EngineerHer

There’s a particular kind of conversation I have regularly with senior women engineers.

It usually starts with them telling me about the role they want next. The flexibility they need. The salary they deserve. The kind of leadership they’d finally like to experience.

And then, somewhere in the middle of that conversation, something else surfaces. A manager who took credit for their work. A restructure that pushed them sideways. A project they poured themselves into that was quietly cancelled. A moment they spoke up and were talked over, and decided never to do it again.

The past doesn’t stay in the past. It shows up in every career decision you make from that point forward – in what you’re afraid to ask for, what you assume you won’t get, what you talk yourself out of before you’ve even tried.

For women engineers reconciling their career past, this is often the most important work. Not the CV. Not the interview prep. This.

Why we don’t look back

There’s a reason most career advice tells you to focus on the future. Looking back is uncomfortable. The difficult roles, the bad managers, the moments where things went wrong or where you made choices you’d make differently now – none of that feels like useful material.

So we skip it. We tell ourselves it doesn’t matter anymore. We focus on what we want next and try to leave the rest behind.

The problem is that unexamined experience doesn’t disappear. It becomes the invisible architecture of your decision making. The reason you hesitate before negotiating. The reason you downplay your achievements in interviews. The reason you accept conditions you’d never advise a colleague to accept.

You’re not carrying the past because you’re weak or stuck. You’re carrying it because nobody ever helped you put it down properly.

What reconciling the past actually means

I want to be clear about what this isn’t. It isn’t about dwelling. It isn’t about blame. It isn’t about spending hours unpacking every difficult experience you’ve ever had at work.

Reconciling your career past means looking at the whole picture honestly – the good, the bad, and the complicated – and extracting what’s actually useful from it.

Because here’s what I know after two decades in engineering across food, pharma, medical devices, steel and more: the jobs that were hardest to survive are usually the ones that taught you the most.

The manager who micromanaged everything taught you exactly what autonomy means to you and why you need it.

The project that failed taught you more about problem solving under pressure than any of the ones that went smoothly.

The role where you were the only woman in the room and felt it every single day taught you something about resilience, about reading a room, about making your voice heard in environments that weren’t designed to amplify it.

That’s not nothing. That’s a body of hard won knowledge that most people in your field don’t have.

The questions worth sitting with

For women engineers reconciling their career past, I find these questions more useful than any forward planning exercise:

What did the difficult roles cost you? Not just in terms of time or energy – but what did you stop believing about yourself, or stop asking for, because of what happened?

What did they give you that you haven’t fully claimed yet? The skills, the perspective, the absolute clarity about what you will and won’t accept – where is that showing up in how you present yourself?

What decisions are you still making based on old evidence? If you’re avoiding certain types of roles, certain kinds of conversations, certain salary figures – is that based on what’s true now, or what was true in a previous chapter?

What would you tell a younger engineer going through what you went through? Often the advice we’d give someone else is the advice we most need to hear ourselves.

The past as a resource, not a weight

The goal isn’t to make peace with everything that went wrong. Some of it was genuinely unfair. Some of it was structural, systemic, the result of being a woman in an industry that still has a long way to go.

You don’t have to be grateful for any of that.

But you can choose to use it. To let the clarity it gave you – about who you are, what you need, what you will never again accept – become the foundation of what you build next rather than a shadow over it.

That’s the shift. From the past as something that happened to you, to the past as something that prepared you.

If you’re ready to start that process properly, the Engineering Career Clarity Guide is a good place to begin. It walks you through your values, your non-negotiables, and where you actually are right now – using your real experience, not a generic framework.

You can download it free here: The Engineering Career Clarity Guide

The past isn’t the problem. It’s part of the answer.