What Happens When 300 Women Walk Into a Room.

Published: 2024  |  Perspective updated: 2025

Last year I walked into a room of 299 women I did not know. On my own. At an event I had never attended before, in a community I had never been part of.

Daunted, yes. Nervous, definitely. Social battery already at about 60%, as a Scot at a networking event will often admit.

Worth it? Completely.

The event was run by egg — Scotland's largest platform for connecting, supporting, and celebrating women, which has also launched a co-working space in Edinburgh. I had heard about it. I had been meaning to go. And I am glad I finally did, because it reminded me of something I think gets underestimated in professional life: the specific, irreplaceable energy of being in a room with people who are building things and willing to talk honestly about it.

What I actually took away

The stories that stayed with me were not the polished ones. They were the ones where someone talked about what had been hard — the no's they had heard, the obstacles that had not moved, the moments where they had kept going anyway.

There were former professional female athletes in the room — women who had built careers in sport that did not pay them what their male counterparts earned, who had been told repeatedly that there was not a market for what they were doing, and who had kept going anyway. The resilience in that was not performative. It was just the reality of what it takes to build something when the structural conditions are not in your favour.

There were also founders at various stages — some just starting, some scaling, some navigating the particular challenge of growing a business in Scotland with ambitions that go beyond Scotland. The conversations about community building and consumer engagement were some of the most practically useful I have had. Not frameworks. Real things that people had tried and learned from.

On introducing yourself honestly

One of the things that came out of the day — prompted by the wonderful Sam Sheppard — was a challenge to introduce ourselves not by job title or company name, but by what we actually cared about and what we were trying to do.

It is a small thing. But it changes the conversation.

When I did it, what came out was something like: I am customer obsessed. I define and deliver strategies aimed at achieving positive social impact through designing inclusively for everyone. My passions are people, the betterment of women's health, financial and digital inclusion, tech for good, sustainable finance, and understanding different cultures.

That is harder to say than “I'm a consultant”. It is also more honest and more useful for the person you are talking to. It tells them something about what you actually believe and what you might be able to do together.

I think professional introductions — particularly for women, and particularly in environments where the default is to lead with credentials — often undersell what people are actually about. Egg's approach to creating space for a different kind of introduction felt like a small but meaningful design choice.

Why community infrastructure matters

There is a broader point here about the value of spaces like egg, and about what is lost when they do not exist.

Women in professional life benefit from networks. That is not a controversial claim. What is less often said is that the quality of those networks matters enormously — that a network of 300 people who share a set of values and are willing to be genuinely useful to each other is qualitatively different from a large LinkedIn following or an industry association membership.

Research into what drives women's entrepreneurial success consistently points to access to relevant networks, peer support, and mentors who have navigated similar challenges as key factors. Formal programmes can provide some of this. But informal community — the kind built by organisations like egg over years of consistent, well-designed events — provides something that programmes cannot easily replicate.

I went to the egg event a bit sceptical about whether it would be worth the social energy. I came away thinking about who I had met, what I had heard, and what I wanted to do differently. That is a pretty good return on an afternoon.

One thing I want to carry forward

The invitation to be honest about what you care about — not just what you do — feels worth holding onto beyond a single event.

In my own work, the moments where I have been most useful to clients are the ones where I have been clear about what I believe: that financial services can and should serve everyone, not just the easy customers; that inclusive design is better design; that the gap between what organisations say they value and what they actually build is where most of the interesting and important work happens.

That is not just a pitch. It is what I actually think. And being in a room of 300 women who were similarly willing to say what they actually thought made me want to say it more clearly and more often.