The Fix with Michelle King: Recent Episodes
Welton Media Limited
The Fix is a podcast that shares stories of women and men who are taking action and innovating to advance equality in the workplace and beyond.
Aside from sleep, work is where we spend most of our waking hours over our lifetime. How we experience work is how we experience a considerable amount of our lives, which is why managing the meaning we derive from work is essential to our overall life satisfaction. Knowing how your workplace works is how we can begin to make it work for everyone.
Most of us want more meaning at work and badly. A 2018 study by BetterUp surveyed 2285 American professionals and found that 9 out of 10 employees, regardless of their job level, tasks or salary, are willing to trade a percentage of their lifetime earnings for greater meaning at work. Moreover, participants were willing to forego 23% of their total future earnings (almost as much as people spend on housing) to have a job that gave them meaning!
On this weeks episode I am interviewing my friend and New York Times bestselling author Eve Rodsky on how we can find greater meaning in life and work.
Eve Rodsky
Find Your Unicorn Space
How Work Works
The degree to which we feel like we belong at work depends on the nature of our relationship with our workplace. We don’t often think about our job as a relationship, but it is, at least in a sense. Your job is a reciprocal relationship. You exchange your time, energy, and expertise for money, advancement, and fulfilment at a basic level. The exchange can happen only if both parties trust each other, which is why I refer to the relationship between workplaces and employees as a trust exchange.
The challenge we have today is that so many people don’t trust their workplaces, this is why we see the rise of quiet quitting or the lazy girl jobs phenomenon. People want to come into work do the bare minimum and go home, because workplaces are not meeting their needs beyond a paycheck.
The problem is next to sleeping, work is where we spend the most number of hours over our lifetime. We cannot afford to not care about work or ignore our need for meaning and belonging. Our experience of work makes up a huge proportion of our experience of life.
Michelle King
How Work Works
The publishing industry is notorious for a lack of diversity. In 2016 The Bookseller examined the lists of the UK’s most established publishing houses and found that there were fewer than 100 books published by authors of colour.
In 2021, out of a total of 4,017 authors and illustrators featured across 33 catalogues from the UK’s top five publishers and selected independent presses, 2.5% were Black British, when compared to the overall output.
These numbers speak for themselves.
In this episode I am interviewing my friend and three times published bestselling author Minda Harts on how to write a book and get it published. We will also be unpacking how to tackle inequality in publishing.
I really think we all can play a role in either perpetuating or tackling the inequality in publishing through the books we purchase the content we consume. All of our choices either disrupt or contribute to the inequality in publishing. If we truly want to consume the best content, then we need to level the playing field so that all the talented voices can be heard.
Minda Harts
Michelle King - How Work Works
It's that time of year again; companies are adding new graduates to their ranks and training them, much like they always have. According to a National Association of Colleges and Employers report, despite a slower job market, hiring projections indicate that companies plan to hire 4% more graduates in 2023 than in 2022. While employers continue hiring graduates, many are unaware of the specific skill gaps graduates face and what managers can do to solve these challenges.
Companies often sell the idea that an employee’s potential is determined by the skills they can list on a resume, but this isn’t true. Just take a look at the way companies promote employees within an organization. Every year, managers will meet to discuss which employees have the potential to move to the next level. Leaders will debate people’s different skill sets to try and achieve consensus on the final list of candidates for future leadership positions. What leaders are assessing isn’t the technical or soft skills an employee has; instead, it’s their ability to learn on the job.
In this weeks episode, we share what skills graduates need to thrive in the new world of work but to maximize their potential we need graduates to take ownership of what they learn and how they learn it.
How Work Works
Tool kit for advancing your career
Based on my work, I know for sure that at one time or another, most of us have lost our belief in work. We have felt the pain of being excluded from informal networks, the stress of trying to keep up with the pace of change, or burnout after putting in countless hours to get the next promotion, only to be overlooked or disillusioned with cut-throat corporate cultures. We are tired of accepting the myth that individual advancement must come at a cost to ourselves and the people we work with.
Aside from sleep, work is where we spend most of our waking hours over our lifetime. How we experience work is how we experience a considerable amount of our lives, which is why managing the meaning we derive from work is essential to our overall life satisfaction. Knowing how your workplace works is how we can begin to make it work for everyone.
Michelle King
How Work Works
According to the most recent “Women in the Workplace” report from LeanIn.Org and McKinsey, the gap between men and women leaving their jobs is the largest it has been since the report was first published eight years ago. For every female director who is promoted, two women at the same level of seniority choose to quit. The report states that women are leaving companies that fail to deliver on “the cultural elements of work that are critically important to them.”
Culture is our lived experience of work, and for women today, the lived experience of work isn’t great. For example, the Women at Work report by Deloitte published this year finds that 10% more women are experiencing; harassment, microaggressions and exclusion at work compared to a year ago. Overall, this is an increase from 51% to 59% of women.
To understand how pervasive toxic cultures are, Charles Sull, cofounder of CultureX and Donald Sull, senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and cofounder of CultureX analyzed the language that 3 million U.S. employees used in Glassdoor reviews to describe their employer between 2016 and 2021.
What they found is a gender gap in men and women’s experiences of toxic workplace cultures. Overall Women spoke more negatively than men about most elements of culture, including work-life balance and collaboration. The largest gap between the genders however, is for toxic culture, which they define as a workplace culture that is disrespectful, no inclusive, unethical, cutthroat, or abusive.
On todays episode Charlie Sull joins us on the show to discuss these issues.
Even if employees don’t quit, employees in toxic environments are more likely to disengage from their work, exert less effort, and bad-mouth their employer to others. Sustained exposure to a toxic culture increases the odds that employees will suffer from anxiety, depression, burnout, and serious physical health issues.
Given the impact toxic workplace cultures can have on our mental and emotional wellbeing, it is important we understand how to solve this issue.
Here Charlie shares what we can do.
Action One: Be nicer to people - dilute the toxic culture.
Action Two: Report toxic behaviour to HR, if you witness it or it is happening to you.
Action Three: Take reliable data to senior leadership and keep talking about it to ensure senior management realize that this is a problem and place the item on the agenda of the CEO. Don’t lose your voice.
CultureX
For most people we want feedback at work, but it is also something we dread. Unless feedback is actionable and helpful, it just feels like unnecessary criticism or a way for organizations to try and get people to fit into toxic workplace cultures.
In the HBR article entitled Women Get “Nicer” Feedback — and It Holds Them Back authors Lily Jampol, Aneeta Rattan and Elizabeth Baily Wolf shared how their research finds even if their male and female employees perform at exactly the same level, managers tend to prioritize kindness more when giving feedback to women than when giving the same feedback to men.
Across a series of studies, we asked more than 1,500 MBA students, full-time employees, and managers based in the U.S. and the UK to imagine giving developmental feedback to an employee who needed to improve their performance. The employee was described in exactly the same way to all participants, except that half were told the employee’s name was Sarah, while the other half were told the employee’s name was Andrew. We then asked the participants about their goals going into this conversation, and while they all said they wanted to give candid feedback, those who were told the employee was named Sarah were significantly more likely than those who were told the employee was named Andrew to prioritize being kind as well. This was true regardless of the gender or political leanings of the person giving the feedback: Whether they self-identified as male or female, liberal or conservative, our participants consistently reported being more motivated to be kind when giving feedback to a woman than when giving it to a man.
Joining us on the podcast today is Lily Jampol, Partner and Head of People Science and Services at ReadySet and Aneeta Rattan, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School, where we will unpack all things feedback related.
In their article for HBR, Lily, Aneeta and Elizabeth share that constructive feedback is essential for anyone’s growth. Most of what we learn at work – around 70% happens informally and on the job. We learn through the feedback we get, it is literally how we develop our social and technical skills.
But as a manager, it can be challenging to get the balance right between being kind but also clear and firm.
Given the important role that feedback had on an employee’s development, engagement and performance, we need leaders to understand how to get it right. Here Lily shares four actions we can use to improve the feedback we give:
Action One:
Create a culture of feedback systems and behavioral approaches.
Action Two:
Establish common touch points so early intervention takes place when employees seem to be struggling.
Action Three:
Prepare your feedback sessions, what are the three things you want to get across in your feedback?
Action Four:
Review the feedback which has been given, take an audit to use for future feedback sessions.
Lily Jampol
Aneeta Rattan
For many people International Women’s Day has lost its way. It is too readily used by corporates as a day to provide lip service to gender equality and women’s advancement at work.
But women don’t need one day of celebration, we need companies to take action every day to remove the barriers to women’s advancement and fulfillment at work.
Without action it is too easy for men, women and all individuals to become fatigued, disengaged and disillusioned with efforts to advance gender equality.
To prevent this, we wanted to share our list of dos and don’ts to help people celebrate IWD in a meaningful way.
Joining us on the show today is guest host Selina Suresh. Selina works with Michelle at The Culture Practice and she also worked for UN Women in New York and Nepal.
We need workplaces to look at the ideal worker behaviors they reward, endorse and support that create cultures of inequality at work. We need workplaces to make significant, meaningful efforts to change their cultures, so that they work for everyone.
Often around IWD time, you might hear a few men say, what about men?! Why don’t we have a day specifically dedicated to men’s advancement? Well that's simple, men already dominate most leadership positions, they don’t face the same degree of discrimination and marginalization that women do. Workplaces already work for men. The real reason this question is asked, is all too often IWD initiative's can forget about men, and the important role they play in advancing gender equality at work.
Action: Don’t get sucked into performative events or platitudes or pink merchandise (no matter how enticing it might appear)! Recognize that this day was created by advocates and for advocates dedicated to advancing women, all women in all areas of life. It’s a day of meaningful action and the best way to celebrate it is by challenging yourself to do more.
Visit https://onehundredactions.com/ use these actions to make change today.
Every year companies spend about $8 billion on DEI initiatives in the United States, according to research conducted by the consulting firm McKinsey.
With all this money and attention given to DEI efforts we need to ask ourselves an important question: Who benefits?
A 2019 report entitled Being Black in Corporate America: An Intersectional Exploration released by the consulting firm Coqual, finds that black professionals are more likely to encounter prejudice and microaggressions than any other racial or ethnic group.
They are less likely than their white counterparts to have access to senior leaders and to have support from their managers.
Yet few white professionals see what their black colleagues are up against. 65% of black professionals say that black employees have to work harder in order to advance, but only 16% of their white colleagues agree with that statement.
The study also finds that black professionals are more likely than white professionals to be ambitious, and they are more likely to have strong professional networks.
In this episode, Lanaya Irvin, CEO at Coqual, explains Coqual’s report findings in more detail.
Coqual recently launched a study around black talent in the UK. We saw a similar perception gap. There's this material gap in perception that makes overcoming this, these hurdles of retention, development, advancement that much more difficult. This happens because the gap between what employees are experiencing and what their peers or their managers understand or believe, is really wide.
The starting point is recognizing that we must account for all areas of difference and different lived experiences in understanding inequality and addressing the issues it creates.
Here Lanaya shares with us three actions we can all use in bridging this gap:
Action One: Lift up the ideas of others in order to foster a sense of belonging.
Action Two: Have clear expectations around how you can advance or gain promotions at work.
Action Three: Embrace all differences of those around you whether it be a person’s skillset, their unique contributions to work or their challenges.
Lanaya Irvin
Coqual
Research is telling us is that hybrid working is something most employees want, it does increase our productivity because we don’t have to commute, and most companies are likely to keep it in place, but it comes at a cost.
We need to be aware of these costs so we can manage them. Hybrid working does increase stress, loneliness, isolation, and disengagement. In many ways it is culture eroding. That doesn’t mean we get rid of hybrid working. I believe it is here to stay. Rather it means we need to be aware of these challenges so we can take action to solve them.
The consulting firm Deloitte has for the second year released its Women @ Work 2022: A Global Outlook report, a survey of 5,000 women across 10 countries The survey provides a unique glimpse into the lives of women in the workplace amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The responses from around the globe made it clear that women’s “everyday” workplace experiences were having a detrimental impact on their engagement and that the pandemic was having a severe impact on women’s lives and careers, including their work/life balance and wellbeing.
Emma Codd, Global Inclusion Leader for Deloitte joins me on the podcast today to discuss the report’s findings in more detail. We discuss the issues women face with hybrid working, flexible working and overcoming the barriers to their advancement at work.
Emma states that women that work in a hybrid manner which was around half of the respondents that can work in a hybrid way, of those respondents, 60% said they'd experienced exclusion in the past year. Around 50% said they weren't getting the access they needed to leaders which we all know how important sponsorship is for anybody that is in an underrepresented group is so important. Suddenly that's not there anymore.
Emma states there are four questions every organization globally should be asking; often only needing tweaks to resolve the outcome, but still action taking place:
Question One: Does your culture allow employees to feel safe when asking for flexible working? If not, how can it change?
Question Two: Do all employees feel connected? If not, why not?
Question Three: Do all employees belong? Why do employees feel isolated?
Question Four: Does each employee have equal access to support? How can this access improve?
Deloitte Women @ Work 2022 Survey
Emma Codd
Making a career change is important because outside of sleep, work is where we spend the greatest number of hours over our lifetime. Work plays a huge role in shaping our identities, relationships and sense of belonging.
On today’s podcast we are joined by Sarah Wittman, Assistant Professor of Management at George Mason University’s School of Business, who has conducted research into how work shapes our identity. In her article for Harvard Business Review she shares how thanks to major shifts in the labor market, workers are switching organizations, functions, and even industries much more frequently than past generations. Consequently, our sense of self at work is constantly changing too.
We do tend to be on these career treadmills. What can I get? What's the next position? All of these other things. And even when we're jumping industries, we say, okay, this is a great opportunity for me. I'm going to be increasing maybe my status, my pay etc, maybe my work life balance. But when we really get down to it, I think we need to take into account that identity long angle. Identities, if we want to define them, are these self-definitions; what we use to describe ourselves. This can be personal characteristics, such as, I'm hardworking. Or it can be role related. I am a professor or relational. I'm also a spouse, I'm a teacher, I'm a mentor. Or when we talk about the gender angle, it can be social identities. When we think about what comes with us, and this is where lingering identities come in, it's essentially what do we carry with us when we leave one job and enter another?
Managing our work identity is important, especially when you are looking to change jobs or careers.
In addition to using the VME (Value, Meanings and Enactment) framework, Sarah says there are three actions you can take to ensure your success in a new role, company or career path:
Action One: Understand your current work identity well enough to use it as a filtering device for available opportunities.
Action Two: Only pursue job opportunities that offer a good enough match for your identity.
Action Three: Understand how your identity will change in your new role.
Changing careers or jobs can be difficult. To give yourself the best possible chance of success you have to assess if the job will add and enable your sense of self.
Sarah Wittman
George Mason University
Successful women often disregard gender roles, which makes people uncomfortable. For female leaders, managing this is critical. Having people support you determines how well you can build relationships and influence people, in other words, how well you can lead. Leading through backlash can be an incredibly difficult thing to do, as it takes a toll on women’s self-esteem and relationships. Backlash results in people disliking successful women and preferring male leaders. As society doesn’t associate women with power, employees don’t either, which is why it’s acceptable to push back on women leaders and question their legitimacy.
On today’s podcast we are joined again by Dr Michelle Harrison Global CEO of Kantar Public, who is going to be discussing the recently published findings of the fifth and extended edition of The Reykjavík Index for Leadership, which highlights entrenched prejudice towards women leaders. Launched in 2018, The Reykjavík Index for Leadership measures and tracks progress in society’s perceptions of women and men’s suitability to lead across 23 economic sectors. Together with Women Political Leaders, Michelle and her company conducted this groundbreaking research, and together we will unpack why societal attitudes have stalled when it comes to women in leadership positions.
If we take the five year view, there's been no improvement, but there was a period when things looked like they were, and then there's been a quite a sharp reversal. Let’s think about those two particular measures. We ask people, and it's a percentage, do they feel very comfortable with the idea of a female CEO of a large corporation. And we also asked the same question about a Head of State. The data on female CEOs for the G7 group go back five years and it was 46% of the population who felt very comfortable. So the majority of people, in the G7 group of countries are not feeling entirely comfortable with the idea of a woman being in charge of a country or a large organization.
