Latest / Unbehaved / Why Work Is Harder for Women — 5 Hidden Barriers Nobody Talks About

Transcript

Why Work Is Harder for Women — 5 Hidden Barriers Nobody Talks About · Unbehaved

0:01
Hello there, and welcome to Better Than This. This is a show for ambitious humans
0:05
who are tired of the status quo playbook and are looking for something better.
0:08
My name is Megan French Dunbar, and I've spent the last decade exploring what
0:12
it would take to improve work for everyone, to discover whether or not it's
0:17
possible to succeed in business without being forced to sacrifice ourselves,
0:22
without the chronic stress, the burnout,
0:24
guilt, overwhelm, the anxiety.
0:27
Good news, it is. As an author, entrepreneur,
0:31
journalist, and resident instigator, I've interviewed over a thousand extraordinary
0:35
business leaders who've achieved success by throwing the old playbook out the
0:40
window and doing everything differently.
0:42
What's even better is that this new playbook improves your performance,
0:46
your workplace, and your life.
0:48
If you're ready to admit that the way we're working isn't working and are looking
0:53
for something better than this, you're in the right place. Let's get started.
0:58
Hello there, and welcome to Better Than This. My name is Megan French Dunbar,
1:03
and I'm going to be your host today as we talk all about why women are struggling
1:09
in the workplace more than men. Yes, women are struggling in the workplace.
1:13
Research-backed, why women are struggling more than men.
1:17
We're going to get into some of the deeper issues that are potentially hidden
1:21
barriers that many people aren't aware of that are actually holding women back
1:26
and causing them to suffer while they're working.
1:29
The reason we're doing this is because in order to explore solutions,
1:33
we first need to truly understand the problem. Now, you might be asking yourself,
1:38
is this episode only for women?
1:41
Absolutely not. I would argue that this is great information for any leader
1:47
to have, regardless of gender identity, because it makes you more knowledgeable,
1:51
it helps you better understand how to support your team, create a great workplace
1:55
for all, and makes you a more multifaceted leader.
1:59
So let's get started. If you joined me in episode one, we talked about all of
2:04
the ways in which work currently isn't working for everyone,
2:08
regardless of gender identity.
2:09
We covered five key issues as a little recap that are really exacerbating some
2:16
of the mental and physical health issues that people are contending with as
2:19
a result of the contemporary business norms and the current,
2:23
what I call, toxic business playbook.
2:26
The five issues that we reviewed were overly demanding,
2:30
overly stressful, high-pressure workplaces, cost-cutting scenarios that are
2:36
making it so people can't make ends meet and that are putting people's physical
2:40
health and safety in jeopardy, hierarchical command and control cultures.
2:45
Hyper-competitive and super individualistic workplaces, and the winner-takes-all
2:51
paradigm that is brought to us by shareholder supremacy.
2:55
So if you want to dig into all those, You can check out episode one if you haven't done so already.
3:01
What we did was learn the ways in which these five key issues exist.
3:06
Tie directly to the six key causes of burnout, some of the main drivers of mental
3:12
and physical health issues, and the key causes of stress that we know of.
3:16
So that's all in episode one if you want to go check it out.
3:18
But today, we're specifically going to be looking at why women are struggling more than men.
3:24
And this was something that at first for me started a bit as an observation.
3:28
I was contending with significant levels of anxiety, depression,
3:33
and ultimately full-scale burnout as CEO of my first company,
3:37
Conscious Company Media.
3:38
I started opening up about this.
3:41
I'd do a lot of keynote presentations. We hosted our own events,
3:44
and people would come to these events, and I'd be pretty open about my own struggles.
3:49
How I was kind of tying my worth to my work, how I was overly stressed,
3:53
how I was working myself to the bone, how my identity was really wrapped up and being busy.
3:58
And then I would notice on the back end, of course, when we are open and vulnerable,
4:03
people tend to feel a little bit more connected with us.
4:06
There's a reason for that that we will get into in future episodes.
4:08
But people would often come talk to me after I would get off the stage and relay
4:13
to me a bit about their experience talking about burnout or stress or undiagnosed
4:18
medical conditions related to work-related stress.
4:21
And I started to notice that I was hearing more from women than men.
4:26
I would hear stories like this one from Zahra Kassam.
4:30
Zahra is the co-founder and former CEO of Monty Kids, and she currently works
4:36
at the Mushroom Farm in Pescadero, California.
4:39
This was her experience as she was running her business. I was sick.
4:43
There was the mental health stuff, but my body was trying to stop me.
4:47
Things just kept happening. There was a period of several months where I literally
4:52
couldn't use my wrists because it was kind of like a carpal tunnel,
4:57
but it was coming from my shoulders. I couldn't pick up a coffee mug.
4:59
I had to go get my hair blow dried
5:01
because I couldn't wash my own hair for months. And so that happened.
5:05
And then there was like a concussion. And it was just one thing after another
5:11
after another that my body was like, you got to stop.
5:15
And so funny, my concussion doctor, I went to Walnut Creek to this guy who sees
5:20
like all the athletes. He was like, you know, a concussion, like,
5:23
you got to slow down. Like you can't.
5:26
And the reason you're having such bad symptoms is because you're doing this
5:30
company and you're mothering and it's like, it's just too much.
5:32
And I was like, not expecting that.
5:35
Give me some, I don't know, something.
5:38
Just take care of my concussion. So I kept getting all these signals to slow
5:42
down. And I felt like I needed to.
5:44
But I wasn't actively thinking about my identity. I was thinking about who's going to.
5:52
Like, I just, I felt like I was, I couldn't stop.
5:57
I was hearing all of these stories of pretty profound struggle in the workplace.
