Episode 156: An Immigrant's Tale

Show transcript:

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

This time…coming to a new country …settling into the culture…and working within it…all that experience can help when the unexpected happens.

“I adapted pretty quickly, you know, this is my new circumstance and I have to figure out how to go forward from here. Obviously I look back, but I can't be tied to that because it's going to weigh me down.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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I first spotted Fernanda Santos’s name in the newspaper – this was more than five years ago now…she was reporting for the New York Times, and I used to read her stories from the US border with Mexico.

Today she teaches journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, specifically, narrative writing and bilingual journalism – her first language is Portuguese. She also speaks English and Spanish.

“I think I've wanted to be something along the lines of a journalist since I was, as far back as I can remember. And the reason is that I have always loved to find out about other people's lives. I've always loved to ask questions and listen to their stories. And I've always loved to write. I come from a family of storytellers. I'm from Brazil originally, from a very special place in Brazil called Bahia, um, the state of Bahia, the city of Salvador, and my family has indigenous roots. So the idea of telling stories was, has always been very present in my life.”

Her dad grew up very poor but as a young man he got a job at a local bank and eventually he made a career as an economist. In the 80s his job transferred him and the whole family to Rio. Fernanda says she was a young teenager when she moved there…

“And really got to experience so much of the inequality that defines Brazil and became fascinated with the idea of actually learning about the lives of these people, so, you know, that's sort of what put me on this path that eventually brought me here to this country in 1998 to go to graduate school.”

In her twenties she was working for this business magazine…and she got to travel a lot in South America, which she loved. And that’s pretty much what brought her to the US to study – the love of going somewhere different, experiencing a different culture…

“I never came here with the idea of, of staying. That wasn't my plan really. I came so that I could go back to Brazil with a master's degree and say, ‘Hey, I went to the United States. I got a master's degree in journalism,’ and there's something to be said about going to graduate school in the United States in Brazil that goes a long way and so I had this grand plan. I'm just going to go back and work for my, for, for one of Rio's leading newspapers and I'm just going to be a reporter in the communities, in the favelas, like writing about the lives of these people who, you know, we see every day, we cross paths with every day, but whose lives we know very, very little about. Um, but, but then I never did. I never went back.”

After graduate school in Boston she found she qualified to stay in the US for another year through a specific work program… so she went to a job fair…there were jobs available at various local newspapers in Massachusetts…

“…and I was also interviewed by a man who, um, I sort of fell in love at first sight, which was very bizarre. I felt that it was totally inappropriate to be talking to someone and feeling inside my head. Like, I really would love to go out with this guy.” 

It turned out the feeling was mutual…

“…because he had my resume, which had my phone number, which led him to call me and offer me an unpaid internship. And I said, I don't work for free.

AM-T: Good for you!

 “Yeah. And I don't, and I tell everybody, don't, we are worth something. Even if it's to pick up, to make somebody's coffee and bring it to that person, you are giving that person more time to work on whatever it is that person is doing. Therefore you were giving that person the opportunity to make money, which means that your job is valuable. So I was actually very outraged. I don't remember in Brazil ever hearing anything about unpaid internships. And when I was offered that, I totally thought I was being exploited. Which of course, of course if you are working for free, you are being exploited. And he said, well, um, let me see what I can pay you. And so we started talking on the phone and the conversation went on for, I don't know, maybe an hour and he said, can I call you tomorrow?”

He did, after he got off work at 11p.m. and they talked till early the next morning. That was the beginning of a month of late-night calls. After 30 days, Fernanda told this guy, Mike, that she thought they should go out.

Meanwhile she landed a job at another local paper, not his – this job was in Springfield, Massachusetts. And she and Mike started dating. Then pretty quickly they moved in together. She says she had no idea what the culture of New England was like. She says the communities she reported on were very white, quite reserved, quite affluent. She says when she went to report on an event or meeting…

“People were very nice and respectful of me, but at the same time I always felt like I was the exotic plant in the room.” 

The people she was reporting on were as curious about her, as she was about them.  She came to love the area, in part because Massachusetts was her husband’s home. It’s where she first learned about American life.

Still, she and Mike were ready to move to New York a few years later – they were married by now, and Fernanda landed a job at the New York Daily News, and eventually at the New York Times. She reported on New York City for several years, got promoted. Also during this time she and Mike had a daughter, Flora. 

They loved city life, but they lived in a fairly small apartment in Queens – there was no outdoor space. So when she was offered another promotion - to be the Times’s bureau chief in Phoenix, Arizona…she said yes. There’d be more space for her daughter to run around, she’d have more autonomy…

 “So we came to Arizona with that in mind, you know, it's gonna be a great opportunity for me professionally. I'll be in a border state. And that was long before the border was anything like what it is today. So I really got to experience also the borderlands for what it really is, this kind of third country. Um, not quite the United States, not quite Mexico with amazing people and rich culture.”

 And they had a house – with a yard, and a pool, and wonderful views over the city…Mike was working as a consultant now, but spending a lot of time looking after Flora while Fernanda went off on assignment. She loved the variety of her job…but the hours could be punishing. She traveled a lot, spent a lot of weekends working, didn’t feel she could say no to any of this. It was just the job.

And then after five happy years in Arizona her bosses told her, her time was up – she had to come back to New York. Fernanda was the main earner in the household, had been for years now…and even though she worried about how unaffordable New York had become, she started looking for housing, worrying about schools, thinking about the commute. 

One day she’s on a real estate app scrolling through apartment after apartment…

“And Mike looks at me and says, what's your purpose in life? And I said, what do you mean? And I was, I was actually quite mad at him because this is not a time to have an existential conversation, you know, it's like real life here we're talking about. And he said, no, I mean, this is really important. What's your purpose in life? And I said, well, you know, I just wanna be happy. I want to spend time with the people I love. I want to do something I love, I want to write more. I want to be a great example for my kid, but I want to be happy. I want to spend time with you guys. I'm always out. I'm always on the road. Even when I'm home, I'm not home ‘cause I'm working. And he said, well, then quit. Why do you have to go back to the New York Times? And I said, well, what am I going to do in Arizona? And he said, well, we'll figure it out.” 

They were still thinking about it when a month or so later something landed in her lap – she got an informal job offer from the journalism school where she now works. She mulled it over, she hadn’t ever thought about teaching…and then, her paper announced it was offering buyouts. That was the final push. She took a buyout, said yes to the teaching job. She and her family embarked on a big summer adventure before she started the new job. Everything felt like it was falling into place.

But when they returned, things did not go as expected.

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Fernanda, Mike and Flora had an amazing summer that year - they went to Hawaii, spent time riding horses at a dude ranch in Wyoming…they did things she and Mike had always wanted to do. Then it was time to go back to Phoenix, and get back to work.

“I started my new job in August, 2017. I really liked it. In September Mike started complaining about back pain and being that men don't have a lot of tolerance to pain I was like, you know, you probably pulled a muscle, take some Advil, three days, get some rest and you'll feel better. And he did.” 

But the pain came back.

“And he started waking up in the middle of the night with pain and pacing around the house. And I remember hearing the flip flops, you know, the sound of the flip flops on the tile floor.” 

He went to a doctor, the doctor told him it was a gastric complaint, gave him some medicine. But one day, he and Fernanda were working together at home when he said you know I think I need to go to the ER, this pain is really bad. Fernanda was about to go to a big meeting with her boss but she said please call me and tell me what happens. Later that day…

“And I got a call from him and he said, they found a mass in my pancreas, and they are going to have to, they want to admit me. And I said, okay, well, I'm on my way there.”

She asked the parents of Flora’s best friend to pick her up from her piano lesson and take her to their house.

“So I went to the hospital, obviously I was there with him. He was by then getting morphine. So he went from, I mean, being at home and I'm telling him to take Advil to being hospitalized and taking morphine. Mike was hospitalized September 29th. It was a Friday. On October 2nd, he was positively diagnosed with stage three advanced pancreatic cancer. On November 1st he died. From diagnosis to death, we only had 30 days. 

She was a widow at 44 years old.

“With a child who absolutely adored her father ‘cause he was her everything while I was out in the world reporting for the New York Times, never worrying about her because I knew she had everything she needed and more. He was a better mom than me. You know, he, he was very patient. Um, he loved to play. He would sit down and play with her. And, um, I'd have had a lot of time for that cause it was, I was so consumed with my work, you know, and so, um, I, you know, had to [Ashley: how old was Flora when she lost her dad?] Flora was eight, so she was old enough to understand what death means. She had been going to a Lutheran school. I'm not Lutheran and nor am I…I'm a very pan religious person. I believe in a higher power. And I call him God, but I don't care if you call him by another name or her. And I believe in saints. We're big Virgin Mary people in my family. So it was good that she had that religious grounding because it made things a little less difficult to explain that, you know, when you die, you go to heaven, you don't disappear.”

Mike died the day after Flora’s favorite day of the year – Halloween. Fernanda thinks he may have hung on until then because he didn’t want to spoil it for Flora. She’d gone out trick or treating that night, and she was still asleep on the morning of November 1st when her father died.

“I had to tell her something, right, the first thing she asked is, where's Daddy? And I said, Daddy went to heaven. And I told her that I saw the angel that came and picked him up and it was a little girl angel like her and wore glasses like she did and, and the angel carry him to heaven and, and he was now there. And uh, obviously she was very upset. And the first thing she told me was, the very first thing she was able to tell me was, if you get married again, I am never going to go to your wedding. I am not going to your wedding.”

Ashley: “Wow…”

“Yes. So I said, well Flora, Mommy's not really thinking about getting married again, but noted.”

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Flora went back to school quickly, but Fernanda’s employer told her to take time off, and she did. She needed it.

“Both my employer and my colleagues were incredible. Um, I honestly did not expect to be so well-treated, uh, not because it was badly treated before, but because I had come from a mentality that, I was led to believe in the type of job that I did and working for the places I worked for and the people I worked for. That your job always comes first. And it's true that they never said that to me. And I may have completely made that up in my head, but people don't make things up out of thin air. Right? I always felt guilty about saying, I can't go tonight to this thing because it's my daughter's birthday party and I, you know, I'm kind of hosting people here, and I would feel horribly guilty.

Actually, my last Mother's Day card from Mike, I found it yesterday. I was cleaning the office. I'm trying little by little to organize the office and it said ‘Happy Mother's Day. You know, the best thing about you is that you put up with me, Happy Mother's Day. We miss you.’ And I must have been traveling somewhere right in the, in may, mother's day, 2017 and then I thought, I thought to myself, yes, I was in Naco, Arizona working on a video project with a video journalist who was seven months pregnant. And we were both spending our mother's day in…We stayed in this hotel in Bisbee and we were both there. She was about to become a mother for the first time. And I had my child with her father, and we were both working, and I didn't want that in my life anymore. 

In the weeks after Mike’s death she stayed home – she spent a lot of time alone, she wrote, she looked at their finances…and she fielded questions about her future…

“I had a lot of people ask me, not, not now, not anymore, but in the weeks after my husband died, ‘are you going to go back to Brazil?’ As if my existence here was predicated on his existence, I was nothing without him. There was no purpose for me being here if he weren't here with me.” 

AM-T: Yeah, that’s interesting.

“Yeah, and I moved here in 1998. Mike died in 2017 I had been here a long time. I had achieved more professional prominence than he did. I made more than he did. His treatment was paid for by the health plan that I, you know, that was part of my job. I mean, yet the question was not, you know, so what's your plan going forward? It was, are you going back to Brazil?”

Apart from anything else, she and Mike had a daughter – who is a mix of backgrounds from both sides, and very American…neither of them was going anywhere.

Something else she heard a lot in those days, both from colleagues and on social media – was the comment, you’re so strong. It took her by surprise a bit. She says she did accept help from people in the wake of Mike’s death, it wasn’t like she was doing everything on her own…but… 

“I also have always been someone who had to adapt to new things and new situations. I left my country, I came here, I had to adapt. You know, I moved within the United States. I moved to different places, I covered different communities. I would go from one community to another, completely different on the same day sometimes. So it's, it requires, journalism trained me for this because it requires this constant adaptability. So when it came time to adapt to this new life, I'm not going to say that it was easy. It's not easy still. I miss my husband every day, but I adapted pretty quickly, you know, this is my new circumstance and I have to figure out how to go forward from here. You know, obviously I look back, but I can't be tied to that because it's going to weigh me down. And I think that people just didn't expect that kind of reaction. So I would get from them all the time. You're so strong. Gosh, you're so strong.”

She wasn’t fitting into their ideas of what a grieving widow should look like although she certainly was grieving. Fernanda says before she met Mike she was someone who’d say, I’m never going to get married – why do women need to get married? She hated the societal pressure that’s put on women to marry. And as she told Flora right after Mike died, meeting someone was far from her mind. 

But gradually she spent less time at home, more time out in the world…

“Mike and I used to go to a gym together. Uh, obviously, I'm sure people who have gone through a loss will understand that it became very difficult for me to go to that gym, because of the memories. But about a year or so after his death, I decided to go back, because it's very convenient and costs $10 a month.”

And this guy approaches her on one of her visits – he’s a salesman for the gym, he was asking if she’d like to sign up for a personal training package.

“So he came to me and I was very rude to him telling him that I was not interested. And I wasn't interested because I didn't have money. My budget had no room for personal training. But he was incredibly caring and sweet and I felt bad about being rude to him. So, you know, a week or so later, I apologized and I explained to him that I was a widow and I had a child and I had to be very careful about my money.”

This man, Clint, he was kind and solicitous…and they began spending time together…

“…and we just struck up this friendship that, you know, evolved into companionship. And that's when I realized that I didn't need a man, but I wanted company. I wanted company in my life.” 

They went out for a while, Clint met Flora, then Fernanda suddenly pulled back, she felt it was all going too fast…then, on Flora’s advice, she reconsidered. And today, the three of them live together, in the house Mike and Fernanda bought when they moved to Phoenix.

“And Mike is very much present. You know, I'm looking at a picture of him right now. There are pictures of him all over the house. We talk about him all the time. And I think one of the things that most endeared me to Clint was the fact that he never, never has never attempted to compete with Mike or to occupy the space that was his, you know, he is creating his own space. So it's, you know, it's a really special thing to be able to come to a place where you love someone deeply. You miss that person every moment of your existence, yet you love someone else too. And maybe that's what being strong means, you know, if that's what being strong means, I want to be that kind of strong.” 

When I approached Fernanda to come on the show it was right after I’d read an article of hers in the New York Times about her new family life; and in it she said Clint had lost his job at the gym back in March, right after the lockdown in Arizona started. But she wasn’t worried.

“It's only hard to be the breadwinner, the one who supports the home. If you expected something different. If you were raised as a woman expecting that one day you would marry a man who would give you a quote unquote, good life. I never expected that. I always worked for everything I have and I love my job. I love teaching, I love to write, I continue to write…the day to day load, I can handle it, you know, so Clint's unemployment, we can handle it. We're working on it. He's applying for jobs. He had a job interview yesterday. He might soon be hired, but maybe not. Who knows, but you know, we're in this together. And what better place to be as the world changes so profoundly than with people who love you and whom you love, you know, and weathering the storm together.”

And I just found out Clint did get that job. He’s still in sales but instead of gym memberships and personal training packages he is selling…baking ingredients to donut shops, bakeries, and restaurants.

Thanks to Fernanda Santos for being my guest on this show. I have some photos of Fernanda and her family – you’ll find those and links to some of her articles under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. If you like the show and haven’t given it a review on Apple Podcasts I’d love it if you could – reviews help independent shows like mine find new listeners.

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

Episode 155: Firefighter

Show transcript:

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

This time, some of us have two jobs – one that pays us, one that gives us another kind of reward.

In this episode we meet two women who volunteer as firefighters…

“I actually think that being a female is an advantage in some ways, because there are lots of ways of getting things done. It’s not always brute strength which is the best way.”

“I finally turn and I turn down my music, and she goes, you’re a firefighter! And I said, yes ma’am, and she points to her daughters and her daughters are all amped up and I was like, that’s what it’s about.”

Coming up – how a second career helping others can change your life in unexpected ways.

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Australia just had a devastating fire season – it began almost a year ago, and escalated badly at the end of 2019. A lot of you will have seen pictures in the news of Australians evacuated from their homes huddled on beaches, of fires raging, and thick smoke that traveled hundreds of miles. More than 30 people died, thousands of homes were lost, millions of animals killed.

Stephanie Looi is one of thousands of volunteers who helped to fight those fires and rescue people trapped in their homes.

“I flew the fires from the north of the state to the southern border, and across a lot of different fires even during a day…so you might start the day in Sydney and end up on the Victorian border pulling people out…”

She’s a volunteer with the New South Wales Rural Fire Service. New South Wales was the state worst hit by the fires and it has the biggest volunteer firefighting service in the world – Stephanie says about 72 thousand volunteers and they cover 95% of the state.

She wants to emphasize that here she is not speaking on behalf of her organization, these are her personal opinions. We spoke over Zoom.

Stephanie has a few different roles in the fire service. Locally, she’s deputy captain of a brigade in her area on the outskirts of Sydney.

“So driving a big red truck under lights and sirens, I’m a response driver for my brigade, and being able to do that, I drive a little hatchback in real life [laughs] so driving a 13 and a half ton truck under lights and sirens is a big stretch for me, and it took me a lot of work to be able to do that.”

And it built a lot of confidence along the way. She also works as part of a remote area firefighting team – they can travel hundreds of miles by air to get to a fire. And she’s a member of a rescue crew…

“So winching out of a helicopter into flood waters onto the roof of a car to pull someone out, or flying in front of a bush fire to pull residents out…they’re all things we’re trained to do and we all do – and it’s pretty incredible to have those sorts of opportunities when in my civilian life I sit at a desk and write stuff.” 

Stephanie’s other job – that one that pays her - is in public health. She works from home, sits at a computer, has meetings, online and off. When she’s not working she’s taking her three-year-old daughter to dance class, dispensing snacks, reading bedtime stories. The fire service is a different world.    

“Certainly some of the experiences I’ve had, you have to pinch yourself that it’s happened. So in the last fire season we were flying in army helicopters…and here we are screaming down to the Victorian border with the doors off and you’re just like what just happened there, I’m like a middle-aged mum and I’m literally sitting in the door of an army helicopter as we’re screaming off to rescue someone with a whole bunch of army guys…it was interesting!”

AM-T: And it must make you feel really good…

“Yeah it does, when we see disasters I think as humans we want to help – whether it’s coronavirus or big fires or floods or whatever it is, I think as humans we do get an urge not to be helpless in those sorts of situations…so for me it’s a really good feeling to feel like you’re part of the solution. I really like that.” 

Women are still a minority in the New South Wales Rural Fire Service – as they are in most fire services. But their numbers are growing.

“So when I joined there weren’t that many of us, I certainly would be the only female on the truck or go to a fire and there’d be 100 firefighters there and you’d be the only woman. But in the last ten years there are a lot more women in the service, so in my brigade we can turn out an entire truck of women these days including an officer and a driver, which is pretty cool. And we do see a lot more women in the service. But it’s not all roses, there are still lots and lots of issues we need to address to make it really equal.”

She says take the structural stuff. The fire service is hierarchical and even though almost a quarter of the service is now women, she says still only five percent of the top roles are held by women – and she says the way things work in the service makes it hard for mothers like her to give as much time to it as they used to. And that in turn affects who gets to rise up the ranks.

“It’s hard in terms of if you want to do courses that allow you to fulfill more roles or get that rank promotion, they go on in the evenings, weeknights, and kids have sports, they need to be put to bed…that kind of thing. And it becomes an issue. And how we treat women who are pregnant in the service, because when you’re firefighting you can be exposed to different toxins, and how that works when you’re pregnant - it’s easy to say, ‘you’re a volunteer, don’t turn up,’ but the brigades are a lot of your social structures and support networks, so by saying don’t turn up all of a sudden you’ve taken the support structures and support networks away from a woman at a time when they actually really need them.” 

AMT: I’m curious though, your husband, would he accommodate, just as an example, you being gone in the evening to do training classes or whatever …

“He does. I’m lucky. He’s amazing. Not just the training classes, he’s just lived through the fire season like I have. He’s picked up the bulk of the caregiving – daycare pickups, drop-offs, putting her to bed, explaining why Mummy’s not there again, and just giving extra hugs because I’m away, right, I am lucky because I have that support but not all women have that I suppose, and I think if we look in society it is traditionally the man that’s been able to go out and do stuff while the woman has been at home. I still believe that it needs to be more equal across the board – looking at things like how much day care costs, looking at daycare outside traditional hours or short term daycare, how society allows women to get around those sorts of things.”

AM-T: You’ve made me think…Do you think there’s an advantage to being a woman in this role? Are you able to do things that men can’t? I know people think well men this physical strength and women lack that strength and that may be true, but maybe there are other ways people aren’t even thinking about in which women particularly shine…”

“Absolutely. So particularly in my rescue crewy role I actually think that being a female is an advantage in some ways, because there are a lot of ways of getting things done, and it’s not always brute strength which is the best way.”

As Stephanie mentioned before, one of the things her rescue team does is help drivers stranded by floods. The recent fire season finally ended with the heaviest rains in years. 

“Cars are really tricky things because in water they’re really unstable, if you move your weight the wrong way or the victim moves their weight the wrong way all of a sudden that car can be swept downstream or you tip and roll and you lose everyone off it, so you’ve got to be pretty careful how you move people around particularly if you’re trying to get people out of the driver’s seat onto the roof so you can get them out. Because of that we tend to be pretty directive with people I suppose when we’re trying to move them around the car. You’ll get in their face, you’ll do a bit of yelling, you’ll physically pull that person across because you want them to do exactly what you need them to do at that time.

So one of my colleagues has winched out of this helicopter onto the roof of the car, she’s a mum, two kids, and I’m listening along on a headset expecting to hear a bit of yelling and instead of that what I hear is this, ‘OK, love, righty-o now, you scooch your bottom over, OK, we can do this, arms up sweetheart!’ And it was hilarious, it was the funniest thing ever – she just chucked her best mum voice on and that victim just did exactly what she wanted. But what it did was it really de-escalated a situation that can be really, really stressful and I think the other part is she managed to stay authentic to who she was, which I think is really nice. She went, ‘I’m not a yelling person, I don’t need to do that to achieve this outcome,’ so in that sort of case I think her way was actually better.”

And she says in the case of a wildfire, when you land at someone’s farm and tell them they need to come with you right now – they know they’re likely to lose their home, livestock, and pets to that fire…

“And that’s a really tough decision for someone to make, and I think that a little bit of compassion, a little empathy and sometimes a hug or two can help sit that decision easier on someone’s shoulders as they’ve left. And I’m not saying men don’t display compassion and empathy because they absolutely do, but what I am saying is that they’re not terms we often use when we talk about firefighting and I think that we should…because it’s not all about the brave firemen striding through the smoke to throw the damsel in distress over his shoulder and stride off into the sunset. There are lots of skills that make a good firefighter and if you think about strength and fitness, well twelve weeks with a PT will probably fix that, but if you have the wrong attitude or if you don’t have empathy or you don’t work well in a team, well 12 weeks at a coach isn’t going to fix that. So the easiest thing to fix is your fitness so I don’t necessarily see why we get so hung up on it.”

She’s been doing this for ten years now and this past fire season seemed endless. And there are those improvements she’d like to see to make things easier for women in the service. 

AM-T: ‘Cause you mentioned the structural issues, and your little girl is at an age where she needs tons of attention…do you want to continue in the service?

“I do, yeah. Like I said before, I think when you see bad stuff happen you want to be part of the solution. Also my child’s an only child so I think it’s good for her to understand that sometimes other people need me more than she needs me right now. I think being an only child sometimes it’s easy to assume you’re the center of someone’s world, and actually she is the center of my world, but sometimes other people need me so right then I have to go, or I’m not at home to kiss you goodnight, or the pager’s gone off and actually you need to go somewhere or be dropped with Grandma or something like that.”

And she thinks her role with the fire service makes her a better parent. Being with people who have lost everything to a fire – it’s helped keep Stephanie focused on what’s important: her husband and child. She says stuff? She could leave it behind in a heartbeat. And she knows a three-year-old’s meltdown in the supermarket is pretty minor in the scheme of things. 

AM-T: How do you feel after the recent fire season, were you just exhausted? 

“It’s kind of funny because we went straight from there pretty much into Coronavirus-land. It’s all a bit crazy really. It was exhausting and intense and I did things you abstractly train for but I never thought you’d have to do. So we’d fly into a valley, go ‘oh, there are 15 properties here, we have time to land in one, which one will it be?’ And I remember sitting in that training thinking oh my God, how am I ever going to do that, or how could I make that decision, also how could I live with myself after having to make that decision? And after doing it a few times you realize those decisions are actually really easy and it’s quite easy to live with yourself afterwards, you say ‘we made the best decision we could with the information we had,’ and you move on, so in some ways it was a really positive thing to be able to say actually, I know that my training works.”

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Kassie Stevens grew up in the northern hemisphere on the other side of the Pacific Ocean near San Diego, California. She got interested in fire at a very young age. The hills around her house would burn every few years. Kassie’s 35 now. But once, when she was about six, her dad took her to get a closer look at an approaching fire…

“I have this memory that’s burned…it’s got its own little ripple in my brain, and it’s the fire coming over the hill and it looks like a spider…because the heat and the waves and the fire, it looked like spider legs crawling up the side of the hill.”

She remembers being mesmerized – scared, but also excited.

“There’s just something about the smell, the color of the sky, and how everything kind of takes over. It was just so beautiful, it’s still clear in my head.”

Kassie’s dad had been in the navy, then he became a police officer. Her mom was a medical transcriptionist. Community service was an idea she grew up with. And she admired firefighters from afar. But despite her longtime interest, she didn’t pursue it once she left high school, tried college, and then dropped out.

“I was still so ignorant, like we all are at 18 years old, I had no confidence in myself, I didn’t think I’d be capable of doing any of the things…I would drive past fire stations and be like man, I bet you that’s awesome, that’s a ton of fun, but I bet you it’s hard, I don’t know if I can do it, I didn’t have the confidence in myself, and Shaun really helped, pushed to get me going there and joining the fire service and being good and comfortable in it.”

So let me backtrack for a minute here. Back in January I got an email one day from a guy in Oklahoma – his name is Shaun Pryor. He said, you know, ‘you should really talk to my fiancée for your show – she’s a firefighter – it’s a world riddled with stereotypes and expectations. And she has some stories to tell.’

I’d never got an email like that before.  

Shaun: “I thought, you know what, I’m proud of her, I’m proud of what she does, I’m proud of how hard she works, and as my grandmother used to say, closed mouths don’t get fed, so I thought I’d give it a shot.”

Shaun and Kassie met about five years ago. Kassie had left California years before, married young, and eventually settled in Oklahoma. She ended up getting divorced…and she met Shaun and his son, Riley, who lived with Shaun fulltime. They’ve been inseparable ever since.

“Being his stepmom, being his mom, has been the best thing that has ever happened to me, next to meeting Shaun. Riley gave me something that I couldn’t do on my own, so – sorry, I’m getting emotional – so that’s really special to me.”

She says Shaun has always been giving and helpful to those around him, and he joined a nearby fire department before she did, right around the time a wildfire raged in Oklahoma for weeks.  

“He got in and it was like a drug, and it was all fire department, all the time, if he had spare time, he was there at the fire station. So he really pushed my want for it and made me feel like I could do it.” 

Kassie’s regular job is in property management - she runs a 300-unit apartment complex. And she feels like she’s good at it, but she says she knew there had to be more to life than going to work and having people complain to her about their toilets. She longed to do something more – to serve her community the way her parents had when she was growing up, the way Shaun was now. Finally, his encouragement paid off, and she joined.

“Normal week for me is get up, go to work, deal with people’s apartments flooding, people being mad, then go to the gym then on Thursdays, come home, get changed, get in the truck, be at the station all night, stay till midnight, come back, go to sleep, go to work next day, then go to the station on the weekend for training or for any other calls that come in during that time or during the week.”

A lot of the work is responding to medical emergencies and helping out before the paramedics get there. She says this year’s been a quiet fire season, though others have not. 

And right now it’s Kassie’s day job that’s supporting everyone. When I was first emailing with them both, Shaun worked as a warehouse manager for a company that makes safety gear for people working in the nearby oilfield – Oklahoma is a big oil producing state. But as Kassie told me during our interview…

“So when Covid happened and the price of oil dropped, Shaun has actually been unemployed. He was let go the first week back on March 13th. 

AM-T: Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know that.

“It’s OK, it’s OK. It was really scary at first but it’s actually worked out really well. Riley our son is not in school, he gets to be home with dad all day, they get to spend a lot of time together which they don’t normally get to because of the fire service. Riley is getting home-schooled, so it’s actually been beneficial for our family.”

Shaun has scaled back from the fire service a bit while Kassie has taken on more. And there are challenges that come with the role.

For background – Kassie and Shaun are a mixed-race couple, she’s white, he’s African-American, and the fire department they serve is in a traditionally black community. She says she’s had someone outright tell her a white woman shouldn’t be doing her job in their community, and there was the firefighter who said he wouldn’t want to work with her for that same reason.

And Kassie says in a rural area in a conservative state, people aren’t always thrilled to see a woman turn up in answer to a call. And at times her department has been largely made up of female volunteers.

“This expectation that if you call, these big burly men are gonna show up…that’s what everyone expects…but when you have a call and three women roll up at your house everyone tilts their head , people don’t know how to react to it, or you get the people who say don’t touch me, I don’t want you here, they want to shove you out the door, they want nothing to do with you because you’re a woman – now I don’t know if this is a nationwide issue or just dealing with a small community…I don’t know. But even just at work, no joke, 3 days ago, I was talking to my electrician and I had my water bottle and duffel bag and had changed over and I was getting ready to get in the truck and head to the station, and he was like, where are you going? And I said I’m heading to the station, and he said what station, and I said the fire house, and he goes, why? And I said because I’m a firefighter, and he said, no you’re not. And it’s just like no, I just figured I’d say that for funsies…and it happens so often, it’s constant.”

It really bugs her. But she loves the work – she loves helping the people who place those calls. As in so many rural areas, younger people in their area tend to head to the cities for jobs, so there’s a real need for volunteers like Kassie. And she says there are other benefits – like the ability to change minds.

“I would say my most favorite moment, I don’t know why I’m so emotional today, geez Louise…so when Shaun and I first met, Riley used to say, girls can’t do anything, girls can’t do this, girls can’t do that – and I’ve made it my mission to prove to him girls can do anything because that’s so important to me, there are so many women out there who think they can’t do it…and it’s so frustrating to me. It doesn’t matter if you have lady parts, get out there and do it, and I hate, hate, hate men out there who think just because you’re a woman you can’t do it. I wanted to make sure my son could grow up and he wasn’t going to be one of those men, that he didn’t think women couldn’t be firefighters, he didn’t think women couldn’t be police officers, didn’t think women could join the military and be a fighting force – I wanted my son to not be one of those men.”

Shaun: “You know the sad part is I don’t know where he got that from because I can say I didn’t teach him that, but he did not believe women could do half of the things, it shocked me, I’m like, Dude, man, I’ve been a bad dad, but yeah, she’s been an inspiration, like there’s nothing, mostly, women can’t do, like I tell Kassie, I don’t see you benching 500 pounds but other than that there’s nothing she can’t do and it’s been great for him, it’s been really good.”

Kassie wants to be an inspiration outside the home too. She was in Walmart once, still in her uniform, and she notices this little girl just starting at her…

“It dawned on me she’s never seen a female firefighter, and she was all smiles. The other day I was in my truck driving home, in gear, I had my window down, it was the first beautiful day we’ve had in, gosh, weeks! I’m listening to my music, I’ve got the windows down the sunroof up, and this woman just keeps pointing at me, and I’m like, what is she doing? She’s looking at her little girls in the back seat, and she’s pointing at me, looking back and I finally turn down my music and I’m like, what’s up? And she goes, you’re a firefighter, and I said, yes ma’am, and she points to her daughters and her daughters are all amped up and I was like, that’s what it’s about.”

She loves those moments when young girls can see something in her that might encourage them – she says changing their minds about what they’re capable of…it’s one of the best aspects of this role.  

She’d recommend this kind of work to anyone.   

“I feel like everybody needs to have that moment in their life where something that they did, not something your kid did, something you did, made you so proud, it made your chest tight. And that’s that pride that comes from serving your community, from helping people when they need it.”

And that won’t always mean rescuing people from a fire, or a car wreck. It might just be helping an older person off the floor of their kitchen when they’ve fallen, and can’t get up.

“At the end of the day we know we’re there to make a difference, whether anyone sees it or not, that’s not what’s important, it’s like opening the door to someone, you don’t open the door to someone because you want them to say thank you, you open the door to someone because you’re doing what’s right.”

So if you’ve ever cast a curious eye at your local fire house…

“It’s a great place to be, I would encourage any woman who’s out there considering it, call your local volunteer fire department and see if they need anyone, see if they’re doing a recruit class, or see if you can just come down for a day and hang out – you just have to make that one phone call, show up, that’s all it takes.”

Kassie Stevens in Oklahoma. Kassie actually has 3 jobs – as well as managing the apartment complex and being a volunteer firefighter she restores furniture on the weekends.

Thanks to Kassie and Shaun and Stephanie Looi for being my guests on this show.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. I’ll post some photos of my guests under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.

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

Episode 154: Straight Talk + Empathy - Women, Men, and Leadership in Crisis

Show transcript:

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

This time…what some of the best leaders during this pandemic have in common…

“They get results, they don’t dominate screens to build their brands. They’re not in it for themselves, they’re on the ground getting the system fixed so that people stop dying.”

And many of this group are women…

“Maybe a pandemic will be the trigger or factor that makes people realize we can’t just have a bunch of over-confident, narcissistic, egomaniac males in power when they’re clueless.”

Women, men, and leadership in crisis, coming up on The Broad Experience. 

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So for a few weeks now news stories have been popping up ON this theme: countries that are doing better with the coronavirus are often led by women. And by ‘better’ I mean getting a handle on the virus early and suffering relatively few deaths. Countries usually cited in these pieces include Taiwan, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Germany, and New Zealand.

A couple of the articles that have come out in this topic recently were written by two former guests on this show, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. Avivah runs Twenty First, a firm that helps organizations achieve more gender balance. She’s a Canadian now based in the UK after years of living in Paris.

Tomas is Argentinian by birth, he is chief talent scientist for Manpower Group, also a psychologist and author of the book Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?

Avivah, Tomas and I are of course all working from home in our separate locations. The three of us got together online last week.

Ashley: So Avivah, in your piece you come across as being really gung-ho about women being superior leaders during this particular crisis, the pandemic. What stands out to you in particular?

Avivah: I actually wouldn’t exactly frame it that way. What I find very interesting about any crisis in general is that it’s very revelatory. It reveals countries, companies, couples, as they are, and who can step up into a difficult situation and who falls back or out. I kept getting and reading more and more news stories about all these different women all over the world doing innovative, interesting, new things that were in such stark contrast to some of the worst examples of leadership that we’re seeing right now, which were mostly male. So it’s not that there are not good forms of male leadership but some of the emerging women leaders are offering a new tone and some really, really inspiring leadership, and I think that’s just a wonderful thing to keep in mind as we all go to our voting booths in the next few years.

Ashley: Well yes, you end your piece by saying, we need to vote for more of this. But can I just ask you to pick a couple of women leaders and talk about how they stand out?

Avivah: Well I’d say everyone’s talking about Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, she’s young, she’s fresh, she’s new, she’s a mother, she’s had a baby in power, and in this particular crisis she’s been unbelievably clear, truthful, decisive, powerful, and empathetic and loving. And I think it’s that combination of things that we don’t see that much of. The combination of power and what I termed ‘love’.

And here I’m just gonna break in and play a tiny clip from a Facebook live talk Jacinda Ardern did from home in late March, talking to New Zealanders about the virus…she apologized for her casual clothing, said she’d just put her daughter to bed…then began talking about the virus and what New Zealanders needed to do to combat the spread. She reassured them…

Jacinda Ardern: “…all the efforts that we’re putting in should show if we follow the rules…till then do check in on your neighbors, especially check in on those who are elderly, give them a call, see what their needs are, and if you can go and grab their essentials… pop them on the front door for them…remember, the way we can keep them safe is by keeping our distance…”

Avivah: I think especially in political leaders, you get the sense they’re motivated either by love or by hate…and there are some that are creating very divisive currents in the face of this current fear, and other leaders are really attaching themselves to love. So I think Jacinda Ardern was one, Angela Merkel in Germany was another, very clear, very careful, very both compassionate and absolutely decisive in the face of the crisis they were facing. So some of the strengths that I wanted to bring out about these women are typically masculine strengths – straight talking truth tellers, very decisive and a very strong use of technology to help them – all the testing, tracking, social media assistance are three stereotypically male leadership qualities that all these women have used very powerfully.

Ashley: Tomas what do you think. When I read your piece on this topic I read you as being a little more tentative on this subject of women being better leaders during this time. What do you think?

So look, I think it’s a very nuanced issue. So on the one hand I think we need to start by asking why is this question interesting, why are we asking whether women are doing a better job managing the pandemic or not? I think there are 2 potential motivations for asking these questions: one is what I would consider a more legitimate motive which is to find out what’s working so other leaders ,male or female, can emulate it and help their countries or help their people. Since no one knows what the solutions are or ultimately what will be very effective since we’re hitting a moving target, that’s a very important question. The second one is the old war between the genders, oh let’s see so we can reach a conclusion of whether men are better than women or vice versa. The main reason I object to that question is because we know the answer already – and we’re not going to answer with ten or 15 women in a sample of 195 men. The question I’ve been asked a lot during this pandemic is do we need a different type of leader now, should we throw away our old leadership models because this is an unprecedented circumstance, and when I think about the attributes we need to lead effectively in a crisis, I agree with the list Avivah provided in her article, but I’d sum it up by saying we need leaders to be intelligent, ethical, empathetic, so that’s the love part, and humble, so yes I’d say we do need a new type of leader…because mostly we don’t have that in our leaders and now the emperor has no clothes because leaders are under scrutiny like never before…and people even though they want to trust their governments and politicians because they’re desperate, they see there’s a lot of incompetence in the world of political leadership, and that’s not so much the case among female leaders.

Ashley: I want to stick with you – when I met with you last year we talked about Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, and you said, no one is gonna want to make a movie about Angele Merkel…but she has this understated quiet competence…her background as a scientist is what’s really come to the fore in this current crisis. She’s telling it like it is, people seem to believe her and she has a background in science…

 Tomas: Yup, I think what’s interesting about her now is that she’s in that rare small group of female heads of state…but also she’s arguably she’s the best performing head of state if you look at statistics…

Avivah: Probably one of the longest serving!