To create workplaces that work for everyone we need to understand how they are broken. Here Michele shares specific actions we can take to tackle gender inequality:
Action One: Keep striving for change: we do need to just keep going. We have to create workplaces where people are rewarded fairly and with as much inclusivity as possible, this will benefit us all.
Action Two: Stop trying to fix women, we don't need to fix women. The issues are about the way organizations, companies, and societies work. All of our work about inclusivity and diversity is for everyone and moving sharply away from the idea that we're trying to help women deal with these issues.
Action 3: Keep calling people out. We all need to take a stronger view about all of the actions, behaviors and microaggressions that women and other groups experience every day in the workplace. We need to put the onus on correcting the people who do these things and not on the people who previously we might have been training to better manage being on the receiving end of that.
Dr Michelle Harrison
Kantar Public
Our expectations of leadership are masculine, when we evaluate men’s potential, we are much more likely to see them as a good fit. Women do not meet our masculine expectations, therefore the projection is never triggered.
This male bias in our cognitive processing of leadership potential is powerful. “Think manager, think male” means we can fail to see women’s leadership potential. In fact, research suggests that men and women behave very similarly in senior roles, but men routinely receive higher leadership ratings.
On today’s podcast, Lisa S. Kaplowitz, Executive Director at Rutgers Center for Women in Business will be joining us to discuss the harmful ways women have to change themselves to fit the ideal worker image, and organizations that devalue anyone who differs from it. In an article for Harvard Business Review entitled, 5 Harmful Ways Women Feel They Must Adapt in Corporate America Lisa and two co-authors share findings from their research, Lisa outlines what these adaptations are and why they are ultimately harmful.
She also leaves us with some actions to implement into our workplaces in order to bridge the gap in the devaluing of difference:
Action One: Be aware – Know what an ideal worker looks like when they show up in your workplace.
Action Two: Ask – Do not assume. Ask an employee how you can support them, what additional resources they might need and what help they may need to advance in their career or to get a project to completion.
Action Three: Ensure interactions are authentic, genuine and informal conversations.
Action Four: Give feedback. Honest feedback, without sugar coating. Allow feedback to be a conversation where all can have their say.
Rutgers Center for Women in Business
Lisa S Kaplowitz
Today is a special episode, we are going to unpack how to make a career change. Whether that is starting a new job or building your own business, at some point most of us will want to make a change, the problem is it can often feel overwhelming when you do. However, you might be surprised to learn just how many of us experience career changes on a regular basis.
According to the latest findings from the Pew Research Center approximately 53% of employed U.S. adults quit their jobs in 2021 and changed their occupation or field of work at some point last year. Additionally, Research by the online career platform, Zippia finds that in the United States, 37% of the labor force changed or lost their job in 2020.
The average American worker has 12 jobs throughout a lifetime and an average tenure of about 4.1 years. Learning to manage your career is a critical skill.
On today’s podcast, Dorie Clark, author, consultant and keynote speaker will be joining us to discuss how you can make a career change and find meaning at work.
While most of us can identify a meaningful goal we want to pursue, there isn’t always an equal opportunity to realize these ambitions. Men and women do not have the same access to purse their passions, hobbies and interests outside of work. In the United Kingdom the office for National Statistics data has found that men spend an average of four hours and 39 minutes every week on hobbies, computing and games. In comparison, women spend just two hours and 38 minutes on the same activities. Men were found to spend more of their hours on leisure time than women in almost every category, including watching TV, hobbies and eating out.
When not in leisure, women were more likely to be performing unpaid work. This may include dependent care and housework.
In order to reach a point of fulfilment Dorie leaves us with some actions from the podcast.
Action 1: Avoid burnout – Get to know yourself, understand how your body feels, don’t get to the point of burnout as the recovery is long.
Action 2: Don’t fight reality – Push yourself when necessary but know when to stop, this is not sustainable.
Action 3: Take the survey – If you answered no to at least half of these questions, you may not feel as engaged or fulfilled in your current role. Something may need to change.
Dorie Clark
Dorie Clark - LinkedIn
Joining us on today’s episode is Lily Zheng author of DEI Deconstructed and a sought-after diversity, equity, and inclusion speaker, strategist, and organizational consultant who specializes in hands-on systemic change to turn positive DEI intentions into positive DEI outcomes for workplaces and everyone in them.
Why do DEI efforts fail, is a question asked by many leaders. Why is it that companies claim to be invested in advancing DEI, launching one initiative after another, yet research finds at any one point in time roughly 50% of us feel isolated, excluded, devalued and disengaged at work?
There are three reasons why DEI efforts fail, these include fatigue, backlash and denial. When DEI efforts, don’t address the root cause of inequality people become tired with all the lip service. This fatigue leads to backlash as people resist effort and initiatives that aim to address discrimination and inequality at work. And when resistance isn’t enough, people may resort to denying that inequality exists at all, examples of this include managers simply not believing inequality is a problem in their workplace.
Lily explains that it’s not that people are tired of doing DEI work, it's that they're tired of doing DEI work that doesn't achieve anything. To address that kind of fatigue we need to be rethinking all of our in initiatives, potentially even doing less, but making sure that we can directly tie every single thing we're doing into the outcomes we're trying to create.
Fatigue backlash and denial create the DEI death spiral because it leaves people feeling powerless to affect change. There is nothing I can do to change my workplace, but this simply isn’t true Lily gives us these actions to take away.
Action One: Get to know the difference between the types of power; formal, reward, coercive and expert power. Know that everyone within an organization has power, you just have to know how to use it.
Action Two: Be strategic in how you use your power and think of your connections within an organization to use your unique power as a tool to make change. Back this up with expert ideas to aid change to take place.
Action Three: Organizing is really powerful. You can organize as part of an employee resource group. You can organize as part of a DEI council or committee, you can organize to encourage and highlight the workforces strengths. All of these are really powerful. Manifestations of collective power, collective organizing, collective advocacy. They’re all tools that all employees have at their disposal to make change within workplaces
Lily Zheng
Dei Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right
In today’s episode of The Fix, we are going to unpack the specific challenges that women face at the midpoint in their careers, with Coleen Ammerman, the director of the 'Gender Initiative' at Harvard Business School and coauthor, with Boris Groysberg, of 'Glass Half-Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work'. Colleen shares why the barriers to women’s advancement at work are greatest around the midpoint in their careers.
Inequality is particularly challenging for women managers because of the continued acceptance and denial of negative gender norms at work. For example, according to one study outlined in Michelle’s book, 'The FIX: How to Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work', about 82% of the 350 male CEOs surveyed agree that the key barrier women face at work is a lack of general or supervisory experience. However, only 47% of the 461 female leaders surveyed agree that this is a key barrier.
This difference comes down to the widely held belief, established through the patriarchy and that women are simply less capable than men. This shows up when men say things like “She needs more time to round out her experience” or even “She needs more time to prove herself”, about women who are just as experienced as their male colleagues. Experience is not the issue here. Women must overcome the widespread belief that they are just not as competent as men. Colleen explains the scrutiny women encounter at the midpoint in their careers when it comes to performance.
During our discussion, Colleen shares with us some key actions she believes we need to take to remove the barriers women face at work.
Action One: Acknowledge that inequality is a workplace issue. We need to fix the processes and systems that create inequality by removing the biases in how companies hire, develop, reward and promote women.
Action Two: We need managers to be committed to being objective and making decisions which both recognize and remove their own biases. This starts with leaders becoming aware of how their beliefs about competence and leadership could negatively impact the judgments they make about women at work.
Action Three: You have the power to advocate for yourself and your colleagues. When decisions are made in your workplace about women or minorities that limits them or their advancement, always ask why. Why is this requirement used for promotion decisions? Why are we not asking the same of men? Why do women need to do more to be considered for a promotion? Why can’t mothers lead? Why are there so few women leaders in our organization? If you are ever unsure about whether to ask why or whether the situation is an example of an invisible barrier, consider if the situation is something a man is likely to experience. Would men’s promotability be limited if they got married? Is a man’s leadership capability questioned when he becomes a father? If the answer is no, then push back. Keep asking why until the real problem surfaces.
Colleen Ammerman
Glass Half-Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work.
This week’s podcast features a former guest Laura Bates, who is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, an ever-increasing collection of over 200,000 testimonies of gender inequality, with branches in 25 countries worldwide.
Laura writes regularly for the Guardian, Telegraph and the New York Times amongst others and won a British Press Award for her journalism in 2015. She has written numerous books, and her latest Fix The System Not The Women is near and dear to our hearts with its message.
When it comes to gender inequality, most people can agree that we need to tackle obvious forms of discrimination, like sexual harassment and sexual assault. But this agreement doesn’t always extend to covert forms of discrimination, like consistently devaluing women’s contributions in a team meeting, or only asking women on a team to take notes. But we have to appreciate the interrelationship between different forms of sexism and discriminatory systems. As Laura put it in a piece for the Guardian “It is vital to resist those who mock and criticize us for tackling “minor” manifestations of prejudice, because these are the things that normalize and ingrain the treatment of women as second-class citizens, opening the door for everything else, from workplace discrimination to sexual violence.” If we are going to solve inequality, we have to address the various ways that it shows up, at work and the workplace is a really important part of this equation.
Discussions like today’s can feel overwhelming but there is always something we can do to effect positive change. Yes gender inequality is a systemic issue, but it’s created through the beliefs, behaviors and interactions we each engage in, which means we have the power, collectively, to dismantle it. Laura shared some important actions we can all do more of.
Action One: Raise our voices and demand the system needs to change. Too often inequality is taken for granted as the way things are, but when we question this and call it out we raise awareness of what needs to change.
Action Two: Lend your voices to support active change, place your signature on that campaign. For example, Laura shared that the Center for Women's Justice is running a campaign where they are pushing for a statutory inquiry into misogyny within policing. So that's something that all of us can support and lend our voices to, our signatures to that petition.
Action Three: Stop blaming others within the workplace and focusing on individuals when things happen, to dismantle inequality we all need to take small consistent acts each and every day.
The Everyday Sexism Project
Fix The System Not The Women
On this weeks episode, we’re excited to feature our guest, Dolly Chugh. Dolly is an award-winning psychologist and the Jacob B. Melnick Term Professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She studies how and why most of us, however well-intended we are, are still prone to race and gender bias.
In Dolly’s brand new book “A More Just future”, she shares the psychological tools we need to confront the white washing of our history so we can build forward better.
In our wonderful conversation with Dolly she shared specific actions people can take to engage with the paradoxes that exist so we can avoid getting stuck and instead keep moving forward to a more equitable future.
Action 1: It is important to think about whatever media you consume whether it's social media, books, podcasts, movies, music, video games. We can each review the content we have consumed, over the last week, and evaluate how much similarity there was in the voices that were centered and in the creators’ voices as well. We can then reflect on how similar those voices were to our own? Very much like an echo chamber audit.
Action 2: Building on the above audit. Think about how you might broaden and diversify that content. Simply by adding more diversity to the information we consume, Dolly points out that we will hear perspectives about the past and the present that are new. This alone she believes will set us on the path of being able to be more attuned to situations where we may be consuming racial fables or even perpetuating them ourselves.
Action 3: Try to notice the paradoxes where information exists and hold space for conflicting ideas, realities and perspectives to be true at the same time. We are often confronting together the reality that DEI is full of paradoxes – one being that one person can experience work as a meritocracy while another quite the opposite. Both experiences can exist in parallel without cancelling each other out. The gamechanger is being able to understand what creates those different realities and how the gap can be closed in the future. The more we can accept paradoxes with an open mind then the more we understand how inequalities are created and perpetuated and the better equipped we will be to tackle them.
Dolly Chugh
Book - A More Just Future
Though the reality of women’s rights varies hugely across the world, by country, by geography, by ethnicity, by socio economic circumstance - in recent decades, more and more women have won rights and spaces like never before: like the right to choose for themselves and to autonomy over their bodies, to have a career, not to have children, to have abortions, to love other women.
On today's episode we are joined by Susanne Kaiser - author of “Political Masculinity”. She warns that some men feel their masculinity is threatened by these shifts and grieve the loss of male privilege. They share a sense of being entitled to women’s bodies and sex, attention, affection, and recognition. According to Susanne they want to force women back to a subordinate position in the social hierarchy, and make the needs and privileges of men dominant once again by turning masculinity into a political program. Susanne’s work highlights the mysoginistic and sexist views she says are shared by many right-wing extremists, religious fundamentalists and male supremacists coming together in a global backlash against Western democracy.
Feminism is the belief that men and masculinity are just as valuable as women and femininity, and that every individual deserves the freedom to be themselves and to be valued for that.
The fight for control over women’s bodies is a fight against feminism.
Political Masculinity
One thing is clear to me.
The progress of DEI efforts in organizations has stalled.
New research findings released by the Charted Management Institute or CMI, in the United Kingdom last month reveals a growing sentiment towards DEI efforts. People are growing weary of DEI.
In the Managers Pulse Point Survey, CMI found that despite ongoing efforts and activity towards gender equality, workplace gender equity remains elusive. The research has also revealed that employees, particularly men are either passive and or actively resisting DEI efforts.
These findings highlight for me the current state of DEI, which is fatigue. While there has been huge amount of inequality, awareness raising with things like the 'me too' movement and the 'anti-racism' movement, when this is not met with tangible action it can lead to feelings of exhaustion, isolation, frustration and sometimes skepticism about DEI efforts. People from typically underrepresented groups experience this as all DEI talk and no action, which leads to disengagement.
But the reverse is true for people in dominant positions in workplaces, typically white men. They perceive all the DEI talk as action and believe activity is underway to address the issues, even though very little changes actually take place. So consequently, they feel left out, disengaged and disillusioned with DEI efforts, believing too much focus is being given to these topics.
Joining us on today’s episode is Ann Francke, Chief Executive of CMI, to discuss these findings and share why we need to fight DEI fatigue if we want to meaningfully advance diversity, equity and inclusion at work.
Ann Francke
Chartered Management Institute (CMI)
Time and time again, studies have shown that math and science are perceived to be male arenas and that scientists are perceived to be predominantly men.
To advance more women into STEM fields, not only do women need to know about the career options available to them but they need to believe its possible for them to have a fulfilling career in these fields.
A 2019 study published in Frontier Education found that gender-science stereotypes of math and science influence young women's and men's aspirations to enrol in a STEM major at university. For example, by showing adverts for STEM careers that feature men and women, and promoting a less masculine image of science in university recruitment efforts has the potential to increase the likelihood of STEM career aspirations for young women and young men.
It stands to reason that the more exposure young people have to STEM the more likely they are to view STEM as a potential career path, whether they are male, female or any other gender.
On this podcast we are excited to have with us the CEO of Girls Who Code, Dr. Tarika Barrett and UScellular’s Vice President of Enterprise Portfolio Management and Technology Shared Services, Denise Lintz.
They will share how they are tackling increasing children’s access to STEM education and why awareness of STEM career paths is critical to advancing diversity in STEM.
Girls Who Code
USCellular
Dr.Tarika Barrett
As an employer, it is important to understand gender and non-binary inclusion and what it means for your company – for the way you manage your people and for the way your people interact with each other. There are lots of brilliant resources out there to help with this including the 'Genderbread Person' which is described as a teaching tool for breaking the big concept of gender down into bite-sized, digestible pieces.
Language really matters when it comes to supporting non-binary employees. The use of gender binary language is common in everyday life and conversation. Individuals regularly utilize gendered language like ladies and gentlemen, or mankind when referring to others, but greetings friends, folks, y’all, you, all, and everyone ensure we are including all employees when saying hello or opening a meeting.
While many use these terms without the intention to exclude others, gendered language does not acknowledge or validate the existence of those who identify outside of the gender binary. Saying an individual’s correct name and pronouns is an important way to demonstrate respect and courtesy towards non-binary employees in the workplace.
To help us understand how to navigate and prepare for a non-binary future, we are joined by Christy Pruitt-Haynes, a consultant from the NeuroLeadership Institute, a global neuroscience consultancy.
NeuroLeadership Institute
Christy Pruitt-Haynes
We all know that demonstrating empathy is critical to developing relationships, but it is also critical for business.
A study by the consulting firm Catalyst examining 889 employees found that when leaders were empathetic, 61% of employees are able to innovate compared to only 13% of employees with less empathetic leaders.
