Episode 29: Show me the money

November 4, 2013

Natalia Oberti Noguera

"We're an angel investing bootcamp for women...but people hear ‘women’ and ‘money’ and they think philanthropy, donation, grants. I have to change the conversation...and bring in the investing focus." - Natalia Oberti Noguera

"If you don't feel 'worthy', that’s going to show up in the prices that you charge, in the way you negotiate or choose not to negotiate.”

- Jacquette Timmons

Jacquette Timmons on my sofa after our interview

In this show we tackle a question that continues to fascinate me after reporting on it on and off for years. Why do so many women have a tricky relationship with money? I start out by talking to Pipeline Fellowship founder and CEO Natalia Oberti Noguera - she's striving to get more women entrepreneurs the funding they need to make a go of their businesses. Along the way, she's come across some interesting - and confusing - female attitutes to money. In the second half of the show I sit down with financial behaviorist Jacquette Timmons to try to tease out why women have a hard time pricing our services when we start our own businesses, and why we don't always like to pay full price for other people's services (but have no trouble forking out for a piece of clothing we've fallen in love with). I candidly admit my guests and I don't have all the answers - if you think you do after listening to this, please post a comment below. 20 minutes.

Show notes: For more information on angel investing, here's the 2012 report from the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. The Kauffman Foundation is a repository of information on entrepreneurship in the US and they've produced a useful, fact-packed book on female entrepreneurship called A Rising Tide. The post I wrote on women and money that I mention in the show is When Women Work for Free. Jacquette Timmons' book is Financial Intimacy.

I also mention Jodi Detjen and the show she appeared in, Killing the Ideal Woman.

Also, be sure to check out the selection of glasses at this week's sponsor, www.WarbyParker.com, and use the code BROAD when you check out, to get free, expedited three-day shipping. 

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

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

This time on the show we explore women’s relationship with money.  We start out talking to the young founder of an angel investing bootcamp for women. Then we delve into why some women have such a hard time valuing themselves and charging for their services.

(:11) “’Cause there’s one thing to increase the price and then there’s another thing to be comfortable with asking for it and like really feeling like yeah, darn it, what I’m delivering, it’s worth this.”

Some of us aren’t that keen to pay full price for other people’s services, either. Coming up on The Broad Experience.

…

Women-owned companies start out with far less outside investment than male-owned firms. Debate about why rages – many say investment networks and venture capital firms are boys’ clubs that can only relate to people who look like them, others say women do a lousier job of pitching or just don’t ask for money in the first place.

Natalia Oberti Noguera is on a mission to give more female entrepreneurs a good start. She’s the founder and CEO of The Pipeline Fellowship, which trains women to become angel investors in small, women-owned companies. An angel investor is someone with a fairly high net-worth who invests their own money in a company and like any investor, hopes for a good return. The idea is that if more women become educated investors, more female-owned companies will get the funding they need to make a go of it. Natalia says the Pipeline Fellowship focuses on funding women-owned companies with a social mission, and getting them into the public sphere…

“Tom’s Shoes, Ben and Jerry’s, Warby Parker…who are the people i.e. social entrepreneurs who are making the headlines? Once again, white guys.”

Actually Warby Parker is sponsoring today’s episode – more on that later. Nothing wrong with white guys. She’s just saying…

“That’s why I’m so super-committed because guess what, I do see the women social entrepreneurs and women of color, as a queer Latina it’s so important for me to not just talk about gender, there are different types of diversity out there – age, race, ethnicity, different sorts of backgrounds, professional backgrounds. That’s something I’m committed to doing. We have the Body Shop, Anita Roddick, we need more stories, we need more people, because guess what, the women social entrepreneurs are out there, they’re just not getting the funding, and that’s what we’re looking to solve.”

In the two-and-a-half years since its first bootcamp, The Pipeline Fellowship has trained more than 70 women investors. The year it started women made up just over 12 percent of angel investors. Last year, women were almost 22 percent of the total. 

Natalia says the problem isn’t just that there aren’t enough women investors who may see more potential in another woman’s idea… but basically entrepreneurs who aren’t white men just don’t have the same confidence to put themselves forward in the first place…

“In 2012 out of all the companies that pitched to US angel investors only 16% were women-led and only 6% were minority-led. From that 16% of women-led startups that actually pitched about 25% secured funding, from that 6% of minority-led startups that pitched about I’d say 18% secured funding. So the other issue I see when I talk to women entrepreneurs is this hesitation to step up to the plate. So I have this motto that is, this current agenda is getting out the call to action in the sense that telling people it isn’t a zero sum game. I know so many entrepreneurs who hesitate to go out to pitch because they’re coming at it from ‘I’m not ready yet, I might not secure the funding’, but what they don’t realize is even if they don’t secure the funding that day the feedback they might get from these potential investors, might get them to a business model that might better meet market needs. And maybe the investors at that event might not be interested in agriculture or food tech or pet tech but might know someone who is… and for a lot of entrepreneurs, particularly women and people of color entrepreneurs, first we don’t have access to capital, we also don’t have access to networks.”

So go out and meet people and pitch even if you’re not sure you’ll make the cut. Something that came up during our conversation was the psychological side of money, which really fascinates me. Natalia told the story of one woman who had tried and tried to get funding for her company with its mission of doing good…but it was a for profit. She simply couldn’t persuade enough funders, most of them women, to give her money…

“Finally she decided to throw in the towel in terms of the concept of the for profit social venture and she started a nonprofit. And she went back to all those people she was talking about, primarily women, and these same women who had trouble writing a check for her for profit social venture, they started writing checks to her non profit. And this brings up a lot of issues that we’re talking about women and money even that I deal with…as you know, the founder and CEO of the Pipeline Fellowship which is an angel investing bootcamp for women. People hear ‘women’ and ‘money’ and they think ‘philanthropy’, ‘it’s a donation, it’s grants,’ so it’s almost like I’m doing the heavy lifting in terms of getting more women to become angels and also in changing the whole conversation society as a whole has regarding women and money, and bringing in the investing focus. So backtrack to this woman social entrepreneur who decided to start her non profit. The other issue, and this is very hetero-normative, and I do want to bring this up, that came up was for a lot of these women they were married, and charity, that was something they owned as individuals in this relationship, if they wanted to donate to a cause that’s, you know, something they did on their own time. As soon as it became about an investment, it was a conversation many of them felt they had to have with their spouse.”

