Episode 34: Make them laugh - women, men, and humor at the office

February 10, 2014

"Women aren’t supposed to be funny, but men are. And both men and women are prepared to laugh at men, but very few men seem to be prepared to laugh at women’s jokes." - Judith Baxter

Judith BaxterIn what I hope will be the first of several shows on language and communication, we're looking at humor as a leadership trait. I've always thought of humor as a great way to break the ice or keep things bearable in an otherwise boring or stressful work environment. But it turns out if you're a senior woman in a corporation, the use of humor can be fraught with unintended consequences, few of them funny. Always a devotee of the self-deprecating joke, I was surprised to learn from my guest, professor of linguistics Judith Baxter, that these self-directed barbs don't go down well when women deploy them in board meetings. Tune into the show to find out what happens when senior men and women use banter or otherwise joke around. Ponder why this form of office communication works for men, but not their female counterparts. And laugh. Or grit your teeth, depending on your level of frustration. (Full show transcript below.)

10 minutes.

If these experiences ring true, or false, do leave a comment below.

Show notes: Here's a blog post I wrote recently about 'double voice discourse', one of Judith Baxter's other areas of expertise (I bet you've used it).

This piece about Judith and her research - and the humor consultancy we mentioned - appears on The Glass Hammer website.

If you haven't yet read it, I highly recommend Tina Fey's book Bossypants. It's not only hilarious but has recommendations about dealing with difficult people and situations in the workplace - even a workplace devoted to crafting jokes.  

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, you’ve heard it before – women aren’t funny – or at least not as hilarious as men. I talk to a linguist who has studied the way senior women and men use humor in the workplace…

“Men were using it more often and were using it in a way that produced a laugh whereas when women used it, less often, they often didn’t get a laugh.”

In fact 80 percent of their jokes fell flat. Keep listening to find out why. 

Judith Baxter is a professor of applied linguists at Aston University in England. I first read about her work on language and gender more than a year ago. I was fascinated by it because our use of language in the workplace is one of those things most of us don’t think about – yet it has a big effect on the way other people perceive us.

Judith and a colleague did their research for their latest study over an 18-month period at seven multinational companies based in the UK. They spent many hours recording and studying the language of senior men and women while they were conducting high-level meetings.  Judith and I spoke on Skype.

“As I believe language is one of the main ways in which we construct our identities in the workplace, I just wanted to find out if there was something happening in a meeting – um, people spend so long in meetings, some managers are in meetings nearly all day. So it’s obviously a key experience for them, so I went in wanting to analyze the language they use.”

And what she found was that men joked more than women – and their use of humor was more successful…

“In that they were using humor in a more crafted and professional way to manage people, whereas the women were perhaps less easy with using humor, and often there were cases of humor going wrong when the women used it. Men were using it more often and in way that produced a laugh. Whereas when women used it…less often, they often didn’t get a laugh from others round the room, so I was quite interested in knowing why that was the case.”

AM-T: Yeah. Well when you say men were using it in a sort of…they were more deft in their use of humor…give me an example.

“It would be a case of using humor if a colleague was difficult. If conflict was brewing, a male leader would often use humor to banter with the person being difficult - you’d have a running gag or sequence of witticisms going through the discussion, where very often the male manager was joking with the person being difficult, and it would diffuse the situation and people ended up laughing rather than disagreeing with eachother. To me that was a very skilled use of language to get a positive outcome with a difficult colleague.”

AM-T: But what about with women then – how did you see it backfire with women?

“Well I do believe that men and women can use humor in exactly the same ways, but when it’s a situation where women are in the minority women, I think women tend to feel a bit more defensive, less relaxed, less self assured in that situation, and therefore humor doesn’t come quite so naturally to them. When they did use humor it tended to be quite self deprecating, in the sense of they would turn the humor against themselves and mock themselves, rather than what the men did, which was to mock other people. So men were happy to tease or kind of use jocular abuse against other colleagues, whereas women tended not to do that or they did it at their peril. When they did do it, it often didn’t work.”

And this self-deprecating humor didn’t go down well much of the time. Which struck me as odd, because as a woman I’m very familiar with self-deprecation. Nearly all women use it. And we like it, because as Judith says, it makes us seem approachable.

“If you criticize yourself or mock yourself, then you are less of a threat to other people. So if women are a threat to men in that kind of context, and some women think they are, one of the ways they can dilute that threat is to have a joke at their own expense…it’s much more high risk to joke at someone else’s expense because you can’t be sure anyone’s going to laugh at that and it could be seen as insulting, but if they make a joke at own expense then no one else is losing face. So it seems to me it’s done as a means of saying look I’m not threatening, I’m somebody that you can get on with, you don’t have to worry about me.”

That kind of humor may work in a group of women, but remember if a senior woman was leading a meeting Judith was observing she was still in a minority in the room – there was about an 80/20 split of men to women. And in a meeting that was made up largely of men, the tactic of making fun of herself often flopped, and the woman came across as needy or defensive.

Judith found that at these high-level meetings, more than 80 percent of women’s jokes were met with silence. Meanwhile 90 percent of men’s jokes got instant laugher or approval. Why?

