Episode 178: Working Couples - Your Questions Answered

Show transcript:

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

As promised at the end of the last show on working couples, I’m bringing you a short show this time featuring a few of your questions about your own dual-career couples, and Jennifer Petriglieri’s answers. Jennifer is a professor at INSEAD business school and the author of the book Couples That Work.

One of these couples has children, two don’t.

Let’s start with this one.

AM-T: This woman says, ‘in my house we both have careers, one of us is an overworking driver the other is content with just working…it can cause friction and judgment from both sides. Any thoughts on balancing these extremes?’”

“First, I would say, I'm assuming, oh, I don't know if she, she or he is the overworking one…”

AM-T: “She’s the driver. She’s the overworking driver. And she says my husband is happy to just go out and play golf in the afternoon sometimes, and I guess she frowns at that and he’s like, what’s your problem?”

“Yeah. So I think very often when couples have become so polarized like that, they're doing a little bit of work on behalf of the other person. I bet there are days when she, even if she's super ambitious, super driving, which I can identify with because I am, there's still the occasional day where I'm like, oh my goodness, I would love to just go to the swimming pool this afternoon. But when we cling to that identity that, well, I'm the overworking one, I'm the driving one, I'm not going to do that, what we're doing is pushing ourselves further into those positions.

So I'm sure they have natural tendencies, where she is more driven than he is, and that's fine. But what we see over time is that we tend to become more extreme versions of ourselves because that's our role. And the first thing to do is to watch for those times where we're on the opposite spectrum. And there will be some, I guarantee, but it's really important when they happen that we claim them because we don't just get us off the hook. We also get our partner off the hook of taking the other extreme, which can drive us bananas, right. Because I'm sure her husband, clearly he's less driven than she is, but that doesn't mean he's not driven at all. And if she's the only one expressing that, then he's kind of left on the hook of the other end. So I think it's really important that we claim the other side when it pops up so we don't become exaggerated versions of ourselves.”

In other words, when a tiny voice tells YOU, the hard-charging one, to go to the pool on a summer afternoon, try it – go. Don’t tell yourself you MUST stay at your desk just because you’re that person.

 “And then I think the other thing to say is, um, the best, the most successful couples are not necessarily the couples who are just like each other, and I think it's really important to accept that, that it's not necessarily great if you were with someone else who was super hard driving as well, that may not be the healthiest thing. And I just think kind of recognizing that, to have someone maybe not who's your polar opposite. Cause I think when that happens, it feels as if you've both gone too far in that direction, but has just kind of oppositional tendencies to you can be a really, really healthy thing. And, and as long as it's not impeding on your goals, that's fine.”

The next dilemma is one I hear about a lot from friends in heterosexual relationships…

This person says: I’m curious on Jennifer’s take for the lead parent who does the invisible tasks  – because I feel like this falls on moms even if both parents are working full time. How can couples actually balance these invisible tasks in a real way?

“So first of all, it's true, right. Even if we are both working and we commit to co-parenting or co kind of householding, it doesn't always work. And the reason is there's a big difference between the doing and the planning, right? So it's one thing to do the shopping. It's another thing to look in the fridge, write the list, what have we not got, plan the meals. And many couples are quite good at splitting the doing, but the planning will fall onto one of them. And when we look, the planning actually takes longer. It's more cognitively taxing, it's more stressful. And it's really invisible work. So the best way to get over that split in the planning is to divide and conquer the tasks. Now, what do I mean by that?

I mean that you take sole responsibility for one task, the planning, the doing the everything. Obviously there are a couple of tasks, maybe cooking, you don't want to do that every night, but almost every task you can totally divide. So let me give you a personal example. Within the childcare bucket, my husband, he owns the health task. So the dentist, the doctor, the vaccination schedule, my kids are older now so it's all the braces and the orthodontics…he does all that, I don't need to think about it. Right? He books, the appointments, he takes them. He does everything. I am all the friends things, the parties, the sleepovers, the remembering the name of the baby brother or whatever, that's me. He doesn't need to think about it. And what we see in this actually quite a bit of research on this is when we do that, when we totally divide, it gets rid of the invisible work, because this is just not my responsibility, so I don't do it. And you'd be surprised, you can do that for almost everything.”

And she says don’t just TALK about this, don’t make a verbal agreement – make it official by writing it all down.

“So essentially you get a big piece of paper. You write down everything, all the chores. So I'll give you another funny example, gardening, right? I am in charge of the lawn. He is in charge of the weeding. I never think of the flowerbeds. I never think of the weeding. That's his job. He never thinks of the lawn, right? So it's not just about saying the whole garden is yours or the whole childcare is yours. It's like literally writing out the tasks, dividing them up, committing to your half of the list, and then just don't interfere, right? It may get done the day later. But if it's not on your list, it's none of your business. And this is the best way. When you start to split the tasks this week I'm doing this, next week, you're doing that, Monday, Tuesday, I do this Thursday, Friday, you do that. It's a disaster. Now, obviously there are some things like cooking, like maybe picking kids up from school. You might need to do that. But for most things, strict divide and conquer.” 

AM-T: “OK that’s great, that’s great, thank you. And finally, this question relates quite a bit to some things you write about in the book because this is some of the couples that you cover. But she says, ‘I’d love to hear her thoughts on how couples can best manage dual careers when one of you gets a big opportunity. For example my spouse and I are currently temporarily living in separate places because of our careers. It makes it easier because we don’t have children but what are the implications for love and work, or even if one of us gets an offer for  a job that’ll be more demanding for a particular amount of time.’”

“So this is where a preemptive conversation is really helpful and the preemptive conversation should be around boundaries. Now, when I think about boundaries, there's four big ones. One is place, location. A great way to do this is to get a map of the world or a map of your country or a map of the region. And literally circle in different colored pens, green for you, red for him, whatever, the places you could realistically live and work together. What this does is it takes choices off the table. And very often what happens, especially for early stage of our career is we get a little bit seduced by these amazing opportunities without thinking through the consequences further on.”

So place is the first boundary. Second is time. Some weeks will always be crazy of course, but Jennifer says you need to think about if your partner works more than X hours per week, how is that going to affect your relationship?

The third boundary is travel.

“How much travel is too much travel? You know, if you travel more than 20% of the time, can we manage that in our couple or not? And then I think the fourth boundary, which people talk about less is the boundary between your couple or your nuclear family and the wider extended family. And this can be a really stressful boundary if you don't manage it right. So like how much time are we really going to spend with your parents or your wider family? What do we do for holidays?

When we negotiate these boundaries, two things happen. One is we get a bit more certainty on the table, which takes off a lot of stress, two, is it makes decision-making easier because we have some parameters, we know, okay, this is the field we're playing on and anything outside of the field, we're not going there. So it enables you a little bit more guilt-free decision-making and three is, it gives you some parameters, almost like the canary in the mine, right? A warning that if you get close to these boundaries, it's like, okay, we need to reassess the situation. But I think if you  - if have couples have that, they can make a lot of different arrangements work. I think sometimes you read these articles, you should never live apart, or you should always do this. I mean, this is ridiculous. All of these things can work. The question is when they work and they work when they're very clearly negotiated in advance and mindfully negotiated, not just, ‘I want this, you want that,’ but what are the implications if we make this choice in three years, in five years, I think it's a bit hard to work more than five years out, but doing that can be really helpful.”

Thanks to Jennifer Petriglieri for being my guest on these last two shows. Her book is Couples That Work – How Dual Career Couples Can Thrive in Love and Work.

You can find a transcript of this and nearly all other episodes at TheBroadExperience.com.

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

Episode 177: Couples That Work

Show transcript:

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

This time…dual career couples are the norm in many parts of the world. But most books and articles offer career advice – OR relationship advice – but they ignore the link between the two. My guest today has studied that link, looking at what works, what doesn’t, and the underlying expectations couples have for eachother…

“So let's imagine your partner’s working really hard. You might even say they're overworking, and on the surface, you may want them to stop. But imagine they just come home one day, ‘I've resigned.’ That's probably going to be incredibly anxiety provoking for you, even if you've been begging them to slow down their work.” 

Couples that work – coming up on The Broad Experience.

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 I’ve always thought of this show as being about the invisible currents that run beneath women’s lives. This episode focuses on the currents beneath working couple’s lives – and there is a lot going on under the surface.

Jennifer Petriglieri is one half of a dual-career couple. She’s a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, the international business school based outside Paris. She’s also the author of the book Couples that Work – How Dual Career Couples Can Thrive in Love and Work.

Jennifer has spent years researching this topic. She interviewed more than 100 working couples all over the world and many of their stories make it into the book. Some are in their twenties, some in their sixties, and all ages in between. Her purpose: finding out what works over the long term for couples with careers, and how to navigate the roadblocks.

I found it one of the most eye-opening and profound books I’ve read in ages, and I was really excited to talk to Jennifer.

AM-T: “You have a really interesting story yourself. So how did you get interested in the first place in this topic of couples and careers?” 

“Yeah. So it's really a kind of meeting of two forces. So on the one hand, I'm a business school professor, I research and for a long time, I'd research people's career trajectories. And I got to the stage where people would say to me, you know, if you really want to understand my career, you should talk to my partner, which rang a chord for me, because I'm also part of a working couple and know that it's not just about who does the washing up, right? I think we often think about the way life and work combines as to like, who manages the kids and who does the washing up, which of course is part of it. But I knew in my own skin, it's much more than that. It's like, how do you support each other? And how do your careers interact? So it really got me thinking, and it was also at the time when sort of Sheryl Sandberg and Lean In was coming to the front. And this idea of the most important career decision you make is who you marry. And apart from thinking that was incredibly unromantic, I sort of looked at it and thought, well, yes but no. I mean, it sort of frames it as a choice question. How do you pick the right person, almost the kind of Disney princess, you know, you choose the frog, you kiss the frog and you live happily ever after. But in my experience, the problems arise because I kissed the frog, right? I found the right person and then things started to get complicated. So I’m really interested in less of the, how do you pick the right person, but in the 'then what' question and how do you make it work once you've made that choice is once you've chosen, you want a career and you're deeply in love with someone, then what?”

AM-T: “And tell me how your own life played into this because you and your husband started to talk about sensible stuff to do with work and careers really early on – I mean really early on.”

“Yeah, so I think…let's just say both of us had a string of failed relationships. And I think when we got together, there was a sense that we'd met our match, but I think we were also both worried because we screwed it up so many times before. So I think there was a sense of, I don't want to mess this up and I also don't want to mess my career up. Like I want both. And how do we do that?”

So Jennifer and her future husband Gianpiero start seeing eachother and a few weeks later it’s New Year’s Eve and he asks her to come to his hometown in Sicily for a visit.

“You know, my first time in Sicily, I arrived, you know, classic...He picks me up on the back of the Vespa. I mean, how exciting is that? And we drive along the coast and we sit down and we start talking about this. And he was like, you know, I don't want to mess this up. How do we make this work? And the first conversation was really like, this will be a worthwhile relationship if, and what do we both want out of it? And it really started, I guess, the habit of talking about this stuff, which has really become ingrained in us. And I think when I started to do the research, what I saw was those couples who did well over time, and of course we all face challenges. It's not that they didn't face challenges - were couples who also had the habit of talking about the important stuff. So I think, you know, we read the usual relationships book and it's all about communication. And of course it's a truism, but there's so many couples out there who talk all the time and say nothing to each other, right. They're talking about the weather, the TV shows, Netflix, who's picking the kids up. This is not how to build a relationship. And I think over time, particularly those couples who are trying to combine a career and a relationship it's about developing the habit of talking about, well, how is that going to work? And what do we want and how are we going to support each other?”

So they had these conversations right at the beginning and they went on having them. And for quite a while all went well. But several years into the relationship, when Jennifer and Gianpiero had a young family, Jennifer came this close to doing what many women do in the early years – giving up work. 

“So we'd gone all in. We'd had two children in 16 months. So you can imagine we had two under twos, neither of whom slept a wink, and it was the time I was doing my PhD actually. So I was studying really hard, and in an area where it's really what we think of as an up and out career, you know, you either succeed or you're out, so very high pressure and Gianpiero was really establishing his career at the same time. And it was just incredibly difficult to juggle it all.”

AM-T: “And just to be clear, he’s an academic too.”

“Yeah. He's an academic too. So he's on what we call the tenure track. So really high pressure, you have to publish, or they say perish, you can interpret that how you like. And our daughter, our second was born and on the 29th of December, so kind of middle of winter, and it was a really harsh winter. So snow, everywhere, super cold, like you couldn't go out at all. And it was March and the weather still wasn't breaking. And you know, I was breastfeeding, eight times at night, whatever you do at that age. And it got to one morning, I don’t know four o'clock in the morning and I just thought, I just cannot carry on. I sort of came down the next morning, which was still at like 5.30 in the morning and said, you know, I'm just going to stop.

And he said in slightly different words, ‘over my dead body’, and basically said, I'm not going to let you, because I know that you will bitterly regret this. And at the time I was very shocked. Let's just say, I wasn't happy. I was expecting a nice little support, of course, don't worry. And I felt like I got a bit of a kick, but it was a really helpful kick. And it was a kick, which took a lot of love to give. It would have been so easy for him to say, yeah, you give up your career. Like, easy life for me, but he didn't. And of course, if he hadn't right, we wouldn't be talking today. There would be no book. There would be no, there will be no career. I think it's, you know, he reminded me of the stuff we talked about on that Sicilian beach all those years ago that, you know, a good partner for me was not just someone who tolerated my ambition, but someone who supported it. And I think there are times when we're ambitious people, when support means a bit of a push, right, that is actually the kindest thing to do rather than what we think of as the classic empathy, which is don't panic, do what you like, you know, we don't always need that. And it's helpful to be reminded of that.”

At that time Jennifer and her husband were in what in the book she calls the first transition of their lives and careers together.

She outlines three transitions couples go through over their years together and how they can weather them, sharing stories of her research subjects and their own struggles and successes.

“So the first transition comes – it doesn't matter when you get together as a couple, it's coming. And it usually comes in the first five to eight years. And it's that point where you first have to make a tough decision, which really requires you to combine your, what were parallel tracks. So that might be, for example, you know, one of you get offers the job on the other side of the country. What do you do? Does one person follow? Do they take the opportunity? It's a time where we really need to figure out how are our careers going to fit together.

It might be the birth of a first child. You know, anyone who has children knows that is the end of parallel living. And on the surface, we tend to think it's a practical choice. You know, would we earn the same amount of money if we move cross country, how do we organize childcare? But of course, it's not, it's really a choice of power, you know, who gets to choose, who has the privilege to choose, whose career is priority? How do we support each other's ambitions? What if I take second place? How do we switch that back? And the big mistake couples make at this first transition is not to talk about that stuff, right? They talk about the practically, how might we make this work rather than thinking about what does this mean to us, and what might this set us up to do, and what roles might we get pushed into at this transition?”

That’s what happened to one couple she profiles…Jasmine and Alejandro…. They lived in Toronto, were about to get married when Jasmine gets offered an amazing promotion almost 3,000 miles away in Vancouver. Now until that point their careers had been individual. They had run in parallel, and neither of them had had to compromise.

So they thought practically – this was a promotion, it was a great opportunity, and Alejandro was able to find a good job in Vancouver. So they went. But after a few months in their new lives, things began to go awry. They started arguing about stupid things. But the reasons were all beneath the surface: Alejandro had a festering resentment that he’d moved across the country for HER job. She felt bad about that so she began to make up for it in other ways.

“And of course, really this was about who got to choose the move, you know? And so to compensate for that as many couples do, the woman who led the move then became very subservient in other things, you know, you decide what to do at the weekend, and you choose the apartment we're gonna rent and you pick the sofa we're going to buy and all this sort of stuff, which in some ways is a psychological way to rebalance. But of course it doesn't work, and eventually the house of cards falls down and they realized that the issue is it's put her in the powerful position, right? It's put her in the choosing position. Now they're a very egalitarian couple. It's not that they felt that he should be in the choosing position, but it's the fact that they fell into that without discussing it.

“And so many times with these couples, it's that, that gets them into trouble. It's not what they've picked. It's the way they've gone about picking it. If I can put it like that. So it's not that Vancouver was quote unquote, a bad choice for them, but the way they chose it led them into a bad process. And we see this time and time again. And in fact, practicality is interesting because it's often a word for money, right? We often think about the financial aspects. Now, of course, money is important for all of us. You know, let's not be naive. However, when we think about a meaningful life, it's more than about money. And when we just focus on that as a decision-making criteria, we often get these dynamics of regret, resentment. And we know that when resentment gets into a relationship, it's really difficult to get out of that space.”

What I found so interesting about this situation was all the underlying stuff about gender stereotypes, right? They thought they were egalitarian but you point out that we’re all  bombarded with societal messages that reinforce those age-old stereotypes…I mean she even went all 1950s housewife with housework…

“We see this in the research as well. Actually, the women who do the most housework in the world are women who significantly out earn their husbands. And in fact, they do more than the average stay at home wife.”

AM-T: “Because?”

“Because it's this compensatory mechanism, right? We’ve upturned the apple cart. So I'm going to try and compensate by turning it back in a different direction. And of course this is unconscious. It's not that anyone sits down and thinks, oh, I'm panicking about this. I better do more washing up. You know, it's a very sort of unconscious mechanism that this occurs by, yeah.”

Another couple Jennifer writes about during their first transition was Hannah and Santiago. They were living and working in her hometown of Brussels. He’s Portuguese. They thought it made sense to live in Brussels because she had a good, well paying job – she earned more than he did…and they had twin toddlers to support.

But while her career took off, his didn’t. He felt he was passed over for opportunities at work because he was a foreigner. Their lives seemed like a frantic cycle of ‘doing’ – he missed Portugal’s customs and slower pace of life. In short, he realized how important home and its culture was to him. His wife had had no idea how strongly he felt.

Ultimately, the couple agreed they’d move the family to Portugal.

“And I think this speaks to the issue of how do we measure our lives, right. I think in our cultures, especially in the UK and the US externally, there's a lot of measurement on how successful you are in your career. But actually when you look at people, that's not how they measure their lives. There's a lot of other factors around community, around do I get to pursue some of the personal goals? And I think when people weigh all of those up, it can be easier to take a decision, which on the surface, like for them to move to Portugal, they had to take a cut in their pay. But when they measured that up against the other things that were important to them, that was worth it, you know, plus the cost of living obviously there is a lot less. So, you know, there's the relative amount. But I think society very often pushes us to see success as the career, as opposed to balancing these multiple yardsticks that are important to us.”

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The second transition for dual-career couples often comes when they’re in their forties. They’ve built careers and now they take a step back and think, how did I get here? Is this where I want to be? If not, what do I want to do for the rest of my career? And when you get to mid-life there is a sense that life is starting to pass quickly – so you want to get it right.

“And so it's a point where we rethink the path we've been on, which can be very stressful in a couple, because if you're starting to question my life, my career, it's so easy for the other person to think, well, is this about me? Is this my fault? What does that say about our relationship? And of course, if we look at the divorce statistics, they're not linear across time, this is a real peak time for couples to break up. And we have all sorts of hypotheses why that is, but it really does coincide with this transition where we're both working through these I suppose you could call them existential questions, right, of what next, what's the direction? How am I going to make purpose in life more than getting my step on the career ladder? You know, maybe establishing a family, which are all good things, right? But I think we want more at that time of life.”

One thing that jumped out at me when I was reading about these couples in the second transition was how many of them had got caught up in what Santiago the Portuguese guy described – a cycle of do, do, do – couples are so busy between work and maybe their kids’ schedules and their own social lives, they don’t make much time for eachother.

“Yeah. And I think what's really interesting right now is a lot of couples are reconsidering that because of the pandemic, right. They've had a taste of how life can be different. I think what happens is the easiest way to describe it is we get onto a treadmill, right? And it's a treadmill of expectations. It's not necessarily a treadmill of what we want. And I want to be clear. It's not necessarily a bad treadmill. It's just that it's not right for everyone. And I think because most people do it, we just get onto it without really thinking.”

After work or before work there’s the gym or other sports, there’s entertaining friends at the weekends, and if you have children you become a taxi service for them.

“And we just add, add, add until our calendars become like every half an hour back to back all day long into the evening, collapse into bed, repeat. And it's a really hard trap to get out of because in many places we actually like this stuff, right? It's not quote unquote bad things. It's just too much. And we take on too much. And I think in doing, doing, doing, of course we stop being, right? We were not human beings, we're human doings.”

And this is everyone – not just couples with kids, not just heterosexual couples. The gay couples and child-free couples Jennifer talked to ran into just as many hurdles navigating their lives and careers as everyone else.

“We can sometimes look at couples with no children or maybe same-sex couples who aren't dealing so much with the gender polarization and think, well, it's all good for them. I mean, that's not true. We're all human beings. You know, we all face resentment. We all face envy. We all face, your career is going better than mine and I'm not sure I like that. It's all a question of, you know, are you supporting me? Do you understand me? These are really universal questions. And I also look at couples at different generational stages and also different cultures. And this stuff is so, so universal.”

“One thing that emerges from your research is that  few of us leave ample time to reflect on our lives…when we’re unhappy, or going through something in our couple and career because of that ‘do, do, do’ thing you’re not allowing the time…you use this term liminality in the book, we need a liminal period to think about things and so few of us have that or will make space for that in our lives…”

“And I think what's interesting at the moment is we can see the rates of burnout increasing, for example, and this really, I mean, it hits everyone hard, but it hits working couples really hard when one or both goodness, for better burnt out, because a lot of the suddenly a lot of pressure on the other one as well. And we mainly, we often focus on the person who's burnt out or who's very stressed, but for the partner it's incredibly stressful to deal with. And I think the way we've come to think of burnout is okay, you get the meditation app, you eat healthy, you exercise an hour a day and you know, you'll be fine. Well, those things can help, but there is a certain amount of - it's a little bit like being pregnant, right. It takes nine months and it's not good to do it in eight, right? That's not what you want to do…a lot of these things, whether it's dealing with burnout, whether it's thinking through a career transition, they take a certain amount of time and trying to speed through that with tips and tricks and life hacks can often backfire long term. And I saw this a lot in the second transition, you know, couples will be like, ‘I'm unhappy with my life. Okay. Let's sit down for a weekend and try and sort it all through. And we're going to make a load of decisions.’ And then three months later, they're back to square one, right. Because they just didn't give it enough time, to settle and work through. We're so trained to go for action. We've under-appreciated the just sitting with the discomfort and how powerful that can be in the long-term.”

The third transition Jennifer outlines is about what happens in the last phase of our careers…

“So at the beginning of our career and the middle of our career, we're working really hard to establish ourselves. And we often have the pressure of childcare, elder care, you know, being people in the community, all that sort of stuff. And then at some point, those, those issues ease. So we've proven ourselves in our career. We've reached a, hopefully a decent position, our children, if we've had them, are leaving home and our parents sadly may have passed on, and suddenly we have this renewed freedom, and with it comes the sense of what, what do I do in the last phase? So it's this real sense of exploration and it can be a really exciting time. And we see people reinventing careers hugely and reinventing their lives. It can also be a real stressful time because it's like, well, I'm no longer that hands-on mum or I'm no longer that bright young thing raising the career ladder.”

She describes it as a time of loss and of opportunity.

And reading about the last two phases of couples’ lives something really hit home – which is that when one of you wants something different out of your lives and careers than you did 20 years ago…the other partner is often quite uncomfortable with the idea of their spouse changing, because we’ve become very attached to our role in the relationship. And if they’re changing…that means we have to change too.

“Yeah. And so I love this piece of my research because what I came to see is, you could think of it as a role and a counter role, right? Whatever your partner does, there's usually a payoff for you in it. Right. Even if you don't recognize it so much. So let's imagine your partner’s working really hard. You might even say they're overworking, um, and on the surface, you may want them to stop. But imagine they just come home one day, I've resigned, right? I'm going to take a break, I'll figure it out. That's probably going to be incredibly anxiety provoking for you, even if you've been begging them to slow down their work, because suddenly it puts different roles on your shoulders. My goodness, I need to be the breadwinner for a while. Ooh, where did that come from? Or, you know, if you suddenly turn into the reflective one, maybe I'm the person who needs to hold the progressing forward and the working.

And we often see this, not just in roles like breadwinner, home carer, but also in more psychological roles. So usually in couples, we split these psychological roles. So you're the organized one and I'm the laid back one, you know, but you may get to a point where you're like, actually I used to be quite laid back and I would like to be a bit more laid back now, but that means I need to organize a bit more. No, I'm not sure I want to do that. Because I'm quite invested in the identity of being the laid back one. And I think this pops up especially in mid or later life, is how do you unlock those familiar positions you've got yourself into.”

But it can work, as several couples in the book show. It requires patience, understanding, and a bit of generosity on both sides.

AM-T: “I have to say reading this book…there’s so much we don’t discuss as couple that we should – it made me realize anew how complicated our relationships are, and how communication is so vital and how most of us don’t communicate enough about the important things.”

“Yeah. So I think we have so many unspoken agreements, right? And those unspoken agreements are also the things we really not going to talk about because we don't want to go there. And of course on the surface, it would be a bore to talk about this stuff all the time. That would be a little bit much, but what happens is often in the early stage of our relationship, we're actually very good at talking about this. So when I interviewed those younger couples and I don't just mean in chronological age, but when they're new couples. So even those couples who are maybe on their second or third relationship, they may be mid fifties. They get together again. They're really good at discussing these things. In fact, those couples tend to be the best because they've made big mistakes in the past. But then all couples eventually fall into this, ‘Oh, we know, I know what you want. I know what you like. We don't need to talk about this stuff anymore,’ without thinking it evolves. And that's when the issue happens. So I think it's less of a case that we haven't got the skills to talk about this stuff. And I'm sure most people have the desire to fix these things. I think we just layer assumptions onto our relationship that become so ingrained, we just don't think about it.”

I know I said this earlier but this book has many profound insights – I highly recommend it to anyone who’s part of a dual-career couple and even if you’re not but you’d like to be at some point. You’ll be armed with a lot of useful tools going in.

And you haven’t heard the last of Jennifer Petriglieri. Next time I’m releasing a short show with some of your questions about your own dual-career couple dilemmas and Jennifer will be answering those questions. Look for that in the next couple of weeks.  

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

Episode 176: Thinking Differently: Neurodiversity at Work

Show transcript:

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

This time…you are struggling at work, but you don’t know why…

“I truly believed that at some point this knowledge or way of doing things would just kick in and I’d suddenly get it, and I just never got there, that day never came.”

Then you find out your brain works a little differently than other people’s… 

“I did not suspect a thing. I called myself absent-minded and I thought I had some quirks, but it was completely out of the blue that this was even a thing ‘cause I found out in a really funny way.”

And every woman in this story lived with her condition for years before she got a diagnosis.

“It started making me think about the last, you know, 20 odd years and what's happened in my life, and it explained lot of things.”

Neurodiversity at work – how it helps, how it hinders, and what workplaces can learn.

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I have to admit that when Emma Case messaged me earlier this year and used the word ‘neurodivergent’, I didn’t know what it meant. Since then I’ve felt like I’ve come across that or ‘neurodiversity’ everywhere. It’s the term used for brain functioning that differs from what’s generally considered the standard model. Emma said these women’s perspectives are largely missing from the mainstream conversation on women and work, and would I consider incorporating some into this show? So I’m starting with her story.

Emma grew up in the English midlands. She was always creative. At 17 she decided she wanted to work in the fashion industry. Which she did – she became a buyer. And she’ll tell you The Devil Wears Prada isn’t far off the truth…

“In many ways that is a good example of what the industry can be like. And what I mean by that is that it is tough, it isn’t easy, and while it is tough it’s but it’s tough for everybody. So I think that maybe masked my struggles.”

She says lots of people in fashion burn out at some point, and what she was going through at her last company could easily have been ascribed to that. It was a famous brand, and a dream for Emma to work there. But she found the transition from small companies hard. She says in the small firms where she’d worked before it was pretty chaotic – everyone doing something different, people getting up and down, going in and out. And she did well in that environment. She says it allowed her to burn off some of her excess energy. And she was able to make her role her own.

But at the big company, things were different. She worked in a silent room with the numbers people. The friendly chaos was gone. And she was expected to conform to company culture. She found all the rules and systems hard to keep on top of. In fact she found pretty much everything hard to keep on top of.

“I had this niggling feeling in the back of my mind for the longest time that something wasn’t right. As an example, I’d go away on holiday and I’d come back and it was almost like I was going into a brand new job. And we might laugh about it that we forget the password for our computer or those types of things. But it was more than that. It was things I was doing day in, day out and they just weren’t sticking.”

To take one example…

“There was a company I’d need to visit maybe 3 or 4 times a week – I’d need to hop on the underground and go to their office. There was a point in the journey where I would always get lost. I just could not remember the route and I would do it 3 or 4 times a week.”

But each time it happened Emma would put it down to not concentrating properly.

“When we struggle with things as women, and I am going to generalize, we quite often put the blame at our feet – we think there’s something that we’re not doing, that we need to try harder, that there’s something that we’re missing. So I remember making sure I wasn’t on my phone, wasn’t listening to music, and every time I entered that underground at a certain point it would feel as if I’d never been there before.”

But again, she blamed herself. She’d always had difficulties with certain tasks, anything to do with organization just wasn’t her thing. She figured she would master this route at some point.

And yet this kind of thing had been part of Emma’s life for years, and by now she was in her early thirties. She often had trouble turning up at the right place at the right time. She wasn’t good at paying bills, setting up direct debits, or meeting deadlines in her personal or professional life. Still… 

“It was very easy for me to pass that off as someone who wasn’t paying attention or I hadn’t read the right thing or figured it out yet. So again, I kept putting it at my feet. And this was the thing, I truly believed that at some point this knowledge or way of doing things would just kick in and I’d suddenly get it, and I just never got there, that day never came. And as the years progressed it felt as if more was at stake. So I was watching my peers pass me by. Yes, people say comparison is the thief of joy, but that day when I sat on my bed thinking about my peers, thinking about where they were and where I was, thinking about how we started all together, it hit me there was something more to this.”

AM-T: “You mean you weren’t quite in the position you thought you should be in at that point?”

“I wasn’t in the position where I knew I should be. you’ll know this yourself. We know what we as individuals what we are capable of, and what my life felt like giving 110 percent and only getting 50 percent back.”

AM-T: “I’m curious, did you seek a specialist, did you think I’ve got to take this to the next level. How did you even come to be diagnosed?” 

“I did that thing we all do now – I hopped online, I was putting in random words, searching on Google, and trying to find things. And at some point I found a woman’s story and I thought that is me. That is my story. And it just said, ‘and I have ADHD.’ And I was gobsmacked.” 

ADHD. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Emma didn’t just settle for a Google diagnosis, she did seek a medical opinion and she was officially diagnosed at about 33 years old. But the reason she was so surprised is that, as she put it, ADHD was for little American white boys. Emma is Black. That’s how she thought of it – that’s who she was aware of having ADHD.

And she says many of us assume the same thing. That ADHD is about boys bouncing off the walls, not being able to concentrate in school, being disruptive. We tend to focus on the H – the hyperactivity in ADHD.

“For many women that H does not look the same way as it does for boys and men. So that hyperactivity is internalized, so for many women it manifests as anxiety – it’s an inner hyperactivity, that feeling of not being able to stop, the wheels don’t stop turning in your head.”

Emma ended up leaving her employer before she got her diagnosis of ADHD. All she knew then was that the environment wasn’t for her, that she wasn’t thriving there. She went into business for herself and later on she turned that business into Women Beyond the Box. It’s a platform to support neurodivergent women and to bring attention to their successes – she has a top 50 list of women there on the website.

As part of her work Emma coaches individual women and she’s hired by big companies to talk about neurodiversity and advise them on how to create a more inclusive workplace. One that accepts individual differences and capitalizes on them, rather than forcing everyone into a corporate box.

AM-T: “When I first spoke to you, you said this is a feminist issue.”

“Oh it is, absolutely, it is a feminist issue. There are so many women who are not being diagnosed or who are misdiagnosed.  I say it’s a feminist issue because boys and men are diagnosed. Because when the studies were being done around ADHD it was men and boys who were in that sample – so all the key characteristics of ADHD are based on men and boys and what that looks like. So as I said to you about that H, that hyperactivity, it’s very rare you’ll find women or girls jumping out of their seats at school…we’ve  been socialized to be… 

AM-T: “Good.”

“Good, exactly. We don’t do that kind of thing, so all that struggle is internal, so what women tend to be diagnosed with is depression or anxiety or borderline personality disorder, so it’s mood disorders.

And this is not controversial for me to say that within medicine women are quite often not listened to, or we’re classed as being overly emotional, or hysterical, that kind of thing, so we have this lost generation of women who are secretly struggling thinking that they’re dreadful, knowing there is something good about them but who might never realize their potential. And it’s just sad.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, Paige Jeffrey was also diagnosed with ADHD as an adult.

“Well, I found out last summer actually. And I did not suspect a thing. I called myself absent-minded and I thought I had some quirks, but it was completely out of the blue that this was even a thing ‘cause I found out in a really funny way.”

Paige is 34. She lives near Thunder Bay, Ontario, with her husband and two daughters, they’re 4 and 8. And last year her sister told Paige that she might want to get her older daughter checked for ADHD. She said her own daughter had recently been diagnosed, the condition ran in families, and she saw some similarities between the cousins. So Paige started doing some research.

“…and I’ll say as much as I had heard that things express differently with women and I’m for equality and all that, it kind of never occurred to me that ADHD was gonna be it – and I looked into it and was like oh, that’s her, that’s her, and that’s her…and then, while I was doing it, I was like, oh, that’s me, that’s me, and that’s me!”

Paige had done really well in school but university felt so overwhelming, she didn’t complete any secondary education. She says she’s largely self-taught and she’s done well, but as you’ll hear in a bit, she often found office life a challenge. Like Emma, it seemed to her other people had a secret code for how this whole thing worked that she somehow lacked.

But when Paige sought medical advice for her daughter and herself, she hit roadblocks.

“The first doctor I spoke to said it’s probably not ADHD, your daughter probably has high anxieties, and I don’t think you have ADHD either, I think it’s just depression, and this was in the beginning of the pandemic, so she kind of assumed it was depression and anxiety for both of us and that’s how she was gonna treat it.”

Paige went on to seek a second opinion. And while she was told it was highly likely she had ADHD, she says to this day she hasn’t been able to get any diagnosis for her daughter, partly due to the Canadian medical system slowing down during Covid.

But once she knew she had this condition, she took steps to get to grips with it.

“And one of the things I ended up doing, I ended up getting a coach for ADHD, and it’s funny cause I remember listening to your episode on coaching and I remember seeing the advantages but thinking yeah, I don’t know that I would ever spend the money on it. But I will say that she is invaluable, she is just about the best thing ever…she’s given me so much insight into the way my mind works, and we have talked about how ADHD affects your executive functions, so like kind of the way your brain works.”

She says she doesn’t cope well with having a big, nebulous goal. Her brain needs to focus on something specific. Her coach helps her with that.

“So we really hammer down on action plans and set a time and a date to be accountable to. That’s one thing you’ll also see in people with ADHD. The procrastination is real. I know this probably happens with people in general, but you’ll find you procrastinate up until, oh, I have a deadline in a day, and you’ll blaze through it and you get a good mark anyways. It’s how I got through school.”

These days Paige has her own business, so she does need to meet client deadlines. She’s a web designer for small businesses, usually solopreneurs. I wondered if she ever tells her clients about her condition…

“When it comes to clients now, it can depend a little bit, I’ve got some clients who are a little bit closer, and sometimes I explain to them that this is a thing, and usually we do this when things are a little more conversational…but it’s not generally something I tend to reveal. I don’t know that I would reveal it to a boss necessarily unless I felt comfortable, and I don’t think people should have to be obligated to tell others, you know, but I also understand the reality of it. The reality is it would be really nice to be able to say well, everyone should be accepting of another person and not everyone thinks the same way as you, but realistically it doesn’t work out that way, you know, and that’s what happened to me.” 

She says in her previous life as an office worker…

“I’d go into a new job, usually very enthusiastically. I tended to be that person in the office to whom everyone would come for help because I was usually able to figure out the problem…if I have the details of something I can take a look at it and be like oh we’re gonna do this, this and this, and we’ve fixed it. Even with processes in the office, I’m really good at going, if we did it this way this would be much more efficient. What I’m really good at is connecting point A to point B. What I am not good at is defining the A and B points and that is where I tended to trip up.”

She says a lot of people with ADHD have difficulty visualizing the end product. She says when people say, ‘think outside the box’ she can do that – IF she knows what the box is meant to look like first. But that can be hard to explain to managers. 

“And how this worked out in practical terms is I would get a project, and the boss would be like hey, here you go, off you go. And I would say, hang on a second, I have some questions…because I would need to know what that blue box was gonna look like, what the end result was going to be in order to make sure I’d done what they were expecting of me, because often what was in their head was different to what I thought of in my head. I had that happen a couple of times, too where a boss was like, no, I’m done with this, do it, do it however you want…and they’d come back and be like no, you need to fix this, this is wrong. So I had a habit of asking a lot of questions at the beginning of the project and I’d get bosses telling me, well you have no initiative, why can’t you just take this project and run with it?

It’s not that I don’t have initiative, I absolutely have initiative, the problem is when I don’t understand what the end result should be I struggle really hard with getting started and proceeding forward. I found ways to work around this – at my last job I had a really amazing friend who was the office manager, who would help me understand what it is that our boss was asking for so I didn’t have to go and bother the boss.”

And once she knew what she was aiming for, she could bring all her creativity to the project. She just needed a little help kicking off. 

