Ambition and Power: bonus track

October 21, 2012

I gleaned a lot of interesting insights from my interviews with Caroline Turner and Nicki Gilmour for the ambition and power episode, which I released a couple of weeks ago. As I'm trying to keep the podcasts short, I often end up having to leave out some great stuff that deserves to be heard and debated. So I'm trying an experiment: I've put together a bonus track or 'extras' episode featuring some of the things I couldn't fit into the original podcast. Let me know what you think. Worth doing occasionally?

Episode 9: Ambition and Power

October 2, 2012

In this episode, we explore women's fraught relationship with ambition and power. Some of us are happy to describe ourselves as ambitious while others balk at the term. Power? No thank you, many women say. Things look nasty at the top. But having power is about far more than ruling the roost. 

If you want to read more about the Stanford promotions study mentioned in the podcast, you can do that here. Nicki Gilmour mentioned Her Place at the Table, co-authored by Carol Frohlinger. You can find out more about Nicki at The Glass Hammer and Caroline Turner at Difference Works. 

Episode 8: The Good Girls Revolt

September 10, 2012

Lynn Povich never considered herself career savvy or ambitious. After all, she started work in the middle of the 1960s, when nice girls like her could aspire to be a secretary, teacher or nurse once they graduated from college (if they didn't marry right away). But after Povich landed her first secretarial job at Newsweek in 1965 the journalism bug bit, and she was soon working as a researcher for the magazine. Still, all was not well. At Newsweek, men were writers, and women ('the dollies' in office parlance) fact-checked their pieces. That's just the way things were, and the women accepted it. Until they didn't. Lynn and her colleagues sued Newsweek for sex discrimination in 1970, the first ever female class action lawsuit.

Tune in to hear about the suit that changed so much for women in the media and the workplace in general, and let me know how much, if anything, you think has stayed the same.