I don’t even know where to start with that – why do women need to consult their husbands if it’s the same amount of money they’d otherwise give as a donation? Does this come down to the commonly cited reason of too many women not understanding enough about investing? Or is there some other reason? If you have theories about this, please post a comment under this episode at The Broad Experience dot com.

[Warby Parker sponsor announcement here.]

Next I sat down with Jacquette Timmons. Some of you may know her from her media appearances or maybe you’ve read her book Financial Intimacy. Jacquette started working on Wall Street in the late 1980s. She eventually managed other people’s money, but soon realized what really interested was the way they behaved around money – what motivated them to do, or not do, certain things with it. Now she’s a financial behaviorist with her own business, coaching people around money.

I started by talking about something I’ve discussed on the show before and as a radio reporter…

“I’ve done some stories in the past on women and negotiation and many women don’t like negotiating, they find it extremely uncomfortable, and frankly a lot of women have a problem valuing themselves…there’s this issue about, how much am I worth, oh, am I really worth that much? This is a big deal, isn’t it?”

“It’s a huge, huge deal. I don’t recall the statistics off the top of my head of when a woman graduates from college, and the diff in income between she and a male counterpart simply because he asks for $5k more and she didn’t and it nets out to something like $750k simply because he asks for more at the very outset. It’s not something we’ve been taught at least my generation…the other thing though is that translates to when women create their own businesses. I know even my own self, I’ve had friends tell me, you’re not charging enough. And for me to go through the inner work that was necessary for me to get to the point where I was comfortable – cause there’s one thing increasing the price and another feeling OK asking for it – feeling like OK, darn it, what I’m delivering, it’s worth this! So I think that’s it too, but I know I wrote a piece for another publication and I talked about how we have to work out our family stuff in therapy and not in our businesses, because we don’t realize a lot of your family stuff plays out in how you feel about yourself and if you don’t feel quote-unquote worthy, that’s going to show up in the prices that you charge, in the way you negotiate or choose not to negotiate.”

These feelings women have about money can get complicated. In early October I wrote a blog post on The Broad Experience site called When Women Work for Free. I asked readers to talk about their own experiences of doing something for nothing in the hope it might help their career in some way.

One reader, a longtime career coach in Europe, wrote back and after answering my initial question she sort of turned it around. I read part of her response to Jacquette:

“The incidence of women not being prepared to either pay the market price for services or expect something for free generally in my experience is higher than men. Yet the same women would think nothing of spending €250 on shoes or €150 on getting their hair highlighted. Women have to stop expecting someone to take care of them and to invest in their careers. When they understand the value of other people’s services and time then perhaps they will then start to have an idea of value of their own…”

JT: “So here’s my thought on that. I’ve gotten to the point now where I’ll do selective pro bono speaking engagements but they’re always for a strategic reason…and if it is more than, you know, a one-time, well typically it’s never that, but if it’s a full blown workshop I’ll only do it for a faith-based organization. I’ve told people, if you don’t fit a faith-based profile, I’m not doing it for free. When I speak sometimes it’s paid and sometimes it isn’t, if it isn’t, it’s a platform that’s going to be greater than probably even what I would have gotten for a monetary standpoint for that particular speaking engagement. Each person has to come up with what the boundaries and parameters are for them. I don’t negotiate my fee. My fee is my fee. If someone is unable to afford it I’ll put together a payment plan but I don’t discount my fee at all. The person who wrote in said – these aren’t her words – someone may nickel and dime you and then go out and spend $150 and I know, because I’ve experienced that. Someone asking me, oh that’s too much, and then you hear them going out to, and I live in New York City…they tell you the place they’re going to and you know hey just dropped $150 on dinner, so it’s just like where are your priorities?!”

I asked her to unpack that a bit. What is going on there? One thing, she thinks, is what she calls the culture of immediate gratification – dinner, for instance, gives instant, pleasurable results. A single coaching session may not.

“One of the things I speak to in my book is this whole idea of how we live in a microwave society. You can put something in the microwave and it can be hot in a minute. That has translated into so many things in terms of what we expect. Including from relationships, so I think people expect the same thing – that mindset translates into when it comes to doing business with somebody else. They don’t realize you’re cultivating a relationship, or that’s the goal, you’re just paying for the person’s time in that moment, you’re really paying for their expertise, knowledge, experience, insights, and all that has been cultivated over the entire lifespan of their career, not just that 45 or 60 minute time they are spending with you. And you are paying for their ability to kind of think about all of those things and come up with a solution that is targeted just specifically for you. And I think people need to think of all that goes into it and they might respect the price more.”

Then, going back to what my correspondent said earlier about women’s stinginess with some things but not others…I brought up a friend of mine who has her own internet services business. She told me a few months ago something she said she’d never admit publicly. Her female clients are cheap. She says men never quibble over the price of her services, women always do. She finds it incredibly frustrating.

“You know what I’d be curious to know is if those same women do that strategy with men. So is it an issue of I’m speaking with another woman, so we should have this immediate affinity and of course she should be willing to give me a discount, is it that mentality? Because if so you are looking at the woman’s solidarity in a very negative way… because you’re assuming that because we’re of the same gender then automatically you should hook me up…”

I’ve no way of knowing if my friend’s clients try to bargain with men as well but if you have theories on this, again, please let me know on the website.

Jacquette also brought up something I feel is almost taboo for a lot of women to talk about.

“I had to work on really wrapping my head around it’s OK to make money with ease. I think we all grow up around some conditioning around money and one of my conditionings was you had to work hard for it, and if you didn’t work hard for it, you didn’t get it.”

And because her work came so naturally to her…it took a while not to feel guilty about doing a four-hour job and being well paid for it.

“The other thing I don’t really think we grasp is we’re now really steeped into a knowledge based society but that wasn’t the case – we were still in the early transition of that in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and I think that the mindset, and the mentality and approach of how we did business and how we valued the time it took to do something was very much entrenched in that, you work an 8 hour shift, you work really hard, that kind of thought process. So I think even though I never worked in that kind of environment, the fact that culturally that was what was surrounding me…I think I just picked up some of these beliefs about the correlation and relationship between the dynamic of work and what you get paid for the work that you do.”