Still, Paige always hit a point in a job when she got really bored. Once she’d mastered her role, her brain itched to tackle something new. So when Paige and her family moved north, away from the Toronto area to a small town, she decided to go freelance.

“When I had the opportunity to jump into my own business it gives me the flexibility to balance both large projects and smaller projects so I always kind of have things going on…and the fact that I get to work with a new client every time, and we’re always doing something a little different, you know there’s a new way of expressing it, they’ve got a new brand so it’s a brand new personality you have to work with, it reinvigorates everything for me all on its own. I don’t have to struggle with that, and that’s one of the reasons I like it so much.”

More from Paige a bit later in the show.

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Michelle Jones is also from Ontario. And to tell her story we need to go back in time almost 25 years.

Back then, when she was a 19-year-old university student Michelle found out some weird symptoms she’d been having were being caused by a brain tumor.

But again, it took a while to get to that diagnosis.

“My regular GP basically put it down to stress in my first year of college. I was a female so I was going through, you know, hormonal things, and literally that I was a hypochondriac. And I remember that so clearly because my brother actually went to the appointment with me.”

He’d been witnessing the changes in her behavior and she wanted him there to corroborate what was happening to her. Still, that doctor wasn’t worried. Luckily for Michelle, others were. The tumor was found, she had a successful operation and an intense but successful recovery. And she went back to her classes…and her life, for the next two decades.

Then about five years ago she and her husband moved to the US, to the San Francisco Bay area. She started having some chronic pain and thought, I need to get this checked out. So she sees a neurologist, gets some tests done, and goes in for the results.

“And I was sitting in his office and he was reviewing this MRI scan with me and he basically just said, ‘you know, everything looks great. There's nothing of concern, but I will say that you have a large part of your brain missing.’”

Now initially Michelle thought well, maybe he’s talking about the brain tumor – so she said, well, yes, I had brain tumor removed when I was 19. And he said no, that’s not what I’m talking about. Part of your brain isn’t there.  

“What he was pointing out was that one-third of my Corpus Callosum was missing. And the Corpus Callosum is the sort of mesh system, or, you know, the network that connects to your left and your right hemispheres. And so this is how your brain talks to - one side talks to the other.”

But with split brain – the term the neurologist used to describe her condition – that doesn’t happen. Each hemisphere is working hard but they’re not really connecting.

Michelle was shocked that she’d never known about this missing part of her brain, which must have been removed during her tumor operation.

“But also it started making me think about the last, you know, 20 odd years and what's happened in my life, and it explained lot of things.”

Michelle has worked in the UK, Canada and now the US. For years she was a manager in the travel industry. And her reviews would often mention words like ‘thorough’ and ‘cautious.’ She says looking back, she was pretty meticulous about everything…

“I always got feedback of Michelle is very cautious and she makes really good decisions, and she seems to look at every sort of scenario. And I really just thought that I was, you know, smart and, you know, looking at all angles of a problem before, you know, suggesting solutions or directing staff on how they could maneuver through different problems.”

AM-T: “Just to be clear, what you found out through your research on split brain is, this is part of the condition, right?”

“Yes. And now I've sort of come to the conclusion that each hemisphere kind of fights with each other. I think I really noticed going back to university at age 37, I went back to university to do a second BA in art history and then went on to do my master's in museology. And I had so much reading to do for every class, some semesters I had six classes, so I had tons of reading. And I was really struggling with doing the reading the night before like most students do, like I’ll read that the night before the class so it's really fresh in my brain. But I found that, um, I was reading things twice and it was because the first time our first run through was from my right side of my brain, and the second run through it was from my left side of my brain. And then after those two read-throughs, they would sort of have an argument with each other to say, you know, what are we reading here and how can we, you know, disseminate this into something that makes sense.”

She began to wonder if she’d ever finish her degree with all the reading that was involved – she was suddenly aware of this condition she didn’t even know she’d had before.

‘I guess not to use a cliché, but it really did my head in.”

She didn’t know what if anything to say to other people about it, either.

“I don't tell everybody about it because it's something that you can't see. And when I first told family members about it, their response was, but look at you, like, look at you, you're going to university again, you did this whole career in the travel industry. You're very successful, it clearly hasn't hampered any sort of progress or success in your life. But I was starting to think differently, like, what if I had have known and could have, you know, maybe gotten accommodations or let colleagues know that this is how I function and this is my brain and this is what I need in order to make those decisions. So I need a quiet space or I need more time to look at all different areas.”

She started to doubt herself… On the one hand it was all good, on the other, it was confusing. She’d found out that when you’re born with split brain, it can be really debilitating. So there was a bit of guilt thrown in there too.

But Michelle got her BA and then went on to do her master’s – with the help of an advisor she says kept her focused on what she could do, not what held her back. And all this time she was becoming gradually more comfortable with her new identity as someone with split brain.

Today she works as a museum curator and she’s focused on ways to open up the art world to all different types of people. She says split brain is actually perfect for this work…because it’s not all about coming to one conclusion.

“I was really lucky to study in an academic museum. So I was engaging with sciences, with math, with fashion students - and all coming in thinking about ways to interpret objects differently. And my brain loves this kind of stuff, because it then gives me the feeling that, because I think one way, I most often feel that I'm wrong because it's so different from everybody else. But when you get, you know, more than one opinion in a group setting, you tend to see that your view is not wrong and that everybody has a different view. And I think that's what I love about the art world and museums is that interpretation is up to the viewer.”

Like all the guests in this episode, Michelle hopes workplace can open up a bit more – be more inclusive for everyone. She thinks emerging from the pandemic might be the boost workplaces need to switch up the open plan office, for instance…which a lot of us were never crazy about…

“So it could be something like, you know, having a private pod at work that individuals can work, you know, separately in, well that benefits everybody, because no doubt, there's a time where a non- neurodiverse person could really benefit sitting in that pod.” 

And enjoying a little peace and quiet.

Paige Jeffrey has some parting advice for managers with staff who may not quite fit the office mold. They could have ADHD or another form of neurodiversity.

“I would say to people in management or in a position where they may have people on their team who struggle with it and may not even realize it…don’t be afraid to answer questions, maybe you don’t want to spend forever doing the project for them, but sometimes just a few questions is all they need…and that is enough for them to run off and do it. And it will save you time in the long run if you have some of that understanding and if you realize sometimes people’s minds work a little differently, and it doesn’t make them a bad employee, it means that their strengths are in different places.”

As with her. As she said earlier, once she knows what that box looks like she can think outside of it. She says the way her ADHD brain works has given her a lot of creative freedom to do some amazing things. She just wishes more workplaces could think outside their own boxes…

“I think understanding is key to human relationships, period. Having some understanding, having some knowledge that some people think a little bit differently and that to play to their strengths is going to give you the best working team you could possibly have is really important and maybe something that isn’t always talked about in all workplaces.”

Paige Jeffrey. Thanks to her, Michelle Jones and Emma Case for being my guests on this show. I will link you to more information about women and neurodiversity under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com. And thanks to Emma for approaching me in the first place about covering this topic.

I also want to say thank you to Mary Sier for her help with research for this episode.   

You listeners are a big part of The Broad Experience – every one of the women in today’s show is a listener with a story to tell…which just proves my belief that normal people are more interesting than most celebrities.

If you enjoy this non-celebrity podcast or think it could help someone else please pass it on – email, social media, however you want to do it.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time.

There will be a bit of a longer than usual break before you hear from me again because I’m taking the time to get some new interviews done for some new shows. I’m also traveling to see my family for the first time in 18 months.

In the meantime, I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks as ever for listening.

Episode 175: Rejecting Resilience

Show transcript:

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

This time…rejecting resilience at work.  

 “You’re supposed to be the person who has all the answers. Like, I was doing a very radical thing in terms of being a physician and sharing with the world that I don't have it all together.”

And someone who’s dedicated her young career to helping Black women with their mental health…

“There are some clients who after a session they’re like, man, I’ve never been able to talk about this but just thank you for being with me every week, thank you for listening to me, validating me.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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Today, Dr Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo runs her own business: Melanin and Medicine.

She is also a pediatrician who has worked all over the world – from New York City and Boston, to Cuba, Malawi, Kenya, and South Africa.  

Omolara grew up in Queens, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. Her mum was a visiting nurse when she was young. After school, Omolara would go with her on her rounds…

“And I was her assistant, so get the dressing, get the gauze.”

But she says it was another woman who inspired her to become a doctor, when she was just five years old.

“I was always around my pediatrician, I had a lot of sinus and throat issues and so I'd always go and she was a Black woman and just so caring, so nurturing, I loved this woman… And I thought of the fact that somebody who's not a part of my family, but a part of our lives, I thought that's a really special place to be. And I wanted to replicate that.”

Add that to what she saw went she went out on rounds with her mom, and she was attracted to the idea that medicine was a way to heal the body, yes, but more than that, it was a way to connect with people on a pretty intimate level.

Her parents were thrilled with her chosen career path…in fact she says they probably helped push her in that direction too, keen to see their daughter excel in their new country.  

Fast forward close to 20 years and Omolara is standing in an interview room at medical school. Although she herself had a Black female doctor as a kid, they were still a rarity, and she was still an unusual applicant. She’d prepared her speech about why she wants to follow this path. She’d practiced it multiple times, and she launched in…

“And so everything came out beautifully about my story, what's going on, why I want to be a doctor. And then the first thing after I finished my monologue, was ‘wow, you're really articulate.’ And I was just like…did you hear what I said? I don't know if you heard it, or if you were just amazed by the fact that I could put words together coherently, despite the fact that I am a college graduate and, you know, and applying to medical school.”

Now of course she didn’t say any of that. She knew something was off, but she didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it back then.

She says the Black women she met and connected with at medical school…they really bonded. She says like people in the army, they went through things no one else could understand, not even their families. And what they learned there – what they were taught, she says – was to be stoic…resilient…

“You know, in my work right now, where I focus on black women physicians, I think that is why it's particularly important because many times there's an inability to be vulnerable, which is what we've learned in medical school. We learn that vulnerability is not the way that you are able are supposed to practice. Although what I've learned culturally is it’s exactly the opposite. Like in terms of the more vulnerable I am about my situations and what I'm going through, I actually resonate a lot more with my patients of color and my Black patients.”

Omalara has been dedicated to children’s health her entire career. Specifically getting under-served kids from immigrant or minority families access to good care.

By her early 30s she’s seeing patients, she’s teaching, she’s setting up programs to serve children and their families…she’s married and she’s had her first baby.

It was a lot. She had become a doctor to her family’s delight, she was doing work she cared deeply about, and she was very much a minority – Black women doctors make up about two percent of doctors in the U.S. She felt a lot of pressure to be good at her job, and to prove herself. She says she never said no to an opportunity.

“So I remember that if someone needed me to speak for something, I had no time to do it, I’d figure out a place, I'd probably cancel a weekend that was supposed to be with my family in order to do that. I remember seeing patients and being so afraid of like, if my notes were fine enough that if people… would people say anything about my notes, that I would stay sometimes up to 12:00 AM, after seeing patients in the clinic, basically the cleaning team knew my name by that time…”

Meanwhile she says she’d experience indignities at work, comments, slights…and she says it was never one person, or one thing…

“Like there are multiple times when, you know, we were in, I would be in meetings and I had, I was basically an expert in the topic and, and would raise my hand to speak and would always be overlooked. And were dealing with those things. But then there were these things where it was almost like, um, I think people call it stereotype threat where it's kind of, I don't want people to think that I am lazy, not good, so I'm going to do above and beyond. And so that there's not even a trace of that. And I think that medicine sometimes rewards that.”

She says self-sacrifice is generally seen as a plus. And that reminds me of conversations I’ve had with other female doctors for this show.

The other women in medicine I’ve interviewed are white – but Omolara says on top of some of the gender stuff she was dealing with stereotypes about who Black women are, and the ‘strong Black woman’ trope. The idea that she could handle anything, that Omolara would always get it done… for ages she believed this herself.

“…and so when you have both a trope that says that, and the work that you do, it's kind of a recipe for disaster where you are also really scared of saying no and potentially jeopardizing or alienating yourself, and potentially saying the wrong thing that might make someone think that you're being angry or hostile and potentially that jeopardizing your job.”

She says that worry was ever present for her…so she didn’t speak up about the comments and assumptions that belittled or stereotyped her. She had a good job. She’d made her family proud. She didn’t want to rock the boat.

 She points out that recently there have been news reports about black women physicians who spoke up about racism and sexism at their institutions, and lost their positions…

“And I think that fear was in my mind about well, this is all I have, I have no other things. So let me make sure I conform myself, follow the rules, don't make waves, and make sure that I do it really, really well.”

AM-T: “What relationship do you think your upbringing and the way your parents raised you had to do with the way you felt you had to conduct yourself?”

“Ashley…what a good question. So I think many children of immigrants will feel that there is a duty when we think about our parents and we think about what they left and, and how much, how hard they work. My parents worked in a factory, although they were trained professionals, initially, and also how hard they do everything just for us, that there is this thought of how do I pay them back? How do I make sure that they're the most proud people? And I think that a lot of the over-achieving that happened to some extent is, I'm just compelled to like help people, but to some extent of thinking that, okay, validation, let me make sure it was this good enough - was this good enough? And I think when you get accolades for the work that you do, you feel like, well, that's a testament to them. And it almost is like, okay, well, maybe it is worth it because at least it's showing in a good light my family and all of those connections. That there is a deep component, especially for, I know in the Nigerian culture, there is a very deep component around education, and what does the end product look like?”

During this time she had a second daughter. Her girls are a couple of years apart. So on top of burnishing the end product she was tending to them, driving them from place to place as they got older…we’re going to talk more about her family setup later, but suffice it to say that Omolara was doing the bulk of the childcare, then working late into the night.

After years of doing it all, in 2019 everything changed.   

“I was seeing patients, I was educating, I was starting programs, leading them…and it hit a wall. I actually stopped seeing patients for a few months. And then I found myself hospitalized. I found myself over the course of one week going from nauseous and dizzy to being unable to move my right side of my body and unable to walk.”

For a while she didn’t know what was wrong…was it cancer…what was causing her body to behave like this? Her life had changed in a matter of days.

“The woman who would travel and do everything for everyone couldn't even go to the bathroom by herself. And as I sat there, my brother called me and said, ‘Omolara, I need you to sit here and just think about you and what brings you joy.’ And I couldn't even answer that. I had no clue what brought me joy. And that was the moment where I realized, how many of us are like this? How many of us are on the outside as Black women taught to suppress our emotions, taught to care for everyone, but also taught to be uber independent, and end up with some physical or mental health crisis?”

That realization caused her to pivot. More on that a bit later in the show.

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Like Omolara Uwemedimo, Camesha Jones got into her line of work because she wanted to help people. But her personal experience also played a part.

Camesha is a social worker and therapist based in Chicago. But less than ten years ago she was a student.

“During my final year in undergrad I was under immense stress. I was working 20 hours a week, in school fulltime, and at that time I knew something was off, cause I’m like, I shouldn’t be this stressed and this overwhelmed all the time.”

She started to experience depression-like symptoms, but she put it all down to stress…told herself she’d get through it.

“And I think a lot of people are like this, where they are noticing changes in their mental health but they don’t necessarily attribute it to a mental health condition…it’s more so like I’m just going through a lot, or I’m just really, really stressed.”

The summer before she due to move to Chicago to get her graduate degree she experienced a few different crises. She was told she had bi-polar disorder. Which initially she rejected because of the stigma she associated with that label. She ended up in an outpatient program, seeing a psychiatrist…but not seeing her experience as a black woman reflected anywhere. She didn’t feel they really got her.

Ultimately that experience and her own efforts to improve her mental health led her to start an entrepreneurial venture – it’s called Sista Afya, and it provides mental health support to black women in Chicago, many of whom have never had the opportunity to get it before.

Camesha says she’d seen so many Black women beginning with her own family members, downplay their own wellbeing and see it downplayed by society.

“For me it was important to say that Black women deserve quality mental healthcare, they deserve the space to connect with one another, to receive support and to heal.”

Another thing that galvanized her was the number of mental health clinics the city of Chicago shut down in the last decade…often in black and brown neighborhoods…

“So if you think about that, that was a political decision that disproportionately impacted black and brown communities so where do those people go? How do we fill that gap?”

She says Sista Afya helps do that. As a therapist she sees everyone from women on public assistance to professionals with PhDs.

AM-T: “And has your work changed a lot during the pandemic?”

“Yes, yes, the demand is through the roof. That is the biggest thing that I’ve seen, and not just for myself but for other therapists in the field, is I don’t think the mental health field has ever experienced this high of a demand for services, so that’s one thing. The other things is working with people who have contracted Covid, people who never had mental health symptoms before and are now experiencing them for the first time. And then people who have existing mental health conditions and now it’s worse, because of all the stresses related to the multiple pandemics – so we have Covid 19, we have political issues, economic issues, racial injustice issues…if you think about that particularly in the black community, I don’t want to necessarily say black people are necessarily experiencing worse stressors, I just think it’s different for us.”

She says her clients are grateful for the opportunity to talk to a professional, to have their mental wellness considered a priority.

“There are some clients who after a session they’re like, man, I’ve never been able to talk about this but just thank you for being with me every week, thank you for listening to me, validating me …I will say most of my clients do say thank you, and that means a lot because this is not an easy job, you’re holding a lot of heavy things that people are going through.”

AM-T: “I was gonna ask you about that, I mean it is a lot to carry yourself, you must have ways of managing your own - the burden of this job. I mean I know a lot of therapists have a therapist, I hope you do.”  

“Yes, I have a therapist, I see her every two weeks, and more if needed.”

Camesha is only 29. She says there’s a lot else she wants to do outside of her professional life – live in different countries, have a family. But it is really important to her to keep advocating for the mental health care of women who haven’t had a lot of access to these services. Because they need them as much as anyone.

“We know if we’re not OK mentally a lot of other areas of our lives deteriorate, and sometimes people don’t see mental health as being something that should be really prioritized or attended to, but I believe it’s literally the gateway to healing. It’s the gateway to having the life that you want.”

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Omolara Uwemedimo has done a lot of work on her mental health in the past two years – as well as her physical health. Her tests in the hospital finally revealed that she had multiple sclerosis. That explained the changes to her right side, her sudden inability to walk.

Today she’s 39, and she’s a lot better, but her right side is still affected. She says she can feel stress these days in her leg or arm…so she’s unapologetic about needing naps. Also doing yoga.

It is a big change from the old days when she kept pushing herself to do more. And her workplace happily gave her more.

“When I left, when I was hospitalized, my work was distributed to five different people. And that was a wake -up call.”

She knew there were a lot of other Black women like her, in medicine and academia, who felt they had to keep out-performing just to stay in the game. She initially started an online support group based around black motherhood…

“But then I realized that there were these group of women who would never talk that were in the group. And they were physicians like me. And I realized that there was an inability to be vulnerable in larger spaces because you're supposed to be the person who has all the answers. Like, I was doing a very radical thing in terms of being a physician and sharing with the world that I don't have it all together. And I wanted to create a space for them because I know how much work it is not just to be a black woman, but to be a black woman who is not only caring for family, friends, but also caring for patients, and holding that load. And a lot of time keeping it all in.”

That’s when her business Melanin and Medicine was born. She wanted other doctors to be able to do what she hadn’t before she got sick: reject the idea that they were superwomen, and that the workplace needed their resilience to function…

“That piece has been something that I've really worked in the coaching and the strategy work that I do with a lot of the women I'm blessed to work with, because it's unlearning the fact that you can be more than that and that you can say no, and it's okay to say, ‘I don't have time to do that. And no, I'm not as strong as you think I am and I can’t do five jobs.”

She finds the work incredibly rewarding – so rewarding she has to remind herself not to over work in this new life she’s created.  

She says she’s finally spending time nurturing her kids – not just feeding and bathing them but talking to them, listening to them, telling them about what she does, why it’s important. They know she needs to rest and take care of herself.

It wasn’t until she got sick that the whole family was jolted into doing things differently. Including her husband.

“He was like, Oh, I guess I have to do this now. Right. And now I ask, and now he's there and he does everything, but it wasn't, I asked him and he wouldn't do it. It was like, we never asked, we just thought, that that was what we were supposed to do. Do everything.”

AM-T: “Oh…so you mean you as the mum had that thing of, ‘this is my job, as well.’”

“Correct.” 

AM-T: “And my husband is the man of the house and he doesn’t really do the kids…”

“Correct, correct.”

After all she’d seen her own mother do everything when she was a kid. But in the last couple of years her mom has told her, you think I wouldn’t have liked some help if I could get it? Her family supports her career shift.

AM-T: “Is there anything you’d like to say that you haven’t said, particularly about what your hope is for the future for black women in your field?”

“I think the biggest thing that I hope is that we get loud, that we take up as much space as possible, that we allow women who are coming into this field to see that as the norm, and that we recognize that safety and security comes at a cost, and that a lot of times the risk is staying where you are and staying in that place of settling - not shifting. And so when I see women understanding that that's the actual risk now, that's a generational legacy. If we can change the strong black woman trope to that one, I think that would be a really cool thing for black women professionals at large, not just physicians.”

Dr. Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo. You can find out more about her work at OmolaraMD.com. Thanks to Omolara and Camesha Jones for being my guests on this show. I’ll also include links to both of their work under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.

That’s the Broad Experience for this time.

This one-woman podcast has been going for nine years. The world of women in the workplace has changed in some ways and in others, not so much.  Of course the pandemic has caused huge changes to the world of work and I want to look at how all this is affecting women in more shows later this year.

Please help support my work on the show either by leaving a review or giving a donation of whatever size via the support tab at TheBroadExperience.com – listener support pays for the website, for a new mic I just got. And it is just so nice to know that you’re out there and appreciate the show enough to help it keep going.  

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

Episode 174: Alcohol and Work

Show transcript:

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

This time… women are drinking a lot more alcohol than they did a few decades ago…and sometimes the stress of work can help turn a habit into a problem.  

“You know it’s very easy for us to creep into imposter syndrome as young professionals: ‘I don't know why they hired me. I'm going to get fired.’ All of those things. And drinking can shut that voice out.”

And you might assume the pandemic had made things worse for anyone struggling with an addiction to alcohol. But that’s not universally true.  

“Women take this opportunity of isolation and lockdown, and actually use it to their advantage on their recovery journey. So they are saying things like wow, I’m not drinking because I’m not being put in social situations where I’m feeling pressure to drink.”

Women, alcohol and work…coming up on The Broad Experience.

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Britain is a boozy culture, and one of the things I remember from my first ever job is how much socializing was a part of office life. And socializing always meant drinking. My abiding memory of that time is going to the pub at lunchtime on a Friday and spending at least two hours there – drinking lots of wine – then coming back to a sleepy hour or two of work.

Today depending on where you work drinking can still be a big part of the culture. Women now share in what was formerly a man’s world – the workplace – but our bodies don’t deal as well with alcohol. Yet we often feel pressure to join in and keep up.

Lisa Smith was in her twenties and working as a lawyer at one of the big corporate law firms in New York City when her extremely social drinking became something else…

“That is actually when I became a nightly drinker when I was in my first year of practice, living in Manhattan alone for the first time.”

Lisa says she’d always drunk a lot as a young adult. She was a big partyer in college. But looking back, she sees the seeds of her drinking were planted in childhood.

“I grew up in the seventies, my parents had happy hour every night. My dad got home. Like my mom would pull out the JMB scotch and the Triscuits and put it all out. My dad would change his clothes and they would drink to good health. And, you know, for a kid who was really anxious and fearful like myself, like there was a lot of safety in that, that I saw growing up that was, ‘we're all together.’ This is... They would drink to your health each night. But it became my favorite time of the day.”

It wasn’t until much later – after she finally sought treatment for alcoholism – that she was diagnosed with serious depression, and anxiety…but she already had those underlying issues  when she began her job at a prestigious firm.

And like so many law associates before and after…she found it grueling.

“I might not get my assignment turned around from the more senior lawyer or hear what was going on, what I needed to get done that day until noon, maybe, sometimes it was four o'clock in the afternoon, and then the day would start. And when the work came in, it had to get done. So there were all-nighters all the time. And a lot of it as a junior lawyer, you know, it is really, it's the grunt work you're not doing, you know, sophisticated, exciting, legal work. You're really learning. I mean, the best way I learned how to be a lawyer was by watching the lawyers around me and sitting in meetings and listening. But the things that I was responsible for were incredibly detailed. And, you know, so the fear of making a mistake on something was incredible and so it's a scary time. It's a stressful time. And it's exhausting.” 

On a good night she’d get out of the office at 7p.m. Other nights it was more like 9p.m., 11, or later. So she’d go home, stand in front of her fridge in her underwear and pick a beer or wine or whatever she had in there. She’d have a glass or two in an attempt to wind down…

“… trying to find out a way to, for one, go from 60 to zero and get to sleep at the end of the day, but also, to just shut my brain off, you know, all that stress of the day, all that thinking about all these things and being in this intense place all the time, I just wanted to turn it off. You know, it's very easy for us to sort of creep into imposter syndrome as young professionals. You know, there's a lot of, kind of, I don't want to say fear, but there's a lot of apprehension that, ‘Oh my gosh, am I not doing a good job. I don't know why they hired me. I'm going to get fired.’ All of those things. And drinking can shut that voice out.”

Meanwhile she says the legal profession normalized heavy drinking. Every client victory was celebrated with drinks…many nights after work ended at the bar…and Lisa just saw it as blowing off steam. Which she very much needed to do. But when she was home alone it was different. She was drinking more and more…

“I would say, you know, I really shouldn't be having that third glass. And you know, that's not the cocktail hour that my parents had anymore. That's really drinking. And then it would be a bottle. And I would think, well, that's when I sort of crossed into, you know, I need to drink because it's the only way I can cope with this job - I cope with my life overall. And it did, it creeped from that sort of couple of drinks to three to a bottle to then I'd start waking up in the morning and thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, did I open a second bottle last night?’ And I usually had, and at a certain point, I just got used to having that feeling. that hung over, kind of, I operated that way. That's that was just, I was never, truly not hung over once I started drinking every night.”

Still, like so many young women in big cities she put pressure on herself to go to gym first thing in the morning. And she says no one at work knew. She operated fine at the office. This was all going on in her twenties into her thirties. And she knew it was getting out of control.

“And so one morning I woke up and thought, okay, I, this has got to end. And I can't, I am not buying a bottle of wine tonight. I am not drinking. And if I go to the wine store tonight, if I buy a bottle of wine, then I'm an alcoholic. Then I have an addiction to alcohol. And I remember that night standing in the wine store, picking out a bottle of wine.

And I used to go to different wine stores in my neighborhood. I lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan because I didn't, you know, God forbid the people who own the liquor store thought I came in there every night. And, I remember that when I picked up that bottle of wine, I remember just thinking, okay, this is it. I guess I am an alcoholic…and that's okay. That's going to be okay because I'm a quote unquote, high functioning alcoholic.”

She says every time she entered a new stage she had a justification for it. Drinking at lunchtime with workmates? Didn’t the French drink wine at lunch? Americans were so uptight about this stuff.

She made peace with what she knew was a bad situation. At around 30 years old she stopped contributing to her work retirement account because she told herself, what’s the point? I won’t live to be 40. I drink too much.

This slide of Lisa’s went on for 12 years…now during that time she switched jobs – she stopped practicing law and went over to the administrative side of the business.

She was married for a while and moved out of state. But when that marriage ended she came back to New York. This was just after 9/11, which was a terrible time for the city. And for Lisa. She was drinking in the morning by this time, and she says she soon added cocaine into the mix to offset the effects of the alcohol and be able to function during the day.

“If you saw me, when I sort of came to, at like seven in the morning, you would look at me and go, that woman is sick. There's something really wrong with her. You know, I'd be throwing up, it was a mess. And then if you saw me two hours later, once I got calibrated with cocaine and alcohol together and got that sort of crazy balance going, then you would think like, Oh, hi, there's Lisa. And I would sit in meetings like that at 8.30 in the morning with a room full of partners.”

AM-T: “Was there one particular incident that spurred you to get help?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was in, I was really, you know, I’d wake up in the morning and wish I hadn't woken up. I would just like roll my eyes and be like, Ugh, not again. But then when morning it was a Monday morning, I had gotten all calibrated and I had to go into work. So I was in, you know, my work stuff. I had my, I had my makeup on, I had my laptop, my New York times heading to the elevator to go to work. And I became like, overcome with this physical sensation. And I thought, Oh my God, I'm having a heart attack. Or, Oh my God, I finally overdosed. I now know that it was a panic attack, but somehow for some reason in that moment where I really thought like, okay, I am going to die now. Like something snapped in me. And I said, wait, wait, I don't want to die right now. I don't want to die right here in the hallway. And I knew the only thing I could do was get help.”

So she turns around, goes back to her apartment and calls her doctor. And tells them she needs to go into detox – and she knew she’d need a medicated detox in a hospital. So she gets that set up. And then after that, it wasn’t her family she called, or her friends…

“The first thing I did was open my laptop and email my office and say, listen, I had a medical emergency over the weekend, please don't worry about me. All is fine, but I am in the hospital. So I'm going to be out of touch, but I'll see you next Monday. And please don't worry. All is fine. Um, because, you know, while I would come clean to anybody in my life, I was not coming clean at work. Uh, I was afraid of the stigma. I was afraid that I had left on the Friday before considered, you know, a reliable, capable, smart member of the team and that if somehow they found out which I assumed they would, what was wrong, I would never be considered the same again. I would be seen as weak, deficient, certainly not reliable, possibly amoral, I just wasn't willing to take that chance.”

AM-T: That’s very telling that work was the first person you contacted…but you didn’t let on…”

“Yeah. And I know now I really was far from alone in that, there was a big study done by Hazelden, Betty Ford and the American Bar Association. And the numbers are super high for lawyers with alcohol use disorder. And when the survey asked, why don't you seek help, um, then there were two answers far and above the rest. One was, I'm afraid of what my colleagues will find out and think less of me. And second was, I know you're telling me that there are these free and confidential resources out there, but I don't believe that, I think my privacy is going to be violated. And then I'm back to number one. So it's all stigma. So when I talk about the fact that stigma kills it's true - stigma is keeping people from getting help and too many times that not, not everybody by far is as fortunate as I have been in, you know, in getting help and getting better.”

Lisa never told that firm what had happened – they never knew she’d been an addict or was in recovery. When she left there after a year or so and went somewhere else she only told that employer just before her memoir came out – ten years into her time there. She says they were wonderful. But that fear of crashing her career – it hovered over her for more than a decade.

Today, Lisa lives in California with her husband. She is the author of the book Girl Walks Out of A Bar. She left her last law firm a few years ago to concentrate full-time on speaking to law schools, law firms about addiction, support, and recovery – and how to create work cultures that don’t rely so much on alcohol.

I’m going to talk to her again about alcohol and workplace culture a bit later in the show.  

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Lisa went through her hell long before the pandemic hit.

But we know that alcohol sales are significantly up this last year…and we know from a recent study that women – mothers – are drinking more.

Dawn Nickel is…co-founder of the She Recovers Foundation. She started it with her daughter ten years ago. It provides support to women in recovery from a lot of different things – although Dawn says around 80 percent have struggled with substance use.

Dawn is based in Victoria, British Columbia. We spoke by phone.

I asked her first, do women face different issues from men in coming forward and saying…’I have something I need to recover from…’ is it different for women?

“Incredibly so, and there’s one main reason for that, and that is the stigma associated with mental health or substance use disorders, right. If I’m a mother who am I gonna tell that I have a substance use problem but not be afraid someone’s gonna come and take my children…if I have a mental health disorder who am I gonna tell and not be afraid my boss is gonna find out? It is different for men, it just simply is…and with regard to substance use disorder, although it affects more men than women, women have much more negative experiences with substance abuse disorders, for physiological reasons as well as stigma and other reasons, so it disproportionately affects women negatively.”

AM-T: “It’s interesting, I mean it can’t be that great for men either to tell a supervisor that they have a problem and might be going to rehab…I mean do you think it’s worse for women in particular because we have an expectation to quote – behave ourselves?” 

“Absolutely, it’s a whole gender role thing right, we’re supposed to be good women, good mothers, good wives. So we’re demonized I think when we have these issues. For men I think – if there’s a husband in a family, or the male partner, off he goes to treatment while the wife or female partner or other partner stays home…in gay couples may be different…but men can go off to treatment if there’s somebody who stays home to take care of the kids.”

She says with women, it is still different. Being the primary caregiver does hamper many women from getting treatment.

“Women seek treatment and support at lower numbers than men do.”

Now my theory about life in the pandemic had been that if you already had a problem with alcohol, it was bound to get worse with all the pressures of the last year…and Dawn says for some women in the She Recovers community, that’s true…

“The pandemic and all of the things that come along with it, whether it’s worries about your job, or your partner’s job, or your parents who you can’t visit because they’re in a care home, or your children who you have to take care of, you don’t know how to home school – for some women, for a portion of women in our community it was a last straw, this was it – some of it returned to drinking, or increased their drinking and they’re off now, they’re off doing their thing. So that’s been hard to watch.” 

But for others, she says, this crazy year has had the opposite effect…

“The other side of the spectrum which has been such a beautiful surprise actually for me to witness, has been watching women take this opportunity of isolation and lockdown, slow down, and use it to their advantage on their recovery journey. So they are saying things like, ‘wow – you know, I’m not drinking because I’m not being put into social situations where I’m feeling pressure to drink.’”

They’re not meeting up with friends for dinners out, and Dawn says crucially most of them are not going into work so there’s no after-work socializing pulling them in. These women have been able to use the time at home to the benefit of their health.

Dawn says there’s another thing she’s noticed about her community of women in recovery during these past months.

“I think there’s a high percentage of women who have really taken this opportunity to reflect on whether they’re in the right work or not. We are kind of facing death in the last year, we’re seeing so much of it, we’re learning so much about it…I’m one of them, right, thinking just in case my time is more limited than it might be a year or so ago, am I in the right work right now, am I doing the right thing? So for the women who have the privilege of having the mental and emotional space to explore what this time has meant for them, I do see a lot of re-thinking.”

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As I said earlier, my first job was in an office where heavy drinking was a given. My second job wasn’t much different. And when I got to New York and worked in advertising, it was similar – a testosterone-filled workplace where drinking with your colleagues after work was just being a good team player. It was about fitting in.

The only difference was in New York, no one slunk in late and obviously hungover after a night out.

Lisa Smith says in the legal world, drinking and career progression have been aligned for ages. 

“I started working in New York in 1991, and total old boys club. It was a bonding thing with the team. You know, I might be sitting at my desk at eight o'clock at night and a partner on a deal would come by and say, ‘Hey, a bunch of us are going to go to the bar. You want to come?’ And I would say, yeah, I want to come, because one, I wanted to drink. And two, you know, I wanted to be part of that scene and part of that culture. And I was one of the few women who was, and I have to say, I do think that the fact that I was one of the women who could go to the bar and talk about sports and all of those kinds of things, I think that was part of why I was well-liked in my job.”

She’s pretty sure she got career opportunities she wouldn’t have if she’d stayed at her desk or gone home, instead of going out.

And she says other women lawyers still face this dilemma… 

“We tend to want to please everybody, right? So when the partner knocks on the door at eight o'clock at night and says, do you want to go to the bar…that people pleasing idea of trying to make everybody happy can be a bit of a conflict I think for women, more than men, as I've seen it happen.

I do think that this next generation coming up is a lot more able to find their footing on that. I have seen now for the first time, junior lawyers who have said, when they've been approached to go out to the bar at the end of the night, and they'll say, ‘no thanks, I've got a yoga class’ or ‘no, thanks. I've got plans tonight.’”

Today in her work she talks to law firms about their cultures…and how they should focus less on alcohol as a social glue. She had been doing this for a while and it wasn’t getting much traction, until a few years ago. 

“And then the #MeToo movement hit. All of a sudden, everybody wanted to talk about it because the firms had put together the fact that most times you are dealing, you know, with something, with a #MeToo incident gets reported, or there is some inappropriate activity, invariably there's alcohol involved…I spoke to one firm and this is right after #MeToo. And the managing partner said, he's like, ‘you know, we are taking on this drinking issue all the time. And we told everybody, when you go out for drinks, the firm is not paying for shots anymore. No more shots.’ And I was like, well, it's a start, I guess.”

At the last law firm where Lisa worked they had a 100th birthday party…invited all their clients…it was held in a fancy venue in Manhattan…and normally they’d have a lot of alcoholic drinks waiting for guests to pick up on the way into the venue, including a signature cocktail. This time they also included a signature mocktail – a virgin Mohito…that guests could pick up on their way in…

“And there were so many people that did that and I had a client say to me, ‘I'm so glad you did this. This was such a great idea. You know, I felt like I had to come tonight to celebrate, but I have to get on the train and go home and do math with my kid…it's Tuesday night, I wasn't going to drink.’ I would never advocate for removing alcohol from the workplace. But what I do advocate for is understanding that it's not the only thing and that if we are going to not make it so that the person who goes out to the bar the latest gets the best bonding experience and opportunities, we have to be conscious. And I do think the pandemic gives a lot of workplaces a real opportunity to reset and rethink alcohol coming back. Right? What used to always be doesn't have to be the same anymore.”

Maybe it won’t be.

And as Lisa said a little earlier, she sees young women having a really positive effect on the workplace. In her work in support of lawyers in recovery she’s noticed them speaking up, talking to management about things she’d never have dared to in her day…really taking on office culture.

“Women are starting to become more vocal about what that means for not just drinking, not just saying, you know, we really need to deemphasize here. We really should be doing something else, or I don't want to participate in that, but saying what they think all around about what the workplace should be like - we've always just kind of conformed to the male workplace. And I think that we're seeing more and more of women being willing to speak up, to try to help better their workplace. And I think that redounds to the benefit of women, but also to men. There are a lot of men out there who have no interest in going to the bar just as much.”

