The empathy edge

Nearly two decades ago, I began my career as a bright-eyed 21-year-old in the world of journalism and film, a world that shaped my early understanding of storytelling, purpose, and people. Since then, I’ve walked through many professional landscapes — corporate meeting rooms, academic corridors, design studios, and now, a manufacturing organisation. Through all these shifts, one question has quietly travelled with me: what is it that women bring to work? And more specifically, what happens when women work together?

Fate, or karma perhaps, answered that question not once but twice. In my current role at a large manufacturing organisation, where I work to advance gender equity on the shop floor, the corporate function I joined turned out to be an all-women team. Another team I collaborate with is also entirely female. And so began a renewed inquiry, now less theoretical and more experiential, into the energies women bring, individually and collectively, into the professional domain.

Juggling heartbreak and ambition

Each woman I work with or have worked with comes from a different walk of life. We were not curated; we are a collage — mothers with toddlers, young women contemplating marriage, middle-aged women reinventing themselves, newlywed professionals navigating the domestic-corporate duality, married women with teenagers. In many ways, the team forms a living timeline of the stages I have moved through and the ones still ahead. In our shared space, I saw myself at 27, juggling heartbreak and ambition. I recognised traces of my 34-year-old self building a work identity, upskilling and parenting my little girl. Women carry timelines within them, not only their own but also the generational echoes of motherhood, silence, rebellion, nurturing, and survival.

At a farewell party for one of our team members, nine women laughed freely, stories spilling into the air. There was no need to perform strength, no pretence of composure. For that moment, we weren’t just colleagues, we were companions, witnessing one another as we were.

This emotional bandwidth wasn’t a distraction from productivity; it was its foundation. Trust, honest feedback, shared wins, and supported failures — these are not byproducts of work. They are its core.

Trust circles, safe havens

Long before corporate spaces or creative studios, my earliest memories of women together were forged in the heart of the residential colony where I grew up. After sending their husbands off to work, the women would gather in small circles, knitting, mending, or simply catching up. These impromptu gatherings became trust circles, safe havens where stories, grievances and hopes were shared in quiet confidence.

Years later, as a design consultant dabbling in the arts, I found myself drawn back to this memory. I organised an experience workshop, “Tales of Thread,” as an intentional recreation of those mornings long ago. Women from varied backgrounds came together not just to learn embroidery, but to stitch their stories of love, memory, and pain into fabric.

In the act of making, layers of experience surfaced, shared with a candour that surprised even the tellers. A rose became a memory of first love, a line carried the weight of endurance, a bud marked hope still forming. One woman spoke of how the smell of jackfruit always returned her to a childhood friendship lost too soon. Another embroidered a tornado to honour her grandmother and shared how safety had vanished with her passing. Around the circle, laughter and grief sat side by side. As we made together, experience became visible, tenderness was shared without hesitation.

There is something profound about women in groups — a communal intuition allows for effortless expression, silent understanding, and a deep, restorative ease. 

Whether in travel, at work, or around a kitchen table, I see this quality again and again; a shared wellspring of trust that I think of as an “undercurrent of openness,” where experiences are recognised without explanation. In these circles, literal or metaphorical, women draw strength not just from themselves, but from each other.

One of the most life-defining instances was through an unexpected breakfast conversation with a colleague who would later become a friend. At the time, I was in the middle of a difficult life transition, living in a far-off town, uncertain and anxious about the road ahead. In that first conversation, I allowed myself to speak my fears, raw and unpolished, as I felt them. What I received in return was not pity, but presence, a steady calm, and gentle pointers to where I might find the support I needed to heal. The advice mattered, but the exchange of vulnerability mattered more: safety offered, safety returned.

Through the years, I’ve watched this same undercurrent flow in other workplaces too: a female colleague quietly feeding my child, another leaving small, thoughtful gifts, someone packing an extra box of pasta because she remembered who liked it, a trinket brought back from a trip. These gestures seem ordinary, but they are anything but. They represent the everyday ways women weave belonging, care, and resilience into each other’s lives. 