“Well I think this is a lot to do with cultural assumptions about who is funny in our western society – in the sense that traditionally men are the ones who are the comics, who make the jokes, on stage, etc. and women are meant to be a supportive audience who laugh at the jokes…culturally there are still very few examples of women as standup comics for example, and very few role models of women who are funny, whereas there are dozens and dozens of men who do that very well. So I think it’s about the fact that women aren’t supposed to be funny, but men are – and both men and women are prepared to laugh at men, but very few men seem to be prepared to laugh at women’s jokes – they’ll laugh at women but not with women.”

Judith found things changed a lot when she looked at humor among middle managers. In those cases the gender distribution in the room was much more equal.

There were many more women at that level, and men and women were using humor in similar ways. She says the women felt much more comfortable in that situation, and they got more laughs.

But what about the fact men joke around in meetings more than women, especially with other men…

“I think men do it as a form of bonding, perhaps they don’t get the same opportunities to go and have a chat over coffee as women do. Women find these sort of moments to connect with eachother socially whereas I think men in the workplace tend to do that less so, so humor is their kind of way of bonding with eachother in these more public situations.”

And it turns out some companies in the US take humor very seriously. They want to encourage bonding between company and client – all through a few laughs. And they’re prepared to pay for it…

AM-T: “I was just floored and amused to learn that here in the States on the west coast, there’s actually a consultancy that ‘teaches businesses how to employ humor in order to make a more genuine, human connection with their clients,’ and I thought, ‘God, how American, you know that there’s actually a consultancy that teaches companies how to be funny.”

“That is interesting. I mean humor is just another resource for doing leadership. If you think of leadership being about the way we speak and interact primarily, There’s a whole range of ways we can use language to be incredibly effective and influential – and humor is just part of the toolkit. So I can understand that. I mean I think it’s probably harder to teach people to be funny, but there are things you can encourage people to do. It’s a mindset really, if you can change people’s mindset about humor and why we use it…then perhaps people will use it in more productive ways.”

Judith Baxter.  You can read more about Judith’s work and some of her other findings on the way women use language at the Broadly Speaking blog at The Broad Experience.com. Ever heard of double-voice discourse? You’ll probably recognize it when you read about it. It turns out women use this second-guessing speech tactic four times as much as men.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. You’ll find a few show notes under this episode at The Broad Experience dot com. Feel free to comment there and on the show’s Facebook page.

The Broad Experience is supported by the Mule Radio Syndicate. Check out all the other great podcasts at Mule Radio dot net.

As ever, please spread the word about the show – the more people know it exists and begin to listen, the more chance I have of getting further sponsorship. Also, if you like what you hear please write a review of the show on iTunes. And if there’s something you’d like to hear covered, get in touch with me at ashley at The Broad Experience dot com.

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

Episode 33: What is success?

January 27, 2014

"The women I work with are what I call 'perfectionistic over-functioners' - they need to get an 'A' in everything, they do more than is necessary, more than is appropriate and more than is healthy."
- Kathy Caprino

"When your success is based on getting the goal you’re never happy. So you’re happy when you get the goal, for a moment, but then the bar gets higher. Then it’s like, OK, what’s next?" - Emily Bennington 

Kathy CaprinoAt the start of a new year people's thoughts often turn to what they can make of the clean slate that lies ahead. We're asked what our new year's resolutions are. Some of us (not me) actually make them. We see countelss headlines urging us to work on a newer, better version of ourselves - to make this the year we become truly successful at something, whether it's landing a better job or losing weight. 

Emily Bennington

In this show we take a closer look at what success means. I spoke to career and leadership coach Kathy Caprino and mindful leadership coach Emily Bennington. Both women are also authors, and both have corporate careers behind them. Kathy and I discuss why some of us seem to expect success to come almost instantly when we launch a new project or entrepreneurial venture - and what the reality of such a launch entails.

Emily talks about her entry into the work world as a wildly ambitious twenty-something set on corporate domination. She wanted the title, the promotion, the money. What she hadn't bargained on was just how stressful she would find her ascent. After years of striving she had a change of heart, and changed her definition of success. You can comment on and share the piece below, or weigh in on the show's Facebook page. Full transcript below.

20 minutes.

Show notes: Kathy Caprino is the author of Breakdown, Breakthrough.

Emily Bennington's latest book is Who Says It's a Man's World.

Here's a link to the video Kathy Caprino made to answer that reader's question on whether she should give up her new endeavor because it was proving so hard.

And for another take on success (the more traditional kind), here's a piece by 'tiger mother' Amy Chua and her husband Jed Rosenfeld from the New York Times. 

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… what does success actually mean…and what does it take to get there?

“There are an awful lot of messages that if you’re doing it right you’re just going to attract wealth and fame and recognition and ease, and it’s just not accurate.”

“My success at the time was defined by what I had, it was defined by my position on the org chart, it was defined by the amount of money in my bank account.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

We’ve just begun a new year and that means we’ve all seen plenty of articles with titles like ‘7 ways to a new you’ or ’10 ways to be more successful in 2014’. It seemed a good time to consider what exactly success means for different people, and why some of us expect it to come so quickly.

