Episode 71: Our Bodies, Our Work

“We still think of men as the normal people and men’s bodies as normal bodies, and then women represent this abnormal case that’s problematic for employers and society in general.”

— Heather Dillaway

Show transcript:

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

This time…menstruation at work. How do you talk about it – if you talk about it?

“So I had this conversation with him – I said I’ve got this thing called endometriosis, it’s really terrible, and I’m probably going to have major surgery – and he was like huh, OK. He didn’t seem fazed by the fact it was about periods, to give him credit.”

But not all men are comfortable with the topic…

“It was like a ten member, all white, middle-aged male group of angel investors. I’m the only girl in the room, I was 22 at the time. And selling them on why period underwear is a good investment.”

And why women tend to go through menopause quietly…

“If we are acknowledging menopause we are acknowledging that aging happens and there is life after fertility and that’s still scary to us somehow.”

Coming up – our bodies, our work…we can’t divorce the two. Even if our workplace wishes otherwise.

_________________________________________________________________________________

There’s been quite a bit of public talk about periods this year. Female athletes have come out and talked about how having their period can adversely affect their performance. There’s an ongoing Twitter campaign to live tweet your period. And Donald Trump made his infamous blood-related comments to Fox journalist Megyn Kelly in a presidential debate this summer.

I’d been thinking about doing a show about menstruation – but I wasn’t sure. I felt a bit squeamish about it myself if I’m honest – and I also wondered whether there was enough to talk about with the intersection of periods and work.

And then I went on a business trip for a few days. And the day I landed, the very first day of the trip, I got my period. And I didn’t feel horrible – but I didn’t feel great either. And that was when I decided OK, I am going to do a show about this. Because women go through this bodily process at work every month for much of their lives that men do not. The experience can vary, of course – it can be absolutely fine, but it can involve bolts to the bathroom, severe pain, embarrassing leaks. And it is worth talking about. Because we are expected to perform no matter what’s going on with our wombs – and we are not expected to talk about it.

I knew I wanted to talk to a sociologist about all this. So I called Heather Dillaway. She is a professor of sociology at Wayne State University in Michigan. She studies menopause experiences in particular and other aspects of living in a female body. She says ever since women started going out to work they’ve had to deal with menstruation quietly, so they can fit in…

“It’s important to remember that paid workplaces are pretty much modeled after men’s lifecycles and men’s bodies, and so women as paid workers are sort of foreign or abnormal to start with.”

She says everything from pregnancy to breastfeeding to periods – they mark women as outliers at work. People who things have to be arranged around. And for decades women put up with their role as the ‘other’ at work and the judgments that went with that. But today there’s a much stronger lobby for parental leave and the ability to pump milk in comfort – even in workaholic countries like the US. I told Heather I think breastfeeding has a lot of strong advocates…

“Yeah so you’re right, the things that have to do with early motherhood are getting a lot more positive attention lately and different groups are lobbying for workplaces to pay attention to breast feeding and to pregnancy and to maternity leave and they are having more success, and I think that goes back to the fact we are a pretty procreative country in terms of mindset. We value families and we value when women become mothers. We sort of expect women to become mothers and to prioritize it – so if any bodily processes are going to get attention in the workplace it’s going to be the ones that signify motherhood, whereas menstruation is sort of this process that happens across the lifespan, and it doesn’t result– it’s sort of the opposite of motherhood, it means motherhood isn’t happening, so it’s seen differently.”

AM-T: “Mmm, and frankly there’s disgust around periods that there isn’t around breastfeeding.”

“For sure. Yeah, it’s seen as dirty, it’s seen as unclean, it’s seen as something that is unhealthy and sick – when actually in reality it’s the opposite, it means that women’s bodies are actually working…so the cultural ideas around menstruation still suggest to us that it shouldn’t happen and that it’s akin to being sick.”

And of course if you live in a developing country there’s a high chance your period really is taboo – in some cases you may even have to live apart from the rest of your family during your period because you’re considered tainted.

Thankfully things are a lot easier in the west. Still, if those of us in white-collar jobs only deal with our periods in whispers…there are many more women who have a much more structured workplace and less agency…

“Yeah, and that’s a good reminder, right - we get stuck talking about professional workers who have a desk and a drawer they keep tampons in and they can easily run to the bathroom and deal with whatever menstrual hygiene issues they’re having, and that is not most workers, we have to think about how hard it is to hide things like menstruation when you’re a shift worker or hourly worker.”

So my theory about this whole topic is the younger you are the happier you are to discuss it and want it to be discussed more openly. The older you are the more likely you are to have been raised with the idea that you put up and shut up – and why do we have to talk about everything publicly these days?

And talking of young women, before we did the interview Heather Dillaway had sent me an article from the Daily Mail. It was about a few women in their late 20s and early 30s who have stopped their periods altogether. I knew about pills that ensure you only get a few periods a year…

AM-T: “But I’m not sure I’d ever read about stopping your period entirely unless you were doing something like climbing Everest, I mean I have heard about women who were doing very specific things and wanted to stop their periods to achieve something. But that was such an interesting piece about people who just feel that their period is such a hassle and that it’s impacting their career.”

“So yeah, recent articles like the one in the Daily Mail are talking about very career-oriented women who are taking medications to opt out of having periods. And the argument is that if they had a period that would slow them down at work and make them different and prevent them from the successes they can get if they take the medication So these kinds of conversations cement the idea that to have success in your career you have to get rid of periods, you have to not menstruate and really that means you have to be less like a woman.”

I posted that Daily Mail piece on the Broad Experience Facebook page a few weeks ago and it got a really big response. I’ll post the piece under this episode on the website so you can read it if you haven’t already.

Another thing I’d read about online while doing research for this show was that in some countries in Asia…women actually get days off for their period if they need them…

AM-T: “I feel sort of torn on that and I don’t know how - I wonder how American women would handle that if they were presented with that - or British women – anyone in the west where periods are less taboo than they are in other cultures. Because if you get days off, there’s a high chance I think that you’ll be judged – you’ll be judged negatively for taking those days.”

“Right and you do still see the same thing around maternity leave sometimes. If people take their entire maternity leave or family leave they may be seen as a lesser employee of sorts. The idea that women are bad if they do need a few days off stems from fact that we still think of men as the normal people and men’s bodies as normal bodies and then women represent this abnormal case that’s problematic for employers and society in general. On the other hand maybe not every single woman needs a day off every time she menstruates. I mean just the way we talk about it sometimes makes it seem like it’s more of a crisis than it really is. And it reaffirms this idea that menstruation is only bad and only causes problems – which it doesn’t.”

But if you’re one of those women who suffers each month it can disrupt your work life along with the rest of your life. Rachel Ben Hamou is British and she and her husband now live in LA - she works for a video games company.

She’s 33 now, but back when she was a teenager things started to go very wrong each month…

“I’ve always had painful periods since I was about 15, 16. With my period I’d pass out. On several occasions I knocked my head or injure myself, because I would faint with the pain. My mum took me to see various doctors, and they would say things like oh, it’s just period pain, nothing to worry about.”

Only when she was 23 was she finally diagnosed with endometriosis.

With endometriosis the lining of your womb also grows outside the womb – it attaches itself to nearby organs – in Rachel’s case it was on her bowel. The condition has a lot of nasty side-effects and a couple of them are severe period pain and heavy bleeding. There’s no cure, only different treatments.

Before she was diagnosed she used to miss days of college when the pain was really bad. Then she started work.

“My first real job I had a male boss who was actually very empathetic – and it was soon after I took that job that I got diagnosed. And so I kind of went into work, and I was very shell shocked by the diagnosis after suffering for so long, and I had a lot of emotional baggage around being told I was silly and to pull myself together for 8 years. So I had this conversation with him – I said I’ve got this thing called endometriosis, it’s really terrible, and I’m probably going to have major surgery – and he was like huh, OK. He didn’t seem fazed by the fact it was about periods, to give him credit.

But the challenge with that was when I had the time off for the surgery, and I think this is common from what I know…the odd day off here and there when you have your period is inconvenient, and depending on where you work can become a problem. For me it never has been. But the real bulk is if you choose to have the surgery, you can be off for 3, 4 weeks recovering from that kind of surgery.”

She was told surgery was the way forward for her. But it turned out to be a big operation…

“And they said of course we’ll keep your job open, the thing is we’re really struggling to keep up without you here, how would you feel about us having someone coming to do your job temporarily….and then maybe we can look for something else when you feel up to return to work. And they’d weekly ask me how do you feel about returning? I had no idea. And particularly after a bowel re-section for endometriosis you can’t leave the house because you can’t leave the toilet – so it’s incredibly impractical. So the result of that for me when I was ready to return, which was about 12 weeks later, they’d given my job to this person who was doing it temporarily…they found me another role, that really wasn’t as challenging, it wasn’t full time, it was only part-time, it was not as well compensated, and it wasn’t taking me on my career path.”

Now that said Rachel made the best out of that situation. The job she ended up in involved a lot of training, she found she really enjoyed it, ended up opening her owntraining company…and that’s part of what landed her the job she now does in LA.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Julie Sygiel is making a business out of periods. She’s the founder and chief creative officer of Dear Kate, a startup in New York that makes performance underwear. Back when she was studying chemical engineering at Brown University she took an entrepreneur class. Each team had to put forth a business idea and write a business plan…

“And so there were three girls in our team and we started brainstorming and somehow started talking about underwear and what happens to underwear during that time of the month and I should note that there was also a guy on our team as well so he was a really good sport when we were talking about periods, and we were like, wouldn't be so cool if we could create like the Wonder Woman pair of underwear so you put it on and you just feel amazing because they're super comfortable, they're super cute and you're not reaching to the very back of your drawer for your ugliest pairs, [‘granny pants’] yeah, and we weren't sure if it was possible to create these new fabrics but the goal is to create a fabric that’s stain releasing so you're never hand washing, it’s all machine washable, comes out good as new from the laundry and then also to have a thin, protective layer so be prepared for anything and never really be caught off guard.”

After college she began to turn that idea into reality. She eventually found her fabric and the company is now 6 years old. They make the underwear in New York City and ship all over the place.

Like any entrepreneur Julie was and still is looking for funding – and funders are a famously male dominated group…

AM-T: Who were you approaching, because we all know that the venture capital community is something like 95% male, or more…”

“Yeah, it was a very interesting dynamic because most of the investors we were pitching were men. I remember one evening where we went to pitch, it was like a ten member, all white, middle aged male group of angel investors. I’m the only girl in the room, I was 22 at the time I think. And selling them on why period underwear is a good investment.”

That group passed. But the company has raised $1.7 million dollars since then and they have both male and female funders. And some enthusiastic wearers…

AM-T: “I have a couple of pairs of your underwear, which are very nice. It’s a great idea. But they’re not cheap, right? The way I see it you have to be at a certain socioeconomic level to even consider buying a pair of underwear that’s more than $20. Do you hope to make them more available to everybody?”

“Absolutely. Right now we’re all manufactured in the US. All our technical fabrics are manufactured in the US. And while we’ve grown a lot over the last six years in the grand scheme of things we’re still a small company. The price point is directly reflective of the cost it takes to make a pair of underwear. Definitely the hope is as we grow the cost will come down. I would love to do a collaboration with Target or something. Sara Blakely did, she has the Spanx line, but she did Assets for Target. So that was much more accessible to a larger group of women.”

And thinking about all the women who rely on black knickers every month…well, at least most of us can still carry on with our lives… 

AM-T: “If you live in a developing country, actually menstruation is an economic issue. Young girls often don’t go to school because they’re branded as unclean. And the same thing can happen in some workplaces as well. Not all women make it to work during that time.”

“Right, I think the cultural experience of menstruation is so different in many parts of the world and so I can really only speak for my experience, but you know just the other day Isabella called me out in the office…”

Isabella is Dear Kate’s marketing manager…

“…because we’re six girls in the office and you know there are men who sit nearby, but I was like, does anyone have a pad? And I'm whispering and hiding it and she's like, dude, we're all about being bold and, you know, periods are not something that we should be ashamed of or hide, and she was like, flaunt that thing.”

AM-T: “How did you feel about that?”

“I felt she was exactly right. I felt that she was totally right. Because you know, what do I want my work place to be? I want it to be open and comfortable, and you know if I had a migraine headache or if I had food poisoning and I really felt bad, I'm not just going to keep that to myself, I'm going to explain it to the team and say like, hey, I'm not feeling well and I need to go home, or I need to just go take a minute, I'll take a walk or something. And so I think in a lot of workplaces you would never tell someone ‘I've got really bad cramps’, like I need to leave this meeting, you just say like oh I don't feel well. You know, why is it that we feel like we can't bring up periods, that we have to just pretend like it's not happening because we would be weaker or something. But the reality is that we as women do have these additional physical experiences that we go through and – not that every woman wants to tell the world. So it's not like you have to say, ‘hello I'm menstruating!’ But if you're someone who would like to be able to say, I've got really bad cramps today, can we push that meeting till tomorrow? or whatever, you should feel free to do that and it shouldn't be this super-secretive thing.”

And maybe some offices are going that way. Rachel Ben Hamou says she’d like to be that open at her workplace but she isn’t quite there yet. That said, her office is good when it comes to allowing her to take time if she needs it…everyone is self-directed…

“So there’s no one sitting here saying, what have you achieved this week? It’s up to you to be accountable. But depending on the role you’re in that can be problematic. My choice of role has been influenced by my health condition. At one point I was interested in doing something, basically training on a schedule – and if you have a whole class of people scheduled to turn up for you on the 21st you pretty much have to be there on the 21st…so if you get your period or are not well that’s problematic. I felt the risks of me not being able to meet those time commitments were too high. So I’ve tried to optimize around things so that isn’t the case.

She knows she’s lucky to be able to do that.

She’s taken measures to deal with her endometriosis that mean she suffers a lot less than she used to. And she thinks her workplace might just be open to more discussion about these kinds of things – even if it is mostly men… 

“The office where I am now there’s about a thousand people, and probably 900 of them are men, and about 700 of them are men under the age of 30. So lots of young men. What’s interesting is we have interesting discussions – we have a diversity mailing list and on that we had a discussion about people who were transgender, or didn’t identify as male or female, and whether we should have unisex toilets because of that. And the discussions that came up around that, including things around periods, you know, people saying, well I wouldn’t be comfortable if there were men in the bathroom and I needed to ask someone if they had a tampon, you know, these kinds of things came up, so I found that very interesting.”