6:04
And I was noticing that a lot of them were coming from women.
6:07
I didn't know if this was just because perhaps women were more comfortable talking
6:10
about it, or there were, as a result of the network that I had,
6:14
I started looking into the research on this.
6:16
And it turns out that research actually supported my observations.
6:21
Women, in fact, are struggling more at work than men. Women consistently report
6:26
higher levels of stress and burnout than men.
6:29
Working women's well-being is declining faster than working men's,
6:34
regardless of whether or not they have children.
6:36
Research done by Tetiana Podrovska found that women, as they ascend leadership
6:42
ranks, their symptoms of depression increase, while men do the exact opposite.
6:47
As they ascend into higher levels of leadership, their symptoms of depression decrease.
6:53
So what is going on here? It's not, I'll say this right from the top,
6:56
it is not that women are built differently and that we can't handle the stress
7:00
and pressure or that you are not enough to handle the stress and pressure of the workplace.
7:06
That is not what is happening here. What is in fact happening here are there
7:10
numerous issues in the business world that work against women that men do not contend with.
7:18
Why, you may ask? That's what we're going to get into. So the idea of business
7:22
has been around for the last few thousand years.
7:26
When business became a thing, something that was also more recently on the.
7:37
You might have heard this word. It might make you uncomfortable.
7:39
It used to make me very uncomfortable. And I used to feel this way of like,
7:42
patriarchy isn't really a thing.
7:44
Men and women are equal now. I have the same access to opportunities as men, so that's not an issue.
7:50
But then I learned a bit more about patriarchy. I actually understood the definition.
7:56
And started experiencing some of the patriarchal beliefs that pervade the business
8:01
world myself and was like, oh, maybe, maybe it's still, maybe it's still an issue.
8:06
So, patriarchy, put simply, foundational belief is that men are superior to women.
8:13
Societies are culture where men hold more power than women.
8:17
This is true of nearly all present-day societies and has been true for about
8:23
the last 10,000 years or so.
8:25
If you want to go down the rabbit hole on this, I highly recommend Elise Lonan's
8:30
book On Our Best Behavior.
8:32
The first chapter is all about the origins of patriarchy and how this all came
8:35
to be, which as I was reading it, there was a part of me that was like,
8:39
wait, haven't men always dominated women? Isn't this kind of the natural order of things?
8:45
In fact, it isn't. The history of our species before about 10,000 years ago
8:50
when we aggregated in cities, there's a lot on this in the other book,
8:54
I won't go too far into it.
8:55
But before this, we were nomadic tribes, hunter-gatherers, and most research
9:00
supports the concept that men and women were considered equal.
9:04
And then a number of things happened, monotheistic religions,
9:08
yada yada, bing, bing, bong.
9:09
And all of a sudden we have societies where men are considered superior and
9:14
should have all the power.
9:16
They're put in leadership positions and women are not only seen as inferior,
9:21
but they're starting to be seen as their role is to support men by staying home, bearing children,
9:27
doing domestic labor, which also some of these beliefs turn into things like
9:33
women should be docile and subservient, kind, nurturing, compassionate,
9:37
meek, all of the things so that they obey men in their lives.
9:42
These patriarchal beliefs were already firmly entrenched in most societies worldwide
9:49
by the time business became a thing.
9:52
And so business, as it's evolved of the last many few thousand years,
9:57
has always been under the lens of patriarchy.
10:01
Nearly all present-day societies are in fact considered patriarchal societies.
10:08
Don't believe me, one of the scholars on this says one of the quickest ways
10:12
to determine whether or not you live in a patriarchal society is to question,
10:16
are the norms in your society that upon a heterosexual marriage,
10:21
the woman takes the man's last name?
10:22
Or how odd would it be if a man and a woman got married and a man took the woman's last name?
10:28
Would that be considered atypical, against the norm? Would that man be questioned?
10:34
Yes, in nearly every single society worldwide present day.
10:39
Yes, the extremity in which the patriarchal beliefs and the oppression of women
10:45
varies widely based on where you live.
10:48
And that doesn't mean that societies aren't still patriarchal worldwide,
10:52
with the exception of a few matriarchal societies. And I think there's like four.
10:58
We're not going to go too far down that rabbit hole, I think, if I can rein myself in.
11:05
So patriarchy, business, yes, back on track.
11:08
So here's what happened as a result of patriarchy and business growing up together
11:14
over the last few thousand years.
11:16
Men have almost always been designing the way that business has evolved from
11:22
the creation of contract and workers'
11:24
rights and all the norms and the ways in which we practice business that has
11:29
almost all exclusively been established by men. Yes, there were exceptions.
11:35
In the last few hundred years, there were women who owned things like brothels
11:40
and boarding houses, the things that were considered below men,
11:43
but still had to exist, had to brothels.
11:46
Wink, wink. Yep, they definitely had to exist.
11:49
But so women were running some of these businesses, and it isn't until the 1970s,
11:54
50-plus years ago that women began entering the workforce in earnest beyond
12:01
kind of basic entry-level roles.
12:04
There's maybe this beginning to see women ascending into more leadership level
12:09
ranks and the belief that maybe women could do some of the roles that men traditionally do.
12:15
We've made a ton of progress over the last 50 years and
12:21
And men are still in nearly every single leadership role worldwide that is on a major scale.
12:30
95% of CEOs worldwide are men. Yes, that was 95%.
12:36
Women hold less than 30% of C-suite roles worldwide.
12:42
22% of those held by white women, 6% held by women of color,
12:47
and less than 30% of senior management roles. 10 largest companies in the world,
12:51
all led by men. You can see where I'm going with this.
12:54
Men are still at the helm in most seats worldwide in the contemporary business world.