Tomas: Right, so it’s not like she can be accused of inheriting a good system…also if you look at style, very tough, short, concise, fact-based communication, very different not just from Trump but Andrew Cuomo who spends an hour a day talking to us about his mum and recipes for pasta, and his popularity ratings are up despite the dismal performance of New York, and probably Angela Merkel doesn’t have what she deserves, right? We forget about it. I’ve seen a McKinsey study saying oh, Germany has so many intensive care beds, they’re doing very well…well so do many other countries…and I think what you could rightly ask is whether the causal relationship is inverted, and whether a country that has a certain level of education, resources, equality and rationality is more likely to elect people like Merkel to begin with. That I’m open to and we’re not saying that these leaders were thrown out of the blue and came out of nowhere, same with Jacinda in New Zealand, or in the case of Finland, there are certain conditions that enable more equality, more gender equality and more competence in leadership as well, and by the way they’re part of the same syndrome I think.

Ashley: Avivah?

Avivah: Well I think political systems are a lot like corporate systems and national political systems are more or less male dominated by hyper masculinized, aggressive, assertive…look what goes on in the UK – these very small chambers where they really perfect the art of yelling at eachother all day long, I mean that is not going ever to attract a really large group of highly talented women who today are in huge demand in every well paying company in the globe. So talent goes where it’s wanted and that’s one of the tragedies of the current political context is they don’t want women at a time in history where women represent some of the best brains and majority of the educated population in an ever expanding number of countries around the planet. So we’re actually removing 60 percent of the talent from our political talent pools and recruiting from an ever shrinking minority which will never guarantee the best. And the more it becomes this hyper male aggressive stereotypical type of place, like certain sectors of the business world, the more it will alienate good men as well. Because this is not an issue about gender, it’s about where does smart talent go whether it’s male or female and what type of culture does it want to work in and everybody wants to work in smart places with gender balance as a norm, and there aren’t these extremes of femininity and masculinity in these completely outdated, backward looking traditions.

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Ashley: Tomas, it’s interesting you talk about AC…I was going to bring up Andrew Cuomo as someone whose popularity has really increased and someone who is displaying…some of what are often seen as stereotypical feminine qualities as well. I have to admit I haven’t been watching him regularly so I didn’t know about the pasta recipes.

Tomas: Well, so I think he’s a very interesting phenomenon and he’s become a phenomenon right now and he’s achieved cult-like status, at least in the US, and his briefing has been celebrated very widely. And I hope by the way I’m able to comment on this and other political leaders in a fairly a-political way which is what I try to do. I’m aware that’s not easy to do or the perception is that I am not being objective. But I want to make a few remarks on him…there’s no question his popularity rose a lot since the crisis started… and there’s no question New York, the state, is not performing well with the pandemic. How is it possible that this guy so popular? Well I think there are a lot of competing explanations which make a lot of sense. First, his style is the opposite to Donald Trump’s style though they’re both charismatic white males. One is all about bad news, tough love, fact-based, consistent, and logical – and the other is at the opposite end of the spectrum.

People accuse Trump of politicizing the crisis, but so has Cuomo. Cuomo has turned himself into the Trump anti -hero and immediately everyone who dislikes Trump in the country loves Cuomo, no matter what. And then I think Cuomo much like other politicians exploits what politicians do very well, which is when things aren’t going well, it’s not my fault, I inherited a broken system and there is not enough hospital capacity, tor here’s a lot of density etc. etc. and when they’re going well, it’s because of what I did. It’s not exclusive to Cuomo but it’s something that is typical in politicians ,by the way especially male politicians, we don’t see it that often in women either. But the analysis I’d like to do at the end of this is how did countries do when they focused on style…and on the other hand substance - so charisma or confidence on one side, and substance and competence on the other.

Ashley: Avivah I have to ask you about Boris Johnson. You’re in my home country so you’ve been living through the pandemic over there.

Well, I think he falls into one of these camps, the counter point to everything we’ve been saying, what’s emerging from all these women we’ve been admiring…is not what we have seen in the UK, it was not decisive, he did not speak the truth, all the original flubbing around we’re not gonna do anything, we’re not gonna lock down, we’re gonna have this whole idea of herd immunity which freaked a lot of people out, what does that mean, are we just gonna let people die, I think there was a tremendous amount of fear and then there was inconsistency in the government…the whole issue of being decisive doesn’t exist. we don’t have enough PPE, the machines, ventilators haven’t arrived, been built, I think the NHS is in borderline crisis, the frontline people haven’t been protected, it’s a not very happy story and it hasn’t been very well managed. And it hasn’t been done with any degree of love or empathy by any of the poor figures who are standing, all male usually at the end of every day – to try and explain the hundreds of deaths a day. There isn’t a lot of love or holding of the population to make them feel in any way they can trust this team. It’s not like trust levels were high before this but I think now they’re gonna be hard to recuperate, and that’s a dangerous place to be.

Ashley: I was rather hoping that he’d come out of this with a different approach…after his own hospital stay and brush with this disease…

 Avivah: The strangest thing is his popularity only rose because he was sick…it is interesting to see how popularity levels…so I think it’s funny to see Cuomo who I would suggest is tapping into the stereotypically feminine playbook by talking about his mother all the time and his pasta recipes, and he goes on and on and on chatting, I mean if a woman were doing that she’d be absolutely lambasted…and then on the other hand why is Boris Johnson ticking up? Because he was sick. How’s that for a leadership criteria?

Tomas: It’s a great point, Avivah, and I think on Cuomo, clearly he is seen as empathetic and he’s seen as kind and caring which is traditionally a more feminine quality but it’s quite interesting that we are now more welcoming of that trait in men, and also that maybe because the bar is so low and leaders offer so little, you have one leader who has mastered that one trait and we don’t care about anything else, you know, results or politicizing or even a clear degree of narcissism you can see there, he’ll be a great talk show host, right, there all the time, I think people are satisfied just with love, right, showing love, and again that goes back to being forced to trust a leader when things are really tough and bad because they have no other alternative.

Ashley: Yeah, and I would say for some of us at least it’s like a breath of fresh air after the leadership we’ve been seeing nationally – it’s like you’re running into the arms of this person who is such a contrast to the head of the federal government.

Tomas: I agree but that’s what I meant when I said the bar is very low. And also it’s very cultural. To the average Dane, Finn or German, to see Cuomo doing jokes and briefings every day while the state is collapsing is unthinkable, it’s unthinkable, but it works in New York.

Ashley:  I was gonna say some of what you were talking about with Cuomo that strikes me as very American, an American audience responds well to that, but you’re right, so many other cultures wouldn’t.

 Tomas: Which is important as well because if you could have the luxury of a controlled experiment and switch people around…you probably couldn’t judge their effectiveness as they’re so inherent to the culture they’re in. the style part of it is very context specific I think…whether you have people who are high performing or low performing there’s a stylistic element that’s very cultural.

 Avivah: Well and I’d just like to add that what these two US leaders Trump and Cuomo share is they’re both after image – they’re both crafting image and popularity in their own areas and they’re using the tools to do that, whatever it takes. I don’t think those are leadership skills, I think those are political skills in keeping and holding power. And that’s a very different motivation I would suggest to what I was pointing to, among the women and the men who have managed their countries much, much better is they get results, they don’t take up air space, they don’t dominate screens to build their brands, they’re not in it for themselves, they’re on the ground getting the system fixed so that people stop dying. We are all gonna end up being able to judge these leaders on very clear data.

Ashley: One thing that jumped out at me from a piece I read in WaPo by Harvard Kennedy School lecturer…women have less runway to screw up…she was citing that as potentially one of the reasons women were proving so focused and effective is they knew they could not screw up…

Tomas: Well that might be true but  it’s not a major contributing factor to the performance of women…it’s far deeper than that, I think, look in many instances even if we end up seeing that the strong performance of female leaders perpetuates and sustains until in the end so it’s clear even to people who don’t wanna see it, that women did better than men – even then you could argue that’s a consequence of sexism in the system because to get to these positions women have to be better, smarter, more qualified to begin with. The fact that then they’re under more scrutiny and the stakes are higher and if they fail they will make things harder for millions of women who aspire to leadership elsewhere, that might be true but I think it’s a minor and trivial matter. It’s not a major contributing factor to gender differences in performance in my view. 

Avivah: And I’ll pile on top of that, I think it’s such a strong characteristic, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, particularly the two we live in, the US and the UK, where women are SO uncomfortable and men too by the way with the idea we can talk about differences between man and women. Oh my God, it’s just like, oh no, you’ve got to say especially if you’re a woman, that there are no differences at all etc. etc. which whether it’s nature or nurture nobody’s going to argue very long that men and women aren’t socialized in dramatically different ways that creates different skills and behaviors. That doesn’t necessarily make us innately different. But it might make us innately skilled for leadership in the 21st century, which I think is true, one. And two, why wouldn’t we want to use what is today the majority of the brains on the planet to be more represented on the political stage. Today there are 545 million people who have a female political leader running their countries. That is only 7% of the population. Women are 60% of university graduates globally. That gap between the 60% of what we want running organizations and countries and the 7% we’ve currently managed to get there is our human potential – that is what we can hope to have in the future, better leaders because they’ll be more gender balanced, because the world today is more gender balanced – it’s got nothing to do with any kind of war between men and women, that men are better, women are better, that’s such a reduction of the conversation, is men and women need to be in power representationally to their percentage and skills, and we’re completely failing that measure and that’s why we’re all suffering from lousy leadership.

Tomas: And I would add Ashley that if it is true that women are under higher pressure because we are tougher, and stricter, and more demanding with female heads of states and we don’t allow them to fail, I’m fine with that, but let’s apply that same standard to men, so the issue is not that we hold them accountable there’s a lot of pressure on female heads of state, that’s OK, after all they have a big job and they’re responsible for a lot of lives. The problem is men might feel if they do a bad job it doesn’t matter, they get another job or they go on the speaking circuit.

Which has been known to happen.

As we got towards the end of the conversation I asked my guests if either of them had a question for the other. They did, and I’m including Avivah’s question and Tomas’s answer because they’re specifically related to our topic today.

Avivah: So Tomas, my question for you is, do you think this will fundamentally change people’s vision of female leadership, now that we’ve gone through such an insane crisis…will we trust and elect more women?

 Tomas: So I think it will help drive incremental progress forward. I don’t think it will dramatically change things and that all the chauvinists in the world will wake up being feminists tomorrow once we have the final data on this…it could be the new kind of symbolic case study equivalent to…people still talk about Churchill as an example of situational factors that determine a different type of leader because he was an unemployable drunk and basically he became a key figure in WWII, maybe a pandemic will be the trigger or factor that makes people realize we can’t just have a bunch of over confident narcissistic egomaniac males in power when they’re clueless, maybe that will be it, and I hope so.

Avivah: Or really smart and dangerous autocrats, that’s our choice right now.

Tomas: Yeah, exactly.

Avivah: I’d vote for women, I don’t know why most men wouldn’t.

Ashley: That might be a whole ‘nother podcast, Avivah.

Thanks to Avivah and Tomas for being my guests on this show.

You can hear more from Tomas in episode 148, that’s called So Many Incompetent Leaders. And Avivah’s last appearances were in episodes 120 and 121.

I will post links to my guests’ articles and a few others on the topic of female leadership in the pandemic under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.

If you have a comment you can leave one on the website or you can email me at ashley at thebroadexperience.com.

Thanks to all those of you who’ve supported the show with a donation and especially to those of you who donate something to The Broad Experience each month. I truly appreciate it. This show is now 8 years old and I would never have got here without you.

 I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte, thanks for listening – see you next time.

Episode 153: Partnership in the Pandemic

Show transcript:

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

This time…

“Nick, oh no, no, no, no! um, he needs a nap – do you wanna put him down or do you want me to put him down?”

Most of us are shut in at home, with our work and our families. Does the pandemic mean less equality for women?

“I felt really fragmented in terms of trying to focus on work and was really struggling with that – whereas I was finding my husband was getting much more of a chance to have his uninterrupted time.”

And are some of us taking on an invisible load during this time?

“I try to get him to contact his family but I think because it does weigh on my mind constantly it sort of just ends up falling on me.”

 Work, family, and equality at home - coming up on The Broad Experience.

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 So I’m recording this in mid-April. For most people listening all over the world schools are closed, couples are at home together, many of them with kids. 

Dan Carlson is one half of a couple in exactly this position. He’s also a sociologist. He teaches family and consumer studies at the University of Utah. Over the years his research has focused on areas like paternity leave, the division of labor in the household, and how that affects couples’ relationships – especially heterosexual couples where gender norms play a big role. 

I started our conversation by bringing up an article some of you may have read in The Atlantic – it’s called The Coronavirus is a Disaster for Feminism…

AM-T: “One of the things that writer is talking about is women being traditionally the caregivers, getting lumbered with more of that work even as the pandemic rages all around us and people are at home. There’s this one line, ‘the pandemic smashes up the bargain so many dual-earner couples have made in the developed world: we can both work because someone else is looking after our children.’  And the writer says, ‘instead couples will have to decide which one of them takes the hit.’ What do you think of that line, do you think that is what’s going on in a lot of households, that one person is deciding to take the hit?”

“I don’t know if couples are deciding that one person has to bear these responsibilities. I think that sort of violates this egalitarian belief system so many people espouse these days. I can see it going both ways, I mean I can see it where a couple decides that yes, one person will pull back from their job, and if that’s the case that is most likely to be the mother, but I can also see a situation where couples decide to share that load.”

He and some colleagues are launching new research to find out what really is happening in households right now.

“This is a situation in which we need good data, and our goal is to get that and to understand what's going on.”

This is a rich time for sociologists – there’s so much to discover about how human beings are behaving in what is a brand new situation for most of us.

Dan says past research shows that couples report higher relationship satisfaction when there’s a more equal division of labor in the home – and this applies across the socio-economic spectrum.

But often that division of labor isn’t equal, and it isn’t always discussed, either. Dan did some research with two colleagues, Amanda Miller and Sharon Sassler…

“They collected some really excellent interviews, data from interviews with cohabiting couples several years back. And, and you find that, you know, even if women are unhappy with the division of labor that they may not even bring it up, you know, because they already preference their partner's desires or they’re afraid of pushing him too hard. And men will lean on these, you know, tropes of, well, you know, she just sees dirt more than I do and I just have a higher tolerance for it. And they fall back on these notions of sort of natural inherent differences between men and women as to why they can't do it. And then even if men do it, you know, you find that somehow they're incompetent at it, which is ridiculous because it's not difficult work. But somehow they, they fudge it up and that in the future gets them out of it, right. Because no one can afford to spend time training them when things need to be done.”

And let’s face it, sometimes women just want things done the way they want them done. Especially in the pandemic, a couple the women you’ll hear from later talked about cleaning being something they could control right now. And they valued that.

AM-T: “I found out about you and your work because another sociologist had linked me to a series of Tweets you did essentially giving men who wanted to listen a little bit of advice about how they might step up more during this time. One of the interesting things you said was around specific jobs. I think you said that when you try and divide tasks, like, ‘I do the laundry, she does the dishes,’ you said inequities can develop.”

“Yeah. So, we're combining all these different tasks when we talk about housework, right? It's all gets lumped into this general umbrella term. So we're talking about laundry, we're talking about dishes, we're talking about cooking, we're talking about shopping for groceries, cleaning toilets. So, you know, historically what scholars have done is they just kind of, they add it all up, they add up all the time for all of these things, and then they create a proportionate share, you know, proportionally, how much are men doing, and if it's near 50%, then it's like, ‘Oh, they're egalitarian.’ But the problem with that again, is that these tasks vary widely in terms of their qualities. So, you know, how enjoyable they are, how socially isolating they are, whether they can be done together, with your partner. And so if you ask people, you know, what would you rather do? Would you rather wash the dishes and you know, if you have little ones, right, if you find that that old sippy cup of milk underneath the couch that's been there for two weeks, that you want to clean that, you know, do you want to, someone had an upset stomach and you want to clean the toilet? Like, or do you want to cook a dinner or would you like to go grocery shopping and pick up a couple of things? These tasks very widely.”

Still he says a lot of couples do split tasks this way. Each person consistently does a specific job like cooking or cleaning the bathroom or taking out the trash.

“But what my research is showing is that couples who do it that way, who divide it up, tend to not always think that their arrangement is fair. They have lower satisfaction with their division of housework and their relationship satisfaction is much lower than couples who are always pitching in and doing everything together. And in fact, you know, just to give you a number here, only half of couples who divide everything up in a sort of equal way, only half of them report that their relationship is fair, whereas nearly 100% of those who are doing all the tasks jointly report that their relationship is fair. So again, 50/50 is important, but how you get to 50/50, I think is what really matters.”

Kristen Elworthy admits her pre-pandemic household wasn’t 50/50 and her current household isn’t either – but it is more balanced than usual. Even if some of the hardest stuff about being at home – helping home-school your kids – is largely falling to her.

“Alright  Sienna, you’re all done with you music class…thank you.”

Her eldest, Sienna, is 7…

“OK Si, are you good or do you wanna do any more of it?

“I’m good.”

“You’re good, OK.

 “Yeah…”

“What do you need little man?”

Nicholas, her youngest, is a toddler. And Emilia is 5.

“Oh Emi, when you do your class you can show them you did your solar system puzzle already, so you already know the planets…Nicky, no snacks! Alright, Siena, come here please…”

Kristen works in PR and communications. She’s a consultant with her own business, she works from home and she has a flexible schedule.  

Her husband Craig is in cyber security. In normal times he works a full day at his office. They live in the Boston suburbs.

“I will say it’s been a 7 year evolution, every time I get a handle on things we have another child, so every time we have another kid the distribution of work load shifts, every time, I was joking with my husband that my son, who is one and a half, ever since this whole pandemic started won’t let me put him to bed, so now he wants him to put him to bed, which is new, which is great for me. We’re equal partners in parenting but because of my flexibility and my personality to be honest, I’m the one running the trains.”

AM-T: “So when you say your personality tell me about yourself, are you a control freak, what are you saying?”

“I’m a bit of a control freak – when I do delegate I’m totally fine ceding it, my husband handles my daughter’s hockey team completely, I know nothing about it…certain parts of our lives he does, I don’t think about it – outside of the house, certain contractors…but when it comes to the kids it tends to be me, a) because I’m a bit of a control freak but b) because mine is the flexible schedule I needed to come up with how to work around it, how much I wanted to be working vs. being home with the kids. Those are choices I’m lucky to be able to make and he doesn’t have that same decision process, he works traditional hours.”

AM-T: “What about help at home – do you have a nanny, do you have a cleaner, what’s the story there?”

“So I’ve been saying, the first thing they tell every working mom is to outsource everything and three weeks ago they took it all away. So it’s very eye opening, we have a cleaner who comes every two weeks who isn’t coming right now. The older girls are in school, there’s a sitter who comes a couple of days a week for my son and I work long days those days – so I have 2 long days and then work mornings, nights and naptimes the other three days. I have family in town, sisters, parents…they live down the street…they are super helpful – so if I had extra hours they would help out, and we are not seeing them any more. So all those social supports, paid and unpaid, have been removed from the picture.”

She read that Atlantic article about the coronavirus being terrible for feminism…and initially she agreed - she thought her carefully calibrated work/life balance would collapse…especially because she’s really busy with work at the moment.  

“So I was dreading how we were gonna do it…admittedly it’s been many early mornings and late nights for me to get the work done…at first my husband kept to that nine to five schedule, as things have progressed his workplace and himself have been a bit more open to flexibility because everyone’s in this position now. He works a lot on Europe for calls so he’s on calls early and by 3 maybe he’s wrapping up, so I can then work all afternoon. We switch off, we try to work around eachother’s calls. He has been seeing what’s been going on all day that he didn’t necessarily see before and he’s said it’s made him want to jump in more. So at first I thought it was gonna be a disaster, but I think it’s been good for him and for me and for the kids for him to be more equally parenting them, especially when we’re all here all day, they need a new voice and face after a few hours. The school work is falling mostly in the morning, mostly falls on me to keep that organized, but he’ll take them outside, throw a ball around with them, do a science project with them, so it’s equaling out and it’s actually a really positive transition as the weeks have gone on, especially as we may be doing this for several more months.”

“Want to come for a nap with Dada? Say bye bye…”

“Bye Nick, have a good snooze…” 

She says in their house it’s all hands on deck right now – they haven’t had a big discussion about the division of labor – whoever is free and can do it, just does whatever needs doing.

Still she says this lockdown is tough on parents no matter what. 

“It’s so hard to give these kids what they need, I mean we started distance learning this week with my kids, they’re young so I’m not worried about their ability to go to second grade and kindergarten next year, but I keep missing Zoom calls for them because I’m on Zoom calls of my own, and you know, we’re being asked to both hold down fulltime jobs, teach two kids and keep a third one engaged and alive. Cause he just wants to climb the walls because he’s a baby…and also clean the house, and cook basically every meal and go grocery shopping, but don’t go grocery shopping, and all these other impossible tasks, it’s just hard, I don’t think anyone’s really escaping it, but particularly for working parents of both genders it’s just so much pressure right now. And everyone keeps telling you to take it easy on yourself but the list is endless, regardless.”

---

A few weeks ago one of you asked on Facebook if you thought the pandemic was harder in general on women than men. And of course many of the workers most affected by the virus – healthcare workers, food service workers, domestic workers – they are largely women.

But there may be something else going on too – something less obvious. Women and men often process things differently, deal with stress differently – and women tend to ruminate more than men. We’ve also been socialized to put other people’s feelings first.

Samantha Murphy and her husband live in Calgary, in western Canada. They both work in the oil and gas industry. They’re in their mid -thirties. No kids. Two cats.

Sam says she’s always done most of the housework…but the split has improved over the years.  

“We still don’t agree on what that looks like. I feel like If you made a recording of us it would be 75/25 or 70/30 split, that’s with quite a bit of work over the years evolving from 90/10 split, of talking about why it’s important to have help and important for me not to have to ask him to do a lot of the work…we have reached a comfortable equilibrium…and some of that has been aided by hiring a house cleaner when we moved to a larger place, I just recognized the toll it was gonna take for me to keep up with it compared to an apartment, and I had gotten a promotion so it seemed like right time to hire people to do the cleaning for us…and that’s actually been tremendous for our relationship, to be totally honest. And they’re not doing that for us now, so more cleaning.”

AM-T: “So we’re talking about a 90/10 split, originally, where you were the 90…WHY in this day and age?”

“Because it was easy. Easier for me to just do the work than nag. Seems like the same old story everyone has to tell, but I would ask work to be done, it wouldn’t get done so I’d do it myself. It would often result in arguments, kind of just got easier for me to do it. But over time I did see the value, especially because we’d like to have a family in the not too distant future, of having a husband that participates a little bit more. So that’s where I started putting some work into our relationship and into making it known why it’s important to have the support and the positive impact that could have on our life. I’d say by and large it’s worked. It’s still not the split that I’d love but it’s certainly working better than it was before. I’m actually quite happy with it.”

She says he now cooks one meal a week and they get takeout once a week, he cleans up after the cats, does dishes, does more errands. And she’s been making an effort to take on more traditionally male jobs like home renovation projects and tackling technical issues rather than asking him to just fix them for her.

But during the pandemic she says they’ve slid into bad habits. Her husband is spending more time with technology to ease stress, less time on housework. Meanwhile she’s getting OCD about tidiness.

She says one big difference between them is the mental load she’s carrying right now.

“What’s happening with me is because we do have family that’s distant there’s this pressure to reach out more frequently, and it weighs on my mind, especially my mother in law who lives on her own…because I do try to split things, normally, I try to get him to contact his family but because it does weigh on my mind constantly it does end up falling on me. And it’s not just family, it’s friends, I know people are living by themselves, I’ve been reaching out to them more frequently, I know that’s important, and it’s led to some really nice conversations actually, but it’s also led to probably being a sympathetic ear 100% more than I was before.”

She also volunteers for an organization that supports seniors in her community, often people who live below the poverty line and live alone. Her job is to call an older person just to chat – and since the pandemic started, the group has asked for extra help. 

“Rather than one person a couple of times a week I’ve now got two people, I’m making five phone calls a week, and I find myself on there for probably upwards of 3 hours – and I guess within all of this the folks I’m talking to are often in distress and anxious, and I’m a pretty empathetic person so it affects me, I find it’s impacting my ability to sleep a little bit, my mood certainly, I have to check myself especially interacting with my husband who has to put up with me every day, getting a little bit irritable or weepy or sad. And then there’s keeping on top of work as well, I am still working 9-5 maybe a little bit more even, without the commute my manager sort of expects us to be online by 8 o clock every morning until 5 o’clock, so it’s not a ton but it adds up.”

Then there’s her own family. Sam’s sister lost her job recently, she’s now living with their mother, and Sam finds herself mediating their somewhat difficult relationship.

AM-T: “How is your husband riding this out, how is he doing?”

“Um, I think he’s throwing himself into work, he is very busy, he’s also doing some coursework on the side, we’ve actually been faring fairly well I think as a couple, we’ve had some good conversations, I’ve tried to be open and communicative when I’ve felt agitated or down, even if it’s just a heads up that I may be behaving badly and saying things I might regret, and it’s worked so far. One thing that’s been nice is we’ve been going for a lot of walks together, late evenings, on the weekend, having wine, and I would say things are actually pretty good on that front, I can’t complain…but yes I’d say in general keeping himself as busy as possible with work. That’s how he sees he’s contributing and creating value is through his work.”

Spending more time together has been a positive during a tide of negative news. And she’s glad to offer support to everyone she does. But she can’t help hoping things ease up before too long so she’s not stretched in quite so many directions.

Thousands of miles away in Bristol, England, Anna Lagerdahl offers emotional support too, but she does it for a living.

“I’m a clinical psychologist, I work for the NHS in cancer services.”

Anna works just over three days a week for the National Health Service. Her clients are cancer patients, often readjusting to normal life after many months of treatment. Her husband works in IT. They have two children, they’re five and two and a half. And like Kristen’s family, they’re all home together at the moment with no childcare.

“So the first couple of weeks we it was really enjoyable spending more time with the children, we were both really enjoying that, but in terms of getting work done we were not the best at communicating at who had important meetings when. There was one day I was talking to patients on the phone, and at same time my husband was interviewing someone for a job, and we’d booked at exactly the same time…so the day before we realized this, and we thought, gosh, what do we do now? So we just decided to put the TV on for the children and sort of hope for the best really. But that made us realize we needed to be a bit more organized in terms of discussing who has what on, and I think we’ve just not been used to doing that.”

Also she says, the kids were used to her being the go-to parent because she spent the most time with them. They couldn’t leave her alone at home.

“When I was working the children would constantly come up stairs and look for me and want to come in and see what I was doing.” 

It was hard to get anything done.

“I felt really fragmented in terms of trying to focus on work and was really struggling with that – whereas I was finding my husband was getting much more of a chance to have his uninterrupted time.”

So she and her husband decided to change things up. Two weeks ago they agreed to each work half a day, then catch up with work during the evening when the kids were in bed. This arrangement is working well so far. Her children are reassured by her presence in the house but no longer feel the need to check on her constantly. 

Until the pandemic, her son, who’s two…he wanted her to do everything for him. He’s always turn to Anna rather than his dad.  

“But that’s really starting to change, and I was working earlier and I looked out from the balcony down to the garden and they were playing, and my son looked up and just waved at me and then carried on playing, whereas before he wouldn’t have done that. So it’s been really nice to see that transition. 

She says getting child-related tasks and other tasks done – it all seems a bit easier now than it did before. She says it may be because she and her husband are at home more and have more chance to discuss things.   

“Whereas usually when we’re both away at work in the day and then we get home and the children are hungry and we’re hungry and we’re aware they need to get to bed and it can feel quite rushed, and sometimes miscommunication can happen. Where now it feels more like we have more time to think things through a bit more and discuss things, it’s just five minutes here and there, it’s not long conversations, but I guess we check in with eachother more because we’re around eachother all the time.”

I told Anna about Sam Murphy and her volunteer job talking to older people who are struggling in the pandemic, and how that left her feeling distressed as well. 

AM-T: “Do you think you’re more stressed that someone else might be because you’re talking to people every day about their concerns and distress?”

“No, I’d say the opposite in some ways – I find having a focus that’s really meaningful, I can actually do something, helps me stay more focused on things like work and not get too stressed about other things that are going on –it’s  really important to me that I can do something because I guess lot of people can’t. Either they’ve been furloughed, or there might be a lot of reasons why they can’t do the things they usually do, whereas I can, and that gives me a strong sense of meaning and purpose.”

And she says having the children around can be a boon…

“If I have a morning of very emotive conversations then being able to go downstairs and giving my children a hug is – there’s something about that that’s quite soothing. In some ways I find it hard that it’s brought my work so very clearly into the home. Because usually I’d drive to work, do my job there, then drive home and have time to process work in the car and get home and my focus would be different – it’s all becoming a bit mixed at the moment. I find that them being quite boundaried about staying up in the room where I’m working while I am working…and finding other ways of maintaining those boundaries, that’s helpful.”

AM-T: Just going back to what you said about you find it nice to be able to offer people something during this, you’re helping people in this situation and a lot of other people don’t have that. Have you found just through your skills that you bring to your job, do you have less anxiety around this pandemic than some of your friends, do you think your training has helped you cope with what’s going on around us any better than anyone else?”

“Oh, I think it varies – I think for first couple of weeks I felt overwhelmed, like I had porridge in my brain, I was thinking very slowly. It depends a bit on what’s going on…having a focus means I don’t sit reading lots of news updates…there are things I talk to patients about I know are helpful for them to consider…if I’m faced with a similar situation in theory I know the helpful tools to draw on. But I also think it also depends on how you’re affected…if you know someone very unwell then for sure, that’s going to increase anxiety levels. At the moment it feels like we’re in a bit of a bubble, we have a house, we have a garden, it’s not the biggest garden in the world, but we have options…if you don’t have a lot of options even if you have the tools that’s gonna be more difficult to manage.”

Anyone who has a sick family member or is struggling financially right now knows this all too well.

But for now Anna says, her family is managing. Some things are harder than before, but communication and cooperation are helping a lot.

Dan Carlson from the University of Utah says right now it’s hard to think of this situation as temporary. The weeks can seem endless.

“But eventually this will end the, the shelter in place orders and stay at home orders and people will go back to work. But I think it's really important that people recognize that what we're doing now and the patterns that we're setting now have the power to persist. And especially if it comes to, you know, shaping a more egalitarian relationship. You know, we know that when men take paternity leave, that even though that's short-lived, that taking that time off and spending it with their family leads to more childcare and more housework and those increased responsibilities, those persist even after men return to work.”

So he says if couples do share more of the domestic and childcare labor now…

 “…there is a possibility that, that this will become a new pattern in your life and that even after things return to normalcy that how you’re dividing work in this moment will be something that’ll carry into the future.”

That’s the Broad Experience for this time. Thanks to Dan Carlson, Kristen Elworthy, Samantha Murphy and Anna Lagerdahl for being my guests on this show.

 I’ll post a few photos of some of my guests and their families under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.

 In a future episode I’ll bring you the stories of women who don’t have as many resources to fall back on during the pandemic.  

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

Episode 152: Young Breadwinner

Show transcript:

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

Before we get into the show I just want to acknowledge that I have been incredibly distracted by the coronavirus. This is a deeply scary and unsettling time for so many of us. I hate being unable to get to my family in England while all this is going on. I know some of you are in a similar position. And it’s really made me think about what I should do with the show right now given pretty much everyone is paying attention to just one story at the moment.

I think I am going to produce a couple of upcoming shows that are related to the current situation because it seems almost weird not to.

But in this episode I am bringing you a totally different story. It’s the story of someone I know, my friend Marie.

I met her through a freelance job more than a decade ago – it was a market research type gig. But as I got to know her I found out she’d originally done the job I had wanted growing up.

“I entered the workforce at the ripe age of 5 years old, and I got into show business.”

I used to envy those child actors so much.

Coming up…someone who started her career when most kids are starting school…and ultimately let it go because climbing this particular ladder didn’t seem worth the sacrifice.

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Marie is the youngest of four kids. Her mother, an artist, was a single mom and when Marie was little they were on welfare to get by. She remembers being hungry. That time of the month when the cupboard truly was bare, except for sugar, which she and her sister would spoon into their mouths.

One day when she was five, her mom was reading the newspaper and she saw an ad inviting kids in the area to come and audition in front of a talent agent. 

“Each of us tried out, and me, as the smallest, blondest one, I could read, my mom had taught all of us to read quite young – I could take a page of copy, read it over and read it back. And the agent at the table was thrilled with this and signed me up on the spot.”

Not long after signing up with that agent she began going on auditions; then she started to land acting jobs in commercials. 

“Commercials for foods, mostly junk food, food and toys. And most of these commercials are aimed at other children. This is the rise of marketing towards children in the 1980s, the great era of advertising to children during the cartoons on the weekends.”

If you grew up in the US you’ll probably remember this line from a famous cereal ad. 

“Silly rabbit – Trix is for kids!”

 For non-Americans, Trix is a sugary cereal and Marie did the voiceover for that brand starring a cartoon rabbit for four years. She also acted on screen in a bunch of other ads – her first gig was a series of commercials for a laundry detergent.

Her family lived about two hours north of New York City, in the Hudson Valley. As she grew up she spent a lot of time commuting back and forth to the city with her mum, going on auditions and shooting commercials. 

As she got older, she started trying out for films and TV as well.

“I remember my first job on a film, I was 9 – I loved the experience, I remember telling people in the cast and crew this is a great job, I much prefer the dramatic job because I don’t have to smile all day. Because the work for the commercials, the publicity, etc. you’re the cute kid, you’re smiling, I remember at the end of one shoot I told my mom, Mom, my smiler muscles hurt.” 

AM-T: “Did you always enjoy it…give a sense of…it’s so hard for other people to imagine not being in school every day and just having that boring routine and hanging out with other kids after school, on the weekend. I don’t know how different…maybe you could give a sense of how your life did or did not match that description.

“Right, that’s a great question, I did not have a normal life in that regard because I didn’t go to school, I wasn’t in school because I was busy working. Other young performers my age, they’ll probably describe a similar experience, as your career heats up your school experience goes down because the demands are such, you have to choose as a young person: OK kid, do you want to go to school or be in the business? And me, I chose the business, that’s what I was doing, so no I didn’t go to school, and I didn’t have much of an experience – most of my days were around adults, so I didn’t really grow up with a peer group.”

Her mum home-schooled Marie and her three siblings, but when she was on set…she says there wasn’t that much schooling going on.

Instead, she was earning money. Quite a lot. And she understood right from the get-go that her job was important to everyone in her family.

“Let’s put it this way. We were not in a great situation financially, and I knew from the beginning that this was a fun thing to do but it was also a financial thing to do, and that I was helping my family access a better quality of life and that above all is what made me happy. And any time I went out to read, it wasn’t for me so much…there was the attention on me but it was really about improving our situation and helping my family and hopefully securing a better financial future and career for myself. So I knew all of that from day one. 

She could hardly fail to notice. After all…

“I was paid in my name,  I was paid checks many thousands of dollars in my name, written to me, I am 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years old, I’d sign the back of my check and walk into the local branch of my bank. ‘Oh, here comes that small child again, with a check for many thousands of dollars, and I would put it into my bank account.’”

She was proud to be helping her family. But it was really more than help – it was everything. 

“I was the income earner for our family beginning at age 5 until about age 15.”

And while she brought home the bacon she was also learning a lot. She may not have gone to school but she says she gleaned so much during those years about what it means to be a professional. She says bringing a positive attitude to everything you do was one of her main takeaways. Then there was teamwork. She says there’s this perception that the actor is the star of a production, but she knew she could only do her job thanks to the work of scores of people the audience couldn’t see. They supported her, and she wanted to do her job well to support them. She says knowing the value of a good team is something she’s carried into later life.

And as the years went by, she became more and more aware of what it meant to be female in show business. She was playing adorable blondes; sometimes she’d play the younger version of a famous actress in a flashback scene. It was exciting…but…

“As a working actor, especially as a young person and a female you also understood pretty early what was going to be expected of you relating to your gender, and the race was sort of on to establish your credibility.”

Credibility meaning name recognition, so she could negotiate to get better parts. Ones with more character development, more depth – parts where she wasn’t just standing around looking pretty.

“So to me the pressure was on to try to make a name and get some kind of credibility because then that’s negotiating power. Because from an early age when I was maybe around ten or eleven you start to notice pretty acutely that most of what is expected to you is certain gender roles. And I didn’t like the direction that was going. I remember once I was walking to an audition with my mom, you know, cute blond child maybe put on a little blush or light makeup to make her look extra cute. And it occurrs to me what if I get hit by this bus, on the corner of this NYC street, what if I get hideously disfigured by this bus, my so-called career is over. It just struck me like a ton of bricks how much what I was doing was relating to my physique and looking a certain way. And I thought well then, my whole livelihood is wiped out if something happens to my lovely little face, and I thought, this is really not fair, and then it got me thinking about how stereotyped the roles were that I was reading for.”

She started counting the lines in the scripts she was getting, to see how many lines the female characters had…

“…and consistently guess what, they were always, always much lower than those of the male characters. I was like, I want to be the boy going off having adventures and doing stuff, why am I the piece of furniture, the supporting character?”

The character who needed to be rescued? And as she got into her teens, the world of work got weirder.

“There is a very tricky transition. People in the business will tell you it's very difficult to transition from being a charming child performer to an adult. And that creepy in between place is riddled with pitfalls.”

She says that began for her at age 13…

“I was already reading for roles where you’re either the virgin, or the whore, or you’ve been raped or you’ve been knocked up. It just started to get really graphic really quickly and I just started to get angry because I’m thinking, why am I reading for these roles? Why do I have to deal with this right now?”

She was only 13; until recently she’d been playing innocent kids. She says she didn’t really talk about it with her mum – her mum was not a stage mother who interfered a lot. No one was forcing her to audition for this stuff, and everyone around her was very professional. But privately she still cursed whoever was writing these scenes. Luckily she had a manager who was supportive.

“I did discuss things with her. Without her support I don’t know what I would have done. She did have a good way of diffusing this content with me and checking to see if I was OK. Frankly I was probably less OK than I pretended I was. I thought these are the options I’m presented with, these are the roles I’m being offered, and I just have to suck it up and do it.”

She saw these roles as pitstops on her journey to eventually getting better parts. Or at least she hoped that would be the case. But as the teenage years went by she became increasingly disenchanted with her industry. She was seeing a certain pattern play out with slightly older actresses…

“There was this paradigm you’d have to pass through as a professional actress, you’d kind of flail around in the bottom, you’d get a couple of roles, then you’d have to do a topless scene, you’d do a couple of topless or naked scenes, then hopefully you’d have a name where you could negotiate your way out of the topless or naked scenes. It’s like your get out of jail card. And I couldn’t face that so standard and boring trajectory. It just made me really angry, it was like, why do I have to give you all of this just to get to something more interesting and professional.” 

Maybe things would have been different if more people behind the scenes on these productions were women themselves. But that was not the case. 

“Sadly my entire time, ten years in the industry reading, I read for one lady director…and that is including commercials, everything. There were some ladies present as producers, executive producers, but not very many. So it was kind of a given there was not much space for women in the creation of these pieces. It’s kind of sad how at the time it seemed like this monolithic, unchangeable thing and it didn’t even occur to me to stay and fight and change because when you’re faced with the monolith you just think well, that’s just how it works, and these are the rules, this is what you have to do to get out of jail, quote unquote, and I just started to get really disgusted with that and that’s a lot of why I stopped and left the industry.”

