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Hi everyone,

Over the past few months I’ve been struggling with the mind-boggling uselessness of the German bureaucracy. A lot of services are only partially digitised. Many of the documents that must be exchanged are unfriendly PDFs which you may even be invited to fax back to the relevant institutions. Setting up a company is a taxing experience that can take many months. And of course it doesn’t help that customer service as a concept is alien to the country’s culture. Your Disney+ (or Netflix) apps get better every year. But these services remain hopelessly the same.

The gap between the way these services are delivered and the technologies we use on a daily basis is wider than it’s ever been. Though it’s likely to be worse in Germany than in many other places, there’s actually such a gap everywhere. Technologies continue to grow exponentially whereas our public services, traditional organisations, legal categories and social norms change much more slowly, in a linear fashion.

At school, classes are often taught as if Google and Youtube didn’t exist. Our tax systems largely ignore the specifics of our digital economy and fail to properly grasp the value created by digital giants. Labour unions fail to target the growing precariat of our day and age. More people fall through the cracks of the safety net we designed for the industrial age. Even the way we measure and analyse economic value is more and more beside the point. The list could go on and on…

That’s why I was particularly satisfied to find out that this gap had been given a name: the Exponential Gap. In a must-read book titled Exponential, Azeem Azhar, creator of the influential Exponential View newsletter and Harvard Business Review podcast, explains that in our Exponential Age, technological change is exponential whereas institutional change is only linear, which results in a fast-growing gap between the two.

After the publication of my book Du Labeur à l’ouvrage (“From Graft to Craft”), he invited me to talk about technology and the new world of work in his HBR podcast. So it was with immense pleasure that I returned the invitation and interviewed Azeem about the exponential gap and its consequences on work in my Laetitia@Work podcast. We had a fascinating conversation about his new book (and the process of writing it), the pervasiveness of tech pessimism, the exponential gap, the new world of work, the skills of the future, the gender gap and many more things.

Listen to my interview of Azeem by using the player in this newsletter 🎧 ☝️

I recommend you read his book 📚 It’s a short, well crafted book that manages to make clear the issues at stake in the paradigm shift we are experiencing. With a few striking concepts, it gives us food for thought about the institutional issues of our Exponential Age. Like every good read, it made me wonder about more things, including the relationship between the exponential gap and the gender gap 👇💡

Mind the Exponential Gap

There are many reasons why human-built institutions are slow to adapt, from the psychological trouble we have conceptualising exponential change, through to the inherent difficulty of turning around a big organisation. All contribute to the widening gulf between technology and our social institutions” (Exponential)

The pandemic provided us with ample evidence about our being ill-equipped to grasp exponential change. At the beginning of each new wave of contamination, policy makers fell into the same cognitive trap. They ignored exponential growth at the beginning. The early points on any exponential curve look so unimpressive at first that everybody (except for epidemiologists or financial experts) will fail to pay attention to it. So people aren’t ready to adapt to exponential change.

👉 Read my Welcome to the Jungle review (in French) of Azeem’s book: Futur du travail : Et si le problème c’était le “fossé exponentiel” ?

Though this example isn’t in the book, this cognitive problem is best illustrated by the wheat and chessboard problem: if a chessboard were to have wheat placed upon each square such that one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on (doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square), how many grains of wheat would be on the chessboard at the finish?

The total number of grains equals 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. Unless you’re good at math, you can’t even read that figure. That’s eighteen quintillion, four hundred forty-six quadrillion, seven hundred forty-four trillion, seventy-three billion, seven hundred nine million, five hundred fifty-one thousand, six hundred and fifteen, over 1.4 trillion metric tons. Or 2,000 times the annual world production of wheat, as explained in Wikipedia.

We humans are better at incremental changes. We understand the seasons, our human lifespan, and the (linear) productivity of an assembly line. Not the exponential phenomenon of artificial intelligence. Nor the effect of Wright’s Law. Likewise all our legacy institutions—social norms, policies and organisations—weren’t designed for the Exponential Age. They often move too slowly to adapt.

The “exponential gap” is the kind of enlightening, catch-all notion that can make a book very successful because people will talk about it everywhere. It explains many of the problems we deal with and why our legacy institutions can’t keep up. As it widens, the gap leads to more cultural and political tension and resentment. In short, the gap makes us angry as my anecdote about German bureaucracy illustrates… (although I do sometimes wonder why I don’t see more people express their anger at Germany’s particularly disastrous exponential gap!)

How do the exponential gap and the gender gap intersect?

I confess that’s one of the questions that concerns me the most. Exponential technologies and companies are overwhelmingly in male hands. Women make up less than 20% of the engineers who make them. They don’t share much in the exponential profits of winner-take-all digital giants. Less than 5% of venture capital go to female-funded companies. Even when they do ask for money, women don’t get much of it. Because it’s so hostile to them, many women find it hard to identify with the culture and mindset that come with working at an exponential company.

I read in a Harvard Business Review article titled “Women-Led Startups Received Just 2.3% of VC Funding in 2020” that women received even less VC funding in 2020 than in 2019:

It will likely be some time before all the reasons for this precipitous drop are clear. Some speculate that the pandemic made investors more wary of risks and more likely to stick to their existing networks — which is very much a “boys’ club” and tougher for women to break into. And even when going outside their networks, many investors may be sticking with “pattern-matching habits,” seeking the same kinds of companies that they’ve supported in the past, which are often tech companies led by men.

After all, only about 12% of decision makers at VC firms are women, and most firms still don’t have a single female partner, according to an analysis last year. Of all partners at these firms, only 2.4% are female founding partners — who, as Fast Company notes, “control an outsize proportion of a firm’s investment decisions.” When women venture capitalists do make the decisions, they’re twice as likely to invest in female founding teams.

The lack of gender equality in funding startups leads to further problems. It affects the overall jobs picture for women exponentially. It’s also likely to slow the recovery and efforts to tackle inequality.

Reading Azeem’s book I couldn’t help but wonder: if the “exponential” curve is so much more male, does that mean there’s an exponential gender gap?

At least the idea that tech is gender neutral is one that fewer people will dare defend today. For a couple of years now, there have been more and more debates about the many biases of AI and tech. The book Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez helped shed light on the problem. See this Guardian review of Criado-Perez’s book:

Gender-blindness in tech culture produces what Criado Perez calls the “one-size-fits-men” approach. 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. One woman reported that her car’s voice-command system only listened to her husband, even when he was sitting in the passenger seat. Women are more likely to feel sick while wearing a VR headset. Another study found that fitness monitors underestimate steps during housework by up to 74%, and users complain that they don’t count steps taken while pushing a pram (...)

The sheer abundance of examples in this book militates somewhat against its argument, which is that there is a lack of gender-specific data: a “gender data gap”. Googling “gender impact assessment” yields upwards of 345m results. Criado Perez to some extent acknowledges this tension, imploring planners and politicians to make better use of the data that already exists, but that’s less an issue of data than of policy and design.

The neat thing about data is that it avoids thorny questions of intention. Criado Perez doesn’t set out to prove a vast conspiracy; she simply wields data like a laser, slicing cleanly through the fog of unconscious and unthinking preferences. Unless we crunch the numbers and take positive steps to correct bias, she argues, inequality will automatically continue. Technology is associated with innovation, but algorithms tend to reinforce the status quo: “If you like that, you’ll love this.”

Also last year Black Lives Matter denounced how biased facial recognition software is against Black people. More people ask “Who is making sure the AI machines aren’t racist?” So if everything on the “exponential” curve is that biased and unequal, how dangerous is that for all those people who live and work on the “linear” curve? What do you think?

🚀 Nicolas and I released two new Nouveau Départ podcasts (in 🇫🇷): Angela Merkel est-elle féministe ? & Innover et investir dans le "hardware" 🎧 Sign in on Substack.