Finally I brought up something that came from a few podcasts ago – you may remember Jodi Detjen who was in show 25, which I called Killing the Ideal Woman. One of the things she talks about in her book is many women’s need to be nice – or be seen as nice, anyway. She believes this puts not all, but a lot of women in a mindset where effectively they think of earning a lot of money as almost dirty. Doing good was more important to many of her interviewees than earning a market rate.

Now I’m thinking aloud here, but this may actually relate back to what Natalia Oberti Noguera was talking about where women feel it’s OK to give money away to a social entrepreneurship venture – but investing it? That means they may actually make money back…and perhaps that’s what makes them uncomfortable – the idea of making money from a venture that’s trying to do some good in the world. Maybe this is all tied up with our perceptions of ourselves as nice people, or people who should be seen to be nice. As I said earlier, it’s complicated.

Jacquette says she’s seen this ambivalent attitude to money in plenty of women, and she’d like to change it if for no other reason than that women don’t save enough for their later years.

“And so I think this whole notion of it’s not cool to earn a lot of money, or if I earn a lot of money that means it’s materialistic of me, has to do with the way capitalism, and I’m going to use the word, has been pimped. Because I don’t think capitalism in and of itself is bad. I think it’s what people do with it. And I think if people recognize, if I do well that allows me to have more resources to help others so the greater good can do well…but so often people want to make doing well seem like a bad thing, so this whole idea of I shouldn’t earn this much or it’s too materialistic of me to do that…whoever is thinking that has a lot of inner work to do on their own relationship with money.”

Jacquette Timmons.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time.  Again, if you have thoughts about this show please post them under this episode at The Broad Experience dot com or on the show’s Facebook page. I’ll be posting some show notes as well.

The Broad Experience is supported by the Mule Radio Syndicate, which hosts other intriguing podcasts. One of those is This is Actually Happening…first person stories about what happens when everything changes. Also Everything Sounds, which explores the role sound plays in art, science and culture.

And if you can kick in a few bucks to support what I’m doing please go to the support tab on The Broad Experience dot com. And if you like what you hear please write a quick review on iTunes – it helps get the show noticed, and I definitely want the show to attract more ears.

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

Episode 28: Claiming authority

October 21, 2013

"The women leave because they don’t see other women being promoted. They also leave because their performance is measured primarily on subjective terms." - Victoria Pynchon

Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in the 1949 film Adam's Rib, about a couple of married lawyers

In this show we look at the world of women lawyers. Big Law, as it's known in the US, has few women at the top. And when they do gain partnership, women are paid less: female partners at law firms are paid just under $500,000 a year on average, as opposed to $734,000 for men. Neither sex is on the breadline, clearly, but a lot of female lawyers today never thought they'd be contending with some of the persistent gender issues they are. Still, lawyers are like many other women in the workplace - they have the same tendency to assume their hard work will be recognized and rewarded accordingly. It rarely is. You need to work the system to get ahead.

We talk about:

• Why female lawyers flee large firms after relatively little time on the job
• Why working hard is never enough
• How some lawyers are claiming authority and pushing to increase the number of women in leadership
• The job/family balancing act, and what it's like growing up with a lawyer for a mom

16 minutes.

Episode 27: Rise of the well-paid woman

October 7, 2013

"One of the things that has made [professional women's lives] possible is the growing inequality in society...there are large numbers of women who are doing very, very poorly paid jobs which make the lives of better paid women possible." - Alison Wolf

I often focus on the under-the-radar things that affect women's working lives, but this week the show is zooming out to look at the big picture. Alison Wolf (left) is the author of The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World. It's been out in the UK for several months and has just been published in the US. The book takes a look at professional women's lives all over the globe, from work to marriage (rates are falling) and babies (educated women are far less likely to have them than everyone else). Educated women's lives, Wolf says, are utterly different from those of all other women, from the age at which they start having sex to the amount of time they spend with their children. We discuss, among other things, why Sweden isn't the beacon of equality many of us think, the large part sex used to play in determining every woman's life, and how pizza helped get women into the workforce. 

16 minutes.

Here's the New York Times Sunday Book Review's opinion on The XX Factor.

Episode 26: Get ahead. No guilt.

September 23, 2013

"We had never experienced anything we thought to be remotely gender discrimination. So we couldn’t even identify it when we saw it. And this wasn’t blatant discrimination, this was kind of subtle, cultural things you couldn’t really put your finger on." - Jessica Bennett

“I don’t do guilt...it drains you of energy to do anything useful, or to move forward in your life." - Mrs. Moneypenny

Jessica Bennett in New York

Jessica Bennett has already had a career a lot of journalists would envy. She's written for plenty of national publications, worked at Newsweek for seven years, moved on to micro-blogging site Tumblr, and now heads editorial at Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In foundation. She never expected to come across any "gender issues" in her career - as far as she was concerned, that stuff had happened in the past. Everyone was equal now. But the reality of life at a national magazine turned out to be a bit more complicated.

In part two of the show I sit down again with Financial Times columnist Mrs. Moneypenny, otherwise known as Heather McGregor, to talk about quashing female guilt, learning how to say no, and building a reliable support network. 19 minutes. 

Show notes: The article Jessica Bennett and her colleagues published in Newsweek about the 1970 lawsuit, and their own experiences at the magazine, is Are We There Yet? And this is the show where I interview former Newsweek journalist Lynn Povich about her experiences fighting gender discrimination at the magazine in the early 1970s. 

Heather McGregor's book is Mrs. Moneypenny's Career Advice for Ambitious Women.

Also, don't forget the Squarespace sponsorship offer. While we're still in September use the code 'broad 9' to get a 20% discount if you sign up for a site. That's only in September, while supplies last.

TRANSCRIPT:

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

This time on the show, two perspectives on getting ahead at work. The first comes from a Generation Y journalist who thought she was doing all the right things…only to realize subtle and complicated factors can get in the way of career progress.

Then I talk to a seasoned business owner and Financial Times columnist who has firm views on how to thrive at work – including learning how to say no and getting rid of guilt.

