I donned an orange safety vest and sparkling new hard hat fresh from its cellophane wrapper and trudged up the wide, steep incline under a blazing California sky. My gait was off-kilter, too much weight in the front of my steel-toed boots. The Sony camera slung across my body hit my back every step I took, like a stranger trying to get my attention. I shoved my small notebook and pen into my jeans back pocket and swung the camera around, securing it with my right hand. Up and up the bridge deck I climbed, all the way to the end, halfway across the San Francisco Bay. On the edge looking down, I saw a huge concrete segment weighing a million pounds ready to be hoisted into place. All potential, I thought.

*

I was an improbable candidate for a career in construction. I didn’t know what civil infrastructure was when I accepted a job at one of the largest bridge builders in the country. I was raised by my mother and attended an all-girls high school, which meant my formative years had been short on men. My teachers gave no indication that women couldn’t do anything men could. Achieving equality was not explicitly stated; there was simply no mention of men or boys in our quest for greatness.

I graduated from college at the height of the dot-com boom, when money and optimism flowed freely, dissolving any remaining teenage angst I had about sticking it to the man. When the tech bubble burst and the company I was working for ran out of money, I didn’t think much about accepting a job at a construction company. As marketing coordinator, my responsibilities would include publishing a quarterly magazine and managing the website. The job required traveling to bridge sites, where I spent many hours wearing a life preserver, drenched in sweat, climbing up towers, trudging through tunnels, or descending into massive steel cofferdams. I learned about all the different kinds of bridges, how each tower, foundation, and deck was constructed.

*

Over the next few years, I built a proper communications department in charge of marketing, public relations, branding, and more. I attended shareholder meetings overseas and press conferences in Manhattan. They put me up in nice hotels and treated me to expensive wine and steak dinners. Once, one of my direct reports and I flew on the corporate jet. As a child of divorced parents, I was not used to such luxuries. It was hard not to feel valued. I thought maybe I’d make it all the way to vice president one day.

I didn’t mind being the only woman in the room, even though I sometimes had to drag an extra chair into the conference room and sit behind the circle of men at the table. No, really, it’s no problem, I said if one of them offered me a seat. I never felt like the offer was genuine. They didn’t insist.

A decade into my career, when one of our projects started losing money, they asked me to step away from communications to help with proposals because that whole team had either quit or been laid off.

“Just until we right the ship,” they said.

That was when my new boss arrived, a charming Frenchman around my age, tall with thick, dark hair. I googled his watch and discovered it cost $3,000. He was so seemingly in control and confident that I didn’t know whether I wanted to be him or sleep with him. After we submitted a few successful proposals and hired a new proposal team, I built up the courage to ask him if I could move into business development, a more respected and higher paid position held by men. I knew no proposal manager was ever going to make it to VP.

He resisted at first. He then offered a manager-level role, but I declined. When he finally agreed to a director-level position, a lateral move, I did not feel happy or relieved. I felt hurt he didn’t recognize my potential and began to doubt my own ability.

*

Over the next few years, the Frenchman moved up the ladder and I remained where I was. I watched mediocre men promoted to vice president. No matter how hard I pressed my foot on the gas, I was getting passed on all sides. My boss explained that since they’d promoted Kevin/Steve/John, they also had to promote Dave/Mike/Bill. “You know, to be fair,” he said. It was like an equal rights crusade for white dudes. He explained why a female colleague was not promoted. “His ego couldn’t handle reporting to her,” he said.

Around this same time, in my late thirties, a senior executive told me to “bring that skinny waist over here" in front of two male colleagues who said nothing. My reaction was like a phenomenon I’d learned about in tennis. When a ball is hit at a certain angle, it takes more effort to redirect the ball than to hit it back in the same direction. I couldn’t muster the additional strength needed to redirect his request, so I walked over to him and let him put his arm around me. I had neither the desire nor the energy to deal with him on top of working a full-time job and being the mother of a small child.

