Something has been showing up in my LinkedIn feed a lot lately.

GTM Engineer. Narrative Architect. Distribution Strategist. Revenue Systems Builder. Growth Operator. The job postings keep coming. The thought leadership keeps building. The podcast appearances, the Substack newsletters, the TikTok explainers about why distribution is the most important thing in business right now.

It's everywhere. And it's mostly men saying it.

I've been in this world long enough to find that interesting.

The feminisation nobody talks about

In the 1930s men outnumbered women as advertising agents nearly eight to one, even though women were responsible for 75 to 85% of all consumer spending. By 2019 that had completely reversed. Women made up 64% of the marketing industry. By the early 2020s 52% of Chief Marketing Officers were women.

And somewhere in that shift, marketing stopped being taken seriously.

Not because the work changed. Because of who was doing it. There are decades of research on this pattern. When a profession becomes female-dominated, its perceived value declines regardless of its actual complexity. Nurses. Teachers. PR professionals. Marketing followed the same arc. The cultural shorthand became Carrie Bradshaw writing about shoes. Emily in Paris posting pretty pictures. A girl in a nice outfit with a decent Instagram. Underpaid. Decorative. Not quite serious.

What marketing actually is, applied psychology, distribution science, buyer behaviour, narrative construction, the manipulation of perception at scale, became more powerful while being more thoroughly dismissed.

What changed

AI made building easy. The bottleneck moved from making the thing to getting people to care about the thing. And suddenly distribution was the most important problem in business.

This is when the vocabulary started changing. GTM strategy. Narrative engineering. Growth architecture. Revenue systems. The same activities that had been called marketing started acquiring new names. Harder names. More technical-sounding names. Names that belonged in a board deck rather than a Canva template.

The term GTM engineering was literally invented in 2023 by a software company that needed a title for their internal sales reps and didn't want to call them salespeople. Two years later it had its own salary benchmarks, job boards, bootcamps, and over 3,000 LinkedIn listings in January 2026 alone. GTM engineering jobs grew 205% year over year in 2025.

The work didn't change. The label did.

This is not new either. Mark Zuckerberg rebranded the business analyst role as data science to attract PhDs. Then rebranded marketing as growth. The trick is always the same. Take existing work. Give it a technical-sounding name. Watch the salaries and the gender ratio shift accordingly.

In 2023 over 260,000 tech employees were laid off. Marketing and creative functions were among the first cut, with 27% of marketing departments experiencing losses. And yet the outcomes those teams produced, positioning, distribution, narrative, were still needed. The work got deprioritised. Then rebranded. Then rehired at a higher salary under a new title.

The uncomfortable observation

A woman saying she does content and brand voice is a marketing girlie. A man saying he owns narrative and distribution strategy is a GTM leader. The deliverables are identical. The perception is not.

This is a language observation as much as a gender one. The words you use to describe your work shape how seriously it gets taken before anyone has seen the actual output. Marketing has always known this. It is literally the discipline. The irony of marketing being undervalued because of how it was perceived is almost too neat.

There is a real tension here between being authentic and being legible in a language the room respects. Most people building in public are performing a version of themselves calibrated for reception rather than expression. The question is how much distance there is between those two versions. And whether your audience can feel the gap even when they can't name it.

That gap is what Odassity was built to examine.

The pipes were always full

Getting people to care about something is harder than building it. That was true before AI. It is more visibly true now that AI made building easy. The founders who will win understand that distribution is not a phase after product. It is the whole game from the beginning.

We just started calling it GTM engineering. And somehow that changed who got invited to the table.

To the marketing girlies doing this work in under-resourced, under-respected roles for years. You were doing GTM engineering before it had a name. Before it had a salary to match. Before anyone decided it was serious.

The pipes were always full. Someone just finally noticed the water.

Today's micro-fable:

A woman spent thirty years building bridges. When she died they named one after her husband. He had watched her work from the window and occasionally brought her tea. The bridge still stands. It is considered one of the finest in the kingdom. Nobody knows who built it. The plaque says otherwise.