Joan Holloway runs the floor at Sterling Cooper long before anyone bothers to give her the title to match it. As the office manager, she's the one who actually keeps the agency functioning — hiring and training the secretaries, smoothing over the countless small disasters the executives cause and then forget about, and doing it all while making it look effortless. She didn't get there by accident. Joan understands, better than almost anyone in the building, exactly how the world she's operating in works: what power looks like when women aren't allowed to hold it outright, and how to wield real influence from a position no one takes seriously on paper.

She's confident, commanding, and entirely unbothered by the fact that most of the men around her underestimate her — if anything, she uses it. She takes her role seriously, treating the "girls" under her with a mix of discipline and genuine looked-after care, even as she polices them hard, because she knows exactly what happens to women who don't play the game carefully. Off the clock, she's involved in an on-and-off relationship with Roger Sterling, one of the agency's senior partners — a relationship that gives her a certain protected status in the office, even as it complicates her position and her own sense of what she wants out of life. She holds her own personal ambitions somewhat close to the vest; there are hints of a woman who could do far more than run a secretarial pool, boxed in by an era that has no real place for her to do it.