My Next Seat At The Table Is At Lean In

The first thing I saw was the table.

It was my first day at Fortune Magazine in late 2013. Twenty-three years old, I had barely just entered the workforce. I remember walking into the Time Inc. office in midtown Manhattan with a new JCrew blazer and a nervous energy.?

As I would come to discover, the team at Fortune gathered every morning to discuss the agenda for both the website and upcoming print magazine. Sometimes, there was pressing news that needed to be assigned? and reported out immediately. Other times, cover designs were mocked up and critiqued. But always, editors would gather around a boardroom table to discuss the news of the day.

Outlining the circumference of the boardroom was a row of chairs, not at the table itself. Typically, this is where junior staff and supporting team members would sit. Despite there being many open seats at the table itself, many staff members elected to sit around the edge of the room, further away from our Editor in Chief, the top editors, and the items on the agenda up for discussion. While this table etiquette was hardly limited to Fortune — but a common practice in newsrooms — I still found it to be curious.?

Roughly six months before my start date at Fortune, Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. I remember reading the book in one sitting on a beach vacation over the summer. While many of the messages in the book have remained in the zeitgeist for the last decade, there is one that I remember hearing loud and clear. Through anecdotes about her own career, Sheryl encouraged young women like me to take a seat at the table. In other words, she was telling me, and millions of women like me, to seek challenges, take risks and pursue their goals with fervor.?

So when I walked into Fortune magazine that first day and the many days after that, I remember seeing that table and thinking, “Is this the table Sheryl was talking about? Should I take a seat?”

It took me months, if I recall correctly, to actually take a seat at the table. As I was originally a contractor getting paid hourly, it felt silly to pull up a seat next to some of the top editors in business journalism. But I remember the first time I got up the courage to sit at the table itself, confident after publishing several pieces online. And it was that day that I got one of my more significant assignments for the print magazine.

I am thinking a lot about that moment and how it has shaped my career as I start a new position as Editor In Chief and Vice President of Education of Lean In , the non-profit foundation that was born from Sheryl’s book. Over the past decade, I have devoted my career to telling stories that advance women and make workplaces more equitable. I now get to do that in-house with a team of innovators and leaders who I have worked with and admired for years.?

Even with the countless stories I have written on the topic of women in the workplace over the years, the numbers are moving, but slower than we would all like. When I first reported on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women List, 24 Fortune 500 CEOs were female . That number just now surpassed 50 — it took ten years to get to 10%, not even close to half . And as Lean In shares each year in its Women In The Workplace report , only one in four C-suite leaders is a woman, and only one in 20 is a woman of color.

Still, after working for media and technology companies on trying to solve these issues, I feel strongly that in this new position I will be able to move the needle on the path to progress more than I have ever before.?

This new role — which has me overseeing our strategy for original research and programmatic content — comes at a definitive moment in my personal life as well. Five months ago, I gave birth to my first child, James. As I wrote in Fortune moments before he was born, I became a mother fearful about what that new title would mean for my professional career. After all, the facts are clear: The odds are heavily stacked against working mothers in America, especially those who take time off to take care of a child. But now that I’m on the other side of maternity leave, I know it will only strengthen what I’m able to give an organization like Lean In. That’s why as a new mom, I am taking on my most significant challenge yet.?

As I think back to those early days in my career, I am eager to support the women who walk into rooms every day at work and stare at boardroom tables, wondering if they should sit down. But more importantly, I want our content and programming to reach the women who don’t even make it into the room at all. That’s where the real work to be done is, after all.?

I look forward to my new seat at the table, where I plan to welcome many more women to sit down with me as well.?