Lisa Smith is the author of Girl Walks Out of a Bar. Thanks to her and to Dawn Nickel of She Recovers for being my guests on this show.  

I will link you to more information about Dawn and Lisa under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.

And just one more thing about this topic before we go – Lisa and I discussed something we’ve both noticed a lot here in the US. The way that drinking is clearly marketed directly to women as a lifestyle. There are those glasses you can get saying ‘mommy juice’ or ‘wine o’clock’ – there are yoga and wine sessions…art and wine…Lisa saw crates of wine at the supermarket stacked right next to the back-to-school supplies…

“All these things are very targeted to tell women, look it’s OK, and it’s even feminine, it’s even something that is special to the women, it’s not just you tagglng along with the guys. It’s your own thing.”

If you think this episode could be helpful to someone else please share it with them. This show really has traveled by word of mouth. Thanks to all of you who have told your friends and colleagues about it.

 That’s The Broad Experience for this time.

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

Episode 172: Speaking While Female

Show transcript:

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

This time…it’s Women’s History Month and we are taking a historical view of women as public speakers. Traditionally, stating one’s views in public was a man’s game…and women who spoke up got a lot of pushback…

 “They would say, ‘are you a man?’ The insinuation being if you were standing there speaking you were pretending to be male, you were overstepping your role, stepping out of your gendered role and into the territory of male behavior.”

 How the past relates to the present. Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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Listen to this snippet from a speech by the actress Dorothy Dandridge in 1963. She was standing in front of a crowd of 35,000 at a civil rights rally in Los Angeles, and she was introducing the main act: Dr. Martin Luther King.

“There have been so many wonderful speakers here this afternoon that I feel just a little bit  inadequate in making my little speech. But I must say I have never spoken for such a worthy cause before such a large audience…I am not a speaker, but I have to say what I have worked on that I must say…”

The self-deprecation, the insistence that she’s not really a speaker…it all feels familiar to those of us who dread speaking in public. Who am I to put my thoughts out there? And what if I stumble, forget what I’m gonna say, embarrass myself? 

Dana Rubin is a speechwriter and a speech coach who’s pretty obsessed with the history of women’s speech. For years she wrote speeches, taught men and women how to become better public speakers. She still does. And she noticed how many of the women hesitated to speak in public. To claim any expertise. To put their voices out there.

“And I began to wonder, why is it so challenging for so many women?”

So a few years ago she went to her bookshelf, to her speech anthologies, and began flipping through the pages. And that’s when she realized to her horror that the vast majority of speeches in there were by men.

“And when I say to my horror it was horrifying to see so few women represented, but it was also horrifying for me to realize that had been staring me in the face, the books had been on my shelves for years, and I had never fully appreciated that the way we have constructed public speaking and speech is as a male endeavor.”

That realization galvanized her. Yes, those books had some speeches by women like Elizabeth I, Margaret Thatcher, and Eleanor Roosevelt. But it was the same handful of speeches that cropped up over and over again. She started scouring anthologies, searching on the internet…and came across example after example of women’s speeches she’d never read or heard about, going back hundreds of years.

A couple of years ago she started building a speech bank of women’s speeches – you can find it at SpeakingWhileFemale.co. 

“And I have thousands of speeches now by women in history…not every one is historically significant but a lot are, and a lot of them are totally unknown, they’re not part of our school curriculum, they’re not recognized, they’re not in our pantheon of role models. And that really bothers me.”

Because she says women were speaking in public. But history didn’t make note of their speeches the way it did men’s. She says if only more of us knew about all the women of the past who were orators…who took up the challenge of speaking in public.  

And it was a challenge. Dana says women were regularly attacked for speaking up. They had fruit thrown at them and they were heckled all the time. The story goes that African-American abolitionist Sojourner Truth was speaking once in the 1800s…

“And someone called out from the audience, are you a man? So in defiance she ripped open her blouse to show them she wasn’t a man. But that was common, they would say, ‘are you a man?’ The insinuation being if you were standing there speaking you were overstepping your role, stepping out of your gendered role and into the territory of male behavior.”

AM-T: “I mean that’s not that different from today in many ways, especially if you think about women speaking out online, and the abuse they get for speaking up about things on social media.”

“Well, we all know social media is a hornet’s nest and anyone who does anything that is unpopular to anybody can and does get victimized, but women are certainly at the top of that list. Women who put their opinions out there, left, right, any kind of opinion, women get challenged just because they’re using their voices, because they’re presenting themselves as experts, as authorities. When women put their voices into the world they are exposed and vulnerable and it shouldn’t have to be that way.” 

AM-T: “And I want to come back to the history in a minute but I want to go to a bit of your history…when you first got into the workforce for instance, were you then a confidence speaker, did you enjoy speaking in front of groups of people and standing up and stating your opinion?”

“No, I’m so glad you asked that because I historically have been a terrified speaker. In fact the reason I got into public speaking originally is cos when I was in my 20s I was asked to speak at an alumni org and I was at the podium and I was speaking and I just blacked out. It’s common occurrence in public speaking, all of a sudden I couldn’t remember what I had said previously, in the middle of a sentence, what I was supposed to say, I just had a blackout…and it was horrifying. I fumbled my way through it, I was a very timid speaker…not confident at all and I joined Toastmasters.”

Toastmasters is an international organization that teaches public speaking and leadership skills. Dana built up her own skills there, and ultimately that led to public speaking becoming her life’s work.

“To this day I would not say I’m a confident speaker, but I have discovered one of the keys to speaking more confidently is knowing your topic. The more you speak about a topic the more comfortable you are with it. And I always tell my terrified speakers, my speakers who are nervous about the platform: know your topic.”

I’ve always found the more passionate I am about a subject the likelier I am to give a good talk. And of course I get nervous before I speak. So do most of Dana’s clients.

“Right now I’m actually coaching a woman who’s in the NYPD, the New York Police Department, and she has to speak to her colleagues as part of her professional responsibilities and she is terrified, or has been terrified. And I just, I tell her, get up there and do it, I give her a whole range of strategies that she can use to calm herself down…and there are a lot of different strategies and any good speaking coach knows these. You have to explore, to find the ones that work for you, there’s a multitude of strategies you can draw on: you can talk about breath control, mindset, feeling your feet on the ground, having notes in front of you, there’s a whole bunch of different things you can do that’ll make it easier for you, everybody’s different.”

She says while many women struggle with public speaking it’s certainly not everyone. The younger the woman, she says, the likelier it is she has confidence in her own voice. But she says whoever is speaking, they have a fine line to tread while doing it - particularly in male-dominated environments…

“We don’t want to hide our identity, we don’t want to mask ourselves, we don’t want to be something other than who we are, but we have to play on their terms in that we have to project utmost confidence, we have to be sure of ourselves…we have to project knowledge and authority to be taken seriously. And to do all those things it is, has been and is still a man’s game and we have to learn how to play it on our own terms.

By the way I was a speechwriter for a year for the former head of the NYPD when it was Ray Kelly, and I learned an enormous amount about the New York Police Department. it is very much a man’s world and it’s a place where not a lot of emotion is expressed. They’re not comfortable with expressing of a lot of emotion so when they talk about incidents, crime incidents, they talk about them extremely factually, emotion is not normally part of the equation…and it’s important for women in that environment to abide by those rules and present themselves that way but still be true to themselves, to be authentic. It’s a challenge.”  

Another famously male environment of course…is politics…

[Fade up applause/Thatcher speech here]

Margaret Thatcher: “To those waiting with baited breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: you turn if you want to…” [much applause]

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher speaking to the Conservative Party Conference in 1980…

Thatcher: “The lady’s not for turning.”

Now Mrs. Thatcher reportedly sought voice lessons and by the time she became prime minister her vocal pitch was quite a bit lower than it was earlier in her career – when she’d been accused of being ‘shrill’.

So how do you abide by the unwritten rules but still stay true to yourself? Many women today would say – don’t tell me to lower my voice and sound more like a man. In fact I did a show on around topic a few years ago…it was a pretty heated debate.  

Dana says look, of course women have higher voices than men – we have shorter vocal folds, different hormones…

“So women have higher voices and higher voices have been interpreted as less powerful. I don’t think women should change their voices, I think women should speak like women. We want our voices to be aspects of our bodies, as they are. However if we want to sound powerful we need to speak as powerfully as we can, we need to speak in a powerful way, and that means minimizing our filler words, not apologizing, not backing into what we’re saying…and it also means lowering our pitch at the end of a sentence or the end of a phrase. When we want to hammer home a point we need to go down.”

We all use upspeak and it’s fine to use it sometimes, but she says to sound authoritative, to get people to receive your message, you need to end your sentences on a decisive note.

I just want to say a couple of things in the break here: first, thank you so much to all those of you who pitched in recently on the Facebook page with advice for a listener who had a particular work problem. I’m not going to lie, it can get lonely doing this show by myself and I love it when I’m reminded that there is a community out there and that you’re willing to help eachother. This isn’t the first time I’ve anonymized a listener query and posted it on Facebook so thank you again for always jumping in and offering up your own perspectives and advice.

Also…you know what hell this year has been for parents – in particular a lot of mothers. The new season of the Double Shift podcast just started – I’ve mentioned the show to you before, I’m betting some of you already listen. It’s a storytelling show that challenges the status quo of motherhood in America and this season the hosts Katherine Goldstein and Angela Garbes are focusing on what this pandemic has truly costs mums…I just listened to the first episode, it features a waitress in Mississippi who has had an incredibly challenging year…she is so raw and honest – I think it’s an interview Broad Experience listeners will really enjoy and they have a bunch more episodes coming. And just like this show is not just for women, the Double Shift isn’t just for mums either. They have plenty of dads and non parents like me who are fans as well.

They’re doing really important work. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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AM-T: “You and I were talking offline about the recent remarks by the now former head of the Tokyo Olympics Committee Yoshiro Mori…he mentioned that women talk too much in meetings, and they were all going to compete with eachother to talk. And this caused a massive storm, and he did end up resigning. What does that say about our voices in the workplace and how we are perceived? Japan is a very particular culture and society of course.”

“Yoshiro Mori is gone. He was the prime minister. He had the most visible position of leadership in his country. And his position with the Olympics was a very prominent one and with that remark he stripped back the veneer and showed us what he thinks of women in the workplace. And it’s really unfortunate. But that viewpoint must be widespread, there must be many, many people who object categorically to women’s voices. Women talk too much. That is a very, very old trope.”

“And I was looking in my archive the other day at a speech by a young woman, a schoolgirl named Anna Harrington in Massachusetts. She gave a speech at her school academy in 1793, and I’ll read you just the first line of what she said: “It is not unknown to you how much wit has been scattered on the subject of the loquacity of women.” So there she was referring to the idea that women are loquacious, that women speak too much, in 1793. This goes back a long time, the roots are very deeply embedded in all of our cultures, Japan might be a particular case of a very conservative and patriarchal society, but that’s the world that we live in.”

And that reminded me of a famous speech from about 8 years ago, made by then Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. She was addressing her political rival, then leader of the opposition Tony Abbott. I’m not gonna play you some of the most famous bits, they’re very easily found online…we’re jumping in near the end…

“Good sense, common sense…not the kind of double standards and political game playing imposed by the leader of the opposition…now looking at his watch because apparently a woman’s spoken too long, I’ve had him yell at me to shut up in the past. I will take the remaining seconds of my speaking time…”

Gillard faced a ton of sexism in her role as Australia’s first female prime minister, particularly as a woman without children – a lot of it really visceral and crude.

In fact Gillard probably wouldn’t be surprised by the existence of some early 20th century postcards Dana pointed me to.

“I came across some postcards that stem from the suffrage era. I’ve been a postcard collector for many years, so I have thousands of postcards, and during the latter years of the suffrage campaign postcards were really popular. They’d publish these anti-suffrage postcards – they were against the women’s rights movement and the women’s suffrage movement, and they’d show images of women being tortured because they were speaking. They’re images of women with their tongues or their lips being mutilated…their tongues being cut off, sliced, hacked, there are clamps on them and chains on them, some of them have plugs in their mouth, a lot of them have women’s tongues being nailed to wood…I mean these are torture scenes.”

And you can go on eBay and search using terms like women and misogyny and comic…and you’ll find these images for sale…being peddled as amusement…

“In what world would it be OK that we call these images comic? We both know if there were any images of others being tortured, of any black people being tortured, no one would call those comic. I mean it’s really outrageous that people consider those comic.

One of those images shows a woman with her tongue being sliced off by a giant pair of scissors. And here’s the thing that really infuriates me. Someone has taken that image and made it commercially available in a series of products – you can have that image framed for your wall, you can have it made into a pillow, you can have it put on a mug…you can have it made into a jigsaw. In case that image really delights and tickles you, you can have that image of a woman’s tongue being sliced off for your domestic enjoyment.”

In the same era as those postcards were being produced, this woman was speaking in the soon-to-be Soviet Union, advocating for women’s equality…this recording is about a hundred years old.

[Alexadra Kollontai speech here]

Here, Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai address a group of women. She begins…

“For many centuries woman was oppressed and had no rights. For many centuries she was just an appendage to the man, his shadow. The husband provided for his wife, so long as she obeyed her husband’s will, meekly endured her own powerlessness, her own domestic and family slavery.”

She goes on to urge the women of Russia to work, to build nurseries, maternity homes, public canteens. She says, “Your place, working women and peasant women, is under the red revolutionary banner of worldly victorious communism!”

Dana was happy to unearth that historic speech and link to it in her speech bank.

“And I’m always looking for more, so if any of your listeners have example of speeches they think belong in my speech bank I really welcome those, I invite them to email me share them with me so I can get them up on the site as quickly as possible. My goal with this project is for every young girl, and I do mean young girl, from Kenya to Kentucky, anywhere in the world she has access to the internet, I want her to go the site, read the words of a powerful woman, hear her speak, hear her voice, and be inspired to use their own voices.”

Just as Dorothy Dandridge was in 1963. 

Dandridge: “We as actors and actresses should take part in the most important drama this country has seen. And again the name of the drama is freedom.”

Thanks to Dana Rubin for being my guest on this show.

You can find the speech bank at SpeakingWhileFemale.co and there’s an email address you can use to contact her right at the top of the page. I’ll link you to more information about Dana and other resources for women speakers under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com. 

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks so much for listening.

Episode 171: Unconventional

Show transcript:

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

This time…what it means to have an unconventional career path… 

“I don't regret having such a strange and wandering work life. I don't regret it mostly because I don't see the point in regretting it, but I don't feel proud of it either. I feel like I am of a piece in this way. I mean it's how I roll. It's how I am.”

The messy business of getting to where you want to be – coming up on The Broad Experience.

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 When I left university I had quite a few friends who seemed to know exactly what they wanted to do with their lives. They went straight off to train as accountants, teachers, lawyers. I was envious…. To 21-year-old me, it seemed like they had everything sorted out. I had naively assumed that by the time I graduated from university I’d have miraculously turned into a fully fledged grownup who knew what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. That was not to be.

My own twenties were spent in a series of jobs in insurance, publishing and digital marketing…but they were jobs. I never felt I had a career until I was in my thirties and in radio. And even now, almost 20 years later, I still wonder if my choppy work life can be called a career.

On today’s show, we focus on the messiness of the unconventional career path. My guest is Erica Heilman. As some of you know, Erica is the host of the podcast Rumblestrip. Many of the characters, the stories she tells, are set in Vermont, where she’s from and where she lives…with her son Henry. He’s 17 now.

But I don’t want you to think this is two audio producers navel gazing because that’s not the point of this show. Many of us have had unconventional paths and I’m betting Erica and I aren’t the only ones who have asked ourselves sometimes, what the hell am I doing?

Erica and I are podcast pen pals – never met in person but we go back and forth a lot about the highs and lows of being independent podcasters.

AM-T: “All I know about your background is that television featured in it somewhere and that being a private eye featured. So how on earth did that bring you to audio?”

“Yeah, I think that I have one of the most, I mean, I didn't know this at the time ‘cause I was just trying to get through growing up and then becoming a grownup, but I have the most circuitous route to audio and also kind of the most hapless and sort of feckless life trajectory. I never had a plan. I mean, I went to musical theater school, for four years I took tap dancing.”

AM-T: “Who does that other than people who want to be on Broadway?”

“Who does that indeed. Oh my God. Who does that? And this was before Glee! Like who the hell does that? Nobody was doing musical theater, or they were doing it but they weren’t talking about it, because it was before Glee. The crazy thing is it never occurred to me. I mean a lot of the people I went to musical theater school with are still doing musical theater professionally and cause duh, like that's what we were there to learn how to do, but it never occurred to me in a million years that I would ever do musical theater professionally. So I don't know why I did that, but I think it was partly that I wanted to, I wanted to learn how to do something really well…but again, all my intentions were quite vague and once I graduated from college, I never was thinking I was going to go to New York and, you know hoof it around Broadway auditioning, which is what everybody else did.”

But she did end up in another famous city…

“And so I moved to Chicago and I started selling muffins at a muffin shop. And then I took up with an experimental theater company and we ended up doing Oklahoma…” 

AM-T: “I love Oklahoma.”

“I mean what is not to love about Oklahoma, right? But, except for that this was nothing like Oklahoma. It was only like Oklahoma in very abstract ways. You know, like a mini leather dress Oklahoma kind of approach, and then selling muffins during the day and thinking…and I spent a lot of time that first year out of college - I don't know if this is true for everybody, but I was really depressed. It was as though the soundtrack had stopped…”

AM-T: “It's a big transition to go from college/university life to work life. You have less freedom, you feel boxed in, it’s hard.”  

“Well, you don't know what's supposed to happen. Like I, because I have this problem of not being able to anticipate even what might happen tomorrow, I really didn't know what was going to happen…anyway, I moved to Chicago and sold muffins and thought you know, maybe what I’m doing now is selling muffins and this is what I’ll always do.”

It wasn’t. In the end, she only stayed in Chicago for a year. She found it harder and harder to drag herself to rehearsal for the theater company. Instead she’d sit in front of the news – specifically a show some of you in the US will know, it used to be called the McNeil Lehrer News Hour. Now it’s just called PBS News Hour.

“And every night I would have to leave midway through the show to go to play rehearsal. And every night I was resentful because I loved that show. I loved that show. I loved that it dared to be boring. I mean, that was their motto in fact - was dare to be boring - which is what I think news should get back to.”

Agreed.

So she leaves Chicago, heads home to Vermont, and gets a job milking cows for a few months. She then uses that money to go traveling with a friend, they get round-the-world tickets – and when she comes back to the US many months later…she still doesn’t have any concrete career plans, but then out of the blue…

“I met a woman who happened to work at McNeil Lehrer News Hour. And she said there was some sort of very lowly positions there. And I said, ‘I'm going to - that will be my position. I will have that position.’ And so I went and I got it and I moved to New York. And then what followed were a series of years in documentary television.”

That lowly position at the news show led to other opportunities in TV documentaries…and it turned out ultimately that TV wasn’t entirely Erica’s thing…but she was learning more and more about interviewing people, which is really what she felt like she wanted to do. She’s deeply interested in people, their feelings, their motivations…And she was living in New York, one of the most creative cities in the world.

By the late 1990s I was living there too, stimulated but also a bit intimidated…

AM-T: “I want to ask you about your feelings about working in a big, ambitious, thriving city like New York, right, because i realized maybe when I was about 30 that actually this wasn’t normal. Being surrounded by people who were this career driven, this ambitious, I didn’t have feel bad, because in other parts of the world, other parts of the US even, this wouldn’t have been the case, I would have been surrounded by much more normal people. But I felt a little, like I’ve said this on the show before, I have a B plus personality, not an A, I’m a B plus. So I’m used to be surrounded by A type personalities but I’m not really an A type myself, but you realize when you’re in big cities they are full of Type A people. Did you feel like you belonged in that environment, how did you feel about working in a crazy place like New York?”

“Well, for me, so I was coming from a very small town. So moving to New York, I mean there wasn't anything familiar or comfortable…it was profoundly disorienting, and talk about a soundtrack. It's kind of like suddenly the soundtrack was full on, but it didn't feel like it was the soundtrack to my life. You know, it was just really loud, but I didn't know whose life it was playing for. So it was a profound culture shock going to New York, and yeah, everybody had a project, everybody had an idea and everybody was, everybody was going somewhere really fast. And I did not feel that way. 

And again, I'm not, like of temperamentally I'm not going anywhere. Like that's, my nature is that the only thing that's ever going on is the question what's going on. And so that's a very present way of thinking, right? And so I don't know how to plan for the next step in my career. And I didn't then, and I still don't, but it was hard to not be more that way, living in New York. I mean, there were so many jobs around and I was working in a big building full of shows happening, that it was relatively easy to bounce from one to the next. So it wasn't that I couldn't find work ever, or that I wasn't forward moving in that regard. Like I was always working, but I had no idea where it was going and what I was pretty certain about, and I still have a lot of shame about this, is that I never thought that I would ever be the full-on… that I'd be the producer. Because being the producer meant being with your head on the chopping block, and I didn't think I was smart enough or good enough to ever be that person.”

She was associate producer, but she says she was never head producer for that reason – she just didn’t have the confidence. And maybe you’ve had this too, that sense of slight shame when you didn’t take a particular job or even try to apply for it…I have…but on the flip side looking back she doesn’t really mind because TV wasn’t her anyway…she says it was expensive to make, full of jostling egos…

“And I just thought all of this is all such bullshit, the way that this whole world of television operates. So I taught myself how to produce audio…I just kind of like wandering in the dark in a room, wandered toward audio because it allowed me to do what I wanted to do, which was interview people and edit, but I didn't have to raise $500,000 to do it.”

She left New York a couple of years after 9/11 and went home to Vermont. Around this time she also got pregnant… she had a baby, but she and her son’s father split up when he was just one. So now Erica is back in Vermont…on her own, with a toddler.

She had been working for a health website when she arrived back home. Then she got a job doing data entry for a friend’s company, then she started making some radio pieces on the side…something she really enjoyed. And then she landed a job she did for several years. She had this friend Susan, who she’d met in New York years when they both worked in documentaries. Susan now lived in Vermont as well, and she worked as a private detective. 

“So after being home in Vermont a while, she gave me work because it was very, it was a similar skillset to documentary work. It's essentially, find people and talk to them and figure out what happened.”

AM-T: “That’s so interesting because I do think people – you talk about being a private detective and people’s ears perk up and they think, hmmm, that’s interesting…”

“I know, everybody thinks…and you know it’s really funny too, Susan always says this too, is people always think they’d be a really good PI. People often say, I always thought I’d be really good at that…And you say, ‘yeah, yeah…right.’ And you know, the thing is, people are titillated and it is titillating. I mean, it’s, it was all crime. It was all criminal work that I was doing. So I guess on some level that is titillating. I mean, Lord knows there are enough podcasts about crime. Everybody wants to hear about dead girls apparently. But this was a lot of, you know, pedophilia and child abuse and domestic abuse and really garish stabbings. And I mean, those are all perhaps titillating one at a time, but they become less titillating when you’re working on 20 at a time.”

But throughout her time as a private eye Erica was using her questioning skills and her listening skills – putting a story together, piece by piece. She says the problem is the pieced-together story was then just given to lawyers to use in court…it wasn’t HER story.

She was telling stories in her freelance radio work. But pitching stories, getting them accepted and aired…it was uphill work.

Erica wanted to tell stories of her own. Make something of her own. We were both late bloomers in this regard – like me she was in her forties when she launched her podcast, Rumblestrip…

“I remember of like a moment when I decided, and it was, there was just a moment. I think I was on a StairMaster and I remember thinking, Oh, now it's time to do that. It's simple. You have to just start doing that, or you're going to be disappointed. You're going to be a disappointment to yourself and to your son, if you don't start making consistently. And the way to make it consistently is to have, is to do it yourself and make a podcast. And then you don't need anybody's permission to air things.”

She says she made a lot of bad audio to begin with…but today her intimate, beautifully crafted show has listeners all over the world. She produces it single-handedly from home.

---

Erica has lived back in Vermont for almost two decades now…far from the cities where she’s worked in the past.  

AM-T: “Thinking back to New York and what we talked about, this endless current of energy and ambition that you’re surrounded by…I haven’t really talked to that many people for the show who live in rural parts of the world…I spoke to a young farmer once in Maine, I recently spoke to a volunteer firefighter in Oklahoma, but those are the exceptions…and I’m really curious, do you and your friends spend a lot of time talking about your careers. How does it feel compared to the big city life?”

“Yeah, that's a fascinating kind of area. Like what is, what does life mean in the city versus the country? What is the tempo of life? I mean, I think one of the things I remember vividly noticing when I moved to Vermont or came home to Vermont, was that nobody asked me, ‘what do you do?’ at a party. That was very noteworthy that the first question that people were asking me was not kind of, you know, well, what do you do? Nobody thought to ask that, which isn't to say that, I'm not saying that in New York it's horrible or that it's a horrible place where everybody is just ambitious.

I mean, what I miss about New York is just that people are extremely excited about what they're doing and want to talk about it. I wasn't moving in banker circles where ambition was just about climbing a ladder of some kind. I was with people who were really excited about what they were doing, but there's also a certain way in which that can be very tiring when you don't want to think about all that. You don't always want to be thinking about what you're doing. You know, the project that you're working on. And in Vermont, there was just a great silence that opened up around that. And that wasn't such a constant pressing question.”

She says living in a rural part of the country is different in other ways, too…

“Nobody does one thing. People do lots of things. You might be a carpenter and you know, a furniture maker and you're in a band and, oh, also you run marathons or whatever. People are self identified - they do many things. They are very seldom one thing. And also people very often don't have regular jobs here, at least in my experience, a lot of people here kind of piece lives together. So what they're doing is really interesting, but it's not quite so intensely singular as a lot of lives in New York.”

She does a mixture of things herself, but they’re all audio-focused – she makes her show, she makes audio for the Vermont Folk Life Center and other institutions, Vermont Public Radio.

AM-T: At this point now that you’re balancing your show and other audio work do you feel like you’re where you’re meant to be, are you happy where you’re at in your career? And do you think about it as a career I guess I should ask? Because sometimes I wonder about that myself, I think, do I have a career or do I just have a series of weird stages? I don’t know.”

“I think I am in the latter category of, I have a series of weird stages. I have never thought of myself as someone with a career. I just don't, I don't think of myself that way. But I'm very happy with where I am right now. I love what I do, although it's lonely and it's challenging in lots of ways, but I feel absolutely like this is what I want to be doing and where I want to be doing it. “

In this clip from one of Erica’s shows last year she’s interviewing a 15-year-old boy, Leland. He’s a neighbor of hers. She’s interviewed him every year for the past six years…   

[Erica and Leland clip here]

Erica says she is glad she moved back to Vermont all those years ago. She wants to record the  lives of Vermonters, the sounds of the place – that is her life’s work now. She says working in audio allows her to indulge a long love affair with the place where she grew up…

“I hear it differently. I experience it differently with a microphone and I, this is a place that I have a long-term love for. And also, which includes hate of, you know, it's a place that, you know, I remember vividly when I first came back here, there were certain bird sounds that came right up out of my childhood. They were deep sense memories, um, from childhood. And I realized, Oh, this place has a very particular sound to it that I know that is of me. And when I have a micro, now that I have a microphone, I feel like I'm chronicling something that is, you know, really, um, uh, cellular for me somehow, you know, I want to listen to it. I want, and I want to record recorded. I want, I mean, I want it to be recorded the sound of this place. Um, and I don't think I'll ever get tired of, of, of doing that.”

…

CLIP 2 ends: “The birds are still out but the peepers are starting…”

I wondered if Erica sees all the jobs she’s had over the years as helping her get to where she is now…or not?

“Yeah. I don't know how much my muffin jobs….you know, the muffin jobs went on for quite some time. I mean, I had a lot of muffin jobs and I don't know that they were awfully character-building or that they gave me any special insights. And frankly, when I think back, I do think back with a certain measure of shame at my absolute bewilderment, my chronic bewilderment in my life, that I never knew where I was heading. And it took a long time to get here. And I don't know that I wouldn't have started my show a lot earlier if I had, um…I don’t know, I want the answer to be different.

You know, I don't regret having such a strange and wandering, work life. I don't regret it mostly because I don't see the point in regretting it, but I don't feel proud of it either. I feel like I am of a piece in this way. I am of a piece. I mean it's how I roll. It's how I am, but I am not forward-thinking and so I've just taken what comes next, always.”

AM-T: “I should ask you this one question before we go – which is how do you view success, what to you is success?”

“Yeah, boy I mean we’ve talked about this a lot. I wish I had better, more inspiring answers. This is a question when you’re with independent podcasting that haunts one. How many listeners is enough listeners, how much money is enough money, what feedback loop is required to feel success?

I finally feel successful because finally I'm making something that I believe in, and that requires courage, and also that I am willing to fail with, because I care about it. I'm willing to fail in what I do, and that feels like success to me, or that's part of why I feel successful is that I finally feel willing to look stupid, in order to make something that I think is worth listening to.” 

AM-T: “Yeah, so for you success is bound up with what you do and how it makes you feel, not with earning a certain amount of money by a certain age or stage?”

“Yes, right, yes, absolutely. I think it's like, it feels like my first honest job in the sense that it feels true, it feels like it's part of me, it's not separate from me. And so that feels successful. It feels like I finally figured out a thing that feels true. And yeah, it is not financial. I mean, my son wonders this sometimes. Why do you not make more money? And why don't you seem to care? Or, why don't you have more listeners or why aren't you looking to become bigger and more successful? And I don't have answers. I don't know why I don't want those things or why those things aren't compelling to me, or compelling enough to work hard to get them, but they're not.”

Erica Heilman.

Last year Erica made a series of podcasts during Covid called ‘Our Show’ – they were made with tape that listeners around the world sent into her. At the end of last year The Atlantic magazine picked 50 best podcasts of 2020 and Erica’s series came in at number one.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. I will link you to more information about Erica and Rumblestrip under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com

 If you enjoy my one-woman show and you haven’t given it a review I would love it if you could – you can also give a donation of any amount at the support tab at TheBroadExperience.com.

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

Episode 170: Emergency: Women in Medicine during Covid

Show transcript:

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

This time, bringing change for women in emergency medicine.

This pandemic year has taken a huge physical and mental toll on them and their colleagues. My guest says the medical profession could do a lot to improve things.

“They can remove the stigma around needing mental health support so that physicians and other healthcare workers can feel safe, not to think that by seeking care and saving their own lives, they will also lose their careers.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

---

Before we begin…we’re going to touch on a number of different topics in this show from gender equity in medicine to questions about the Covid vaccine, but one of the things we’re going to talk about is suicide – just to give you a heads up.

I met Dr. Dara Kass on email about five years ago. She got in touch to ask me to speak at a small event she was organizing for women in medicine, and even though that didn’t work out and we never actually met, I kept following her work. During Covid I noticed she’d amassed a huge following on Twitter. Her tweets about Covid and other things reminded me I really did want to talk to her for the show.

[Doorbell sound] 

Dara is an emergency medicine doctor at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in upper Manhattan. 

“Hello, hello!

Nice to meet you…

Come, come…”

She has had both shots of the Pfizer vaccine and she was happy to have me to her house in Brooklyn to talk. I kept my mask on, but then she said, why don’t I just give you a quick Covid test right here? Out came a little packet…

“Close your mouth, put your head forward, look forward…”

Up went that skinny swab into my nose…

“Aaah! Oof…”

“OK…it’s totally fine…”

And within a few minutes we found it was fine. I was negative.

Dara lives in this house with her husband and kids, 13, 11 and 8. She grew up with an ER nurse for a mother. She says she was always attracted to emergency medicine.

“It actually suited my personality really well. I am probably an undiagnosed, but severe ADD person who really just likes running around and focusing on interesting things.”

Today, in her forties, she does less running around, but a mix of work still keeps her engaged. Pre-Covid, she spent quite a bit of time on advocacy work – traveling the country lecturing on how to improve equity in the medical field. She co-heads a group called FemInEM that supports the advancement of women in emergency medicine.

She still does shifts in the ER itself, and she does a lot of telemedicine as well, seeing patients via video in their own homes.

AM-T: “Did you go in as a young resident, were you already thinking about gender in medicine, or not at all?”

“So not at all. I mentioned that my mom was the reason I became a doctor because she was a nurse, but she certainly wasn't ever limited by her gender that I'd ever seen, and my parents had a pretty equitable relationship and my dad was a teacher and he was the primary care provider for us when she was at work. So I never really thought of gender as being a defining characteristic of my career. It certainly defined, you know, who I was as a person. And so when I became a physician, I never thought that there was a reason that women couldn't be doctors. And I didn't think it would limit my professional growth other than, you know, knowing that a woman had never been president. So I knew society had certainly some barriers for women, but not for me.

You know, it's an immense level of privilege when you're raised in a family that feels very egalitarian. And then I got married and I became a mom, and I realized that the ideas that I had had about how many things I could balance at once were limited by what I was being supported to do at my workplace.”

It started with her first pregnancy. As the baby grew it got cumbersome to work in the ER, to move quickly, do everything she needed to for patients. At one point she started to go into pre-term labor. And she found out plenty of other women physicians before her had as well.

She couldn’t believe she was dealing with this. This was the two-thousands…yet she was expected to do what so many other women had done before her: fit in to the workplace as it was, or simply get a different job.  And Dara wasn’t prepared to do either.

“And that was really the birth of the work around gender equity was when it became an insurmountable mountain for me to deal with, that I had to then create sustainable change so that other people didn't have to solve it for themselves.” 

Much of her advocacy has been around leave. There wasn’t any parental leave where she worked during her first pregnancy. And the non-birth parent, usually the dad, she noticed never took leave when a child was born since any leave was unpaid. So she’s proposed a gender neutral leave strategy everywhere she’s worked. And she says every time she’s had a child – and she’s had three – the leave policy has been a bit better than the time before.

But then there’s being back at work after you’ve had a baby…working and lactating can be tricky enough when you work in an office. But when you work in an emergency room…

“So I remember that I, as a new attending in the ER, because we didn't have breaks and we didn't have double coverage, if I was the only doctor in charge of a room of, you know, 15 patients in the ER, I would have to pump behind a curtain, but still accept patient presentations while that was happening. Now that's absurd, right? It's bad television, right? It's a bad television show. You think that's going to happen like on The Office or something, where like somebody is going to be at the door, they're going, ‘knock, knock, knock.’ And you hear the ‘shoom, shoom, shoom’ of the pump, and you realize how uncomfortable it is for the person on the other end, too. Right? Like nobody wants to be part of that process.”

She says at least they’ve made the pumps quieter over the years. But she worked to persuade her managers, you know, women really need a place to pump…and they heard her.

Still, she says… 

“It's a struggle in many emergency departments to find the time and space to pump, and then the cultural support around doing it. So even if you've created a room with a chair and a refrigerator, and a time that says, ‘okay, from 12.30 to 1, you can do it,’ if everyone around you thinks that you're taking a break and they equate it to smoking, which was happening a lot, right? You know, ‘you don't cover me when I smoke, why should I cover you when you pump?’ Which is crazy, right. It's just, this is an absurd mindset to have, but these are the things that we had to address once at a time in the house of medicine.”

AM-T: “Well, tell me, so what happened though? So you propose this…. did they say, ‘Oh yeah, great, thanks. We'll implement this.’ How did it go?”

“So I'm a pretty persistent person, I guess, is the word., I don't really take no for an answer, especially when it comes to logical solutions for people that I think need help. So I didn't take no. I did presentations and I went to…I made sure that I had the right partners, and the truth is that, you know, it's not that people want to be, they don't want to be against change. They don't want to be punitive. They just don't want to necessarily have to solve the problem themselves. And they don't want to be burdened with the inconvenience of that problem. 

So if you can find a best middle ground that doesn't really cost them money, that doesn't really make things uncomfortable for them and just gets everybody what they need, you can usually find people to come to the table. It hasn't been easy. And you know, I've been doing this, my daughter's 13 years old, so it's not been overnight. But there has been a cultural shift in emergency medicine and what I do around the support for all parents.”

The inequalities don’t just occur around birth and childcare. She says female doctors earn less than male doctors – whether or not they’re parents. But in a profession where shifts and long hours are the norm, family does play a huge role in women’s ability to get ahead when they’re the primary caretaker in a household. Which plenty still are.

“When you need reliable childcare and flexible scheduling and the ability to be available to your family when it's necessary, that often comes at a salary cut, because you pay for that…because our society has been constructed to the fact that the neutral worker is not distracted, has no other commitments, is always available and never sleeps, you know? And so when you look for any consideration that allows you to have a life, then you pay for that, whether it's promotion or respect or money, something comes out always, until we reframe that expectation.”

Dara says there’s no better time to re-frame that expectation than now, as doctors continue to reel from the impact of Covid 19.

At the very beginning of last year she says she wasn’t that worried about Covid. It didn’t seem to be in the US. But then, in February, with all the news from Italy and their cases spreading like crazy, she became more concerned. She remembers it was late February when she first wore a mask in the ER with a patient she thought might have Covid. Still, shortly after she flew off to give a talk in another part of the country.  

“By the first week in March, the game had already changed. It was my last plane trip to go give a lecture somewhere else. We started hearing about a lot of patients in New York that were home with these upper respiratory symptoms. And really our telemedicine practice exploded, with so many patients who were sick that I knew that we were all going to get sick.”

Dara’s youngest child, a boy, had to have a liver transplant when he was two years old. So his health was a big consideration for her as Covid began its march through New York City…

“I remember that my husband and I went to Soul Cycle, which we loved, and it was our last Saturday class and we're walking home and we're trying to figure out what do we do if somebody in our family gets sick, how do we live in our house? How do we move people around, how do we quarantine? And, you know, I found Soul Cycle very cathartic. I still do. And I started thinking about the idea of being sick with my son and being the reason he gets this virus. And I couldn’t handle that.”

