The only man in the room

The meeting starts, and I count: 5 women, one me. This has been my professional reality for more than a year now, the lone male on a team led by a fierce woman. In corporate India, where the World Economic Forum reports women remain dramatically underrepresented in leadership, I've stumbled into a statistical anomaly. But it's International Men's Day, and I'm thinking about a different kind of math.

Every March 8th, the most-searched phrase on Google isn't about women's achievements or ongoing struggles. It's ‘When is International Men's Day?’ Today is that day, November 19th, and I find myself wondering: What exactly are we celebrating?And why do we even need to.

I didn't learn masculinity from action heroes or school ground brawls. I learned it from my mother, a nurse, and my sister. My mother showed me that strength looked like double shifts and patient care while your blood pressure shoots through the roof. My sister shows me, repeatedly, that good intentions aren't enough. "The inherent patriarchal values are very hard to get rid of," she told me. "Simply not being bad isn't the same as being good."

Then there is my boss and manager, both women, who've mastered the art of patience, the kind that makes you feel that they carry an iceberg on their heads. From them, I've learned that leadership isn't about having all the answers immediately, it's about creating space for better questions. My teammates, too, have given me something I didn't know I was missing, confidence without bravado, the assurance that someone has your back not because you've earned it through dominance, but because that's what functional teams do.

She's right, of course. And that's the point of today, not celebration, but reckoning.

The script we inherited

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has documented what we've all absorbed: male characters are systematically shown as emotionally inexpressive, their silence coded as strength rather than dysfunction. From Gillette's ‘Man Up’ to Bollywood's stalker-as-lover trope, we've been sold a version of manhood that confuses aggression with passion and vulnerability with weakness.

I thought I'd escaped this programming. I was wrong. It took watching Barbie, yes, that Barbie, to recognise how deeply the script ran. The film's depiction of everyday male entitlement felt like watching home videos I didn't know had been filmed.

In my current role, I've discovered something unexpected, the absence of masculine performance creates space for actual work.

The difference is subtle but unmistakable. In male-dominated spaces, I've watched conversations become competitions, who can speak longest, loudest, most definitively. Research confirms this isn't perception but pattern: women are interrupted 33 percent more often than men in meetings, their contributions often credited to the man who amplified them minutes later.

Here, in this female-majority team, the dynamic shifts. Ideas are built collaboratively rather than defensively. Silence means thinking, not strategising your next interruption. I'm heard, not because I've fought for airtime, but because the structure assumes everyone's contribution has value. And most of the time my ideas are enhanced by my team mates.

But integration required unlearning. Three lessons stand out.

First, decenter yourself. Women are often socialised as communal problem-solvers. The impulse to be the hero, to swoop in with solutions, reads as dominance, not help. Participation means building on others' ideas, not replacing them.

Second, listen to what isn't said. When a colleague mentions working late to finish a project, she's not bragging about hustle culture, she's navigating the reality that women are expected to prove their commitment in ways men aren't.

Third, recognise invisible labor. Someone remembers birthdays, checks in during difficult weeks, commutes from very far, maintains and nurtures team culture. This emotional infrastructure work, predominantly done by women, is both essential and unpaid. To truly belong, you must contribute to it, not just benefit from it.

What I'll never face

The most radicalising aspect of working in a female-majority environment is confronting, daily, the obstacles I don't encounter.

I leave the office at 8 p.m. without clutching my keys as a weapon or sharing my live location. My firmness is interpreted as leadership; theirs risks being dismissed as shrillness. When I take a sick day, no one wonders if it's ‘really’ that bad. LinkedIn's Opportunity Index found that 85 percent of working women in India have missed promotions due to gender. That's a ceiling I'll never hit my head on. NEVER.

This isn't guilt. It's data. It's reality. And it's why the question "Do we need International Men's Day?" exists.

We need Men's Day if it means confronting why our suicide rates are higher, because we've weaponised our own emotional isolation. We need it if it means examining why "strength" is so fragile it can't accommodate vulnerability. We need it if it means acknowledging that women, mothers, sisters, colleagues, bosses, have been doing the unpaid labor of teaching us emotional literacy while we've been busy being ‘strong.’

We don't need it if it's another excuse to center ourselves in every conversation, including those about our own dysfunction.

My sister was right. The work of dismantling patriarchal programming is slow, ongoing, and uncomfortable. It requires recognising that the system isn't broken; it is working exactly as designed, just not for everyone. The responsibility, therefore, falls on our shoulders to actively dismantle this machinery of oppression. We must call out misogyny, educate against it, and break the chains of traditions that exist solely to benefit men and the patriarchy.

So today, instead of celebrating, I'm practicing something harder: shutting up and listening. Not performing wokeness or waiting for applause. Just listening to the room where, for once, I'm not assumed to be the most important voice in it.