Episode 37: Leaning In (re-release)

March 24, 2014

It's almost an anniversary edition: this time last year I met with five other women in a West Village apartment. Over Middle Eastern food and a couple of bottles of wine, we debated the newly released Sheryl Sandberg book Lean In. The show was released in mid-April, 2013, and remains one of my favorites.

Back row, l to r: Yvahn Martin, Dora Chomiak, Stacy-Marie Ishmael. Front row: l to r: me, Gia Freirech, Rebecca Jackson (a bit shiny after our wine)We talk about the merits of Sandberg's book, discussing, among other things, her attitude to getting ahead and her vision of success, how quiet she is about how she raises her own children, whether it's really OK to cry at work, and how men are also - or should be - part of this conversation. You can read more about my guests at the original post for this episode.

26 minutes. 

Episode 35: Advertising is broken - women speak out

February 24, 2014

"Women don't make it to the top because they don't deserve to - they're crap...they wimp out and go suckle something." - Former WPP global creative director Neil French, 2005

"The unpredictability of the work...is probably the hardest thing for women to get over. But then there are other things that are more insidious." - Kat Gordon

Kat GordonWe're surrounded by more marketing messages today than ever before (current estimate: we absorb about 3,000 such messages every single day). Many of them are targeted to women. After all, women hold 80% of the buying power in any household. Yet despite that, few women are making creative decisions at the tops of advertising firms. My guests on this show argue that's a little odd - and that it's time things changed. I speak with Marti Barletta of the TrendSight Group, Monique Nelson of UniWorld Group, and Kat Gordon of the 3% Conference.

Kat Gordon founded the 3% Conference to get the ad industry to confront the creativity gap and work out how more women can rise to the role of creative director. As we discuss in the show, a decades-old agency culture won't change quickly, but with men's help, it can change. (Full show transcript below.)

16 minutes.

Show notes: 

This is a link to part of the dissertation (now book) that got everyone talking about that 3% statistic. It's by academic Kasey Farris Windels. If you Google her you can download the whole dissertation - it's the first link that comes up.

From the She-Economy website: quick facts and statistics about marketing to women.

Here's a good Adweek piece by Cindy Gallop on solving the creative director gender gap.

Kat Gordon posted on the 3% Conference blog about Mita Diran's death, and included another tale of excessive overwork from a top female creative.

Here's a piece from an Australian news site about Diran's death.

Here's the Pew Social Trends survey from 2013 on men, women and work/life balance.

Two decent ads aimed at women and girls: If you haven't seen it yet, check out this ad for Pantene shampoo (made for the Philippino market - I don't know the gender mix, if any, on the creative team.) This Goldie Blox ad also went viral when it came out.

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 look at women who work in advertising. It’s a popular industry for women, but a tiny minority make the creative decisions that put ads on screens. Billions of consumers take in marketing messages largely created by men. And those messages tend to influence us a lot more than we think. But changing the status quo means tackling the culture at ad agencies…

“I feel like advertising is broken and that the things we value and prize and the way we try to demonstrate our worth to clients is so off, and no one is getting to the root of that.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

Kat Gordon has worked in advertising for 25 years. She left the world of big ad agencies in the late nineties to go freelance - she was a copywriter back then. These days she’s creative director of her own agency, Maternal Instinct. She also founded and runs the 3% Conference, which aims to increase the numbers of women in high-level creative jobs in advertising. She started to notice the gender imbalance in the industry quite a while ago. One incident at a former employer has always stuck in her mind.

“We were pitching the Saab car account. And the entire pitch team except for one team member was male, so they had 16 men and one woman pitching this car account. And also I want to add that everyone on that team except for the one woman, she was Asian, was white – it was this white male lineup trying to win a piece of businesses from the Swedes…and if you know anything about cultural bents, you know that’s a nation that’s a lot more progressive than many…”

They did not win the account, for whatever reason. Years later Kat started the 3% Conference to ask why 97 percent of creative directors are men – and what the industry can do to change that. But as Kat just alluded to, it’s not just women who thin out the higher up you go in the ad world. Even in the lower ranks, most people pretty much look the same.

“For advertising to have a lack of diversity is such an oxymoron to me, I think it’s just bizarre.”

That’s Monique Nelson. She’s the CEO of Uniworld Group, a multicultural marketing agency based in New York.

“We should reflect the people that we’re talking to, shameless plug for Uniworld Group, but the one thing I love about my agency is we are diverse, and that’s huge. But yeah, Madison Avenue has a long way to go with respect to not only female, but diversity in its truest form. My dream would be we really do reflect, especially here in the US, the American experience, which is not white and male, dominantly.”