She thought, I can’t live with myself if he gets it because of me. At that point she’d been doing telemedicine for a few days, she hadn’t been in the ER, and she didn’t think she’d been exposed to Covid. So she and her husband moved her three kids to her parents’ house in New Jersey. Dara didn’t see them again for well over a month.

She moved them out on a Friday.

“And I went back into the ER and started seeing patients. And by the following Monday I was infected. So it was pretty close.  I found myself coronavirus positive March 19th, which was pretty early. I was part of that first wave of people who were sick. And what was interesting was, finding out that you have the same virus that is overwhelming every patient you see is actually pretty scary.”

She had no idea how her body would handle it. But luckily for her, she didn’t get short of breath. She had a fever, terrible body aches, a cough…but most of the time she was sick things felt manageable: she took painkillers and kept working as a telemedicine doctor from her bedroom.

Her husband was staying in another part of the house – a setup they initiated before Dara came down with the virus.

“And we're very lucky that we have a house that has enough bedrooms that we could separate, and I'm Jewish and I've been Jewish my whole life. And so I have a family that's Orthodox, and there's a whole aspect of Orthodox Judaism by which you, you know, you don't come together until you're married, so you don't touch, you don't even hold hands. And so I told my husband that we were going to be a unmarried Orthodox Jewish couple. And the only reason why I use that analogy, because it made a lot of sense to us, was it really put a limit on us touching, right. I didn't know if I was going to get it. I didn't know if I was going to spread it. And so my husband and I did not hold hands. We didn't sit within six feet of each other for the entire week before I got sick, and he never got it. And so for me, it was the perfect lesson in how to prevent spread of this virus because I wore a mask at my own house. I ate in my room, and this was really early. I started being able to tell other people that they could stop the spread of this virus, even if they had to live with other people. So when I had patients who lived in multi-generational houses, I could give them guidance on how not to spread the virus.”

But even after she felt better, she didn’t think it was safe to have her kids back until she’d tested negative. She knows better today, but back then no one knew exactly when you were no longer infectious. So she moved out to a hotel while her kids moved back in with their dad after a house cleaning. She stayed at the hotel alone for three weeks until she got a negative test result.  

“It was sad, but I also was busy. And so I worked a lot in the ER and I, um, I watched a lot of Netflix and I tried to enjoy... There's a lot of days before the pandemic where I just prayed for one day in bed with no kids and nobody bothering me. And I tried to remember that as I was unexpectedly in a hotel by myself with no kids and no one bothering me.” 

Dara was working with Covid patients during New York’s terrible spring of 2020, when hospitals filled up, refrigerated trucks took in bodies, and 20,000 people died. 

“Because of the way that I practice medicine right now, I don't do a lot of critical care, but I do try to help out where I can. And I do remember that we had one day in the city where we had just an overwhelming number of people pass away from the virus and I offered to help make the phone calls to parents, to the families. Because when you want to do something like that, if you don't have anything else to do, it's much better, right? You want to be able to sit and have conversations. And it was, you know, a lot is made of, especially as in the beginning of the pandemic in New York, we rejected every family member from coming into the hospital. We had to contain things. We made women give birth by themselves.

I remember when I found that I was positive for the virus and I was going to get antibodies, the first thing I tweeted was, ‘I'm taking myself and my antibodies and I'm going to be the best birth partner for every woman in the hospital.’ But a lot of these families were dropping off their loved one at the hospital, had no idea what was happening to them, and this was happening all over the country. But the day that I started making my first phone calls to parents and children who dropped off a loved one at the door of the hospital and within 12 hours, the person passed away. I mean, that is a skillset that I don't want to maintain. And listening to people cry on the other end in a way that has, it doesn't happen that often, right? We've been dealing with death in the emergency department forever. I mean, that's unfortunately part of our job. Like, that part wasn't new. The sheer pain and unexpected nature of the loneliness and the fear around how patients were dying was completely foreign to me because it's not how we do what we do. And I never want that to come back.”

That awfulness was at least part of her job. But in late April Dara went through another tough experience…this time it was personal.

The supervisor of the emergency department at Dara’s hospital, Columbia Presbyterian, was a doctor named Lorna Breen. She was a friend and colleague. She was accomplished, hard driving, ambitious, funny. And after dealing with Covid for many weeks - understaffing at the hospital, not enough protective equipment, and too many patient deaths, Dr. Breen became seriously depressed. She went back home to Virginia to be with her family and get treatment. But one day, she took her own life. She was 49.

AM-T: “I want to talk about mental health for a minute, because you did lose one of your colleagues to suicide this year. And it was quite well-publicized here in the U S, certainly on the East coast. Do you mind talking about Lorna Breen for a minute?” 

“So what I will talk about I think is what I think her family wants us to talk about. So, you know, the events surrounding Lorna's death I think were a direct reflection of the moment we were in. It was, it was terrible. I'll just leave it there. But one of the things that happened so quickly was because we were coming out of this horrific moment in New York, and because her family was thrust into the spotlight because of what it represented for the physician workforce, the healthcare workforce for New York City, the idea that an incredibly successful, beautiful, smart, amazing human could take her own life, reflected something that was so broken in our system, which was the idea that this pandemic was going to have consequences beyond if somebody had a cough or a fever, and that it reflected the brokenness of the health care system in support of its workforce, around mental health…and that there were aspects of Lorna's care that she was afraid to seek, because she was afraid of the stigma and the career ending consequences of needing to be admitted for depression and suicideality. And that once she had the strength, which we see all the time in patients that are depressed, to actually complete a suicide, she did. And we know that as a warning, amongst patients who are in treatment for depression, that their most dangerous time for a patient who's depressed is not when they're at the bottom of their depression, but when they're coming out of it, because then they finally have the energy to complete suicide.

And for Lorna and her family, one of the lessons I think that came out of this, and the thing that they've been carrying forward is that this healthcare workforce, our entire country's healthcare workforce has to be supported to come out of this pandemic. Because if you think that we have been in the bottom of the throes of this, it is the time when everyone sits back with the stuff that they've dealt with, that could be the most dangerous. And what her family has chosen to do is really invest in legislation and in support and in education around making sure that this doesn't happen to anybody else, and that they can educate physicians and nurses and other healthcare workers, and that they can remove the stigma around needing mental health support and even medications and treatments and hospitalizations, so that physicians and other healthcare workers can feel safe…not to think that by seeking care and saving their own lives, they will also lose their careers. So with that, I'm entirely inspired by her family who has taken a devastating loss and really channeled it into something so purposeful. And I know she'd be proud.”

I told Dara this conversation reminded me of a show I did a few years ago about physician burnout. One of my guests told the story of how when her husband got cancer and she needed to step back a bit from work to care for him, she didn’t feel particularly supported by her colleagues. She felt like a burden. She said there wasn’t a lot of empathy in an environment where everyone was working hard…and now they had to cover for her, too.

“That actually, it kind of reflects back to one of the things I was talking about in the beginning, which was the maternity leave and physical limitations of being pregnant, is that we reward neutral, right? We reward people that don't burden us with their needs, that don't get pregnant, don't lactate, don't break your leg, don't have a heart attack, whatever it is, but I don't want to know anything from you except that you can show up and do your job and be done. And the idea that people may be depressed and be on medication and need hospitalization or treatments, is a departure from our sense of ‘leave me out of your business. I don't want to know.’ So I think that the reintegration of that as a normal and completely typical way to live, I think is going to be critically important, especially as what we've gone through over the past year is not normal. It is extraordinary to think that you can take an entire workforce of humans and traumatize them internally and externally for an entire year, exposing them to a life-threatening virus, watching overwhelming death, I think be gas- lit by your administration…that this had to go on longer than even necessary, and then expect them to just be fine. You know, that's just not reasonable. And I think we're going to deal with the consequences of that for a long time coming.”

---

Given that I was sitting with a doctor in her living room I wanted to make sure I asked her about a couple of Covid-related things that had been nagging at me. One, I’d been surprised when I first read that many healthcare workers were reluctant to get the Covid vaccine.

Dara says there’s been too much attention paid to this – when in reality, why shouldn’t healthcare workers be nervous?

“The idea that healthcare workers… like healthcare workers smoke, they [drink] bad food. They don't always exercise. So the idea that healthcare workers would be the first, a hundred percent in line to take the vaccine when there is normal vaccine hesitancy around a new pandemic and a new vaccine, I think was unreasonable in its expectations. There is a correlation between the education level of people who are vaccinating themselves and those who are choosing to not get vaccinated. And so the higher, the more advanced degrees somebody has, the more likely they are to get vaccinated it seems. So we're seeing that the proportion of healthcare workers that are not getting vaccinated tend to be people that are not physicians or even nurses, but, you know, the home health aides and people that are working in the hospital system, but maybe not necessarily in direct patient care.

But we're also seeing that that hesitancy is going away with time. So it was a new vaccine and the healthcare workers were first. And so the fact that a third of healthcare workers didn't get vaccinated first pass is still a better average than the average citizen was that first week. And what I say to healthcare workers who are still reluctant is identify, what's making you hesitant? Because there's a difference between vaccine hesitancy based on all kinds of expected reasons. So it's a new vaccine, it's a new virus. I want to see more data. I want to see more time versus true anti-vaxxers people that are against science and against vaccination. And I worry that we are lumping both together, right? The idea that people who haven't gotten vaccinated won't get vaccinated. And so I try to get people to identify whatever marker it is that will make them feel comfortable, just because you're a nurse doesn't mean you don't want to see 15 million people get vaccinated before you.”

Just to make sure it’s safe.

But there are also conspiracy theories flying around about the vaccine…one big one is aimed at women. And the vast majority of healthcare workers are women. 

“Conspiracy theories around vaccines are very deliberate. And if you think about a lot of the conspiracy theories around vaccinations for children and creating autism, which is a fear parents have, you think also about the fact that a lot of the people who are going to be vaccinated here are going to be both women and the women who are decision-makers for their families. And so is it shocking that the number one conspiracy theory I have heard, which is completely not rooted in science, is that somehow this vaccine affects your fertility, that somehow, and it's a pretty creative explanation, I mean you've got to give respect where respect is due. And so these people that make up these anti-vaccine conspiracy theories look to something relatively absurd, and then they walk it back with scientifically soft and questionable language. And so the idea that was put out was that the spike protein of the Coronavirus resembles the spike protein of the placenta, and that if you target the spike protein of the Coronavirus, you would then also prevent placental growth.

Now what's amazing about that, it means that every single person who's been naturally infected with coronavirus who has their own internal antibodies would also not be able to get pregnant. We know that's not true. We know that people in the studies with the vaccine have gotten pregnant. We know plenty of women have survived their pregnancies and the Coronavirus. We know plenty of people that have gotten pregnant after having had the coronavirus. So no, there's no evidence to say that it affects fertility. It is completely bonkers, but conspiracy theories aren't meant to be believable. They're meant to create doubt. And so that's one of the things that we need to remember is the misinformation and disinformation campaigns are good at what they do. And so we need to continue to address the science, which is to say that this is a safe, it's an effective vaccine. And it's really kind of exciting that it came out so quickly.”

AM-T: “You've alluded to some of this in the interview, but how do you feel now about the immediate future for women in your area, women in emergency medicine, and coming out of this pandemic in particular, equity...”

“So I think that…I'm on pause when it comes to making decisions about equity and access and careers for anybody right now. I think we're all on pause. This pandemic has been hard for the careers of everybody I know, and that includes women and women in medicine. I think everyone has stopped paying attention to their own promotion and growth, and we just need to make sure that we're getting paid and taking care of our families. I'm hopeful that the rebirth after this, cause it's going to be a rebirth, it’s going to be a regrowth, is more equitable at its foundations. And that includes things like paid leave support for families, work-life balance…I hate the term, but I use it deliberately now to say that we now know how much can be done from home. And even in medicine, a lot of our educational programs can be done from home.

And that means that I can see my kids more. You know, when I do an interview or I teach a class on Zoom, there are aspects that should be together, but if I can do half of them at home, then that's twice as much time with my kids, and that matters. And I want that to matter. And I think that should matter for women and for men and for all parents. But I think for women's careers, the less we have to fit everything into a square box, the better off we're going to be. And I'm optimistic that our whole selves are going to be welcomed into the future in a way that they kind of weren't before.”

Dr. Dara Kass. I will link you to more information about Dara and Lorna Breen, and the foundation her family has started in her honor, under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. You know where to find me if you have questions or feedback – I’m at ashley@thebroadexperience.com and on Twitter and the show’s Facebook page.

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

Episode 169: Controlling the Controllable

Show transcript:

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

This time…trying to control what we can control in this crazy world we inhabit in 2021. Including, getting paid for our work.  

“What I have to do is go, this is my rate, and then shut up. That’s very hard. Because my tendency would be: this is my day rate, but of course you might not want to pay that and I can offer you a discount…you start to talk yourself out of it if you’re not careful.

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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The beginning of this year does not feel like the last new year – doesn’t feel like any new year I’ve ever known. Much of the world is still engulfed by the pandemic. Many of us if we’re working have been working at home for months. When I moved to America almost 25 years ago I could never have imagined the situation we now find ourselves in where Americans just violently invaded the seat of government.

By the time a lot of you hear this Joe Biden and Kamala Harris should have been sworn in as president and vice president…maybe this year can redeem itself soon.  

Since there is so much we can’t control at the moment we are gonna talk about what we can do – that is, take the reins of our own career. Which most of us are now having to do from behind a computer.

And we’re gonna talk about a subject I’ve covered in the past that I still think about: women offering their services for free.

My guest started 2020 on a high, then everything ground to a halt, and by October it seemed like her new business was done.

You’ve met Lisa Unwin before. Just over two years ago I did a show called The Comeback. Lisa starred in that show, she’d co-written a book called She’s Back about women coming back after career breaks.

Lisa is from Sheffield, in Yorkshire. These days she lives in London with her husband and teenage kids. 

The year after we last spoke she co-founded another business, Reignite Academy. Its aim is to get lawyers back to work after a career break, sometimes a long break – anyone, but of course it is almost entirely women they work with.

“So beginning of 2020, Reignite had been going for over a year, we had placed 25 women back into work after career breaks into 13 different law firms, we were super excited about the future, we thought we might expand outside of London to Birmingham and the south of England.”

Then came mid-March. And everything stopped. Their clients cut all discretionary spending. Now after the initial shock Lisa says at least they were helped the UK’s furlough scheme. That meant that even though they wouldn’t have any income coming in from clients for a few months – what they thought would be a few – they could keep on their one fulltime employee.

They made themselves useful with online trainings, advice.

Summer came, many people in the UK went away on vacation, the virus didn’t seem as much of a threat. The government told people to go back to their workplaces.  

Lisa was gearing up to get back to fulltime business in September. But then virus numbers began to climb.

“Within the space of a week, I think it was the second week in September, when we’d been hoping to sign up our member law firms again, the government said, ‘actually this edict we had where you all need to go back to the office, actually we’ve changed our minds about that,

you need to go back home.’ And I think it sapped the life blood and confidence out of the system. So law firms we’d been hoping to sign up as members again in September suddenly said, ‘we’re really keen but it won’t be until next year.’ Now we’re not just a small business, we’re a tiny business, we’re like well I’m not sure we can continue for another six months with no income, maybe we have to pull the plug. I think I was in denial about that for a good four or five weeks and then come October I was really low, and I thought this business has no future, we had to let our one employee go, which was really sad – and we just sat back and licked our wounds for a couple of weeks and felt very sorry for ourselves, if I’m perfectly honest.”

Right around then I came across one of Lisa’s wound-licking posts on LinkedIn. She felt like yet again, women were getting shafted as companies dropped commitments they’d made only months earlier. But she didn’t feel sorry for herself for long. Her posts soon took on their usual bracing tone. She began to focus on what people could do with their careers in a pandemic, not what they couldn’t.  

One article of Lisa’s that really caught my eye was about how women should do the next lockdown differently. In it she cited a survey by the magazine The Lawyer – among other things it had asked male and female law firm partners how they had fared during the first UK lockdown in the spring. Including which social media networks they’d been using.

“And they found men were much more likely to be more active on LinkedIn than they were pre pandemic, and women were less active on LinkedIn but more active on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter…so that made me cross again because I thought you know we’ve only ourselves to blame here if we choose to use this time to faff around on Facebook when our male colleagues are on LinkedIn maintaining their networks, building their personal profile, keeping up with that’s going on with their clients.

So the article I wrote began - the context of it was let’s use this lockdown productively, don’t make the mistakes we made last time, let’s think about how you can use the time, so make sure your partner shares the burden if you’ve got one – a partner that is, not a burden – be on LinkedIn, picked the phone up and reconnect with people, don’t sit back and moan…no one’s on a plane anymore so the people you want to talk to will pick the phone up. Pick the phone up, speak to them.” 

AM-T: “Yeah, well I want to ask you about the phone actually. Because you and I remember a time when in business it was normal in business to be on a lot of phone calls…and as a journalist it still is, although a lot has gone to email and messaging apps, but picking up the phone when you’re on deadline is still a good way to get hold of people…so it hasn’t become as alien to me as it has to others in different spheres of work. But I think if you didn’t grow up using the phone as part of your daily life it can be a bit scary to pick up the phone and talk to somebody.”

“Yeah, and you just have to do it. When I first started work as a 22 year-old you’d have to pick up the phone to chase some letters that were due from a client. And I’d sit there with this phone in front of me and I’d have to wait till there was no one in the room to hear my conversation, before I dared pick the phone up and have this conversation, but it’s the best way of developing a relationship with people, actually talking to them. A lot of what Reignite does is recruiting. You can’t recruit people without talking to them…they want to talk to you about what’s that client like? I want to ask, what are your concerns? You don’t get that flavour from an email. So you have to. And although it’s scary it’s so efficient – a conversation you can resolve in 5 minutes on a phone call, what might take you half an hour or more if you’re faffing about on email trying to sort out a time to meet.”

I do think trying to connect with someone senior to you has a bit of an art to it. I’m not sure picking up the phone and calling them out of the blue is necessarily going to win them over. But I do think on the whole the phone is underrated. 

We are of course spending a ton of time on video, and Lisa thinks being plunged into someone’s home is democratizing professional relationships.

“That I think has taken away a lot of barriers and made things a lot more informal. So if I think about going to see a client before, I’d have to arrange a meeting, and then go to their offices, often they were shared offices so you’d have to get past some barrier, go up the right escalator, get past another set of receptionists, it was all very formal. You’re handing your name over, getting a name badge, getting in a lift that could take you to the wrong floor if you’re not careful…then you meet someone in a meeting room where there’s a power equation, and someone pours the coffee, or gives you a biscuit or not. Whereas if I arrange to meet a client they’re in their own home and I can see the washing in the background and their kids are coming in or the dog is barking…it just reminds you that we’re all human.”

AM-T: “I want to go back to that really interesting finding of where male lawyers were spending their time in lockdown on social media, which was on LinkedIn…and where the women were, which was on what I think of as the more social networks…but why do you think it is that women were or are spending their time on those networks more than LinkedIn? There might be a few reasons for that, have you thought about that?”

“One, they’ve never used it so they don’t appreciate how useful it still is. And number two even when they do appreciate it’s useful, I’ll say to people, why are you not on LinkedIn and they’ll say well I’m a bit embarrassed, why are you embarrassed? Well people I used to work with are really senior and look at me I’ve done nothing for 5 years – I’ll go OK, forget the done nothing bit, the fact that the people you used to work with are really senior, is a good thing. Because people generally are quite nice, and when you connect with them and tell you what you’re doing and ask for a bit of help, they’ll help you. And the connections you make early on in your career, they will grow with you. And it doesn’t matter if you haven’t spoken to them for 10, 15 years, they’ll remember you. I’ve found this definitely, and they will connect with you.”

I agree about LinkedIn. I used to think of it as a sort of online CV and not much more. But until last summer I’d spent a long time paying hardly any attention to it and when I came back I realized it had morphed into a social network a lot like the others – or at least it’s trying to be.

And I don’t want to harp on this too much but those findings about male and female lawyers, and which social media they were using in lockdown. As I said to Lisa after all these weren’t women lawyers who were on a career break, they were working just like the men, and maybe part of the reason women were on the other networks more is because they were sharing their frustrations, and you’re going to do that on Facebook or Instagram.

“Yeah, yeah, and probably getting some tips on home schooling, and it was probably a bit of a release valve. But then it comes back to taking ownership of your own career and your own future.

Sweeping generalization alert – I think a lot of times women, especially if you have children, you’re responsible for so much and often your career does take a bit of a back seat because you’re looking after three people’s diaries, two people’s educations, a home, all that…I’ve done my fair share of moaning about how it’s not fair we were excluded from a lot of the informal networks where business goes on – like the pub, the racecourse, the rugby match, but those things not going on now, so we can’t really moan about that any more. But if you don’t want to do those things what are you gonna do to promote yourself and to progress your career? No one’s gonna do it for you. That’s one of the things I realized back in the autumn when I was licking my wounds feeling really sorry for myself that the Reignite Academy which I’d worked so hard to build was going to fail. And I thought well, it will if I continue to sit here and feel sorry for myself. The only way we’ll get this going again is if I start picking up the phone to clients, talking to them about the year ahead, telling them what fabulous candidates we’ve got and doing this for myself, along with Steph my business partner.”

So after her initial weeks-long slump in the Autumn, Lisa began doing just that. And it worked. Are they as busy as she’d like? No. But all is not doom and gloom either. They had some new law firms sign up as members, which gave them membership fees. They placed six women in jobs, that got them placement fees.

And so much of what she’s been doing all along with both her businesses is connecting with people who are in were in her orbit. She says it comes back to that thing of just keeping in touch with people…

“My original business was called She’s Back, which was about shining a light on the potential of women in all sorts of professions who’d lost their careers in some way…the biggest thing I learned in setting that business up and then through Reignite, your network, or your connections – because women hate the word networking - they’re one of the most powerful assets you have, and as women I don’t think we always use it as much as we should. So they’re there. The people you’ve worked with, worked for, the people you’ve come across, the charity work you do, there’s so many people who can help you if you know how to tap into them, and use them, and help them back…but you have to use the online channels to find them now because we are stuck at home.”

Sometimes you don’t even have to know the person. This is a story about the power of social media and as I told Lisa, it took me completely by surprise.  

AM-T: “I actually got a job last year from a tweet. Which I would never have expected. And all I did was write about somebody’s work, I linked to this article he’d written, and I tagged him, he wrote about podcasting which I do tweet about sometimes…I’d done this a few times over the course of a few months, and after one particular tweet I got an email in my inbox essentially saying would you like to work with me on a podcast? And I was stunned, because all I was doing was sharing his work and tagging him so that he knew about it.”

“Mmm, it’s just about being a little bit savvy – my friend Deb who I wrote She’s

Back the book with, she calls it being at the Net, just being ready, being on it, she’s a little live wire, she’s from Yorkshire as well, just being really savvy and ready to be there and say something and be useful.”

Sometimes when you’re ready, serendipity strikes.

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Recently I posted something on social media on a topic that is close to my heart – getting asked to work for free. I did a whole show on this back in 2014 that some of you will remember. I came across something online the other week – basically it’s 4 points with which to politely respond if someone asks you to work for nothing.

AM-T: “And you a couple of months ago wrote a whole post about this. And I’d like to talk about this because it’s something I believe women are still approached and asked to do more often than men are. Because women, sorry people, expect women to be nice and agreeable and pliable and frankly they expect women to do things for free in a way they don’t expect men to. And you said you were willingly doing it.”

“Oh I did loads for free, because when I first set up my excuse/rationale was ‘this will help me build my brand.’ But that’s only useful if it helps you build your brand in a way that’ll ultimately help earn you money. And the danger of being on a podium or a panel where you give away your expertise for free, is you enhance your reputation for being great on a panel where you give away your expertise for free.

So I learned the hard way, and in the article I talk about my aha moment, I was speaking at a breakfast meeting for a multinational consulting firm - they’d asked me to come and speak to this team of people. For nothing. And of course I did because it was building my brand with this multinational firm. And I got there, and I had to move heaven and earth to get to Central London, it was at Fortnum and Mason so it was really posh – moved heaven and earth to get there for 7.30, we had breakfast, I spoke, everyone had a fabulous time. And I looked around and I realized the man on the door at Fortnum and Mason, the driver of the tube, the people sitting round and eating, the people serving, cooking the breakfast, clearing everything away, every single person was being paid to be there apart from me.

And when it came to the end of the breakfast, someone made a very nice speech, thank you very much for your time, and they gave me a mug with my initial on it, L, which is for Lisa and it’s also for Loser. I took this mug home and I have my tea in it every morning, because it was nobody’s fault that I was doing that for free except for mine. They’d asked and I’d said yes. I never even said to them, do you have a budget? Here’s my day rate, this is what I charge.  just went and…so that was a big ‘aha’ for me.” 

As she became firmer, better at saying ‘what’s your budget?’ and thus getting paid to talk, she noticed something else: that when people had to pay to attend the event – online or off – almost everyone showed up. When the event was free, the room might be half empty, which felt pretty insulting to her. We all tend to value what we pay for.

Lisa had another clarifying moment a bit later on. She was asked to give a half hour talk at a company.

“And I said to Melinda my business partner, I said I’m not sure how much to charge for this because it’s only thirty minutes. And she said Lisa, it’s not the thirty minutes you’re gonna spend speaking, it’s the 30 years’ experience you’ve had that allow you to say something useful in those 30 minutes. I thought oh, love that way of looking at it!” 

And it’s true. If you’re a knowledge worker it’s your knowledge that people are after – and many years of experience build up a lot of knowledge. 

But of course there are going to be times when you make an exception, like when a cause or a person means a lot to you and you’re happy to offer your services.

But even for causes that Lisa’s really into, she’s careful now to ask about the budget first.

“I’ve done a couple of talks for people’s women’s networks where I’ve gone OK I’d love to do this, this is what I can offer, do you have a budget? Or, this is my day rate. What I have to do is go, this is my rate, and then shut up. That’s very hard. Because my tendency would be: this is my day rate, but of course you might not want to pay that and I can offer you a discount…you start to talk yourself out of it if you’re not careful. And I’ve found that works really well – the shutting up bit, and knowing what your fee is.”

It is really hard to do when you’re used to undermining yourself, but practice makes perfect.

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AM-T: “Before we go let’s come back to the pandemic and the situation we’re all in now. I’ve never been a fan of January. I’ve never been one of these ‘new year, new you’ people. I’ve actually always found it hard to drag myself through January. To me, this year it feels like more of the same, it doesn’t feel like a normal new year at all. And I’m finding it even harder than usual to be optimistic, about what’s coming up given a) where we are with the virus in the US and UK and b) obviously the stuff that’s going on politically in the US is horrendous and…oof…”

 “I know what you mean. I hate January. But I guess I’m treating it each day at a time, But I’m also, I am really positive about the future and that’s because of where we started actually. The world has changed. Yes, we’ve got to get people vaccinated. And until we get mass vaccinations we’re not gonna ease the pressure on the NHS here and allow people to get back to any form of normal. But that is happening, we’ve just got to be a little bit patient. If I look to business the world has changed, remote working is much more the norm, which is a game changer for a lot of people, and for women in particular. I am seeing businesses start to take seriously the need to find ways of attracting and retaining different sorts of talent. Which is really positive – be that diff because they’re of different ethnicity or female in a traditionally male world. I genuinely – I could be completely wrong, but I genuinely think there’s an appetite for that. And as long as I do something each day that I feel nudges us a little closer to having a business to go back to. My expectations are now very, very low – it doesn’t take a lot for me to go, that was good!”

Lisa Unwin.

And if you’re interested in listening to more on some of the stuff we discussed in this show you can hear The Hell of Networking – that’s episode 40…and episode 52, When Women Work For Free.

 That’s The Broad Experience for this time.

Please keep telling your friends about the show…word of mouth has been hugely helpful in building an audience. Thank you again to all my supporters. You can donate any amount at the support tab at TheBroadExperience.com and if you can part with 50 bucks I’ll send you a Broad Experience T-shirt – ladies cut. You can see that on the website.

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

Episode 168: Home Alone

Show transcript:

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

This time, three perspectives on living and working alone…

“So much of what I’ve been reading about how to adjust in the pandemic is how to keep up social relationships. And that’s unquestionably important. But I think it’s also important to talk about the value of solitude.”

“The general discourse around it is let’s all band together and support the mothers and fathers in this trying time, and not once has it been mentioned, let’s band together and support the people who are enduring this by themselves.”

“It forces you to some personal growth whether you like it or not. When it’s not about survival you get to know yourself in a different way.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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I was a mess in the lead-up to my 40th birthday. My father had died, work was in upheaval…All I could think about was that I had failed as a woman – I didn’t have the things society said I should have by that age – a partner and children. Things I had wanted all my life.

Then as soon I got past the birthday everything was fine. It was like, OK so I didn’t meet expectations – so what? It was like a weight had been lifted from me and I could do anything I wanted. I started this show the next year.

Women who never married used to be called spinsters. And even today remaining single, without children, has some stigma attached. Yes, it’s changing, and yes the single life gets glorified in some pop culture. But traditional attitudes are always ready to pounce.

But if you feel it’s bad now, let me introduce you to Joan DelFattore.

Joan has been happily single for decades. She is a retired professor of English at the University of Delaware. She still teaches from time, and in recent years she’s written a lot about the single life, and particularly about improving access to healthcare for single adults. More about that in a minute. 

Joan is 74 now. We got on the phone last week.

AM-T: “And what did it feel like when you were in your twenties, I mean the societal pressure now on women to pair off can be pretty intense. So what was it like then?”

“It was incredible. Let me give you a very specific example. I’d been working fulltime as an adult for 7 years before I had a legal right to a credit card or mortgage or to any other credit…there was no law that prevented banks from giving credit to single women, but they routinely did not. It was not until 1974 that Congress passed a law saying that marital status could not be used as the basis for determining whether someone could get credit. So think about that, how that feels living in a society where you could not get credit in your own name – it was deliberately aimed at making it difficult for women to work on their own, live on their own, have independent lifestyles.”

In 1979 she’s in her early 30s and she lands her first job at the University of Delaware. She should have been able to get a credit card by then, but when she applied for a Visa card, no bank in town would give her one. Until she got to the very last place. That bank manager said there’s no point even putting in your application because they’ll turn it down…

“He gave me a credit card with a limit of $499 because that was the most he could approve on his own signature.”

She says not that long afterwards, credit cards were being issued to pretty much everyone.

Joan says she knew early on that she didn’t want to be half of a couple. She liked her freedom, her career, her friends. But the rest of the world was focused on partnerships.  

“At work it was not uncommon for the single faculty to be expected to teach at night because of course the married faculty were expected to be with their spouses…as if there was nothing a single person might want to do at night that would be equally important. And tremendous pressure to marry – people didn’t even say why are you not married, they said things like when are you going to get married?”   

She’d laugh it off, try and change the subject. Basically she says she flew under the radar for years. She didn’t want to make a statement about being single. She just was.

But about 10 years ago Joan was diagnosed with stage 4 gall bladder cancer. She told me the survival rate for this type of cancer is around 2%. She found a great surgeon, who operated successfully – but then she needed follow up chemo, her chance of survival was still tiny. Now Joan had done her research. She knew the type and amount of treatment she should get to maximize her chances of survival. But she says the medical oncologist she saw wanted to give her a lesser treatment – because he worried that, being single, she didn’t have the kind of support network she’d need to get through this grueling treatment… 

“He was totally hung up on the fact that…he kept asking, you have no husband, you have no sons, you have no daughters? He couldn’t get passed that. And even when I tried to tell him about the friend based support and extended family support I had received after the surgery, that had gotten me through that, so it was not hypothetical, I knew I had a strong support system, I couldn’t finish a sentence, he interrupted me, and was going to give me just this one, mild drug. If I hadn’t known that was not what I was supposed to get, I would have stayed with him, and almost certainly would not have survived.”

She found another oncologist who was willing to give her that higher dose of the drug. And she came through. But that experience changed her.

“So at that point I said ok I can put up with the teaching at night, I can put up with the questions when are you going to get married, but when you try to kill me now I am going to do something about that, that’s a little too much.”

Joan wondered if she was just unlucky, or if other single people had similar experiences. She did a lot of research, and found solid evidence that marital status did predict what kind of cancer care you’d get. The New England Journal of Medicine published her findings.

Earlier this year, she had an article in the Washington Post that looked at single-by-choice people and how they were pretty well prepared to thrive in lockdown. But the one thing they did worry about was being overlooked for Covid treatment because of their lack of a partner. Because of the perception that they just don’t have those close, caring relationships in their life.

Joan says for her and many other single people, nothing could be further from the truth.

She has a group of cousins who are like siblings, she has women friends she met through a travel group – women who say they confide some things to her and other members of their friend group that they wouldn’t to their spouse…

“And so there’s a real intimacy, a closeness that people sometimes think comes only inside marriage, and always inside marriage…but that kind of close relationship can happen between people who, if you want to put it this way, whose souls are on the same wavelength. It doesn’t have to be someone to whom you’re related by blood or by law.”

Joan has been busy throughout the pandemic pursuing her many interests – reading, opera, walking…some of this she does with friends, other times she’s alone or in a group on Zoom. But she has a community around her. She says she relies on them, and they rely on her.

But not everyone feels they have that.    

My next guest only wants to use her first name, Susie. She lives on the west coast, works in consulting. She’s in her forties. And unlike Joan, she did not seek out the single life. In fact she desperately wanted a partner and children. And it hurts that she doesn’t have them – especially during Covid. 

“Being stuck at home by myself living a life I didn’t want is really challenging. I haven’t touched another person since late February. No hugs, no comforting hand holding, no nothing. It is a very unique experience and it doesn’t get a lot of exposure and I think there are a lot of reasons for that that makes it even harder to endure… It feels like an invisible struggle.”

As the pandemic has ground on we’ve all got used to seeing frequent glimpses into eachother’s home lives via Zoom meetings.

But Susie says for her what’s been tough is seeing her colleagues’ family lives play out in the background of meetings…it exacerbates her feelings of isolation.  

“It’s just a much more personal view into the lives of people. However, I’m witnessing their life but the same is not happening in reverse. It’s really challenging because I don’t necessarily want to share this very personal element of my life with my co-workers…and yet I’m being just shoved into their personal life. I’m sure they’re not excited about it either. But the general discourse around it is let’s all band together and support the mothers and fathers in this trying time, and not once has it been mentioned, let’s band together and support the people who are enduring this by themselves.”

She says any outreach her company has done has spoken to couples and families. Like the webinar she was on a few months ago…

“That webinar was focused on dealing with your spouse and dealing with your children and going through home schooling…and it basically provided me nothing, because I don’t have that experience, and when I asked a question, what do you recommend people who are enduring this by themselves? What do you recommend for them? And the presenter just was stunned into silence, had never considered it.”

Susie says it’s that knowledge that what she’s going through isn’t even on people’s radars that so hard to bear.

Her remaining family lives far away. She’s lonely, and has hardly seen anyone in person this whole time because she’s afraid of getting sick. She says she has to think more about this than other people because she doesn’t have anyone to take care of her should that happen.

“If you start to get sick you have to figure things out, you have to prepare for every situation, and it’s really hard and it’s almost like because there’s no one to witness us because we’re by ourselves, the world doesn’t think about it.”

One bright spot in that otherwise underwhelming webinar was that after she asked her question, the facilitator of the meeting spoke up herself. She said she too was single…

“And she was able to provide some empathy…and she basically said yeah, it’s a struggle to see and hear my married and parent friends talking about what this is like for them because that’s not what I’m experiencing and it’s really hard to feel so alone and isolated.”

AM-T: “So that must have felt really validating.”

“Oh, it was amazing, it was incredible, I reached out to her afterward and thanked her so much. Not only did she make me feel that what I’m experiencing isn’t unusual or there’s not something wrong with me. It also helped everyone else on that webinar open their minds a little bit to what others’ experiences are like.”

She says it’s difficult to hear her mom friends bemoan the craziness of their lives juggling work and home schooling – they say things like, ‘you’re so lucky you don’t have to deal with this.’ But because ‘this’ – a family – is exactly what Susie wants and doesn’t have, she hates hearing that. She does not feel lucky. For her, part of success means being half of a couple, being a mother.

She would love her HR department and some of her married friends to think more about people who don’t fit the family mold.

“I don’t need people to stop, I just need people to be more aware. Women have miscarriages, people go through divorces, there are a lot of things people experience and just being aware not everyone is living the same life would be so much more helpful. Inclusion doesn’t stop at the things we currently think of as inclusion, it includes all types of different lifestyles and things people didn’t chose or didn’t choose.”

She says even if companies just used language like ‘families and individuals’ instead of just ‘families’, it would make her and others like her feel better.

“You can make a big difference. You can make someone feel ignored or you can make somebody feel like they’re seen – and right now when there are so many challenges, feeling seen is huge and it’s a gift you can give to so many people who aren’t being seen.”

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When I posted about this topic on Facebook the other week the responses were quite varied. One of you said you’d been fine living and working alone during Covid but you had two cats, and you’d chosen to live alone, and that made all the difference. Another almost burned out in the summer in part because of all the household chores that piled up on top of work…someone else was frustrated by the difficulty of dating during this time…

What was clear from the responses is that you need your friends. Seeing other people both safely in person and online and talking on the phone is really important. And still it can be hard.

Magali Rozenfeld is a psychotherapist in New York City. She’s originally from Belgium and she started out as a lawyer before changing careers.

