“You are great exactly because you do not understand all the IT stuff!”
This is what my managers and colleagues used to tell me while I was navigating my way through my first years in IT consulting as a business analyst, hampered by impostor syndrome and uncertainty.
My first real job was at IBM, in the Netherlands. I was one of the first international hires of the first ever Graduate Program at IBM NL. I still consider myself young, fresh and free today, yet we are talking about 2013. At the time, almost 90% of my colleagues and clients were male. I stepped into this environment fresh out of Uni where I really enjoyed the company of my male friends, especially the ones fond of finance and economics.
I found myself working in super corporate environments… Shell, KPN, Vodafone, Alliander, Voo across the Netherlands and Belgium. Always sitting on the IT side of things and trying my best to understand the bare minimum from IT architects and development teams to connect the dots and bring projects to life. In a meeting where I was the only woman, I struggled to keep up with the conversation as it was too technical – I am a natural listener rather than a smooth talker, especially in my non-native language. In that very meeting I was asked by a client why I was there and if that had anything to do with the fact that I was wearing a skirt.
It seems unbelievable today.
But that moment forced me to question what “belonging” in tech really meant.
I did not stop wearing skirts, I did not stop listening, but I did feel the need to be heard because I did have something to say. Did I understand the implications of choosing solution A or B at a technical level? No, I did not. But I did understand that when Engineer A was proposing his solution and Engineer B was disagreeing, they were using the same words but that they meant different things and that the disagreement wasn’t technical, it was interpretational. By asking how the choice would affect usability and long-term maintainability, I wasn’t adding technical depth, I was reframing the conversation.
As a woman working in tech, I realised that it’s just too easy to underestimate the skills that we have, the perspective that we bring to the table and the idea that a single ‘right’ way to be technical – historically defined by men – is outdated. In fact, diverse perspectives improve technology outcomes, but this has only relatively recently been acknowledged. Women need to be able to work in tech without pretending to be someone or something that they are not.
I started seeing myself as valuable, if not unique, because of my capability to connect the dots, enable communications, speaking the unspoken, seeing beyond the technical level. Then I decided to move away from IT Consulting and step into something I was deeply passionate about: advertising but still linked to tech, digital advertising. In there I saw the magic of connecting technology, design and psychology.
From then on, I again accepted I was not the most technical person in the room but decided to marry up two things that historically were not connected: creativity and data. That’s when I understood my value was never about technical depth alone. It was about operating at the intersection of disciplines and I realised I had earned my right to be in the room.
Now I am a young director in a 650+ people company. Strong with my voice, my pauses, my silences, my cultural differences, my added value awareness and my expertise, I decided to embrace a new challenge: going back to tech, working alongside a dev team to bring Saas Solutions to the market in a space that I feel like I own. I now feel ready and stronger to be at the same table with a male audience, empowered to support decisions that are inclusive and take different points of view into consideration, at the intersection of rationale, creativity, technology and the corporate world. I am also very happy to have more women join me at the same table just a few years later.
One of my mentors once told me to replace “Yes, but” with “Yes, and.” Tech needs deep expertise. Yes, and it needs translators. Yes, and it needs people who see usability. Yes, and it needs people who ask the uncomfortable questions. That mindset changed how I see myself in the room. You don’t have to compete on the same metric as everyone else. You can contribute differently. If you’ve ever felt “not technical enough,” maybe the question isn’t how to become someone else. Maybe it’s how to bring your full way of thinking into the room. That shift, from comparison to contribution, can change how you see yourself and how you shape the systems around you.