Recently I came across a video career coach Kathy Caprino had posted on her website. Some of you will remember Kathy from episode 14 of the show. She talked about the difficulty so many women having fitting into the typical corporation. She now counsels a lot of those women.

In this video she was responding to an email from a reader. The woman had a corporate career and wasn’t enjoying it. She’d started a side project she was passionate about – a travel blog. But despite several months’ worth of effort the blog wasn’t getting much traffic. She wanted to know whether to give up. I wanted to know why so many of us assume endeavors like this will be successful right away.

“You know I was thinking about why do we assume it’s going to be easy, and I think there are three key reasons for that: social media and internet marketing gurus sell to us by saying it’s all going to be a split second, blink of an eye, drop of a hat, and it’s just not true… the second is, our level of experience: what I find is people who have launched things in the world, in the corporate world, entrepreneurially, otherwise, creatively, they know how much effort it takes, how hard it is, so your level of experience in doing this will gauge, it informs you. Third is, a lot of people try to do this stuff by themselves, alone, in a vacuum, you should reach out and get some form of expertise, so you do need not necessarily to pay a lot of money, but you do need expert help when you’re launching something like that.”

I prodded her on the gender factor. Could a man have written the exact same email? Are women more easily discouraged by an apparent lack of progress? Kathy says there’s something in that.

“The women I work with anyway are what I call, often, perfectionistic over-functioners. They need to get an A in everything, and they do more than is necessary, more than is appropriate and more than is healthy. I see it over and over and over again, and there is a reluctance to reach out and get help, and there is truly a reluctance to invest in yourself. I know how hard that is, having my own business, you have to pay all the bills, sock away something in savings so you can invest later, and in order to grow you have to pay for things, a new website, whatever. I do feel from my experience that women struggle with that more than men.”

Some of you will have heard me talk about this in the show I did on women’s relationship with money. Many of us are happy to splurge on some indulgence like a new shirt, but balk at paying for services that could have a much longer-lasting effect on our lives. But back to what it takes to build a new endeavor from scratch.

“You know there’s another thing we didn’t talk about, that build it and they will come belief – and some people, it’s a new-agey believe, a spiritual belief, and I am a spiritual individual, I believe in spiritual principles, but this build it and they will come, and do what you love and the money will follow, I don’t believe in either of those, necessarily. But there are an awful lot of messages that if you’re doing it right you’re just going to attract wealth and fame and recognition and ease, and it’s just not accurate.”

So Kathy offered her correspondent some practical advice about what it means to keep going with an entrepreneurial project.

“Realize that everything we create of meaning and value requires work, it doesn’t fall in your lap. But the question is this, what does the work feel like? So when I look at what I’m putting out in the world, writing for Forbes or my new Amazing Career Project…it’s an incredible amount of work, but it’s enlivening work - not every minute, let’s not kid ourselves, but in general I’m excited, enthralled, I can’t wait to interview someone else. If it feels terrible, debilitating, demoralizing, if you procrastinate and want to do anything but that work, then something’s wrong. Then you need to look at what is not happening that should be. The second thing I mentioned to her was we often overly attach to how something should look and the outcome. I see this with people who write books…’I should be able to sell 30,000 books overnight.’ We overly attach without realistic expectations, and that makes us suffer. And the third thing that’s important to look at is, with this blog this individual is doing, is that really the right form for the essence that you’re trying to create and feel and experience? So for her for instance, she loved travel, but I didn’t know is blogging about travel the right thing? There are a million ways we can we can honor our passion for travel, and blogging, which requires content creation, editing, editorial calendars, it’s a vigilant process, maybe that isn’t the right form for the essence she’s looking for.”

She says it’s not that surprising this woman should search for an outlet when she’s so fed up at work. And at least she’s doing something on a trial basis – she hasn’t left her job. Yet.

“What I see are many, many midlife women coming to a true crisis. They wake up and say I don’t want to continue doing this one second more. They’ve been hurt or downtrodden or thwarted or suppressed, they’re not happy in their careers so they fantasize about a new direction. And I call it the pendulum swing because it’s like ‘joop’, going to the opposite side of the world in terms of what they want to do. And that was me, I had an 18-year corporate career and there was a lot of pain in it.”

After she was laid off just after 9/11 Kathy knew she wanted nothing more to do with corporate life. So she trained to become a therapist. But she discovered after a while that while it might be miles away from company life, it still wasn’t the right role for her.  It took more years and more training to develop her role as a leadership coach.

“I think we have to be very careful if we’re in careers that are causing us pain and suffering. The answer is not to leap into another direction without doing what I call the five steps of career change, and one of those is explore it and try it on and know before you leap that it’s the right direction.”

Kathy Caprino. Kathy is the owner of Ellia Communications and the author of the book Breakdown, Breakthrough. I’ll be posting links to her information under this episode at The Broad Experience.com

A quick note here before we go on. The Guardian recently featured The Broad Experience as one of its ’10 best lesser-known podcasts’. I was the only woman on the list. This was a huge thrill for me because as some of you know, building a show like this takes a lot of time and work, so to be recognized by a publication like the Guardian feels great. I also want to take the opportunity to say thank you to all those of you who’ve taken the time to write a positive review about the show on iTunes or who’ve given a donation – or both. It all adds up. Thank you.

