Episode 94: Class and Career

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time, career and class. Because even if we don’t talk about it…

“It absolutely is clearly a part of how people think about themselves, how people understand eachother and as our study showed, how people get ahead or don’t.”

And having a different background from everyone else at work can leave you feeling isolated…

“The people that I deal with now, they’ve probably never met anyone from where I grew up. They probably would live their whole lives and would never meet anybody like I was when I was a young child.”

Coming up…social mobility is possible, especially with a good education. But what’s it like when your career and your background don’t match?

Julie O’Heir works for an adult education program at a university in the American Midwest. She wrote to me a couple of months ago and said have you ever thought about doing a show on being in the professional world when you come from a working class background? She said a lot of her colleagues had a toolkit for the workplace that she didn’t, because of her upbringing…  

“My mother was a teacher at a Catholic school and my dad worked for a construction company. And most people in the area I grew up in in the Midwest were either police officers or firemen.”

The women were crossing guards, teachers, nurses, or they pieced together part-time jobs around looking after their kids. When Julie’s mother retired, she was earning less than 30 thousand dollars a year.

But Julie and her siblings were able to go to college. And when she got there she found herself surrounded by students who had their own cars, credit cards…

“I had to work my entire time at university and that’s when I found you miss out at college if you have to work. I could not take an unpaid internship, I couldn’t spend an extended period of time volunteering. You know when it came to the end of college and I was trying to figure out what the next steps are I thought it might be hard to get a professional reference because I never had a job where I wasn’t waiting tables or dong service-oriented work.”

AM-T: “Before we go on I want to dial back to what you said about how you grew up because a lot of people I think would say teaching, nursing, being a firefighter or a cop, that those were middle class professions.”

“I definitely understand that perspective. I guess I mean more culturally. Aside from nurses I guess, but most firefighters I knew, police officers, didn’t have college degrees. My mom had a degree from a teaching college, my dad didn’t have a degree – what I mean more is I didn’t know anyone who had developed a profession. I didn’t know any lawyers, doctors, university professors, anyone who was an accountant. People who had gone to school for a specific profession outside of a vocation.”

And she says not coming from that world left her with a knowledge gap. She says she just didn’t realize until she’d been in academia for a while that there was so much invisible stuff involved in having a career – take the idea of professional development…

“Things that are part of your job – or, perhaps a better way of talking about it would be networking. It took me a very long time to understand what networking is and why you would do it. Part of that was, culturally growing up if someone is a police officer you just apply to be a police officer.”

There was none of this business of courting people over drinks in a cacophonous hotel conference room. It took a question from her boss one day to make her realize she was missing something.

“My supervisor and I were at a conference, and we had been there a couple of days and he said ‘what kind of connections are you making?’ And I had no idea what he was talking about. And I thought, oh, we’re just all here talking about the fact we all do the same type of higher education work. It didn’t make sense to me to think oh, these people have been in my profession for a long time, and …I could very much learn things from them in the workplace. Those kind of things didn’t cross my mind.”

Like a lot of people she recoiled from the idea of networking at first.

“It feels very much like self-promotion, and…the reason I say there’s a connection to class is I think when I was much younger perhaps in high school or early days in college I thought it was like you were sucking up to someone, and that went against every cultural norm that I knew. And I’ve always thought that was related to class. Maybe it’s an American thing or maybe it’s a universal thing. But now I know it’s about inviting them into your professional life…but you know, trying to build a vocabulary for your work skills or professional goals, that takes time for everyone, but if you didn’t know about that type of vocabulary then just trying to define everything is much more difficult.”

Sometimes she feels her vocabulary is off. She says she didn’t know talking about money – or the lack of it – wasn’t done in academic circles. But whenever she’s brought money up, she says people go quiet. She doesn’t do it any more.

There are still work occasions when she squirms.

“If it is a professional happy hour, a networking event with a social piece to it, I am very uncomfortable in those situations because I think that…For example, a few months ago I was out with some faculty members at the university and I was the only staff person there. Politics came up and I mentioned how my brother and my brother-in-law, both are in different trade unions, and how those unions were having disagreements about which presidential candidate to back, and the faculty member I was talking to said oh, are they in a teachers’ union? And I said no, one is an insulator, the other is a building engineer. And she said ‘Oh, I’ve never met someone whose union was not a teacher’s union.’”

Julie had grown up with men in unions, men who worked with their hands. And this woman didn’t know anyone who did that kind of thing?

She could feel this weird imposter syndrome swimming over her, that feeling of not belonging, of not being quite up to par.

AM-T: “I mean did she seem amused, bemused? I’m just curious, I mean I wonder how she felt versus about how you felt.”

“I don’t know – I think this is another professional difference. She seemed very good at keeping it a low emotional conversation whereas I wanted to say how do you not know anyone in a union? I was much more interested in her experience. But she just seemed very surprised – like, oh, it’s so interesting that you would know someone like that. And I thought, I think it’s interesting I know all these people who have PhDs now.”

She’s 32 now and she says she is getting more comfortable in this rarified world. And she feels lucky to have had such a good education herself, including graduate school. At the moment a quarter of her salary goes to paying off her student loans. But she says it could be worse.

My next guest has a PhD himself. Daniel Laurison is a professor of sociology at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Before that, he spent three years at the London School of Economics doing research on class and inequality in the UK.

And I couldn’t do a show about class without talking about Britain.

AM-T: “First of all, before we talk about the study you did with Sam Friedman, you are an American and you plunged into British society – to what extent to you think Britain is still a place where class matters?”

“Oh, I think it absolutely matters in Britain, it matters in the US as well. People say it’s less obvious or less overt here and I think that’s true but it’s clearly a part of how people think about themselves, how people understand eachother and as our study showed, how people get ahead or don’t.”

Daniel and his LSE colleague Sam Friedman did this study on people in high-status professions like law, medicine, and finance – and they looked at their backgrounds.  

“We were interested in the question of how much class origin matters for the success of people who have been what sociologists call upwardly socially mobile – for people who have gotten into high status professional or managerial jobs but who come from working class backgrounds, are they at any disadvantage or once they enter those professions or does class go away? Are they just like everybody else?”

What they found suggests class doesn’t entirely go away. They examined labor force data that showed what these high-status employees’ parents did for a living back when the employees  were 14 – they used that information to determine class origin. Then they looked at what these employees were earning now as adult lawyers, doctors and so on.

“There’s a 17% difference between working class origin people and privileged origin people in these top jobs. When you control for everything you can control for in these models that difference gets smaller, but it’s still about 9 or 10% in annual earnings.”

So people who now worked in high status jobs, but had grown up with less privileged backgrounds - they were earning less than their peers who’d grown up with professional parents. Or as a British newspaper put it when the research was published last year, ‘it pays to be posh at work.’

There’s a gender piece to this too. And remember ‘long range upwardly mobile’ means a person from a household where the parents did low skilled jobs…

“If you just look at women versus women and men versus men, the gaps were about the same, but if you look at long range upwardly mobile women versus men from privileged backgrounds, the gap is about twice as big, right, because they have both a gender pay gap and a class origin pay gap.”

So what Daniel and his co-author call the class ceiling seems to be that bit higher for women. They’re now doing follow-up research and interviews to find out more about why these income gaps exist.

But what about America? He says no one has done an identical study here, but similar studies and books have come to similar conclusions.

AM-T: “What do you think the difference or differences are in attitudes to class in the US versus the UK?”

“I think the big difference is it’s subtler here in the US. We read people’s class when we interact with them but we’re less aware that we’re doing it. And we’re less explicit about it with eachother and with ourselves. In the UK as you well know, you know an awful lot about someone when they open their mouth based on their accent. Their accent ties people to regions and to a fairly large extent as I understand it, ties people to class origins as well. In the US it’s not quite so cut and dried, you know, America more or less from its founding has had a myth of being a pure meritocracy where class doesn’t matter at all. That stems from the fact that we got here and nobody was a noble...so there was some difference in how much class there was. But there have still always been differences in the amount of economic resources people have and cultures they have and all the things that come together to advantage people or disadvantage people.”

Add race, and class acquires another layer of complexity. 

Denise McKenzie is a patent lawyer at an international law firm. She’s based in LA. She’s in her fifties now and she’s been a lawyer for about 20 years. She grew up in Los Angeles too, but in very different circumstances from most of her colleagues.

Denise has a packed schedule so I got her on the phone between meetings.

“I am the first person in my family to go to college. My mom was a teenage mom—she had her first child at 15 and she had me at 17. And my dad was a technician. He worked with engineers. His big thing was getting me into math and science. He wanted me to be a scientist or engineer because those are the people he worked with and admired. So when I was little he’d make flash cards for me to teach me my math facts.”

She worked hard, did well at school and got into UCLA. She commuted an hour and a half each way to the university and back and held a job on top of her studies. She majored in mathematics and electrical engineering.

“And I ended up working at Hughes Aircraft as an engineer in their missile design group.”

Hughes Aircraft was a big defense contractor. Denise had met her dad’s expectations – and her own. She was now an engineer.

AM-T: “So from the get-go when you began in your first career, were there feelings of discomfort, how did it go?”

“Well my feelings of discomfort started when I went to UCLA – I went to an inner city school and that school didn’t really prepare me for what I was getting into, especially not for math and science. So when I went to UCLA I was in my calculus class – and at that time it was between 350 to 400 students in the class. I was so confused in that class…even though I’d been top at my high school…I had done everything at my high school, student council, top grades, I was a cheerleader, I was one of the best people. At UCLA in my calculus class I was so confused I didn’t even know how to ask a question, that’s how confused I was. I felt like a total failure.”

She was overwhelmed. But UCLA offered resources to students from less privileged backgrounds. They put her in touch with a tutor.

“I get a tutor in every class, I worked day and night and actually I didn’t do that well, my first quarter I did very poorly. The school sent me a letter and said get your grades up or you’re not gonna be able to go here. And I was devastated because from my home, from my school I was this best person who was supposed to be successful, and I just really was not prepared.”

But she kept at it, and the work did eventually pay off. She graduated and landed that engineering job. Still, she often felt ill at ease at work. A) she was an African-American woman among many white and Asian men. She says they really didn’t know how to talk to her. But the other thing was she didn’t know how to navigate this new environment. Take her first performance reviews.

“It was just very awkward, I just didn’t know how to handle myself. I didn’t know how to…I mean I should have been selling myself, telling them all the stuff that I achieved, and I didn’t do that. I didn’t do any of that.”

Because she didn’t know she was supposed to. Now it didn’t help that the person reviewing her was a man who wouldn’t even look her in the eye. And that she already felt like the odd one out.

“I just looked very different, right.  There’s no one there like me. And that’s even now, to be quite frank – when people meet me they’re just kind of shocked.”

And for Denise this is where it all gets mixed up – is she being judged on her gender, her background, her race, or all three? She is a true minority in her current workplace too. A black woman among many white men in a highly specialized area of law. She says few lawyers have her background in engineering technology.

But some people can’t seem to get past the surface. She tells the story of one encounter. She was meeting with another lawyer about a case. He was sitting opposite her, and she started to feel self-conscious…

“He kept staring at me and I kept thinking is something wrong with my clothing…I just felt very odd because he kept staring at me. And he said, the judge in our case, she’s just like you. And I didn’t know what he meant…I said, oh, is she an engineer and a lawyer? And he said no, she’s just like you in every way. And he said, she’s black, and I think if we put you on the case maybe you could talk to her because she doesn’t understand technology. And I was just so shocked that he said that and he said you know, she’s in Oakland, (which is an inner city area in California). I was so shocked he said this because he was not saying it in a mean way, he’s not a mean person, this was just what he was thinking. We were talking about very complex technical matters and I realized he was not really listening to what I was saying about the technology, he was focused on what I looked like, and who I was, an African-American woman. I really didn’t know that people focused on that first and almost solely.”

AM-T: “And what did you say in response?”

“Well what I said was I most judges, whether they are African-American or not, don’t understand technology – I said she’s just like every other judge, you know, she doesn’t need me to explain something to her. That’s what I said to him.”

He laughed – perhaps nervously. She’s not sure if he got it. And the incident made her feel so isolated – again.

She says in her world of corporate law virtually everyone she comes into contact with has parents who were white professionals…

“Some of the them the parents were lawyers, you know, doctors, so not just professionals but highly paid professionals, a lot of them went to private high schools and just had a different type of upbringing than I had. They had traveled the world more than I had. So in that situation, when you’re having a conversation, just a regular informal conversation, I felt excluded…not necessarily because they were intentionally excluding me, but because I couldn’t contribute to the conversation, if that makes sense.”

Daniel Laurison says that experience is common…

“Sam Friedman who’s my co-author on a lot of these studies has done a lot of research showing how much people feel out of place when have been long range upwardly mobile and how painful that can be for people, even if they’re simultaneously also happy with the job they’ve got, the career they’ve had, the opportunities to give to their children. A big part of what happens when people have long range social mobility is they end up in places that don’t feel comfortable to them and the norms are different from what they’re used to, the things people chat about are different, and it’s not through any fault of theirs, it’s just that the whole culture is so is dominated by people from privileged backgrounds who tend to have somewhat their own culture.”

“The people that I deal with now, they’ve probably never met anyone from where I grew up. They probably live their whole lives and would never meet anybody like I was when I was a young child. I myself only see people like that when I would look at my family. And it’s because I work a lot, and the world I’m in, it’s like it’s parallel to the world where I grew up in, it just doesn’t cross.”

AM-T: “How does that feel?”

“Well it’s, um…it’s not a good feeling because I often feel like an outsider. I feel like an outsider for a variety of reasons, a lot because I’m African-American, I’m a woman and working in an all- white male career, but then also from the people I grew up with as well. Because I’m different now, I’m different than them, we’ve had completely different experiences, and really it’s hard to relate. I mean my struggles, if I talk about my struggles they seem like nothing compared to someone who maybe can’t put food on the table…right?”

She is close to her family though – despite how different their lives are now. She says her parents have always been eager to understand her new world even if it does seem far removed from theirs. And they’ve always supported her.

Denise met her husband back at UCLA. She says their daughter is having a totally different experience than she did growing up. And Denise says that’s wonderful, but it’s also been unsettling sometimes. 

“My daughter, she goes to private school, so when I was looking for schools for her to go to when she was in kindergarten, we went to the interview, and they wanted her, she’s bright, whatever. And I cried after that meeting because I thought of all the little kids that go to the schools I went to, and I thought, how can they even compete in this world? If you have kids who go to these schools that cost like $25,000 a year for kindergarten, I mean that’s crazy, and then you have kids in the inner city, they don’t even have the books and pencils and desks they need, then how can they compete when it’s time to go to college? How are they going to get into the top schools? Most of them don’t. And for me just that realization, because I’d never seen that. Where my daughter went to school, I didn’t know that existed.”

Her daughter is now in college, studying computer science. Denise is thrilled things will be easier for her as she transitions to the professional world.

Because when she looks back at her own trajectory, she says she thinks of how difficult it was. And still is. 

“I mean this will sound funny but I feel like I wouldn’t advise it – this path that I was on, I wouldn’t advise it. It’s uphill. You have moments of pleasure you have to enjoy and appreciate, but it’s grueling.”

AM-T: “But you did it.”

“Yeah, somehow, by the grace of God. I mean I don’t know, I just think it’s um, it’s so unfair, it’s such an uneven playing field. When people evaluate you, when they look at you they don’t look at all that. They just think that everybody has the same opportunity and everybody doesn’t. To get where I am I worked day, night, weekends, holidays, vacations and birthdays. When my daughter was little she didn’t know when her birthday was, because I had to celebrate her birthday when I had a free moment. But I felt like I had to work like that just to sustain myself.”

AM-T: “You know what you said about lack of opportunity and how could kids in inner city schools possibly ever get to the same level as kids who went to a school like your daughter’s?  Was it your dad, I mean obviously you made this transition, and you’ve pointed out a lot of other people don’t, was it your dad and his coaching and your own intelligence and drive, a combination of those things?”

“Yeah, I think it was my family. My dad, he was like drilling me with the math facts but he also gave me the confidence that I could be like a scientist or engineer, right. Because most women have math phobia, and this is a whole big thing right now, about girls and math and that kind of stuff, well my dad before it was even popular was like, this is what you’re gonna do. So I never, ever doubted that I could do it. And then my family – even my grandmother, because I told you my mother was 15, and we lived next to my grandmother - my whole family just cheered for me, everything I did was just like oh my gosh, she’s gonna be the one that makes it. So I really think it was my family.”

She says her own perseverance played its part too, especially when it looked like she might get kicked out UCLA because she couldn’t keep up.

And even though she said she wouldn’t advise it, this journey through socio-economic layers, by the end of our conversation she’d remembered something a speaker at her high school had told the class back in the late ‘70s…

“This is all he said, he just said never, never, never give up, and I think that’s what I’d say – I know that’s simple but that’s really it - just don’t give up. And I think if you don’t give up you might not reach your goal, but you’ll be much better off than you were before you tried.”

Denise McKenzie. Thanks to her, Julie O’Heir and Daniel Laurison for being my guests on this show.

If you have something to say about the show I’d love to hear from you – you can reach me via the website or post your comment under this episode or on the show’s Facebook page. And I am reading those iTunes reviews so thanks for the ideas you’ve raised there, as well.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. If you’re not already a subscriber please sign up on iTunes or wherever else you get your podcasts – you will never miss an episode again – and tell your friends and colleagues about the show too.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. 

Episode 92: Illness and Secrecy

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time, working with an illness…

“We have a stereotype of women as weak, or weaker. So I think that when you have a chronic illness and you’re sitting there thinking, I am weaker than my male colleagues, I do have more trouble with this, I think that part rankles in a way that would be very different than it would be for men.”

And how or whether to let the office know about it…

“Two people at work asked me oh, what happened to your arm? And I lied. I said oh, I just fell and sprained my wrist. And that’s when I really started thinking more about how am I gonna handle this at work? What am I going to say?”

Coming up, we look at our attitudes to health and strength at work.

Mary Ratliff lives in Virginia, just outside Washington DC. She was one of several listeners who wrote to me after the show I did on working with Asperger’s. I asked if you’d be interested to hear more about people working with some kind of health condition.

And part of the reason I wanted to talk to Mary was because of something she said about being in a creative field and having a chronic condition. She’s a documentary filmmaker, but like so many filmmakers that’s not how she earns all of her living. She handles social media for a Washington think tank 15 hours a week, and she does various other gigs. And her condition isn’t the kind of illness where people offer you immediate sympathy or understanding.

We spoke on Skype.

AM-T: “When you wrote to me you said you had a sleep disorder…”

“Yeah, so people with chronic illness are familiar with this – I have a diagnosis that is their best guess. I’ve had so many tests that have come up negative they’ve said OK we think you have idiopathic hypersomnia – which when you boil it down means you have extreme fatigue where we can’t find a primary cause…so I’ve been tested for apnea, narcolepsy, all those things. None of them are what my issue is.”

The first time she went to a doctor for this was when she was 14. She’s now in her mid-thirties. So she’s been dealing with this for years.

“I’ve had good months, bad months, that kind of thing, and like I’ve said I’ve been tested for apnea 3 times actually because I’m also overweight. And being an overweight woman in the American medical system means you have a tendency for doctors to discount what you’re telling them. And they have a tendency to be like, oh you’re just out of shape, you need to exercise, eat less…so I was wading through that for a very long time. But for me it started to come into a conclusion in 2012.”

She was doing post-production on her documentary and making silly mistakes. She was also working on a couple of friends’ films and just knew she was not doing as good a job as she could. Added to the built-up lack of sleep was the stress of bringing in these projects in good shape, on deadline. She says she’s had anxiety issues for some time…

“So the anxiety was at an all-time high. I spent 6 months, almost a year where I’d be awake for 30 to 36 hours and sleep for 14 hours. I was non-functional. I was no good to the rest of the world.”

She had to figure out what was going on. So she started seeking out specialists. She’s been through 3 sleep studies since then, received tons of suggestions – yes, she gave up caffeine years ago. Now she has a doctor she really likes – but no one’s really got to the bottom of what’s causing this - yet. Right now she’s doing better though. She’s on medication to help her stay awake, rather than to help her sleep.

“Once I started taking that and I’m awake for more of the day – you know, I used to get to a point where at 2 o’clock in the afternoon I could not keep my eyes open, and I would fall asleep and if I didn’t set an alarm I’d sleep for 2 or 3 hours in the middle of the afternoon, and that throws off your sleep cycle. Now I’m on this medicine during the day I’m sleeping better at night.”

AM-T: “You spoke to me specifically when you approached me about this, about your life as a creative, and you said there’s a lot of advice and rules for creative careers that can be hurtful or difficult when you have a chronic illness. What did you mean by that?”

“The one I think of first whenever people bring this up, is when you do anything to do with writing people say write every day…and when you have a chronic illness and you have bad days you can feel like the biggest failure in the world if you’re not able to do something everyone else acts like is so simple. Where they’re like, ‘you can’t be a writer if you don’t write every day. You don’t really mean it.’ They do this with art too – if you’re not working on your art every day, and if you’re a freelancer, if you’re not looking for jobs every day, you’re not committed, you’re not really doing it, you don’t really mean it.”

But there were days and still are days when she feels like she just can’t put finger to keyboard. Her brain’s in a total fog. And she knows she’s not the only one who’s struggling.

“Especially someone with a chronic illness like fibromyalgia that has a pain component and you can’t even sit up at the computer, how are you supposed to be looking for a job that day? But then you’ve got all of these little voices saying you don’t want it, you’re not chasing your passion, and that starts to wear you out, and that is where I started to get upset and resist my diagnosis and say it’s gotta be something that’s fixable, it’s got to be just me. And maybe if I just change this one thing, maybe if I just do this, I can be this creative like they say I’m supposed to be.”

She says it’s only been during the past few months that she’s been able to tell herself on bad days, she can’t do that particular task.

“And that doesn’t mean that I’m a failure. It just means I have a different situation.”

AM-T: “I was gonna say, how do you feel about this situation, I mean frustrated, guilty, less than, all of those things?”

“Yeah, it’s definitely all of those depending on the day, sometimes all at once, and to be a bit topical about it all the discussion in the past few weeks about Hillary Clinton’s health has really bothered me. Because I already feel there are already people looking at me thinking oh, she can’t do this. And to see someone who’s trying for the most powerful position in the country and because she likes to sit with a pillow behind her back, people think she can’t do it...”

And in case this Hillary pillow story passed you by, back in August there was a flurry of internet chatter about photos taken of Clinton using a pillow or leaning against a stool at public events. The question seemed to be – if she needed these props – could she lead?

Mary and I had this conversation right after Clinton revealed she had pneumonia, but she hadn’t let on about the illness for a couple of days after her diagnosis.

Mary isn’t surprised Clinton kept her mouth shut. She says it’s partly why she’s been so hard on herself. The image we’re supposed to present at work is one of strength – anything less and you can be branded not good enough.

“The rhetoric comes across as very derogatory towards people who aren’t perfectly able bodied. And so it does, it makes you start to feel so less than, that you have to say that’s a thing that’s beyond my abilities. I can’t do that.”

Just because she can’t work on a film set 6 days a week for 12 hours a day, she says that doesn’t mean she’s a less creative person, or someone who’s coasting, not making an effort…

“But that’s very hard to get through to people. My parents are both disabled so it’s something I’ve noticed for a very long time. Things like, when people think it’s funny to laugh at people who take the elevator up one flight of steps and to insult them and say they’re lazy. And it’s like, you don’t know them, you don’t know the challenges they’re facing, you don’t know why that person wanted to sit down on the subway. Maybe they just had knee surgery, you have no idea. Our society has some problems with that that they need to work out.”

And as we were talking about these perceptions of weakness and laziness, I was thinking about the other side of this story – men. In a way I wonder if this stuff is harder for men – after all the stereotype of the invincible alpha male is very much out there. So are you thought even less of if you’re a man who has some kind of condition you’re dealing with?

Mary doesn’t think so.

“You know there’s this idea that if a woman wants to be successful in the workplace she has to be twice as successful. So you’re already coming from this disadvantaged place where people don’t have the same expectations of you. Again going back to Hillary Clinton, if a male candidate had said he felt overheated, people probably wouldn’t have thought that far into it. But with her, there’s amateur people saying she has Parkinson’s and trying to diagnose her from random things. And I think a little bit of that is that idea that we have a stereotype of women as weak or weaker, that women are weaker, physically. So I think that when you have a chronic illness and you’re sitting there thinking, I am weaker than my male colleagues, I do have more trouble with this, I can’t lift that box…I do have to go get help. I think that part rankles in a way that would be very different than it would be for men.”

If you have a different opinion, let me know – especially if you’re a man who’s had his own experience of illness at work. 

When Mary first got her part-time social media job she wasn’t comfortable letting on to managers or colleagues that she had any kind of health issue. She’d do her utmost to make sure she was ‘on’ the whole time she was at work. She’d arrange therapy sessions or doctor’s appointments around that.

But later, when she’d been there a while, she was put on an experimental regime to limit her sleep, and this was going to interfere with her work. The idea was to re-train her body and mind…

“Trying to re-set your body and re-set your body clock, so I was trying to function on even less sleep than I’d been getting, and I finally realized I’d have to tell them…and I was like, ‘right now my brain is Swiss cheese because I’m not getting any sleep, and it’s on purpose, I’m under doctor’s supervision…but I just need you to be patient with me and to help me, like if I ask you go back over my work, try not to judge me for it.’ And they were perfectly understanding, I have amazing co-workers, I love my job.”

She realizes that compared to a lot of people she is lucky.

My next guest isn’t using her name. You’ll find out why a little later. She can say what she does for a living.

“I’m a human resources professional, I am a generalist, and I work in a large corporation.”

She just turned 35. She’s been married since she was in her late 20s. No kids. Back in April of this year she went on vacation.

“And I went to a tropical location, and even walking on the beach was painful – my knees were just bothering me so much and it really worried me, also because there was swimming pool and I realized I couldn’t tread water any more, there was no strength in my legs. I’ve always been a strong swimmer.”

She says the pain wasn’t like anything else she’d experienced.

“It felt really heavy, almost like I had a bag of hot coals tied around my knees, it was just extremely uncomfortable.”

This wasn’t the first time she’d noticed something amiss. About ten years before she’d had some issues with her balance and had to be hospitalized for a while. Then lately she’d begun feeling odd sensations in her body; she was tired, she had go to the bathroom more often. But none of it really seemed like a big deal until what happened on that beach.

When she got back from vacation she saw a doctor, had a bunch of tests.

And one day she’s at work – and the phone rings. It’s her doctor. So she’s sitting there, no privacy…

“We have open plan cubicles, and I stepped away into a conference room, I have a conference room near my cubicle. He said based on what you’ve described and some of the tests, we did MRIs, and some lab work, based on all that I think that you have MS.”

Multiple Sclerosis.

“He was pretty confident, pretty sure it was MS. I just knew in my gut he was right, you just get that feeling, you know. I knew that it was MS. I still had to get a confirmation from a neurologist, but I knew that was it. I was just in a conference room by myself on the phone with him, I just sort of started crying, and then I called my husband, and then I cleaned myself up and got back to work, because I was in the office. And then just kind of processing that for the rest of the day and the day and weeks to come.”

On the one hand she thought, how can this be me? I can’t have this disease. On the other something at the back of her brain told her, yup, this is what’s wrong – it all fits. And the thing about MS is, people have quite different experiences with the disease, so she’s not sure how things will pan out for her long term.

“For some people it’s their eyesight, and for some it’s their balance, and for some like with me, odd sensations and trouble walking. So they really don’t know what you can expect, everyone is different. From what I’ve read online there’s a percentage, maybe 20% of people that do end up wheelchair-bound – so that part has probably been the scariest, is thinking about the future and not knowing.”

AM-T: “I mean you were at work when you got the diagnosis which is typical that this should happen in a place where we’re trying to maintain our privacy. Talk about how you’ve handled this at work because you mentioned you’ve had some trouble walking and some people are going to notice that.”

“Yes, one person did notice and she said are you OK, what’s happening, your walking…and I just said oh, my knees are a little stiff today, I’ll be fine, I said something very quickly, in the hallway, I didn’t know how to react. Up to that point I really hadn’t thought about how to react to questions at work. I didn’t prepare, I shrugged it off, she wished me well and we went on our way.

But I needed some treatment that required an IV on my arm, so I had a bandage on my arm for 5 days. And 2 people at work asked me oh, what happened to your arm? And I lied. I said oh, I just fell and sprained my wrist. Again I just didn’t know what to say. So I did lie. And that’s when I really started thinking more about how am I gonna handle this at work? What am I going to say? Because lying, and keeping that secret, just started to make me feel really uncomfortable.”

After all she sees these people every day. And they’re well intentioned. But…

“I do have some concerns about the consequences of disclosure.”

Now she works in HR. She says she’s not worried about losing her job over this revelation – in fact the law would be on her side.

She wanted to be anonymous on this show for slightly different reasons. For one thing her boss doesn’t know yet that she has MS. And her boss may sympathize for all she knows…but it’s more complicated than that.   

“Thinking about promotions and opportunities, would I be held back from those because I might be seen as less competent or less able to handle stress because I have multiple sclerosis and so that really is my main concern. And I know this because I am an HR professional, I know that biases exist.”

AM-T: “Well I thought that was so interesting to me, that you wrote you work in HR and you know how things really work, you said. Because we’re all presented with this idea that HR in America at least is terribly fair, and there are all these rules, and American companies have to jump through all these hoops if they want to get rid of somebody, so what’s it really like?”

“Well what I mean by that is all these rules do exist – the ADA, Americans with Disabilities Act, protects against discriminating in hiring and promotions at work, and that’s all true – but again if a hiring manger is faced with that decision, he or she could simply say I am not the most qualified candidate for whatever reason, maybe I don’t have enough experience, or I don’t have the right certification, it could be anything else, and I’d have no way to prove that’s because the manager is aware that I have MS.”

She’s been reading a lot online. And she says even the MS Society advises you may not want to say anything at work because of just these things – the possibility being treated differently, losing out on better positions. Again, this whole thing of being seen as weak and not up to the job.

Still, she wonders…should she tell people? After all…

“There’s a lot of talk nowadays about authenticity at work, right, bringing your authentic self to work. And so that’s something I’ve been thinking about, OK, I need to get more comfortable. And I know I will over time. This is who I am, I have multiple sclerosis and that is my authentic self now, and it’s different from who I was just a few months ago, and just getting comfortable with that and saying that if need be.”

But at the same time I don’t think she should be under any pressure to tell because of an overblown management trend around being authentic. But you may have other ideas. I told my listener I’d ask – is there anyone out there in a similar boat who has any advice for her? Let me know if so.

I wondered how much her diagnosis is affecting her outlook on life.

“It’s amazing how in a few short months it’s impacting everything – the way I see the world and especially in my interactions at work, and maybe that’s a silver lining, right, it makes us more empathetic and more open to that. We just don’t know what someone is going through at work. It’s impossible to separate what’s going on in your personal life from work. And that’s been one of my biggest takeaways is I just don’t know what someone’s going through.”

AM-T: “What about your thoughts about your future career? Some people when they get a diagnosis, they say it’s changed my view of what I think is important, somebody who was wildly ambitious now wants to spend more time with their family. It’s a bit of a cliché but you know what I mean. I wonder, are you thinking at all differently about career versus the rest of your life, or not really?”

“I am a little bit and I’m not superbly ambitious or anything like that, not to this point. One thing I am thinking about is um, the stress level. If I wanted to be in a leadership position or a management position that comes with a lot of stress. And stress can make my condition, can cause a relapse or exacerbation.”

Which obviously she wants to avoid.   

“What has not changed is wanting to be a solid performer. Because now that I’m ill, obviously I’ve always needed my job, we all need our jobs. But now I really need my job. I have short-term disability with my job, and long-term disability, and that has become just crucial in my thinking. OK, if I become severely disabled or anything I know I have this security at work, and that’s a comfort. So I don’t want to do anything to risk that. So whatever the future holds I don’t know, but being a solid performer, that hasn’t changed.”

Thanks to my listener for sharing her experience on the podcast.

And as I said earlier if any of you want to contribute to this discussion, particularly about how and whether to come clean about an illness or other condition at work, let me know. You can post on the Facebook page, at the Broad Experience dot com, or you can email me via the website.

And my first guest, Mary Ratliff, does her own podcast called Introductions Necessary – it’s all about women in STEM fields, most of whom we’ve never heard of.

I am getting married at the end of this week and I’m a bit busy so you won’t be getting a new show in two weeks – but I promise the one you will get is relevant to our current times.

And I get that not everyone can contribute with a donation to the show but maybe you can write a positive review on iTunes – I’d love it if you did.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. 

Episode 91: Sandberg vs. Slaughter

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time, we look at two influential women – Sheryl Sandberg…

“To tell women who are bumping up against these intractable and structural problems that it’s all about you…is just extremely frustrating in the end because it’s not all about you.”

And Anne-Marie Slaughter…

“How can we effect change so that everybody can have this blend of care and competition so the world is more integrated?”

Coming up – will change come through individual efforts, or is it more about the system?

Back in July I released a show called Selling Empowerment – it was all about the cult of the women’s conference. We asked whether those conferences really had any positive effect for women long-term.

During my interviews for that show two women’s names kept coming up – Sheryl Sandberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter.  You’re probably familiar with them. Sandberg of course became famous after publishing her book Lean In in 2013. It’s a call to arms for women to push themselves forward at work. Anne-Marie Slaughter is a former US State Department official who wrote an article for The Atlantic in 2012 called Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. Last year she published a book that grew out of that article – it’s called Unfinished Business – Women, Men, Work, Family.

It’s hard to exist in this world of women and work without hearing these women’s names bandied about all the time. And Sandberg in particular evokes strong feelings – even among people who haven’t read her book. Many women resent a woman of Sandberg’s background and wealth apparently telling them how to tackle their work lives.

What I got from Lean In was take some of it, leave the rest. For instance, for me, it was a bit annoying that Sandberg seemed to be talking only to women who had partners who could help them out. She seemed to assume every grown woman had one. I didn’t. But I found plenty of other stuff in the book useful.

And of course now Sandberg doesn’t have a partner herself. Her husband died in an accident last year. They have two children.

I asked you to tell me how you felt about Sandberg and Slaughter and their messages. And I discussed it with business journalist Sheelah Kolhatkar when we spoke for the show on women’s conferences.  

“Well I think both Sheryl Sandberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter are really important and I admire them personally, what they’ve accomplished and done, in terms of making this issue part of the conversation, and we needed that, I’m thankful to both of them for that…I think they also on some level represent these two ways or approaching this problem, of women’s lack of progress in different parts of the modern world. Sheryl was really preaching individualism, self- improvement, I’m gonna work on myself, I mean that whole idea of leaning in, she wasn’t saying the whole office should lean in, she wants you personally to lean in harder and do what you need to do, and not leave before you leave, and just take the big job, and push push push. I think those are important points but they’re not going to solve the problem. And I think yes, she’s obviously immensely wealthy…and I’m sure she’s a billionaire many times over because of Facebook, but to tell women who are bumping up against these intractable and structural problems that it’s all about you – and you through personal behavior change and self- improvement can plow your way through is just extremely frustrating in the end. Because it’s not just about you. It’s about a whole bunch of other things that have nothing to do with you.”