So opening up about periods is one thing. But what about that process towards the end of the reproductive lifespan? There isn’t a live tweet your menopause campaign on Twitter. Heather Dillaway says people forget older women still have a lot going on with their bodies…

“Menopause is sort of like puberty - your hormones are changing, your symptoms might be a bit uncontrollable, and so menopausal women are dealing with irregular bleeding in the workplace, they might be dealing with heavy bleeding as well – they might be dealing with hot flushes, so there’s definitely symptoms that might be somewhat public sometimes, or at least might have to be dealt with on a daily basis and we should be talking about them – because if you think about middle aged women they might be at the prime of their careers and also going through menopause at the same time, so this is a reality, there are lots of workers who are going through menopause.”

And I was hoping to speak to a couple of them. I found one person I’ve interviewed for other stories in the past – she’d written a great piece on menopause at work for one of the women’s magazines. But she didn’t want to talk on tape about her own experience. Nor did a good friend of mine who’s gone through menopause younger than most – she’s in her mid-40s. She told me in an email it was wonderful not to have periods. She also said she felt very isolated as virtually the only person she knows around her age who’s gone through this. She had a hot flush at work recently and she did end up having a quick menopause chat with two colleagues – but then she worried she’d over-shared.

And if you think about the few female CEOs of big companies who are out there…they’re pretty much all in their 50s or 60s…so they have these demanding jobs and sometimes these demanding symptoms that go with menopause – and we don’t hear anything about how they handle it on top of their work… which I personally would love to hear about.

Heather says women’s squeamishness about discussing this is partly related to our society’s obsession with youth…

“As much as we’ve moved past this idea of older women as not worth much, menopause does signify that someone is aging and sometimes that equation means that someone is lesser – and so we think of women as reproductive and fertile and young, and if we are acknowledging menopause we are acknowledging that maturation or aging happens and there is life after fertility, and that’s still scary to us somehow, it’s still seen as negative and also because people don’t talk too much about menopause I think it’s actually hard for women to deal with symptoms in the workplace or in any public setting.”

As my anonymous sources can attest.

Doing this show has really made me want to do another show on women and aging at work. I did an episode on this fairly early on but I think it’s time I picked up this topic again and that menopause is part of the conversation this time. If you’ve been through menopause or are going through it and you’d be willing to come on the show and talk about how that’s all going down at work please get in touch. I’m at ashley@thebroadexperience.com.

Thank you again to all those of you who’ve supported the show either with a one-time donation or by becoming a monthly contributor – it really means a lot. If you’d like to become a supporter just go to the support tab at The Broad Experience.com.

As usual I’ll post links relating to today’s show under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com. You can comment there or on the show’s Facebook page. And I’m @ashleymilnetyte on Twitter – without the hyphen.

Thanks for listening. See you next time. 

Episode 70: A Female Education

“Our students do come out of here quite confident…they have a sense of self, a sense of poise and confidence I don’t see coming out of many of the co-ed schools.”

— Debora Spar

Show transcript:

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

This time, making a traditionally female institution a bit more diverse…

“We want to make sure that men who might be applying for our jobs understand that we are an equal opportunity employer and this is a very good place to be a man.”

But it is still a women’s college, with feminist ideals – ideals that don’t always triumph in the workplace…

“Barnard really created such a strong sense of self-worth but it left it up to us and up to me how to translate that sense of self worth into actual behavior once you start working fulltime.”

Coming up – the merits of a single-sex college education and how that prepares women for work.

Barnard College sits just across the street from Columbia University on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It was founded in 1889 to give women access to the same kind of liberal arts education that was already available to men. America used to have lots of women’s colleges before higher education became mixed. According to the Women’s College Coalition back in 1960 there were 230 women’s colleges. Today, there are just over 40.

But Barnard is in demand. Last year it got more than six times as may applications as it had places.

Debora Spar is the president of Barnard. She has been at the helm since 2008. Before that she was a professor at Harvard Business School.

AM-T: “You’ve had this illustrious career at a famous institution, Harvard Business School…which we know is mostly male, and there’s been a lot of coverage of that…and then you came here to Barnard…it must have been very different. What was that like?”

“Well I always joke I underwent a hormonal transformation when I went from Harvard to Barnard. I joke but I mean it quite seriously, that at least in my own experience being at a place run by and dominated by men is fundamentally different from being at a place that’s run by and dominated by women. And it’s not better or worse but it’s quite different.

At Harvard and male places in general people are quite frontal – people are comfortable with conflict, with saying ‘that was stupid’ or ‘that’s a bad idea’ or ‘God, I disagree with you.’ And generally they move on from that – the attacks are loud but short and generally forgotten by next day. Whereas at Barnard and women-dominated places generally people are less comfortable with conflict. There are very few instances of what I call a frontal stabbing. But people are more likely to paper over their disagreements…things tend to simmer a little bit more, old wounds tend to fester, to stay around longer. And it’s a different management style. And to jump to a conclusion, I come away from this dual experience even more firmly convinced than at the outset that diversity is a really good thing. It’s not that you want places to be run just by women any more than you want them to be run just by men – but you want an environment with men and women, different ages, different ethnicities, different, preferences, so you get that mix and the good parts of all the different components.”

AM-T: “What is the makeup here, you joked at the last conference I went to, oh, we need more men here…but what is the makeup?”

“Well I have worked to get more men here. On the student side of course we’re all female. On faculty side it’s about 50/50…On the staff side I’ve hired quite a few men. So 2 of my senior staff members are now male, 2 out of 9 – it’s a flip of what I experienced in my old life, 2 women in a room of 8 men…you know, we don’t only hire men of course, but we want people to understand we are an equal opportunity employer…and this is a very good place to be a man although if you’re a man here you have to get used to being in a female environment. The bad joke I use is the chitchat before a meeting will be about hairstyles and handbags from time to time, and if you’re the only guy in the room that’s awkward. Just as it’s often awkward – well I’ll personalize it. In my old life I was always awkward when people spoke about Australian rules rugby, as I know nothing about that. But you get used to different kids of chit chat. And I think there’s some benefit in seeing that, but there’s more benefit in getting the diversity so everyone feels comfortable with the chitchat.

The other place we’ve brought men in is on the board level. The Barnard board historically was mostly composed of alumnae, who by definition were women. We now have a number of dads, husbands of alums…men who are just interested in women’s leadership, and that’s been a really good thing.”

She says another good thing about having more men around? Men still have most of the influence in the corporate world. So the more of them you involve the more doors you can open for your female alumnae. And she says there’s something else….

“And I want to be careful not to go too far into gender stereotypes, but I think in general men are more comfortable than women are talking about money – and in areas like fundraising it’s actually very helpful to have a bit of a macho attitude in the room sometimes, where a woman might tend to say, 'This is really important, we all need to think about this,' I remember one meeting where one male said, 'Enough talk, this is how much money I’m going to give, I want everyone to open their checkbooks right now.' It’s not that a woman would never say those words, but they’re words more commonly attributed to men.”

And sticking to stereotypes for a minute, more commonly attributed to women is the idea that they don’t support eachother – we talked about this in detail on the last show. Debora Spar says no, women don’t always treat eachother well, but…

“I think there are some problems with how the issue is framed. I think we expect women to be more supportive. And maybe that’s just an unfair expectation. I remember a male colleague of mine, junior, saying to me some years ago ‘how come you’re not more nurturing to the other junior people in the organization?’ And I got quite angry, and this is someone I was very fond of, had in fact hired and promoted. I said ‘what do you mean I’m not nurturing? I hired you, I promoted you.’ He said ‘yes but you know, I don’t spend a lot of time telling you my troubles.’ And I said ‘well, do you spent a lot of time telling your troubles to Tom, Dick and Harry?’ Of course not. So I think there’s an additional expectation on women that we will be nurturing and supportive and provide shoulder to cry on, even when it’s not in our job description.”

And that can skew men’s and women’s views of female authority figures or colleagues who aren’t warm and fuzzy.

President Spar says – and of course she would – that at Barnard, all the students are supportive of one another. She says during the course of their four years there they learn how to stand up for themselves…without deferring to anyone…

“I think there’s some benefit that occurs from spending these four very previous years in an environment where the social life is quite separate from the academic life. We have boys everywhere because we have so many Columbia students, but I think our young women get more opportunities to sit in class, sit in a math class, a statistics class, any class really, and focus on the material, the reaction to the material, focus on developing their own brains…rather than constantly worrying about, oh, the guy next to me, do I sound like a girl if I say this, do I sound like a girl if I don’t put my hand up, if I do put my hand up? They get rid of those invisible bubbles that so many women still have inside their heads all the time.

Ashley Pope can attest to that. She graduated from Barnard in 2007. She wasn’t specifically seeking a women’s college at 17 or 18…but she’s glad she went to one.

“How many 18-year-old girls, women, are so confident in their abilities and speaking for themselves, advocating for themselves that they could go and succeed in he workplace right then? I know I wasn’t ready to. Barnard gave me the time and support I needed for that.”

She says she was shy and withdrawn when she got there and changed a lot during those years.  She says her experience at college also gave her something else – the ability to take criticism…

“Did I take it perfectly? No. But I learned how to take criticism. I didn’t know how to take criticism before I went to Barnard…and especially being a woman going out into the workplace you have to know how to take criticism, and not take it personally, and just speaking for myself, not cry, feel like you’re getting in trouble…”

She needs a tough hide now she’s a lawyer in New York City – although she says so far she hasn’t come up against any gender issues at work. I wondered whether an alumni network of mostly women was as useful as a mixed network might have been…but Ashley has no complaints.

“It’s a good network of women and especially the older generations – you know, those were the colleges that women went to, so when you look at some of the graduates, some of the older women who are CEOs or successful politicians, a fair number of them went to a women’s college."

Hillary Clinton went to Wellesley. And she is in the running for the most powerful position in the world.  

---

So I want to say two things here.

First, this episode of The Broad Experience is brought to you by Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs is a nonpartisan magazine—they publish thoughtful pieces by experts who span the political spectrum, so they allow readers to form their own opinions about today’s most important global issues. And let’s face it, there is a lot going on in the world at the moment. Broad Experience listeners get a special discount – more than three-quarters off a subscription to Foreign Affairs— to sign up, go to ForeignAffairs.com/Broad.

Second, if you get something out of the show please go and post a review on iTunes – I know I say this a lot but usually at the end when maybe you’re not paying as much attention. But these reviews are hugely helpful in bringing the show to more people’s attention – so press pause – do it – and come back.

Thank you.

---

Jamie Buck-Tomek attended Smith College in Massachusetts. She graduated in the early 2000s. She’d been to a technical college for a year before Smith and that was full of men. Being at a women’s college, looking around at her classmates, she felt inspired…

“Being in the classes people were very supportive, there was not a lot of talking over eachother, which I know is a common refrain of co-ed classes – so it really changed my perspective on what was normal.”

And what it was reasonable for her to do with her life. She’s pretty much always worked in a tech role.

And you know what she said about her classmates being supportive – I wanted to hear more about that. I did not go to a women’s college but I did go to an all-girls’ school until I was 18. And while I have great friends from those days, supportive is not a word I associate with many of the girls there. There were cliques, bitchiness and bullying by an active minority. And even when all that died down, I couldn’t wait to get out into a co-ed world.

But Jamie’s experience at college was very different…

“A lot of the student body at Smith was almost counter-culture in a way, and that was actually not only supported but encouraged…there was a lot of time and activity spent on what might be considered different and minority groups, and it is what you think, there are a lot of gay women who go to all women’s colleges…I think with that they likely did not have such a welcoming environment where they were and Smith became a welcoming environment, and it became welcoming to anyone who was different…one, it attracted people who were generally nice, it also encouraged people to work together, there were a lot of events about sisterhood and such – so they wanted it to be a community.”

In a real ‘we’re all learning what it is to be women together’ kind of way. She loved it. But one thing she wishes she’d learned more about back then? How the workplace actually works…

“I mean I’m pretty sure that even my first job I got paid less than a male counterpart – I obviously don’t have any truth to that, but just the sense I got about what other people were making, they got me for a steel, and I didn’t know. I think maybe part of it was if you’re in an all-women’s college and you’re not facing those kinds of issues you probably aren’t prepared for that, and you may think that, ‘oh, this is great, everybody’s nice, everybody’s supportive, everyone wants me to be a powerful woman’ because that’s what you’ve experienced. And the people we’d go see, if we were to see alumnae, it was always very positive about their role in the company – there wasn’t a lot, at least at the events I went to, about the struggles that they had, so I think they wanted people to be confident that they could go out there, but maybe at the same time we just weren’t aware that we might still be facing some of those very common problems about negotiating salary and advancing.”

Smith’s director of career development told me last week that these days Smith offers salary negotiation workshops and workshops about living on a budget- she says they’re both popular.

Unlike Jamie, Michelle Fan was aware of what she might be up against once she started working. Or at least partly aware. She graduated from Barnard in 2009 and now works in London for a branding company.

She says Barnard inculcated in her the idea that she could do anything, that what she thought had merit, and she that needed to speak her mind But once she started working, things got more complicated…

“It was harder to figure out on my own how to apply this belief that my thoughts were important to the workplace. So for instance, when I was first negotiating my salary at my current company I really was hyper-aware…not just through what I learned at Barnard but through articles I had read, that women ask for less money, so I tried to be as assertive as possible to ask for what I wanted for my salary, to try to aim higher and not be too modest in terms of what I was asking for.”

The problem was, with all she knew about the fact she should negotiate…she didn’t really know how to do the delicate dance a negotiation can require – especially if you’re female…

“So in one of these conversations I think I came across as quite rude and demanding – I was quite adamant about not underestimating what I could make and shooting as high as possible…”

Things turned out OK. She wasn’t totally rebuffed. But looking back, she wishes she’d been channeled her assertiveness a bit differently. Then there was the sexual comment a colleague made on her first day at work – not about her – but again, her feminist education hadn’t quite prepared her for how to respond.

