For every woman who looks fine, but isn't.
Keynotes and workshops on invisible illness, concealment, and what it costs to hide well at work.
The Skill Nobody Puts on a Resume
Paige Lavell has spent over a decade leading in the payments industry including at Etsy, Meta, Block, and PayPal, most of them managing an autoimmune disease and the coping that came with it. This talk lays out the pattern underneath both: the disease is invisible, the coping is invisible, and she hid them both well enough that she kept climbing. No one around her knew there was anything to hide. Audiences leave with language for something they've likely never named, in themselves or in someone they manage.
The Getting-Ready Ritual
Fifteen minutes penciling in eyebrows thinned by an underactive thyroid, timed to end exactly when the elevator doors open or the Zoom window pops up. This talk starts at Paige Lavell's own bathroom mirror and works outward: what it costs to prepare a visibly capable version of yourself every day, and why most of that preparation happens in a room nobody else is in.
Why Invisible Disability Never Makes It Into Manager Training
Over a decade inside the payments industry, including at Etsy, Meta, Block, and PayPal, taught Paige Lavell how these organizations actually build a training deck, and what never makes it in. Two-thirds of working women with an autoimmune condition stay in a job for the health insurance alone, and replacing a mid-level employee costs an employer 50 to 200% of her salary. Using one specific, dated scene rather than a general claim, this talk shows what a benefits leader is measured on, what an employee calculates before disclosing anything, and where the two stop lining up. Built for HR and benefits leaders who write the training nobody else in this category has actually sat inside a company long enough to report on.
