I had never hired a man

I had never hired a man. Not directly, anyway.

I'd led men—usually the ones I inherited when I took over a team—but when it came to choosing who came into my team, I always chose women. For a long time I told myself it was coincidence, competence, or cultural fit.

Recruiting for something I owned brought a pattern I'd never properly examined into focus. I wasn't just choosing women. I was avoiding something else.

Because long before I was a leader or a founder, I was a young woman learning, in the hardest way possible, what it felt like to exist in unsafe places and workplace cultures. Both times alcohol was involved. And I've asked myself the question people like to ask victims: did I have a type, or did the way I was attract a certain individual? Not to assign blame—but to expose how hollow that logic is. Because none of it changes the truth: no consent is not consent. Alcohol isn't an excuse. It's a no.

I've always been clear that the restaurant where I was raped isn't responsible for my rape, and that the bank where I was sexually violated didn't assault me. But as the owner of a business I'm also explicitly clear how responsible I am for the culture and environment I create.

That restaurant did enable an environment where nineteen-year-olds were readily served until intoxicated. That bank did take a whole team away for an off-site and consistently fill my glass. Whether it's that black, ripped, curling sign on the back wall—"alcohol will not be served to intoxicated persons"—or values supposedly embedded in corporate culture, words only matter if they're lived. Especially by leaders. Especially by owners.

When I revisit those experiences through the lens I have today, I don't just see individual moments. I see the environments. I see what was normalised. I see what was overlooked. And I see myself—learning, over time, how to lead differently.

The people who walk through the doors of a business you own are whole humans—with histories, with people who love them, with vulnerabilities they didn't leave at home. And many of us, as leaders and employers, will be responsible for those people—sometimes for years, sometimes for just a few hours inside the walls of something we built.

That awareness brought me back to recruitment. And to a pattern I needed to examine honestly.

I don't hire on ideology. I don't believe in filling roles to balance genders or make statements. My core belief is that the right person should always get the job—the most capable, the most values-aligned, regardless of gender, orientation, ethnicity, or familial status.

And yet I'd unconsciously eliminated an entire variable. Not because I thought women couldn't cause harm—I hold everyone to the same standards. But because I couldn't read which men would betray themselves under pressure. Which ones would override their own discomfort to perform 'team player.' Which ones would carry what didn't belong to them while avoiding what did.

Read that again, because I had to. It isn't a belief about men. It's an admission that I had no read.

Bias is a conclusion about a category. A blind spot is a category you never gathered evidence on. Mine was the second, and it was self-sealing: I'd never chosen a man, so I never built the read, so I never chose one. Every man I'd had to form a working judgement about was a man I hadn't chosen.

So I defaulted to: easier to hire women, where I could spot unsafe behaviour once they were in.

That's not a solution. That's a workaround.

And look at what I was actually describing, when I described what I couldn't see. Not predation. A man who overrides his own discomfort to stay in the room. A man who carries what isn't his because putting it down would look like weakness. That pattern isn't a risk men pose. It's a price men are asked to pay—trained in early, rewarded hard. In the rooms where nothing was said, not everyone staying silent was safe either.

The real issue was never learning to identify which individuals were 'safe.' It was building systems where unsafe behaviour is harder to hide, harder to normalise and much harder to sustain.

Every time we hire, the pool widens, and the range of people in it widens with it. What I notice now is that the categories are genuinely less relevant, because the questions reveal what actually matters.

Not because I learned to read men—because I stopped needing to read anyone.

An all-women team was never the goal. It was a symptom of an unexamined pattern.

So in recruitment I ask candidates: When have you been asked to do something that didn't feel right, and how did you push back? Do you work extra hours outside normal time—and if so, why? What do boundaries mean to you, and how good are you at holding them?

I'm looking for one thing: will this person betray themselves?

Not because I expect people to avoid discomfort, or believe that advocating for yourself means doing only what you want. Responsibility is often uncomfortable. The question is whether you can remain in contact with what you know, need and perceive while still carrying what properly belongs to you and seeking clarity for what you don't.

When someone overrides their own limits, ignores their own discomfort, performs agreement or worthiness instead of saying what is true, the thing they didn't name doesn't disappear. It moves. Someone else carries it. A decision gets made with incomplete information. Resentment appears downstream. Capacity gets mistaken for commitment. Silence gets mistaken for consent.

That is how compensatory load moves through human systems.

Advocating for yourself and delivering on your responsibilities aren't in tension in the businesses I own. They're both non-negotiable. Self-advocacy is load-bearing precisely because it helps keep responsibility, information and consequence where they belong.

You carry what belongs to you, so I can keep carrying what belongs to me.

I don't want, and won't have, a culture where people feel victim to it but never say anything. Where people carry things that don't belong to them while avoiding what does.

The more my team is rooted in agency and ownership—responsible for what belongs to them, holding the standard, saying something when it slips—the safer the environment becomes. Not because I'm vigilant. Because we all are.

When you hire people who won't betray themselves, psychological safety stops being something leadership has to manufacture. It becomes something the people in the system participate in producing.

My job then isn't about creating safety for people to speak up. Yes, that's necessary—but it's not enough. My job also isn't to protect people from discomfort. Discomfort is a given. It's to notice when they're absorbing it instead of naming it—and call that out.

And when everyone operates that way, towards something that actually matters, with enough margin to show up fully—that's when culture becomes something you feel, not something you manage.

How I hire is one of the clearest ways I lead myself and my businesses. Not from fear. Not from ideology. From consciousness.

I can't guarantee what another person will do. But I can decide what the systems I own reward, what they tolerate, what they make visible, and what they ask each of us to carry.

My responsibility isn't to carry everyone. It's to build and conduct a business in which what belongs to each of us can be carried where it belongs.

That part is mine.