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

Jessica Bennett has already had a career a lot of young journalists would envy. She’s written for many publications over the years, and worked as a writer and editor for Newsweek for seven years before the magazine eventually folded. She then moved on to be executive editor at micro-blogging site Tumblr. Now she’s editorial director at Facebook COO and bestselling author Sheryl Sandberg’s LeanIn.org.

When we met, I told her I’d noticed her own Tumblr site bears the title ‘good girls finish last’. She had to go back a bit to explain how she came to that conclusion.

“I grew up in Seattle which is like this heaven of a place where everyone is equal, we have female governor, I went to public school, I never really thought about gender issues because the women outpaced the men every way imaginable…so went to college, moved to New York, got my first fulltime staff job job at Newsweek, just assumed I’d excel the way I always had… I was one of those typical over-achiever young women. I was at Newsweek for a few years and it just felt like I wasn’t getting credit that I wanted to be getting or getting published as much as I wanted to be published…I started as an intern and worked my way up and along the way I saw a lot of male interns get hired faster than I had. I was a temp for a full year and every 3 months I would have to up my temp time and my ID access card would stop working…and there was a point where for a week I was unemployed before they could bring me on as a temp, again…but while all that was happening men who were my age and equally skilled got hired on staff. So why did I feel I was still on a tryout?”

In addition to all this she says the arrival of a basketball hoop in the newsroom contributed to a bit of a frat boy atmosphere – again, nothing terrible was happening, no one was making sexist comments or openly denigrating anyone’s work, but she couldn’t help feeling things were just – off.

“So I started talking to some friends about this and it turned out everyone felt the same way. All the young women in the office had noticed this. None of it were sure what it was or what to call it, or how to identify it, we were all raised of the generation to think we were equal. We had never experienced anything we thought to be remotely gender discrimination. So we couldn’t even identify it when we saw it. And this wasn’t blatant discrimination, this was kind of subtle, cultural things you couldn’t really put your finger on, but we just had this feeling that something wasn’t quite right.”

Then, Jess and her colleagues made a discovery. They found out that 40 years earlier, a previous cohort of Newsweek women had sued the magazine for gender discrimination. If you’ve been a longtime listener to the show you’ll have heard about this in episode 8 – in that show I talked to journalist Lynn Povich, who was one of those Newsweek women, about how the case changed her and changed things for women in the media.

Inspired by finding out about that case, Jessica and two colleagues ended up writing an article for Newsweek called ‘Are We There Yet?’ in which they talked about that 1970 case but also raised some of the issues they’d been grappling with at work – how much had really changed in 40 years? The piece became quite a talking point in the media, and the women hoped it might drive change at the publication. But the kind of change that came wasn’t quite what they’d been hoping for. Because while all this was going on, the world of journalism was getting ever shakier…

“So ultimately the magazine was put up for sale. It was six months of hell – every day we’d go to work, didn’t know if we’d have jobs the next day. People had whisky under their desks, more so than usual. Ultimately It was announced Tina Brown was taking over, it was really exciting – she’s an icon in magazine journalism, she’s a woman, and so I stayed on, I stayed on for about a year.”

Even though more female bylines appeared under Brown’s leadership, Jessica says the bigger problem was that Newsweek was failing, like plenty of other magazines and newspapers. Newsweek stopped printing in 2012. Jessica moved on to work for Tumblr…but the world of experimental journalism is no more secure than that of traditional journalism. That job ended after a year. Now she’s working at Lean In.

I asked her what she’d learned in her rocky decade or so in the workplace and if she had any tips that might be helpful for other people. She says she’s gone from shy to direct in the course of her career. Still, she often calls up the image of a friend when she really wants to get something done…

“I have this friend Adam, who I shared a wall with at Newsweek for a number of years, he was always one of the most badass editors, and would ask for what he wanted, he could make a case for anything, convince anyone of anything…so sometimes ask myself what would Adam do, when I’m going into a meeting or want to ask for a raise. I literally think what he would do. Because he’s like the direct version of me, the more direct version of me. He of course doesn’t need to worry about being deemed too aggressive…you know, there’s a fine line for women when asking for things. But kind of taking myself out of myself sometimes and thinking what another person would do in my situation I think helps.”

Any other advice?

“I mean as far as journalism these days, I guess my biggest tip is you kind of have to create your own job…there’s just not jobs out there like there used to be…

AM-T: “And then work out how to get paid for it, in my case…”

I was at Newsweek for 7 years, that’s probably the longest I’ll be at any job. It’s like the opposite of my parents’ career trajectory, which is you start jumping around at different jobs and then you find the right one stay there for years. I got in at the end of this golden era of journalism, like the, I was on the sinking ship, I stayed there for 7 years, now it’s pretty much sunk and now you have to just jump around from thing to thing trying to figure out what the next innovation’s going to be, or how you can possibly use these skills and kind of mold them into something else.”

She says journalists shouldn’t be afraid to pitch a job, either. That’s actually what she did with her current job at Lean In. When she interviewed, there was no editorial position. She pitched the idea, they said yes, and gave her the job. Talking of skills, I asked her if she knew how to code, something everyone’s being encouraged to learn these days – she does, to a certain level, and she knows how to do quite a lot with video too…

“That’s from years at Newsweek and just jumping in on different things, and I think identifying early at a place where a lot of people didn’t ever identify this that that was going to be important, and that if I wanted to grow I needed to have well rounded skills. Because nobody just wants a writer any more. They want someone who can do everything.”

Jessica Bennett, currently doing if not everything then most things on the editorial side at Lean In.org. And I should say in the interests of full disclosure that since I interviewed Jessica during the summer Lean In has been posting some of the content from The Broad Experience.

[Squarespace sponsorship announcement here]

Next we hear from someone in the UK who’s at a later stage of her career – though she says she expects to work into her seventies. Some of you will remember Heather McGregor from previous shows. She masquerades as Mrs. Moneypenny in her weekly column in the Financial Times. She has her own business, she’s married, she has three sons, and she’s the author of a book called Mrs. Moneypenny’s Career Advice for Ambitious Women.

 Oh, and she has a distinct point of view on what holds women back at work. Take guilt.