👩‍💻 For Welcome to the Jungle, I wrote new pieces : Futur du travail : et si le problème c’était le « fossé exponentiel » ?, La pénalité maternelle, ça vous parle ?

📺 If you missed the live event last week, you can now watch our last Café Freelance with Coworkees about freelancing and time management 🇫🇷 w. Diane Ballonad Rolland & Marielle Cuirassier on Youtube!

Miscellaneous

🤔 Why Is Exercise Good, But Physical Jobs are Bad?, Sam Westreich, Medium, July 2021: “Some people in white-collar fields dream about getting a more active job. They consider taking a job as a waitress or a construction worker, believing that they’ll be out doing exercise and will be more fit. “If I work at a physical job, it’s like getting a workout regimen in every day!” Unfortunately, physical activity workers are also at high risk of a number of diseases related to their jobs. People working at Amazon warehouses, for instance, are at a higher risk of back injuries, muscle sprains or injuries, and a wide variety of repetitive stress injuries.”

🛫 Who needs expats?, Bartleby, The Economist, September 2021: “If chief executives are the monarchs of the corporate world, the cadre of well-paid staff they deploy from head office to oversee operations across the planet are their ambassadors. In the golden era of globalisation, sending an expatriate Western executive to a distant emerging market signalled the place was being taken seriously. That model was starting to feel out of date before covid-19 made foreign travel a misery. As Zoom and remote work have become the norm, is shuffling emissaries across the world even worth it anymore?”

♀️ How Some Women Are Remaking the Workplace to Better Suit Their Lives, Raksha Vasudevan, The New York Times, September 2021: “Offering more remote work options and flexible hours in a culture that still expects employees to overwork may actually do more harm than good, contributing to a greater erosion of boundaries between work and personal life. The pandemic has confirmed this: Instead of using time spent on commutes, breaks and socializing at work to rest, most people simply worked more. A recent survey also found that 39 percent of women fear that taking advantage of flexible work arrangements will negatively affect their career growth.”

Mind the gap and take care! 🤗

Subscribe at laetitiaatwork.substack.com

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Hi everyone,

What do bike lanes have to do with the future of work? You may think about the riders who deliver meals to well-to-do urbanites. Or about those same well-to-do creative class urbanites who choose to ride to work to reduce their carbon footprint. But this narrow vision tends to fuel a culture war around cycling that opposes rich, educated urban dwellers and others outside the city centre who largely rely on cars. This vision misses the point.

Our transport infrastructures support and mould the fabric of our society. They empower networks of relationships and clusters of talent. They enable numerous activities. They connect service workers (who often live in the periphery) to their place of work (often the city centre). But a lot of these infrastructures were not designed for everybody. The people who shaped them had factory workers and office employees in mind, not the service workers.

Like all infrastructures, bike lanes should be developed with all that in mind. When you look at the infrastructure decisions made in the Netherlands in the 1970s, you see that they were designed as very democratic and inclusive infrastructures: the old use them, people with disabilities use them, so do families with children. Cycling is cheap. And it has the potential to transform our (work) lives for the better.

That’s why I interviewed Chris Bruntlett for my Laetitia@Work podcast. He and his wife Melissa are urban mobility activists who wrote two best-selling books about cycling: Building the Cycling City and Curbing Traffic. A couple of years ago they moved from Vancouver, Canada to the Netherlands to fully embrace the cycling lifestyle. He even became the marketing director of the Dutch Cycling Embassy, a “vast network of public and private organisations from the Netherlands who wish to share their expertise on building what supports the Dutch cycling culture to those interested”.

👉 I loved this conversation so I’m very happy to share this podcast with you 🎧 ☝️

In this newsletter I also wanted to share a few thoughts on the relationship between bike lanes, the feminist city and the future of work 🚴👇💡

Last year I interviewed feminist geographer Leslie Kern after the publication of her book Feminist City. I even dedicated a whole newsletter to the subject: We need (feminist) cities. The first point addressed in this newsletter is that urban design isn’t “neutral”. As Leslie Kern wrote in her book:

“This simple statement of the fact that built environments reflect the societies that construct them might seem obvious. In a world where everything from medication to crash test dummies, bullet-proof vests to kitchen counters, smartphones to office temperatures, are designed, tested, and set to standards determined by men’s bodies and needs, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. (...) The continued underrepresentation of women in architectural and planning professions means that women’s experiences of and in these places are likely to be overlooked or based on outdated stereotypes.”

If vibrant cities are the future of humanity then we should make that future more inclusive, heed the poor who live at the periphery, those who care for others, and those who live outside it. If developing networks and relationships is essential in the future of work, then we should design our infrastructures in such a way as to make more diverse networks possible. One of the keys is to include care work in the reflection. As Chris and Melissa explain in their book:

“The danger is not considering care work and the trips required to perform it—or care trips—in the transportation planning landscape, is that the needs of a significant portion of the population are left unmet. Care trips are often undercounted or uncounted because they don’t fall into easily measured, quantifiable definitions. When you think of the average journey to drop kids off at school or daycare, stop at the grocery store, or visit the doctor’s office, they are generally less than a kilometer in distance and seldom take longer than 15 minutes. Most travel surveys fail to take these measurements into account due to their brevity, ultimately ignoring entire swaths of mobility patterns. At the same time, care trips are usually arranged in a polygonal spatial pattern—indirect and with multiple stops—covering smaller geographical areas that are closer to home and made on foot or public transport. From a data collection stance, these trips are harder to track than the average, single-purpose commute for employment.”

That is how I understand the now famous concept of the 15-minute city inspired by Carlos Moreno and popularised by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo. Whether it’s 15 minutes or 25 minutes is irrelevant. What matters is how easy and sustainable it is for everyone to rely on friends, family, community, work and public services, to have autonomy, integrate work and life, and build relationships.

That’s why one of the limits of the Paris-centred debate around the 15-minute city is that it rarely includes the immigrant service workers who live in the periphery. Most of Paris’ nannies, nurses, employees and cleaning people live quite far from the centre. And their needs aren’t really addressed by the policies implemented in Paris intra muros, yet the city needs them for all its services. I can’t help but think that if this metropolis was Dutch, it would be safe and easy to cycle from Saint-Denis to Paris.

Today’s huge shortage of workers has several causes. One of these causes is that it’s become harder and harder to pay for housing in the cities where most of the jobs are. Over the past couple of decades, real estate prices and rents have risen much faster than wages. As a result more workers are excluded from the cities that need them. Better public transportation, between various areas in the periphery as well as between centre and periphery, can help reduce that mismatch by better connecting workers to employers. And yes, bike lanes can help too, provided there are many more of them.

Chris and Melissa are adamant: bike lanes are a vital component of the feminist city! And we have a lot to learn from the Dutch in that regard. I couldn’t encourage enough to listen to Chris Bruntlett’s interview to find out more about the Dutch cycling model 🎧 ☝️

🎒 Yesterday my children Beatrice (12) & Ferdinand (9) bravely went back to school in Bavaria ❤️‍🔥 Lots of stress, a bit of excitement, and some relief for me. Fingers crossed 🤞 Let’s hope this year the schools remain open most of the time and they get the cultural & linguistic immersion we were after.

🚀 Tomorrow Nicolas and I will launch the new season of our Nouveau Départ podcast (in 🇫🇷). After recording more than 150 podcasts with over 60,000 downloads, we’ve decided to drop the subscription model & make our podcast entirely free! You can now listen to some of our podcasts which used to be for subscribers only, like: Qu'est-ce que "faire carrière" aujourd'hui ? 🎧 Sign in for future ones on Substack (1 per week).