For one thing, America is going to be majority non-white within the next few decades. And women make more than 80 percent of the buying decisions in any household. Yet they’re usually not deciding what goes into the ads we see – and we apparently take in more than 3,000 marketing messages a day. Marti Barletta runs the Trendsight Group, which specializes in marketing to women.

“Most of the time in the world people don’t understand the differences between men and women and the problem with that in advertising is that the role of advertising is to interest, motivate and persuade people who very often are quite different from you.”

And she says that can be a problem if a team of guys is creating, say, a car campaign and doesn’t realize men and women come to decisions in quite different ways.

“So one of the things, stereotypes about women you may have heard, is that women are fickle, they can’t make up their minds, they change their minds all the time. Now what really is going on there is that women’s decision process is quite enormously different from men’s decision process.  It’s one of the things that surprised me the most, because you wouldn’t think it would be gender-related, but it actually is.”

She says for instance men tend to make buying decisions in a fairly linear way. Women on the other hand are more likely to take in multiple strands of information as they research a product, and change their mind depending on what they learn…

“So women’s process tends to loop back very often throughout the process as she learns more and more things about the product, the dealership, what her friend have preferred, etcetera. “

Marti Barletta and Kat Gordon both say it’s not that women are all fabulous at marketing to other women. Men have created some fantastic ads that do very well with female consumers. The industry needs a mixture of thinking, Kat Gordon says.

In that case, I had a question for her.

AM-T: “It’s sort of ironic because you’re making this point in your work that there just aren’t… that only 3% of top creatives are women. And yet you left the agency world yourself because you felt you couldn’t stay there and raise your children. And this is the problem, isn’t it?”

“It’s a huge part of the problem, absolutely. I revisit that time in my own mind, and I try to think…I don’t ever remember  thinking it was an option to stay and have kids…I don’t remember ever seeing anyone in leadership who was pregnant. So I’m not suggesting that they told me I couldn’t, I just somehow didn’t think it was possible. And I was commuting every day from Palo Alto to San Francisco and it was a long day, and I just I remember thinking, ‘I can’t do this job and be the kind of mother I think I want to be.’ “

She has that in common with a lot of women from many industries. But there are  some outliers. I told Kat about a woman I’d interviewed last year for a magazine piece. Her name is Marlene Hore and she spent years as a top advertising executive in Canada. She became a creative director in the 80s. She loved her job. She told me something I don’t hear many women say out loud. She had two daughters during the height of her career. She told me her daughters would have liked to have her at home a lot more during their childhood, and that she had missed out on plenty of ballet recitals and dinners at home. She said she adored her children but added, “I had to do something that was ‘me’.”

“Yeah, you know one of the things I heard Sheryl Sandberg say recently, I was lucky, I got to meet her and she gave a talk, and she talked about how no one at her level or in any kind of senior leadership talks about how joyful it can be to work – you know, it’s always about how to juggle it and how to do it all, and it’s kind of, even the language we use has built into it that it’s going to suck, or it’s going be hard, and that no one really talks about how wonderful it is, man or woman, to feel like you are using your gifts, making a difference, having an impact, and that’ something she’s trying to do, to show that she loves her work. And it sounds like this woman you just described felt the same way. I do think that’s part of the conversation that hasn’t really taken root yet and needs to.”

At the 3% Conference she says there’s no whingeing or hand-wringing. She’s actually trying to isolate what it is that keeps women out of top creative roles, so agencies can change the way they do things. She says there’s no doubt that having kids and wanting to spend time with them is a major issue women creatives have to grapple with.

“So it really is at that – I heard someone call it the messy middle – it’s right in those years where you’re maybe in your early thirties, you’ve got enough experience at that point to become an associate creative director, and you’re right at that point where you’re thinking of having a family, as I did. The types of things that make it so difficult for women with small children – and men as well, I don’t want to leave them out of this – is the unpredictability of the work…you know, for anyone that’s worked as creative director, copywriter, art director, you know you go into a client presentation, you don’t know if you’re going to sell the work and if you don’t you’re under the gun to produce something new that they’re going to like…often it can mean working all weekend or working late, or hop on a plane to go present again.