They also found that 76% of people who experienced empathy from their leaders reported they were engaged compared with only 32% who experienced less empathy.
When people felt their leaders were more empathetic, 86% reported they are able to navigate the demands of their work and life, successfully juggling their personal, family and work obligations. This is compared with 60% of those who perceived less empathy.
Clearly there is a link between empathy and better workplace cultures. The challenge is how do we make empathy a regular business practice?
In the book Tell Me More About That, brand strategist and thought leader Rob Volpe draws on his years of research conducting thousands of in-home interviews with everyday people to illustrate the 5 Steps to Empathy. These are the actions you and I can take to build a strong and reflexive empathy muscle.
Rob is joining us on today’s episode to share these insights, explaining what empathy is and what it is not and the different kinds of empathy we may experience.
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About Rob
Leaders have a difficult job when it comes to leading on DEI, are you equipped for challenging conversations to arise, do you have enough knowledge yourself and do you have the answers? A leader’s job is to build and maintain cultures that value difference because this is what it means to lead.
Valuing difference is a practice. Anti-racisim, anti-ableisms, classims, sexisim and homophobia are all practices. Educational programs, workplace training, books, podcasts and courses are all resources that we can use to build our muscle when it comes to valuing difference. There is no end to this work, because this is how workplaces need to work. When we don’t treat DEI as a practice, we don’t engage in the action necessary to truly create workplace cultures that value difference.
In the book How to be an Antiracist, Dr Ibram X. Kendi says that ““racist” and “antiracist” are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment. These are not permanent tattoos. No one becomes a racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other.”
What can we do within our organizations to strive towards antiracism? To help us with that question Trudi Lebron, author of The Antiracist Business Book: An Equity Centered Approach to Work, Wealth, and Leadership, will be joining us on the show today to discuss how organizations can make anti-racism a fundamental way of working.
www.trudilebron.com
The Antiracist Business Book
@trudilebron
Is AI inherently sexist? Or are we building AI with the biases we are still struggling to root out of our human interactions? And is a lack of diversity in the innovation process translating into the technology? AI is built and maintained by data, and if the data collected only represents the view of one type of individual or overly weights the importance of this information then the decisions AI makes will reinforce this inequality.
In a 2019 article for Sandford Social Innovation Review, entitled 'When Good Algorithms Go Sexist: Why and How to Advance AI Gender Equity', the co-author Genevieve Smith shared how she and her husband applied for the same credit card. Despite having a slightly better credit score and the same income, expenses and debt as her husband, the credit card company set her credit limit at almost half the amount. Customer service employees were unable to explain why the algorithm deemed the wife significantly less creditworthy.
What is most likely to have happened in this case is that AI was to blame as Genevieve shares in her article many institutions make decisions based on artificial intelligence (AI) systems using machine learning (ML), whereby a series of algorithms takes and learns from massive amounts of data to find patterns and make predictions. Yet gender bias in these systems is pervasive and has profound impacts on women’s short and long-term psychological, economic and health security.
On today’s episode we welcome Alexandra Ebert who will share what AI is and how it will impact our jobs but also why you don’t need to be scared of it. Most importantly, Alexandra tells us why we need to manage AI carefully to ensure equitable outcomes and so as not to exacerbate or perpetuate existing gender inequities.
Alexandra's Story
LinkedIn - Alexandra Ebert
Diversity is simply good for business. Companies with greater gender diversity in their leadership outperform their less diverse competitors, having higher returns on capital and credited with better employee engagement and retention. These companies have loyal customers, are more relevant to a broader customer base, are more innovative and are better at problem-solving. The same goes for companies that are more ethnically and racially diverse.
Almost no companies are reflective of the diverse makeup of their country despite a spend of $7 billion a year on DEI efforts. Part of the problem is that the fixation on diversity numbers dominates the dialogue around diversity and inclusion. While the numbers are incredibly important they provide a needed snapshot of how an organization’s employee base is made up and can measure things like attraction, retention and promotion.
A focus on diversity numbers alone can create dangerous tunnel vision. By only targeting diversity numbers, businesses can end up failing to deal with the underlying causes of how an organization’s diversity makeup came to be and what the culture of the organization is like.
In order to ensure you have the whole picture, we are going to discuss the pro’s and con’s of having diversity targets. Specifically Kelly is going to share the argument for having diversity targets and Michelle will share why she doesn’t believe that they work and then we will look at how you can try and use them in the right way if you have to have them within your organization.
The Great Resignation, has seen employees leaving their jobs at unprecedented rates. According to the US Labor Bureau in November 2021 alone, 4.5 million employees quit
Reports by the online media publication The Plug states that workers across the U.S. are finding more reasons to leave their jobs than having reasons to stay, citing burnout, being overworked amid shortages in some industries and pay that hasn’t kept track with inflation. But for Black workers, unaddressed racial issues in the workplace are among the long list of causes, directly fueling the Great Resignation.
Black employees simply don’t feel like they belong and consequently they are turning to entrepreneurship. The number of African American business owners in operation surged to almost 1.5 million in August 2021, up 38% from February 2020.
LinkedIn surveyed over 1,000 Black entrepreneurs to uncover why professionals are starting their own businesses, the factors prompting professionals to leave the corporate workforce and the challenges Black professionals often face when launching a business.
Some of the highlights of their research findings include:
- Over 1 in 3 (37%) Black Entrepreneurs with full time jobs have not told their company that they have their own business.
- 35% of Black Entrepreneurs with full time jobs feel that they’ve been overlooked for career advancement opportunities because they have an additional business.
- 55% of Black Entrepreneurs left the workforce to pursue entrepreneurship to have more flexibility & control over their schedule.
- 37% of Black entrepreneurs feel like they have to have someone White on their leadership team/ executive board in order to get funding.
- 43% of Black entrepreneurs believe having access to funding/capital is key to growing your business, yet only 1 in 4 Black business owners have received funding.
On today’s episode we discuss these findings and more with Rosanna Durruthy, Chief Diversity Officer for LinkedIn. Rosanna shares with us why Black employees are leaving their workplaces to start their own businesses.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmdurruthy/
https://twitter.com/talentalchemist
https://dileaders.com/blog/speakers/rosanna-durruthy/
Being unaware of people’s experiences of inequality like racism or sexism, often inadvertently and unwillingly leads to behaviors that are racist and sexist. We are simply blind to inequality. Being able to learn about inequality without ever having to experience it, is really the ultimate privilege. But just like inequality, when we deny our privilege we are blinded by it. Privilege makes it easy to deny other people’s experiences of inequality and keeps us from seeing the workplace in the way others see it. Denial is what keeps inequality alive in workplaces today. When leaders and employees see how being a part of the dominant group gives them access to power and privilege, they will also become aware of the unique position they are in to dismantle the very inequality they benefit from.
In 2018, anti-racism guide and mental health activist Myisha T. Hill launched the Check Your Privilege movement on Instagram. This is a global movement that supports individuals on their journey to becoming actively anti-racist. In just over three short years, it amassed 750,000 followers and became a sought-after hub for interracial activism during 2020’s ongoing wave of civil unrest.
In her upcoming book, Heal Your Way Forward: The Co-Conspirator's Guide to an Antiracist Future, Myisha shares her perspective and asks this critical question of antiracism work: what do we want the world to look like in 7 generations?
On today’s episode, Myisha shares how we can all take action to check our privilege and tackle systemic racism and prejudices.
Instagram: @myishathill
Website: checkyourprivilege
Today on the show my dear friend Eve Rodsky is joining us! Eve has been featured on the show before, with her New York Times best selling book, Fair Play and now Eve is here again with her new book, 'Unicorn Space', which is all about making time for your creative pursuits.
As a researcher, I was intrigued with this idea that men and women have different opportunities to pursue creative interests, which makes sense. Women disproportionally undertake domestic chores and child care requirements, therefore leaving less time to pursue interests outside of work and home life. For example a study by LifeSearch found that among working women, half (50%) still say they do the majority of household chores, in comparison to men where just one in four (25%) of all working men, spend an average of 7.6 hours on housework per week – almost equivalent to a typical working day – on top of their paid job.
This isn't just that women have less time to be creative and innovative, workplaces in particular de-value women’s creativity. A 2015 academic study published in the journal Psychological Science, finds that creativity itself is gendered. The paper states that organisations increasingly reward those who are seen as true “innovators.” Surveys of top business executives have identified “creative thinking” as the ability most valued in employees and one of the most important skills for the future. However, stereotypical expectations of men and women’s creativity shape how creativity is judged and acknowledged. This paper finds that creativity itself is more strongly associated with stereotypically masculine characteristics and that a man’s work is more likely to be deemed creative. The research also finds that men’s ideas are more often deemed “ingenious” than women’s even when it’s on the same topic. In particular, supervisors assess their female employees as less creative, even when they are exhibiting more of the stereotypically masculine behaviours associated with creativity.
Creativity is gendered. We value men’s creative time, ideas and outputs more than a woman's. Therefore it is no surprise that we make more time for men to be creative because we believe it's more valuable. This is inequality, the belief that men and masculinity are somehow more valuable than women and femininity. And this plays out in all aspects of life, even how we spend our creative time as Eve explains in today's episode.
Website: everodsky.com
Book: Unicorn Space
Instagram: @everodsky
This podcast is dedicated to the topic of hiring diverse talent whilst also looking at what businesses can do to really try and value difference.
Research states that 46% of people’s experiences of inclusion at work are down to their manager’s behavior. So, 46% of your experiences of whether you feel included or not are attributed to your manager’s behavior. So when I hear “not my workplace, I’ve done everything I can. My workplace is a meritocracy. These hostile work environments might be true for some people. It’s not true for my workplace”. I need you to take a breath and accept the fact that because your workplace works for you, you are probably not aware of the ways in which it doesn’t work for other people.
We need to believe people when they tell of their lived experience in your workplace and actually their lived experience of you and understand that actually women might not feel safe to speak up.
Listen in to find out more about how you can hire smart and also listen better to those already hired.
As adults, if we have never experienced homelessness, it can be really tempting to turn away and not engage with the humanity of the situation. Sometimes it’s just too upsetting and we feel guilty or even embarrassed about our own comparative security. We need reminding of the importance of engaging with homelessness empathetically and that it is not as far away as we might like to think.
Often it isn’t just one thing, most people become homeless because a lot of challenges in their life play out at the same time creating an impossible situation. But most people don’t want to hear all the reasons they might become homeless because we don’t want to believe it could be true for us. Out of sight out of mind.
This is why states like Texas in recent months have a new law that criminalizes public camping and bans cities from adopting policies that prohibit or discourage the enforcement of any public camping ban. People who don’t comply with the law can be ticketed, arrested, and fined up to $500. Arresting, fining and punishing people for being homeless does nothing to address homelessness.
On today’s podcast we are joined by community activist Regina Jackson, to share insights from her work as President & CEO of the East Oakland Youth Development Center. For the past 27 years, Regina has provided services and support for homeless youth in the city of Oakland through housing, job training and life skill development opportunities. On this episode she will share why homelessness is an issue for all of us.
I often get asked by people, surely gender equality will just be achieved in time? Aren’t we becoming more progressive? Won’t younger generations ensure we have greater equality because they hold more liberal views.
The answer to all these questions is No.
The belief that we will just achieve equality through the passing of time is one of the reasons we will never achieve equality no matter how much time we have.
Equality is a practice it is something that we do. Taking action every day to value difference is something we all need to do to build a more equitable working world.
The starting point for tackling this is being honest about where we are at and the beliefs we hold that inform how we think and the lack of action each of us take to tackle inequality.
On today’s podcast we are joined by Dr Michelle Harrison, Global CEO of Kantar Public, who is going to be discussing the recently published findings of the fourth and extended edition of The Reykjavík Index for Leadership, which highlights entrenched prejudice towards women leaders. Together we will unpack why societal attitudes have stalled when it comes to advancing gender equality in leadership.
Over the last four years we have spoken with so many incredible people from all walks of life about how to make a more diverse, equitable and inclusive world.
During that time I have found there are some consistent lessons that people shared around what it really takes to build a workplace that works for everyone.
So to help kick off this year in the right way, we will be discussing my top 10 lessons learnt in DEI. This is based off the podcast episodes as well as our four decades of experience and my nearly two decades of researching workplaces. I have not shared these insights anywhere else so this is a first and hopefully you will find it helpful, practical and an inspiring way to begin your year.
So let’s get started with our top ten DEI lessons for 2022.
As the entire world works to contain the spread of the coronavirus, the role of effective leadership has been brought into razor sharp focus. What people need now are leaders with empathy, compassion and an ability to show support, skills that women leaders tend to exhibit more than men. While it may take a global pandemic to finally acknowledge the unique talents and capabilities women leaders offer, companies shouldn't wait until there is a crisis to afford women an opportunity to lead. It's a trend we've seen before. The 2008 financial crisis was a result of irresponsible risk taking that ultimately came down to leadership and organizational priorities. Research examining risk-taking behavior finds that men are more prone to taking higher risks. Increased collective risk-taking behavior contributed to the crisis, which was an outcome of male-dominated workplaces that valued individual achievement and competition rather than collective well-being. Subsequent research found that women tend to adopt a more relational approach to leadership, which is more effective in a crisis compared to the more traditional command-and-control style of leadership typically adopted by men. Overall, women leaders adopt a relational style when leading through a crisis, which is highly effective as they focus on building trust, alleviating fears and managing the crisis at hand.
Joining us on today’s podcast is Professor Jennifer Jordan, a social psychologist and Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour at IMD. Jennifer explains the evolution of good leadership and what each of us can do to prepare for the new world of work.
If the pandemic has taught us anything it is that to collaborate either virtually or in person we need to learn how we can bridge our individual and cultural differences and work as one team regardless of our location. We need to create culturally inclusive environments.
Culture includes the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts. Culture also includes the shared patterns of behaviors, norms, interactions, and understanding that are learned through socialization. One way that culture plays out for all of us is through language.
How we communicate, the words, tone and body language we use all represent our culture and can make it hard for people, who differ from our culture to understand what we are trying to say.
We have always lived in an ethnically diverse society, we are all operating in an increasingly culturally diverse environment where we need to be able to interact, communicate, build relationships, and work effectively with people from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds.
Technology has made workplaces diverse and global. To succeed you need to be able to understand and appreciate diversity in its many forms, and to effectively engage and communicate with people from different cultures. But how may of us know how to adapt the way we communicate to ensure we are understood?
Joining us on todays podcast is Felicity Wingrove. Felicity is a leading expert on the applied psychology of language. Felicity will share specific strategies you can use to communicate with anyone, anywhere.
Have you heard of the 'Great Resignation' or the 'Big Quit'? It is an informal name for the widespread trend of a significant number of workers leaving their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While most news articles are covering the 'Great Resignation' in relation to the United States, the problem is happening on a global level and it is thought to be the result of many different factors, notably employees dissatisfaction with current working conditions and post Covid reassessment of the lack of career and home life integration.
This month in the United States, according to Guardian 2.9% of the workforce quit their jobs. Nearly 1.2 million jobs were open in the UK in the most recent quarter, with 15 of 18 sectors reporting record numbers.
People cite all kinds of reasons for quitting. They want a better work-life balance, they want more challenges, better conditions, more meaning. For employees who are left behind and those who want to make the move but are worried they are trading one job they hate for another it is critical to understand how we can love the jobs we are in.
Joining us on today’s episode is Dr Kathryn Owler, a happiness at workplace coach, who will share her research findings and advice for how to enjoy your job and have a meaningful career.
Recently a male colleague asked me what he could do to support women at work, and I told him to start by being an ally. Simply speaking up when someone makes a derogatory comment about women, even if it seems innocent enough, is how men can practice this. When one of his colleagues made a comment to him about the size of their female coworker’s breasts, he spoke up. He said, “Don’t do that. Don’t speak about her like that. It’s not cool.” While this might seem like a small action, it is really an incredibly powerful way to create equality at work. By speaking up, my male colleague instantly reset the standards for how men speak, think, and interact with each other and the women in that office.
The challenge with allyship is it generally involves spending your privilege. It is uncomfortable. It requires speaking up. Taking action. Calling out inequality, even if you benefit from it.