Next I spoke to Emily Bennington. Emily teaches and writes about mindful leadership for professional women – and she came to that via a whirlwind of an early career. When she entered the workforce about 14 years ago she didn’t so much hit the ground running as racing. She thought she knew exactly what she wanted from life – to be successful in the sense of having the right title, the right clothes, earning a lot of money. And this was for good reason. Her mother hadn’t had a career.

“She was basically beholden to the decisions that the partners made in her life  for her. And that didn’t always work out so well.”

She stuck in some abusive relationships because she couldn’t support herself otherwise. She did find happiness with Emily’s step-father but after almost 20 years he died of a heart attack and again, her mum was left alone with few financial underpinnings. All Emily knew was that she was not going to let the same thing happen to her.

“I started my career working for a marketing agency, and I was a ball of ambition. Actually it came across as ambition but what was driving it was fear. Again, watching how my mother was and knowing that wasn’t what I wanted for myself…I was just pushing, pushing, pushing, and it resulted in burnout very young. But one of the things that got me so interested in leadership and mindful leadership in particular was after pushing for a year, my first year in the workforce, I had first performance review with my boss. One of the things he said was, ‘Emily, I think your technical work is great, and I want to see you succeed in your career, but here’s the problem – I know you want a raise, I know you want a promotion, but I can’t promote you because no one on this team respects you.’

Ouch.

“One of the tings I learned walking out of that meeting was my success wasn’t just dependent on what I brought to the table, my success was dependent on the support and the encouragement of my team…it was the whole, a rising tide lifts all boats, right? After that meeting it became very clear to me if I was going to succeed, I was going to have to learn how to be a team builder.”

OK, but why didn’t anyone respect her?

“Well I was the classic, I like to refer to it as Devil Wears Prada archetype, it was the highly ambitious woman, who at the end of the day – and I don’t want to categorize it as just women because obviously men fall into this trap too. But my success at the time was defined by what I had, it was defined by my position on the org chart, it was defined by the amount of money in my bank account, and it was all of those external factors that really contributed to how I saw myself…and you know what? I thought that because that’s what we’re taught success is. When you got into the bookstore and look at the leadership section or career section that’s basically how success is defined.  And so I fell into that. And what I learned after a few years was that that’s a trap, and that actually makes you pretty unhappy, and so I had to flip it upside down on its head.”

Emily and her husband have two little boys who are now 8 and 6. She says when she had them she was at the height of her corporate career. Striving, getting her first book published, being head of a young professional’s group, sitting on a board, always comparing herself to her colleagues. She was exhausted and crying a lot when she got home. She says stepping away from corporate life, thinking about who and what really mattered to her, changed her whole idea of what it is to be successful. She’s still ambitious, but says she controls that drive rather than the other way around.

“A magnificent career comes from being a magnificent woman first. And it’s a really flipped upside-down paradigm of success. And it goes against judging your success based on what it is that you have and what you have achieved. It bases success on the only thing in your life that you can control, and that’s yourself and how you choose to respond to the world around you. So when I talk about what it is to be successful now, success is showing up every day as the best of myself, as the best of who I am and who I want to be and letting the chips fall as they may as a result of that.”

This was starting to get a bit Oprah for me. I asked Emily to drill down and give me some examples of how this mindfulness plays out in her daily life. For one thing, I knew she had an interesting approach to goals. We’re often told goals are vital to move us forward in life and work. I find them useful motivators.

“I have a very love/hate relationship with goals. Because the most unhappy I’ve ever been in my career is when I was 100% goal-driven and viewing my success based on whether I achieved the goal. That is really a system designed to ensure we’re perpetually unsatisfied. Because when your success is based on the goal you’re never happy – so you’re happy when you get the goal for a moment, but then the bar gets higher. Then it’s like, OK, what’s next? So what I’ve discovered is you can’t rest in achieving the goal, there’s always another step to be made afterwards, and if you don’t get the goal you feel like a loser, so that process, getting the goal or not getting the goal, is just this emotional rollercoaster.”

One that was making her miserable.  Ultimately, she decided to focus on the way she carried herself each day.

“So I sat down and thought of different virtues I wanted to personify and embody: for me these were things like discipline, these were positivity, mindfulness, so what I focus on instead of, ‘Did I get everything done on my task list today?’, what I focus on at the end of the day is did I show up as who I wanted to be? And what I’ve discovered is that as I continue to show up as the best of who I am, I get the things done that need to be done and I do them well.”

So the goals tend to happen anyway.

“And I tell you what, I’ve been happier than I’ve ever been as a result of just saying, you know what, it’s not that I don’t have goals, like you, they’re incredibly motivating, but you have to detach from them if you want to maintain some sort of peace in your life.”

So she keeps them there but she’s also able to let them go if she doesn’t hit them. As for what she calls ‘virtues’ like positivity, she says sure, it’s easy to say you want to remain positive in a dysfunctional work environment. But you have to pair that positivity with a true intention to carry it out at all times – even testing times…

“If you set an intention, so you’re being proactive about who you want to be, then you tend to be that person versus just allowing the emotion or whatever it is you’re feeling in the moment to guide your behavior so you’re kind of blowing in the wind like a flag. But if you have an intention it’s almost like you set your sail, this is who you’re going to be, and you tend to stick with that. So if you do that over and over and over again, what starts to happen is you get the little things right each day. So as you get the little things right time and time and time again what happens is, you look back and go, oh, I’ve got this great reputation at work, and I’m happier too.”