He was in his 40s and they were discussing X Factor, the reality show. He brought up a female singer he thought was hot…

“And how he’d like to – and it’s just something really vulgar, maybe you’ll have to edit this out – but something about how he’d like to take a shot into her, or something, just like something really not appropriate. And I didn’t think this was a pattern in that workplace in particular, but that comment really struck me and I thought it was really, really rude. Yet at the same time I didn’t feel that I had the skills…especially looking at that situation in retrospect, I don’t know what I could have done to stick up to myself better – so in the end I didn’t end up saying anything even though I thought it was inappropriate that he’d end up saying something like that.”

We could probably do a whole show just on the best ways to respond to sexist comments at work. But Michelle was brand new in the job – she hadn’t been working in London that long and thought well, maybe this is just the culture here. Like so many other women through the decades, she didn’t want to make a fuss. Still, the whole episode was confusing…

“Barnard really created such a strong sense of self-worth but it left it up to us and up to me how to translate that sense of self worth into actual behavior once you start working fulltime.”

And she mentioned culture just now – Michelle was born in China, mostly raised in America, now living in England. And one thing the British do a lot is apologize. That’s something Michelle and her class at Barnard were taught not to do – that too many women apologize over nothing, that it undermines your authority…be assertive, they were told.

Then, she started working in the land of Hugh Grant…

“So if you go into a culture where apologizing is so embedded into politeness and how people speak to one another, and there are so many nuanced meanings to the word ‘sorry’ – it could be an aggressive sorry, it could be like sorry, but I’m not sorry at all’ – if I’ve been taught not to apologize and to be super assertive, how do I behave in this new environment?”

She’s only been in London a year and a half, but she’s mustered up a few tactics…

“So far what I’ve been doing is not apologizing but trying to be as considerate and as polite as possible…it still feels weird because ‘sorry’ is still very much a part of the English lingo and I do want to participate in that. But you know, now there’s this tension between I don’t want to apologize because I want to say what I need and ask for what I need without communicating guilt. But on the other hand I think this is just another example of how maybe it would have been helpful and it would be helpful now to have more examples of how to translate these ideals about the equality between men and women into reality, into a world and a life where you don’t see that equality played out in a lot of circumstances.”

Homework for colleges, perhaps.

And speaking of equality, when I was with Debora Spar, the president of Barnard, we got onto the topic of men’s and women’s behavior in the office. I mentioned an email I got from a listener. She talked about a time she was with a female supervisor when that woman suddenly bent down to adjust her stocking – she joked that as they were two girls together it was OK. But my listener thought it was unprofessional. 

Debora Spar agrees.

“I’m pretty hard core about this. I think we all need to separate our emotional lives from our work lives. I’ve been quoted harshly but I still stand by the quote. Don’t cry in the office. Don’t put your stockings on in full view, I don’t care who’s in the room, your work life is not your personal life. Of course that doesn’t mean you can’t share celebrations or God forbid tragedies with your co-workers. But our work lives are not our personal lives.”

AM-T: “But what if something at work is making you cry?”

“Go to the ladies’ room, wait till you get home…I don’t think the work environment demands crying. It just shouldn’t. That doesn’t mean you won’t feel like it from time to time, but keep it out of your professional life…and I say that to both men and women but I think women are a little bit more prone to thinking it’s OK.”

AM-T: “But we’re also more prone to cry for physiological reasons actually, so that’s why I think it’s a bit unfair on us because if we do well up in a work situation people are rolling their eyes…”

“But I think there’s an analog to it – men, don’t lose your tempers at work, I don’t care how angry you get, work is not an environment for screaming…keep your tempers in check, don’t tell sexual jokes, they don’t belong in the workplace…so I think there are different things I would push out of the workplace for men and women but I think there’s a list that applies to everybody. There are certain behaviors that don’t belong in the workplace. They’re not professional.”

Debora Spar – thanks so much to her and my other guests for appearing in this episode. Last year I did a whole show on emotions at the office – you can find it in the archives, it was number 36 - people do have quite different opinions on that topic of crying at work.

And don’t forget to check out my sponsor – especially if you’re a news junkie – they’re at ForeignAffairs.com/broad – you’ll get a huge discount on a year’s subscription by going to that web address.

And I want to recommend an episode of another podcast that a listener recommended to me on Twitter. It’s the Freakonomics podcast and the episode I loved recently is the one where host Stephen Dubner interviewed Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust. She went to an all women’s college herself – Bryn Mawr – she now runs one of the most famous educational institutions in the world. It’s a great listen.

And of course if you had an all-female education I’d love to hear from you – actually even if you didn’t – you can post a comment under this episode at The Broad Experience dot com or on the show’s Facebook page.

And for those of you who were incensed by some of the comments in my last show about the innate characteristics of men and women – I do plan to tackle this topic with a neuroscientist in a future show, hopefully before the end of this year.

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

Episode 69: Working with Other Women

“Many women are shocked when their female boss is not nice to them. Whereas I don’t think they’d be as shocked when a male boss isn’t nice to them. ”

— Katherine Crowley

Show transcript:

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

This time, why can it be so difficult to work with other women?

“We don’t know how to overtly compete the way men do. So men will compete on a day to day basis, say ‘I’m gonna bring you down,’ then go out for a beer at night – well, we don’t. We will cut you out of an email maybe, or bad mouth you behind your back…”

But have you ever considered you might be part of the problem?

“What I find is that many women are shocked when their female boss is not nice to them. Whereas I don’t think they’d be as shocked when a male boss isn’t nice to them.”

Coming up, we look at female relationships at work – and how to handle an undermining boss.

If you’ve been listening to the show since the start you may remember a podcast I did in 2013 called The Mean Girls Edition. I felt conflicted about it. Because let’s face it – the world is full of stereotypes and clichés about women being horrible to eachother. But I did it because I knew a lot women have problems with other women at work. And since that show went out I’ve continued to get emails from listeners outlining bad situations with female colleagues. These listeners often say they just prefer to work with men – that view is borne out in some surveys by the way.

And before we kick off today’s show I just want to say that my last job where I worked in a female-dominated environment was fantastic – it was a small office, it was public radio, and we were all friendly and supportive of one another. I miss it.

And I’m sure there are lots of other workplaces like that out there. But in this show we’re tackling the darker side of female relationships. I met two women recently who spend a lot of time thinking about this. They run their own company and help people manage difficult relationships at work.

“My name is Katherine Crowley and I work as a career and life coach at K Squared Enterprises…and I’m Kathi Elster and I’m an executive coach and a career coach.”

They’ve written a few books on office life: Working for You Isn’t Working for Me, Working with You is Killing Me, and Mean Girls at Work.

I started off by telling them about some of the reaction I had from listeners the last time I decided to cover this topic…

AM-T: “One of them said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t do this because it perpetuates stereotypes against women,’ and I agree, but on the other hand, it’s true – and I want to talk about what people are experiencing in their work lives. And I’ve received plenty of emails from women telling me, ‘I have a very unsupportive female supervisor,’ so miserable that they’ve left…so what’s going on there? What are some of the dynamics?"

Katherine: “Well, Ashley…

AM-T: “Where do we start?” [laughing]

Katherine: “Well we start with something you referenced when you contacted to us. Which is we are designed differently. Women are designed through history to tend and befriend. Because of being the quote, weaker sex, in the days of being out there in the caves, they had to bond in order to protect the children, so they had to bond, they had to make friendships. At the same time women are most comfortable not with vertical but with horizontal power structures. The female animal, primates, are also more comfortable with horizontal structures, so this is fairly innate.”

Now that is interesting. I have never liked that whole hierarchy thing myself. I have no interest in climbing a ladder. And I used to think that meant I wasn’t ambitious, but I’ve come to realize it just means I’m not that competitive.  I like working with other people. And yes, I instinctively try to bond with other women. The problem is, my attitude isn’t really suited to a typical workplace.

“So the challenge when you get into the workplace, the workplace is not horizontal. So if I have a woman boss, my brain has this expectation that she should be treating me as if I’m her equal and as if we are friends. So employees are harder on their female bosses than they are on their male bosses. At the same time, female bosses often have a hard time when they sense that pushback from their female employees and I think often become rather harsh authority figures to those members of their staff.”

Kathi: “I think it’s fascinating that a lot of it is innate and the way we are structured as women, and there’s very little written or talked about it. We love the work of Pat Heim, she wrote In the Company of Women, we highly recommend it. It’s a little dense but it explains that women want to be friends before they want to be anything else. And we don’t know how to overtly compete like men do. Men will face competition a daily basis, then go out for a beer at night – well, we don’t. We cut you out of an email maybe, or bad mouth you behind your back…and then it becomes very covert, a smile to your face while hurting you in the back. And then that war gets very deep and goes on for a very long time.”

She says some women know perfectly well how passively hostile they’re being, but other times, it’s unconscious. And some situations seem to send our competitive instincts into overdrive…

Kathi: “So what happens in the workplace – but I want to get out of the workplace for a minute. Where I felt the worst woman on woman behavior was in the playground. It was when I had a small child. I pulled myself out of it, I thought, well, I won’t have any mother friends. And I actually never did acquire any.”

AM-T: “That’s unusual…"

Kathi: “No, I think it’s pretty much the story…women may make friends with other mothers but they lose them over time. It’s very problematic – it’s not just the workplace, it’s in every area of life.”

She says women have to be nicer to one another. But getting there comes with admitting that competition is a natural instinct for many of us, we’re just not used to expressing it. Most of us aren’t exactly socialized to compete, after all.

I told Kathi and Katherine the story a listener told me last year about working in a female-dominated company.

AM-T: “Feminism was part of its mission, right, it was about making the world a better place, and she was the one who said ‘I have never worked in a less supportive environment than this’…so what’s going on there, though, if we want to be nice, why aren’t we?"

Katherine: “Well, it has everything to do with awareness and that is what we are trying to bring out with our book – if we are designed to be covertly competitive then of course a woman, a feminist organization is going to have plenty of covert competition going in there if no one is aware of it. The other thing women have to own is that we’re very averse to criticism. We are very sensitive, we care a lot. In fact the male business owners and leaders who spoke to us said women are the best workers because they invest their whole solves in work. And that’s great except when you then take personally the behavior of all the other women around you. And that’s the other challenge we have, we tent to personalize business behavior. We have – literally we have 40% more connective tissue between the left and right lobes our brain. Feelings get stirred in there.”

Oh, so guilty. And forget the workplace – that explains a lot of problems between men and women in general.

Kathi says a huge part of all this is women actually owning up to the fact we have some pretty unpleasant tendencies…

“I grew a lot in writing this book and I saw a lot of my own behavior that was far from perfect. I’ve had to change a lot myself and it’s not easy. And in dong it, of course I’ve taught my family to say, ‘that was mean girl Kathy’ whenever I talk about another woman negatively, which is something I tend to do. I’m learning to stop doing that. This is not an easy thing we have to unlearn and change.”

But some women are prepared to come clean about their lack of support for their fellow females…

Katherine: “I actually had a very candid conversation with the senior vice president of a major bank – and she admitted that she suffered and worked so hard to get where she is that it’s very hard for her to be generous to her younger female executives…and I think that is not uncommon, it’s like the famous medical school system where the interns have to suffer the same as the doctors did to earn their degree - that women who have finally made it can often feel like, OK, I’m not going to give you a break because I had to work so hard to get to this place.”

AM-T: “And that’s the complaint of course that so many younger women have. That I’m not getting the mentoring I expected from this woman or the ladder has been pulled up behind her. And it does seem very sad to me that that has to happen – but she probably looks at these whippersnappers and thinks, why should I lend a hand?”

Kathi: “Right. And I also think we come from a little bit of starvation, women, especially the ones who have fought to get here. I think we think there are so few opportunities, I’m not giving anything away. And I think that’s a mistake also because women can now make more opportunities for other women. And there are more small businesses started by women than men because women like that flexibility of time and they also don’t like the hierarchical structure…so there are more opportunities for women business owners to really support other women. The corporate structure is so male dominated…I don’t know how that is going to change. It’s going to take a while.

And the big surprise in our book was that men liked it. Because, and if we can help men help other women support women that would be helpful. Because they would see cat fights and they didn’t understand why they were going on, why they were not letting it go. And we don’t, we hold on to resentment a lot longer than men do. And we have to understand that about ourselves and work on it. So I don’t want to exclude men from this equation, I think they can play a role in it.”

This episode of The Broad Experience is sponsored by Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs is a nonpartisan magazine—they publish thoughtful pieces by experts who span the political spectrum, allowing readers to form their own opinions about today’s most important global issues. Broad Experience listeners get a special discount – more than three-quarters off a subscription to Foreign Affairs— to sign up, go to ForeignAffairs.com/Broad.

And talking of men…I wanted to get Kathi and Katherine’s opinions on something another Broad Experience listener wrote to me about. She had been in academia. Ultimately she left because she had such a bad experience with her female supervisor. She said this woman undermined her all the time and was always stressed out and negative. At the end of her email she mentioned the men in her work life...

AM-T: “One of the interesting things she said which again, is such a cliché…she said, ‘This and past experience has left me with a decided preference for working with men. In general I have found men in the workplace to be much more well adjusted, calmer, less stressed, less inclined to play mind games and spread rumors and more literal in their dealings. They also tend to be and give concrete advice…’

“I mean there’s a lot packed into that and it’s completely anecdotal, but some of the things she says about men I’ve heard other people say too. So is it unfair, or fair?"

Kathi: “You know because we go into corporations and we deal with relationships we see a lot of bad men. So let’s be honest, not all men are as perfect as she just said. But the thing about men is they are not as relational at work, they don’t take it as personally – it’s work, you go to work and you go out at night. They don’t process it and think about it as much as women do. So they may appear to this woman as easier to deal with than other women.”

She says if a woman is in a situation like this with a female supervisor she has to take a look at herself and her own behavior as well…because she could be exacerbating a bad situation. We’ll talk more about this in a minute. 

Katherine says there may be something else going on here…another unconscious bias at work.

“What I find is that many women are shocked when their female boss is not nice to them. Whereas I don’t think they’d be as shocked when a male boss isn’t nice to them. And I recently spoke to someone who’s got a new job and her male boss said to her: ‘I don’t want to talk to you unless I absolutely have to.’  And she’s accepted it, like OK, he doesn’t like talking. Period. Can you imagine if a female boss said that to her female employee – ‘I don’t want to talk to you unless I absolutely have to’ – what label do you think that female employee would give to that female boss?”