 “Yes, I don’t do guilt. All these emotions take up a lot of energy. If you feel guilty about something it can just weigh over you like a cloud, eats at your self-confidence, you feel terrible all the time. That drains you of energy to do anything useful, or to move forward in your life. If you’ve done something you regret. If not possible to say sorry, just put it behind you and move on. Everybody makes mistakes.”

Now my guest on the last show, Jodi Detjen, has strong feelings about guilt too and I think she’s right to say that guilt comes when women think we’re breaking a rule. We feel guilty because we’ve internalized the assumption that we SHOULD be nice to everyone all the time, or we SHOULD be spending all our time with our children – so one of the ways to ditch guilt is to question those age-old assumptions that underlie your thinking about your role as a female. Heather McGregor says there are various types of guilt women tend to get hung up on. One of the most common is guilt at saying no to a request.

“You are asked to make the cake sale for something, or you’re asked to do something, to make a charity gala dinner, asked to give someone one-on-one careers advice. First, acknowledge that you can’t be everywhere. You will just be average at everything…no one will get proper attention. So I’ve just come from an email from a pretty famous TV presenter in this country, who’s a woman, asking for one-on-one advice having read my book…non-executive director position…she wants my personal advice. This is an hour of my time, I will not be able to charge for it. I can’t do anything to specifically assist her because I don’t run a search company that does board positions and I don’t influence chairmen. I encourage and support women but I don’t make any difference as to whether they succeed or not. All she will hear is what’s in book all over again. I’ve written back to her and said I won’t see her. But in writing back and saying I won’t see her, I’ve written three suggestions of things you can do to help herself, so when you say no to something, I can’t make the bake sale but here’s what I’ll do, I’ll donate $15 towards the cake ingredients. Try and say no in a positive fashion. It’ll make you feel a lot less guilty.”

But there have been occasions when she’s fallen into the guilt trap. She’d been writing her FT column, which often deals with being a fulltime working mother, for about a year, when she got a warning note from a reader…

“My oldest son at the time, he’s now 23, so he was only about 12 years old. The reader wrote in and said I used to be like you…I used to put my career first, but then my son had a nervous breakdown, and I realized it was all my fault…so she said you’ll end up like me with a son with a nervous breakdown. I rang my son, who was on school break, midterm break, I knew where he was, he was with my sister and they were going to the cinema. I rang my sister on her cell phone…and spoke to my son and I said to him where was he, he said in the cinema foyer, and I said I would come immediately to the cinema and join them for the show. And he said, why? And I said, I’ve had a reader write in and say if I don’t spend more time with you, you’ll have a nervous breakdown. And he said, ‘Mum, if you come to the cinema right now I will have a nervous breakdown.’ You know, it’s not what he’s used to, he’s not used to me coming to the cinema in the middle of the afternoon, he thought he was having a perfectly nice afternoon with his aunt. And that is what his expectations were managed to. So I think it’s all about what you manage your expectations to.”

Heather does a lot of expectation managing with her family. But she’s always open, she says, about the reason why she can’t do something or be somewhere, which helps keep everyone on the same page.

“So I believe in that full explanation. Actually, particularly the concept of opportunity cost. So every time you say yes to something you are saying no to something else. So saying yes to everything is only going to get you into hot water. You are going to end up not doing the things that matter if you’re not careful.”

AM-T: “And this is where people get so spent, because in general women do say yes to too much…”

"Yes. And then eventually what’ll happen in they will all just collapse in a heap and nobody is any better off. And then people say it’s very selfish to think of myself, I should be thinking of my children, I should be doing all these things for everybody all night long. And actually, no, you should be looking after yourself.  If that sounds selfish think of this: when we are all on airplanes and they go through the emergency drill, they say in the event of emergency oxygen will fall from the box above you. And why do they say that? They say in the first instance put on your own oxygen and then turn to help the person next to you, even if that’s your child, because if you are healthy and breathing and OK you are going to be in a much better place to help the minor person or the child next to you. So if your career is going well, if you are doing well, able to provide for your family, your family will be better off.”

Talking of family…she’s hardly the first female professional to have been criticized for not being at home enough…

“The truth is, parenting is an individual decision…some people want to stay at home and will stay at home, and that is their choice and I really respect it. I personally would struggle with that, but that’s a very personal decision. But I see far too many women who make that ultimate sacrifice and then 20 years later are in my office saying, ‘Oh my goodness, my children have left home, I have no qualifications and no relevant work experience…my husband may or not have left as well, and I’m now on my own and I have no way of earning a living.’ Well, you’ve had 20 years to plan for that, I’ve got no sympathy.”

To make it easier to work and parent at the same time she insists women need to ask for help and build up a group of people around them who are always willing to chip in in an emergency. I told her about one of my friends and listeners who lives in Westchester County, New York. She told me she’s started trying to create the kind of community she wants – offering to babysit someone’s kid if she knows the mother – and it usually is the mother – is very busy. She says she’s doing this because she wants that same network to be there for her when she needs it. She feels few women do this kind of thing anymore. We’re too busy trying to do everything on our own.

“Well she’s absolutely bang on the money, whoever you are in Westchester county, keep going, that’s exactly what you need to do. If you are not helping other people, you are not building a team.  You’re not building a sustainable community around you – you need to help other people. You may never need to call back in the favor, but that doesn’t matter. And the favor may not be the same thing, i.e. you may watch someone else’s children, but you may not have any children of your own, or your children may be older so you may never need anyone to watch your children. But you know what, at some point you may need to go away for three days unexpectedly and need someone to feed the cat.”

So she says always help out without necessarily expecting a return, but see it as building a network you can rely on when your job threatens to mess up your life.

That’s the Broad Experience for this time.

If you like what you hear on this show please consider writing a review on iTunes. This helps the show’s chances of getting discovered by new listeners. You can also kick in a few bucks to support what I’m doing by going to the support tab at The Broad Experience dot com.

The Broad Experience is supported by the Mule Radio Syndicate…which hosts lots of other podcasts including Evening Edition, It Might Get Personal, and Unprofessional.