At 15 years old, she stopped acting. It was a difficult decision. It was the only world she’d ever known. But she started to think about what might come next.

“…since I hadn't been to school, I wanted to start taking control of my destiny because I realized that so much of performing, performance work or being a working actor is waiting for the phone to ring, it's a very passive role. Um, so I thought, well, let me go to school and you know, try to carve out something more to do with my mind than the way that I look because it seems to me that most of my value in this trade is about the way that I look. And I, I just was so tired of that and, and I'm really glad that I made that decision.”

AM-T: “Yeah. When you came out of college, well actually before we talk about that, talk about, because all of our, I've spoken about this on the show before to the extent that our identities are tied up with what we do. And there you were having worked in this industry for about 10 years and you're around 15 when you sort of start to step away. How hard was that just in that your identity was, 'I'm an actor' and also not to mention your identity is the support for your family.”

“Oh, it was horrible. I mean, it was the worst thing I'd ever done in my life. It was horrible because I felt here's this thing that I was made to do, that I was raised to do and suddenly I couldn't do it anymore.”

She missed acting. She missed the work and the people who’d taught her for ten years. She had hoped for a long career in showbusiness. But the costs just seemed too great.

---

Marie had always been a quick learner and that paid off after she stopped acting. She attended a local community college, then landed a generous scholarship to a prestigious liberal arts college. By this point very little of the money she’d earned during her career was left – about two thousand dollars, and she put that towards her education.

But being plunged into a group of her peers at 18 – it was tough. She got to college, and wondered why everyone else was behaving like children…gathering in groups….leaving some people out…whispering behind eachother’s backs. She’d never been in a school playground, so she had no experience of this stuff…

“I couldn’t relate, didn’t understand it, I couldn’t keep up, I had a hard time making friends, I just didn’t understand the motivations and games and cliques, etc.”

And when she tried out for a play some of her fellow students were putting on…

“I didn’t get a single part. It was kind of astonishing because of the people in the room, the students in the room I was thinking, hmm, wait, who of us here has a page of credentials…so that was confusing and I thought, welcome to the world of peer pressure and all that. Later I got something…and that was very positive. But that was a jarring experience to meet my peer group at that point in life.”

When she graduated with a degree in French Studies – with a specialty in cultural anthropology…she rebelled against her artistic upbringing. 

“I got into the information business and I, I liked the idea of, um, using my mind and helping people in an abstract way with information and advisory. So I got into sort of a consulting type job and that was really thrilling for me because it's, again, it, you know, a lot of my work was over the phone or you know, or didn't have to do with the way that you looked in person.”

But it took a while to get used to this more humdrum world…not to feel that every time she met someone new in or outside work she had to win them over…

“Then I realized, oh, I’m not in an audition. These are just people and I'm talking to them and I don't have to be the funniest, most charming, most clever whatever person in the room. I can just be, and I don't have to be the object of attention. Because the dynamic that's set up in an audition is exactly that. There may be one two, 15 people in a room, but they're all focused on you, and it's for you to like, save the day and get the job. But most normal human interactions are not like that. So it took me a while to learn how to calm down the need to impress - talk about insecurity. My God…”

AM-T: “Doing what you’re doing now, do you ever think, I wish I’d stayed in the business, or not?”

“Of course. When you see certain posters of certain people you’re like wow, good for them…that could have been me, yup. I used to look at…in the difficult in between years, l’d be looking through the newspaper and I’d look at the movie ads in the back and each time you look at someone doing well you feel like a failure, and I’m like this isn’t just a phantasm, this is real, it could have been me, and yet what kind of an absurd experience is that to be mad at yourself because you’re not in the new movie coming out.”

Some of her contemporaries – the people who were up for the same parts she was back in the day…they stayed in the industry: actors like Reese Witherspoon, Tara Reid, Claire Danes, Alicia Silverstone and Natalie Portman. 

But when the #MeToo movement began, Reese Witherspoon spoke up about a director assaulting her when she was just 16 years old.

When Marie thinks about #MeToo and the man whose actions sparked the whole movement…

“The Weinstein stories were just kind of corroborating what I described to you earlier. And in some ways were validating the experience that I had, meaning, okay. I wasn't just crazy. I didn't just imagine these things, this was actually real and happening. And, you know, I was lucky enough to avoid those sorts of scenarios. So I guess I wasn't surprised because that's the dynamic that I had understood to exist in the industry. So I wasn't surprised and yet the depth of it just made me really sad, and it might seem, it's a little difficult to judge and understand these stories now because well, we kind of wonder, well they didn't have to do that. Why did they do that? But I think it's difficult to, to go back a couple of decades or even a few years and remember just how impenetrable that wall seemed and just how unfair of like, well, if I want to do this job, um, I have to, to, you know, do these certain favors.”

AM-T: “What did you think when the verdict came that he had been convicted on two of the counts, anyway?”

“I'm pleased that justice is being done, at least for some of these women. I am a bit dismayed though, to hear how, I dunno, jaundiced or, you know, now people are angry at this movement and are pushing back and it's getting more complicated. So this is still a lot more work to be done.” 

AM-T: “When you look back, is there anything you’d change about your working childhood?”

“Um…if I had to do it again, because again, it’s an industry I loved, it was my home, it’s where I grew up, and where I belonged and I felt raised by those people, and I learned a lot from them. If I were to do things again I probably wouldn’t have approached it so much from being in front of the camera as being behind the camera because that’s where things get interesting. And I didn’t have any role models…I only met one female director in my entire professional career. if I had more female role models I’d have felt it was a bit more possible for me to make a difference on that angle either in writing or producing. Because that’s where things happen. If you look at the flow chart of a production the actor is the last thought in that process, it all flows downhill, and the aggravating thing is you’re only asked to recite these words that someone else wrote, someone else came up with and produced. Behind the camera, In the writing room that’s where you get to create roles, create the kind of tomboys or characters I didn’t see, I didn’t get to read for. So that’s where I think you can effectuate more change…I mean I’m happy to see performers who are able to do better roles, but I think the real power happens in the making of the works, not in the performing of them.”

And things are changing…slowly. Last year women made up 20 percent of people working behind the scenes on the top 100 films in the US – directors, writers, producers, cinematographers – and that’s the highest percentage ever recorded. Those figures come from The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, at San Diego State University.

Thanks to Marie for being my guest on this show. I will post a few photos of Marie in her acting heyday under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. You can reach me via email at ashley at TheBroadExperience dot com or on the Facebook page or Twitter. It’s always good to hear from you, especially at a time when many of us are isolated. Thanks to all those of you who contributed to that FB discussion of what kinds of shows you wanted during the coronavirus outbreak.

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

Episode 151: Mary Lou at 94

Show transcript:

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

This time, a 20th century woman looks back on a rich and complicated life…

“I had never wanted to get divorced. I thought it could be made to work. I thought I could find other diversions that could keep me busy.”

“AM-T: “So what did it feel like to be out on your own and totally supporting yourself?”

“Liberating…liberating! And I had the teaching job and I loved it. I loved it every day more and I never expected to.” 

But she began her first job as a teenager in 1941. Decades of experience…coming up.

---

Mary Lou is 94 years old. She’s an old friend of my husband’s family and when I talked to her about her life several months ago she and her partner were staying with us for the weekend. She didn’t want to use her last name in the podcast.

I have said this before but I love talking to older women – actually anyone older, but for the purposes of this show I’ve always wanted to get more perspectives from women in their 80s and 90s.

Mary Lou was born into a middle-class family on the eastern end of Long Island, New York. The ocean was about 2 miles away from their house.

“My dad and mother got married when they were both very, very young – he and his brother were both in the mason contracting business. His brother moved away and he took over the contracting business. He was an excellent bricklayer but a very poor businessman.”

She says her father lost his business after the Wall Street crash of 1929 and things were very lean for a few years. He also drank a lot. She remembers before she was even a teenager she used to go into bars to pull him out and bring him home. She says her parents had a rocky relationship.

“…from the time I was 11 or 12 I’d say let’s get divorced for God’s sakes, let’s get divorced. My mother would say, ‘he loves me.’ What good’s that? But I also learned at that time no one was gonna take care of me, really. My grandmother I could rely on but I didn’t expect her to support me. But I knew that my parents weren’t going to do it. So I became very independent and very selfish actually.”

At the age of 15 she landed a summer job…but it wasn’t the typical job a teenager might get in a resort town, working at the movie theater, in a restaurant…or at the beach.

“I worked 5 and sometimes 6 days a week at the telephone company as a telephone operator…” 

AM-T: ‘What was that like?” 

“It was so much fun, I loved it. One other woman and I were trained that year, she stayed on for 40 years. I used it for college money…however, I liked the job so much, it was clean, and easy to do…”

And she kept doing it during summer vacations for years. If you’ve seen the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel you’ll remember Midge Maisel working in the basement of that department store as an operator…similarly, Mary Lou says she had a strict manager. If this lady thought Mary Lou had made any kind of mistake her heels would click swiftly across the floor and she’d berate Mary Lou then and there.

But as she says, she loved the job. It gave her her first real sense of independence.

“The money was good. My parents didn’t pay a cent of my tuition, I put myself through school totally.”

She went to college on Long Island – Adelphi University. During that time, this was during WWII, she worked as a babysitter for a local family.

After college…she started training as a social worker. It was one of relatively few professions open to women in the mid-1940s. Mary Lou remembers her first job in a town north of New York City, on the Hudson River.

“And I got a job for $90 a month. That was it. 90 bucks a month, in a school for neglected and dependent children. It was an adjunct to getting some training in social work. They gave me one child and they supervised me and my kid, I remember, the child was only about 8, and he was there because he had pushed his brother out of a tenement window and he had died, it was pretty heavy.”

During this time she was also going to graduate school for social work, commuting back and forth between school and her job. And she had a boyfriend situation to resolve.  

“I had been going with a boy for 6 years, 2 years in high school and 4 years in college, we were planning on marriage but hadn’t finalized it to the point of where or when, and then I’d met my third cousin, and he had come to visit my grandmother, so I was engaged to two of them, I was engaged to two of them for about a year. Couldn’t make up my mind…

AM-T: “And they didn’t know about the other one presumably?”

“Oh they knew about the other one – they knew I was agonizing over which one to choose, to the point that one time I remember having them meet eachother, I thought if I saw them together maybe I’d make up my mind.”

Ultimately, as one of the boys predicted, she ended up with neither of them. But she did begin to have adventures of the kind that would mark the rest of her life. Her uncle gave her a gift of money, and instead of spending it on a washing machine, as a female relative suggested…she took off to Mexico… 

[Laughs] “I stayed there for 6 months…that was quite an experience.”

She stayed with a friend who was living there with her husband. She says she rode horses, hung out with cowboys…and generally lived it up.

But eventually she ended up back in her hometown on Long Island, and worked at the telephone company again. That’s when she got the idea to go to New York City and become a dancer with Arthur Murray, who had a famous ballroom dance school.

“I mean I have some rhythm but nothing like what would have been required. So that’s what I was going to do. I wanted to live in New York, I was going to live in a woman’s hotel in New York. My father didn’t like that idea. He said you’ve gone to college for 4 years, and you should go into social work. And I said, you haven’t paid a cent for my education so you don’t have a say in it, Ote. I called him by his first name. I was rather disrespectful to him.”

But in fact her father won the argument – and she did end up going back to social work. She was in her mid-twenties now. 

AM-T: “So at the time were you thinking, I’ll always work, or were you expecting to marry…”

“I expected to get married, all my friends from college were getting married…yes, the push was you had to get married. And I’ve thought about it a lot, because at the time I guess I had fleeting ideas…in fact when I was going to graduate school in New York, Columbia, I started taking law courses, because I had a teacher who’d been on the National Labor Relations Board during the law and he was fascinating, but it never occurred to me to stop and become a lawyer…never occurred to me.”

So few women were lawyers at the time, she had no role models. But marriage and motherhood were very much in vogue, especially now the second world war was over and all the men were home and wanting to settle down. In the late 1940s, Mary Lou went upstate to visit her brother who was studying to be an engineer…

“And he introduced me to my to-be husband, and it was a real adjustment to me. He was a Roman Catholic but he seemed to be a very good person.”

In case you’re wondering about that ‘but’ – at the time, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants like Mary Lou almost never married Catholics. It simply wasn’t done. As a teenager Mary Lou had played tennis one summer with a Catholic boy a few years older…

“…and my grandmother got very upset about it and said the time to start going with a Catholic is never.”

When Mary Lou got engaged to her future husband, her grandmother announced she would not attend the wedding. Mary Lou says she died a few months beforehand to avoid the whole thing.

“And I married him because, I wasn’t madly in love with him, you know, if you say ‘love’ – I found love at the age of 85…”

More on that in a bit.

“But I figured I was going to have a good marriage and a good life, and I saw he had possibilities, he was graduating from an engineering course. I thought he was more ambitious than he was…I mean I didn’t expect him to be the head of Hamilton Standard Propeller, but he was a good worker and he was a good man. And he was a very good father…ha! But I had joined the Catholic Church when I got married in 1950 and I didn’t use birth control and I had children…I had 7 pregnancies in 14 years, and that…and 6 living children, one miscarriage.” 

After Mary Lou and her husband married they settled in central Connecticut. It was a conservative time. Women had flooded into the workforce during the War. Now the men were home and working again, and if you were a middle class wife, you stayed at home and tended to the children and the house.

“And we moved into a new house within a year after marriage, so it was settling into this house, having a garden, doing canning…raising children and bla bla bla. But I joined the League of Women Voters, and it was political. And I loved it.”

Mary Lou needed an outlet. She had an active, inquisitive mind. She was restless at home.

“I would get very bored, and as I say, the League saved my life. I think I probably would have gone nuts if I hadn’t had the League to do some thinking about. My husband was not political…a good man but he didn’t much care for worrying about the state of the world or anything like that. He was intelligent. I helped him get his master’s and we had a lot of fun doing that…but he wouldn’t go on and get his PhD. He could have had education paid for by his company…and I couldn’t figure that one out, why he wouldn’t want to do that. And it didn’t occur to me to go to school at that time, mostly I guess because I was pretty tired, for one thing I breastfed all my kids for at least a year, I’d read that breastfeeding helped you in not getting pregnant, which it did, for the first year at least, then when I gave it up I’d get pregnant again.”

During her fourth pregnancy Mary Lou says she got quite sick…and her subsequent pregnancies were very uncomfortable.

“I knew about contraception of course but I had made a decision to become a Roman Catholic and I thought the least I could do was keep that vow.”

But after her last child was born she felt desperate. She says she went to her doctor’s office.

“I walked into his place and I said, I’ve had it. He said, I never thought you’d ask. He suggested sterilization.”

Ultimately, she did get sterilized. She says her husband wasn’t pleased about it. He thought it was wrong.

But she felt free.

And that freedom opened up other opportunities.

Around this time, when her final son was still a baby, she met a someone at a friend’s party – a guy named Stan.

“And this man said to me, my son was 9 months old, he said what do you do? And I said tomorrow I’m gonna do peaches, the next day I’m gonna do apple sauce…he said what? I said well I have 6 children. He said you don’t have a job, a part-time job or anything? He was a teacher, and he taught also in night school. He was also Afro-American. I didn’t have a part-time job? No, it never occurred to me. I had too much work to do at home. You do peaches? And I went home and thought about it and thought, that’s pretty crazy. Because he said why don’t you become a teacher? And I said how do I do that? He said, you go to school part-time.”

AM-T: “But is this because he’d spoken to you and got a sense of your intellectual bent?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Well actually he said later he really liked my tail, you’re gonna have to edit this one, but that’s what he said. I couldn’t find my shoes and I was looking underneath the sofa…but he just couldn’t believe I hadn’t figured that one out. And he kept after me, and I said to my husband that fall, I think I’m gonna go back to school: ‘Oh you’ve got too much work to do, how can you do that?’ He did not want me to go to school, and then Stan would call me up and say aren’t you going back to school?”

In a minute, Mary Lou puts her newfound freedom to the test.

---

For several months Mary Lou dithered about whether to return to school. Her husband was not into the idea of her studying to become a teacher, but eventually she decided she was going to do it. But the first time she went to register, she couldn’t go through with it. She was so nervous she fled the line and went back home.

The following day she returned, and this time she signed up.

Her husband wasn’t thrilled, but he did agree to take care of the kids while she went to school at night.

“But I came home one night, it was one of the first classes I’d really gotten excited about…and I came in around 9.30 at night, and I said guess what I learned tonight? or something. And he said, be quiet. And I looked at the television, and he said, can’t you see I’m watching television? And I looked and there was a commercial. I was so pissed. I said, that’s it.”

She began to think about a separation then…

“I had never wanted to get divorced…I always wanted to make it work. I thought it could be made to work. I thought I find other diversions that would keep me busy.”

It was a few more years before Mary Lou and her husband actually got divorced. And remember, Mary Lou was the one who wanted the split but she was also the partner who wasn’t earning any money – or at least by the time they split up she was earning some money as a substitute teacher, but nothing that could support her and 6 kids. Meanwhile, though, she’d begun a relationship with Stan – the man who’d encouraged her to go back to school in the first place. Things were getting complicated.

“It was just a pipe dream that I’d be leaving him to find another man to live with who would help me raise my children. Because Stan the man was a very ambitious person, and it was his second marriage, he only had one child he was caring for…he’d left the first one right after she’d been born. And there was no way this guy was going to get married. And at the time in the 70s he would be jeopardizing his professionalism, because mixed couples just were not operating much at that time.”

So she had to make a decision…about her family. It was 1971.

“I gave it the old college try to think that I could support them and be divorced – that was one of the things, he didn’t want to get divorced, he offered me the job as his housekeeper. No, I wasn’t going to do that.

AM-T: “Meaning we have a sham marriage but it looks like we’re married…” 

“Exactly, exactly, and at that point I just wanted out, I guess I just wanted to grow up. So we got divorced.”

And she gave him chief custody of the children – for the next couple of years she’d see them mostly during school vacations. The eldest was about 18, the youngest was 6.

Mary Lou went to Baltimore and lived with her brother – but Baltimore was where Stan was, too. Through him, she got a job teaching adults…

“And I loved it. I loved teaching the adults, mostly Vietnam vets, and women in their 40s and 50s working three jobs, and I learned a lot from them, mostly black, mostly very poor, and the GIs were stoned – I mean you know, it was a very turbulent time.”

But she felt she was thriving in the chaos. The aftermath of her marriage must have been traumatic for her children…but for her, the seventies were a time of personal growth…bursting out after feeling confined for a long time. Finding herself…and finding she enjoyed her job.

“So after I got my graduate degree in education I got a graduate degree in social studies…I was teaching social studies in Baltimore, in fact I was the first black teacher in the adult education program in Baltimore…”

AM-T: “The first black teacher or the first white teacher?”

“The first white teacher teaching black history, excuse me…the only reason I got the job was I had had one course in central Connecticut in black history, because at the time it was required…that blacks were…they were opening up the teaching system to everybody. But I had the course, so I had the paper…and the black women who were able to teach that history…and here I am a white northern woman teaching black history to veterans when they came home. I mean I think that was an insult. But I worked very hard at it, and I did a good job at it and so – that was the best job I ever had, teaching the adults and the veterans.”

After two years she found a job was open to her back in Connecticut, near her old town. So she said goodbye to Stan, and headed home.

She was near her kids again but she didn’t push to see them all the time. She was now working in the local school system, and she says she’d keep tabs on her kids by checking the register every day to see if they were all in school or if any of them were out sick. She says her ex-husband made clear to her that he was in charge now.

“And it was a moral situation too – I had been so bad, morally I’d done everything wrong, breaking the marriage and having an affair and so on. He saw black and white. Interesting thing was when I left him, he said, I’ll never get married again. Sure you will, I said, and I said about dating, why don’t you go with Joan? She was a friend of mine. He said I’ll never...well 6 months after I left, my oldest son said Daddy’s going out with Joan. I said, I knew it. She had 6 children but a couple of dead husbands. She went to the same church as he did. She called me when I was in Baltimore and said I’ll never marry him, Lou. I said be my guest, but I said, 12 kids, Joan? You better think twice.”

They didn’t marry, but she says Joan and her former husband did stay together until the end of their lives.

Mary Lou says to his credit, her ex-husband didn’t badmouth her to their children. She says she has a pretty good relationship with most of them today. She says she’s proud of them – that they’re all good citizens, kind, and responsible. 

“And my oldest daughter now and I are estranged. And I think it’s because she felt that I really gave her father short shrift. And she’s probably right. But I think he was probably much happier with Joan even on a part-time basis than he’d have been with me. I used to make him nervous.

AM-T: “Why?”

“Well we’d go to parties and I’d get excited by people and I’d act stupid and we’d come home and he’d criticize me: ‘You did this, or you did that.’ I had no intention of doing this or that. You know.”

AM-T: “Well, he expected to be married to someone more conventional.”

“Exactly, exactly.”

AM-T: In 1950 when he got married things had become very conventional again after the war when so many women had gone into the workforce, and you were on the backlash end of that when women were expected to be home fulltime being perfect wives and mothers.

“The interesting thing is I had models. My friends in New York were working jobs and raising children but they only had two for instance. And Laura, my best friend, was working. She only had two. I think it was the quantity, not the quality, of the whole thing.”

At this point we switched venues – Mary Lou needed to get to the ferry to get home to Connecticut, but I wanted to keep talking so I turned on the tape recorder again in the car.

My husband is driving and in the passenger seat is Al, Mary Lou’s partner. I’m in the back seat with Mary Lou.

AM-T: “So what did it feel like to be out on your own and totally supporting yourself?”

“Liberating…liberating! And I had the teaching job and I loved it. I loved it every day more and I never expected to…it’s interesting, in 8th grade a guidance teacher had said you have 3 choices, you can be a teacher, you can be a nurse, or you can work in an office. I said, I don’t want to do any of those. He said, why don’t you become a social worker? That’s why I became hooked on social work. But I loved the teaching because the feedback from the kids was exciting…it wasn’t so in social work, social work was solve, solve the people’s problems, but the kids and especially the junior high when I was teaching, and then when I had my own classroom at the high school, the kids were not only my salvation, they were my teachers, and they amused me, I never had a day that I didn’t want to be in the classroom.”

She retired at 68 – only because she was losing her eyesight and needed to drive to work. Hearing she was likely to go blind at some point, she got on a plane and went to Paris that summer.

After her marriage, Mary Lou didn’t have another long relationship for quite a while. She met people, but no one special.

So just over a decade ago she decided to try something new.

“And then I went on the internet – I didn’t go on the internet immediately but 12 years ago I went on the internet. I was only on about a year. I only dated 2 or 3 people, nobody worked out, and I thought oh, the heck with this, and I was about to quit the whole thing when Al’s picture came up…and it was so…he was so attractive. He looked, oh, I loved that picture. He was so theatrical.”

Her eyesight was poor, but good enough, she was still emailing back then – the picture was black and white. Al had his head cocked on one side…he was wearing a cap…

“And just – oh, he looked adorable, and then he was a good talker. Turns out he was from the Midwest for crying out loud. At first when I talked to him I had no idea he was Afro-American.”

That first conversation went well. They kept talking…and then she flew from Connecticut to Chicago to meet him for the first time. She says she was smitten from the start.

At this point I’m trying to pin down when exactly it was that they met and how old everyone was – I know Al is about a decade younger than Mary Lou. And here I should say Al really didn’t want to be part of this conversation. He’s a man of few words.

 Mary Lou: “Is it only 9? Didn’t I meet him when I was 85? 

Ashley: Do you remember, Al? 

Al: What?

Ashley: How old was she when you met?

Al: I don’t know…84.

Ashley: OK, give me something Al, what did you think when you first met her in person?

Al: Well I’m not in your interview. You can turn the interview off and maybe we can talk!”

Mary Lou: “He doesn’t want to divulge any information about himself – he might one day be president and they might dig up some dirt on him.”

Al moved east to be with Mary Lou and for the last year they’ve lived in a retirement community. Mary Lou says she’s still getting used to it after fending for herself for so long. 

 And after a lifetime of adventure and of fierce independence…

AM-T: “It must be nice to be with somebody at this point in your life…”

“It definitely is, and he’s a snuggler, it’s great, I love that. And he eats anything. He’s easy to be with…as long as I do what he says…”[laughs]

Mary Lou turns 95 this month. She says one of her daughters is taking her and Al out to celebrate.

That’s the Broad Experience for this time. I will post a couple of photos of Mary Lou under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.

If you have questions or comments you can always reach me at ashley @ the broad experience.com or on the show’s Facebook page, or on Twitter.

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

 “…And we have been together 24/7 for ten years, or 11, we don’t know which – maybe it’s only 9, who knows? [Laughter]…I don’t know.”

Episode 150: Who Do You Think You Are?

Show transcript:

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

This is the first show after my hiatus…I was itching to bring you something as soon as I could in the new year. I am not entirely finished with the project that’s consumed my time over the last several months, so this show isn’t entirely new. I produced much of it about four years ago but you’ll hear some things in here that you haven’t heard before.

And I’m working on getting a bunch of new shows ready for you.  

In this episode, we look at that invisible issue that runs beneath so many women’s lives: confidence – or 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.

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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 a few years ago 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.”

Maybe some of you have read the book The Confidence Code. There’s a part where an African-American lawyer 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 works 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.”

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?”

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Stacey Vanek Smith is co-host of the Indicator podcast from NPR’s Planet Money, 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. You will hear her play down her achievements.  

“I deal with my insecurity by undercutting myself and my work – and that’s how I deal with my lack of confidence…by being honest about it or talking about it but you know I’m not sure that is always the best way…I guess every woman who does creative work or work of any kind is insecure about it on some level. I don’t know, I’ve been thinking about it a lot about how I handle it and , trying to stop myself when someone says, Oh, I liked your piece, not being like, oh, you know, oh, I was disappointed in that, just being like, thank you. It’s really hard.”

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.”

I’ve been that dreary, dependable woman. But the swagger isn’t something either of us can emulate. When Stacey is 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.

But letting other people know you lack confidence can backfire, as I discovered in the days when Stacey and I were working for the same organization. To me, my lack of confidence was such an integral part of me I didn’t even think about it. But one day, I was forced to.

AM-T: One of the best pieces of career advice I ever got from an editor – in fact, Liza Tucker, why not say her name out loud? I got assigned a story one day and I thought it was really silly. And I conveyed the fact I wasn’t really sure I could do a great job on it. And I remember feeling really insecure about it and sort of rolling my eyes and thinking, this is such a dumb story. But I went off and made the calls and turned it around on deadline and it turned out to be fine.  And as with so many stories it turned out there was something interesting, and they were perfectly happy with it. But the next day Liza called me at my desk and said I don’t know why you were so under confident about that story yesterday but you should never show your editor that you’re un- confident because it gives people a reason to not have confidence in you. By showing that I was insecure about something I was telegraphing to my bosses that maybe I couldn’t be trusted to pull it off.

“Right, and I also feel like when you get into that mentality it’s really hard to fight for more. To tell yourself like, I really deserve more, I should be getting this promotion or this raise, and 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 or something like that before I feel like I can ask for something…I don’t feel comfortable necessarily 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 can be 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.

Stacey is the author a new book called Machiavelli for Women – it’s coming out in the summer of 2020 and I will have her back on the show then.

Thanks to her and Denise Barreto for being my guests on this episode.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time.

If you have an idea for an upcoming show feel free to share it with me – quite a few of the shows you’ve heard have come from listeners. And I’m always glad to hear from you.

You can reach me at ashley at the broad experience dot com or on Twitter or Facebook.

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

Episode 149: Forgiveness at Work

Show transcript:

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

This time, how much should we forgive at work…

“If you’re constantly internalizing dozens of these interactions in a day, you have to have an outlet, you have to have a way to let that go.”

Work can be the source of plenty of slights and upset. My guest today says she’s thrived by making forgiveness a career tactic.

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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A couple of shows ago you heard an episode called Forced Out, about leaving a job in bad circumstances. In that show we discussed ways of dealing with painful situations at work from being fired to just having a really poor relationship with your manager. But today the more under the radar stuff gets a lot of attention too – not that they haven’t been around for a while - micro-aggressions, the little things someone will say or do that can make someone feel distinctly like they don’t belong.

Christie Lindor is something of an expert in dealing with them. She describes herself as first generation everything.

“First generation American,, first college grad of my family, first corporate professional.”

Christie’s parents are from Haiti, and Christie was raised in Boston.

“We grew up speaking 3 languages at home, so when you’re always context switching, we spoke French, we spoke Creole, which is a local dialect in Haiti, as well as English, and I hear this happens a lot in bilingual or multigenerational families, we’ll speak one or two sentences and we’ll speak 3 languages together…and we understand eachother, but outside sometimes people are like, you have your own language!”

Her parents entertained the immigrant parents’ dream: that their girl would become a doctor or a lawyer or maybe an engineer. But Christie, once she got to college…she found out about this thing called…a management consultant. And that’s what she ended up becoming after she graduated. She loved the idea of helping clients solve problems, working as part of a team. She’s been at it now for close to 20 years.

I told her I’ve met a lot of recovering consultants over the years.  

“Most people on average don’t last more than 2, 3 years in the business. I had no idea going into it that was the case at first, I just knew it was incredibly hard. There was kind of an elitist club to it – you were either in or you were out. If you were in that meant you had opportunities for apprenticeship, for mentors, for exposure to really cool projects and if you were out, it took a lot more for you to be able to really prove your worth, be able to get a seat at the table, and I had to learn that the hard way.”

She tried not to feel intimidated by the Ivy League graduates around her with their sparkling pedigrees. And she put up with a lot as she started to crack consulting’s culture.  

“In consulting, I usually spend most of my days being the only woman and sometimes the only person of color in the room, and with that comes a lot of subtle but not so subtle acts of whether it’s sexism or racism or ageism…when I was younger there was an ageism thing…there was a lot of biases that just came with my mere existence coming into this space.”

Back in the day, when she first started out, she was just concentrating on being the best she could be, getting the work done. But one incident really took her aback. She had interviewed to be involved on a particular client project. She says in consulting you interview with the client to make sure the role is the right fit for you.  

“So I remember I had a really great interview over with phone with the client and with the engagement manager, I’d had a series of conversations with them, sounds like it was a great fit,  I was really excited about the opportunity I think this was my third or fourth project into my career so right out the gate, within my first two years starting in this type of work. So I flew out to the client site it’s my, first day on project, I was really excited, I was supposed to meet the engagement manager at the security desk, to give me access to the building.”

Now this was in the days before everyone had a photo attached to their online profile. The manager had described himself and what he was wearing that day. So Christie’s standing there in the busy lobby and she knows what she’s looking for.  

“So I remember him getting off the elevator, and I saw him, and he was kind of looking up and down, looking for me to be able to meet up. Since I recognized him from his description and I naturally went up to him, said hey, my name is Christie, I’m so excited to meet you, and I put out my hand to shake his hand. And I distinctly remember, Ashley, the facial expressions he had – his face transitioned from being really upbeat and excited to him being surprised, to being a little confused, to being disappointed, in like less than ten seconds. And then he kind of blurted out, ‘oh, you’re Christie!’”

She says she was clearly NOT what he was expecting. This was about 15 years ago now. Still…

“I’ll never forget it because it was such an awkward elevator ride up to the client site. I’m uncomfortable because he’s uncomfortable, and while you think about that instant, he didn’t really do anything to me. He didn’t harm me. But his non-verbal cues were felt and on a subconscious level. And that really played out. It was a three-month engagement and I had to mentally push that out of my head.  I remember I said to myself you know Christie, you gotta move on and it’s your first day on the project you gotta make a great impression. But deep down that was always nagging and it really affected my experience with him and with the client. And I can think of literally thousands of different types of examples like that, that happened to me on a regular basis. So for me forgiveness became a survival technique. It became something I had to lean on to be able to focus on what mattered, to pivot my energy, for me to be able to kind of not let people’s biases or their stereotypes about me, affect me.”

We’ll talk more about forgiveness in a minute, but first…I wondered, did that awkward situation ever resolve?

“It never really did resolve. I think he got over the fact that I am who I am. He never said anything out of the ordinary to me…I moved it out of my head as I mentioned and focused on the day and the work. But that initial reaction did impact my ability to trust him. So from the get I never really trusted him, and he was a nice guy, I learned a lot on the three months that I worked with him, and I think by the end things were fine, we delivered the work, things were great, but I walked away from the experience not really trusting him, there was never a reason to bring it up. It was early in my career so it wasn’t like I had that kind of courage to bring that situation up to him and honestly Ashley at the time I didn’t really have mentors or anyone to talk to about it.” 

She says internalized it. She did the same with subsequent situations like the time a leader she admired acknowledged everyone else in the room’s ideas…but didn’t even make eye contact with her. Or the time she found out a colleague with 8 years less experience than her was making almost 50% more. 

“I wasn’t sharing as much of myself, sharing ideas, bringing those to the table, I was already an introvert but certain situations I experienced made me even more introverted, made me more quiet. Which obviously in a very collaborative career like consulting being quiet and not being able to share your thoughts and ideas on a particular solution is actually not the best thing to do. So when I caught myself being more internal, even though I was dealing with different things, I realized I had to come up with a different paradigm of how I was interacting with the world in order for me to thrive.”

So she came up with this idea of forgiveness to make lemons out of lemonade, as she puts it. She had to have an outlet, a way to let go, otherwise she says she might just have quit consulting altogether. But one big blow put the whole forgiveness thing to the test. She had worked like crazy all year – as usual – she was always the most knowledgeable, most prepared person in the room. She was expecting a top performance rating and a promotion at the end of the fiscal year.

But she didn’t get one.

She was crushed. And after wallowing for a few days in shock, anger, grief…she decided to take a new tack. She calls it ‘release’ – where you take control of your hurt and upset and use it to move forward. In her case, she realized she had been spending all her energy trying to get ahead within her organization – but no one outside it knew who she was. She couldn’t control what happened at work – at least not as much as she’d like. But she could control what she did next. She set about building her own brand outside of her company – in just over a year she wrote articles, a book, she did a TEDx talk, launched a podcast…and the year after that she even got that promotion. But it didn’t matter as much any more. Because by that time she felt powerful in her own right.

She says too many people still cleave to the idea that if you forgive, you’re letting someone off the hook.

 “There’s a story or belief that’s out there that forgiveness means that everything is OK – or if you’re forgiving someone it means there’s an absolute, someone was absolutely wrong or right in a particular scenario. I’ve had to look at forgiveness in a different light. I’ve had to almost redefine what forgives means for me, and for me it’s more about self-care. There’s a saying out there that I really love – if you don’t forgive someone it’s like you’re drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. That’s essentially what happens if you’ve gone through something and you’re holding onto something, it doesn’t serve you a purpose.” 

I relate to that. A painful work experience for me came out of me being pitted against a younger colleague in another city for a job I really wanted and felt I deserved after years of building up to it. I did not get the job. It was a small office, and of course this new person was gonna be around me all day. I was smarting with indignation. Part of me…there was nothing I wanted more than to be snarky or cool with this person because I was feeling aggrieved that they got ‘my’ job. The other part was more mature. I thought, bitter as I feel about what’s happened (and there was a whole history to this), who am I helping by playing to my worst instincts? Management made this decision. I’m just making myself look bad and getting a little petty satisfaction for a while, perhaps…but in the end being mean wasn’t going to serve me any purpose whatsoever. But I did have to swallow hard to do this. Then after being friendly for a while it just became normal. And I did take matters into my own hands and tell the company I needed more money if I was going to stay there. I got a 20 percent raise. So ultimately I came away from the situation feeling that I had channeled my bitter feelings into something more rewarding.

Circling back to a situation Christie outlines in her new workbook, Release – Use the Power of Forgiveness to Get Unstuck and Thrive in your Career. She knows this woman called Quinn. And maybe this rings bells for some of you, but Quinn was an up and coming leader in her 20s, she was promoted to manage a 20-person team. But after that promotion her longtime supervisor, Martha – who’d been with the company ten years – suddenly turned on her. She was verbally abusive, she belittled her in front of the staff. It was awful. After trying HR, with no effect, Quinn thought OK – what do I really want out of this situation? Martha clearly feels threatened by me. But I want her as a mentor, I can learn a lot from her if she’ll only treat me like a human being and be collaborative.

“She said you know what, she said I really want to have a relationship with this individual. I have a lot to learn. Martha will be a great mentor to me even though I’ve come to this supervisory role. So even though she’d gone through a lot with this individual she felt she was at a place where it would be more beneficial to her to repair the relationship and start over, but start over from a lens of ‘let me share what really happened, how it made me feel and what kind of relationship I want with you.’”

Quinn did just that. She approached Martha, told her she wanted to learn from her, she wasn’t trying to take her job. And it worked. The older woman was totally disarmed by her words, and they went on to have a fruitful relationship.

That feels like a very mature approach and it’s one that again it can be hard for us to take when we’re clouded by emotions like anger and hurt and resentment. But it’s worth pausing to think about what you want at the end of the day – not just how aggrieved you feel.  

Finally I asked Christie if she doesn’t at least sometimes take someone to task for something they’ve said or done. She does. Like the time a colleague of hers casually dissed Haitians because he’d had a bad experience with someone. She took him aside, explained to him among other things that Haitians weren’t monolithic; she says she was satisfied with his apology. But she’s careful about who she speaks to.

“I think it’s situational. There have been times I have said something to an individual. There has to be a care factor – I have to care enough about really creating, maintaining, strengthening a relationship with another person to want to be vulnerable and share that, but that’s a choice I decide that I make. It has to be resolved in a way that is mutually beneficial. I have to walk away having voiced my opinion and being heard and the other person walks away hearing a different perspective.”

Christie Lindor is the author most recently of a workbook called Release – Use the Power of Forgiveness to Get Unstuck and Thrive in Your Career.

That’s the Broad Experience for this time, and this is the last episode you’ll heard for a while…I’m putting the show on hiatus for the first time in seven and a half years.

I have a big work project that’s going to dominate much of my time for the next several months. I know I can’t do that and this show well – at the same time – so I’m gonna take a break, and use the time I’m not producing the show to think about where it should go in the future.

In the meantime, there is a large archive for you to delve into. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for your support…and thanks for listening.

Episode 148: So Many Incompetent Leaders

Show transcript:

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

This time…why are so many leaders bad at their jobs, and could their sex have anything to do with that?

“When you ask people, who wants to do something, who wants to be in charge, be successful…the people who raise their hands may or may not have talent. For sure more men than women are gonna raise their hands. So instead of blaming women for not leaning in, how about we stop falling for people, usually men, who lean in when they don’t have the talents to back it up?”

 Most of us give our leaders a failing grade…would that change if more of them were women? Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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A few months ago one of my guests was Financial Times writer Pilita Clark. When we spoke in our episode about women and mediocrity, she brought up a book she’d read and I’d heard about. Its title…Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders (and how to fix it).

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the author of that book. He’s also chief talent scientist for Manpower Group, a huge staffing firm.

