The meeting was starting but I was having trouble focusing. Not because I had just flown halfway across the world. And not because most attendees were speaking a different language. I was feeling off-kilter because I was the only woman in a room full of men.
The setting was the corporate headquarters of the global company I worked for, Sony Electronics. I had traveled to Tokyo with my boss and his boss to present our strategy to the head of the Sony brand office. As the first-ever brand manager for Sony in the U.S., I already felt pressure to impress. But as the only woman among men—many of whom were senior to me in age and professional rank—the pressure felt even more intense. My presence was conspicuous, and I suspected that everything I did or said was judged—at least in part—through the lens of my gender.
While that may have been the first time I found myself as the only woman in a room like that, it was not the last. Throughout the rest of my career, as I rose through the corporate ranks and later as a consultant to Fortune 1000 companies—and even now as co-founder of a Christian ministry that works with pastors—I have found myself in countless situations where I am the only woman.
I have gotten used to the challenges that come with these situations: being underestimated, patronized, or simply ignored; struggling to be heard without interruption; having to establish my credibility over and over again; feeling the weight of representing all the other women who are not in the room.
What I have been less prepared for is the silence from my church. Not acknowledging that what happens in those rooms matters. Not supporting me in discerning how to navigate those situations. Not inviting me to bring the skills and insights I have gained there back into the life of the congregation.
I know I am not alone. I have met many professional women who share my experience with this double silence—unseen in our work for being women, unseen in our churches for being professionals. These two silences are not unrelated.
The relationship between the Church and women—especially professional women—has become precarious. Women have been leaving the church. According to Barna Group, while 43% of American men attend church regularly, only 36% of women do. And this is not simply because more men are coming to church. It is also because, as Barna reports, “churches are losing women more than they are gaining men.”
The disparity is even sharper among younger women. Barna reports that among millennials, 55% of men attend church regularly compared to 38% of women. A 2023 American Adolescence Study found that 54% of Gen Z adults who had left their formative religion are women, while 46% are men.
The decline among professional women specifically has been building for over a decade. A 2015 Barna study found that 27% of professional women were already leaving the church. Today, Barna finds twice as many Christian working mothers as fathers—22% versus 11%—say they are not attending church at all.
Many forces are driving this. Many young women find traditional, hierarchical church structures out of sync with the values and experiences they encounter everywhere else. According to the American Adolescence study, nearly two-thirds of Gen Z women say churches don’t treat men and women equally. Having grown up in a society that increasingly affirms women’s leadership and agency, it is no wonder they feel sidelined or slighted by churches that limit their roles.
Patricia Miller, writing for Religion Dispatches, observes, “The more churches talk about denying women and others bodily autonomy, stressing culture-war issues like abortion, LGBTQ rights, and contraception, and backing political actors who make it happen, the more that educated women, especially younger women, respond by walking out the door.” Faithful, thoughtful Christians hold these positions for good reasons, so they may not be wrong—but the empirical evidence does indicate that when they dominate a church’s public identity, women may experience them not as doctrine to understand but as personal judgment to avoid. Miller notes that what may feel political or theological to men often feels personal to women.
With more women delaying marriage or remaining single, the way most congregations structure themselves around nuclear families makes church feel, at best, irrelevant—and, at worst, off-putting. High-profile scandals involving male church leaders have further eroded trust, compounding a broader decline in institutional confidence.
But there is more to women’s exodus from church than external trends. According to extensive research by professors Denise Daniels and Elaine Howard Ecklund, reported in Working for Better: A New Approach to Faith at Work, churches engage in practices and offer experiences that can be unappealing and even alienating for professional women in particular.
Women report their work is not affirmed and is often degraded by churches. This shows up explicitly in messages that discourage women from working or give higher regard to men’s professional experiences. It shows up implicitly in expectations that women will volunteer more than men, or that husbands should out-earn their wives. Sermons that address men’s work concerns but not women’s, women’s programs scheduled during working hours, male pastors who deflect engagement with women to their wives or female staff—these all contribute to professional women feeling unsupported by their churches.
These patterns, Daniels and Ecklund found, persist across all types of Christian churches and denominations—and they carry real spiritual consequences. “Women in these churches are offered a faith identity without a significant place for their professional lives,” they write. Not engaging their work sends the message that it does not matter. Not inviting them to use their gifts suggests those gifts do not matter. It precludes their discipleship—and prevents them from discipling others.