AM-T: “Bitch.”

Katherine: “Thank you. Again to me it’s about awareness – we’re always better people when we’re working on a certain topic, learning…so I now have to catch myself if I’m in the company of a woman who is either very capable or very attractive and I can feel my competitive spirit come in. And I have to say, OK, I’m feeling competitive with her…it doesn’t mean I’m then a bad person, it just means I may have to reel in my covert tendencies and if I want to compete with her I may need to do it in a more outright fashion.”

So awareness is great. But what if you’re aware of the warped dynamics in your office…but the other person is clueless?

AM-T: “Let’s just take the example of a female employee and a female boss. So the woman is in the lower power position and she has a boss who seems to be undermining her or is mean or whatever. How do you deal with that, because you’re not in the power position? It’s all very well being aware. If you’re aware and she’s not, what are you supposed to do?”

Kathi: “Well, so it’s a little hypothetical but the first thing you want to do is check your own emotions, because we’ll take it very personally and get very upset, and get to the facts…and be able to go to her and say real factually, ‘I was not invited to this meeting and this is something I’m working on,’ or ‘I noticed I wasn’t given this project, why didn’t I get it?’ Go to her factually and see if you can have a professional relationship with her, not an emotional one.”

Katherine: “And in Mean Girls At Work we have a process called ‘Don’t Go There’ – the first thing you want to do is rein in the less productive behaviors…so you don’t go to your colleagues and say she’s such a b----, I can’t stand her, look what she did to me, bla, bla, bla. But you may need to go to somebody about what you’re experiencing to sort out exactly what’s going on. If you realize OK, this queen bee, she feels threatened – then there may be things you can do to help her feel less threatened. You may need to acknowledge her experience, you may need to give her credit for something she helped you with, you may need to give her credit for something that you accomplished but say how her support actually has facilitated this for you…so there are ways you can work with the individual with that knowledge, the knowledge of their insecurity or seamy underbelly so to speak…and still be professional and move your career forward.”

AM-T: “You know what you said about don’t go off and gossip to your colleagues, well of course that’s what we all do.”

Kathi: “That’s the first thing we do. Because women have to talk it out, and that’s a beautiful thing. But you want to find a mentor or sponsor or someone outside the company that you can talk it through and they won’t feel the emotion because they weren’t there, and then they’ll be able to say OK, so what’s really going on here, and come up with a strategy about how you can approach your boss. So it’s OK to talk it out, just don’t talk it out over and over again to your colleagues. That’s not good, it’s detrimental.”

Katherine: “In our executive coaching we help a good number of women with these exact situations - we’re processors so we need to get it off our chest…we will let them air the whole situation and then we will say OK, what is going to help you the most professionally here? To think of it from an objective perspective. And what are the business tactics you can take? So if you want to be invited to next meeting, say, ‘I’m sure it wasn’t your intention but I would prefer in the future to be included in this meeting, here are my reasons for doing that.’ Follow up with an email, saying ‘thank you so much for listening, I look forward to the next meeting.’ Totally professional. Not, ‘You always do this to me, I know you have it in for me,’ or some other way of attacking. Usually we’re quiet, quiet, quiet, and then boom – and by the time you get to the boom it’s not going to be a constructive conversation and you’re the person who’s going to look petty and personal.”

True. But it can be so hard when you’re upset by something to keep your emotions at bay and the facts at the forefront.  

AM-T: “You’ve seen these tactics work, you’ve seen these situations improve, because I think people would really like to hear about that. Because I do think people tend to get to a point and then they just quit.”

Kathi: “Well I think sometimes you have to leave if it’s gone too far, but in general we help people turn the dynamic around and look at it more objectively and see how they may have made it worse and how they can get the relationship back on track. I’m trying to think of an example…”

Katherine: “Well, we’re working with someone who has a particularly mean boss right now and while her situation isn’t much ‘better’ she has stopped acting out – because if you fight and get in a power struggle with a mean boss then you’re the person who looks like the problem…so we’ve taught her to stay cool, to address each meeting from a professional position, to not get defensive when her boss comes back with a very attacking point of view and to just continue with her job. And what is happening is that mean boss’s behavior is becoming apparent in and of itself because this individual is no longer reacting. So that’s – it’s not a happier ever after thing, but now the company itself can hold her accountable for her behavior rather than seeing the employee as the problem.”

AM-T: “Well talking about holding somebody accountable…back in my many years of working for companies I can’t imagine going to HR and telling on a boss. Do you think that’s a bad idea or does it depend on the situation?”

Kathi: “Well it depends on the situation. Many, many people can’t go to HR, they can’t go to senior leadership. But Katherine brought up a really important point – when you’re in a tug of war, in a power struggle with your boss, or another woman, you look like the problem. So I think anybody that has to leave their job is because it’s gone so far – their relationship with this person has gone to the point where it’s probably not repairable and they look like the bad one.”

AM-T: “But also it’s so stressful….you are miserable and you can’t take it any more.”

Katherine: “Right. We are not encouraging you to stay in a sadistic situation. But we are encouraging you to do what you can to neutralize it.”

Kathi: “It just saddens me that so many women don’t want to work with other women and that they prefer to work with men. I’d just encourage them to continue to try and to look at their side of the picture. Is it always the other women or is it something they are doing to contribute to making the situation worse?”

Katherine: “And maybe this is just that I’m an optimistic person but I prefer to give us good intentions. We meet very few people who say, ‘I just want to screw as many people as I can today. I can’t wait to be mean when I leave my house in the morning.’ So we’re trying, and we have a ways to go, and women are now over 50% of the workforce, and certainly 60% of the advanced degrees. We’re just going to be dealing with eachother more, Ashley, not less. So it’s time to wake up and smell the perfume or something, you know – be willing to build your awareness. We all need to be willing to work on this."

Katherine Crowley and Kathi Elster. You can hear them on their own podcast; they tackle different work problems every week – it’s called My Crazy Office.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. As usual I’d love to hear from you – does any of what we’ve talked about today ring bells for you? Do you have other ways that have worked to diffuse a dysfunctional situation? Let me know in the comments under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com or on the show’s Facebook page. And I’ll be posting links to a few articles about women supporting other women – or not – under this episode as well. 

Next time, the president of a famous American women’s college on making the switch from a male environment to a female one…

“I always joke that I underwent a hormonal transformation when I moved from Harvard to Barnard, and I say it jokingly but I actually mean it. Being at a place that is run by and dominated by men is fundamentally different from being at a place that is run by and dominated by women.”

That’s two weeks from now.

And don’t forget to check out my sponsor for this show, Foreign Affairs magazine – go to foreignaffairs.com/broad for a huge discount on a year’s subscription.

And if you can support this one-woman show with a donation that would be much appreciated – just hit the support tab on the website. If you can give as much as $50 you will receive a Broad Experience T-shirt in return. There’s a photo of that on the website too.

Thanks to Eliza-Sankar Gordon for her help with this episode.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. See you next time.   

Episode 68: Introverts at the Office

“Men have had the advantage to some degree of having that strong silent type, that label that is sometimes valued or seen as an attractive feature. And a quiet woman is automatically assumed to be shy.”

— Beth Buelow

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…

 “Although extroversion wasn’t required to be good at the job, it was certainly something that was really strongly valued."

Introverts can feel awkward in the modern workplace – and judged. Perhaps women more so than men…

“So I think a quiet man it’s oh, he’s thinking, or he’s introspective, or he’s deep, a quiet women is shy or afraid…or you’re not confident, you need to have more confidence in yourself.”

Coming up – introverts at the office. How to survive in an extrovert world and when to accept you just don’t fit in.

---

Beth Buelow lives in Tacoma, Washington. She’s a coach and a writer who works with introverts – particularly people who work for themselves. I discovered her though her podcast, The Introvert Entrepreneur. She’s also the author of a new book called The Introvert Entrepreneur: Amplify Your Strengths and Create Success on Your Own Terms. 

But this whole introvert-for-a-living thing – it didn’t start till later in life. She’s a classically trained musician and for years she worked in the arts and for non-profits. Before that, she was just a little girl who enjoyed her own company….

“I think I always knew that I was not as outgoing, not as social as other kids but like other introverts I just thought I was shy. And that is often the label that adults will put on you when they see that you're not naturally reaching out to lots of people. They'll say oh, she's just shy.”

Frankly when I discovered music in the 6th grade, you know someone put a clarinet in my hands, and that became my identity. I was able to, I don't want to say hide behind it because it was actually what helped me come out of my shell.”

As she grew up Beth became more and more interested in personality tests. She soon identified as an introvert – but she found out an introvert wasn’t a shy person – although they could be. And Beth says this is what a lot of people still get wrong. Introversion and extroversion aren’t about shyness versus a big personality. They have to do with where you get your energy. An extrovert tends to get their energy from other people – from the outside world. All that socializing keeps them going. An introvert gains energy from having plenty of alone time and being in less stimulating environments. Being surrounded by yakking colleagues can drain an introvert pretty quickly.

I took a test on Beth’s site and my suspicions were confirmed – I was deemed an ambivert. 

“Aha. An ambivert is somebody who falls in the middle, and there's a lot more coming out as the introvert conversation has heated up that says most people are ambiverts. It makes sense because the introvert/extrovert categories exist on a spectrum.”

I can’t stand working alone for more than a day or so. I need that energy that comes from other people. On the other hand, I feel overwhelmed in large groups. I’ll completely clam up. I’m much more comfortable one on one or with just a few people.

And of course anyone can be an introvert or an extrovert. But I wanted to know whether Beth thought there were any differences between men’s and women’s experiences…and also in how colleagues see them…

“I think men have had the advantage to some degree of having that strong silent type, that label that is sometimes valued or seen as an attractive feature. And a quiet woman is automatically assumed to be shy. A quiet man, it’s like, oh, he's thinking, or he's introspective, or he's deep. A quiet woman is shy or afraid or mousy, you're not outspoken enough, you're not confident, you need to have more confidence in yourself. So I think that they interpret the silence, or the quieter nature, or however your introverted presence is showing up, they're seeing it more as a negative."

She wonders if that affects how bosses view these women’s futures…

“Perhaps they are especially attuned to OK, you’re a potential leader but you’re kind of quiet so you need to speak up.”

She says those women may not be advancing as fast as they might otherwise. Now she says this is just a theory. Maybe some of you have promoted more introverted women to senior roles…or maybe you’re a quieter type who feels you’ve lost out because your bosses wanted a more outgoing character. Or perhaps you’ve faked it to meet a manager’s expectations.   

And we’ll come back to that idea of women speaking up – or not – later in the show.

Now not every workplace is hell bent on recruiting extroverts – but the average American workplace at least seems to love them.

“And you see it in everything from job postings, they'll say "we're looking for friendly, outgoing sales reps" or customer service or there was even a job posting for dental hygienists and it said "no introverts". The ad blatantly said, "no introverts".

So it was like, really? Do you understand what an introvert is? So the bias shows up even at that level. And lots of workplaces will say, "we work hard and we play hard" and "we're a family" and "we love going to happy hours together" and all this, so there is this workplace culture that has this extrovert expectation, and it becomes compounded when you have a trend toward open office plans. No one has an office anymore, no one has a door, and you have to sign out space if you want some privacy, and those sorts of things are very energetically taxing to a lot of people, especially the introvert, who will be able to better focus, and think, and be creative, if they've got space, more quiet than noise.”

Open plan offices don’t bother me. But some of us with introvert tendencies dread another aspect of office life…

AM-T: “I mean I can’t think of anything worse than going on a bonding activity – so many companies do this. My brother’s company in London does this – it has retreats. My heart just sinks thinking about those things.”

“I've taken to calling those things forced fun, in some cases. I remember when I worked at a large non-profit, if it was your birthday everyone had to gather in the conference room and sing and ate cake, and I just got to the point where I just would take the day off. I thought, I don't want the forced fun. I look at that now, and this is where introverts need to be aware and sensitive, I think you know, maybe the gathering, and this also goes if you are exiting a place, and you know people say, we want to take you out for happy hour or we want to have a little party, or something like that. And a lot of us would say, "mmm, no, that's OK, I don't want people to make a big deal." But sometimes those rituals are there as much for the other people as they are for you.

And I thought if I'm always saying, "no, don't do anything," or I'm disappearing on my birthday, it's kind of making an assumption that it's forced fun and it doesn't give other people a chance to acknowledge and even celebrate whatever it is that I bring to the table.”

OK, I can buy into that idea. But what about those outside-the-office marathons otherwise known as conferences? They’re tailor made for extroverts.

AM-T: “I don’t go to that many but whenever I do I’m spent by the end of the two or three days. And I need to go back to the hotel room and not attend all the schmoozing events. But I feel bad, I feel guilty, because I’ve been fed this idea that the whole point of me being at the conference is to network and meet all these people. But it’s just too much.”

“Yes, and I think it's just you can't have too much of a good thing, and for me my networking and my visibility and my learning is happening during those sessions. And I guess I've stopped feeling guilty about doing those other things because I think this is my experience. I paid to be here and I am and if I'm going to get the most out of it, if I’m going to get what I came for, then I need to take care of myself.”

And when it comes to networking in general…she says she’s stopped pretending to be an extrovert for the evening…

“Because I think when we're trying to imitate other people and we're saying, "oh she's got it down," and "she's better at that than I am, so I need to be like her" that is not trusting that who I am is enough. So at one point, it was another one of those kind of lightbulb moments when I said, "wait a minute, I'm trying to be like this other extroverted person, and I'm not and it doesn't feel good!" and so "what strengths do I naturally have that I can bring to the table?" That I'm comfortable smiling at people and making eye contact, that I'm a really good listener, that I can ask really good questions. And that allowed me to be able to connect with people in an authentic way, not feel like I was faking it, and basically set myself up for better success.”

She no longer dreads a roomful of strangers.