“Mostly my remit is pretty sensible, it’s to ensure we can apply latest science and technology for understanding people – their strengths, talents and skills, to help them find relevant jobs…companies or employers tell you, I need A, B or C, how can you work out whether somebody has that talent and potential? That includes also predicting whether someone can be good manager or a good leader.”

Science and technology – we’ll come back to this later, but Tomas says rather than using these methods to determine who could be a promising leader, we keep falling back on old stereotypes we can detect with our own eyes and ears – people, usually men, who are bursting with confidence and charisma, who have a pretty high opinion of their talents, and often turn out not to be nearly as good as they think they are.

Tomas came to his current role by way of academia and clinical practice. He’s a psychologist by training. And he says growing up where he did in Buenos Aires, that career choice was almost inevitable. His neighborhood, Villa Freud, was bursting with therapists – and their clients.

“The reality is that when I was growing up everyone went to the psychoanalyst, or had a shrink, even our dog at home had a psychoanalyst, who was obviously treating us, not the dog. The dog looked pretty embarrassed while we were describing the problems it had. So it was natural almost by default that I went on and studied psychology.”

He says he got interested in the topic of leadership early on, again, because of where he lived.  

“Growing up in Argentina you could see at any point in time the problems incompetent leadership causes. 150 years ago Argentina was the future, it was one of the richest countries in the world with a GDP higher than Germany’s and France, today it’s the only perpetually declining nation in the world, why? Because we keep electing inept leaders, who tend to be mostly charismatic, over-confident narcissists.”

These outward traits seduce us – or a lot of us anyway. Studies show more men than women are over-confident (and do we really even need a study to tell us that?), and that quality often disguises a lack of competence.

Meanwhile, he says, stereotypical female traits like self-awareness and emotional intelligence and empathy are seen as soft, not seen as leadership traits.

“It’s a bit like when you tell women oh, you’re too kind and caring to be a leader… first that’s patronizing, secondly, we need leaders who are kind and caring.”

Which leads me to my first question.

AM-T: “I remember years ago reading your piece with that same title, ‘Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?’ in the Harvard Business review and I remember you referencing Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, because that had just come out. Can you just talk a little bit about, now that article has become a book, what prompted you to write that piece?” 

“So the original idea for the article was actually my editor’s – I always say behind every incompetent man there is a competent woman. Because Sarah Greene, who was my editor at the time, she was the editor for the book, sent me this link on Sheryl’s new book and the beginning of the movement if you like, and said, what do you think? I said, it doesn’t make much sense to me. In the rich world today there’s no evidence that women don’t want to be managers or leaders. They should have lower levels of motivation given they have fewer options and choices. And yet their willingness or desire to lead is as high as that you find in men.

Secondly, the Lean In argument does seem to be pointing the finger at women and telling them we need to fix you, there’s something wrong with you, you are responsible for your inadequate levels of success…oh, just look at me, I made it just by leaning in. And that’s the last part I wanted to tackle with the article and the main argument underpinning book. So in any area of competence or talent there has never been a correlation between people wanting to do something and people being good at something. That applies to leadership as well, when you ask people who wants to do something, who wants to be in charge, be successful? The people who raise their hands may or may not have talent, the correlation is almost zero. For sure more men than women are gonna raise their hands. So argument I made was, instead of blaming women for not leaning in, how about we stop falling for people, usually men, who lean in when they don’t have the talents to back it up?”

AM-T: “Talk about, well you call it the female advantage, and I always feel we’re getting into slightly murky waters when we begin to talk about male and female traits, but maybe you could tell people, you make the point that on so many measures men and women are actually really similar…”

“Yeah, men and women are similar in most regards. You have to first understand that even when we talk about personality traits that are stereotypically more feminine, things like emotional intelligence, altruism, friendliness, sensitivity, caring, self-awareness, self-criticism, humility and integrity – each of these traits is normally distributed, so much like height…you can imagine if you plot height across gender on average men are taller than women, but we all know women who a taller than a lot of men and vice versa. Same applies to these traits. We all know men who are more humble, caring, empathetic than many women, but I think it’s still accurate to say that these are feminine traits because they are on average displayed more frequently by women than by men.”

Still, he knows not everyone will appreciate that description.

“Feminists don’t like this argument because their view, the traditional feminist view is we are the same and there aren’t any gender differences and in essence androgyny is the reality. It is true culturally we are gravitating towards androgyny - so if you compare chauvinistic countries like Japan and Argentina to egalitarian countries like Iceland and Sweden, you’ll see more androgynous displays of behavior, so fewer gender differences in the latter. But today, still there are these gender differences. What I’m arguing is not to have more women in charge but I’m trying to highlight the benefits of a more feminine leadership style.  Because after decades of selecting too much on hyper masculinity, and putting people in charge because they are kick-ass aggressive, fearless, over-confident, and quite greedy at times, there is more of a need than there ever was to have people who have altruism, integrity, humility, empathy and caring – so that’s the female advantage and that’s why my conclusion is that if it’s your goal to increase the representation of women in leadership, the best gender diversity intervention to achieve that is to focus on talent, not on gender. If you focus on talent you won’t just get more women in leadership roles, you’ll get slightly more women than men in leadership roles.

By the way, today many competent men are overlooked or ignored for leadership roles because they are more feminine than our archetypes like to think leaders should be like.”

He stresses this: he’s not saying that all men are terrible leaders or that all women are amazing leaders. He’s saying that if only more organizations – and electorates – would revise what we thought of as desirable leadership traits we’d have a lot more competent leadership everywhere.

And another thing, he says…the idea of leadership itself is often misunderstood.

“…often it focuses not on whether you’re truly interested in turning a group of people into a high performing team but the question almost is diluted to, would you like to be successful? Because if you want to be successful you almost certainly have to manage people, have responsibilities and be a leader. Too many people equate being a leader with the pinnacle of individual of career success. In fact leadership is a psychological role that enables people to be part of a unit to work together and achieve something they can’t achieve individually.”

Now those of you who are leaders will know that already. But I have to admit that I hadn’t thought about it that carefully before and I sort of fell into that trap of equating leadership with this personal goal of…being a leader means being someone at the top of the pile. Rather than thinking of it as the person who’s meant to inspire people, help everyone else do their jobs better.

And of course a lot of people with a leadership title DON’T do that. 

“They have negative effects on their teams, on their subordinates, their followers, meaning they cause low levels of engagement, job satisfaction, productivity, trust, morale…and high levels of anxiety, burnout, stress. They’re the main reason why people quit not just their jobs but their organizations, and in some instances traditional employment altogether. Most people who enter self-employment have been traumatized by their previous bosses.”

I’m guessing some of you are among them.

The beginning of Tomas’s book focuses on over-confidence and narcissism and how damaging those traits can be in a leader. And how over-confident people so often overshadow more modest people with plenty of skills to do the job.

And I flatter myself that I can spot an over-confident narcissist a mile off. But when I got to the chapter on the myth of charisma…and how we rely on that far too much when we pick someone for a job…that’s when I thought, hmm…I could be part of the problem. Because I am a sucker for charisma. And I wanted to know why – why do I feel drawn to someone whose character sparkles right out of the gate?

Tomas says if you think back a few millennia to when we all lived in small groups as hunter-gatherers. We had to assess our fellow humans on physical traits like strength – could they defeat a predator? Run away quickly? We just looked at them and drew our conclusion.

“Fast forward thousands of years, and we’re living in world where talent is abstract, hard to judge, how do you know if someone can put in place digital transformation or come up with good innovation strategy? It requires a lot of expertise, it requires competence to spot competence and to spot incompetence…but we’re still living under this illusion that we interact with someone for a few minutes, we can tell. It’s why we value charisma so much…you’re not necessarily a bad person when you’re charismatic, but if you’re a bad person charisma will make you a lot more destructive…right, these are extreme examples but Stalin, Mao, Hitler, name your dictator, would have been a lot less harmful had they not been charismatic.”

Of course we don’t all fall for charisma all the time. He says German premier Angela Merkel, re-elected multiple times? No one’s going to want to make a movie about her. Mary Barra, CEO of GM? Her personality has apparently been described as ‘vanilla’. Both leaders have been uncommonly successful at their jobs. They’re competent without the outward show.

But he says we often make snap decisions about people’s potential because, basically…we’re lazy.

“We’re much more efficient if we don’t have to spend a lot of time working out what somebody else is like.”

And as humans we need to maintain high levels of self-esteem – at work and elsewhere. We don’t want to be wrong. So he says even if we are…we’re usually loath to admit it.

“So I make inferences about you and arrive at the rapid conclusion that you’re boring, nasty, stupid, I’ll then attend to any information that supports that initial inference and ignore anything that contradicts this. Why, because I want to feel good about myself. Think about the implications of this at work, say I interview you for a job and I think you’re great, 6 months later even if you suck at that job, I will still want to think that you are great, otherwise I look like an idiot.

So we are intellectually lazy, we want to make decisions on others in split seconds, we don’t want to prove ourselves wrong so we are stubborn and love ourselves too much to admit to mistakes. And then finally there is the ever growing complexity of the world of talent, the world of work, where you need a science and a methodology to work out what people are good at. It’s crazy to think in world awash with data, where you can have live Twitter feeds fact checking anything politicians say online, that doesn’t change people’s votes. It’s whether someone is sweaty or looks good or has a nice suit or makes a joke is more important determining whether we vote for that person or not…in America today the number one predictor of who wins the presidency other than height is, would you like to have a beer with this person? So we love to live in a world where our gut feelings and instincts drive our decisions, and we love to ignore evidence even when there is an overwhelming amount of it.”

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When Tomas talks to CEOs and other executives – which he does pretty much every day, and asks them how they tell if someone has good leadership potential…

“More often than not the answer is, you just know, or, you know it when you see it, or I know it when I see it.”

But he says the reality is that’s far from the case for most people.

“So we have to have the humility and self-criticism to distrust our instincts, focus on the right traits and use the right tools, ideally science-based tools, to identify those traits, and it’s frustrating because we’ve known this to be the case for three or four decades.”

But what he calls the unstructured interview where it’s really more of a conversation…it’s still prevalent. And he says this type of interview is a classic way for the interviewer to fall back on old biases and end up choosing someone who’s a lot like him or her.  

But I have to say I don’t like the idea of these psychometric tests…

AM-T: “I’m one of these people, I would worry I would mis-perform on a test, and I’d hope they’d meet me…I’d hope I can impress them with my personality, and it’s interesting that I’m fearful of the method you say is far better at measuring how we are.”

“Yes, historically the interview has mostly been a chat, I mean we met, we established a rapport, but imagine actually that determines whether you get a job or not and imagine there are alternatives that in essence follow the same approach, which is to try to find relevant signal of potential, which is to try to correlate things you do that make you different from others with performance indicators. Because that’s how you decide as a human, whether you trust someone, whether they’re interesting, but we can’t do it at scale, and we can’t do it really rigorously. Especially if you want a world that is more egalitarian and fairer towards minorities, vulnerable populations, especially if you’re saying we should ignore things like whether somebody is female and attractive, old, poor, etcetera…humans are not very good at ignoring information, we can’t unlearn things.”

He says as the digital world evolves…there will be more and better data and technology to help us determine people’s potential for top jobs. We just have to use it.

Before Tomas and I ended our conversation I wanted to get back to female leaders. I was thinking of one in particular and wondering what Tomas, her fellow countryman, thought of her leadership style. I wasn’t sure she displayed many of those female traits he described earlier. So how does he rate former Argentine president Kristina Fernandez de Kirchner…

“She is exceptional in many ways – ironically there have been more female heads of state in South America, more than in more egalitarian places, but these women have tended to out-male males in masculinity. So she definitely displays a lot of antagonistic and anti-social tendencies, she is very abrasive, over confident and quite brash and reckless. Although I don’t have her personality assessment, it is fair to guess, to infer that there are some narcissistic tendencies there.”

None of which he says is that surprising given her rise in a macho culture…

“So often you can be a biological female but you’re part of the same system and you rise to the top with the same rules of the game. Now Theresa May is gone, but for…” 

AM-T: “I was just gonna get to her. A lot of people would say she’s not charismatic, and I was one of the people who thought at the time phew, someone who’s boring and sensible, but she’s turned out to not be a very good leader.”

“Correct, so a lot of people – which I think you could have predicted, right, given where she came from, and the fact nobody wanted that job, but when the book came out a lot of men wrote to me saying, there are also incompetent women, look at Theresa May… well first, incompetent women don’t rise to the top as frequently as incompetent men. And secondly, even though she is probably incompetent or was incompetent, the impossible problem she was asked to solve was caused by incompetent men, or men who behaved, or had incompetent lapses at least for some time.”

He’s talking about former British prime minster David Cameron, who ushered in a national referendum on EU membership fully expecting voters to want to stay IN the EU, not leave it, as the majority voted to do.  

“Things for sure from an individual career standpoint had been good for him and the country to the extent even people who disliked the Conservatives couldn’t complain too much about him. Suddenly one really bad over-confident decision led to the problem we are still trying to solve today. And sometimes people take issue with this, they don’t like it because they assume I am taking a remainer’s point of view, and people still voted for Brexit and that is true, people voted for Brexit, but from his own view point or vantage point, it was a big mistake.”

As I release this episode Theresa May is on her way out…and her likely successor is an over-confident, charismatic…you know the rest…

“…and I am a British citizen so I can speak to this as well, I think the prospects of her successors are going to be not just worse but fully aligned with the characters I describe in my book. So it’s the return of the incompetent men on steroids I think.”

I think the prospects of Britain’s new prime minister opening Tomas’s book are slim, but I do recommend it for anyone who wants a thoughtful take on what constitutes good leadership and what will lead to more of it. 

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. Thanks to Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic for being my guest on this show.

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

Episode 147: Forced Out (re-boot)

Show transcript:

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

This time we’re re-visiting a show I first put out about 4 years ago now. But the topic feels as relevant as ever – what it feels like to leave a job in less than ideal circumstances, and how to recover from that.

You might be fired, you might be pressured to leave, you might choose to leave because of a personality clash…

“I don’t understand the psychology of it, what was happening between her and me. But there was undermining and erosion of my spirit. That’s the only way I can describe it.”

And losing a job can leave you reeling.   

“Whereas I think the first time I was fired I’d had this series of transgressions, this time I absolutely didn’t see it coming at all. And there was a physical reaction to it. I felt completely sick.”

Coming up – two women, two stories, and some advice on how to get your mojo back after a bad breakup with work.  

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I’m actually planning on upcoming show in 2019 about forgiveness at work, and this seems like a good precursor to that. Because for many of us work is not just business – it’s personal. If we feel slighted or insulted or ignored…it can be really hard to get over that. As Marion Kane can attest.

Marion is a food writer who lives in Toronto. Actually she calls herself a food sleuth. For years she wrote for Canada’s daily newspapers. She spent 18 of those at one of the big Toronto dailies. First she was the food editor. And she had quite a career during that time. She became friends with the legendary food writer Julia Child, she says she was the first person in Canada to interview a young Jamie Oliver back in the ‘90s…she interviewed a member of the mob – he’d brought out a Mafia cookbook.

She and I spoke on Skype.

AM-T: So you had a really exciting time, it sounds like.

“Yes, I loved it! And the ‘90s were the heyday of newspapers. There was money around to send me to conferences, to have breakfast with Julia Child, to go to the Napa Valley to be wined and dined by chefs in a vineyard on Thanksgiving - it was amazing. But meanwhile I don’t want to ignore the fact newsrooms are grinders. They are very hectic places, you have deadlines, and I was producing the whole food section every week.”

It was a lot of work for one person. Ultimately she ended up getting run down, getting sick and taking some time off. When she came back she said she didn’t want to be the food editor any more – the pace was too relentless. The paper asked what she did want to do and she said, I’d love to write a column. They said yes. So Marion was able to leave that hectic pace behind. She had less responsibility overall. She should have been happy. But she had this editor…

“And this person was already gunning for me, I could tell. I didn’t know why and I don’t know why to this day. I’m guessing she felt threatened that I had a fiefdom of my own. The food section was very successful, it was very popular. So I don’t understand the psychology of it, what was happening between her and me. But there was undermining and erosion of my spirit, that’s the only way I can describe it.” 

She says to take one example, the editor would consult much younger members of the newsroom about Marion’s beat – right in front of Marion.

“She would call me in and with a copy editor person who was handling the copy – and say, what do you think we should do with the food section, turning her back to me. I was one of the many people in that newsroom who spent a fair amount of time weeping in the toilet. You know newsrooms are brutal places, there’s a lot of addiction, a lot of alcoholism in newsrooms. I’m not going to badmouth them because they’re one of the most exciting places. I mean you’re in the thick of it. And I love that.”

But she hated feeling this editor didn’t support her or her work. Now maybe some of you are thinking she was being overly sensitive. And that’s always possible. But if you’ve been in a similar situation you know how hard it is to put your finger on some of this inter-personal stuff that goes on at work. It’s a lot of tiny things that add up over time. 

One day Marion found her food column had been moved from a prominent spot – buried, she says, right next to the religion page.

AM-T: Now I’m just curious, did you ever consider confronting her and saying look, why are you doing these things?

“That’s a good point. I don’t know if I ever did. You didn’t do that in the newspaper business. I tried leaving – oh, I know what I did. I used to leave her phone messages before work. And I used to write columns, I guess this was passive/aggressive of me. But I’d learned the hard way it wouldn’t work to confront her. So I wrote a couple of columns about how miserable I was. And she called me in and said you know, that’s enough with those columns about how miserable you are. I did go to the union, I consulted doctors because my anxiety level was very high. And I couldn’t sleep and I was taking sleeping pills. And I’ve written about how that story ended.”

AM-T: Right. And before we get onto that just tell me what ultimately…how did you make your exit?

“In 2007, the spring, I got an email from the powers that be or actually the person they’d hired at the newspaper to downsize. And I’d heard people were getting emails to offer buyouts and I thought oh God, that’s terrible for them. And then I got one. I got an email saying we’re happy to offer you this and that, and it was a lot of money actually. And I was so outraged by this because I felt I was a marquee writer and I think I was, I had a following, I’d never missed a deadline, and I answered in a huff: ‘thank you for thinking of me but I don’t want to accept the offer.’”

AM-T: Hmm, wounded pride.

“Yeah, in a huff, you know? It was illogical and wrong and I didn’t seek advice; I should have legal advice actually. Other colleagues of mine did.”

She says the paper was sending out these notices to everyone around her age – she had turned 60 recently. But at the time she was so offended she reacted emotionally rather than rationally. She had second thoughts later. She wrote back to the paper saying she’d had a re-think and she’d like to take the buyout. They said no. So Marion decided to resign. She felt it was time. And her tenure ended on a high note. The paper gave her a good sendoff and she wrote a farewell column. 

“I don’t have many regrets. My bank account would be far larger. That’s the advice I would give to people: Don’t stay in a toxic situation, however. Don’t let a boss bully you. Stand up for yourself. And I think if it’s impossible to stand up…oh, here’s a good irony…my boss was demoted shortly after I resigned.”

AM-T: That must have felt very satisfying.

“I have to say it did. I’d like to think it was because she had mistreated me, which was known in the newsroom, but I don’t know if that’s the case.”

It’s been about 8 years now, but all the feelings she had about that editor – they haven’t entirely left her.

“I still see her on occasion on the street. And I’ve had a fantasy of confronting her now about this. And I was in a grocery store recently and she was there and I said to another friend that I came across in that store, ‘I have to the urge to tell her what I think of her and what she did to me.’ And my friend said no, those things never work out the way you think.” 

AM-T: Very wise advice.

 “Yes.”

Marion says whatever went wrong with that personal relationship, it was time to leave the paper.  

AM-T: Because that was 2007, I was going to ask has it worked out and have you been happy in what you’ve been doing since then?

“Well I had a period of dealing with a cross addiction to sleeping pills, Lorazopam, and alcohol, that was partly brought on by stress, but I’d say it was a childhood thing that may have happened anyway. But I hit bottom in 2008 and have been in recovery for 6 and a half years. And you know the gift of an addiction and having to face your demons is that you can re-build your life in a healthier, healing way.”

Marion wrote to me after the interview and said if there’s one thing she wants to get across it’s that if you’re in a toxic situation it is better to leave before you get burned out and make some bad decisions. Now of course she was lucky that she could quit without anything to go to. She was close to retirement age anyway, and she had a nest egg. Most people will need to search for another job while they’re grinning and bearing it at work.

You can hear Marion on her podcast, it’s called Sittin’ in the Kitchen. You can find it on all the usual podcast apps. A show she did at the end of 2018 about a Toronto drop-in shelter for homeless women is a finalist for the Association of Food Journalist awards.

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Next, a guest some of you will know from past shows. I interviewed her several times during the early years of the podcast. Today, Heather McGregor is executive dean of Edinburgh Business School in Scotland.  When I met her for this interview she was still running a headhunting firm in London – Taylor Bennett. She’s still non-executive chairman of the firm. For many years she also write for the Financial Times under the pen name Mrs. Moneypenny.

Heather is no stranger to job loss.  

“I was fired from my first ever job actually, my first proper job, which I was placed into by the company I now own. It was slightly unfortunate. I seemed to enter into a whole series of disastrous decisions at that company, and the final straw in their view was when I made an error of judgment in wearing an inappropriate dress to a client dinner.”

Her bosses at the ad agency deemed the dress too revealing. She says she’s learned a lot since that time – it was the mid-‘80s. Still, it was a dinner, not the office. And what really got to her was her boss’s comment that someone like Heather should not reveal too much skin because he said, ‘we have secretaries for that.’

“I was more furious about the comment that we have secretaries for that kind of thing. I thought to tell me that we employed secretaries I the office for the purposes of looking decorative was very insulting to the women that worked there.”

Heather and I had emailed a bit about all this before we met and I thought she’d been fired twice in all.

AM-T: “And what about the next time, or the final time you got laid off?”

“No, there was one in between. So when I went part-time to do my MBA I also took some contracts on.”

Just to jump in here – in her late 20s Heather decided she really wanted to do an MBA. She was working for a biotech company and her boss at the time wouldn’t pay for it, but he did let her go part-time so she could manage the MBA work a bit better. But as as soon as the MBA work scaled down at certain times of year she sought extra work.

“And I took on a 6-month part-time contract….which interestingly my current company also found for me. And I did it for 6 months and literally the night before the final day I was working late and the boss called me in and she said I’m sorry to tell you we’re not renewing your contract. We think you’re too big a personality to work here.”

AM-T: What does that mean?

“I think it means that I can be very divisive. I think that’s probably true of me even at 53.  Some people enjoy working with me and other people find that I’m too outspoken. And I was much younger, I was 29 at the time. But I was absolutely devastated. I had not seen it coming. Whereas I think in my, the first time I’d had this series of transgressions, which culminated in the dress but there had been other transgressions…so you could see the pattern emerging, the dress was just the final straw really. But this time I absolutely didn’t see it coming at all. First of all there was a physical reaction to it – I felt completely sick. And I didn’t even want to go out of the front door of the building. I went back to my desk and I cried. And then I phoned my husband and asked him to meet me at the goods lift. And I took my things out via the goods lift because I didn’t want to go out by the main reception, I was so upset.”

She couldn’t bear to bump into anyone she’d been working with. She was much more of a mess than she’d been that first time.

“I was upset for lots of reasons. I’d got the job through a referral from people I liked, trusted and wanted to be proud of me. So to get sacked from it was really hard. I put everything into it. I was actually to help this company start a new business stream, so I’d been the architect of new business stream, I’d brought in lots of revenue. On an economic basis there was no justification. It was a personality thing. And I thought if I’d failed for a technical reason or a financial reason I could understand. But just to be told just my face didn’t fit was really hard.”

AM-T: How did you recover from that?

“I have to say that was very tough. As I anticipated the recruiter who had put me in gave me the most enormous bollocking as well. Which I was expecting. They were very disappointed in me. They had put me into a short-term contract hoping there would be a renewal. They couldn’t believe I’d managed to get myself fired, again in their eyes through being too outspoken, having too big a personality. It was a big learning lesson for me about the importance of managing how you come across. I’ve talked before about all the visual signals but it also includes how you come across in what you say – if you’ve got a point to make it’s important to make it, but think about how you make it.”

Losing that job that way really dented her confidence. And she probably she hardly strikes you as lacking in that department, but she says she has plenty of self-doubt at times. She believes lack of confidence is one of the biggest things that holds women back. And when you leave in challenging circumstances, it’s often hard to market yourself effectively because you feel so low…

“I spoke to a friend recently who came to me for careers advice. She is leaving her job under very difficult circumstances, but she hasn’t been fired. She has 2 children and one of them very sadly died of meningitis last year. And this was a wonderful teenage boy, incredibly gifted. And she feels she needs a slightly different life, she needs to move house, she needs to move job, she needs start life again in a different form. She doesn’t feel at the moment she’s on 100 percent form. So my suggestion to her was do something with a friend, something that isn’t necessarily at the top of your intellectual capabilities, doing something where you can contribute where you know that what you are doing is appreciated.”

Something she says that will build your confidence again. And that goes for everyone, not just people who have gone through a tragedy.

AM-T: “Yeah, because I think that’s the worst thing, is that you may have felt extremely confident previously and then this happens and it just puts you on the ground. Everything you thought you knew about yourself you start to question even though there is a sensible voice in your head telling you look, you’ve had this career. Just that rejection is so – I mean we were talking about this on email, it can feel like being dumped. It can feel like a relationship ending.”

 “Yes, so for lots of people their work is much more to them than they sometimes realize.  So your work is your affirmation, your work is your social life in many cases, a lot of your friends will be at work, it’s a means to pay the bills so it’s keeping the show on the road. So your job is so many things to you and to be told that you are not wanted any more, it’s hard enough in a relationship but in a job it can be devastating.”

AM-T: And it’s funny I mean when I left a job…hmm, it was my doing but it was because I didn’t feel – it was a contract job that had gone on for years and I didn’t really feel appreciated enough and I remember – I’ll never forget this, being told I wasn’t ‘distinctive enough’. That was my stab to the heart. And it honestly, it felt like a loss. In the same year my dad died, and all these things happened in the same year.  But it felt like another loss along with the other actual losses of people that were happening.”

“And all of the grief cycle that you go through in a loss is the same grief cycle you go through with the loss of a job – the shock, the denial, and then the recovery. But just as there are things you can do when you are bereaved or you have a relationship breakup so there are things you can do when you have a breakup with an employer. As I said I would definitely find the thing you know you are good at and where you can make a contribution and where someone is going to say thank you. The important thing is to start to believe in yourself again.”

Sometimes that breakup can get legally messy. How you handle a perceived unfair dismissal will depend on where you live in the world and what the law is. Heather says if you feel you’re being edged out, suddenly getting bad reviews after a perfect record, have a conversation with your boss about what’s going on…

“…because sometimes it’s best to walk away with your head held high and say if you want me to go, I’ll go. And just as when people in divorces are so bitter that they drag the whole thing through the courts, it costs everyone a lot of money, it costs a lot of time and energy and you have to say sometimes what is the point? So I would say with people being dismissed from jobs. Yes, people shouldn’t get away with dismissing you unfairly, of course they shouldn’t. So there’s a place for tribunals. But if you think you’ve only got half a chance of wining and frankly your time, effort and energy would be better spent doing something else, I would encourage you to do that.”

AM-T: Mmm, right…

“And I think the important thing about anger and bitterness, these are emotions, and emotions take energy. I would always encourage people to channel that energy into someone else. I prefer not to get mad but to get even. And every time I’ve been dumped by a man I’ve made sure I’ve upgraded the next time I’ve gone out with one, and every time I’ve been sacked I’ve made sure I’ve gone out and got a better job next.”

Something to aspire to – no matter who dumped you or who you’re working for.

Heather McGregor is the author of Mrs. Moneypenny’s Financial Advice for Independent Women and Mrs. Moneypenny’s Career Advice for Women.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time.  

I’ll post some show notes about my guests under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.

As usual I’d love to hear from you – you can reach me at ashley at thebroadexperience.com or on Twitter or Facebook. If you are able to support this show with a 50 dollar donation I will send you the official Broad Experience T-shirt – ladies cut – you can see a picture of that on the website at the ‘support’ tab.

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

Episode 146: Ageism, or Prejudice Against Our Future Selves

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 about aging in the workplace. Perceptions of women as workers often change as they get older…

“They're not seen as attractive as they were before. And I mean that both physically as well as in terms of the skills that they have, or they're seen as behind the times…”

“So if we have a wrinkle that’s a defeat, if we have grey hair that’s a defeat. Increasingly I think women in the workplace feel they need to hide these signs of aging just to maintain a sense that they are still relevant.”

But having lived a little can pay off, career-wise…

“In many ways all the life experience I had beforehand helps to inform my practice now and makes my job more enjoyable, and makes it easier to understand my clients.”

Three perspectives on aging and work, plus ideas for combating ageism…coming up on The Broad Experience.

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I don’t want this show to be depressing but at the same time I do – as usual – want it to be real. And the reality is there seems to be more bias against older women in the workplace than there does against older men – now I know that men face age discrimination too. But what little research exists points to the fact that a combination of factors hits older women who either want a new job, or want to keep an old one.

 “So there is this paradox that goes on when women are younger.”

That’s Terri Boyer. She directs the Anne Welsh McNulty Institute for Women's Leadership at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. Terri has appeared on the show before – a very early episode – and I knew if anyone was following the research on women and aging at work, it would be her.

“Workplaces are obsessed with their potential to be mothers or the fact that if they're going to be mothers they're not going to be as dedicated to their career despite the fact that many women don't actually become mothers at all. But then what you see happening about the mid-thirties and later in women's lives is the opposite starts to happen.”

Suddenly, just as many women begin to feel a little freer of home responsibilities than they did …work begins to lose confidence in them for a different reason…  

“…because they're not seen as attractive as they were before. And I mean that both physically as well as in terms of the skills that they have, or they're seen as behind the times or not as committed to their work. So despite the fact that in the beginning we may have discriminated against women because of their potential to be mothers and be distracted and not as committed, now as they age, we're discriminating against them because they're perceived as maybe not as qualified or less likely to be flexible, et cetera.

And the research plays this out for sure. We see that women are experiencing an intersection of ageism and gender discrimination that men don't seem to experience in the same ways, and particularly around their physical appearance and their health and their perceptions of skill, particularly when it comes to technical skills, and their ability to learn and contribute.”

AM-T: “That’s so interesting, so are you saying that men, I mean I know age discrimination can happen to anyone, and lots of men have experienced it, are you saying women are more likely to be thought less likely to be technically savvy at say, 50, than a guy at the same age?”

“Yes. Women are definitely seen as less tech savvy and less likely to be able to learn the skill. So this is a really interesting piece. Women are in general perceived as less technically skilled as men or more fearful of technology or technophobe if you will. But as they age. That's definitely something that employers may hold against them where they say, mmm, she might not be able to be as responsive or up on the latest technologies that we definitely need in our workplace. And so you see that coming back to women and being used as an excuse for their lack of employment or not hiring them or demoting them.” 

The Institute Terri heads actually has a program called ‘transitions’ where they work with women to help them navigate some of what hits them later in their careers – whether that’s demotions, downsizing, not being able to get back into the workforce after a break. Terri says a company will often assume…

“Oh, she’s 45, 50, she’s gonna want a much higher salary level than the entry level I’m able to offer her, or maybe looking for a kind of compensation package we can’t give and so I’m not gonna hire her here because she’s not looking for the same things I am, I want someone fresh out who’s moldable, who’s still young and looking to build their career.”

Age discrimination is illegal in many countries but it happens all the time. A Broad Experience listener in Canada responded to a callout I did on Facebook, and she described a conversation just like the one Terri just talked about. She’s in tech, got a call from a recruiter at a global company – but for technical reasons…the woman hadn’t been able to view the candidate’s CV ahead of time. When the recruiter found out my listener had 25 years of experience…her tone changed right away. She told her she was over-qualified and out of their salary range – without even asking her what her salary expectations were. She mentioned wanting someone ‘young’ and trainable…then when she finally viewed her CV she realized what a good match she was…but my listener said she was so upset by the call she decided not to continue with the hiring process. She says she’s been working since she left high school, and she’s guessing the recruiter thought she was quite a bit older than she is. But the woman’s attitude left its mark. The candidate knew that at least at first, she’d been a victim of age bias.

I asked Terri Boyer…

AM-T: “Has it always been this way, I know your knowledge goes back a long way especially as concerns women in the workplace in the US…I’m just wondering, obviously there were many fewer women in the workforce in the 1960s, you were more of an outlier if you’d had a career beginning in the 1940s or 50s and carried into the 60s or 70s or 80s, but do you think this attitude to aging women has always been the same or do you think it’s more intense now than it was decades ago?”

“I think it's likely more intense now than it was decades ago. And that's because women's, the share of older women in the paid labor force is actually growing. So by 2024 you're looking at women over the age of 55 representing about a quarter of women in the labor force. So women, older women in particular, are growing in numbers in the workforce. And so you're seeing a change, that increase has only been in the past decade and a half. And so you're seeing a change in the perception of employers and workplaces on how women are in these workplaces and what their skills look like, et cetera. So I guess by their virtue of their greater numbers in the workforce you're seeing more reaction coming from employers and co-workers.”

I told Terri about the conversations I’d had for the last show, the menopause show, and about how surprised I was that the UK was all over this idea of de-stigmatizing menopause at work. They seem way ahead of the US.

“I think in the States we see menopause and women’s transition from fertile to infertile as something that is a negative. You know we're so focused on the youth culture here, particularly for women, right, that menopause is seen as one of those weakness aspects that would highlight your gender and because of that, because we still don't tie women to the identity of leader, that highlighting something that's about their gender identity would breathe fresh in people's minds that they aren't ready to be leaders or they aren't fitting our ideal of a leader.

I think that you know, our focus on youth contrasts directly with the idea that you may be aging and that there's physical proof of it. We want to hide that. We don't want any physical proof of our aging in the workforce.”

Still, Rachel Lankester of British-based online community Magnificent Midlife, says it’s not like British women don’t face prejudice.

“There’s a lot of shame associated with both menopause and with aging. If you look at the difference between men and women, men are silver foxes as they age, men don’t fight aging as women are encouraged to do –  yet everything about aging for women is seen as negative, and that applies in life in general but also in the workplace, so if we have a wrinkle that’s a defeat, if we have grey hair that’s a defeat. Increasingly I think women in workplace feel they need to hide these signs of aging just to maintain a sense that they are still relevant.”

When I first met Rachel in London a few years ago she was running just one aspect of her business – a website called The Mutton Club. In case some of you aren’t familiar with the expression ‘mutton dressed as lamb’…  

“Certainly in the UK women are very, very scared of becoming mutton as they get older and that goes back to being mutton dressed as lamb…so trying to be younger than you actually are, and I wanted to turn that on its head and make women feel quite pleased actually to be mutton…so the whole idea of Mutton Club was you had to be mutton to get into it, you couldn’t be in it if you were younger.”

Rachel started the Mutton Club in part because of her own experience going through menopause at the early age of 41. She found herself completely unprepared for how that experience would make her feel – but ultimately, it led her to view her life in a completely different, more positive way, and we’ll get into more of that later.

She is a great admirer of writer and anti-ageism activist Ashton Applewhite – maybe some of you know her work. You can check it out at thischairrocks.com. Rachel says we nearly all have negative feelings about ageing, as women. How can we help but imbibe what’s all around us?  

“We buy into those narratives, we’ve been fed those narratives for so long. We’re fed anti-aging products in our 20s…and young girls now are having that so it’s about changing it not just for the women suffering ageism in workplace now but the women coming up. Because if they’re looking at older women in the workplace and perhaps not even seeing them, because if we dye our hair we’re contributing to making ourselves invisible…it’s not obvious to see us because we’re trying to look younger, than those younger women aren’t seeing older women flourishing in the workplace and they buy into that ageist narrative, but as Ashton says, ageism is prejudice against our future selves.”

AM-T: “I know, that’s such a great way to put it.”

“It’s fantastic, because we’re all going to age.”

AM-T: “…the tricky thing is, it’s so hard when you’re younger to see yourself as older, because you’re in your life now…and you can think maybe 5 years into the future but to think 20 years into the future is really tough, isn’t it?” 

“Well I did it even at 41, when I went through early menopause the biggest problem for me was feeling catapulted into middle age. Because I associated menopause with being a much older woman, I had no idea it could impact me at 41, and then over time I realized that yes, I was being prejudiced, because at 41 yes of course I was middle aged. I was in the middle of my life.”

“I like the word mid-life, middle aged does sound a little old to me but now I have a completely different approach, I am really proud to be a midlife woman.”

 AM-T: “Why?”

“Because it’s brought so much to me actually, and this is part of the narrative I want to get across. For example, we feel we are losing our value in the workplace and the world, we may feel in competition with younger women, we feel we’re struggling to keep up with certain things. But all of that is actually within our control; most of it is in our head, because ageism starts between our ears. If we can re-frame our own narrative about ageing that’s in our heads, and acknowledge things like, for example, we have a second creative peak in our 50s, who knew that? We have - lot of women talk about a surge in energy post-menopause. And women don’t know about that. When we’ve gone through menopause we have a different hormonal profile and that means we’re actually hormonally on more of a level playing field with men, and therefore why can’t we just go out, start believing in ourselves and start upping the impact we can have – it’s just that so many of us, and society tells us to do this, thinks of it as negative and I don’t believe it is. So I’m really pleased because midlife has brought amazing things to me and amazing knowledge, and opportunities, capabilities, new people I’m meeting, so that’s good.”

She’s not the only one. Stay tuned.

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A couple of months ago a reader responded to a comment I’d made about ageism in one of my newsletters. She’s from New Zealand and her name is Kate Wiseman. She wrote:

As an older newcomer to the law, I find my age works in my favour. People seem to assume I’ve been doing this for a long time and give me credit far beyond that which I deserve!”

Which I suppose you could say is a sort of ageism in reverse…but I asked Kate to record a voice memo telling me a bit more about her later-in-life career. She was at her holiday home by the beach when she did this so you may hear a bit of extraneous beach noise.

Kate got married pretty young, had a son, and rather than going back to her old area of sales and marketing thought she’d really like to do a law degree. So when her little boy was one, she started studying law.

“But his dad didn’t like me being out of the house and not earning money so I only did one year o my law degree then and then I went back to work.”

That was more than 25 years ago. Kate had another son, got divorced, worked some more, married again, helped her husband run a business, had twin daughters who are now 16. And when they went off to kindergarten…she decided she wanted to take up her law degree again.

“So I started that long process, took me about 8 years in the end to finish…but it was good time, because I studied, slowly at first and then I increased the number of papers I did as the children got older.” 

She worked part time in law as she went along. And a few years ago she qualified as a barrister.

“It’s taken hard work to get here but I’ve also been extraordinarily lucky in ending up in a good place, and in a good role, which I love. I have great clients and interesting work, and one of the things and the reason I’m doing this interview in the first place, is one of the things I find is people assume I’ve been doing this job for a long time because  I’ve got wrinkles, I’m in my fifties, early fifties, and I understand a huge range of the issues facing my clients because I do a lot of work in the family law area…and often with people with companies. I’ve had my own business, I know what it’s like to be an entrepreneur. I know what it’s like to be an employee…to be the manager of a group of people. I’ve had 4 children of my own and a stepdaughter. I’ve been through two divorces and I’m married for the third time, which some people say  is a triumph of hope over experience but so far, so very good…and I find that most of the time people just assume that I’ve been working in the field for a long time. No one ever questions my experience.”