The invisible load

The invisible load women carry is not tied to a single workplace or role; it stretches across homes, families, friendships, and communities. I’ve often seen women arrive at work carrying bags no one else can see, stuffed with grief, anxiety, abuse, dreams secretly nurtured and sometimes deferred, or the weight of care that rarely makes it onto a résumé. And yet, women show up, not merely as employees, but often as caregivers, confidantes, emotionally attuned navigators of complex interpersonal situations. I’ve witnessed this in small, unguarded moments, a confession over chai, a breath released when someone finally stops hiding her struggle.

I also think of my own mother, a working woman in the 1980s, balancing a home while pursuing her doctoral research at a time when domestic help was rare. My father cooked, cleaned, and cared for us, yet there were still tasks only she could carry. When my sister was born, my mother no longer had her own mother to lean on. Instead, our neighbour, a homemaker, stepped in, opening her home and her arms so the baby could grow up in a place of care that was a home, not a daycare centre. In doing so, she gave my mother the chance to continue her work as a professor and gave me a lesson I still carry: that the strength of women often lies in the invisible webs they weave for one another. These webs don’t just hold families together; they create the possibility for women to keep showing up at work, at home, and in the world. 

What shifts things is not leniency or concessions, but spaces that acknowledge this unseen load without demanding explanation. In those spaces, identity isn’t something women have to earn back; it is already recognised.

A workplace designed with wisdom doesn’t need a different rulebook for women. It needs to understand that emotional, relational, and even spiritual safety are not “soft”; they are sensible. 

The soft and the fierce

There is a duality in the feminine that is rarely spoken of at work. Between gentleness and grit, women hold a spectrum of energies that cannot be reduced to ‘nurturing’ or ‘emotional.’ In these all-women teams, I witnessed a rhythm that wasn’t merely efficient; it was embodied. There was space for both hustle and healing, for gentle disagreement, loud arguments and fierce loyalty. Professional ambition didn’t cancel out personal vulnerability. Shared experiences — ill children, ailing spouses, struggles with singlehood — enriched rather than disrupted professional understanding and alignment.

In today’s performance-obsessed AI-driven world, this way of working feels almost countercultural. Algorithms may optimise many things, but it is human attunement that keeps workplaces humane. 

A structural sisterhood

Working with women has taught me something far beyond gender. It has taught me generosity. We’ve covered for each other during daunting deadlines and heartbreak, celebrated small victories as though they were national awards, and shown up tired, hopeful, hormonal, hilarious — and still made it work. Not despite emotions, but often because of them.

This is not to say all-women teams are without challenges. We’ve had our conflicts, mismatched communication styles, and emotionally charged moments that needed careful navigation. But these experiences cemented something in me: sisterhood at work is not sentimental. It is a structural alternative to the hyper-individualistic, burnout-prone cultures around us. 

So, what would it mean to design workspaces (and technologies) that are attuned to how women experience safety and success? We need honest conversations. Not just about sexual harassment or pay equity (important as those are), but about belonging, microaggressions, the unpaid mental labour, the joy of mutual care, and the healing power of laughter.

Reclaiming communing

As we reflect on what women bring to work, it is essential to recognise communing as a throughline, a way of building trust, connection, and belonging that stretches across generations.

Across the roles women occupy, within homes, at school gates, and in families, there thrives a tradition of mutual support, wisdom-sharing, and protective care. In these spaces, women instinctively build trust circles that last across generations. I think of this as communing, not a performance of support, but a practice of standing with, sharing in, and rising together, a lived fabric of connecting that has always been part of women’s ways of being.

Yet, in today’s hyper-individualistic work culture, this natural inclination toward community is often misunderstood, even seen as a threat. The very qualities that fortify families, friendships, and grassroots communities are, in some spaces, quietly discouraged or boxed up under the banner of “soft skills.” Employees are nudged toward competition rather than collaboration. This must shift.

If workplaces want to truly tap into the strengths women bring, they must recognise communing as an asset, not an anomaly. They must nurture the intuitive, creative, relational capacities women carry and weave them into daily work.

Workplaces that see the whole person see more clearly. Communing is not an accessory to culture; it is the architecture of the future workplace. When we design with it, we don’t just build jobs, we build places where people belong, grow, and thrive. Intentional communing allows intergenerational wisdom to flow across ages, hierarchies, and backgrounds. It appears in circles of trust, in quiet ease, in the unspoken ways women lift one another without keeping score.

And when we get this right, we all rise. Together.

The author is a Bengaluru-based transdisciplinary designer, academic and writer. Views are personal.