OK, it was time for me to put on my cynical journalist’s hat.

AM-T: Because it sounds really encouraging and I love this different way of thinking about success and the way we do things, it certainly suits me. But the fact is we live in a society that largely still places the other value on success – you know, the title, the org chart version, and when you’re a woman in a corporation, I don’t know, what do you think, have you heard from women in corporations and they’re saying your advice and your methods are making a difference to them? I just know how dysfunctional companies can be and I wonder if women can really make this change from the inside, and how long it’s going to take.”

“Hmm, yeah, and that’s where business culture itself needs to change. And that’s one of the reasons why I love speaking to women because women really seem to get this idea of conscious leadership. By conscious leadership I mean not just looking out for yourself but looking out for the team around you, and using that to propel your way up. I mean I love the quote that great leaders don’t have to claw their way to the top, they’re carried there. And that’s what I mean by conscious leadership. And that’s what I think leadership needs to be and that’s where business I think needs to reform in some ways to support leaders who rise in that way.”

She says Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post are two top dogs she admires who are exercising conscious leadership. If you have a job at either of those places, I’d love to hear whether you think it’s working.

Emily still reminds herself of different ways to think about success.

“Usually when you first meet somebody, at a cocktail party or whatever, the first question you ask aside from what’s your name, is what do you do? That puts us in a position where we evaluate our success based on again, the things we have and the things we don’t have, the job we have and the job we don’t have, but I had friend of mine ask me how do you serve…and I just thought that was such a fantastic question. It really put things into perspective for me to think about OK, well I may not be as accomplished as I want to be, but I can always serve, so whether you’re serving clients, or students, whoever you’re serving, if you are serving well, if you’re doing that well, you will have satisfied students, satisfied clients, whatever, and that will propel your career, it will advance what you do.  And so I just keep that in mind right now all the time. If I’m serving well I will get where I want to go.  And so it just once again shifts the perspective to something I can control. I can’t always control how advanced that I am in my career…” 

Office politics…

“Exactly…but I can always control how I’m serving. And I think if you bring that mindset to work with you every day, you’ll really find what I call the snow-globe mind, the monkey mind or whatever, begins to settle, because again, you’re re-claiming your power by focusing on what you can control.”

Emily Bennington. You can find out more about Emily at her website and I’m putting a link to that and her book, Who Says It’s a Man’s World? under this episode at The Broad Experience dot com.

That’s the Broad Experience for this time.  Next time on the show we look at the different ways men and women use humor in the office.

“Men were using it more often and were using it in a way that produced a laugh whereas when women used it less often, they often didn’t get a laugh.”

Hmmm.

The Broad Experience is supported by the Mule Radio Syndicate…which hosts other great podcasts including the investigative show Muckrock, and Impolite Company.

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

Episode 32: Home as career-killer

December 16, 2013

"As women we get so much career advice about what to do in the office, but one of our biggest career obstacles happens at home, before we even walk out the door in the morning." - Liz O'Donnell

"What I see with my friends in Europe, male and female, is that we all work 90%. We never quite do the extra hour...because you have to take the kids to school or get the kids from school." - Simon Kuper

Liz O'Donnell

In this show I talk to Liz O'Donnell of the blog Hello Ladies. She's written a book called Mogul, Mom & Maid about how tough life still is for women who work a fairly serious job and have a family. A lot of women will relate to the stories her interviewees tell about their messy, exhausting lives. Liz, the sole breadwinner in her family, has long given up on most housework (her husband is rather selective in his choice of tasks). But she's quite unusual.  She points out that American women are caught between high expectations at work and traditional social norms at home - not to mention a school system that thinks we're still in the '50s. 

Simon Kuper

 I knew I wanted a male perspective on some of the things Liz and I discussed. Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper came to mind right away. He's based in Paris, and three years ago he wrote this column in the FT about the many hours he was devoting to childcare, and how much of a shock to his system that was proving. He talks about the work-and-family culture in Europe, where men willingly take paternity leave, and where the work ethic is less relentless (and we're not just talking about France). He says men want what women want. Attention Sheryl Sandberg.

17 minutes.

Please go to Mule Radio's homepage and fill out their five-minute survey - doing this means you give me a greater chance of getting sponsors for this show.

Show notes:

Pew Social Trends survey: Modern Parenthood - Roles of Moms and Dads Converge as they Balance Work and Family (March 2013)

Women with Elite Education Opting out of Full-Time Careers - Vanderbilt University (April 2013)

Why Dads Don't Take Paternity Leave - Wall Street Journal (June 2013)

Paternity Leave Dads Seen as 'Not Man Enough' - Globe and Mail (August 2013)

More Men Take Paternity Leave - The Tennessean (November 2013)

SHOW TRANSCRIPT (but it's much more fun to listen to the podcast):

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

This time we look at the idea that part of the reason women aren’t further ahead at work is because they’re still doing so much at home…

“As women we get so much career advice about what to do in the office but one  of our biggest career obstacles happens at home before we even walk out the back door in the morning, we already have a hurdle to overcome.”