And Sandberg didn’t address those – the limits of your particular workplace or bosses and the system as a whole – which after all was designed by and for men. There was a lot about you changing your approach to things…and I think this is really interesting because it’s my theory that the older you are the more OK you are with making some personal tweaks. The younger you are the more it rankles – this idea of fitting in with an existing, male-dominated structure.

I heard from one of my listeners on this, Aesha Williams. She’s in Chicago.

“I strongly believe that institutions need to change and it really rubs met the wrong way if I’m listening to a show or reading a blog or whatever and it suggests women should just suck it up and maybe change their way of dressing or their way of being because men won’t take them seriously.  That’s a real problem for me. I don’t understand how anything is gonna change if we have to continue forcing ourselves into a male world instead of the world changing to accept women and their habits and their behaviors.”

 I hear her. But I also think at least some of the advice in Lean In is worth a try if it’s going to get you more money or something else you want.

I asked Claudia Chan about Sandberg’s message too. She was my other guest in that show on women’s conferences. She’s a longtime entrepreneur.

“I see Sheryl, even in reading Lean In, obviously she has a very traditional – like Harvard, right, to State Department I believe, to Google, to Facebook…and so she’s had this very traditional corporate upbringing. So her story in many ways probably will resonate with more corporate women. But to me Sheryl did not have to do the book, she did not have to do any of it. She was rich enough. She already had enough recognition and fame. So I believe it was really generous of her to share that story.  And really she’s young, she’s beautiful, she runs one of the coolest companies in the world. So she had the microphone to attract all that media attention, right, and she really did in many ways resuscitate this modern conversation around feminism – or the conversation around modern feminism.”

It’s true. When I started this show the year before Sandberg published Lean In, women in the workplace felt like a niche topic. Now, it’s huge.

Dawn Edmiston teaches at William and Mary College and she’s a former guest on the show. She was galvanized by Sandberg’s message.

“Did I agree with everything that was said in her book? No. But we rarely agree with everything that is said by others. As a college professor I have had the privilege of teaching hundreds of women who of course are very fortunate to even have the opportunity to have a college education. But they’re also very fortunate to have a woman like Sheryl Sandberg who is creating her own path and empowering women to think differently about their own lives and how they choose to define themselves.”

But many women’s ire grew from the fact they’ve been leaning in, sometimes for years – and they still aren’t where they’d like to be. Who was the privileged, highly connected Sheryl Sandberg to tell them how to climb the ladder? People got up in arms about the parenting side of the book because of course Sandberg and her late husband had plenty of help at home. Help a lot of people can’t afford.

And since Sandberg became a widow last year she has said, I didn’t get it before – I had no idea how hard it was to keep all the balls in the air at work when you are the only parent. It was an admission that she had been in a bit of a bubble.

And especially if you work in America, you need help. It’s a workaholic culture. There’s very little government or company support for working couples with kids or single parents. Here’s Sheelah again.

“And that’s where Anne-Marie offered a more relatable, more honest assessment, or philosophy. She said, that’s all good but in fact there are these structural problems, we in fact have a barbaric policy system with regard to family leave. We’re telling women to leave, if they’re lucky enough to get 12 weeks of unpaid time off, which very few people do in an economy where most people’s salaries have not gone up since 1990 and the cost of living has soared – to tell these women to take your 12 weeks of time off and then leave your 12-week- old baby in a ridiculously expensive daycare or in a totally unregulated black market nanny economy, is just barbaric.

And then they get to work and there’s no accommodation for the fact they’re new parents and there’s this sense they have to put in face time, and there are no women they can look at above them who managed to do this. And of course women get frustrated and quit when they can. We have this huge proportion of households headed by single mothers…who are in an impossible bind, and that’s even more acute if you go down the income ladder. So Anne-Marie at least was acknowledging these things we all know are true which is the system is not right. It’s not fair, it is stacked against women, it is not a reflection of the way the world is. It was all designed on a 1950s ideal of a man going to work every day, long hours at the office, and the women at home taking care of the home front. And that is just not the way the world is. And our policies and corporate culture have not changed.”

And she says they won’t as long as women are trying to address these things through their personal behavior.

Another listener of mine, Karen Lock Kolp, says she’d barely followed Sandberg until recently. She read Lean In this summer and found a lot to like when it comes to self-advocacy. But she’s a bigger Slaughter fan.

“I love her emphasis on care.”

She likes the way Slaughter challenges traditional views about who should work and strive for promotions, and who should look after others…

“She suggests that people need to think more about care and competition together. So if we think of these two worlds as care has been the women’s purview and competition has been the men’s, we need to think about how those can blend. Because we live in world where care is extremely important and it’s not getting the kind of emphasis that it should be getting. Everyone needs to care for their families whether it’s aging parents or young children or spouses, friends, anything like that.”

She appreciates that Anne-Marie Slaughter has raised this question…

“How can we effect change so that everybody can have this blend of care and competition so the world is more integrated? And I just love that idea, I’m so completely taken with it.”

But of course to have that more integrated world…attitudes at the office need to change. Not to mention political attitudes.

Sheelah Kolhatkar says Slaughter could have done more in her book to tackle exactly how that change might come to pass. 

“I would have liked to see her go farther in terms of practical advice and suggestions and the fact that she didn’t I think reflects the fact that it’s actually really difficult to address.”

Also, as I see it from my perch as an ex-pat, not everyone in the US wants this kind of change. The whole country was founded on this idea that you help yourself. A lot of people look on government as a clunky, overweening force…something that’s far likelier to mess you up than help you out.  

AM-T: “And this is speaking as someone who didn’t grow up here, the cult of the individual is a very American thing. You know it’s not the same… I think the UK is closest to the US in terms of culture, of the European countries. But it’s a given there as in so many other European countries that you get some help from the government.”

“Right, no, sure, there’s obviously a strain of American culture that says I don’t want help from anyone. However, there are a lot of people getting help and big companies are certainly getting a lot of help. It always shocks me that women’s issues and childcare issues – I hate to just call them just women’s issues, but family issues, don’t become more prominent in political campaigns, and I think now with Hillary Clinton as the apparent Democratic nominee for president, I think this is going to become a bigger part of the conversation, but that’s what it took for it to even get talked about. Year after year I’d say why aren’t women organizing and demanding certain things? There are other groups of people pushing their rights forward, which is very good, but why are women not doing that too, why are they not saying no, we refuse to live with this situation anymore? And in fact there are many men who feel the same way. They want to have family lives, particularly younger men coming up into these companies now. They do not want the old system where they worked till 8p.m. and don’t ever see their children. Most of them do not want that. So it’s going to take everybody demanding that companies be more flexible and that public policy change to reflect the way the world has changed and not pretend we’re in a 1950s white male utopia. It’s just not like that any more.”

 Sheelah Kolhatkar – she’s now at the New Yorker.

I’m particularly interested to know what you think if you don’t live in the US – do you think the status quo here is crazy? Or does it also feel hard to have a sane existence as an ambitious female where you are, even if public policy is on your side?

As usual you can comment on the website or on the show’s Facebook page or you can email me – I’d love to hear from you.

And if you’re interested in Lean In – even if you’re a hater - you might want to download an early show I did called Leaning In – it was a 6-woman debate on Sandberg’s book and there were a lot of different opinions.

Thanks to all those of you who have given donations to this one-woman show – you are helping to keep it going. If you’d like to join them, go to the support tab at TheBroadExperience.com.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.  

Episode 88: Selling Empowerment

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time, maybe you’ve noticed there are a lot of women’s conferences out there lately. They’re popping up everywhere…advertising empowerment, inspiration….and not just for women nearing the top…

“What about your average consumer who’s watching Kim Kardashian or who has like, no clue as to what even empowerment means and what feminism is or why it matters to them? So my goal is really to set out to create the world’s most accessible women’s conference.”

But are these events actually changing anything for women?

“They’re really based on this philosophy of you can just work to improve yourself, make yourself better, smarter, stronger. But the fact is as long as women are fighting these little solo battles I don’t think a lot is going to change.”

Coming up, we take a look at the growing business of women’s conferences and whether they’re anything more than a tonic.  

Sheelah Kolhatkar is a staff writer for the New Yorker. When we met a bit earlier this summer she was still at Business Week. And earlier this year she wrote a piece for that magazine that articulated so many things I’d been thinking about women’s conferences but hadn’t quite been able to put into words.

I asked Sheelah how she came to this topic in the first place.

“I noticed over the last couple of years I’d get invitations to these women’s conferences, it seemed to happen every month, it was women’s empowerment, it was women in science, women in STEM, the glass ceiling – there were dozens of them. And I was intrigued and of course I’m interested in women’s issues, it’s something I write about. So I started to go. The first thing I noticed was the way a lot of the women up on the stage look – they are very glamorous, most of them…this was the strong point I came away with. Often wearing these stylish little skits and dresses, they had these crazy high heels on…I’m not someone who can really wear heels though I think they look great…they’re all up there in these stiletto heels talking about feminism and women’s empowerment, and when you sit in the audience there’s this row of high stiletto heels right at your eye level, it’s all you see when you sit down below the stage – and I thought that was odd given the subject matter of these conferences, and so I started to wonder, what exactly were these conference achieving – they were clearly turning into a huge business for a lot of corporations and media companies and I started to wonder whether any of the women attending were coming away with what was advertised – which was empowerment, inspiration, changing the conversation, they were vague promises but I wondered if people were getting what they paid for.”

And that business about the shoes – that really struck me at the last couple of conferences I went to. And if you’re thinking well what does it matter what people wear on their feet, I guess to me the fact these women on the panels all looked so glamorous and were in these towering heels made me wonder, do I fit in here? Does my version of feminism belong here? I suppose I felt a little intimidated by the glamor level.

AM-T: “It became a game with myself when I went to one – is there anyone on a panel who isn’t wearing stilettos? And I think the last time I went to a conference who wasn’t actually wearing stilettos, nobody was wearing flats, they were wearing some kind of in between shoe. But I’ve also wondered about this – do you have to look like the best approximation of a model to be a panelist at this thing, and if so, doesn’t that defeat the purpose?”

“I think that’s a good question. I should disclose I’ve participated in many of these conferences as a panelist and moderator, so I started to think about this myself. You want to look good, a lot of people are watching you, people are making videos, tweeting photos – of course we want to look good. And then you look around at what other people are wearing, and part of the aesthetic comes from the broadcast TV world because often these conferences go to TV anchors and reporters and ask them to do these live interviews, because those people are used to doing that. And the broadcast TV aesthetic is quite unforgiving for women in my opinion…typically it’s a very image conscious business and the women are very, very thin and wear these tiny sleeveless dresses as they report on the news all day, and they wear these high heels. So this has translated over to the conference world.”

But not completely. Sheelah points out there is one conference with quite a mix of guests – Tina Brown’s wildly successful Women in the World conference. It’s been held on a few continents. She has tons of celebrities from entertainment, politics and royalty. But she also features refugees and rape victims from Syria and India, women whose names we’d never know if we didn’t attend the conference and hear their stories. But the thing about hearing their stories is, you want to do something to help after the event is over. And you don’t really get the opportunity. Even if you come away awed by their bravery and determination.

AM-T: “With regard to whether these actually do anything, that was what was lurking in the back of my head. Like the people you talked to in the piece I’ve come away inspired with a lovely warm glow inside, thinking about all the achievements I’ve heard about, all the conquering hard times and all that, but at what point did you start to think…was it at the very first conference you attended where you thought, is this achieving anything? Or was it as a result of going to several that the warm glow began to wear off?”

“I had a moment of epiphany when I acted as moderator at one particular panel. It was at Advertising Week, and the subject of the discussion – it was called ‘the glass ladder’, and it was about women in creative professions, film, music, creative directors, it was group of very impressive women from different companies, very accomplished women.”

The event was held at a big theater on 42nd Street in New York, and the room was packed.

She says you could feel the excitement in the air. This topic was something these women really wanted to sink their teeth into – because there are so few women at the top in these creative industries. Sheelah says the session was a hit. And at the end, she glanced out across the room…

“So the house lights came up and it was all women, there wasn’t a single man there. And I guess that shouldn’t have really surprised me but I was still a little shocked to see how uniformly female the audience was. And I thought well, I’m glad that women are seeking out these kinds of experiences to help guide them or get advice but really men ae missing from these conversations about why there aren’t more women in certain industries, why their careers fall apart after children, why maternity leave is so far behind most advanced countries, and none of those things are really going to change unless men are involved. Because men still run most of these companies, they’re the ones setting the policies at these corporations where all these women are struggling to figure out how to move forward, and just that moment really crystalized it for me.”

I’ve had that feeling too. That said, one of the conferences I went to a few years ago, the SHE Summit in New York, had one panel where men talked about men’s part in this whole effort to bring more equality to the workplace and life in general. But there were almost no men in the audience. And one of the men on the panel even raised this. He said the names of these conferences put men off.  

AM-T: “He pointed out, how many men are going to attend something that has the word women in the title? And I think about that all the time I mean even the title of my show, I’m pretty sure, I know I have male listeners but they’re going to be a minority because most people are like, that’s not for me, because it has ‘women’ in it. And I think that’s a problem with these conferences.”

“I raised this with a lot of the conference organizers and they all acknowledged that yes, we need to get more men – but packaging these things and branding them as a women’s event is very effective. They are sold out – even though there’s a new one popping up every day there seems to be unlimited demand, which I concluded is a reflection of the fact women are very frustrated. They go charging into the workplace, they get their degrees, they get the best grades, and then they suddenly encounter all sorts of obstacles they weren’t anticipating. They look around, they’re thinking about starting a family or trying to move up or making less money than their male colleague and they’re kind of just bewildered, they did all the things we’re telling them to do and they’re feeling really frustrated. So as long as that exists as a problem in our society, these conferences are gonna fill up with women.

 Now getting more men involved is one important goal. I would say having spoken to a number of historians and social justice experts and activists, a few of them said you know if there was more follow through afterwards that might help too. Because the conferences are very individual, very focused on personal issues, personal improvement – they’re based on this philosophy that you can just work to improve yourself, make yourself better, smarter, stronger, lose a few pounds, get better footwear, ask for more raises. There’s a lot of advice about how women should ask for raises more often, which I think is true. But as long as women are fighting these little solo battles I don’t think a lot is going to change. I spoke with a few women studies professors, academics and historians who have studied social change, movements, and civil rights, the fact is things don’t happen on a big scale till people take collective action.  So people, women, need to group together and push for changes whether it’s in the political arena or within individual companies and I think so long as women are being preached at, being told they should constantly work harder to make themselves better, there’s just going to be a wall – there’s only so far you can go with just pure self-improvement advice.”

Or is there? We’ll come back to Sheelah again a little later in the show. In the meantime, we’ll hear from someone with a different take.

Claudia Chan is the founder and CEO of SHE Global Media. She and her organization put on a women’s conference every year in New York – one I’ve been to a few times. She says the aim is to bring together a group of women who want to be leaders – women who are part of what she calls the macro movement…

“Our core conference every year is SHE Summit, and it is a membership driven global empowerment conference and it's all about attracting, identifying, convening who these individuals are, to give them the role models and the education and the conversation and the activation to rise to their highest potential and lift other women.”

Heady stuff.  

Claudia started her conference right around the same time I launched The Broad Experience. It was 2012. And until former state department employee Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote her famous ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have It All’ article for the Atlantic that summer, women and the workplace definitely felt micro rather than macro. Her article and Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In changed that. Suddenly it felt like everyone was talking about this stuff.

“Yeah. And it's great because it's almost like a crescendo has happened right, and we're all tackling different pieces of it, and so you know, I come from - my last company was another event company called Shecky’s, and we convened women and their girlfriend groups for shopping experiences, discovery. And so my whole background was convening mass crowds of women and figuring out what they would be attracted to. And so my whole goal was I wanted to mainstream women's empowerment – I’m like everything out there women’s conference-wise was elite, exclusive and expensive. And I'm like OK, well that's great and it's important to convene our most successful powerful people, you know female leaders, but what about your average consumer who's like watching Kim Kardashian or has no clue as to what even empowerment means and what feminism is, or you know, why it matters to them. So that's you know I my goal is really to set out to create the world's most accessible Women's Conference and to create an agenda that was that was very relatable and practical.”

Claudia’s had some fantastic speakers – including Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, Deeprak Chopra, and Marianne Pearl, the widow of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. And then there was that panel on men’s part in lifting women up that still sticks in my mind a couple of years later.

“I mean and this year we're actually going to have even more men and that's what it is right? It’s giving this audience – and we charge you know two hundred to five hundred dollars for access to the conference so it's super accessible for two days, and it's almost like a leadership curriculum that women will go through, but you're just getting this massive exposure to such a wide variety of role models and thought leaders.”

AM-T: “But the argument that was made in that Business Week piece was and then you get back to your desk, and the guy next to you is still being paid more. And there are all these structural issues that mean there’s only so far you can go with all that stuff that you took away from conferences because of the way that the American workplace works. You’re hitting a wall after a while no matter how empowered you feel when you leave a conference.”

“Yeah you know so it's interesting, I mean I'm doing this because I'm a product of consuming thought leadership, I'm a product of consuming inspiration. And whether or not I consume that inspiration through books or through conferences or my Sunday sermons when I go to church or my yoga meditation and immersions, and you know like I have my mixed bag of sort of what’s ignited me, what's activated me. But you know in order for people to really get activated we need to connect with other people, we need to get educated, right, we need to get inspired and it's that inspiration, it's that content that creates the consciousness and it's the consciousness that actually creates the change. And then we can say that you know these conferences are critical because in many ways, it’s hearing other people's stories, it’s seeing other role models. We cannot be what we cannot see, we cannot become what we do not believe, so you know we need exposure to these types of things, and there's something about the physicality right, I mean it's one thing to read some article in The New York Times and read a great compelling piece, or watch a really inspirational video, but it’s a whole other thing when you're physically energized - the power of a real life energy is so strong.”

It’s true. There is something about being in a room with all those other people who care about the same thing. And the panels are inspiring.

“…and the thing is that greatness and leadership and making a massive social change to actually change these structures that we’re pissed off about, we have to be the change we want to see. So we can’t just go to a conference and say, ‘Oh it's amazing’ and we go back to everyday life. You know we have to actually work harder unfortunately, you know, to actually do the more work so that OK, so what else am I going to do about that like that really pisses me off, that thing about blah blah blah policy, or this issue, or the fact my company doesn't have this, like can we be social entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs? We need to self-motivate.”

So for Claudia, self-motivation is key.

And the thing is, she’s got so much energy and she feels so passionately about making things better for women…you get all caught up in her enthusiasm when you hear her speak. There’s definitely a whiff of Oprah about her. Claudia genuinely wants change. She wants to help people. She’s not a cynical person. Unlike yours truly.

Talking of my dark side, what about what comes after the conference? Does anything change?

“What I typically see is people sort of up their game. If you're, whether or not you're, for example if you're starting a company or you're building a company, because a lot of what we teach is ‘obstacles are what create the opportunities’ right, and you know it's often easy to get discouraged, and we've seen people sort of up their game. One person launched a water company, Wellness Water for Women, out of coming out of SHE Summit. She personally said to me, you know this is inspired me so much, I'm going to do this. We've had a lot of those stories. A lot of women have actually met collaborators like assistants, made hires through connections at SHE Summit. We've had people that have met and created businesses together.”

She says she’s had women in corporate tell her they’re now determined to make changes at their workplace.

“And it's definitely one of those things where you know everybody always asks well what's the what's the next step out of this, we can’t just continue to bring people together, we have to have like more practical next step. And the truth is there's a lot of things that do happen, it's just a lot of that is hard, you know it's hard to track those things.”

 I can believe it. Doing this podcast I have the same feeling – I think and hope that in its own way it’s helping galvanize change…but frankly this show isn’t going to alter America’s lack of a maternity leave policy, for example.

But talking of impact, I wonder if Claudia has ever thought about this idea for her conference – it’s something Sheelah Kolhatkar brought up with me. All these conferences are sponsored by big corporate names. And you do wonder sometimes…are these sponsor companies walking the walk where women are concerned…or just talking the talk?

Here’s Sheelah again.

“I think companies who are involved in this world, particularly there are a lot of corporate sponsors who pay money to have their logos prominently displayed, if conference organizers wanted to push for change they could tell those companies, if you want to be affiliated with our women’s empowerment conference, you need to make a commitment to get 30% female board members at your company or to publish all the salaries of your employees so people can see whether they’re being paid less than their male counterparts…all these things they could do. And I think that’s happened in small ways around the margins but I think the people in this industry could really push for change by demanding that in exchange for the branding and public relations benefit you have to actually do something.”

AM-T: “Actually that reminds me of something you alluded to in the piece…you get these women from famous companies who are often panelists, guests, talking about their own experience but then you might read something 3 days later about that company that’s not flattering about how it treats its female employees…I ’ve often wondered, watching these women from companies that have a lot to lose about being too honest, how honest are you able to be up on the podium?”

 “Well I went to the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, which is a very interesting conference that’s been going on for 15 years or more, and it’s been very successful, I think they’re now charging $10,000 a head, this is the cream of the crop of corporate America, and I did certainly notice a lot of these women go on the stage and do these interviews but they are corporate actors, and they can be fired at any point like anyone else, and they have to think about their company and their company’s share price, and their PR department, they’re very restricted what they can say. They were often presenting I believe a rosier view, where they were glossing over some of the dirty details, and then you’d notice in between sessions, you’d have these off the record chats over wine at dinner with these power women, and they would just dish about how hard things were, their whole board was male, it was this incredible struggle, many of them have husbands who didn’t work outside the home and that’s how they’re managing to have families and do it all – but you just wouldn’t necessarily know that from the outside, they look like these superwomen who are doing all these things that seem really difficult when you actually try them yourself. And that was something Anne-Marie Slaughter mentioned when I spoke to her for this piece. She said if I were doing this, I would ask all the women to go up there and give us the warts and all description of what their domestic arrangement is like – I think it would be hard to get that kind of honesty, I don’t know why women are so scared of talking about it…but it has become a big stigma, you can’t go public with some of these things. But I think that would be more helpful, than presenting this glossy view that you can have the raise, and the big job, …nothing works that smoothly in reality and I think women get incredibly frustrating thinking they can have all this stuff that is in fact impossible to achieve without tremendous sacrifice, so a more honest conversation would be helpful.”

Finally, I wanted to ask her about something – that word that plays such a big role in any discussion around women.

AM-T: “What do you think of the word empowerment? How does that word make you feel?”

“Well it’s a complicated word. I think the concept behind it is very valid and important. There are a lot of women who don’t feel like they have the authority or self-confidence to speak their mind and ask for what they deserve and point out injustice when they see it. At the same time it’s been coopted by a lot of people selling us things, and it has maybe cheapened it a little bit, the power of that word has been diluted by the fact it’s being used by so many people to sell whatever it is they’re selling.”

She says take American’s National Football League – some of its players have been involved in notorious domestic violence cases and the League has been roundly criticized for its slow response. But even the NFL has launched a women’s summit with the tagline ‘empowerment through sport.’

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. Thanks to Sheelah Kolhatkar and Claudia Chan for being my guests on this show.

Now part of my discussion with both Sheelah and Claudia didn’t make it into this show. We got into a conversation about two women you could say are the unofficial leaders of the current women’s movement. They are Sheryl Sandberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter.  

And here’s where I’d like to hear from you.

Maybe you’ve read Lean In or Slaughter’s book, Unfinished Business. You know each woman comes from a different place – Sandberg is all about the individual making change, Slaughter is much more about institutions and structures needing to change.

If you have strong feelings about either woman’s message or how they’ve affected your attitude or your life and you’d like to be on the show, send me a voice memo with your thoughts. Please start off by telling me your name and where you live. I’m at ashley@thebroadexperience.com. And I’ll need those voice memos by August 15th.

As usual you can comment on this episode either on the show’s Facebook page or at TheBroadExperience.com – you can also sign up for my newsletter right there on the homepage.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. See you next time. 

Episode 87: Work and Intimacy (part 2)

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This is the second of two shows on work and intimacy…and the affect one has on the other.

“Culturally, what we see as really important is productivity, status, position, achievement – women are so achievement focused. And my feeling is you have to decide, how do you want to live your life?”

Coming up, the rest of my conversation with sexuality counselor and nurse/midwife Evelyn Resh.

Since I released the first of these two shows I’ve heard from a few listeners especially on that point where Evelyn said she’d get pushback – where she advised women to start having kids in their twenties. One 25-year-old listener said look, I’m in law school, I don’t even have time to have a boyfriend – I’m focusing on me.  And one of them said, I’m 31 and I’m single and I basically don’t have an intimate life. And now thanks to what your guest said, I’m worried about having a high-risk pregnancy.

When I was 31 I didn’t have an intimate life either. I felt like I was living in a culture that glorified sex, and I wasn’t part of that.

So these shows with Evelyn aren’t meant to be shaming single people. They’re aimed at people in a relationship, but I figured they’re worth listening to for everyone because most of us who are not in a relationship now probably will be at some point in the future.

And here’s something else I heard from a different listener. She wrote after the very first show I did with Evelyn a few years ago. She said, I liked hearing that show but you said absolutely nothing about gay relationships. She said I’m gay and I can tell you when you get two women together, two women focused on doing everything for everyone else, your sex life can suffer.

I asked Evelyn to talk about this.

“Sure, well this is handy because I am a lesbian and I’ve been with my same sex partner for 23 years. I think the woman who wrote to you and said how is this different with two women, I think there’s a hot mess component to this for precisely the reasons that she has brought up to you which is that generally speaking you’ve got women who are dedicated to family and to work and to advocating for everyone in their family and trying to do everything.

We both happen to have children we brought into our marriage…and we now have 3 granddaughters from my spouse’s oldest son. And so now, it’s funny we’re doing this interview today because just this past weekend the whole tribe was here and what were the two of us doing?  We were concentrating and focusing on having everything perfect for everyone there. And then we had to start the work week yesterday. And the two of us were like limp rags. And trying the entire weekend to say OK look it’s not all on our shoulders, these kids are all grown up now…let them take over more of this. And it was not very successful. So there we were cooking meals for 12 people, making sure that there was something everyone was going to enjoy, grocery shopping at the end of our workdays, it was insane.  And by the time we fell into bed we were just spent. And we had this whole tribe of perfectly competent adults who could have taken more of that on. But there’s this way of mothers and as women that we assumed it.”

I asked her if there were any other things that are specific to gay couples and she said people who are married or partnered, they tend to have a lot of the same issues – regardless of their sexuality. She sees about 80% heterosexual couples, 20% gay couples.

I wondered what happens to the dynamic in a same-sex female couple if one woman stays home and the other goes out to work. But Evelyn says she doesn’t see that much.

“I see less and less of that because so many families can’t survive on one income, and so I have very few people where either member of the couple is at home full time. What I do see is actually it’s more often men who are at home fulltime taking care of children and women who are sole breadwinners and still having to do so much work at home, because the way that men take care of children isn’t the way that women take care of children… and 9 times out of 10 women who are powerhouses in the workforce are going to come in and be powerhouses at home – and not let go of a lot of that responsibility.  They want it to be done their way, and so this creates a whole new set of problems. And in terms of intimacy also.”

AM-T: “In terms of intimacy, in what way?”

“Well there’s an interesting thing that has started to happen in my practice. And that is that women who are very competent and very high level professional women start to feel resentful of men that are staying home and doing more female traditional things, because they want to come home and they want their male partner to act and be more traditionally male – so I’ll give you an example. Women will say to me, I come home, I make all the decisions, I pay all the bills, we go out to dinner and I say, where are we going? and he says, well where would you like to go? Why can’t he just sometimes take charge of that and say, meet me at such and such a restaurant at 7p.m? And that’s that. And then I can just surrender. I feel like I’m in charge of everything and I want him to stay in a more masculine energy, linear thinking place. He’s become so feminine I can’t stand it.

And then I start to laugh and I say but this is the arrangement you’ve made and it doesn’t engender him with a lot of masculine energy. Well then he should find it somewhere. It’s fascinating what’s going on now with more and more women, if someone is a sole wage owner it’s not that uncommon that it’s the wife in the family who works. Men are in this weird place and they feel kind of emasculated – this is what men have said to me. And the impact it’s having on sex is very complex.”

She says the women want a traditional chest-thumping mate to pop up at their desire. Which tends not to happen. Meanwhile she says the guys often wonder what exactly their wife wants. Now I imagine this is not the case in every relationship where the woman is the sole wage earner in a heterosexual couple…but those people aren’t the ones calling Evelyn.

In the first show I did with Evelyn 3 years ago she focused quite a bit on the role children play in relationships. If you remember in that show I mentioned that Evelyn trained her daughter when she was ten to do her own laundry. This was so Evelyn wasn’t so overwhelmed between work and home. She reasoned if her daughter could operate a computer, she could operate a washing machine. This gave her a bit more freedom from housework, more time with her spouse.

She says one big problem with this whole work/family dynamic is that too many women put their kids before their partners. They do too much for them – as you heard earlier Evelyn isn’t totally immune from this even now; they worry about what’ll happen if the kids get less attention.

“While I don’t think it is always a good idea to put your partner first I do think it’s a good idea to put your partner first more times than to put your children first. Because children grow up and they leave. And what we want for our children is for them to have marriages where their partner loves them a lot and keeps them in mind as being a very important thing, perhaps the most important thing more of the time. And this is not to say when children are struggling or they’re sick but to say to your children we’re going have dinner on our own. You’re going to have dinner at 5.30 and we’re going to eat at 7 is not a mean thing. But this idea that families have to be pods that are moving together at all times and parents don’t take more time to themselves…I have many, many couples who come in in crisis and I say when was the last time you went away on your own? Oh, well before the children were born. How old are your children? Well, 8 and 10. And 11 and a half. And I’m thinking no wonder you’re in crisis. The two of you are managers. You’re family managers, you’re not lovers any more. So this is a big problem for people and they have some terror around leaving their children because their kids might get upset – well, kids get upset. What I’ve experienced is the thing they get most upset about is when they can sense their parents are not a united front. Because the fact is parents are the masters of their universe. And if there’s dissention among the parents the children will get symptomatic. So when parents say go away, I want your mother all to myself, even if kids protest in the beginning it’s very reassuring to them because their parents are not at odds with one another. And that’s what people have to understand is that parents being really unified, really together, really loving one another and expressing their exclusivity at the expense of children on some sort of regular basis is in their children’s better interest, and this is something that’s very hard to grasp.”

And on that same theme of putting your partner first, here’s a statistic I got from Ellevate, the women’s networking group; maybe some of you are members as well and saw this. In one of their recent surveys they asked which relationships their members spent the most time nurturing.

28% said it was relationships with their peers. 25 percent said it was relationships with clients. 11% said it was relationships with their partners. Well at least partners came before bosses –but still, 11%...it gives you an idea of how easy it is for us to take that particular relationship for granted.

AM-T: “Switching tack, because I want to talk about you. Because you wrote a really interesting email saying I have not been taking my own medicine, and now I’m living in a sexual Sahara, and I need to change this. And I’d like you to talk about what happened and how did things play out?”

“Well I think because we know one another and I’m not shy about anything, I’m perfectly comfortable with you asking such a specific and pointed question. And the best way I can answer this for you is by saying it’s an ongoing work in progress. I’m seeing that I’m still pushing against a tide of that sexual Sahara. And having to remind myself every day OK, look at the calendar – when was the last time you had sex? And people will say to me that is so contrived, I can’t imagine, you put on your calendar when you are intimate with your spouse? And I say yes, -- because time can go by and both of us feel exhausted, but as we become increasingly estranged from one another in that intimate realm that we only share with one another, it feels harder and harder to get back there. And so for me I do keep a calendar. I call it my sex hearts calendar. I put these red hearts on there and go oh lord, 5 weeks, this is not OK…it’s not OK based on my own values system. Where can I just let something go and say no, I don’t want to do that right now, I want to be with my spouse.  So it’s an ongoing work on progress and it’s very, very, challenging especially because of my fatigue level and many of us start to face physical challenges that interfere with being sexually active – we have a new knee, new hip, I don’t know, but it’s really the fatigue more than anything. So how do you work that into your life?”

AM-T: “You talked in some detail in that email about how mentally grueling your job can be.”

“Yeah, I come home and I’m not compos mentis. I can just sit and stare out my window, I live in a rural area, it’s very beautiful, sometimes I just sit and stare and I’m so grateful not to have to communicate with anyone by speech or anything else…because I’ve been doing that all day. On average I see 20, 22 people a day…very complex patients. I often work a 12-hour day and I feel that also in healthcare you take a lot of that work home with you, you worry about people, you want to make sure they’re OK, you want to come up with plans that might suit them better in terms of their care. So there’s a mental burden that I know others in my position feel as well. Speaking of dusting things off that needs to be dusted away and tidied up before I can enter into a realm that is so specific to my marriage and is something I share with just one person. So there’s a kind of mental clarity we need to be focused on our sexuality and I still find myself working on it; my spouse feels the same way. The one thing I believe saves us is that we talk about it all the time, even if we’re talking about how we haven’t had sex in four weeks, we’re talking about it, and we make an effort to be loving and affectionate, and not in this communal roommate sort of way, the kind you would only be with a partner.  Kissing one another on our lips, not just on our cheeks or on the top of our head on our way to bed because we’re so tired. That kind of thing. There are certain things that are reserved for my married life that I don’t share with anyone else, and I focus on those even when sexuality feels it’s so subterranean because of my workload.”

AM-T: “Well yes it was poignant…getting that email…because this is what you talk about all the time and certainly when you’re working with clients on their sex lives and what we talked about in our first show, you have to focus on pleasure…it’s an important part of life. I was going to ask you if you had your coffee this morning, sitting down, looking at the view [laughing] but you also say your spouse said she was going to rat you out to your public.”

“Yes, well that still is a threat. Periodically. Especially as I still send out my e-blast every 5 weeks or so…I really enjoy focusing on something pithy, in 450 words or less. Sometimes she’ll say to me really, how honest are you going to be with them, it’s been five weeks, and you’re going to be writing something about sex as if you’re an expert? So we have this humor that goes back and forth between us. And sometimes she’ll say OK, if you work on this email we’d better have sex pretty soon because you’re not going to have anything to write about, or you’re not going to make any sense. And it’s true. I pull a lot of content from the experience of having a loving marriage and being sexually alive and alert—and definitely the pleasure piece, and that experience of my coffee every morning, not in a paper cup, not while I’m driving, but sitting, having it in a real ceramic mug…it is something important, it makes me feel alert and alive and I cherish it every single day. So there are still those rules around pleasurable living and when I start to feel I’ve had no pleasure all day long I dial back and find a way to get it, because it helps me keep going.”