The intervention of bystanders often acts as the crucial brake on acts of bullying and discrimination. We can help bystanders become upstanders or allies by making them aware of the problem of inaction.
Joining us on today’s episode is Rohit Bhargava and Jennifer Brown, authors of the book 'Beyond Diversity', who will share the difference between bystanders and upstanders, and how you can take action to tackle inequality when it plays out at work.
Men’s ability to financially support their family is equated with their identity and self-worth. Living up to this requires that men have a job, conform to the 1950’s ideal worker image, and advance at work. This is the expectation we all hold for men, and it limits men’s freedom to explore their identities outside of work.
We need to let go of the idea that women’s careers are somehow expendable, but men’s careers are not. This is not just good for women, it’s good for men. For example, a 2016 study found that men are better able to accommodate their dual identities when their wives work because they get to define success outside of just the breadwinner role. Sharing the burden to provide for the family frees men up to rethink their identity. The greatest challenge men face in straying from the breadwinner role is the risk of losing their self-worth and social status. When men don’t work, they forgo their place in society. Men can no longer build their confidence through their work, so they need to find this somewhere else. Research investigating how men deal with job loss finds that not only do men carry a heavy financial and emotional strain when they are let go, but they also struggle with the sense that they are no longer real men. We look down on men who are not breadwinners because they are not fulfilling what society deems men’s role should be. Research also finds this can be painful for men, especially if they are stay-at-home dads and their wives take on the breadwinner role. Men may try to rebalance this perceived loss of masculinity by being less supportive when it comes to childcare and domestic chores.
To unpack this issue we are joined by the Report’s author Gary Barker, who will start us off by sharing how the role of fathers has changed over time.
Over the last two years health and wellbeing has become front and center in organisational life, thanks to the pandemic. We have all heard of the business case for DEI but what about the wellness case for DEI? It is becoming increasingly apparent that without compassionate, inclusive, people-centred workplaces, health and wellbeing suffers and, in turn, so does productivity. If we want more innovative, collaborative and productive workplaces, we need to put wellbeing front and center, not just for some employees but for everyone.
Employee wellbeing on the one hand and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts on the other have a symbiotic relationship. Taking a diverse and inclusive approach to wellbeing within a business will enhance employees’ feelings of inclusion and belonging, which in turn improves their mental and emotional wellbeing, which further enhances their sense of belonging. And so the cycle goes on.
To understand how we can put wellbeing at the center of our DEI efforts we are joined on the show today by Dr. Marlette Jackson the Global Director of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at Vigin Pulse. Dr Jackson discusses how diversity and inclusion are intertwined with employee health and wellbeing, because when employees feel like they can be their true selves, they use fewer sick days, stay longer at their company and are happier and more engaged in their work. She will also share how Virgin Pulse is putting wellbeing at the center of its own DEI efforts.
Both men and women are feeling even more burned out in 2021 than they were in 2020. The annual 'Women in the Workplace' report from McKinsey & Co. and LeanIn.Org found that the gap between women and men who say they are burned out has nearly doubled in the last year. Women in particular have taken on more responsibilities at home from supervising remote learning for their children to basic household chores. Women have also been forced out of their jobs at a disproportionate rate. As the U.S. Census Data reports there are nearly 1.5 million fewer mothers with children 18 or younger in the workforce in March 2021 compared to February 2020.
The oppressive systems we live and work under have created a burnout epidemic, and this is all the worse for Black women and femmes who have a long legacy of exhaustion at the hands of white supremacist heteropatriarchy. Imagine the impact when, on top of the daily strife of enduring systems of misogynoir, you are also forced to weather an unprecedented and entirely mishandled health pandemic that is statistically more likely to murder you.
Black women persist, despite a system set up to ensure they don’t. Black women don’t need to learn to lean in, they are already doing this simply by showing up every day and overcoming one barrier after another. Black women must persist against the odds just to do their job, be treated fairly, get paid equally, and access leadership opportunities. We need to create a work environment where Black women don’t have to lean in, perform to a higher standard or deal with excessive burnout because the organization already works for them.
On this episode I am joined by career coach, Ashley Morgan, to discuss why Black women’s experience of burnout is different and importantly how all of us can navigate burnout and manage our wellbeing in difficult times.
When we talk about pressure we usually conjure up negative images – being pressured into something, feeling the weight of pressure. Even the dictionary definition of “pressure” focuses on coercion and intimidation. And who could forget Queen and David Bowie singing about pressure being the force that burns a building down, splits a family in two, puts people on streets.
But is this the whole story? In this episode we are joined by Dane Jensen, CEO of Third Factor and an expert on pressure. He unpacks what pressure is, how it differs from stress and how we can harness pressure to our benefit - individually and in our organisations. Dane has worked with thousands of high performers including top business leaders and executives, world-class athletes, Navy SEALs, politicians, and even busy parents. If you want to understand how pressure is experienced differently for everyone and what you can do to excel during difficult moments or challenges in your life then this extended episode is just for you.
When men align with other men who hold positions of power, they are better able to access the privilege associated with that power. This includes things like having direct access to high-profile people, job opportunities, high-profile assignments, and rewards at work. Homosocial behaviors provide men with ways to develop relationships with other men in positions of power, to their benefit. There are many ways these behaviors show up in workplaces, but they tend to result in employees tolerating and even accepting bullying, sexual harassment, discrimination, and exclusionary behaviors. Organizational banter is a great example of this and generally includes verbally attacking colleagues under the guise of “joking” to maintain dominance over others. It also involves making sexist jokes or derogatory comments based on people’s identities that diminish a person’s self-esteem and perceived value. When leaders remain silent, they sanction these behaviors, which also validates the people who engage in them. This can create an entire workplace culture that is hostile toward women.
A good example of this is the craft brewing industry. In May of this year, NPR reported that Brienne Allan, a brewery worker, went to Instagram to complain about sexual harassment in her workplace and thousands of other women – and a few men – chimed in with their stories including offhanded, rude comments, sexual violence and sexual harassment, as well as racism from owners and superiors. The Craft Brewing industry is being forced to reckon with the sexism, racism and sexual assault allegations.
On today’s episode we are joined by Founder and Executive Director of Infinite Ingredient, Katie Muggli, who has been in the hospitality industry for over 20 years, with five years specific to the craft beer industry. Kate founded Infinite Ingredient to actively support the mental and physical well-being of individuals working in the craft beverage industry through outreach, education, and access to resources. She shares her story and reflects on the 'me too' movement and its ripples through the craft beer industry.
As workplaces are now taking the steps to shift back to versions of ‘business as usual’, it is also a critical time and a golden opportunity for them to focus on the wellbeing and psychological safety of employees across their organisation.
We see psychological safety in teams when members engage in learning behaviours, such as asking for help, seeking feedback, admitting errors, being open about lack of knowledge, trying something new or voicing work-related dissenting views, with the belief there will not be reprisal or retribution.
On this special episode we wanted to share two fireside chats recorded at our Reimagine 2021 event last Friday.
Our first chat is with Minda Harts, author of The Memo interviewed by Sue Eilfield, Vice President, People & Culture and Inclusion & Diversity at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners. Sue interviews Minda on her work advancing racial and ethnic minority women at work and healing from racial trauma at work.
Our second chat is with Jon Hicks ,Senior Counsel, Employment Law at Netflix Inc and Mark McKenna Coles, EMEA Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Lead from Spotify who will share how to build psychological safety at work.
When I started out in my career, there were so many articles and news reports, events, training and speakers sharing how to engage and manage millennial workers. And over the years I have seen this same focus extend to Generation Z. Companies want to and need to engage the next generation, many of whom want businesses to change their approach to sustainability, equity and corporate social responsibility for the better. The challenge is there isn't a quick fix to tackling the problem. All too often companies claim to have engaged young people about a product or service, yet these very young people are absent from decision making processes. All to often companies have a preconceived notion of what it means to sell to young people that ends up being condescending and patronising. Hashtags and snapchat alone won’t be enough to engage the next generation. What companies need are leaders who know how to listen, engage and value the age diversity of their entire organisation. Joining us on todays episode is Melissa Kilby, Executive Director of Girl Up the global leadership development organization transforming a generation of girls to be a force for gender equality and social change. Since 2010, Girl Up has developed 75,000 girl leaders in 120 countries and all 50 U.S. states and has raised more than $27 million for girls’ leadership programs and impact partners at the United Nations. As a next gen leadership expert, Melissa will unpack the common mistakes companies make when trying to engage the next generation of change makers and what each of us can do bridge the age gap at work.
In the process of selling my first book, I spoke to several editors at major publishing houses. One editor revealed that she was thankful her workplace was “not gendered in any way.” In that moment, I realized how much we all take inequality for granted at work. This made me determined to find a way to explain how systemic this issue is and how most workplaces don’t work for men and women in the same way—even industries that aren’t seemingly male dominated. In fact, the publishing industry is a great example of this. While women make up a large proportion of employees in the industry, men maintain a hold on positions of power. In 2018, the Government Equalities Office (GEO) in the United Kingdom reported that while women make up almost two-thirds of the workforce in publishing, men are paid more on average. Reasons cited for this included the higher number of men in senior roles; the higher proportion of women in lower pay brackets; and the higher number of women with flexible work arrangements.
These issues could describe just about any industry because nearly all workplaces are gendered—they were built by men, for men. But it’s not always obvious how this negatively impacts women at work from day to day. Nor how this plays out differently when we consider the intersecting identities women have.
Joining us on today's episode is Rebekah Borucki, Founder and President, Row House Publishing, Inc.
Row House Publishing is on an incredible mission to support diverse communities within the book publishing industry. On this episode Rebekah will unpack inequality within the publishing industry and what we can do to tackle it.
Last week the supreme court in the United States decided by five to four to allow Texas to effectively ban abortions in the state despite the blatant disregard of the court’s own 1973 ruling legalizing abortion in US, Roe v Wade.
United Nations human rights experts have called the new Texas abortion law “structural sex and gender-based discrimination at its worst”.
Women of color, those with low incomes and from other vulnerable groups would be hardest hit from this ban.
Given the significance of this legal change in the United States we wanted to dedicate todays episode to understanding the issue in more detail and how we can support women globally with this issue.
In today's episode I am hosting a conversation with our very own Kelly Thomson, a partner in the employment, engagement and equality practice at the international law firm RPC, based in London and Anna Cronin-Scott an international lawyer who has been practicing law since 2010. Anna also served as special assistant to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright from 2005-2008, accompanying the Secretary on delegations to Nigeria, Europe and domestically.
From a young age, we are taught what the appropriate behavior is for boys and girls. Through repeated exposure over the years we come to know how men and women are meant to behave. These beliefs are then used to make judgments about women at work. When women succeed in traditionally male-dominated roles, they defy the expectations society has for women and they are punished for it.
One study found that when women lead teams with only male employees or teams with a mix of male and female employees, their status as a woman leader activates gender stereotyping, which negatively impacts how they are perceived as leaders.
On today’s episode we are going to unpack how inequality at work also creates backlash when it comes to authority. Joining us on the show is Mary Ann Sieghart who will talk about her new book The Authority Gap and how to address and counteract systemic sexism in ways that benefit us all.
When it comes to innovation, current approaches tend to adopt a male lens, by only considering the needs of men, or only engaging men in the design process. Consequently, many products we have today were never designed with women in mind. While there is increased attention on the gender gap in innovation, it isn't enough.
What we need is a GENDER-RESPONSIVE APPROACH to innovation, which means going beyond acknowledging and raising awareness of gender gaps, to make sure women’s and men’s concerns and experiences are equally integrated in the design of innovative products or services and that due consideration is given to how gender norms, roles and relations and limit the innovation process and associated benefits.
Joining us on today’s episode is Danielle Kayembe, a female futurist and serial entrepreneur with a focus on projects at the intersection of women, innovation, and impact. Danielle will unpack how to close the gender gap in innovation, and ensure that future innovations don't leave anyone behind.
Between 2015 and 2020 there was a 107% increase in the number of people employed with the head of diversity job title, according to LinkedIn data. This global hiring trend is set to continue, as more businesses appreciate the fundamental importance, including to the bottom line of having more diverse representation and inclusive cultures.
The top three fastest growing roles in this space, according to a LinkedIn report, are Director of Diversity, Diversity Officer, and Head of Diversity. 77% of all new D&I roles are either senior or director positions with 22.8% of these roles in leadership positions. And only one in five are entry level.
If the makeup of leadership teams begins to look different, doesn’t that mean the organization values difference? It’s incredibly common to see business leaders make external corporate commitments like this, which are often not hard quotas but rather “aspirational targets.” The aim is to achieve a trickle-down effect by hiring other female leaders; the hope is they will work to increase the representation of women, thereby magically transforming the culture. What could possibly go wrong?
On todays episode we are joined by Dr Ted Sun, author, speaker and expert in leadership, with two doctorate degrees, one in psychology and another in business. Dr Ted will unpack why diversity quotas are not the answer.
There is a loneliness epidemic, and it is affecting people from all ages. A recent study, conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, suggests that the proportion of people who can name six close friends has dropped from 55% to 27% since the 1990's and one in five single men say they do not have any close friends. According to the Guardian, while the pandemic has increased experiences of loneliness, people were struggling long before as a YouGov study carried out in 2019 suggested that 9 in 10 people between the age of 18-24 suffered from loneliness to some degree, and nearly half had difficulty making friends.
The challenges with making friends differ for men and women. The study entitled 'Gender Differences in Friendship Patterns' finds that women are more intimate and emotional in their same-sex friendships than men, women also tend to place a higher value on these friendships than men do. Women emphasized talking, emotional sharing, and discussing personal problems with their same-sex friends, and men showed an emphasis on sharing activities and doing things with their men friends. This is largely because men are socialized to not share their feelings. Being a man means going it alone. Results from this study suggest that men need to be socialized to express their emotions to form intimate and more beneficial same-sex friendships.
The friendship gender gap can have significant consequences as men face higher rates of isolation, loneliness, depression and even suicide. We all need connection in some way or another. On today's episode Adam Smiley Poswolsky author of Friendship in the Age of Loneliness, will join us to share how we can form meaningful friendships and create belonging at work and in life.
Inequality is everywhere, even when it comes to comedy. What we are encouraged to find funny, is often aligned with what men find funny. This is the male gaze of comedy. We are socialized to believe that women are just not as funny as men. Women comedians receive far harsher criticisms than men. Women’s experiences, in general, are just not normalized in the way men's are. Comedy is a very difficult industry for women to break into.
Madeleine Smithberg and Lizz Winstead, creators of The Daily Show, celebrate the show's 25th year in July. During her time as the executive producer of the show, Madeline was responsible for casting Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell and Mo Rocca to name a few. She went on to earn a Peabody and Emmy award for her work. Lizz was not only co-created the show, but she was also a former head writer, drawing inspiration for the show from her early career in stand-up.
What makes these achievements even more remarkable is that comedy is a highly male dominated industry. Gender biases, like the belief that women are naturally less humorous than men, limit women's access to opportunities and pay. Gender stereotypes also place increased pressure on women to perform to a consistently high standard and avoid confirming negative beliefs about their capability.
What Madeleine and Lizz have clearly proved over the last 25 years, is that women don’t need to work the male gaze of comedy, in fact when women tell their own stories they provide greater opportunities to advance diversity in comedy more broadly. Women’s experiences are valuable, funny, and relatable. Not just to women, but to everyone.
My friend, I do not believe you are a racist.
My friend, I realize you do not need to care. You do not need to learn the cultural norms of Black people as a prerequisite for your career advancement and access to opportunity. You do not need to understand my fears and perceptions to keep yourself safe or to have social mobility. You do not need to consider my journey or think critically about how the construct of our nation was built nor how it’s supporting your success while it constrains mine. Your future is not predicated on me, how I feel, or what I think of you. You sit in a different position than I do. Yet, when you ask me what you can do as a first step, I emphatically say: just care enough to ask the question.
These are the words of Melvin J. Gravely, II from his forthcoming book about the racial divide in America, Dear White Friend: The Realities of Race, the Power of Relationships and Our Path to Equity. As a CEO and civic leader, Melvin speaks to his white colleagues, many of whom are uncomfortable talking about race, without judgement to offer a different perspective on race relations and equity.
In this episode Melvin joins us to share how we can engage in race issues and become empowered to be a part of the conversation and the solution.