👩‍💻 For Welcome to the Jungle, I collaborated on this piece (in English): “Friends: 4 scenes that show the rocky manager-employee relationship.” There are many more articles to come in the next few weeks!

🧘 I was interviewed by friend and fellow yogi Charlotte Multon about the mental issues the self-employed face, and how jujitsu 🥋 and yoga helped me with these issues: “Investir sa santé mentale : le secret des indépendants.”

📺 My next “Café Freelance” event with Coworkees is about freelancing and time management 🇫🇷 My panel will feature Diane Ballonad Rolland & Marielle Cuirassier. Join us on September 23 at 9:30 CET!

Miscellaneous

😩 Collaboration Overload Is Sinking Productivity, Rob Cross, Mike Benson, Jack Kostal, and RJ Milnor, Harvard Business Review, September 2021: “Collaborative work — time spent on email, IM, phone, and video calls — has risen 50% or more over the past decade to consume 85% or more of most people’s work weeks. The Covid-19 pandemic caused this figure to take another sharp upward tick, with people spending more time each week in shorter and more fragmented meetings, with voice and video call times doubling and IM traffic increasing by 65%. And to make matters worse, collaboration demands are moving further into the evening and are beginning earlier in the morning.”

🛫 The Trouble With Airports, and How to Fix Them, Elaine Glusac, The New York Times, September 2021: “Exposing passengers to nature by way of plants is another stress reliever airports are adopting as designers champion “biophilic” — or nature-loving — plans.“The last thing you want after traveling in a stale tube is being in a hermetically sealed airport environment,” said Matt Needham, the director of aviation and transportation at HOK architects, which created parklike areas in the new La Guardia Terminal B in New York City.”

⛵ Plague of the Sea, Anton Howes, Age of Invention, September 2021: “Such was scurvy, the scourge of sailors, explorers, and the besieged — sometimes worsened, if that can be imagined, when the absence of other vitamins from low food supplies added confusion, diarrhoea, memory loss, numbed extremities, and skin that started to stiffen and peel in the sun above deck. For as long as humans have suffered severe food shortages, scurvy has been known. The first record of it appears to date to ancient Egypt, in 1550BC.”

See you on a bike lane 🚴‍♀️, in a train 🚇 or anywhere on the road. If you’re in Bavaria, let’s meet! 🤗

Subscribe at laetitiaatwork.substack.com

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Hi everyone,

I don’t play video games. In fact I don’t really play any games at all. But that’s not something I take any pride in. In fact I’m convinced I’m missing out on a lot of fun and opportunities to learn different skills. Lately I’ve been reading about video games. In these times of social distancing and sensory deprivation, I would now consider exploring the world of games.

There are multiple reasons why I don’t play video games. One of them is that nobody in my family played them. Another is that they have a history of sexism and misogyny that has made them unappealing to me. Some women are attracted to all-male worlds (finance, tech, venture capital, Formula 1, brick masonry, plumbing) but I tend to find them terribly boring.

I’ve never made a conscious decision not to play them (like I’ve never made a conscious decision not to read much about finance). Sexism doesn’t have to be violent or explicit to work its exclusionary wonders. The mere absence of women is often enough to make me feel uninterested in something. Though to be fair, video games also have a history of violent sexism.

So it is with a lot of interest that I read a newsletter by a woman about another woman who studies the psychology of video games. The newsletter is one of my favourites, Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study, one edition of which was an interview with Dr Rachel Kowert titled "Parents deserve so much more when it comes to the ways video games are discussed in our popular media."

I interviewed Rachel Kowert and I absolutely loved the conversation we had. Her words about the psychological needs (competence, autonomy, relatedness) you can meet with games really resonated. So did her rant against the moral panic surrounding video games that mass media keep spreading. I came out of this conversation determined that games should be my own new frontier.

🎧 You can listen to my conversation with Rachel Kowert titled “Let Children Play Video Games” by using the player above ☝️ or, if you prefer, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and why not seize this opportunity to listen to other Building Bridges podcasts?)

To say the history of video games is not inclusive to women would be an understatement

The sexism in computer science is closely intertwined with the sexism of the gaming industry. And vice versa. In fact today’s extreme gender segregation in both these worlds is fairly recent. Up until the 1980s there were a lot more women in computer science. (Watch the series Halt and Catch Fire to see wonderful 80s female characters in computer science and gaming.)In the early 1980s nearly 40% of computer science graduates were female. But starting in 1985, those numbers suddenly plummeted. Today it is less than 20%. One of the main reasons for this dramatic shift is video games marketing. “The dude-centric computer marketing campaigns of that time may be to blame.” Computers were used mostly for games which targeted boys.

For example in 1985 Apple’s ad for its new PC featured a boy who wants to be an astronaut (“there’s no telling how far it can take you”). In the ad the boy sits in class near a sulky girl in front of her own computer whose sad face probably broke every computer-loving girl’s heart. The boy teases the girl, thus subtly implying she can’t be any good at using it.

And voilà. After 1985 the male computing culture needed only to perpetuate itself. It became a chicken-and-egg problem. Games were sold to boys who were the only ones buying them because of all the marketing targeting them. Ten years later it was all too natural for Nintendo to release its “Game Boy”. And computer science lost its women too.

Because girls didn’t play as many games they didn’t use computers as much, which is what led to the “experience gap” (addressed by Jane Margolis’s research as early as the mid-1990s). In the introduction of her research paper, she mentions the story of a girl named Lily who loses interest in computer science:

Lily was a first-year undergraduate computer science major who entered one of the top computer science departments in the country with a great deal of enthusiasm for the subject. Her interest was first sparked in high school, when she took an advanced placement computer science course at the suggestion of her guidance counselor. "As soon as I started taking that course in programming, I realized I loved it...I absolutely loved it," she tells us in her first interview. Her enjoyment of a summer programming job solidified her decision to major in CS. She enjoyed "the challenges the programmer faces," and found the problem-solving to be fun.

Yet by the end of her second semester, she has decided to transfer to the English department. Her enthusiasm for computer science is extinguished. She says, "In high school, when I’d go home from class, I would be like ‘Oh, let’s program a little.’ But, now I am just like, ‘Let’s not bother.’" Struggling with the course work, perceiving her peers (mostly male) as doing much better with much less effort, feeling a misfit between herself and a cultural norm that associates success with an all-consuming love of computing, she questions whether she belongs in the department. Several semesters after leaving computer science, Lily describes her disappointment in having transferred out. It is not that she is unhappy in English. She loves the humanities. But she remembers how much she loved programming, had wanted to major in computer science, and feels dismayed with how her interest has been extinguished.

Lily’s experience is not unique. Her story highlights a key struggle experienced by many women studying computer science at the college level. Once enthusiastic about the field, their interest dissipates.

And so sexism in the gaming industry did not get better. It became worse and worse. Games featured only male characters and stereotypical hyper-sexualised female characters, which made them less attractive to women, which incentivized the industry to continue to target male gamers only. As Rachel Kowert explains in her book A Parent’s Guide to Video Games:

“The problem is that constant and prolonged exposure to the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of women in video games is thought to cultivate sexist thoughts, attitudes and behaviours among mostly male video game players. That is, the overwhelming portrayal of women in unflattering and stereotypical roles is believed to turn the interactive space of a video game into a highly influential method of teaching prejudice against women, whether intentional or not. This concern grows in regard to teenage players, as they are at a greater risk for influence via media.

Research have found that male players who are exposed to stereotypical representations of women in video games report being more tolerant of sexual harassment, and they are more likely to agree that women are weak and need a man’s protection.”