13:00
Why does this matter? I am not saying that men are inherently evil and because
13:06
they've been in charge, business is broken.
13:09
I'll say that again for those of you in the back who just really want to be pissed at me.
13:13
I am not saying that men have broken business because men suck.
13:19
Not saying that. What I am saying is that men who have been societally conditioned
13:27
with patriarchal beliefs about women's inferiority and, more recently,
13:33
toxic masculinity about what it means to be a man, these beliefs are held by
13:40
many of the men who are in positions of power, and as a result,
13:44
they now pervade the business world.
13:47
We're going to talk about five key ways in which they actually show up in the
13:53
business world and are holding women back.
13:55
These might be things that you currently contend with, are very aware of.
14:00
Some of these might be things that you are not as conscious of.
14:02
We're going to go through all five of them so you can understand how these are
14:05
probably impacting your day-to-day work.
14:09
The first and most obvious, gender discrimination.
14:12
After I did my MBA, I got a job. I was so excited about it, and I was on the
14:19
leadership team. It was an organization that I had really looked up to the founder
14:24
and some of his pioneering work.
14:26
And I get in there and a few months in, I'm the director of development and
14:31
they send me our annual budget and I'm going through the line items trying to
14:35
figure out kind of the budget for this big annual event that I'm going to be hosting. And.
14:40
On the spreadsheet, there are, of course, the team's salaries,
14:45
and I am a curious, normal human being, so I took a look.
14:49
I mean, they didn't tell me not to, and I was a little surprised when I saw
14:55
that one of the male associates, who was two levels below me,
15:00
was making quite a bit more money than me on the leadership team.
15:04
And I was like, oh, this is, I feel frustrated.
15:08
And then I looked at all of the women's salaries on the team,
15:11
and it would appear that all of the women made quite a bit less than the men on the team.
15:16
And this was really one of the first times I had had exposure to the gender pay gap,
15:23
which is probably one of the more obvious things in the business world that
15:28
most women are aware of that is a thing literally being paid less for the same, or in this case,
15:36
a higher level of work than men.
15:39
This is, of course, true for all women, 84 cents on the dollar for white women, which is the best.
15:46
Women of color have it much worse and are paid much less money for the same
15:51
work. But wait, there's more.
15:53
So, yes, the pay gap is an issue, but gender discrimination continues to pervade
15:58
many other elements of the business world.
16:00
The United Nations just recently did their little survey and they found that
16:04
9 out of 10 people worldwide still hold fundamental biases against women.
16:11
90% of humans holding fundamental biases against women and how this shows up
16:16
in the workplace. We have 40% of women who've experienced direct gender-based
16:21
discrimination at work. Women are.
16:24
Automatically judged as being less competent and held to higher standards.
16:30
In the tech world, a recent survey found 94% of people feel that women are held
16:36
to higher standards than men for the same work.
16:40
Women are more likely to have their work questioned or have someone else take credit for their ideas.
16:45
I remember one of the interviews I was doing for the book, Kat Perez,
16:49
who is the co-founder of FAM, was telling me about a previous role that she had back in the day.
16:53
The male CEO, any work turned in by a woman, he automatically doubted and questioned
16:59
and had the men on the team validate the findings of the women.
17:03
But any work submitted by men, including male interns, was just automatically accepted.
17:11
Of course, they know what they're doing. They're a man. So I don't know if you've
17:14
experienced anything like this in any of your workplaces. It doesn't feel particularly good.
17:19
Women are also not considered leadership material.
17:23
Globally, roughly 40% of people feel that men make better leaders based on gender identity alone.
17:31
Female candidates for leadership roles are consistently judged as having less
17:35
leadership potential than men, making them 14% less likely to be promoted.
17:42
There's the think leader, think male phenomenon, where if you are asked,
17:48
think of a leader or think of a manager,
17:51
more than 70% of people worldwide will automatically think of a man,
17:55
most often a white man, because that's just how we are conditioned to think of what a leader is.
18:01
We rarely think of a woman automatically when we think of leadership.
18:06
There's kind of this fundamental bias that's just ingrained in many of us because
18:11
of the societal conditioning.
18:12
This also shows up as women just automatically being considered as a more junior level person.
18:18
Women are twice as likely to be mistaken for someone more junior.
18:24
I still remember multiple years ago, I went to a business conference with the
18:28
chairman of the parent company that I sold my first company to.
18:32
So I was the CEO of a wholly owned subsidiary brand.
18:35
He was the chairman of the board of this larger parent company.
18:38
And as a CEO with CEO on my name tag, more than a dozen times I had men ask
18:45
me while I was standing next to the chairman if I was his assistant.
18:50
Women are also judged more harshly. More than 75% of high-performing women receive
18:56
negative feedback from their superiors compared to,
19:00
wait for it, just guess, like how many, what percentage of men do you think
19:04
are receiving negative feedback from their superiors, the high-achieving men? Two.
19:09
Did you guess two? Yeah, it's probably even less than you thought.
19:12
Two percent of men are receiving negative feedback from their superiors.
19:16
Women tend to be judged more harshly. Women in the workplace are essentially
19:21
considered incompetent until proven overly capable.
19:25
We have to prove ourselves constantly. And even when we do, our work is ignored.
19:31
Our ideas are dismissed.
19:33
You're sitting down at a table of men. No one's making eye contact with you.
19:37
No one's asking for your opinion. There's these subtle microaggressions that
19:41
we're constantly dealing with, and also just blatant gender discrimination as well.
19:45
I don't know how this aligns with your experience, but it doesn't feel particularly
19:50
great to be discriminated against solely based on gender identity.
19:54
And if you might remember from episode one, discrimination is one of the key
19:59
factors that often leads to people developing mental health disorders.
