There is a meeting after every meeting and it is held in the bathroom. I am a senior director at a Fortune 500 company and I have been in this second meeting, the one held in the bathroom, every Tuesday morning for nine years. The first meeting is the one on the official calendar. The second meeting is the one we hold in the bathroom to figure out what to do with the things that happened in the first meeting that we were not, professionally, allowed to react to.
I am writing this without the company's name because the company does not matter. I have worked at three companies in the last fifteen years and the bathroom meeting was held at all of them. The participants vary. The format does not. A woman has said something in the official meeting and a man has reframed it as his own idea three minutes later and the four other women in the room have texted each other under the table. The texts are slightly different at every company but the substance is identical. The substance is: 'are we going to address this.' The answer, in nine cases out of ten, is no. The bathroom meeting is the place where we metabolize the no.
What gets metabolized in the bathroom is not, primarily, the man's behavior. The man's behavior is at this point almost a constant. What gets metabolized is the woman's own response to her own anger about the man's behavior. She is angry. She knows she is angry. She also knows that if she expresses the anger in the meeting she will be tagged in her own personnel file as difficult and that this tag will follow her through every promotion cycle for the rest of her career. She will not be wrong about this. The data on this is decades old and embarrassingly consistent. The narrative that women lack confidence in meetings is the wrong narrative. The accurate narrative is that women have correctly priced the cost of expressing what they think.
The bathroom meeting solves nothing about the official meeting. It accomplishes something else, which I have come to think of as the most important reason it persists: it confirms, to each woman present, that she is not crazy. Without the bathroom meeting, each of us would be sitting alone with a feeling she could not verify against an outside source. With the bathroom meeting, the feeling becomes a fact. Five women noticed the same thing. The thing happened. The thing did not happen because she is uniquely sensitive or uniquely ambitious or uniquely difficult. The thing happened because the thing happens in every meeting and nobody talks about it openly because the cost of talking about it openly is presently borne entirely by the woman who speaks up.
I am going to retire in eight years. I have decided, recently, that I am going to spend the eight years figuring out how to move the bathroom meeting into the official meeting. I do not know how to do this. I have a vague plan involving hiring, sponsorship, and a couple of very specific board appointments. I have a less vague plan involving learning to say what I think in the room. The scripts for doing this exist; my mother could not have used them, and I have been using them in private for years. The harder thing is using them in public. I am forty-two and have nine years of professional capital banked. If I cannot do it, I am not sure who will. The woman two seats over from me is thirty-three. She is brilliant and she is already developing the migraine.