By Joan Lyons

This is Chapter One of Joan Lyon’s upcoming book Women Moving People. More information on the book and how you can contribute can be found on her website.

Trigger Warnings: Sexual Harassment, Stalking, Depression, Ageism, Sexism, PTSD, Anxiety


Fresh out of the Netherlands, I was ready to solve our nation’s problems when it came to city planning, and design. I applied for jobs everywhere. Washington, D.C., Seattle, Denver, Palo Alto… you name the bigger city, I probably applied to a job there. The search proved to be difficult. The planning and design space in the US context tends to favor degrees from North American planning programs, which I had been told previously, but didn’t realize how difficult it was. I likely applied for over 100 jobs before I found success in Grand County, Colorado.

Having grown up ski racing in the county, I knew I loved the Fraser Valley, and was desperate to find something. The County was looking for a new planner, and I immediately applied and interviewed the following week. I packed all of my bags and took the journey to the Western Slope to live in a rural community for the first time at the ripe age of 22. I had lived alone before, but not in a county of less than 5,000. Because I was familiar with the area after spending every weekend of my childhood here, I wasn’t nervous in the slightest. My first day went well. I met all of the other friendly people I worked with and saw how the public interacted with staff at our planning and building windows. The future looked bright for me!

Day two hit me like a load of bricks.

Our office had an open door policy so that everyone could hear what our community was requesting from the windows for service. On day two, someone requested me by name. My administrative assistant walked into my office and told me that someone wanted to see me, and I figured that that person was someone my family knew or that I grew up ski racing with. But I asked her to go back again and ask the person again for their name since I didn’t recognize it. She returned, and I still was unsure of the individual’s relation to me but walked up to the window. The person was someone I had met once before in my life two years prior in Denver, two and a half hours away from my office. We hadn’t spoken since then, and this person did not tell me they were coming to visit me in my office. In short, I was stalked at my place of employment, and was mortified as my new colleagues listened to the conversation I had with this person.

“Hi Joan, it’s been a while since I’ve seen you, but congratulations on your new job! I saw you got it on LinkedIn, and was in the area, so I figured I’d stop by.”

“Hi there! I’m sorry it took me so long to come out. I didn’t recognize your name, but upon seeing you, I immediately realized who you were. I hope you are doing well.”

Even though my colleagues had just met me, they could sense the uncertainty in my voice as we talked. I tried to play it cool, acting as if nothing was wrong, but immediately as I finished and he left, I talked to my female colleagues in the office about the situation.

The questions I kept asking myself were “Why didn’t this person reach out to me to let me know they were coming? Had I done something wrong posting my new job on LinkedIn? Why did this man do this? Should I be concerned for my safety?”

In short, the situation was the start of my welcoming to the male-dominated industry of planning, engineering, and design.

Fast forward to 2021, and I’ve landed a different job managing a team of four at a transportation non-profit in Boulder, had met the love of my life and gotten engaged, and was in the process of moving across the country and planning a wedding. Life was good. I worked with a team of primarily all women, felt supported in my environment and workplace, had a job that let me work primarily from home to have work life balance.

One week before I got married, someone that I had worked closely with at the Colorado Department of Transportation prior to going to grad school was messaging me. The messages were incoherent. At first, I thought this former colleague’s child had taken their phone to send me texts about “loving me”, that I was “cute” and “looked good”. I thought nothing of it and moved on with my day. The following day that person apologized for messaging me, and I realized this person was intoxicated, married with kids, and sending inappropriate messages.

I was devastated.

I respected this person immensely, but never spoke to them again. Tears were shed. I asked myself questions again “why would they do this? Did I do something wrong 4 years prior to make them think I liked them like that? Do they know I’m engaged? Why, why why?”

