Episode 49: The pace of progress

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October 5, 2014

"I often walked away from the school playground thinking, why am I doing this? I am disheveled, I am tired, I am exhausted, and it is just relentless. But then I'd get to work and think, 'This is what I am doing.'" - Carola Hoyos

"When you look at the whole career path it’s such that women just can’t be bothered. They think the workplace they’re in, at universities especially, is just so lousy that they leave.” - Curt Rice

23 minutes.

Carola Hoyos

So much attention is focused on women in the workplace these days that you might think progress is everywhere. Yes, more women are joining company boards, and some prominent women have top jobs. But other numbers haven't shifted much. In this show Financial Times journalist Carola Hoyos laments the slow pace of change in Britain in particular. But she says one upcoming move could turn things around.

One country that seems to be getting a lot right on work and life is Norway. Curt Rice has lived there for 25 years. He's steeped himself in research on why women lag behind. Still, he's optimistic about gender balance in his world of academia and at companies - partly because of an experiment his university carried out.

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Episode 48: Professional women, no kids

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September 21, 2014

"We can’t change as much as we’d like to how society looks at us, but we can certainly change how we look at ourselves...we are not second to mother." - Melanie Notkin

"The reason I didn’t have kids is not because I wanted a career instead of children. It’s because I just didn’t want to have children of my own. And I think that’s a valid choice too." - Jennifer Rapach

More and more women are reaching their mid-forties without having children. Sometimes this is by choice, and sometimes it's not. But here's what both sets of women have in common: they're operating in a world where being a mother is still considered the default setting for women. Discussions of women in leadership usually assume every woman has to juggle her work with children. But where does that leave the rest of us? 

In this show we meet three successful women, childless and child-free: Melanie Notkin, founder of Savvy Auntie and author of the book Otherhood, Sara Hinkle, who works in academia and is tired of feeling left out of conversations about work/life balance, and Jennifer Rapach, who has been married for 20 years and has never wanted children. Try explaining that to the rest of the universe. 25 minutes. 

 

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Episode 47: Authenticity vs. conformity

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September 8, 2014

"There’s this tension that we all deal with between authenticity and conformity. How much are you willing to change your identity in order to climb the next rung of the ladder?” - Sylvia Hewlett

"I remember saying this to my boss a while ago, I said, 'My personality is what it is. I started two data-driven divisions in the face of people who didn’t get what we did. That’s the kind of personality it takes to do that is somebody like me.'" - Lauren Tucker

'Authenticity' is a buzzword that crops up a lot these days in posts and articles about the workplace. We're all meant to be in an era where we can be ourselves at work. But how realisitic a goal is that for women, really?

In this show I talk to author and speaker Sylvia Ann Hewlett (right), whose most recent book is Executive Presence. Sylvia says women have to find the right balance of being themselves and having the perfect combination of gravitas, communication skills and appearance to be considered for leadership positions. She talks about how to pull that off.  

Lauren Tucker (left) leads her own division at an ad agency, but she says meshing her forthright personality with the workplace is not straightforward, even at her level. And why should she even have to try?

25 minutes.

 

Further reading: Sylvia Ann Hewlett founded the Center for Talent Innovation. She is the author most recently of Executive Presence. 

Lauren Tucker is SVP at The Martin Agency. Her blog post for the 3 Percent Conference site is Beyond the Cracked Ceiling - into the Hall of Mirrors.

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: how authentic can you be at work?

 

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Episode 46: Communication at the office

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August 11, 2014

"We have misinterpreted men’s transactional style as being dismissive or exclusionary. And men have misinterpreted women’s style as not being logical...Whereas it’s just a style difference that is very complimentary to one another.” - Barbara Annis

A lot of women run up against communication problems at work - everything from a failure to be heard in meetings to giving orders to having male colleagues misread something they said. In this show we look at how differently men and women use language in the workplace. And we find out what each sex can do to better understand the other's style, from interrupting to taking...a while...to get to the point. 22 minutes.

Reagan-Thatcher cabinet talks, 1981. Courtesy of White House photographic office. Thatcher certainly knew something about being a lone female voice in meetings.

Further reading: Robin Lakoff is professor emerita of linguistics at UC Berkeley. 

Barbara Annis is the co-author, most recently, of Gender Intelligence - Breakthrough Strategies for Increasing Diversity and Improving Your Bottom Line.

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Episode 45: Killing the ideal woman (re-release)

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July 28, 2014

"We realized women were making career-limiting decisions consistently based on this ideal woman. And the ideal woman does it all, she looks really good, and she is really nice." - Jodi Detjen 

14 minutes.

In this show we look at how much women are still trying to live up to the stereotype of the ideal woman, and how that may be hurting our careers. You know her: she's does everything (at home and at work), she looks fabulous, and, of course, she's nice. My interviewee, management professor and author Jodi Detjen, says women's efforts to tick all the right female boxes are consuming our waking thoughts, and our careers are suffering as a result.

Whether you agree or not, I'd like to hear from you. Post a comment here or on the show's Facebook page.  You can see the post for the original release of the show here.

 

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Episode 44: The motherhood factor

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July 14, 2014

“All of a sudden, all of the things the workplace seemed to accept about these women and that they seemed to accept about the workplace…had been thrown out the window, and they were put under this intense scrutiny as if they weren’t as committed to their jobs as they had been before having kids.” – Rachael Ellison

25 minutes.

For years, motherhood was considered our only job. Today, many women head back to work full-time not long after becoming parents. For some, everything goes smoothly, but for others, the return to work is challenging and confusing: they may not want the same things from their job that they did before, they crave flexibility (and can’t seem to get it), or their employer’s perception of them as a worker has changed – and not for the better.

In this show we look at the transition from worker to worker-parent, find out what companies are doing to accommodate employees, and discuss how overburdened parents can make the pitch for a saner existence.

Ivalo Andreassen with, l to r: Elanor (2) Aputsiaq (2) and Aleksander (4). Ivalo has Alopecia, which causes hair loss.

Further reading:

Flexibility: who wants it, who gets it - my blog post on workplace flexibility featuring Rachael Ellison.

The unspoken fears of maternity leave - my blog post on maternity transition featuring Karen Rubin.

Rachael Ellison is a coach and work/life advocate. She specializes in helping people navigate the twists and turns of working parenthood.

Karen Rubin is managing director of Talking Talent US, a firm founded in the UK by CEO Chris Parke. It works with companies and female employees on maternity transition coaching and on developing the female talent pipeline, which tends to leak in the middle.

Ivalo Andreassen works in sales for a Danish IT company. 

 

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 happens to a woman’s career when she returns to work after having a baby.  Some women find other people’s perceptions of them begin to change…

“I was quite stressed and then I talked to my boss and she said yeah, it’s because you have all those children, so of course, no wonder you’re getting stressed.”

And making the pitch for flexibility…before you hit a wall.

“As put upon and as burnt out as you might feel, you have to be able to re-frame that for an organization and just make sure you’re not bringing that emotional dump to them, because they’re not going to respond well.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

 

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