You Can Be Surrounded by People and Still Have No One Who Gets It – Or You

She oversees a $55 million budget. She leads 200 employees. By every external measure, she has made it.

And yet, Siri Swahari, a senior technology executive who has spent decades rising through the ranks, will tell you there was a period where she felt profoundly alone.

Not physically alone. She had a wonderful husband, a close friend circle, great mentors both inside and outside her company. But when something hard happened at work such as a political battle she couldn't name, a room where she had to justify her presence despite having clearly earned it, the particular exhaustion of being the only woman at the table,  she had nowhere to take it.

She'd go to her friends. They'd listen. They'd offer advice. And she'd walk away thinking, Why are you not understanding me?

It wasn't that they didn't care. They did. It was that they hadn't walked the same path. They'd never had to prove themselves in a room they'd already earned. They couldn't quite grasp the weight of what it meant to be someone people look to for all the answers while simultaneously not being allowed to show weakness. So, the advice they gave, however loving, landed a little off.

"It takes one to know one," Siri said.

This is the quiet tax that senior women pay that rarely makes it onto a resume or a LinkedIn post. It's not just that the climb is harder. It's that the higher you go, the lonelier the terrain becomes, because there are fewer and fewer people around you who've been where you are. Your peers inside the company are also your competition. The women below you are looking up to you for strength. And the people outside work who love you most simply don't have the frame of reference to understand what you're navigating.

This is a particular problem for women, and an even sharper one for women of color. The pipeline issue is well-documented.  Studies show that women enter STEM fields at roughly equal rates to men, but leave within a decade at far higher rates. The result is that by the time you reach the executive table, the ratio is nowhere near equal. If you're a woman, you may be one of one or two. If you're a brown woman, the chances are even slimmer that someone across that table has shared your specific experience of having to constantly prove that yes, you really are who your title says you are.

What Siri eventually realized is that the solution isn't therapy or venting or even mentorship in the traditional sense. It's peer community. It's having a room full of people who are at the same altitude, navigating the same weather, and who can say I know exactly what you mean without you having to explain the backstory.

That insight changed everything for her. And it's the reason she built something about it. We-C, Women Executives Circle. It’s a powerful not-for-profit organization that empowers senior women to lean on each other for advice, support, and navigation through the toughest terrain – the executive level at the corporate office. 

Siri has since grown the organization from a lunch with fewer than 10 women to 300 members across 22 cities in just one year. She uses a very unique framework to ensure every single person in the room is genuinely heard and now the state of North Carolina decided to give her organization its own official day. 

This is a conversation every senior woman needs to listen to. Listen to the full episode here.