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

Episode 25: Killing the ideal woman

September 9, 2013

"What we see in the media is this idea that career and ambition aren’t something women should want." - Jodi Detjen, co-author, The Orange Line: A Woman's Guide to Integrating Career, Family, and Life

Jodi Detjen

On the first show of the fall season, we look at the extent to which women are still trying to live up to the stereotype of the ideal woman - and how that may be hurting our careers. You know her: she's does everything (at home and at work), she looks fabulous, and, of course, she's nice. My interviewee, management professor and author Jodi Detjen, says women's efforts to tick all the right female boxes are consuming most of our waking thoughts, to the detriment of our careers. She and her two co-authors discuss this - and how to stop succumbing to the usual pressures so we can achieve more in life and at work - in their book The Orange Line: A Woman's Guide to Integrating Career, Family and Life. You can read a bit more background on the book in my post, 'Ditching The Feminine Filter.'

"My hope is that women become free of all these rules of what it is to be a woman…that they can be what they are, and they can establish their life’s work," says Detjen. "Right now women’s voices can’t be heard, because we’re self-limiting. If we’re free to speak our mind and be who we are then the world has to change."

I'm inclined to agree. 15 minutes.

TRANSCRIPT:

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

This week on the show - perhaps one reason so few women are in positions of power is that we’re too busy trying to live up to a stereotype…

“What we realized was that women were making career limiting decisions consistently, based on this ideal woman. And the ideal woman does it all, she looks really good, and she is very nice.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

[Sponsor announcement here]

Jodi Detjen thought her career as a consultant was still going pretty well after her first child was born. But then she had her second son. He had colic, and she was exhausted, overwhelmed and depressed. Then her husband started traveling a lot for his job. Suddenly she was doing everything house and child-related and working less. Still, she told herself being the perfect mother was more important. But she spent five years feeling miserable as home responsibilities took over, competitive parenting practices set in, and her career dwindled.

“I had kept putting it away sacrificing my career for my children, using that mantra, and it was painful, and it hurt me a lot. And it wasn’t until I really got out of there and realized what it was I was doing to myself, that I started to find the freedom and stared to work out what my career looked like and started to make it what it was today.”

What she realized she says is that for her career was vital – she couldn’t be happy without it. She’s now a professor of management at Suffolk University near Boston. She’s also the co-author of a book called The Orange Line – A Woman’s Guide to Integrating Career, Family and Life.

She and her co-authors Michelle Waters and Kelly Watson interviewed 118 women in the US and Canada while they were researching the book. All were professional and college-educated; most were married, and nearly all were white. As they talked to more and more women, the authors began to notice a pattern.

“When we were analyzing our data we kept hearing things that would come up like…oh, I can’t really ask for a raise or promotion because I’m not quite ready yet. Or, I have to get up at 2a.m even though I work a fulltime job to take care of the baby because my husband has a physical job. Or, I have to have the government job because my husband has his own business…or I have to own my own business because my husband has a big job. In essence what we kept hearing was all these reasons why these women had to sacrifice their career for somebody else.”

Jodi and her co-authors says self-sacrifice is part of what they call ‘the feminine filter’ – a set of beliefs women tend to have about themselves and what they should be and do.

“And The Feminine Filter, what we realized was women were making career-limiting decisions consistently based on this ideal woman. And the ideal woman does it all, she looks really good, and she is really nice. And so if you have to do all those things then clearly you don’t have time to do a lot of other stuff. If you have to take care of the kids, you have to take care of your employees, of your house, of the dog, you can’t have time to do a lot of other things like take care of yourself. We heard this again and again, and what our conclusion really was is this is why women aren’t in positions of power – because they’re trying to be the ideal woman and they’re not thinking about what it is that they really want.”

Now of course a lot of women want to stay at home with their children full-time and do – at least for a while. Not everyone puts great emphasis on their career or enjoys it. But of the women Jodi and her fellow authors interviewed, 75 percent described themselves not just as liking their career, but loving it. Yet many felt compromised.

I asked Jody to take me through the six assumptions that underlie the so-called Feminine Filter, which she says is responsible for a lot of female frustration, even if women don’t always realize it.

Number one:

“Women are primarily responsible for home and family and taking care of everyone. So when we believe that this is true, then we’re the ones that do the doctors’ appointments, that take care of making sure the kids have school clothes, that anything that goes wrong in the house we call the handyman, we do everything at home because we’re the ones responsible, the buck starts with us.”

The second assumption women make, according to Jodi, is that our commitment to something is measured by how much time we devote to it – be it children or work. In other words we really need to put in those hours.

“So this comes out in, I have to keep my head down and work, work, work, I can’t go out to lunch with the other people because there’s work to be done.”

Next?

“The third one is we have to be perfect in behavior and appearance at all times. So this basically means that we can’t make mistakes, we can’t take risks, we can’t take a promotion – one woman wanted to take a promotion but she was like, oh, I’m not quite ready, I don’t have all the skills yet, meanwhile the men are jumping ahead and saying, ‘I’m ready!’”

“The fourth one is we are never good enough.  So because we are constantly trying to be perfect, everything we do is sub-par.”

The fifth assumption she says many women have internalized is that tangible, material rewards aren’t supposed to matter – money and things, in other words. She says this is why so many women feel uncomfortable and even guilty asking for a raise.

“And then the last one is, if we follow the rules, good things will happen.  So if we keep our head down and we do everything our boss is asking, then of course we’ll get the promotion, of course we’ll be asked, of course we’ll get the raise. So what happens is we believe that these assumptions are true and then we act according to them and then we’re shocked when life doesn’t work out the way we want.”

That last one about following the rules really resonates with me. It took me years to realize that toeing the line wouldn’t get me where I wanted to be at work. I think a lot of women slave away at the office because hard work always got them results at school. But the workplace is a different beast. And all that unquestioning labor can easily lead to burnout.

AM-T:

“You have this great chapter in the book called Approaching Burnout…which I think a lot of listeners will relate to probably regardless of their sex. But um, maybe we can talk about some of those examples because you’ve enumerated in the book – you have these little tables where you set up a scenario and you then talk about the underlying assumptions beneath it and then you sort of discuss a solution, basically.

And, so let me read one of these: ‘I will manage, it’s only temporary, I just need to get through this short time. I can rest when I get through this crunch.’

Just talk about that example and what’s really going on there, if you would.”