And we hear a male view on domestic arrangements and career inhibitions…

(:09) “I would like to be the most successful journalist in the world but I have to you know, at seven in the morning I have to spend the whole weekend in playgrounds shouting at people.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

Liz O’Donnell is the sole wage earner in her family of four. She works in marketing in Boston. Her husband stays at home in the suburbs to run the house and look after their two kids when they get back from school. On top of her job, Liz runs the blog Hello Ladies, and she’s the author of a new book called Mogul, Mom, and Maid. She doesn’t spend much time slaving over a hot stove, let alone a vacuum cleaner. But she realized a lot of working women she knew were. One the one hand, they had their jobs in the hard-charging, high expectations American workplace. On the other, they had to deal with everyone’s expectations of what a woman’s role is outside the office. Take the school gates…

“The schools absolutely still default to the mother. At the beginning of the year we have to fill out so much paperwork about emergency contacts, medical records, etc. and regardless of the fact my husband and I always write down that he’s at home and I’m in the city at work…if my child is sick, the school calls me.”

School drives her crazy in other ways, too.

“I don’t have working mother guilt, as the breadwinner I will never feel guilty about earning a living for my family, I’m fairly organized, I can get it all done, but the times you’ll find me in tears about being a working mother, it’s usually related to the schools – it’s related to the lack of communication or yet another opportunity to have to tell my children no. “

No, because yet again she’s been told about some school event at short notice and it’s too late to cancel a client meeting and get there. She tells the story of one of the professional women she talked to for the book and how that woman has her child in a school that has half days one day each week. As if arranging pickup and childcare around that half-day weren’t hard enough, the woman noticed that during one particular week the school had moved the half-day from its regular slot. Liz says this kind of last minute logistical hurdle is the kind of thing women juggle in their heads every day…

“The thought process and the thinking that goes into it and how much planning she has to do just for that one change, it was incredible, and these are the things I call the invisible tasks.”

AMT:

You’ve brought me very neatly to my next question. Initially a reader might think, well what does all this have to do with the workplace? But actually the fact it’s usually the woman who’s thinking and planning and has all this on her plate on top of work…it takes up an enormous amount of head space.”

“It takes up an enormous amount of head space, that’s it. It doesn’t necessarily take up an enormous amount of space on your to-do list. It may feel like in your home things are split fairly equitably: I fluff, you fold, I wash, you dry…but this thinking, this constantly thinking through all of the moving parts…where you need to be, where your child needs to be, when the school is open, when the forms are due, when to buy the uniform, practice has changed - it’s mental energy.”

One of the things you pick up on in the book is that few women felt their husbands did enough at home. The husbands, though, felt they did quite a bit – and most did a lot more than their own fathers. According to the Pew Research Center, the amount of time American fathers spend with their kids has almost tripled since 1965.

Both halves of these couple worked, but the women told stories of the guy heading straight to his tool shed at the end of the day instead of picking up the baby, or not cleaning up after dinner even though that was his regular chore. Still…

AM-T:

“Another thing that jumped out at me from the women you interviewed was the extent to which…a lot of them actually felt that – almost that it really was their role to do this or their husbands couldn’t do it the way they could, or this idea of he doesn’t notice if it’s dirty…he doesn’t even see it, so I just do it because it would never get done, and I would be driven crazy by it, that kind of thing, and I think that’s so interesting because it brings up the question of how much of it is coming from us, and how much is coming from the outside.”

“Yeah, and I hesitate around this discussion because I don’t want to put it all on the woman. I mean clearly men need to step up their role at home – you look at their statistics, you look at the women in the book, there’s more men could be doing. At the same time there is a level of maternal gatekeeping that we back ourselves into these roles at home. And again I think it has to do again with how we were raised what we saw our mothers do, what we hold as the image of a perfect mother, there are so many factors. But if women can learn to let go…I go out and speak to groups of women now the book is published and one of the things I say is put down the mop. Whatever the mop is for you…if it’s making a perfect hospital bed when you make the beds in the morning or whether your child’s clothes are pressed, whatever it is, try it for one week, just one week, no one will get hurt. And you’ll see you can free up some more mental time and physical time…and, you know, start to let go of your standards.

There was a woman in the book who I thought said something rather interesting. She said you know when my husband sends the kids to school and forgets a snack he says, ‘Oh, I forgot the snack today.’ But if I send my kids to school without a snack I think, ‘I am the worst mother ever.’ So it’s perspective.”

AM-T:

“Right. It’s the societal pressure on women to be perfect and of course to be perfect mothers because that’s the role we were born to play…and you also talk about the occasion where Michelle Obama described herself as mom-in-chief and all the writing and blogging that took place after that…and that really struck me as well because I think very much that at the end of the day society still thinks that is what women should be above all else and that is our most important job, in quotes…”

“That phrase crops up in the media every three months, right? That motherhood is the most important job.  And you even have the president saying it. And I don’t buy it – I don’t buy it for a number of reasons. One is that we have to shift to think if that’s the most important job, it has to be parenting is the most important job.

AM-t: Right.

