You have probably heard it before. Maybe from a mentor, a LinkedIn post, or even from that voice in your own head on a particularly tough day:
“No one is coming to save you.”
It sounds strong. It sounds like exactly what a woman who has decided to stop waiting and start owning her career would say. And in many ways, it is true. But what if that phrase, as powerful as it feels, is only telling you half the story? What if the half you are missing is the very thing standing between you and the career you actually want?
This is the conversation African women in STEM need to be having more openly. Not in hushed tones between trusted colleagues, but out loud, in the spaces where real career decisions get made. And it is a conversation that Adaeze Iloeje-Udeogalanya, TEDx speaker, leadership strategist, and founder of African Women in STEM, is not afraid to lead.
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/lunch-with-leaders/the-hidden-truth-about-e2M8tqErgDl
Self-Reliance Is a Strength, It Can Also Be a Trap.
For many African women in STEM, working hard and figuring things out alone is not just a strategy. It is an identity, modelled for you, praised in you, and rewarded in your early years. Also, it carried you through school, through your degree, through your first role, and into wherever you are sitting right now. That deserves real acknowledgement.
But at some point, something shifts. The same trait that made you exceptional starts to work against you.
When your entire professional identity is built around doing things alone, asking for help begins to feel like weakness. Being seen to struggle feels dangerous. So you put your head down, do excellent and undeniable work, and wait for it to speak for itself.
And then you watch someone else walk through a door you did not even know was open.
That is not a talent problem or work ethic problem. That is an access problem. And access, as uncomfortable as it can be to sit with, does not come from producing more. It comes from relationships, proximity, and being present in the right rooms at the right time.
The hard truth is that self-reliance, when taken too far, stops being independence and starts being isolation. And isolation is one of the quietest career killers for high-achieving women.
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/lunch-with-leaders/the-hidden-truth-about-e2M8tqErgDl
The Second Half of the Sentence That Changes Everything
Here is the complete truth that does not get said enough: No one is coming to save you, but many people are willing to help you.
That second half is not a small add-on. It is not a softening of the original message. Instead, it is a fundamentally different way of seeing how careers actually work.
It means you are not supposed to figure everything out alone. It means the right people, those who can open doors, make introductions, and say your name in rooms you are not in, are genuinely out there. But they cannot help you if they do not know what you are working toward, if they have never had a real conversation with you, or if you have made yourself invisible by keeping your head down and waiting for your work to be discovered.
Helping is not the same as saving. Saving implies rescue. Helping implies partnership. And partnership requires you to show up, communicate, and make it possible for others to see where they fit into your story.
Think about elite athletes. A sprinter runs alone on the track, but behind her performance is a coach refining her technique, a physiotherapist managing her body, a nutritionist fuelling her training, and a wider team making her excellence possible. Even the most solitary-looking success is a team effort beneath the surface. Your career is built the same way, whether you have been treating it that way or not.
What the Numbers Say About How Careers Actually Move
If you have been relying primarily on doing great work and applying through official channels, the data is worth paying attention to.
Only 1 to 2 percent of jobs are filled through job boards. 85 percent of roles are filled through networking. And 70 percent of positions are never publicly advertised at all.
Sit with that for a moment. The opportunities you are working so hard to qualify for are largely being distributed through conversations and relationships that exist completely outside your line of sight. Not always because of malice, but because human beings advocate for people they know, trust, and can picture in a role.
This is not just anecdotal. According to UNESCO, women currently represent only 35 percent of STEM graduates globally. That gap does not exist because women are less capable. It exists because of structural barriers, including limited access to networks, mentorship, and the kinds of informal conversations where opportunities are born. The same structural gaps that affect women entering STEM also follow them throughout their careers, which is why being intentional about building access becomes not just useful but necessary.
Understanding how the professional world actually works is not political. It is not cynical. It is strategic.