20:04
That was issue number one. Issue number two. It's what I call expected gender
20:09
roles and double standards.
20:11
So when I was thinking about this one, one of the stories that came to mind
20:16
when we first sold our company, Conscious Company Media, we sold it to this
20:21
larger company in New York.
20:23
And I think as a young woman founder, I was proud of myself for what I had done, sure.
20:30
And I still had this idea that someone else,
20:34
some other leader would have been able to come into my organization and within
20:39
a few weeks, like whip it into shape and identify tons of revenue opportunities
20:44
and that I wasn't really like a real leader yet.
20:49
So when we sold to this parent company, they had a lot of highly experienced
20:55
former finance people, like people that I was like, oh, these people are just
20:58
going to, well, they're going to save us.
21:01
And I really wanted to impress them.
21:06
Like, I wanted them to believe that I was a real business person.
21:11
Like, even just talking about it, I'm like, geez, Louise. So the parent company
21:15
owned four organizations total, us being one of them. And we did kind of our
21:19
first summit with the CEOs of all of the subsidiary brands. All four of us happen to be women.
21:25
And we get into this workshop and we're going through kind of figuring out how
21:29
we can build our revenue lines together and support each other.
21:33
And like, here's our plans for the next two years. And how are they going to align with your events?
21:37
And we're figuring all this out and trying to, you know, have very strategic
21:42
conversations around running a business.
21:44
And one of the men from the parent company stops us in the middle of a conversation
21:50
and just says, I just, I feel like you're all being so emotional.
21:56
You're all just getting so emotional that we can't think about this rationally.
22:00
And I'm like looking around like, like, like, this isn't this isn't even like,
22:06
this is not me emotional.
22:08
This is me just like having a basic conversation about business and feeling
22:14
passionate about it and probably excited.
22:17
And I'm a total business nerd.
22:20
I love talking about this stuff. But yeah, I'm probably very engaged and probably
22:23
there's a lot of, you know, you're going to see if you're watching any video
22:28
of me, you see there's a lot of hand motions.
22:30
Like, I'm a very engaged person when I'm having a conversation.
22:34
And he just reads this as all of us being highly emotional. And when he drops
22:38
this word, emotional, I felt like my stomach sank out of my butt.
22:45
Like, I was so embarrassed.
22:49
Like I said, I really had wanted to impress these people.
22:52
And to be labeled on the first day as being emotional when we're all together,
22:58
I went home and couldn't stop thinking about what did I say?
23:03
Was there something specific I did? Questioning myself.
23:07
And so the next day, I showed up with my stoic mask on.
23:12
I am not going to show any emotion in this session.
23:16
I am just going to be robotic and answer the questions and I'm not even going to smile.
23:20
And then later that day, of course, the leader comes and asks me,
23:24
what's wrong? What's wrong with you? Are you upset?
23:26
And I'm like, I don't like, I can't win here. Ever experienced something like this?
23:30
Yeah, this is the wonderful lose-lose that many women are in in the workplace.
23:37
The expected gender roles and double standards that we are contending with.
23:41
When I talk about the lose-lose, it is, we still have the patriarchal belief
23:47
system that has societally conditioned young women,
23:51
often starting from a young age, that we are to be quiet and agreeable,
23:56
that we're to smile and be kind and be meek and docile, and everything is just nurturing.
24:03
We're supposed to be compassionate. We're given our baby dolls and taught how
24:07
to cook and bake, and everything is about molding you to be a very agreeable,
24:12
subservient, delightful person.
24:14
Pretty wife and delightful mother, right?
24:18
And then you get into the workplace, and holy macaroni, since it has for thousands
24:24
of years been led by men who are also, since young age, being conditioned.
24:30
To have masculine, quote, masculine traits, when in fact all of these traits,
24:35
the feminine and the masculine, are in fact available to us all as humans.
24:40
But we decided, since the whole patriarchy situation to just take a buzzsaw,
24:45
cut them down the middle.
24:46
Here's the masculine traits. Here's the feminine traits.
24:49
And young men, boys don't cry. They are to be tough. They're to be competitive,
24:54
aggressive, dominant, strong, everything.
24:57
All the masculine traits, they are conditioned to embody those from a young
25:00
age and often even made fun of if they display anything feminine or sweet or
25:08
gentle or nice or anything.
25:10
So these are the same men then that are still in positions of power and are
25:14
deciding how we do business.
25:15
And so when we have the whole think leader, think male, or think manager,
25:20
think male, it is either you think of a man or you think of masculine traits
25:25
because as what we've become accustomed that leadership means masculine.
25:30
The business world rewards people for displaying quote masculine traits because
25:35
that's what most of the men have been bringing to the table for the last few thousand years.
25:40
So when women get in there, we're told that we also, we need to do,
25:44
you need to pretend like you're the man and you need to wear the power suit.
25:48
You need to assimilate and show that you can hang with the boys.
25:52
You're not to show emotions. You need to be strong, aggressive,
25:55
competitive, dominant. You need to be masculine.
25:58
And then when a woman does this, what happens?
26:03
I'm sure you've experienced something like this. Oh, what's wrong?
26:07
You're too loud. You're too emotional. You're too bitchy. You're too bossy. You're too angry.
26:12
You're just too much. We don't like that version of you.
26:17
The woman who's doing the whole masculine thing, that makes me uncomfortable.
26:22
Could you go back to being the like meek, subservient woman,
26:25
even though you can't succeed either way?
26:28
These are the double standards that women are contending with.
26:32
This is why we're labeled as emotional, if this has ever happened to you.
26:36
Roughly 90% of high-performing women receive feedback about their personalities
26:42
compared to 12% of high-performing men.
