When Representation Becomes Code
- Tammy Mifflin, MBA, CPRW, CDCS
- Oct 14
- 5 min read
The Moment It Hit Me
I was sitting at a café table, the only woman and Black person, surrounded by three white male executives. It wasn’t unfamiliar. I’d been there before, countless times, in boardrooms and brainstorming sessions where I was used to holding my own.
We talked, laughed, and prepared to head to our next meeting. As I stood to leave, a Black woman at a nearby table caught my eye. She had the biggest smile and said,
“I see you. You’re at the table, holding your own, and making us proud. Thank you for inspiring me.”
Her words stopped me in my tracks. My eyes filled with tears because, in that moment, I realized something I had never fully named: I wasn’t just representing me. I was representing us.
Every woman who had fought to be seen, heard, and respected in spaces that weren’t designed for her.
That encounter changed how I understood leadership. It wasn’t just about having a seat at the table. It was about the unseen weight of what it means to be there.
“I used to think being the only woman at the table was a sign of progress until I realized I wasn’t just there to contribute. I was there to represent.”
The Unspoken Role: The Invisible Burden of Ambassadorship
That moment crystallized what I now call the invisible burden of ambassadorship.
When you’re “the only” — the only woman, the only person of color, the only person from your background — your presence takes on meaning beyond your role. You become an ambassador for an entire group, whether you intended to or not.
You’re expected to contribute with excellence, while also symbolizing progress. You modulate every tone, every comment, every expression, not just for your own credibility but for what it might signal about those who’ll come after you.
It’s a dual consciousness that’s both empowering and exhausting. You perform your work while carrying invisible work — the labor of representation.
When you do well, you prove the possibility. When you falter, it feels as if you’re confirming bias. It’s a leadership tightrope, and few talk about how isolating it can be.
Over time, I realized that being “the only” came with a silent expectation, one that was never spoken but always felt. When you’re the sole representative of your gender or race in a room, people often see you as more than yourself; they see you as a symbol.
“Ambassadorship isn’t a role you apply for — it’s one the room assigns you.”
When Systems Mirror Society: The Subtle Coding of Bias
Bias doesn’t always shout. Sometimes it whispers through systems we’ve stopped questioning.
Ambassadorship doesn’t exist in isolation; it’s shaped by the structures around us. For decades, organizations have measured leadership by outdated templates, frameworks designed for sameness rather than difference. The model of what a “leader” looks like, sounds like, and leads like has been replicated so often that it has become invisible, baked into how decisions are made and success is defined.
Now, as technology takes center stage in how we recruit, promote, and evaluate talent, those same biases are quietly finding a new home: inside the algorithms that guide our future.
Artificial intelligence learns from the past, and the past is filled with inequities. When those historical patterns become data, the bias doesn’t disappear; it becomes automated.
We’ve already seen how this plays out:
Hiring software, such as Amazon's AI recruiting tool, was found to downgrade résumés containing women’s names or words like “volunteer” and “parent.”
Facial recognition systems from major tech firms misidentified women of color at rates as high as 34%, compared to under 1% for light-skinned men.
Productivity and performance tracking tools often equate visibility with value, penalizing employees, especially women, who work flexibly or balance caregiving responsibilities.
Each of these examples represents something bigger, a warning that we may be encoding yesterday’s prejudices into tomorrow’s progress.
If we aren’t intentional, the systems we build to make leadership more efficient will make bias more efficient too.
The Leadership Imperative: Women as Ethical Architects of the Future
This is where women leaders hold immense, often untapped power.
Because women have lived through ambassadorship, that delicate dance between representation and authenticity, they’re uniquely equipped to see what others miss. They notice micro-inequities. They sense tone and bias before the data ever captures it.
That’s precisely the perspective needed in the rooms (and digital spaces) where the next generation of leadership systems is being built.
Women must not only sit at the decision-making table, but we must also have a voice in how those decisions are made. Leadership in this new era isn’t just about managing people. It’s about shaping systems that manage people fairly.
As women leaders, we’ve long been the interpreters translating emotion into strategy, culture into communication, and human experience into policy. That ability to bridge the unseen and the unspoken is exactly what leadership in this next era demands.
But now, the language of leadership is changing. The future translation isn’t just cultural, it’s technological.
“We’ve spent years translating culture into conversation. Now, we must translate inclusion into code.”
Redefining Inclusion: From Representation to Redesign
True inclusion can no longer stop at representation. Representation gets you in the room; design changes what happens once you’re there.
Redefining inclusion means:
Auditing systems: Asking who built the tools that measure performance, and for whom they were built.
Expanding influence: Ensuring diverse voices contribute to data design, leadership development, and ethical oversight.
Creating checks and balances: Embedding empathy and ethics in the frameworks that define opportunity.
Inclusion isn’t just a moral choice. It’s a design choice that determines whether tomorrow’s workplaces replicate the inequities of the past or evolve into something more equitable and human.
“The next generation of leadership won’t just sit at the table. They’ll shape the algorithm that decides who gets invited.”
Beyond the Seat
That day in the café, I realized leadership has never been about simply sitting at the table. It’s about what you do once you’re there. Too often, representation stops at visibility, as if being seen is the goal. But true leadership begins when we use that visibility to reshape what the table represents.
Ambassadorship gave us awareness. Technology has given us access. Now, both demand something deeper — the courage to lead from conviction, not compliance.
The future of leadership won’t be defined by who occupies the seat, but by those who redefine what it means to lead from it. Because once we move beyond the seat, we move into purpose, the place where inclusion becomes innovation, and presence becomes progress.
The next frontier of leadership isn’t just about who’s in the room; it’s about who’s shaping the system that decides who gets in. Women leaders must ensure that inclusion isn’t just performed but is programmed with purpose. And if we want the future of leadership to reflect all of us, then women can’t just represent inclusion; we must architect it.
Final Thoughts
That day in the café stays with me. Not just because of what that woman said, but because of what it revealed. I wasn’t simply part of a conversation; I was part of a pattern. One where women are celebrated for being “in the room,” yet still expected to carry the emotional weight of proving why we belong there.
The next era of leadership will belong to those who can see both the people and the patterns. Those who understand that data has a heartbeat, culture has a code, and leadership has a responsibility to connect them both.
The systems being built today will shape leadership for decades to come. So the question isn’t just, Do women have a seat at the table?, but are we shaping the systems that decide who’s invited to sit there in the first place?
Leadership isn’t about claiming a seat. It’s about creating environments where every voice has weight and every perspective is built into the foundation. That’s how we move from representation to redesign and from visibility to value.
Comments