Twenty-Two at the Top: The Stat Behind Being the Only Woman in the Shop

"Twenty-Two at the Top" opens with two numbers shouted like a chant, and the song spends the rest of its runtime explaining why they belong together: eighteen percent in the shop, twenty-two at the top.

Where the song came from

The idea comes straight from a real, specific finding: women make up 18 percent of the field's professionals overall, but 22 percent of its leaders and managers, according to a 2025 workforce survey, a field where women are a minority that leads above its own share. The song builds a career around that gap, following someone who started as the only woman on the floor and ended up running the shop.

Four women out of fifty-one, one program, five yearsThat's the math I walked in with, and look who's still hereShop shirts only came in a men's extra-largeSo I rolled up the sleeves and I built my own cart

A detail that isn't exaggerated

That cart line is a real rite of passage, not a flourish, building a personal preventive-maintenance cart from scratch is treated across the field as a kind of initiation, something every biomed eventually does regardless of who they are. The program statistic in the first verse is real too: in one biomedical equipment technology program, only 4 of 51 graduates over a five-year span were women, the exact kind of math the song's narrator says she walked in with.

Nothin' off that truck touches a patient till it passes my testNow I run the shop, and I'm mentoring the next

That isn't a rare story, either. Industry profiles of women in the field repeatedly turn up the same detail: being the only woman on a floor, in a department, sometimes in an entire program. The song borrows the specific cadence of that experience from a real detail in how biomed departments actually dispatch their technicians, through computers, pagers, phones and radios; whoever gets paged first is whoever the department trusts most with the hardest call. It's a small operational detail to build a chorus around, but it's exactly the kind of fact only an insider would think to include.

That closing image isn't incidental either. The field runs structured mentoring tracks that pair students and newcomers with working professionals, used deliberately to recruit and retain women in a trade many outsiders don't know exists, exactly the role the song's narrator has grown into by its final verse, holding the door for whoever comes next. The bridge's choir answer, come on in, extends that trust outward instead of keeping it as one person's story. Neither number in the song's hook is treated as a finish line; both are treated as evidence that persistence compounds.