In fact, she says, quite the opposite – sometimes her own confidence has lagged that of her client. She was in court for the first time as a newly minted lawyer a few years ago, quaking with nerves…

“…and the judge had asked some tricky questions right at the start of the hearing, and my heart had sunk, but I happily was able to get up and answer the question and my client said to me afterwards that he’d listened to the judge and thought, oh no, what are we gonna do next? And then he said, and then my lawyer got up and saved the day! And that was such a wonderful thing to hear, especially after my very first hearing. But he didn’t know it was my very first hearing, and he still doesn’t know to this day, as far as I’m aware.”

She loves the work she does now.

“A lot of the time I’m older than my clients and I suppose again they assume I know what I’m doing, and more and more I feel as if perhaps I do know quite a bit of it, certainly not all of it…”

But she loves that about the law – that there’s always more to learn.

“I’ve been lucky. Coming late has just been a good thing. It’s not a handicap at all, and in many ways all the life experience I had beforehand helps to inform my practice now and makes my job my enjoyable and makes it easier to understand my clients.” 

Kate Wiseman in New Zealand.

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So one thing we haven’t touched on so far is of course that ageism affects women’s ability to earn a living. Research shows that women are far less prepared for retirement than men are, they don’t have nearly as much saved. And plenty of women in their older years are single. Here’s Rachel Lankester again…

“The pay gap kicks in early, it gets worse as we age. We are penalized for caregiving whether that’s children or older parents. Everything comes at midlife, we are caring up and down. But in Australia apparently the biggest group experiencing homelessness is older, single women – and that is just scary. We need to do something about it to enable women to keep earning in later life. We can’t stop otherwise we will absolutely be in poverty in older age.”

We keep reading about how much longer we’re all going to live and how in some countries we’ll need to work into our 70s or older…but how can we work if companies won’t hire us or won’t keep us on?

I asked Terri Boyer for some suggestions.

AM-T: “I mean is there anything we can do about this, it’s so depressing to think about this especially if you are in your forties and suddenly thinking about this next push into your fifties…is there anything people can do to combat age discrimination other than getting Botox and stuff like that?”

“Well, right, if we keep getting Botox then we're not going to combat the age discrimination because we're going to keep conforming to people's standards of perceived youth as beautiful and the highest level of contribution that we can make.

I think there are definitely a few things that women can do in particular to build employers’ perceptions of their worth in the workplace. And the first is to know your worth, to be able to confidently articulate the sorts of things that you can contribute to your workplace. And that's going to require a little bit of self-reflection and understanding of what you can contribute in the workplace. A lot of times women in particular, they may be able to articulate very well the mission and value of their organization or their department, etc. but they don't tend to think of their own leadership value, or their own skills that they contribute. And so being really sharp and building into your own professional development, regularly self-reflecting on what your worth is and being able to articulate that in a manner that comes off very quickly and confidently is something that can be very helpful.

The second is to make sure that you're making connections across generations. One of the things that that Transitions program that I mentioned earlier that we're doing out of our institute does, is helps women build connections across the generations. So we have young students, young professionals, as well as women who are mid to late career or even retired, talking with each other and showing that you're able to communicate across generations and understanding the perspectives of others in the workplace. So making sure that you're not attracting yourself only to people who are like you, that you are building those connections across different generations would be really helpful to you.”

She says those connections should include mentors and sponsors who are willing to champion you and your work.

Rachel Lankester agrees…

“…it’s really important to get people mixing both in life and the workplace and it would be really nice to have more mentoring relationships, I think. And the mentoring can work both ways, I have a mentor who is much younger than me who helps me on stuff and similarly I’m mentored by people older than me, so it can work all ways. And I think having that conversation where younger women in particular are aware of older women thriving, it helps them relax about getting older and it also enables all those discussions to come about.”

 AM-T: “Yeah, that’s something I think about a lot because I’m sure there have been times in my life at work where I have thought uncharitable thoughts about an older woman. I can’t think of an example off the top of my head but I can totally imagine me doing it.”

 “I can too, and I think I did it, and then you get to the age you were being disparaging about or at least thinking negatively about, and it’s a completely different picture.”  

 Empathy is everything.

 That’s The Broad Experience for this time. Thanks to Terri Boyer, Rachel Lankester, and Kate Wiseman for being my guests on this show.

And I’ll just acknowledge here that I know age bias works the other way too – I’ve heard from several of you talking about being passed over for jobs because you’ve been told you’re too young, and people wouldn’t take you seriously in the role. And I don’t want to minimize that experience – but I believe the ageism at the other end of the spectrum is more damaging because it hits women in their prime earning years just as they’re trying to save for retirement.

I will post show notes under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com and as usual I would love to hear from you – you can always email me at ashley at thebroadexperience.com or track me down on social media.

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

Episode 145: Working through Menopause

Show transcript:

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

This time…the first of a couple of shows on getting older in the workplace.

“You know it's crazy that the majority of women are going to go through menopause and yet it can seem like a really lonely place. It's not a topic that's discussed enough even amongst friends.”

At work, traditionally, menopause has been something to be borne – but not talked about. But maybe that’s part of the problem…

“We play at being superhuman all the time. And I think if more of us can have these honest conversations then there's less chance of us being discriminated against.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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So I honestly don’t think I’d ever heard the word peri-menopause until the end of last year. That’s when I came across an article in the New York Times called Puberty for the Middle Aged. In it the author talked about all the weird things that happen to your body on your way to having your last period, which for most women will happen in their early 50s. So perimenopause is sort of the lead up to menopause, if you will.

And I have to admit – and I am betting I am not alone here – that I always kind of thought menopause wouldn’t happen to me. It just seemed so far off…and I had no idea my body would start to prepare itself while I was still in my forties. I had no idea because it seems like no one talks about this. Periods have had a bit of a re-brand in the past couple of years – think all those new menstrual products you’ve heard about, some of them on this show. A new generation of female entrepreneurs has punctured some of the taboo around menstruation. But menopause? Not really. So far I’m not seeing any feminist marketing around menopause. It’s still largely spoken about in whispers – at least in the youth-obsessed US.

But in the UK, things are different.

“My name is Julie Dennis and I am a menopause coach and trainer. And I work with organizations across the UK to help improve the experience of women working through menopause.”

Because of course lots of women going through menopause are working.

And while some of us won’t feel many changes at all as our hormones fluctuate, others will feel a lot. Ever since women have worked outside the home we have carried on, even when we’ve felt exhausted or suddenly become drenched with sweat…but Julie says with an aging workforce in the UK and many women in their 40s and 50s working…it’s time employers learned how to support their female staff through this transition. By doing so she says they’re likely to keep more women in the workplace.

Initially her workshops were more about the women themselves than anyone else – they’d share stories and tips. It was warm and fuzzy but it didn’t really lead anywhere. Now, that’s changing.

“What we're now seeing in the UK is that organisations are looking at menopause policy and guidelines, they’re training line managers so that they're in a position to be able to support staff members working through menopause.”

We’ll talk more about what that looks like in a minute. I wanted to know what the women in Julie’s workshops want to talk about once she gets there. First, she says they want to know how long their various symptoms are going to last.

“And actually I think it's also important that we should point out that one in four, one in five women actually don't notice any symptoms at all, three out of four do. One out of four have experienced symptoms to such a degree they've actually considered leaving the workforce because of the impact that it's had on their career. But typically what women want to know is how long is this going to last, and what they really want to be able to do is to talk. You know it's crazy that the majority of women are going to go through menopause and yet it can seem like a really lonely place. It's not a topic that's discussed enough even amongst friends. So if you can get a roomful of women together at work and get a couple of them just to share their personal stories, there's this kind of massive sigh of relief from everybody in the room, going, Oh my God, it's not just me.”

Typically she says, women who are really feeling those hormonal changes play out…they’re hanging on to their jobs. But they feel like they’re suffering and there’s no support from their workplace – even if they do decide to talk to a manager about what’s going on.

“So for example, there was one lady in a workshop once and…Did you ever commute in London, Ashley?”

AM-T: “Yes.”

“Yes. So you know what the tubes are like, right. So by the time she got to work every morning she was absolutely drenched because of her, her hot flushes were that bad. So she'd get to work, she worked in a wealthy organization so she was able to have a shower when she arrived on the premises but then she'd be late to her desk. So her boss wanted her to get an earlier train to cope with that. Other ladies – I know, right?

Really heavy periods are another symptom that we don't hear talked about quite so much and I've spoken to a couple of ladies who've actually ruined office chairs as a result of having a really heavy period, and just the mortification and embarrassment of having to deal with that. And it's not just the male bosses who don't understand, it is the younger women too, just because they haven't experienced it yet. So I think sometimes we also get a lot of you know, the guys don't understand what's going on, the male line managers, but it's the female line managers who have just as little information about it too.”

AMT: “That bleeding through… it’s something everyone dreads.”

“Just absolutely awful, so one company I've worked with recently, whenever they replace chairs now, or they recover chairs they're recovering them in black. So if anybody ever does have an accident it's not going to be so obvious.”

“We talk about reasonable adjustments both with the women themselves and with the line managers, and all they are, are changes that can be put in place to improve the experience of the employee, and they can be something simple like USB desk fan so you can control your own temperature, environment temperature, without impacting everybody else. It can be something larger like the recovering of office chairs or it can be something like an like an honesty box in the bathroom that's filled with sanitary products. So again anyone who suddenly has an unexpected period can go to the bathroom and know that there’ll be free protection available there to put in place immediately.”

All this sounds feasible in a white-collar workplace where you may sit at a desk all day. But what about women who work in factories or on shifts where they’re on the go all the time? Julie says it’s difficult to break away from a serving position you’re meant to be at for hours, or to leave your desk at a call center other than on set breaks. But some organizations she’s worked with have nixed the need for permission to leave a work station, or provided employees on the go with water bottles, or established a network of so-called ‘menopause champions’ in the workplace.

I was interested to know more about who attends her workshops, and especially whether men show up. She says it’s important not to separate out the women because the whole point of what she does is to de-mystify menopause for everyone…

“…however, they fare much better if they're in their own workshop in a room amongst themselves where they're much more comfortable sharing stories. So we'll do a workshop that’s specifically to support the women experiencing menopause. We'll do another one that's specifically for line managers, talking to them about how to spot symptoms, about what reasonable adjustments could work, what their company’s already got in place, how to have a supportive conversation. You know what you don't do is pull somebody aside and say you know I've noticed this is going on, are you menopausal? You know what it’s like, when you're looking for a red car right, you see red cars everywhere. So when you've been on a course on  menopause you see menopause everywhere. But actually just because the woman is in her late 40s or early 50s and her behavior has changed at work, it's not always going to be menopause. You know it could be bereavement, divorce, there could be anything going on. So it's being aware of the language that you use, and then the third training is a colleague awareness session, and that's where anybody could come to the session so you get men and women, older guys, younger guys in the room…”

AMT: I'm also curious with these sessions are the companies, do they encourage their employees to go or do they say hey you're going to that session because I can see some people, it is a topic that makes a lot of people squeamish.”

“Yeah, I think so too. So it's not a compliance issue at organizations at all, they’re always voluntary, and in the mixed sessions and the colleague awareness sessions it would usually be 90 percent women and 10 percent men. So there's still not many men turning up. And often that's because they think they're not going to be welcome or they are feeling a bit awkward and embarrassed. So that's something that needs to be worked on. And again that's about company culture and sometimes something like a poster campaign can work better than a workshop, you know, just having posters up around the building in places where people will stop and read just some basic facts and advice.”

So just ten percent men…that seems tiny. But Julie says it is a start.

Finally, I wanted to bring up something I often think about.

AM-T: “What interests me and I wonder if this will ever happen, would be to have quite a senior woman, someone who is quite well known, to talk about this, I think that would go a huge way to opening up conversation about menopause, don’t you?”

“Oh, I agree. Absolutely. Be an absolutely marvelous thing to have. What we have got in the U.K. is the rise of celebrity menopause. So we've had quite a few major celebrities and minor celebrities actually, women in their 50s who still are regularly seen on TV, to talk about their menopause experience, and actually over in the States you've got Gwyneth Paltrow doing it as well haven't you? So, and I think you know it's easier for them because they're a personal brand and that's the choice they make. But for the very senior women it is a lot a lot harder. I think still if you are a woman in a very senior leadership position, you don't want to talk about anything that could be perceived as a weakness. So I think it's much harder for them to talk about it. However, what would be great to be great would be to have a senior female leader who said yes, this is what I was struggling with, but this is what I've done and now everything's fine. But I think it's still that, you know, they're reluctant to share any perceived weaknesses, which is unfortunate.”

Because while we are still such a minority in top roles, it seems like women have to keep making out that we’re just like men. Coming up…someone who is bringing radical honestly – and a small fan – into her workplace.

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Rebekah Bostan lives and works in London – she’s been in the global energy field for almost 20 years.

And last year she began to notice little things about herself changing. Like how she felt on her commute…

 “…I was on the tube, I started feeling quite hot, I assumed I was developing claustrophobia, you know. I was more irritated than usual with my children and my partner but I assumed that obviously they were just being more irritating than normal. Um, I would forget words in meetings, and I would just think oh, I'm just really tired, I must just take some more time for myself and when I started developing more and more symptoms I started slowly piecing them together and then I think when I started developing day and night sweats that's when it really, I just thought huh what is going on here. This is obviously not normal.”

But Rebekah was only 40. Menopause was far from her mind.

“And I just happened to mention to my mum that I was sleeping really badly and I was waking up quite hot. I was having to open the window. And she just laughed and she was like, oh, that's just perimenopause. And then she kind of dropped the bomb because obviously I was like, well, it can't be perimenopause I'm only just turned 40. And she was like, oh no, I had I was in full blown menopause at 41. And your grandmother was 43.”

Rebecca it seemed was following in their footsteps. She was so relieved to know what was going on – because like a lot of women who start experiencing these things, she had begun to worry about her mental health. Because the stuff we don’t hear much about – until it happens to us – that was what bothered Rebekah most: mood swings, increased anxiety about her job, and memory loss or brain fog. Never ideal, but especially at work, where as Julie Dennis put it, we’re always trying to show the most polished version of ourselves.

“So I think that the memory fog has really hit me since January and is to the point where you know it can be simple words like a fork or a knife to you know obviously much more complicated terminology that I use in my job. And I just you know there is literally a gap and you know it's not like you know you're trying to remember you know your second cousin twice removed kind of you know where obviously you would struggle you literally know that this is a word you commonly use and you can't find it in your head. And then that starts to make you feel quite anxious. You know especially if it happens you know in the world of work, you know I do have to use a lot of technical language and if I don't have those words you know I end up then having to make you know a 10 sentence…sentence in order to you know describe the word I’m trying to find. And that's not really what clients are paying me for, they're playing me to be concise, to give them really good advice. And that's really tricky when that starts to happen. I mean I happen to now use a lot of cheat sheets. So my son happens to have dyslexia and ADHD. So we use a lot of mind maps in my house, and I've actually started using mind maps before meetings, with kind of key words that I really, really don't want to forget before the meeting.”

Recently she was speaking at an event about women and sisterhood. So it was a sympathetic crowd…

“And I was making what I thought was a really good point until I couldn't remember the word that I was building up to. And we were talking actually about careers and how you progressed your careers and the word I was looking for was career pivot. So though I was looking for the word pivot and I was trying to point out that you know you don't always have to leave your job if you're unhappy, you can try and pivot your job to find more interesting tasks. And I could not find the word pivot in my mind and I just had to stop, and you know and that kind of disempowered me at that moment because you know I had been saying things for a few minutes. People were obviously engaged and then I lost that word, and just losing that word just really knocks your confidence.”

AMT: “So how did you come back from that?”

“So then you obviously have to start thinking of other words and then you have these moments of silence which you know I mean I understand that silence obviously feels so much worse to you than it does to other people, they probably think you're taking a breath or you’re thinking you know. You know but for you at that moment you think everyone is just like what is the matter with that woman? Why can't she continue her sentence? And you know so actually because I was in that sympathetic environment, I said you know what, I'm really sorry, I'm going through the perimenopause, I’ve forgotten the word. Can anyone help me out here?”

And they did. Someone came up with ‘pivot.’

But she’s always worried about what clients may think of her when she blanks on a word during a meeting. Rebekah’s been at her current company for 14 years. So she feels pretty comfortable there. And she often deals with her anxiety by asking colleagues for backup.  

“What I’ve started to do is when I have bad days where I wake up and feel like OK, today is gonna be a bit trickier, and I have client meetings, then now I war people I’m with in the meeting ad say if it looks like I’m forgetting a word, can you just try and jump in for me? I mean it’s tricky for the people, I’m asking them to help me in that situation. But I’d much rather they knew there was a risk something was going to happen, rather than that we all sit in silence while I try to remember a technical word.”

Rebekah told me just the other day that she’d had blanked on a technical phrase during a client call shortly after our interview – but while she felt the silence went on forever while she searched for another description, when she asked a colleague about it afterwards he said he hadn’t even noticed.

Meanwhile as you heard, she’s happy to introduce the idea of ‘perimenopause’ at work. And her workplace is 70 percent male.

“So I mean most people actually now in my direct working circle know that I’m perimenopausal now, mainly because I go into most meeting rooms with a USB fan. So it’s kind of almost like my calling card. I don’t have a sign above my head but I have a little fan that follows me around, and either people pretend it’s not there and think curious thoughts, but mostly actually people have engaged with me and said oh, what’s that? Why have you brought that? My previous boss, we happened to be in a meeting last week and I brought my fan in and he was just like, you know, he made some joke about you know the Caribbean or the tropics or whatever. And I said oh, you know, it’s because I’m going through the perimenopause. And he was like, ‘oh my gosh, my wife’s going through the perimenopause and she has these and these symptoms.’ What can I do? What can I do to help her? And it was really interesting because we wouldn’t have had that conversation otherwise.”

Rebekah says it’s rare that she gets a negative reaction, but she was on a client call once, a conference call with others, and she had her fan going in the meeting room.

“Another colleague arrived late. He just said, oh, turn off that fan, it’s going to distract the client. And actually the other colleague who was with me, who was male, said no, Rebekah needs that fan, and we’re going to continue this meeting. You know so I didn’t have to explain myself, and it was really great to have somebody not standing up for me, but just saying, you know what, she’s not doing it because it’s so on-trend to have a USB fan, she’s obviously doing it for a reason.”

Experiencing menopause symptoms as early as Rebekah is can feel really lonely. She doesn’t have any friends going through the same thing. So she took a chance recently – she approached a colleague she didn’t know well, someone she suspected might be in a similar position.

“So I actually reached out to a lady who works in another division in my company today actually. And I very briefly went up to her and said, ‘I'm going to assume something, if I'm totally wrong, let's pretend this conversation didn't happen.’ And I said I think you might have gone through the perimenopause or be going through the perimenopause because she has a USB fan on her desk. And she was like, yes! And then you know, do you want to have lunch? And then we went and sat down and had lunch and that's the only way I could know that potentially she might be going through similar things to me is because she had a fan on her desk.”

AMT: “And how was it, did you talk about it?”

“It was really interesting. I mean she's 46 and she started about five years ago and she's still having you know, hot flashes and memory fog and anxiety and things like that. So obviously for me that made me a little bit anxious because I was thinking wow, I've got maybe five, 10 years of this, how very exciting…But at the same time it was really good to meet somebody who was going through the same thing. They can't always solve the issue you're going through. But to be able to know and see somebody else you know who you know is still at work, and she talked about for example, in her team, if she's had a really bad night her boss is absolutely happy for her to come in an hour or two late so she can catch up on sleep, and then she'll just stay later.”

So that woman also felt comfortable telling her boss about what was going on. But I can only imagine many women will not. Rebekah is a big believer in bringing your whole self to work. But as I said to her…

AMT: “The flipside of that whole bringing yourself to work thing, the culture in the US is very youth-focused…there will be women who would be terrified to let on about menopause because they’re very worried they’re going to be discriminated against. And the next time it comes time for some cuts they’ll be out because they’ve outed herself as someone who is, quote, aging. And that does happen.”

“I'm absolutely of no doubt it happens and I think also for example, I work in a very corporate environment, but for example if you work in an environment where you have to wear a uniform or something, where you literally do have to ask for an adjustment in order to continue your job, that must be a really scary conversation. But we've got to have these conversations as women. For example, we generally pretend in the workplace even if we're having a bad period for example that we're absolutely fine. We play at being superhuman all the time. And I think if more of us can have these honest conversations then there's less chance of us being discriminated against. If more conversations are happening. If it's just one here or there then it is easier to ignore us…you know and it's almost like we have to have those brave conversations individually and those brave conversations are not for everyone to have. I wouldn't say that should be everyone’s cup of tea, but we can't change your culture by just pretending it's not happening to us.”

AM-T: “I also think there are some people listening to this who will remain a bit squeamish about discussing their personal circumstances publicly also, I did a show about 3 years ago focused on our bodies at work, it around menstruation, menopause came into it but not deeply, endometriosis, and I know some people found that a tough show ‘cause they’re kind of like, ergh, I don’t talk about that stuff, it’s private, that is something that I have no wish to discuss with the wider world.”

“I mean I absolutely agree. I was actually talking to a colleague of mine who I was telling her that I was doing this show and she was like, Oh, I'm not sure. That seems like a very public thing to talk about. You know, she's currently having IVF to have children and she said you know I wouldn't want to go around you know telling people I'm doing IVF. And absolutely. That's her decision to make. But the reality is that very few people are going to have IVF but absolutely every single woman is going to go through perimenopause.”

Rebekah Bostan. Thanks to her and Julie Dennis for being my guests on this show.

You will find show notes and links under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com. I don’t know about you but I feel like menopause is ripe for some disruption – it’s great that it’s being discussed so openly in the UK, but what about other countries?

I realize not everyone wants to talk about this but I do agree with my guests – women are not men, we’re a big part of the workforce, and organizations need to understand that we undergo different things when we are at work because our bodies do different things – so why not support us through this change?

Before we go, I want to let you know about a show I bet some of you have already discovered – it’s focused on a new generation working mothers and it’s called The Double Shift. It’s not about parenting or kids really.

Past episodes include an intimate audio documentary about what it’s really like to run for office with little kids, an reported episode on sex worker moms, and what it’s like to be a working mom when your office is a legal brothel and a profile of an amazing woman who runs an overnight daycare in Las Vegas. What these women have in common is that they’re not willing to accept the status quo for working moms in America. The show is hosted by Katherine Goldstein – check out The Double Shift wherever you get your podcasts.

 I always love to hear from you – you can email me at ashley at thebroadexperience.com, tweet me or post on the Facebook page.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte, thanks for listening.

Episode 143: True Equality: When It's OK to be Mediocre

Show transcript:

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

 This time…we all love a bit of inspiration in the form of successful women. After all you can’t be what you can’t see, right? But maybe all that lionizing reveals an unpleasant truth…

“…that women need to be just utterly brilliant, utterly wonderful to get recognition…actually real equality boils down to not having to do that.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

 Before we get into the show, a quick word about a former guest. I know a lot of you lead a team.  When you’re a manager, your work is about more than just the work.  It’s about managing human relationships, and enabling your team to get things done, and thrive.  

It’s not always easy!  People Management is skill that you develop, over time, when you make the commitment to learn.

You can find Anne Libby’s free monthly newsletter On Management at people dot substack dot com.  Each month, you’ll learn about how good managers do their work, and ways you can practice and learn.  Noted management expert Anne Libby* also interviews experts and practitioners, and writes and curates recommended reading for you about people management and workplace trends.

The internet is full of advice.  Some of it is BS.  On Management is practical, topical, and smart -- it’s like getting a monthly email from an experienced mentor.  Or your cool aunt.  You can find it at people dot substack dot com.

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The last episode I did on caring for a parent was pretty serious…and this week’s show is quite the change of tone. To give you a bit of context, for several years now I’ve received a lot of emails at my Broad Experience address often written by a PR person, asking me to interview some amazing sounding woman – she is often a coach, sometimes a startup CEO or a corporate executive – words like ‘empowering’, ‘inspiring’ and ‘killing it’ are sprinkled throughout the email. But instead of being inspired…I just feel tired.

So when I read a column by Pilita Clark in the Financial Times last month it hit home. The title? Women Must Demand the Right to be as Useless as Men. I knew I wanted to talk to her about the ideas in that piece, and she I spoke the other week.

Pilita is Australian by birth but she’s lived in the UK for 17 years. These days she writes about modern corporate life; she’s also covered aviation and the environment for the FT.  

And in the runup to International Women’s Day in March her inbox is flooded with emails singing the praises of high achieving females. Pilita has been urged to write about a woman who among other achievements has climbed Everest…

“…a visionary doctor/entrepreneur, this extraordinary woman who is a quadri-lingual vegan who floated a business in her 20s and she works in refugee camps with the UN in her spare time…is completely unstoppable, she was reading share prices to her father at the age of 4 and is a really extraordinary woman. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this at one level, and I am always pleased to see women doing brilliantly…there’s also no question obviously that there’s a long, long way to go, that we have not achieved equality by most measures…but I guess what I find this year is something that is increasingly annoying – it’s that tiring sense that women need to be utterly brilliant, utterly wonderful to get recognition, and that is actually something I’ve thought for a long time, that actually real equality boils down to not having to do that, to just being ordinary and just doing your job and in fact you could even be potentially quite mediocre.”

And just bumbling along and not worrying about your career too much. She says she began thinking about this topic intently when she came across a blog post by a senior woman in the UK…

“She’s a really experienced female director, an ex-McKinsey partner, Harvard MBA, she works, has served on a lot of boards. And she literally in a blog based on a speech she did about the dearth of female chairs…said, ‘at interview we need to be twice as good as the men to overcome the gaps in our CVs and the perceived risk in being different, and I don’t think we quite realize that.’ And I thought, ugh, OK, that’s reasonable, I’m sure that’s a sensible thing to be thinking about, but you know what? It’s really, really irritating in 2019 that we have to keep thinking about this.”

It got her thinking about those notes she gets encouraging her to write about various wonder women. Similar to the ones I get.

AM-T: “One of the things I have found that your article crystallized for me, it was hard for me to put my finger on it, was this thing of, why do I cringe a bit when I get these emails? Then I feel mean, I feel like a bad person that I’m cringing slightly at all this wondrous achievement.”

“I know, I completely sympathize with you on that one…I feel very much the same way. Part of the reason for me anyway is the thought that I have to be ultra-brilliant and incredibly wonderful and supremely generous and fair and terrific and spectacular. Really it makes me feel like having a drink and a lie down. I mean it’s just, it’s wearying – implicitly I think the suggestion lies there that in order to be taken seriously and to really achieve is just that you have to be an extraordinary woman.”

I agree – I think the reason my eyes glaze over is partly because the emails all sound the same now, but it’s also because I’m never going to be like that myself and I wonder how many other women can manage it. I resist the implication that achievement means firing on all cylinders and sleeping 4 hours a night.

I began The Broad Experience exactly seven years ago…and back then I rarely got pitches talking up professional women. So in a way it’s a sign of progress just being made aware that so many stellar women are out there, with publicists – starting businesses, writing books, overcoming obstacles…helping people. It was after one very famous book was published back in 2013 that I began getting all these emails… The book of course was Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. Before it came out I felt like I was here in my little corner talking about all these experiences women had at work, but no one was really listening. Then Sandberg came along and suddenly everyone was listening and talking and the amount of coverage on women at work exploded…to the extent that for me at least, it all began to run together…

“Mmm, interesting, well I think you’re absolutely right that Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s book, did have a huge impact, it stirred a lot of debate, but it divided a lot of people, and I’m one of the people who think why don’t men lean out, why is it always women who need to do the changing? Why can’t we just do what we feel like doing, and not having to be constantly thinking about our behavior and the impression we’re giving, if you think what life must be like if you don’t have to think about this all the time, it’s a very different way of viewing the world. That’s why I think this book, ‘Why do so Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?’, I’m not sure if a woman had written it that it would have had quite the same attention.”

And it would have attracted a whole bunch of haters. Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders is of course a provocative title. The author originally wrote a piece along the same lines in the Harvard Business Review back in 2013 – in fact it was partly in response to Lean In being published. In that article he said he was surprised to see Lean In encouraging women to adopt what he called dysfunctional leadership traits…

“I do think he puts his finger on a really important point that applies to women and men really, and that is that we have this annoying tendency to confuse confidence with leadership capacity, and his point is that very confident people who are often narcissistic…walk into a room, own the room, basically they have a huge amount of swagger and sway – they are statistically he says more likely to be men. But they find it a lot easier to get into top jobs. And that means they squeeze out equally or perhaps more able, more considerate, humble people and that includes men as well as women. So his point is that we need to think again about our ideas of what good leadership entails, and I think that’s absolutely right. It would undoubtedly help a lot of women but it would also help a lot of extremely pleasant and able men I can think of who are overlooked for jobs on a fairly regular basis, and really they’re the jobs that are often taken by – not entirely arrogant, loudmouth men, but I wouldn’t say I’ve not seen that either. It can be a fairly common occurrence in some offices.”

In fact, author Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic says, we might want to see swagger as something to avoid…

“We need to try to not be swayed, not to automatically think that just because someone is very loud and very confident and seems to be completely on top of things – these actually sometimes can be warning signs that this person is not necessarily going to be a great leader.”

And Pilita says he goes further. He says women should get first consideration for leadership roles.

“For whatever reason it may well be correct to say, as he says, that we should be giving preferential treatment to women…we should actively be discriminating in favor of female leaders.”

Then again…

“I dunno, I can’t help feeling a little uneasy about that, actually. There’s something I find a bit annoying about that – because again it’s kind of suggesting there is an intrinsic quality based on gender, which is not what feminism is about essentially. So I think no matter what one’s gender, if one can lead well then one should be rewarded for that.”

One much maligned leader who happens to be female is British Prime Minister Theresa May – or at least she was still prime minister when I recorded this. Pilita says until there are more women in top roles the urge to celebrate superwomen will persist…

“In many ways it’s just a numbers game, I think the more women go into places where they’re not necessarily in the minority then I think essentially things will change quite dramatically and women won’t feel they’re standing out, they won’t feel they have to be anything very special. They’ll just be there and people won’t notice – and in a way you kind of see that happening already here in the UK with a female prime minister, and quite a number of female cabinet ministers. Really it’s quite interesting at a time when people are paying more attention than ever to politics, because of the Brexit debate. I’m not saying there’s no sexism whatsoever being attached to the portrayal of various women in the spotlight at the moment but really it does feel as though there are so many now, people’s gender is not really coming into it in this debate as it might have done 10, 15, 20 years ago.”

AMT: “That’s interesting, and actually that makes me want to ask because I am removed from it over here, has there been any commentary on Theresa May’s sex going along with all the Brexit coverage…are people trying to interpret any of her actions through the lens of gender?”

“I’m sure there have been isolated instances of it, but I struggle to recall a prominent one. Late last year and early this year, when things were getting quite intense, there was a huge amount of commentary where people were describing her as resilient, she was so resilient, she was plowing on, she was very stubborn, she was refusing to be knocked over despite the adversity she was facing. And this word resilient kept being used again and again. At first I thought the unsaid words here were, she’s doing really well for a woman. But actually colleagues who were covering John Major when he was struggling with Euro-skeptics in his party said the same sorts of words and descriptions were being used about him. I don’t know, my sense is actually that really there’s been quite a lack of focus on whatever she’s wearing, what she looks like. Maybe because the issue, Brexit, is so enormous, and so important, and so all encompassing…”

That there’s no time or appetite for petty coverage around gender.

And finally to the last part of Pilita’s column asking why women can’t be allowed be as useless as men…

AM-T: “To sort of round out your piece you said you’ve always harbored an urge to see an International Crap Women’s Day. Why?”

“Alright, so this is basically a joke, but a semi-serious joke. So I just used to wonder what would it be like, if you had an International Crap Women’s Day where you were literally celebrating the right of women to be as rubbish as any man. At one end there’s a lot to choose from and you could have a lot of fun with it. There was a fantastic story here last year about a model here in the UK who went to Morocco, and she got so drunk on her way back, when she landed at Gatwick, she thought she was still in Morocco. And Elizabeth Holmes is just – she would be a complete pinup…”

Elizabeth Holmes in case you haven’t heard of her was a star of Silicon Valley – she quit Stanford University at 19 to start her blood testing company, Theranos. Over the next decade or so it raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. She was touted as the next Steve Jobs. Today, she stands accused of massive fraud. I just finished listening to the podcast The Dropout, which all about her rise and fall.

“…you know, having managed to persuade all of these enormously successful investors to put their money into her Theranos company, her blood-testing startup…she is now facing a series of fraud charges and the idea she’s the new female Steve jobs has taken a tumble recently. There is any number of women we could lionize in this way. The idea is to say we’re not perfect, or great, we can be just as bad, evil, hopeless and ridiculous as men, but so what? The point would be we need the freedom to be just people, really.”

On the other hand, many women want and need inspiration. They don’t necessarily want to see a former icon disparaged. I read a snarky piece about Holmes in Refinery29 earlier this year…

AM-T: “And it was very interesting to read the comments…and a couple of women had a good point. Because the writer had focused specifically on her hair color and the fact that she dyes her hair, and under that sleek blonde was a mousy-haired brunette…and it did actually come across as very sexist. And a couple of women commenters took the writer to task on that. But at least one other said, you know why are you focusing on this one bad apple, there are all these amazing women in Silicon Valley, why can’t you focus on them? Which brings you and I back to where we started.”

“Yeah, well, OK – the difficulty with all of this is as we know, when women go to get money from venture capital firms they really struggle, there’s that great case of those women who changed their names on letters and emails to male or ambiguous names, and suddenly started getting all these meetings with VC companies in Silicon Valley. On the one hand you can see why there is an urge to celebrate and publicize and promote these brilliant women. Because there’s an urge to say, look, stop thinking we are useless…but that trouble is I guess that in itself feeds into this idea that we’re gonna have to be twice or three or four times as good, constantly.”

The bar she says is just too high.

“…growing up in Australia in particular, when there were very few female leaders in politics, business, anywhere, and when one of them stumbled or did something shocking or got into trouble you felt it was a black mark, a problem for you, even though it had nothing to do with you, and you thought…why shouldn’t she stumble? It comes back to numbers and about the fact there were very few women in these positions. And the more we become very used to having female prime ministers the way we do in the UK now, the less we’re going to be thinking much about the fact that they’re female. That’s the point I am trying to make here, but anyway…if anybody does feel like setting up International Crap Women’s Day I am just a phone call away.”

Pilita Clark.

 I will post a few show notes under this episode at The Broad Experience.com, including Pilita’s original column. And as ever I’d love to hear from you – I’m sure she and I are not the only ones with opinions on this topic. Post a comment on the website, tweet me or email me or post to the Facebook page.

 You can help this show with a donation of any amount at the support tab at The Broad Experience.com. And if you can’t give just write a review on iTunes instead. Every little act of support helps.

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

Episode 142: Working Daughters: Your Career + Parent-care

Show transcript:

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

This time…when career and caring clash. Caring for parent, that is…

“It seemed inevitable that every time I flew to San Francisco where my company was headquartered, something would come up. The minute I touched down in San Francisco I'd have five voicemails from the nurse at the assisted living.”

“I just remember taking her to one doctor, and one doctor’s appointment took 5 hours and I was thinking, how am I ever gonna do this as one person because she needs to see ten doctors. So how do you do that and still balance your career or progress in your career?”

“It was so all encompassing. And I’d see my guitar in the corner of the room and see my friends and peers doing their lives, oh, a CD released, Grammy nomination here…”

Three women, in corporate and creative jobs on their careers plus caregiving…coming up on The Broad Experience.

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If you’ve been listening to the show since the beginning you may remember an episode I did several years ago called Home as Career Killer. One of my guests in that show was Liz O’Donnell. She’d been writing about women and work for quite a while and she had just published a book called Mogul, Mom and Maid – Liz was her family’s sole breadwinner at the time.

A few years ago I noticed that she’d switched tack in what she was posting about online. She’d shifted to talking about the issues around being a working woman who’s caring not just for her kids – but for her parents. In 2016 she wrote a great piece in The Atlantic called The Crisis Facing America’s Working Daughters. I meant to get back in touch with her then – but it was only this past autumn, when I faced a crisis with my own mother back in London…that I really began to think about this issue properly. I wasn’t expecting to be hit with caregiving stuff in my forties – but in the fact the typical caregiver is a woman in her late forties or fifties. Usually she has kids and a job as well.  

Enter Liz. Liz founded an online community called Working Daughter – a website, a Facebook group – she also has an upcoming book of the same name. The subtitle: a guide to caring for your aging parents while making a living.  

And that’s all in her spare time. She works at a PR firm – she was fulltime until last year.

The working daughter stage of Liz’s life began in earnest several years ago. She was in her late forties, her parents were in their 80s. They lived fairly close to her in Massachusetts. One day in particular got her thinking about this group of women who are juggling work and parent care.  

“I had taken a day off from work so that I could take my mother to the doctor and I got up at 5:00 to send some work e-mails. Then at 6:00 I was getting the kids out the door to school. Then I drove, my mother’s about an hour away from me, drove down to take her to the doctor and she wasn't ready to go. I had to push the appointment back. The doctor that day asked me why I worked and didn't quit to spend more time with my mother? It was a brutal day.” 

Later that night…about 11p.m, as she drove home from a talk she’d given to a group of working mothers, she thought, why on earth isn’t there more attention to working daughters? The idea for an online community was born. 

Meanwhile, her own life was getting more complicated. Both her parents were failing in different ways…one weekend her sister – who doesn’t live nearby – called and told Liz that she’d been on the phone to their parents and something was wrong. Could Liz go over and check on them? That was a Sunday. Liz drove off…and didn’t come home till one week later. Much of that time was spent in hospitals trying to get diagnoses. Her father was very confused, her mother was ill and couldn’t be left alone. 

“And I was so busy and so overwhelmed by everything I was witnessing and handling that I never told work. I work remotely. I never even told work that I wasn't at work and I would just try to answer enough emails every night and in the morning so it looked like I was at work, and I wasn't trying to fool anyone, I just really couldn't stop and say ‘Whoa, this is what's happening.’ So if you fast forward to right before the day they were diagnosed, I remember I was at the hospital, my dad was then sent to, and I found a quiet space and there happened to be a wheelchair. And I sat down and I called my boss and said, here's what's going on in my life.”

And her boss was quite sympathetic.

“So her first thing she said was, ‘you know you need to take care of yourself,’ which are the six most annoying words I think that a caregiver can ever hear because we know we need to take care of ourselves but we don't know how to take care of ourselves. And she asked me how I wanted to handle the situation, and I as the breadwinner I said ‘I want to keep working. You know, I'll figure this out.’”

But that was before she received two diagnoses. On July 1st 2014, Liz was told her father had Alzheimer’s and her mother had ovarian cancer. A couple of weeks later she saw her boss in person.