Thanks to the pandemic our working lives seem to be in a constant state of change, with more uncertainty and new challenges arising almost on a daily basis. As lockdown eases, we will have to adopt new ways of working yet again.
Across the country people are being called to return to work and go back to normal but what is normal? The pandemic raised awareness of the importance of managing mental health at work, which includes talking about the mental and emotional challenges we face, or the stress of integrating work and home life or the difficulties of navigating the lack of social interaction in a virtual working world. The new normal includes workplaces, where physical, mental and emotional wellbeing of employees is the primary concern of managers. Long gone are the days when managers could sweep these issues under the rug. The post pandemic workplace is human.
In todays episode Melissa Doman, Author, Organizational Psychologist, Former Clinical Mental Health Therapist and Mental Health at Work Specialist will be joining us on the show to share why the pandemic has given us a permission slip to be human at work and how we can use this as an opportunity to improve our working lives.
Earlier this year, dancers from around the world spoke out against racism in ballet, standing in solidarity with black French ballet dancer, Chloe Lopes Gomes. In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, Chloe reported that she was repeatedly told she didn’t fit in because of her black skin, that she was pressured to wear white skin makeup and in rehearsals was told her mistakes stood out because of her skin colour and that she couldn’t have the white veil her white colleagues would have, because she is black. In April, the BBC reported that Chloe had received €16,000 and had her contract renewed, in an out-of-court settlement with Berlin State Ballet which has also pledged to work to build a culture of openness. In a news interview with NBC, Chloe called for the ballet world to tackle elitism and the limited access for racial minorities both amongst dancers themselves and in the audience which is, also, overwhelmingly white.
Did you know that research has found that racial discrimination may actually be affecting the way genes are expressed, leading to increased levels of dangerous stress hormones? In an article in Dance Magazine, Dr Erlanger A Turner, PhD says that the stress of experiencing or witnessing racism and discrimination can take a psychological toll, linked to increased stress, lower self-esteem and risk for mental health difficulties like depression. He points out that for Black dancers, this toll may make it difficult to effectively practice their craft due to lack of energy or motivation.
In today's episode we are joined by Ingrid Silva, the famous ballet dancer with the Dance Theatre of Harlem Company and an advocate for diversity in the ballet world. Together we will be unpacking how to overcome racism in dance.
Feedback is part and parcel of working life. We give it, we receive it and mostly we hope that it is positive. Giving and receiving feedback is an art. Knowing how to respond or provide feedback is important because when done well feedback enables performance, engagement, sense of belonging and collaboration. In short knowing how to give feedback is a critical skill for surviving and thriving in workplaces today. But there is just one major problem, feedback is a gendered phenomenon, specifically the type of feedback men provide to women.
Not only do women get different types of feedback to that given to men like a number of professional women I know who have been given the feedback to “smile more” in contrast with another who was advised to be less friendly if she wanted to be taken seriously, but another study published in a Harvard Business Review article finds that managers tend to give female employees softened, less honest feedback on their performance.
In particular, the article states that women are systematically less likely to receive specific feedback tied to outcomes, both when they receive praise and when the feedback is developmental. In other words, men are offered a clearer picture of what they are doing well and more-specific guidance of what is needed to get to the next level.
In this weeks episode we are joined by Dr. Laura Hamill. She is an organizational psychologist and Chief Science Officer at the Limeade Institute. Laura unpacks how to be more effective at giving and receiving feedback, having difficult conversations and overcoming gender bias when it comes to the type of feedback we provide to women.
The barriers faced by racial and ethnic minority women are significantly more complex than those which face white women. In the 2010 journal article “Women and Women of Color in Leadership,” authors Janis Sanchez-Hucles and Donald Davis argue that women of color face the compounded effect of “gendered racism.” They cannot separate the multiple aspects of their identity. This means that women of color carry a heavier load because they experience both sexism and racism, as well as the interplay between these forms of inequality. Their research finds that African-American women experience greater negative stereotypes because of the combined impact of racism and sexism and are more likely to experience discrimination, prejudice, and unfair treatment when it comes to promotions, training, advancement, and support. This compounded disadvantage is associated with increased stress and lower self-esteem.
And, of course, women of color are not a uniform group, there is a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds that individual women may identify with. This is further differentiated when you factor in age, sexual orientation, religion, and physical or mental ability. The more identities a person has and the more these differ from the stereotypical ideal worker standard, the more likely it is that they will experience the compounded effects of inequality.
In today's podcast we will be talking to Sophie Williams. Sophie is the author of 'Millennial Black' & 'Anti Racist Ally' . She is also a TED speaker and Racial Equity Consultant and Activist. In this episode we will share how we can move beyond performative allyship and become real success partners at work.
Despite the saying, the thing that makes great minds so great is they don't all think alike. Increasingly companies need people who can solve complex problems, innovate and create in new ways precisely because they don’t view the world in the same way as many others do.
The term “neurodivergent” describes a person who thinks differently to the dominant social norm - or “neurotypical” person - because of individual differences related to a cognitive condition such as Autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia or ADHD.
That's why companies like SAP, Microsoft and Google have invested in hiring people who are Autistic or otherwise neurodivergent.
But not all workplaces value or nurture different ways of thinking and within the 20% of the global population which is neurodivergent, it’s estimated the unemployment rate is over 80% .
If there is one thing that the pandemic has taught us it’s that work accommodations can be made with great success. Businesses need neurodiversity to outcompete their competitors. Making targeted accommodations to create more inclusive work environments for people who are neurodivergent can unlock one of the world’s largest untapped talent pools.
In an article for HBR, Rob Austin, professor of information systems at Ivey Business School in Canada who studies neurodiversity in the workplace, shares that although many companies are just beginning to realize the benefits of neurodiversity, SAP’s program, which is four years old, is already paying off in terms of increased productivity gains, quality improvement, boosts in innovative capabilities, and broad increases in employee engagement.
On today's episode Rob joins us to unpack what neurodiversity is and tell us why organisations need neurodivergent people now more than ever.
As countries begin to ease lock down restrictions, a lot of employees want to know what will the post-pandemic workplace look like? For many office workers remote work is here to stay, whether they like it or not. Companies like Twitter and Dropbox, have moved to almost complete remote working with no signs that this will change.
According to LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index, roughly half of U.S. professionals believe their companies will allow them to telecommute at least part of the time after the pandemic. That percentage is even higher in industries including tech (73%), finance (67%) and media (59%), that see flexible work as the future.
While the pandemic has shown us that flexible working is possible, surviving and thriving are not the same thing. While working from home can reduce company costs, and increase employee productivity, it also increases employee stress as boundaries become difficult to manage, and there is pressure to always be on.
As we enter this new phase of working life it is important to understand what the costs are especially when it comes to inclusion and wellbeing.
On this episode we are joined by hybrid working expert, Anna Meller who will unpack what hybrid working is. What jobs can be done from home, how we can set boundaries with our workplaces, and what can we do to prepare for the post pandemic workplace.
It is not surprising there is a gender pain gap given the distinct under-researching of womens’ health and the implications this has for medical education and training. In the book Invisible Women, Caroline Criado-Perez points out that it has been historically assumed that there wasn’t anything fundamentally different between male and female bodies other than size and reproductive function - so for years medical education has been focused on a male “norm”.
The doctor-patient relationship is a fiduciary one which means it is based on mutual trust and respect being a core component of good care. The more barriers there are to understanding each other, the greater the risk to quality of care. But many women do face significant barriers as a result of the gender pain gap. These include a lack of understanding of female specific health concerns and a lack of awareness of sex-based differences in the way non-gendered health issues, such as heart attacks, are experienced. Consequently women are more likely to be misdiagnosed or poorly cared for, which detrimentally impacts their health, wellbeing and life expectancy. The impacts can be disastrous. A 2016 study found that women were 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack.
On today’s episode we will be speaking with Dr. Jennifer Peña who is former physician to the White House Medical Unit, internal medicine doctor, Army vet, and a trailblazer in digital and telehealth. Dr. Peña will unpack the issue of gender inequality in medicine and how we can tackle this.
Over the next five to ten years, jobs will change due to technological advancements like artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, 3-D printing, and nanotechnology. While these advancements will create a range of new jobs in industries yet to be created, many of today’s jobs will still exist, they will just look a little different and probably involve working with machines. Consider the field of medicine, where medical doctors are primarily responsible for correctly diagnosing and treating patients.
In the future, it may be algorithms making these diagnoses with remarkable accuracy. Computers could be used to make recommendations about the best treatment. Artificial Intelligence could replace pharmacists, and, in some cases, robots could even carry out surgery. Doctors won’t disappear, but they won’t diagnose or prescribe medicine in the same way they do today. Their role will change as they will need to comfort and manage patients to a greater extent. Just like this example, in the immediate future, advancements in technology won’t necessarily replace all jobs, but it will alter the way most of us work.
The parts of our jobs that are routine, administrative, and repetitive will likely be replaced by technology. According to the consulting firm McKinsey, for 60 percent of all jobs at least one-third of the activities can be automated. Like doctors, employees will be freed up to undertake new tasks in new ways, which will require new skills.
In this podcast we are joined by Dr. Leah Weiss who is a Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer. She has focused her studies on compassionate leadership, and the positive effect it has on organizations. In this episode Leah will unpack what compassionate leadership is, how we can develop it and why it really is the future of leadership.
Psychological safety, a term coined and defined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, people feel psychologically safe at work when they believe that they can be themselves at work and they won't be punished or humiliated for sharing their identity, speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.
In short, it is how comfortable individuals are with being themselves, taking risks and being vulnerable with their team. Having a diverse workforce most certainly does not guarantee that everyone in your organization feel comfortable or valued for who they are.
One of the quickest ways to erode psychological safety is microagressions, which are the indirect or unintentional expressions of racism, sexism, ageism, or ableism. Like asking to touch a Black colleagues hair, pushing a persons wheelchair without asking or telling women to smile. These are all forms of discrimination that come out in seemingly innocuous comments by people who might be completely unaware.
It is not the one off comment that has the greatest impact, rather it is the compounded effect day in and day out of working in an environment where you have to be on alert for where the next comment might be coming from. This has the greatest detrimental impact on a persons mental and emotional wellbeing because it sends the message that they do not belong.
Given the widespread nature of microagressions, on today's episode Heather Younger, international speaker, consultant, adjunct organizational leadership professor and author of The Art of Caring Leadership shares how we can manage microagressions when they happen and build a workplace where people can be themselves.
Did you know that in the United States in 2020 over 2 million women left the workforce, and in December 140,000 jobs were lost and every one of those was to a woman. This is an issue which disproportionately impacts Black and Latina women, who often work in roles that lack paid sick leave and the ability to work from home. As covid19 hit, mothers were forced to stay at home to care for their children.
According to UN Women, the global organisation responsible for advancing gender equality, before the crisis started, women did nearly 3 times as much unpaid care and domestic work as men. Social distancing measures, school closures and overburdened health systems have put an increased demand on women and girls to cater to the basic survival needs of the family and care for the sick and the elderly. Emerging evidence from UN Women’s rapid gender assessment surveys demonstrates that the disproportionate share of unpaid care work is still falling on women’s shoulders during the pandemic; in fact, they report an increase in unpaid care, often while managing paid work.
This is a global issue. In rural contexts, women are generally responsible for gathering water and firewood. This constrains their ability to carry out paid work, particularly when jobs cannot be carried out remotely. In urban areas, women are having to care for children at home while holding down a full time remote job. While men have spent more time at home, and in some cases cared for their children or dependents too, women are still undertaking the majority of domestic duties at home.
Tina Tchen, the president and CEO of TIME’S UP Now and the TIME’S UP Foundation, joins us to share why care can’t wait. Tina is a former assistant to President Barack Obama, executive director of the White House Council on Women and Girls, and chief of staff to First Lady Michelle Obama. Tina has worked to advance gender equality, particularly for working women. Here Tina shares how the care crisis is playing out in the United States.
The social model of disability, which is a way of viewing the world developed by people with different mental and physical abilities, is the idea that society disables physically impaired people by assuming everyone experiences life in the same way. By not accounting for people’s differences, one of which is physical impairments, we inadvertently exclude people from fully participating in day to day activities.
This can include structural barriers, like not having access to handicap accessible toilets, or social barriers, like holding negative attitudes and behaviors toward people with impairments.
When it comes to disability rights, the shift that each of us can make is from viewing people as disabled by their differences to being disabled by the barriers they encounter in society. By viewing disability in this way, we can begin to tackle ableism and start to identify all the barriers that prevent people with impairments from having equal opportunities in life.
Over 50 million Americans live with disabilities, and the disability rights movement is focused on securing equal rights and equal opportunities for people with different physical and mental abilities.
In today's episode we are joined by Kathy Martinez, an internationally recognized disability rights leader and the President and CEO of Disability Rights Advocates, a United States nonprofit legal center that works to advance disability rights. Kathy is the former SVP, Head of Disability and Accessibility Strategy for Wells Fargo. She was born blind along with her sister, and has been an advocate for people with disabilities for most of her career.
Along with Kathy, we unpack how the disability rights movement is working to remove the institutional, physical, and societal barriers people with disabilities face. We will also share specific actions each of us can take to ensure that we create a society where people with disabilities are free to live their lives like anyone else.
Did you know that according to UNICEF, babies as young as 6 months old notice physical differences including skin color, and studies show that by the age of 5 children treat people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds differently, favoring some over others.
Inequality is everywhere, there is simply no way to shield children from it. So what can you do? Arm your children with awareness. Ignoring inequality doesn't protect your children from it. When kids are exposed to bias, discrimination and inequality without understanding what is happening, they can feel isolated, lost and unsafe, which negatively impacts their confidence, development and emotional well being.
To arm your children with awareness and understanding of inequality requires getting comfortable talking about difficult topics, like ableism, sexims, racism and classism. The earlier parents start having these discussions the more effective their children will be in dealing with the challenges of inequality that they encounter every day.
In todays episode we are joined by Mallika Chopra, daughter of the well known thought leader, Deepack Chopra. Mallika is a mother, author and public speaker. She has written a series of 'Just Be' books for children to help them tackle difficult topics like body positivity, diversity and inclusion. These include Just Breathe, Just Feel, and Just Be You. Here, she discusses how to arm your children with awareness, and why this is critical to helping the next generation navigate and overcome the inequality that exists in everyday life.
Global Pride Day is June 27th a day chosen for people to be proud of who they love irrespective of their sexual orientation or gender. It is not just a celebration of love and acceptance, it is also a day to recognize how far we have come in celebrating the LGBTQIA+ community and how far we still have to go to ensure equality, equity and inclusion of its members.
In the United States being homosexual was considered a mental illness in the 1960’s and at the same time in the United Kingdom it was considered a crime to be gay.
But towards the end of the 60’s with events like the Stonewall riots, the fight against homophobia and the fight for equality prevailed. On todays episode we will celebrate these achievements and unpack what more we need to do.
Joining us is André Thomas, NYC Pride Co-Chair who will detail the theme for this years pride month and the challenges that lie ahead.
According to a report by the American census, despite making up nearly half of the U.S. workforce, women are still vastly underrepresented in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workforce.
Women made gains from 8% of STEM workers in 1970 to 27% in 2019 but men still dominated the field. Men made up 52% of all U.S. workers but 73% of all STEM workers.
Given the technological advancements with things like AI, robotics, nanotechnology and the internet of things, STEM occupations are expected to increase over the next ten years however the gender gap in STEM persists.
According to the non-profit consulting firm Catalyst, the gap in STEM begins in education and is fuelled by gender stereotypes and expectations regarding “women’s work.”
In today’s episode I speak to Alisha Arora, a 14 year old young woman, who is on a mission to leverage exponential technology to solve some of the world’s largest problems. Alisha is an advocate and activator for mental health, and is currently researching at MIT’s AI lab to diagnose and prevent suicide with machine learning. Alisha represents the future of STEM and so today in this inspiring episode Alisha will share her work, ambitions, and experiences working in STEM.
In January this year, the government in the United Kingdom, released a stay at home Covid 19 advert, that had illustrations of women undertaking a range of domestic responsibilities, like ironing, homeschooling and cleaning while the one male featured in the advert is sat on the couch. They were forced to withdraw the advert for it’s sexist depictions of women.