Lisa Sonnier describes herself as a reformed introvert. She says as a kid she spent a lot of time alone out of choice. But as she grew up she realized she was pretty lonely. She started making a concerted effort to be more social. Today she works in the water department of a big city in Texas. But even though she says she’s now the life of the party, her inner introvert is still there…

“Part of my job is constantly talking to people, staff or superiors, on a public service front, council members and citizens. I feel like I have to be able to solve all their problems and think about what they're going through and help them out. Then at the end of the day I don't like to talk to anyone, I like to be quiet, having more of my own time. And I only just realized that I was becoming totally burned out, this being on all the time, without giving myself that time to sit and contemplate.”

She says her own experience makes her sympathetic to the introverts in her office. She manages a lot of people with scientific or technical backgrounds. She has an engineering degree herself. And she tries to adapt her management style for the less outgoing personalities…  

“I try to be quiet, I try to listen and let them come out with what they’re gonna say at their own pace, which is difficult, I like to chime in and say I know where we're going with this. Let them say what they want to say. Some of this is knowing some people don't always speak up. So when certain people go on and on at a meeting, I try to seek out the people who have been quiet and ask them directly for their opinion, especially if they're going to tell me their opinion later, after the meeting, so I try to get them to say it to everyone.

Not to torture them, but so everyone in the room has a chance to know they’re contributing. Especially the ones with the technical knowledge that can really help a project.

“…and sometimes it’s hard to understand those people or to get them to speak up, but they always know what they're talking about so if you can coax it out of them that information is gold, but yeah, they don't always make it top of the charisma pile -- so they're not always in leadership positions, but usually they know which way the boat should go.”

And we’re back to that idea that the most charismatic people – and people who speak up in meetings – they’re the ones who get promoted, even if they’re contributing plenty, quietly, in their daily work.

Frieda Klotz has been that quiet contributor. Frieda lives in Belgium now, but she and I met a few years ago in New York. She’s Irish, and she’d been living in New York for several years. She’s a writer and editor and a couple of years ago she landed her first permanent, non-freelance American job. She was still quite new when she realized there were certain expectations she wasn’t meeting…

“My role was to do research and also to engage with my colleagues obviously, and sometimes to present to clients. And it was really interesting because in that organization although being extroverted wasn't required to be good at the job, it was certainly something that was really strongly valued, and there were a few different ways that this kind of manifested, and probably the main one I found was we did a Myers Briggs test…"

In case you haven’t come across it, the Myers Briggs test is a personality assessment…

“And it turned out that of the 20 or so people who I worked with 18 of them categorized themselves as extroverts, and the head of our group was a really high on the extrovert scale and then there was one person who was neutral, but with one with one notch into introversion, and then I was actually the only strong introvert within my division in the company. And I was then kind of asked to raise my hand and identify myself, which I thought was very funny, and I felt a little bit as though I was sort of being shamed for being an introvert, because although it was all very touchy feely and everybody was kind of saying, oh, it doesn't matter what you, the reality is it was really clear that our C.E.O. highly valued extroverts just like her.”

Frieda soon learned if she wanted to fit in she had to try harder to bring out another side of herself.

“I would say the culture that I was in was something of a sort of maybe not just an extrovert culture but interrupting was something that was kind of very standard, and I certainly found that people I worked with directly regularly interrupted at meetings and it was almost, if you didn't interrupt there is never going to be an opportunity to speak at all. So I did actually learn how to interrupt.”     

I recently read an interview with former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright. She was urging women to learn how to interrupt at work, or they’d risk never being heard or having their views considered.

“It is kind of liberating when you start to interrupt people and nothing bad happens. I think I was brought up with the idea that if you interrupt it’s terribly rude and you kind of shouldn't do it. But the reality is when you do and just keep speaking everything is fine.”

So acquiring that new skill was a plus. But she kept on feeling out of place. Especially when the personal critiques began…

“I was told that I needed to cut my bangs because people, the manager actually commented that I was probably hiding behind my bangs which wasn't true actually, but she said I know you're probably hiding behind your bangs because you are timid and we're so assertive here, but really people won't be able to interact with you properly or connect with the you unless they can see your face, and so I recommend that you cut your bangs or put your hair back. And I do understand that people need to see your face to interact with you but  again it was kind of strangely presented as feedback, and a separate colleague told me there were issues with how I sat and with my voice. Again it was somewhat vague – I mean I think the thing about my voice is interesting, I’m not sure it gets back to the idea of being an introvert or not, but this woman said there was something about my voice that was problematic.”

AM-T: "Like what?"

“She never clarified I'm afraid, so I don't know. Maybe it was that I spoke a little bit quietly. I know when I'm nervous my voice can get shaky, which really doesn't help. But yes, the feedback was about whether I was a cultural fit for the organization, and what I found strange was that I had done a two hour interview to get the position and I hadn't really changed dramatically in the three weeks between doing the interview and getting the job, and so it was strange then to be kind of asked to change my style and my voice and these other things in order to fit into what was essentially a research job.”

Maybe there was even a cultural side to this – perhaps some of these managers had a stereotype in mind…

“Typically Irish people are thought to have the gift of the gab and to be chatty and all sorts of other things as well. But, yeah I don't think introversion is widely viewed as being an Irish trait, but having said that I did a little bit of reading and I think the people in northern Europe are considered to be much more introverted, and being in Belgium where I am now I would say the culture is extremely introverted. And I could imagine that somebody who was too extroverted could be kind of looked upon as being you know annoying or overconfident or arrogant.”

In America, it seems there’s no such thing as being too outgoing – and as I told Beth Buelow, perhaps that’s why to me, even the word 'introvert' seems tainted…

AM-T: “Even the word has a slightly negative connotation. That must be from the culture, and the fact that extroversion is what’s admired in this culture. I think that’s why I feel guilty about removing myself in these conference type situations.”

“Yes, you're right that it's so much grounded in what we've been fed culturally about how we are supposed to be especially in social situations, and we become a little suspicious if someone is quiet or if they disappear and don't show up at the afternoon session or they're just squirreling away and talking to a couple of people instead of a bunch of them.

I think it's partly because of this really longstanding misperception of what it means to be an introvert, and people will think an introvert is shy or anti- social. I often joke that people think they're serial killers in waiting because when I first started the Introvert Entrepreneur I set up a Google alert for the work introvert. And almost every email notice that came into my inbox was some sort of story about somebody committing a crime. And the police, the neighbor, the co-worker would use the word introvert, or the reporter would stick it in there, "yeah, you know, the alleged gunman was really quiet, kept to himself, I think he was an introvert." So that word became synonymous with somebody to be a little afraid of or somebody to be a little suspicious of, and so people think, "oh, we've got to fix that" or, you know, introversion is not a good thing, and I do think that we're starting to take the word back and be able to claim it over the past few years. But I also think we have a long way to go.”

Beth is one of several authors these days who’s loudly advocating for introverts. Or maybe not loudly. Maybe assiduously is a better word. Thanks to her and my other two guests for sharing their stories on this episode.

That’s the Broad Experience for this time. As usual I’d love to hear any thoughts you have on the show – you can post them in the comments section on the website or on the show’s Facebook page.

And if you’re a fan of the podcast and haven’t done so please consider writing a review on iTunes – it helps The Broad Experience come to other people’s attention. This is a one-woman show without a marketing department of any kind so your help is greatly appreciated. And thanks again to all those of you who’ve donated to the podcast – there are more T-shirts. Check the website for details.  

And finally, thank you to Eliza Sankar-Gordon for her help with this episode.

I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. See you next time.  

Episode 67: How to Make the Most of Your Time

“Why are we so apt to blame work for hard choices when there are other reasons that we have to make choices as well? I think it’s because we’re still not entirely comfortable with women achieving professionally. ”

— Laura Vanderkam

Show Transcript:

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

This time, my guest says women have bought in to a story – a dark tale that says we can’t have senior jobs and a thriving family life. We just don’t have time to make it all work. But she says beware of scaling back…

“So in particular if people are thinking about taking an eighty percent schedule I would caution against that because it is quite possible to slack for twenty percent of the time and still get paid for it.”

Coming up, how women with big jobs manage their time – and what the rest of us can learn from that.

---

During the fourth episode of The Broad Experience I met someone regular listeners have come to know. Financial Times columnist Mrs. Moneypenny believes women can achieve whatever they want – it all comes down to choices…

“Whatever your ambition it is very unlikely you will achieve it if you don’t put some time into it. There are 168 hours in the week (there’s a great book in the States actually called 168 Hours that I highly commend to you) – you need, as an ambitious person, let alone an ambitious woman, to take that 168 hours and use it wisely.”

The author of that book, 168 Hours, is Laura Vanderkam. She’s become a well known writer on time management and productivity. She has a new book out and it’s all about women. It’s called I Know How She Does It – How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time.

I started our interview saying women do seem to have more trouble than men managing their time.

“Well I think that it's more a question of expectations. I think that men are not as bothered by this idea that they are both working and having a family life as well because they are expected to work. It is not seen as something transgressive that they are doing that they need to justify, and because of it I think there may be a little bit less guilt associated with that and hence less sort of angsty writing about it as well.”

And that angsty writing she says – it has a negative influence on women.

AM-T: “At the beginning you essentially say women have been fed this narrative about what’s achievable as a working mother and that narrative is actually hurting us. Can you expand on that a bit?”

“Certainly. I think that we've been told that in order to make the pieces of life fit together we need to lower our professional ambitions because it is the job with less responsibility and at least in our mind fewer hours that will make a full family life possible. But I would argue that that's actually not the case. I would hope that young women would not fear the big job because often it is the big job that will give you more autonomy. It will give you more flexibility, and it will also give you more resources, which you can use to hire help to make the rest of your life work.

So when women choose not to go after the big job because of the perception that it will require you to work around the clock and never see your family, they cut themselves off from very high earning professions and the reality is that many times these jobs don't actually require that many extra hours on the margin. So the average woman in my study worked forty-four hours a week. If you look at the average mother with a full time job it's somewhere between 35 and 37 hours a week depending on the age of her children. So you know, the difference between thirty seven hours a week and forty four hours a week…It's not nothing but it's not you know an order of magnitude different either. So if you knew that the difference between earning less than forty thousand dollars a year, which is what the average woman with a full time job earns, versus earning six figures a year is possibly seven hours a week. Well that suggests there are quite high returns to those few extra hours on the margins, and especially since the women in my project were often able to move work around in ways that kept it from interfering with family life in the way you might imagine it would. They had far more balanced lives I think than people imagine and in many cases I think than women with jobs that at least on the surface seem more family friendly.”

Laura is married with four kids herself. Her youngest was born earlier this year, and he isn’t sleeping well at the moment. She’s always been intrigued by how other women with children build careers and family lives and maintain their equanimity. She chose to focus solely on mothers for this book because she says it’s mothers who get all the media attention – and high earning mothers in particular. All those ‘can’t have it all’ stories are about them because in theory they’re juggling so much. She wanted to drill down and look at their lives in detail.

So here’s what she did: she got about 150 women who make more than $100,000 a year and who have at least one kid under 18 living at home – and she had them fill out time logs for a whole week. Most were married, some were single parents. She ended up with more than 1,000 days to examine – she looked at each half-hour slot the women had filled in. You’ll see some of these timelogs replicated in the book.

And here’s what she noticed. Actually these women almost to a woman got enough sleep – at least 7 hours a night. They worked, sometimes a lot, but not as much as they might have thought. They saw their kids for hours a day AND they had some leisure time. This emerging portrait did not fit in with the horror stories we hear of the hair-on-fire, stressed-out female executive…

I wanted to talk to Laura about one horror story in particular. About two years ago a lawyer at the top firm Clifford Chance wrote a goodbye email to colleagues and it made it onto the internet. She outlined a horrendous day she’d had. It featured fractious children, an unhelpful husband, demanding clients, bad traffic and late daycare pickup. She concluded by saying she couldn’t practice law any more and be a good mother. It was all too much.

Wasn’t it?

“To be fair the woman at Clifford Chance had an absolutely horrible day. That was a pretty wretched one as wretched days go. On the other hand I think it is also possible to have a wretched day within a pretty good life. And so the question is do we feel like we have to draw a conclusion from a wretched day. Or can we just acknowledge that sometimes there are wretched days and no one is entitled to a stress free life.”

Without knowing more about that woman’s story it’s impossible to say for her. But Laura says it’s important to see the whole mosaic of your life to keep pushing ahead. She says people should look at time as the whole week, the whole 168 hours, or even the whole month…not focus on what they can or should do in just one day.  The women in her study cobbled successes together over a number of days – projects tackled, clients met, kids taken to dentist appointments. And to make it all work they often let themselves off the hook on things like housework. Yes, plenty of them had a cleaner, but they still had to do things like dishes and laundry and picking up after kids. And many of them just…let it go. Sometimes dishes went undone. Floors stayed messy. A child got herself ready for school even if she left the house looking less than pristine. Many of these women gave up control to gain some precious minutes.

---

This episode of The Broad Experience is sponsored by Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs is a nonpartisan magazine—they publish thoughtful pieces by experts who span the political spectrum, allowing readers to form their own opinions about today’s most important global issues. Broad Experience listeners get a special discount – more than three-quarters off a subscription to Foreign Affairs— to sign up, go to ForeignAffairs.com/Broad.

---

There’s another study I’m gonna mention that some of you may have read about earlier this year. A Boston University researcher looked at how men and women at a huge consulting firm managed their time. Consulting is a notoriously full-on environment – it requires almost round-the-clock attention to clients. Both men and women at this firm disliked how much of their lives got eaten by work. 80-hour weeks were pretty much expected. But the men dealt with this problem differently than the women. The men subtly altered their workloads – taking on local clients, telecommuting, things like that. They just didn’t advertise it – so managers still viewed them as stars even though they worked less. The women though – they asked for their workloads to be scaled back. As a result their reputations suffered.

But oh, how I understand that instinct to ask…

AM-T: “I mean I have that typical female trait where I always ask for permission first…and it’s something I’m really trying to work on. But I notice this about myself, I never just assume I can do something. A voice inside me says, ‘You can’t do that.’”

“Yes, I think we have a tendency to want to be good girls and play by the rules.

And in many cases that serves us quite well in life, it's why women are doing better graduating from college and things like that than men, in general.