And for more on our relationship with pleasure – including Evelyn’s coffee habit – go back to show number 19 when I first met her.

But just going back to that whole idea of needing to make time for sex in your schedule…and how hard it can feel to do that.

AM-T: “I was thinking about this in terms of the busyness factor… especially with women, your brain is always buzzing with all those things you have to do. And I – I don’t know if I want to say this on my own podcast – but sometimes, if you have sex in the morning before work you risk being late for work.”

And you’re thinking OK, I’m probably gonna be late but it would be really nice to do this now…but which is more important, having sex, you know, being with my partner, or being on time? And you are a bit late. But it’s probably a good reminder that you need to prioritize sex sometimes if you want to have a happy relationship.

“Yes, that’s true. I mean people often say to me I want it to be spontaneous and I want it to flow… well it doesn’t, there’s not really anything that’s spontaneous. I mean once in a while we might start kissing and then move into something more intimate than that. But generally   speaking there’s not too much spontaneity in most people’s lives even when they’re on vacation. There’s planning that goes on. Even if they just say let’s take the morning and see where it leads us. OK, well I guess we could call that spontaneous. But it takes a lot of energy to be orgasmic, to stay focused, and with women’s minds being as busy as they are and multitasking, you have to do this mediation exercise. I mean women will say we’re starting to have sex and then I’m thinking about, oh God, did I write the bus note for the kids or oh no, I left my cashmere sweater in the wash.”

Or I forgot to send that email, or I need finish that report…

“And I say yes, that’s a mind, that is what minds do. And when that does happen, I mean there’s the meditation technique where thoughts come into your mind, you think about them and you drop them, and then you re-refocus back to where they are. There’s no crime in kissing your partner or touching your genitals or their genitals and thinking about your cashmere sweater is in the wash, you don’t have to admit those things. You can recognize them, they can be kind of comical. You can be like, oh well, I’ll get them later. This is what minds do. And this whole idea that with a meditation practice for example, you’re going to clear your mind completely – that doesn’t happen. It’s not the end of the world when those things happen, and you just keep going, you just keep having sex.”

OK.

Finally I told Evelyn about something that happened around the first time I spoke to her three years ago. I had written a blog post that I posted on the Broad Experience site…

AM-T: “… related to my feeling that whenever I read these articles about very successful women I always wondered, are they having sex? I’m nosy…I can’t help wondering about this aspect of their lives that of course is never mentioned in a Fortune Magazine article. I tweeted this blog post about it and somebody on Twitter got very angry…essentially accusing me of blaming women for one more thing they weren’t doing. It was an angry response suggesting that to talk about needing to have sex was kind of anti-women.”

“Yeah, well I think if somebody is attached to that concept of objectifying women then we have to look at that, or if they feel that way about being sexual, that’s it’s not a health practice…then I mean I work with them from that point. I don’t have this penchant for making sure people are sexually active on some kind of schedule. But what I get disturbed about is when people say I miss having sex, I don’t know why I feel so far away from it, help me get closer to it. Personally from doing this work for such a long time and with many high powered women that, you know, have been featured in those magazines, is the answer to your question is no, they’re not having sex. They aren’t. Because they’re doing a million other things. And they don’t have the energy for it and because they don’t see it as important, and part of why they don’t is because again, culturally, what we see as important is productivity, status, position, money, you know, achievement – women are so achievement focused. And my feeling is you have to decide, how do you want to live your life? What is going to be important? Yes, it’s important to live a life that is intellectually satisfying and where you’re contributing to the world, however you work is not going to miss you if something happens, but your spouse will, and your family will. Your spouse, their life will be forever changed, because there will never be another you.”

Evelyn Resh. You can check out her site at EvelynResh.com. She’s the author of the books Women, Sex, Power and Pleasure and The Secret Lives of Teen Girls. She also does counseling sessions via Skype.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time.

Two shows in a row about sex – you’re probably dying for a rest. And you’ll get one because I need a bit of time before I can put some new shows together so there’ll be a longer than usual break before the next one in July.

If you like what you hear on the show please consider kicking in a few bucks to support my work. Some of you do that already and I’m very grateful. If you can part with $50 you will get the official Broad Experience T-shirt – you can see a photo of that on the site under the support tab.

And if you can’t give just rate the show and write a review on iTunes – it’s quick and easy and it helps The Broad Experience get noticed.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.  See you in a few weeks. 

Episode 86: Work and Intimacy (part 1)

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time we re-visit a guest some of you first met three years ago. She is eloquent on a topic most of us don’t discuss – and you certainly won’t read about it in books or articles on professional women…

“Yes we’ve gained ground, and yes we have more important positions and we’re more influential. But the price is that we are working more and many of us are working for less money, and that takes a toll on people’s self-practices including paying attention to their intimate lives.”

Yup – Evelyn Resh is back to talk about the negative affect our work culture can have on our relationships, and what we can do about it.

So if you didn’t hear my original show with sexuality counselor and author Evelyn Resh I’m actually going suggest you hit pause on this show and go and download or play that original show first – it’s number 19, I repeated it as show 38, and it’s called Women, Work, and Sex. It’s a great introduction to Evelyn to why I wanted to talk about sex in the context of a podcast like this one.

But the thing with this show is it’s not just about our working lives, it’s about our lives. And work affects so many aspects of life – including our sex lives. And for the more reticent among you, no, this isn’t about to turn into the Dan Savage sex podcast. Evelyn is a nurse-midwife and she comes at this from her position as someone who cares deeply about women’s health and also women’s ability to take pleasure in life. All types of pleasure. And she says our 24/7 culture has pretty much eroded our relationship to slow enjoyment of everyday things, something as simple as sitting with your coffee rather than grabbing it on the go.

We had a long conversation and what I’m doing is dividing it into two shows. So I’ll release the next part of our discussion next week so you won’t have to wait a full two weeks for that one.

And just to let you know I spoke to Evelyn by phone which isn’t my usual practice because the quality isn’t great. Evelyn lives in a rural part of Massachusetts and there’s no cell service so she didn’t have an iPhone to tape her end of the conversation, we tried Skype a few times but there was a ringing on the line that would have driven you mad. So in the end we used her landline.

I started off by asking her to describe her work. It has changed a bit since I last spoke to her. She recently got her second master’s degree in nursing education. And these days she’s taking care of pregnant women and women needing gynecological care. And quite a few of them have drug problems.

“I have a very large percentage of people, actually 30%, who are opioid addicted and need an enormous amount of health education – and that’s just from my maternity caseload, not even from my gynecological case load. So I’m doing a lot of addiction medicine, a lot of primary care, a lot of health education, every single day on a myriad of subjects. And sexual health is tied into just all of it. And then the remainder of my practice is very mixed between professional people, working class clientele and a working poor.”

She commutes an hour each way by car. And she is pretty wiped out when she gets home. So she does understand how much work can take out of you. I reminded her of what we’d discussed last time – the fact that a lot women give too much to our work…

AM-T: “...and you talked about their sense of obligation to their jobs…and how we could all feel less responsible to work and probably not be fired, but then I know you yourself have fallen into that trap in recent years, right?”

“Yes, it’s been very stressful. And it’s been interesting to live the experience of women who’ve come to see me for care…and then write about it from my own perspective as well as have it seasoned and sprinkled and adorned by their own experience. I feel what’s happening in the workplace for professional women is yes we’ve gained ground, yes we have more important positions and are more influential…but there’s a price to be paid with that. And the price is we are working more and many of us are working for less money, even if our status has shifted and gotten higher, and that takes a toll on people’s self-care practices…including paying attention to their intimate lives. Because what women will do is prune and snip and take away from that seat of power which is their primary relationship, their loving relationship. Because they’ll feel often – and sometimes this is true but after a certain point it isn’t – that with that sturdy seat of power, they can afford to do that. But if they do it for too long and they do it too often their sense of gravity starts to shift.”   

AM-T: “Yeah, I re-listened to the show we did a few years ago and it’s still so fresh. Everything you talked about is so true and I’m sure it’s true of a lot of people listening who perhaps have jobs, and kids, and a partner, and as you said in that show, the partner gets less, they end up putting the partner last.”

“They do, and what’s interesting about this and difficult is that it impacts the quality of life across the board for women. One of the things that also gets interfered with consistently are self-care practices and I see their intimate life as an aspect of self-care. Because generally speaking women will say to me you know when we are intimate I feel so much better and ask myself over and over again why don’t we do this more often…I feel good the next day, reenergized, connected, they go off and they feel more positive, and then more and more days go by and it becomes a month and it becomes six week and people haven’t tended to their intimate lives, and the cycle starts all over again.”

AM-T: “And then – for instance, OK, I know somebody who has said…'I just, sex, it’s the last thing on my list.' She has a really busy job here in New York. She has a husband, she has two below the age of ten children, and she’s like, 'yep, I can’t be bothered, I don’t want it.'”

“I hear this from people often, then they’ll come to me, they’ll want some sort of magic bullet about how do I resurrect this, how do I want this more, how do I engage more? And I say in order to do this, you have to prioritize it. And it’s a disciplined practice. Just like your exercise schedule is or paying attention to having a sound diet or getting to bed early enough or turning off your communication device – you have to decide how important is it to you…and then they say oh, it’s very important, but it’s not as important as they identified it as being. And then they wonder 2 or 3 years afterwards why has their relationship fallen to pieces. They say oh, I had no idea, I didn’t see this coming – and I say, yeah, you did, you came to me 3 years ago, you knew this was an important piece. And this isn’t to say – in any relationship whether same sex or heterosexual – I’ll often hear from heterosexual women well that’s all he wants, he’s constantly coming after me. And I have worked with too many men to believe that’s the case for most men. Most men I have worked with who are heterosexual deeply love their partner, are not chasing them down like wild dogs, what they’re doing is saying I really miss you, I miss this contact…and I want you to pay more attention to me than you’re paying to work, to our children, to your girlfriends, to your family and oh, postscript, your mate.”

AM-T: “And I suppose I should say or we should say that for instance after the last show ran I got a comment from a guy saying, you should know it’s not just women who feel this way because of work.”

“Oh, I think that’s true and the other factor that’s involved in this since you and I first spoke is I too am older I’m 57, I’m really feeling it, and my age-match peers who are professional people are feeling it, and we often talk about how at the end of the day all we have anything left for is to come home, think about what do we want to put on our toast for dinner and then decide what we need to zone out on for an hour and a half of TV before we go to sleep and start all over again. And men are absolutely feeling this way. But what has happened in the American culture is work has taken such a central stage and the second stage is children, that American couples are living in sexless marriages everywhere. And my feeling is it’s not good for families, it’s not good for children and it’s definitely not good in terms of how we perceive our work. Because what ends up happening is people crack and they say I can’t do this any more. And you lose an entire pool of talented people because the system that they’re trying to function in is really not a system that is health promoting or joyful. It’s productivity promoting, it’s focused on getting the job done, but that’s not the only thing that’s happening in people’s lives. And when they start taking these hits at the end of the day when they come home or when they start the day and they leave the house after they’ve had so much bickering or some big blowup, it doesn’t make for a very productive worker.”

AM-T: “Right, and you know as you were talking and talking about America in particular, I have quite a lot of listeners in other countries, I mean I wonder if my listeners in Sweden have sexier marriages than American couples for instance, because of course work cultures are different in different parts of the world and they’re not as intense in France and some of the Scandinavian countries that have shorter work days and more of an emphasis on family life.”           

“Well and what’s interesting is not only do they have shorter work day and more time for holiday time, they also have more productivity. So what’s fascinating to me is we have so much research-based evidence to confirm that workers are more productive when they have more time off and shorter work weeks, and yet in the American system of work we see people put in 12, 14, 15 hour days. And because I work in the ob/gyn world and clinical medicine in general, I’m very familiar with people needing to take call.”

Meaning being on call.

“And I took call for years. And what comes on call is catastrophic, and I see my ob/gyn colleagues working incredibly hard, making life and death decisions when they’re on call. It’s very serious work, and they’re exhausted. And they do get more time off than I do because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to function at all. But even if you’re not on call and you’re working 10-15 hours a day every day and you only get 3 weeks off a year, that’s just plain wrong, and it’s unhealthy. So it’s a curious thing that goes on in the Unites States, because we have lots of good evidence from other parts of the world that productivity would improve, and family life would improve, and yet we persist with this two or three weeks off a year and people working long days and long hours.”

That discussion about European attitudes led us down a side route, talking about how much more evolved countries like the Netherlands are in educating their young about sex – the result is many fewer teenage pregnancies compared to the US. And she says that lack of sex education in America – it raises its head even when she’s working with middle-aged patients…

“These are professional women I’ll work with sometimes who are CEOs of companies, and my population is quite diversified, I still actually work at work at Canyon Ranch in Lenox, which is a destination wellness spa, a very elite population, very upper class, these people are very bright, well educated, and they’ll have conversations with me that are positively confounding. I’ll think to myself how is it you’ve had your whole life to learn this and still at 52 you have no idea really of what you’re talking about?”

AM-T: “Can you give me an example?”

“OK, so I’ll give you a perfect example. I had a woman who was the CEO of a very large company, she had a very demanding, serious job. She had been recently divorced and had reentered the dating scene and she had multiple partners now, she was taking a more recreational approach to her sexual activity than she had when she was married and earlier in life. And she was not post-menopausal so she absolutely needed contraception still and she wasn’t using a condom and she asked me well, why would I do that. And I said, well your risk of being exposed to sexually transmitted infections is significantly higher, and you could get pregnant. And she said, well I’m not gonna get pregnant, I’m 50. And I said well, that is actually not the case, and this could be a crisis for you, in terms of your heath, your wellness and the stability of your life. And she had absolutely no idea. And in that regard in terms of condom use I see a lot more wisdom amongst my teenagers than I do amongst my middle aged women who are professional people.”

And that discussion about knowledge and planning reminded her of something else…

“And you know this leads us down a different tributary around women and work and I think you’ll get considerable pushback from this statement I’m about to make but I feel really compelled to make it, because it’s really a women’s health issue and it affects work dramatically. And that is that we have more and more women who are delaying their reproductive lives, who are starting their pregnancies, first pregnancies, at 38, 39, 41 which is very complicated, and puts them at significantly higher risk. And now what I’m doing in my work is something I never imagined. Which is I’m saying to women in their 20s, what are your plans for having a family?” 

They respond, oh, I’m not gonna be thinking about that for ages. And Evelyn pushes back…

“Because I need you to consider starting your family in your mid-twenties, so a) you have time for child spacing…”

b) you can be sure your fertility is at its best…

 “And c) you’re not so exhausted. You need your stamina. And they’re absolutely stunned. And the reason I say this is that I work with professional women who have very demanding jobs, they have their first baby at 34 and they’re ready to fall over in a heap, between dealing with the responsibilities of their children, dealing with the demands of their job and trying to attend to their marriages. So there’s a planning problem here that people aren’t recognizing, because they say, well, I want to get really established in my career. And while I’m sensitive to that I also know that people can be established in their career or be reestablished in their career at pretty much any point in their lives. But they cannot rely on their eggs nor their stamina at any point in their lives.”

I’m not sure how easy it is to reestablish yourself in a career, actually – and I think that’s why so many women wait.

Now I have to admit I was squirming when Evelyn was talking about this. Not because of the career part but because not all of us have partners when we’re in our twenties. Or even in our thirties. How many of us have been in that situation where you thought perhaps you could see family life on the horizon and then…something happens, and you break up.

AM-T: “I always say this, we don’t all have neat and tidy lives that fit into this pretty box where everything’s done and dusted when you’re 29. I certainly never wanted to put off having a kid but life happens to some of us and you don’t have the opportunity to have children when you’re even 34.”

“Oh, it’s absolutely true and this is the complexity of raising this issue when I see them. But this has become a cultural shift in terms of priority also. The priority has been in educated women becoming increasingly educated and focusing more and more on their professions and less and less on motherhood or on marriages, and I’m not saying this is good or bad, I’m saying one of the consequences of that is what I’m talking about. Which is I’m seeing women at 34, or 35 who are starting their families and up against an enormous constellation of risk factors. And it’s an interesting tradeoff.

At 57 I so remember when Ms. Magazine first hit the newsstand, and the feminist movement was gaining ground. You know, what I heard from the feminist movement was not that I needed to everything I wanted to do, but that now I had a choice to do what I wanted to do. And I think what’s happened for a lot of women is the message they’ve gotten is well, you can do it all, you can do everything, and my contention is, not really, and be able to maintain the most important pieces and parts. Because it’s too splitting to us. And our work environment in the United States doesn’t help us do many things except for work. So women are faced with a really complex choice.”

I’m going to let you give the feedback on that. I’m curious to hear from people who did have children later about how that’s working out – and especially how much you and your partner divide all the kid and home responsibilities. That’s something else Evelyn and I touched on last time.

Next time, things get personal. Evelyn’s work has been intense lately, and she has not been taking her own advice about tending to her relationship. She still sends out a regular email blast to her followers about all things sexual, but her spouse is not impressed…

“Sometimes she’ll say to me really, how honest are you gonna be with them? It’s been five weeks - and you’re gonna be writing something about sex as if you’re an expert?”

That’s next time on The Broad Experience. Along with a lot of other stuff.

Evelyn is the author of two books – the Secret Lives of Teen Girls and Women, Sex, Power and Pleasure.

She and I will be back next week.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. See you then.

Episode 85: Far From Home - Women in Aid

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success.

This time…when you’re doing your job far from home, culture clash is almost inevitable. But in disaster zones in developing countries…

“You have to go into that and act as a woman, in many cases act as a manager, in situations or cultures where that’s really very rare or completely unheard of.’

Which can be uncomfortable for both parties.

A lot of us donate to charities or nonprofits. Depending on which causes you care about some of that money may go to a group like Oxfam or Doctors Without Borders -- an NGO that helps people in desperate situations, usually abroad. But how often do any of us think about the workers at those organizations? The people who work in the refugee camps or help get fresh water to remote communities? If I ever hear the words “aid worker” on the news it’s usually because one of them has been kidnapped or killed on the job.

Aid work – like other helping professions – is female-dominated. And a couple of months ago I heard from one of these women. She’s a listener and she said you know, we hear a lot about women CEOs, we even hear about women in the military, but we never hear about women in aid. And there is a lot to talk about.

We’re not using her real name because she doesn’t want to hurt her chances of landing her next job.

“I’m Jessica and I’m an aid worker. So I work in humanitarian response which kind of means working in emergency situations.”

Jessica is 28 now. She started her career in South Sudan, working with displaced people, then after a few years she went on to Jordan, then back to South Sudan, then to Sierra Leone. Sometimes the work can be dangerous – she has hidden in a bunker for hours while under bombardment – sometimes it’s more pedestrian…

“In Sierra Leone I was distributing hygiene kits to schools – going to rural villages and trying to organize how is this going to work in terms of the cars, and what we put in there, and on what days you do what.”

When we spoke she was on a break in London, between contracts. She says that’s how it works for most aid workers who go abroad for their jobs. You’re gone for 6 or 9 months. The work is intense. Then you go back home to flop for a while before starting a new gig.

“When I come back to London and I’m there for 2 weeks what I want to do is eat a lot of cheese, and lie down, see my friends and watch a lot of Netflix.”

But this time she’s taking a longer break. She’s thinking hard about what to do next. Because she says one of the tough things about this work is the utter lack of work/life balance.

“When I first entered the sector I was very naïve, it was my first proper job, I’d just come to South Sudan, and it was 2 days after independence and it was all very exciting. And I had dinner with a woman in her late 40s who basically sat me down and said, you be careful entering into this sector because what happens to a lot of women is they have a lot of fun, then when they get to their mid 30s they realize they don’t have a husband or children or any stability, and they want it, and by that time it’s too late for them to get it because by that time all the men in the sector are dating younger women. And obviously that’s a generalization and some people don’t do that, but that’s definitely a feeling, and I’m aware there are a lot of women older than me who’ve been in the sector for longer who feel that it’s challenging and maybe have enjoyed some aspects of their lifestyle but feel there is a cost.”

Jessica says because of that conversation, she’s been thinking about her priorities from the get-go. She says she’s turned down jobs because she’s put her relationship first…

“And trying to have a relationship even when you both work in this sector can be quite difficult particularly at the beginning where maybe you have fewer job opportunities available to you.”

She’s been in a relationship for three years. And in all that time they’ve lived in the same place for a whopping two months. She says she’s back in London now in part because that’s where her partner is at the moment, and she decided she had to give things a chance.

“Of course you get regular holidays. But it’s not like a long distance relationship where you can drive for 3 or 4 hours to see somebody, it’s one where you need to take a UN helicopter to go to the place where they are. It’s not something you can do regularly. And I just felt if I want to continue this and not just have a relationship via Skype, and by Skype chat because often the internet isn’t good enough to support video…then I need to really consider what I want to do. And I think a lot of people, you see they’ll have a relationship with someone in a certain location and when one or the other leaves they will end up breaking up. Not all of them. Some do manage to go to the next location and find jobs in similar locations. I mean of course for people who are not straight, cisgender people it’s much more complicated. You may be working in countries for example where being a homosexual is illegal, and that’s also something a lot of organizations struggle with how to deal with that. I’ve known people who’ve felt they have to hide that for security reasons. I’ve known lots of colleagues who are gay, and I haven’t come across any trans people and I think it’s because it must be very challenging for them. My gay colleagues, they’re fine, they deal with it but it’s more challenging and there’s also confusion to an extent about what is the policy and how much is it the organization’s…how much of it is it a personal issue versus a work issue. Because in those situations then it can bring negative things against the organization itself, etcetera…it’s a very thorny issue and I think one the sector is trying to address. There’s definitely still a lot more work to be done on that.”

What she has to contend with on a personal level is much more benign. It’s just this question of how are they going to make things work long-term, let alone with children, given the distances involved and the work they do? She says it’s not just her who’s doing the thinking.

“We sat down and each wrote down the top 10 countries we’d be interested in working in and then got together and saw which ones overlapped. We’ve done this a couple of times. It does look like a very strange list. At the moment Afghanistan is on three, Nigeria is on there, any of the countries involved in the Burundi crisis…so any of the countries where they have refugees at the moment. Myanmar, Iraq, Pakistan…and Central African Republic and DRC…”

The Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Which is perhaps not where most people might think about setting up a love nest together.”

But she says those places – that’s where the two of them both have an interest and where they’re likely to get jobs they’re both qualified for.

Given how demanding the work can be, I wanted to know what she loved about it.  

“I mean it’s very complicated, obviously I’m doing it because I have a desire to help, and I think the work I do is useful and makes a difference. I’m also aware it’s very complicated, and there are a lot of issues going on there, and that it’s not as simple as me going and helping people. But also I like the adventure, l like meeting people from new countries, I like being thrown into the middle of very difficult circumstances and always having the adrenaline of changing situations and having to adapt to that.”    

London can feel quite sedate by comparison.

So as she says she likes the difficult-ness of her job in many ways. But one of the things she mentioned when she first emailed me was what a big problem sexual assault and sexual harassment are in the aid world. Jessica says the worst thing that’s happened to her is a wildly inappropriate comment. But she says talk to female aid workers and many of them have horror stories about lecherous bosses who feel they have complete impunity to behave that way. Others have been raped by colleagues. You can check out the site reporttheabuse.org to get a sense of these stories. The URL is https://reporttheabuse.org/

Jessica says dealing with sexual harassment is trickier than it might be if you were in your home country. For one thing, the local culture could be very male-centric...

“And of course it’s further complicated by fact you’re working with so many different cultures than your own. Not just the people from the country you’re working with. The ex-pats come from all over the world…it’s not like all the expats are European, you get expats from other countries who also may have different perceptions of gender, dating, what’s appropriate, what’s not appropriate, so you have to fit into that to a certain extent. You have to be culturally sensitive to your colleagues as well. But that kind of complicates the issue.”

Because what’s normal male-to-female behavior to some is insulting to others. And the environment they all work in can exacerbate this stuff.

“I do think there’s a culture of machoness within the sector caused by people being very stressed and being like, well, we’re in this disaster zone, all bets are off. So that can make it difficult. And also you’re in a place where you’re entirely dependent on your organization in a lot of places. There is no active local police force or government that would have the capacity or laws to protect you that you might expect in your own country so you’re entirely dependent on your organization for that kind of support.”

And that support doesn’t always come. She says at least the topic is now being discussed more openly in the aid community. It’s a start.

Onto a more minor difficulty. I did a whole show last year on menstruation at work, and society’s attitudes to women’s bodily functions. Jessica says you think it’s bad having a period at your office? Try the delights of menstruating in a remote area. Local women have no access to tampons or pads. So neither to you.

“In terms of sanitary equipment you have to bring your own stuff…so if you’re packing for 3 or 6 months or you don’t know how long, then you have to bring all that with you. You often also have squat toilets, and often they’re not that clean because you just can’t be clean within that situation. When you have a squat toilet that’s, there’s no concrete walls, it’s made of grass, or maybe plastic sheeting, you are going to get flies and lizards and everything like that around. In some places of course it’s difficult to buy toilet paper. That is obviously something that people try to provide because culturally it’s difficult for some people not to have that around. But it’s also something that especially if you’re traveling around, you just get used to. And yes, having periods is difficult. And I have had the situation once where I drove two and a half hours to a field location, went to the loo, realized I had my period, and literally my only option was to drive 2.5 hours back the other way.

I guess I could have asked the women who lived there but unfortunately the reality for a lot of women in the world is they use grass or bits of old cloth. And I feel very bad that’s something they have to do, but it’s not something I think I could deal with myself. But that was very awkward telling the driver, ‘I have to go back, now. I cannot stay here for the rest of the day as planned.’ And after that I learnt to always be prepared. Because it’s not like in countries where I’m used to where there’s always some kind of solution.”

That made me think about just how different her work life is from most of her friends back home. She says she has a good, close group of friends, particularly women friends, but talking about work can feel weird.

“How can you really explain to somebody what it’s like to work surrounded by 70,000 refugees or to be in a position where you see people without enough food, or everyone around you is absolutely desperate and has had to leave their homes and has lost relatives? It is quite an overwhelming experience that does change you. And I’m sure that’s the same for other contexts as well.

Within the sector you make jokes about it, well about funny things that happen, and I think that’s kind of a coping mechanism, but within normal people conversation, or normal among the people I grew up amongst, it can seem that you’re bringing in all these giant, serious things to the conversation they wouldn’t necessarily normally think about except if they’re watching the news for half an hour they’d go, oh, that’s terrible, and turn it off. So you can feel you are bringing an uncomfortable subject into a very comfortable position. And it does feel like others will struggle to understand that aspect of you.”

She says it’s totally different with other aid workers – they get it.  

Still, despite the difficulties and discomfort that can come with the job, she says she’s learned so much.

“It does expose you to different ways of being a woman. You get exposed to all these different cultures where femininity or what that means is expressed very differently…you have to go as a woman, act as a manger, in situations or cultures where that’s very rare or completely unheard of for the people living there. What do you do if you’re a manager for a group of 20 people where you’ve tried to hire as many women as you could, but very few women applied because there’s a cultural barrier against that, so the majority are men with maybe a couple of younger women who have never married. And none of these men have ever been in a situation where they’ve ever had a woman in a position of authority over them. And you have to navigate that. It’s a fine line between you don’t want to be the random foreigner who’s coming in, bossing people about and being horrible, and not sensitive to the nuances of the situation, but also you don’t want to be a pushover. So that’s an interesting dynamic.”

She says she has had criticism from local staff, but she thinks of it as part of the job. She says navigating those social relationships is a challenge – but she likes it. And she didn’t articulate this but I will. She’s a young, white woman often managing people of a different race who are often older than her. Which surely adds to that dynamic.

She says the local staff, they’re working in their own country, and that country has undergone a disaster, so they’re stressed out, just like the people they’re all trying to help. Jessica says you have to handle each situation with sensitivity – particularly if you’re female.

“Some people do it without much sensitivity but just get respected for being leaders or for being macho. So I think some men in the sector play up to that macho-ness that might be found more in that area or in that country…that’s how then they act as a leader. But as a woman you have to go in and create your own way to try and get the work done and to solve interpersonal conflicts between your staff members, which may have strange and difficult cultural aspects that are quite alien to you, while being an effective manager. I once had to deal with 2 male staff, one of whom was accusing the other of threatening to kill him using witchcraft…which I personally don’t believe in but I have to take it seriously and not disregard that person’s feelings and fears. And also be aware that normally they probably wouldn’t be going to a woman who’s younger than them to solve a dispute between them. In that case I tried to facilitate dialogue between the two and then said that was something they needed to discuss among their families and the community.

But that’s just one example. I have lots of other examples. I had one issue where some male staff were accusing a female staff member of having premarital sex. Which was difficult obviously because that’s something me and all my friends do, and don’t think is wrong. But it’s not really my place to say that and say they’re being stupid without acknowledging the fact that accusation in their world has a very different meaning than what it does to me.”

On the one hand she wanted to be a feminist and tell these guys to stop slut-shaming. On the other hand she knew that would backfire. Again, she says she had to try to respect the local culture. So she told the men there should be a distinction between work life and private life – that it wasn’t appropriate to bring stuff about this woman’s private life into the workplace unless it affected the work.

She says to this day she doesn’t know if she handled it the right way.

And she says after all these are only her experiences. She’s a highly educated woman from the west. Women from different backgrounds will have other experiences.

She’s grateful to have lived and worked with some of them. She says it’s one of the best things about the job.

“In what other sector would I spend five months literally living in the same room as a Kenyan woman in her 40s or 50s, and trying to sneak in a bit drunk on Saturday night…but also seeing her and her missing her children back in Kenya, but feeling that this opportunity was a good one for her professionally. I don’t think there’s any other sector where I could have that experience of being so close to so many people, but also so many women of different ages and different cultures to me.”

Jessica is still considering her next career move. And I’m setting up an interview with her Kenyan roommate to hear her side of the women-in-aid story.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time.

If you think stories like these are important please consider kicking in with a donation. You can do that at thebroadexperience.com/support. If you donate $50 you will receive the official Broad Experience T-shirt. You can see a photo of that on the website. And thanks again to all those of you who’ve already supported the show or support it on a monthly basis.

If you can’t donate, write a review on iTunes instead – it’s free and it only takes a couple of minutes.

You can send me feedback via the website or leave a comment there or on the show’s Facebook page.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.

Episode 84: When Women Decide

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time…women, decision making and risk taking.

“People often think a woman leader who’s made a mistake should be demoted. Whereas a male leader who took a risk and it didn’t work, out, sure he made bad judgment, but he doesn’t lose as many status or competence points.”

Coming up, women make a lot more big decisions than we used to. But even today, our judgment isn’t entirely trusted.

But first, this episode is supported by Write, Speak, Code…

Write/Speak/Code is about owning your expertise. As a woman and woman-identifying developer, their conference gives you the skills to be more visible and to lead through writing, public speaking, and an open source code contribution. This year's conference is in Chicago, June 15-18.

For full details and registration info go to http://www.writespeakcode.com

Therese Huston is a cognitive psychologist. She’s also the founding director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Seattle University. And she’s the author of a new book called How Women Decide – What’s True, What’s Not, and What Strategies Spark the Best Choices.

For centuries most women didn’t get to decide anything that happened outside the home. Until pretty recently our brains weren’t thought to be up to the task.

“So in the United States women received the right to vote in 1920, which is after almost a dozen other countries, in fact the UK you’ll be proud to hear got the right to vote for women in 1918, although it’s kind of funny, because at the time only women over 30 were allowed to vote. It took a little longer before younger women were trusted with their judgment. So that’s 1920. Fifty years later in 1970 women were still being denied lines of credit, suggesting women couldn’t be held accountable for making their own financial decisions. One of my favorite stories here is about Billie Jean King who many of us know as a champion tennis player. And she won 3 Wimbledon titles in a single year. And she brought in tremendous earnings enough to cover all the expenses for her family. Well she tied get credit card in her own name, but the banks wouldn’t give her one. The only way she could secure a credit card was if her husband was listed as the primary person on the account. Now we could point to some logic here if her husband had an income but he didn’t. Billie Jean King was putting him through law school. So this is, we have this long history of women not being trusted to make important decisions.

And there is a hangover from that history. Society still has trouble seeing women as decision makers. Therese points to a Pew Research study from last year. It found people saw men as more ambitious than women… 

“But there was an even bigger gap on decisiveness. Men were perceived as being much more decisive than women, at least men leaders. And that’s a real problem because there’s this continued perception that if you want someone decisive and you want them at the top, what you want is a male leader.”

But she says when it comes to healthy adults…

“The research actually shows that men and women are just as likely to struggle with a decision. There are certain populations, like teenagers – evidently female teenagers are less decisive than male teenagers.”

But then they’re not usually leading anything either.

A few years ago Therese wasn’t thinking about any of this. She came to this project by accident. One day she started asking her academic colleagues about their pet peeves, and one psychologist said, ‘All the books about decision making are written by men.’ Therese had quite a lot of those books on her shelves. She’d never noticed this. Then she realized not only where they all written by men – but all the decision-makers they focused on were men too. They were all stockbrokers or airline pilots…

“And they were fascinating examples but I suddenly had this lens, this realization that there was a real gap, of not looking at women as decision makers. And it’s something that nagged at me. I set aside the topic for about 6 months because I didn’t want to write about gender. And this topic wouldn’t let me go. Everywhere I looked I would see this glaring gap.”

AM-T: “Why didn’t you want to write about gender?”

“You know, my experience growing up as a graduate and as a post-doc was that it was very gendered to study gender. Most of the people I knew who studied gender were women, and it didn’t seem, this shows my own bias, it seemed the hard problems were the ones the men were studying. So I turned towards neuroscience, and I was the only female in the lab for years, and sure enough I got to address some interesting and hard problems. But it’s fascinating, it turns out writing about gender is harder than writing about neuroscience, so it’s been a nice affirmation that this is a very hard issue to study.”

AM-T: “In what way? Why has it been harder?”

“It’s harder because when you’re talking about neuroscience you can use terms that people mostly don’t have any clue what they mean. So I can talk about the hippocampus or the lateral pre- frontal cortex, that, it might be impressive, but there’s a good chance most listeners won’t have any context or frame of reference for that. Whereas if I talk about what it’s like to make a contribution in a high pressure meeting, and you’re going to propose a new idea, and how men and women might do that differently, people have plenty of experience with that, and strong opinions. So trying to explain what the research has to say about gender is stepping into a complicated set of experiences people already have, or they already have opinions and they might be more skeptical of the research.”

Welcome to my world.

But back to the way we see men and women. And the fact we don’t instinctively see women as leadership material. Therese says there’s this jargon-y academic term ‘role congruity’…

“This idea that when we think of a leader and we think of a man, those two concepts have a lot of overlapping qualities. We think of men as ambitious and action-oriented and we think of a leader as ambitious and action-oriented. Whereas when we think of the qualities of a woman and a leader there doesn’t tend to be much overlap. Women are thought to be more friendly, more compassionate and more nurturing. And we may like those qualities in a leader but they’re not the qualities we immediately want. We want a decisive leader and we expect men to be decisive and we don’t expect that of women, for instance.”