This research confirms what I hear privately. I feel invisible is the most common complaint. Pastors don’t get me. Churches don’t know what to do with me.
Women tell me they are seen in their churches primarily as mothers and wives—not as individuals—and that distinction matters deeply to them. Professional women say they do not feel understood at church, so they mentally and emotionally disengage. Young women report not receiving support they long for from their church when making decisions about careers, marriage, or having children.
So, I have begun to see the Church’s alienation of women—especially professionals—is not a fringe frustration. It is widespread. And it does not stay in the pews. When young women do not see their older counterparts affirmed in the Church, they turn elsewhere for role models and support. When seekers observe practices that seem out of step with biblical principles of equality and dignity, they form a distorted picture of the Christian faith. And when churches perpetuate gender bias rather than reforming it, they undermine one of their primary callings.
Let me make this personal. When I have felt isolated and marginalized at church, I start to question my giftedness, my value—even my identity.
When I am engaged differently because of my gender, I begin to wonder if I am lesser-than. I start to question my capabilities and contributions. Sometimes I actually wish I was not me.
Earlier this year, I attended a small conference hosted by a seminary. The topic was faith and work integration, and as co-founder of the Bay Area Center for Faith, Work & Tech, I had been invited to share perspectives from our work discipling tech workers in Silicon Valley. When I arrived, I discovered I would be one of three women in a room full of male seminarians, pastors, and ministry leaders.
While my lack of a theological degree kept me from contributing to the more technical discussions, I found myself self-editing far more because of my gender. Speak too quickly and risk sounding overconfident. Raise a point about working women’s needs and risk seeming self-serving. Show some passion while making a point and risk being labeled that woman.
None of the men were disrespectful—on the contrary, several went noticeably out of their way to make me feel included. And yet.
I have been in enough of these rooms to have learned that conforming to gender expectations is safer than trying to overcome them. And it is better to anticipate potential resistance to female leadership than to pretend it does not exist and stumble onto a potential minefield. So, I spoke deferentially, let others go first, and left some things unsaid.
In situations like that, I find myself wishing I did not have to think about my gender at all. I find myself thinking how much easier—perhaps better—it would be to be a man.
Those are the moments when I have to return to the Imago Dei.
The doctrine that all humans are made in God’s image is not decorative theology. It is the primary anthropological fact. Gender is a core element of that image, but it is not above our identity as image-bearers. We are not women-made-in-God’s-image and men-made-in-God’s-image. We are, together, image-bearers.
And we are called together to shared work and shared flourishing. Genesis 1:27–28 says that God blessed them—man and woman—and said to them: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” This is a joint commission. The Imago Dei means that every person who enters a workplace carries something of God into that space—and that the partnership between man and woman is, from the beginning, full and equal.
The more detailed creation account in Genesis 2 expounds this point. God creates the first woman from the man’s rib to be his ezer kenegdo. Ezer, a word most often used to describe God, means deliverer and lifesaver—not helper in the diminutive sense we often assume. Kenegdo means in front of, opposite, corresponding to—the woman is the man’s mirror image. Far from subordination, these verses describe a partnership that is essential to God’s mission on earth.
Gender conflict enters the story as part of the curse—not as God’s original design. And like all brokenness in this world, its repair was initiated by Christ’s death and resurrection and continues as a calling for all his disciples.
So, gender—my gender—is real and good, but it is not my primary identity. And that is why, when I am engaged as a woman before I am engaged as an image-bearer of God with particular gifts and particular callings, something in my sense of identity in Christ gets quietly eroded. That erosion is not a private inconvenience. It is a loss the whole Church bears.
Let me be clear. I am not trying to make the case for egalitarianism over complementarianism. In fact, I can appreciate the bind many complementarian churches find themselves in.
On one side, a rising and increasingly aggressive patriarchy movement is pushing the complementarian framework toward explicit male dominance—in the home, the Church, and the public square. On the other, women and seekers within those same congregations are quietly asking whether there is a version of complementarianism that doesn’t manifest in a system designed to keep them small. The result is a difficult, awkward middle position—and I see many complementarian pastors genuinely trying to navigate it with integrity.