Why I would now consider making video games my own personal new frontier

Social distancing and sensory deprivation have taken a toll

To combat the toxic effects of isolation and sensory deprivation many people have turned to gaming. And right they are. Good video games meet some of our most basic psychological needs. As Rachel explains in our interview:

A good game is one that meets our three basic psychological needs. This is called self-determination theory. It gives us a sense of achievement, a sense of competence and a sense of relatedness. We get a sense of achievement by achieving things in the game. We get a sense of relatedness by playing with others or even the relationships that we have with the other computer-generated characters. And it gives us a sense of competence. We're able to progress, we're able to get better.

So those three elements, competence, autonomy and relatedness are three basic psychological needs. And when we get them met, we feel good. And good games are capable of helping us get these needs met.

Cultivating brain plasticity and developing cognitive abilities

I’m 42 years old, the perfect age to look for the (now quite distant) child in me and find great joy in playing games. 40 is an empowering age in so many ways (I feel more confident, more powerful, more free than I was at 20 or 30) but it’s also an age of work work work responsibilities duties and no play. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

In addition there are many cognitive benefits to playing video games, which could help cultivate brain plasticity. It is said to help improve sustained and selective attention and visuospatial skills (a person’s ability to identify visual and spatial relationships among objects).

But I wouldn’t buy too much into the idea of playing games just for the sake of fighting Alzheimer as most of these claims are dubious marketing claims. Really the most important thing is to have fun. That’s what’s ultimately good for cognition, memory and mental health!

Video games should play a part in the future of work

As an industry, video games will only grow in the future and call for more creativity and diverse talent. But that’s not all. In fact gaming may come to replace some of the everyday informal, yet essential interactions that take place at the office. Gaming is already used in team building. But it could gain more ground as a tool to create serendipity.

So much has been said about the water cooler effect and the many virtues of random physical encounters to spark a sense of belonging and generate new ideas. Well, video games can do that too! We’re not about to find out about virtual serendipity by using Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex… but apparently there’s loads of serendipity in Animal Crossing or Minecraft!

The main reason why we assume that nothing can ever replace the office is that we’ve been using very disappointing tools. So far our online experience has been pretty shitty. It’s basically like going from 3D to 2D: you lose a lot. But couldn’t our online experience be a lot better and a lot more fun?

Managers, take note: virtual gaming can be a great way to engage and enrich your teams, especially in a time when bonding opportunities may be scarce. (...)

For one, playing games mirrors the kinds of interactions that help teams work better together, like pursuing mutual goals, allocating shared resources, negotiating task ownership, and collaborating to solve problems. A Brigham Young University study of 80 newly formed teams found that groups that played video games together for just 45 minutes were 20 percent more productive than those that engaged in more traditional team-building exercises. Notably, this was true for novices and avid gamers alike.

(...) strong interpersonal connections are an important ingredient for more effective teams. “Playing games with someone means interacting in a different space. You’re making an agreement with them to navigate that space together, and you’ll see a different side of them than you normally would in a professional setting,” says Matt Parker, professor at the New York University Game Center. (see the whole article here)

Supporting feminism by playing video games

The industry has gotten so big. It is worth tens of billions of dollars and it is growing every year. Women can’t afford to continue to ignore it. And the fact is that many women do not ignore it: it is said that the number of female gamers is on the increase and that roughly 40% of US gamers are women. But the percentage of games created by women, marketed to a female (or mixed) audience is significantly lower than that: “Women and non-binary people make up approximately 14% of game audio professionals.”

It’s time to end the chicken-and-egg cycle. The more women play games and the more they communicate about what they’d like their games to be like, the more gaming professionals will start developing such games and hiring and promoting more women. We’re not there yet. But there’s hope. Cinema is changing. The video games industry can change too.

As you may have understood from this newsletter, I’m very clueless when it comes to games. I’m open to all your suggestions. What would be the best way for me to get started? What’s the game that YOU like best and why?

🏔️ I’ve finally taken up hiking in the Bavarian Alps! Thanks Clotilde & Klaus for getting me started. It’s going to be a weekly thing. I feel like a new woman 🤗

🚀 For Nouveau Départ we’ve recorded new podcasts, among which: Laissez-nous jouer aux jeux vidéo !, IKEA : une entreprise en transition ?, Merci mais non merci : j’ai choisi une carrière d’un autre genre, Tout comprendre sur la crise au Texas, La viande est-elle la nouvelle cigarette ?, … Subscribe to Nouveau Départ!

👩‍💻 For Welcome to the Jungle, I wrote new pieces: Télétravail : soignez la paranoïa de vos équipes !, Conjuguer carrière et vie privée : les secrets des couples qui marchent, Soif de pouvoir, égo démesuré... souffrez-vous du syndrome d'Hubris ?, 15 conseils pour favoriser l’inclusion dans une équipe distribuée…

🎙️ After Rachel Kowert there are more fantastic Building Bridges podcasts to come. 🎧 Subscribe to Building Bridges and receive the next one in your mailbox.

Miscellaneous

📚 Imagine Your Flexible Office Work Future, Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study, March 2021: “The idea of “boundaries” has become so porous when it comes to cultivating work/life balance that it’s lost all meaning. People don’t respect boundaries. You don’t respect them. Even when the pandemic is over, it’s going to be very, very difficult to try to rebuild them. What we actually need are guardrails, big and sturdy ones, to protect us from the runaway semi-truck of work.”

🤓 The Woody Allen vs. Mia Farrow story is also a story of workplace abuse, Constance Grady, Vox, March 2021: “the story of Woody Allen and the Farrows is not just a story about child abuse and incest, although it is both of those things. It is also a story about workplace abuse. The power dynamics of this family were deeply shaped by the power dynamics on the sets of the movies they made together. Intentionally or not, Allen molded his relationship with Farrow so that he was in control of how she earned her money. And when their relationship ended, he took full advantage of that position.”

✉️ E-mail Is Making Us Miserable, Cal Newport, New Yorker Business Review, February 2021: “The missed connections in an ever-filling e-mail in-box sound these same Paleolithic alarm bells—regardless of our best attempts to convince ourselves that this unanswered communication isn’t critical. This effect is so strong that when Arianna Huffington’s company, Thrive Global, explored how to free its employees from this anxiety while they were on vacation (when the knowledge of accumulating messages becomes particularly acute), it ended up experimenting with an extreme solution.”

Until next time, let’s try and hike or play more 🏔️ 🕹️

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Listen now | Th case for gender quotas in media and organisations

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Hi everyone,

Happy New Year to you all! 2021 isn’t (yet) what we would like it to be. Many of us find ourselves in hard lockdown again. Germany has just extended and strengthened its national lockdown as daily deaths are now skyrocketing. So has the UK. It looks like 2021 will continue to teach us not to take anything for granted 😟

For many of us there is nowhere to go but stay home (yet again). But to go out and expand your horizon, there will always be podcasts and books. That’s why this week my newsletter aims to give you both 🤗

🎧 You can listen to my conversation with Professor Mariana Mazzucato about “Rethinking the State” by using the player above ☝️ or, if you prefer, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and why not take this opportunity to explore my other Building Bridges podcasts?)

📚 Below is my list of 12 books about the future of work I read in 2020. For six years now I’ve read between 10 and 15 books about the future of work and organisations each year. I could read many more of course, but I also read some novels and essays not directly related to work.

I’m also a big practitioner of the great, ancient art of tsundoku (積ん読), i.e. acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in my home without reading them. Tsundoku improves my life: just my looking at the said piles, I get all warm inside at the idea of future knowledge and adventure.

I hope this list will inspire you too 💡👇

1 The Culture Map by Erin Meyer

As you may have noticed from reading my previous newsletters (namely “Navigating across cultures and getting ready for the future of work”), The Culture Map is a book that made quite an impression on me. I’m half-French, half-German, taught English in France, lived in the UK for 5 years, worked with Americans, and now I live in Germany, so of course I love studying cultural differences! Local cultures remain stubbornly divergent. And I’m convinced that learning to navigate between them is the skill of the future. For example, the best remote teams have integrated relevant lessons from intercultural teams.