AM-T: “And also you point out that women’s decisions are questioned a lot more than men’s are. Or least least when they’re decisions not everyone agrees with. So for instance when Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer made that famous announcement that she was no longer going to allow Yahoo workers to work from home, there was this storm of media criticism over this. And then a week later something else happened. Talk about that because I had absolutely no idea about that.”

“So you’ve captured it perfectly. Most people know Meyer ended the work from home policy for Yahoo. But what people don’t know is that about a week after Meyer announced her decision, Best Buy’s CEO Hubert Joly announced the exact same decision, that they were ending Best Buy’s work from home policy.”

For those of you outside the US, Best Buy is a big electronics retailer.

“Now when Joly made this announcement it made a few headlines, particularly in Minnesota where Best Buy is headquartered. But there were headlines for a few months and then the story vanished, whereas we’re still talking about Yahoo. I’ve seen interviews this year where people are debating was it a good idea for Yahoo and Marissa Meyer to cancel the work from home policy? Now you might be thinking, well, Yahoo probably has more employees who work from home, but no, Best Buy had approximately 20 times more employees who were affected by this decision. So if we were really talking about the decision, we should be talking about Joly just as often. But for making the same decision Joly got a few sidelong glances whereas Meyer has been second-guessed for years.”

AM-T: “And why? Just because she’s a female making a decision that affects a lot of people’s lives?”

“Well this is an interesting, complex issue. When I talk about it to some people they say well, it matters more that Meyer made this decision because she’s a woman, and we expect women to be more understanding of other women who perhaps need more flexible work schedules. And that’s an excellent point, but it still shows an underlying bias that we’re judging her decision differently than we do men’s, that we’re expecting women to look out for the flock, to have a different set of criteria, whereas men in the same leadership role can make a decision based on just, what’s the bottom line?”

And get away with it. And as she says part of the problem we have with women making these kinds of apparently ‘harsh’ decisions is that we expect women to come from a different place – we expect them to care more. And we often expect them to be collaborative. And you’ve probably read that being collaborative, that’s something women are supposed do well – it’s seen as more of a female trait. And it’s usually seen as a positive thing, this business of listening to others and seeking consensus among your team.

“On the one hand it makes sense, people think they want a collaborative, cooperative supervisor. But the problem is people don’t perceive that collaborative and decisive mix. If you’re a leader and you want people to weigh in on a decision, well, one interpretation of that is that maybe you can’t decide for yourself. So the upside is you’re being collaborative, your employees are going to like you, the downside is you just lost some points on the decisiveness scale. And that’s a real problem for women because many women take a collaborative approach to decision making. That probably perpetuates this perspective that decisiveness is not a strength for women.”

She tells the story of a woman she interviewed for her book. This woman said whenever a female manager at her company had a big decision to make there’d be a line of people waiting to give input. And as this employee put it, ‘the last person who touched it’ would influence the manager’s decision.

“And when I asked her well why don’t the men have a line outside their door, she said when the men make a decision, you’ll find out. There’s no opportunity for input, they’ll let you know if they want input. And this brings us to the possible advice for women, which is that if you are open to input to make it very clear when you’re taking input and whose input you’re prioritizing and why.”

Which does sound like a lot of extra stuff for women to think about. But she says doing that could prevent people from assuming you sway like the wind…

“So you can be seen as both decisive and collaborative, and it’s not seen as an open-ended free-for-all.”

I’d love to hear from people about this – a lot of you listening have plenty of decision-making experience in a work setting. Email me via the website or better still, leave a comment under this episode or on the Facebook page so we can get a conversation going.

Making a decision involves taking a risk – by deciding one thing you’re dropping other options. And Therese found that despite the overwhelming belief that women are risk-averse, it really depends on the type of risk you’re talking about. She says when it comes to workplace decisions, men and women take equal numbers of risks.

But if women are risk-averse in certain circumstances, is that surprising? Maybe you’ve read about this research too or you see it in your daily life. I read about it in a New York Times piece a couple of months ago and Therese writes about it in her book. But when men and women were observed with their kids in the playground, the psychologist doing the observing found parents of either sex were far more protective of their daughters then their sons. They were more likely to say, ‘be careful!’ to a girl than a boy. And when a boy didn’t want to do something like climb down a fireman’s pole…the parents pressured him to try it. If a girl said she was scared to try the pole the parents were like, that’s fine. And when a girl did go down the pole her parents rushed to assist her – even if the girl didn’t ask for help.

When a boy took on the pole, his parents didn’t offer physical help, they just coached him from the sidelines…

“So it’s definitely associated with men, and our language is very telling on this…in American culture there are phrases like ‘man up’, and ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ and ‘be a man or a mouse’…the idea is you need to stand up and take a risk here. There aren’t comparable phrases for women.”

Instead we’ve got things like nervous Nellie…

“Nervous Nellie, exactly. If anything we’ve got phrases that suggest women should shrink away from risk.

In terms of women being punished for taking risks…there’s some really interesting Yale research by Victoria Brescoll, looking at when men and women take a risk and they make a mistake. Women are judged much more harshly and they lose a lot of status points – people often think a woman leader who’s made a mistake should be demoted. Whereas a male leader who took a risk and it didn’t work, out, well, there were a lot of circumstantial reasons why that was a problem. Sure he made bad judgment, but he doesn’t lose as many status or competence points. So it becomes this tricky issue. The whole point with taking a risk is you don’t know how it’s going to work out, so taking a risk inherently involves uncertainty, and women are punished much more when that uncertainty becomes a failure."

As Therese was talking I started thinking about the Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. Since Therese and I spoke Rousseff has been suspended from office and she may be impeached. Now I don’t know a lot about what Rousseff may or may not have done to fiddle Brazil’s budget—the risks she may have taken. But I couldn’t help wondering if Rousseff were a HE, would HE be undergoing the exact same process of investigation and removal from office?

“I wondered that as well. I’ve been following that news story a bit, and one of the things that some of the reporters have commented on is that the corruption that’s happened under Rousseff’s political career, that’s happened recently, is that there have been previous male leaders who have had the same problems with corruption, that this is nothing new. So the question is why is she being grilled for this and why does she face impeachment when this has gone on for a while? Now other people would say there’s a level at which this has happened, in terms of her moving around funds that are particularly suspect.

But I think that gets to anther bias about women which is the assumption that women will be more honest… that’s one of the findings out there, which is that women will be more honest than men. And it makes me wonder are women then held to higher standard for honesty than men are? So a male politician who’s a bit corrupt or he’s misrepresented the facts, we can brush that aside. But it’s considered a feminine quality to be honest, so if a woman defies that and does something that’s clearly dishonest, I think it raises our hackles more than it might for a man making the same choice.”

And of course that made me think about Hillary Clinton. Her honesty and openness keep coming under the spotlight.

AM-T: “One of the things Clinton is lambasted for is that she won’t admit her mistakes [her emails, deadly situation at US embassy in Libya], and that she doesn’t really apologize…that this is one of her big failings, that she doesn’t admit that she’s done something wrong. And reading the book I wondered if that is a Clinton trait… or if her sex and her knowledge of how she’ll be judged if she does say sorry, affects the fact that she doesn’t say sorry?”

“It would be fascinating to ask her that question right? If one could have a candid conversation. I wouldn’t be surprised if even at a subconscious level that’s playing into her reluctance to take ownership for those things…because she probably hasn’t read the research but the research indicates that when women make a mistake and it becomes clear that it was costly they’re held under more scrutiny and it’s judged as a more serious indictment of their abilities, and so it’s probably easier for people to debate this out and for people to take different perspectives and make different arguments as to whether the problem is as big as other people say, than for her to step in and admit and apologize. On the one hand Americans love an apology, they love it when people take responsibility for their mistakes. But on the other hand that’s primarily been male leaders who have done that and been able to remain male leaders. And there’s a real question of what kind of competency and status she might lose if she were able to do that.”

I’d love to know if there’s a female politician we’re forgetting who’s actually said sorry publically for something – maybe she survived, or lost her job, but I’d love to hear about it if you can think of anyone.

Therese says risk-taking is like decision making in that more people need to see women as risk-takers. On that note, she has some advice.

“It’s important for women to draw attention to the successful risks they’ve taken. I admit this is never a piece of career advice I’ve received. When you’re listing, doing the year performance review, and you’re listing your accomplishments, you’re typically pointing out events that were well attended or a project that brought in a lot of capital. And one of my suggestions would be that a thing to do when discussing your performance with your boss in a one-on-one conversation would be to point out, ‘here’s a risk I took and here’s how it ended up working out. No one expected this event to work, and I pushed for it, and it ended up being the best attended event of the year.’ And the reason I think it’s important we begin doing this is that when men take risks we tend to notice it much more than when women take risks. Researchers have done studies where they give people identical descriptions of actions someone took in their workplace, and people will notice the risks the man took and if you just substitute in a female name they don’t notice those were risks when it was a woman.”

So she says if you’re in a workplace that values risk taking, try it. She says a male colleague might get credit for his risk without needing to raise it while your success could be overlooked. And if this sounds like another example of women having to do more to get what we deserve…it is.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. Thanks to Therese Huston, author of How Women Decide, for being my guest on this show.

If you’re in tech don’t forget to check out write/speak/code, their conference is coming up in mid-June.

Thanks again to those of you who’ve taken a couple of minutes to write an iTunes review of the show – I would love to get up to 200 reviews – that’s only 45 to go. If you can help, great. Having ratings and reviews does help the show get noticed.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.

Episode 83: I Did It My Way

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time, the second of two shows on generational conflict at work.

“It’s been a really uncomfortable decade for me and my friends I think. But it’s cultivated a certain amount of unwillingness to be the good girl.”

She thinks the older women in her industry are under-appreciated in spite of everything they do.

And we hear from a 40-something on what influenced her career choices…

“You know, my parents were divorced. And I remember looking at the mothers and the women around me and thinking they are beholden to somebody else for their safety and lifestyle.”

Coming up.

So I know I said we’d be concentrating more on Gen X women in this show and we will get to them, but I want to start off with Nora Mathews. She’s the 30 year-old from the last show. She knows her generation has this reputation of being over-entitled, special snowflakes. She works in media and publishing in New York. And she graduated into a recession. She didn’t get right on her chosen career path after college…it took some years of doing jobs she was overqualified for. She hasn’t had the experience in her chosen field she thought she’d have by this age. The older women she works with have had a more straightforward path; they’re excelling. But that said…

AM-T: “Do you ever feel envious of the women in the generation above you?”

“No. I feel like especially Gen X women are in a tight spot between boomers and millennials and they if anything have a lot of pressure on them to perform…”

And she says at her office they do – brilliantly. But she’s not sure they get the recognition they deserve.  

“I think while there are definite benefits to having started up the career ladder in time to be doing financially better than me and my friends are, I still see a certain amount of pressure and almost that ‘good girl’ expectation that can be crushing, where, my direct boss for instance is killing it, she’s single handedly doubled, tripled our revenue in the last 7, 8 years she’s been there. And I do think she’s somewhat overlooked because she’s a traditionally good, type A, striving, achieving woman who isn’t necessarily going to push forward and demand what she wants from her job. If anything it’s the opposite of the special snowflake -----thing – it’s that I see a lot of women of that generation performing at a very high level and having it be what’s expected of them.”

AM-T: “And as we know, that doesn’t always work out so well…”

“Exactly. And my friends and I are almost forced to opt out a little bit, we have to have our side hustle just to pay our rent here in New York. We all have at least two or three jobs. We can’t survive and be quite as polite and quite as good, because wages have stagnated and we have to negotiate for that raise or we can’t pay our rent. So it’s uncomfortable, and it’s been a really uncomfortable decade for me and my friends, I think. But it has cultivated a certain amount of unwillingness to be the good girl that I see a lot of the older women I really respect still struggling with.”

AM-T: “That’s really interesting. So tell us about your side hustle or hustles.”

“I have 4 jobs right now. I have my corporate 9 to 5. I’ve worked with an educational non- profit for several years teaching after school programs and I also teach with their corporate programs…”

On top of that she’s a qualified massage therapist – still does that for friends and family on the weekends…and then she does consulting…

“…for a female-owned and female-operated startup that helps independently published mid-list authors implement marketing strategies and provides virtual assistance for them.”

Now this is something I really admire about younger women. I launched The Broad Experience while I was studying on an entrepreneurial journalism program at CUNY in New York. And nearly everyone else on that program was in their mid to late twenties. It was pretty intimidating, I have to say. But what really struck me was how much these people did – how many different types of work they had going on at the same time on top of school and how they seemed perfectly able to cope with that.

“The whole growth of the multi job economy is happening and so frankly for both boomers and Gen Xers – like, we don’t really know that world so how can we advise on it, because we didn’t grow up in a world we you had 12 things going on at once, and how do you balance all that?”

Joanna Bloor is another Gen Xer – she lives in San Francisco, she has a background in media and tech, and she’s CEO of The Amplify Lab. It helps C-suite level women build a strategy around what they want to be known for.

She says yes, she definitely counts as a ‘good girl.’  Although she now counsels other women NOT to assume they’ll get where they want JUST by doing their job well.

Joanna used to work for Pandora, the music streaming company. And things were exploding when she was there. She had lots of 20-somethings working for her; she says they were keen and talented – and ambitious.

“So here I am with an amazing team of people but leading this organization and having to scale an organization that was doubling, tripling its revenue, the speed everything was happening at was crazy. And I just kept on going, please just come to me with ideas and solutions all day every day. And I was immensely frustrated because these people would look at me and go well, what is it that you want me to do? And I’d be like, ‘argh, just go figure it out, come up with solutions.”

So she started to think – a lot – about why the 20-somethings seemed different from her and her peers. Here’s where we go broad for a minute, and yes, there will be generalizations. But here goes. Joanna says this is how she and her friends grew up: they saw their mothers return to work in the ‘80s after years of not working, and a lot of them became latchkey kids. Back at home after school, alone, and left to their own devices. There was no structure, basically – as long as you were home by dinner, it was fine.

She says contrast that with her 20-something team and how they grew up. Parents were much more involved in their activities. They had afternoons filled with after-school programs. In short they had a lot going on. Their time was more structured, and they had more guidance.

“They have been taught, follow the rules, or here are the rules for this is what you need to get an A. So they’re like, what are the rules, what are the guidelines. Whereas my generation are basically happiest generally when there’s a blank sheet of paper, and they’re like, well give me the high level, don’t give me the guardrails. Let me just innovate from nothing. Because that’s the muscle that we’ve gotten really strong with. And you put those two together, with one group of people who are like, tell me what to do to get an A, and the other group is saying ‘it’s not the A that matters,’ and then you start having that conflict.”

She says you just need to be aware of where the two groups are coming from to pull a project off successfully. And she says they did that all the time.  

Joanna believes divorce also plays a part in her generation’s perspective. Divorce shot up in the 70s and 80s when she was growing up. And back then women often found themselves suddenly on their own, with rusty professional skills. They were at a disadvantage in the job market. Many of these women took a big financial hit.

Joanna says for her and all her friends whose parents split up…that era made them who they are as workers and parents.

“Because of my work, I work with a lot of executive women, and across the board every one of them had this moment in their early to mid-teens where they were like, wait a second, I really have to rely on myself, an almost an off the chart experience of, I am responsible for putting a roof over my head. The whole Cinderella/Prince Charming fantasy just evaporated.”

Joanna grew up in England until she was 14. At that point her mother re-married and they all moved to Texas. But when she thinks back to that time in England after her parents divorced…

“I remember looking at the mothers and the women around me and thinking they are beholden to somebody else for their safety and lifestyle. And there was one woman, one, I think she got married at 56, and then she also married a lord, so she had this incredibly glamorous life as a single person…she had this flat I London, and traveled, and I was like hang on, I want to be like her. She dramatically influenced my own story of saying I want to be so successful I can be financially independent, so there’s this almost fierceness I think, and I’m going to get backlash for this because as women we don’t like the bad words, we only like the nice, kind, lovely words. But there’s this fierceness around Gen X women of, ‘I have to take care of myself and my family.’ Not that everybody doesn’t have that but there’s a lot more color there.”

And maybe this is true for women who were children of divorce. But I’m Gen X and my parents stayed married, my mother didn’t go back to work. For years my only real ambition to be a wife and mother. I know, right? A few things changed over the years.

But Joanna says the Gen X women she knows share her mindset of ‘I’ll get this done my way.’ And it’s different to the way the young women she works with think. She says they have a much more collaborative attitude both at work, and at home…

“Like I listen to both the men and women who worked with me and there was equally this concept of the young woman taking care of the family as there was for young men. And it was unheard of in our world to have a stay at-home-dad and this concept of co-parenting really rose around it. So there’s the decisions around the concept of having children. And I am fairly dramatic with this. This is part of why I chose to be a super-auntie to my sisters’ kids but not have my own because I wanted to have that freedom. But then I also sit here and talk to you and I physically cringed because that whole voice of ‘isn’t that selfish, you terrible - you are now not feminine because you chose not to have children’ is absolutely speaking in my head. And that choice really for, I think, my generation, the Gen Xers, and before, wasn’t there – and what I hope for this generation is that it is.”

And if you too have had that feeling of being less-than because you’re not a mother, you might want to listen to a show I did on this in 2014 – it’s number 48. It’s called Professional Women, No Kids.

The approach to motherhood can still divide professional women.

Some of you may remember Rachael Ellison. I spoke to her two years ago for a show I did called The Motherhood Factor – it focused on how women are treated differently at work once they have children.

Rachael wrote a great piece for the Huffington Post recently on generational differences between women. And it reminded me of something she told me when I spoke to her for that show. She was coaching this woman who worked for a big company in New York. She was a mother in her mid-thirties, and she turned to an older female colleague for advice, a senior vice president at the company…

“She knew she wanted to have three kids and she saw this woman above her had had three kids. So she said how do you do it, you know, that dreaded question, how do you do it? And she said it’s really easy, you just get a daytime nanny, an evening nanny, a cook, and a housekeeper. Those are the four things you need. And you’ll be set. And for her, forget the financial implications of that, that’s not what she’d envisioned for working parenthood, that’s not what she wanted.”

But Gen Xer Anne Loehr -  you heard her on the last show - she says that baby boomer who had all that help at home, there’s a reason for that. She and the women older than her entered the workforce in a different era…

“Now think of it from the woman’s perspective, my mother’s perspective and all the women of that generation who we have to thank…they thought and were told you have to be like a man – you dressed like a man, wore the boxy suits, they were more assertive, they hadn’t understood they had their own value as women leaders… they didn’t understand how to use that yet, so for a woman of that generation, yeah, because that’s what the men did – the men made sure everything was taken care of at home and then they did whatever they had to do to be successful. So the women followed suit.”

Though most of them couldn’t afford a staff. Rachael Ellison says the problem is when you’re working for a big company where none of the higher-ups talk openly about how they manage their lives, it’s no wonder some women feel their only option is to imitate what’s gone before.

She was talking to a client who had a 10-month old baby. This woman had a big job, and she was going in early, leaving late. Hardly saw her kid. She was having a hard time…she seemed on the verge of saying something has to change…

“Later on in the conversation just a few minutes later she had almost, you could see her steeling herself, galvanizing herself, arming herself with the knowledge that she could do it, giving herself an inner pep talk. And she said, you know what I should do, I should do it the way, so-and-so, my supervisor, does it. She has two kids and she’s done these 10 major projects that I admire, and I should show my staff that the same thing is possible. They too can have a kid and navigate this field. Which seemed so hard for me to digest, it just seemed like she was really struggling, but because there wasn’t really transparency and she felt she had to follow the model of the generation prior.”

She then found out later that female SVP, she had a stay-at-home husband – that’s one big reason why she could pull off all those projects.

Joanna Bloor says in her world, in Silicon Valley, young women mostly DON’T want to emulate their elders when it comes to parenthood. She says they don’t want to make the choices her contemporaries have made. With her friends and largely with mine, it looks like this:

“There was the step out of work and be a stay-at-home mom, which I absolutely have a lot of girlfriends who are that, and the choices that they made, and now they’re all like, oh, crap, I have to do that whole, ‘how do you get back into the workplace?’ And then another group, it’s a small group, who said I’m absolutely going to stay in the workplace – the kind of have no life, which I think is what Gen Y is reacting to. And/or have actually found that unicorn of a partner, where the dads are stay-at-home dads, I have a lot of friends who have stay at home dads, and I think it’s fantastic that that actually started with our generation. Or there are the ones like me who say, you know what, this is my path, and I’m absolutely going to be the substitute mom for a lot of people, but having my own children isn’t part of my journey.”

Joanna has mentored a lot of women. She still does. And she thinks a lot about what younger women expect from older ones, and what older ones can actually deliver.

“And this is the piece that I am still thinking about and I haven’t completely codified, but as a woman there is this expectation constantly that you are supposed to lift up the generation behind you, the women behind you, so as a Gen X woman you’re running around doing all your stuff and trying to balance life and family and work and all these sorts of things, and a) there’s not enough of you to go around, and we all hear the Madeleine Albright thing of there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help women. But there’s a supply and demand issue in play. There’s only so much helping we can do. Plus we are all human beings and every so often we have a bad day, so we might be kind of a jerk. This is the thing I’m still curious about, is, from woman to woman, do you measure when a woman is not nice to you more harshly than a man not being nice to you? Does that color it? And I believe it does. I think about when I’ve gotten bad feedback, when a guy says, you messed up this project or you did something bad, or he’s just a jerk, I go ‘oh, he’s just a jerk,’ but when a woman does it to you you go, oh she’s not nice. And that whole thing of we’re supposed to be the mother, nurturer thing as well as these power professional business things… you almost have to be schizophrenic to deal with the whole thing.”

Yup. You heard Barnard president Debora Spar talk about this on a past show. The idea that we expect women to be nurturing so we’re more disappointed when they don’t conform to type.

“I do hear from the young women I work with this whole, well, women don’t help me move up, and I’m like, guys, there’s a supply and demand issue, we don’t have enough hours in the day to help you all – trust me.”

She says all the Gen X women she knows are trying to help the next generation.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. As usual you can comment on this episode at The Broad Experience.com, or on the show’s Facebook page – or you can email me via the contact tab on the website. I’d love to hear whether any of this resonates with your experiences.

Thanks to all those of you who’ve taken a few minutes to review the show on iTunes and to everyone who’s supported the show with a donation – I really appreciate it.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. See you next time. 

Episode 82: Generation Clash

Show transcript: 

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time…generational conflict between women at work. We all know it’s there, lurking, even if we talk about it behind eachother’s backs…

“I had one assistant who wouldn’t even answer the phone if she didn’t recognize the number. She was so used to screening calls.”

We have different attitudes to communication and perhaps to getting ahead, as well…

“All of the women I’ve worked with have felt like in their own way, from their own perspective, are trying to help, but they’re trying based on the information they have and what things were like when they were coming up through the workplace.”

Coming up…the first of two shows on different generational perspectives at work.

So I’m starting this show with the generational expert. Anne Loehr is a leadership consultant.  She writes quite a bit about women at work and about managing across generations. And like me – she’s Gen X. I’m smack in my mid-forties, right between two much bigger generational cohorts – the baby boomers and the millennials.

Anne says in some parts of the world there will be far less of a pronounced difference in attitude between generations. But in the west, we do have this stratification depending on when we were born and what was going on in the outside world at the time. 

“And the research shows each generation is shaped by 3 types of events: political, technological, and societal.”

And because of that we each have a collective understanding, a particular way of thinking and being…

“So although yes we are all Americans…”

Well, some of us…

“We have differences. We have more similarities than differences but we do have differences in what shaped us. What shaped the boomers, impacted how they see the world and see work, which is different from what shaped Gen X, who were born between 1965 and 1980 which is different from Gen Y, who is born between 1981 to 2001. And if we as leaders, as colleagues, as people in any type of organization can understand that we can then make it be less of ‘oh my God, she’s making me crazy,’ and make it more oh, she’s just doing the Gen X or the Gen Y thing, and we can find ways to leverage those differences instead of pointing our finger at them and thinking they’re bad people.”

She says we just see the world differently. And when we don’t account for those different lenses, we clash.

Lynne Testoni was born at the end of the baby boom. She’s 53, she lives in Sydney, Australia, and she’s a longtime journalist. Right now she’s the managing editor of a trade magazine. And she says her experience of entering the workforce was just really different from her young colleagues’ experience today…

“When I became a journalist not many people did degrees, they came straight from school…they did a cadetship, sort of like an apprenticeship. So we were treated like rubbish, and we had to learn from the ground up, and everyone would correct our work and take us out and yell at us occasionally.”

It wasn’t fun but it was character building. Today the young women she works with come from the most highly educated generation in history.

“In a good way people these days are more qualified, more thoughtful, more mature, they’re older when they start, I was only 18 when I started. I haven’t employed someone out of school for 20 years…so they’re all 22, 23 at least. But I do find in some ways they’re less mature about practical things. Some young people are not good at practical housekeeping things. They don’t know how to wash the dishes or make their own lunches, or budget, or do some of those things I had to learn when I was 18 because I had to live out of home. Most people live at home with their parents till they’re a lot older and that stymies a certain amount of independence I think. And I find because they’re a bit more mollycoddled by their parents – and I’m a parent too so I totally know how that happens – I think they’re a lot more sensitive to criticism.”

She says they could do with a bit of toughening up. But she says there are lots of good things about millennials too.

“I find that particularly they’re less stuck in their ways, they’re not stuck in an old fashioned way of doing things. They can think laterally, they’re more likely to speak up, more confident, I was terrified of speaking to any of these people because as I was yelled at. Now, there’s a more open office, people are more receptive to new ideas and they take on a lot more of the suggestions the younger member of staff have.”

And she says young women just expect more from their employers – and themselves.

“Certainly in my day there were things that as a girl, a female journalist, that I wasn’t allowed to do. My boss wouldn’t let me do the police rounds, I had to do the school rounds, I did weddings, and all those real girly things back then. But now it doesn’t make any difference. And I think they have higher expectations about what women can do. And they’re more ambitious than I was when I was their age…because I thought, I didn’t have any women managers, I certainly didn’t have any women managers who were parents. So I honestly felt and believed back then, 30 years ago, that it was impossible to be a parent and a senior manager.”

Which is exactly what she ended up becoming. And she says women respect her for her experience – she was a pioneer, and she’s mentored a lot of other women, including pregnant ones. She doesn’t work with that many young men but she notices they are more likely to write her off as an older woman – to assume she doesn’t know how to use technology, that kind of thing…

“And I do find sometimes that young men do tend to treat me more like their mother than young women, who tend to look at me more as a role model or a mentor.”

Still, there are things she finds odd about this generation at the office.

“One is their reluctance to speak on the phone.”

YES!

“This is a generation that has grown up on email and I guess they’re called digital natives. And I find they’re really not used to dealing with strangers on the phone. They have a lot of connections in virtual ways but less in real ways. I had one assistant who wouldn’t even answer the phone if she didn’t recognize the number. She was so used to screening calls which is what a lot of people do now on phones, like on their mobiles and stuff. And she didn’t realize – I had to talk to her – that if you’re at work you answer the phone. You don’t wait for it to be someone you know. And she found that really hard.”

But it’s not just that some 20-somethings are nervous about talking to people they don’t know. I’ve noticed a general reluctance to use the phone as a business tool.  

So Generation Y, what is it about the phone that you find so objectionable?

“That’s a really good question.”

Nora Mathews just turned 30. She works in journalism too, but on the business side, the publishing side.

“I think when it comes to the workplace it’s about having a paper trail, I mean a digital trail – it’s easier to collaborate, share and remember if you have this external brain of everything always being documented…so if you have a conversation on the phone for a work thing and you’re trying to remember later what you said, if you’re using Slack it’s all right there…you can go back to it, hop in, see what you were talking about, make their suggestions, so as a work thing I’d say it’s an efficiency thing. And as a generational preference I would say phone is the least useful form of communication because you don’t get body language. If you’re in front of someone on video chat or in real life you can pick up on so much more. And there’s a lot that gets lost in translation if you’re only using your voice.”

Nora works for Gen X women and she likes them, respects them, but tensions do crop up.

“There’s some sort of communication breakdown that happens and I think it might have to do with people that had started their careers and had a foothold in their career before the recession, and people who started their careers during or afterwards just have a very different perspective in the workplace.”

And we’ll get into that more in a minute. Nora says she’s noticed a lot of inter-generational angst, it’s partly why she’s so interested in this topic, as well as her own experiences at work…

“It feels to me like there are a lot of generational flame wars that are happening on the internet right now where people are trying to prod people – millennials are trying to throw things at boomers and vice versa and Gen X gets caught in the middle. And I don’t know if that is very productive or very accurate. Like I haven’t met the phantom millennial who feels entitled and needs a lot of hand holding, but I also haven’t met the phantom boomer. I think all of the women I’ve worked with and maybe I’ve been lucky in that respect have felt in their own way, from their own perspective, they’re trying to help, but they’re trying based on the information they have and what things were like when they were coming up through the workplace. So I’ve noticed the women I work for maybe assume a certain level of me trying to climb the same ladder that existed when they were climbing it. And as someone who, I graduated in 2008 and I was always a super achiever, I had great grades, graduated with high honors. In any other era I would have been an immediate scrambling up the ladder person and I was a janitor for two years.”

She wasn’t cleaning out the loos at the subway station – she was working at a spa…

“But it caused a perspective shift and attitude shift as to how much emotional energy goes into my job or my emotional wellbeing or my identity comes from the work I do during the day.”

And she has this feeling that the women she works for, these Gen X women, they don’t get it. They worry that she isn’t putting enough of herself into her job…and she says it’s something…

“…that feels like a very women-on-women attitude – I don’t see it expected of other men of my generation in the workplace, and it’s not that it’s negative exactly, it’s that there’s an expectation that there’s a confluence between my performance at my daily tasks and my emotional investment in my work. So the men I work with for example are able to get raises and promotions and do a great job crushing their daily tasks and contributing to strategy, and hitting their goals, and they’re not expected to engage in the performance of being in love with those tasks.”

AM-T: “Is what you’re saying that the women you work for expect you to be emotionally invested in your work where they don’t necessarily expect the guys to be?”

“That’s what it feels like, and maybe part of that is they see a little of themselves in me or there’s this mentoring relationship and that’s what their experience has been. And in some ways especially in the industries I’ve been in, if you are starting out at the bottom of the ladder and really had to pay your dues and scramble and invest all of yourself in climbing that ladder it requires a certain amount of emotional investment. And they’ve clearly done that and gotten to a place where things are going well for them, and they want to help me through that same process. But my peers and I look – especially in media and publishing – and we see an industry that’s being radically restructured, we see like what does it mean to get on the bottom rung of a ladder that’s falling down?” 

They’re not keen to tread that wobbly ladder – at least not in the same way, making the same sacrifices.

“And it’s not that my friends and I weren’t working very hard but we saw how institutions won’t necessarily take care of you in the way that they were once expected to, and that you have to work hard at whatever it is that pays your bills, but that doesn’t have to be the thing that…”

 AM-T: “Sustains your soul.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t have to sustain your soul. And it can be that you’re a spa janitor writing a novel and bartending at night and taking some copywriting work on the side, and none of those things are who you are, they’re what you do.”

And we’re going to talk more about side hustles – that feature of millennial working life – in the next show.

I brought up with Nora something my wonderful ex-intern April told me once. She was working at a particular place and she had this problem that needing solving, but she couldn’t go straight to the top people to tackle it. She was told, oh no, you have to go to this person first, and he’ll escalate it to those people. And she just could not believe what she saw as the level of bureaucracy she had to go through to get something done. She thought this was absolutely absurd. I asked Nora if this was something she thought about too.

“Absolutely – yes, and it’s difficult to know, whether…because it does feel like the Gen X women who are my direct superiors, they are the gatekeepers and the enforcers of those bureaucratic systems. So it’s difficult to tell sometimes, where is that level of resistance? Is it with my direct superiors? Is it institutional, corporate culture in general that’s the problem? It’s hard to know where it begins. But it’s something we run into regularly and the younger women that I work with are all trying to get everyone on board with using these systems that make everything faster, more efficient, that will prevent there being silos between different departments and will get people collaborating and really doing what needs to be done to bring the industry forward. But again we are the youngest workers in the workforce, and we have the least power, and we’ve been around for the least amount of time…so it’s difficult to say to someone who is older than you and who is experienced and who you do respect, that there are some things they’re probably getting wrong.”

And talking of older people and getting things wrong, I asked Nora how she felt about the recent storm over comments Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright made about who young American women should vote for. Both women are Democrats. Both support Hillary Clinton. But the youngest female Democrats are much more likely to support Bernie Sanders.

During a TV interview Steinem commented that young women were into Bernie because quote ‘the boys are with Bernie.’ Cue outrage, derision and general nastiness.

Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright also stepped in it at a rally for Clinton…

Albright: “…and a lot of you younger women don’t think you have to – it’s been done. It’s not done. And you have to help. Hillary Clinton will always be there for you. And just remember, there’s a special place in hell for women who do not help eachother.”

“I think it was not worded well and I think it was a deep misunderstanding of how women of my generation would hear it. But I can also understand as a young woman coming from a workplace that still suffers from a lot of gender imbalance and we’re still struggling with issues that from when I was very young I was raised to think would not exist any more…and I now see they do. Where to be women who’ve dealt with that their whole lives, I can see where they’re coming from, I think that it was poorly said and poorly executed. I think the war that’s happened over it is about that same fundamental breakdown in communication and deep misunderstanding.”

The kind of breakdown that sometimes happens at her office.

Next time we’re going to get more perspective from Gen X women…and how they see themselves and Gen Y split on attitudes from getting ahead, to the approach to  parenthood…

“There’s the decisions around the whole concept of having children. And I am fairly dramatic with this. This is why I chose to be a super-auntie to my sisters’ kids and not have my own because I wanted to have that freedom.”

But she doesn’t think Gen Y women want to make that same choice.

We’ll hear more from that guest and others on the next show.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. As usual you can comment under this episode on the website or on the show’s Facebook page.

If you can kick in a few bucks to support this one woman show it’s easy, just go to the support tab at TheBroadExperience.com. If you can’t but you’d like to support me another way please leave a rating and a review on iTunes – it helps more people find the show, and a bigger audience can bring a lot of benefits.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.  

Episode 81: Money vs. Fulfillment

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time…two themes from two listeners. One is about money – if you’re happy with your job, how much does it matter if you don’t get paid as much as the man who did it previously?

“For the person who says money isn’t everything I would push back and say OK, if money isn’t everything, what would you do if you didn’t get your next paycheck?”

And say you’re married to a guy who earns a lot more than you do. You see the women around you giving up work to stay home with their kids. Should you join them?