This is exactly the kind of conversation Adaeze has with honesty and depth in this episode of Lunch with Leaders. If any of this is landing for you, the full episode will take it further.
Listen to The Hidden Truth About Career Success for African Women in STEM here.
Productivity Is Not Enough On Its Own
This is perhaps the hardest thing to absorb when you are a high achiever who has built everything on results: your output alone will not take you where you want to go.
Relationships, proximity, and access consistently matter more than productivity in isolation. You can be the most technically skilled, most hardworking, most committed person on your team, and still be passed over if the decision-makers in your world do not know your name, do not understand your ambitions, and have never sat across from you in a real conversation.
That is not unfair in the way it might first feel. It is deeply human. People champion people they know. People invest in people they trust. And trust is not built in deliverables. It is built in conversations, in presence, in the small and consistent moments of genuine connection.
This is why building influence is a skill, and a learnable one at that. It is not reserved for extroverts or for people with existing connections. It is available to anyone willing to be intentional about it. The episode on Usefulness vs. Impact in Career Advancement: Leadership Insights for Women in STEM goes deep on exactly this, breaking down the crucial difference between being seen as useful and being seen as someone worth investing in. That distinction alone has the power to reshape how you show up at work.
Are You Actually Positioned for the Opportunities You Want?
Before moving forward, it is worth pausing for some honest self-assessment. Not the kind you do to beat yourself up, but the kind that tells you exactly where to direct your energy.
Ask yourself:
Do the decision-makers in your organisation actually know who you are beyond your job title and your output? Does your skip-level manager know what your career goals are, or does that conversation simply not exist yet?
Are you in rooms where strategy is being discussed, or only in rooms where tasks are being distributed? Are you part of communities where people understand your specific experience without you having to explain and justify it every single time?
If those questions feel uncomfortable, that discomfort is useful. It is pointing you directly toward the areas where a small amount of intentional effort can produce a significant shift.
Building the kind of influence that genuinely moves your career forward requires understanding not just how to work harder, but how the systems around you actually operate and how to position yourself within them. The episode on Systems Thinking for Building Influence and High-Performing Leadership Teams addresses this with the kind of practical depth that makes the ideas immediately usable, not just inspiring in the moment.
Also, the African Women in STEM community exists for exactly this: women who are done figuring it all out in isolation and are ready to build with people who genuinely understand the journey.
Join the community here and step into a space where your growth is the priority.
The Weight Nobody Talks About
There is something particular about being an African woman in STEM that most mainstream career conversations simply do not account for. You are often carrying multiple layers simultaneously: the expectations of your family, the cultural dynamics of your workplace, the experience of being a woman in a technical field, and frequently the weight of being one of very few people who look like you in the room.
Generic career advice was not written with you in mind. It was written for a default professional that does not include your specific experience. And when you try to apply that advice without spaces where your context is truly understood, it can leave you feeling like the strategies work for everyone except you. That feeling is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a sign that you need a different kind of support.
This is precisely why spaces built specifically for African women in STEM are not a luxury. They are infrastructure. They are not a retreat from the professional world, but a place to think clearly, connect authentically, build real relationships, and move forward with support rather than in spite of the absence of it.
The UNESCO report on advancing gender equality in STEM makes clear that structural support and community are among the most powerful levers for closing the gender gap in technical fields. Individual effort matters, but it matters far more when it is backed by the right environment.
The Shift That Makes Everything Else Possible
Moving from isolation to intentional connection does not require you to become someone you are not. It does not mean performing extroversion or pretending that networking feels effortless when it does not. It means deciding, clearly and deliberately, that your career is not a solo journey, and building accordingly.
In addition, the hidden truth about career success is not that you need to work harder or want it more. It is that you need to let the right people in. Not because you cannot do it alone, but because you were never supposed to.
Listen to this episode of Lunch with Leaders and hear Adaeze walk through this mindset shift in full. It is thirteen minutes that might reframe how you have been thinking about your career entirely.