At times during those years, I would sit in my office and stare at the plant on my desk. When I noticed it wilting from weeks without water, I’d dump an old half-empty glass of water into the pot. This routine had been going on for a decade, but no matter how brown and brittle its leaves became or how dead it looked on the outside, the plant always sprung back to life. The plant’s innate desire to thrive was so strong, the smallest amount of nourishment was all it took to keep it going. I could relate. I didn’t need the ideal environment, just an acceptable one.

My sole female colleague and I used the humor of the oppressed to stay sane. When a woman joined our company’s board, I sent my colleague an email.

The good news is that they appointed a woman to the board. The bad news is she has three degrees from ivy league schools—Harvard, MIT, and Stanford—while men still require just two qualifications: a degree from Sacramento State and a penis.

*

During that decade, I started to wonder about the American Dream. Not only that it might be impossible to attain, but how I wasn't sure I even wanted what it had to offer. Was climbing the corporate ladder going to solve my problem? I didn’t even know what my problem was. But as soon as I began to have doubts, I felt guilty for wanting more. I didn’t deserve to be questioning my good fortune. I was being selfish and spoiled. I told myself most people would kill for a job like mine.

While I hated that there were no women in positions of power and despised a system that prioritized a man’s fragile ego over a woman’s advancement, I knew wrath wasn’t going to resonate with the guys signing my paycheck. Such a small thing to get all worked up about, I imagined them saying behind closed doors. I was aware of the hysterical woman trope.

I stayed because, all things considered, the good still outweighed the bad. When I wasn’t being sexually harassed, I was having fun! I remembered what my high school chemistry teacher used to say: “Buck up and be a woman.” I agreed. I needed to toughen up and quit complaining. If I didn’t like the situation, I should change it.

*

Around that time, I drove my daughter to a tennis lesson and stayed to watch. The coach divided the group into two teams, two girls and ten boys on each, and instructed the kids to pick a team name.

“Any adjective followed by a vegetable,” he stipulated.

The boys offered a few ideas: “Giant eggplant!” “Huge banana!” “Massive cucumber!”

Not all of the boys were yelling. Most were walking in circles staring at the ceiling. My daughter and her friend looked at each other and rolled their eyes. My daughter is not shy. She likes to sing and dance on stage, but in a room full of loud boys, she was either too tired or disinterested to scream her idea more loudly.

All of those years of meetings—the ones in which my idea was ignored until a man offered the same idea, and the room concurred with its brilliance—was what happened when the guy-to-girl ratio was out of whack, in professions like engineering and tech and the occasional co-ed tennis clinic. And while most men are perfectly fine, three of them won’t stop screaming about their giant eggplants. I guess I could have tried to channel my inner Gloria Steinem, but I was only one person in a sea of men. The real question was, why didn’t any of the men speak up?

*

A few weeks after the tennis lesson, I took a walk with my husband along the path behind our house. We got to talking about work. He'd discovered he was happiest as a software developer working in our basement communicating with other humans solely via Slack. He had no chip on his shoulder about feeling like he deserved more. He’d felt in charge of his own career.

“I’m a six-foot-tall white guy,” he told me. “I don’t have to prove anything.”

He said, “Maybe your ambition comes from someone saying you can’t do it, and you just want to prove them wrong.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe my problem wasn’t because I hadn’t climbed far enough but that I’d been chasing something I didn’t even want just because someone told me I couldn’t have it.

*

After fifteen years, I finally decided to quit my job. The Frenchman, who was COO by then, summoned me to his office. He told me the company was on the verge of greatness. I did not mention I’d been through many verges of greatness before he arrived. I did not tell him I felt like the company was more mine than his.

"If this is about the money, don’t worry,” he said. “I will take care of the money.”

I turned my head and looked out the window at the dark clouds rolling in from the mountains. Heavy drops of rain struck the window one at a time, then two together, then all at once.

“Staying here wouldn’t be fair,” I said.

“Wouldn’t be fair to whom?” he asked.