26:47
Women are also twice as likely to have someone comment on their emotional state
26:51
and are two and a half times more likely than men to have someone comment on
26:55
their appearance because they need to be pretty.
26:58
Everything is about appearance and us being cute and sweet and delightful and
27:03
wonderful little women.
27:05
But we can't.
27:07
Actually win like that, so then we try, you know, doing the whole,
27:11
what are some of the other, like, masculine leadership traits, and we aren't likable.
27:16
Social psychologist Dr. Sidney Hurston Dupree's research into this found that
27:21
when women use language that is powerful and dominant, others view them as being cold and less likable.
27:29
Patriarchy! While these findings apply to all women, unsurprisingly,
27:35
they found the effects were strongest for Black and Latina women.
27:39
Women of color continually being at the receiving end of additional microaggressions, judgment,
27:48
everything that they're doing is under this microscope of having to prove themselves
27:53
more and more than anyone else in the workplace.
27:57
And women, even when we do ascend the ranks and achieve success at work,
28:04
research continually shows that we are less likable and penalized for violating
28:11
traditional gender norms.
28:14
Seeing a woman in a position of power makes many people uncomfortable because
28:20
of patriarchy. We are conditioned.
28:22
We're not used to it. There's also continued expected gender roles outside of work.
28:29
When I think about this, I think about the fact that every single email with
28:33
a birthday invitation from one of
28:35
my children's friends or classmates is immediately sent to me. The mother.
28:41
Women are the kind of social chairs of the house, expected to do many of the
28:46
continued domestic work in the house and the emotional labor,
28:50
the social invitations,
28:52
the PTAs, organizing social events, taking care of friends and family,
28:56
groceries, cooking, all of those things.
28:59
Author Eve Rodsky in her book Fair Play found even in the most equitable.
29:06
Heterosexual households, women still take on a disproportionate and inequitable
29:11
amount of household responsibilities and emotional labor as compared to their male partners.
29:17
We have more work outside of work that we have to do.
29:21
We have to prove ourselves more in the workplace.
29:25
And so there's just this constant feeling that we have to do more. We're never enough.
29:30
We are constantly being judged on both sides of the equation.
29:34
The societal expectations on women outside of work have not evolved to support
29:39
women being successful in the workplace, and it makes us feel like garbage.
29:45
Fantastic. There's also the whole, like, barriers for working parents where...
29:50
Many workplaces and many contemporary business norms don't support working parents.
29:56
There's working hours that don't align with the school day hours.
30:00
There are rigid, inflexible working policies that parents can't leave at certain
30:06
times of the day or they have to be in the office. There's limited sick leave.
30:10
There's all sorts of these barriers that are built from the place of the expectation
30:15
that the woman is staying at home,
30:18
taking care of the children and everything at home, and the man is at work and
30:21
that he does not have to worry about being a parent because it's being taken care of for him.
30:27
And these barriers continue to persist in many workplaces worldwide where if
30:34
two working parents are working full-time, very hard for them to succeed without
30:40
external help in some way.
30:42
So there's continued barriers for parents, expected gender norms inside and
30:46
outside of the workplace and this double standards with women's behavior.
30:51
I don't know if this aligns with your experience. If you've felt any of these
30:54
gendered expectations.
30:56
Either inside or outside of the workplace or gone on a work trip or been somewhere
31:00
and had someone ask you about who's taking care of your kids,
31:03
where they're definitely not asking your male colleague the same thing or being
31:07
guilt tripped for traveling and leaving your children home or been given negative
31:12
feedback about your personality.
31:13
I still remember our former nanny was telling me about a previous role she had
31:18
where she had been asked to come in for feedback from her superior.
31:22
It was not a typical performance review time and she was a little bit nervous about it.
31:27
She comes into his office and he says, listen, you are doing,
31:31
you're exceeding above and beyond on kind of all of the expectations that we
31:36
have for you, but I have some feedback for you.
31:39
That I think that you need now because I don't think it can wait for your performance
31:43
review. And she's like, oh, yeah, of course. Like, I'm all ears.
31:47
I think you need to smile more. People say that they feel intimidated around
31:52
you because you don't smile all the time.
31:55
She's like, mm-hmm, yeah, great, fantastic.
31:59
I'm sure that he's telling the male colleagues here that they need to smile more. Not happening.
32:08
Anyway, I digress. Issue number three.
32:12
So my beloved friend, I'm not going to use her name because I'm sure she doesn't
32:17
want me to be, you know, identifying her, but she works for a construction company.
32:23
They have these kind of obscure job sites all over in this remote area,
32:27
and she's driven to one and then has to,
32:30
she's on her cycle and has to drive 25 minutes to go find a bathroom at a gas
32:38
station that she can use because on site,
32:41
on the construction site, they only have one porter potty and she's on her cycle
32:46
and she's the only woman there and she does not want to have to,
32:52
take care of her bodily needs in the porter potty where all of her male colleagues
32:56
can see the evidence of said bodily functions.
33:01
So she has to consistently, when she's on her cycle, drive to gas stations to
33:06
find a bathroom and then come back.
33:09
Because of course, this need is not taken into account.
33:12
As she was telling me about this, I was like, oh yes, I still remember pumping
33:17
breast milk next to a public toilet at a company in New York that didn't have space for me to pump.
33:26
When I was four months postpartum.
33:29
Just, you know, casually pumping breast milk next to a disgusting public toilet.
33:34
Some of these things are, in fact, what I call male-centered workplaces or professional
33:40
environments where they do not take into account women's bodily needs and they are built for men.
33:47
One of the more obvious examples of this is how often have you headed in summer,
33:54
middle of summer, head into an office space, and you see every single woman
33:58
in there wearing a shawl or a coat or wrapped in like a sleeping blanket because
34:04
she's freezing to death because the air conditioning is being pumped to 58 degrees.
