I’d seen photos of Dave’s office in magazines, so the first thing I did when I arrived to meet him was look up at the dangling pencils that he famously tossed into the acoustic tile ceiling. For the rest of the meeting, the pencils hovered above me like little swords of Damocles. Dave sat behind his desk, wearing sweats and clutching a football. I’d prepared some jokes, but my main task was to convey that I could fit in. I mentioned my background as a sportswriter for The Boston Globe. We talked about favorite teams while Dave tossed the football into the air. When an employee walked in, he threw the ball at her without warning. She caught it.

The meeting seemed to go well. Later that day, my then agent Gavin Polone called. He sounded angry.

“Congratulations. You got the job. Now turn it down.”

Writing for Late Night would mean a 75-percent pay cut for me (and by extension, less money for him). Gavin tried, but he couldn’t talk me out of it. This was my dream job and my chance to work for the funniest man on television.

On my first day, I settled into my office, located on the main hallway of our offices at 30 Rock, across from the copy room. Other writers started streaming past my door. Most waved and kept going. One stopped to introduce himself and chat about mutual friends. It all seemed friendly until just before he exited, when he made an offbeat prediction.

“Before this is over,” he said, pointedly, “I will see a tampon fall out of your purse.”

I felt strangely shaken as he walked away. Over the years, when I’ve repeated this story, friends have usually reacted with confusion.

“Why would he have said that?”

I had no idea until about 20 years later, when I was helping Sheryl Sandberg write Lean In and she taught me about “stereotype threat.” It turns out that when members of a group are made aware of a negative stereotype, they are more likely to conform to that stereotype. For example, our culture perpetuates the myth that girls don’t excel at math, so when asked to check off a box marked “M” or “F” before a math test, girls perform worse than their male peers. Simply reminding them that they’re girls creates anxiety, which disrupts cognitive processing.

Our culture also perpetuates the myth that women aren’t funny. Maybe this is why the male writer went out of his way to remind me of my gender that first day. If he had been simply trying to shock, he could’ve said, “Before this is over, I will hear you fart.” It’s the same joke construction (i.e., in the future, some bodily function will embarrass you), but gender-nonspecific. I don’t think that writer acted consciously, but by mentioning a tampon, he singled me out by what set me apart.

Every day I caught a glimpse of the boss when he passed my office at about 10:50 A.M. Dave walked the halls briskly, like a guy hurrying home in a rainstorm. In those days, Dave rarely set foot in the writers’ room and preferred to hear pitches over the car phone on his drive home. The writers would generate ideas during the day, and then we’d break for that night’s taping. After the show, Dave would return to the office for a postmortem. We’d wait until we saw him hustling past the writers’ room, head fixed straight ahead to avoid any eye contact. About seven minutes later, Steve would gather his papers and say, “Well, I guess I’ll go call Dave.”