Workplace fairness: when female bosses lack empathy.

I was three sentences into a routine business travel request when I saw it: the team building trip had been brought forward to the exact week of my son’s 3rd birthday. Not near it. Not around it. On it. I stared at the screen for a moment longer than I needed to, waiting for the dates to rearrange themselves into something less cruel. They didn’t.

I want to be honest about what happened next, because the honest version isn’t flattering to anyone, including me.

I raised it with my supervisor mid-discussion, half apologetic before I’d even finished the sentence, asking only for permission to leave on an earlier flight on the final day. I wasn’t asking to skip the trip. I wasn’t asking for special treatment. I was asking for a few hours. I’d already started blaming myself before she said a word, telling myself I should have submitted annual leave three months in advance, as if I owned a crystal ball that could have predicted a date change none of us knew about. That’s the first thing worth noticing: I walked into that conversation already guilty, before anyone had accused me of anything.

Then came the line, delivered in front of my peers, that I’ll be turning over for a long time: “It can be anyone’s birthday, and you are not getting an earlier flight home.” Flat. Final. Public.

I didn’t argue. I didn’t have the words ready, only the tears, which arrived exactly as the meeting ended, as if they’d been queuing politely and waiting for the door to shut behind everyone else. My colleagues wrote to me afterwards, kind, sorry, unsure what to say. My plan for the day, a nursery party bag drop before work, a small cake before bedtime, quietly folded itself away.

Here’s the part I keep circling back to. My supervisor is a woman. A mother. Her children are grown, which means she has already lived every version of this exact moment I’m dreading: the school play missed, the birthday shrunk to a rushed phone call, the years that don’t come back. She, of all people, had the fluency to say “I understand” and chose “it can be anyone’s birthday” instead. That’s not a difference in policy. That’s a difference in empathy, and it’s the kind that stings more, not less, coming from someone who should know better.

Because it isn’t anyone’s birthday. It’s the birthday of a child I waited seven years to meet, two more years after his older sister. When you’ve done that kind of waiting, a birthday stops being a diary entry and becomes proof of something you weren’t sure would happen. Losing the chance to mark it properly isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a small, specific grief, and no organisational chart gets to decide it doesn’t count.

Where is empathy in leadership? What unsettles me most is the gap between what companies say about supporting women and what actually happens when a woman is the one holding the calendar. The empowerment language is easy to print on a values page. It’s much harder to practise when the person asking for grace is a subordinate and the person granting it has already forgotten how heavy that particular week can feel. Fairness at work was never going to be solved by having more women in charge. It’s solved by those women choosing to remember, on purpose, what it cost them, and refusing to make someone else pay the same price without a fight.

I haven’t resolved this. I’m not going to pretend a neat lesson arrived along with the tears. But I have decided a few things, and I’ll pass them on in case they’re useful to you too.

If a date changes and it collides with something that matters, raise it in writing, immediately, so there’s a record and you’re not relying on memory or mercy later. Ask for what you actually need, not the maximum, because a small, specific request is harder to dismiss than a vague one. Don’t let guilt get there before you do; you are not responsible for decisions made by other people’s calendars. And notice who shows empathy and who performs it, because you’ll need that information again.

I still don’t know if I’ll see the earlier flight approved. But I know I’ll remember, precisely, how it felt to be told my son’s birthday was interchangeable. And I intend to make sure no one under me ever hears those words from mine.