“…and I walked into the hotel where we're meeting up to go see a client, and I just burst into tears. And I'd been trying not to get to that point with her because I knew what she was going to say which was you need to take a leave of absence. And I was terrified that she would say that because I couldn't afford to take a leave of absence. So I was trying to hide it. I knew she was right, but I also knew that it wasn't right for me. So we talked it through and I said I can do this, but I went part time, and we agreed that I would have a flexible schedule, and some days I would work in the morning and some days I would work at night, and I would let the team know day to day what I was doing.”

She says she lost out financially but at the time there was so much going on, it had to be that way. Liz’s mother opted not to be treated for the cancer and she died several months later. Liz went back to fulltime work right after the funeral. Meanwhile Liz’s dad was now living at an assisted living facility just down the street from Liz and her family – she’s married with two teenagers.

And for a couple of years she says things were pretty good. Her dad’s Alzheimer’s seemed to be under control; they had some good times as a family. But then things began to go downhill.

“It seemed inevitable that every time I flew to San Francisco where my company was headquartered, something would come up. The minute I touched down in San Francisco I'd have five voicemails from the nurse at the assisted living. You know, he didn't seem well, can I take him to the doctor, or you know something came up.

We live in the Northeast and we had a really big snowfall one winter and my father kept stealing the shovels and going out and shoveling, because he didn't think the facility was doing a good enough job. And of course they didn't want this 89-year-old man who was a fall risk out shoveling. So they'd call me and say ‘you need to talk him,’ and I'd be across the country.”

That said, she knows she’s fortunate compared to many other employees who work day to day in an office or a factory. Where if they disappear to take a parent to the doctor or deal with a sudden crisis, they’re afraid of looking bad…or worse, losing their job.

“So absolutely, there are advantages to the fact that I'm remote and I have…you know there are also advantages to the fact that I'm fairly senior in my career and flexibility is born of building trust and seniority over time. On the other hand, I don't have the same camaraderie necessarily with my co-workers. I needed to lean on them quite a bit so that if I couldn't finish something and I was leaving in the morning I needed them to take over and I didn't quite have the same rhythms and relationships that you might have if you're sitting next to someone every day. So that was tough.”

Then, last year, the same year her father died, Liz’s job was downsized. She was moved to part-time. And she’s never going to know how much her caregiving had to do with that – or IF it had to do with that. But she can’t help thinking all the flextime she took over the years might have affected the company’s view of her.

“Part of it was circumstantial across what was happening in our industry and in the business. But, and part of this might be in my head, but I never felt Ashley like I got back to the status and the security and the influence that I had at work or in my career.”

She says a couple of things are at play when it comes to perceptions of professionals like her…

“One is that we don't tend to work at the same company for years like we used to. So where I earned my street cred and my ability to be flexible wasn't necessarily at the firm that I was at now. So the younger staff didn't know that I had already paid my dues, and they come in and they see this older woman and she's always leaving and she's not at her desk or she's not on Slack or instant message. They don't know how hard I've worked and what my abilities are, necessarily. So I think that's a factor for a lot of people who need to take flex is that we work at so many different companies, people don’t necessarily see the progression…and the other thing I think is that eldercare is invisible.

So when you have a new baby, your coworkers throw you a shower and your friends throw you a shower and everyone…you come in on your maternity leave and you bring the baby and everybody oohs and aahs, and then you bring pictures, and people expect that when you come back from that leave that you might have shifted a little bit or that you have other priorities in addition to your career, and it's talked about. But when you're caring for an aging parent you're really ultimately facing down dying and death and nobody wants you to bring that up in the office.”

Liz says life for working daughters can certainly improve…we will come back to that later in the show.

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I’m meeting Maria Toropova in Brooklyn, in the empty apartment she just rented for her and her mum. She’s a member of Liz’s online community, Working Daughter, and we’d spoken by phone before I showed up at her new place. It’s new construction, and the apartment isn’t large by non-New York standards, but it has two floors. The upstairs bathroom is sleek but compact…

“This is the tiniest sink you’ll ever see in your life…”

Maria’s bedroom is downstairs in the basement…

“The only thing that kills me is that there are no windows…[laughs] it’s actually a really decent size for New York…half bath, separate entrance…” [Fade under trax…]

Until last summer Maria was like a lot of other young professionals in New York. She was 29, sharing a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village with a roommate, putting in long hours at the office. Seeing friends after work, going for long runs along the Hudson River to de-stress.

Her mum was living in St. Louis, where Maria grew up. Maria and her parents emigrated to the US from Russia when she was 12 years old. They’re originally from Azerbaijan. Her father died a year after they arrived in America. Ever since, it’s been just Maria and her mum.

Her mother used to work as a computer engineer…since arriving in the US, she’s worked long hours as a home health aide.

Maria works for a big financial services company. She’s in training and development. And she was at the office last August when she got a call that changed her life.

She works in a building with terrible cell phone reception. And the summer is a really busy time for her. So when she noticed a voicemail from her mom’s friend back home, she thought, I’ll pick it up later. 

“I got a voicemail from her friend, I didn’t think anything of it, a few hours later it was still there. I went into a room to listen, I couldn’t get whole voicemail as the reception was so poor, I just heard words like hospital and stroke, so I called her friend back but I couldn’t get the full picture, so I had to get on a landline in a private office, obviously at that point quite emotional and trying to find out what happened, and that’s when I found out she had a stroke the night before.” 

Maria’s mother had been able to call her friend the following morning and say, please go to work for me, there’s something wrong. But because she’d waited half a day before she got help, the stroke did quite a bit of damage. 

Maria’s boss took her home from the office and she flew out to St. Louis that evening…

“She was in the ICU when I got there, she was in the ICU quite a bit, then in hospital and in rehab, so I was completely off the grid…took 2 weeks of time off. And as she transferred to in-patient rehab, I said I thought I could go back to working remotely. And I have said this a lot, I’m incredibly lucky, I have an incredible boss, he’s the most incredible human being I’ve ever met, professionally and otherwise, the kindest human, he stood behind me and so did the company, and that meant the world and still does. With that we were able to work out a remote work arrangement.”

Maria had a ton on her plate. She was visiting her mother in rehab, talking to doctors, handling reams of paperwork. Then her mother came home and Maria was taking care of her and working flexible hours from the house. In the fall, she felt herself crumbling.

“At first I started to get a lot of bad anxiety, panic attacks, I thought I was having a stroke, as time moved on I fell into, I think the diagnosis was severe depression, so… but at first I think I was functioning on adrenalin but it caught up to me in November/December time, and that’s when I took a leave of absence from work.”

Maria went on disability leave. She found a good psychiatrist in St. Louis and she’s been seeing her ever since. She says any kind of therapy is frowned upon in her immigrant community, but she thinks it’s saved her life – her words.

She says again, her workplace and her manager in particular have been supportive over everything she’s been through…

“…even with that said I still found myself struggling, because I do have a demanding job, and trying to balance it all, first you get this influx of information and bills, I think I took 2 boxes of paperwork here with me [to New York]. So it was balancing that and still making sure I was always – putting my job family first and making sure I am giving that 150% and at some point I just felt like it wasn’t possible.”

No kidding. Maria was putting a lot of pressure on herself. And when her mother came home, that was when she realized just how intense her new role was going to be. 

“…and once she was home and I was her sole 24/7 caregiver, she was fine for periods of time and I had friends helping out, but I just remember taking her to one doctor, and one doctor’s appointment took 5 hours and I was thinking, how am I ever gonna do this as one person because she needs to see ten doctors, and it just literally took half of my day. So how do you do that and still balance your career or progress in your career?”

She honestly doesn’t know. She’s still at the start of all this.

She says her mom has recovered well from the stroke in many ways – she’s walking and talking. But she has cognitive difficulties now, like a much older person might. Her mum is 65. Maria says her mom is dying to go back to work as a home health aide, but Maria’s not sure that’ll happen. 

She has a big support network in St. Louis, but she’s just sold the family home, and rented this place in Brooklyn for the two of them.

AM-T: “Why did you decide to move back here to this difficult city?”

“Yes, so I think unfortunately my mom has literally worked 70 hour weeks, every single week, she’s taken one vacation in the last 17 years…due to the fact we are an immigrant family, I knew this time would come where I would fully support her, so it was just…I didn’t necessarily expect it to come in the way that it did…and financially we need assistance…she has no income except for very small social security checks…so it’s imperative that I keep my job, which is obviously here, and I found out through resources available to me through work that New York is one of the best states for public assistance for healthcare. That largely drove my decision.”

She says back in Missouri she was told the most economical option would be to have her mother live in a nursing home. Something Maria can barely contemplate.

AM-T: “Talk a bit about that – you talked about this on the phone, about culture and how you would never have your mum living other than where you are.” 

“Yeah, so I think a lot of my personal struggles and relationship with my mom have been driven by that cultural gap – so she just turned 65, I’m about to be 30, so we have a very different age gap as well as a cultural gap, she grew up in the Soviet Union in a very conservative country within the Soviet Union, I largely grew up here so my ideas are very much American, but the value set is still rooted in me from that Eastern European society, so I’ve always struggled with that ‘cause in Russia or any other Eastern European cultures back in the day and still now, it’s common to have multi-generational households, and a lot of the parents’ happiness and sense of self comes from their children…and in America it’s very much centered around the individual…so growing up here, and I’ve always struggled with that. What would make my mom happy versus what would make me happy? And so now having lived with her under same roof and having lived with her having gone through this illness those issues have surfaced even more…in terms of, even here I’m gonna be moving into the basement, how much privacy will I have because privacy is not something that’s really valued, at least in the culture that I grew up whereas in America it very much is…um…and so I think that will kind of play into it, at the same time I can’t imagine, just because she’s very young, she’s only 65, and again it’s a very personal choice, I have no judgment, everyone has to make the right choice for them, but for me personally, I can’t imagine leaving her in a nursing home right now…even though that’s what she’s saying I should be doing because she’s worried I’m giving up my life to take care of her.” 

Maria says life in New York with her mum – it’s going to be different from the old, relatively carefree days before last August. She used to joke with her colleagues with kids, how do you look after them after a hard day at work? Now, she’ll be in a similar position. 

AM-T: “What do you think about the prospect of going back to work? When you think about that what do you think?”

“I think it’s a two-parter – I think equally excited and overwhelmed. Excited, when I was talking about whether I move back or not, in a way it’s survivalist instinct where I get parts of my own life back, the ones that I could, and work was a huge element of that, and going back into the environment that I know, and I love my team, the people I work with, so I’m looking forward to that and daily interactions. Overwhelmed, where I know how seriously I took my job and how I’ll likely feel when I return. I had the luxury of staying late when I needed to and coming in early, and now I’ll pretty much have limitations around that. Sort of figuring out how that’s gonna play into my job function and just career, long-term, I wonder will I able to go on a business trip again and how that’s gonna affect my career prospects. I think I mentioned I was set on international career opportunities, and recognizing that’s no longer an option, so figuring out what that means for my career going forward. 

AM-T: “Yeah, didn’t you say you’d been hoping to go to London?”

“I did, yes, so I did share that with my boss and he was obviously very supportive, and ironically I was thinking of the timeline to do that right around the time she got sick, so just, I guess, trying to figure out what that means for my career in the long-term.”

She’s taking things one day at a time. She knows her mum will have trouble adjusting to the change once she moves here, but she hopes they’ll gradually find their feet together. She feels the responsibility of being the sole wage earner and carer, still, she says she can make it work.

“Part of the beauty of the city is it is so full of different possibilities, there’s no tunnel vision, there’s still artists and musicians and struggling artists, quote unquote, that are surviving here, so I don’t think it’s impossible, I just think it’s gonna be a little bit different…”

Maria and her mother have already been through a lot together. And Maria has good friends and supportive colleagues. She hopes with help, the two of them can weather this change as well.

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You met Kate Schutt in the first of two shows I did recently on the coaching industry. Kate is a coach, but she’s also trained as a musician and her long-time career has been as a singer/songwriter. Not an easy career at the best of times.

Like Maria, she became a carer unexpectedly. In her case, she was in her late 30s. And just about to leave on a work trip she was quite excited about…

“I was headed to an extended gig in the middle east, in Doha, Qatar, I was gonna play guitar and sing in a fancy hotel there, I had negotiated my contract…I had my two guitars in my duffel bag packed and would be there for at least a month, maybe more…I went home to say goodbye to my parents, it was a Friday, I was leaving on a Monday, got out of the car and my mom did not look well at all. And just from the expression on her face I knew something was up, and that’s when she told me she’d been having these symptoms, she had had a CAT scan and was waiting for the results of that CAT scan to come in.”

While Kate was there, the results came back. Her mother had a tumor in her abdomen and a diagnosis of ovarian cancer. Kate decided then and there that her work trip was off.

“I asked my dad to take me back to the train station, I took a train back to New York, I unpacked, I re-packed, took one guitar and a small bag back to Pennsylvania where my family home is, and moved into a childhood bedroom and became my mom’s primary caregiver.”

Kate says she adored her mother. She wanted to be with her while she went through what they all knew would be grueling treatment. She says it was absolutely her choice to do this. Unlike Maria who has to support her mother financially, Kate’s family could support her while she took care of her mother, interacted with doctors, and ferried her to and from hospital visits.

I asked what role her father played.

“My dad was my wingman, he was her loving partner of decades of marriage but I like to just say he’s an old school dad, he was incapable of quarter-backing this care. It was extremely complicated as anybody who has been through anything like this or any dealings with the western medical system, it was…there were lots of decisions to make constantly with half or less than half information.”

She says he just wasn’t the person to handle all that.

Kate says handling it was a fulltime job. She had less and less time to even think about her own life, her own career.

“It was so all encompassing. And I’d see my guitar in the corner of the room and see my friends and peers and mates, doing their lives, oh, a CD released, oh, Grammy nomination here, oh, new body of music, tour with this person…it was a very strange experience. I guess the thing I would say was I did not feel like myself. That’s what I kept saying to my partner; I said, I don’t recognize myself. And for me certainly in the beginning there was so much to do…to get her through the major de-bulking surgery, front line chemo, I would literally put her to bed at night and face plant on the bed, and if I had an hour free, which would be early morning before she woke up, I had to exercise because that’s how I process my stress. So it was like exercise and process my stress, or pick up my guitar, and at that point I was unable to pick up my guitar.”

Kate and her family knew the cancer would end her mother’s life. But they strove to give her as good a life as she could have while she was going through treatment. Kate says it was a privilege to take care of her. Their relationship deepened as time went on.

“I had years to talk about the most important questions in life: like where do you think you go when you die, do you think you go anywhere? What does living a good life mean to you? Who do you want to spend your time with now it’s so precious, and why does that person get more of your time than not? What do you really care about getting done before you die?”

Kate’s mum lived for four years after that diagnosis, and Kate was there the whole time. By the end, she was totally spent. Exhausted mentally and physically.

Both she and her dad took some time to recover. She says it took another year to get her dad’s life back on track, not to mention her own.

AM-T: “And when you got back on the other side of that when you were strong enough to function as a working person…did you really feel that, were you like, yup, I really have lost 4 years and I notice that?”

“Yeah, I feel it every day when I sit down to practice my guitar. I mean I spent 5 years not practicing daily. Everyone who plays an instrument knows you can’t expect yourself to perform as an instrumentalist or a musician and not be working on your craft…when I wasn’t doing that…and you know my story a little, so you know eventually I started writing notes toward writing songs…so it wasn’t like for the whole 4 years it was just fixing meals and going to the hospital. Sure there was, after I got my feet under me a year and a half into it… I started to be able to make notes towards the thing I’m now working on, which is making this album, but this morning, sitting down to practice my guitar, that’s why I say I have to remind myself I can’t be upset at myself, that’s a choice I made, if I’m frustrated with where I am as a player partly it’s because for five years I didn’t do anything on my instrument.”

She says her earning power as a musician has taken a hit too…

“Earning power and earning potential is real—I mean you’re only young enough to have verve and energy to pursue your career…I mean hopefully we’re all living longer and with a lot of energy, but I believe in that stuff. If I wanted to go out and get a job even now, I’m 43 about to be 44, that’s an old age to be starting something new. So I felt like, yeah, I wasn’t building anything publicly, let’s put it that way, I was writing notes toward songs -- gee whiz, good for you…nothing that anybody would look at and say that has value, in our world today. I mean the thing I know, and I’m getting choked up, is I know what kind of a person it takes to do that work…and that’s probably where your listeners will meet me, is because it’s a very different person who says yes to that challenge, and I have to believe, I have to, otherwise I might as well go off myself, I have to believe there was a meaning for my music, for my soul, for my friends and loved ones, that me going through that experience was meant for, quote unquote, was teaching me something about what it means to live.”

Kate did a TED talk last year about how to help someone cope with a loss – I will link you to that under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.

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If you’re in the position of caring for a parent while holding down a job, much will depend on where you work. Or who your manager is. Maria Toropova has been lucky in that regard. Liz O’Donnell of Working Daughter says women in her community have experiences that are all over the place. She says American employers are getting better at trying to offer some formal help…

“We're seeing more and more companies crop up here in the U.S. that are selling into employers, we will help your employee find backup care. We will help your employees sort through the checklist of things that they need to do to provide care. So companies are now starting to contract these companies and offer these services, so that’s part of it."

Then there’s the cultural part. She says if we could just talk about all this a bit more…

“And I don't believe we should all go in and share our personal information in the workplace every day, but if we at least give the space if somebody wants to talk about it or learn not to run away in horror if somebody brings up, ‘I just came from hospice before I showed up for work’ or ‘I'm heading to hospice you know on my way home tonight,’ if we just started to normalize that, give it some space then I think that would help and we see working parent groups all the time at large corporations and small ones too. I don't know that we have many formalized support groups for people who have parents.”

And in a work-centric culture like America’s, many carers are forced to decide: Work, or family?

“There are a number of women that I can think of who have told us in the group that they've lost their job as a result of caregiving or not necessarily that they were fired as a result of caregiving, but they didn't feel that they could manage both work and care. I think one of the things that people don't realize also about caregiving is how many medical tasks caregivers can be doing. Not all of us but some people are going to work whether it's a desk job or a shift job and then coming home and they're giving injections, they're changing colostomy bags, they're sorting 14 pills at a time. This is stuff that you think you need to have medical training, the nursing school or medical school for, and daughters and sons are doing it every day. So that's a huge responsibility and a huge stress. So how do you go to work on top of all of that?”

And Liz says there’s another part of all this. Something that’s beyond the realm of HR…

“And that’s the part companies can’t necessarily help with, right – the emotional part, and there’s a huge emotional part, because you're having to come to terms with the fact that your parent isn't able to do what they used to do, and you have to come to terms with the fact that that also means that they may not be there for you in the way you're used to them being there for you. It definitely, definitely shakes your identity. And people talk a lot about this idea of it's a role reversal. And I like to shy away, move away from that term. I mean in a sense it is a role reversal, I'm caring for you versus you caring for me. But the reason I'm not crazy about that term is I prefer to think of it just as a natural stage in life. You know when you're young you have a child parent relationship and then as an adult you hope you can have an adult-adult relationship with your parents and then as they get older I just like to think of it as yet another phase…”

A phase where the relationship naturally shifts –and why not normalize it, she says, because it’s going to happen to us.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time…thanks to Liz O’Donnell, Maria Toropova and Kate Schutt for being my guests on this show. I will link you to Liz’s community Working Daughter and to Kate’s TED talk under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.

 As ever I am keen to hear from you – if you have anything you’d like to add to the discussion you can comment under this episode on the website or tweet me or email or post on the Facebook page.

 And if you can afford to kick in to support the show that would be much appreciated. Thanks again to those of you who have done this and especially to my monthly sustainers.

 If you can’t give, write a review on Apple Podcasts instead. It all helps the show get noticed in our increasingly crowded podcast world.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte, thanks for listening, see you next time.

Episode 141: When I'm 85 - an interview with Madeleine Kunin

Show transcript:

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

This time, a woman with a long career in public life reflects on what it means to be in her 80s…

“You can still enjoy a sunset at 85 so I try to dwell on things of beauty. When you know there’s not much time left you have to focus on what really gives you joy and what makes life meaningful.”

Retired politician Madeleine Kunin comes of age. Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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We rarely hear the voices of older people in the media. And a lot of us don’t have a person in their 70s or 80r or 90s with whom we spent any amount of time. That’s a really different situation from the one we had for centuries, when we all lived in our hometowns in tight family groups.

Some of you will remember I interviewed Madeleine Kunin back in 2015 – she was one of two guests in a show called Politics is Power. She is a former governor of Vermont, a university professor and an author. If you haven’t heard that show I recommend it – you’ll find out much more about Madeleine’s political career there. She is intelligent and thoughtful and a great talker. When I heard she had a new memoir out about growing old, I jumped at the chance to talk to her again.

Her book is called Coming of Age – My Journey to the Eighties. 

AM-T: “You may allude to this in the text but…just picking my age…when you were in your forties did you think at all about being in your 80s?”

“No, it seemed miles away – I think until you begin to feel old and reach your 70s or 80s you still think you’re gonna live forever and that old age is a very distant mirage you don’t really believe is real. Of course I thought of it in terms of my mother and other relatives but I felt invincible in my forties.”

AM-T: “When did you start…did you start to feel a little less invincible in the last decade or so?”

“Yes, I guess so, I can’t pinpoint a date or a time. I guess when I began to feel my knees going up and down stairs I realized something new was happening – and maybe it’s bits of memory, you walk into a room and when you get there you can’t remember what you were looking for. So bits and pieces that make you feel your age. And then just the number. I remember I felt at 70, 70 felt very old, and when I reached 85, which is my present age, 85 didn’t seem related to me – 85 was somebody else, not me. But in the process of writing this book I took responsibility for my age.”

AM-T: “Yeah, well that brings me to my next question which is why did you decide to write about being in your 80s?”

“Well, I felt myself changing – my body, my mind, my emotions, and I also felt like a somewhat different person, it’s like I opened a new door like I could walk in and be more self- revealing. Having lived a public life for so many years where what I said and what I did was carefully scrutinized, and a politician develops a certain defense mechanism, you screen your words through a sieve so that you can omit anything controversial or that can get you into trouble.

As I approached my 80s I became more flamboyant and figured what have I got to lose? And I could explore my inner thinking and write poetry. I had written poetry off and on but very sporadically and suddenly the poetry muse sat on my shoulder, there she was, and poetry requires time and quiet and sustained thinking, something you can’t do ever in public life because you’re on a 15 minute chopped up schedule and you have to go onto the next thing and you also have to be careful, so I sort of enjoy being at the stage I’m in where I can be more free and self-revealing.”

AMT: “I wonder now watching the…a number of women have declared for Democratic candidates for president in 2020 and do you think that’s changed at all, do you think politicians can be a bit more real these days, or not really?”

“Well, I think that is to be seen. The good news is there are now four Democratic women…running for the Democratic nomination for president and they can’t be targets in the same way Hillary was. They still have to be somewhat careful but I don’t think they are as easily attacked. People said to me when Hillary was running I would vote for a woman but just not Hillary, I don’t like Hillary. Well now there are four women you can choose from and if you don’t like them all that makes you prejudiced. I think the variety is healthy. But I did know Kamala Harris wore a black suit, she may wear a black suit throughout the campaign because there’s only so much you can say about a black suit. The others will find their own comfort zone but the hope is they’ll stop talking about shoes and stockings and hair and fingernail polish and whatever it is they zone in on. I mean men just don’t get that attention about their attire, because it’s assumed what a man will wear, a dark suit, red tie, or a blue tie, that’s the end of the conversation. And I think one of the reasons people focus so much on how women look is they’re trying to find out who this woman is who’s competing for a man’s job…is she like a man, is she like a woman, is she tough enough, is she likeable enough? There’s still some extra baggage that women candidates for president have to carry.”

AMT: “I want to go back to you because I want make sure I cover some of the parts of your book I was most interested in and curious about. Well, I guess you can tell me if this is too personal, but when you parted from your first husband you’d been married for about 35 years, right?”

“Yes.” 

“And I remember you telling me before when I interviewed you that he was a supportive spouse when you were in public office, you probably couldn’t have done it without him…” 

“Right.”

“You were sixtyish when you parted ways, was it hard to be on your own or was it a relief or both?”

“Well I think it was hard to be on my own and somewhat a relief, but I think the actual parting of the ways is never easy in any divorce and I was very fortunate to have a wonderful second marriage, but my first husband was supportive of my getting into politics which I think is essential. It’s hard for a woman to be all on her own through the rigors of a campaign. You’re doing something very demanding and somewhat unusual still, so a partner has to be with you. But as I said my second husband also supported my writing and I couldn’t have written this book, Coming of Age, without my husband’s support. He was my backup and it also allowed me to take more risks in what I wrote about.”

She says she and her husband John made a great team. We’ll come back to their late-life partnership in a few minutes.

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When Madelene became single for the first time in decades she was in her early sixties. She had finished her three terms as governor of Vermont. She had also taken on the role of US deputy secretary of education in the Clinton administration. After she divorced, she was appointed US ambassador to Switzerland, the country where she was born in the early 1930s.

She was excited to go back, but when she got to her formal residence in Bern, she realized being an ambassador without a partner could be rather lonely.

“It was a new experience…in a way I had everything one could want – I had staff, maids, chauffeur, chef, but at the end of the day you are alone. As time went on I did find some good friends, swiss friends, I could pick up the phone and say do you want to go to a movie? I also had cousins…that was a source of strength there.”

Still, being a single woman felt awkward at times, especially in such a social role. She writes about a time when there was no available male ambassador to dance with at an annual ball she threw at the US embassy, so a Marine politely made himself available. She left early.

“I think my almost embarrassment applies to women in many situations and I was more self-conscious than anyone else. That was a hard night but most of my stay in Switzerland was happy. It was great to come back to the country where I was born. My mother brought my brother and I to America at the outbreak of WWII and we didn’t know whether Switzerland would be pulled into the War and occupied by Hitler. And we had the American dream, my mother was very optimistic, she said anything is possible in America and that carried me forward, I believed it when we got to the shores of America.”

AM-T: “Yeah, I’d read a little bit about your childhood but to read about what your mother went to when you were too young to remember, your father killed himself, he was depressed, and your mother was left with you and your brother to shepherd through the rest of your childhoods on her own.”

 “Well yes as I got older I grew in my appreciation of my mother’s courage and sense of adventure. She took us both on the ship that was vastly overcrowded as everyone was trying to leave Europe, and brought us to America. She was a gutsy woman and unfortunately she never lived to see me in public life.”

AM-T: “You talk a little bit about your relationship with money and how careful your mother was with money. Now obviously you weren’t destitute or you couldn’t have come to America, she must have had some money to live on but she parsed it out very carefully, is that right?

“Yes, that’s about right. we weren’t living in poverty but we didn’t have a big nest egg. My father had been a successful businessman. He imported shoes from the United States and elsewhere and so there was no panic, no suffering but she knew there was a limited amount and we were just missing little things I wished I had but weren’t essentials, like I wished I had piano lessons, I wished I’d had ballet. I was not really expected to go to college because my mother and the family didn’t go to university in Europe, but I knew I wanted to go – I found my way, there were no loans but you could work as a waitress for the summer and learn enough to get you through.

Which is just what she did. Madeleine says she felt relieved about money when she married a doctor…even though she’d supported herself until then, the pressure was off. She worried about money again when they split up. In fact she sometimes fantasized about stealing a loo roll from a public place, just in case. And she’s not the only one.

“I actually met somebody who said I did that, she stole or was tempted to steal a roll of toilet paper, you suddenly feel maybe I won’t have enough money to buy the essentials, of course I didn’t but the feeling your funds are limited, your options are limited, strikes a lot of women who are newly divorced, maybe I have to fend for myself…”

When Madeleine returned from her time Switzerland she settled back in Vermont. But she didn’t retire. She taught at the University of Vermont and elsewhere, she started Emerge Vermont, an organization to recruit and train Democratic women to run for office, she wrote…and she toyed with the idea of internet dating. She’d heard good things about it, but it felt uncomfortable, being a former governor putting up a dating profile. She never did it.

Then one day about ten years into being single, she met someone. He was someone she knew of – in fact they’d met years before. His name was John Hennessey and he’d been the dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He was a widower, and he and his wife had donated to Madeleine’s campaigns in the past. In the mid-2000s, he asked her if she’d like to get involved with an organization called Americans for Campaign Reform.

Now that doesn’t sound very romantic, but…

“Best decision I ever made to say yes to that invitation. And I hate to use ‘love at first sight,’ it’s such a cliché, but he met two of my criteria – one he was a Democrat, he and his wife had been very active Democrats in New Hampshire. And two he was a feminist, he referred to God as she, and I hadn’t developed that habit but it thrilled me of course when he said that, so we were very well matched and when we met again later for lunch I happened to have 2 tickets to the Vermont Symphony. I asked him if he’d like to come to the symphony that night and he prudently asked, what’s the program? And I said Beethoven’s Ninth, and that did it. So I really have to thank Beethoven.”  

AM-T: “What did it feel like falling in love again probably 50 years after you did it the first time?”

“It just felt natural, I don’t know, it was so easy, we moved in together, shared our furniture, we had no arguments, just as if we were on the same wavelength. The only thing was I had to give up my dog, my dog was not a very well-behaved dog and didn’t seem to like John, she’d jump up on him. She was a Swiss dog, a herding dog, not the ideal house pet, so I faced this quandary, John or the dog…obviously it was not much of a quandary, she went to a lovely farm in Montana where she lived happily ever after.”

Madeleine and John got married when she was 72 and he was 80. They traveled to India, England, Egypt, Italy—and lots of other places, enjoying eachother’s company and the fact they were so well matched, it was almost like they’d always known eachother. He’d come with her on all her book tours and take notes each time, keeping tabs on reactions to her speeches. People who saw them out together often assumed they’d been together for years.

They eventually downsized their home to an apartment in a retirement community in Vermont. That became especially convenient when John’s health began to go downhill. He had physical ailments but he also began to suffer from bouts of depression.

AM-T: “How did you find being a carer at the end of his life? A lot of your time was spent caring and worrying that he might fall and worrying about his health…”

“Well the first 8 or so years we saw the world together, we traveled, he was fine, he had never been depressed, so this happened near the end. He was a very upbeat person and he was a person who took women seriously; listened to them, questioned them and also advocated for them. He wouldn’t accept the deanship of the Tuck School unless they allowed women to be accepted at the school, and he got that. That was the proviso the school agreed with.

But being a carer is, it really depends on the two people involved. Love helps. If you really love someone you want to help them get better, you want to be with them, and that gave me strength that we had this love for eachother. But it’s also frustrating at times because there’s only so much you can do even as a loving caregiver. You can’t shake off depression, much as you try. You can for a moment distract and touch and be close but it’s a very hard thing to deal with. I think the most important thing is you don’t give up, that you’re close to the person you’re caring for and you get some respite. I was lucky that we live in a continuing care community, so I had help, which was very important.”

John died at the beginning of last year. He was 92.

Madeleine feels incredibly lucky to have had him in her life. She enjoys good health herself, which she admits is one of the key components of having a good old age.

 “A lot of your ability to enjoy life as you get older is dependent on your financial situation and on your health. Though some people conquer both but it’s true it’s much harder if you’ve got financial worries or a debilitating health situation, but even then you can still work around it. I see people in wheelchairs who give me a big smile. So I think the idea is carpe diem, enjoy the day, and my husband and I used to say that to eachother, carpe diem, and it’s inscribed in my wedding band.”

I asked Madeleine to elaborate on something she said earlier, about noticing how much she was changing in her 80s…how so?

“I’m just more thoughtful, I’m more internal rather than external, I’m writing serious poetry and to write poetry you have to dig deep, you can’t just talk about the obvious, you have to find words. I’m also more introspective. What I try to do but don’t always succeed is to live in the moment, to try to – you can still enjoy a sunset at 85 so I try to dwell on things of beauty, I still read a lot, l am lucky to have good friends. So when you know there’s not much time left you have to focus on what really gives you joy and what makes life meaningful. You can’t do it every day 24/7 but you can pinch yourself every once in a while when you get depressed and say stop, look what you’ve got, you’re so fortunate.” 

AM-T: “Is there anything you didn’t expect that you love about being in your 80s?”

“Well, that I can still be creative, that I can still enjoy things – it’s not what I had pictured in my mind. I remember going to an 80 year old man’s birthday party and thinking wow, that’s really old, and expecting him to be decrepit, and need help walking…and I see a lot of that, old people with some disability where I live, but I see others old people here who are lively, doing things, good conversationalists, so I think it doesn’t end at 80 or 85, as long as you’re still curious, as long as you’re still interested in new things, you can be happy.”

Madeleine Kunin. Her new book is called Coming of Age – My Journey to the Eighties.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. I will link you to more information about Madeleine and her husband and to that last show I did with her under this episode at The Broad Experience dot com.

I said this a few years ago in a blog post and I’ve completely failed to do it…but I would love to interview more older women. Maybe you know someone in her 80s or 90s who comes from a totally different background than Madeleine who might be a good guest on the show. I’m always open to your suggestions – shoot me an email at ashley@thebroadexperience.com

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

Episode 140: The Coaching Cure, part 2: The Coachee

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 looking at women and the coaching industry.

How does a client pick a good coach?

“Even if somebody has all the certifications they still might not be very good, or they might be great. They might not have any certifications and they might be brilliant.”

And once you have chosen someone, you want that investment to work out.

“If you are paying more money, for the most part people tend to take things more seriously. They tend to trust the advice more, and they also tend to be more likely to follow through on it.”

Which is all very well if the coach is effective and ethical.

And we follow up on a coachee’s first experience of being coached at work.

“Getting curious about my emotions at work has changed the way I experience work, because it’s helped me be less emotional and diffuse the emotion that can pile up if I don’t address it.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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 So last time you heard the first of a two-part show on the coaching industry, and that show focused on the coaches themselves. If you haven’t heard that episode I recommend you start there – this show will just make a bit more sense if you listen to that one first.

Now I said last time that I have had a lot of questions about the coaching industry. I’ve wondered why it’s been growing so fast, why so many women are involved both as coaches and clients, and frankly I’ve wondered if some of it isn’t just too good to be true – self-improvement jargon sold to people who want change in some aspect of their lives.  

That said I’m also genuinely curious about what coaching can potentially do.  

You first met Anne Libby in a show that came out at the beginning of last year called A Year For Women. And you heard me teasing her newsletter in a promotion on a recent show. Now Anne is a management expert and consultant on all things management. I had a feeling she would have noticed the growth of coaching as an occupation, and I was right. In fact, it turns out she’s trained as a coach herself, even if she doesn’t coach that often. She says when it comes to the growing numbers of coaches out there…

“There are no barriers to entry. You know, I mean you can get a WordPress website up and running or you know a Squarespace or whatever, in less than three hours. You know, buy a domain name, put your coaching website up there and you're open for business. Now that doesn't mean that you're gonna be able to run it as a business. And again, like why are more women doing this? Because I also think that the path to feeling certified at it, which would be the next step, to get some training and whatnot, is something that we are attracted to. We want to be the best at school. And it's a prescribed series of steps that you can take in order to theoretically be able to do something like this as part of your living, or as a living.”

Not to mention the desire to help other people using your own hard won experience.

Still she says when she started working in banking in the ‘80s, helping employees grow and reach their potential…it was a given. Something that happened on the job.

“Coaching was a thing that your manager did for you. It wasn't like there was a coaching engagement. It wasn't like there was a separate person who was going to coach you. I would say sometimes I probably got coaching from H.R. executives as well. Having a problem employee, how should I handle this? I've never had to deal with this before. How should I handle it? So you've got coaching from a variety of people in an organization…”

But these days…

“… because corporations have skinnied out their sort of cadre of middle managers and H.R. exacts for that matter, the kind of people who were functionally coaching and developing me…”

Are just not there in the same numbers. The journalism site Pro Publica has been looking at the numbers of people in their 50s being laid off and not being able to find another, permanent job in the US workforce. Anne works with young leaders in her consulting practice, but she suspects there are far fewer 50 and 60-somethings around today to provide the kind of on-site coaching she got as a young employee.    

“And yet this seasoning that you get between age 40 and age 55 both in life and beyond, in life and in your professional experience is a rich thing to bring to younger people and share with them. And the expectation back in the day was you would do that. And people did do that. People invested hundreds and thousands of hours in helping me to develop as a manager.”

“I have not really had that experience with managers in my career. There have been very few people who have coached me while I worked for them.”

That’s Danielle Sauve. She started working in the early 2000s. You met her at the end of the last show and in a few minutes we’ll hear what happened during her own coaching engagement. But to Anne’s point, Danielle says that kind of encouraging, open relationship with a manager isn’t anything she’s ever had.  

And the reason for that isn’t just down to the fact there are fewer middle managers than there used to be. You heard Terry Maltbia of Columbia University’s coaching program in the last show. He says the workplace has changed in many ways in the last few decades…

“As I observe what’s happening in the world of work, most recently 2008, but I noticed even from the early 80s when I started work to the 90s to the early 2000s that with each passing decade there were fewer and fewer resources and focus on development, people and human and organizational development.  A lot of that was being outsourced. There were fewer and fewer internal resources for developing managers, developing people therefore, and so I think what has happened, is, one of the things that makes coaching popular is it’s filling a void.” 

Perhaps especially for women. A few of you have brought this up with me. You’ve pointed out women traditionally haven’t had a lot of mentorship, or sponsorship. They haven’t had as many people looking out for them at work as their male colleagues. So no wonder we look to outside sources for support and advice.

And I’ll add to that and say I bet coaching is also meeting a need for independent workers like me. Huge numbers of people today are not traditionally employed…many of us are freelance or own our own businesses. We’re on our own. We don’t have a manager or a colleague to consult if we’re flailing around in our careers. In previous reporting I’ve done I spoke to a small business owner who swore by her coach. She said without that person to hold her to account and keep her on track, her business just would not be as successful.

But how do any of us who are paying for our own coach – how do we choose the right person? Conventional wisdom says you should check the coach has certifications. But Terry Maltbia of Columbia University told me none of the coaches who teach on his prestigious coaching program have certificates. They’ve been it as too long. Before there were many training programs out there. Plus, nowadays there are so many training programs, so many different certificates, it’s dizzying. Anne agrees.

“Even if somebody has all the certifications they still might not be very good, or they might be great. They might not have any certifications and they might be brilliant. I mean I think the most important thing is that if you are thinking about engaging with somebody who calls themself a coach they should be able to explain their process to you. They should be able to answer questions for you about what you are going to get out of it. The coach should be able to tell you how you will spend time together and what kind of work you will be doing during that time and what kind of work you'll be doing in the off hours, and in the case of people who are being coached through their workplaces, there should be a transparent and clear idea of how the different stakeholders will be involved in the entire process of coaching. That’s what I would say to anybody who is thinking about getting a coach who's cynical about it, because there are good coaches out there and you can have good results from it. But if you are discouraged from asking questions about how the coach plans for you to achieve those results and what those results will be and look like, then you probably should move on to the next one and you should probably be allowed to talk to people who’ve work with that coach as well, not just the reference on the website, but to actually talk with them.”

