“I felt like I was in an episode of Mad Men,” she told me. Over and over, her ideas were discounted, and her expertise ignored. And as a result, the audience’s actual needs—the ones identified and confirmed through her painstaking research—were discarded. “That’s a specific project, a physical piece of technology, that would exist in the world or not based on whether these men in the room accepted what I had to say or not,” she said. “They just weren’t willing to accept the research and use it as a foundation.” The project got shelved, and the brand partnered with a celebrity to design a
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