But when it comes to the workplace it doesn't always work in our favor because women get the idea that if they want to work differently they need to negotiate to get that. Well inherent in this word ‘negotiate’ is that you are giving something up in order to get something you want. What is that thing you're giving up? Well it's often pay, it's prestige, it's promotion opportunities. And what you really want is not necessarily to work less. You just want to work differently, you often want to move work around on dimensions of time and place. And if that's all you want well if you think about it why do you have to give anything up to get that? And I think that was the idea that men were using, that as long as I turn in the results. It's really nobody's business about the particulars if it comes down to it I will explain myself. But you know for the most part no one's going to ask and so I don't need to formally announce, by the way I'm going to go read to my son's preschool class tomorrow morning and I will officially be in at ten thirty. You know they just show up at ten thirty, and you know, you could be a million other places before ten thirty. You could be stuck in traffic, you could be visiting a client. You know you could be taking a call from home. Who knows really. So you don't have to announce this. You can just quietly achieve the sort of work life balance you want.”

That’s what some of the women in her study did. Although I have to say it would be nice if companies could cave a bit to accommodate people’s actual lives.

And related to that topic of managing your time to your advantage is the whole idea of working part-time.  Part-time can look like the holy grail to a lot of parents. But I have friends who have taken part time jobs only to find there’s a catch: that supposedly part-time gig does not fit into three days a week after all. It’s taking up pretty much all their time even when they’re home.

“We think that going part time will allow us to officially set boundaries right, we've paid the price. Now we can set artificial boundaries but the problem is just because you have a boundary doesn't mean that people will automatically respect it. And so you're going to have to constantly be negotiating this you know you if you have Tuesday as your day off. People are still going to schedule meetings on Tuesday. Your team is still going to have a conference call they're going to wonder why you're not there. They're going to e-mail you and wonder why you haven't responded and so you can not respond but many people are trying to be accommodating and so they wind up working basically full time hours they're just getting paid less for it. So in particular if people are thinking about taking an eighty percent schedule I would caution against that because it is quite possible to slack for twenty percent of the time and still get paid for it. I am not sure how many people who are working aren't slacking twenty percent of the time at the office. So why officially cut your pay just to go through, you know we all go through ups and downs in our productivity and this may be a particular low point for you but probably there will be a higher point at another point.”

She says another way women try to spend more time with family is by avoiding the extra-curricular stuff like networking. She admits she doesn’t go to as many events as she probably should. But particularly if you work for a firm, keeping too much to yourself can be a bad career move.

“…we want to work with people that we trust and trust is partly built up through social interactions and relaxed get-togethers and those often just can't happen during the normal nine to five and so you know, I've seen this happen with women managers who get really bad feedback from their teams because they're not taking them out to dinner. And that seems so silly, like why doesn't everyone just want to go home? Well you know why should you have to hang out with your colleagues more. But it is this investment and social time with your team that makes people trust you and like you and want to work with you. And so you ignore that at your peril. And I think it helps to recognize that this need not be an either or situation. Just because you are a working parent doesn't mean you have to go home at five p.m. every night without fail. When we think of only living our lives in twenty four hours then we wind up in this trap where we think it's either/or, but if you gave yourself say a budget of three social events with work per month, well that's three evenings there's thirty days in a month so that's ten percent of your evenings. So ninety percent of the time you're home. Ten percent of the time you're with your colleagues -- that really doesn't strike me as a horrible balance, but that ten percent invested at work could go a really long way in making people still see you as the kind of person who's willing to invest in those relationships.”

AM-T: “But again as you point out part of the reason women are doing this is that they’re rushing home to see their kids, and you know, ‘I hardly see my kids.’ Again, this story that’s been out there for centuries that the perfect mother does certain things.”

“Well I would I would argue with the centuries thing, I think it's been out for approximately fifty years and before that there wasn't as much discussion of this, I mean if you look at more traditional societies certainly mom is out there in the field right alongside dad. There's no separation here in terms of the traditional roles. But yes there is a story that is out here that a good mother does certain things.

And even women who earn incredible amounts of money which will give their children all sorts of opportunities will not give themselves any credit for that because in their mind the only thing that counts that a mother does is that she is available at ten A.M. on Tuesday. And if she is not available at ten A.M. on Tuesday she is failing as a mother. And the fact that you can…bring the kids to Europe for spring break, can afford the best violin teacher out there and have them live in a good school district or pay to go to private school, none of that counts right? And I find that a very funny way of looking at it because kids need both time and money and almost universally if you are working, you are providing both. And I think that one thing that will help women with this, I really do encourage people to keep track of their time for a week and many of the women in my project were quite surprised to see how much time they were spending with their families.”

One woman told Laura she didn’t feel guilty any more after viewing her time log.

So given what Laura found in those time logs…why the drumbeat of woe about high-achieving women and balance?

AM-T: “Why is that so persistent, I mean you call it a recitation of dark moments. What’s going on there that this negative stuff is far more out there than the kind of achievable lives you’re talking about?”

“Partly it's just that darker moments are darkly entertaining. I mean there's nothing exciting about a headline that says a woman does work and life just fine. You know that that's not the sort of story that anyone wants to read whereas reading about for instance that that Clifford Chance associate’s horrible day in which she you know is woken up by the kids multiple times and has a long day of you know a colleague sitting on a note until daycare is closing and whatever else happens, that is far more entertaining, and there's also the fact that negative things stand out in the mind more than good things. We are prone to notice them and so when you have a couple points of evidence they tend to lead us to a conclusion that's the whole story telling format that's what makes narrative, and the human brain remembers things in the form of stories. So it becomes very easy for us to say this negative thing happened, this negative thing happened, this negative thing happened. Therefore life is crazy, life is unsustainable, and particularly for women because it is still seen as somehow strange and different and we're not sure quite how we feel about it. We are prone to assign blame for negative things to work and so we get you know the story going where we're lamenting a softball game missed because of a late flight and we start down the road of, you know, should we cut back our hours at work, should we resign? But no one has that same angst over a softball game missed because another child has a swim meet at the exact same time. Like we're not led to the conclusion that you need to get rid of the other kid from that hard choice moment. And yet life is all hard choice moments. So why not? I mean why are we so apt to blame work for these bad choices when there are other reasons that we have to make choices as well? And I think it's because we're still not entirely comfortable with women achieving professionally. And I do hope that that will change over time and I hope that one of the things I've done in this book is introduce the idea that there are many women who are doing fine with it and it doesn't need to be this harried, sleep deprived, angsty life.”

AM-T “And just finally tell me there are days when you get to the end of your day and you go, oh God, I wish I’d been more productive today. Or does that never happen to you?”

 “No, it happens all the time. I have not felt necessarily all that productive lately as I have not been sleeping as much as I wish I could, but I try to keep moving forward and keep my eyes on the big goals, and you know some little stuff might not happen and that's OK. But you know on the whole life is pretty good.”

 Laura Vanderkam. The book is I Know How She Does It. And if you want to track your own time for a week or two you’ll find a link Laura gave me under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com – from that link you can download one of her timesheets. And you can find her at lauravanderkam.com.

Now if only someone could write a similar book for women at the other end of the economic spectrum.

I’d love to hear about how you manage your time whether or not you have kids. You can comment under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com or on the show’s Facebook page.

And if you’re a news junkie don’t forget to check out my sponsor for this show, Foreign Affairs magazine – go to foreignaffairs.com/broad for a huge discount on a year’s subscription.

And if you’re a longtime fan of the podcast and can contribute $50 you will receive a Broad Experience T-shirt in return – for details and a photo of the shirt check out the page for this episode at The BroadExperience.com.

Finally, thanks to Emma Jacobs for her help with this episode.

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

Broad Experience Shorts: Non-Mom

Show Transcript:

“Ironically today in America there are fewer mothers than ever before, and we have made motherhood the ultimate way to be a woman.”

— Melanie Notkin

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

So I know I said last time I wasn’t releasing a new show for a bit. But I wanted to release this short show that picks up on a theme I covered last year – professional women who aren’t mothers. This topic was really popular – much more than I thought it would be. And it was personal for me.

Today I wanted to use some more of my interview with Melanie Notkin.

Melanie was one of three guests I had on the original show. She’s the author of a book called Otherhood – it’s about women who are approaching the end of their childbearing years, always wanted kids, but don’t have them. And if you’re a woman without kids, whatever the reason, you can get a little weary of those happy family ads you see all the time – or the occasional comments about everything you’re missing out on by not being a mother. Particularly if you live outside a big city – you’re unusual if you don’t have kids by your early 30s. And you feel it.

But in countries like Britain and the US about 20 percent of women today end up not having children. That’s millions of people who aren’t society’s default setting. Melanie and I started to talk about the words ‘women’ and ‘mother’…and how sometimes they’re used interchangeably.

"I think that we need to really understand what we say when we say women in the workforce, because often enough it’s about mothers.”

AM-T: “Yeah, we’re all conflated as if everyone is a mum.”

“And whether or not we want to be that woman, or if we became that woman later in life, we are not the same woman. And what happens in the workplace is because of that, when mother…and this idea of the most important job in the world, and more so often than her job. And when a woman leaves her job...and I champion and support this idea, when she needs to take time for this newborn...of course, I wish I had that opportunity to take care of my newborn. But in the meantime we have to understand, maternity leave outside of it, just leaving early for a sick child, who is picking up the slack? Often the single and childless women. And that means who is working on holidays? "Oh, Christmas. I have to be with my kids, oh you can stay late to finish the report, I've got to get home to my kids." As if the single woman, or the childless woman, has no life outside of work. Or even if that life is recognized, it's less important, it’s understood, than taking care of a child.

I’ve read a couple of horror stories of single women who needed to take time off for serious health issues. Their bosses weren’t supportive and ultimately they lost their jobs.  Now people have lost jobs over sick kids too. But the problem with being single is that if you are ill for a long time…

“There's no law in America that says any family member can take time off to take care of a single woman. God forbid you end up in the hospital and nobody can take time to care for you. You have to take care of yourself.”

Now in the past that wouldn’t have been such an issue. People lived in smaller, closer communities, not thousands of miles from family or close friends the way some of us do today. But what really interests me about the past is there were always some unmarried women in communities. And yes, they were called spinsters…but quite often they had important roles to play in their town, they looked after nieces or nephews. They worked. I read a great book a few years ago called Singled Out. It’s all about the British women who were coming of age right around the time of World War I. Hundreds of thousands of British men died in that war, and it created a big group of women who never found mates. This went against everything they’d been brought up to do… but they made lives for themselves – good ones.

AM-T: "It was such a wonderful book about what these women did with their lives. For many decades, I feel like it was more acceptable for women not to marry. What’s happened since then?"

"I call it ‘ momopeia’ – the myopic view is mother as the ultimate woman.

AM-T: “I wonder why though?”

“Just like any trend, whether it’s to be stick skinny, there seems to be this aspiration -- we’ve made it aspirational and a lot of is…”

AM-T: “Celebrity stuff.”

“Yes, it’s pushed out by Hollywood.  And if you look at the front page of magazines and other gossip blogs, that need content and a lot of content all the time, and the interstitial content of even a weekly magazine, the headline  is always who is pregnant, who has a baby, is she pregnant, a baby bump...And now let’s not look at A-list celebrities, let’s look at b-list celebrities, forget b-list celebrities let’s go to reality show celebrities. We have extended this to anybody who remotely may have a baby. And this ‘momopia’ has made so many of us, ironically today in America more than ever before there are fewer mothers, and we have made motherhood the ultimate way to be a woman. In fact, Jessica Alba said once on Jay Leno’s tonight show, when she was pregnant with her second, that with this second now she’ll really be a mother. The first was yeah okay she gave birth, but now with two she’s really a mother. As if now, she’s extended the line of what you need to achieve in order to be a real woman with two kids.  And the pressure on women to have to live up to that can be quite detrimental."

Maybe you agree – or disagree – either way I love hearing from you. You can post a comment under this episode at the re-vamped Broad Experience website OR on the show’s Facebook page.

And if you didn’t catch my first episode on professional women with no kids it’s show number 48 – and that includes a married woman who never wanted to have children – and she finds that pretty tough to explain to most people.

If you enjoy the show please consider writing a review on iTunes and spreading the word on social media. And if you can support The Broad Experience with a $50 donation you will get the official Broad Experience T-shirt. More details under this episode on the website.

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

Episode 66: Men on Women

“I was told [the job] was going to my female co-worker, and it enraged me. I thought, ‘This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. I expressed myself in the masculine...and you gave it to a woman.’”

— Benjamin DeBoer

“I think it’s very easy for men left alone without any women in a group to have a boys’ club environment...and maybe there is a young man who feels uncomfortable with that but he doesn’t feel empowered to speak up.”

— Erik Michaels-Ober

View fullsize

In this episode two men share their views on women and men in the workplace. One is straight, one gay, one works in tech and one in the arts.

We talk about how gay men can be sexist too, why society values masculine qualities over feminine ones, and what one company,SoundCloud, is doing to increase the number of female engineers who work there (including making its job descriptions less exacting).

View fullsize

Thanks to my guests Benjamin DeBoer and Erik Michaels-Ober for being on this man-only episode of The Broad Experience.

And don't forget to check out my sponsor for this week at Doodle.com - they make setting up meetings a lot easier, and the basic service is totally free.​

And now for the T-shirt news I mentioned on the show. Anyone who donates $50 to the show via the support page will receive a Broad Experience T-shirt like the one below. Yes, this is a ladies' shirt, but guys, if you're interested, I can definitely get a man's shirt made up as well.

Please go to this Google form to fill in your name, address, email, and most important,size. The order will be sent once the shirts have arrived and the donation has been made. Shirt is 90% cotton, 10% polyester. It displays the graphics from this website's banner, including the text 'a conversation about women, the workplace, and success'.

If you're female here's what I can tell you: these T-shirts are not overly large. I'm 5'8 and broad shouldered and I wear a medium, whereas with other T-shirts I can easily wear a small.

View fullsize

---

Show Transcript

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

This time, men discuss their feelings about women in the workplace. And those feelings aren’t always warm…

“I was told that actually it was going to go to my female co-worker…and it enraged me, and I felt incredibly resentful. I thought that this isn't how it's supposed to go.”

And we’ve talked quite a bit on this show about being a woman in tech. What does the landscape look like from the guys’ perspective?

“Being in an environment, especially on the engineering side, it just sort of becomes the wallpaper, and you stop noticing there aren’t any women when there should be.”