34:10
Research shows that 5 to 10 degrees higher temperature is where most women are comfortable than men.
34:16
But the standard office temperature, the formula for that,
34:21
is based on the metabolic rate of a 40-year-old man's body, even though the
34:27
standard offers temperature that is commonly recommended by OSHA is 75.
34:32
And when I was saying, oh, it's annoying, but it's not that big of a deal,
34:36
then I looked at research that showed, there was a study that showed reducing
34:41
the temperature from 77 degrees to 72 degrees in a room of women cut their productivity
34:49
in half and doubled their mistakes.
34:53
It's not like a, oh, it's kind of annoying. It's actually impacting the quality
34:59
of your work and your ability to focus when an entire workspace or a professional
35:03
environment is being built around men's needs.
35:06
The other kind of subtle, not so subtle message that it continually reminds
35:11
you as a woman is you belong here.
35:13
You're the exception. This space was built for men.
35:17
We're letting you be here. Please don't complain or ask for any special treatment or accommodations.
35:24
Because you're lucky enough that we allowed you in here, right?
35:28
If you might remember, a sense of belonging is a key human need that we all have,
35:34
and having any sort of sense of exclusion or othering directly results to higher
35:41
rates of depression and anxiety.
35:43
It doesn't feel good to constantly be reminded that you are the outsider.
35:49
Issue number four, objectification, sexual harassment.
35:53
This one, again, fairly obvious to most women because, you know,
35:58
most of us have experienced this.
36:00
And it genuinely impacts our ability to thrive at work or in our career.
36:06
I still remember we were invited as a female-founded team to come to a pitch
36:13
event that was supporting women.
36:15
We did a dinner and then some of the companies were supposed to stand up and
36:18
tell a little bit about what they were looking for, what their company was,
36:21
and hopefully a bit of an investor, founder, meet and greet.
36:25
And I'm seated next to this man. I've met him before, but only in passing.
36:29
And I sit down next to him.
36:32
He asks me what I like to do. I go through all the typical things,
36:35
snowboarding, hiking, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, what do you like to do?
36:39
Excuse. There's a curse word coming up. He looks at me straight in the eyes.
36:43
He looks at me and he goes, I like to fuck.
36:46
Do you? And I'm like, I don't even know. What do you say to that?
36:53
And I know that this man,
36:56
is best friends with one of the investors that I have met with and that I am
36:59
trying to get to invest in my company. So all of a sudden there's power.
37:03
I don't want to say anything. I don't want to make this uncomfortable.
37:06
I don't want to call him out in the middle of this dinner and make a scene as,
37:11
again, the emotional woman who's overreacting about a comment that a man is
37:15
saying when I'm sure if I said anything, I'm just joking.
37:18
Oh, yeah, can't take a joke. Like, I don't even know what he would have said.
37:21
So anyways, I just am like, oh, I just like look at him and like,
37:25
what are you going to have for dinner?
37:27
And then I stand up to do my pitch, you know, five minutes later.
37:31
I'm absolutely rattled. And at this point, I'm starting to look around the room
37:35
and look at all of these other investors here and think about like,
37:39
are they just, are they all the same?
37:41
Are they all here to like prey on the female founders?
37:45
I don't even know. I'm so stressed. I stand up. I completely bungle the pitch.
37:52
Unsurprisingly, Unfortunately, zero investors come and express interest in our
37:56
company because I've just like word vomited this stupid pitch up there because
38:00
I'm so nervous and I'm so angry about what this man has just said.
38:04
Like, how many times has this happened or something like this?
38:08
And this isn't even, you know, this is just a bad comment. Women are being sexually
38:12
harassed. They are being sexually assaulted.
38:15
We are being victimized, objectified in the workplace.
38:18
Present statistics say 54 to 81% of women have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace.
38:26
Unfortunately, more than half of women aren't reporting that,
38:30
though, because they are worried about having potential job loss,
38:34
being labeled as a troublemaker, or having their concern not taken seriously.
38:39
Roughly 50% of women report that sexual harassment has hurt their career in
38:45
some way, causing them to quit a job, lower rates of job satisfaction or engagement,
38:51
or suffer from increased financial stress.
38:54
When I think about sexual harassment hurting my career,
38:56
I can point to this example where I'm like, yeah, I just destroyed an entire
39:01
pitch event because of one comment, and this is one of many stories that I have, as do most women.
39:10
I imagine you or someone that you know has a terrible story.
39:16
Constant low-level anxiety and fear that women experience that,
39:20
you know, you step into an elevator with a strange man, or you notice a man
39:24
is following you down a dark street, or you're all of a sudden alone in a room
39:28
with someone that you don't know.
39:29
Author Dr. Valerie Raine in her book calls this collective trauma.
39:33
It says women share the collective understanding and experience of how traumatic
39:39
it is to be concerned and fearful for your safety, for your bodily autonomy, for the concern about,
39:48
what men can get away with and often do when they feel like they have the right to women's bodies.
39:56
So, issue number five, last one.
40:00
I did, I mentioned earlier about toxic masculinity.
40:04
So, I grew up absolutely idolizing my older brother.
40:08
He's four years older than me to the day, and because he's my only sibling,
40:14
I wanted to prove to my brother and his friends that I was cool and I could hang.
40:21
So what this meant for me, I was tough. I competed in everything.
40:25
I played basketball and soccer.
40:27
I was very good at sports. My brother and I physically fought a lot and I really
40:32
liked to show how great of a fighter I was. I was strong. I was tough.
40:36
I was a total tomboy. Don't cry. Don't ask for help.