She says the pandemic has brought hardship and misery to a lot of people, for those lucky enough to be healthy and financially stable…there are opportunities to explore, internally.

“There’s something new that’s come our way that we didn’t expect, that we weren’t prepared for, and it’s a change in the system, a change in our lives that we have to adjust to, and so as long as obviously you’re privileged enough to feel safe and have financial security and all these basic needs are met, then what do you do with that shift? It forces you to some personal growth whether you like it or not. When it’s not about survival you get to know yourself in a different way. There is less busyness and overscheduling and intense, doing, doing, doing – life has become, especially if you live alone and you work at home, a lot slower, and a lot of the ways you’ve used in the past perhaps for coping and keeping difficult emotions at bay are gone. So you have to wrestle with all of this, which is not necessarily pleasant but can also reap incredible benefits.”

Magali and Joan Del Fattore are in agreement on this. As a longtime single person Joan is entirely at ease with her own company, and her own psyche, and she is a firm believer in the power of solitude. In the worthwhile-ness of getting to know yourself.  

“So much of what I’ve been reading about how to adjust in the pandemic is how to keep up social relationships. And that’s unquestionably important. But I think it’s also important to talk about the value of solitude. The value of having time to just be quiet and think. The value of doing reflective writing. The value of having interests that deeply engage you that are not compatible with someone chattering at you all that time. It’s not either or. In my opinion it’s a balance between that social/psychological, emotional intersection, but also quiet – the kinds of reading and thinking and self-growth that happen when you’re in a room alone with yourself and that’s OK.”

Solitude and loneliness are two different things. I can relate to what Joan says. In my many years of living alone – not exactly by choice – I enjoyed it a lot of the time. I saw friends a lot, I a gave dinner parties, I also cooked for myself, I read, and I was able to develop and launch a big creative project - this one. I had more headspace back then.

Magali Rozenfeld says for some of her single women clients, it’s hard to slow down, even now. We talked about this a couple of shows ago with Laura Vanderkam but living and working alone can mean you never switch off.

“A lot of the work I do right now is teaching people to set boundaries, allowing themselves to set boundaries, if you talk about women who are socialized to please a lot and to bend over backwards and women who don’t have children, that guilt – when they look at women who do have kids and they have to work so much – so there’s this tendency to over-extend yourself and at some point you’re burned out, because actually also the isolation and the work, as we talked about, it takes effort to do these things to keep your mental health at a level that’s acceptable, that’s satisfactory for you, for yourself. All of this combined, setting boundaries and learning how to say no, taking vacations even if you don’t feel safe going anywhere, learning how to listen to yourself and then take action is a big part of it.”

AM-T: “Yeah, and actually saying to yourself, I’m worth it. I think that for a lot of women is a problem. We don’t even let ourselves think that.”

“Yeah, giving yourself permission to say no and to stop and to learn what’s OK and what’s not OK, and when to ring the alarm bell.”

AM-T: “Yeah, it’s funny just talking about this has reminded me of a couple of things in my life. One nice thing I used to do in all my years of living alone, I used to buy flowers for myself at the weekend, they looked pretty and they gave my mood a lift…as did going to all sorts of shops, coffee shops, and having exchanges with the staff…years ago I remember, I shared an office with this guy…we were both about 30…I bought myself some fish from the fish market nearby, and he asked if I was having people over for dinner. I said no, it’s just my food, and he looked at me like I had 3 heads, he was so surprised I was taking the trouble to feed myself real food, and I was surprised by his surprise. He had been in a couple for a very long time… it was really interesting, because when you value yourself you actually feed yourself properly.”

“Yeah, when you value yourself it’s a lot easier to set those boundaries, and to know what’s good for yourself. And when it’s too much. And so obviously working on self-esteem and self worth and all of this is extremely important, like in normal times, pandemic times, maybe what’s good is now there’s more opportunity to see that something is a little bit off, in terms of the work/life balance.”

AM-T: “This idea of who you are when you’re alone, you said this, when our lives are crazy, busy, commuting, we’ve got lots going on, you don’t have time to look more closely at yourself, and now…there is generally more time and people are looking inward more, I’d love to explore that idea with you, of who you are when you’re alone and who you might want to be that’s different from who you are right now.”

“Yeah, that is obviously very different for everybody, but it’s cultivating that opportunity of, with things being taken away, what’s left, and how do you make use of it? With people who are in treatment and in therapy that meant really digging deeper in some of the work, it’s been an opportunity to dig deeper in the work we were doing pre pandemic, there’s less noise, recounting of what has happened in a week, because less has happened in a week and maybe more has happened internally…and really getting to know your feelings, I spend also when we talk about work life balance or fighting isolation, really getting to know what it is that feeds you, you know, developing this relationship with yourself where you get to know what feels good to you in a way you may not have had time to do before, because life is so hectic.

So really finding out the difference between what is self-care and what is numbing, how do you take care of yourself, how do you gauge, oh, I’ve watched 15 hours of Netflix, how do I feel after this, is this feeding me, is this making me feel good, is it – do I feel energized or do I feel depleted? And having this relationship with yourself is beneficial…because that is going to be something that will accompany you throughout your life, really knowing a little bit more about who you are because you have this time to do it.”

Finally, I asked Magali, what if you are someone who’s really struggling with living and working alone right now? What if you weren’t happy being single when Covid hit, and the isolation has just exacerbated that?

“So I think if you walked into this already frustrated and annoyed or angry or sad, sad, lots of feelings where you are in your life that you don’t want to be, but maybe there was still hope, you were dating, it wasn’t working but you were trying to do that, but it’s been taken away – pfft, it’s gone…there’s a loss, so the first step is always to first acknowledge the pain, the loss, the anger – and obviously it’s harder to do it alone than if you’re already in treatment with someone or if you have a group of people, support where you can process…these are difficult feelings…the loss, mourning of that loss, if you are on a time schedule to have kids and like time is ticking, there are a lot of difficult emotion to if you can, honor, because they’re not going to go away unless you move through them.

And so that’s the first step. It’s already a hard step. There’s no way to say, oh, no, its OK – it’s not, it sucks.”

AM-T: “Yeah…and then what would the next step after honoring your feelings be?”

“That’s the tricky part of the feelings, when do you know, when are you done? As we were talking about this growth, this inner work is tuning in with how you are with something. As you develop that skill you know when you’re done with the feeling because it doesn’t bother you any more. We talk a lot about acceptance, people say I just want to be OK with this, well you can’t just be OK with this, you gotta walk through it, so it’s learning how to do that, and then something else opens up. I mean…It’s obviously not a ‘how to’ – there is no how-to for these things, ‘cos they’re tough - that’s a very therapist-y answer.”

It really is.

Thanks to Magali Rozenfeld, to Susie, and to Joan Del Fattore for being my guests on this show.

And a few weeks ago I read a wonderful piece about loneliness in the pandemic that I highly recommend – it is beautifully written. I’m going to link you to it under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time.

It’s the end of a very long year that most of us never could have imagined. Thank you all for continuing to devote a little of your listening time to my independent podcast. I really appreciate my listeners, I love hearing from you - and thank you especially to those of you who support the show each month.

I hope you all get some time to relax in the next few weeks.

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

Episode 167: Power and Body Language (re-release)

Show transcript:

Hey, it’s Ashley. I am prepping a new show for you but it’s not ready this week so in the meantime I’m re-releasing this show on power and body language because it’s one of my favorites.  There’s a lot in here that’s still totally relevant today and some other things I hope have changed.

Here’s the show.

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

This time, the messages we send at work not through what we say, but what we don’t say…

“You take a normal body and you make it even more compact and that’s a sign of quote femininity, and it’s also a sign of low power.”

He who has the power takes up more room. 

And what do you do when you go to a meeting prepared to do business and are greeted…warmly?

“Quite often I get pulled in for a kiss. And I’ve had one person tell me not to be so formal. It’s all jokey, it’s all intended to be very nice.”

Or is it?

Coming up: Power and body language at work.

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Several months ago I did a show on communication at the office. But that show only covered verbal communication, and so much of our communication is nonverbal. It’s in the looks we give, in smiles, in gestures. Marianne LaFrance has devoted her working life to researching this topic. She’s a professor of psychology and women and gender sexuality studies at Yale.

“Power is often reflected in the fact that people with power, that is having higher power than someone else, they tend to take up more space: so they talk more, they take up more room, their arms are spread out, their legs are spread out, they tend to assume that the floor is theirs. So they engage in more presentation that others have to listen to.”

A while after Marianne and I spoke, I was looking at coverage of the café siege in Sydney that left two hostages dead. One of the images that popped up on the New York Times website showed a male TV reporter talking to camera near the site of the siege. He was standing with his feet in a wide V-shape, smacking of confidence – he looked like he owned the street. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a female reporter stand like that. I know I never have. 

AM-T: And what about women in the workplace and what we tend to do? I don’t want to indicate that everybody crosses their legs and folds themselves into a pretzel in a meeting, but I know I’ve done that, and I wonder if you could talk about the ways in which women use our posture in the workplace?

“Well, women – you’ve described it absolutely rightly, that is, women take up little space, and how that’s accomplished is if they’re sitting the lower legs are parallel and the knees are together, or one leg is crossed over the other at the ankle, reducing the distance between the legs in lateral sense, arms tend to be very close to the body, often such that hands are folded in the lap or at the very least the elbows are held close to the sides of the body. So you take a normal body and you make it even more compact and that’s a sign of quote femininity, and it’s also a sign of low power.”

It all goes back to how women are raised and the messages we get about what we’re supposed to be – neat, tidy, small, and inoffensive. Basically this kind of condensing posture says I’m not really here – don’t notice me, don’t ask me anything. That’s certainly what I’ve tried to achieve subconsciously in some past job situations. But one of my listeners, Alisha Miranda, she wrote to me recently with the opposite problem. Until a few weeks ago she was with a company where her bosses implied she was sitting too confidently – they said her posture was too assertive, asked that she sit back a bit in meetings to diminish what they saw as a confrontational stance. In other words the exact way a guy would sit. She was also reprimanded for taking notes on her laptop during meetings – having her head down indicated to them she wasn’t paying attention…

“Mm-hmm. Well I think the thing that’s interesting is often people have a reaction to someone who steps out of the usual gender rules for how to hold one’s body or voice for that matter, so that often people are told to quiet down or be more respectful or adopt some position that suggests they are listening, that they’re going to be good doobies rather than speak out.” 

And we got a hint of this just now with Alisha’s experience, but Marianne says this question of power, it’s not just in how we hold our bodies. It’s present in eye contact as well…

“…there is a lot of eye contact going on precisely when the high power person is talking. So let’s imagine I’m in a high power role and you and I are having a conversation: I will talk and look directly at you while I’m talking, and you will look back, because good listeners tend to look at the people who are talking. The result is a lot of this eye contact or mutual gaze. But what happens when the conversation changes hands as it were, now the low power person is talking – and they probably won’t look much while they’re talking…”

In other words that lower power person doesn’t quite dare to hold eye contact with the more powerful person they’re addressing…

“And meanwhile the high power person is in the uncommon position of having to listen, and they tend to not look at the person who’s talking.”

So translated to the workplace…many women will be the ones at the end of all that eye contact. But when it’s their turn to speak their boss will tend to look away quite a bit during that interaction.

Now you can’t do a show on non-verbal communication and power without mentioning Amy Cuddy. A lot of you probably know who I’m talking about. For those who don’t, Cuddy is a sociology professor at Harvard Business School who shot to fame after a TED talk she gave in 2012…

“….but before I give it away I want to ask you to right now do a little audit of your body and what you’re doing with your body…so how many of you are making yourselves smaller…”

That 20-minute talk is TED’s second most popular ever. It’s had more than 5 million views.

The element of Cuddy’s talk people fixate on is this: that people can actually use what she calls power poses to get into a better state of mind before something nervewracking like an interview or presentation. So in other words if you’re someone who tends to shrink into yourself, if you practice standing like an alpha male, shoulders back, legs spread, or feet on a chair…you’ll feel more confident when you start that interview.

Marianne LaFrance says yes, but there’s a twist… 

“On the one hand I think professor Cuddy is absolutely right, if women adopt even for brief period an expansive posture it translates into feeling more expansive, feeling more in control, feeling more power. What she doesn’t speak to however is what the effect is on other people if they see it. So in fact the thing that’s interesting is if you attend closely to Cuddy’s presentation, she’ll talk about the fact of women, suggesting that women before a presentation or a big class, going to the ladies’ room and pumping up those shoulders and swinging those arms and holding the chin up high and that prepares the person for what’s coming up…”

Marianne says there’s good reason for the exhortation to do this in private, in the loo – and not actually in the interview or presentation itself. 

“In fact we are doing some research right now where we’re finding that women who adopt expansive postures are not exactly liked a whole lot. So they may feel better themselves but it also has interpersonal consequences.”

You’ve heard it before: men can be competent and likeable but women are generally seen as one or the other, not both.

Now I am working on my own posture and I do think there’s a medium here. You don’t have to strut like a type-A male if that’s not you, but you can uncross your legs and arms for instance. You can try not to hunch. You can stop fiddling with your hair. And if you’re a female a leader I would love to hear from you about whether this whole body language thing is something you think about and monitor, and how you’ve dealt with any criticism.  

I was fascinated by what Amy Cuddy says in her talk about the effects of these so-called power poses: in experiments she found when people practiced a hunched-up pose, arms crossed, etcetera, for a few minutes, their stress hormone, cortisol, went up…and when people used a powerful pose their testosterone went up…

“Yes, exactly, testosterone, the data aren’t all consistent on that count but it makes good sense…because testosterone is associated with feelings of certainty, self- confidence, self-esteem if you will, and we know hormones vary from moment to moment and we know that both sexes have levels of testosterone…so the thing that’s interesting is if testosterone actually does go up when women are being more expansive in their postures, that is really interesting thing and it shows once again that our bodies, our minds, and our psyches and our emotions are tied in very complicated ways with eachother.”

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I want to tell you about a new podcast series. It’s called Work It and the two hosts won a podcast competition in Charlotte, North Caroline last year. They beat out 400 other entries to win.

The hosts Stephanie Hale and Jill Bjers have conversations with people about their relationship with their jobs and how it shapes their view of the world. The latest shows include the theme of love, with a wedding planner, a therapist and a vet… and the theme of having a passion or maybe even an obsession with your work.

Check out Work It on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever you find podcasts, not to mention on WFAE.org/WorkIt.

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Another Broad Experience listener, Geof Morris, got in touch with me recently about an aspect of body language he’s noticed in his workplace…

“What I’ve seen consistently men do with women in my background, aerospace engineers…is that they will initiative physical contact, almost always on the arm, when they’re trying to defuse a stressful situation or worse, dismiss the woman’s point of view altogether. I’ve seen it happen before and I’ve probably done it once or twice myself without thinking. I saw it happen the other day in a meeting.  The woman didn’t flinch but she visibly stiffened, and frankly there was no need at all to initiate any physical contact.”

To be clear, he says this is always men who are at the same level or higher than the woman they’re touching. Marianne LaFrance says this is a tricky situation for the woman at the end of those fingers….

“Under those circumstances one can’t protest, that’s again one of those difficult situations because to say, excuse me, please don’t touch me, would be seen as making a fuss about something that was completely unintentional, benign, you know, what are you getting so exercised about?”

She says high-power people often feel they have the right to touch others, but think about it the other way around – most employees wouldn’t just go up and tap their boss on the shoulder, let alone touch him or her in a meeting.

But touching on the arm – that’s just one aspect of unwanted physical contact at work.  A couple of months ago I read an article in the Financial Times by Elaine Moore. She had recently begun a new beat at the FT covering capital markets and she was having a lot of meetings in the City, London’s financial center. She was meeting economists, bankers, the PR people for those people…and almost every one of these contacts was a man. The only women she encountered in this new world were receptionists and assistants. She felt completely outnumbered. At the same time she found her personal space was no longer her own…

“Basically I was getting kissed, much more than I would have expected and more than I think a lot of people in other industries realized. So quite often, if I met somebody once and they’re a contact and we meet again, it doesn’t really matter what time of day it is, whether it’s a dinner, or it’s a lunch, or it’s even breakfast meetings, coffees, and quite often in quite formal settings, so within the bank or within a public restaurant or something, fairly often when I arrive I would be greeted with a kiss on either cheek.”

Now you might say, well, isn’t that nice? How friendly! Even Elaine didn’t think much of it initially…

“…until I came into the office after a breakfast meeting and spoke to some of my male colleagues – because I’d been kissed by about five different people who I didn’t know – and  I asked them whether it was happening, whether you know, the opposite sex greeted them with kisses, and they all looked at me as though I was mad. It doesn’t happen to them. I don’t think it ever happens to them.”

Her female colleagues on the other hand? They experienced the same thing – the one-way kiss from men. Elaine says it just felt weird…

“It really makes you notice that you are different to everybody else in the room I think. If you’re treated in a different way, even if you’re being treated in a way that is supposed to be really nice, it’s just a little kind of a reminder that you are not the same as everybody else in the room. And I think that you’re very aware of that already, so it’s just slightly odd because it kind of reinforces the idea that everybody else also recognizes that you’re not the same as everybody else in the room, and that can be quite tricky I think in the workplace, I don’t think that’s necessarily really helpful when you’re trying to do a job.”

At which point I couldn’t help wondering whether this had always been an issue for women in financial services in London – they may be relatively few but they have been around for a few decades now.

AM-T: “It strikes me also as a much more European thing, the Americans are much more hands off when it comes to that sort of thing. Even friends don’t kiss here as much as they do in Europe.” 

“Really, that’s very interesting. I think that’s the UK’s special quality is that we sit halfway between the US and Europe and I think in certain social situations like these we’re not quite sure of what we’re doing. We’re trying to be polite to one another and we’ve lost the kind of very formal social ceremonies that maybe we used to do, and we make it up on the hoof and sometimes it doesn’t go very well. I think you’re right, I’m sure the European influence has something to do with it.  I think women probably were kissed when they were starting off in the ‘80s in some of these industries. I spoke to a lot of my friends who work in other industries when I was thinking about this because I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just a few random instances, something odd that was happening in a new job. And I found that to some of them the whole thing seemed completely absurd. And that happened when they worked in industries that were more evenly men-and-women distributed. So people working in the charity section had never heard of it, it would never happen, whereas those who worked in still quite male-dominated industries – one girl is a comedy writer and comedy writers’ rooms are predominately male – she said it happens to her all the time. So I think it’s the gender split, that’s kind of what’s kind of behind the behavior.”

We’ll get back to that thought in a minute. But first I wondered what happens when Elaine sticks out her hand for a more dignified greeting?

“Well I get pulled in, quite often I get pulled in for a kiss. I’ve had one person tell me not to be so formal…it’s all very jokey, it’s all intended to be very nice but I think some people, some men, find it awkward to take a woman’s hand because they think a handshake is something you do with men, and kisses are something you do with women, so I guess they’re thinking in their own social circles they wouldn’t shake hands with the wives of their friends, or their female friends. So I think that’s what they’re kind of referencing when they’re going in for a kiss.”

And to me that’s just the problem. Elaine’s article is a funny, lighthearted piece – but what niggled at me from the get-go was just that last point: Marianne LaFrance says when men kiss women in this kind of work environment…

“It basically changes a professional context to a social one, which is a way to reduce someone’s stature.”

To put women back in their box, to treat them as social prop rather than someone on the same level.

AM-T: I read it as disempowering for her, the woman…

“I think it is disempowering because again because what it does is re-define the situation. So you think you’re here to discuss currency exchange but someone else is going to first remind you that you’re just a nice woman, after all, which is a way to put you down, it’s a subtle way of reducing your stature as someone who has important things to talk about. One of the things women have a tough time doing still is being taken seriously in a professional context…and anything that subtly undermines their stature as professionals can have some undoing consequences.”

Elaine has done her best to keep any such consequences at bay. She can hardly duck, still…

“I try to avoid it so I try to be quite formal – and I have noticed since I wrote that piece I get kissed hardly at all now. So something’s changed.”

No more business kisses for Elaine Moore. I’ll link you to her piece under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.

When I was putting the podcast together I checked in with a powerful woman I know in London who some of you will remember – business owner Heather McGregor. She says she never greets new contacts of either sex with anything other than a handshake…but sure enough, men will go straight for her cheek, even at a first meeting.

I’d love to hear your experiences of any of the topics we’ve discussed on the show today. Post a comment on the website or on the show’s Facebook page – I will be checking in.

And have you ever thought about power and smiling? Marianne LaFrance and I had a much longer conversation and because I didn’t have time to include it in this show I am writing a blog post about gender and smiling so you can read all about it. Go to The Broad Experience.com for that.

Hi, it’s 2020 Ashley again. I And re-listening to it today, I think there are a couple of bits where I’d love to do an update – since this show first went out not only have we had the #MeToo movement, we’ve also had a global pandemic. When it comes to non verbal communication…so much of our meetings with others…they’re now happening on a screen, not on person. So if you’d like to hear an update on some of these issues in 2021 let me know – I do this show for you and I want to give you what you want.

That’s it – you’ll get a new show very soon.

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

Episode 166: How to Work Better from Home - a conversation with Laura Vanderkam

Show transcript:

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

This time…as many of us go back into lockdown…we need to get used to working from home. But it’s not easy.

“It was hard to figure out how psychologically do you feel productive for the day when you haven’t gone anywhere? How do you know the day is over? Is it sometimes hard to get in work mode or out of work mode, which is more of a problem for many people.”

How to work better from home, coming up on The Broad Experience.

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Depending on where you live you may well be experiencing an echo of what we all went through earlier this year – being in lockdown, and working from home. It’s definitely part of what’s happening to women’s careers right now.

And while some people have enjoyed this break from their regular workplace, and ditching the commute, we don’t all fall into that category. Throw in the stresses of caring for children and monitoring their home schooling, and working from home looks a lot different than it did pre-pandemic.

Laura Vanderkam is a work-from-home veteran. You’ve heard her on the show before and probably a lot of other places as well. She’s an author and podcaster, she writes a lot about time use and productivity, and I last spoke to her in 2015 for a show about how women can better manage their time.

A few months ago she came out with a new book, inspired by the pandemic. It’s called The New Corner Office – How the Most Successful People Work From Home.

“I recognized in March a lot of people were trying to work in a totally new way and they were looking for content about how to do it well. And to me I’ve been working from home for 18 years, it didn’t seem like rocket science to me, but then I thought back to what my first year was like of working from home and I realized I was kind of a mess – it was hard to figure out how psychologically do you feel productive for the day when you haven’t gone anywhere? How do you know the day is over?”

How do you avoid re-arranging the kitchen cabinets or falling down internet rabbit holes instead of working?

So those are a couple of my problems as another fairly long-time worker-from-home. In fact it’s why in pre-Covid times I used to rent a shared workspace or use the local library as my office. Being away from home helped keep me focused on work. But for many of us, those aren’t options any more. At least for now.

And I don’t even have kids. Laura has five. Her eldest is 13, her youngest is 10 months old. She has a nanny, as you might expect. But childcare has been a huge problem for so many people during the pandemic.  

AM-T: “Before we get into some of the nitty gritty of the book I want to acknowledge that some people even now probably don’t have access to daycare, they are still lacking the supports they had up to mid-March, depending where in the country or where in the world they live. So, ugh…it’s so hard to get work done when you also have children underfoot particularly really little children who need your attention and want your attention all the time, I mean how do you deal with that?”

“Yeah, it is incredibly challenging, thinking back I’ve talked to many people who’ve wanted to work from home for years, I mean this is not a new interest of mine. People say, ‘oh I’d like to work from home, maybe I can save money on childcare.’ No, no, no, if you’re working from home, you’re still working, which means you can’t be the adult in charge of your young children during the hours you intend to work. Now of course people lost their childcare situations or realized school isn’t childcare, right, so you’re now stuck with doing the custodial care of your kids…I would say there’s a couple of things to recognize here. That fundamental thing has not changed, right, it’s pretty much impossible to work if you are caring for young kids, so you have to come up with some situation that can work. So if you have a partner who is also working from home, the best option tends to be to split the week.”

She has a piece on her blog about this, I’ll link you to it in the show notes. The idea is that each partner works for a set number of totally focused hours each week…while the other partner takes care of the kids. Then they switch.

“But to do that requires two people to totally be in it together, and say we are gonna stick to this schedule and when I am on with the kids I’m not just keeping them safe, I’m keeping them out of your office and away from you. And that’s the job, both parties have to do that. Where it becomes a problem is when couples don’t necessarily have that discussion and have that basic agreement on making sure that each party is covering for the other. You don’t have to do it with a partner, you can do it with sibling, a cousin who has kids of similar age, you can do the same schedule, a neighbor. I would also recommend that people try to hire childcare, someone who you trust to come into your home for certain number of hours per week who has similar philosophies to you on how much social distancing is going on. Because long term it doesn’t work. It is pretty much impossible to care for a two-year-old and work. You’ll be pulled in multiple directions all the time. You’re gonna get so much more done in two hours of focused work and two hours of caring for your kid versus 4 hours of going back and forth. That’s making people feel fragmented and distracted and unhappy, and so I am saying to people I know it’s challenging, I know there are a lot of bad situations right now, but do what you can to get some focused hours. Yes, it might cost more money but maybe there are categories you’re not spending on in 2020, like you’re not taking that big trip, maybe that money can move into a different budget category, because your career is in fact worth it.”

But what if you’re not a parent? Rather than feeling like you don’t have enough time for your work, we non-parents often feel like our work could fill the whole day. And it can be hard to introduce boundaries between work time and non-work time…it all mushes together – especially now when there’s so little else to do.

I asked Laura how important it is to have boundaries.

“People have different feelings about this. If you are the sort of person who thinks you’d benefit from more strict boundaries…there are a couple of things you can do. Do close the door, have a workspace you cannot see, that helps, but it’s psychological as well. It helps to come up with a way to indicate to yourself that the day is done – if there is some kind of ceremony you can have, call a colleague to say goodbye, walk the dog, write your to-do list for tomorrow…that’s a very good way to close out the day because then you can stop thinking about all the stuff you have going on that you know you have to do because you gotta plan for it – hey look, here’s my schedule for tomorrow, I plan to tackle these things. So now I’ve done marching for the day so I can rest to march again tomorrow.”

She says it also helps to think of your work day not in hours, but rather as a series of tasks…

“You know, these are the 3-5 main tasks I have to do today and if I do all these it’ll have been a great day and when these are done you are done…and you know it’s been a great day because you’ve set these goals, and you usually can give yourself a little more permission to relax. If all of that does not work then you need to be slightly more aggressive about scheduling things into your personal life that will force you to stop. So many years ago when I was first working from home, I didn’t have any caregiving responsibilities so there was nothing forcing a stop on the workday, no sitter who had to go home or anything like that. So I would half work, half surf the web into the evening doing nothing of importance but not feeling relaxed either…so I ended up joining three community choirs, and that allowed me to say three nights a week, I have to stop at 6 because I have to get ready to be at rehearsal at seven…it made me much more efficient because I had this commitment, I knew the day would end and I couldn’t just blow it off.”

AM-T: “Three? That’s a lot of singing!”

“I need a lot. Well I had nothing else going on. To get myself out of the house that’s what I needed to do…but having some commitments in your personal life is key. You will blow off a general desire to stop work…what is that? You don’t respect that, other people won’t respect that. but oh, I’m doing online tutoring for high school students at 7 o’ clock, well nobody wants to keep you from doing that. They will respect that in a way that they won’t just respect like, yep, leaving.”

What I’ve found quite useful for making me stop is booking an online class right at 6 o’clock. There’s a Pilates class I really like that starts at 6 – and it’s all happening from the same computer where I do my work – but when I book that I know I have to be done by 5.55 and I won’t go back online afterwards.

And if you live alone these online classes are also a nice way to see other humans, not connected to your workplace. There’s a sense of shared goals and doing something you all enjoy that really cheered me up during the early days of lockdown.  

I spoke to Laura back at the start of October. And before she and I sat down together, virtually, a few of you on Facebook brought up things you’d like to ask her about. One of you asked this, about sticking to routines:

AMT: “She said, does Laura have any tips about people with neuro-diverse brains especially people who struggle with making routines and structure long after the fun of making them has gone away.”

“Well you know we all have different affinities for routines, some like them and some don’t, but if this person knows herself you know what are the structures that help you be your best and often being your best is incredibly motivational – so maybe you set certain rules for yourself. ‘I will always do X, I will spend an hour on X first thing and then let the day be a little more freeform. But I know if I spend an hour on X the day will go better so I will feel better.’ Or maybe this person needs to set timers, or put alarms for taking breaks at certain times. Maybe she has a tendency to not do that and then get distracted by things she wouldn’t actively spend time on…maybe you need some sort of alarm to bring you back to the present say OK well I’ll take a ten minute break, then re-evaluate what I’m working on.

Some people benefit from having accountability partners…someone they’d check in with and say, we’ve decided on this certain template for our days, because we think it’ll help us work better, let’s check in at the end of the day and rate ourselves, one to ten.”

Someone else asked how to get time for yourself AND time for you and your partner during all this. This person has 3 kids. Laura says time for yourself is easier – she and her husband swap times, like he runs one morning while she does the kids, or she runs while takes charge at home.   

Time for your relationship, she says, that’s harder…in the case of her and her husband…

“We try to go have a drink together on the porch at night when the baby is in bed for instance, and the other kids are doing whatever, watching horrible stuff on YouTube…but just let it go, try to find some spot in your residence or outside…put folding chairs on the balcony, back yard, whatever you have, in the driveway, and it doesn’t have to be an incredible amount of time, even just deciding, ok we’re gonna try to find 15, 20 minutes talking to eachother without the distractions of kids, two to three times a week. It’s something. It’s not the long weekend trip to Paris but nobody’s doing that now, so take what you can get.”

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I haven’t done this for a while, but I want to let you know about a new podcast series.

It’s called Work It and the two hosts won a podcast competition in Charlotte, North Caroline last year. They beat out 400 other entries to win.

 The hosts are Stephanie Hale and Jill Bjers, and they have conversations with people about their relationship with their jobs and how it shapes their view of the world. That includes the theme of pain with a doula and a piercer… and the idea of success with a barber and a stay-at-home mom.

Gain a new perspective on work and life: Check out Work It on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever you find podcasts, not to mention on WFAE.org/WorkIt.

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There’s a chapter in The New Corner Office called Getting the Rhythm Right that struck a chord with me. It stresses that many of us working from home have the opportunity to do our work when it best suits us. I know that I am much more of a morning person, and it was good to be reminded that if I have something challenging to do, I should do it at the time of day when my motivation and energy are highest.

“Yeah, you want to match the right work to the right time. One of the upsides of remote work is it can be more self-directed, but part of that is figuring out when you can do various types of work…and if you are the sort of person who works best in the morning on difficult and complicated things – and that is the case for most people, we are better able to handle those things in the morning – then by all means put that work in the morning. Save the status meetings and email checking and all that for later in the day when you’re a little bit more tired and you don’t need to be your best self.”

And one of her readers suggested something that is perhaps even more important, which is if you’re someone who expects to be regularly interrupted during the day try to get in at least one hour of focused work really early in the morning. That way you get a head start on the day and if your day gets torpedoed by other people at least you’ll have got that time in first thing.

AM-T: “Can we talk for a minute about the differences between being…for instance, you and I both essentially work for ourselves. I am used to managing my own time. Others have just been launched into this WFH situation, you work for a company, you’re being managed from your home computer, then there are those people who are managers. How do you manage a team from home?”

“Well I think it’s really an opportunity to shift management more to managing by task rather than time. There’s been a lot of lazy management in the world that you assume because you see a row of people in your office at their computers looking busy that  stuff must be getting done. Is it getting done? That’s not always apparent…when you have that team working remotely you can’t rely on that at all. Certain in the first days of the pandemic there were a lot of organizations requiring everyone to check in on a video chat at 9 o’ clock to check they weren’t watching Netflix or something…that’s not really the danger with professional employees. You really need to help employees manage their time well and partly what this can be is having conversations with each of your direct reports like, what would be a challenging but doable week – if you got through the end of the week and did these things what would it be, and what would make it be a really good week, let’s set those goals on Friday looking to the next week and check in again the next Friday and see what got done and what your priorities are for the next week.” 

I was really surprised to hear that some companies actually wanted to check in with their people at the beginning of the day…

“Yeah, a lot of places were doing these 9a.m. check-ins, there’s so much so wrong about that, it’s just hard to know where to start. It’s a lack of trust. People who work from home are in fact working. Like I don’t know why there was this worry people were going to watch Netflix all day if they were working from home…if you are managing people who are engaged employees they’re gonna be engaged employees no matter where they are, the location is not gonna be what’s gonna turn somebody into a slacker.”

AM-T: “Do you think working from home is going to be much more common from this point forward?”

“I think it has to be. I mean it was growing in the past, quite a bit. But there were many organizations that were not using it to the extent that they probably could. I’ve interviewed business leaders in the past and I think I use this quote in the book: One gentleman had been talking about remote work as a future trend his organization needed to be aware of. But he’s like, ‘but of course it could never work for us.’ Well I can tell you that organization is all working from home right now and as far as I can tell they haven’t gone out of business, so it’s possible it could work for them…that their meetings and emails and phone calls were not so different from everyone else’s that they couldn’t possibly be done remotely.

The problem is people tend to see this is either /or…they’re like ‘but we have to do work in person,’ well nobody’s saying you don’t. But there’s a way to do some work in person and some work remote. In many cases there is best done in person and other work that is best done remotely. If you have a hybrid situation you can often get the best of both worlds. You can also hire from far more afield, which is a great upside for having different talent; if you have a situation where people can come in more like one week a month you can hire from anywhere, fly people in, they can stay in a hotel, they work from anywhere else in world the rest of the time. And you’ll still have the benefits of having pretty frequent in person interaction. But I find it hard to believe the best people for your business all live within one hour of you. So the idea of being able to hire more broadly is just a huge upside.”

But one downside of the whole pandemic is the effect it’s having on women’s careers – whether or not they’re working from home.

I mentioned to Laura the recent McKinsey/Lean In report that found more than one in four women in corporate America are considering downsizing their careers or leaving the workforce altogether. The report came out around the same time as US jobs data that showed hundreds of thousands of women had left the workforce.

Laura certainly believes in the power of the individual to do things for herself.  

“Now obviously I’m not saying organizations can’t do a million other things to be better about this. Great, I’m glad to hear McKinsey is interested in this, I’m sure there are things they can do too – any company can manage differently, manage by task rather than time, don’t require a 9a.m. check-in, don’t judge people based on hours in a seat, understand people have lives and keeping people is a bigger benefit right now than the short-term thinking of oh, this is an A plus employee who is doing B level work, we’ve got to get rid of that person - it’s probably more efficient to have an A plus employee do B level work for a year and be back to A plus, than trying to hire someone else to replace that person who’s gonna do the equivalent of their C minus for at least six months till they get ready and get on board. Trying to understand that everyone is doing their best is great. And then I also think people themselves, women in particular need to figure out what will make daily life doable and understand that their ability to concentrate and focus should be a family priority, and if it is not you need to figure out what is going wrong and how you can enlist the support to make that possible.”

She urges women to try every avenue before succumbing to the pressures of the pandemic.

“I hope people who are considering leaving their positions will really think hard about that. It reminds me of the rough moments/rough months when people come back from maternity leave. I think pretty much anyone who’s had a regular job and has come back from having a baby has had that moment of like, I should quit, because it’s so hard for the first few months. But it does get better. So you want to make sure you are not making a life altering decision based on a few months of difficulties, same with this. You want to make sure that – if you want to quit your job because that’s your long term plan, awesome, great, that’s wonderful, but if it’s because the current situation is challenging you might also ask yourself what can I do to make this better, and try that, and if that works great, and if that doesn’t you can re-evaluate, but you might want to try to improve the situation first.” 

Laura Vanderkam. Her new book – it’s available as an e-book – is The New Corner Office.

I’ll link you to Laura’s site under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.

That’s the Broad Experience for this time.

Next time on the show, we hear from a professional woman who would have loved to have had kids running in and out of her Zoom meetings. But she’s single, and going through this time alone.

“I haven’t touched another person since late February, no hugs, no comforting hand-holding, no nothing. It is a very unique experience, and it doesn’t get a lot of exposure.”

More on that in the next episode as we continue this series about what is happening to women’s careers right now.

And do check out ‘Work It’ on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or WFAE.org/WorkIt.

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

Episode 165: Yes, You Can Negotiate During Covid

Show transcript:

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

 This time…many of us are working like mad  during this pandemic, but are we asking for what we want and need at work?

“Is now an OK time to ask? Because everyone’s under stress, because my company laid off a bunch of people, because the company’s not doing well, because I’m worried that they’re gonna get upset with me.”

Getting what you want in difficult times. Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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As I think about what is happening to women’s careers right now, one of the things I’ve been thinking about is negotiation. At the best of times a lot of women are reluctant to negotiate – asking for something for ourselves goes against how we’ve been socialized. In a time like this…if I were working for an organization right now I know I’d be held back by all the usual things – not wanting to make a nuisance of myself at a terrible time, seeing things from the company’s perspective…and yet I know from past work I’ve done on this topic that people can negotiate successfully pretty much any time.

I wanted to talk to someone about how to get what you want at work during Covid.

So recently I sat down with Foniti Iconomopoulos.  She lives in Toronto. She began her career working in manufacturing, ended up doing all the negotiation with the big customers like Wal Mart…then she went on to work for a company that did negotiation training. And several years ago she went out on her own – she started her own business teaching negotiation techniques within companies, and to MBA students, and speaking at conferences.