But he is trying to do something about it.

Coming up.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Benjamin DeBoer is in his early thirties. For years after college he lived in New York, working in the opera world. Now he lives just outside Washington DC and he has two jobs – he does marketing for an arts organization and he works for a coffee company.

“From the outside looking in right you know working in the arts and working in the coffee industry, they are seemingly very progressive industries and in many ways they are, they're very inclusive. But I think that sexism still is part of those environments and there are very few women in power in the arts. I mean there certainly are some, but many of them tend to be gay women. “

Ben’s gay himself. And he shares a house with a female couple – they’re married, and he says the 3 of them spend a lot of time talking about gender and gender stereotypes. Here’s what he’s noticed working in the arts – for one thing he says it is still largely straight, white men at the top…and they feel comfortable with people who act like them.

“I’ve noticed that gay women who express themselves more in the masculine or present themselves more in the masculine versus women who are more traditionally feminine, or perceived as more traditionally feminine, are treated more as equals. And I can't help but wonder if we value expressing ourselves more in the masculine in the workplace than we do in the feminine right, because expressing yourself in the masculine tends to mean that you pursue success, that you are more aggressive, that you display more emotional control, and I just wonder why we feel that everyone has to conform to that standard, that masculine standard.”

He has both sides himself. And he’s found his feminine side that generally isn’t a good thing at work.

He has always worked with plenty of women and he had always thought of women as equals. Or at least he thought he thought that way…

“I came to realize that actually a lot of my close gay male friends and co-workers at times could be very sexist, and that sexism isn't just for straight men and that was very surprising to me, and it was surprising to me that actually at times I played along with that and that and that I – I mean we all think that gay men are our woman's best friend. But you know sexism and sexist comments and sexist thinking can happen in the gay community too. And you know I think the thing is that you know, I think a lot of it is this sort of an unconscious prejudice, and I don't know if you feel this way, but I think a lot of times in the workplace there's an unconscious prejudice against gay women. I think there's also an unconscious prejudice against gay men from other men. And I wonder if you know, we put women down because it's the easiest group to target and maybe we, maybe we as gay men -- I can't speak for others but maybe myself -- it was a way to feel more important or to self-aggrandize or to not feel like I was on the outs.”

One incident made him think profoundly about his own biases. He often feels like an outsider in the company of other men. Yet he IS a guy, and he’s tall and well built. So when this macho-sounding job came up at the coffee company he works for, he decided to prove himself…

“I had applied to work in the back in the roasting facility, and the positions of coffee roaster tend to be held by men and it was between me and a woman who worked there and she had worked there less time than I had, I had more time on her at the company, I was older than her. And I went into the interview and presented myself kind of, or I thought I presented myself as this guy who was capable, who could fix things, who could work with tools who could, that I could lift things there were in the job description you had to be able to lift I think more than thirty pounds, and it wasn't necessarily a sexist requirement. It was just a requirement of the job that you had to be physical.”

He threw every male stereotype in his arsenal at that interview. And he left feeling pretty good about how things went.

“And then, I was pulled in to the into my boss's office you know a couple weeks later and I was told that actually it was going to go to my female co-worker. And it enraged me and I was felt incredibly resentful. And I thought that this isn't how it's supposed to go. I expressed myself in the masculine, I presented myself the way I thought I was supposed to be. And you gave it to a woman.”

They gave it to her because they told him she had the right skillset and background for the job. Still, he stewed. He thought he’d followed the unwritten rules of the company – it felt like a boys’ club and he was trying to be one of the boys. And it hadn’t worked.

AM-T: How long did it take you to get over that?

 “It took a couple weeks and in fact I applied for another job there and I was told that in the in the interim in the period between my not getting that job and me applying for another job within the company, that I was difficult to be around – and that I didn't display a certain level of professionalism that they were looking for.”

AM-T: Ooh…

“Yes. And it really forced me to do some real critical thinking about…I mean not to be too hard on myself but you know, I understood what they were saying. I was very disappointed and I'd applied for several jobs for several jobs within the company and I was feeling undervalued and under-appreciated, and I thought…it was my perception that I didn't get the job because I wasn't being perceived as a capable man, that I wasn't teachable, that I couldn't work with tools. And then I guess on the other hand you know I am…I mean I’m a human being and I should be allowed to express emotion and disappointment. And I think it goes back to that emotional control. I think men are really expected to show emotional control perhaps in a way that women are not expected to.”

AM-T: How has it been at work since - have you recovered your equilibrium?

“I have, yes, and you know I I'm very happy for the woman that got the job in the back. She is doing a great job and I think that she definitely has the right skill set and I think it's it kind of you know, failure or disappointment are things that we have to deal with in life, and it was a growing experience for me and when I didn't get the second job because of because I was told that I didn't handle it that well I felt that I recovered from it very quickly. But I will say that it has really, your podcast and my experience of losing a job to a woman where I thought that what they were looking for was this sort of classic and the stereotypical man for the job? It's really helped me to be more aware, more conscious of how I think of women and be more aware of my own sexism and my own prejudices at work, something I was not aware of before, or I didn’t even think that that was within me. I didn't even think I have those issues.”

Glad to be of service.

We’ll come back to Ben and perceptions of masculine and feminine behavior a bit later in the show.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

This episode of The Broad Experience is sponsored by Doodle. Trying to schedule a meeting with a group of people can turn into a huge time suck over email or text. Doodle is an online scheduling tool that makes setting up meetings a lot easier. All you have to do is get the participants to select possible dates and times.With a quick look, you'll see everyone's availability and you can make a final decision that satisfies the whole group.

The basic scheduling service is totally free. Premium Doodle starts at only $39 per year and offers business users extra features such as calendar integration, automatic reminders, and more.

Over 24 million people use Doodle each month to save time and schedule lots of different events, and you can, too. Get started for free by going to Doodle.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

My next guest works in a heavily male industry – technology. He’s a software developer and he works at SoundCloud, which actually hosts this podcast. He’s also a listener of mine, and when I put out a call a few months ago for men in tech to talk about their perspective on women at work he got in touch.

Erik went straight from college to working in Silicon Valley. There wasn’t a single woman engineer on any of the teams he worked on.

“…and I don’t even think I interviewed one the first 8 years of my career. And that was despite the fact the first two companies I worked for were founded by women.”

Then he moved to SoundCloud. He works at their head office in Berlin.

“Here there’s a number of great women who I started working with and just learned a lot from and them, and they became some of my favorite coworkers to work with. That’s when I began to see what a loss it was not just for women, but for the men in the industry, right. Like, we’re missing out in the experience of working with women and learning from women and having that perspective in our lives and in our work.”

Of course I asked him to describe what he meant. He didn’t want to reinforce stereotypes, but having said that…he was willing to say this…

“I think the women who I work with tend to be much more methodological in their approach and for men a lot of times it’s, here’s the problem, let’s race towards it and hit it with a hammer and go as fast as we can and just make a beeline for it. And I think a lot working with women – and with some men – it’s more an attitude of let’s take a step back, let’s think about this problem holistically…is the thing we’re solving the real problem, is it the root problem?”

Also he says when it comes to computer code he’s noticed something else. In general he says women put more emphasis on the human aspects of code. He says that means their code might be easier to read and understand…even if it makes it slower. He says a lot of the time that’s the right tradeoff to make.

Not that he notices everything. His girlfriend sometimes has to nudge him into awareness. She also works at SoundCloud.

“..so you know there might be something like an all-hands meeting, the whole company comes together, and there’s a presentation by four of our executives, there’s a panel at the front, they’re doing questions and answers, and it’s an all male panel. And maybe once or twice that’s fine, but if it’s 2 or 3 meetings in a row that’s something she would notice and point out, and I might not even notice. And being in an environment, especially on the engineering side, it just becomes the wallpaper, and you stop noticing there aren’t any women when there should be.”

He says the company has been making a concerted effort lately to get more women into its engineering department, and it’s been working. They’ve largely been small tweaks. For one thing SoundCloud studied the wording on its job descriptions…

“And we said, OK – this is actually based on some research that showed that women will only apply for a job if they apply for 100% of the qualifications where men will do so of they meet some smaller percentage, they’re willing to put themselves out there even if they’re not fully qualified – and so we looked at a lot of things, so having a college degree was a requirement on many of our jobs. And when we looked internally we said OK, how many of the engineers we’ve hired have a college degree? Is it 100% No, it’s not. We’ve hired a lot of male engineers who don’t have a college degree but decided to apply anyway.”

So they removed that college degree requirement from several job descriptions.

Another thing they did is a bit like something you’ve probably heard about from the classical music industry – blind auditions, where the judges can’t see whether the musician auditioning is male of female – in this case it was blind reviews of computer code applicants had written…

“… we removed the name and resume, any identifying information from that code and just presented the code as is and had people review it blindly – just to remove any implicit biases that might be going on as people were reviewing it. I think that’s really helped make our process more fair. And as I said we’ve increased the number of women – we’ve actually doubled it in the past 18 months or so.”

It’s a big jump. Still, the number of female engineers at the company hovers at about 15 percent. There’s a lot more to do.

There was one thing I really wanted to ask Erik as a young man. A few years ago, right around the time I was starting this show, I assumed Generation Y men were total converts to equality…utterly enlightened.

AM-T: “What about men your age though, because you must be about 30, right?”

“Right.”

“Because what I was saying earlier, I thought this was going to be a completely enlightened generation…then I heard all these stories about…a tech startup in the Boston area…girls were part of the attraction of the Christmas party…these guys were raised by mothers who were feminists…I’m curious as to what your friends are like and whether people outside your company with all its initiatives have any interest in this topic at all?”

“I mean first of all I think really the best educated people don’t have those attitudes in my experience. A lot of times companies talk about culture fit as a criterion for hiring. And to me it’s about that – it’s like, I don’t care about how good of a software developer you are, if you’re a sexist asshole I’m not going to hire you.”

But what about those young men at the startup I mentioned? I bet they all had good degrees.

“I don’t know, I just think it’s very easy for men left alone without any women in a group to kind of have that boys’ club environment, so some idea like using women for advertising manages to get through. And you know, maybe there is a young man in the company who feels uncomfortable about that but maybe they don’t feel empowered to speak up or they feel they may be ostracized in that group.”

Perhaps it’s all about fitting in. Peer pressure. Ben DeBoer is familiar with those things as well.

“I mean certainly there's a long way to go for women in the workplace. I think there's a long way to go for men in the workplace, gay or straight. I think many work environments are still run by you know straight men and I know that for me as a gay man in the workplace I have been afraid to be perceived as weak, as a less resourceful, as less capable. I have a fear of being perceived as feminine by my other male colleagues, especially those who are in power or who are making decisions. And while some of that may be my own insecurity I also can't help but think that that is what the world has messaged to me from an early very early age is that…you know, I’ll use a classic example: when I when I was a young boy I was more feminine and so I was often called a girl. ’Oh, Ben’s a girl, you know, he's a little girl, he's very feminine, and that was said very negatively. And when I asked my roommate who is, you know, she's an athlete. She's very masculine in certain ways – she, you know, has a short haircut she was always a tomboy when she was very young, and she said not once did anyone ever say, ‘Oh you're a boy.’ She was never called out for being athletic, she was never called out for being a tomboy. And I just can't help but think that's because in our society we value masculine qualities over feminine qualities.

Men are number one, women are number two, and to be a man expressing himself in the feminine is bad, but to be a woman and express yourself in the masculine, that is OK, that is good, and I would love to see that gap closed. I would love to see us expressing our masculine and feminine sides both as men and women and not assign that to one gender and to value both.”

Ben DeBoer. Thanks to him and Erik Michaels-Ober for being my guests on this man-only episode of The Broad Experience.  As usual you can add a comment beneath this episode on the website or on the show’s Facebook page. I’d love to hear from you.

And if you’ve never used it check out Doodle, my sponsor for this week’s show.  It makes scheduling meetings so much easier – and you’ll be supporting a company that supports The Broad Experience.

And talking of support…I’m mentioning this in my newsletter but I thought I’d say something here too. As you know this is a one-woman show with no support other than occasional sponsorship dollars and listener donations.

If you are willing to support the show with a $50 donation you can get the official Broad Experience T-shirt, which I first had made last year. Now this is a ladies shirt but given you’ve just heard a man show, gentlemen, I’m sure I can do something for you too.

You’ll find more details of how to order, including a photo of the shirt, under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.

I’m taking a brief production break so there won’t be another show in two weeks…but I have lots of shows in the archive so I hope you’ll check those out if you’re a new listener. The topics include work and sex…why women have a hard time negotiating with female bosses, and emotions at the office.

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

Episode 65: Transcending tradition - women in India

“Women face this one universal problem, which is that men mostly cannot deal with women around them...it’s the whole ego issue.”

— Shaili Chopra

Shaili Chopra

India is the world's largest democracy, with a population of more than 1.2 billion. Still, just a third of women are in the workforce. India-watchers say if more women contributed to the economy the country's GDP would shoot up. 

In this show I talk to Indian journalist and author Shaili Chopra. She says Indian women lack role models. She's out to change that with her media company She The People. We talk about the obstacles Indian women face that western women don't, the influence caste still has on society, and why Shaili's nanny has a nanny of her own. We also debate the meaning of the word 'feminist'. 

Don't forget to check out my sponsor this week at Doodle.com - it's free, and it takes the hassle out of arranging meetings.

India has a huge problem with sexual violence and sexual molestation (imagine sitting in your car when a hand comes through the window to grab your breast). In this video Samhita Arni talks to Meghna Pant about the problem and her initiative, Mapping Sexual Violence. 

---

Transcript

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

This time, 1.2 billion people live in India. And women work everywhere from big offices to call centers to other people’s homes…

“The people who work for me and my child actually have babysitters of their own because she today can work in my house only because she has somebody who will go and get her child back from school, so I think it works at different levels in India.”

My guest wants to empower more women in India – but she wouldn’t say she’s one of the sisterhood.

“An extreme sense of feminism is possibly hurting more women than helping them. I mean I’m an observer of that debate because I don’t call myself a feminist.”

Coming up, we look at how women are faring in the world’s biggest democracy.