So that’s probably the hardest thing for women to get over. But then there are other things that are more insidious – one of the big things I noticed when I worked in the agency world is you get trained to be a creative thinker but you don’t get trained at portfolio school, I’m hoping this has changed, but you’re not trained to sell your work and to be a really persuasive presenter. A lot of women leave that to their male partners or account directors, so they are not selling their work, so they’re letting someone else take the glory, someone else learn how to deflect criticism and get a client to fall in love with something, which is a really important skill…and I see that lack of confidence carry through into things like women not entering their work into awards shows, women not being jurors of award shows, women not speaking at conferences, women not writing op-ed pieces. It’s a visibility issue. So that’s another challenge for women in advertising is getting them to believe their opinion matters, getting them to speak up, getting them to put their face out there, getting them to enter their work in awards shows. And then mentorship. You just can’t downplay that you need someone – and sponsorship -  you need someone  to see the talent in you and open doors for you, and what’s very sad,  is many well intended men are nervous about mentoring young women as it can look unsavory – they don’t want to look like a lech inviting the young copywriter to lunch. And one of things I say to men when we go on our roadshows or they come to our event is please get over that and don’t care what others might think, because these women need you more than you can imagine. And if you are a woman who’s achieved success, mentor as well: women really need other women pulling them up and advocating for them and giving them insight into how to navigate that messy middle.”

So I asked, do the men actually get it? She says most agencies are clamoring for guidance on how to keep women and some guys do understand the issues. Others are learning to. She uses a recent conference as an example. There were four male creative directors on a panel.

“And the one thing that happened that was so interesting…sexism came up, the male advantage, sexism, and I can’t remember which but – one of the panelists came up and said that’s old school, that doesn’t happen any more. The female panelist said guys, I hate to tell you, it does still go on…and everyone in the audience was kind of nodding along, so I do think it’s one of those things that if you haven’t experienced it first hand it’s hard to believe it happens to the degree it does. So I do think men are aware they’re losing female talent, but I don’t think they’re always aware of all the little things that happen that contribute to women giving up.”

Of course those hours we talked about a bit earlier – they’re a big thing, and they can be brutal. At the end of last year a young copywriter in Indonesia called Mita Diran collapsed and died not long after tweeting that she’d worked 30 hours straight on a client project. Kat says those kinds of stories make her despair, because there’s no need for anyone to drive themselves that hard.

“The thing that I keep saying, and I feel like this lone voice saying this, those kinds of work environments and that kind of pushing yourself to the limit does not result in creative output - it’s been proven, if you look at where ideas flourish and where amazing synapses connect in your brain, it is not at 2a.m. in a war room of an agency after you’ve been drinking Red Bull all day. That’s a recipe for disaster. So I feel like advertising is broken and that the things we value and prize and the way we try to demonstrate our worth to clients is so off, and no one is getting to the root of that, because if you really want to create great work for your clients that’s going to be motivating to consumers you would not run your agency the way you do. And I think if I were a client today and I knew what my customer base looked like, and chances are it’s mostly female, and I knew that by demanding something to be done in a crazy turnaround kind of crash and burn, and that meant the female creatives at the agency would be less likely to be able to service my business, why is that a worthwhile trade? I think it’s actually lunacy.”

She says things are changing at big companies like Google that have in-house creative departments. There everyone works together as a team to create the best work. But in the agency world, there’s still that imperative to prove yourself to the client…

“People say, well, that’s just the way it is, and I think wow, if that’s how much the agency culture is cemented in people’s minds…I don’t know, maybe I’m enough of an outsider, maybe it’s because I live in Silicon Valley and work with a lot of startups, and I’m trained to think differently and ask questions, but I don’t think it’s working, and I don’t think the men are happy either.”

Last year a survey from Pew Social Trends in the US revealed half of working dads felt stressed trying to balance work and family life – that’s compared to 56% of working mothers.

“And on the one hand I feel sad that now our brothers are feeling the pinch too, but in a way I think it’s necessary because until the HR departments are hearing a chorus of voices crying uncle and saying this is just untenable, things don’t change.”

So men, speak up. The next 3% Conference takes place in November this year in San Fransisco.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time.

The Broad Experience is a member of the Mule Radio Syndicate – go to Mule Radio dot net to check out other great podcasts including This is Actually Happening…and Let’s Make Mistakes.

As usual I’ll be posting show notes under this episode at The Broad Experience.com. You can comment on what you’ve just heard on the website or on the show’s Facebook page. In the unlikely event you can’t get enough of me, you can sign up for the weekly newsletter, also on the homepage.

And if you can, please consider throwing in a few bucks to support what I’m doing by clicking on the ‘support’ link at The Broad Experience.com. I’m thinking of setting up a more formal way of supporting the show via another website – if you have ideas about the kids of rewards you’d like to receive for donating a little money, please let me know what they are. I’m at Ashley at The Broad Experience dot com.

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

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. 

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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.