“This is exactly how women have been socialized to think – that they’re being selfish if they don’t sacrifice their career ambitions for the family.”

Coming up – two sets of views on fair pay and whether to opt out.  

But first, this episode of the show is brought to you by Write, Speak, Code. Write Speak Code empowers women in technology. The Write Speak Code conference is taking place in June in Chicago and it’s where women in tech can learn to become speakers, thought leaders, and open source contributors. You can sign up for news about the conference at writespeakcode.com.

And if your company would like to sponsor the event the organizers would love to hear from you – all the information is at writespeakcode.com. 

My first guest is Jacquette Timmons. Jacquette is an investment expert and an author and a financial behaviorist – she coaches people on their behavior around money and their attitudes to money. She was in a show I did a couple of yeas ago called Show Me the Money.  

The first question we’re going to consider came after one of my listeners heard the final show of last year – it was called Redefining Success. And in it two women talked about leaving their old, lucrative work lives behind and starting anew. In both cases they were earning less than they did before.

So here’s what this listener said in her email.  

“If I look at my current position I am very successful based on what I have been able to accomplish and the perception of other people.  I enjoy my work most days and am pleased when I can lead the university in efforts to improve the lives of students.

That said, I am grossly underpaid compared to not my most recent predecessor (female), but her predecessor (male).  I would be interested in a discussion on how far you push gender equality if you are indeed satisfied with everything else in the work environment."  

So I asked Jacquette, is it OK to rest on our laurels IF we earn enough, and we’re happy with everything else?

“On one hand the short answer to that question is yes of course you can, you can rest on your laurels if that is sufficient to you. But obviously it isn’t or she wouldn’t be asking the question. So I think in this particular case what it comes down to is have you defined what good enough is for you individually on many different levels? What’s good enough in terms of compensation, in terms of scope of work…and if you do that assessment and you walk away with everything I have here is just fine, then you don’t have to make any changes.”

But again she says that’s probably not the case here.

This particular listener isn’t the only one to have written to me saying look, with women it’s about more than money. Another woman emailed saying women care about other things, like flexibility. We’re just not thinking in terms of every last dollar.

“What I love about exploring this topic is that – while we’re not going to come up with an answer, but I like all the different things we can tap into to get to an answer or several answers. At the end of the day what I find really interesting is it’s only people who have the privilege of saying it’s not all about money can actually say it’s not all about money. So in having this conversation, for the person who says money isn’t everything I would push back and say OK, if money isn’t everything, what would you do if you didn’t get your next paycheck, what would you do currently if the money you didn’t have currently is no longer there? I think you can only say that if you know you have a cushion. It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs…once the bottom level is completely satisfied then you can go up to the next level and after that the whole idea is you get to the final pinnacle, you can focus on personal development, self-fulfillment and things of that nature. So if you’re there it’s easy to say that something that’s connected to a very basic way of living and being is perhaps immaterial, than if you’re not there. So I’d push back and say that I disagree with the whole idea that money doesn’t matter. Where I think the challenge is real and something we all have to work on is the degree to which we allow money to define who we are.”

And of course no one’s saying money doesn’t matter – but for some women it doesn’t have to matter as much because they have a spouse who earns far more. We’ll come back to that idea with the next question.

On the other hand, plenty of women either support themselves or an entire family single-handedly. Or they end up parting from their higher-earning spouse. As my next guest says, those scenarios should galvanize us…

“There was a recent Wall Street Journal article talking about how women over 60 have to stay now longer in the workforce because they realize, oh my God, I don’t have enough money for retirement. So women live a lot longer, but they make a lot less. And with the economic uncertainty we face now money matters more than ever.”

Jodi Detjen is a professor of management at Suffolk University in Boston. She also runs Orange Grove Consulting - it specializes in women’s leadership development. Some of you may remember her from an earlier show I did called Killing the Ideal Woman.

Jodi says there’s another reason women should care about maximizing our earnings…

“So money also maters because it’s a statement of our value in the workplace. So when we make less, then guess what? People assume we add less value.”

But a lot of women don’t think about that. In fact when she and her co-authors were doing research for their book The Orange Line they found the women they interviewed – all women with good careers - rationalized money actually didn’t matter that much or it ought not to. It was almost as if money was dirty and they should aspire to nobler things than chasing a higher salary.

She says another reason some women downplay the importance of money is because if money is important, that means we have to ask for more of it. We have to negotiate for ourselves. And a lot of us dread that.     

“And we know from research and from others’ research that women out-negotiate men when they negotiate for the company, but we’ve been socialized not to bring our own needs into the equation. So we’re not supposed to negotiate or ask for things for ourselves. But now there’s growing awareness of this, there’s been a lot of talk about this, so as a result it’s becoming much more acceptable for women to negotiate for their salary. It still requires some finessing but it’s a lot easier.”

She gets clients to practice negotiating for smaller, more everyday stuff just so they get comfortable with the process.

She’s not saying we should devote ourselves to grabbing that last penny above all else.

“It’s not an either or – either I focus on money or I just live with what I’ve got and feel happy about it. What I’m saying is money isn’t the whole story, but it’s still part of the story. So we still need to be paid what the role or the job is worth. But that’s the difference. Satisficing is when we’re being paid less than value of what we bring to table – that’s de-valuating ourselves. What we’ve been socialized to do is to say we can sacrifice, that’s OK…we can satisfice. What I’m saying is we need to be paid co-measureate value…so then once we get to that level then we can start thinking of the other ways we could redefine success.”

So she says if she were my listener she would tackle this – go to HR, make a case for why she should earn more, all depending on her work environment. But Jodi says she and her predecessor are and were both being discriminated against.

And even though Jodi has emphasized negotiating here, she says it’s not the ideal solution.

“The other thing I would suggest is as we move up in organizations and become better managers and we become leaders in our organizations, then we can make the pay thing a lot more transparent. Because the question I always have is why on earth do we have to negotiate salary anyway? Why can’t it be pretty clear why people make what they make? And the fact that we give people raises because they negotiate to me seems not very transparent at all. Just because someone’s a good negotiator, they get more money, that doesn’t seem to be a good valuation of their value. So I think there are some systemic challenges here but they’re not going be changed until women, who do take a wider view, get into positions of power and start making those changes.”

That idea of ending salary negotiations – that’s something the former acting CEO of Reddit, Ellen Pao, introduced while she was at the company last year.

The next question came from a listener in Silicon Valley. She works for a nonprofit. Her husband is a big player at a famous technology company. They have one child. And she admits her issue is a problem of privilege – but I’m sure she’s right that lots of other women are grappling with the same question.

She says her husband is a great, hands-on dad. But his career is on a tear. His job pays multiple times what hers does and she says they’ve had problems navigating the dynamic caused by vastly different incomes. She says he’s supportive of her career, but he’s so successful she’s beginning to feel her career doesn’t really matter by comparison. Meanwhile all his male colleagues have stay-at-home wives.

 I was telling Jacquette about this and I started to quote from the email…

AM-T: “She likes her career but she’s beginning to question whether she is selfish for even wanting a job when her husband is earning so much more money and would clearly be able to do more if he had a stay at home wife. She says she wants to support him and she’s thrilled he’s doing so well and opening up so many opportunities for their family…but she’s clearly feeling that they could achieve more as a family…she even says we could have another child if I was more available. She says should I throw in the towel and stay home to support his clearly more lucrative career?”

[Laughs] “Oh my God. When I chuckle I’m not being dismissive. I chuckle because what I hear is that they’re just not on the same page. They don’t have – from what you’ve described they’re not really operating as a team. They haven’t come together to figure out OK, as a team what is the big picture goal and strategy we’re working on and toward. As a team each team member plays a role – what’s your role going to be in contributing to that overall vision and overall big picture? So I think from what I hear her saying it’s not about we so much as it’s about I. I wonder if she were on the call to us if, and I said to her well, how would you think of this if you were looking at not doing the things you say you want to do for the next 5 years so you can perhaps expand your family and perhaps give him the space to do even more with his career which is bringing in a great deal of resources for you, and not look at this as ‘if I do that I’m giving something up’ and instead look at it as ‘in doing that, this is my role, this is my contribution into the bigger picture and the bigger plan.’

Which I must admit I was quite surprised to hear. But…

“Yeah, that’s my view.”

AM-T: Go into that a little bit more. To me she’s clearly feeling pressure. And you know these statistics, right, the women who tend to stay home tend to be at each end of the socioeconomic spectrum…so those at the bottom end and those at the very top end so some of the most educated women in the country actually end up staying home and looking after there kids and she’s seeing that all around her and wondering should I be one of those people?”

“Well see that gets to the bigger issue and I think the crux of it all for both that first question you shared and this, which is our tendency to compare ourselves to other people in other situations.  So we might feel really comfortable and competent with the decision or choice we’ve arrived at and then begin to question the validity of that as we look at other people’s choices…the problem is that we’re looking at the part of the choice we can see, but we’re not looking at all of the things other people may have taken into consideration to arrive at the choice they’ve determined is best for them.”

AM-T: “Let me just go down because I told her I was going to be talking about her problem and she wrote me a little follow-up email. Yes, she says here…

‘There is significant evidence that if I opt out, he will make more money and be more successful on his own than both of us working. My added flexibility would allow us to maximize our family income, his time off and possibly have another child. So despite all we’ve gained is it still the most rational choice for women in higher income brackets to stay at home?’”

“To me that is that is both a philosophical and very personal question at the same time. And personal aspect of that question is do you have a game plan in terms of when you return to work? So if you say alright, sweetheart, I’m going to agree to opt out and I will onboard at a later point in time…do you have a pre-determined time in mind as to when you are going to do that? and as you take care of the home are you setting aside an hour a week to keep on top of your skills, to keep on top of your networking so when it’s time to on ramp you are not starting from scratch to make that happen - it really is a matter of being able to tap into your network and saying OK, I’m ready to jump back into this thing and it’s not going to be a huge learning curve for you to be able to do that.”

Jodi Detjen agrees anyone taking a career break needs to stay connected to their industry or they’ll risk their skills becoming obsolete. But she feels very differently on everything else.  

“So first off I think, I’ll start with the either or perch women get stuck with in their career. When we look at our research we keep seeing this big assumption that women are the ones primarily responsible for home and family so career is a lower priority so I have to put my career on the back burner. The assumption of course is that the husband’s career is then primary. And we’re doing some research on men and careers and that is what men believe – their primary responsibility is career and home is secondary. But men aren’t saying they want this. We’ve got men and women assuming this is way it is and both working under this constraint. What would happen if we reframed this totally to both our careers matter and family is important to both of us? You notice I’m not even mentioning money here. I’m seeing both people want careers and family. And if we reframe it to this is the premise…and this is what my husband and I have done. The husband’s ambition doesn’t have to be swallowed and her ambitions don’t have to be submerged. It’s a negotiation. How do we make it happen? It’s about saying here’s what I need for my career, here’s what you need for yours, and here’s what we need for the family. How do we accomplish this? And you figure it out. So on any given day one career might take priority, but over a trajectory we’ve agreed both careers are important.

Let me get to the point about being selfish.  This is exactly how women have been socialized to think – that they’re being selfish if they don’t sacrifice their career ambitions for the family. And it’s such a beautiful label because we put it on ourselves and it keeps us small. Oh, you’re being selfish. Because then immediately we go, oh, I have to sacrifice myself.

If you see a woman talk about being selfish watch what happens to her body. She will scrunch in. She physically gets smaller. So now imagine what would happen if we said as women our career matters – so imagine all the ideas, energy, impact, all the ways work is already changing because women are showing up for their careers – we know having women working is good for business, it’s good for the world. Keeping our careers small keeps business as usual, it’s a mindset. So instead let’s say, both careers matter.”

She says we conflate money with worth – but she says just because he earns more his career is not automatically more important. And yes his job pays more – but say you give up yours, and then he’s laid off, or something else happens to upend your regular life with that big salary coming in…she says it’s risky for women to give up work completely.

And she says there’s another reason to think twice…

“When women give up their careers for their husbands they perpetuate this dynamic where only men and a few women make it to the top with a stay at home spouse – and that they’re the only people who can make it to the top of organizations. So it makes it really hard for people in those positions to understand the dual career dynamic. And because those people haven’t experienced it they don’t really understand it so they don’t build organizations that help dual-career families or single parent families. Deciding to prioritize a husband’s career then ends up being a problem of privilege because only families of privilege can do it.”

And that’s what my listener is seeing all around her. But what about her feeling that putting her husband’s career first would enable them to have another child?

“This is what we heard a lot in the women’s stories we interviewed and the women we’ve been working with since. It’s this deal of my career has to be smaller or we can’t achieve all these things we want as a family, yet when you look at the research on dual career families what you see is there’s a lot of happiness, because both partners are sharing in this decision – so if there’s sacrifice both partners do it together…and in the long run the family is better off because both parts of the family are contributing to it neither one feels resentment because they don’t have to sacrifice a big, big part of who they are. I don’t know if it’s true what she’s saying – we spoke to women who are very successful who have 4 kids. It’s about figuring it out. And what we we found about figuring it out is that women put rules up. Such like, well I can’t have my kids be with a babysitter because I need to be with my children. Rather than saying when you look at the data there is no data to show children in daycare are worse off, as long as daycare is good, which if she’s in this position where her husband is the primary earner and she could scale back, they have access to quality daycare. Her kids would be fine in daycare, it’s a question of how she’s doing it.

Also in stories we hear from women and heard in our research there’s this palpable sadness, and we hear it in this question as well – ‘I have to sacrifice my career. I don’t want to but I can’t see another way out.’ And this comes back to this either/orness. Either I’m the one taking care of the family OR I’m all in my career.  Rather than the nuance. And this comes right back to that first question of isn’t there more to life? So if we look at a holistic life there’s elements of career, there’s elements of family and life and there’s elements for us. And it’s all three of them together that makes a full, rich life. Sacrificing one part of it gives you a partial life and what kind of a message is that sending to our kids?”

She says so many of our expectations and our concerns – they spring from quite a new idea of what an ideal family looks like.

“So our conclusion on all this is that we have this vision of an ideal of a perfect family – and this is where the woman makes family a priority and the man makes career a priority…and that’s the ideal still even though that ideal was invented in the 1950s. It never really existed before then because women have always worked because they had to, it just wasn’t paid. They were the ones feeding the farmers, they were the ones doing all the work in the house. It wasn’t till the 1950s when the men needed to go back to work, they needed jobs, that they created this ideal woman, stay at home thing.

So what ends up happening is we’ve created this society then especially at the upper echelons where you have to be all in at work. Or it looks that way. And the only way you can be all in if you’re putting in 60, 70 hours a week So that requires someone to be home with the kids.

So if you’re looking at this as a 1950s mentality of someone has to be home with he kids, the easiest one to do this is the one making the least amount of money. I’m not getting into the argument of whether women want to stay home because that’s a totally different argument. I’m talking about the women who really enjoy their careers. There’s a lot of research suggesting women quit not to stay home but because they can’t figure out how to make it all work. The organizations aren’t supporting them. The good news is that men are really starting to push back in part because there are so many dual-career families, and the men have as much pressure. To give you a personal example, my husband is C level at a startup, he has just as much pressure dealing with family as I do…his work is closer to our house than my work so he takes a lot of the doctors’ appointment and those things, and he’s had to figure it out. But what’s happened is he’s become a role model…and he’s had young men tell him he’s a role model for them because they then realize they can figure it out too.

Why have women chosen this? Because we believe this fundamental assumption that women are supposed to take care of the kids, and it’s just an assumption. When we reframe it back to my career matters, your career matters, our family matters, let’s figure it out, then it’s a completely different conversation.”

Jodi Detjen. Thanks to her and Jacquette Timmons for being my guests on today’s show.

As usual I’m interested to know what YOU think about both these questions.  

You can comment under this episode on the website or on the show’s Facebook page.

And if you’re in tech don’t forget to check out the upcoming conference at writespeakcode.com.

Thanks so much to all those of you who support this one-woman show. If you give monthly or if you’ve done a one off donation of maybe you’ve donated in return for a Broad Experience T-shirt – you can find out more at the support tab at TheBroadExperience.com.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. See you next time.

Episode 80: Daughters in Charge (re-release)

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time on the show…traditionally it’s been men who follow their fathers into a family business. But more and more daughters are taking this route. I wanted to look into what kinds of challenges they face that their brothers don’t.  For one thing, what happens when YOU are your brothers’ boss?

“I’ve never actually asked them and my father has never told them they should report to the president. So my guess is they would have difficulty doing that.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

Marty Betagole is from Cincinnati, Ohio. She graduated from college in the ‘70s and she went back to Cincinnati, where her dad owned a vehicle-leasing business. Now she wasn’t that interested in joining the business. She’d worked there one summer, and it was fine, but she still didn’t think about it as a possible career, and her dad wasn’t trying to pull her on board. But a few years after graduating she was working for another company as a personnel manager, as they called them in those days. And one day she got a call…

“I knew our comptroller at the family company and she was somewhat difficult to work for and she reached out to me and asked if I wanted to be her assistant. She made the offer, my dad did not make the offer.”

So Marty started working at her dad’s company as assistant comptroller. But not long after she’d been hired, Marty’s boss – who she says was a brilliant woman – she got sick. She smoked three packs a day. It was the seventies after all. It turned out she had lung cancer. She died soon afterwards. Marty took over her role, and the company became her career. In 2000 she became president.  To this day, the firm is very much a family affair.

“My dad is, uh, still the CEO and then I have two brothers who have been involved with the business. And we’re all the sibs in the family.”

Her father is now in his mid-80s and he lives in Florida most of the year. Marty runs things. Which sounds pretty good. And it is…but there are certain things that keep niggling at her even after all her years with the company. I’m going to play you a piece of tape she left me as a message right before we did our interview. I’d asked her to test the iPhone technology we used to tape her half of the conversation. 

“Hi Ashley this is Marty Betagole…voice memo’s test…I shared with you that my dad has always recognized all of his children at the same level. I can’t tell you whether that’s because of the way that my dad is or because I’m the daughter, but I can tell you it has undermined my confidence. And I think a lot of how much I could have accomplished faster if I had had that confidence.”

Marty’s dad may have named her president…but for years, there was never a proper organizational chart showing specifically who did what and who reported to whom. She says things were old-fashioned, they continued the way her dad had always done them in part because he was still involved. But he never explicitly stated who was boss. Even though you might think that was obvious.

And her brothers?

“My feeling is that they really wouldn’t want to report to me. One of my brothers, we have another business, and one of my brothers is in charge of that business, he would be the president of that business. I…I just think they would have…I’ve never actually asked them and my father has never told them they should report to the president. So my guess is they would have difficulty doing that.”

It’s bugged her over the years. But during our interview she’s quick to say she doesn’t think this is gender-related. She says her dad wants to treat all his children equally, that’s all. And if two of his children had to report to another, that might create a difficult family situation.

She says what has helped her a lot over the years is finding mentors outside the company. She thinks it’s vital for women in family businesses to do this – to seek mentors who have a different perspective from the one you’re surrounded by all day.  

I asked if her dad was a mentor.

“He was…sure…of course he was a mentor to a certain extent. But that’s just one opinion, and I think that you need more opinions.  And then when you’re working for a family business….you know you don’t know if they’re just being nice to you because your name’s on the smokestack of if people are treating you and giving you the responsibility that you’re getting because you really have earned it.”

She says maybe it’s just her generation of women, but even though they graduated at a time when women were told they could do everything, women like Marty hadn’t exactly been raised to be working women – she says her mum probably expected her to stay home, just like she had. So she’s always felt she’s had to find her way in the workplace. Something her dad never had to do.

AM-T: Is he proud of you?

“Um…I don’t know.”

She says her brothers would answer exactly the same way. Their dad is just not the demonstrative type.

And over the years Marty says things at the company have got a lot easier. Efficient systems have been put in place, new people have joined…

“I’m happier now, because I think we have transitioned to a professionally managed corporation, because I feel like I have a nice team, a good team, a capable team…of people who are good at what they do. But I guess you could attribute that back to…I feel like there’s always somebody who could do the job better than me.”

That lack of confidence still haunts her, and she thinks she’s pretty much stuck with that mindset. She hopes young women joining family businesses today will have alot more self-assurance.

Sara Corey is one of those women. She’s 24. She’s a generation younger than Marty and already head of agronomy at Daniel Corey Farms in Monticello, Maine.

Now…when she was in college she had no intention of going back to the family farm. She was studying to become a pharmacist. But part way through her college career, she changed her mind. The potato fields called her back. And her dad? She says he’s delighted she’s there.

“He’s just always treated me like I’m of the guys, like, Sara, go jump in one of those farm trucks. Like geez Dad, I don’t know how to drive one of those. Figure it out! Like that’s just how he’s always been, and I can operate anything on the farm. That’s just how he’s raised me.”

Not that every moment of working together is bliss…things can get testy.

“We get in little tiffs sometimes, you know, like a normal father/daughter would and a normal employer/employee would.”

But basically they have a great relationship. When she comes up against any problems being a woman in her business, they’re related to other people. Sara is a member of a young farmer’s group up in Maine. They hold regular meetings.

 “And when I go I’m the only female.”

One girl surrounded by a lot of guys with a lot of attitude…

“And they’re young guys that are trying to make it in the same industry I’m trying to make it in…it’s a little difficult, I feel like it takes longer to earn their respect in a way just ‘cause they look at a female maybe not knowing as much as they know, or not having the experience, and I really have to work for it.”

And she does. She thinks she’s winning people over, gradually. With older men she says it’s less of an issue – maybe because they like and respect her dad. One thing she knows her youth brings to the business?  Her ease with technology. The farm didn’t even have a website until she joined and put something together. She loves her smartphone. She’s downloaded a bunch of apps and she’s making them work for the business.

“And I can see at any given time, anywhere, like when I went to Texas to the Potato Expo, this year, this past January, I could pull up my potato house and see what the temperatures were of the potatoes, what the humidity was.”

Remote potato farming. Her father and his friends were impressed.

“Dad’ll be like, Sara, show ‘em what you got on your phone. And the older guys too, they’ll be like, what is that?”

Like Marty Betagole, Sara has two younger brothers and she thinks they’ll follow her back to the farm.  She says she likes working there a lot more than she thought she would. Every day is different. Recently she’s been shipping potatoes everywhere from South Carolina to Egypt…that kind of responsibility gives her confidence. So do other challenges that crop up.

“We recently had a potato conference of Maine and they asked me to moderate part of the section. And to get up there and like, you’re looking out and you’re introducing these figures and it’s all men looking back at me, it can definitely be intimidating, can definitely be intimidating. I did it.”

Last year the Maine Potato Board awarded Sara the title ‘young farmer of the year’.

As women all over the world become more educated, more of them are going where only their brothers would have gone before. In the US, the number of women joining family businesses is almost five times greater than it was in the late ‘90s. Daphne Halkias is an American academic - she lives in Athens with her husband and kids. She’s been studying women in family businesses for more than ten years.  She first got interested when she was teaching a class of female MBAs in Greece. She says in Greece, the family business is the core of the economy. Many of her class were daughters whose fathers were reluctantly letting them into their companies – but the working relationships were quite tricky.

Daphne’s edited a book on the topic. It’s called Father-Daughter Succession in Family Business – a cross cultural perspective. She says you could be in cultures as different as Canada, Pakistan, and Nigeria… but women joining their fathers at the family firm have a lot in common.

“Across cultures we found that daughters, at first there was some resistance to daughters becoming involved in the family business…and this even goes in developed countries as well, and many times the father would look to…could son in law be in the business, but after a while as daughters worked with the father…then fathers began to recognize what a jewel they had in these prospective daughter successors.”

AM-T: “What sticking points were there for these women, because I know you said in many cases it might not have started out particularly hopefully but then the fathers came to really admire the daughters…”

“I think in all cultures a woman still has to prove herself…a boy will from birth be named CEO of the company some day. And we’ve seen a lot of corporations too, family businesses, excuse me, that have failed in 2nd generation…because a successor was put there only because they were a family remember, successor…and this has happened a lot with boys who were successors, and it brings up a lot of a family conflict and business problems… but girls had to prove themselves…they didn’t succeed into business from day they were born. They had to go and get an MBA, work from the bottom rungs. Many times a male successor won’t be put in front lines to work, they will be brought straight to the leadership office immediately. A woman will have to work her way up. So I would say that’s the biggest sticking point.”

AM-T: But you’ve also said…and this is really interesting for someone based in the US where there is so much angst about childcare…this family situation is an advantage, isn’t it?

Oh yes. That’s another key thing we saw in the developing world or in nations where extended family is very strong. In nations, which is most of the world, you know, where the extended family is very strong , families all tend to live in the same neighborhood or same building…across Med or Middle East, patriarch or matriarch will build an apartment building with six or seven apartments and all their children or grandchildren will live in one building, no matter what social strata you come from. This, as they say in the Mediterranean, many hands makes a mother’s work more pleasant.”

Quite. And that topic of motherhood…it’s a big deal for women in parts of the world where you don’t necessarily have extended family around the corner.

Amy Katz runs an online community called Daughters in Charge.  She’s worked with lots of family businesses during her consulting career. She gradually became convinced women joining family firms needed a group they could turn to, to share their experiences and seek advice or mentorship.

She says one issue that crops up a lot in small family businesses in the US – maternity leave policies. Or rather, the lack thereof. She’s found that pregnancies among team members are often a first at family companies. She knows one family…

“Siblings who are all working in the business and who are all owners. And when the women decide to have children and want to work out a flexible schedule, the men feel that that isn’t fair. They’re not typically at a point where the men would think of taking time off themselves.”

After all, no man ever had before. She says women in these firms are often pioneers. They may come from a job on the outside and have the task of bringing new knowledge to a company set in its ways…they may be not taken seriously by older male employees. Another thing she points out though is that family firms are increasingly being run by women – so sometimes these days a daughter is joining her mother at the office. And that isn’t always easy either.

“I even received a letter this morning from a young woman saying how difficult it is to work with her mother. And that their relationship has always been strained and now they’re in the business world and it’s becoming even more difficult to have her mother as a manager. On the other hand there are businesses where several daughters are working with their mother and learning not only to have their mother as a manager but to have their sister as a manager.” 

“My name is Jessi Lima Bollin, and I am the director of marketing and communications for Best Upon Request.”

Jessi works for her mother’s company – it provides concierge services to companies that want to provide a bit of extra support to their employees.

She’s 29, married with two little kids, a boy and a girl. She worked for a year or two doing other things after college…but the pull of the family firm didn’t take long to exert itself…

“I was hired as a communications coordinator and then we had some really fast-paced growth years, I ended up creating my own department and getting promoted…because there was that need. I didn’t want anyone to think this was a fast track because I was the boss’s daughter.  That was a huge thing for me. I really wanted to prove myself.”

Jessi has two younger sisters, Natalie and Sophia. They’ve both joined the business too. And when Jessi began working for her mother, she decided to make some relationship tweaks for the office…

“I wanted it to be a professional environment so I decided to call her Tilly and not Mom…my sisters came to work here, it was a challenge for them to get used to… for me it also helps I’m talking to you as my boss, as my mentor, and then I’ll say OK Mom, now I’m talking to you as my mom.”

AM-T: Doesn’t that get tricky sometimes?

“It just kind of works out, and my sister Natalie…she’s three-and-a-half years younger than me, she reports to me, it really works, we really care about the business, we can vent to one another, we talk about what solutions we have…then sometimes it’s like OK, Nat, Natalie, I need to talk to you about like, whatever, and you’re my sister…it helps set boundaries.”

Jessi says basically they’re able to separate their work selves and their home selves. And she has no trouble critiquing her mother at work, because they have a good relationship…which she says other employees might hesitate to do. Although Jessi sometimes wonders if her mum is being hard enough on her…

“There’s been times where I’ve gone to my mom and say…I really appreciate what you said that in the meeting but you’ve said that before and I want to make sure it’s not you saying that as my mom. I so appreciate what you’re praising me about but I want to make sure it’s not the proud momma coming out, I want you to be my boss.”

She says the work relationship is definitely a dance, always a work in progress…but she says she and her sisters all want the company to be successful. And they all look up to their mum – as a boss and a parent.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. You can see a couple of photos and check out the show notes on this episode’s page at The Broad Experience dot com.

You can comment on this episode on the website or on the show’s Facebook page.

Special thanks to Amy Katz this week – the whole idea for this show came from her, and I stole her company’s name as the show’s title.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. 

Episode 79: Don't Treat Women Like Men

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time why treating women like men doesn’t help women at work. And why women’s groups within companies may be a waste of time…

“The only reason to change it is it doesn’t usually, in any way, improve the overall gender balance at the company.”

Coming up a conversation with a longtime advocate of what she always calls balance – not women’s leadership.

But first, this episode of the show is brought to you by Write, Speak, Code. If you’re in tech you know balance is still pretty elusive in that industry. Write Speak Code empowers women in technology. The Write Speak Code conference is taking place in June in Chicago and it’s where women in tech can learn to become speakers, thought leaders, and open source contributors. You can sign up for news about the conference at writespeakcode.com.

And if your company would like to sponsor the event the organizers would be glad to hear from you – all the information is at writespeakcode.com. 

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is Canadian by birth but she’s most of her life in Europe. She’s CEO of 20-First – it’s a consultancy that works with companies that want to get equal numbers of men and women at their firms, particularly at the top. You may remember her from a show I did in 2014 called Stop Fixing Women, Start Fixing Companies.

I keep up with her through the pieces she writes for for the Harvard Business Review. And I wanted to kick off this conversation by talking about a piece of hers I read last year. It was called ‘To Hold Women Back, Keep Treating Them Like Men’. I enjoyed it but I thought the title and the idea that men and women ought to be treated differently was bound to rile some people.

Avivah recently moved from Paris to London and we spoke on Skype. 

She says whenever she speaks at a company or event she’ll often start by asking everyone in the room if they believe there are differences between the sexes. She says more than 90 percent raise their hands.

“And then if I ask the men in the room, and I usually have mostly men in my corporate work, in these sessions, if they understand women, they laugh and shake their heads in despair and say no. I point out, in 2016 don’t they think it’s interesting that that they’re running multinationals with 50% of the workforce being women and they say they don’t understand them in any substantive way, or the differences there might be between men and women? So I understand the fear a lot of women and some men have in denying gender differences – we’ve been in that space of denial for the last couple of generations for good reason, but now we are strong enough to say we are both equal and different.”

Now if you’re already bristling, she says the differences she talks about aren’t differences we’re supposedly born with.

“It’s simply that in the way the two sexes have been socialized, are balanced in schools and then in business you end up having very different experiences and expectations. So the differences we usually focus on are pretty simple: it’s the issues of career cycles, communication styles and attitudes towards power and ambition.”

I was about to jump to the next question but Avivah wanted to get into this innate thing a bit more.

“So the nature/nurture debate is worth parking ourselves in briefly. I am not saying men and women are innately different…even though I think they probably are in a variety of ways… but nor do I think Chinese and Americans are innately different. The issue is if you actually want to sell to the Chinese or recruit some Chinese into the leadership team it becomes incredibly important that you understand language and the culture of the Chinese… that’s self evident. Nobody’s going to argue that much. But I would say exactly the same is true of men and women. If you have a male dominated and male-normed company, which most of us do, and have done for a long time, if we want to sell to or recruit women into our organizations and leadership teams we need to recognize that they might be slightly different and understand what those differences are and how to manage across them. So I don’t think it’s necessary that the differences be innate for them to impact what we’re currently facing in organizations.”

And you know the numbers. Most of you are listening to this in countries where fewer than 20 percent of executives are female – and chief executives? Far less than that.

So one of the differences Avivah was talking about is communication styles. By that she means the tendency for men to be more direct, to interrupt more, to be more likely to say ‘I’ achieved something where women are likelier to say ‘we’…it’s all been well documented.

I told her but I get in trouble with listeners sometimes and they’ll say, oh but what you said was such a generalization, I’m a woman who’s naturally direct. I don’t fit the female stereotype.

Avivah says well yes, of course that’s always going to be true, no one is going to fit a stereotype all the time, but companies? They generally rely on a one type of leadership style…

“And if they have a certain number of typically or stereotypically masculine characteristics on their leadership styles, they’ll find a few women who fit but they won’t be tapping into 100% of the female talent pipeline. So the trouble you’re getting into and everybody gets into is that nothing that we’re saying about gender is true for any one individual, it’s just that the statistics show that on the whole communication styles in companies are normed rather masculine, and on the whole most women don’t feel entirely aligned with that style. That’s not exactly revolutionary, right?”

She says just look at tech companies and how hard they find it to attract and keep women. She was talking to a top manager at a well known company last year and he said, ‘We’re having a lot of trouble finding women who fit the culture.’

“I mean classic, right?”

She says that attitude is backwards. But most companies still think that way – they think of the women as being the problem, not their own culture.  

Contrast that with a Canadian tech startup she wrote about. The young men running it wrote to the women they were trying to recruit saying look, we realize we’re a bunch of over-educated white guys…and we don’t want the whole company to look like us, think like us. They invited the women to suggest ways to make the culture more inclusive and they did some research themselves. They now have an almost even split of men and women on staff.

But back to that ‘innate’ discussion for a minute, because it kept rearing its head during our conversation.

AM-T: “What you were describing, the innate versus nurture argument, it’s coming up more and more now, partly because certainly - I don’t know how much in Europe but certainly here in the US, the whole discussion of transgender people has just exploded and that brings up a lot of questions about who are we really deep down, and some of these more recent studies of differences in the brain, and, lack of differences between male and female brains it’s interesting I think that it’s becoming a bigger topic of discussion.”

“Yeah, listen, I’ve been accused now once or twice of being ‘overly binary’…that is the new black, and I think that’s going to be a very dangerous orientation for the whole gender space in what we’re trying to do…which is simply balance out the masculine/feminine spectrum in organizations, politics and society. The fact that of course every man and woman on the planet has a spectrum of masculine and feminine within them – I think the challenge, and maybe the gender fluidity movement will make us more tolerant of what we call any kind of behavioral set…whatever you call it, male or female, masculine, feminine – this, that, or the other, the issue is really that the dominant norm happens to be a pretty narrow slice of existing masculinity, and until we broaden that out it’s gonna keep a lot of people out.”

Including some men. It’s something I think about a lot – the fact that boys and young men still largely have to live up to this quite macho stereotype of what a man is. It’s narrow and limiting.  

“Hugely, especially in Anglo Saxon countries and especially in the US – it’s one of the more extremely masculine countries, it’s less true in Sweden or in France where men will be more acceptably entering into a more feminine side of their internal spectrum. So what we call men and women also is affected by all the cultural norms we inherit, but yeah, they’re still very powerful, they’re very active and unfortunately we’re still orienting our children down these paths, and we’ll see if this whole gender fluidity movement lets off on kids. But I’m not very convinced from anything I’ve seen so far that we’re going to let gender stereotypes go. It’s been a few millennia in the making, so I know we’re quick to adapt, but I’m not expecting anything to happen quite as quickly as we think.”