Sexism in advertising is an issue that has been around as long as the advertising industry has. Organisations like the Advertising Standards Authority in the United Kingdom are tasked with spotting and removing sexist adverts. But often by this point it is too late, the message is already out there and the damage is already done. To combat sexism in advertising we need to arm ourselves with the awareness to spot adverts that reinforce negative stereotypes, across all areas of difference.
On today’s episode Tim Parkin, global brand marketing expert, author and speaker, will be joining us on the show to discuss why in 2020 there is still such widespread sexism in advertising and what we can do to tackle this issue.
Mallory Weggemann has proved to be one of the most inspirational figures in the sport of swimming. It isn’t because of her achievements in the sport, which are incredibly impressive but rather it is because of how she has fought back after tragedy.
She is a Paralympic Gold-Medalist, 15-Time World Champion Swimmer, Author of the book Limitless and founder of social impact agency, TFA Group.
Mallory has broken 34 American Records, 15 World Records, becoming a twelve time World Champion and became a two Paralympic Medalist at the London 2012 Games. She is now training for the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games.
Here, Mallory shares her inspiring journey in overcoming tragedy and how she became limitless.
Transgender and gender-nonconforming people face risks that make them particularly vulnerable to homicide. Some experience bias explicitly because of their gender identity. For others, their identity makes them more likely to experience other risk factors, such as unemployment or homelessness, experts say. The risks are compounded for trans women of color, especially Black women, who face the additional burden of racism.
Last year was the deadliest one on record for transgender Americans, with Black transgender women accounting for two-thirds of total recorded deaths since 2013, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
While President Joe Biden signed an executive action affirming that LGBTQ Americans would be protected against discrimination in education, employment, housing, and other fundamental aspects of life in America, there is still along way to go to tackle violence against the trans community.
In the Great Recession, men lost twice as many jobs as women. But from February to May, in the united states 11.5 million women lost their jobs compared with 9 million men because of business closures intended to stop the spread of Covid-19. By the end of April, women's job losses had erased a decade of employment gains.
In the 2020 recession, job losses are much higher for women. At its peak, women's unemployment had risen by 2.9 percentage points more than men's unemployment.
We spoke with Blessing Adesiyan the Founder & CEO of Mother Honestly, a global community for working mothers about the impact of the current shecession. Blessing shares her research that her organization has undertaken to better understand the impact of the economic downturn on working mother and importantly what we can do to tackle this issue.
Is your team at work psychologically safe? A team feels psychologically safe when individuals believe they won't be exposed to interpersonal or social threats for engaging in learning behaviors such as asking for help, seeking feedback, admitting errors or lack of knowledge, trying something new, or voicing work-related dissenting views. Research has shown that the absence of such threats is strongly associated with team members bringing their whole self to work, expressing their creativity, talents, and skills, learning, and innovating.
Given the importance of psychological safety in creating inclusion and belonging at work, I spoke with Madison Butler, DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) practitioner and advocate for being human at work. In this episode, Madison and I discuss why psychological safety is critical to inclusion and diversity efforts and what each of us can do to create it.
It is never too early to engage young women and men in the fight against climate change. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provided a wake-up call about the importance of teaching kids about sustainability. The report warns that greenhouse gas levels are at their highest in 800,000 years.
The findings signal the need for drastic action globally at all levels of society including among governments, businesses, communities, and schools. This includes educating kids across all age groups and levels of schooling to prepare them to be able to live more sustainable lives.
In this episode, we're featuring 16-year old climate activist Sarah Goody who is launching a 4 Part “Climate Action Crash Course” Webinar Series for Youth and Young Adults. Sarah will share her work and reveal how we need to engage the next generation of women and men in the fight against climate change.
When it comes to advancing women at work, there is a gap between the commitment male allies say they have and what they are actually doing. It’s the same as the conversation around race: It’s not enough to say you’re not a racist, you have to actually do something to create change and take action.
On this episode, David G. Smith, Ph.D. and W. Brad Johnson, Ph.D. show why and how men have a crucial role to play in promoting gender equality at work. Research shows that when men are deliberately engaged in gender inclusion programs, 96 percent of women in those organizations perceive real progress in gender equality, compared with only 30 percent of women in organizations without strong male engagement. Smith, a sociologist, and Johnson, a clinical psychologist, are former naval officers with a mission to help men become more effective allies with women and more inclusive leaders in the workplace.
Creating a more equal workplace, where you feel like you can be yourself and will be valued for that, is going to take all of us. Research finds that unequal work environments —where employees dread going to work, don’t feel they can be honest with their manager, and may witness or experience harassment or discrimination — are the primary reasons workers quit their jobs. Approximately one in four employees dreads going to work because they do not feel safe, respected, or valued. Inequality creates exclusion and isolation, detrimentally impacting innovation, productivity, engagement, and retention. Allyship programs are one way to make employees aware of how inequality works and what they can do to solve it. For example, a 2018 study conducted by Business in the Community found that 33% of Black employees believe their ethnicity will be a barrier to their next career move, in stark contrast to just 1% of white employees. Allyship at work helps to bring the challenges of racism in organizations to the surface and importantly, how each of us can practice anti-racism.
On today’s episode Wade Davis, VP of Inclusion within the Product group at Netflix will be joining us on the show to discuss all things allyship.
It seems to be increasingly difficult to talk about sexism, equality, and women’s rights in a modern society that perceives itself to have achieved gender equality. When women or men complain about everyday sexism or suggest that you are unhappy about the way in which women are portrayed and perceived renders you likely to be labeled difficult or uptight. Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project has spearheaded a global movement to raise awareness of the day-to-day experiences of sexism women have to endure. Through the project, Laura has cataloged stories from hundreds of women detailing their experiences of sexism.
Solving inequality starts with tackling it. On this episode, Laura Bates will be joining us to discuss the project and how you can take action to eradicate everyday sexism.
Technology adoption could displace millions from their jobs; many others will need to change the way they work. Globally, 40 million to 160 million women may need to transition between occupations by 2030, often into higher-skilled roles. If they make these transitions, women could find more productive, better paid work; if they don’t, they could face a growing wage gap or leaving the labor market.
COVID-19 has had a detrimental impact on gender equality and resulted in hundreds of thousands of women leaving the workforce. To prevent this from happening again, we need to understand the technological changes that are coming and the impact they are likely to have, and whether this will be different for men and women.
Joining us on the show today is Dr Daniel Susskind who is the co-author of the best-selling book, "The Future of the Professions" and the author of "A World Without Work." We will discuss the impact of technology, particularly artificial intelligence, on work and society and most importantly, answer the question on everyone’s mind: Are robots going to take your job? And, what can you do to prepare for the future world of work?
More women and girls are experiencing stress, anxiety, and other mental health impacts as a result of the pandemic. Experts warn that this could have devastating long-term impacts. In September, the nonprofit organization Care released findings from a study investigating 10,000 men and women's experiences of mental health across 40 countries. The findings show that 27% of women had reported increases in challenges in relation to mental illness, compared to 10% of men. The reason for the gender disparity in mental wellbeing is a result of several factors such as unpaid labor in the house which increased exponentially in many cases led to stress, worries about food, work, and health care.
Women are more prone to experience gender-based violence during lockdown. They are also almost twice as likely to find it harder to access quality healthcare services needed during the pandemic. The facts behind the COVID-19 pandemic crisis reveal that mothers of small children are three times more likely than fathers to lose their jobs. Single mothers are faring even worse. At the same time, suicide is the second leading cause of death among young adults, but statistically higher for young women.
That is why Deepak Chopra and Gabriella Wright, this week's guests, have teamed up to support women with the Love in Action campaign, which provides all women with free access to a three-month course designed by Deepak to take on and overcome the mental health challenges women are grappling with. The initiative will partner with EBY, the women's underwear brand, to support and empower women to realize their full potential. On today's episode, Deepak and Gabriella will share more about this incredible initiative.
You can learn more about Love in Action at blog.join-eby.com/deepak-chopra
The number of people incarcerated in America today is more than four times larger than it was in 1980. The criminal justice system disproportionately impacts poor and Black men and women. The experiences of women — as well as trans and nonbinary people — are too often lost, because men comprise the vast majority of the incarcerated population. Research is shedding light on the injustices faced by women and LGBTQ+ people behind bars, as well as on issues like money bail and family separation that disproportionately affect women.
Currently, there are 231,000 women locked up in the United States. While women make up just 10 percent of the total incarcerated population, women's incarceration rates are continuing to grow faster than men's. On today’s episode, Tamra Ryan, CEO of Women's Bean Project, will share the difficulties women face reentering society and the working world after serving jail time. She will share her work to humanize re-entry through employment and how we tackle the current flaws in the corrections system.
According to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, four times more women than men dropped out of the labor force in September 2020. This is having a detrimental impact on women’s financial health. Research shows that the gender savings gap has widened as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic with women now having a third less saved. More women than men are relying on previous savings to cover essential costs during the pandemic — depleting their already smaller savings pot. Over a third of women (35%) admitted to dipping into their savings over the past six months, compared to just 15% of men.
To better understand the financial gap women are experiencing during the pandemic, Tamara Gillian, founder of The WealthiHer Network, will be joining us on this episode. Tamara will share findings from The WealthiHer Report 2020, which provides us with insights to better understand how Covid-19 has impacted women and altered their attitudes to wealth, life, and their finances.
When millions of U.S. office workers were sent to work from home in March to curb the spread of the coronavirus, employers did something few have done successfully at scale — they sent corporate culture home with them. For several weeks in the spring, office professionals banded together to adjust to a new way of living and working online. But as weeks of remote work have stretched into months, it’s becoming clear the toxic environment sometimes housed in office cubicles and shared break rooms is moving into workers’ homes, too.
On today’s episode, May Habib, CEO of Writer, recently released findings from a new survey that sheds light on the state of workplace communication during the pandemic. The company surveyed more than 1,000 employees on how they interact with co-workers over media such as chat and videoconference and found that racial and ethnic minority participants reported a far higher incidence of toxic communication, such as racist, discriminatory, bullying, and sexually inappropriate messages, than white people do.
Last weekend, Kamala Harris made history when she became America's first female, first Black and first South Asian vice president-elect, representing a new face of political power. The California senator's history-making win also represents the millions of women in the demographics -- often overlooked, historically underrepresented, and systematically ignored -- who are now the recipients of that new power for the first time in the country's 200-plus-year history.
On this special episode, my former UN Women colleague, Selina Suresh, will be interviewing me on how we can get more women, like Kamala into positions of power, and more importantly, keep them there.
Americans – Generation Z (“Gen Z”). Born after 1996, most members of this generation are not yet old enough to vote, but as the oldest among them turn 23 this year, roughly 24 million will have the opportunity to cast a ballot in November. And their political clout will continue to grow steadily in the coming years, as more and more of them reach voting age. Members of Gen Z are more racially and ethnically diverse than any previous generation, and they are on track to be the most well-educated generation yet. They are also digital natives who have little or no memory of the world as it existed before smartphones.
Unlike the Millennials – who came of age during the Great Recession – this new generation was in line to inherit a strong economy with record-low unemployment. That has all changed now with COVID-19. There are already signs that the oldest Gen Zers have been particularly hit hard in the early weeks and months. In a March 2020 Pew Research Center survey, half of the oldest Gen Zers (ages 18 to 23) reported that they or someone in their household had lost a job or taken a cut in pay because of the outbreak.
Aside from the unique set of circumstances in which Gen Z is approaching adulthood, what do we know about this new generation? To understand the generational differences and why they matter, Casey Welch, CEO of Tallo, a platform that helps Gen Z find scholarship, university, and job opportunities will be joining us on this episode to better understand the challenges and opportunities facing the Gen Z.
A survey released this month by Women Who Tech, which includes responses from 1,003 tech employees, founders, and investors, globally found that nearly 50% of women founders and women working in tech have experienced harassment — a statistic that has barely budged since 2017.
When asked what kind of sexual harassment, 65% of women founders said they were propositioned for sex. In addition: • 59% of women experienced unwanted physical contact • 56% of women had sexual slurs directed at them • 32% of women were groped • 24% of women were sent graphic photos
On this episode, Justyn Hintze, Director of Women Who Tech, will share the report findings and help explain why there has been such little progress when it comes to creating a safe, welcoming work environment for women in technology.
If you are committed to tackling inequality, racism, sexism, classism, ableism, at some point in undertaking this work, you will realize that the work begins with each of us. We have to address our own racist and sexist beliefs on a daily basis, with the curiosity and compassion needed to transform these beliefs.
Today’s episode is a special one that features Benjamin Mertz, a composer, performer, and song leader who specializes in music of the Black Spiritual tradition. Benjamin is a human rights and racial justice activist. On this episode, you will get a glimpse into how he uses the power of music, storytelling, and human emotions to heal racial divides.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, emerging data and reports from those on the front lines, have shown that all types of violence against women and girls, particularly domestic violence, has intensified. Isolation makes the situation worse, as women and girls are more vulnerable, because of a lack of established social support systems. The temporary shutdown of non-essential businesses has led to unemployed and economic strain and quarantine conditions are associated with alcohol abuse and depression. All of this coupled with the stay-at-home orders have led to the global increase in domestic violence. This is the "Shadow Pandemic" growing amidst the COVID-19 crisis. As COVID-19 cases continue to strain health services, essential services, such as domestic violence shelters and helplines, have reached capacity. More needs to be done to prioritize addressing violence against women in COVID-19 response and recovery efforts.
On today’s podcast, Jessica Teresi, survivor of childhood sexual abuse and intimate partner violence, an advocate for change and an expert in sexual violence trauma and prevention will unpack the key factors that lead someone to become a domestic abuser, and what we can do to tackle this important issue.
There is growing research demonstrating how ineffective unconscious bias training is. A longitudinal study found that traditional diversity trainings are the least effective efforts in increasing numbers of underrepresented minorities, while experimental research has shown that presenting evidence that people commonly rely on stereotypes — information often found in diversity trainings — isn’t helpful and can even condone the use of stereotypes.
One of the major challenges is simply telling people they are biased. Furthermore, telling people that biases are unconscious encourages them to believe that there is nothing they can do about it — as it's unconscious after all! So how can we fix this? The aim is to enable employees to become conscious decision-makers, as they are aware of their biases and know how to overcome them in decision-making processes. To explore how we can make this shift, Pamela Fuller, a FranklinCovey’s thought-leader on unconscious bias, and co-author of the upcoming book "The Leader’s Guide to Unconscious Bias: How to Reframe Bias, Cultivate Connection, and Create High-Performing Teams", will share how we can overcome our unconscious biases and make more effective and equitable decisions at work.
Imposter syndrome was first identified in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes. In their paper, they theorized that women were uniquely affected by imposter syndrome. Since then, research has shown that both men and women experience imposter feelings, and Clance published a later paper acknowledging that impostor syndrome is not limited to women.
On this episode, Rita Clifton, author of "Love Your Imposter: Be Your Best Self, Flaws and All" will tackle the myth that you need to 'fake it until you make it', arguing that being yourself is your greatest weapon and why workplaces need authenticity more than employees do.
Today, employees must manage both a virtual workplace and a work environment at home. This takes different types of skills, like online collaboration, delegation, and time management. For leaders, the primary concern is how to ensure engagement, wellbeing, and inclusion in a virtual work environment. Employee engagement is critical to enabling creativity, innovation, problem-solving, productivity, and profits. And what enables engagement? Leadership.
On this episode, Edward Hess, author of the new book "Hyper-Learning: How to Adapt to the Speed of Change" and Professor of Business Administration, Batten Fellow and a senior executive with more than 20 years of experience working in corporate America, will share why the old, control and command, fear- and ego-based ways of working and leading won’t survive and why the workplaces of the future will be more human.
In 2018, Uber Founder Travis Kalanick stepped down as CEO following a number of public scandals, which revealed the toxic organizational culture. Studies show that 40% of women with engineering degrees quit or never enter the profession, with the vast majority leaving due to hostile work environments. But how do so many young tech companies develop these types of toxic atmospheres and what can we learn from cases like these?
This week, we are joined by Frances Frei, Professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School and a workplace culture expert who helped turn Uber's culture around — serving as the company's first SVP of leadership and strategy. In this episode, Frances talks to us about how we can tell if our workplace is toxic and what companies can do to fix this.