2 Feminist City by Leslie Kern

Not that long ago most people would have laughed at the idea that geography could be sexist or feminist. But today we accept that urban planning does have consequences on gender equality, and that the city is at the heart of many future of work issues. As the pandemic has made all too (terribly) visible: without proper childcare and healthcare infrastructures, we’re all doomed. Leslie Kern is a feminist geographer whose thoughts on urban activism and the future of cities bring fresh perspective to rethink the future of work with a gender lens. That’s why I did a podcast with her too 🎧

3 The Value of Everything by Mariana Mazzucato

I’ve long been a big fan of Mariana Mazzucato’s work. The Value of Everything, her second book, felt quite personal to me. It questions the difference between value creation and value extraction, and the way economic theory failed us in that regard. How come so many of today’s “essential” workers (nurses, elderly care workers, nannies, teachers, and the like) also happen to be the least valued in society? I used to be a teacher in France: we were told again and again that we were a “cost” (while the private sector supposedly “created value”). Listen to my podcast with Professor Mazzucato in the player above☝️ or on Apple Podcasts 🎧

4 Wordslut by Amanda Montell

What does a book about language and feminism have to do with the future of work, you may ask. Well, quite a lot. As you may remember from my 7 trends for 2021, “activism will force more people to share power”. And language is where it all starts. Before power can be shared, there are numerous linguistic battles to wage. In that book, Montell moves between history and popular culture to explore the relationship between language and society. Linguistic activism has already started to bleed into the world of work. Advertisers, recruiters and communicators can’t afford to ignore it!

5 The New Long Life by Lynda Gratton & Andrew Scott

“Age is malleable” has become an essential component of my thoughts on the future of work. It’s funny how futurists focus so much on AI and so little on the one thing that we do know about the future: we’ll be older! Lynda Gratton & Andrew Scott have published two books on the “age of longevity” and its implications on education, careers, lives and our institutions. In The 100-Year Life, they explained that we’re moving away from the “three-stage life” (education, work, retirement) of the industrial age. In The New Long Life, they focus on the intersection between the longevity revolution & technological change. Listen to my new podcast with Andrew Scott 🎧

6 Chez soi by Mona Chollet

This essay by Swiss journalist Mona Chollet may only be available in French and may have been written several years ago, it does deserve a good place on this list. Stuck at home during lockdown in 2020, many French readers turned to Chez soi for insights about the domestic sphere. I strongly believe that the home is the next future-of-work frontier. So Chollet’s “odyssey of domestic space” is a good place to start. This book conveys the wisdom of the “unjustly denigrated home” and asks extremely relevant questions such as “Who does the cleaning?”. (For those who don’t read French, I also recommend At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson.)

7 The Uncertainty Mindset by Vaughn Tan

Here’s another book about which I wrote a lot (“The Uncertainty Mindset and the Future of Work”). Some books I squeeze out to the marrow. And this is one of them. For 10 years, Vaughn Tan, a professor of strategy & ex-Googler, watched how a group of highly innovative R&D food labs across the world of high-end cuisine approached innovation. Interestingly, the world of high-end cuisine underwent a paradigm shift that is full of useful lessons for many people and the world of work in general. There was a shift from efficiency as the main virtue to innovation. To understand what the uncertainty mindset consists in, listen to my podcast with Vaughn Tan 🎧

8 Le génie lesbien by Alice Coffin

Alice Coffin is a French journalist and lesbian activist whose book Le génie lesbien caused a stir in France in 2020. Her book questions the notion of genius traditionally associated to men and highlights the contribution of women, especially lesbians, to human “genius”. It’s also a textbook about activism in a hostile environment (France really is quite sexist and lesbian-phobic). With a Fulbright scholarship, she studied activism in the US, methods of collective action and organising … and applied these lessons in France. As activism is part of my “7 trends”, this is a must-read!

9 The Passion Economy by Adam Davidson

The “passion economy” is a concept that is all the rage in Silicon Valley and among creative freelancers. But Davidson’s book, The Passion Economy (2020), isn’t about creative content creators, it is about more “ordinary” small businesses “riding the waves of change”. The stories he tells encourage all of us to apply strategy to our individual work lives and find a niche to profit from our “passion” (this word shouldn’t intimidate you). According to Davidson, the first rule of the passion economy is to “pursue intimacy at scale”: “You may need to get creative and experimental and be willing to reach out to a lot of people—who might at first, seem uninterested in whatever it is you have to offer.”

10 Extra Time by Camilla Cavendish

The ongoing demographic shift is such a big subject that it really does call for more than one book on this list. In Extra Time: 10 Lessons for an Ageing World, Camilla Cavendish, an editor at the Financial Times, “embarks on a journey to understand how different countries are responding to these unprecedented challenges.” She contests our taboos around age. “Our stereotypes are out of date”. “Unconsciously, our language turns (older) people into sub-humans, lesser beings”. But can we ask people to work longer while letting these stereotypes persist? If postponing retirement really means unemployment & poverty, it’s really a scam, isn’t it? (Rhetorical question all mine).

11 Couples That Work by Jennifer Petriglieri

Let’s stop entertaining this fiction that work and family exist on different planes altogether! Families and couples are entities that shape individual careers and personal decisions. They’re also economic systems in themselves where individual roles must be defined and income and expenses balanced. (That’s largely why gender inequalities tend to accrue over time.) Jennifer Petriglieri’s Couples That Work offers insightful typologies, stories and analyses that help us see careers as the interconnected, interdependent, collective things that they often are. In our individualistic cultures, self-help books usually cater exclusively to the individual. Not this one.

12 Yoga, une histoire-monde by Marie Kock

There are few industries that illustrate our changing aspirations and the growing importance of urban proximity services the way yoga does. And yet few books have been published about how yoga became a globalised, multi-billion industry with hundreds of millions of practitioners, millions of would-be instructors (some of whom aim to thus escape the corporate world) and predatory institutions in-between. Marie Kock, a French journalist (and yoga practitioner) dived into the history of yoga to write Yoga, une histoire-monde - De Bikram aux Beatles, du LSD à la quête de soi : le récit d'une conquête. It’s a fascinating read.

🇩🇪 ☃️ Germany has entered its hardest lockdown ever. Schools will remain closed at least until the end of January. I’m worried about what this means for my 12-year-old daughter who’s not been around children her own age for nearly a year. I’m worried about what this means for the mental health of many elderly people who live on their own (including my parents). This is all so f…… depressing 😭

🚀 For Nouveau Départ we’ve recorded new podcasts, among which: 🇬🇧 La place du Royaume-Uni dans le monde, 💸 Tout sur la fiscalité des multinationales, 💡Apprendre toute sa vie : la nouvelle norme … In 2021, give Nouveau Départ a try! (Students can get a discount is they ask for one 🤗)

👩‍💻 For Welcome to the Jungle, I wrote several new articles, but they haven’t been published yet. I’ll share them next time…

🎙️ As far as the Building Bridges podcast is concerned, I’m proud to say that 6 podcasts have already been published, with Leslie Kern, James Crabtree, Bruno Maçães, Mariana Mazzucato, Vaughn tan, and Andrew Scott. You can find all of them on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to Building Bridges to receive the next one in your mailbox 🎧

Miscellaneous

😚 What the Pandemic Has Done for Dating, Sara Konrath, The Atlantic, December 2020: “What do I do? Do I ask him if he wants to, like, breathe the same air as me?” My friend describes this sharing-breath conversation as “basically the sex-without-a-condom conversation, but for kissing.” She talked it over with the man, and they decided to set up strict parameters for their bubble. They are now in a happy, committed relationship.