Fotini says she came by this knowledge naturally…

“I’ve been negotiating my whole life. If you’ve seen the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding that is indeed exactly how I grew up, without exaggeration. So negotiating with a big fat Greek dad certainly primed me for a lot of the stuff I do today in the corporate world.”

AM-T: “Well talking of culture, Canada is a big immigrant nation. You’re in Toronto and that’s a really popular city for new immigrants to settle in. I wonder with your female clients and your students who are from immigrant backgrounds, do they find it harder to negotiate at all?”

“I do think culture absolutely affects how we negotiate without question. It depends on which culture. As a woman born to Greek immigrant parents it’s part of our culture to negotiate everything. I’ve watched my dad negotiate everything growing up and my mom is that sly negotiator where you don’t realize she’s negotiating but she is. So that’s our culture, if you were to go to a market in Greece which I did growing up, that’s part of the cultural norms, you assume you’re gonna negotiate.

I teach MBA classes that are full of international students. And I’d say Canada in general is still a very young country, it’s not like the US that was founded over a couple hundred years ago. My parents only came here in the 60s and 70s and they’re considered to have been here a long time. So when I look at some of my Indian students who come in, they’re again used to some of that cultural norm of negotiating for everything. But then I look at some of the other elements of those cultures too and I go, women are raised to be more submissive, raised not to raise their voices and so on, and they bring that with them as well. And so some of my students and the people I talk to are really good at adapting to the current environment, going ‘I’m gonna leave my baggage behind,’ but others at a subconscious level have a hard time disentangling themselves from those cultural norms, and so it takes me to push them and go, why aren’t you asking, and they go, I don’t know, I guess because I never saw my mom asking, I didn’t do it, or because I was told you mustn’t speak before being spoken to, I didn’t bother dong it.”

 AM-T: So we’re in this moment now where I bet so many women who still have their jobs, they’re working like crazy, it’s a nutty time as we still go through Covid in many parts of the world. And they’d love to ask for something at work whether it’s the raise, more flexibility, anything, but they think, ‘oh, I don’t think now’s the right time, everything’s so difficult.’ I bet there are lots of people secretly wishing they could ask for something but they’re not. What are you hearing on that score…am I onto something?”

“You are, for sure, it truly breaks my heart to read about all the statistics we’re seeing now in a Covid world where women are the ones who are being set back. They’re managing the conflict at home, managing the education, they are literally taking a back seat to everything that needs to be done. I am hearing about so many women who are reaching out to me, whether they were former MBA students I was teaching, former audiences in my keynotes, even some corporate clients – they’re saying, I’m struggling, but is now an OK time to ask, because everyone’s under stress, because my company laid off a bunch of people, because the company’s not doing well, because I’m worried that they’re gonna get upset with me.

And there are so many excuses to not do it…but my world has always been about helping people to find the reasons to do it. It’s about finding your value, understanding the value you bring, and not only that but finding a way to do it where there won’t be any repercussions, where you can mitigate the risk of being seen as greedy, abrasive, bitchy, and all of those things.”

AM-T: “Right. Well talk about what women can do now, then. Because a very early story I did on negotiation years ago, 15 years ago, I’ll never forget, this older white guy said, women are great employees because they always see things from my point of view, they always see things from the company’s point of view. I mean he knew the situation and he was half laughing but he was like, ‘they do back down sooner than men because the minute I say well, you know, now’s not a great time for us, they’ll back off.’”

“So it’s about taking that soundbite, what you just said of they see things from my point of view, and from the company’s point of view, and using it to your advantage So what you’re going to ask for, how does that help the company? If you need flextime or to manage your kid or just take a mental break, how is that gonna be helpful to you and then how is that gonna translate to…be helpful to the company? If you can give me this flextime or thing I’m asking for it’s gonna make me a much more productive employee, it’s going to make this job more sustainable, whatever that thing is that’s gonna benefit the organization, all that is, is re-framing. But you need to not put your own needs aside, you need to not be a victim of your own empathy. And that’s what I tell women all the time, you’re great at thinking how is this gonna benefit the team or how can I help the organization right now or I don’t want to be a burden to the organization right now. That is the empathy gone too far. How do I make sure my needs are taken care of right now, in the context of how does it help the organization move forward? Because the truth of the matter is if you are burning out, if you are overdoing it, you are not putting 100% into everything, you’re making more mistakes, eventually you’re just gonna quit because you’re gonna say I can’t do this job and manage everything else that’s going on. Or it may be something as simple as, I found my peers are getting paid more than me and I’m pissed off. It’s gonna fill you with resentment and you won’t be that productive employee. So it might be as simple as framing it as hey, I want to make sure I’m the most productive, that I’m feeling valued, and when I’m feeling valued I’m giving it my all and you’re getting a lot more out of me. What can we do to maximize my productivity here? What can we do to make sure I am feeling valued here the way others are feeling valued?

So the form of a question is a great tactical way of managing it. But not a question of permission, it’s not, can you do this for me? Because that gives them the option to say no. It’s how do you work on this for me, what do we do to make this a reality?”

AM-T: “Now what about money though, because I can see how a lot of people might choose to negotiate for, say, more flexibility in lieu of negotiating for money, because they feel like this is a terrible time to ask for more money. But what would you say about asking for more money at a time like this?”

“I would say know the situation; go in and do your research about context. Is the company suffering? Are they truly laying people off because they’re barely keeping the lights on? That might be a terrible time to ask for money. But you can still position yourself to set up a better time to do it. If the company is down on their luck or suffering because of Covid…you can be the one who acknowledges and is empathetic and says, ‘I get that now is not a great time. We are gonna have to talk about this at some point, what do we need to see in terms of a turnaround? When do you expect things to get better?’ I would almost prefer you to set up your next negotiation now. Because you’re demonstrating that I’m not gonna be ignored, but I’m also not gonna be a jerk who’s asking for something I know you can’t afford to do right now.”

Then again some companies are doing OK right now – even if it’s harder for employees to actually do their work for all the usual Covid reasons.

“Everybody might be a bit more stressed out because we’re juggling a bunch more responsibilities or it’s harder to do it remotely, but if there’s still cashflows coming in the way there was before, OR some companies are even thriving right now. Why in the hell would you hold back from doing it? That’s the question I make people ask themselves.”

This past summer Fotini heard from a woman she’d helped through a negotiation a couple of years ago, when she first started in a new job.

“And she said, ‘it’s time for me to get a promotion and a raise and I’m not getting enough. But I do know the company is suffering, they laid off a bunch of people, a bunch took pay cuts, however my department is carrying a bunch of other departments.’ Well shouldn’t this person be rewarded for that? How do you make them acknowledge that? How do you make them go you’re right, if it wasn’t for your team and what you’re churning out we wouldn’t be able to keep those other people employed. So then it’s about having that conversation of what can you do right now? And if now’s not the right time, when is? When can we do something, how can we make it retroactive, how can we make sure I’m feeling rewarded for this? Because I’ll end up on the brink of burnout and if that happens it’s not gonna be good for anybody.

 And she ended up getting a phenomenal result. She said it’s not what we would have had in past years, but she said ‘I almost didn’t ask for anything. So I feel good that I got some increase and a promise of in six months we’ll review and see what we can do to improve things later.’”

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So as Fotini says, negotiation is a matter of persuasion and engagement as much as anything else. Seeing things from the other side’s point of view - but not too much.

When I posted about this topic on Facebook a while ago one listener in Ireland emailed me. She was worried because she’s on maternity leave and was due to be promoted – then all promotions got canceled in Covid. She’s worried she’s at home, with 3 kids, out of it. Feels like she’ll be forgotten about by the time she goes back to work.

Fotini says with maternity leave ideally you’ll plan it out and be strategic. In a pre-Covid world she used to tell people…

“…if you’re gonna go into the office and visit with the baby, strategically plan it so you do it when the bosses are gonna be around, because you want to make sure you are top of mind to them. You want to stay relevant, you want to remind them I still exist.”

Depending where in the world you are, doing that is less easy during Covid. But she says the same principles she’s already talked about apply to coming back from your leave and not getting sidelined. It’s about reminding people of your strengths, and presenting yourself as someone who can help them solve problems.

“If you can present yourself as someone who wants to relieve some of their stress why wouldn’t they want to have a conversation with you, why wouldn’t they want to carve out time in a Zoom meeting or whatever it might look like? And I’d also be cognizant of doing that same networking of people around the organization, know what’s going on, what moves have been made, who’s in what positions now, what positions have become available, what the culture is like, what moves have been made since the last time you were there…stay in touch with your friends.

Should you be able to just tap out and enjoy your year or however long you have without thinking about work? Sure, but the reality is you’re gonna have to go back, so why not set yourself up for success? So do a little bit of that groundwork…it’s power, information that you’ll use to make yourself relevant again so you can demonstrate that you’re not entirely out of the loop.”

AM-T: In talking about this you’ve reminded me to ask about something else, which is, isn’t this stuff a bit trickier now that most of us, many of the people listening to this, will not yet be back in a physical office with your managers and your colleagues? It’s all very well asking for things when you’re looking at someone face to face, but how would you suggest that we tackle these kinds of questions in a virtual world and actually that extends to networking as well, to keeping in touch with people and reminding them that we exist?

“Yeah, my preference is to avoid email. I don’t know about you but I am more and more inundated with emails now than I’ve ever been before because everyone is sitting at a computer. I feel like difficult or crucial conversations are always done better in a face-to-face world. Face-to-face now for us just means Zoom or whatever tool you’re using. I do prefer to have that visual representation of some kind, because we communicate in 3 ways: we communicate using our words, we communicate our sounds and we communicate using our non-verbal communication. When you eliminate any of those forms and you reduce it to a phone call for example, they can’t see the look of endearment on your face, the look of concern, trust, empathy, any of those things, there’s room for misinterpretation there…maybe that was sarcasm, maybe it wasn’t – people can’t see your face. If you’re doing it over email, there’s a reason there’s a million and one emojis…or an acronym like LOL…it’s because there’s so much room for misinterpretation…so you might be misinterpreted as abrasive or any of these things if you haven’t taken your time to think through carefully the sandwich of cooperation.

 So when you’re writing an email it’s hey, hope you had a good weekend, at the beginning of Covid it was hope you’re staying healthy, but you want to start with that warmth, get to the meat of the sandwich and end again with a bit more warmth. With email you don’t want to end it with let me know your thoughts, you don’t want to leave it out there to the ether as a passive comment they can or can’t respond to, if they feel like it. It’s finishing it with a question of, when is the best time for us to have a conversation about this? So if you are going to be reaching out to kick off this process, to even ask for a Zoom meeting, it’s not saying, ‘I’d love to talk to you, when do you have time?’ signed Fotini. No, it’s ‘when is the best time for us to have this conversation? I’ve got openings on Thursdays and Tuesdays, which is most appropriate for you?’ Now because it’s in the form of a question, socially we are compelled to answer a question, there’s an action that’s asked of us, and because of that, once I answer that question, the principles of persuasion show us that at a subconscious level I feel accountable to what I just answered to you. So if I say, Thursday is the best time, now I feel like I have to carve out that time on Thursday, I’m not likely to ignore you, I’ve opened the door for us to have this conversation on Thursday.”

She says if you really hate the idea of a video meeting to talk about this you could do it by email. But she says if you are going to negotiate this way, you need to think really carefully about how you phrase things. You should ask someone else to look over the email to make sure it comes across the way you want it to, because it’s so easy to come off wrong in writing – and you don’t want to be using emojis in a negotiation.

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I want to end the show where we began, with this idea of the role culture plays in our lives.  

Several years ago Fotini was getting ready to teach her first ever negotiation workshop in her non-native language of Greek.

 “I speak Greek at home but it’s very…simplified, like a kid in the second grade would speak the level of Greek that I speak at home.”

She was going to be speaking at a company in Athens. Greece is a patriarchal society. She knew that, she grew up around it. She also knew the likelihood was that this group of executives would be almost 100% male.

So she studied up on business Greek, spent a lot of time with her head in a dictionary. She knew that as a young woman, then in her early 30s, going into a roomful of senior, middle-aged Greek men she had to present herself in just the right way.

“And at the end of the workshop this one woman who was there came over and she goes, I just need to shake your hand. And I said why? She goes, I don’t know how you did it, I know these guys, they had their phones down the whole time, they were listening to you the whole time, and it was just about how I commanded myself in the very beginning of this thing. Because I walked in and I was clearly much younger than them, AND I wasn’t speaking Greek the way they did, and they knew I was from Canada. And I had enough intrigue for them to go who is this person and why does my boss trust that she’s gonna be the best person for me to listen to?  

But I also commanded myself with a little bit of…I have students in my classes who are quite nervous about the fact they don’t speak English as a first language, or their language skills aren’t as good as they’d like for them to be. And I said look, when I go into Athens and I run a workshop I say flat out, look, clearly this is not my first language it’s one of four languages that I speak, and if you prefer me to do this in English so I’m more comfortable I’m happy to do that – I’m doing you a favor basically, read between the lines, that I’m speaking to you in Greek right now. There’s this element of confidence slash arrogance, it’s a healthy level of arrogance to go yeah, I’m not speaking Greek the way you do but I know you don’t speak English the way I do and I know you don’t speak the other languages I do, so listen up gentlemen – that’s kind of the undertone of everything I say, but I have to be careful I don’t push the arrogance so far that I turn them off. And that’s really an intuitive thing, it’s really watching the faces and everything else in the room as well. I’ll say I won them over by the end of the session, they were like, next time you’re in the country let us know and we’ll take you out for dinner, and so on, so there’s a lot with the cultural norms that helped me along that path as well. It was an uphill battle going in but I came with all the ammunition I needed to make sure I was ready for that battle.”

AM-T: “And finally, what do you think your two cultures, or the two main cultures in your life, Greek culture and Canadian culture, how do you think they’ve contributed to you as a woman in the workplace?” 

“That’s a tough one. I always felt like I have this dichotomy in my brain – of when I was a kid, even as an adult, people ask what’s your background, where are you from? As if it’s not assumed I’m not from Canada. It’s a little bit offensive, I know people are just curious because I don’t look like a typical Caucasian woman even though on paper I am considered Caucasian. I’ve experience racism, I’ve listened to people say awful things to my dad, the ‘go back to where you came from’ kind of stuff that is burned into my memory. So I try to make sure I don’t hold that against everybody when I’m walking around society. When someone asks me what’s my background I try to make sure I’m not offended by it, and I think that’s the Canadianism coming out in me.

I do think the assertiveness I have is very much my Greek roots. I think the cooperativeness I have is very much my Canadian roots. Because I came from a workplace that told us ‘you don’t want to be liked, you need to be respected.’  I’ve come from studying the subject for so long that I understand likeabilty is actually a very important piece of negotiation and persuasion. So I think that Canadian-ness has helped me to tap into the likeability. That’s not to say Greeks aren’t likeable people, we are a very hospitable bunch…there’s an element of hospitality that I know is deep in my DNA. But I do know the Canadian polite stuff is not overwhelming for me because I have this other element of my personality to bring it back. I do think those cultures are battling at some point…but I think I’ve found a happy medium of those two things. Because Canadians are famous for apologizing for everything and I’m definitely not that person. But I think it’s my upbringing with my dad especially that has that very, very Greek extreme. And then I’m surrounded by students and children and coworkers who have that very Canadian extreme – I’ve just found a place where they can both live in harmony which I think has been the key to so much of my success.”

Thanks to Fotini Iconomopoulos for being my guest on this show.

She has a book coming out next spring – it’s called Say Less, Get More – Unconventional Negotiation Techniques to Get What You Want.

 I will link you to Fotini’s website under this episode at The Broad Experience.com. And if you want to hear more on negotiation you’ll find two episodes I did about this in 2018 – they are episodes 128 and 129. And it’s thanks to Natalie Reynolds, my guest, in episode 128 that I found Fotini in the first place.

That’s the Broad Experience for this time.

You can find me in all the usual places or email me at Ashley at TheBroadExperience.com – I’m always grateful to get any feedback you may have. Also if you enjoy the show and you haven’t reviewed it yet I’d love it if you could do that – that’s on Apple Podcasts. It actually does seem to help the podcast stand out and get found so it’s really worth it to me.

 We’ll continue this series about what’s happening to women’s careers right now, next time.

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

Episode 164: Hard Conversations

Show transcript:

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

This time, data shows a lot of women are dropping out of the workforce due to the pressures of Covid. It’s not surprising. And yet…

“When we start to de-prioritize our careers and prioritize a partner’s career there’s this inherent message of my career, my identity, my desire, less important.”

 Coming up, a business owner falls into that exact trap – then pulls herself out.

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So before we get into the show I just want to say i really hope these shows on what’s happening to women’s careers right now are helpful – that has always been the aim of this podcast ever since I started it 8 years ago. And I know we are all individuals and different people are going through different things at the moment – last time the show focused on two women without kids because I think that point of view gets left out quite a lot with all the focus on family wellbeing. But you can also be single without kids and again if that’s you you’re probably having a different experience of these weird times than everyone else. I want to get in as many perspectives as possible, so if you feel something about the current women and work situation isn’t being covered and especially if you’d like to contribute to the show yourself, get in touch with me, I’d love to hear from you.

In this episode we’re back to the topic of partners. And I know from my listeners that plenty of you have great husbands and boyfriends who really are just as enmeshed in the work/life balance – it really is equal. But that’s not everybody.

The latest US jobs report show many more women than men left the workforce in September – 4 times as many – it’s data that reflects what we’ve already talked about on the show. That a good number of women have decided the pandemic juggle is just too demanding. They’re relying on a partner’s income to see them through while they manage the home front.

My guest this week is Rachel Garrett. She’s a coach who specializes in helping women with career transitions and getting what they want in the workplace. She featured in one of those shows I did in 2019 on the coaching industry.

And I approached her several weeks ago because I had begun to think: women are the majority of people who hire coaches and the majority OF coaches…as a sex they’re busier than ever before so you’d think they’d have less time to focus on career stuff. At the same time we’re in period of huge career upheaval for a lot of people. So maybe the coaching business is doing great?

It turns out Rachel has lived both sides of this. When Covid hit, she’d been doing well – working with corporate clients and individuals both in New York City where she lives and by Zoom in different parts of the country.

Then, in March…

“People who were about to sign on said you know what, let me come back to you. I can’t focus on this. And then some of the people I was working with, we continued to work together for a little while, but they were just so overwhelmed by what they were dealing with on a day to day with their kids and filling in all the gaps there that many of them said, can we take a pause, can we take a break? I did that and I was pretty focused on some of this corporate work but there was a moment in May where I said to my husband, you know what, I’m down to one private client, and she has Covid.”

But there was something else going on too. It wasn’t just that her clients had disappeared. Rachel wasn’t hustling the way she usually did to bring in new business.  

She and her husband have daughters who are 9 and 12 and from mid-March, they were at home.

AM-T: “What happened to you in March and April, did you find yourself falling into the same gender traps that other people have?”

“I absolutely did, and it wasn’t something my partner asked me to do, it was something I took on myself, I said, well I need to be the one helping with the school and getting them on Zooms and helping with the technology issues we were having, I need to be the one to make sure my elderly uncle is safe in his assisted living, and I need to be the one who is figuring out how this is going to work. So I was reaching out less about my business, I was writing less and I was in the habit of writing weekly, I didn’t know what to write about, I felt very stuck.”

What could she advise her usual clientele when it felt like the bottom was falling out of all of their worlds? Most of her clients are married with kids. Childcare was suddenly unavailable – unless you had a live-in nanny.

And Rachel noticed one thing right at the start of the pandemic when so many of us were sent home…

“A lot of the male partners, their employers were not responding to the fact that these men were parents. There was the expectation that women would get a little more flexibility and fill in the gaps. Whereas the men were expected to, just, you know, 7.30 to 7 still, and great, now there’s no commute, we can have them for more time.”

This same thing was happening in her own house. Rachel’s husband works in consulting. Normally he works out of an office in Manhattan – pretty long hours. She works in an office at home. But when the pandemic kicked in…

“I gave my husband the home office for the full day, he was on calls, I was crunched on my bed doing these client sessions where we were talking about really traumatic things. And there was this moment where I said, this has to shift - as someone who takes a stand for women’s careers and for women prioritizing their careers, I am not prioritizing my business right now.”

So she took a step back and really thought about why she wasn’t taking her own advice during lockdown.

“I realized that I was getting these subtle messages from the media, I was always the one the school reached out to, and it was, I’m the one who always has to be in charge. And if I’m a good mom right now to my girls I have to really be present for their every need and their every emotional need.”  

She thought about that and how she’d fallen into the same trap she would usually advise other women to avoid – putting everyone else ahead of themselves. But the pandemic had turned things upside down. It was easy to revert to stereotypes.

At this point Rachel had to think through what part was she playing in this, and what part was he playing? Yes, she was bent into a pretzel on their bed doing her work while he made his calls out of a comfortable home office…he was enabling this situation, but she hadn’t asked for anything different. So she launched a series of conversations… 

“I need a better work situation, you know, what’s it gonna look like? Looking at desks, and looking at ways I could close a door, and setting better boundaries with the girls, and asking them to do more. And my girls are at an age where that’s really possible.”

Having these discussions has made a big difference. One tricky area was screen time. Her husband was worried the kids were spending too much time on screens during lockdown. And Rachel’s like, well…yes…and their screen time allows some of MY work time.

“And I had to put it out there, I was like, ‘they’re healthy, they’re emotionally well, they have what they need. During a pandemic if they have a little extra screen time so I have more time to focus while we can’t bring in a babysitter, that may be what we need to do’, and there were some negotiations there.”

And as she reclaimed her time, she began to re-focus her business on helping women get what they want from their career during the pandemic. On clarifying their needs, particularly as working parents. Her old website copy was replaced with new copy that directly addresses what’s going on now.

She put the time into marketing. And business began to come back.

“It was because in some ways I had a focus and I was speaking directly to where they were. I ended up having one of my best months in July, which was pretty incredible given where I was. And it’s in no small part too that I had childcare during July. I was able to bring in a former sitter safely…and I have almost fulltime childcare for my younger one, where that it was part of what I needed, and I think it’s important to say, because childcare is so critical to women’s career success.”

Without that babysitter, she wouldn’t be doing as well.

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So Rachel has found a situation that works for her even as her children continue to attend school from home most days a week.

And to the women who say, look, this is just too hard. Something has to give, and it’s gonna be my job – at least for now. Rachel says this…

“To me the tactics are figure-outable, it’s the fear that is reinforced by a lot of the messaging we hear that we need to be the ones there. For me I think there are ways to help women take baby steps through that, and maybe that’s taking on project work, seeing if you can do something part time…”

She tells women who really want to leave, keep a toe in, or even a whole foot. She says of course you can come back…

“It’s absolutely doable but it is harder, mostly because of the mindset work and the confidence.”

Now there are different views on the wisdom of taking a career break, and I want to leave Rachel for a minute and go to Avivah Wittenberg-Cox who was here a couple of shows ago.

When I spoke to Avivah last month she too was an advocate of ‘the conversation’ – the discussion between two partners about who does what and how they work together to run things – and not just during a crisis.

“I’ve done a lot of work with dual career couples, saying bring your leadership skills home, work with your spouse as though they were part of the most important team in your life. So vision days, budgeting, future planning, scenario planning, contracting, performance appraisals. Do it, do it with your spouse, all those things are very useful – monthly sit down catch ups one on one, all the things you do automatically with your team at work they don’t do with their team at home, and actually lockdown was a good time to start dong that kind of thing including children in this kind of stuff, so they learn all the complexities of managing through really tough times. It is always a learning opportunity and can I just add that for the women who are stuck in this time and space and parenting, I still believe this generation of women we’re seeing emerge now, will have their best career years later than we expect. So post-50 I think are the peak female career years, esp for women with families who want to spend some time on them, and why not? It’s a different shape of career than the one we’ve been sold and the one that men abide by, right? And that’s OK.”

AM-T: “OK but what about the women who are right now saying, look, I just have to step away from my career right now, my family needs me…”

“Great, to them I’d say don’t swallow the cool aid of oh my God, you’re taking time off, it’s so hard to re-entry, bla bla bla, no it’s not, don’t buy that either, take all the time you want, you can always get back in somehow, I don’t say it’s easy but it’s a lot about the narrative of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And your ability and confidence of selling the package or re-creating yourself on your own, right? I do think entrepreneurship is a good solution but I do hear women so traumatized by the idea of stopping momentarily, which a lot of women in a lot of countries do very naturally right. It’s not the end of the world, as I also keep repeating, longevity means our careers are gonna be 50 years long at least, what you do with a few years in the middle is gonna matter less and less and less.”

So a different view but overlaps with Rachel in that emphasis that re-entering successfully is a lot about confidence and mindset. And it may be harder to marshal that confidence the longer you’re out.   

And if you’re still very much working, you may be so busy on so many fronts you haven’t had the space to sit down and think – to ask, how can I make this easier on myself? Or maybe you have ideas but voicing at work feels somehow inappropriate.

AM-T: “What do you say to the women who may be thinking, well, this isn’t really the time to ask for anything at work because we’re all struggling, my boss is struggling, we’re all just trying to get through this.”

“So I am really passionate about authentic self-promotion at work and so I work with women to plant those seeds often of the value they’re adding, the small ideas they may have come up with that made a big impact. So when you get in the habit of doing more of that the conversation about asking for what you need, shifts. So yes, if the conversations are always about what you need then yeah, I get it. But we need to make sure you’re balancing that out so they’re really seeing the critical value that you’re bringing. And in that conversation it’s seeing, I think people should always be networking and interviewing a couple of times a year so you know what else is out there and you know what your street value is, so it’s good to know you have options, you know what your street value is even in a pandemic, I’m seeing people get out of toxic roles and get into new roles that are a better fit for them because they’re clearer on what they need and they ask for it.”

She doesn’t just help women practice the discussions they might have with managers or during job interviews. She addresses the home front too.

“One of the things I’ve been doing with clients is helping them role play conversations with their partners to really advocate for what they need, and most often the male partners are coming from a really good, loving, equitable place but they don’t see the things that we see and so it’s on us to raise it and have the conversations, which are hard, but important if you want to keep that career going so you can create a little space for yourself.”

AM-T: “Well that brings me neatly to my next question because I was gonna ask you what is your husband doing now that he wasn’t in March or April?”

“Yeah, a lot. First of all, he is typically more the cook in our family but I did find his meetings ran longer so I’d just jump in and start doing dinner. Now I just keep my door closed until 6.30. Maybe I’m just checking on emails. And then he ends up going and getting dinner started, so he does pretty much all the cooking, which is great.”

 He’s more aware of all the school stuff too. And when she does get on a Zoom meeting with the kids’ school, and he has a work call, she sees it as a choice – that yes, she wants to be in that meeting.

She knows this is an incredibly challenging time – and that staying ambitious, asking for that promotion – it’s not easy when events are pulling you in so many directions.

But she firmly believes women shouldn’t sideline themselves.

“The key thing is that when we start to de-prioritize our careers and prioritize a partner’s career there’s this inherent message of my career, my identity, my desire, less important. And that first step to regaining that career and stepping out and doing what you want to do is saying no, I have to make the time, I have to make the time to find a job, to think about what I want, I have to ask for what I want. And these things that I want are just as important as what you want.”

Rachel Garrett. I’ll link you to Rachel’s website under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.

If you like this independent show please tell your friends about it…share the episodes on social media…anything you can do to support this one-woman production is much appreciated. And I’ve you’re hit me up on Linked in and I’ve ignored you it’s only because I have no idea when listeners are sending invites so if that’s you do just write a quick note saying you’re a listener so I know who you are.

 That’s the Broad Experience for this time. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.

Episode 163: No Kids. Working Hard.

Show transcript:

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

This time, when we discuss women’s careers in the pandemic we’re mostly talking about mothers. But what if you don’t have kids?

“I’m reaping the rewards of those choices and I was before Covid, and all this year has really done I feel is magnify those opportunities for me to keep working and keep exceling when others may have barriers that they’re facing instead.”

Still, not every child-free woman sees this time as an opportunity… 

“When I entered this job I was banking on being able to work more hours and pick up the pieces and stuff, I was banking on all that to work in my favor. At this point in the pandemic, I don’t know that I’m as motivated as I was before to work my way up.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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In all the discussion we’ve been having in the last two shows on what’s happening to women’s careers right now…the conversation has really been centered around women with children. All the pressure they’re under handling their jobs and their children’s presence at home at the same time…the online schooling…the daily care. We’re gonna talk more about this in upcoming shows – because the fact is most women do have children certainly in their thirties and beyond.

But a good chunk of us don’t. And I really was curious about how these women are faring at work during this time.

In this show we meet two women, at different stages of their careers and they live in very different parts of the US. Neither has children and each is having a distinct experience of work during this pandemic.

Jennifer Szambecki lives in Wichita, Kansas. Some of you have met her before – she featured in an episode I did a few years ago called Conservative Women Speak Up.   

She’s in her early 40s, married to a teacher. And she just landed a new job in July as marketing director at an architecture and construction firm.

She says she feels a lot of compassion for her parent colleagues…and has done since the pandemic began.

“And at the same time I found myself thinking wow, I probably really have an opportunity to do more of the kind of work I want to be doing, more work in general, really shine in this season, because I am not worrying about students remotely learning or anything like that, and I felt and feel bad saying that.” 

In a previous episode in this series she heard LinkedIn’s Jessi Hempel talk about how frustrated she was when she realized her colleagues without kids could get so much extra work done during lockdown…whereas Jessi had only just mastered how to keep her toddler alive and entertained AND hold down her job.

Jennifer says on the contrary for her, these last six months or so have been fruitful. She took advantage of the early days of the pandemic to work harder.

“I think part of why I feel empowered and energized was after spending 5 or 6 months of feeling like I was ramping up and doing a lot and increasing my capacity to perform and achieve…I do feel like I felt more confident taking this role and taking on this challenge as a result.”

She says she has far more responsibility in this new job than she’s had before. The hours she put in during the spring prepared her for it.

And she says not having children is part of the equation.

“A huge factor of what has made it possible for me to excel in my career has been the decision that I never wanted to have kids, I never felt the desire to have kids, it was never a choice like ‘oh, maybe I want to have kids but I’m not going to because I’m choosing my career.’ I did not want to have children and never have wanted that – so it was easy to focus all that energy especially in my twenties, before I was married, on my career and thankfully I married an incredibly supportive man who loves how successful I am and loves how driven I am, so my thirties and forties are characterized by the same ability to excel in those ways. So I do feel like I am reaping the rewards of those choices anyway, and I was before Covid, and all this year has really done is give an extra spotlight on that or magnify those opportunities to keep working and keep exceling when others may have barriers they’re facing instead.”

AM-T: “Talk about context now because I was very interested in what you said in an email to me about where you live and how unusual you are in not having children.”

“It’s true. I know of only a couple of other women and they’re much younger than me who’ve gone on record saying they don’t desire to have children. Most women my age either do have children, most of them do, very few don’t, those were not by choice – so this is a part of the country, I found a map I can send you that shows fertility density and how deep red compared to the rest of the country the middle 12 states are in the US, compared to the other two-thirds in either direction. We do have more children here by and large, and we have more space, you can live like a king in the middle of the country,  have all the kids you want, have all the space you want,  and probably afford it on one income. So I am absolutely the outlier among my closest friends and family, having no children.”

AM-T: “Have you over the years had those questions…’why don’t you have kids?’”

“Oh yes, yes. In this very role the very first question every person has asked me is whether I have kids and when I say no, the look passes across their face, they realize they’re not supposed to ask why, and they move on to another subject. But I can just see the look pass across their face, they want to say ‘why!?’ Obviously something has gone terribly wrong in my life if I’ve made it to this point and I don’t have children.”

AM-T: “And when people do ask why, which I assume they sometimes do, what do you say and what do they then say?”

“I tell them the truth. I strongly believe the Lord simply did not give me that desire, I don’t know why. I have theories such as being a great auntie and a great friend to other women and families with kids, and also being in a position professionally to help other employees, colleagues with children and families have the resources and opportunities they want and need.” 

AM-T: “Well that actually reminds me, it brings me to the last time we spoke…it was for a show called Conservative Women Speak Up, and you are a conservative Christian, which actually must make you even more unusual.”

“It’s true, yes, there are absolutely women and men in the most conservative extremes of both politics and faith who would say I’m doing something wrong by not having children. And that’s OK. I know I’m not doing anything wrong.” 

AM-T: “Well this makes me wonder actually, how does faith play into your career and your career progress?”

“Oh, that’s a great question. I think my faith is something that you could say started when I was in my very late teens and early 20s, so my faith has grown literally with my career, on the same schedule as my career timeline, and as I’ve matured in my faith I’ve matured as a human, as I’ve been aging all of these years and having great and hard and wonderful life experiences, and I think at this point my faith really is the center of the decisions I make with my husband about my career and where we’re going together on this career journey I’m on, and how I treat the people I work with and just really how I think about my work.

Part of what I wanted to say earlier but I know for people who don’t share my faith it just sounds so cheesy, but I’ve been so excited this year to get to use all the gifts God gave me to just work my butt off and have the energy to do that, and I hope that continues and I’m excited for when the people around me who are struggling so much to divide their energy between home and work and family and so many things, when they can rejoin in the fullest way so we can all take our energy together and do more wonderful things together, I think there’s gonna be some pent up work energy coming in 2021 and I’m here for it.”

Jennifer Szambecki in Wichita.

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Jennifer lives in a conservative part of the US. She told me there hadn’t been many marches for social justice in her area, but a lot of parents have protested against restrictions on school sports during Covid.

My next guest – Sandra – lives in the famously liberal San Francisco Bay area. She’s 30 years old, married, works for a consulting firm.

She says early in the pandemic colleagues with children scrambled to deal with work and home simultaneously. Which left Sandra filling in the gaps.

“I just sort of stopped seeing people’s availability on their calendars, it just stared disappearing so I had project manager colleagues just kind of disappear overnight.”

And at first, as the situation sunk in, she was fine with this. In fact she wanted to help her parent colleagues.  

“I think for myself it wasn’t hard to be like, oh, you need to go drop off your children at your mom’s place? Of course I can cover for you on this call. It’s not a big deal. And I think it continued for a while that way, where I was like well, I have all this extra time where I’m not commuting,– so for me it felt like an opportunity, for the first couple of weeks where, ‘I might as well help out if I can.’

AM-T: “So as the months have dragged on and we now find ourselves 6 months or so into this, how have your thoughts and feelings changed during that time? I think you said you were pretty tired at this point.”

“Yes…um, I think I feel tired because now that we’ve had more than Covid happen, you know we’ve had so much unrest, and people trying to get a revolution going, there’s so much happening in society at large even beyond Covid, we have an election coming up.” 

All this has been on her mind. And some worries are closer to home.   

“For me, something that’s been weighing on me a lot is my parents are technically part of the vulnerable population. My parents are a little bit older, they’re immigrants, and right now they have health problems and they are too scared to go to the hospital.”

She says they need routine preventative care but they’re avoiding it because they’re so worried about picking up the virus in a medical setting.   

She says just because she doesn’t have children doesn’t mean she isn’t experiencing Covid-related stresses of her own.

And look, she’s grateful to have a job at all. Several of her friends have lost theirs in the pandemic.

But she’s working so much these days, she says she’s not even sure what being ambitious means anymore.

“I think what my company does a really good job of is making space for parents, and I think that’s a huge win, in my lifetime that seems like a really big win for parents in the workplace to not to feel discriminated against and to be able to take off and be able to go pick up their kids from daycare and whatever…it just seems like young people and people without children in my experience have sort of been your resiliency strategy. Where we sort of pick up the slack when needed or if someone needs to stay late to do X Y Z, we all know who it’s gonna be. Just little things like staying late, doing just a little bit of extra work, doing a little bit of admin work…historically it’s fallen on me because I’m a woman but also a young person and someone without childcare duties – and not to downplay childcare duties because those are really important and very expensive for a lot of parents, but for me, I’m 30, and I do wonder what do things look like for me if I want to have children in the future myself? Part of me wants to cash in on this terrible system in the future and then there’s another part of me that’s…this is not something I want to perpetuate either, where we don’t make space for people without children to also have their own lives.”

She doesn’t want to make it and us versus them situation. Especially as she and her husband are thinking about having kids.

But what the pandemic has done to her workload is making her re-think everything about her job.

“I think Before Covid the benefit was I’d commute into the office. So I’d get in and It would be 8, 8.30 I would leave if I left at 6 or 7 I’d be leaving the office. And I think a lot of people experience the same thing, right. Now it’s hard to go home because you’re already at home.” 

She starts work at the same time…and she tries to log off around 5.30 or 6. But she says if she gets off that early she has to sign back on later, because that’s when many of her coworkers can get work done – late in the evening.

And sometimes she thinks – am I just being inefficient? Or she tells herself, maybe this is just what a more junior person HAS to do… 

“I’ve been a lower level employee at a lot of places that I’ve worked, so maybe it’s more a grind it out kind of problem where you expect the lower level people to just work hard and work your way up and eventually you can make more decisions on your own schedule, your own work, and whatever. But at this point in the pandemic I don’t know that I’m as motivated as I was before to work my way up.”

She says pre-Covid…

“Taking on more of the admin or more of the marketing work, those were little extras that I would see, oh, that might go on my performance review or that’s something I’d remind my manager about when I’m looking for a promotion. I used to keep track of these things every week.”

Now she says she doesn’t have room in her head for that kind of thing. And she’s not sure it would make much of a difference anyway.  

“You know when I entered this job I was kind of banking on being able to work more hours and pick up the pieces and stuff…I was banking on all that to work in my favor and get me where I wanted to go. Because I was seeing that availability and willingness to jump in and help the rest of the team, I was seeing that being rewarded. And I was also seeing that parents were given space to take care of their kids and they took real parental leave, you know, where they were gone for a while, and all these things were really encouraging to me…but now it seems like I’ve sort of missed my window to put in that extra time.”