Women who might have been considered for leadership roles often find that their dedication and capability are called into question as they approach motherhood. Simply being at a point in life where society assumes that women might want to have children can stall their career progression. Motherhood is a clear sign women are betraying the ideal worker standard. When women go on maternity leave, return to work, or take up flexible workplace practices, they face a range of beliefs and behaviors that serve to devalue them and their contribution. With COVID-19, these challenges have never been more difficult to overcome, as women are more likely to care for children and support them with homeschooling, while at the same time working from home. Women do all of this and then are more likely to be penalized for it, by their employers as they are perceived to be less committed, ambitious and serious about their work. To support women at work, we need company cultures that provide more than accommodations. We need leaders who adopt and value family-friendly practices.
On this episode, Robin J. Ely, a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, will join us to discuss what is really holding women back at work.
Today, companies want you to believe that they are not just selling a car, shampoo, or a pair of jeans, but rather they are fighting for gender and racial equality in an attempt to connect with millennials who are willing to spend more money on socially conscious products. Brands have started using progressive values as a marketing ploy and are appropriating social activism as a form of advertising.
Companies want consumers to believe that this is not simply about commercial gain rather, openly advocating for social issues is a communication of what the company stands for. But what happens when people who work for these companies have a very different lived experience of the brand. Are companies that espouse values of inclusion, diversity, and equality walking the talk? Or is this just more woke washing? On today’s episode, inclusion experts and consultants Erin Dowell and Marlette Jackson will share the signs your company and even you might be engaging in woke washing and what the costs of this are. Also, we will address what you and your organization can do to get real about equality.
Perfectionism, the need to look, act and be perceived in an ideal way is on the rise. As many as two in five kids and adolescents are perfectionists. But, perfectionism is not so much about how you behave and more about how you think about yourself. The beauty industry has traditionally been one of the worst offenders for embellishing reality and selling women idealised and restrictive forms of perfection, underpinned by extreme airbrushing and dubious claims. However, recently, the big trend in beauty has been for hyper realness, with diverse models, bold statements of ’no-airbushing’ and simplified and playful product packaging. One of the main drivers for this is ‘perfection fatigue’, wherein consumers are so accustomed to seeing the conventionally ‘fake’ and perfectly polished beauty ads that the primary response is simply indifference.
On today’s episode, I will be speaking with Laura Johnson, co-founder of Zebedee, a specialist talent agency created to increase the representation of people who have until now been excluded in the media. On this episode, Laura will share why perfection fatigue matters and how companies can adopt a more inclusive and diverse approach to advertising.
The first unemployment wave in the United States due to the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted women. When the pandemic first hit in March, over 700,000 people lost their jobs and nearly 60% of them were women, according to the United States Labor Department. Not much has changed since then.
More than 36 million Americans are now unemployed, and women and minorities have been the hardest hit. women are over-represented in the hospitality, child care, leisure, and retail industries, which are currently experiencing the biggest losses. Other sectors like education, government, and health care — also tend to be dominated by women.
The current economic situation is unlike the last recession the US experienced in 2008 and 2009, which hit male-dominated industries like finance and construction first. Finance jobs have higher incomes and manufacturing jobs tend to be unionized, but the industries experiencing a downturn now do not offer the same protections.
On today's episode we will be speaking with the CEO of vCandidates.com, LT Ladino Bryson, known as “The Employment Therapist!™” who will share what candidates can do to land their next job and why COVID-19 presents a major opportunity for companies who are committed to equality.
The deaths and disappearances of women and girls in Juarez, which sits adjacent to El Paso, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, and in other parts of Mexico had once dominated international headlines. But in recent years, attention had evaporated. That all changed earlier this year with the murder of Isabel Cabanillas, a young female artist and activist in the Mexican border city of Juarez. Isabel was just 26 years old when she was shot dead while riding her bike home.
In the last three decades, hundreds of women like Isabel have been brutally murdered or raped, tortured and trafficked. These gender-based crimes are known as femicide, defined as the killing of a woman or a girl because of her gender and many of the cases remain unsolved today. In 2019, Juárez recorded nearly 1,500 killings that is an average of four per day. Following Isabel’s murder hundreds of women took to the streets with a message to authorities: Don't let this crime go unpunished like all the rest.
Women fashioned ski masks out of black T-shirts, with mascara and red lipstick peeking through torn-out holes. They chanted "Not one more" as they marched. The demonstration was one in a series of protests and vigils that have spread nationwide demanding an end to gender-based violence.
On today’s episode, we will be speaking with Mónica Ortiz Uribe, a freelance radio reporter for NPR and PRI, and co-host of the new podcast series “Forgotten: Women of Juárez." On today’s podcast episode, she will share why femicide is critical issue affecting both Mexico and the United States and what we can do to tackle this issue.
People are disabled by the barriers they encounter in society, and not by their differences. By viewing it in this way, we can begin to tackle ableism and start to identify all the barriers that prevent people with impairments from having equal opportunities in life. Creating equality and valuing each other in the same way begins with how we view the problem.
On today’s episode, we will be hearing from Alex Knoll, the 14-year-old inventor of Ability App, a mobile app that functions like Yelp, but for people with disabilities. Ability App connects people with disabilities related to mobility, vision, hearing or cognition with businesses that have the resources to accommodate them. Alex will share his inspiring journey and how each of us can remove the barriers that ableism creates.
We all know that the COVID-19 virus is spreading at an alarming rate, but fear and panic can spread even faster. Fortunately, there are steps we can take right now to boost our emotional response to the never ending anxiety, fear and panic created by this pandemic. Research finds that we tend to be influenced by other peoples’ behaviors and emotions and we might even copy them. While this might not be a problem most of the time, it can be really unhelpful during a crisis. For many of us one of the major challenges we have to manage during the global pandemic is simply our ability to deal with the uncertainty and emotional turmoil the pandemic creates. In this episode, we're thrilled to hear from Dr. Susan David, Harvard medical school psychologist and author of the best selling book "Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life". Susan will share her life's work, research and understanding of how we can deal with our emotional responses in an effective way, and what this really looks like in a global pandemic. She will also share strategies leaders can use at work to create an emotionally agile workforce and successfully navigate this very tricky time.
In order to break down systemic barriers that exist in the technology and venture capital industry, it is important to understand the core challenges that ultimately set the stage for why Black founders receive less than 1% of venture capital. This week’s guest is Dave Jakubowski, co-founder of Ureeka, an online community that connects small to mid-sized underrepresented business owners to peers, mentors and coaches, and vetted resources to access capital.
As a Silicon Valley expert, Dave has witnessed the unconscious bias that has created numerous barriers to Black business owners accessing funding. Black entrepreneurs experience a higher chance of loan rejection and a lower acceptance into business accelerators. On today’s episode, Dave will outline the systemic barriers and the role of white males in removing these obstacles.
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Get a copy of my book "The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work" https://www.amazon.com/The-Fix-Overcome-the-Invisible-Barriers-That-Are-Holding-Women-Back-at-Work/dp/1982110929
Or get the audio book here:
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Google Play: http://bit.ly/38w03er
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To check out episodes you missed or learn how to partner with us, visit thefixpodcast.org
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This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
In the United States, women make up 47% of the total workforce. But professional female pilots constitute five percent of the piloting workforce, a statistic that has remained unmoved in four decades. Compared to other STEM fields and “traditionally” male-dominated industries, aviation has one of the lowest percentages of women. There are mentors, scholarships, conferences, magazines and organizations that all have a goal to increase the abysmal five percent statistic. When experts are questioned on this topic, often the same old explanation is given: “It’s a pipeline problem.”
On today's episode, Kimberly Perkins, an International Captain and Safety Officer on Gulfstream 650 aircraft based in Seattle, Washington and humanitarian activist through Aviation for Humanity will reveal what the systemic barriers are to women’s advancement in aviation and why the industry has to change.
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Get a copy of my book "The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work" https://www.amazon.com/The-Fix-Overcome-the-Invisible-Barriers-That-Are-Holding-Women-Back-at-Work/dp/1982110929
Or get the audio book here:
Audible: https://adbl.co/2sLCbEH
Google Play: http://bit.ly/38w03er
--
To check out episodes you missed or learn how to partner with us, visit thefixpodcast.org
Sign up for my newsletter: thefixpodcast.org/newsletter
Check out my website: michellepking.com
This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
Managing a remote workforce is not as simple as telling everyone they can work from home. In fact, companies have been trying this for a long time and failing badly. Jodi Geddes co-founder of Circle In, which helps companies to support working parents, will be joining us on this episode to discuss results from a new online global survey her company undertook. The study finds that COVID-19 has changed people’s demands and expectations of working life.
Now, 97% of men and women want to retain the freedom to work flexibly when COVID-19 restrictions are over. Employees now want to define where they work, when they work and the ability to reduce their working hours, if needed. On this episode, we will unpack these findings and discover what it really takes to manage a remote workforce.
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Get a copy of my book "The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work" https://www.amazon.com/The-Fix-Overcome-the-Invisible-Barriers-That-Are-Holding-Women-Back-at-Work/dp/1982110929
Or get the audio book here:
Audible: https://adbl.co/2sLCbEH
Google Play: http://bit.ly/38w03er
--
To check out episodes you missed or learn how to partner with us, visit thefixpodcast.org
Sign up for my newsletter: thefixpodcast.org/newsletter
Check out my website: michellepking.com
This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
Despite glaring evidence that diversity and inclusion (D&I) should be a priority amidst the global pandemic, the latest McKinsey Report "Diversity wins: How Inclusion Matters" report finds that some organizations and leaders have pulled back their efforts, stating that diversity and inclusion is a “luxury they cannot afford.” This kind of logic makes it clear that some leaders still fail to understand the real benefits to be gained from investing in diversity and inclusion programs.
On this episode, I am joined by Kevin Dolan, a senior partner with McKinsey who will unpack their latest research report which makes a clear case for why diverse companies are now more likely than ever to outperform less diverse peers on profitability. Kevin will also share why companies need to double down their D&I efforts today in the wake of COVID 19 and what each of us can do to prepare for the post-pandemic workplace.
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Follow me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michellepking
Get a copy of my book "The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work" https://www.amazon.com/The-Fix-Overcome-the-Invisible-Barriers-That-Are-Holding-Women-Back-at-Work/dp/1982110929
Or get the audio book here:
Audible: https://adbl.co/2sLCbEH
Google Play: http://bit.ly/38w03er
--
To check out episodes you missed or learn how to partner with us, visit thefixpodcast.org
Sign up for my newsletter: thefixpodcast.org/newsletter
Check out my website: michellepking.com
This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
Making the decision to change or transition your biological sex and gender role is probably one of the biggest decisions you can make in life because gender and biological sex are such a huge part of individual identity.
No two transitions are alike. The specific steps of transition and their timing can vary, and individuals have different preferences about how widely they want their transitions to be announced. However, there are actions every workplace can take to support employees through this process. So today, you will all be hearing from Jennifer Fountain who transitioned from male to female, while working at a different role and organization to her current position and employer. On this episode, Jennifer will share her experiences and advice on how we can support employees with transitioning at work.
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Follow me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michellepking
Get a copy of my book "The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work" https://www.amazon.com/The-Fix-Overcome-the-Invisible-Barriers-That-Are-Holding-Women-Back-at-Work/dp/1982110929
Or get the audio book here:
Audible: https://adbl.co/2sLCbEH
Google Play: http://bit.ly/38w03er
--
To check out episodes you missed or learn how to partner with us, visit thefixpodcast.org
Sign up for my newsletter: thefixpodcast.org/newsletter
Check out my website: michellepking.com
This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
A Pew Research report finds 42% of women in the United States say they have faced discrimination at work because of their gender. This included being treated as less competent, receiving less support from leaders, enduring social isolation, or being denied opportunities to advance. When discrimination shows up at work, leaders may acknowledge it, but they believe these are just one-off events that women need to overcome on their own. This makes it easy to believe that women are the problem, not workplaces.
On this episode, Adrienne Lawrence, author of "Staying in the Game: The Playbook for Beating Workplace Sexual Harassment," a first-of-its-kind survival guide will share why neither men nor women escape sexual harassment unscathed and why sexual harassment is a key feature of the COVID-19 workplace and what you can do to fix this.
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Follow me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michellepking
Get a copy of my book "The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work" https://www.amazon.com/The-Fix-Overcome-the-Invisible-Barriers-That-Are-Holding-Women-Back-at-Work/dp/1982110929
Or get the audio book here:
Audible: https://adbl.co/2sLCbEH
Google Play: http://bit.ly/38w03er
--
To check out episodes you missed or learn how to partner with us, visit thefixpodcast.org
Sign up for my newsletter: thefixpodcast.org/newsletter
Check out my website: michellepking.com
This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and isolation efforts in March, Americans have reported negative mental health outcomes. Whether it’s because they’ve lost a job or are in fear losing one, they’re struggling to piece together money to pay bills, or they’re worried about their health and safety (or that of everyone in their house), the continuous onslaught of worry and insecurity is leading to greater mental health issues than ever before. Today, most people who are in lockdown are reporting symptoms and signs of depression, anxiety, and fear. This increase has been sustained for several weeks and shows no signs yet of fading.
In this episode, we are going to unpack mental health and discuss how you can manage your mental and emotional wellbeing during this time. Ken Duckworth, M.D., chief medical officer of the National Alliance on Mental Illness will be joining us on this episode. Dr. Duckworth will share all the strategies you can use to look after yourself during COVID 19 and beyond.
Following the global financial crisis in 2008, Christine Lagarde, then Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, is quoted as saying: “If Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters, today’s economic crisis clearly would look quite different.” Her argument is based on several reports following the crisis. These reports found that banks led by a higher proportion of women suffered less from the global economic crisis.
These findings place a lot of pressure on companies and boards to have a greater gender balance of women in leadership positions. In Europe, for example, female board representation in big banks increased from 15% to 33% in 2008. Research has consistently found that women are more effective leaders, especially during a crisis.
On this episode, you will hear from one such leader, Liz Elting, who just launched the Halo Fund, a new multimillion-dollar charitable initiative created to support comprehensive pandemic relief efforts, including funding for research, frontline healthcare workers, public health resources, and direct support to the country's most vulnerable and underserved communities. On this episode, we will highlight all the ways women are stepping up to lead during COVD-19 and what you can do to support them.
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Follow me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michellepking
Get a copy of my book "The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work" https://www.amazon.com/The-Fix-Overcome-the-Invisible-Barriers-That-Are-Holding-Women-Back-at-Work/dp/1982110929
Or get the audio book here:
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Google Play: http://bit.ly/38w03er
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This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
To acknowledge different gender identities in 2014, Facebook added more than 50 custom gender options for users who don’t identify simply as “male” or “female.” In September 2019, Grammy-award winning singer-songwriter Sam Smith announced on Instagram that they’ve decided to start using gender-neutral pronouns. Sam posted an image that said “My pronouns are they/them.” Sam received a lot of pushback from fans and members of the media who are either unable or unwilling to accept the change. There has been a lot of focus on personal pronouns recently. We are even seeing senators like Kamala Harris introducing herself by stating that her pronouns are "she, her and hers."
I know a lot of listeners might be wondering why pronouns matter. Why is it important to let people know what your pronouns are? I have had people ask me all these questions. The good news is today, with the help of Inclusion expert and Netflix Inclusion Program Manager Julia Stern, we are going to answer all these questions and more. On this episode, we will unpack everything you need to know about personal pronouns, why they matter, and what action each of us can take to be more inclusive when it comes to personal pronouns.
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Follow me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michellepking
Get a copy of my book "The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work" https://www.amazon.com/The-Fix-Overcome-the-Invisible-Barriers-That-Are-Holding-Women-Back-at-Work/dp/1982110929
Or get the audio book here:
Audible: https://adbl.co/2sLCbEH
Google Play: http://bit.ly/38w03er
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To check out episodes you missed or learn how to partner with us, visit thefixpodcast.org
Sign up for my newsletter: thefixpodcast.org/newsletter
Check out my website: michellepking.com
This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
Women in Britain are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack, as heart failure trials generally use male participants. Cars are designed around the body of “Reference Man". Although men are more likely to crash, women involved in collisions are nearly 50% more likely to be seriously hurt. The average smartphone – 5.5 inches long – is too big for most women’s hands, and it doesn’t often fit in our pockets. Speech-recognition software is trained on recordings of male voices. Google’s version is 70% more likely to understand men. And the list goes on and on and on.