“To me.”

*

My new job at a rival construction company was better, but I had changed. I was no longer looking for that next rung on the ladder.

I flew to a work conference in Cincinnati. At the hotel the first night, I reflected on my life and saw someone who had taken the path of least resistance. I had given too much of myself and hadn’t gotten enough in return. I panicked at all the time I’d wasted. A million books unread, art unseen, conversations unspoken. Shit. Shit. Shit. How many years did I have left?

That night I stayed in my room and read in bed. I ignored invites to networking happy hours. I slept late, until a sliver of white light at the drape’s edge forced my eyelids open. There was no way I was going to that conference. Once dressed, I took the elevator downstairs, pushed through the lobby doors, and headed toward the Contemporary Arts Center. I saw two guys I knew in suits on their way to the conference. I slowed my gait and looked down. I did not want to stop and explain why I was wearing jeans and tennis shoes walking in the opposite direction of where the morning’s opening remarks would begin in ten minutes.

Inside the museum, I walked upstairs into a sparse gallery where a group of women sat quietly at a long table.

“Would you like to make a candle?” one of them whispered.

She handed me a stack of milky decals. I paged through them and saw they were religious images, the kind you see on devotional candles. After many pages, I came to a different image, a square with block letters in black and yellow, like a construction sign. I flipped the page right side up and read the words: Warning: Women at Work.

*

When I got home, I hired a career coach. I told her I had no desire to advance my career. She told me to list five things I was interested in and pick one.

“Find a small way to incorporate it into your life,” she said.

I found a writing workshop downtown and began writing. Writing was excruciating, but not writing became even worse. I could no longer enjoy a simple game of Wordle because I felt guilty any time I wasn’t writing.

Writing was self-loathing and hopelessness and promise and exuberance, and that was just the first sentence. When did you know a piece was finished? You didn’t. How did you know if something was good? You didn’t. Your piece didn’t resonate with the audience? Find a new audience!

I read essays aloud in my workshop that contained truths I hadn’t even told my husband. It was terrifying at first, but the more I did it, the easier it got. My psyche developed a callus. One of my stories was chosen by a local theater company and read by an actor on stage. When the audience laughed at a line I wrote, I felt like my heart was going to explode. In all my years of working, my heart was never close to doing that.

Writing was all process and discovery. It was the opposite of wanting to become a VP. I used to imagine how I would feel once I reached whatever goal I was striving for at work. I’d expected to feel happy. But it wasn’t happiness I now felt. It was merely an absence of pain. For the first time in my life, I felt an okay-ness in the here and now. I was no longer trying to get anywhere.

*

I probably shouldn’t have expected so much from a job. My job didn't give me purpose. So what? I think my real problem was that I didn’t feel in control. My agency—my ability to act and achieve a desired outcome—was impossible to maintain within a system that contained so many opposing forces. Maybe I would have made the decision to stop climbing the ladder on my own, but I was never given the chance to find out.

I still work in construction. I feel empathy for my male colleagues these days, the ones I see trying to do better. As Virginia Woolf wrote, “Life for both sexes...is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle.” Maybe it was unfair to expect men to do more within a capitalist system that rewards personal achievement. As a white, college educated woman, I’d had advantages too, yet I’d been too concerned with my own career to help anyone else.

I recently started a women’s resource group at work. During our first meeting, around ten of us shared our stories. We couldn’t believe how similar our experiences had been.

The pandemic’s Great Resignation wasn’t what we first thought. People didn’t quit working, they quit working for shitty companies, and a booming economy enabled that choice. I used to wonder whether the Frenchman’s resistance to my advancement was due to my own shortcomings, but I don’t wonder anymore. I see now that my story didn’t resonate with the audience, so I found a new audience, and I was lucky to have that choice.

-Anonymous

After a long career in corporate communications, the author started writing personal essays in 2018 and is currently at work on a manuscript about her experience working in the male-dominated world of construction. She lives with her husband and daughter in Colorado.