AM-T: “‘Cause what you’re saying is before Covid you felt like you’d be noticed for jumping in and taking things on, and that’s the way people tell us we get promoted, right, is by doing that kind of stuff. But now that’s just expected in this crazy situation, so it’s not something you feel your managers are any longer viewing as promotion material. It’s just what people are doing during the pandemic.”

“It’s what people are doing, and I don’t actually know that they’re keeping tabs on anything any more, they’re just trying to get the work done and go home. So it’s a little bit of everything. No one’s doing their best right now.”

Thanks to Sandra and to Jennifer Szambecki for being my guests on this show.

If you have ideas or feedback you can find me on email via the website or on Twitter or on the Facebook page.

Next time we’ll continue this series about what’s going on with women’s careers right now.

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

Episode 162: The Coming Shift: What's Happening to Our Careers (part 2)

Show transcript:

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

In the last episode we worried that women might be losing ground during this pandemic. This time, a different perspective…

“Suddenly flexibility – something that women have been fighting for for thirty years is becoming the default position for a growing number of companies, and we’re already yelling victim, victim, victim, rather than wow, this is really cool.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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What is happening to women’s careers right now? That’s the question you heard Jessi Hempel and I tackle in the last podcast. And it’s one I’m going to keep asking one way or another in these next few shows.

In that conversation with Jessi we looked at some of what we’re hearing anecdotally…that women with families…some of them are thinking about quitting their jobs – or they already have - because they just don’t see how they can make it all work when their children need so much support right now. It’s an old story but with a new, pandemic twist.

My guest today is more optimistic. And she says organizations can learn a lot of lessons from this pandemic that they can use to make everyone’s life at work easier when we return to some kind of normality.

You last heard from Avivah Wittenberg-Cox a few months ago in a show about how male and female leaders around the world were handling the coronavirus crisis. She is CEO of consultancy 20-First, she works with companies to bring gender balance to their businesses. She uses that expression deliberately.

“Yes because I am very careful about integrating and including the dominant majorities and in a lot of companies that happens to be men. So if you show up and say you’re pushing women, it’s not usually the most receptive message. You can just switch your semantics to we’re promoting balance, which I have found is just much more receivable.”

Avivah is a Canadian now living in the UK. 

I started by talking about doom and gloom – the fact that female-dominated sectors like hospitality and retail have been hard hit by this pandemic. Many women have lost their jobs.

And women in other sectors and high wage brackets are struggling too.

AM-T: “There’s been tons of reporting about how women with families…it’s still seems to be the woman who’s taking on the bulk of dealing with the kids and the home schooling and all that, which can really take you away from your job. And it can just feel like this is a time that as a sex we’re going backwards not forwards. Would you disagree?” 

Avivah Wittenberg Cox: “I would cautiously hold my fire until I have a bit more proof. I am continually suspect of a strong media preference for positioning and framing women as victims.” 

AM-T: “Tell me more.”

“Well it just seems like the overwhelming story we keep getting is dire tales that women are suffering, and I’m on a million panels that are discussing this topic and not one of them will say that actually men are dying more of Covid than we are. I suspect the lack of balance and equity between men and women and between…we’re still on this fighting spirit of ‘fight for women,’ which I have done all my career, and I think we have to be cautious about ‘everything’s being lost.’ I think one of the astonishing realities I’ve heard about a lot in the last 5 months is what I call the Berlin Wall of personal and professional life has fallen down, NOT just for women but for men too. So there’s been more men confronted with the realities of working from home and taking care of children than there ever has been before, I mean this is a big breakthrough, right? Nobody talks about that.”

That’s something that came across in an episode I did in the spring about partnership in the pandemic. It featured three women, all married, two of them had kids. And both those mothers said their husbands were doing more childcare during lockdown. Life was still chaotic, but each felt their husbands had built a stronger bond with their kids during this time.

“We seem to prefer to say women have taken over and…how do they know that already? Who’s doing that research and I want to see the reports and the stats. That’s not what I am hearing. I hear all these companies doing work from home, going on permanent work from home. Suddenly flexibility – something that women have been fighting for for thirty years is becoming the default position for a growing number of companies, and we’re already yelling victim, victim, victim, rather than wow, this is really cool, let’s redesign the workplace with a technology that’s now on tap, and that we can do this kind of thing and everybody is discovering that, and yes, I will add there remains a very interesting issue that has been perhaps less the focus of our work for this last little while, because we’ve been focused on gender balance at work, there remains an issue of gender balance at home. And that is what is being revealed at times like this. So when push comes to shove what happens in the home when there’s two careers, two kids, no day care and nothing else, who has the power, and how is it balanced between two parents?”

Sociologist Daniel Carlson has been looking at this. He also appeared in that episode about couples during Covid. Several weeks after we spoke he and some colleagues published their own research into men, women, and the division of labor during the pandemic. What they found was less dire than some surveys suggest. Men WERE doing more childcare and housework than they had before, although most women still did the bulk of it and they certainly reported they were doing the bulk of homeschooling.

The research concluded that lockdown had made most households more egalitarian…but an egalitarian utopia it was not.

Avivah says what we don’t know is what those conversations are like between partners. Women may insist on equality at work. But to what extent are they asking for or demanding it at home?

 “What choices do they make, how much negotiating power do they have, how can they contract with their spouses, do they even try, do they themselves default and assume they’re the better teachers and accompaniers of their children…do they leave space for their spouse…we’ve been through this before but this is now a whole new game when you’ve got two parents in lockdown for five or six months and no school on the horizons – it’s very revelatory of company cultures, of couple cultures, of country cultures…who is doing this well, who is doing this badly, and we will see both, but it’s a legacy of gender issues, how we’ve all been brought up, what we think our roles in the home are, they’re in evolution for men and women, and we’ve hit this crisis when shared parental leave has just been introduced in various countries in the last few years…it’s a whole new era but it’s the beginning of this era for fathers to take their rightful place in fatherhood, something many of them have been fighting for for quite some time.

Now have women suffered from this crisis? You’re absolutely right in saying it’s the sectors that were female-dominated that suffered in this crisis most, just as in the last crisis in 2008 it was the sectors dominated by men that suffered most. But that’s not like a gender bias attack, we’re going backward, it’s the weird circumstances of the world. And if anyone feels they’re going backwards at home, time to fight back, right? Time to renegotiate what you’re willing to do or not.”

She says these can be difficult conversations. They can challenge the ideas men and women are carrying around about what a good mother or a good man SHOULD do. But they need to be had.

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AM-T: “You wrote in this Forbes piece in July that this crisis actually presents an opportunity for organizations to change the way they do things and make things more equitable.” 

“Yeah, I mean never waste a crisis is typical management speak, right? It depends of course on the state of a company, right, if it’s fighting for its life and very fearful I find usually companies then hunker down on people they trust and the past. They go backwards, of course they do ‘cause they can’t see their way through. Good companies with strong leadership innovate, re-create, leapfrog forward, and yeah, they’re inventing new ways of working, new definitions of flexibility, insisting on the gender balance journeys they’ve already usually been on for a number of years, very cautious not to lose it all in the next two years.”

Avivah has said this before but she really believes if companies are going to thrive in the future they have to be more humane. They have to show what she calls love to their employees.

“Well run companies and countries during Covid have realized that good leadership encapsulates and includes pretty finely attuned emotional support, psychological safety at work, bringing your whole self to work, all these concepts that have been in the progressive leadership ranks have proven survival tactics in a crisis like this one, to keep people engaged and delivering under really stressful situations sometimes. To take care of your people, to show love, not just utilization has been really key. So I tend to – I’m in a default space, the companies I work with tend to be good companies and good employers tend to be self-selecting. I’ve been very impressed by their ability to protect jobs, to do innovative things, to have senior leaders lose some salary so they wouldn’t have to let people go and people would accept salary adjustments across the board...there’s been all kinds of, you know…here in the UK there has been the furlough scheme but when the furlough scheme ends, they have been protecting these things. They’ve gone a long way – that doesn’t mean they haven’t let anybody go but they’ve done it very mindfully, carefully, with strong communication.” 

Not every company has handled Covid with grace.  Even companies that claim to be family friendly. Like the small firm a listener of mine in New Zealand works for. She left me a voice memo a few weeks ago. 

“I can’t really blame them for reacting the way they did when we were told we had to go into lockdown, there was just no procedure for this. At home I have a 4 year old daughter and a husband. It was just us during the lockdown period. I struggled a lot working from home and felt terribly guilty about not being a good worker and for struggling to be a good mum. 

Her husband took full charge of their daughter but still…her daughter wanted HER attention as well. She hated this meshing of her work and her home lives. Her employer didn’t seem to grasp how hard it was to get things done in the circumstances.

“I felt as though our mental health took second place to completing the job, the work, was the priority. What would have made a significant difference for me and other staff aside from reducing the expectations from management, would have been to limit client expectations. The communication to our clients was that it was business as usual, and it just wasn’t.”

Now she’s back at the office she says there’s been no outlet to talk about this.

She says most of her bosses are men with wives who work part-time.

Avivah says that could be part of the problem.

“Generally what I find about the business world despite this talk we hear of ‘bring your whole self to work’ and authenticity and all that…a lot of male dominated, male normed corporate company environments are: never show your emotions, totally eliminate any reference to your personal life. As personal as you’ll go is what football game you watched over the weekend. And there’s this complete compartmentalization between personal and professional. Which women have always been incapable of separating right, and this is why this experience has I think been so seminal, is it’s knocked down that wall for men too, which is new, right? So I’m not surprised some of these companies are desperately trying to put it back up as fast as possible because they don’t want it down. But for employees who saw it fall and experienced its fall and know how much better they felt being able to be the same human being at home and work rather than two separate versions of themselves…I think it’s probably wiser management to learn how to integrate it, and a lot of men are uncomfortable, we haven’t raised men…that’s the management culture and I would add the English speaking language culture to be rational, unemotional, that’s why women have always made men uncomfortable because we’re always embracing our emotions, naming them talking  about them, but now we know, we’ve got MIT saying gender balanced teams are more effective because they have more EQ, because they have more psychological safety… because women bring up different subjects. It reminds me of a company I interviewed years ago in Canada, an electricity company that had gender-balanced, and the CEO was just so impressed that the number of their safety incidents fell by like 50% in the first year because he said women talk about fears and problems, and men don’t.”

AM-T: “That’s so interesting…”

“And I think in moments of crisis, if you can’t talk about what’s going on you’re gonna fail, you’re gonna burn out, you’re gonna melt down, you’re gonna have cancer in 20 years, it’s just not good for humans to lock down all their emotions especially in this kind of massive, collective trauma thing we’re going through.”

She’s been speaking to clients and consulting with couples all over the world during Covid. And one thing she notes is how many baby boomer men have wives who don’t work. They’re at the top, they’re affluent…

“So lockdown to them means something very different than it does to the young, dual career spouses they employ. And there’s this complete generational and financial divide. They’re at home, they have beautiful homes, often they’re in their country home because they have more than one… and they have an office and the door is closed and to them not only are they comfortable they’re in a very happy place, they don’t have to commute, they have their families, they get to see them every day in a much less stressful way. So for some of those guys it’s been an unexpected pleasure, all of this. The age of their children makes an enormous difference most of them will be older, it’s lovely to have your 20 year-olds come back home, it’s been a gift to a number of senior people I’ve been talking to, they get their kids home for a few months, which is like cherry on the cake of life for some of them, so it’s almost the complete reverse of what their staffs are going through, which they may not fully understand, appreciate or see, right?”

She says many younger men want to be present for their kids during all this. But…

“Men are not going to be sharing, ‘oh my God I’ve gotta take care of the kids,’ to a senior guy who isn’t very open to that kind of conversation. This is the problem we have with parental leave still. I hasten to add that what people don’t integrate is the big generational shift isn’t between you and your mother and me and my mother, it’s between young men and these boomer men, that’s the big shift, is on fatherhood and the roles of men in the world over the last 30 years, right, so what we see is all the men running large organizations today come from one generation that often weren’t dual career or certainly not the ones in the most senior roles, their wives often let work go, so they’re in lead careers, never really had to worry about the kids. And they don’t necessarily understand, appreciate or encourage a younger generation of men to do differently. And they’re very suspicious of young men who want to balance.

They only just barely got used to women being the pain in the neck we are, you know, oh, babies, bla bla bla, and now they have the spectrum, oh my God, men are gonna want this too? Geez, then the game’s over, everyone is gonna want this. And that’s exactly the issue.”

But that attitude on the part of some bosses is contributing to the imbalance of power at home, as men hesitate to ask for much flexibility. Age-old beliefs about gender roles can be incredibly hard to shake. 

AM-T: “Sort of back to the beginning…for many people because they are still working from home in some form of lockdown situation, it feels a bit Groundhog-Day-like, and I think treading water is a good way to put it, as one of my correspondents put it…what are you hearing, you’re talking to people all over the world you say. Are people just treading water in their careers, how are they feeling? What’s going to happen to us?”

“We’re in for a tough year, we’ve only really seen so far the health crisis, now it’s the economic crisis and huge numbers of companies…we’re going into some really, really bad numbers. Which governments will cough up, which ones have money to cough up more…anybody who thinks companies aren’t going to be massively laying off don’t have their eyes on the road. It’s terrifying. No, I think, listen, it’s really terrifying. So anyone who’s in a job should stay there, which is what I’m telling my daughter who hates her job and wants to quit. It’s not the moment to quit, I don’t care how much you hate your job, unless you’re ready to go off and do something really different…I think there’s a lot of treading water, there’s always a pendulum swing between who has the power. Is it the employer or is it the employee?”

Since the pandemic struck, it’s the employer.

“This is not a time of ease, of facility, of power on the employee’s side. So if you’re in any kind of a stable place, stay there, and if you’ve lost something my advice is really to start thinking creatively about how to start something on your own. I hope to see a huge uptick in entrepreneurship would be my only silver lining of what’s coming. And even that is tricky, right?”

AM-T: “And in the US, your heath insurance, most people depend on their work to pay for their health insurance and when you work for yourself paying for your health insurance is on you – so that’s another difficulty in the US for people going out on their own.”

“I think the issue is not that they’re going to be going out on their own, it’s that there are going to be people now on their own. It’s how they’re going to end up, and then it’s how do you start over, you have to keep learning and growing and doing. I think there are a lot of opportunities, there’s always new spaces opening up in markets, there will be huge needs…there are a lot of problems, right? When there are problems there’s always a business solution to offer for it that people will be ready to pay for, and I think that people should start thinking. That’s definitely where I would recommend that we all start thinking creatively about how can we in the next decade solve some of the issues?

What I’m also hearing is that a lot of people are having second thoughts about what they’ve been doing for the last decade, what are they doing, how are they spending their life? When you know you can get sick it helps to remind you that life is short and sweet, right? Are you doing something you’re convinced by and committed to? And if in any case we’re all gonna lose our jobs and have to shift, which I think many of us will have to do at all ages right…this is hitting across the age span, although what I see in the statistics is that it’s hitting most in the 60s and in the 20s, which are two difficult ages to be re-creating by the way…”

AM-T: “Why in your twenties?”

“Well because these poor young kids, if they’re just graduating it’s very hard to find work, if they’ve just been hired as interns and stuff they’re let go. Those are the easy ones to lose. They don’t have long term contracts, they’re on short term things. So then yeah, I’d offer a different way of thinking about work which I think many people will come to: How to find a bit more meaning in what you do, and how can you help others, rather than just getting a job and earning your income.”

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. I’ll post some links to Avivah’s recent articles under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com and I’ll also link you to Daniel Carlson’s research on the division of labor at home during Covid.

You can find me in all the usual places – by email, on Twitter or on the Facebook page.

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

Episode 161: What is Happening to Women's Careers Right Now?

Show transcript:

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

 This time…as this year began a lot of people were making career plans…then life as we knew it came to a halt.

“Maybe they wanted a career change, maybe they wanted that big promotion, and it’s not so much those career questions went away, it’s as if they exist in a different plane in time. And we’re not existing in that plane right now.”

Coming up, the first of a few shows on what is happening to women’s careers right now and where we might go from here.

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This has been an utterly weird year in so many ways and it’s not over yet. There’s the sadness and grief of Covid – for all the people who have died, and for the end of normal life, which happened so suddenly. There’s the ongoing uncertainty about what life will look like when this pandemic does – finally – come to an end. There’s the economic fallout which is happening all around us.

And in the midst of such huge considerations it’s not surprising a lot of women are putting ambitions to one side as they focus on the day to day.  

My guest this week has a bird’s eye view on the world of work. Jessi Hempel is a longtime magazine journalist who is now at Linked In – in fact she hosts their weekly podcast on work, Hello Monday. We spoke a couple of weeks ago just as summer was coming to an end.  

AM-T: “You have this incredible window on to working people’s feelings and what’s happening to them right now. What do you know about what women in particular are going through at the moment, whether that’s from your own show, from the feedback you get from listeners, or from LinkedIn itself and messages and forums that are posted on LinkedIn?” 

“You know that’s the million dollar question and I think a lot of people, from a lot of places in the world, not just the US, many of our listeners – our show is about the future of work, where careers are going and how we navigate proactively so we have interesting work that pays well in the future. That is the goal. Before the pandemic that was a theoretical question, we did a lot of thinking way out, where’s this going in 5 years? And then the pandemic happened and suddenly in a moment we all had to figure out how to work differently. And honestly for most of our listeners, male and female, but really for women, it was an emergency that has forced many of our listeners to come to terms with where their career fits in their life, to figure out newly the balance between their work and their other responsibilities, to figure out what to prioritize right now and how to prioritize what you have to prioritize right now without losing sight of what you want for your career.” 

And for many women, their priorities have shifted. We know this anecdotally and there are some studies that back this up – women have taken on more of the home stuff during this pandemic. That means overseeing their children’s online schooling in addition to doing their own jobs. 

If you live in the U.S., your kids may not have gone back to school in person in the last few weeks. Or if they have, they’re just going a day or two a week – and who knows how long that’ll last? 

For lots of professional women, including some of Jessi’s listeners, this crisis has made them re-think their commitment to their jobs. 

Jessi has a listener in Florida called Mirna.

“And she wrote to me and said, ‘I’m a lawyer, a happy lawyer, I’ve figured out over time how to do my work, sometimes part-time and from home, and spring was terrible for my kids…telling my elementary school kids to spend hours on Zoom feels hopeless. And as I go into the fall I’m thinking about quitting my job. It’s not something I ever thought I wanted to do, I like my career, but my kids, they need this.’ And honestly that voice, that voice I hear over and over again in different ways.”

And we’ll talk more about the power of that voice in an upcoming show. 

Now of course if you CAN leave your job, if you don’t need two incomes to support yourselves, you’re one of the lucky ones.

One of my listeners told me a similar story to Mirna’s but the gender roles are flipped. Her husband lost his job early in the pandemic – and with it, their health insurance. She has her own consulting business and she loves it, but she quickly landed a full-time job – with benefits – to support their family. She says he isn’t even going to look for another job until the pandemic is over – because their two young kids are doing online schooling full-time for the foreseeable future and she says someone has to manage that. She says she knows they’re fortunate, but she adds ‘we’ve turned our careers upside down because of this.’ 

But if you have kids and you’re not partnered, this situation is far tougher. Jessi has corresponded with another of her listeners, a nurse on the west coast – where life is even more complicated because of the wildfires raging there. She has a seven-year-old son and she used to have pretty decent childcare coverage – her parents would help out a lot, some of her friends would help. Then the virus came and suddenly her parents were out as babysitters.

And because of her job as a nurse, even friends were reluctant to care for her son for fear they might be exposed to the virus. 

“What do you do? Just what do you do? Well you piece it together week by week, and it should be said for people listening who may be in this position, this is so exhausting and this is the way so many parents and caretakers are making the pandemic work. You get a few weeks leave from your office and score, you’re good for a few weeks, then you find a summer camp for your kid and score, you’re good for another week. Then you can take your vacation and you’ve got another week. And you keep piecing it together like that. And I’ve just talked to this woman in the last two weeks and she was trying to navigate the back to school piece, which is SO complicated no matter where you are in the country. The child’s school is going back on a hybrid model, and the day will start 20 minutes after her work is supposed to start, then the child will only go 2 days a week so what do you do for the other 3 days…and school will start in less than a month and she doesn’t have answers to these questions. I think it’s impossible to really understand the weight of the complexity of those thoughts as you work through them…just how much psychological time it takes to be in that unknown trying to figure it out day after day. That’s for single parents but also for any caretakers.”

It’s a depressing conclusion to come to, that women’s careers seem to be suffering more than men’s during all this…but at least on the surface it does seem like that’s happening.

“Yeah, I think that’s true. I also think this is very much a gendered issue and it’s also an economic issue. And it can at times be hard to split those things. I’ll give you a very personal example. I’m married to a woman and we have a two-year-old, actually he’s one and a half. And when we got ready to have a kid we sat down and said how are we gonna do this? We live in NYC, it’s expensive. We realized we needed two incomes in our family but we also needed for one parent to be the dominant parent to make sure the bills got paid every month, and one partner to be the dominant parent to make sure the child got to every doctor’s appointment. And we were going to have to divide the labor. So we’ve done that. Over course of the pandemic my wife’s career has suffered and mine has not. You see that playing out in same-gendered families the same way you do in differently gendered families.”

AM-T: What industry is your wife in, what kind of thing does she do?

“Oh goodness, she’s the director of a preschool, and heavy sighs, because it’s a really, really difficult time to be in the business of child-care.”

AM-T: “This makes me think about my next question which is, is anyone rising in their career right now, is anyone getting promoted? Is that even happening?”

“Yeah in fact it’s totally happening and I hear from a lot of those folks too. I hear from folks getting jobs which is not the story line you expect, right, we’re in a moment where it feels like most people around us are furloughed, laid off, but in fact lots of places are hiring.” 

She recently talked to a startup CEO who’d laid off a bunch of staff in May, but now he was hiring again. 

“Another listener, longtime listener, she was offered a job at McKinsey the first week in April, she started in May. So there are two things I’ll say about the job market as it exists right now. It is porous and weird and changing all the time and up and down and in moments like that, there are opportunities. So people who are trying to get up one rung on the ladder, that’s still there for you.  And then once you’re at the job, it’s a weird thing about getting ahead right now. People for whom there are not a lot of other things going on in their lives have had more time to devote to the actual work of work, like so much time, right? And that has led to some people spiraling ahead.”

We will talk more about that in a minute.

---

So if you don’t have kids it’s likely that as Jessi just said, you have had more time, more headspace, to devote to your career since the pandemic started. 

She says her own team at LinkedIn is one example of this. But just to backtrack for a minute… everything shut down in mid-March she and her wife realized…we can’t expect our nanny to come to our house every day. Like so many others, they had to work out how to juggle in their case a toddler, with two jobs. 

“And over the next couple of weeks I never took any days off from my job, and luckily LinkedIn is an incredibly supportive company, my manager was great about saying just do what you can do right now. But at same time as I did my job I packed as much of my life as I could into my Subaru, my wife and I drove 15 hours to her parents’ house in Mississippi. We figured out how to live in her childhood bedroom upstairs, we figured out how to adjust my son to a new routine, still doing the job, right, just early in the mornings and late at night, and it took about a month and finally I was like I got it, I feel normal again. 

And I looked up and all my colleagues without kids, suddenly they weren’t just doing the job, they were doing the job plus, they were doing all the extra things that were allowing them pilot into this moment, and take advantage of all the trends going on and move our product forward at work. And I was like oh man, it wasn’t enough for me to figure out how to do this, I’m competing with people who don’t have this set of responsibilities who just bested me, and I didn’t see it coming. And I don’t know, I found that really frustrating.”

And again, I’ve heard anecdotes along these lines. They’ve often come from female academics. These women say their career progress has stalled during the pandemic because focusing on their research is pretty much impossible when they have young children hanging off their chairs…while they say many male professors have been submitting papers as if nothing were happening. 

As one of you pointed out on Facebook, this does make you wonder what’s going to happen at annual review time, when some people have just been more able than others to get work done.

And talking of children’s antics, if you DO have small children, one thing you probably hope to avoid but don’t always is having your offspring appear on your screen, sit on your lap, when you’re in a meeting. Jessi says even though her colleagues make all the right noises, she hates it when this happens and says it really is a last resort…

“So you put your one-and-a-half year old on your knee…if I have Jude on my knee it’s because everything else has failed us. It’s because he did not eat breakfast, it’s because his caretaker did not arrive on time, it’s because my wife is on an even more important call and it’s because he’s mad. And my colleagues who don’t have children, they want to be supportive so they say cute things about him and that is the right way to be supportive…but the thing they don’t understand, it’s like the secret code that goes with that experience of the parents, is that this is awful. That this cute child sitting on my knee is making this meeting impossible for me to be present at.” 

She says she can’t pay attention more than 20% to the meeting, or 20% to her kid. The rest of her mind is taken up with worrying about being both a bad parent and a bad employee. But at least she has a supportive boss. 

“Yeah, here’s the thing about Dan, my manager Dan Roth, who runs the news team at LinkedIn. He has three sons. He’s also trying to keep his 3 sons engaged over the course of this crazy summer. When school was in session he was responsible for some of the school day…on the regular his sons make appearances in Zoom, they just show up, they want his attention, they want to play video games, he sometimes has to stop a second, deal with them, turn his volume back on, I know it’s as aggravating for him as it is for me when my son is on my knee, but it is because he does that, that I even feel safe talking to you publicly about how hard this is, like it is that modeling. We shouldn’t give him extra credit for being a man on this one, but we should give him extra credit for being a manager that models being a great parent.”

And I should have asked Jessi whether she had any inkling into her boss’s level of guilt – or not – when he wasn’t paying attention to his home-bound kids. Because she has a LOT – and yes she’s a relatively new mother, but she’s wrestling with this constantly.

“It’s amazing how at the same time I can feel like an awful mom because my one and a half year old has been watching 2 hours of Sesame Street, and that is more screen time than he ever had in his entire first year of life, and also an awful colleague because I haven’t read the notes in preparation for a meeting. But at the end of the day…if I have to choose being good at one of those things instead of being bad at both, I will choose my child. And I will do it to the point of bankruptcy, I’ll do it till I can’t not do it. And I don’t want to speak for all women, I want to speak for myself, I didn’t expect that about motherhood and it turned out to be true for me.”

But other people have been forced to make hard decisions because of a parent, rather than a child. More and more of us are taking on this kind of caregiving. 

“I know another woman, she’s had to make a similar decision because her mother has Alzheimer’s, she doesn’t have a partner or children, and she got to the point where her mother needed fulltime care. And we have seen how the pandemic has decimated facilities for older people. And she had to make the difficult choice, do I stop out of my career for a while to care for my mother? And she’s done that.”

In a world that feels so abnormal, lots of plans don’t seem to fit any more. Our horizons have shrunk.

“People began the year thinking about the next thing they wanted to do…maybe they wanted a career change, maybe they wanted that big promotion, maybe they were on the cusp of finally starting their own company. Then within a week there was a massive swing to safety and security. Now, all of those questions, maybe they haven’t even been murmured since March. Now it’s can I take care of me? Can I take care of my family, of the people who need me? And it’s not so much that those career questions went away, it’s as if they exist in a different plane in time. And we’re not existing in that plane right now. It’s just on pause.”

But will that pause damage women’s progress? I think a lot of us are worried about this.

Maybe it’s too early to tell, but I asked Jessi anyway.  

“So as a journalist I will tell you I have no empirical data on the macro trends that might shed light on this. As a woman in the middle of my career and as someone who is ambitious and wants great things for my own career and for women in general in the workplace, I’m terrified. Economic recessions are times when companies pull back on all the hard work they’ve done around diversity and inclusion, all the more so in a year when they’re being pressed to direct all their energy on that front toward people of color, which they should be doing. But often women fall through the cracks in that conversation. Now add to it that many women don’t even have the energy or the attention to focus on that because they’re trying to keep things together at home right now, and yeah, I’m scared.”

That said…Jessi points out there are also some hopeful signs for women who may have lost a job or someone who’s chosen to step out of the workforce to help her family get through this time.

“I think you see women able to see more models of other people who have gone before them, and stopped out and stopped back into the workforce. More coaches and specialists who exist to help them do that, programs, and you see the beginning of, not a playbook, but a sense that this doesn’t have to be getting off the highway but rather taking the pause, and coming back. And the coming back by the way, that’s where I want our podcast Hello Monday as a podcast about the future of work, to really focus its energy, because the truth is, like, there are a lot of things that we can and should be doing right now that are light lift, that are not hard, that set us up for an easier future transition.”

Thanks to Jessi Hempel for being my guest on this show.

You can hear Jessi’s conversation with Mirna – the lawyer in Florida who was close to giving up work for now - in a recent episode of Hello Monday called How to Take a Career Break Without Giving It All Up.

In the next few weeks, we’re going to continue the discussion of what’s going on with our careers right now.    

“I realized that I was getting these subtle messages from the media, I was always the one who the school reached out to…and if I’m a good mom to my girls right now I have to be present for their every need and their every emotional need.” 

But does she? 

And when your organization’s expectations barely change even when everything else has…it can leave a bitter taste in your mouth…

“Work did put a lot of pressure on us to work full-time from home despite the fact nearly everyone had small children at home as well. We’re back in the office now. I still hold a lot of resentment though and they haven’t given us an outlet to talk about it – yet.”

But for some firms, the pandemic is an opportunity to get better… 

“Good companies with strong leadership innovate, re-create, leapfrog forward – they’re inventing new ways of working, new definitions of flexibility…”

More perspectives coming up in the weeks ahead.

In the meantime, you can always reach me via Twitter or Facebook or by emailing me at ashley at the broad experience dot com. I’d love to hear from women who don’t have children about how your work experience has been during the last several months. And from men as well – whatever your family situation.

Thanks to all those of you have supported this one-woman show in the past and to those of you who do this every month. You can contribute to the show and make a donation of any size via the support tab at TheBroadExperience.com

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

Episode 160: Stress and the Benefits of Being Outside (re-release)

Show transcript:

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

This time…a show for summer. We all used to spend a lot more time outside. And it’s still one of the best ways to combat stress – particularly for women…

“We are fully engaged with our sensory and perceptual systems in ways that make us feel alive and vital and healthy rather than being buffeted around by these expectations of how women are supposed to behave or look.”

Coming up, how nature and being outside can help us manage life and work.

---

I am an urban person. I grew up in a city, moved to another city for college, I worked in London for a few years and then I moved to New York – the ultimate metropolis. And I thought I’d always live in a city. I couldn’t imagine life otherwise. There’s so much to do, so much creative energy, so many jobs.

But in recent years big city living has begun to feel old. Or maybe it’s just me. But increasingly I find the noise and the crowds and the jostling on the subway is just too much. And I’ve noticed something else – the more time I spend outside, in nature, the calmer I feel. Work stress or stress in general seems to bother me less when I’m looking at a lake or a field or a mountain.

A couple of months ago I came across a book by science writer Florence Williams. It’s called The Nature Fix. Its subtitle is ‘why nature makes us happier, healthier and more creative.’

Of course I picked it up.

Florence is a contributing editor to Outside Magazine, and she also hosts the Outside podcast.

She’s done a lot of reporting and research for this book. Among many other things she found women can benefit more than men from spending time outside, in a natural setting.

I started by asking why she’d tackled this subject in the first place.

AM-T: “What were some of the things that prompted you to write this book The Nature Fix that I enjoyed so much?”

“Oh, thanks Ashley. Well I guess it began with my personal journey. I spent two decades living in the Rocky Mountains. You know really my entire adult life, and then my husband took a job in Washington D.C. and we had to move.

And it was really a hard adjustment for me to go from being so nature connected almost on an hourly basis, to living in the middle of the city, and experiencing the noise and the sort of monochromatic cityscape, just the sort of busy ness and the urban built environment. And I noticed some changes in my own kind of emotional state, in my psychological state, that weren’t so good. More anxiety, I certainly wasn't sleeping so well, I was depressed. I mean some of that is just transition you know, from that time of life. But I think also I started thinking about how the environment affects our emotional states.”

And right around this time Outside gave her an assignment – to go to Japan and write about forest bathing…this practice where overworked city types immerse themselves in nature…

“Stressed out urbanites go to the woods for 15 or 20 minutes and just kind of practice being mindful in the woods and kind of de-stressing. And it's something that's being really promoted by the government in Japan. You know as a way to help their workers who are the most overworked population you know in the world basically, they work the longest hours, and they're really stressed out. There's high rates of depression and suicide. And at the same time researchers are studying what's happening to these people's physiology after 15 or 20 minutes in the woods.

And so I went to Japan, I saw that people's blood pressures were dropping, their heart rates were changing, their stress hormones were changing. And that there really was science you know behind this. And so I think that's really what launched the book. I just felt like there's enough to write about and I'm personally interested in what the science has to say about you know this idea of nature deficit disorder.”

Nature deficit disorder. A lot of us have it. Most of us live and work in urban environments. In the US in particular you can drive from home to office to supermarket and back home without even walking a block. And many of our jobs are screen-based and sedentary…

“…you know it seems like mentally and cognitively when we're kind of inside responding to emails all the time, staring at screens, you know being kind of reactive to the massive amounts of information coming to us that it creates a certain amount of fatigue. You know cognitive fatigue, and that translates into emotional fatigue and a little bit of strain and grumpiness, and all this may be happening on a pretty subconscious level. But it looks like when we are able to kind of take a break, go outside, get a little bit of relief and a little bit of maybe sensory stimulation, that it can really reboot us, it can re-boot us cognitively, studies show that after short breaks, looking for example at grass and trees we come back to the tasks at hand fresher. Our working memory is a little bit better, our cognitive processing is a little bit faster after we get that break. And so I think that's a great lesson. That we need to know that by taking a break we're not just taking ourselves out of productivity, that we're actually making ourselves more productive when we go back.”

AM-T: “Yeah, I think that's the hard one for people to at least for workaholics or type-A personalities who abound in cities to get their heads around, right? That you're not slacking off. You're actually helping yourself to be more efficient at work.”

“Exactly, and you see enlightened companies really starting to understand this and embrace it. You know a lot of the high-tech companies in Silicon Valley, they now have walking trails on the roof. They have roof gardens. Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook takes walking meetings. So I think you know in some parts of the workspace there's this kind of understanding that yes, this is actually good for productivity. But I think it is hard for individuals to kind of know to take that break, and we don't pay a lot of attention to how we feel after we take a break. And that's one of the points that I really make in the book is that we need to pay attention to how we feel in these different environments, kind of tune in a little bit more because there's so much individual variation to when people go outside, and some people love looking at the ocean and some people hate looking at the ocean and feel threatened by it. And we just don't necessarily tend to pay attention to where and how we feel best. And I think that that's a really lost opportunity.”

AM-T: “Yeah. I want to talk more about the…what we can do about this for ourselves and our own health. I mean some of us are lucky enough to be able to spend time outside of cities when we live in cities. I mean most every summer that I've been living in the U.S. I've gone to a lake in Pennsylvania most weekends of the summer. And one thing I've noticed especially in recent years, so it's definitely for me related to getting older, is that I'll go on Friday night and my head will be full of the things that I didn't finish during the week. I am going to get those things done at the weekend! You know when I'm there you know there'll be no e-mail coming in. Great time to finish off all that work. When I get there, or when I wake up on Saturday morning and I'm in this incredibly quiet atmosphere. And I can see the water, and  I can hear birds and it's so peaceful, I feel entirely different about my work. It just doesn't seem as important anymore. It doesn't it doesn't have the same power over me that it did on Friday night when I just spent the entire week working.”

“Exactly. Exactly. And the studies really back that up, that when we experience natural beauty you know specifically sort of awe, the emotion of awe, which has typically been an understudied emotion but is now really being looked at as kind of one of the neglected positive emotions that we could learn something from, what they're finding is that it really helps slow our perception of time when we experience natural beauty we suddenly feel less stressed out, we feel like we have more time to solve these problems. Maybe they don't become as important, and our own personal problems also recede and we tend to feel more connected to other people which I think is really interesting. So you know there's this way that being in nature in some ways makes us more fit for civilization because it does make us more community minded, makes us feel more connected to each other. And also it can take us out of what are sometimes debilitating personal playbacks of our own issues and problems, and it gives us greater perspective.”

Who wouldn’t want that?

AM-T: “My show focuses on women's experiences in life but particularly work. What does your work life balance feel like or what did it feel like when you decided to write the book. I mean did it change when you moved to D.C. or not particularly?   Was it the same set of things, you were just in different circumstances?”

“Yeah, that's a good question. I would say I'm still trying to get a handle on how to have a balanced work life situation and part of that is I have two kids you know. And you know a full time job. And so it's always a struggle I think to balance, and to feel balanced and to also have some you know personal time and exercise time and all that. So it's something I struggle with. And when I moved to D.C. I would say you know it just felt a little more intense. I mean D.C. is it's just a hyper urban environment. It takes longer to get anywhere. You know the traffic is horrible. My kids were going to school kind of in a different part of town and you know I would have to spend a fair amount of time driving them around in traffic. And also you know in an unfamiliar geography, so I would end up in these traffic circles you know being cut off by very impatient commuters and I would just start cursing and crying and feeling overwhelmed.

I think my kids were like oh my God, Mom, maybe we should go to school a little closer.

You know so we did, and we adjusted that. Now the kids go to neighborhood schools. You know I had to sort of figure that out. But I think anytime you move it's kind of demanding right, because you have to find new everything new grocery stores new eye doctors, new pediatricians. It's all just like, your workload I think gets really intense. Plus the D.C. work culture itself is more intense.”