“The other thing I think is interesting about this pressure we feel is that it used to be pre social media that you’d feel this pressure by looking at celebrity moms…somebody would have a baby and they’d lose the weight and be out and about and then back to work on a film…You’d say, why can’t I be like that? But intellectually you knew that actress was paid to be that thin and perfect – and had a whole army of people helping her. Now, we do that to ourselves by posting our most perfect moment on Facebook, so now I go on Facebook and see the woman down the street having a wonderful family night, or going on a fabulous vacation, or celebrating a great career success. So now it’s harder I think to not compare to what we think other women are living - you know, these perfect lives they might be living.”

And again, that kind of endless comparison eats your mental energy – not to mention your self-esteem. In short, stay off Facebook. Talking of comparisons, a lot of women Liz spoke to felt there were double standards when it came to how parents are perceived at work.

“You see the man who’s leaving early to coach his kid’s sports team being lauded as a great father and a good guy, and someone we should promote. And you see the woman who’s leaving early to catch the bus, as oh, not so committed to work, she’s a mom. I think the real change will happen when these men start to find a way to say hey, I want what she has. I think more and more men – and you see studies coming out of Boston College Center for Work and Family – you see more and more men saying I want more balance in my life…they may have been raised to say I provide and I die, right? But they are realizing something much more fulfilling is happening in the home…”

But it’s still risky for a lot men to say they want more time with family.  In the US, the attitude at most workplaces is that work comes first. I know someone who works for a global company based in New York. When his son was born several years ago he had the opportunity to take paternity leave. But he was taken aside by some male colleagues and told not to do it. They said taking time off to be with his baby would make him look like a slacker. So he didn’t take his leave. That’s totally different from the attitude in Europe, where you’re expected to take your paternity leave, and looked on askance if you don’t.  We’re going to hear more about European attitudes to career and family in a minute. 

SQUARESPACE SPONSOR BREAK HERE - use the code 'BROAD12' to get a 10% discount when you sign up.

After talking to Liz, I decided I wanted a man’s view on some of this stuff. And I knew exactly the man I wanted. Simon Kuper is a Financial Times columnist. He and his wife live in Paris with their three children, a seven-year-old girl and five-year-old twin boys. Life in the home, fulfilling? Yes, but also unexpected.

“I grew up thinking that I would have a job and I’d have a family, but I’d never conceived of having a family being that, you know, you’re woken up at 7 in the morning by children making a noise, and then you have to help everyone get dressed and brush their teeth and then you want to be back at 6 to spend time with them and you end up completely exhausted at 8.30 by time they fall asleep, etcetera. And when the weekend starts you face 36 hours straight with them. And I’d never imagined that.”

Why would he? When he was a child in the seventies, as he wrote in one of his columns, girls grew up playing with dolls and visiting new babies. Boys didn’t. They grew up thinking they’d have time to themselves.

“When I vaguely thought about having children I thought well, you know, there’ll be a child or two but I’ll really just work…and I didn’t really think about who would bring up the children. Now I find myself in a situation I hadn’t expected at all and that makes it probably more difficult, because there’s a voice in me that says if you weren’t putting the children to bed now, or if you weren’t going to spend the entire weekend with the children, you could do a million other things, you could do all your work, or go to movies, or go to Rome, you know, all these fantasies, whereas I should really be thinking, well, this is my life.”

I started to say this made sense – that no wonder men feel quite proud of themselves for the work they do at home given most of them weren’t raised to think they’d be playing these roles at all. But Simon disputes the idea that men feel smug about their contribution.  

“Almost all the men and women I know would subscribe to the statement ‘men and women are equal’, so we should both raise the children, we should both work. I don’t really know people who would dissent from that statement.  So when I do the same amount of childcare as my wife or perhaps a bit less, nobody says, oh, that’s wonderful, you’re doing as much as a woman, people say that’s about right, that’s what you should be doing. I think men don’t largely feel in my circle we are wonderful, we’re doing a lot of childcare, it’s just what your wife and yourself and your friends expect from you.”

I don’t see quite that level of egalitarianism here in the US. Life in this country involves more hustle these days what with stagnating wages, expensive childcare and rising healthcare costs. It’s also a work culture of long hours.

“A job in upper-middle class America is more than full-time. And so generally you can only have one more than full-time job per family. Whereas what I see with my friends in Europe, male and female, is we all work 90% - we never quite do the extra hour, not because you’re lazy…but because you have to take the kids to school or get the kids from school…so both men and women I see with families in my generation in Europe, we’re not maxing out our careers, we’re doing as well as we can and more or less trying to get by in these years…I think that’s a difference from the upper middle class American families I see…where the man is maxing out his career and kind of has to, to earn the family budget, and the woman has left her career.”

 And that does happen, of course, even when both parties earn well. Vanderbilt University released a study earlier this year - it found women from America’s most elite universities were less likely to work once they had kids than other educated women. 

Liz O’Donnell says her book is really for the women in the middle - people who actually can’t afford to give up their job, but in many cases have had to give up their cleaner.

“So women who are saying I really want a fulfilling career, I want to add value, be valued, I want a good paycheck and a good job, but I can’t do it at 60 hours a week, and I’m not willing to make the personal sacrifices that are required to go all the way to the C suite.”