40:39
Never show that I'm weak. I would make fun of girly girls or anything feminine.
40:44
For some reason, I really wanted to be a stockbroker. It's like,
40:47
oh, they are powerful and they have money.
40:49
I don't even know what they do. I just know that they make money and people
40:51
like them because they're masculine and I wanted to do that.
40:55
What I didn't realize at the time was that a lot of the behaviors that I was
40:59
attempting to show, manly behaviors are toxic masculine behaviors.
41:07
When I became leader of my company, I tried not to show emotions or weakness. I never asked for help.
41:12
That was very much how this showed up later in life as an adult.
41:15
I really wanted to be infallible. I was tough. I don't know.
41:21
Put my game face on. I was competitive. And one of the reasons that I brought
41:25
these into the workspace is because these are, in fact, widely accepted and,
41:30
in fact, encouraged in the workplace.
41:33
When we look at what toxic masculinity actually is, and this is from the Anxiety
41:38
and Depression Association of America, there are three key tenets of toxic masculinity.
41:44
The first being toughness and authority.
41:47
This is very much that to be a man, to be manly, men need to be dominant and
41:53
tough and controlling. They are to be obeyed.
41:55
That showing emotion besides anger and pride, but showing any other emotion is a sign of weakness.
42:01
Men need to be mentally tough, physically tough. Violence demonstrates how strong
42:06
you are and asking for help is weakness. So this is toughness and authority.
42:11
Element number two is anti-femininity. This is hostility, objectification,
42:16
and violence against women.
42:17
The third element is around power and success, that your self-worth and the
42:22
respect of others is gained by accruing money, power, status,
42:27
wealth. Everything is a competition.
42:30
Winner takes all. So we have toughness, anti-femininity, and power and success are the three elements.
42:37
When I really dug into this and then thought about the business world,
42:42
I was like, wait a second, I think connect this dot and this dot and wait a
42:47
second, I see like a really interesting picture here.
42:51
These beliefs directly relate to many of our present day contemporary business norms.
42:58
Want to like do a little side by side comparison? Let's do it.
43:02
So your sense of worth is defined by power and money.
43:05
How do, how are businesses judged? What is the success metric for business?
43:12
Profit. Profit and power. The largest organizations are the most profitable.
43:17
Everything is about power, influence, and money. And individual success,
43:21
many people base their individual success in how well they're doing in their
43:26
career solely on their salary, their title, their influence,
43:30
their power, their money, their wealth.
43:32
Number two, this strength defined by aggression, domination, toughness.
43:39
We see leaders who come to the plate and they think that effective management
43:44
means being aggressive, dominant, competitive.
43:49
They're using fear-based tactics to keep people in line.
43:52
There's all of this inherent competition that's baked into organizations themselves
43:58
with individuals competing against each other for promotions or titles,
44:03
people actively sabotaging their coworkers so that they can climb the ladder faster than them.
44:07
There's also competition crushing, dominating industry competitors.
44:13
Any other organization that is in your industry is considered a competitor that
44:17
you are supposed to crush, take down.
44:19
You're supposed to win the competition, whatever the competition is.
44:22
So everything is about strength, domination, competition, aggression.
44:26
We also see this element of the dominant leader having all the power, making the decisions.
44:32
We have command and control culture, hierarchy, where there's one leader at
44:37
the top who's making decisions for everyone and everyone underneath the leader
44:40
is to obey. We see leaders who feel like they have to have all of the answers.
44:45
They never ask for help. They never admit when they're wrong because,
44:49
of course, that's a sign of weakness.
44:50
They have to have as large of an ego as possible to be this proud peacock,
44:54
and they feel like they are solely responsible for the success of a company
44:58
without giving any consideration or acknowledging the people who have helped them get there.
45:04
We see anti-femininity as well in the workplace, not only gender discrimination,
45:10
which we've already discussed, but also emotions not being welcome in the workplace, right?
45:14
You're supposed to keep your personal life at home. You're not supposed to show emotions.
45:18
Any feminine traits such as being compassionate or empathetic or nurturing, those are not welcome.
45:25
Valued in the workplace. They are sometimes seen as being inappropriate in the
45:29
workplace, or more recently, they are considered soft skills that like might
45:34
have some value, but really let's call them soft skills because they're still
45:38
inferior to anything masculine.
45:40
We also see you must win, win at all costs.
45:44
If you lose, you are weak and winner takes all. This of course is the shareholder supremacy paradigm.
45:52
Winner takes all, the most profitable companies. That is the entire goal of
45:56
the game, short-term profit maximization.
45:59
And once that happens, and once a company is successful, all of the winnings,
46:03
all of the spoils, all the go to the victor, who are in this case, the shareholders.
46:08
So there's this toughness, competition, anti-femininity, power,
46:13
success, everybody must win.
46:15
These are all inherently baked into the way in which that we are currently working.
46:22
We went to a hedge fund a few years ago, and did their women's executive forum.
46:26
And I talked a little bit about this side-by-side comparison of toxic masculine
46:30
beliefs versus some of the ways in which we're currently doing business.
46:33
And I had tons of women after this presentation come up to me,
46:37
especially like in the hedge fund world, how uncomfortable it was making them
46:41
that they'd never realized how toxically masculine their workplaces were.
46:46
I'm wondering if you've seen this in your career, any of these issues showing up for you.
46:50
As soon as I started to acknowledge these and knew what they were,
46:54
I started seeing them everywhere.
46:56
So we take all of these issues, perhaps you might be starting to see like, oh yes.
47:01
Women have their work cut out for them. This isn't the easiest road to follow.
47:07
Women are constantly feeling like they have to prove themselves.
47:10
They're being judged more critically. They have to go above and beyond.