She says Boulder, where they had been living, it attracts people who are seeking a more balanced lifestyle – they’re less career-driven, more lifestyle driven. They’re into yoga, meditation, hiking and biking, eating right. She says DC is full of the best and the brightest, but it just felt so different. Not only were there a lot more people but there were a lot fewer trees. And it didn’t help that their house was right under the flight path.

In a minute, we talk about how being outside can help women in particular, and Florence comes to terms with her new surroundings.

So I knew Florence had done her own reporting on how women benefit from being outdoors.

AM-T: “In a recent issue of Outside that was dedicated to women really you have this great piece on Girl Scouts and it was about…you shadowed a whole group of Girl Scouts who were out in the wilderness and they were sort of achieving feats outdoors… What I took away from it was, it was this idea of being outdoors in a group helping each other that took the focus away from some of the things that can kind of bedevil teenage girls like self-consciousness and screens and meanness from other people. Social media, all that. It was so interesting. I mean they're really young. But all that stuff, that bad stuff can really start women on the road to feeling less than. And that their looks are the most important thing about them. I mean do you think grown women can experience some of that? Can learn some of the same things that those young girls learned from being outside for a concentrated period of time?”

“Oh yeah, absolutely. I really do. There's been some really interesting studies looking at for example self-esteem, leadership, confidence and time outside.

And we know, for example REI is in the middle of this campaign called force of nature and they've done some internal studies as well, or some surveys. And what it really shows is that the time what women spend outside as girls kind of having adventures and doing sports outside, the more confidence they have as adults. And the more they experience gender equity for example in their careers, the more confidence they have, the more leadership. And I think that definitely translates, can translate into time outside for women. You know any time that we're using our bodies and enjoying the strength you know and the skills and the coordination of our muscles, we are not thinking so much about how we look. We're thinking about how our bodies work. And I think that's really important jump for women to make because society just tells us that our looks are so important and it's hard, you know. I mean as girls I think were especially vulnerable to that. But as grown women we are too. You know those messages really don't cease, sadly. It's kind of the dominant message that the media still gives us. And yet I think when we're outside they're just, there are no mirrors. We're with friends. We're in a more supportive potentially social environment. We are fully engaged with our sensory and perceptual systems in ways that make us feel alive and vital and healthy, rather than just kind of being buffeted around by these more social and perceptual expectations of how women are supposed to behave or look."

AM-T: “And actually when you were talking that reminded me there will be someone women listening to this who can’t be active outside, whether it's through illness or disability, they can't enjoy their bodies the way many of us can because our bodies work for us. I mean what do we know about being outside for people who don't have full use of their limbs for instance? I mean are the benefits of nature still there?”

“Absolutely. I mean people who can't fully exercise or be active in nature still have their sensory systems right, largely intact. So they're still able to somehow, the wonderful smells of springtime or drink in the visuals of the sunset. Experience the night sky or the changing phases of the moon. So there's still a full sensory engagement even if it's not necessarily on an aerobic level and that's OK. I mean exercising in nature is one thing but sitting in nature, connecting to nature, is fully another and incredibly valuable. I've been contacted by a number of people since I wrote this book. You know many of whom share with me that they're not able to fully run a river or climb a mountain but they still find nature to be tremendously healing, tremendously powerful and they're still able to find that nature connection. And I think you know, that's a beautiful thing.”

AM-T: “Definitely. And in any of your work, I mean this didn't really come out in the book, the book was written for everyone. But I ask again because my emphasis is on women. Do you think that there…Do you see any difference in the ways in which men and women benefit from nature?  I mean I think women, traditionally if you look at all the statistics women or women who work full time and have families are still doing more. I don't know if this applies to you, but on the home front, than the male partner. And I wonder if you think women may be cutting themselves off from nature more than guys because they feel more time strapped.”

“Yes, I've given quite a bit of thought to this question of how men and women may experience nature differently and also how they may benefit from it differentially. And I would say that there are some really interesting differences.

Yes, we know that women are more stressed out and more depressed than their male counterparts. Part of that is because we are pulled in so many different directions domestically and in our work lives, we're taking care of different generations, older parents, we're taking care of kids. We are sometimes cut off you know from the kind of community and social and family support that women got when we lived closer to families and in clan groups and you know in kinships and so on. So we know that women, for example in the United States, women are on antidepressants at a rate of one out of four. Women in middle age. And I think that's a shocking statistic and kind of speaks to the problem. We also know that girls tend to be more depressed than boys. They're at higher risk for suicide. I'm sorry to report that the fastest growing rate of suicides is in young girls ages 10 to 14, which is I think shocking. Andpart of that is that women have this burden of expectations. And society expects them to work and behave a certain way. And now you know with Instagram and Internet culture it's all just become I think harder to be a girl in some ways. But it's always been hard.

But we also know that women when they do go outside may experience bigger benefits and maybe that's because they're more stressed when they start.

But there have been studies showing that women who live closer to greenspace actually experience greater benefits in terms of their mortality in terms of their stress cortisol regulation than men do. So when women can access nature and can experience it they actually may be better helped. And there's some really interesting studies looking at kids for example even in forced kindergartens. And I really like the study I think it's really interesting in conventional sort of urban playgrounds. Boys tend to run around more than girls do. You know the girls kind of sit and play their games the boys run around and do kind of sporty stuff. But in the forest schools where both genders are outside most of the day the girls are approaching parity with the boys in terms of physical exercise. So they're also out there jumping across the creeks and climbing the trees and swimming from the ropes.

And so I love that we don't really tend to think of nature as being kind of gender neutralizing or equalizing and it can be. And so I think it's an important way to look at…and also you know kind of another excuse to really make a bigger effort to get girls outside because the benefits are bigger.”

Which is fascinating and great to know. But let’s face it…if you live far from the wilderness, getting there can be a challenge. Or enough of a hassle to put you off doing it regularly. So what’s a city dweller to do?

AM-T: “Just talking about cities and you now live in a city, I live in a city and yes we can get benefits from going to parks but I'm speaking to you on… I think it's going to be 92 degrees today, high humidity. Heat warnings, all the rest of it here. Being outside, I mean they’re not even advising you to be outside I mean obviously today is a worst case scenario for me, but for people who aren't able to regularly get out of a city, I mean what can they do? If they seek out a park in a city is that something?"

“Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean the reality is Ashley that most of us do live in cities right around the world over 50 percent of people live in cities. That number is increasing you know hugely every year in the United States. 70 percent of us live in cities. So we really have to figure out how to access nature in a city. And I've had to figure that out was part of my move and I feel like I've really made a lot of progress in terms of kind of learning how to do it. Yes we need to get outside. We need to think about even how we position our computers. You know is it that we're looking at nearby nature you know in the backyard or on the street. We can change the way we walk through cities to take more tree-lined streets and then I'd have to learn how to really be mindful in those more nature-y spaces to get the full benefits.

So for example if I'm in a city park I really will try to take my ear buds out and I will try not to multitask while I'm in that space because the studies, the science really shows that when we are multitasking, when we're talking on the phone we're just not getting the full restorative benefits of being outside. We really kind of need to be listening to the birdsong and looking for the birds, maybe looking at fractal patterns which I talk about some in the book, you know drinking in that color green which we know also provide some calm to people.

But it takes an intention and it takes some effort. And if you're just kind of like blindly marching through the park on your way to the bus you know and thinking about your deadlines you're just not going to get the full the full bang for it.”

She says as for the summer heat, she goes for walks in DC once the sun has gone down. And she also says don’t be tempted to stay inside just because it’s cold or blustery outside. Studies show we get cognitive benefits from being outdoors even when it’s freezing or pouring. We just come back that bit sharper than when we left.  

AM-T: “And finally, I’m just wondering about this. I'm becoming more and more envious of women who work outdoors or at least in a natural setting. Do we know anything about whether those women are happier and less stressed than those of us who toil over a computer screen most of the day?”

“Great question. I don't think we really do know. I don't think we really drill down. We do know that women who live closer to greenspace are healthier. And that's from studies in the U.S., large scale epidemiological studies and the Nurses’ Health Study in the United States which is being studied by Harvard, has really recently come out with some very telling statistics. That the nurses who live closer to greenspace sort of within a quarter mile of greenspace have lower rates of depression, they have lower rates of cardiovascular disease, they have lower rates of cancer, interestingly, lower rates of stress, and they think that this is all sort of mediated by depression so that women who live closer to greenspace just feel better. Are happier people. And so you know it's important to think about, I think, as we do move around and as we migrate you know to different cities or to different neighborhoods that we really should place a premium on trees, on parks, you know these things end up really mattering toward daily stress levels and ultimately to our health.”

Florence Williams, author of The Nature Fix and contributing editor at Outside Magazine

That’s The Broad Experience for this time.

I know some of you work outside and it’s not always on a pristine mountaintop, and I’d love to hear from you. You can comment on this episode at TheBroadExperience.com or on the show’s Facebook page or you can tweet me or email me.

The rest of you…go outside!

And if you want more podcasts about inspiring women, take a listen to Inflection Point with Lauren Schiller. She talks with women who have faced a challenge, stepped up to create change and are ready to tell their stories... so we can find out how women rise up--and how we can apply what they've learned, to our own lives. Check it out. Inflection Point with Lauren Schiller, you can find it in iTunes, RadioPublic, or wherever you get your podcasts."

So if you have some extra time this August listen to Lauren’s show, go back through the archives of my show – there are a lot of back episodes to enjoy. I hope you enjoy what’s left of your summer.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. I will see you in September.

Episode 159: Science Evangelist

Show transcript:

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

This time…women don’t always feel welcome in the scientific community – some perhaps less than others.

“We all love science, and this construction of race is just false. If we could just focus on the fact we all love science, we’re all geeking out about the amazing things that atoms do, it would be fantastic.”

But this scientist found her niche and she says other women can too…

“Go and find environments where you feel valued. There’s no honor in fighting fights where you feel like you’re always going to be losing. There are plenty of other more conducive places to getting work done.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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Before I introduce my guest, I want you to hear a story. Before the pandemic she would travel a lot for work. And one day she was in an airport bathroom on the east coast…those bathrooms where the faucets come on automatically. She went to wash her hands…

“…and the faucet wouldn’t work. I said OK, no problem, so I went to the one nearby, that didn’t work. I went to another one, that didn’t work. And this woman came in – I’m African-American, this woman came in, she had a lighter complexion, she put her hand under the faucet and it worked immediately. I said aha! I’m a scientist so I said let me go back over to this faucet because it does work - so I outstretched my hand so the lighter part of my hand, my palm, was in front of the photo sensor. Boom, there goes the water. So when this water faucet was made there was an assumption made in its process – it was designed, it was tested, on people with lighter skin.” 

This is Ainissa Ramirez.

“I’m a scientist, a science writer, and the author of the book The Alchemy of Us.” 

When Ainissa was studying science and engineering at top universities like Brown and Stanford there weren’t  many people like her. We know the same goes for many areas of science and technology today. So perhaps it’s not surprising that whoever designed these faucets thought about themselves in the design and testing phases.  

I’d always assumed those faucets were operated by motion sensors. She says some are, but others work with a light sensor…

“There’s a light coming out, and it’s going to hit a surface, and bounce back to a sensor, and when it gets enough light it’ll say oh, somebody’s there, let me turn that on.  So if someone has light skin that light will bounce off their skin and go to the detector. But darker skin, brown skin absorbs more light so that detector doesn’t register light being bounced back, so it doesn’t think anybody is in front of it, so it doesn’t turn on.” 

These days, Ainissa explains how things work for a living.  She calls herself a science communicator – even a science evangelist. She wants more people of all backgrounds to enjoy science and pursue it as career.

When she was an undergraduate she thought she might become an electrical engineer like her dad. But those courses didn’t really speak to her. She had to do this prerequisite course called ‘materials science’ – she’d never heard of it, assumed it would be really boring. But that professor said something that blew her away. 

“What he said was, everything around us has to do with the interaction of atoms, and these little things you cannot see, that are hard to see even with microscope, are in charge of everything in our world. And if you can understand how they do what they do you can get them to do new things and make new materials. And this is the lens I’ve now adopted to understand the world.”

 She went on to get a doctorate at Stanford, and became a materials scientist.

Her first job was at the famous Bell Labs in New Jersey, and then she taught at Yale.

Now, she’s out on her own. We’ll talk more about that decision to change direction – and her new book in a bit.

But first, I wanted her to go back in time.

 “I’ve loved science since I was very, very young, so I was a geek for most of my life. I was one of those little girls who was very curious, always asking lots of questions, always taking things apart, not always putting things back together the exact same way.”

She had a loving family who always supported her interests. In fact when I opened her book I noticed it was dedicated to two women, her mother and grandmother. I wanted to know more about them. 

“Well my grandmother was my superhero. Everybody deserves a superhero. And my grandmother was definitely mine. She was amazing…and my mom…she’s always been my number one fan…she believed in the book way more, and way more often than I did.”

Both women sacrificed a lot before Ainissa was even born. Ainissa’s grandmother immigrated from the Caribbean to the UK in the years after the Second World War, then from there to the US…with Ainissa’s mother in tow. Throughout her life she supported family members back home in Antigua – she sent food home, she sponsored people for green cards. She worked a lot – as a nurse’s aide and a cleaner of fancy houses, among other things. She had a lot of responsibilities.  

“She was kind of on the hard side, she was a little gruff…but she always warmed up when I interacted with her. I was very fortunate. Sometimes I’d be working on science projects, and there was one science project where I had to identify leaves and I needed to go to Central Park, and she took me. She was very busy, but she was giving me the message that education is very, very important.” 

Ainissa was raised in New Jersey and she went to Catholic schools. She got more and more obsessed with science and she credits her grandmother with being part of the reason she’s so good at communicating what she knows, making it accessible in her talks and lectures.

“I grew up in a working-class neighborhood and wanted to explain science to people around me, particularly my grandmother, and how do you do this in a way that it resonates…I wanted to make sure my grandmother understood what I was learning in school. I’m so excited, how do I explain this to her even if it’s a topic she may not be familiar with? So I’d compare things to things that were around her, or I’d make stories up to explain the things and she would get it, oh, OK, I get it…and I think that muscle which was exercised very early at 7, 8, 9 years old and also that perspective that science is for everyone…is something that was nurtured at a very, very early age.

So later on when I was a professor I knew I loved teaching, and my teaching scores were always off the chart because I took the approach that I am here to get you where I think you should be so, I’m gonna meet you where you are and explain it as a story, demonstration or what have you. And I think the reason why I make science approachable is the lessons I learned very, very young when I was trying to explain science to my grandmother.”

Throughout her school years Ainissa excelled – her family saw it, her teachers saw it…they recognized the budding scientist and they were thrilled when she headed off to Brown University in Rhode Island…she was on her way.  

“And when I got to Brown the brakes are pumped.”

The subject she’d always loved…it was suddenly being taught in this very formal way – instead of being about the wonder of discovery…it was all about weeding people out…

“In fact I remember one class when a professor said this and he almost said this with pride, he said look to your left, look to your right, one of you won’t be here next semester. And he was right. Next semester another professor said the same thing, and he was right…they would cut us in half every semester for at least four semesters…and this didn’t seem right to me. Everyone here loved science, this was a rare breed, and you’re taking the posture that we need to cut the numbers in half every time we had this huge array of talent.”

She says she almost fell through the cracks…she had been the best at her high school but now…she was surrounded by the best from everywhere, a lot of people from private schools…she was floundering. And she hated the way her beloved subject was being taught…

“It shouldn’t be that way. We need a world where people know about science and how to make decisions for themselves, that’s why we’re in this problem today with this anti science world because we’ve set up this kind of dynamic. So I was very heartbroken by the process of learning science in my undergraduate years, but fortunately I found a way to turn that around.”

AM-T: “Science isn’t known as an area that’s terribly friendly to women and particularly to women of color, I’m really curious…your experience both in the corporate world in academia…has that been borne out to you, have you had a lot of eye-rolling experiences?”

“Well, I mean it’s definitely difficult. When I was in graduate school, I can’t say I was the first, but I was the first African-American woman to get a PhD in materials science when I was at Stanford…so when you’re this unusual body they don’t really have high expectations for you. And I’ve witnessed it not only myself but with my colleagues, they’d treat us a certain way, where you don’t really belong here. It was said or you just got that impression, and so that’s something I had to deal with. And the thing that is so sad about it is we all love science, and this construction of race is just false, if we could just focus on the fact we all love science, we’re all geeking out about the amazing things that atoms do, it would be fantastic. But science is done in the context of us being humans so there’s this other layer that’s always kind of in the background murking things up a little bit.”

Still, through her academic career she had mentors who got her through, and encouraged her to stay the course – a German-born professor at Brown who coached her in chemistry…

“Mrs Morse who, I’m writing an essay about her too, she had a thick German accent, she was very stern, but when she smiled she lit up and she saved me…because if I failed Chemistry 21 I never would have become an engineer or a scientist.”

An African-American professor at Stanford…then, as a newly minted PhD …she landed a job at Bell Labs…

“When I got to Bell Labs it was like a moment of relief, phew, thank goodness, my boss’s boss’s boss Jim Mitchell was an African-American man, there were so many more women and black scientists and African-American scientists, and scientists of all hues there that I didn’t have to do the proof of principle, ‘I should be here,’ because there were so many here, and they were all excellent, members of the national academies, presidents of their societies. I was very new and unaccomplished compared to them, so it was great – I was like, of course I belong here, this is my tribe. When I went back into academia I went back into an environment which was male, pale, I went to Yale, so all that was lost. But at least I remembered…my Bell Labs memories kept me going when I was there.”

Ainissa taught mechanical engineering at Yale. As she said, the environment there was not as comfortable. Of her incoming cohort of younger professors she was the only Black professor…and then, when she and her colleagues came up for tenure years later…none of them got it. That would have been the opportunity for a permanent professorship – a job for life.  

And when she found out, she thought, OK – this is a time to decide what to do next. Stay in academia, or try something new? 

While she was at Yale her absolute favorite part of her time there was teaching something called Science Saturdays…a program for kids. She’d teach on Saturdays two months out of the year…

“I felt so alive during those two months. And then after the preparations and after the lectures were over my energy would get back to some baseline. And I did Science Saturdays for about 7 years and I’d just notice that October and April I was on fire, and afterwards I wasn’t.”

She thought about it, and she realized…this is what she loved. Communicating with young people, making them as curious and excited about science as she’d been as a kid.

“Trying something new was absolutely scary, but I told myself let’s try something new, if it doesn’t work out let’s go get a job. And I haven’t had to make that decision so it’s been good.”

In a minute we’re going to hear a few stories from Ainissa book, The Alchemy of Us – how Humans and Matter Transformed One Another…beginning with two areas I think a lot of us have a conflicted relationship with – time and sleep.

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One of the best parts of Ainissa’s book for me was how she made me understand the way human beings used to relate to time. Because let’s face it – today, people – especially working women, dare I say, have a pretty stressful relationship with time. 

But as Ainissa says, clocks are a relatively recent invention. We used to tell time by the position of the sun. 

“We were more connected to nature and to our own bodies…my stomach growled, I knew it was time to go to lunch, now, when it ‘s noon or 11.30 we just go to lunch whether we’re hungry or not. So time dictates our lives more than it did with our ancestors – in fact so much so that it changed the way we sleep. Our ancestors before the industrial revolution used to sleep differently, they’d sleep in two intervals. They’d go to bed at nine, sleep for about three and a half hours, at most, wake up on purpose for about an hour or so, do things around the house, clean, read, do a puzzle, then go to bed for another three and a half hours.”

She says you can find mentions of this in literature, including Dickens and the Brontes…this so-called ‘first sleep’…

“But now we have a more consolidated version of sleep and the reason why is it was changed by two inventions – the clock and the light bulb. The lightbulb allowed us to go to bed later, so one of those segments of sleep was shortened, and the clock forced us to wake up earlier ‘cause we had to go to work or prepare people to go to school, things like that. So those two segments of sleep became consolidated and that’s what our sleep looks like today. 

AM-T: “That’s so interesting…and I think another thing for my audience is…a lot of women just don’t feel they get enough sleep because time is closing in on them at both ends, kind of thing…”

“Well absolutely. We have a very strange relationship with sleep because we think of sleep as a form of weakness, if you take a nap it’s like, what’s wrong with that person. Well, I’m tired, that’s what’s wrong with me, and I should go to sleep, but we don’t do that, we’ll caffeinate or we’ll go to the gym to bolster ourselves. But a lot of other countries, if they’re tired, they go to sleep. Another thing I talk about in the Alchemy of Us is a lot of us suffer from sleep ailments, insomnia is off the charts and there are people who are willing to sell us all sorts of pillows and mattresses…stuff like that. It ends up that the way we sleep may not be ideal for our health, we used to sleep in 2 segments and people would wake on purpose in the middle of the night, some forms of insomnia might be hearkening back to our old form of segmented sleep. So when our ancestors woke up in the middle of the night they didn’t think they had a problem…this was just the natural way to sleep. So we need a better relationship to sleep, we need to have more of it, we need to see it not as a form of weakness if we actually do it, and if we wake in the middle of the night maybe this is part of our natural rhythm of sleeping.”

 AM-T: “And you wrote about this, on this same topic of time, you wrote about this female entrepreneur from the 19th century who I’d never heard of because Ruth Belville, right?”

“Right, she’s the first person you meet when you open up the book The Alchemy of Us. And Ruth Belville had this unusual position. She worked in the 19th century and she sold time. She would wake up early, in her home 30 miles outside of London, make her way to London, go to Greenwich, and walk up a very steep hill to the Royal Observatory where the precise time was. 

She would be carrying with her a watch she’d nicknamed Arnold, she’d give Arnold the watch to the attendant, the attendant would look at her watch and compare it to the scientific clock, give her a certificate noting the difference…and then she’d make her way back to London and she’d give the precise time to people who needed to know it. Lots of people had clocks and the clocks were great but sometimes they slipped and they didn’t know the exact time, so she would come once a week and say OK, here is the precise time, and people would re-set their clocks. So they could have it – lawyers, banks, train stations needed to know the precise time, so that was her business.”

Ruth Belville isn’t the only woman I’d never heard of who I read about in Ainissa’s book. Another one is called Caroline Hunter. 

“Caroline Hunter is an American hero that most people don’t know about. Caroline Hunter was an African-American woman, who started a position as a chemist at Polaroid in the 1970s…and Polaroid was a much beloved company like Apple when Steve Jobs was still around. Everyone loved Polaroid, they were so excited to be there. And Polaroid made this fantastic technology that everyone wanted, which was a camera that generated a picture right away, an instant camera. Caroline worked in this technology. One day she’s going to lunch with her friend Ken Williams who worked in the art department. And they see on the bulletin board in his office a mock-up of an identification card – and it says department of the Mines, Republic of South Africa.”

They thought, what does Polaroid have to do with South Africa? American companies weren’t supposed to be doing business with South Africa because of its apartheid system, which kept the races apart and kept Black South Africans down.

“So they investigated and they found that all black South Africans had to carry with them a passbook. A passbook controlled and monitored where they could go because it told officials where they lived and where they could not visit. At the heart of the passbook was a picture generated by Polaroid.

Caroline and Ken didn’t think this was right…and so they went to their management to talk about this and their response was fairly lukewarm. Caroline and Ken – this is the 70s – they graduated into activists, they started the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement to get Polaroid to stop selling its camera film and camera system to South Africa, to stop buttressing this oppressive regime.”

It took seven years, Polaroid eventually did stop selling to South Africa, but Caroline and Ken were fired early on.

And staying on the topic of photography, Ainissa says in the 1960s Black families were getting fed up with the quality of their kids’ school photographs…

“One of the most precious memories you have as a child is the school photo – and African- American mothers were looking at the photo of their children and saying something’s not right. Here we have both black and white kids, and black kids are not turning out well in the film. It end up that the film had a bias – it was better designed for lighter colored skin. And it wasn’t until schools were integrated, which was in the 1950s, where this became noticeable. Before when white kids were altogether the film looked fine for them, and when black kids were together it looked fine for them, because they’d do things with lighting and things like that, but when kids were together both black and white, white kids turned out well and black kids did not.”

Kodak was the main producer of color film and it finally did change the formulation of its film - but not because of Black parents. It also got complaints from two business groups – chocolate makers, and furniture makers. Each of those manufacturers of brown things felt their products weren’t coming out well in their print ads – the delectable nature of a chocolate bar of the sheen of a wooden table just weren’t coming across in photos.  

So Kodak came up with a new formulation in the late 70s.

And this story brings us back to the beginning – that story of the faucet in the bathroom that didn’t turn on for darker skin.

Ainissa tells these stories because she lives this stuff herself. But also because she’s a scientist who’s passionate about helping the rest of us understand how things work…and she wants to take science out of the academy and get kids and young adults excited about it. So some of them can turn science into their work. So there’ll be more Ainissas in the future.

AM-T: “Thank you so much for doing this. Is there anything else you’d like to say about…say there are some young, budding, or female scientists who area already into their careers, is there anything you’d like to convey before we go?”

“Well I would say that there are so many voices that are going to say that your voice is not important, and that voice may even sound like the one in your head. But your voice is precious, and you should protect it, and you should do everything in your power to make sure it gets heard. Go and find environments where you feel valued. There’s no honor in fighting fights where you feel like you’re always going to be losing. There are plenty of other more conducive places to getting work done. And the last thing I’d say is make sure you’re doing your work, whatever you feel you’re specially tailored to do, designed to do…there are so many things that tell you, you should be doing this, you should be doing that…but you should pause and listen to that inner small voice and figure out what you were designed to do that you surpass everyone else. Everyone gets one. So be brave enough to find it and I can assure you that when you do, you’re gonna be so happy when you pursue it.”

Ainissa Ramirez is the author of the book The Alchemy of Us.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. You’ll find links to some of Ainissa’s work under this episode at The Broad Experience dot com.

 You can find me in all the usual places – on the website, on Twitter…or on the Facebook page.

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

Episode 158: Caring in a Crisis

Show transcript:

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

This time…when you can’t work from home during Covid 19 – or at least, from your home…because your job is about hands-on care for other people.

“I love training the new blood that’s coming in and want to do this kind of work, I love training them. And I tell them all the time we need guys, we need men in this field.”

Home health aide is one of the fastest growing jobs in the US, and it’s done almost entirely by women.

“What we do on this earth for eachother is the only real thing that counts. It's not about the money, a paycheck is a side benefit for making an impact in the world, and in the lives of people.”

Two women on working with vulnerable people throughout a pandemic, and what that work means to them. Coming up on The Broad Experience.

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 Susie Rivera lives in New Braunfels, Texas. She’s Mexican-American, she’s 63 now and she’s been taking care of other people for a living…for more than 30 years.

 I caught Susie on her cell phone just after she came back from her shift in a private home one day last month.

She started to study for a nurses degree back in the 70s…but she took a break at one point and never ended up completing her studies. Instead she became a CNA or certified nurse’s assistant. She says caregiving work was just a job to her for the first several years she was doing it. Then in the early 1990s her grandfather got sick and she went to help her grandmother take care of him.  

“I was already working in a nursing home but I didn’t’ really – it wasn’t really – I didn’t really get more in touch with my job until I went over there and cared for my grandfather, a family member, you know, that’s what you have to do, treat them like you want your own family treated…”

AM-T: So it changed your attitude to the work you were doing?

 “There you go. Yes ma’am.” 

Since then she’s worked in other nursing homes, in family homes, and for ten years she worked at a hospice, helping care for the dying.

These days Susie works exclusively in clients’ homes. She gets ten dollars an hour for one of her jobs, fifteen for the night job she does at the weekend. And after living in a two-earner household for years, right now, she’s the only one supporting an extended family.

“My wife and I – we’ve been together 28 years – she was also in the medical field, and she worked in a nursing home, until recently, about 3-4 years ago she became disabled so she hasn’t been able to work. We have her sister, her niece, and her grand-niece living with us because they’re going through a hard time.”

They live in a mobile home and it’s a bit crowded at the moment. But Susie’s out a lot – she works about 60 hours a week right now.

During the week she works from 8a.m. to 4p.m. for an elderly man and his wife. She spends the day in their home preparing meals, and helping him with all the tasks of daily living. It was this client who first sounded the alarm about Covid 19 one morning earlier this year.

“He’s a doctor, he’s 98 years old, let me tell you a story. When this Covid was in China we were watching the news and I was making his breakfast and I put his breakfast on the table and he grabbed my hand and said, I’m not gonna lose you, am I? I said, what? ‘You’re not leaving me because of this?’ I said sir, we’re gonna work around this, I’m here for keeps, I’m not gonna be leaving you any time.”

Since Covid 19 hit Texas, Susie has been picking up all the groceries and prescriptions for the couple as well as taking care of things inside the home. Her client’s wife is younger but she’s still afraid to go out and bring the disease back home. So it’s on Susie to make sure she’s taking every measure to keep them all safe.   

AM-T: Like what does this mean for you, are you wearing a mask, what precautions are you taking now?

“I have all this, the mask, gloves, sanitizer, washing hands frequently, whenever I come into contact with him, when I have to do intimate care, his bathing, shower, when I come into close contact with him, using the mask and gloves…keeping the area clean where his walker is, cleaning that all the time, his wheelchair, his bedside commode, just making sure it’s all clean…”

Then she has to worry about everyone in her house…for one thing, her wife has a few underlying conditions. And Susie’s concerned…we spoke before cases in Texas shot up and before mask-wearing in public was mandated. 

“I’ve taken care of people with AIDS, people with tuberculosis, I know the precautions and I know what you need to do, I know what I’m doing is safe, but my stress level and my worry is other people…other people where you go into the store and they’re not wearing a mask, other people that aren’t taking precautions, that’s what I worry about.”

She won’t let her own family leave their home – she does all the shopping for everyone. On her days off, just to get a change of scene, they’ll go on drives – and this is Texas, so they don’t just drive 20 miles. They drive 100, 150 miles just to feel free, to see something different.

As well as her weekday job with the 98-year-old doctor, Susie works for an elderly woman two nights a week – she sleeps over at her house, including on Saturday nights.

AM-T: How many hours a week do you need to work to feel comfortable or at least OK, financially?

“Mmm, I would say…my ideal, what I’d love to do is work full time and have part time job of 20 hours, so that would be what, 70 hours a week…

AM-T: So for you, full time, what’s that, 50 hours a week?

Yeah, 50, 60 hours a week, yes. 

AM-T: So that’s fulltime. And ideally you’d have a part-time job of 20 hours?

AM-T: So in an ideal work you’d be working 80 hours a week, which is double the work week people talk about?

“Right, but see, a lot of us who do home care, we work two jobs because we’re not getting paid the wage we think we need to just get by and pay our bills.”

Susie is lucky compared to many other home care workers – she says the lady she works for on the night shift is wealthy and she pays for Susie’s health insurance. And health insurance is not something every home health aide in America has access to. 

Susie says this is the most difficult time of her working life, but there’s still a lot she loves about her job.

“The people I care for, they have been all sorts of walks of life, they’ve got different achievements and accomplishments in their life, just like my mom and dad, they’re still alive, I want them to live their golden years out. It’s such a – I have brought, people I have taken care of, I’ve brought them to my house for Thanksgiving, I’ve brought them to my house for Christmas…and it just…I really feel elderlies are being neglected, and it’s just a good feeling to do my part and I’m really worried when I get to be that age – who’s going to be there for us?”

AM-T: Do you think of what you do as a job or a career – or a calling?

“It’s a calling. Hands down it’s a calling. I love training the new blood that come in and want to do this kind of work, I love training them. And I keep telling them we need men, we need guys in this work because the population, you know we’re living longer, we’re getting bigger, and we need men to come in and help us, you know, as far as lifting people and getting people taking care of, transferring them, getting them into and out of a car, a vehicle. I love training the new people, and everyone that comes in I give them my phone number, that’s learning this job, and I say call me any time day or night, I’ll walk you through it. Because you’ll really like it once you get into it.”

She says few men DO train for this job. Some that do end up as registered nurses. She loves to see that.

She’s waiting to retire for as long as she can, so she and her wife will have the most comfortable retirement possible. She says she’s pretty fit and she’s got it in her to work several more years.

But she wishes the current situation would calm down.  

“I’ve seen it all and done it all and I really thought I had until this pandemic came – I have been through so much stress and I just want everyone to know, everyone who cares for elderly or cares for disabled, that just do your job and do what you can, and we’ll get through this…and just everybody stay safe.”

Susie Rivera in Texas.

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My next guest lives and works in the northeast, where Covid 19 spiked in the spring and is now coming under control. Maria Colville lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But she was born and raised in Trinidad.

“My mom was a Red Cross nurse most of my life. And so sometimes I would go with her when she goes to carnivals and so forth, and any major event she had to be on site. And in my village, she was known as the village nurse where everybody popped in with a scratch or something broken or something bleeding or whatever…our house was like the general hospital for our local communities. And so watching her and experiencing the compassion and the joy that she got out of helping others, selflessly, impacted me.”

Before she emigrated to the US Maria worked for a credit union in Trinidad. But she says corporate life didn’t really suit her – she liked the idea of helping people the way her mother had. Like Susie, she’s been looking after the vulnerable and elderly for three decades  And the pandemic has had a big effect on her life. 

Normally, she’d work with three clients simultaneously, going to different homes on different days or at different times of the day. Until recently she worked 30 hours a week. But the coronavirus has changed all that.

“I have chosen to stay with one client right now, she's in her seventies. And I am aware of the atmosphere, I'm aware of the fear of coming into contract with COVID-19, especially when you have pre-existing conditions, which she does, which most of our consumers do. And so, for that safety in the atmosphere, for that comfort for her in that atmosphere I choose right now to stay with one consumer while I get assistance financially.”

She’s been able to get some unemployment through the CARES act. It goes some way to making up for the salary she’s losing right now by working with just one client, twice a week.

Maria says she and her client share something important that makes it easier for her to do this work right now, despite the risks… 

“I think one of the great things about working with my consumer is she's a faith-based person, and having faith in God is her foundation, and so the belief is when you are a child of God, everything that concerns you concerns him. And so there's that promise of a protective barrier over you and that no matter what is happening, it is going to work together for your good, and not your hurt.”

AM-T: “And what about you, you also have a deep faith, right, how do you feel about going out to work right now?”

“I'm not worried. I'm not worried about it because I believe that in a crisis, not doing anything is not an option. It is people who are well that has to get on the front lines to assist those who are not. I am not a part of the problem. I am a part of the solution. And so, because I know that, and I'm aware of that. And yes I'm a faith-based person. I know that God has called me for a time such as this, everything that I have been trained in, um, my mentality going in or dealing with any aspects of fear is covered, I don't have a reason to worry, if I die, I die doing what I'm called to do, I die helping others.”

Now all this said…Maria is taking the same precautions as Susie Rivera. She’s a member of the Service Employees International Union and she says the Union supplies its members with protective equipment to the extent it can – but when it runs out and has trouble sourcing more supplies – and this is very common in the US – aides like Maria are on their own.  

“And even right now we’re still having problems getting gloves…masks we’re able to get, but gloves is still on high demand – there are not enough. One of the good things is close to me in Cambridge is a convenience store that has a ready supply of personal protective equipment.”

She says the prices are decent, and when the Union’s supplies run out, she buys what she needs out of her own pocket.

I asked Maria the same question I asked Susie. What does she like most about this job, an intimate, hands-on job that isn’t well paid?

“The opportunity to make an impact in someone else's life, the opportunity to be an extension by which another person can feel whole. When your body betrays you, what happens is you're accustomed to walking or talking or doing things for yourself, and somewhere along the line, you lose the ability to do that. To have someone come into your life that is able to allow you to achieve the same goal in an area that you can no longer perform. That that is major, that is major…that is an extension of your life that you value. And so how could you not want to make an impact like that?”

AM-T: Do you feel valued in your work?

“Yes. That's not always so with every consumer, I've worked with consumers who are very negative, negative in terms of the mindset of superiority, where you're looked down upon because it seems as though your job is minimum wage, or it's my home, you just need to do what I do, your opinion is not important. If I am a healthcare professional, and I'm coming to assist you with the things you cannot do, how can I not be of value?” 

Maria doesn’t say in so many words that it’s white people who are condescending to her, but she does say this…

“Systemic racism is coming, crashing down. It does not belong in our society.

And so people can be very mean, even though you're helping them. And sometimes it's not just about the way they're thinking, it's because of their, also, frustration. They can't do what they want to do that was normal to them. Who likes someone between their legs, cleaning them, washing them and having them naked and having to brush their teeth and having... Nobody would choose that if they had a choice in the matter, so they're betrayed by their own physical body or their own mind, and so the only way they feel better is lashing out, even though they’re lashing out at the person who's helping them. That is why you can't take anything personally, it's not about us.”

She always tries to remember that.

She knows that her work is helping others – whether they acknowledge it or not. And that is its own reward.

“What we do on this earth for eachother is the only real thing that counts. It's not about the money, we're not just here to make an income, a paycheck is a side benefit for making an impact in society, in the world, and in the lives of people…I'm excited about what is happening in the midst of this crisis, because it's not all negative. People are coming back to the core of who they are. They’re discovering the true meaning of why they’re here. And that’s a really big deal.”

Thanks to Maria Colville and Susie Rivera for being my guests on this show.

And if you’d like to hear another show that focuses on women who work in other people’s homes tune into episode 73 – it’s called A Nanny Speaks Up. And in that show we cover some of the power imbalance that happens when your work isn’t in a neutral place like an office but on your employer’s home turf.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. If you have any comments on this episode you can post under this episode at The Broad Experience dot com, or email me via the website or tweet me or post on the Facebook page. I’d love to hear from you.

 If you’d like to support this one-woman show you can do that via the support tab on the website.

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