Beyond these two devastating situations, I’ve experienced blatant ageism, sexism, and seen racism within workplaces. When I reflect on the situations, I feel as if I’ve lived an entire lifetime in the workplace even though I’m only 28. Handling all of the weight of these heavy topics hit me hardest in 2022. I had gone so fast for so long, experienced so much, that it all came crashing down one day. All of the transitions seemed to catch up to me. At first, I thought I was sick. At the time, I was in the process of reading Body Keeps the Score by Dutch author Bessel van der Kolk. I knew at that time that the body presents stress and trauma in a multitude of ways but had never experienced it myself until then.

I was depressed, anxious, and had been diagnosed with PTSD by my therapist. The things that brought me joy normally felt bleak. It was a very dark time in my life – one of the absolute darkest times to date. My conversations with my therapist, Roxanne, normally went somewhere along the lines of this:

“How has your week been Joan? How is work?”

“It’s okay, here’s what is happening at work.”

“It sounds like you are having a fundamental disagreement with the way things are done morally in your industry. Are you sure that this is your career path?”

“I don’t know.”

I would sit in my bedroom and cry for hours after each session. My head would be throbbing in pain from the tears and mental capacity shed. I’d sit and ask myself

“Why am I doing this? Do I really want to be in my industry? Why is this so unbelievably hard? Why can’t I get better? Would people miss me if I died today? How did I even get to this place?”

After months of weekly therapy sessions with Roxanne, we concluded that I needed to channel my frustrations to something bigger, which she had been hinting at this entire time. While I had been changing the structural systems of my industry over time in small ways, I was ready to tackle something bigger.

Since then I’ve secured bipartisan support for funding limitations of transportation projects in North Carolina, identified changes to design standards to make our communities better for all and advocated for them, secured spots on local non-profits in my area, volunteered my time to important causes to me, and more.

I still am challenged every day as a young female in the industry and am constantly fighting to be in the room, and for my seat at the table.

This industry is tough and brutal. It will chew you up and spit you out. But slow down. Reflect. Change the things you see as problems when you have the energy and time for the younger generation. They will thank you along their journey.

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End of Chapter Activity:

  • Journal: What experiences in the workplace have been hard for you? If you don’t work, have you experienced discrimination before in your lifetime? Write down those experiences. Take deep, long breaths as you reflect, and pause to recognize that this can be hard to reflect on. Heal, grieve, and recognize that you cannot change others behavior and mindset. You are doing amazing and thank you for showing up to try this exercise. Sometimes just showing up is enough.
  • Mentor: Find someone at your work, school, or anywhere you go regularly that reminds you of yourself. Maybe it’s someone younger, maybe it’s someone who is just starting out in your industry that made a career change… If you feel you connect with them, consider meeting up with them regularly to be a mentor. Take the hard things you’ve learned and share your story with them. Find ways you can support them through their hard times. You’ll be surprised how much you likely have in common.


With a passion to improve the infrastructure of cities at the local, regional, national, and international level and implement successful projects, Joan Lyons is a committed certified planner with experience in North Carolina, Colorado, the Netherlands, and Louisiana. Her experience in the profession centers around the fields of transportation (bicycle, pedestrian, multimodal, transit, rail, micro mobility, and Transportation Demand Management (TDM)), affordable housing, accessibility (ADA), social justice, sustainability, climate, historic preservation, and participatory planning in communities. Joan is a Senior Planner at Johnson, Mirmiran, and Thompson (JMT) where she leads planning efforts throughout the Southeast and Colorado. In the Fall of 2023, she served as a Lecturer at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill’s Department of City and Regional Planning, where she taught Planning for Natural Hazards and Climate Risk. 

Accolades:

During her time in the profession, she has been recognized for her work by the Women in Transportation Seminar (WTS) and received the Activist/Community Organizer Award in 2022, and received the Association for Commuter Transportation (ACT) 40 Under 40 Award in 2020. She currently serves on the Oaks and Spokes Board of Directors, Alliance for Disability Advocates Board of Directors, and Skate Raleigh Advisory Board.

Images courtesy of Joan Lyons