When award-winning artist and author Vivek Shraya found herself repeatedly lowballed in negotiations, she tried something unconventional: she invented a male assistant. She created a new email alias, responded to inquiries herself as “Adam Miller,” and quickly learned that people who dismissed her proposals responded more favourably when the same messages came from him.
Shraya laughed with the audience at Toast Summit in Toronto as she shared the story, but the point was serious. For many women and racialized people, navigating workplace cultures shaped by masculine norms means managing constant adaptation, negotiation, and risk.
The event, held today at The Quay, marked Toast’s first time hosting in Toronto. The event brings together women in tech, allies, and leaders for a full day of candid conversations about workplace equity.
In this session, Shraya joined vocal empowerment coach Jam Gamble and Toast CEO April Hicke to talk through the choices, trade-offs, and calculations women face in navigating these spaces. They shared examples drawn from experience, offered practical strategies, and spoke openly about how power dynamics, safety, and identity shape how people move through work.
Why belonging still feels conditional
Even as companies promote diversity, many women still describe workplaces where belonging depends on how well they conform to a narrow model of professionalism shaped by masculine culture. The result is a chronic sense of being an outsider, even for those who have achieved visible success.
“If I don’t feel safe, then it’s toxic,” Gamble said. “If I wake up every morning in dread, then it’s toxic.”
In her early career, Gamble followed familiar advice to bring passion, ideas, and confidence to her roles, only to find those traits treated as disruptive.
“I realized that I am a threat. People assume because I was confident, because I was comfortable using my voice, that I was trying to compete. And for a while, I lost my shine.”
Shraya’s experience reflected the added weight of being trans and racialized in professional spaces.
“I’m never not the anomaly,” she said. “Whether that was in academia, music, or publishing, I never walk into a room feeling like I belong.” She described how conversations about diversity often become unspoken invitations for her to perform labour on behalf of others.
“When diversity issues pop up at the meeting, everyone low-key turns to me for my take.”
And this constant positioning takes a toll. “It’s extremely vulnerable to be the other at all times,” Shraya said. “I have to subvert that in my mind by reminding myself that this institution needs my voice.”
Even basic self-expression often gets policed. Gamble recalled how both family and workplace expectations pressured her to suppress her identity, and she had to teach them to “unlearn”.
“You can’t go into the corporate space with a shaved head,” she remembered hearing from her mom. “You can’t go into the corporate space with braids. You can’t go into the corporate space with long, bright, colourful nails. I had to lose myself in order to be seen.”
Reclaiming those expressions later became part of rebuilding her sense of agency.
“If you’re going to get this, you’re going to get all of this,” she said.
The mental calculations behind code-switching
Surviving these environments often requires constant adjustments to how women present themselves, what they say, and how they say it. The process, known as code-switching, means altering language, behaviour, appearance, or tone to conform to dominant expectations and avoid consequences for being different.
Gamble described how code-switching shapes how Black professionals navigate workplace speech.
“You lose the essence of your speech, your style, your vibrancy, in order not to be seen as ghetto or unintelligent,” she said.
Over time, the effort to constantly monitor how she sounded left her drained.
“For so many years I’ve come into spaces sounding like jelly instead of Jam.”
Shraya described a different set of calculations rooted in physical safety.
“For me, code-switching means how much makeup I wear, whether I wear a dress on public transportation,” she said. “Because of homophobia and misogyny, I think about safety a lot.”
Even job interviews involved these negotiations, Shraya said. “I thought, should I show up in a dress? Who’s going to be in that room? I want the job. So how do I get the job?”
Both emphasized that there are times when full authenticity is not possible, and added that family narratives about gratitude further complicate this tension.
Shraya described growing up with immigrant parents who often said, “We’re lucky to be here. This place isn’t ours.” That mindset sometimes followed her into professional spaces. “There’s still a part of me that thinks, I should be grateful they invited a trans person into the room.” But she has worked to challenge that instinct. “Don’t always lean into gratitude, especially when gratitude means being grateful to power. You belong there. You earned that seat.”
Building leverage: how women create space for themselves and others
Even within difficult systems, women develop strategies to protect their value, assert authority, and build collective power. The speakers shared approaches that ranged from negotiation tactics to the importance of solidarity.
For Gamble, one place to start building confidence is at home.
“The amount of women I coach whose biggest vocal barrier is their husband breaks my heart,” she said. “If you can’t speak safely to your own partner, how can you transfer that skill to the workspace?”
Inside the workplace, Shraya emphasized finding trusted allies. In a previous academic job she built a small circle of queer colleagues who supported each other behind the scenes.
“We had our own WhatsApp thread. We would back-channel and use strategic moments. Sometimes I’d say, ‘Can you push this agenda?’ because you can get away with it.”
Negotiating pay required its own learning curve. Gamble described how racialized women often second-guess their worth.
“We used to play a game called, ‘What would the white woman charge?’ Sometimes I’d suggest four, and my colleague would say, it’s at least nine.”
Shraya recommended opening with higher fees as a way to create room for inevitable bargaining.
“If your fee is 20, ask for 25. Because I know I won’t get the fee I should be paid.” She also encouraged challenging low offers directly by asking the other person if they have room to come up a bit. “They always have room,” she said.
Both stressed that sometimes walking away is the right choice.
“I have gotten very comfortable with saying no and getting nothing,” Gamble said. “Because in saying no, I leave with my integrity.”
As the conversation moved to solidarity, Gamble described the amplification strategy developed by women in the Obama White House.
“When someone shares an idea, you repeat it, give them credit, and document it. But that only works if women see each other as equals.”
Shraya noted that solidarity also requires recognizing privilege.
“If you are a white woman, think about your Brown and Black coworkers who may not feel like they can speak up,” she said. “If you have more power in the room, find ways to support those who have less.”
Hicke underscored that allyship cannot be symbolic. “Whether it’s time, money, or social capital, it has to cost you something,” Hicke said (more on that here).
The panel also pointed to structural frameworks that help organizations measure progress.
Gamble described using the 13 workplace factors of psychological safety to give employees language to name harmful behaviours and hold leaders accountable.
“Imagine working somewhere you didn’t have to defend yourself all the time,” she said. “The 13 factors give people language to match the behaviour they experience.”
She recalled training sessions where employees later messaged her privately, saying they had been unable to speak in front of leadership but now had objective reference points to advocate for change.
“You’re not saying Tony’s being a dick,” she said to audience laughter. “You’re saying, as per workplace factor number four, this isn’t happening.”
Hicke cited Google’s Project Aristotle, which identified psychological safety as the strongest predictor of high-performing teams.
These workplaces, the panelists made clear, were not designed with their experiences in mind. Yet through solidarity, deliberate negotiation, and collective support, women continue to navigate and reshape them. Sometimes that means finding allies. Sometimes it means challenging harmful norms. And sometimes, as Shraya’s story illustrated, it means inventing Adam Miller.
Digital Journal is the official media partner for the Toast Summit.