Nor are egalitarian churches immune to this struggle. Daniels and Ecklund report that women face significant gender-related challenges even in denominations that ordain women to pastoral positions. Churches of both theologies may affirm women’s equality and dignity in principle while having few structural practices that demonstrate it. I don’t believe most pastors intend to be malicious or misogynistic. More often, they simply lack a framework that reaches into this space.
This is why I am not arguing theology. I am arguing practice.
Sociologist Joan Acker’s research on what she calls “gendered organizations” is instructive here. Acker found that gender bias is embedded in organizational life not primarily through individual attitudes but through structures—logic and culture, divisions of labor, patterns of interaction, and the construction of identity. It operates beneath intention, accumulated over centuries in which the male experience was simply assumed to be the human experience.
In the corporate world, I have seen this in the way men are often promoted on perceived potential while women are expected to prove past performance first. In the church, it shows up in gendered volunteer pipelines—women to children’s ministry, men to the building committee. I have experienced it personally in church meetings where my husband and I are both present and questions get directed to him first. Or when male lay leaders are called on to pray over a meal more often than women.
If churches want a culture that embodies the universality of the Imago Dei, they need to move from good intentions to deliberate policies, practices, and patterns of collective behavior that produce a context—a felt experience—that demonstrates the beliefs of equality and fairness being put into action, regardless of theological persuasion.
Central to this is work-related discipleship. Dualism—the split between sacred and secular—plagues many churches and leaves workers broadly unformed. But the gap is more acute for women.
Many professional women sit in pews on Sunday having navigated real complexity, exercised moral judgment, and led with courage all week—and hear nothing that speaks to what they have just lived. That gap leaves us to carry our burdens alone—the weight of being the only woman in the room—and overlooks the particular opportunities that accompany those burdens.
The disorientation I felt in that Sony meeting was not only personal; it was representational. Because so few women hold positions of organizational influence at the highest levels, those of us who do feel the weight of being there not just as ourselves but as a data point for whether women in general belong there. We are not only establishing our right to be in the room; we are laying the groundwork for the women who come after us. Every temptation toward imposter syndrome feels like a betrayal of those women.
We also navigate a particular double bind in the exercise of power. Secular leadership culture tells us to project confidence and decisiveness to command respect, while the way of Jesus calls us to humility and lowliness of heart. That tension is real for all believers—but women carry a gendered layer on top of it. Conform to traditionally feminine qualities like warmth and nurture, and we risk being dismissed as unsuited for leadership. Demonstrate traditionally masculine ones like assertiveness and directness, and we risk being labeled bossy or aggressive. There are no easy answers, no one-size-fits-all approach.
And yet. Being the only woman in the room also presents unique vocational opportunities.
We get to bring a sensibility shaped by empathy and experience, grace and grit, into spaces that desperately need it. We contribute a different voice to conversations that lack diverse viewpoints. We model integrative, relational, and courageous leadership for everyone watching—and there are always people watching. We have the chance to represent something that many in those rooms have not yet seen: what it looks like when faith and professional excellence are not in tension, but in partnership.
Our churches should be equipping us for exactly this—but too often, they leave us to figure it out alone.
How do we move forward? When professional women like me are not known by our pastors or supported by our churches, we miss the kind of formation that the unique demands of our positions require. We need mentorship, spiritual direction, and pastoral investment—not as a special accommodation, but as basic discipleship.
What I am asking for is simply this: to be seen—really seen. To be seen for who we are. To be seen as disciples first, not as women first. To be seen the way Jesus saw the women around him.
Jesus engaged with women—Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary and Martha of Bethany, the Samaritan woman at the well—in ways that were meaningful, intimate, and countercultural. He welcomed women into his inner circle. They traveled with him, sat at his feet to receive his teaching, and were the first to whom he revealed himself after the Resurrection. He relied on their financial support, invited them into the work of advancing the Kingdom, and replaced the gendered hierarchy of the Fall with a new order—calling women his sisters and disciples. In short, Jesus saw women as the image-bearers they were.
These are the same steps available to us today. Pastors and church leaders, to disciple professional women:
- Name work from the pulpit—including work done by women. Not as an aside—as theology. Teach how work belongs to the Imago Dei. Show how it runs through the grand narrative of Scripture. Use workplace examples that reflect the actual lives of your congregation. When a woman in your church leads a team through a crisis, negotiates a difficult deal with integrity, or builds something that serves her community—that is faithfulness. Name it. Preach it.