---

India has the next largest population on earth after China. But in China around 65 percent of women are in the workforce. In India it’s closer to 30 percent. And that number has dropped during the last decade.

There are lots of reasons for that.  A woman’s place is still considered to be firmly in the home. And it’s not just children who pull women out of the workforce. The Center for Talent Innovation did a survey of educated Indian women a few years ago. 80 percent of those who quit work said they did so to look after parents or in-laws. There are safety issues for women just getting to and from work in India. And companies aren’t exactly radiating support for women either. That said, I’ve read a couple of pieces of research this week and they both say young Indian women are more ambitious than their American counterparts – they just get stymied faster on their way up the career ladder. 

Shaili Chopra wants to change the odds of women’s success. She is a journalist, author, and media entrepreneur. She lives in Mumbai and she’s married with a baby son. Recently she did something a bit like me – she struck out on her own to found a media company largely for women. It’s called She The People.

Shaili grew up actively studying how to project herself. She did a lot of debating at school and she took elocution lessons.

“But what fascinated me was how women on television read news.”

She knew she wanted to be on TV. And she made it – she studied economics and she got into business journalism at a time when it was just taking off in India. Her first job was at CNBC. She became a well known anchor.

As usual I wanted to know about her upbringing. She says her dad was a big influence. He grew up in a family where it was expected he’d go into the family business. In India there is a lot of pressure to do what your family wants and expects of you. But at the age of 5 he announced he wasn’t interested and he stuck to his guns. He wanted to become an airforce pilot. And he did.  

“Now having had a father who decided to change his own destiny and go with every thought that he had for his ambition, that made it easier for me to being born in a family of two girls, I have a younger sister, at a time in the 80s when most families would tell their children what they should be.”

She says her father didn’t tell them what they should do – he introduced them to all sorts of things when they were young. He taught them chess – they were quite competitive at that – and he took them around factories so they could see how things were made. That was one of their weekend activities. They had a different experience than a lot of other girls…

“We grew up with people who had parents who were very clear the daughter would have to get married at 19, 21, whatever…so often enough we’d come back and have a dining room discussion, as in most families, of ‘what we saw today is not how things will be in our home.’ So that was that learning by watching what others were up to, and I think that strengthened us as people, because India is not a very safe place for women in general but when we grew up we grew up with a sense of free spiritedness that let us be more perceptive as human beings, as we don’t see all the time around us.”

AM-T: “Mmm, and I’m curious, did your mother feel the same way?”

“That’s a very good question. So my mother stepped out of the house for the first time at 21 and that’s when she got married. She was the most educated of all her siblings and when she got married that’s possibly the first time she was exposed to cheese, pasta, how to dance, how you can dance with a man who’s not your husband, it’s absolutely OK to be at a party and socialize and enjoy a drink -- these were not things my mother grew up with. So when she raised us she thought – when she grew up, was that a better way of growing? When women were highly protected within the family and that high level of protection was more like being possessive about your daughters?

So there was a bigdifference in what she was seeing and I think at every stage of, once one got out of the house and started working, we would think back and appreciate the number of changes she took on herself, and how quickly. Because once we were born she had two daughters and it was a time when India was changing, things about women were changing, there was open discussion about sex education in the country, it still remains quite a small group that would discuss this but we happened to be in that small percentage where we’d be exposed to that type of conversation. I think there were definitely times when she felt that we needed to be more traditional than we turned out to be. My sister and I both love debate. So we would not take any statement lying down, we would probably want to question it.”

And that kind of freedom still isn’t the norm for women.

“Even today I think there are thousands and millions of women in India who can’t speak their mind. And they can’t. Which is possibly why we’re still having a debate on marital rape to be a law or not. So you know, there are all kinds of things that came about. But I would say probably my mother was growing herself as she was growing us.”

AM-T: “So interesting. And I want to ask you more about women in India in a minute, but first, let’s talk about She The People. So tell me how – how you came to start that.”

“Actually I wanted to do ShethePeople.tv for one simple reason. There are very few women role models in India. And those there are, they’re possibly on every list that exists both in India and globally. I think India completely lacks the notion of celebrating women who have grown and done successful things, and it doesn’t have to be setting up a company or being a CEO. It could well be just producing great, fantastic pottery, somebody just singing brilliantly. There hasn’t been enough attention to stories beyond people who are in either a million dollar bracket or people who have done blockbuster movies.”

She says there are tons of women doing interesting things – lawyers, comedians, slum workers…but she doesn’t think many people have heard those stories.  

“I mean you possibly have heard stories about India from the December ’12 rape case to the fact that the rape documentary was not aired in India and had to be launched in YouTube.”

That rape case she’s talking about made world news two and a half years ago. A young woman was gang raped in Delhi when she and her boyfriend got on the wrong bus. She died of her injuries. A few months ago the BBC made a film about that rape. India banned it from its airwaves.

Shaili feels stories coming out of her country are at one of two extremes – terrible or wonderful…

“But we do have a very strong middle and we need to celebrate that middle because that is what sustains the country. That’s why we wanted to start She The People, to say there are more role models, look around, and if you’re still stuck just find out what these women did when they were stuck, and then move forward.”

And being stuck is a problem for Indian women. I read an article in Quartz recently called 6 Ways to Stop the Female Brain Drain at Indian Companies. It turns out almost half of Indian women drop out of corporate life between junior and mid levels. Among the reasons cited in the piece?  Pressure for women to put family first, lack of mentors, and lack of support from organizations.

AM-T: “And so it was a really interesting piece about some of the attitudes that women are up against and I just – I wonder what your experience was of that. You’re in your early 30s, right?”

“Right.”

AM-T: “And what about your friends…I mean have you seen this in your own life and in your business reporting?”

“So let me put it this way. Let me start from a different point, not so much from the brain drain aspect but from the fact every woman in India – all women in India have to face some discrimination no matter where they are, what sector they work in, which company they are with. The question is do they face this from the men around them, or the women around them, or both? That’s a whole different debate. But I can tell you having grown in media there have been certain organizations I grew in where the idea of women leaders was almost dead. They didn’t even think women could reach managerial positions. And that had a lot to do with the kind of men they chose to put there. That remains a problem of most organizations. Women face this one universal problem, which is that men mostly cannot deal with women around them: they find it hard to either find somebody who is more efficient or smarter than them, it’s the whole ego issue. Then there’s the whole aspect of if there is woman leader how will these men deal with it, …we may as well not make her a leader because then these guys will not be able to take instructions from her and the whole organization will have a challenge.”

She says women also have to ask for their promotions and often they’re not granted. She says until quite recently a woman at work risked ridicule just for speaking up in meetings.  

“Luckily that’s changed in the last five to seven years because women can just open their mouths and say look I can take you to court about that statement. And that is starting to happen. But I think essentially the problem with most organizations is they don’t stop thinking of those who come with a liability baggage. The minute they start shedding that they’ll realize how fantastic it is to have women. I worked with one organization where 75% of the organization was made up of women. That organization remains one of the best organizations in India for women in media. Because they understand women, they know that when they’re going to give you 200% in the first six months and they can’t give you 200% in the next six months because they’re ill or they’re pregnant or something else happened, they’ll understand. So this is something India is really grappling with in a big way still.”

This episode of The Broad Experience is sponsored by Doodle. You know how frustrating and time-consuming it can be to try and schedule a meeting with a group of people? Doodle is an online scheduling tool that takes the hassle out of arranging meetings. Registration isn’t required so it’s simple to get started. All you have to do is get the participants to select possible dates and times. With a quick look, you'll see everyone's availability and you can make a final decision that satisfies the entire group.

The basic scheduling service is free, and they also offer a free personal scheduling profile called MeetMe.

You can get started by visiting Doodle.com, and also be sure to check out their iPhone and Android apps.

I wanted to talk to Shaili about women and caste. India’s social caste system doesn’t determine quite as much about your life as it used to. Shaili says in cities it’s really not a big deal any more. She says in the white-collar world you get by on merit, not on your official station in life.

“But I think this whole caste factor may still be true for blue-collar jobs in India. They possibly still exist in different degrees of severity depending on north or south. Because in different parts of India there are very different approaches to what your second name is or what your surname resonates with the caste you belong to. So from an urban India point of view we can safely say that’s behind us.”

AM-T: “Because I would have thought – and I had read it was much more prevalent in rural areas. But if you come from a low caste are you even going to get the education that would get you that more professional job?”

“You know I don’t remember who said this but I heard it in a public discourse once, that in India your fate is somewhat sealed on day you’re born and in the household you’re born. And I think that somewhat speaks to what you’re referring to which is that you’re born in a certain caste, in a certain household, in a certain income level. Now opportunities for those people do remain very, very few and that is something a country like India needs to work upon because it’s something that is the majority of the country.”

A third of Indian women are illiterate. And many women work in the unorganized sector – a lot of them do domestic work. That work isn’t counted in official government figures. She says these workers and their families have stayed at the same level in society for generations.

“That said I see that changing because when I have a house help who is saying my children will not do what I’m doing – so I’m not going to cook at homes, I’m going to have children who go out there and hope to be a scientist or something like that. So there are different kinds of people who are finding that as they move from rural to urban India, as they have got some opportunities they are changing their aspirations. But no doubt if people are born in families that are economically backward there is a huge factor that plays there that there are opportunities that may not available to them.

And I’ll say that from two aspects: in India we are in such huge numbers. And I don’t say that proudly or with disdain. When you are with such large numbers you know every single job or opportunity has hundreds or thousands of people competing for that one place. When that happens you are going to find a large number of people falling off that radar with despair or disappointment. And that’s what then leads people to get into that trap, because they unfortunately cannot either match the skill of the job required or match the money it takes to pay for that job.”

The money it takes to pay for that job. India has a lot of corruption. And yes, she says, people who can afford to sometimes pay to get hired – particularly in the public sector.

“I mean you would see newspapers rampant with headlines every month that people are paying for government jobs in the country. And people pay for government jobs because they’re permanent, they come with medical facilities and other facilities…so we do live in that kind of a space in India, that’s why it has this multicultural, multi-fabric to itself, because people who live in parts of urban India are living as good a quality of life as New Yorkers. And there are people living lives which can put even Indians to depression because you don’t know that people are still scavenging in this country.”

There’s so much poverty it’s hard to fathom. But the sheer numbers of people Shaili mentioned, people who need jobs – that means a lot of middle class families in cities can afford domestic help, particularly childcare, that parents in New York or London would kill for.

“I think there’s no doubt about that, that there are more options in India. But I also think that you know most people who look for those options aren’t necessarily rich and urban. The people who work for me and my child actually have babysitters of their own because she can work in my house only because she has someone who can go and get her child back from school. So she is in turn paying someone a sliver of her salary because she wants to work…so I think it works at different levels in India. My babysitter actually has babysitters of her own because she can work only if she has a babysitter. And while I agree that India does give that opportunity I think it is held against India that we have this help…but I see this everywhere, I just got back from Hong Kong – having support in Hong Kong is absolutely normal. I think HK’s economy would shrink or collapse if they didn’t have the support they do Just like Dubai does. So I think from an in principle level I think it’s fine to have help if you are treating them well and paying them what is the good standard in the region…Now where I think we do have to change as a society is we need to start getting some systems and structures in place for people who work – particularly women who work in the unorganized sector – that’s a debate that’s been going on for some time, and it’s because of vested interests we don’t have a conclusion on it.We do need to raise the level of the people who are working there so they don’t have to have the rest of the family also join in to work at similar levels.”

Now most of the people interviewed on Shaili’s site, She the People – they’re strong advocates for women at all levels, and women’s rights are getting more attention in India today. A lot of that’s related to the highly publicized rapes in the country and the sexual molestation women encounter far too often. But Shaili says this debate on men and women – it’s a sensitive one, and it can easily stray into accusations…

“If you say anything that might be obliquely anti-women, not because you want to be anti-women but you have a point that says we need to be balanced on the matter, people will say no, you’re anti-women, and will brush you with the same brush also. I think that kind of convoluted discussion is not really helping most women in India. So an extreme sense of feminism is possibly hurting more women than helping them is what appears to be happening — I mean I’m observer of that debate because I don’t call myself a feminist.”

AM-T: “Now that’s so interesting, why don’t you call yourself a feminist?”

“Because as somebody was suggesting the other day that it’s an extreme definition. I have yet to find a definition of feminism that makes it seem like it’s balanced. And I am a balanced person, I believe in equality. I believe in gender balance. Today I don’t see why people shouldn’t pay attention to parenthood requirements of a father. Why are we only talking about pregnancy leave? So I think that at least in India… maybe if I was in a group in another place that could convince me that this is not how they look at feminism I would probably call myself a feminist depending on how they define feminism…so I am pro women, but I’m not blindly pro women. I believe one has to look at all aspects. Women are human just as much men are, they can well fall in the traps of ego, emotions and so on. So I support women, I am absolutely doggedly working towards the need to highlight the good work done by women…but yeah, I wouldn’t want to slot myself as somebody who is anti-men, as feminists in India see themselves.”

AM-T: “I was going to say, because when you look up the word, the definition is just someone who believes in equality between the sexes. There’s no definition that says feminists are anti-men, but unfortunately that seems to be the connotation the word has taken on over the decades.”

“Now if you define it the way you are I’m definitely a feminist. But if somebody comes up with a definition of their own and I kind of feel that it’s about standing in marches and being absolutely anti anything else, I’m a bit skeptical of all of that. I’m also a big believer in using conversation to take it forward rather than being confrontational. So my understanding of the world around me is more like if you can find a constructive discussion take it forward, rather than not.”

Shaili Chopra is encouraging discussion at SheThePeople.tv. I’m posting one of the latest video interviews from the site under this episode at The Broad Experience dot com. And I wonder how many of you feel the same way about the word feminist? I’d love to get a debate going about that on the Broad Experience Facebook page so head over there to take part. I will start it off. 

Also don’t forget to check out my sponsor for this show – head to Doodle.com to start making scheduling easier.

And finally thank you to my intern of the past year, April Laissle. She is moving on. April’s been so helpful in doing research for the show, logging interview tape, giving me ideas – and of course she starred in the episode on women in their twenties. If you work in public media in the US and you’re looking for a great reporter or producer let me know. I’d love to connect you with April.

That’s the Broad Experience for this time. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.