never ask how long it will continue.
Count the room. If you’re looking at sixty men and one woman, that’s information about your pipeline, not about the available talent.
And check your language. Whether you describe the same behaviour as “strong leadership” or “abrasive” depending on who’s doing it is a habit you can correct once you’ve noticed it.
Ten years later, I remember exactly what was said to me. That’s worth knowing: the people on the receiving end of those remarks do not forget them — and eventually, some of us leave and build something better.