The International Coach Federation urges people to interview at least three coaches before you decide on one to work with. I will link you to their checklist under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.

Christine Whelan is a clinical professor in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Among other things, she’s a longtime researcher on the self-help industry.

I got on the phone with her recently. She says coaching can be a great experience, but there are some caveats.  

“The danger with coaching that I think is also a danger of self-help in general is that after a certain point, you have done the work with the client that you know how to do. And then of course you want to keep working with them. Then you may overreach in terms of what your skill set allows you to do. So when a coach who does not have a psychotherapy background or a marriage and family therapy background oversteps into realms that they're really not qualified to talk about there could be some detrimental results. Now on the other hand think about the close friendships you have. Most of the time our best friends can often act as our coaches and we full well know that they have no official expertise in a lot of the things they're saying. But good advice from somebody who is simply listening and reflecting back to you is very valuable as well.”

Christine isn’t surprised that coaching has become such a part of workplace culture. 

“For centuries, and probably millennia, the most powerful and elite have always had coaches. If you think about elite athletes, if you think about successful business folks at the highest echelons, having somebody who can be your sounding board, having somebody who can offer you advice on your ascent to power is really very, very valuable. So I think two things happened in the last 15 or so years. There has been a democratization of that process to try to bring coaching to as many people as possible, to make it more affordable, to make it less and less of something that is only offered within the C suite and something that is more for everybody. And then there is also the element of a more potentially business socially acceptable approach to self-improvement. So yes, this is where it does intersect with self-help a bit. There are many men in particular who would not be caught dead reading a self-help book, but they would be happy to tell you that they're meeting with their coach.” 

And another thing that’s interesting about our relationship with a coach versus say, a self-help book…is the price difference, and how that affects our behavior.

“So in behavioral psychology we look at this as credible and costly commitments to behavior change. So if you are buying a ten dollar book that is a lower cost commitment to actually changing your behavior than if you are paying up to several thousand dollars for a one on one coaching session, and if you are paying more money, for the most part people tend to take things more seriously. They tend to trust the advice more. They also tend to be more likely to follow through on it because otherwise you're just throwing money down the drain.” 

She says this isn’t always true of course. Think of all the gym memberships that start in January and then it’s direct debit for months, often with little use. But on the whole she says if we pay for a seminar or hire a coach we’re gonna be much keener to incorporate what we learn into our lives.

And that’s great, IF the relationship is healthy and the coach sticks to ethical practices. But it’s not so good if a coachee is vulnerable and desperate for help and picks a coach who wants to make a sale - but doesn’t have their best interests at heart. And this does sometimes happen. Christine says any client should be wary of a coach who has a ‘my way or the highway’ approach. For anyone looking to invest in any type of self-help-related activity, she recommends checking out a site called Seek Safely – she’s on the board on the organization.

“So yes, it can absolutely prey on vulnerable people. All industries can. But if we have some of these guidelines to educate consumers, to help consumers ask and answer the questions about whether they are being kept safe emotionally and physically in the process, then I think we can really minimize a lot of the shysters out there and their effect on people.”

And there’s no indication that our interest in coaching is going away. Almost everyone wants to live a better life, be a better person at home and at work. And Christine says talking about that is more acceptable than it’s ever been.

“There are some fundamental assumptions that we have that are very different than those our great grandparents would have had, which is that everybody has problems and it's not bad to have problems but it's bad to not talk about them, that by acknowledging your problems you are a stronger, a better person and we should all really be open talk about our challenges and work toward improving them. Really this is part of the air we breathe now to the point where when I lay these before my students they say, well of course that's true. And so often I try to send them back to their oldest living relatives, to ask them whether that relative would indeed say, of course that's true. And they come back rather perplexed when they say, Well, my great grandmother said no, you shouldn't talk about your problems and you should always put on a face of competency and just go about your work and don't think too much about it. And they were just utterly perplexed that anybody would have such an idea.

So yes, we have had a real cultural change in terms of how we look at personal improvement. When I did my doctoral work on the self-help industry I showed in numeric terms that self-help books have doubled as a percentage of all books in print in the United States since 1970. There is a huge interest out there and coaching and all the, the rise of so many different kinds of coaches of all walks of life, that’s a product of that as well.”

Christine Whelan.  

In a minute we find out what happened when Danielle Sauvé took up her company’s offer of leadership coaching.  Stay tuned.  

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When she was in her twenties Danielle Sauvé had been hoping for a life in theater – her job as an assistant in marketing, it was just that. A job. She definitely was not leaning in.  

“I haven’t been the kind of person to ever plan a quote-unquote career. For me working was for many years just a day job and then I realized I had to double down in one area of my life and not spread myself so thin, and so started to put more effort and commitment into my work…but I never planned any of those moves, I may have had ideas, and I may have said to the CEO in the elevator once, I’d love to work for you one day, and he took me up on that. But for me that’s not a plan, that’s an opportunistic move.”

So she’s beavering away at a good marketing job at a big company in the Midwest. And one day a senior woman she admires offers to fix her up with an executive coach. She’s starting a pilot program to coach promising women, and she thinks Danielle has a lot of potential. Danielle thinks, sure, why not?

AM-T: “Just one thing I want to check on…was this coaching, was it presented to you as we’re offering this in part to help you serve the company better? Like the new, improved you will be a better worker?” VOICE

“No, it was never about helping me serve the company better. That was made clear to me from the beginning and as part of the objectives of our pilot, the company recognized it was taking a risk specifically by developing women who were leaders, and giving them more tools or developing them as people to be better leaders, period. That to me is definitely very important. Another way they put it in the pitch, was that coaching is really aimed at women navigating all the stress they’re feeling when they’re in a workplace because they have so many more stresses typically with domestic duties and family responsibilities than men experience in the workplace, not to mention any type of discrimination or harassment they may be facing.”

So Danielle starts sessions with her coach, a woman called Annie. They have an hour call once every two weeks. And once she starts talking about work with her coach, her coach begins to challenge her on some of the ways she’s been thinking.   

“The best thing for me was identifying the inner critic which is that little voice in your head that tells you careful, your skirt might be too short, or did you forget to brush your teeth this morning? Anything that makes you feel less than up to the task of the day. Realizing, for me, that that little voice is something that I can turn off or ignore, and it’s not something that’s helping me so I should not listen to it, was really helpful in boosting my confidence and helping me feel like I was less emotionally susceptible to the things that happened to me at the office whether that was receiving feedback I didn’t want to get, or bad news, or extra work, or someone slighting me. By learning to quiet that voice, and remind myself of truths about my capabilities and my skills, that really was what changed the way I started to interact with my colleagues, and my boss, and even the people that reported to me.”

For example, she approached her boss one day and started asking about what might come next for her at the company. Something she’d never done in the past. 

“I simply got curious about what a next move might mean for me and I said so how does this work, do I need to wait to be tapped on the shoulder by you to say Danielle, we think there’s something else we think the business needs you to do that would be more valuable for the business? Or do I need to tell you I would like to do something new and here are some ideas I have, I’m not unhappy, I just need to know how this works. And I don’t think I would even have had this conversation if I had not gone through this coaching. Because I would have just waited for something to come to me. So to me that was a big change. And I’ll give you one more example. I think this coaching has made me much more aware of my feelings and helped me stop just pushing aside my feelings, my emotions, that I think many women are told to do at the office, just put your feelings aside, it’s not about how you feel…but instead by using the opposite approach of why do I feel these feelings, why do I feel so overwhelmed right now, what is bothering me, did someone say something to me, am I really upset about this thing? Getting curious about my emotions at work has changed the way I experience work, because it’s helped me be less emotional and diffuse the emotion that can pile up if I don’t address it. So I actually get way fewer headaches than I used to have, I used to get headaches every week. Which is a real benefit honestly for my quality of life. So that would be a big thing.”

She says as well helping to lower her stress levels, the coaching helped her become more honest with herself about what she wanted…and that led to becoming more honest with other people as well.

“As a mom of four it’s very easy to not think of myself as the main thing – like I have all these responsibilities and obligations, oh, the laundry’s not done, there are so many ways to fill my mind with things I should be doing, or things I should want, all these other people’s expectations. The idea that I need to pay attention to my emotions and be honest with people about how I’m feeling and what I do want. There have been managers in my past who have asked well, what do you want to do?”

And she never had a good answer for them. She just wasn’t used to focusing on…her.

But she’s getting used to it, and that played out recently in a big way. She was approached with an offer to take on a new role.  

“…and I wasn’t actually very excited about it and I really couldn’t hide it because it was all over my face. But because of the coaching I was able to reframe the conversation and help the person making me the offer to see my perspective and in the past I might have just said OK, I’ll take that role and I’ll do what you want me to do even though it could feel like a step back or like I might not be learning something or I might not be very happy. And instead I was honest with the person giving me this offer and said, I just don’t think I would really learn anything but what about these other two ideas. So I suggested a couple of things I thought I would really enjoy to do. And one of them was a really big move for me. And he didn’t like the one, but he did like the other, he liked the big move for me, and that’s what I’m doing. So now I’ll be a vice president, I’ll be on the executive team, I’ll be the first female business leader on the executive team, next to HR, and that’s a really, really big move for me, I’m moving from managing a team of a couple of people in strategy into real operational management for marketing, with  a team of close to 40 people…and it’s in another country!”

Danielle and her entire family – husband, 4 kids, the eldest is a teenager, they’re moving to Belgium this summer, where her new job will be based. And she’s not sure any of this would have happened without the confidence she gained during coaching.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. Thanks to Danielle Sauvé, Anne Libby, Terry Maltbia and Christine Whelan for being my guests on this show. Thanks also to Abby Heverin of the International Coach Federation for answering my endless questions via email.  

I will be posting show notes under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com because there’s actually some stuff about coaching we didn’t get to in these shows, believe it or not. And I’d love to hear about your experience of coaching. You can email me via the website or tweet me or post on the Facebook page.

Thanks again to all those of you who have contributed to this one-woman show. If you can afford to give 50 bucks I will send you the official Broad Experience T-shirt. Ladies cut. You can view that on the website.

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

Episode 138: Focus Amidst the Chaos

Show transcript:

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

This time…a lot of us have an idea – a project – something we want to get off the ground alongside our regular work life. But so often, we can’t quite make it happen.   

“It is absolutely possible to make this year the year that you make the big thing, that everything changes for you. But YOU have to make those changes. You can’t just wish it or decide it, you have to actually take action.”

How to prioritize that idea you’re always talking about…coming up on The Broad Experience. 

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Before we get into the show, a quick word about a former guest. I know a lot of you lead a team.  When you’re a manager, your work is about more than just the work.  It’s about managing human relationships, and enabling your team to get things done, and thrive.  

It’s not always easy!  People Management is skill that you develop, over time, when you make the commitment to learn.

You can find Anne Libby’s free monthly newsletter On Management at people dot substack dot com.  Each month, you’ll learn about how good managers do their work, and ways you can practice and learn.  Noted management expert Anne Libby* also interviews experts and practitioners, and writes and curates recommended reading for you about people management and workplace trends.

The internet is full of advice.  Some of it is BS.  On Management is practical, topical, and smart -- it’s like getting a monthly email from an experienced mentor.  Or your cool aunt.  You can find it at people dot substack dot com.      

At the start of a new year a lot of us are thinking about clearing the decks of old habits, forging new ones. We’re thinking about ways we want to improve our lives – we tell ourselves we really WILL launch that business on the side this year, or start writing that book we’ve been thinking about, or launch that podcast, or just make an old-fashioned photo album – something for us. Something WE really want to do.  

Yet it can be so hard to make those creative projects happen in the midst of work and life, and other people’s needs. I have had my photos printed out for a year. I have not made the album. Often our good intentions fall by the wayside amidst all the demands coming from the outside world. My guest this week knows all about that. 

“I am Jessica Abel, and I am a cartoonist, I’m also the author of a number of books, both prose and comics.”

Jessica is a fully fledged professional creative. On top of her writing and drawing she teaches as well, and she coaches people on how to actually make space in their lives to achieve their creative dreams, whether that’s starting a new business or writing a novel. She’s also married and has two kids. 

Most of her clients are also women.

“I do work with a majority of women and I think women have this issue more strongly than men do…this feeling of obligation to everyone else in their lives more than themselves. They don’t think they have the right to spend time on their book or their paining or whatever it is until they’ve checked all the boxes and everyone is OK. And the fact is no one is ever gonna be OK. There’s always gonna be something else to do. Why do we feel that way, well I think there’s a lot of socialization that goes into that but I feel we also reinforce it ourselves. We tell ourselves this. It’s easier to do something that feels like you’re fulfilling an obligation to someone else than it is to truly believe that your own work is important. To truly feel like that’s the thing – that you deserve equal weight.”

Again, this goes back to what can be a major difference between the sexes – confidence and the belief that you deserve things. That holing up in your study or your lab or your studio, being away from other obligations…it will bring its own rewards.

“This kind of thinking applies both in the professional realm and what we think of as the personal realm. So if your goal on the professional side is to grow your consulting business, you still have to think of the strategic things you should be doing, you need to get your head out of the day to day clamour of email and demands and responding to what people are asking of you…and spend time on what you think of as important and strategic and have to move things forward. That is the same process as you want to start painting again because it makes you happy, and you have to decide that time spent on your painting is as important as organizing your children’s lunchboxes or whatever…that it’s OK for you to let them be disorganized.”

And we’ll come back to that idea of letting things go in a minute.

I’d recently read one of Jessica’s blog posts on her own sometimes frenzied existence. And she described this situation which is probably familiar to a lot of other freelance creatives. You like creating things – so you make something, complete a project, and almost instantly you move on and start creating something else. You don’t implement a marketing plan for the last self-published book you wrote or course you designed – you just jump right into the next thing. You don’t allow yourself any time to sit and ponder what’s important about the project you just completed, or what maybe didn’t work and shouldn’t be repeated.

Jessica says for her, this rushing into the next thing, the lack of reflection…

“…that all comes out of scarcity and scarcity thinking - scarcity of time and money. So it’s not so much that I’m deeply inspired by the next project…maybe I really wanna do it, but my frenzy to jump into the next thing comes from if I’m not working, if I’m not killing myself, I’m gonna end up a bag lady. Things are gonna fall apart. You know, this is anxiety that comes out of a sense of what I’m doing is not enough, it’s not gonna be OK, so I have to keep running as fast as I can. And allowing yourself the space to be creative and to think and to be strategic and to figure out what the end result of one thing is before you move onto the next thing is super scary, really scary, because you have to allow white space in your life and in your calendar.”

Think about that for a minute. To so many of us the mere idea of white space sounds like a luxury. But she’s right. It’s something anyone who has to come up with ideas needs in their life. It’s why we shouldn’t over-schedule ourselves. But only we can put that empty block on our calendars. And doing that probably means NOT doing something else. And that’s where it gets tricky.

Jessica says there are lots of ways our creative endeavors or side hustles can go off track. She’s borrowed a couple of terms from other writers.

“…this term that I got from Kazu Kibuishi …’idea debt.’ All the things you have stored up, you start working on one and the other one jumps up and distracts you from it, so you never get to focus on any one thing. Then you have open loops…and that’s all the little commitments you’ve made to yourself and to other people, they’re literally sitting around your space right now, like just look down and you’ve got some. Tabs on your browser, stuff you wanted to buy but haven’t, emails, little notes. I’m looking at my computer right now and there’s a post-it on my computer telling me what to do today…which is open loops, right? So if you haven’t decided which of those things you’re gonna do and which of these things you’re not gonna do, because I’m sorry to tell you, but you are never gonna finish your to do list. It’s sad but true. It will never happen.”

AMT: “Yeah, I hate that, I love ticking boxes.”

“Yes. It’s deeply satisfying. So that’s one of the biggest problems. I could spend my morning ticking off all these boxes and feeling so efficient. Or I could spend 2 hours sitting with myself and considering what my next step is.”

AMT: “It’s easier to check off the boxes, frankly.”

“It absolutely is. But if you don’t spend the time thinking about what you want to be doing you’re gonna spend time doing whatever is thrown at you and nothing more than that.”

I have been a prime example of this lately. Prioritizing the daily things that come at me via email, or that I put on my to-do list…telling myself I’ll get to my creative project – otherwise known as this show – later in the afternoon…but somehow the daily stuff is still being dealt with at 5p.m. Then another day goes by, more stuff comes in, I tackle that, and so on.

Jessica says one way to escape this trap is to edit your to-do list.  

“If you have a to-do list that is too full for your day, that you cannot do all the things on your to-do list, and by the way I have that every single day…I do it to myself constantly. If you do that you will feel like a failure at the end of the day. If you don’t get control of that, if you don’t decide what you plan to do, what your top three things for tomorrow are the night before, and cut your list down to a doable amount of things, you’re gonna end the day feeling like you suck. So why are you doing that to yourself? So this triage and sorting and conscious decision making is step one of taking control of all this stuff, and it doesn’t matter how busy you are, you still only have 168 hours a week, so if you’re putting 200 hours of stuff on your list…it won’t happen. Just decide, which things really will and which won’t. Decide - it’ll put you in the driver’s seat in way you have not been in the past.”

Jessica says once you begin to take control of your time and make time for the project you’ve set your sights on, it helps you believe in the work and believe it’s real. And you’re more likely to keep doing it. That’s not to say that it’s easy.

“Anyone may be in a situation where you may desperately want write a novel or start a podcast and you only have a couple of hours to work on it per week, probably broken up into bits. And it’s gonna go slow, it’s gonna be really hard. But at least if you decide this is my time, I have this, you can use it as a base to move forward.”

AMT: “And part of that, part of the first thing you talked about is also this business of particularly with women, valuing ourselves and valuing the work we want to do – because so many times there will be that voice in your head saying that you’re selfish, these other things and these other people are more important than your dream project.”

“Yes, exactly. So I think it’s incredibly common especially for women…imagine the scenario. Having a Saturday say, and Saturday afternoon your kid has a ballgame of some kind. You can go to the ballgame which is what’s required of you by society or you can stay home and work on your book. How does it feel to you to say no, I’m not gonna go to your ballgame, I’m gonna stay and work on my book? Everyone’s gonna be fine but you feel like you suck as a mother. Or you need to lower the standards for cleanliness in your home…that’s tough for a lot of people. I’m failing as an adult woman if my house isn’t sparkling. These are moments where you’ll say, who am I to say this book means anything? Nobody’s asking for it, nobody knows it exists. How can you stand in your strength and say no, writing this book is the most important thing I can do for myself, and I’m going to let everything else fall by the wayside for this time when nobody’s telling you it’s any good or that they need it? It’s an incredibly difficult conundrum. It starts by acknowledging that it’s happening. It feels wrong but intellectually you know it’s right, so you’re just gonna go with it.”

AMT: “Hearing you talk about this, I mean some people will think…whether it’s a novel or another project, well but what if this doesn’t pay off for me? Let’s face it, many novels do not sell well, especially when you’re a first time author…many people’s fears I assume will be what if I do lay aside this time and then ultimately I spend hours and hours and what will add up to weeks and weeks over some years, and then the project doesn’t really work out…I can imagine a lot of people thinking that.” 

“Absolutely. I think that’s absolutely true that people do think about that end result. The answer to that is asking yourself the question of what is your goal here? Is it to sell a lot of books, is it to be famous? If it is, that’s legit, you can have that goal. But you have to be aware that you don’t have total control over that. If you want to sell a lot of books you can do a lot towards that goal to do with marketing. And then you can set yourself the task of writing the book and marketing it. But you don’t have control over that. If the action of writing the book is not something that’s going to satisfy something in you that’s really important, then maybe you don’t want to do it, maybe you don’t want to do this thing. You have to find that internal motivation for doing the work, you have to feel the work itself is important enough to do it. Being a professional creative is incredibly hard. I mean you know this, right? It’s unbelievably hard to do this for a living. If you can do anything else and be happy with it, then do that. It’s easier to do almost anything else than this, professionally speaking. But if you feel in yourself the deep desire to make the work you have to separate that from the piece of becoming professional. Making the work is one thing, but is it enough, yes or no? Either answer is fine, but you need to know. And then you want to become professional at it? That’s a separate project. So many people want to make something creative and they imagine if you make it they will come, and it will just translate into being a professional, because it’s so excellent. Which is just not true. The job of making the work support you is huge…and in some ways even bigger than making the work itself.”

What she just said about deciding the work is important enough to do regardless of outcome – that’s what I decided when I began this show. But I often struggle to get it out on time when family commitments and other work take over. Or am I just letting them take over? I don’t teach all year but when I do I’m always surprised by how much time that work takes up. And I told Jessica, I feel I have to put this other work first because it pays me so much more than the podcast. And I would not be popular at home if I spent my weekends tending to my podcast baby the way I used to when I lived by myself.  

“No, that’s a real thing. That’s the kind of painful no you have to face. If you say no to a freelance assignment you say no to money. No can be saying no to your husband or stepchild, I can’t hang out today…no can be to your podcast because you’re doing other things, all of those things are painful, those are tradeoffs that are really hard. So the second piece of this is the calendar piece, it’s looking at how are you spending your time, what are your priorities depending on how you’re spending your time. One of the biggest things that’s transformational for my students and clients is time tracking, it is literally writing down what are you doing all day, then getting conscious and making decisions. Teaching, when you talk about that taking up more time than you think it takes, well, if you tracked it you’d know how much time it took…and then you could account for it going forward instead of looking backward saying oh man, that really came out of left field. That’s kind of the other piece.”

Jessica says we don’t have to do it all at once – we can start taking control of small things one at a time. She says in the end we CAN do what we want with our lives.

“I say that knowing there’s all sorts of people yelling at whatever they’re listening on, saying no, it’s not true for me, I have three children, I have a chronic illness, it’s not possible. I completely acknowledge there are differences between lots of people’s life circumstances and a lot of stuff is not fair, there are lots of circumstances we need to deal with, it’s not an even playing field. But within your own life structure you can move things forward within the limits of what’s in your life, and you can change then what it’s made of.”

But you taking control of some of the chaos is key. Intending to do so isn’t enough.

“A lot of people are gonna be thinking about resolutions and trying to make big changes in your life…clean slate, start over, make everything better, but unless you are actually taking steps to change your engagement with the things on your list, the things you intend to do, the things you’ve been doing, nothing changes – you can’t just decide you’re gonna make this big project this year and not change the structure of how your life works. If you intended to do it last year and it didn’t happen, something happened. You have to say no to other stuff, or nothing changes. I want your listeners to understand it is possible to make this year the year you make the big thing, that everything changes for you, but it’s you who has to make those changes, you can’t wish it or decide it, you have to actually take action.”

AMT: “Affirmations in the morning just won’t cut it.”

“No, I mean there’s nothing wrong with a good gratitude practice. That is a good idea but that is the starting point. Then you actually have to face the hard stuff. Which is making decisions about what you want to do and more importantly what you do not want to do, what you are not going to do. Make those decisions. Then put that in a calendar that actually conforms to the time/space continuum.”

Jessica Abel. She is the author of many books including her latest, Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You’re Drowning in Your Daily Life. I will link you to more information about Jessica and some of her writing under this episode at The Broad Experience dot com.

That’s the last show of 2018. Thanks as ever for listening. If you’d like to kick in to support this one-woman show I would really appreciate it. Just click on the ‘support’ tab at TheBroadExperience.com. Thanks so much to all of you who have done that this year, including my sustaining members who pledge something every single month. Some of you have been doing this for years. I’m very grateful.

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

Episode 139: The Coaching Cure, part 1: The Coach

Show transcript:

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

This time…the coaching industry has exploded in recent years. And it’s dominated by women.

“Women in our corporations are dealing with a lot of bias that men are not dealing with. So they seek out help to acknowledge what they’re experiencing, whether it’s ‘I got fired on maternity leave,’ or ‘I am being overlooked for this promotion.”

And as anyone who’s sought out a coach knows, their services are an investment…

“I never really thought about hiring an executive coach, I’ve met executive coaches, but it always appeared to me they were very, very expensive, and I had excluded myself mentally from being the kind of person who would enlist an executive coach myself.”

But what value do we place on improving our lives – in and out of work?

“Sometimes, when people are skeptical of price there is always this thing to me of like well, what's the value of spending an hour or more a week with a person whose sole focus it is, is on you and what you want from your life. That's not nothing.”

Today, the first of two shows looking at women and the coaching industry.  

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A few years ago when I still was in the habit of blogging regularly…I wrote a post called Everyone’s a Coach. Because that’s how it felt to me. Ever since I’d started doing the show in 2012 and spent more time plugged into this world of women and the workplace, I’d noticed just how many social media profiles of women there were saying they were a coach – very often, specializing in helping women realize their full potential. Now I have nothing against helping women realize their potential – of course. But as the months and years went by I was struck by the sheer numbers of women I was meeting in person or online who introduced themselves with the title ‘coach.’ I thought, but how can all these women be coaches? Is there enough demand for their services, and if so, why?   

 I’ll also admit that some of the relentless positivity of those profiles as well the pitches I was getting from coaches…it just didn’t sit well with me. It seemed too woo-woo for this cynical Brit. It was hard for me to buy into a lot of that personal growth industry lingo. That said I AM someone who believes in paying for help or advice if I need it. I don’t think I can solve all my own problems or issues. I do believe it’s helpful to have a total outsider’s point of view.

 The coaching industry is growing fast all around the world – the International Coach Federation estimates coaching brought in more than two billion dollars in global revenue in 2015, the last year for which figures are available—that was up almost 20 percent from a few years earlier. The industry is unregulated. And anyone can call themselves a coach regardless of whether they’ve done any training or not.

ICF defines coaching as the process of partnering with clients to help them maximize their personal and professional potential. And who wouldn’t want to do that?

Women it turns out are especially keen. We are the majority of coaches and the majority of clients. Many of us are paying out of our own pockets for a coach’s services and coaching does not come cheap.

But being a coach isn’t necessarily easy either – it can be incredibly rewarding work, but doing it for a living means developing serious sales skills and having a lot of happy clients to recommend your services.

I know from asking about this on the Facebook page that some you have hired coaches and benefited tremendously from the relationship. Meanwhile others are wary.

There’s a lot to discuss so I’m breaking this topic into two shows.

 In this first show we’re going to focus on a couple of women who do coaching work – one part-time, one full-time. We are going to meet a trainer of coaches. And I am going to ask everyone rude questions about money.

Kate Schutt is a musician by training and by trade. And for the last several years, she’s also been a coach. She was a serious athlete in college so the whole concept of having a coach to help you do better, it’s something she’s very familiar with. She lives in New York City.

Now Kate isn’t a business coach or an executive coach – she’s not focusing exclusively on a client’s performance at work…

“So I like to call myself, the easiest explanation is a life coach but I've kind of narrowed it a little bit to saying I'm a change coach.”

AMT: “And what does that mean?”

“I help people who are at a transition point in their life figure out what comes next. Or in fact I'd like to change that wording. I like to help them create what comes next.”

About ten years ago Kate stumbled across the term life coach online. She hadn’t heard it before. But it resonated with her.

“That really made sense to me because I had spent most of my life being coached and I knew the difference between a good coach and a bad coach. Everybody does. And you know as I started to explore it for myself it became something that I thought hmmm, I think I’d like to try this with other people.”

AMT: “Something you said just there, you said everyone knows the difference between a good and a bad coach, I disagree. I don’t think everyone does. Tell me from your perspective what is the difference between a good and a bad coach?” 

“Good catch, of course, I’m thinking from my own perspective. I projected that. What is the difference between a good and a bad coach? Challenge you, challenge you to think differently about how you’re showing up in the world. Challenge you to take action. I think that would probably be the biggest thing is taking action in your life towards the goals and things that you say you want.”

In 2010 Kate was at a crossroads. Struggling as a musician and feeling she was working like crazy but not seeing any progress. She says she needed someone to give her an outsider’s perspective and some guidance on how to think about what she was trying to do. She found a coach who turned out to be great for her. She says he helped her step back from all the negative thoughts and self-hatred she often had about not being where she thought she should be in her music career, her fears about not being a devoted enough musician. He encouraged her to see herself in a different light. And as she kept working with him she began to think, I’m getting so much out of this. How do I become this same kind of coach? She felt she was cut out for the work.

“I had always been and still am to a large extent the person in my world who people come to for advice about aspects of their life, their career, I’d like to think I have a very level head. I’ve done a lot of seeking in my life, I’ve had a lot of experiences. I’ve tested myself in many ways, so that…I bring everything to the table.”

When Kate started her coaching practice she worked mostly with women clients…which is typical for a lot of coaches.

“…and then through my conversations with people and just doing it for longer I have had more men come on board which is, I love it. It's very challenging. It's different. I find it very different.”

AMT: “How?”

“The question. The questions, to me…this is gonna be a blanket statement which we will probably get some comments about but women seem to be able to answer more readily the tough questions or the challenging questions or the questions that are like…

Maybe I ask them to take an action or something and they didn't do it or something like that and I say you know, what scared you about that?

Sometimes women seem to be able to answer that question or at least be willing to try and work with me through that and usually the men I work with…it takes a little longer to get there and I'm patient. We'll get there. But I don't think they're as good at off-the-cuff seeing themselves. Is this a terribly gendered response that I'm going to wish I never said?”

AMT: “I don’t think we’re gonna be shouted out of town. I hope not. But yeah, that speaks to the whole idea of self-reflection and self-examination. And I do think on the whole women, and I’m just gonna say that, on the whole women spend more time in their heads looking at themselves and their lives than men do.”

It’s interesting when you look at the statistics collected by ICF – the International Coach Federation. Their last survey showed that almost 70 percent of life coaching clients are women.

So after imploring her coach to get her started on the road to becoming a coach herself, he began giving Kate books to read, and more books – all of which she devoured.

“…and finally after that when he could see I was so eager he just said you should go take the Creativity Coaching Association's courses. I said Okay, great, what's that? So I Googled it, looked good, I signed up for the courses, I started taking them, and to be honest I never finished. I took all the courses you could take and the only thing I had to hand in to get my piece of paper from the Creativity Coaching Association was a book report on a number of books. Now I read anywhere between 80 to over 100 books a year. And for some reason or other I just couldn't make myself do that book report. So I actually never got a certificate from the Creativity Coaching Association but I think that, to me it doesn’t have to do with a piece of paper. It has to do with the coach’s outlook on life and how they view the world and how they propose to get you to where you say you want to go. And are they doing it in their own life? Is their own life a reflection of that?”

Which to be fair, may be a little bit hard for a prospective client to work out. Not all clients will ask those kinds of questions. They may feel they need help – NOW – and just plunge into the relationship.

Talking of plunging in, coaching is a one-on-one engagement and as such it tends to be quite pricey for an individual. Kate doesn’t coach full-time, she’s still busy as a singer/songwriter. And clients usually need to pay at least a few thousand dollars to work with her.

Kate says this whole business of rates and how much to charge can certainly be fraught. But she thinks most independent professionals – including her when she started her coaching practice – undervalue themselves and the work they do. 

“I'd say that our culture has this fantasy that everybody should do everything on their own and that you know advice isn't something you should necessarily pay for. And there's this element I guess when sometimes, when people are skeptical of price or that's shocking to them or whatever it is to them, there is always this thing to me of like well, what's the value of spending an hour or more a week with a person whose sole focus it is on you and what you want from your life. That's not nothing.”

Plus she says think about how many different types of professionals have coaches to help them perform at their peak.

“Coaches have always existed in some form, like, you would never become an Olympian without a coach, you would never become a great violinist, or the greatest musicians we love, they have coaches they just don't…they’re not called coaches they're called teachers, but that's a coach. If you want to be better at being yourself and doing your life, it costs something.”

---

Rachel Garrett is a women’s leadership coach, also based in New York City. She worked in the corporate world for 15 years and like Kate, she was the person friends and colleagues turned to for career advice. Unlike Kate, Rachel does coaching full-time. It’s her bread and butter. She and I met up in Brooklyn recently.

AMT: “When you left your company what level were you at?”

“I was director of digital marketing. The director level worked well for me, and yet I had two small children at the time, so I saw some of the folks who were more senior were having a hard time juggling their parenting and their career. That was one of the challenges, and that’s one of the challenges that my clients face, is that when they get to the destination of the more senior roles they find it hard to put the time in with their families. And that’s been the most exciting work I’m doing with clients is let’s change the destination, let’s show how you can create different boundaries, how you can prioritize your family, and it’s not just about you and your family, it’s modeling it for the other women who are coming up in your organization as well.”

AMT: “It is a little bit ironic that you were a senior woman in corporate and you’re now coaching women to try and help them get to that position, but you left your position to do that. So you’re one less senior woman in corporate now.”

“It’s true. And that’s something I think about a lot with my clients, you need to find what works for you. I knew building a business was always something I wanted to do…whereas a lot of my clients are really thrilled to be part of an organization, they want to build that structure. So what we do is figure out what is important to you and what does success look like.”

One of the questions I’ve been pondering over the last few years is why so many women are interested in hiring a coach. The majority of coaching clients all over the world are female, according to the International Coach Federation – except in Asia.

I’m guessing part of it is that women are perhaps more apt than men to ask for help with their lives and careers when they feel they need it. Rachel thinks it’s more than that…

 “What I realize about my clients is, they are the supports for everyone else in their life and that’s what we do as women, and they don’t have a lot of support in their lives for themselves. The mentors they might go to are so are busy themselves, friends have busy lives, many of my clients are not only mothers but they’re caring for a sick or elderly mother or father. And they just sit with me and we talk about here’s some permission to relax for a minute, you don’t have to do it all, and here’s permission to do it your way.”

 She says so many of the women she works with are stressed, guilty, they feel they can’t say no to things at work and a home. Plus she says…

“Women in our corporations are dealing with a lot of bias that men are not dealing with. So they seek out help to acknowledge what they’re experiencing, whether it’s ‘I got fired on maternity leave,’ or ‘I am being overlooked for this promotion’ to really get a reality check and then support to help them through these situations. My take on why women are reaching out for help more often is they’re dealing with the imbalance in the institutions we’re in.”

But what about career prospects for the coach herself? Because the more social media profiles I see of female coaches, the more gauzy websites I look at, and the more pitches I get in my inbox from women saying they’re a coach…the more I wonder…how can all these coaches find enough work? It can feel like there’s a coach for every woman in America.  

A few years ago I interviewed Terry Maltbia for a radio story – he directs the Columbia Coaching Certification Program at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York. This is a prestigious coach training program at an Ivy League University; it’s always oversubscribed. I caught up with Terry again on the phone recently, but when we met he agreed, the market for coaches is ever more crowded…

“…if you talk to coaches they’re experiencing increased competition. So the supply and demand is a little tricky. It’s true the demand for coaching is increasing compared to when I entered this field in 2006…however the supply of coaches both trained and untrained is actually higher than that.”

And it keeps growing. In the last five years membership of the International Coach Federation has shot up by a third. And that’s just coaches who have a certain amount of formal training and certifications.

The number of coaches out there is something to bear in mind for anyone considering going into coaching. How will you distinguish yourself and make a living with so much competition?   

“I can’t tell you how many people in our first few cohorts were successful people in an organizational environment, often corporate, who for whatever reason decided to be a coach and left their day job in the course of this process. That was alarming to me because they had thought through the passion part of coaching but they hadn’t thought through the business side of coaching…and I think that there are 3 factors that contribute to a sustainable business…one is developing coaching capabilities, so going somewhere and understanding what coaching is, having a clear process, a clear set of ethical standards…most people who enter coaching do that. The other side is getting really clear about the economics for you. Not only individual fees, but are you only gonna do only individual coaching work and how are you gonna scale that? If you’re leaving a corporate job at the vice president level where you’re making a six-figure salary, to make that up in individual sessions is something that requires some thought.”

Now this is something Rachel Garrett did think through before she started coaching a few years ago. And she has now matched her corporate paycheck.

“I was lucky enough to have the marketing skills to get up and running fairly quickly. So I think that was a skillset that was really important for setting up the infrastructure, website and brand. Of course in the first year I was not making same money, but I am able to make the same money now and there’s potential for me to make a lot more than I was as a digital marketer in corporate.”

That’s because she doesn’t just stick to individual clients. She also works with coaching companies, and she’s drafted by corporations to teach workshops in-house. She loves the variety of it.

“I can take on different kinds of projects and scale up in a different way. I’m in charge. I get to choose the kinds of client, the kinds of project, there is no one I have to ask about what to do next. I think I was hungry for that while I was in corporate.”

Rachel is articulating something a lot of other women love about going into coaching or any other solo business – flexibility. Not only the ability to pick clients but the ability to build a business around their and their family’s lives. She loves that she can be a chaperone on her daughters’ school trips without feeling guilty about taking time off work.

Living in New York isn’t cheap. Her husband works full-time but Rachel always wanted to do well financially while helping people at the same time. And that means charging hundreds of dollars an hour.

“It’s taken me a while to continually raise my rates, I started much lower than I should have, but I was gaining confidence that first year out. I quickly realized I needed to raise my rates and my practice is so booked that I continue to do so. I always take on low cost pro bono clients, that’s important to me, I want to be able to make a bigger impact, but especially with corporate clients I am able to make a really good salary.”

AMT: “I think a lot of people listening might say, great, how nice to have a coach, but I can’t pay three, four, five hundred an hour for a coach. So explain from your perspective what you do as a coach that merits what sounds like more than what a lot of therapists would charge.”

“Yes, so for my coaching practice I focus on people creating a personal brand, finding confidence, advocating for themselves, negotiating the kinds of salaries they feel they deserve, asking for promotions, and stepping into the leaders they want to be. So it’s leading their team powerfully and rising through the ranks in their organization. That does change their lives.” 

Rachel says it’s not just New Yorkers who are signing up, either. She’s had clients as far afield as Texas and Oklahoma who meet with her on Skype or Zoom.

If you’re lucky enough to be sponsored for coaching, you won’t pay a penny. 

“I never really thought about hiring an executive coach, I’ve met executive coaches, but it always appeared to me they were very, very expensive. I had excluded myself mentally from being the kind of person who would enlist an executive coach myself.”

That’s Danielle Sauve. She works in marketing at a big company based in the Midwest. She says she kind of stumbled into her career. She started out as an assistant, it was just a day job while she devoted her evenings to working in the theater. But ultimately she gave up the idea of being a stage director and moved up the ranks at work. Last year she was invited to a meeting stuffed with executives and she spotted a senior woman she really admired. Like Danielle this woman had a bunch of kids and worked full-time.  

“I made a joke while we were heading to the rest room, like, oh my goodness, there’s a lot of women filling up the stalls, we’re usually feeling kind of lonely in these executive meetings, and she kind of laughed with me and at some point we ended up talking about how self-conscious we can feel in executive meetings…in this conversation something must have sparked in her mind because the next day she said to me, you know, I’m thinking about starting a pilot program to have women receive some executive coaching and I think you’d be a great  person to do this if you would like to. I’m making the funds available from my department, so it wouldn’t cost you and your department anything. It would be 7 to 10 sessions, there’s a book we go through. And I just said yes.”

 Next time we find out how Danielle’s coaching went, and we look at the past…

“Coaching was a thing your manager did for you.”