The default male is the standard by which everything is measured, which makes women's needs, differences and abilities invisible. On this episode, we'll be hearing from Caroline Criado Perez, author of "Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men". Caroline will share how human history is comprised of a pervasive gender data gap that effectively ‘silences’ and erases women’s accomplishments, experiences, needs and daily lives – and importantly how we can close this gap once and for all.
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Follow me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michellepking
Get a copy of my book "The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work" https://www.amazon.com/The-Fix-Overcome-the-Invisible-Barriers-That-Are-Holding-Women-Back-at-Work/dp/1982110929
Or get the audio book here:
Audible: https://adbl.co/2sLCbEH
Google Play: http://bit.ly/38w03er
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To check out episodes you missed or learn how to partner with us, visit thefixpodcast.org
Sign up for my newsletter: thefixpodcast.org/newsletter
Check out my website: michellepking.com
This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
New York Times investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones covers racial injustice for the New York Times Magazine and leads the 1619 Project, an ongoing initiative that commenced on August 2019, and commemorates the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. Nikole’s work examines slavery's modern legacy and reframes the way we understand this history and the contributions of black Americans to the nation. Failing to understand the implications our history has today makes us blind to the inequalities that confront Black men and women in America. In both Louisiana and Chicago, for example, recent statistics showed that roughly 70% of COVID-19 deaths occurred among Blacks, even though they are a minority in both areas. The long history of both overt and structural racism in society affects access to health care and the quality of treatment provided. On this episode, Nikole will unpack how the toughest challenges we are facing today have their roots in slavery and why ignoring our history prevents us from solving the inequalities that persist today.
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Follow me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michellepking
Get a copy of my book "The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work" https://www.amazon.com/The-Fix-Overcome-the-Invisible-Barriers-That-Are-Holding-Women-Back-at-Work/dp/1982110929
Or get the audio book here:
Audible: https://adbl.co/2sLCbEH
Google Play: http://bit.ly/38w03er
--
To check out episodes you missed or learn how to partner with us, visit thefixpodcast.org
Sign up for my newsletter: thefixpodcast.org/newsletter
Check out my website: michellepking.com
This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
A recent study examining racial disparities reveals that people are more empathetic towards whites than towards blacks, particularly when related to medical treatment or pain. The discovery, known as the racial empathy gap, shows that people, including medical personnel, assume black people feel less pain than white people and helps explain disparities in areas from health care to criminal justice.
A lack of empathy extends to workplaces where men often lack awareness and therefore empathy for the barriers all women face at work. This is because of gender and racial inequality. Similarly, white women often lack understanding and therefore empathy about the challenges women from racial and ethnic minority groups face.
On this episode, my good friend Minda Harts, speaker, founder, and author of “The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat At The Table” will unpack what the empathy gap is, and what white women need to do to advance equality for all women.
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Follow me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michellepking
Get a copy of my book "The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work" https://www.amazon.com/The-Fix-Overcome-the-Invisible-Barriers-That-Are-Holding-Women-Back-at-Work/dp/1982110929
Or get the audio book here:
Audible: https://adbl.co/2sLCbEH
Google Play: http://bit.ly/38w03er
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To check out episodes you missed or learn how to partner with us, visit thefixpodcast.org
Sign up for my newsletter: thefixpodcast.org/newsletter
Check out my website: michellepking.com
This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
So far, more than 3 million Americans have filed for unemployment. That is five times worse than the last time the record was broken, which shows just how suddenly a staggering number of people are losing their jobs or income during the coronavirus pandemic. According to an NPR survey, 18% of households have already reported someone being laid off or having hours reduced because of the coronavirus outbreak with 21 percent of women losing their jobs compared to 16 percent of men.
Losing your job can be scary, overwhelming and extremely challenging during a pandemic, which is why we spoke with Melinda Harrison, a former Olympic Athlete, Executive Coach, and author of "Personal Next: What We Can Learn From Elite Athletes Navigating Career Transition." On this episode, you will discover how to navigate planned or unplanned career transitions and overcome difficulties at work.
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Follow me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michellepking
Get a copy of my book "The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work" https://www.amazon.com/The-Fix-Overcome-the-Invisible-Barriers-That-Are-Holding-Women-Back-at-Work/dp/1982110929
Or get the audio book here:
Audible: https://adbl.co/2sLCbEH
Google Play: http://bit.ly/38w03er
--
To check out episodes you missed or learn how to partner with us, visit thefixpodcast.org
Sign up for my newsletter: thefixpodcast.org/newsletter
Check out my website: michellepking.com
This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
COVID-19 is impacting people throughout the world and it’s never been a more important time to practice inclusive leadership. Leaders tend to react in various ways when fear, anxiety and uncertainty reign. Some might ignore or downplay the severity of the pandemic, attempting to move ahead with business as usual to the extent that is possible. Others might feel stunned by all of the chaos and act in ways that exacerbate the problem.
As the world mobilizes to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus, uncertainty abounds. One thing is clear, however: the COVID-19 outbreak underscores the need for business and society to work together, support one another, be resilient and prepared—qualities that all good leaders can foster.
On this week’s podcast episode, you’ll be hearing from Vernā Myers, a Harvard-trained lawyer and founder of The Vernā Myers Company. Vernā was recently made VP, Inclusion Strategy at Netflix. In this episode, Vernā shared how leaders can lead during this crisis using her four Cs of progress – Cultural Curiosity, Compassion, Consciousness, and Courage. In this conversation, we talked about practical tools for connecting and supporting one another in this difficult time.
Black girls, and other girls of color, experience discriminatory, racist and unfair treatment in school, including suspensions, expulsions, referrals to law enforcement and arrests on school campuses, at rates that exceed the average public school population— and far exceed those experienced by their White female peers.
On today's episode, we will be hearing from Dr. Monique W. Morris, a bestselling author, social justice scholar and the founder and president of the National Black Women’s Justice Institute. Her impactful new and very topical national documentary, "PUSHOUT: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools," exposes the alarming numbers of African American girls facing unfair and inequitable treatment in schools across the country and also outlines initiatives to help them cope and heal. PUSHOUT is based on two of Dr. Morris’s books, "PUSHOUT: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools" and "Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues," and exposes a new and troubling trend: African American girls are the fastest-growing population in the juvenile justice system and the only group of girls disproportionately experiencing harsh discipline at every educational level.
On this episode, we will explore how gendered racism is experienced by Black girls in school and the implications this has for Black women in working life, and importantly what we can do to fix this issue.
Get a copy of my book "The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work" https://www.amazon.com/The-Fix-Overcome-the-Invisible-Barriers-That-Are-Holding-Women-Back-at-Work/dp/1982110929
You can buy the audio book here:
Audible: https://adbl.co/2sLCbEH
Google Play: http://bit.ly/38w03er
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To check out episodes you missed or learn how to partner with us, visit thefixpodcast.org
Sign up for my newsletter: thefixpodcast.org/newsletter
Check out my website: michellepking.com
This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
On our 100th episode, Michelle King is sharing the story of why she decided to write her book three years ago. Camille Laurente, producer of The Fix and CEO of Hueman Group Media, an audio-first company for social change, talks to Michelle about gender denial as the greatest barrier to women’s advancement at work, and why current approaches — leaning in, negotiating better, smiling more, etc — don't work. She also shares some invisible barriers that women face throughout their careers, and the actions we can take to tackle equality at work.
Get a copy of Michelle's book "The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work" https://www.amazon.com/The-Fix-Overcome-the-Invisible-Barriers-That-Are-Holding-Women-Back-at-Work/dp/1982110929
You can buy her audio book here:
Audible: https://adbl.co/2sLCbEH
Google Play: http://bit.ly/38w03er
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To check out episodes you missed or learn how to partner with us, visit thefixpodcast.org
Sign up for my newsletter: thefixpodcast.org/newsletter
Check out my website: michellepking.com
This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
Stories reflect what we socially consider good, valuable, and desirable. As we encounter them from a young age, stories inevitably influence our worldviews, values and practices – by providing us with frames of reference and meaning. However, stories also have the power produce and reproduce socially accepted values and expectations, like sexisim and racisim. This is why it's so important for women in positions of power and privdlge to build platforms, create space and amplify the voices of their less privileged sisters.
On today's episode, we will be hearing from Pat Mitchell, editorial director of TEDWomen and recent author of "Becoming A Dangerous Woman". Throughout her career, Pat has focused on using media as a force for social change, with a special emphasis on the representation of women's voices and stories. On the podcast, she shares why it's so important to live dangerously and how to embrace risk to change the world.
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To check out episodes you missed or learn how to partner with us, visit thefixpodcast.org
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This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
In celebration of Black History Month, we will be hearing from Darnell Moore, an award-winning writer, a leading Black Lives Matter activist, and an advocate for justice and liberation. He grew up in poverty to teenage parents living in New Jersey. Darnell battled with his personal identity as both black and queer. His incredible book ”No Ashes In The Fire” details his experience growing up as a scared, bullied teenager who not only survived, but found his calling.
In this episode, you’ll hear Darnell’s powerful story, which serves to reminds us that liberation is possible if we commit ourselves to fighting for it.
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This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.
A 2008 research study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology finds that people have a tendency to value “male” jobs, like a teacher in industrial art or editor of an automotive magazine, more highly than “female” jobs, like a teacher in elementary school or editor of a food magazine.
Even when jobs do not differ on any factors that contribute to pay, this study found that salaries will be higher for jobs that are considered more “male”.
On this episode, we are hearing from Amanda Goodall, Senior Lecturer in Management at Cass Business School and author of the HBR article “Women Ask for Raises as Often as Men, but Are Less Likely to Get Them.” Goodall will reveal why the gender gap has less to do with women’s not asking, negotiating or leaning in and more to do with straight up discrimination. And more importantly, we will unpack what leaders can do to fix this problem.
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In today's episode, Sara Sutton, founder and CEO of FlexJobs, shares their latest research findings which highlight why flexible work options are the key to making workplaces work for men and women. Flexibility is the umbrella term used to describe any role that breaks the traditional norm of a rigid 9-to-5, five-day week structure. Flexible work gives individuals greater freedom over when, where or how to fulfill their particular roles.
But it is a term we typically associate with mothers. The Flexibility Stigma is really the penalty mothers pay for taking up flexible work, as their workplaces perceive them to be less ambitious, motivated, and productive. This limits their career advancement and pay. Importantly, this is an issue for men too, as research finds men who want to reduce their workhours for family reasons will be penalized. It is estimated they will face a 26% reduction in pay, compared to women who will face a 23% reduction.
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While we have come a long way, given that 100 years ago women were not even able to vote, we still have a really long way to go when it comes to gender equality in politics. Today, women continue to encounter challenges, from sexist double standards to gendered questioning to harassment and alleged assault. On this episode, Rebecca Sive, "Author of Vote Her In: Your Guide to Electing Our First Woman President" will share the different challenges women leaders face working in politics and what it really takes for women to make it to the top.
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Third culture kids is a term to describe people who are raised in a culture other than their parents' or the culture of the country named on their passport for a significant part of their childhood. Third culture kids are often exposed to a greater variety of cultural influences.
While not really identifying with one culture, can make it difficult to feel like you belong anywhere there are benefits to being a third culture kids. For example, research finds that they are generally more tolerant of different cultures and of people of different backgrounds than individuals who do not share this culturally diverse background. Third Culture kids also find it easier to adapt to new cultures and understand how to behave appropriately in these new environments.
Tayo Rockson, a diversity and inclusion expert, is harnessing the insights, knowledge and cultural awareness he has gained from being a third culture kid to enable people to communicate more effectively across cultural divides, connect with others in a meaningful way, and celebrate the differences around us all. On our final episode for 2019, Tayo will share how you can use your differences to make a difference.
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For decades, scientists have long been obsessed with uncovering biological differences between male and female brains. Dating back to the 1800’s, influential scientists, including Charles Darwin believed women were “biologically inferior to men.” The racism and sexism of evolution theory has been documented well and widely publicized. Darwin believed women are inferior because they have inferior brains and therefore, they do not have the right to assume a powerful role in society. Even though this is factually incorrect, Darwin's ideas, including his view of women, have had a major impact on society.
Gina Rippon honorary professor of cognitive neuroimaging at Aston University, in the United Kingdom and author of The Gendered Brain, argues that there is no consistent pattern or structure which reliably characterizes the brain so that we could say, “Okay, that’s a female brain and that’s a male brain.” On this episode, you will hear from Gina who will share her research examining male and female brains, and the role that our environments play in shaping gender differences.
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Women historically have accounted for almost fifty percent of immigrants, and currently exceed that. Though women are integral characters, immigration is rarely thought of as a woman's story. That’s why authors of the bestselling book and podcast, 'Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls' have announced they will be releasing a third volume in Fall 2020, titled Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Immigrant Women Who Changed the World. The book will feature 100 extraordinary immigrant women from the past and the present, who have had to leave their homeland to seek refuge, to realize their dreams, and to share their invaluable contributions with the world.
On this episode, you will hear from Elena Favilli, co-creator of 'Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls' who will share her experience being an immigrant in America and why it is so important to share the stories of immigrant women.
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When we think of celebrating the holidays, we normally think about food. But preparing a special family meal can be impossible for millions of Americans who simply cannot afford food. Hunger doesn't take a break for the holidays.
Millions of people cannot afford food because of underemployment, stagnant wages and rising costs of living. That is why organizations like Feeding America are so important. In this episode, Claire Babineaux-Fontenot Chief Executive Officer of Feeding America shares a special story in how she came to lead the organization that provides millions of Americans with food they need to survive. Claire will share her journey and work at Feeding America and why hunger is an issue for all of us to solve.
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Gender stereotypes and standards for women, ensure that most of the unpaid work in heterosexual relationships lands squarely with women to undertaken – even if women and men work similar hours. Whether it is doing the laundry, overseeing homework, driving kids to afterschool activities or caring for elderly parents, being solely in charge of household routines and tasks has been found to negatively influence mental and emotional health. While men today do more housework and parenting than their forefathers, studies have shown women are still responsible for a larger share of physical, emotional and invisible labor at home.
That’s why Eve Rodsky, a Harvard-educated lawyer who works as an organizational management specialist overseeing philanthropy funds at Fortune 500 companies, is determined to “create a system for domestic rebalance.” After interviewing 500 men and women, Eve came up with the system which she outlines in her book, "Fair Play: The 5 New Rules to Revolutionize Your Marriage, Home and Sense of Purpose." In this episode, Eve will share how you can create equality in your household and why this is so important for men and women’s career success and fulfillment.
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You can’t put a number on equality because it is something people experience. If you are going to measure anything, measure the culture, survey, interview and observe people’s behaviors. This is where inequality happens. The UK parliament is evidence of this. Currently, there are 206 women in the House of Commons. This is an all-time high at 32%. However, the instances of marginalization, discrimination and harassment are also at an all-time high. The very women we have managed to advance into these positions are leaving.
This matters because research indicates that whether a legislator is male or female has a distinct impact on their policy priorities.
On this wee's episode, we will hear from Jennifer Nadel, a qualified barrister, author, speaker, campaigner and an award-winning journalist. Jennifer is also the co-founder of compassion in politics. Jennifer will unpack how women political leaders are systematically bullied, drawing on the UK as an example, and share what we can do to fix it.
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In a research study examining the lived experiences of 1,569 professionals, nonprofit consultancy Catalyst found that 60 % of racial and ethnic minorities at work share this experience. This is known as Emotional Tax or the mental and emotional strain caused by the daily experience of exclusion, discrimination, and bias for racial and ethnic minority employees. Taken together, they impose an Emotional Tax with heavy personal consequences. This Emotional Tax can also harm businesses by preventing employees from being able to thrive at work.
On this episode, you will hear from Dr. Dnika J. Travis, Vice President of Research at Catalyst and recognized researcher, educator, and change leader – especially when it comes to the topic of Emotional Tax. On this episode, she will unpack this important issue and share what each of us can do to tackle it at work.
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This show is produced by Hueman Group Media.