47:13
They have to be perfect and infallible.
47:15
They have to do so while taking on extra work outside of the workplace.
47:19
Otherwise, they'll be judged outside of the workplace as well.
47:22
They're doing this while also feeling like they can't ask for help or accept
47:27
help because then they'll be weak.
47:28
They are feeling they never truly belong, like they're never accepted,
47:32
that they are constantly being discriminated against, harassed,
47:36
objectified, potentially even being forced into positions where they're sacrificing
47:41
or compromising on their values.
47:42
And oh, yeah, don't worry about it. She's feeling like she constantly has to
47:46
change herself because no way in which she's showing up is actually good enough for anyone.
47:50
She's constantly worried about judgment, how other people are perceiving her
47:54
and social acceptability. It's great, right? It's just fantastic.
48:00
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But if you complain about any of this, what's going to happen?
48:06
You're going to be either gaslit and told that you're overreacting and that
48:10
this isn't really an issue or that you are asking for special accommodations
48:14
for being a woman or people aren't even going to believe your experience in
48:17
the first place and say that you're overreacting or that people were just joking.
48:22
You're just going to be kind of shamed and embarrassed and ignored,
48:26
and no one's ever really going to do anything about it.
48:30
So, it's good stuff. This...
48:34
Is, of course, much of the foundations of what I call the old playbook.
48:38
There are better ways to do this. There are many, many business leaders around
48:42
the world who have figured out ways to build organizations that don't have all
48:47
of these issues inherent within them.
48:50
We will dive deep into many of these practices, workplace and management structures,
48:56
tips, insights, all this stuff.
48:57
We're going to get really deep into this in future episodes because today I've
49:02
talked for so long, we're not going to do it today.
49:04
But I'm hoping today that at least you can take away three key insights from this conversation.
49:11
Number one, just because it's the norm doesn't mean that it's right.
49:14
I'll say that again, just because it's the norm doesn't mean that it's right.
49:20
Toxically masculine beliefs are in fact toxic, patriarchal beliefs that we see
49:24
within the workplace, also very harmful to many people within organizations.
49:30
When you have the opportunity, you have microagency.
49:35
You can change your behavior, especially if you're a team lead or in a management
49:38
position or in a decision-making role.
49:41
You can start leaning into doing things like asking for help,
49:44
leaning into some of your, quote, more feminine traits, which we'll do another
49:48
entire podcast episode on all of the ways in which there are healthy masculine
49:53
and feminine traits that make super effective leadership qualities.
49:56
Stop disregarding things as soft skills, share in your success with others,
50:01
focus on rising tide lifting all boats, don't dive into the competition driven mindset.
50:05
There's so many ways for you to subtly begin to push back against the ways in
50:11
which we have just accepted that we do business.
50:13
We don't have to do business this way. Insight number two, stop,
50:18
And just begin noticing if you're holding women in your workplace to higher standards.
50:25
Notice if a young woman comes into the room and you automatically assume she's in a junior position.
50:31
Many of us have been conditioned like this. It is not something to be ashamed about.
50:35
It is something to begin noticing, labeling, and begin changing the assumptions,
50:41
the judgments, all the ways in which these belief systems have infiltrated any beliefs that you have.
50:47
Notice them, name them, work on letting them go. Insight number three.
50:51
This is my favorite one. If you're a woman listening to this,
50:55
at least this was my experience. I felt so damn powerful after I learned all of this stuff.
51:03
This felt so validating to me. I felt like I had been swimming this entire time,
51:10
competing, doing my best, barely keeping my head in my water.
51:14
And I looked back and realize that someone had tied a damn weight to my ankle
51:18
that I didn't even know was there.
51:20
And it made me understand that, holy crap, the fact that I have been swimming.
51:27
Keeping myself afloat, doing pretty well, successful in the business world,
51:32
ran my own company, done my own thing.
51:34
The fact that I have been able to succeed with the weight tied on my damn ankle is incredible.
51:42
Same is true for you. We are all existing in a system that is harming every
51:48
single person in the system, regardless of gender identity.
51:51
And if you're a woman, you're doing it with these additional barriers as well.
51:57
If you are a woman with an additional marginalized identity,
52:01
you have even more barriers.
52:04
When I talk to women who are succeeding in the workplace, I'm just like,
52:07
do you even understand what a miracle you are?
52:10
It is against all odds that we are doing this and we are crushing it.
52:14
And you are an absolute badass if you are doing, if you are even waking up and
52:21
conscious going into the business world at this point.
52:25
Whew. Just going to end there.
52:30
It's like a soapbox on top of a soapbox with a little pep talk added in.
52:35
And I'm not going to apologize for it. Thanks.
52:43
Thanks for hanging in there with me. And I hope some of these insights potentially are helpful.
52:49
Like I said, we're going to get into the solutions in future episodes.
52:53
It is not all gloom and doom.
52:56
There's tons of hope on the horizon. There are many ways to make work better
53:02
so that we don't have to struggle like this and contend with these issues into
53:08
the foreseeable future.
53:09
Until next time, thank you.
53:13
Thanks again for listening to Better Than This. As a reminder,
53:17
you can always find show notes and any corresponding resources for the show
53:21
on the show's website at meganfrenchdunbar.com backslash better than this.
53:26
And if today's episode resonated with you, I would be very grateful if you could
53:31
leave a review or a rating on whichever podcast platform you're listening to
53:34
the show on, or share the episode with a friend who you think would appreciate it.
53:38
You can also subscribe to my sub stack for weekly insights and tools to support
53:42
your growth along the way.
53:44
Until next time, keep challenging the status quo so we can, wait for it,
53:50
build something better than this.
53:54
Take care.