🇩🇪 It’s Easier for a Woman to Become Chancellor Than CEO in Germany, Raymond Colitt, Bloomberg, December 2020: Germany, whose Chancellor Angela Merkel is the longest-serving female head of state in the world, has one of the poorest records for promoting women in business in Europe. The quota bill -- asking companies to have at least one woman on their management boards -- will bump up the share of female executives to about 15%, taking Germany’s ranking to about 17 from 24 in the 27-member European Union.

⚕️ This Is Why Nursing Homes Failed So Badly, E. Tammy Kim, The New York Times, December 2020: When the pandemic is finally history, we’ll need to deal with all of this: the staffing shortages, low pay and lack of accountability —the many ways we have failed residents, family members and staffers. The awful truth is long-term care was designed to fail years before Covid-19.

May we all come out of this mess relatively intact! In the meantime, I’ll try and enjoy the snow ❄️

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Hi everyone,

I’ve long been fascinated by India. As a child and teenager in the 1990s, I went 7 times to India with my parents, notably to Rajasthan. My father had launched a company to import antiques from India to Europe, and so, once (or twice) a year, we’d go with him and stay in old, run down (albeit beautiful) Maharaja palaces (for example, in Jaipur). I have vivid memories of intoxicating smells and colours. Still today I tend to find anything India-related immediately alluring. I like Indian cuisine (I sooo regret the amazing Indian restaurants we used to enjoy in London). Last but not least, as a practitioner of yoga, I’m all the more ensnared in India’s soft power.

So it is with great excitement that I interviewed James Crabtree for my Building Bridges podcast a few weeks ago. James Crabtree was the Financial Times Mumbai chief between 2011 and 2016. In 2018, he published a fascinating book titled The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age which is about inequality, corruption and the new class of ‘Robber Baron’-style billionaires who exert power over India today.

In this podcast we talked about his job as an FT correspondent in India (every journalist’s dream job!), India’s billionaires, the comparison with the American Gilded Age, the new Netflix documentary in which he’s featured (Bad Boy Billionaires: India), the impact of the pandemic, and his present life in Singapore. I can’t encourage you enough to have a listen! In this newsletter, I won’t add (much) to the discussion about India’s Billionaire Raj, but will instead focus on the particular plight of India’s women. To put it very simply, India’s not a country where it is good to be a woman in “normal” times. But it’s gotten much worse with the pandemic. Decades of (relative) progress towards more equality may have been wiped out this year 😱👇

Before the pandemic: 127th out of 160 in gender equality!

According to the United Nations’ Gender Inequality Index (introduced in 2010), India ranked 127th out of 160. Not great, right? The countries that do worse include Afghanistan, Yemen, Sierra Leone or Mali. (The index looks at reproductive health, empowerment, and labour market participation.)The plight of women in India is nothing new. As a child I remember being told about selective abortions, female infanticides, and child marriage. I remember being told about the dowry tradition, and thinking, “What? A girl’s parents have to pay for her to be enslaved?”. In later years, I’d read more about dowries in 19th-century England in all of Jane Austen’s novels.

I also remember hearing stories of widows setting themselves on fire upon the death of their husband: not only is it completely taboo for a widow to remarry but it is even somewhat frowned upon for her to merely continue living. There were also these terrible stories of acid attacks on women who refused some man’s marriage proposal (morality: “Just say no” is fraught with danger). Acid is a cheap way to destroy a woman’s life.

For a few years there’s been more awareness on sexual violence and rape in India. I remember reading recently about the appalling reality of sexual and domestic violence in India. The National Crime Records Bureau reveal that“a crime against a woman is committed every three minutes, a woman is raped every 29 minutes, a dowry death occurs every 77 minutes, and one case of cruelty committed by either the husband or relative of the husband occurs every nine minutes.” Domestic violence is so endemic in India that you can’t wish for any woman to be stuck at home (as women were during lockdown).

What rape statistics really reflect is a vicious cultural agreement that women have little value. Which means in turn that girls must be trained to act as if they do not exist, to minimise their presence to survive, to serve men and not inconvenience them. This sounds archaic in this day and age, but it is true in India and to a greater or lesser degree across many cultures, irrespective of wealth or education. (Guardian)

Female literacy is significantly lower than men’s: the literacy rate is 60.6% for women, while for men it is 81.3%. And last but not least, women have little access to land and property (again, like in Jane Austen’s novels). There are laws meant to improve their situation, of course, but they aren’t really enforced. And women’s property rights depend on religion and tribe. They’re a weird, complex mix of law and custom.

A land of contrasts and slow progress towards gender equality

The perplexing thing about women in India is that the situation is so contrasted. In this country of 3.287 million km² and 1.35 billion inhabitants, there are old, contradictory traditions, strong economic inequalities, a caste system that won’t completely disappear, and lots of geographic and linguistic differences. So as a woman, depending on where you are born, your prospects may be very different. In that regard many other countries where the situation is bad for women offer a more consistently unfortunate experience to its women.

The paradox is that I have come across so many powerful, influential and brilliant Indian women, both in India and throughout the world. Without thinking long and hard I can name several famous and powerful Indian women in the diaspora, like Indra Nooyi (the CEO of PepsiCo) or Ruchi Sanghvi (Facebook’s very first female engineer) in the business world, writer Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), filmmaker Mira Nair, actress Freida Pinto, or even US Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris! When you read about environmentalism and feminism, you also come across Vandana Shiva (I wrote this previous newsletter about ecofeminism in which she played a big part). By no means is this meant to be a comprehensive list…

In India, there are many visibly powerful women in the business world. And the country has a high number of female politicians. In fact many more women have held high offices in India than they have in France! These contrasts make it all the more confusing to people like me. Also a lot of the traditions (related to the caste system or to dowries) that make the situation so terrible for the least privileged women (those who “intersect” with other problems) have theoretically been fought by the government for decades, but are really still there.

Child marriage for example was first outlawed in 1860! In 1929 they passed another law, the Child Marriage Restraint Act, to stop it. But it is still prevalent in modern India today. In rural areas, more than 50% of married women are married before the legal age of 18. A big chunk of the world’s child marriages occur in India today. But all in all a lot of legislation was passed to no avail.

India may be developing, but for a vast majority of women progress towards equality is very slow. Indeed we tend to exaggerate the size of India’s urban middle class where women are much more educated and emancipated. There aren’t that many of them as James Crabtree said in our podcast:

You've got to keep India in your head as the India that is, as opposed to the India that people might want it to be. So you hear all sorts of grand predictions about the size of the Indian middle class. They will tell you to bet on an Indian middle class of 200 or 300 million people, which sounds extraordinary, that's almost all the population of Europe. But actually, the Indian middle class of the sort that you would recognise in Europe is probably about 10 or 20 million people.

Recently economists [like Banerjee and Duflo] did the work of digging down into how big the Indian middle class really is, as you would recognise it as a Western country, and discovering it's much smaller than you think. If you think about the proportion of the population that has a credit card, owns a car, and travels internationally, these are very small numbers of people compared to the nation as a whole.

One of the main problems may be that so many of women’s gains are precarious because they are informal. Officially women’s participation in the workforce is very low: they make up less roughly 20% of the country’s workforce. What this means, of course, is that almost all their work—both paid and unpaid—is part of the informal economy. It goes unrecorded, unprotected, unseen. There’s more exploitation, harassment, and precariousness. Alas, it’s the informal economy that was hit the hardest this year.

India’s ‘Shecession’ could well be the worst

All over the world the current economic crisis hits women hardest (I wrote a newsletter about this), but it is worse in places and sectors where the informal economy is bigger. In the informal economy, workers have no official protection: they receive no unemployment benefits, no stimulus checks, and have no healthcare coverage. It is no surprise that India’s (informal) female workers were hit particularly hard. For example, a lot of domestic workers lost their jobs during the lockdown. More women were forced into marriage (were it not for the lockdown, some may have been able to go away). And many more suffered from domestic violence.