- Rethink the women’s ministry paradigm. If your programming for women centers primarily on domestic life and personal devotion—valuable as those are—you are leaving professional women theologically unsupported for the majority of our waking hours. Ask whether your programming and scheduling reflect the reality that nearly 60% of the women in your congregation work outside the home. And examine whether your volunteer opportunities are gendered in ways that squander the gifts in the room.
- Develop cross-gender mentorship with intention. The Billy Graham rule, applied as a blanket policy, communicates something its adherents may not intend: that women are risks to be managed rather than image-bearers to be discipled and co-laborers to be developed. It over-sexualizes professional relationships, creates distance, and presents a barrier to the kind of pastoral investment women need. At the same time, female church leaders consistently report having no voice in establishing relational boundaries with male colleagues—a dynamic that compounds the isolation. Wisdom, not unexamined rules, is what this moment requires. There are ways to meet and mentor across gender with integrity, transparency, and accountability. Churches that do not figure this out are not protecting their people. They are leaving women behind.
- Make women’s voices visible. Women in many churches manage significant ministry budgets and staff while remaining absent from the elder meetings and steering committees where vision and direction are set. For many churches, particularly those with male-only eldership, this raises a practical question worth sitting with: if the women in your congregation make up half its membership, how do their voices reach the room where decisions about their church are made? Theological convictions about eldership do not have to preclude that question—they can sharpen it. Consider advisory input, structured consultation before major decisions, regular forums where women speak, and leaders listen. These are not workarounds—they are acts of stewardship. Our voice matters. It shapes the culture and practices that translate intent into experience. Our visibility also matters. It tells the next generation of professional women in the congregation whether the community really sees and values them.
- Embrace mixed-gender partnership. The Creation narrative is not only a description of the past—it is a commission for the present. In Together in Ministry, Rob Dixon outlines what flourishing mixed-gender partnerships require: a learner’s posture, honest and vulnerable communication, awareness of one’s own brokenness, and a willingness to name and correct the structural tilts that favor men.
These are not easy changes. This is costly work—but it is also the work of the body of Christ. And it is necessary if the Church does not want to continue to lose half its population, its role models for the next generation, and its image-bearers who God created to advance his Kingdom. These steps require pastors and church leaders to step into the gap between what professional women need and what they experience in their pews.
Professional women also have work to do here. Professional Christian women:
- Claim your vocation. You do not need your church’s permission to believe that your work matters to God. The theological case has been made. You are an image-bearer doing image-bearing work. Live this out—and model it for others.
- Find your people—and build the table if it does not exist. Community among professional Christian women is not a luxury—it is a spiritual necessity. And yet many of us self-edit at church, reluctant to speak openly about professional ambitions or struggles. While we might debate the reasons for this silence, we can agree it costs us. The informal mentorship, the industry networks, the frank conversations about navigating power that professional men take for granted—we need those too. If they do not exist in your context, build them.
- Bring the conversation to your pastor. Not in accusation—in invitation. Many pastors genuinely do not know what professional women in their congregation are carrying, and they have blind spots they do not know to name. Instead of waiting for them to intuit what they have never been taught to see, bring it to them. Bring the research. Bring your story. Bring this essay.
- Hold the tension as a calling. Being the only woman in certain rooms is genuinely hard. It is also a place of particular witness. Seek to be a faithful steward of all you have been given—working with sincerity of heart, resting with trust in your soul.
As I think back to that meeting in Tokyo, I understand now that I should not have been surprised it was so difficult. It reflected the culture around it—one with deep-rooted norms that placed intense pressure on women, and that had no framework for what to do with us when we arrived.
Many corporate organizations still operate that way. So, it is also no surprise that some professional women still find themselves the only ones in elite rooms.
But the Church should know better. Supporting professional women is not simply a matter of fairness—it is the fullness of the body of Christ at work in the world. Every professional Christian woman who is unseen, unmentored, and unsupported is a form of lost witness—to colleagues, to industries, to a watching world that needs to imagine something different.
When the Church equips us well—when it sees us fully, supports us faithfully, and sends us with the commission of the Imago Dei—it becomes what it was always meant to be: the training ground for a different kind of presence in the world.
We are already in the rooms.
The question is whether the Church will meet us there.
