It starts the same way every time. Eight people settle in, somebody shares the agenda, and then comes the pause. "Can someone grab notes?" Nobody moves. Three seconds go by. And then a director turns, smiling, and says the line Latoya could recite in her sleep: "Latoya, you're so good at it — would you mind?" 📝
She doesn't mind. That's the trouble. She opens a fresh page and starts typing, and for the next fifty-five minutes she captures who said what, what got decided and who owes what by when. By 4:30 the recap is in everybody's inbox, clean and accurate. Legit, it's the best meeting record in the building. And Latoya, who had two solid ideas about the rollout, said eleven words the entire hour.
You cannot hold the pen and the floor at the same time. Somebody decided which one she'd get.
What This Actually Costs Her
Start with the obvious one. You can't fully think and transcribe at once. Taking good notes means listening for other people's points, and that uses up exactly the attention she'd need to form and land her own. So in the meetings where direction gets set, Latoya is present as a recorder. Her judgment, which is the thing they pay her for, sits in the room unused.
Then there's the hour after. The recap doesn't write itself. She cleans up the shorthand, sorts decisions from discussion, tags the owners and sends it out. Call it forty minutes a meeting, four meetings a week. That's well over a hundred hours a year of work that appears in nobody's job description and on nobody's performance review, least of all hers.
Now the quiet cost, the one that compounds. People remember who spoke. The colleague who floated a half-formed idea out loud gets remembered as strategic. Latoya, who wrote that idea down and fixed its grammar, gets remembered as helpful. One of those words shows up in promotion conversations. The other shows up in thank-you emails. 🗂️
Picture the Tuesday it mattered. The team is choosing which of two vendors to keep, and Latoya has worked with both. She knows one of them has missed every deadline since spring. She starts to say so, and at that exact moment two people talk over each other and she has to get both points down. By the time her hands stop, the room has moved on and picked the wrong one.
And she has become a dependency without the standing that should come with it. If Latoya is out, there are no notes, and by Thursday nobody can agree on what was decided Tuesday. She's essential to the meeting and somehow not a voice in it — holding all of the record and none of the authority.
The sharpest part is that she's good at it. Every excellent recap is fresh proof that she should be the one asked next time. She's being penalized, slowly and politely, for doing a thankless thing well.
Why it's always her
Nobody in that room sat down and decided Latoya's ideas matter less. It works more quietly than that. Notes are a job with no owner, and jobs with no owner slide toward whoever seems least likely to object and most likely to do it right. In a lot of rooms, that's the Black woman at the table. We've been taking care of the details in other people's rooms for generations, and the habit of handing them to us didn't retire when we got the title.
I see this constantly, and it's rarely malicious, which is what makes it so sticky. The ask comes wrapped in a compliment. "You're so good at it." Saying no to a compliment feels rude, and Latoya knows how "not a team player" travels when it gets attached to a woman who looks like her. So she says yes, and every yes makes the next ask feel more natural to everyone, including her.
Her own standards hold it in place, too. She's sat through the meetings where someone else took notes and the recap was three vague bullets and a wrong date. Part of her would honestly prefer to do it herself than chase a bad record later. That instinct is sound. It's also how a capable woman ends up volunteering for her own sidelining.
And nobody's asked the plain question, which is why a room full of people with laptops is still relying on one person's typing speed at all.
The Questions I Would Ask Latoya
1️⃣ In the last ten meetings you attended, how many times did you take the notes — and how many times did anyone else in that room?
2️⃣ Think of the last idea you had during a meeting and didn't say. What were your hands doing at that moment?
3️⃣ If you stopped today, what exactly would break: the record itself, or everyone's comfort with not having to think about it?
4️⃣ Has anyone ever written "keeps the record for the whole team" anywhere that counts toward your next title?
Notice that none of these are about whether she can keep doing it. Of course she can. They're about why a task this mechanical is still attached to a person, and to this person in particular.
Being trusted with the record is not the same as being trusted with the room.
The Baddie Stack Prescription 💅🏾📱⌨️
🎙️ Automatic transcription and summary, switched on for every recurring meeting. Most meeting platforms can now record a call, turn it into written words and draft a summary with the decisions pulled out. Turned on by default — with the group told plainly that it's running — the record gets made whether or not anyone volunteers, and Latoya's hands are free for the first time in years.
📋 One shared action tracker that the summary feeds directly. Each decision and each "who owes what by when" lands in a single list the whole team can see, with an owner and a date attached. No retyping, no recap email to dig for in three weeks. When somebody asks what was decided, the answer is a link and not a person.
🔁 A rotating reviewer, set by the calendar and not by the pause. The summary still needs a human to read it for two minutes and fix what the tool misheard. That job rotates on a published schedule, so it's someone's turn, by name, before the meeting starts. The awkward silence goes away, and so does the habit of filling it with Latoya.
This breakdown can be customized with a Digital Systems Scan
Latoya isn't too accommodating. She's a strong contributor in a setup that found something easier to do with her. The fix was never to care less about the record. It's making the record nobody's burden, so the woman who has been writing down everyone else's thinking finally gets to do her own out loud.
Take the 4-minute Digital Literacy Assessment to see where your setup actually stands: Start
Then connect with me directly. I will help you put the pen down and take the floor.
Stay Savvy, Baddies 💅🏾.
Tech Baddie Out.