At least four out of 10 women in India lost their jobs in April and May, and 39 per cent of women reported a loss of employment compared with 29 percent of men, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. Oxfam India estimates the economic loss from women becoming unemployed during the pandemic at about US$216-billion, which makes the country’s GDP 8 per cent poorer.

“Women are losing more jobs because they were anyway more vulnerable. They are at a lower level in the hierarchy with precarious conditions of work and poor social security,” said Neetha N., a gender and labour expert and director of the Centre for Women’s Development Studies. (She goes by one name and an initial, a common practice in some parts of India.) (Globe and Mail)

2020 may come with a huge setback for Indian women’s empowerment, which will jeopardise the country’s future prospects and GDP growth:

Oxfam India estimates the financial loss from girls shedding their jobs through the pandemic at about $216 billion, knocking off 8% from the nation’s gross home product. This clouds girls’s already poor financial outlook. (...) Even skilled girls in India have had setbacks. The virus outbreak has led many to earn a living from home… (RedHeart)

Last but not least, a lot of the policies implemented during this crisis to alleviate the burden of (male) unemployment will have deleterious long term effects on gender equality, in particular policies designed to encourage women to stay at home rather than seek work outside. For example, women’s maternity leave was extended, thus reinforcing their role as primary caregivers and making employer discrimination more likely.

It would be wrong to seek comfort in the fact that things are not quite as bad for women in Europe as they are for Indian women. The trends that are more visible there should help us understand what’s slightly less visible here. The share of women in the informal economy is high in Europe too (even if the said informal economy is not as big as it is in India). The harmful effects of the lockdown on domestic violence and the distribution of unpaid domestic work exist in Europe too. It is vital that we Europeans take more of an interest in what’s going on in India 🇮🇳

🥨 🍻 🇩🇪 I’ve found a new home near Munich, Bavaria!! It is spacious and comfortable, it even has a garden… and it is located in a suburban area (a town called Ottobrunn). If I were to tell my 20 or 30-year-old self that she would end up leading some kind of suburban life, far from the vibrancy of a large city’s centre, she wouldn’t believe it. She may even see it as betrayal. I could reassure her by telling her that politically I have no intention of turning conservative ☺️ I might also add that Ottobrunn is closer to the mountains (Bavarian Alps) ⛰️ and that a new hiking era is about to begin!

Seriously, I think I might write a piece about the irresistible lure of suburban life in middle age (and its ambivalence). Suburbia is not supposed to be a place for feminists, but the way I see it: feminists are infiltrating suburbia as I write! And the pandemic may have a profound effect on the transformation of suburban sociology.

Anyway, the rest of the family (husband and son) joined us (my daughter and me) after a separation of 6 weeks! And it felt fantastic to be reunited. Of course such a move comes with a mountain of extra work and chores, and I feel overwhelmed. That’s why I’ve woefully neglected my Laetitia@Work newsletter.

💌 Our media Nouveau départ is growing and growing (I mean its subscribers as well as our now abundant archives). We recorded many new podcasts, among which: 🛒 Commerce de détail et différences culturelles, 🤷‍♂️ La gauche et la droite : que signifient-elles aujourd'hui ?, 🇫🇷 Pourquoi la France résiste tant au télétravail, 🎥 007 : crise du cinéma et changement de société, 🤔 Immobilier : faut-il louer ou acheter ?… If you haven’t subscribed, do give it a try! If you’re student and want a discount, send me an email…

💻 I think I’ve made a new friend! I met Chloé Hermary on Zoom and was so impressed. She founded a feminist coding school called Ada Tech School. She invited me to do a webinar about what it means for a company to be feminist (in French), and I interviewed her for Nouveau Départ (also in French) 🤗

👩‍💻 For Welcome to the Jungle, I wrote many new articles. Here are the last two: 🦍 La crise profite-t-elle aux leaders « gorilles » ? and 🙈 Quelle politique de cooptation pour favoriser la diversité ? 🇫🇷

🎙️ As far as my new podcast Building Bridges is concerned, three interviews have already been published: Leslie Kern, James Crabtree, and Bruno Maçães. Subscribe to Building Bridges if you want to receive the new podcast in your mailbox as soon as it’s published. The next one will be Mariana Mazzucato! 🎧

Miscellaneous

📺 What Companies Who Want More Diversity Can Learn From the BBC, Siri Chilazi & Aneeta Rattan, Behavioral Scientist, November 2020: “To be sure, there was some resistance to the 50:50 Project when it began. Some on the outside questioned whether the BBC had gone too far with its gender equality efforts, while others on the inside viewed 50:50 as “political correctness gone mad” or an initiative to make men “an endangered species” (…) But with strong executive support and data to disprove people’s incorrect assumptions, the project leaders were able to prove naysayers wrong. “50:50 is not about keeping excellent men out of our programs—it’s about finding many more excellent women contributors.”

⚕️job lock and the debt plot, Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study, November 2020: “The Health Insurance Plot is a cousin to the Marriage Plot, which refers to a story that concludes in a marriage. The Marriage Plot is still prevalent today, but in 19th-century England it was especially popular. All of Jane Austen’s novels, for example, end with weddings. At the time, marriage was essentially permanent and offered Austenian heroines domestic and financial security—a kind of happy ending. Today this happy ending is instead achieved by acquiring a job, one with great health benefits. The Health Insurance Plot may have a deadline (…) in which the protagonist anxiously seeks a job with insurance before her 26th birthday. Or the plot can follow a character through her uneven access to health care and into how this uncertainty feel.”

💅🏾 Nail Salons, Lifeline for Immigrants, Have Lost Half Their Business, Juliana Kim, The New York Times, November 2020: “The beauty industry in the city seemed well positioned to bounce back after restrictions ended. After all, many customers had spent months without professional grooming. But now, many of these businesses are on the verge of collapse — a drastic hit for an industry that is an economic engine for immigrant women. Some nail salons have had a difficult time persuading customers that it is safe to come in. Others, especially those in Manhattan business districts, have yet to see regular customers come back because many of them had left the city or are working from home.”

Until next time, namaste 🙏

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Hi everyone,

Last week I launched my new Building Bridges podcast in English with an interview of Leslie Kern about “Feminist Cities”. This podcast is syndicated across a network of newsletters, including European Straits, Nouveau Départ (in French) and Laetitia@Work. I already wrote about the subject of feminist cities in a previous newsletter, but I believe this conversation with Leslie Kern covers an even broader range of subjects, from urban activism to infrastructure, culture and the impact of the pandemic on cities and work. Don’t miss it! I really loved this interview.

This week, as more and more governments are pushed to make more radical decisions to contain the exponential spread of the virus, we are all dreading further uncertainty, disruptions, and possible lockdowns. Some activities will have to be interrupted again. Many plans will have to be cancelled. Again we’ll have to live in the moment and restrain ourselves from thinking we have power over anything. The situation got me thinking about “learned helplessness” and how it’s related to depression. Are we all like lab animals taught to feel helpless?

What is “learned helplessness” and how is it related to our (collective) situation? That’s the theme of this week’s newsletter 🐀 👇

How psychologists theorised about learned helplessness

Throughout the 20th century physiologists and psychologists have carried out countless (cruel) experiments on lab animals to understand how their (and our) behaviour can be conditioned. Over a century ago, Ivan Pavlov obtained a Nobel Prize for Medicine for his principles of classical conditioning that have later been found to operate across multiple behaviour therapies (for example, systematic desensitisation to reduce phobias) and in education. In later decades behavioural sciences explored the cognitive processes in humans, how we process information, perceive our environment, form judgment and make decisions.