I was really interested in what she said about Anglo Saxon countries being rigid on what a man should be. Avivah works all over the world so I wanted to know what she sees elsewhere. Being based in the US I read mostly about US, British and Australian attitudes…

“I think what’s interesting is if you look at the cross-cultural research on these things all the Anglo-Saxon countries are slightly more assertive, competitive, masculine, this is where capitalism has its root, right? Not all countries are like that. So If you look at the Nordic countries, or the Eastern European countries, some of the Asian countries, even some of the Latin American or some of the African countries, you’re going to get a different peek, right?  

So what is deforming us a bit in our own heads is a lot of the research comes out of Anglo Saxon countries, which tend to be quite masculine, and where gender balance isn’t necessarily particularly high. So if you go to Sweden or China, Russia or Brazil it’s going to be a slightly different picture.”

Last time we spoke she said in some of these countries where she’s worked companies worry they’re going to have too many women at the top. It’s the women who seem to be more ambitious – it’s men they’re now concerned about attracting. And she wants to keep other clients thinking about this issue of balance as well, including those in the US.

“Because if we flip over as we are in some areas to become more female than male, have we won? We’ve just been working with a company that has been focused on recruiting more women, so they now are recruiting 75% women at the bottom, and they are still very concerned because they still only have 30% at the top and all their efforts are focused on promoting women. And it never crossed their mind they might have an issue of not enough gender balance in their earlier career phases until we brought it up and said well, is this really what you want, because you’re going to create a greater imbalance ten years down the road. And they literally had never tabled that question. So it just shows how quickly we can flip.”

Finally, I wanted to talk to her about something she keeps coming back to in her writing.

AM-T: “You’ve pointed out that gender at work should not be looked at as a women’s issue. Yet so many companies have women’s empowerment groups, women this, women that, and you point out that often women want those groups… and they feel resentment if a man shows up say at a conference or an event that is dubbed ‘women’s’.”

“Yes, so that’s a very complicated one, right, because over the last – this has been going on for 20 years, right, progressive companies who believed in gender balancing really did believe that this would help – is to put women together and empower them and give them a kick. I think that it was appropriate in its time, it’s just that now we’re looking at very different data and numbers and impacts. And I think it’s a misdiagnosis of the problem. If you’re doing all this stuff to what we call ‘fix the women’, your analysis is there’s something wrong with the women and you’re going try and help them adapt to the way the company is run, right? It’s like the guy earlier saying the women don’t fit – once you find the ones that fit, you’ll be alright. The initial diagnosis is the wrong one. If you asked instead what’s the matter with our company, if we can’t attract, retain and develop what is today 60% of the educated talent pool in the world, you come up with a slightly different answer. It’s, well, maybe it requires our organization adjusting to the new reality of the 21st century, which will be much more gender-balanced, and how do we do that, how do we all adjust? Well it means the majority inside your own company needs to adjust and be aware of what’s happening, and it doesn’t help to isolate the group of women you currently have into a separate ghetto. You actually have to merge everyone together and get them to understand the stakes and what it takes to work across genders.”

AM-T: “And you say, you point out that they should be called balance groups instead, but do you know of any companies that have such a thing as a balance group that both genders are part of?”

“Yes, I was working with HSBC, which is a big bank, very successful, and 5 years ago they were launching their women’s network. They asked me to go and speak and I suggested they probably wanted to start a balance network instead, and they did. And they now have 30,000 people in their network and it’s very successful and they’re a model for a lot of other banks in the City. So yes, I do think it’s time for women’s networks to re-brand, to become much more inclusive, and to explore the issues of gender balance together with men so that we can actually have some impact in these companies. Because I think what we can say is after many years of women’s networks, a lot of companies haven’t made the progress they wanted.”

I got in touch with HSBC’s PR department in London. I wanted to check whether their Balance Network had actually worked – not just whether it was really popular, whether it had grown, but whether it had met the goal it set when it started - to have women fill 25% of leadership positions by 2014. I heard back just as I was putting this show together. The bank said it could not share any data about its diversity numbers or balance network at this time.

Back to women’s networks for a minute.

AM-T: “I think part of it is women quite like being in groups of their own sex, sometimes if they are in a very male dominated industry, there’s something relaxing and comforting about being with their own kind. Do you agree?”

“Absolutely. And I like it. I’m the founder of the European Professional Women’s Network. I am a huge believer in the power of women’s networks, my only argument is that they have a role to play outside of companies, or across sectors, but they are not very helpful inside any one company for a variety of reasons. And I completely acknowledge the fact, which is one of the tragi-comic parts of this debate, is that both men and women love women’s networks.

The women love them because of course we love to get together, we get along pretty well, and we share a lot of issues, particularly in male dominated organizations…and it’s helpful to have a place where you feel psychologically safe where you can discuss them. And the problem is leaders, mostly male, like women’s networks too, because they think they’ve taken care of the gender issue. And the women are happy and they’ve been given a conference or a network or a safe space. So everybody’s happy, right? Why change it? The only reason to change it is that it doesn’t usually in any way improve the overall gender balance at the company – so if you want to just keep women happy, and keep them down, start a women’s network.”

She says if you want to actually change the status quo make sure the leaders of the company are on board and pushing the effort.

That’s what you need – not just men signing up as champions and sponsors…

“It’s the way the whole thing is set up right now, it’s just doomed to fail, right…and everybody is copycatting everybody else so we keep repeating the same mistakes, rather than checking if it actually worked in the company that we’re copying off of. And I think there’s enough pressure now that companies feel they have to do something, and because they tend to be fairly task-oriented they love anything that’s action, so ‘let’s initiate a lot of activities, initiatives, things we can tick the box and say we did. And we’ll get a good performance evaluation at the end of the year.’

It’s all the problems with this whole topic is who’s doing it, who’s accountable, where it sits as an issue, and whether you really want to tap into the huge, powerful business opportunities of balancing a whole global organization. It has to sit in a completely different way and be run as a strategic priority by your executive team. Not very many companies have yet elected to do that, but don’t worry, it’s coming. It can’t not come.”

She says the demographics mean change will happen. The fact that 60 percent of educated workers are female…companies can ignore it for a while, but she says you can’t build a high performing organization if you’re recruiting and developing people from 40% of the talent pool.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. You can comment on the show on the website or on the Facebook page. And please rate and review the show on iTunes if you haven’t done do – that helps us get discovered by other people.

If you didn’t hear my last conversation with Avivah, it’s episode 41, Stop Fixing Women, Start Fixing Companies. You can make sure you never miss an episode by subscribing on iTunes, Stitcher, Acast, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.

Episode 78: Unpacking Sexual Harassment

“When we were called in to dinner he gave my ass an almighty smack and said, ‘Come on, you tart!’”

— Broad Experience listener via email

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This is the second of two shows about unwanted attention at work. This time, we look at what sexual harassment really stems from, what we can do to stop it, and why it’s so prevalent in one particular arena.

“Power in academia is pretty absolute in some ways, so if you have a male superstar science professor, he can completely make or break a career.”

---

Last time we talked about the things that can lead up to sexual harassment or just make women feel disrespected at work – terms of endearment, nicknames, touching, comments about our looks. In this show I wanted to get into sexual harassment at its worst: predatory behavior that can totally poison your experience at work – not to mention your whole life.

Jennifer Berdhahl is a professor of organizational behavior at the University of British Columbia. She specializes in sexual harassment and power and status in the workplace. We spoke on Skype.

She says the problem is most people don’t get what sexual harassment really is. They don’t take it seriously enough. They think it’s about flirtation, sexual desire gone astray…

“But what research really shows is sexual harassment, like racial harassment, is a way of demeaning people based on their sex and gender, making them feel unwelcome or uncomfortable at work…”

She says it’s about asserting dominance over one person or a whole group of people specifically because of their social identity. It’s less about sex, more about control.

“And I think to the extent that we still have this misinformation going around about what sexual harassment is and how serious it is, and what its true underlying motives and/or effects are, we will continue to turn a blind eye to it or not truly understand it in the way that it needs to be understood.”

AM-T: So having said that then, say it’s understood in those terms, that it’s more about power, how do we then go about the next step of trying to stop it or at least curb it?”

“Well I think understanding the different manifestations it takes, so it’s really about sex-based power or gender-based power, so some of the harassment I’ve studied includes harassment by men against other men, so teasing them about their masculinity or status as men. So understanding the broad range of behaviors it takes and recognizing that it’s not just a boss asking a subordinate for sexual favors in exchange for job status.”

That’s the first step. She says the second one is understanding the psychology behind this. We all grow up in a world where men are at the top of the social hierarchy. That’s pretty much baked into our psyches. And she says it’s that gender inequality itself that prompts this kind of behavior…

“For men to define and defend their status based on their manhood or their masculinity, for women, it also empowers women as well to derogate men based on those characteristics as well…so calling men homos or wimps or whatever you might do to try to bring a guy down.”

She says companies though – they’re still talking about harassment in the old way…

“Sexual harassment training programs need to not just go through, this is what you do, this is what you don’t do, a list-wise set of behaviors of dos and don’ts without really explaining where this is coming from and the different ways it might be represented.”

AM-T: “I mean you mention these trainings and I feel like people kind of roll their eyes when they feel they have to have one of these HR trainings, they see it as political correctness.”

“Yep, they do, and I think sometimes it is just kind of like checking the box and making sure the organization has looked like it tried to do something and it’s not as liable any more in case something goes wrong. So there is that kind of cynical side to training. And research shows that kind of training often exacerbates the problem. So people roll their eyes and they feel like, ‘oh, I guess I can’t tell sexual jokes.’  And then they go and push that boundary a little bit, almost as a form of protest, right, like, ‘I can still do this.’”

An amazing number of men still push the boundaries of polite office behavior.  And they can still do this.

I want to tell you a story here about one of my listeners. I was really hoping to get her on the show. At first she agreed, then she backed off. Because she’s afraid of losing her job.

She wrote to me in January and told me about this incident at the company Christmas party. She’s in her late 20s, works in London for a – creative company. And there’s an older man – she says he’s the last of the original partners. And he’s what Kathi Elster from the last show would call a dirty grandpa.

This grandpa has taken a shine to my listener in recent months. So she’s at the Christmas party and she’s wearing a dress with a small slit in the back. He’s standing next to her and puts his hand through that gap, and he starts stroking her back with his thumb while he keeps talking to colleagues. Then when it’s time for dinner he smacks her bottom and says ‘come on, you tart!’ She told me he’s also called her a cow, and a slut, and a slapper. For non British or Australian listeners slapper is another slang word or prostitute. This makes honey or sweetie look charming.

She says she froze when he started touching her. She just didn’t know what to do. And she says that’s the problem. Her generation has no idea how to deal with casual sexism at work, they don’t have a template for it. She’s in a support role at the company, and she says all her other assistant friends have had similar things happen. But they all minimize it by telling themselves oh, they’re old men, they’re dinosaurs, they don’t know any better.

She told me, ‘We all know it’s wrong. But we want to keep our jobs.’

I told Jennifer all this.

“Yeah, that’s really bad. That is the main reason why people don’t speak up about this. The overwhelming percentage of people do not speak up about their experiences of sexual harassment. A survey in Canada in 2014 showed that 80% of people who experienced sexual harassment in the workplace never told anyone because of fear of retaliation. And so that just shows you again…how lopsided our reasoning is around this behavior, how likely it is that a) that the perpetrators usually have power over the victims, that’s why they’re in a position to retaliate or connected to people in a position to retaliate, and the victim is often portrayed as the problem, once the victim comes forward and says hey, this happened to me.”

As for what to do about it, we talked about this in the last show. And even though Jennifer spends her working life steeped in this stuff – but she doesn’t have a magic bullet either. She says if you react with anger then in all likelihood you’ll hurt yourself and your career. But she does say you should report it. And you can do yourself a favor by writing it all down.

“So documenting it is really, really important, if even just for your own sanity, keeping careful notes and records of what happens. And reporting it as soon as you can especially directly to the harasser and documenting that you have expressed your desire for that to stop. You can do it in a polite way, starting there, but making sure it’s been communicated that you don’t welcome this behavior, you find it inappropriate.”

Then it’s a question of going to the next person up from the person doing the harassing, so if it’s your supervisor, try going to his supervisor…

“You have to keep going up until you feel safe and the organization has to understand that is the proper practice and they don’t delegate the complaint back down, they take responsibility at the level that it is brought. Because that’s a huge problem too, these people are connected to eachother and cover for eachother.”

Of course not all companies even have HR departments, and not all HR people are effective…

AMT: “This young woman, I asked her, when she said ‘I’m not going to come on the air after all,’ I asked, have you said anything? She said there’s no point going to HR because the HR director is a notorious gossip…and she said the problem is the men are in all the positions of economic power.”

“Yeah, I mean at a very basic level it’s about respect. So some organizations have tried to frame it as, is this respectful treatment of someone, is this something that puts them in a positive light and makes them feel empowered and included in the workplace? Probably sticking your hand in the back of someone’s dress and giving her a massage and calling her a cow isn’t going to make her feel like that – so turning it into a much broader issue of professional conduct can also help. But it’s true, if it’s someone who’s in a position of power, and economic power, they run HR, they can hire and fire those people too…so these equity offices are usually toothless if the people in power are the harassers or back them.”

A complete lack of desire to act when the perpetrator is the boss seems to be pretty common in these situations. Thank you to those of you who contributed to a Facebook discussion about this topic or told your story in the comments section on the website.

We will be back in a minute.

This episode of The Broad Experience is supported by Write, Speak, Code – Write Speak Code is all about empowering women in a male-dominated industry – technology. It’s all about getting women to become speakers, thought leaders, and open source contributors. The Write Speak Code conference is taking place in June in Chicago. You can sign up for all upcoming news bout the conference at writespeakcode.com.

And if your company would like to sponsor the event the organizers would love to hear from you – all the information is at writespeakcode.com. 

Next I brought up with Jennifer the topic of younger men and their attitudes to women. Which you heard me mention at the end of the last show.

AM-T: “I used to assume that millennial men were enlightened, sorted, no problems there. And then I started to read all these articles about all these incidents in tech startups that are largely run by millennial men and I thought hmm, I don’t think my theory was entirely correct…”

“Well that’s where our understanding of this phenomenon needs to kick in – it’s not about generational awareness and general attitudes it’s about what’s in it for me, what’s my status in the workplace, what’s my identity, how do I define myself, who do I consider to be my competition?

And so millennial men are probably just as much as their forefathers defining a huge part of themselves and their pride and their own personal identity on being better than women. We socialize boys to do that. So if women come in and they can do the job just as well as a man a) that presents a lot of competition, it doubles the playing field, and b) it threatens the social identity of those men in that job to the extent that ‘this is a bro culture’ and they want to keep it that way.”

AM-T: “Talking of culture, academia seems to be a prime place for sexual harassment to flourish and often in the sciences in particular. What’s going on there?”

“Well I think there’s a lot of things going on. There’s a history of professors having relationships with their students. Back in the 60s and 70s I guess maybe that was considered somewhat normal or seen as consensual even though there was a huge power difference between professor and advisee. So there’s that history, but also the vast power difference, the male dominated context of science, the lab space personal opportunities for this kind of harassing treatment. But power in academia is pretty absolute in some senses. So if you have male superstar science professor, he can completely make or break a career in a way that I think is even hard in the corporate world. You can prevent this person making it in science, and at the same time, you can’t be fired – you can fire most people in most companies but tenured professors are often hard to get rid of, so there’s this sense of complete impunity.”

In two recent cases I’ve read about in the sciences, one at the University of Chicago, one at Yale, the male professors ended up stepping down [NB: the professor in this case was finally pushed out]. This was after investigations had been launched and after the media started taking an interest.  But at Yale in particular the whole thing was incredibly drawn-out.

AM-T: “Do you think that academia is any worse at handling these cases than other work environments? They seem to have got themselves in a number of stews about how they handle this stuff.”

“I mean there are definitely work environments that are really bad outside of academia and others that are much better…but there is this, well, ‘we’re so enlightened, we’re progressive, so this couldn’t happen here’ or ‘people can take care of themselves’ – a little bit of that attitude. And then I think, especially the increasing stardom that goes on in academia, it’s a star system now, so you might have men who are running labs, cranking out huge grants and publications and they bring a lot status and recognition to the school. So there’s little desire to do anything if these men are misbehaving, because of the prestige they bring to the department, and because of all that power they have there’s very few people speaking out when these men are behaving badly.”

That jibes with a piece I read recently in the the magazine Nature. It was an op-ed by a female scientist who’d been harassed by a professor 30 years her senior – he was supervising her post-doctoral work. The university he worked for had ultimately found him to be at fault. But it didn’t fire him, and it asked her to keep the whole thing hush-hush.

“Yeah, they’re protecting their own. Cases that I’ve seen have involved, ‘We talked to him, he’s not gonna do that any more.’ There’s no follow through or consequence at all. In the meantime women’s careers have been ruined.”

She says there’s an ongoing problem with post-doctoral students like the one I just mentioned who come from abroad…

“They come to do a post-doc with this amazing star. And they’re even more at the mercy because they’re out of their home country, they don’t have family or friends, they don’t understand the legal system. So there’s this one egregious case in my own field involving post-docs that were actually required by the male professor to wear lingerie and have sex with him in hotel rooms, or else he was going to ruin their careers and cut off their funding and all this kind of stuff. And I’ve heard from equity offices on the campuses I’ve been involved with of similar cases of graduate students and post-docs being very vulnerable, especially from other countries.”

AM-T: “Charming! Lovely stuff. It’s so depressing.”

“It is, and there’s also this don’t ever out anybody norm, don’t ever say who it is. And I think people are starting to get over that. Because once one victim says something usually there’s that whole iceberg below, all those other people who have experienced the same thing who come forward.”

There is one encouraging thing though – this whole ‘he for she’ movement. Jennifer says more and more men in her classes are bothered by things only women used to talk about…

“I’ve noticed in my 17 years of teaching business students a real sea change, and this is a hopeful thing about the next generation, in some of the men, because they are married to or partnered with women who have high powered careers more and more now. We have a plurality of households now with female breadwinners. So the economic shift that’s going on with educational degrees and careers means men are dependent on and intimate with women with very high powered careers, and they’re now personally seeing the repercussions of this kind of behavior in the workplace. And they’re bringing them into my classroom and the men are just as concerned as the women at this point.”

And she says what’s really instructive is when both halves of the couple work at the same place…

“For example my husband and I both started out at the University of Toronto as assistant professors and we witnessed eachother’s 11 year careers there before moving to the University of British Columbia and how completely different the treatment and experience and time of promotion and all that kind of stuff was, so when you have that direct comparison in the same company or organization, it really opens your eyes.”

AM-T: “I take it he was moving ahead faster that you were?”

“Oh yeah, way faster.”

Jennifer Berdahl. One other thing we talked about is a documentary we both enjoyed – it’s called The Mask You Live in. and it’s about  the pressure boys are still under to define themselves as hyper masculine – and sort of in opposition to women. It’s a good film and it makes you realize just how much all that has to do with what women face – everything from domestic violence to discrimination at work. It looks like it’s not streamable yet but I’ll post a link on The Broad Experience site so you can find out more. I’ll also link you to a few articles that are related to today’s show.

As usual if you have thoughts on this episode, let me know either in the comments section on the site or on the show’s Facebook page.

And if you’d like to support this one-woman show, head to the support tab at TheBroadExperience.com. If you can afford to donate 50 bucks to the podcast you will receive the official Broad Experience T-shirt – ladies cut.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.

Episode 77: Don't Call Me Sweetie

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time, there’s outright sexual harassment and there are the subtler forms of being put in your place as a woman…

“We talked for probably about 40 minutes, and at the end of the conversation he says, OK my dear, talk to you later, and hangs up. And I was stunned.”

Then there’s the question of what to do about it…

“I think it’s important to speak up, because a lot of it comes out very unconsciously. I don’t know that they spend a lot of time thinking I’m going to demean that woman over there, I think it’s just automatic.”

Coming up, the first of two shows on sex and power in the 21st century workplace.

---

I was at a birthday dinner in December and the hostess said ‘have you ever done a show on sexual harassment?’ She’s a lawyer and she talked about how this one judge always talks about her looks or the way she’s dressed – but simply does not take her seriously as an attorney. He always addresses his business questions to her male colleague. Now to a lot of people that’s not quite sexual harassment, but it’s certainly related, and so many women face this kind of thing in their daily lives.

I’m going to start the show by talking about something some people think of as totally innocuous: terms of endearment. I heard from a listener last year saying I’m in my mid-20s -- how are women like me meant to be taken seriously as professionals when vendors, clients, colleagues – they call us things like sweetheart and honey?

Ibby Caputo faced a similar problem recently. She’s a freelance journalist, she lives in Boston.  She works in radio like me. And not long ago she was hired to work with a guy on his audio project. She was brought on as his editor.

“I was excited about this job but there were these red flags that stared coming up…we were talking on the phone and working out an episode of his podcast. We talked for probably about 40 minutes, and at the end of the conversation he says, OK my dear, talk to you later, and hangs up. And I was stunned. And as the editor, the editor is person who guides the story, shapes the story, who has some authority – so I felt in that moment he took everything away. I am my husband’s dear, I am my father and mother’s dear but I am not the person I work for’s dear.”

AM-T: So did you address it right away – how did you deal with it?

“I did address it right away and I’m looking up the text I sent right now. I addressed it, not in the most direct way…I did not call him back or anything…let’s see here.”

She admits she took the easier route by sending a text rather than bringing it up in a phone conversation. And she lived miles away from him so this whole job was done over the phone and by email. In her text she said, she had to put this out there, that he’d called her ‘my dear’ and it was, she said, ‘a big no-no’…

“So that’s what I said. And then I wrote, OK? And he did not reply. And I sent that at 4.08p.m. And then I got an email from him about future work. So he just ignored it. And I called up a friend and asked her if my reaction was -- because I started doubting myself, and I asked her if my reaction was legit, and she confirmed my reaction was legit. So I sent a second text, again, not the most direct way of doing it, and I said, ‘I got your email about the episode, I really need you to acknowledge my text about terms of endearment…I need to make sure we are square on that before we move on.’ Then he wrote back, ‘Sorry for the delayed reply, I was making dinner, and sorry for the term of endearment, it won’t happen again, OK?’”

So she thought, great, that went well. But it wasn’t really over. Over the next little while there were some difficulties with the show they were working on – the usual work stuff, and then in a phone call he brought up her manner…

“He said, ‘your edits are awesome, I love what you’re doing for the show. But the direct way you talk to me makes me scared to talk to you. My last editor was a really nice person.’ So my stomach just kind of sank because I’m a really nice person too, I think, but that has nothing to do with anything.”

And that other editor, that nice person – she was a woman too. And as a society we still largely expect women to be nice, to tread carefully around others. Ibby was busting that gender stereotype by being straightforward. And suddenly she found herself on the phone, on the defensive…

“You know, so it was this really weird situation, right, because at least when something like that happens over email you have time to think and digest but all of a sudden I felt like I had to defend myself because of the direct way I talk, or what he perceives as direct speech, which in my understanding is a great quality for an editor to have, you don’t want to waste anyone’s time, you want to be clear. So I started defending myself – I said, ‘I’m very literal and direct and it’s about the work.’ And I said, ‘I’m all business, it’s about the work.’ And then he laughed and he said, ‘yeah, you are all business’ – you know, as if it was a bad thing.”

Ibby began to go over everything that had happened in this back and forth that had started with that first text…and wonder…

“I just wonder, a lot of times I ask myself, well if I had a penis what would be different about this situation? If I were a man, would I be coming up against these things?”

Would a man who was direct with another man be told he was ‘scary to talk to’ – doubtful.

“I think the thing that is the most damaging is I have to question myself – is there something wrong with me? And of course I questioned, is there something wrong with me, what is wrong with me. And fortunately there was a social gathering that night with people in the industry so I was able to talk about it, to men and women, and get feedback on the situation, which helped to restore my confidence. But I feel like without that feedback the easiest route is to question yourself and question what you could be doing differently.”

And of course that is a big part of this – feeling isolated, like you can’t talk about it or you’re afraid of being judged. We’re going to come back to Ibby in a later show.

I also spoke to Kathi Elster and Katherine Crowley for this show. They run a business together where they focus on workplace relationships, and have done for 26 years. So they’ve had their share of demeaning comments – including quite recently when the publisher of one of their books announced, ‘you ladies have worked your panties off on this one.’ But some of their clients – they’ve had much worse experiences. Two female clients lost their jobs recently after refusing the advances of male colleagues. Katherine says this stuff often starts slowly…

KC: “When a young employee first experiences a boss sitting on their desk, leaning closely, arranging to go on a business trip in a very intimate setting – usually what the employee tells herself is nothing is really happening here, or he is just friendly to me, or this is just part of moving my career forward. It tends to build over time where there are a few gestures and you then find yourself in a fully compromised situation…I was thinking of the car ride back to the hotel where the boss suddenly is assuming she will be sleeping with him, and that’s further on in the relationship, that’s not the first blink.

KE: So that was in the financial industry, the company was bought by a London company, she was brought over to do some business with a guy… the gentleman was much older than her, I’m going to call him grandpa…I think there are a lot of dirty grandpas in the workplace. He took her home, back to her hotel, gave her a ride, and assumed he was going to be invited up and brought into her room. She couldn’t believe it. She turned him down and she did OK, there were no repercussions from that…but she was really embarrassed, and put in a horrendous position.”

KC: “And that’s the other part, I think often women wonder if they’ve done something to bring it on. So when it starts to happen they’re not just feeling angry and insulted, they’re feeling ashamed and embarrassed and very confused…so finding the words to say in that moment I think is very challenging.”

This kind of predatory behavior is something I’m going to discuss more in the next show.

For now I want to focus on the smaller things – things some people find flattering, others less so – a nickname here, a touch during a meeting there.

I put a call out on Facebook to see what you had experienced in the way of terms of endearment. And I got quite a few replies. I read some of them out to Kathi and Katherine…

AM-T: “One male supervisor called me kiddo for almost 8 years. That and ‘buckaroo’ she’s had to put up with…Then one of my Danish listeners said a senior male colleague called her ‘little friend’, and she pointed out that she’s a lot taller than he is. And then somebody wrote I worked with someone at a global nonprofit agency the whole world has heard of who told me he was going to spank me if I filled out a form incorrectly…”

Then there’s Ibby’s ‘my dear’ issue and the listener in her 20s who said, how am I meant to progress when colleagues keep using these terms? How am I meant to discourage them while maintaining the relationship?

Many of us either grin or grit our teeth and bear it.

AM-T: “With these little things this is so tricky for women to deal with – because depending who is in the room you’re afraid of looking like quote ‘that woman’ of upsetting the dynamics in the room and coming out of it looking bad. In 2016 what are we supposed to do about this?”

KE: “It’s a really good question. If it works for her to laugh back and say, OK honey – basically make it into a joke, so that it’s not ugh, there’s a girl in the room, and then all the men start looking at her as less than…but sometimes it doesn’t work and you have to let it go and you can say something at another time if you’re alone with that person…you can say I’d prefer if you refer to me by my name, use my name, the endearments are lovely, but you can just say my name.’ I think it’s important to speak up, because a lot of it comes out very unconsciously. I don’t know that they spend a lot of time thinking I’m doing to demean that woman over there, I think it’s just automatic. You don’t have to call them on it, I think when women get really angry in the moment that makes them look bad.”

That’s unfair, but it seems to be true. There’s academic research to back it up – men and women do not respond well to angry women at work.

And we’ll come back to that idea of the endearments being lovely – or not – a bit later.

I’m part of a women’s journalism organization called JAWS – it stands for Journalism and Women’s Symposium. And there was a big discussion on the listserve recently because of one woman’s experience. She was a board member at a non-profit. They were having a meeting. She was the only woman in the room. And the guy next to her – he kept touching her during the meeting. He sort of stroked her arm when he met her, then he poked her a few times when he was making points. She hated it but she kept her mouth shut. But she felt bad about that afterwards.

KC: “I think we all need a list of terms to say in those moments, right. I will say I think everyone has their own response to moments like that. So there are people who shut down, if you tend to shut down, that’s one thing, then there are people who become furious, that’s another, so it would almost be worth it to be prepared with how do you want to respond…

KE: I mean one of the things you could say if someone’s poking you is I don’t love being touched so keep your hands somewhere else, so you’re not bringing attention to your reaction, you’re bringing the attention more to him, or you can subtly change your seat, and then that will show people.”

We talked a lot about an idea Ibby raised with me – that women need some kind of online toolkit we could all refer to. It would be full of responses to use in these kinds of situations, and they could vary depending on different people’s personalities and comfort levels with being direct. But at least we’d have a resource.

I’m also keen to hear from you about your experiences with unwanted attention at work – have you taken action in the moment and if so, how did it go?

Next I brought up Ibby’s  ‘my dear’ episode. She did stand up for herself, she said something, but then the man she was working with told her he was intimidated by her…

AM-T: “So she felt that after all that she had hurt the relationship by saying something…”

KE: “You see I think it was the text…anything that’s written, a text or an email, can be read incorrectly, but if you were to go to the person to say I’m sure you didn’t mean it, it was very sweet of you to use an endearment, but I’d prefer you to use my name going forward, then he knows it’s not coming out of anything that’s going to make him scared of you, it’s just your preference.”

AM-T: “But why do we have to say it’s sweet of you to use it? I don’t think it is sweet, it’s really annoying. It’s 2016!”

KE: “Yeah, I understand, but we haven’t evolved, the human being hasn’t evolved, we’re still humans and the male ego is such we want to get along with them and enlighten them and bring them forward, not make them the enemy.

KC: Actually I would like to go back to what he said, which I think is a very honest statement. I think most men are terrified of women, and so a lot of those terms are for them to manage their fears and insecurities about working with women. In one of our books we have a category called the unconscious discriminator. And that’s one of my favorite categories, because I think if you want to be inflamed you can, but this is a professional situation. Even if you say, it may not have been your intention but I’m not comfortable with those terms, you can give the person the benefit of the doubt without saying they’re lovely, but still address it and try to nip it in the bud. And it’s not like every sexual harassing person is a lovely guy at the core, but addressing it in a non-inflammatory way is your best way out.”

KE: “Unless it’s one of those dirty grandpas, if it’s one of the older men, who really, you could be their granddaughter, or even their daughter, to me that’s a little gross. If they come on and they’re really lecherous you do have to right to their face say that is not allowed…you can’t speak to me that way, I don’t appreciate that, and I am not going to have a sexual relationship with you. I mean I think you have to be more direct with those types.”

AM-T: “Just referring back to what you were saying Katherine…one of the responses on this women’s journalism list thread to the problem of, ‘I was at a nonprofit meeting and the guy was touching me,’ one women wrote, it aggravated her she said that ‘we’re trained to tiptoe around men’s feelings even as they’re stepping on our own.’ And I think that does annoys a lot of people – they’re like, why should I respond in a soft way…why should we do that when they don’t do that to us?”

KE: “Well why are we that way with children? We don’t get angry and yell at children either when we’re educating them or teaching them something because it wouldn’t get through. But we do it in a more sympathetic way and show them how to do it. If you want to assume the superior of the sexes you have to educate, you can’t fight your way through that. We’ve seen people do that and that usually backfires. They’ll just stay away from you and you won’t get what you want. I think the more you want to be insulted by this and it is very insulting, I’m not saying it’s not, but the response doesn’t have to be hate to hate, it doesn’t have to be equal.

KC: Yeah, I have all sorts of opinions about this because by the way I don’t think it’s just men that harass, there are plenty of women who use their sexuality to get ahead. And to understand that while we want to be professional that the workplace does have two genders, and that there is going to be sexual tension…and some people are not going to be as smart as others in terms of the proper boundaries. So I’m an older person, relative to someone 20 or 30. I’ve come to that decision. When I was in my 20s or 30s I hated it when someone made sexual advances to me. I was realizing when I did the Peace Corps, there I was the minority American woman and men would shout obscenities at me because they assumed American women were slutty so they felt they had free license to say whatever they wanted to me. And I did not take the high road, so I shouted back because I didn’t know what to do, and that’s part of it. So to just accept and have awareness…even though it isn’t fair this is part of one’s professional development. You don’t have to embrace it and say that is fabulous…just say this is part of your reality.”

I don’t think it should be part of our reality at this point in time. But the evidence all around me shows it is. And I also want to talk about that men comment Kathi made, about treating men like children. On the one hand, I get it – some older men stuck in the past may need educating. And anyone who’s been in the workplace for a while knows diplomacy is a big part of the game. 

On the other hand if we take this approach aren’t we’re infantilizing men? And aren’t we letting them off the hook in all sorts of ways? That’s a tough one for me.

Katherine says she knows a 50-something guy who landed a big job at a nonprofit – but not long after starting he was taken aside by HR and told to nix what he thought were harmless comments, because the women in the office found them insulting. Things like ’you look lovely’ or ‘got a date tonight?’

“…and he curtailed his behavior but he was not aware of it…for many men, and because the level of sensitivity varies so much from woman to woman and workplace to workplace, it’s confusing to them. And with the sexual revolution it’s even more confusing. If you think about the access men have to images and to sex and to women of all shapes and sizes I think a tendency to objectify women is there, and so the need to correct and instruct and inform and educate men about what is appropriate language and behavior remains a big job for all companies.”

At this point I’m dying to hear from male listeners – if you have thoughts about any of this either write to me or even better send me a voice memo from your phone so I can include you as part of the next show – that’ll come out on February 22nd – I’m at ashley at thebroadexperience dot com.

Here’s what I’ll say in closing. Cultural change takes a long time. Women have risen relatively quickly in the workplace during the past few decades…but society is still catching up. You can see it in the way the media portrays women – yes, it’s got better, especially on TV, but still, look at the ads around you. I mean on the New York subway they still have breast enlargement ads with women holding melons up their chests. This kind of thing is not helping us. And it’s everywhere.

I used to think millennial men were models of enlightenment…but I’ve heard a few things since I’ve been doing the show that have made me less sure. Again I’d love to hear your views on that by email, voicemail or just a comment on the website.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time.

If you haven’t given the podcast a review on iTunes I would love it if you did. And if you’d like to support this one-woman show go to the support tab at TheBroadExperience.com – you can find out more about the official show T-shirt there as well.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.

Episode 76: Communicating While Female

“I have decided that rather than changing myself to be taken more seriously, I would rather just stay who I am and make people take people like me more seriously.”

— Jessie Char

“Our true selves don’t show when we’re in more anxiety ridden situations...Why do we think we should be born an amazing communicator? We’re not.”

— Ita Olsen

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time – women and communication. Women are often criticized for the sound of their voice, the language they use, they way they apologize – and some of them are saying ‘enough.’

“I think that I have decided that rather than changing myself to be taken more seriously I would rather just stay who I am and make people take people like me more seriously.”

But not everyone applauds that decision….