As we consider how and why coaching has become so big.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. I will post show notes under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com. You can find out more about Kate Schutt and Rachel Garrett there. You’ll be hearing more from Kate on a totally different topic in an upcoming show. Thanks to Kate, Rachel, and Terry Maltbia for being my guests on this show.

If you enjoy the podcast please go and write a quick review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. The podcast world is awfully crowded these days and an indy show can easily stay beneath everyone’s radar. Reviews do help the show get noticed by others who might not find it otherwise.

I welcome feedback as always – you can hit me up via the website or on Twitter or post on the Facebook page.

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

Episode 137: Pregnancy Loss and Work

Show transcript:

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

This time…it happens to so many women, but we rarely talk about it. You’re pregnant – you’re excited – then it all goes wrong…

“It is one of those things that from the outside just for practical reasons you have to keep it secret, but then you also can't be like grieving or emotionally affected outwardly in any way.”

And even if you confide in your boss about what’s happened…

“I remember Googling what to say when you experience a miscarriage at work. And all the advice was all about what do you tell your manager. I found absolutely no advice anywhere on what to do about people you actually manage.”

And when a colleague suffers a pregnancy loss or the loss of a baby…how can the rest of us do the right thing?   

“One of the concerns that I've had other women share with me is that when the most painful things for them in their work environment is even when there's support there at the beginning, people say well, you know, it's been three weeks, like, now it's time to get back on board.”

Pregnancy loss and the workplace – coming up on The Broad Experience.

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Early last year I heard from a listener in London. She was a pediatrician at a big hospital and she said she’d just had the tables turned and become a patient. She’d been pregnant for the first time but it had ended in miscarriage. She said the whole experience was distressing and anxiety provoking. I’m gonna read you part of her email. She said…

“Even as a doctor, working in a large, prestigious public hospital, I did not feel comfortable telling my colleagues what was going on, and instead hid behind the excuse that I had to have 'gynaecological surgery'. Why? Lots of reasons. A generally distant relationship with colleagues and a lack of pastoral care within the workplace. A fear of being labelled 'just another 30-something woman trying to fall pregnant', shafted to the 'no ambition' sideheap. Self-consciousness that the main reason for needing time off work was in fact emotional, rather than physical, and a fear that that is perceived as indulgent or lazy...”

She is not alone. There are varying statistics on pregnancy loss – but it seems anywhere from 15 to 25 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Usually this happens within the first 12 weeks. But not always. Within weeks of getting that email, I had my own first miscarriage.

I kept the idea for a show on this topic in my back pocket but to be honest I wasn’t sure it was gonna work. I thought people might be squeamish about it or just not interested because it hadn’t affected them.

But earlier this year I read a blog post on pregnancy loss and the workplace and I posted it to the Facebook page asking if anyone was interested in this topic. I got far more responses than I ever expected – two of the women who responded to that thread are in this show. A common theme emerged from many of you who did respond: you hadn’t told work you were pregnant so no one knew when you miscarried. If work knew you were planning a family they might not promote you, so why let on until you had to? But one of you mentioned just how hard it was to push through at work after a late miscarriage when no one else knew what was going on, and you just kept working.

In this show you’ll meet three women from three different countries. Each had a different experience, and a different work culture, but there are some common threads. And if you’ve just had a miscarriage or ever lost a child then some of this may be upsetting.

Also I want to say that I get that with a topic like this it can be quite jarring to hear ads in some of the breaks – I want to acknowledge that. I don’t have any control over the ad schedule but it is the holiday season as I’m putting this together so you’re likely to hear some.

With that, let’s meet my first guest.

Several years ago Jorli Pena was working in marketing for a big company you’ve all heard of. A corporate giant. She lived in New York City. She and her husband had a little boy who at the time was about three. They wanted a bigger family, and part of the reason Jorli had been so attracted to this company was that they had this program that let people work 4 days a week for 80 percent of their regular salary. Jorli’s manager was a director, and she was part of this program…

“…that was a huge plus for me because I hated the idea that like, wanting to have a family seemed like mutually exclusive in some people’s eyes with wanting to have a great career. So here were these women at this company who were getting promoted it seemed and were working four days a week. So my plan, and it turns out you can’t really plan these things…was  OK great, I’ll take this job and as soon as I have my second baby I’m gonna switch from the five day to the four day, and …it was this huge, it was just this lovely idea.”

She was 37, and she her husband set about trying to create that second baby. She got pregnant quickly, just as she had with her son. Everything was going well. Then, at 11 weeks, she went in for a scan, and there was no heartbeat. The baby had died. She could have had what in the US is called a D&C – the procedure basically where they go in and get everything out – but she was about to go on vacation, and she opted to wait until the miscarriage happened on its own. Which she says turned out to be a really bad idea…involving a trip to the emergency room while she was away.

So after all that – the physical toll, the psychological toll, she landed back in New York and went straight back to work.

“You’re dealing with sadness and also shame, and just embarrassment, and you come back to work and they had just been congratulating you, and you still sort of look pregnant, and nobody talks about it.”

Unlike a lot of people in early pregnancy Jorli had told her boss and some of her workmates she was pregnant. But no sooner than she had begun to adjust to what had happened, she got pregnant again…

“I got pregnant again very quickly after, maybe the first cycle after the miscarriage, which was again amazing. Great. You know I'm kind of an optimist, I thought this would work out, but I knew enough to keep it more under wraps that I didn't really tell a lot of people. I mean almost nobody. And then actually again at 11 weeks…so right when I was like quote ‘safe’ it happened again.”

Now her direct manager was in the know about this pregnancy. And Jorli says she was kind and empathetic after the miscarriage.

“But it is one of those things that from the outside just for practical reasons you have to keep it secret, but then you also can't be like grieving or emotionally affected outwardly in any way. You don't take time off. And it's is devastating.”

AMT: “Hang on. You say you don't take time off. Did you think about taking time off this time?”

“I mean it sounds crazy, but I didn't even consider it. I just, maybe I didn't want to ask or I didn't want to deal with it, I just, no, I mean I this time I did get a D and C which was actually much better for me in terms of the physical aspects. Yep. And so I wish I knew that the first time. But you know, I maybe took that day, the day that I had that procedure.”

 I wonder how much this tendency not to take time off Is tied to US work culture. I also found out through a scan that my pregnancy last year was in medical terms ‘non-viable’. After dissolving on the sidewalk outside the doctor’s office, I was in a dilemma because I had to travel for work in 6 days. There was no way I could jeopardize this trip by having a natural miscarriage. So I scheduled the D and C for the next day, a Saturday to give me what I thought was enough time to recover before heading out on a 5-hour flight on the Wednesday. And it kind of worked out. Except I ended up having some pretty intense pain while I was on the work trip – it was as if my body was saying to me, haha, you think you’ve dealt with me, you think you’ve arranged everything so perfectly around your schedule. But I’m here to remind you it’s not that simple. 

When Jorli had yet another miscarriage, this time at 6 weeks, it began at work. And this time she knew something had to change.

“…because in the midst of all of these losses I did have another child that…I said I may not ever have another kid, let me spend more time with him.”

She decided to go down to that four-day-a-week schedule.

“So I knew with certainty, I walked in on Monday and told my boss, this program I've heard about, like, sign me up. How do I do it? The four day. Which again was a big draw for me to be in the company, and I was told, oh, we've discontinued that program. Oh yeah. And I named this vice president and this director, and they were like, oh, they were grandfathered in. Not happening.”

She was gutted. And she began to think more and more about whether she really wanted to be there at all. She was trying to perform at her usual level but it was tough…

“To have worked at this company right for just over a year and to have had three miscarriages in nine months to like, that profoundly affected my productivity whether I wanted to admit it to myself or not.”

I wanted to go back to something she’d said earlier about coming back to work after her first miscarriage and how that felt.

AMT: “Also you mentioned the word shame when you talked about that, you said you felt shame. Why?”

 “I mean I don’t think shame is very rational. It is so, and it's funny that I said that word but it's probably more embarrassment than shame. But it's just you know it's just this overwhelming feeling of loss. And again, I do think a lot of women can…this wasn't the case with me, but like you know, people can blame their schedule, you know, and their stress and that's certainly a thing with when you're trying to get pregnant you're supposed to not be stressed and it's one of the most stressful experiences of your life and so it's very easy for people to beat themselves up that they're somehow the cause.”

Not long after that third miscarriage, Jorli was laid off. That might seem like the fourth terrible thing that happened to her but actually she was kind of relieved. She’d always been brimming with business ideas and she struck out on her own, first with a resume-writing business, now with a copywriting business. Her husband quit his job in retail and went to work for a small foundation. And the change has worked out well. She says back when she was still at the big company, losing pregnancy after pregnancy, she used to joke with friends that her body was rejecting working there.

“Not to fault this particular company but for me personally my work style didn't fit so well in that world and there is a part of me that, my body was rejecting working there. You know I mean who knows the miracles that happened behind you know getting and staying pregnant, but in retrospect it was not the best fit for me and it enabled me to become an advocate for myself and my family and my schedule and to carve my own path to showing that you can be ambitious and also want to have a family and that just may not look how, you know, a five day regular job.”

After those miscarriages Jorli went on to get pregnant again, and this time it stuck. She had another baby, and another one after that. Her three boys are now ages 9, 5 and 3.

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Leaving a 9-5 job may have been the right choice for Jorli, but it’s not for everyone.

Ceri Napier lives in the south of England. She is deputy CEO of the MS International Federation. They help people with Multiple Sclerosis. She and I spoke on Skype. Like Jorli, she had been part of that Facebook thread on pregnancy loss earlier this year.

She’s in her late 30s now and about 5 years ago she and her husband started trying for a baby. They tried, and tried. Nothing happened…that ultimately led them down the road to IVF. And on the second round of treatment, Ceri got pregnant.

“Because it was IVF we'd had early scans, we'd had a scan at six weeks that had shown a heartbeat I was just over the moon it was the most wonderful feeling in the world after all that effort, all the injections everything, to hear that heartbeat was incredible.”

Ceri had some cysts on her ovaries and the staff asked her to come in for another scan a few weeks later, just to check a particular cyst.  

“So I went along to this second scan at around nine weeks without my husband. I was just so naïve I thought oh, it's just checking on the cyst and I went along and just…yeah, completely devastated, literally floor – it floored me. I was on the floor crying when I was told there was no longer a heartbeat and it was no longer viable. Yeah, absolutely. You know it was last year but it’s still…” 

AMT: “Really raw.”

“Yeah, absolutely. You don't forget. And my husband was luckily able to, he works in London. He was able to get the first train over and come and pick up the pieces and I just remember that day just lying on the sofa together holding each other. Yeah, really a very sad moment in my life.”

Meanwhile, she had to tell her manager what had happened.

 “I'd actually been very open with my boss about the IVF journey that we were on. I told him that afternoon because he knew I was going to a scan that day because I'd asked to work from home. I said, sadly it was a miscarriage, and he immediately says, don't come to work for the next week or so. So I did. I was able to take that time off which was incredibly valuable time for me and my husband to heal and to move through it.”

AM-T: “Yeah, no I can imagine and that’s so different from a lot of the posts I go on Facebook when I first posted about the idea of doing an episode on this topic. So many of the other posts were about people who hadn’t told anyone at work let alone their boss that they were pregnant. So when the miscarriage happened they’re going through all this but they’re completely covering up and most people weren’t taking any time off, either.” 

“Yeah, I think I'm extremely fortunate to have to work in an amazing organization with an incredibly supportive and open boss, maybe because of the nature of the work that we do we're about the right to work, and it is so important for people with disabilities, chronic disabilities like multiple sclerosis, that we like to practice what we preach. So my boss is a great believer in having that flexibility and the respect of the staff, to trust us. You know when we need that time we will come back and we'll be more loyal maybe, as a result.”

But even though her boss knew what was going on, she was a boss herself. And she hadn’t told anyone on her team about this aspect of her life.   

“I remember Googling what to say when you experience a miscarriage at work. And all the advice was all about what do you tell your manager. And I'd already moved beyond that and I was very open with my manager, which was a great support. But I found absolutely nothing or no advice anywhere on what to do about people you actually manage. So that left me in a quandary as well and I actually decided not to tell my team, and my boss let them know I was unwell but I was fine and I'd be coming back to work when I was ready, and left it a little vague which…I don't know. 

I sort of struggled with it at the time, and for several months afterwards what the right thing to do was. I'd actually gone on a senior management training course and that was a great, actually a great opportunity to be in a safe space to talk about miscarriage and my work and my career and my hopes for a baby in the future. The hope to get back on the IVF train as soon as possible, in a safe environment amongst peers and amongst other senior managers to work through this challenge together - and they all advised me to tell my team as well.”

But Ceri still wasn’t sure.

“…and I thought I'll go out for breakfast with them and if it feels right to tell them, I'll tell them. And if it doesn't, I won't. And one of those situations I started to say, I said, I'd like to tell you about why I was off work for two weeks, and they said, ‘you know what Ceri, you don't have to tell me, that's your private situation. I respect that you've had some difficult times recently and I'm here for you if you want to, but you don't need to go into it. Let's move on and know that I'm here and I can pick up the pieces if you want me to do that.’

So a really interesting response, and he was a male colleague and the other team member I ended up telling her and she was amazingly supportive and yeah, it was very freeing to do that, but it then didn't feel I needed to tell anyone else, and it's just personal. I had to follow my heart what felt right.”

And meanwhile she says she just kept working, kept achieving her goals at the office…

“…because there is another parallel universe in which I would never get pregnant, never have a child. And part of me was working very hard at work, at my career, because that could be all I had. So I was performing well and I wouldn't be surprised if you find a lot of high performing women having difficult personal lives and infertility throwing themselves into their work to have something to show for what they're doing at the end of the day.”

Now in her case it worked out. She gave birth to a little boy earlier this year. And she and her husband are thrilled. But her experience of pregnancy loss still feels fresh. Not to mention her experience of IVF. And she says the atmosphere at work can make a big difference in how you feel about being there when you’ve gone through something like this.

“The other thing I would add about the miscarriage and IVF was is the stigma and the things that people say because we don't talk about it, and the reason I wanted to talk about it on the show and just generally amongst friends, and I have since been open with the whole team at work, is because the less we talk about it the more people say the wrong things that upset people and hurt and make a difficult situation even harder.

And the common phrases that you hear when you have a miscarriage are, oh, but at least you got pregnant. Well that's a double whammy when you've got it through IVF for example. And it's just the kind of things that people say often with good intentions to try and make you feel better. Now the only way we change that talk, those things, is to educate people by being open and saying, well instead of saying this can you just say ‘I'm so sorry,’ can you just say’ is there anything I can do to help?’ or you know, more open ended support and empathy rather than, ‘why don't you adopt?’ or I heard, ‘Actually the world's overpopulated anyway.’ You know, the kind of hurtful things people say and that's the other reason I think a lot of people are afraid to talk about it in the workplace, because that sort of thing would make me burst into tears. And you've spoken a lot on your show about crying in the office. And how do you feel comfortable with that, especially as a senior manager, and getting that balance right between being real and being an emotional human being in the workplace, which I very much am in my office because I manage a lot of women as well, and men, and we all have emotions, we all have lives. You want to create an environment in which everyone feels happy being themselves because then they're more productive but also it's just a warmer in working environment. But on the flip side if it becomes too personal and you're breaking down every two minutes then that is maybe an unsettling place to work and can lead to a team feeling unsettled and maybe like they're not in safe hands to get on with their job.”

It is a tricky balance. We’ll talk more in a bit about how to support a colleague who’s gone through a loss.

Finally, Ceri raised something that came up with all three of my interviewees – the role of the partner in all this. 

“This wasn't something that I was going through alone. My husband also had to go back to work much sooner than I did. My return to work…I mean I was working by the end of that first week even though I was sort of signed off work. I did work from home. I did the odd phone call, answered the odd email as a distraction, and then I worked from home the second week and went to this strategy course, but my husband had to go back to work…I think he had some compassionate leave for a day, then went back two days later which is pretty rough.

And so men often get missed out of these topics. I know that The Broad Experience is focusing on women in the workplace but also a great part of what's helped me come to terms with and work through the miscarriage has been the support I've been able to get from my husband.” 

The same thing goes for a partner of any gender of course – often as the person who is not carrying the baby, their feelings are overlooked. 

Coming up…when the worst happens how does someone start to heal herself. And how  colleagues can help…or not.

“We have all of this discourse going around about the importance of vulnerability and the value of vulnerability. But I think you know the reality is that we're sometimes setting people up to almost kind of bare their soul in environments where it's not actually safe to.”

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April Boyd wrote to me last year as well. She’s from Ontario, Canada. She’s a social work therapist by training – she used to work both in a hospital and her own private practice. Her work was with people going through some of life’s hardest times. But despite working in the field of trauma, she was not prepared for what happened to her almost six years ago.

“I had got pregnant, I had had a healthy, happy pregnancy, there was no known issues or concerns noted. And I had a little girl named Nora and she just stopped breathing when she was one day old.”

No one could ever tell her why Nora had died. She and her partner had to try and pick up the pieces of their lives.

“I remember somebody saying to me at one point in time you know April you're probably going to be better able to get through this because you're a therapist. And I just thought that's the craziest thing I've ever heard in my life because in no way have I felt trained to be able to survive the death of my daughter. But what I realized was you know as some time went by there was kind of some truth in what that person had said to me because what I realized was that all the clients I had worked with over the years really had taught me some really important things about how to get through the really intense traumas in our life and how to survive the hard stuff. And so I really felt compelled to start to share what it was that had got me through some of the darkest points of that time especially because when we're talking about infant loss and baby loss and pregnancy loss these really are incredible taboo topics in our culture.”

She runs the Love and Loss Project – it’s a website where you can find resources to help you if you’ve lost a baby or a pregnancy. She’s also in private practice as a coach and therapist for people who’ve experienced pregnancy loss.

In Canada, you’re entitled to a year’s maternity leave. As someone whose had baby had died, April was entitled to four months off work. Which she decided to take in full.

“And that was really challenging for me in a couple ways. So one, there were days when I felt like I could probably be at the at my work, right, or I could probably be doing OK and handling stuff. And it certainly was not my nature to kind of just sit on the bench. But I really wanted to honor my decision to give myself that time because I do believe that that's one of the things that my work with my previous clients had really taught me is I really understood the magnitude of what it was I was dealing with in my life and the significance and the ripples that this experience had in ways I could not even articulate or put my finger on. And so for me, I really wanted to honor that and I really did not want to be in a position where I was going to have to compartmentalize my process or my grief. 

She knew she’d do better when she did go back to work if she took some time to try to come to grips with what had happened to her. It was tricky financially – she wasn’t paid her fulltime salary when she was off. But she says before you decide to soldier on through your grief, think about whether you really have to.

“The reality is it going off work is never a good financial decision. But what I really had to weigh was the difference between the short term reduction in money coming in versus the long term that I didn't want to not be functional later on in some way. So for me that was a little bit of a long term plan, and I think that a lot of people really wrestle with that because there is so much pressure. But one of the things that I really encourage people to do is really kind of break apart you know, what is your reality really, between the fear and the fact? Right. The fear is that I might not have enough, but when you really kind of do the budget I think sometimes we can surprise ourselves by really what we could make work really when we need to. But it is making ourselves prioritize our own healing. And I think often that's the other part of that reality that is really challenging right especially as women we're not really used to giving our own care our own health and wellness that kind of treatment in our life.”

After she went back she says her boss was amazing – very understanding and supportive. And some other colleagues she’d barely known before approached her with offers of support. But she says there were triggers that would crop up during the day that other people didn’t even recognize. One day, a few months after coming back to the hospital, she was walking down the hallway…

“…and one of the women had brought in her newborn grandbaby. And so she is of course is very excited Grandma wanting to share and show off her new little one in the family, which is of course completely understandable. And usually this would be something that would be you know a beautiful bright light in the work day. Right, usually that's the kind of thing that we would get excited about and that would be a special treat.

But I remember walking by and it just hit me like a ton of bricks. It just knocked the wind out of me. And I remember like literally walking past her and she's calling me over like literally being like, April, come here, come here. And I truly just had to look at her say hi. And I just kept going and she called me over again and I just ignored her and kept walking down the hallway. I remember coming into the kitchen. That was the only room there, and I just started bawling.”

Now obviously the woman with the baby didn’t mean any harm. She just wasn’t seeing the world through April’s eyes. And that’s the problem when you come back to work after a terrible loss. Everyone else’s life seems to be going on as normal while yours has been turned upside down.

April was working with a woman recently who’d had a miscarriage. She found it really hard being around colleagues who kept talking about their kids. In her workplace that was what a lot of women did during their lunch hour. She didn’t want to look snobby by not hanging out at lunch, but she just couldn’t take it. She hadn’t told anyone about her pregnancy or the miscarriage…

“…she didn't feel comfortable really letting people know, you know, what had happened, for her that wasn't appropriate in her setting. So we talked about that idea of having an ally. So it's one person that she feels a little more safe with and that she can share, ‘Here's what my reality is, here's what I've gone through, and here's what it's like for me to be in that staff room,’ so that when she would be sitting there, because sometimes when we hear those triggers, right, those stories that people tell we kind of freeze and our speech kind of leaves us in that moment and we end up just being that deer in headlights, right. And so we had talked about that idea that if she had somebody who knew what she was going for that person could help change this topic, they could maybe even kind of follow her out of the room and go for a walk with her.”

Which is exactly what ended up happening. She confided in a colleague and asked that person to help her out. 

“…because at the end of the day I think her biggest fear really tends to boil down to if I lose my cool here, if I end up crying in the kitchen, if I end up kind of losing it, what if I end up being really judged, right, or what if I end up with that horrible awkward silence where people don't know what to say and then they kind of just avoid me?”

April says colleagues who know about the loss often feel awkward because they don’t know exactly how the woman feels herself. And women can feel quite differently about miscarriage.

She says to some women she’s spoken to, a 6-week miscarriage is devastating – they’d already been thinking about names and begun to plan ahead. Other women see it more as an act of nature they can move on from. But if a pregnancy loss of any kind has really thrown you, the workplace often doesn’t help.

April says only about 15 percent of her work comes from companies.

AMT: “Those clients who do come to you, on the workplace side of things, how do they hear about you and what do they want to talk about?”

“So mostly I’ve had contact from people who've said, you know, I know someone in my office has gone through this and I'd like to support them better. 

And so one of the key things that we talk about is really the idea of becoming more flexible with the concept of time, because I think there's often this notion that someone's going to grieve for a couple days and then they're going to be fine. But you know that's certainly one of the concerns that I've had other women share with me is that when the most painful things for them in their work environment is even when there's support there at the beginning, people say well, you know, it's been three weeks, now it's time to get back on board. And you know in many ways they feel like they've been very generous and very tolerant for somebody not being their go to gal anymore. But in reality it doesn't quite work like that all the time, right. There's the good days and bad days. And so some of that piece is it just comes down to really education of here's what this looks like behind the scenes for the person really. And again you know, I really encourage people to think about this in the context of just humanity in general.”

Because anyone can suffer a loss of any kind and find it hard to function at work. And going back to the topic of other people’s responses to your situation, April says it’s understandable that colleagues may feel nervous about saying anything, if they knew you were pregnant. But of course what some people do in that situation is simply say nothing. Which can feel hurtful and add to your isolation.

“So what I would encourage you to think about is I think we can just kind of open that up to say, Hey, I just want to let you know I was thinking about you, I know you've been having a really rough time lately. We're really not making any assumptions about what this means for that person exactly or where they're at. And we're also not prying. Because there's times when I know that people have wanted to show care and support by really asking me a lot of details about it that I really didn't want to get into at work for instance. You're like, I don't want to have this conversation here. So I would say that really the fact that you're even just stepping closer is going to be appreciated because you're identifying yourself as a safe person.”

Finally, she says, not everyone at work IS a safe person. They don’t deserve to hear about your situation. 

“We have all of this discourse going around about the importance of vulnerability and the value of vulnerability. But I think you know the reality is that I think we're sometimes setting people up to almost kind of bare their soul in environments where it's not actually safe to. So for instance I had a client one time that had was not doing her best at work and she actually got a really terrible performance evaluation, and she was really torn about how does she want to address that with her boss. And so what we had looked at was you know is it safe to really do that in that context because she was going to tell him the whole story. Right, as in like the whole details of it, and really this man had given her no indication ever before that he was somebody who was either interested in people's personal lives or willing to be compassionate to that. In fact he had actually been quite harsh with other people in other circumstances. So what we'd really looked at was not just this vulnerability because this feels like what we're supposed to do, but really intentional sharing. And I think that's where we can start to really protect our own hearts and protect our baby's memories. It's really with the idea of what am I choosing to share and with who, who has really earned the right to hear this story? And that's not everybody.” 

April Boyd. You can find out more about April’s work at LoveLossProject.com. Thanks to her, Jorli Peña and Ceri Napier for coming on the show and talking about this incredibly personal topic.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. Of course I would like to know what you think. I hope the show has been helpful.

You know where to find me – you can email me via the website or tweet me or post to the Facebook page.

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

Episode 136: Loyalty Has Limits

Show transcript:

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

This time…why it can be so hard for women to leave a job they’ve held for a while… 

“I didn’t want to let anyone down. I didn’t want to let not only my coworkers, who were my family, but the community, I didn’t want to let the community down.”

And later in the show, what part do emotions play in how women are perceived at work…

“So it’s like, I’m constantly thinking about the whole presentation, body language, what my facial expression must look like, the tone of my voice, the volume of my voice.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much has changed since I started the podcast almost 7 years ago. Women and work wasn’t a big topic of conversation then – now, it is huge. Some of my first shows don’t sound as relevant any more because the topics have been so well covered since then. But some things feels just as relevant today as they did then. One of those topics, I think, is the complicated feelings a lot of women have about leaving a longtime job.

Back in 2013, I talked to Daniella Maveal. Danielle had worked for Etsy for years. She was one of its first employees when it was a scrappy startup. And as I said at the time, she felt really lucky to work there.  

But even when she started to feel restless, about four years in, she couldn’t bring herself to leave. Her job was to liaise with all the sellers who sold their goods through Etsy. Essentially she supported them and coached them on how to better promote their businesses through the site. It was a very public role.

“My face was on blog posts, my face was on the forums, I led live workshops, I traveled and met sellers in person. So people know me as Danielle XO…I’d go to a craft show and…

AM-T: “Just to be clear, that’s your Twitter handle…”

“That’s my Twitter handle and it’s also my Etsy user name and my admin name, it just was everything, Danielle XO, and I’d just picked it out of the blue when I started at Etsy and it was who I became and was recognized as. So I actually probably should have left a year, maybe more than a year before I did, and I just couldn’t imagine who I’d be if I wasn’t Danielle XO. And if I would – if ever again I’d be as important, as respected or listened to, really all of my, I don’t know, my identity, was this Danielle XO.”

So Danielle’s whole sense of herself was bound up in her job. She struggled with the idea of leaving everything she’d built in her role, even though she no longer felt challenged or even felt she fit in that well at the company any more. It had grown massively since she started. When she finally did leave Etsy she was struck by how many of her female friends had similar tales. They weren’t happy at work but couldn’t quite move on. She described this in a blog post she wrote last year as a new problem women have – this struggle to stay or go to the next thing.

“The reason why I say that is that I think men and women have historically been in one job for a very long time. So in terms of being a new problem a lot of people now are changing jobs every few years, especially men. But I think women still feel they have to prove themselves in a career, they have to move up some ladder, and they have to win, be as good as a man is, as strong as a man is, and they equate that to being in a position very long – I feel like it’s a winning thing, like I need to... I don’t know it’s like you never feel…or at least I didn’t…I never felt like I had proven myself enough. I felt like I still had somewhere to go. I think at the end that was the most frustrating part was I actually didn’t know where to go and I wasn’t given, sort of a path, you know, so I didn’t know what that next step was that I needed to conquer.”

I’ve heard plenty of anecdotal evidence like this about women staying in jobs longer than men… and I’d also heard it said that this is another reason for the pay gap – that women move around less so they have fewer opportunities than men to increase their salaries.

But I wanted some hard facts. Terri Boyer is executive director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She says in the early months of a job, studies show women are likelier to quit than men. But this often has to do with family factors – like a situation suddenly arising to do with aging parents or kids. In those cases a woman is likelier to step away from a new job to deal with a crisis than a man is.

“However, as women stay in a job for a longer period of time they are less likely than their male counterparts to leave a job. And I think there’s a lot going on there. There is interesting information about job satisfaction and the external indicators of is my job good, will I have another opportunity, etc. But then there’s also this concept of the longer women stay in the labor market, the lower their expectations are for what is a good job and what their chances are for finding another quote unquote good job out there.”

So what is going on there?

“First of all, women tend to underrate their abilities and worth in the job market and men tend to overrate their abilities and worth in the job market. So when you put a job description in front of a man and a woman their reactions are very different as to whether or not they feel they are qualified and feel competitive with it. And there are different studies that say if you give a list of ten qualifications, a woman feels she has to meet all ten to apply for the job and a man feels like oh I’ve met about six, seven or so of these, therefore I can apply for the job. So of course when you’re thinking about leaving a job, if you don’t see a lot of jobs out there that you meet all of the criteria for, there’s going to be a difference there in thinking of what’s the next thing to move on to.”

As well as undervaluing their qualifications, she says, the longer women stay in the job market the more they factor in children, how they’re going to fit kids into their working lives. Terri says again, this influences their thoughts about where they work – they may think, I’m in a decent situation, it has its pitfalls, but that’s OK because this job fits around the rest of my life…and another job might not. Men are still less likely to think this way.

And there’s more. Listen to what Danielle Maveal said when I asked why she had stayed at Etsy even as she became more and more unhappy…and I should add that Danielle doesn’t have kids.

“Well, one big thing was that I felt I owed it to the company to be there. Like I…”

AM-T: “That sounds very female…”

“Right, it’s a very female perspective on a job. I didn’t want to let anyone down. I didn’t want to let not only my coworkers, who were my family, but the community, I didn’t want to let the community down. And if they were coming to look for me to say I need help with this, and I wasn’t there. That just – I mean even now it gets me emotional, it breaks my heart….and I don’t know if a man would ever be, ‘I can’t leave this job, it would break my heart.’ I mean maybe, but he’d have to be a unique guy at least to admit it.”

Ah, loyalty. Terri Boyer of Rutgers says on the whole, women are more likely to prioritize their relationships with colleagues and clients and it’s another reason why they’re slower to leave a job than men.

---

I asked Danielle what else she felt was holding women back from taking the plunge…

“I mean besides their own insecurities and fear I do think they’re not supported enough by friends, family, people in their lives to take big leaps. I don’t know why that is but the business coach that I was talking to when I wanted to leave Etsy, I was shocked that she said to me, ‘You should leave.’ Because most people, when I had talked to my mother, when I had talked to my friends, ‘You have a great job, you have a great salary, you have healthcare. Why would you leave this job?’ They didn’t ask me if I was challenged.”

Given the state of the economy perhaps it’s not surprising she got those kinds of reactions. Because she didn’t yet have a job to go to. But she wants to encourage other people to have more confidence than she did when she was on the fence, and value all the experience they’ve gained on the job...

“So I think that’s one thing that holds people back, they don’t really put together all that experience…all the ups and downs, even the mistakes you’ve made, really add value to who you are. So keep moving, keep moving forward, that’s something that’s important, and you’re going to be reaching another set of people. That’s something I didn’t realize. It’s like OK, I am leaving this job and these people, these people who rely on me, but I’m going to be going somewhere else where I’ll still have all this value and knowledge and experience and I’ll find other people who will need me as well. It’s OK to be needed.”

Which also struck me as something not a lot of men would say…

“I think it’s OK to be feminine in the workplace. You know to me, the downfall for me was I would take things personally. I would internalize, and I would hold on to…and that was not a positive. But there’s no way I will ever be a masculine worker…and I am OK with that. You know, I’ll cry at work. I’m OK with that. Just respecting myself and valuing myself I think was the big lesson for me.”



Something else I still think about – something that’s still being debated – is how women should be judged for showing emotion at work.

Several senior women who’ve been guests on the podcast have said women should really do their best NOT to cry openly at work. And this is the conventional wisdom, right? That by crying you’re displaying weakness and women should go to all lengths to avoid that if they want to be taken seriously.

But Anne Kreamer disputes that. She’s the author of It’s Always Personal: Navigating Emotion in the New Workplace. I spoke to her in 2014.

“I found that there’s no what I call tissue ceiling, that people at all levels of management reported that they had in fact had cried in the workplace – and that other people viewed the expression of emotion at work as a humanizing force…as something that showed empathy and compassion, and that it was women who were the harshest critics of other women who cried in the workplace. When men saw a woman…and I did a statistical analysis with J Walter Thompson really tabulating all this…and when women saw other women cry they saw it as a personal failure, a moral failing on their part, like they let the home team down. Whereas when a man saw a woman cry at work he was like, oh, she cried, it happens. Next.”

She wrote the book in part because she wanted to work out why women felt so bad about themselves after crying at work. Her research led her to the science of tears.

“Women’s and men’s tear ducts are anatomically different. Men’s are larger than women’s so that a man and a woman might be feeling the exact same degree of emotional distress, and his eyes will only well up, whereas a woman’s tears will spill out and down her face and make her look as if she’s more out of control, whereas in fact it’s just an anatomical difference. It’s crazy. And then the second thing is women produce more prolactin, which is the hormone that triggers treas. So from the get-go women are kind of hard-wired to cry more frequently and when they do cry to have their tears be more visible.”

She too knows this first hand. In the ‘90s, she was an executive at the US children’s channel Nickelodeon. The company had just signed a big deal to distribute their video and audio products with Sony – a deal she and her team had brought to fruition.

“And I was celebrating in my office with my colleagues who’d all spent 18 months putting this deal together. And the phone rang. And it was Sumner Redstone… 

Sumner Redstone is the American media magnate who owns Viacom, which owns Nickelodeon…

“And I sort of naively thought oh how awesome, he’s calling me for the first time ever to congratulate me on a great job…when instead he just started to berate me instantly for having failed to move the Viacom stock price with the announcement of this deal. So I went from cloud 9 to kind of abject misery literally within the space of 90 seconds over this man’s anger frothing out of the end of the telephone receiver at me.”

After he slammed the phone down, she burst into tears. And immediately felt ashamed. She stewed over the incident and her reaction to it for hours, days. But some years later, she made a discovery.

“When I wrote the book about emotion in the workplace I went back and interviewed everybody who’d been in the room at the time - actually I also  tried to interview Sumner Redstone, who amusingly declined the opportunity to talk with me – but I was the only one who remembered the incident with the clarity that I did. One other person said oh yeah, I kind of remember that. But what happens with emotion is that if you ruminate on it…you know I went home and I was chewing over this thing, they went home and had drinks or met their family or did whatever they did, and completely forgot about it. So that’s another one of the interesting little elements of this, is that we all take things far more seriously than the majority of people who happen to be observers of them.”

Sociologist Marianne Cooper says there’s no doubt women have more to contend with when it comes to showing their feelings at work. Marianne is with the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. She was also lead researcher on Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean in.  She says both men and women see women in a certain light, and that influences our responses to female behavior…

“It really starts form a belief that women are just inherently more emotional than men. A man and woman can have the exact same response to something but it will be viewed differently because we are expecting that women are going to be more emotional. So a man and woman doing the same thing, she’s going to be viewed as emotional and out of control…but a man will maybe be seen as passionate or just having a bad day.”

Take anger. Yale University research has shown women who display anger in the workplace lose status in the eyes of observers – these women are seen as being less worthy of a raise and as less competent. Men who get angry? They’re seen as just as competent as usual – and sometimes they even gain status. Marianne Cooper says women face a double bind…

“If you don’t show emotion in some ways you can get higher status as a result of that…but then you’re not really conforming to how people expect you to behave as a woman. So you might be penalized for not being friendly or warm or nurturing… if you’re too friendly or too nurturing or too emotional then you’re penalized for something else, which is not being competent, not being even keeled, not being calm under pressure. So it is a tightrope that women do walk.”

I asked her about crying and the advice senior women still give – just try not to do it. That is, senior women with the notable exception of Sheryl Sandberg. She says we should be able to be authentic at work. Marianne says recommending that we curb our tears still makes sense given many workplaces are pretty buttoned-up.

“…but I think, ultimately you have to understand and I’m sure all of these  women do, there are going to be moments that are just human, we’re not automatons, we can’t regulate our emotions every second of our lives. My hope would be we can work towards a system where women don’t have to  work so hard just to be taken seriously, and that that’s the kind of change we need, where when people cry it’s not perceived as a weakness, as being too emotional, or poor performance under pressure, it’s just seen as being human.”

But for some women in particular, being human, being able to be themselves at work, is something that feels a long way off. When I put out a call on a LinkedIn professional women’s group about this topic I was inundated with responses.

One of the women who got back to me was Kim Norris. She works for a healthcare technology company in the southern US. She trains staff who work in medical coding.

“My experience has been that if you express any type of emotion, even at times elation, it can be detrimental for your reputation.”

Kim is African-American and Latina. She says being half Latina, she uses her hands a lot when she talks. And she says her whole clan is pretty loud. Generally, she’s not shy about expressing emotion. But often over the years at various jobs, she’s had to tamp down her feelings for fear of how she’ll be perceived…and what she says are stereotypes about her race…

“I mean even amongst my female peers, I think that there are times when they feel somewhat intimidated or that I’m going to display aggressive behavior because I am African-American. Just the other day my boss called me into the office and wanted to discuss some possibilities for training and things like that…and she asked me my opinion and as a started to give it to her, she said now wait a minute, before you go there. And I was like wait, before I go where? I hadn’t even said anything really, yet. And that kind of thing. So it’s like, I’m constantly thinking about the whole presentation, body language, what my facial expression must look like, the tone of my voice, the volume of my voice.”

Which gets pretty exhausting. Kim got her bachelor’s degree at 40. She’s now in her mid-forties and she’s about to get her master’s in business administration. She says she’s proud of what she’s achieved professionally and educationally. Yet despite her qualifications, work can still be fraught with small, everyday communication hiccups…

“I find myself at times even not contributing as I would if I had the freedom to not have that stereotype come before me. There are times when I feel that it’s better to not say anything at all than to say something and possibly be misunderstood, so you really choose your words very carefully. And I feel it hinders me professionally a lot of the times because it’s easier for me to perhaps send an email or write a memo rather than being in a room interacting with my peers.”

At least with an email she can work out exactly what she wants to say and how she wants to say it, ahead of time. But she wishes she didn’t have to.

McKinsey and Company and Lean In recently released their 2018 report on women and the workplace. It doesn’t specifically address communication issues and shows of emotion, but one of its conclusions is that women of color still find it harder to advance than white women and that black women get the least access of all to senior leaders. It also found that women of color are far more likely than white women to want to become a top executive. I’ll link you to a copy of that report under this episode at The Broad Experience dot com.

As ever I’d love to know if any of this jibes with your experiences at work. You can write to me at ashley @ TheBroadExperience.com or tweet me or hit up the Facebook page.

I appreciate every donation that comes into the show – this is a one-person production and your support really does matter. You can donate at the support tab at TheBroadExperience.com. And if you can’t give, write a review on iTunes instead – I’d love that too.

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