Simon Kuper says he and his male friends aren’t willing to make those sacrifices either.

“There’s this debate among women about, you know, how hard it is to combine work and family and how women are in this really difficult position, which is all true. But I think what that debate ignores, and I felt it reading the Sheryl Sandberg book, is that most men I know have many of exactly the same problems. I’d like to be the most successful journalist in the world but I have to – at 7 in the morning I have to spend the whole weekend in playgrounds shouting at people, so…

AM-T: Can I just say, you’re not doing too badly…

Well, I make huge work sacrifices, so all these Sheryl Sandberg arguments about how women should lean in, you know, most of my male friends it’s the same, we’re not leaning in, who has the time to lean in to your career the whole time? So I think that the Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg argument is all totally valid, and it’s definitely harder for women, especially in the US, but they talk as if it’s only about – as if only women have these choices, which is just false.”

Simon Kuper. Thanks to him and Liz O’Donnell for being my guests on this last show of the year.

I’m going to post some show notes under this episode at The Broad Experience dot com, including a link to a recent study on men, women, childcare and housework – as well as a few articles about attitudes to paternity leave.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. I’m taking a break till late January, but if you’re a newcomer to the show or you’ve missed an episode or two, there’s plenty to catch up on. A few favorites from this year are the 6-woman debate on Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, the show I did on professional women and sex, and the show I did on women in Kenya.

You can find all those via a link on the homepage and also on iTunes.

The Broad Experience is supported by the Mule Radio Syndicate – they – and I – want to find out more about my listeners so please take 5 minutes to go to Mule Radio dot net and fill out the survey they’re linking to from their homepage. As some of you know putting this show together every 2 weeks takes a tremendous amount of time and energy and I don’t get paid for it. Filling out that survey will help when it comes to finding the right kind of sponsors for this podcast and getting more of them. So please fill out that survey.  It really will be helpful.

I love hearing from people so if you have thoughts or suggestions about the show shoot me an email at Ashley at The Broad Experience.com. And please keep spreading the word about the show.

I’ll be back in 2014. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.

Episode 31: Tips for success from an entrepreneur

December 2, 2013

“My attitude really is that yes is always the answer - now how are we going to do it? Instead of approaching a problem like, 'I don’t think we can do this, this is gonna be hard.'" - Alexandra Ferguson

The first in my Tips for Success series featured the CEO of an advertising agency. We're staying in the creative sphere with this second show. A lot of women dream of starting their own business. My guest actually did it. She's Alexandra Ferguson, CEO of the company of the same name, prolific maker of pillows and makeup cases inscribed with cheeky sayings. 

Alexandra Ferguson at her desk in BrooklynShe started sewing in her living room five years ago. Now she works out of a small factory space in Brooklyn and has more then ten employees - and growing. But getting to where she is now has involved plenty of ups and downs. 

We talk about:

• How she got started and overcame naysayers to keep going
• What it's like working with her mother
• Mistakes made and lessons learned from them
• Not doing it all alone

13 minutes. 

Here's a blog post Alexandra wrote earlier this year that's relevant to our discussion: How I Went From Whiny 'No' to Unstoppable 'Yes'. 

In this photo, taken at the factory, Alexandra is holding a couple of the 'shrunk' pillows you heard about during the podcast - ready to ship, taking up less space and costing less money.

Her mother, Charlotte, is on the far right.

Episode 30: Women in academia

November 18, 2013

"You have to be able to concentrate and that requires a lot of time free from any other thoughts. And that means you can’t be thinking about taking the kids to the doctor, you can’t be thinking about how dirty the house is." - Aeron Haynie

"Who do you report an assault to when it’s your boss? What do you do when that’s the person who raped you?...and when you finally talk to HR they say you’re a graduate student, you’re not technically an employee, so they can’t help you.” - Kate Clancy

Kate Clancy, anthropology professor at the University of Illinois

To an outsider like me, being a professor looks like a great job (I'm thinking vigorous intellectual engagment, flexibility, and long vacations). Often it is, and not just for those reasons. But just because you work in a center of higher learning doesn't mean everything that goes on there lives up to humanity's highest ideals. From maternity leave to work/life balance to getting promotions, life in the ivory tower is often tougher for women. We look at the statistics, talk about why women are still lagging men on the employment front, and get into a sobering discussion about sexual harassment in the scientific community, which, like other STEM fields, is trying to attract more women. 15 minutes.

You can also read a transcript of the show.

Show notes: Here's a selection of further reading and watching on some of the things we touched on during the podcast.

 The AAUP's 2006 report on gender equity in academia

John Curtis's 2013 piece, 'What Roles Are We Modeling?' Gendered Academic Employment and its Consequences

Aeron Haynie contributed a chapter to the book Mama PhD

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Are Your Parental Leave Policities Legal? (by Joan Williams)

The Ivory Ceiling of Service Work (AAUP, Jan/Feb 2011)

Saying no thank you and getting called a wh*** (video by Danielle Lee)

Danielle Lee's Scientific American blog

Kate Clancy's Scientific American blog

A Kate Clancy post from 2012 about sexual harassment at field sites

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.

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