“Instead of battling against it and saying this is who I am…this isn’t who you are. You weren’t born using upspeak, you weren’t born undermining yourself. These are habits we’ve developed over time.”

Habits she says we can un-learn.

Coming up, women’s voices and communication styles play into a perception problem…but whose problem is it?

---

I live in the US and over the past couple of years or so women’s voices have got a lot of attention. And not in a good way. There’s been a lot written about the tendency to use upspeak – that’s when you have a rising intonation at the end of a sentence. And then there’s vocal fry, when your voice gets a bit creaky at the end. Even though men certainly use upspeak – and probably vocal fry – we don’t hear nearly as much about their communication issues.

Jessie Char knows all about this. She works in tech in San Francisco. She gave a talk last year at an industry conference and during the talk she spoke about how she, a young woman, is perceived in part because of the way she sounds.

AM-T: “When did you first realize that some people had an issue with your voice, your speaking voice?”

“I used to be on a podcast called Let's Make Mistakes on Mule Radio with Mike Monteiro and I had really -- after I've been on it for like a year, I hadn't looked at any of the iTunes reviews. And I was thinking like oh, like people on Twitter seem to really like this podcast. You know I was starting to meet people in the real world that actually had recognized me from my voice, like being in an elevator, and somebody being like oh, are you Jessie Char? And I was thinking like, I'm pretty cool. And then I went and I finally did the iTunes reviews and there weren't like a ton of comments, but the only comments about me were about how dumb I sounded. And how annoying my voice was -- somebody said it was like nails on a chalkboard, that was actually the title of their review. ‘Nails on a chalkboard.’ And how some people would fast forward through the parts where I spoke, so they could avoid listening to me.”

AM-T: “I mean that’s pretty – it’s galling, it’s gutting actually to see that kind of feedback about something that’s so personal, it’s part of your identity.”

“Yeah, and it’s not a thing I can change or work on – I mean you know I could technically get a vocal coach and speak in a lower register. But it is me, it’s not a thing I can really work on.”

Jessie’s part of a larger group of women who feel the same way – and they are getting fed up of being criticized for how they speak.

AM-T: “My background is in public radio and women public radio reporters get so much blowback about their voices…and it’s become a topic of conversation in the past couple of years. Because listeners of both sexes write in and they’re really mean about these women’s voices. They’re probably mostly young women… but it’s the kind of feedback that men rarely get. And some of these women are saying I’m female so of course my voice is higher, and b) who are you to tell me how to sound?”

“Yeah, and those conversations about the public radio voices were kind of what awakened my realization that it wasn't just me, and it wasn't about me, it was a part of a larger, I say unfair criticism of women's voices, and it was…Over the last ten years for me as I’ve transitioned into adulthood I think I have just had this gradual awakening of what sexism really is and what it means to me and how it impacts me in a very real and very consistent way. You know there were times when I was younger when you know, like I wear a lot of dresses, I'm a very girly person, in my talk I wore a pink dress. Very intentionally. Because you know, at at lot of tech conferences you see a lot of gray hoodies. And I used to get criticisms like, maybe you should dress a little bit less girly, so that people take you more seriously. And you know that was a thing that I originally also took a little bit personally and like yeah, I maybe am dressing incorrectly for what I want to be perceived as. But just over time I just started realizing more and more that it's not me, and it really isn't just about the way that I dress…”

Or the way she speaks. She says it’s about other people’s inability to see her as fine the way she is. She doesn’t want to change herself to meet some societal expectation for a professional woman.

“I think that I have decided that rather than changing myself to be taken more seriously I would rather just stay who I am and make people take people like me more seriously. Which I hope is a shift that can happen.”

I wonder how long that shift will take. Part of the reason I’m doing this show is that a lot of us work for large companies and they see professionalism as looking and sounding the part.  

I was a guest on the My Crazy Office podcast at the end of last year. An HR person for a law firm wrote in to the show. They admitted they were passing over young – mostly female – lawyers for jobs because they sounded unprofessional with all their upspeak and vocal fry. Then a female engineer wrote in furious that she hadn’t got a promotion – it had gone to a less experienced guy. She’d found out her boss thought she sounded like a Kardashian. He didn’t see her as smart enough to get the job.

Teo Cristea is an actor. She lives in LA and I spoke to her because she has used a voice coach. She wanted to reduce her foreign accent to land better parts. She’s Romanian but she moved to Canada aged 12 and then to the US as an adult. She’s learned how to speak from further back in her mouth and drop the hard consonants of her native country, so when she needs to she can sound completely American.

“The best feelings actually was…I went out for a role that required a foreign accent. I went in speaking perfect American in case I didn’t get the role, I wanted them to know that I could do more than just the foreigner. And the casting director was so worried she felt the need to remind me that this was an audition for a foreign girl and could I do the accent that was required?”

That was huge for her. Her coach helped her with her upspeak too. Like most of us, she didn’t even realize she was doing it.

“I think it’s a result of not being confident about a topic you’re discussing or a situation that you’re in – or not being comfortable exerting that confidence.”

She found nixing the upspeak changed the way people saw her.

“It was a nice confidence boost and people listened to me differently. If someone notices you questioning yourself then they will question you as well.”

But she does think women get unfairly penalized for this…

“I don’t think it is an issue that is limited only to women. I think looking at it that way is actually pretty cruel because it puts women in this little corner saying you are all these negative things…and then to the men who exhibit these symptoms, this coping mechanism or whatever makes them speak this way, it’s sort of ignoring the fact they also have an issue.”

Like upspeak, using a lot of qualifying words in speech or emails is another thing that can make you seem uncertain. Maybe you’ve heard about the new Gmail plug-in that draws your attention to justs and ‘I thinks’ and ‘sorry’s  in your emails – they’re all seen as words that undermine your message.

Jessie Char does pay attention to this stuff.

“I've done a lot of work on my e-mails because you know certain e-mails you want to make sure are very, very clear. And I think that it does help in some cases to look through and see how many justs or maybes or possiblys you have in there and maybe take some of them out, just to strengthen the message. But at the same time I also prefer communicating in a slightly softer tone. Now whether that's a product of you know not wanting to be perceived as too harsh because I'm a woman, because it's so impossible to decouple what is really coming from me versus what is the product of all of the outside influence I get. It's hard to determine that, but I guess, me, as I am with all of my external influences, I do like to soften my emails. Just a little bit and. I don't find that I get negative results out of that, at least at least not that I am aware of.”

I’m the same way. I keep an eye on my justs, but I generally craft my emails carefully. They’re less direct than they could be but I’m OK with that.  And if I’m writing to another woman, I may leave in a just or two that I’d take out if it were writing to a man.

Apologizing is another dance. Women are being urged to apologize less…but there’s cultural stuff here too. For a lot of women – or Brits or Canadians – there’s something polite about all that apologizing. 

Jessie does say sorry more than she’d like. And she isn’t sure how worried to be about it.

“This could be kind of a product of the whole package of me. Looking the way I do and speaking the way I do and whatever my stature is, I'm very short also. And there are just some times when you know I’ll be in a business meeting and I'll be talking to a group of women and men, or just men, because it's tech and sometimes you just end up in a group like that. And it just looks like the words are going in one ear and out the other. And then I panic and backtrack and am not as confident that they are listening to what I'm saying and so I need to like, mix it up a little bit to get their attention or apologize to get their attention. It's like, not an intentional thing that I do at all, but I know it is a thing that I do and I don't know…Since I haven't experienced being a dude or taller or with a lower voice or like a more pant-suit wearing gal…I don't know how I would be perceived differently and if that would change.”

But she’s not keen to start lowering her voice or wearing a Hillary pant suit because she wants to feel like herself.

We’ll come back to that idea in a minute with a very different point of view.

So I know plenty of women in tech listen to the show and I want to let you know about a conference called Write/Speak/Code – they’re sponsoring the show today. Write/Speak/Code takes place in Chicago in June and it’s all about getting women developers to become speakers, thought leaders, and open source contributors. I did a show called Women in Tech Speak up back in 2013 where I went to the conference and we talked a lot about women’s fear of calling ourselves experts and how to change that.

And if your company would like to sponsor the event the organizers would love to hear from you – all the information is at writespeakcode.com.  

Ita Olsen is a communications coach – she’s the person who worked with Teo Cristea on her accent and her upspeak. I also worked with her several years ago to get rid of my filler words – so things like um, y’know, and like – my radio interviews were full of these and I worked with Ita to rein them in.

Her company is called Convey Clearly. As usual I wanted to know a bit about her past and why she got so interested in communication in the first place.

“I remember in 2nd grade Sister Thomasine was my phonics teacher. I’ve always been interested in it. I’ve always been interested not just in the sounds but the relationships and what communication skills do for you.”

Note those last words – what communication skills do for you. She’s always been focused on the idea of using communication to get what you want. And pretty early on she decided her accent wasn’t going to cut it.

“…at the age of 14 I changed my Long Island accent…

AM-T: “How did you sound?”

“I can hardly do it, but I’ll try [does an example of before and after]

Before I was 14 I thought that’s the way it is, that’s how I sound. But no, it’s not a permanent characteristic of mine, I don’t need to stick with it – God-given Long Island accent. I could have been born anywhere, you know?”

So she changed it.

“I got rid of that accent. It took me a few years. I got it totally out of my speech. And then in my 20s I changed my voice. So I had very high pitch…a higher pitch, oh my gosh, this was me giving a presentation at the age of 21. Two people away from me they’d be saying, ‘Ita, can you speak up? I can’t hear you.’ I was so nervous…I’d have a closed throat…what happens when you have a closed throat is your pitch went really high, I went up at the end. And I was insecure and afraid, and you know what, I’m still insecure, I’m still afraid, but I can’t allow that to interrupt my trajectory of my life. I need to keep going, I need to succeed. So I had to make sure I changed the way I spoke.”

Plenty of people think the same way. Her clients often come to her as they’re moving up at work – they may be managing people, they want to come across as more confident, or just get people to listen to them properly and do what they say. Ita says there’s so much power in the human voice – why wouldn’t you want to use it to your advantage? A lot of the work involves doing throat and tongue relaxation exercises, learning where to take deep breaths, and slowing down.

Ita says it’s the women who are most surprised by the outcome. 

“And a lot of the women that come to me, halfway through the program they’ll say this is too much power, like people are doing exactly what I tell them to do…and they want to tone it down at first and I make sure they really bring it all the way. Because we have a responsibility to do our jobs, and do it fairly well…and if we’re kind of timid and not getting our message out there then we’re not living up to that responsibility, so it’s really important.”

Quite a few clients want to be heard more during meetings.

AM-T: “Is it mostly women who come to you with that request, that desire to be heard in meetings or is it guys as well?”

“It’s both, but I would say it’s more women who talk about the meetings, because they get up there and they’re really being interrupted. And everyone wants to place the blame on the people who are interrupting them, but it’s not really – that’s not really where the problem is. The problem with being interrupted is because you’re using a run-on sentence, you’re not being concise, because you’re using upspeak. These sort of things are actually impacting the way other people are processing your information. They can’t process it to a really precise degree. So no one’s trying to be, I don’t know what people are trying to be, maybe some people are…but people aren’t really trying to be mean and say you’re not worthy, you’re not saying anything we want to hear. It’s that you’re not putting your message out as well as you should. And it’s not something that we’re trained – we have to learn this, we have to go about improving ourselves and training ourselves to be able to communicate in this concise fashion, this persuasive fashion.”

Now manterrupting definitely exists – I hardly need to tell some of you this. Plenty of women have experienced that thing where you’ve barely begun to speak when a male colleague runs right over you.

But this isn’t the first time I’ve heard or read about women using run-on sentences. In fact I know I do it myself. Again I guess it’s a question of should that be OK, or should we ramblers learn to be concise, to be better understood?

Going back to what Jessie was talking about earlier in the show, I asked Ita if some women come to her because of the quality of their voices…and she said yes.

“People come to me because when they answer the phone people will say can I speak to your mommy, or did I get the right number? Because they have such a high, tight pitch they sound like a child. But just about everyone I work with ends up with a little bit of a lower pitch because the reason why we have this too high pitch – the reason why we do any of these things, upspeak, glottal fry, run-on sentences, really high pitch - is because our throats are really tense. And this is not an abnormal thing. Everybody has tension in their upper bodies and their vocal mechanism. And the more tension in a situation, the more tense we’re going to be. We have to work on eliminating tension from our bodies.”

AM-T: “Mmm, so you mean…but surely there are some of us who because of heredity have naturally quite high voices?”

“You know…

It may be true, but nobody’s really working with their true voice. Nobody. Unless you’ve learned to open up your throat you’re not using your true voice.”

AM-T: “Huh. Am I using my true voice?”

“Ahh! That’s scary.  I think you’re most of the way there.”

AM-T: “Most of the way there?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

And just to flip back for a minute, did you notice what she did after I asked my question about heredity…

AM-T: …have naturally quite high voices?

[pause, then a breath] “you know…”

That pause, that deep breath before she began speaking – she says it’s all part of what makes you a clearer communicator.

Ita doesn’t just work on voices. She looks at communication across the board, including how you come across in writing. 

“And that’s one of the things I work on with my clients. I had this client at a Fortune 500 company, she was so high up she reported to the CEO…and we were role-playing a meeting she was to have the next day. And she said, “Um, this is just an initial raw draft.” Just, initial, raw and draft all mean the same thing! So talk about coming across as afraid and not strong. So we had her saying to her boss, ‘hey boss, here’s my draft, get a look and let me know what you think.’ Within days he stopped micromanaging her. So she learned to use direct, plain, active language with precise breath groups – that means stopping at appropriate phrases. And people started taking her more seriously -- he, the CEO, stopped micromanaging her and he started respecting her for her opinion.

So these slight little changes, instead of battling against it and saying ‘accept me for who I am,’ this isn’t who you are. You weren’t born using upspeak, you weren’t born putting yourself down or undermining yourself. These are habits we’ve developed over time for various reasons.”

And of course those reasons often have to do with playing out our gender the way we’re expected to. I use softer language in emails because subconsciously I know that’s how I’m expected to come across.

As for speaking, Ita says by learning relaxation exercises and a few other techniques you can come across as perfectly feminine if you want to, yet authoritative. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.

She doesn’t understand the resistance to changing something that could be hurting you at work – or anywhere else.

“Why don’t people accept us for who I am? Shouldn’t I just be able to sound exactly how I sound – that’s how I sound. But why would we think we shouldn’t get better at communicating? It’s the one single pivotal thing that gets us what we need out of life. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education and when we go into the interview we blow it. And if we didn’t blow it we still didn’t come across as well as we can when we’re sitting chatting with our closest confidantes. Our true selves don’t show when we’re in more anxiety ridden situations. We can hire a tennis pro, we take music lessons, we go to the gym, we improve all aspects of ourselves. Why do we think we should be born an amazing communicator? We’re not.”

Ita Olsen. Thanks to her, Jessie Char and Teo Cristea for being my guests on this show.

Let me know what you think. D’you think it’s caving to a sexist society to change your communication style, or do you think of it as self-improvement?

You can comment at The Broad Experience dot com or on the show’s Facebook page. And I did another show on communication in 2014 – that one’s called Communication at the Office, it’s episode 46 if you want to look it up.

If you’re in tech don’t forget to check out writespeakcode.com.

Talking of technology please subscribe to the show on iTunes or however you listen to podcasts, you can also do it on the Acast app – I’ve joined a podcast network called Acast along with lots of other great shows. You’ll be hearing more about them in a future show.

And finally, I’m recording my part of this episode on a new fancy recorder I bought with your contributions to the podcast – so thank you.

I'm Ashley Milne-Tyte. See you next time.

Episode 75: Redefining Success

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time, leaving a job for a new work life – even if you don’t yet know what that life will look like…

“There becomes this thing inside of us that we know if we don't jump we're going to die inside just a little. And so that impulse just becomes so strong we have to listen to it and the emotional simply outweighs the functional.”

But you may have to work out who you are when you’re no longer your job…

“I started to question whether I had ambition anymore. Like did I lose it somewhere or did I drop it and did it roll it into the sewer. Because I had always had it. I'd always had a huge ambition.”

Coming up – disrupting yourself, what can happen afterwards, and re-defining success.  

But first…

This episode of The Broad Experience is sponsored by Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs is a nonpartisan magazine—they publish thoughtful pieces by experts who span the political spectrum, so they let readers form their own opinions about today’s most important global issues. Broad Experience listeners get a special discount – more than three-quarters off a subscription to Foreign Affairs— to sign up, go to ForeignAffairs.com/Broad.

The end of one year, the beginning of a new one – it’s a time when a lot of us think about where we are in our lives and what we might like to change. In this show we’re going to talk to two women who changed their work lives dramatically. They essentially jumped into the unknown. One was restless at her job, the other was much more unhappy. But each of them felt it was time to go.

We had a 3-way Skype call. I asked each woman to introduce herself.

“Hi, this is Tess. I am a former public radio host and current author of the book Leap: Leaving a Job with No Plan B to Find the Career and Life You Really Want.”

“Hi, this is Whitney Johnson. I’m a former Wall Street Equity analyst. I co-founded an investment firm with Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School, and I am the author of Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work.”

I know Tess Vigeland from Marketplace, the public radio business show here in the US. I used to listen to her all the time, then I began working for Marketplace myself. Tess hosted the morning show for several years, then she hosted the weekly personal finance show Marketplace Money. And then, at the top of her game…she left. We’ll talk more about that in a bit.

Whitney Johnson started working in finance as a secretary – she had a music degree and zero business experience. But over the years she was promoted again and again and she became a successful research analyst, analyzing different companies’ stock. And then she too quit. She left that unexpected career and that big paycheck… to become an entrepreneur.

Disruption is probably a familiar term if you’re in the start-up world or even the wider business world. Whitney calls this type of move personal disruption – you start at the low end, climb to the top as she did, then you jack it all in to start all over again, and learn a whole new set of skills…

“Initially I felt this absolute thrill, this exhilaration, like you know I've just jumped off of this huge peak. But then there were moments where I felt this loss of identity. I could no longer call people and say it’s Whitney Johnson from Merrill Lynch, it was just now Whitney Johnson, and there have been certainly lots of days where the P. E. or puke-to-excitement ratio has been so incredibly high I feel like I'm on this thrill ride to zero cash flow. So it's been scary, it’s been lonely, but one of the things I've discovered about disruption is that if it's scary and lonely I'm usually on the right track.”

AM-T: “Tess…weigh in.”

“The thrill ride to zero cash flow, I’m familiar with that.  So yes, I actually disrupted myself before even knowing what that phrase was, what it meant. And I'm grateful to Whitney for identifying it because it's a really scary thing to do when you think that you're all alone and you're crazy. And that's pretty much how I felt when I left my career, my twenty-two year career in public radio. It was what I worked for my whole life. From the moment I left college. And I got it at age thirty-two. And for eleven years I was with a program that you and I know very well, Ashley, Marketplace. We both worked there. And I had an anchor job. And all I ever wanted to do was be famous on the radio and all the sudden that's what I got.

And I spent eleven years there including six years in personal finance. And then, for all kinds of reasons, I left. And usually when you leave your dream job is for the next dream job, it’s for the next great thing that you're going to do. And I didn't have that lined up. And I left without having any idea what I wanted to do next - we're all supposed to have that dream that we're going to do next that the thing that we want to follow, that passion we want to pursue and. I didn't have that because I actually really loved my job. So for me the disruption was total, it was extraordinary. And it was awful. For the good part of the first part, and you know slowly over the last three years now I've learned that it was absolutely what I was what I was supposed to do. But I certainly didn't know that at the time.”

AM-T: “Whitney, you advocate disruption regardless of whether you’re in a situation you feel you have to get out of. Why should somebody do that if they’re feeling sort of fat and happy?”

WJ: “Oh, well…when you put it that way. What I would say is that if you think about – I think every human there's an imperative to actually move forward from stuck to un- stuck, to become more, become who you could be, not who you are. What I would say and I think this really goes to Tess’s idea and her story, is that…whenever we hire a job, we hire it to do and functional and emotional job for us. And a functional job is to put food on the table and to you know, basically be fat. But there's this emotional job that you're hiring your job to do which is, it can be satisfaction, it can be prestige, it can be stature, it can be learning – whatever. And almost always when we make that jump we're making the jump because the job no longer does the emotional job for us, and I suspect Tess if we were really to peel back the layers of why you made the leap and why I left Wall Street there were emotional jobs that were no longer being done and so there becomes this thing inside of us that we know if we don't jump we're going to die inside just a little. And so that impulse just becomes so strong we have to listen to it and the emotional simply outweighs the functional.”

TV: “Yeah, I would totally agree. And you know I would also argue that I was comfortable. I mean sure, I had things that were going on at work and yes, I was kind of tired of the subject matter and all that, but there was nothing like WRONG wrong. Nobody had kicked me, there wasn't anything that I could point to and say, ‘That is absolutely the reason that I should walk out this door.’ It would have been way easier to just stay there and be comfortable and do a job that a lot of people covet, and just to stay in what I intended to do which was, you know, die at the microphone. So for me it was actually much more, I mean it really was disruptive. Because it wasn't what I was supposed to do. It didn't make any sense, at least at the time.

But for me it's exactly what Whitney is is talking about, there were these emotional pulls that I was dealing with and I don't know why I listened to them at the time, people have asked me, why did you finally just decide to go? And it’s very hard to explain. But there was just a point at which I was like, you know, I'm not getting from this job what I need to get. You’re right, I hired it for a reason. And it's not performing for me. And I had to be selfish and say you know what, I need to do what’s best for me. And that means leaving without having any idea what comes next.”

AM-T: “It's interesting this idea of hiring a job. I bet most people do not think about it like that.”

“No they don't. That's one part of Whitney's book that was really eye opening for me. You know I never thought of it that way and I think it's a much healthier way to think about it. I think that shows a confidence in yourself when you're saying that you're going to hire the job. I mean, and that's the way it should be right? We are talent. We are the product. So I wish a lot more people would take what Whitney says and really absorb that and think about it that way.”

Still, making this kind of leap isn’t easy. Tess describes the aftermath as a rollercoaster. You leave, and then you think what have I done? All your security has gone. Yes, you left the politics and perhaps the toxicity of your workplace behind…but now, you’re on your own.

TV: “You know I would go through those valleys where I felt I was just a complete dolt for leaving my job and then I would have these peaks where I would have an independent project, I was working on some freelance project. And I would finish it and I would feel like wow - I did this on my own! I'm working for myself. And it is actually coming to fruition and I'm making money and I'm feeling good about the job I'm doing. But then of course the next day I wouldn't have that project any more and to be like, oh my God, I'm never going to work again. So it is it is very much a roller coaster but I tell you what I've learned is that those swings on the rollercoaster are a hell of a lot more interesting and exciting than the merry go round. “  

WJ: “Yeah, and what I would say, I would add is, I think about the work that I do now and it absolutely is a roller coaster and there are absolutely days that I feel scared and lonely but I also know that the work that I do now, I would say ninety percent of the time is exactly what I want to be doing. And Tess, you kind of alluded to this, this notion of when you work for yourself you have to actually figure out what your value is in the marketplace, and you have your strengths and you have to learn how to negotiate. So there's all these things that when you're inside of a large corporation, you can like sort of not own any of your power, because you negotiate your salary once and then after that you go about your business and you may negotiate three or five years later. Now we're continually every single day figuring out what our value in the marketplace is. And there's this whole notion of eating what you kill. And I and I hate to say it but I'm an adrenaline junkie, and every time I get a check in the mail my daughter, who’s 15 years old, laughs at me because I’m like, I love money. And she’s just like, really? And I’m like, yeah… you get that dopamine squirt when you get a check in the mail that you just simply don't get when you're working for someone besides yourself.”

AM-T: “But I’m going to step in and be that voice of reality of whatever you want to call it… Because you’ve both come from high paying jobs and industries, I mean Whitney, Wall Street, it goes without saying…and Tess, you were a national host…now as somebody whose most recent check in the mail was three hundred dollars, I can tell you now of course I was glad to get that three hundred dollars. But it wasn't six thousand dollars or fifteen thousand dollars. And for those of us who aren't in quite such a sort of high position…you two were able to do this because you did have a cushion. And what about people who don’t?”

 TW: “You know this is a question that I've gotten more than more than any other as I’ve talked about the book and its process and. You know I would say, I’d outright acknowledge that there is a privilege to be able to quit your job without having anything else lined up. Now that said, I do think that people can work toward being able to do it, it’s very difficult. But you know I think that we tend to look at our lives and say, well, this is what it's supposed to look. I have to have X. and Y. and Z. in my life or it's not going to look right. Well, if you adjust some of those expectations of yourself, which means, ignoring what you think everybody else thinks of you, then you know maybe you can take a second job for a while, maybe you can cut back on expenses somewhere, maybe you can even downsize your home. You know it depends what you're willing to do to make a better life for yourself, a better work life for yourself. But yeah, I absolutely was very fortunate that my husband at the time was able to pay the mortgage. And there's no way that we could have done it if that had not been the case. But again, it really is a matter of setting your priorities. And also being willing to step back, to step down from that lofty salary, from that lofty paycheck. I mean my first year out I made about a little over half of what I had made in salary and it was really hard because you know, I think we identify ourselves a lot with the with the money we bring in, with the title that we have. And I didn't have any of that anymore. And I had to figure out how to make the budget work on a lot less, and I was the primary breadwinner in my family. I made more money than my husband. So it was a long way to come down. And there's a lot of psychological emotional turmoil that comes with that.”

AM-T: Whitney?

WJ: “Yeah. I have so many ideas going through my head. I think first of all I would say, you're right, Ashley. There is a privilege that come with being able to have somewhat of a cushion. Two thoughts there, the first is that sometimes people use that cushion notion as an excuse. I remember someone saying to me well, I can’t quit my job. We did the five whys and it came down to it and he could, he had ten years' worth of savings in the bank, so I think the first thing I would say to someone when they say they can’t is, is that really why you can’t?

And the second thing I would say is there’s one thing to make a lot of money and there's another thing to actually save a lot of money. And that's something that I'm actually really learning how to do it to save and to build wealth in a way that I hadn’t when I was making a lot of money. And so I think that's been a really good important lesson for me, but I would add there, this is something that I touch on in the book is this notion of constraints. When you don't have as much of a cushion available to you, you figure out how to make money a lot faster than you would if you did have a big cushion. And it was only when I found that I was going through my nest egg - because interestingly I'm also the primary breadwinners as well – that I started to tap into what my real strengths were. Up until that time I could sort of dabble and go, I think I'm good at that and I think I'm good at the other thing. It was when, ‘OK, are we going to have money in the bank?’ that I started realizing what am I actually really good at that I do naturally that people would actually probably pay me for that right now I don't charge them for because it's just easy and fun?”

One of the things Whitney and Tess get paid for these days is public speaking. But that brings us to another point Whitney makes in her book about disruption – failure is usually part of the process. In her case, one day in particular sticks out.

WJ: “What happened is I was giving a speech, and sometimes I have performance anxiety. And I was up in front of people, there were a couple people in the room that I really cared about what they thought of me. And so I had a panic attack, or a stress episode is probably is a better way to describe it. And so I started talking, and I even had things written down so it’s not like I forgot what I was going to say, and I just kept getting sweatier and sweatier and sweatier, and you know just sweat dripping down my face so by the time I finished I looked like I’d run three miles. And that was really hard for me because I felt this intense experience of shame.”

She really had to work to divorce herself from that awful feeling…

WJ: “You know our society teaches us that our identity is equal to our successes and we learn that from a very young age. And so what I'm having to learn is OK, if I succeed or fail in any given moment, it has nothing to do with my sense of worth or my ultimate worth.”

TV: “We are always, always are harshest critics.”

AM-T: “And dare I say women are more so our harshest critics…”

“Well yes, and Ashley, so I would add there, so the other day someone asked me like which of these variables is harder or easier for women? I would say that the failure is the harder one for women because we tend to judge girls on their track record. And we tended to our judge boys on their potential. So every time a girl makes a mistake then that means her track record just got worse. And so her prospects for the future got worse so we feel more shame around it than a boy who we’re just like oh, that's OK because you know he'll do it better next time. So I do think that failure is especially acute for women, vis-a-vis men.”

AM-T: “Yeah and also you pointed this out and this is so true, that we’re the ones who pay attention in class, we’re the ones who think it's very important to do well in school and we measure ourselves by that kind of success. But then when you get out into the real world. And you realize that there are politics involved in the workplace, and you are not being judged on that essay you did, it's about so much more than the work you're putting in. I think I think women – a lot of us don't have that political savvy, we think that all you have to do is beaver away and you'll be rewarded, and that just isn't true.”

WJ: “Right, right. Which is why when my daughter says to me she’s going to go negotiate with her teacher I’m like, ‘You go girl.’ Because I know she has to get that skill. She needs that skill.”

May she become a master negotiator.

Now one of the most interesting things for me about Tess’s book Leap was that she really had a hard time in the aftermath of leaving her job, and not just in the first few months. It wasn’t a case of leaving an unhappy situation and finding her true self in the outside world. Far from it.

AM-T: “You’re really wrestling with yourself a lot during the book. There’s a lot of questioning of yourself, of you asking yourself why in the earlier months, years it was so hard for you to be in this new situation. You go in and analyze yourself. And I was as so interested in the part where you talk about ambition and the role ambition has played in your life, and you spoke to your parents. Can you talk about that, and what your dad said?”

TV: “Yes. So one of the biggest things for me when I left my job was that I felt like I was stepping away from something that I was supposed to be doing, that I was voluntarily leaving something that was so great -- and you know just to pick up on some of what Whitney just said, I think that particularly as a woman, you know I basically, what I did was I leaned out. And that is not what we are supposed to be doing these days as we all know. You know what I should have done, I kept telling myself you should've just stayed he should've kept pushing and pushing and pushing for that job that you really wanted, that you knew you were never going to get because there was a glass ceiling. But you should have kept trying, to have kept going, because that's what we're all supposed to do, especially as women – if you reach a certain point in your career, you are not supposed to step back. Much less step off the ladder. But that’s what I did, and I started to question whether I had ambition anymore. Like did I lose it somewhere or did I drop it and did it roll it into the sewer. Because I had always had it. I'd always had a huge ambition. I mean I said right off the bat here that I wanted to be famous on the radio. And I got that and I worked really hard to make that happen. So I wanted to explore why I was so obsessed with this idea that I had failed in my ambition. That I had failed in not really pursuing it to the ends of the earth.

And so I sat down with my parents. This is one of the great advantages of being a journalist and a book author is I actually had an excuse to sit down with my parents and stick a microphone in their faces, and we spent a long time talking about the whole notion of career. What it means, what it means to love your career. And then I asked them, I said, you know I have been feeling so bad about this and trying to figure out why it's so important to me to have a really high profile job. Why was I obsessed with that? Why was I so ambitious that all I wanted to do was be famous? Because there's no fame in my family. This didn't come from anywhere or from how I was raised, I just for some reason had this gene in me, and my dad said something to me that I will never ever forget. He said, ‘you know what Tess, I think when you were a kid you didn't like yourself very much. And I think what you've been doing ever since then is proving to people that you are valuable. That you mean something in this world.’

And of course I started crying and said, you're absolutely right. This is all about how I have felt as a girl, as a woman, as a person on this earth. And how I've never been truly comfortable with myself. And so for me a lot of the last three years have been coming to grips with who I am outside of what I do. Figuring out what my value is if I'm not, you know, some famous news broadcaster. People will still recognize my voice in the elevator and I love that. But I certainly don't have what I used to have. But at the same time I've also learned to let go of the external notions of what it means to be successful.”

AM-T: You talk about this at the end of the book as well, you call it ‘giving the middle finger to the success ladder.’

TV: “Did I say that? Yeah…we all I think especially in this country we grow up with this picture of what it means to be successful. Of what that looks like. And it's money. It's things. It's where we live, it's what we drive. Now we all know that that's not supposed to be important, but it just becomes important. And it becomes the way that you show that you have made a good life for yourself. And I had all that. I had all of it. You know I checked off all the boxes that I was supposed to check off to have that life, the only one I didn't check off was having children. But I checked off everything else including the dream job. And then I walked away from it and I had to figure out then what that new definition was for me. And is still evolving, I still don't know what it is and people are constantly        asking me how do you know what your definition of success is, and how can I apply that to my life? My answer to that is, I don't know what your definition is and I would hope that at some point we would all have different definitions. Because we're all individuals, we all have totally different lives that we're living and it shouldn't all be the same. And so why strive for looking the same? Why use some external measure of what that success is supposed to look like?

And as a preview, I am actually right now in the middle of unchecking all those boxes that I checked off, so I already checked off the career box. I’m now checking off the homeownership box, I'm checking off the ‘I have a bunch of things’ box. And I even unchecked my marriage box. And I am literally leaving the country in three weeks to travel and not have any of that comfort around me. Not have any of those notions of success around me at all, it's going to be me and two bags. And that's it. And so I'm kind of forcing myself into an even newer definition of what that success looks like and I don't know what I'm going to be.”

WJ: “You're leaping again.”

“I'm leaping again. Yep, I’m totally disrupting myself again.”

WJ: “That’s exciting.”

“It is. It’s scary. I’m terrified. But I did it three years ago and it worked out pretty well, so why not do it again?”

Tess Vigeland and Whitney Johnson. We had this conversation a few weeks ago. Tess has in fact just flown off to southeast Asia – for what she hopes will be at least a year. She says it’s her first ever year where she doesn’t have a plan.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. You can post comments on this episode on the website or on the show’s Facebook page.

And don’t forget to check out my sponsor at foreignaffairs.com/broad especially if you’re a news junkie.

And thanks again for all your support this year. I’ve heard from many of you by email, and some of you have supported the show with one-off donations or monthly donations. It means a lot and it all adds up as I continue to produce this one-woman show.

Thanks to Erin McMahon for her help on the business side of the show over the past few months.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. See you in 2016. 

Episode 74: On Confidence

“You see a man in a job interview and he answers off the cuff of his sleeve, he doesn’t think, oh my gosh, I might not able to do that, or could I do that.”

— Denise Barreto

“The times when I’ve had to ask for things it’s seemed so hard, it’s almost unthinkable that I would be able to ask for something and that I deserved it.”

— Stacey Vanek Smith

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time, we look at that invisible issue that runs beneath so many women’s lives: confidence – or rather, the lack of it, and what that means for our careers.

“You see a man in a job interview and he answers off the cuff of his sleeve, he doesn’t think, oh my gosh, I might not able to do that, or could I do that?”

And why it can be so hard for women to value what they bring to the table – especially when they’re negotiating…

“The times when I’ve had to ask for things it’s seemed so hard, it’s almost unthinkable that I would be able to ask for something and that I deserved it.”

Coming up – two women from different backgrounds on cultivating confidence and a sense of self-worth.

 But first, this episode of The Broad Experience is brought to you by MM.LaFleur. It’s a fast-growing, woman-run clothing brand committed to helping professional women "live with purpose and dress with ease." You’ll hear more about them a bit later in the show.