From the 1960s onwards more psychologists began to get interested in how and why we get depressed. In particular, new experiments sought to investigate “learned helplessness” in rats: in 1967, Seligman and Maier theorised that when animals learn that outcomes are independent of their responses (i.e. that nothing they do matters), this learning undermines their will to escape. When events are uncontrollable, unpredictable and you have no power whatsoever over them, you won’t even try to escape your situation anymore.

“Learned helplessness” is the behaviour exhibited by a subject who’s endured something very unpleasant repeatedly without having any control over it. Initially, scientists thought that animals learn to accept their powerlessness. When they fail to try and escape the aversive stimulus even when an escape is clearly offered, they were said to have acquired learned helplessness. Even if a door is made available, after a certain point you won’t even try to escape. That’s what torture is about: somebody is said to be “broken” when they’ve acquired the said learned helplessness.

But more recently, neuroscientists showed that the original theory actually had it backwards. The brain’s default mode is to assume there’s no control, and it is power (helpfulness) that is learned, not helplessness. Interestingly we are “naturally” helpless but we learn to have power over our environments. We learn that certain things we do can have an impact. We learn that we can make rules. Obviously some people learn it more than others, as people do not have equal access to power…

Learning power and self-efficacy

We rarely think of power as something that can be learned. Usually it’s seen as something you inherit or something you fight for, not something that has to do with cognition and education. But looking at power through that lens provides interesting insights into the relationship between life experience (life education) and power. Some children are more encouraged to learn power than others. What rules to accept, what rules to bend and what rules to make, for example. And learning power is also somewhat gendered, alas.

There’s one concept that dates back to the 1950s that is specifically about that: the locus of control. It refers to the degree to which people believe that they, as opposed to external forces (beyond their control), have control over the outcome of events in their lives. It’s become an aspect of personality psychology. Your locus is either internal (when you believe you have control over your own life) or external (when you believe your life is controlled by outside factors which you can’t influence, chance or fate, for example).

You’ve probably seen people at work who attribute their success to their own actions only and others who keep thanking fate or their teams for whatever success they encounter. The former have an internal locus of control while the latter have an external locus of control. The former are the same people who blamed the teacher when they had a bad grade at school and blame someone or something else when they encounter failure. To put it bluntly, people with too strong an internal locus of control tend to be a**s. But people with too strong an external locus of control are insecure, and lack ambition and consistency.

Ideally you’d want to have a bit of both, strike a good balance that empowers you to develop ambition and determination, but with enough external locus that you have some humility and will develop an interest in others but yourself.

What’s often referred to as “self-efficacy” is the belief that you can accomplish something. Without it you won’t develop long-term projects. You won’t do much of anything without some degree of self-efficacy. It also plays an important role in health: when people feel that they have self-efficacy over their health conditions, they will follow a treatment and do what’s best for their health (whereas those with no self-efficacy believe that nothing matters and will continue drinking, smoking, or not taking their treatment…)

Depending on your environment and your background, you may be more or less likely to develop an internal locus of control and self-efficacy, you may be more or less likely to just give up or be depressed.

Are we going to lose motivation?

The constant “aversive stimuli” of 2020 over which we seem to have too little control (at least individually) is producing a collective situation of learned helplessness. Under lockdown conditions, we are told to stay put and do nothing. We are asked to be passive and wait. Experiencing stressful situations again and again, are we coming to believe that we are unable to control or change the situation?

2020’s “learned helplessness” leads to increased feelings of stress and depression. Already the signs are ominous that suicides are on the increase all over the world (notably in Japan, in England and Wales). Once you experience a complete lack of control over events around you, you lose motivation. And the problem when you lose motivation is that even when the opportunity does arise for you to improve your circumstances, you won’t take action… and therefore nothing will improve (not the health situation, not the environment, not anything that requires action). With learned helplessness, you become incapable of making decisions even when decisions are necessary.

As professor Martin Seligman (one of the psychologists who defined “learned helplessness” in the first place) explained, three things follow: passiveness in the face of trauma, difficulty learning that responses can control trauma, increase in stress levels (and ill-health). People with depression have no self-efficacy. The less self-efficacy they have, the more they retreat into helplessness.

It’s hard to remain cheerful and optimistic in these challenging times. But I’d argue that it is more important than ever that we all try and maintain or develop a semblance of self-efficacy, because our actions and decisions do matter: individual and collective behaviour to stop the contagion or fight climate change (or voting to stop Donald Trump from starting a second term).

Perhaps one of the ways to “work” on self-efficacy is to exercise it at home: baking a loaf of bread, doing the cleaning, or knitting a jumper. Thus the “retreat” into the domestic sphere can be regarded not as a retreat but as the necessary practice of self-efficacy for future political or social action. By controlling this small world, we learn that we should not give up on the world at large…

🥨 🍻 🇩🇪 I’ve visited several houses in the Munich area and have learned that in Munich, it’s harder to convince a landlord to pick you as their tenant than it is to convince an employer to give you a job. Munich has grown considerably over the past decade and has become Germany’s most expensive city for the simple reason that more people want to live there than there is available housing 🏡

To celebrate Nouveau départ’s 6 months of existence, Nicolas and I interviewed each other about our work and our projects: here’s his interview of me, and my interview of him. Other podcasts include: 👔 Qu'est-ce que "faire carrière" aujourd'hui ?, 🇬🇧 Brexit : enfin, le dénouement ?, Apprendre à vivre avec l’incertitude… If you still haven’t subscribed yet, give it a try!

For Welcome to the Jungle, I wrote a new ebook that was published a few days ago! 👉🏿 Télétravail : nouveau levier d'inclusion ? 🇫🇷 📖

For Building Bridges I’ve already interviewed 6 amazing authors: Leslie Kern (podcast included in this newsletter), James Crabtree, Andrew Scott, Vaughn Tan, Bruno Maçães, and Mariana Mazzucato! Subscribe to Building Bridges if you want to receive the podcast in your mail box as soon as it’s published 🎧

Last but not least, I'm proud to have participated in "The Great Redesign"along with inspiring doers and thinkers. Have a look at NEXT Conference's web page and visit nextconf.eu/books for more information 🚀

Miscellaneous

♀️Women in the Workplace 2020, McKinsey & Company, September 2020: “Women are more likely to have been laid off or furloughed during the COVID-19 crisis, stalling their careers and jeopardizing their financial security. The pandemic has intensified challenges that women already faced. Working mothers have always worked a “double shift”—a full day of work, followed by hours spent caring for children and doing household labor. Now the supports that made this possible—including school and childcare—have been upended. Meanwhile, Black women already faced more barriers to advancement than most other employees.”

🧺 The vicious cycle of never-ending laundry, Rachel Sugar, Vox, October 2020: “We have been doing what is recognizable as modern laundry — using soap and water to make what was dirty clean — for 200 years now. We have outsourced it and insourced it and mechanized it and developed apps for it, but while we have made it easier, we have not made it less. Like so many basic functions of life maintenance — eating, showering, cleaning, sleeping — laundry has yet to be hacked out of existence. But what makes laundry special is that it has also not improved.”

🕊️ It's 2023. Here's How We Fixed the Global Economy, Mariana Mazzucato, Time, October 2020: “Rising to the role of the “entrepreneurial state,” government had finally become an investor of first resort that co-created value with the public sector and civil society. Just as in the days of the Apollo program, working for government—rather than for Google or Goldman Sachs—became the ambition for top talent coming out of university. Government jobs became so desirable and competitive, in fact, that a new curriculum was formed for a global master in public administration degree for people who wanted to become civil servants.”

Until next time… don’t give up on your self-efficacy! 🍞 ❤️

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