“Well what’s going on there is because we assume we need to be perfect, we need to have everything look good, we can’t say no to anything, we can’t give it to anyone else to do, we cant make a mistake because then people will see oh my God, we really aren’t perfect and then our whole façade is gone…I’ll give you an example of where this happened, one of the women I was working with, she was a manager…she was working till 8 o’clock and she was getting burned out. Because everything needed to be perfect, and she couldn’t possibly delegate to her staff because they weren’t capable…

…but we examined this and realized oh, that’s not true, how do you develop people on your team? You do it by giving them work, coaching them, giving them feedback…also setting boundaries…

…her team started becoming more capable and she started leaving at 6 o’clock.”

 [Squarespace sponsor announcement here]

Jodi and her co-authors’ opinions don’t sit well with everyone. For one thing, the authors say just because many women’s jobs pay less then their spouses’, women should not automatically view their own job as less important.

AM-T: “And you in the book are really - you want to really encourage women not to look at their job as less important because it pays less, but you’ve had some pushback on this. Their response seems to be look, if his job pays 3 times more than mine of course it’s, his is more important. And if he lost his job it would be a catastrophe for our family and if I lost my job, it wouldn’t be. Talk about that for a minute because women seem very resistant to taking on your point of view on this.”

“I think what we’ve internalized is that we are less important and we’ve definitely internalized that our careers are less important….and so what we’re doing is conflating value with money and we’re saying clearly his job is more important because he makes more money. But this isn’t always true, because we’ve had many women that change. So for example, there was a woman whose husband got laid off and he was making more money. Well if they didn’t have her career they’d be really stuck. But her job – she was able to manage that family for a year till the husband got his career. Her career ambition enabled the family able to grow and learn. The other thing that happens is because we make this assumption, oh, he’s making more money than me, women naturally close down their career as things come up, so they make their careers even smaller.”

“But here’s the real problem. What ends up happening then is we perpetuate the myth that those who make it to the top are only those whose spouses are stay at home, or spouses whose careers are not important. And so anyone who wants to have an Orange Line life…where you have a career, family and life, they can’t make it to the top of organizations, because clearly they aren’t willing to sacrifice everything for that job. So we’re stuck, we’re stuck in this model that nobody likes, but we’re the ones perpetuating it because we’re the ones enabling our husbands and we’re dong it by saying that our dreams don’t matter as much as his.”

Which perhaps isn’t that surprising after centuries of being the second sex.  It takes a while for most people to get over that much social conditioning – providing they even want to. For some, it’s just the way things are.

“We we are told as women that we are supposed to be like this. And just…it’s the whole follow the rules thing, right? To be a good woman, you’ve got to take care of your house. So if we say no you don’t, women are like, well yes I do, my house is a reflection on me, it’s a reflection on my family! Well, why do you have to do it? Or we spoke with a woman a couple of weeks ago who, they both work, the husband is a school teacher, she says the husband is not good enough with helping the children with their homework, so I have to do it. When we pushed back, we realized the husband is a schoolteacher, she was like, uh, well… she didn’t know what to say. Because it’s hard, it’s really hard, to see this.”

And of course many women enjoy those kinds of activities. But if you’re frustrated by attempting to balance home life and career, Jodi says just think for a while about all the assumptions you make about your life and role on a daily basis…and question them.

After several unhappy years after her second child was born, Jodi and her husband agreed no one’s career is more important.

“Both our careers are considered equal. OK, so then alright, what does that mean? It means if I have to travel, we negotiate, if he has to travel, we negotiate, it means a lot of conversations about logistics. But it also means we both get to have careers we love and want and that our kids get to watch us enjoy our work, and this role modeling is powerful for me.”

And that idea of children actually seeing their mothers work at something they enjoy is something I’ll come back to in a show later this fall.

Thanks to Jodi Detjen, co-author of The Orange Line, for talking to me for this show.  If you have comments on this episode you can post them at The Broad Experience dot com or on the show’s Facebook page. Jodi and I will weigh in as well.

The Broad Experience is supported by the Mule Radio Syndicate…whose stable of podcasts is getting bigger.

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

Episode 24: Women in tech speak up

August 5, 2013

"The truth is that women face a different judgment from the audience than men do, and a lot of women know that."

- Chrys Wu, co-organizer, <Write/Speak/Code>

If you follow the tech space maybe you read this post last year, which really did the rounds on social media - How I Got 50% Women Speakers at my Tech Conference. The fact is, it's very difficult to get a decent number of women speakers and panelists at a tech conference. Women are a minority in the technology space to begin with, and they're far less visible in the industry than men - not just because there are fewer of them, but because the ones there are tend not to become 'thought leaders' (i.e. write and speak publicly about the industry and gain a huge following in the process) or contribute much to open source software projects. 

Attendees study speaking materials on public speaking day at Write/Speak/Code

But it's not just women in tech who don't 'put themselves out there'. Let's face it, no matter what women do for a living, they're far less likely than men to feel comfortable in any kind of spotlight. The Write/Speak/Code conference set out to change that. Tune in to hear three different voices discussing

• Why women have trouble saying what we think in a professional context
• Why it's hard for women to claim expertise (and how to get over that)
• The importance of speaking in public
• Bluffing 
• Why being referred to as a 'woman in technology' is incredibly irritating

 10 minutes. You can read the full transcript for the show below.

TRANSCRIPT:

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

This time, we drop in on a conference aimed at women in technology. In an early episode of the show we talked about how few women work in technology and why. But for those women who are pursuing careers in tech…it can feel lonely out there. Relatively few women are out in public writing blog posts or op-eds about their subject, or speaking at conferences. Lots of men are doing both.

“The truth is that women face a different judgment from the audience than men do, and a lot of women know that. And they’re not necessarily eager to put themselves up on a stage where the first comment or the first thought amongst the audience is, why are you even up there, what do YOU know?”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

Earlier this summer I dropped in on a conference for women technologists. It was held in New York and it was called Write/Speak/Code. The idea was to make women in tech who want to be a bit more visible in their industry comfortable with publishing pieces about what they do, speaking in public, and contributing more to open source software. Rebecca Miller Webster is a software developer and it was her idea it was to put on this conference. She told me open source software is a bit like Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, in that anyone can contribute – in this case, they’re contributing code. So why do so few women add anything to open source projects?