I’m a bit obsessed with confidence, mainly because I’ve never had much. You can see it written in my school reports right from when I was 7 up to 18 – lacks confidence. I’ve cultivated more of it over the years, but that voice in my head that tells me I’m not good enough, that I can’t do something – it’s never really gone away.  And I know it’s sometimes held me back at work.

Denise Barreto is the opposite of me. I first talked to her last year for a show I did on starting your own business. And I wanted to talk to her for this show because I remember how confident she seemed during our conversation. She struck me as having an enviable amount of confidence. Denise runs her own business near Chicago. It’s called Relationships Matter Now and it does strategic planning and marketing.

She says the confidence I hear comes from the fact she feels so competent at her job. So has she never heard that internal voice bringing her down?

“So when you’re talking about that voice, I don’t hear that voice when I’m going to speak in front of a crowd or when I’m walking into a room of executives or I’m walking into a room of elected officials and I’m about to tell them what they need to do – that voice is nonexistent. Perhaps in other situations, like I’m right now in a rough point in my marriage, and that that I hear voice isn’t about my competence or whatever it’s about, am I enough for my husband, have I done enough for him? Am I beautiful enough for him to keep his, you know I mean? Those kinds of things, but I think that’s a very different conversation, and I would say both on a personal and professional level all those things start when we’re children and the things that we’re told and we believe deeply about ourselves start when we’re children.”

Denise’s mother died when she was four. She and her sister were raised by her dad. She knows she missed a lot in losing her mother. But she says one advantage of having her father as the main caregiver was that she saw self-assurance in action every day.

“I gotta say first of all when you grow up with a man at the head of the household I think that’s a whole different dynamic than women. Men seem to be bullheaded confident right? A guy, there’s never a stretch thing for a guy, a guy will go for it. And so I do think that had a big impact on me - my dad wasn’t super-educated but he got out there and he had a really good job and when things didn’t work out he figured out a way to take care of things, so I think that influenced me a lot, and I gotta say losing…I think mothers are very nurturing and they kind of build into the emotional piece of a child, and I missed that, so I think one of the things I’m learning as an adult is that I just never felt things. I may have felt them but I just didn’t allow myself to because I was following the model of my dad, who, I don’t know if he ever felt things because there was no indication of that.”

Her dad faced a lot of challenges growing up, and as an adult…

“My dad grew up in the southern part of the United States under Jim Crow. So my dad is not your picture of confidence, OK. I would see white men humiliate my dad at the gas station driving through Indiana as a kid, and think to myself there’s no way anyone’s ever going to talk to me like that. So there are a lot of intersections and layers that we’re talking about. But you know my dad was born in Alabama in the 1930s…that’s not exactly a very confident time for black people in this country. So the confidence and instilling of my sense of confidence and self all came from him being a man.”

And not specifically a black man.

Last year I read a book called The Confidence Code. And there’s a part where an African-American lawyer, a woman, comments that a lot of black women her age went into the adult world with quite a bit of confidence. Because she says they’ve nearly all been raised by mothers who worked, women who supported families, sometimes single-handedly…so they don’t question the need to get out there and lead.  

I wanted to know if Denise saw that with the women she worked with…

“Most of the work I do I’m the only black woman there, it’s few and far between that I see a lot of black women, but I say definitely the confidence is there and I think too that black women have a tremendous shell that we put up because again this narrative that we hear that we’re not worthy of compassion and feminism and that goes way back in America even to slavery times, I mean we have always had to be strong and that has cultivated the ‘angry black woman’, and I think in general many of us do a lot of protecting ourselves and a lot of wall building in order to keep from letting folks in.”

But maybe there is that layer of confidence that lets you do things and not get eaten by self-doubt.

Still, she says, it’s rare she encounters any woman with quite the self-belief of the average man.

“There’s no stretch job for a guy, when he goes for a job and I hear this all the time because I do a lot of organizational development. You see a man in a job interview and he answers off the cuff of his sleeve, he doesn’t think to, oh my gosh I might not able to do that, or could I do that? He declares he can do that and figures it out later, whereas we are so much more realistic, we are more tuned into our talents and we’re more self-aware than they can be.”

But that self-awareness can undermine us as we question ourselves and sometimes miss out on opportunities.

Denise isn’t someone to let an opportunity pass her by. And she wants her teenage daughter to have the same can-do attitude. 

“I like when people say I’m pushy, that means I’m persuasive, right? So how do we help our girls take those things and not have them be albatrosses around their neck but really building blocks for their confidence. Because that’s a word that’s great on your resume, right? Persuasive?”

This episode of the show is sponsored by MM. LaFleur. Through their Bento Box model, MM.LaFleur takes the work out of dressing for work by delivering stylist-selected, work-appropriate looks right to your door. The pieces are travel-friendly, and a lot of them are machine-washable and wrinkle-resistant. 

When you order your Bento Box there’s no money up front – you get to try a bunch of pieces on at home, keep what you like, send the rest back. And if you order your box anytime from now until December 31st, you'll automatically be entered to win one of five $300 gift cards. Simply take their quick online survey and a gift card may be nestled in your box when it arrives. Visit mmlafleur.com to see the collection and start building your ultimate work wardrobe.

Stacey Vanek Smith is a correspondent for NPR’s Planet Money podcast and she’s also a friend of mine. We used to work together at another show. She’s highly accomplished but you’ll never hear her say it. She says self-deprecation is always how she’s dealt with her insecurities.

She first noticed the gulf between her attitude and that of some of the men around her when she was at journalism school.

“I mean I tended to be in the much more in the female camp of a more modest approach…I’m doing this internship, I’m just getting coffee…but I like the work they do…and I’m also working on this piece I’m excited about for class. And the guys would be like, oh, yeah, I’ve got this amazing internship and I’ve got this amazing piece I’m doing in class. And I remember thinking – I was almost embarrassed for them. But as I went on in my career I noticed that that actually works. It works. When people are like, ‘I’m awesome’, even if it’s so obviously coming from a place of deep insecurity, people believe it – it’s shocking to me. People can get very far in their careers on that kind of confidence and chutzpah.”

Meanwhile women (and men) who think it’s more seemly to let their work speak for them can find they’re missing out on promotions or projects.

Stacey’s seen this happen several times over the years. A young guy with bags of confidence – or at least bravado – comes in and competes for a job with a woman who already works at the company. And the woman may be more qualified, but the bosses often overlook her…

“’Cause it’s like the woman feels sort of dreary and unexciting, she’s been there so many years plugging away…the guy is the lightening bolt – he’s so exciting! And I will see these sort of swaggery, confident guys blow in and take these jobs. And it’s hard. Like it’s a hard thing to watch.”

And that swagger isn’t something she can emulate. When she’s going for a job or a promotion she cannot bring herself to be that guy, talking up her work.

“I tend to also focus on how hard I work, and not on how glorious the product is, because again that feels concrete to me, it feels like something I can prove, whereas the gloriousness of the product feels subjective. I feel like I can’t back it up.”

I think that’s the crux of the problem right there. That when it comes down to it, women like us don’t have that core belief in our value that seems to come naturally to so many men. Stacey has to muster every ounce of determination to ask for more at work…

“The times when I’ve actually asked for things it’s been really hard, it’s almost unthinkable that I would be able to ask for something and that I deserved it was very hard for me to get my head around. And I usually have had to in my career get to a place of feeling …anger or resentment before I feel like I can ask for something…I don’t feel comfortable in myself to say I feel like I deserve this.”

AM-T: “No, I completely agree. But it was you who encouraged me to ask for a raise in a certain job situation that I would never have asked for. Because I was feeling so low and despondent after not getting this job. You were the one who said to me, they still want you, you should ask for X amount, which was 20% more than what I was getting…and if you hadn’t told me that I wouldn’t have gone into that conversation…and asked for exactly that, and I was ready to walk if they didn’t give it to me…and they did. And I never would have done that if I hadn’t had that conversation with you.

“I don’t think I have trouble seeing the value of women around me…and it’s interesting that you bring this up because I feel like I have to have some kind of crazy leverage to ask for something…I have to feel like I’m ready to walk, I don’t feel like I can just ask for something because - I have to have another job offer or feel so unhappy I’m ready to leave. I feel like, I don’t feel like I am enough leverage, I guess, I feel…like I have to say, ‘or else, dot, dot, dot’.

I had a male colleague who spent all his time griping about raises. I’m sure he made a lot more money than I did. On the one hand I found it irritating and I’m not sure it was effective to the degree he was always talking about how he deserved a raise. On the other hand he really thought he deserved a raise all the time, he really thought he deserved more money all the time, and I was jealous of that.”

Me too. Because if you truly believe you deserve it you can ask for it with no qualms. Otherwise, asking is fraught with anxiety.  

And as Denise said near the beginning of the show, this confidence thing goes back to our childhoods. A lot of this comes down to nurture and the messages we get from the world around us about what women ‘should’ be like.

“I grew up in a very traditional house, my mom’s a homemaker, my father had a super demanding job, and I grew up in Idaho which is a very traditional place. And a lot of my aspirations as a young girl were to marry someone who was really successful…not that I didn’t have my own ambitions, I wanted to be a writer, but I always imagined the ultimate success being basically to be Kate Middleton, to marry someone really awesome and have that sort of success by proxy. To me what that says is like, I saw men’s success as important and of value and women’s value as finding a man who was successful…of course ironically enough I’m not married and have actually..."

AM-T: “…had a really good career…”

“Yeah, I was thinking of the Gloria Steinem quote, so many of us have become the men we always wanted to marry. That was going through my head. I mean looking back on the kind of kid I was, I was super ambitious, super ambitious. I worked really hard in school, I wanted to get out of Idaho, I wanted to see the world, I’d always had those ambitions. But I think if you’d asked me directly I probably would have denied it.”

And years later, long after she dropped the supportive wife idea, she’s still a bit ambivalent about her worth…

“Do I think I’m an equal worker? I do, I really do. But I think there’s part of me that doesn’t think that…there’s part of me that thinks mmm, maybe I should get paid a little less, just a little…I think if I were on an absolute equal footing with a male colleague who had the same years of experience, everything, if I found out he were making say 10% more than me I’d be annoyed, but I wouldn’t be outraged.  If I were making 10% more than him I would be, like, very puzzled. I think that would bother me more.”

It’s complicated.

One thing that builds confidence on one level is simply becoming good at what you do.

AM-T: “But it’s not that kind of confidence problem a lot of us suffer from, it’s the much deeper thing about your value in the world. And I don’t know how you get over that. You can gain confidence at a task by doing it over and over again and that’s a lovely thing to have cultivated…but that ‘who do you think you are?’ voice inside…I don’t know how you usurp that voice.”

“God, that’s so true. It is the ‘who do you think you are’. And I have to say, the way I handle that now is I get a little bit excited when I notice something like that…basically if I notice that something is making me uncomfortable, like I feel like I’m not speaking up enough, or I’m not enough part of a project…or I’m not getting promoted fast enough or paid enough or whatever it is, there is something thrilling about that discomfort, there is something exciting to me, because once it’s not sitting well, then eventually I know I’ll do something about it…I feel like that is this really beautiful tension point, that discomfort – like wait, I think I’m worth more. Like if you really did believe you should be paid less, it wouldn’t bother you to learn that you were paid less…but the fact that it bothers you, that is the beginning of change I think.”

Still, she sometimes asks herself, what would life be like if she believed in herself more…

“The real danger of the who-do-you-think-you-are message is that, it’s not like, oh, I wonder if I deserve that, should I ask for that? It’s the stuff you don’t even think of asking for. It’s the stuff that feels so far out of the realm of reality or the realm of anything you’d ever get…that’s what I sometimes think about.

Like I wonder, if I had no questions about my value, like I wonder what I would be doing? Would we all just be like Richard Branson? Maybe, I mean maybe. There’d be so many airlines…”

Stacey Vanek Smith. Thanks to her and Denise Barreto for being my guests on this show.

As usual, you can comment on this episode at The Broad Experience.com and on the show’s Facebook page.

And of course don’t forget to check out my sponsor at MMLaFleur.com.

And if you’re a fan of the show and want to help market it – if you can kick in $50 I’ll send you a Broad Experience T-shirt – ladies’ cut. Check it out at the ‘support’ tab at TheBroadExperience.com.

Thanks to Erin McMahon for her help with this episode.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. See you next time.  

Episode 73: A Nanny Speaks Up

“Don’t we deserve respect? Don’t we deserve to not feel like slaves?”

— Jennifer Bernard

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This week, the busier you are, the likelier you are to pay someone else to do some traditionally female tasks… from childcare to cleaning…

“Professional women need somebody to look after the house and that hasn’t gone away. But it is something that makes many people very uncomfortable. I think women find it more uncomfortable to think about than men because so many of these people are women.”

And today a lot of them are also migrants with their own ambitions… and a desire for recognition…

“This is real work. Domestic workers make every work possible. If we don’t go to work employers can’t go to their jobs. Don’t we deserve respect? Don’t we deserve to not feel like slaves?”

Far more women work in other people’s homes today than they did 40 years ago. And there’s even more of a power disparity between you and your boss when their house is your office.   

This episode of The Broad Experience is sponsored by Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs is a nonpartisan magazine—they publish thoughtful pieces by experts who span the political spectrum, so they let readers form their own opinions about today’s most important global issues. Broad Experience listeners get a special discount – more than three-quarters off a subscription to Foreign Affairs— to sign up, go to ForeignAffairs.com/Broad.

I first talked to Alison Wolf about two years ago. She’s a professor at King’s College London and she’s the author of a book with a provocative US sub-title: The XX Factor – How the Rise of Working Women has Created a Far Less Equal World.

Now pretty much none of us wants to hear that, right – that because we’re working rather than tending to home and hearth society is less equal than it used to be? But Alison says this is an inevitable consequence of so many women becoming highly educated and getting good, demanding jobs. They cannot cook every night – they need much of their food preparation outsourced. They need either daycare or a nanny for their young children or home health aides for their parents. And what Alison calls a new servant class from prepared food workers to aides and cleaners – they’re generally not paid well.

Alison and I met in New York recently – she’d been teaching here this autumn. And I said it’s pretty depressing to read about this widening inequality among women and to think you’re part of it…

“It is pretty depressing. I don’t think it’s something women should beat themselves up about, it ‘s something that professional people need to be aware of. Because of course in the past there were servants – you look at the life of Virginia Wolf for example, renowned feminist writer. She always had servants, she took it for granted there were servants, because houses couldn’t be run without servants. What was also the case of course was that women as a class were in the house acting as organizers of servants and for the most part doing a lot of domestic work themselves. So we have this upstairs/downstairs image but the amount of women who were doing nothing in the house was minute. So the typical middle class/upper middle class pattern was you had a maid of all work, which pretty much summarized it. So you probably gave her the worst jobs like cleaning out the fireplaces, but the reality is it was a lot of work to have a household.”

Alison’s grandmother was a cook. She always told Alison she didn’t know why domestic service got such a bad rap – it really wasn’t so awful. And if you look at the data in Alison’s book it’s really interesting because it’s not just class-bound Britain where so many houses had staff. In America in 1870 Alison says almost half of employed females were domestic servants. And just before the first world war that number was still quite high – a third of working women in the US were servants. It was a just a given in a labor-intensive age that anyone who could afford it had help in the home.

But all that changed fast after World War II. Household help all but disappeared as the labor market opened up to women.  And thus was born the suburban housewife whose entire job was to care for the home and her children. That started to go away a couple of decades later…as educated women began working en masse…

“But the fact remains that just as men in the past needed someone to look after the house, professional women need somebody to look after the house and that hasn’t gone away. But it is something that makes many people very uncomfortable. They don’t like to think about it. I think women find it more uncomfortable to think about than men because so many of these people are women.”

About 90 percent in the US alone. And the fact that people can increasingly tap this kind of help – it’s all related to a big increase in migration that began in the ‘90s.

“You’ve got people recruiting in Indonesia to send nannies to Hong Kong, and people in the Philippines who are traveling to be housekeepers in LA. And you can see this happening whenever there is an economic downturn, what happens in countries hit hard by a downturn is that the women migrate…you can see this really clearly in some of the countries of the old soviet union where the economies have collapsed, there are no jobs at home for anybody, there is nothing for the men, the women leave to work as care assistants and nannies and cleaners and housekeepers in western Europe. You can see it clearly in this country too – instead of the world of the suburbs of the ‘60s and ‘70s where no one had live-in housekeepers, now so many people have a fulltime housekeeper who is almost always a different color and very often from a different country.

This global care chain is new, and you could say if you look at it as an economist that it’s great, everybody’s benefiting, the people who come get good wages and they send them home, and there are a lot of countries in the world where the money that people send home is a hugely important part of national income. On the other hand it makes a lot of us uneasy, this feeling of being, sort of behaving a little bit like a master race…with people from other countries coming and administering to our needs…”

I think that’s what makes me feel squeamish about all this here in America. Many people working for the gainfully employed are immigrants…and in the UK they may be Eastern European. In the US they’re usually a different race from the people they’re working for…

AM-T: “One thing that I notice particularly about New York, is how many white babies are being pushed about by women of color…it is a little odd, and I think the going rate for a nanny in New York is $15 an hour…and of course in America you don’t have health insurance, you have to buy that yourself, and I think it’s a rare employer in New York who is purchasing health insurance for their nanny…so that isn’t much, 15 bucks an hour.”

“It isn’t, and of course one of the problems is if you are going to have this kind of society you cannot pay everybody the amount of money that people who are employing the caregivers and nannies are being paid…this comes back to the inequality thing. You mentioned health insurance. If you are an American middle class or upper middle class person…you’ve got a pretty decent job and an income but it’s not stratospheric, so you’ve got your own health insurance, you’ve got your taxes, you’ve got your mainstream expenses – college fees are on the horizon, by the time you’ve taken all that out there isn’t that much left.

She says if you paid caregivers or cleaners or restaurant workers even half the hourly rate many middle class workers command the arithmetic would fall apart. 

And she says this situation of these big disparities in women’s wages is here to stay – because educated women aren’t going to abandon the workforce in huge numbers. But she says most countries could do more to protect lower-paid workers from exploitation and offer more in the way of a safety net.  

Some domestic workers in the US are organizing to gain more protections under the law. And they say their profession deserves more dignity than it gets.

Jennifer Bernard was born and raised in Trinidad. She was working as an accountant for the government there until the late 1980s…

“With all the, what was happening economically I was one of those that was laid off. And I though OK, everybody’s going to the US, maybe I should do that.”

By that point she was the single mother of an 11-year-old boy and she needed a job. So she left her son with her sister and made her first trip to the US. She eventually outstayed her visa and became one of many undocumented immigrants. She couldn’t land an accountant’s job even if she’d met the US requirements – which she didn’t. She needed money now. She liked children, she knew how to look after them, so she thought, why not try nannying? No one was fussy about her legal status in this profession. But…

“It didn’t meet my expectations at all.”

She landed a job as a live-in nanny for a couple in New Jersey. They had two girls. And Jennifer ended up doing a lot more than caring for them.
“You were the housekeeper, the nanny, the cleaner, the psychologist, you were like an octopus – you had many different hands, you just had to take care of everything. And if the family knew that you were undocumented, and they obviously knew because they’d always go for a domestic worker that was undocumented.”

If they knew you were undocumented she says it put you in a vulnerable position. An employer could always threaten to out her to the authorities. She had to toe the line. She says the man in this couple in New Jersey was fine, but she says his wife made it clear she saw Jennifer as a lesser being. She always looked forward to Friday nights when she’d leave their house and head to Brooklyn for the weekend.

“And one Friday when I was all ready to go into Brooklyn – I was always excited about getting out of there at the end of a week, it was almost like I’m imprisoned. And on Friday the mother of the kids came to me and said you cannot go home today, I need you tomorrow. And I said I have to go home to my family. And she said well if you leave this house you are not getting paid, and you just won’t come back. And I said, OK, I will leave without the money. And I didn’t have money on me enough to take me from where I was in New Jersey, I had to have a cab take me to the train station, I didn’t know how I was gonna get there and it really didn’t matter. I put my backback on my back and I took off.”

She set off on foot for the station…

“And I was walking and walking for like, 40 minutes and all of a sudden I heard the brakes of the car, someone step on the brakes really hard. It was the husband, the father of the children. And he said, what are you dong out here? And I said well, your wife told me I could not go home today and I need to go home to my family…and she did not pay me and I don’t have any money. And he said get in the car, and he was furious. He was such a kind-hearted person, I knew he would take care of me. So I got in the back of the car and he drove to the house, and he told me not to come out o the car. And I could hear his screams him telling her I’m a human being and she can’t treat me like that. And he came out to the car with my wages, an envelope, at that time I was making $240 a week, it was not enough for living in for a 5-day work week but it was enough for me to save, to get my son here eventually…so he gave me my wages, drove me to the train station and said he hoped my weekend would be OK and that I could come back on Monday, and I never went back.”

Now that was the worst job she ever had. Since then she’s had lots of positive experiences. She worked for a lawyer, then a neighbor of his, then an actress…nearly all this time she spent in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope…

“Those kids are still in my life, I meet them for dinner every now and then and we meet in Park Slope and they’re on the street corner waiting for me with their arms open wide. They make me feel so good about the work I do.”

AM-T: “Were you living in with all those families?”

“The only one I lived in with was that first one. And I made a pledge never to live in anybody’s house after that.”

She says working in someone else’s home is already tricky. Living there makes it even more so. She says she could never fight her former employer on her own turf – because it was her house. She held the power.

Jennifer says too many of her colleagues still feel like they can’t push back…

“I still talk to many domestic workers who tell you I feel like I’m a slave, I just have to do this. I have to feed my kids, I want to give my child a college education that I never had. I hear it all the time and I do understand it. And I appreciate the organization I’m a part of because they have given so much light to speaking out, looking for the respect that is due to you and even to accept this is real work. This is real work. Domestic workers make every work possible. If we don’t go to work, employers can’t go to their jobs. So we make every work possible. Don’t we deserve respect? Don’t we deserve to not feel like slaves?”

That organization she mentioned – that’s the National Domestic Workers Alliance. It has worked hard to improve life for workers like Jennifer. If you work as a home health aide, housekeeper or nanny in America you have few protections under federal law. This group helped get new laws passed in several states including New York – laws that mandate things like overtime pay and a minimum of one day off a week.

Jennifer is an organizer for the Alliance. And since the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights became law here a few years ago…

“I have really been so confident since then that I really ask for what I want. I say what I want. I prepare a questionnaire when I go for interviews and I encourage domestic workers to do the same. This is an irregular situation that you’re in. Somebody’s home become your workplace. It’s not like walking into an office. So how do I adjust? I had a situation like that today where I was asked to go into my employers room for some reason and I said I’ve never been in there, I’m not going in there.”

She says keeping out of her boss’s most private space – it’s her way of maintaining boundaries in what is her office. 

Another thing Jennifer does now she feels more empowered? She negotiates above the average New York nanny’s wage when she goes for a new job.

“I ask for what I want now. I don’t work for $16 an hour. I make more than $16 an hour.

AM-T: Can you give us a sense, between 20 and 25, 25 and 30…

“Well, I work for 20-plus dollars an hour. My taxes are paid, which I’m very happy about. I get a monthly Metrocard, every month. And it did not come easy. It comes because I now have a voice I did not have before.”

She’s a legal resident these days, and next year she’ll become a US citizen.

She’s happy with her current employer – a journalist, as it happens. I wanted to double check how many children her boss had, and that question led to some unexpected places.

AM-T: “Are you looking after just the one little boy at the moment?”

“Yes, just the one baby. I had a family before him and I have to say this, that when I listen to the voices of my sisters who were nannying I used to hear them say ‘Oh, I would never work for people of my kind’ and this is quote-unquote black employers…and I said, oh, I have to try this myself, I’m just that kind of person, I’m going to find a black employer and work for them and find out what it’s like. Experience is the best teacher…if I don’t experience this I don’t know what they’re talking about. I went and worked for a black family. It was challenging but it had a good ending…and it had a good ending because I really stood my ground, and what I believe in, how I should be treated, and what my expectations where. And I must say today even though I’m not working for them we have a wonderful relationship.”

AM-T: “Now why was it challenging?”

“Well it was challenging because…I really try to understand when black people become professionals, some of them are on a pedestal where they look down on their own kind. And it’s sad to say but it does happen. It happens in every race but as a black person experiencing it, it’s not always what you expect at all. You expect them, and maybe you shouldn’t, but you expect everyone to respect eachother, but for some reason the one-on-one, it’s like I expect you to understand my plight more, me, the same as you are, what my struggles are…and it’s not always like that, because I am the professional and you’re not, you are the domestic worker… and you still get the feeling of what people’s concepts are for a domestic worker, they still don’t think that you should be respected and you still see that a lot. I see it a lot of times. I have been fortunate to demand the respect and get it, because I’m giving it and if I’m giving it, I would expect it back. So for me it has been good, it has been good. The challenges are what I grow on, and it’s OK. Because I don’t expect life to be all without hurdles.”

It hasn’t been. But she did get her son over here to live with her by the time he was 13. He’s now married, and he’s given her a grandson. And she’s proud of her last three decades as a caregiver to other people’s children.  

AM-T: “And given you had this career as an accountant before you left, do you view this as a career or as a job or a vocation?”

“Well I do consider it my career now because if I spent almost 28 years as a nanny, this is my passion, this is something that, the plan that was laid out by God all the time that I didn’t recognize. We all have something that we’re good at and sometimes we don’t recognize it. We go into all the different avenues searching for the place we should be at. And this is the place I should be.”

A lot of us envy that certainty.

“I am a professional nanny. I am a domestic worker. And I’m a hard-working domestic worker who love my kids with all my heart. And that ability to love someone else’s kid and to give of yourself, is the greatest gift in the world.”

Jennifer works in downtown Brooklyn these days. She’s planning a big party next year for her 60th and to celebrate becoming an American citizen.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. You can post a comment on this show either at the BroadExperience.com or on the Facebook page – if you’re on Facebook feel free to give it a ‘like’. I’m on Twitter at ashleymilnetyte. And you can sign up for our newsletter at The Broad Experience.com.

Don’t forget to check out my sponsor for this episode at foreignaffairs.com/broad – they’re offering an amazing discount off the regular price for a year’s subscription. And this is the second year they’re sponsoring the show. Thank you.  

Also if you weren’t listening to The Broad Experience a couple of years ago check out the first podcast I did with Alison Wolf – that’s episode 27.  Among other things she talked about how the Scandinavian countries aren’t quite as equal as many of us assume.

Thanks again to all those of you who support the show with donations – if you’d like to join the throng just go to the support tab at TheBroadExperience.com.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. See you next time.  

Episode 72: The Power of Image (re-release)

“This is not a sexist thing. This is a communication thing. What are you communicating by how you appear?”

— Mrs. Moneypenny

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, men, the workplace and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This week, a show about image.

I’m quite surprised I’m doing this – it seems a bit retro, a bit a women’s magazine-y to talk about how appearance affects our careers. And I basically have avoided women’s magazines for 15 years because I think they conspire to make women feel inadequate.

What got me thinking about this was reading a column by Financial Times fashion editor Vanessa Friedman.  In it she talked about how Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook studiously avoids discussing her clothes in any articles she’s featured in, even in Vogue – Friedman says it’s as if Sandberg thinks she’ll come across as superficial if she discusses her appearance and the part it plays in her career, even though she’s always meticulously put-together. It reminded me she doesn’t bring clothing and appearance up at all in her book ‘Lean In’ as part of her discussion of what can help women get ahead. Friedman rightly points out, I think, that  

“Clothes are tools to manipulate perception as much as raising your hand or speaking out loud.”

Reading that made me think of another FT columnist, Mrs. Moneypenny, otherwise known as Heather McGregor. She has her own book out, Mrs. Moneypenny’s Career Advice for Ambitious Women – and in that she does talk about appearance.

I met her in London recently and she told me a woman who wants what she calls a serious career needs to give a serious amount of thought to the way she looks. She began by pointing to one very famous woman…

“Hillary Clinton is one of my particular idols in terms of focus, perseverance, and also the greater good. She really passionately believes in changing the world to be a better place and has put everything into it almost at the risk of her health, recently, as you know. But Hillary herself says how you turn out matters. What you do with your hair matters.”

Even if you wish it didn’t. Look what happened when Clinton dared to appear in public last year without makeup. It became a news story.

[CBS This Morning:]

“Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is back from an overseas trip that took her to three countries over the weekend, but it’s not her diplomacy that’s making news. It is her appearance.”

“She appeared with no makeup, natural hair and glasses, and the Secretary makes no apologies.”

HC: “I am so relieved to be at the stage I’m at in my life right now, Jill, because you know if I want to wear my glasses I’m wearing my glasses, if I want to pull my hair back, I’ll pulling my hair back. And, you know, at some point it’s just not something that deserves a whole lot of time and attention. And if others want to, you know, worry about it, I’ll let them do the worrying for a change.”

But that pared-down appearance has not been repeated in public except when Clinton left hospital in January after being treated for a blood clot.

Heather McGregor has her own headhunting firm, so she meets a lot of professionals who are trying to make a good impression.  

“So 85 percent of communication is non-verbal. That’s why radio is such an interesting medium, actually. When you walk into a room you make a number of statements about yourself before you even open your mouth. It’s about the intonation of your voice, it’s about how you come across as a person, it’s about your handshake. When I am teaching interns about how to behave in a business environment I test their handshake. You know, is it an appropriate pressure, is it appropriately un-sweaty, how long should it last, these are all things that matter. You are communicating so much non-verbally.”

And she says despite the amount of attention paid to women’s appearance by pretty much everyone, men DO have to worry about it too.

“What men do is they eliminate appearance as an issue. So with men, as long as they’re neat and tidy, and they’ve got rid of any extraneous nose hair, and they don’t have any body odor problems or breath problems, it’s fine, they just eliminate. Nobody ever hired a man because he looked brilliant but plenty of people didn’t hire men because they turned up looking a shambles. With women you also need to do the same thing, eliminate appearance as an issue. So I have people that come to me saying I haven’t made partner in my law firm.  And then you have to say to them, do you wear that much cleavage at work? Because if you wear that much cleavage at work I’m not surprised you’re not making partner. People will be worried that it sends the wrong signal to clients. So I would say this is not a sexist thing. This is a communication thing. What are you communicating by how you appear?”

But at least some of that is in the eye of the beholder. Because what’s right for one workplace could look very odd in another.

“Knowing that I have to put on a hard hat, it doesn’t make sense to do my hair up.”

That’s Amy Johnson. She’s an engineer for a chemical company, based in Pennsylvania. She spends a lot of time in steel mills and is often the only woman on the premises.

“Knowing that I’m going to be in a mill with high humidity and temperatures exceeding a hundred degrees in the summer, it doesn’t make sense to put on makeup because it’s just going to run off. It doesn’t make sense to put on expensive clothes because it’s just gong to end up greasy and that grease doesn’t come out in the washer.”

In 2011 a Harvard study showed that women wearing a certain amount of makeup – let’s call it medium coverage – were perceived as ‘more competent’ and sometimes trustworthy than those without. The study was pretty small and it was paid for by Proctor & Gamble, which makes a couple of makeup brands itself. It got quite a bit of attention and stirred a fair amount of disdain and outrage among some women.  Amy says in the mill, her credibility hangs on NOT seeming to care too much about the finer details of her appearance…

“If I’m going to walk into an environment that is predominantly male, if not all male, being a female, I don’t want them to disregard me as not being capable. I think if I were to spend too much time on hair and makeup and those things I think it would give the first impression that I’m not really a mill person."

And that’s the last thing her career needs. By presenting the unadorned image she does Amy feels she’s taking the best route to being on equal footing with the men she works with.

“I know that the men tend to change themselves – change the way they act when I’m present. They watch what they say, they don’t cuss as much, they may not be as rude to eachother, they might not yell at eachother like they normally would. But you know they joke around with me. They listen to what I say. I don’t feel like I’m the only female. Which I think is very important.”

She says it’s when she goes into the office, which does have plenty of women, that she feels the need to dress up. Amy’s getting married in a few weeks and she says she will be getting her hair and makeup done for that occasion.

Heather McGregor says whether most people realize it or not, highly successful men are making tweaks to their appearance as their careers progress – often prodded by an outside advisor.

“I was speaking to somebody yesterday morning who has been advising a CEO of a very, very big company, who recently took over the job, about how he should present himself to the outside world - and this had involved even going clothes shopping, and the color of his socks. I don’t believe men don’t have these issues.  Men are taken aside by their chairman when they’re made CEO and told you know, I want to make you CEO, but you’ve got to look more professional, you’ve got to give over more signals about how you are.”

That idea about being given feedback about your appearance is really interesting. Because there’s research from McKinsey and Company says that one of the reasons women are further behind at work is that women get less feedback about everything.  Here’s recently retired McKinsey partner Joanna Barsh.

“Women have to actually fight for feedback. And it’s because everyone around them wants to be nice. It’s not because they want to deny them the ability to grow. They don’t want to hurt them, hurt their feelings, they don’t want them to cry. So women have to say no, really, I obviously have blind spots, everybody has them, what are they? Tell me, what am I doing wrong? And even then people say you’re fine, you’re just fine…yet they’ll take a man aside and say you know what you just did in that meeting, never do that again, that was stupid. They might even swear at the guy. Get yourself a long sleeved shirt…you look cheap in a short-sleeved shirt…so they’ll just say it like it is…you look like an idiot, you sounded like an idiot…don’t ever do that again and what do they say to the woman, you were fine. How is she gonna grow? She’s making the same mistakes.”

Now of course I have no idea how often this lack of feedback concerns a woman’s appearance, and I’m guessing a lot of women are very conscious of the way they look in a professional environment. But it’s very interesting when you think about that fact that many of the managers in a position to give feedback and advice are men. And senior men generally do not feel comfortable giving women advice about their appearance. Heather McGregor says a male CEO client of hers asked her to intervene with one of his female staff, who he said dressed like Miss Marple and needed to acquire a slicker look.

Heather says there’s a simple answer for anyone who feels they want to take a step up and needs to look well put-together, but is floundering a bit about how to upgrade…

“If you have a serious career and serious aspirations and you know, getting the right clothes and using the right makeup doesn’t come naturally to you, don’t be afraid to ask for help. It doesn’t come naturally to me, particularly on makeup, and I went and asked for help. People are always wiling to help you from that girl sitting at the counter at the department store all the way to professional makeup people. Treat it like you were getting married, if you’re going for a promotion get someone to teach you how to do your makeup.”

But sometimes those people can be over-zealous. I’ve come out of department stores where I asked for a natural look…plastered in more makeup than I’d ever choose to wear for the fanciest evening out.

That’s The Broad Experience for this week.

If you have feedback or story ideas you can find me at Ashley at thebroadexperience.com. And if you like what you hear please share the show on social media – it really helps.

I'm Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.