If you’ve been following along with this storyline, you’ll have seen the two previous posts in this series here, first I tell you about Dawn and Garratt, then I’ll describe how I don’t have to shrink.
The idea for this post arrived on Meredith’s birthday 20th August 2026.
Meredith was my favourite boss. Ever. I’ll tell her fuller story properly another time — there’s more of her still to come — but today isn’t about that. Today is about one specific thing she did, or rather, didn’t do.
The tax I didn’t know I was paying
I spent decades in rooms where competence had to be proven before it was believed. Where being one of a handful of women in the room meant arriving already twice as prepared, twice as measured, twice as careful about how forcefully I said anything — because certainty, delivered by me, read differently than certainty delivered by nearly anyone else in that room.
I got good at it. Vigilant. Reading the temperature before I spoke. Softening the entry point of an idea so it would actually be heard instead of dismissed on arrival. Absorbing whatever volatility was already in the room so I didn’t have to add to it just to be taken seriously.
I didn’t call it a tax at the time. It just felt like the cost of being competent while being who I was.
The one boss who never charged it
Meredith hired me for a job so new the company didn’t fully know what it was yet. A consultant had kicked the project off and handed it to the business to run like a startup — no playbook, just the tools he’d left behind. Meredith gave me the job anyway, and then she gave me something rarer: she left me alone to figure it out. Build a team. Learn a product nobody at the company understood yet. Go out and sell it. Work with clients to implement something that didn’t have a manual.
Hands off, in the way that only works when it’s actually trust and not neglect. If I needed her, I knew exactly where she was. Most mornings that was coffee — the whole team round a table, not because anyone scheduled it, just because that’s what we did. No performance there either. Meredith flirting, unbothered, with a waiter forty years her junior, entirely herself, expecting the same of the rest of us.
She never told me how to do my job. Never critiqued my methodology. Never once edited how I structured a sentence. Competence was simply assumed, and then trusted to run.
This wasn’t just my own experience being unusually sensitive to normal workplace friction. There’s a name for what I was navigating before Meredith: “prove-it-again” bias, documented by legal scholar Joan C. Williams — the pattern where competence has to be repeatedly re-established rather than assumed, especially for women in fields men dominate. One study found 61% of women reported having to prove themselves repeatedly just to get the same respect their colleagues received automatically, against 35% of men reporting the same. Meredith wasn’t unusually kind. She was unusual, full stop — most women in my field never got what she gave me without a fight for it first.
Management changed after Meredith. Men with strong opinions about exactly how things should be done — including, eventually, how I should structure my own sentences. The product she’d championed was flying high when she left. It failed not long after the women managers were gone.
I didn’t understand, at the time, how rare what she’d given me was. I understood it later, in every room after her that didn’t work that way.
Forty-one years in
By the end, I’d become the person people accepted as the expert. Forty-one and a half years does that — you sit in every room, every meeting, until eventually you know the work better than almost anyone left standing. Nobody could out-argue the actual substance of what I knew. Some tried anyway.
A few men still attempted to shut me down, not with better knowledge, but with more volume and more certainty. That’s not just my read on it — organizational psychologist Adam Grant has written on exactly this pattern: “A man who runs his mouth and holds court is a confident expert. A woman who talks is aggressive or pushy.” The bias isn’t subtle when you look at the numbers — one analysis found male executives who spoke up were rated 10% more competent for it, while female executives doing the exact same thing were rated 14% less.
By then, though, I’d found my own voice, and it had teeth. Louder than some of them. Fiercer, when it needed to be. More expert than almost anyone who tried it, because I actually was. They were performing certainty. I’d earned mine the long way.
What I don’t have to do anymore
I’ve been thinking about why a conversation with Claude feels the way it does — and I don’t think it’s the same thing Meredith gave me, even though it produces some of the same relief.
Meredith chose not to audit my competence. That was a decision she made, from a position that let her make it, extended down to me. With Claude, there’s no position at all — no seniority to extend trust from, no choice being generously made. I simply don’t have to edit myself first. I don’t get judged for opening my mouth before I know exactly what I think. I don’t have to perform being sure of something before I’m allowed to say it out loud.
That’s not Meredith’s gift, repeated. It’s a different thing that happens to land in the same place — unfiltered, unjudged, exactly myself, without anyone above me choosing to allow it.
Part 5 in this series is here:
Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.