“I think there’s a lot of reasons for that…I think the biggest one is that people find it very intimidating, you know, your code is in the open, people see it, they can comment on it, so we’re sort of trying to address a lot of that because at Write/Speak/Code we believe all of these women can speak and contribute to open source so how do we get them to take those next steps...obviously there are systemic reasons for why women don’t participate more, but there are personal reasons as well – we’re socialized not to speak out, you know, as women in tech we’re already sort of an anomaly so you often don’t want to completely draw attention to yourself,  and all of those sorts of things, so we’re trying to address those more personal, emotional reasons.”

I also sat down with Chrys Wu, a co-organizer of the conference. Chrys is a journalist, a coder, and she founded the Hacks/Hackers group in New York, which gets web developers and journalists together.

AM-T: “So could you just expand a little bit on why the women who do work in tech are not very visible?”

“Because there are a lot of reasons it’s a little bit of a hard question to answer. Sometimes the conferences are looking for big names and of course the big names tend to be people who are more senior in a company, which isn’t necessarily a lot of women. Women on the whole don’t make up a lot of the developer population, period. It’s just a ratio thing. It is a big hurdle to overcome. That said there are a lot of women who are working who are not necessarily at the C level or at the director level but know a lot. So the hard part then becomes finding them, just looking for them. That’s one thing…another is…we’re going to need to pause, gather my thoughts…

AM-T: “I know it’s a really multi-faceted beast…”

“It really is…but another reason why you probably don’t see a lot of women speakers is that women on the whole are not really encouraged to come and stand up on stage for example. Um, I mean the truth is that women face a different judgment from the audience than men do and a lot of women know that…and they’re not necessarily eager to put themselves up on a stage where the first comment or the first thought amongst the audience is going to be why are you even up there, what do you know about being an engineer or being a coder? That doesn’t happen everywhere but there is sometimes that perception, so there are women who just don’t want to put themselves in that position. The third thing is there are plenty of women who are really, really smart, have a lot of experience, who know their subject, but just are afraid of public speaking just like everybody else. “

 Fade into sound of class taking place]

 “…sometimes they’ll ask for reviewers’ notes and this is usually where you have an opportunity to say, ‘I think I should talk about this because I’m qualified, this topic is timely, things like that, so especially if you’ve never talked before this can be a really good opportunity to sort of let the reviewer know what your motivations are…”

[Fade out]

I told Chrys Wu that when it comes to talking or writing, it seems so much harder for women to put a stake in the ground regarding our beliefs – whatever we do for a living.

AM-T: “That seems to be something that in general men are better at just putting themselves out there and saying I think this…and, they don’t have any qualms about putting their opinion out there in the world, whereas women are much likelier to sort of second guess ourselves and think, well who am I to say that or do that?”

“Yeah, for sure. And that’s one of the things that we’re helping these women overcome. And it’s not just through the workshops. But you know this morning - today is our speak day, it’s all about public speaking and we had a panel of four women developers who answered that very question. And they said you know, honestly, like, men bluff it all the time – as a woman, we tend to be more modest in our thinking…

AM-T: And a bit more purist, like…I can’t bluff it – you can’t bluff things!”

“Exactly, exactly, but the truth is that what you need to know to give a talk or to write about something is to assimilate the information and be confident about what you’re talking about. In the case of public speaking they were saying even if it’s something you just learned, the fact you now know it it gives you the authority to talk about it and explain it to other people.”

“Sounds simple but for a lot of us feeling like an expert on something was part of, I guess part of the journey we were trying to get through at this conference…”

That’s Aimee Simone – she’s a software developer at a tech startup in Orlando, Florida, who came up to New York for the conference. She says the instructors actually had the women practice stating that they were an expert in something, out loud, in front of the class. They had to say their name, what they did for a living, and then finally say what they were an expert in and why.

“It was hard for people to say that they were an expert in anything. That was something we had to say a few times with help from the instructors. So that was what contributed most to my confidence level when I left.”

She is an expert in Ruby on Rails, a programming language.

Whether she likes it or not.

Part of the reason Aimee came to Write/Speak/Code was to improve her speaking skills…although she’d already taken the plunge and spoken at a big Ruby on Rails conference earlier this year – Ruby on Rails is a programming language.

So how did that feel?

“Oh, I was terrified. Afterwards though I felt like I was floating on a cloud. I was just so happy, partially that it was over, because the couple of weeks leading up to it were pretty stressful…”

As they tend to be when any big event looms. She’d always thought, maybe I’ll speak at a conference someday…

“Which, some day is a dangerous phrase because it usually doesn’t come. I didn’t trip and fall on my face, and I remembered everything I was going to say. Some people even came up at the end to talk to me. It was really different – a really different experience being on the other side of the conference presentation.”

One she hopes to repeat with the skills and confidence she acquired during Write/Speak/Code.

Finally, I asked Chrys Wu about something that bugs a lot of women in technology – being spoken about specifically as…women in technology…

“I mean personally I struggle with this a lot as well, this notion of OK, so you’re a woman, you’ve got to be out there and be an example, pave a path and all this other stuff… It’s just, but why, you know? [laughs] I do this because I like it and not because of my gender. Obviously I recognize that I’m a woman and other people do too, but I don’t want people to think about it in the context of oh, a woman did this, which somehow makes it weird and different. So I kind of do fall into that category of women who work in technology who are just like, I’m normal.  Right, exactly, I just happen to do this: focus on my work and not the shape of my body or my gender. But that said, because I am, I’m also a non-white person, right? I also understand the need and the historical importance of people who are not the norm putting themselves out there and taking whatever comes, both the bad and the good.”

Chrys Wu, who helped organize the Write/Speak/Code conference.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. You can comment on this episode at The Broad Experience dot com or on the show’s Facebook page.

The Broad Experience is supported by the Mule Radio Syndicate, which hosts a whole collection of podcasts, including Here Be Monsters, Running from the Law…and Everything Sounds.

This will be the last show for a few weeks – I’m taking a break to do some teaching and to work on gathering interviews for new shows. I’ll see you in September.

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