1. You interrupted me. I’m not finished talking.

"Exac…" my half-formed word hangs in the boardroom air, ignored. I try again. "Exactly what I was…" and trail off. Getting the room to listen today is challenging and I can’t help wonder whether this is correlated to the fact that I’m often the only woman in a meeting room with six men. Sometimes being the only woman on a project means everyone is deferential to me and other times it means I’m left out of the conversation. Either way, in male-dominated industries, my gender always seems to matter in some way and in this meeting it’s rendered me invisible. I don’t say, "You interrupted me. I’m not finished talking" because I still want to be liked. I’m a woman after all.