It just about the problems. Its focus on solutions, and i love your key insight for just that we tend to give advice to women and the resulting books and conferences telling them what they need to change. We need to negotiate more and we will never get the corner office. But what you point out is we are not the ones that are broken. Whats broken is the workplace and as we know they were designed by a man for men when women try to act like men it hasnt worked out well for us and i love how you put it. We need to call a timeout on the women fixing epidemic and as you point out, gender and quality isnt just about women. It isnt just about women but its all of us and about making the workplace better for everyone. So thank you, welcome. Your book provides a guide. Why dont we dived right in here. If you could share with us what is your own background that brought you to this place . Guest its funny ive been researching this for many years looking at why women are not moving at the same rate as men. When i started out many, many years ago, it is when the lehman was very popular and that is rooted in the use of solutions. We were asking women to do more and fit in more interested in but quite frankly they really are not valued, so when i was researching it, i was looking at what women need to do differently and why they were not advancing and very quickly in reviewing the literature i found in terms of the leadership capability, problemsolving, how they engage with managers and police and a lot of that was new to me. I didnt know that if you take networking as an example, women are told to attend networking programs and learn how to network and theres a perception they dont do that well because they dont have the same access as men and thats an example of how they dont have the same access rather than digging deep to understand what the problem is and why women are excluded even when they have access they dont benefit the same way so very quickly my Research Found actually when men have everything they need to succeed and then some. Its more that the workplace is were designed by and for him ideal worker that tends to be an ablebodied white male and most women do not fit that ideal prototype so it creates challenges. But the thing that is really interesting i found the prototype they found a lot of challenges so my book outlines the standard that actually what we need is the freedom to be valuable and we need workplaces that are designed for difference quite opposite of what we have today. Host tommy about your background and how you got interested in the topic. Guest i have bee had been wg in Human Resources most of my career and what i found consistently as gender inequality and i became interested in how workplaces led me to want to understand this issue and so its something ive been looking at the last 17 years so cross ive been trying to understand what it is about the workplaces that dont support everybody to succeed in an equal way and so researching this it became apparent that there are solutions out there so for me it is about trying to share that with everybody so they understand when it comes to inclusion and equity that is what ive been trying to share as a researcher and practition practitioner. Host im glad you brought up the point about how Much Researching has done because what they found as you talk about a lot is just wrong and you just referenced a few points. Are there areas where it says when men act in a certain way that is incorrect . Guest to do something we are not asking men to, we really need to think about it. When it comes to sort of leaning and i think the book was written in a time and place where they wanted the solution and liked the idea of a. It discriminates because they were not designed for differen difference. Was this sort of ideal. A. The more challenges you are going to face and that is something that we all talk about. Organizations are inherently set up for this ideal prototype to succeed and that creates a lot of challenges for anybody that might differ in the ideals and so i think that it is to think about the solutions and do any of these works because a lot of them dont they just take for example the idea that they dont ask for pay rises and the pay gap and there is a great study that shows that is not the case. They asked for pay rises just as much as men and part of the reason for that is true discrimination but also women are penalized when they ask because they are asserting themselves and find the standards and almost thankful that you have a job so when they come in there asking for what they are worth, they are penalized because they seem to be asserting themselves. Not afraid to ask to do things to fit into the environment and number two, to look at the solutions than to say do they work and in most cases, they dont because they are not addressing the underlying system which is the policies, the processes in terms of the daytoday behaviors into some of the personal belief that the employees have really value people differently and values mean more and thats what creates the workplaces. Host by no other research the site talks about when women seek more than men in the business setting a. Of terrible thing when im back at work. You touched on one of his corporate conformity mind. They have to live up to the ideal of the standard, the maximum standard in terms of not just how they look but the middleclass ablebodied males. They might be seen as competent but they are not likable because to be likable, you have to engage in behaviors we typically associate with women when they defy the standard of what it looks like which is being made maternal. They are really going to be disliked. So there is a tradeoff they have to engage in the behaviors but then when they engage in a more feminist behavior to be likable they are not seen as competent so its a tradeoff between likability and competence and creates challenges early on a. I would say one of the big challenges into the whole reason i wrote this book something i discovered in my own research as a believe. So they dont have different experiences and with that kind of logic we are denying the inequality and it makes it really hard to solve and so while we say what youre going to encounter when you leave and given tandgo into the workplaces conditionethat isconditioned ex. The conditioned to believe that and it is a meritocracy and another big before. It is to discriminate and you can do everything right and still not advance because you dont fit the prototype and you sort of have to juggle things like this to try to fit in so the best thing people can do is arm themselves with the awareness of how they dont work for everybody in the same way and how you navigate is the most important way of how we change and accommodate the difference and work for everybody. Host throughout the book it brings home the default and you talk about the don draper and the white male and that is kind of the default that means women or anyone that do not conform to that are not necessarily the other and it really came out. You have a passage in the book where you talk about how child care benefits if we were actually creating a workforce from scratch right now for all of us, all of those things would be built into the workplace but because they are the other end of the workplace didnt start with women in mind all of those are seen as benefits, and your point is they shouldnt be benefits, they should be part of the fabric of work. Can you talk about that a little . Guest i was in denial about the challenges and i see the standard sort of work for them. It actually works for a very small number of people and even then it requires for example that of men dont talk about having to balance fatherhood and working lives and that men are silenced and engage in some of those behaviors were they have to sort of tolerate those behaviors even if the banks are uncomfortable. When it comes to motherhood there is what drives me crazy but its a sport of womens problem. So how we can approach it and even then it is and how do we make the workplaces more apparent. Its okay, how do we apply to help them fit into this Work Environment and the reality is if wasnt designed for me in the first place. Its fixing something that was originally broken. They dont talk about them enough. They deserve the workplaces that value them and the workplaces need us. There is a great study by the Federal Reserve bank of st. Louis which found a 30 year period the mothers of two, so its no surprise we know what it takes to juggle all of this but people are often chalked because its one of the most productive workers. They were not designed for that and so it is less about slapping on a Flexible Work policy. They may have the opportunity to engage in Flexible Work but you can have all those policies in place. All of my work in the whole book talks about culture we look at these periods in the daytoday moments if your boss is sitting there saying its hard to advance those on a reduced schedule where we are going to denote you to the sort of lonely role because you were on a reduced schedule, those are all sorallsorted and thereallsort d its something called the parttime penalty who have this access to the longterm Career Opportunities and overwhelmingly that is two thirds of all parttime workers and so the challenges show up in those daytoday moments. Policies and processes are managing disorder challenges and considering the identities outside of work. Host i could have told you as someone thats hired hundreds of people in my time and also as a mother of two, i totally believe mothers are productive and lets talk about the solutions here. You talk about cultural change and also about leadership. What is the balance to get to the right place in the workplace do we need a legislative change, its all about cultural change, do we need the law. I believe it is an invitation to a. To that leadership when we think of what goes on, we are looking at the leaders and many of the leaders today are in denial about the challenges and most underrepresented groups and organizations and if they do not understand the barriers and are taking steps to remove the barriers and most have been in the daytoday moments is when a moment there is a sexist comment or Office Banter that marginalizes employees at work. So thats the moment is and outside of legislation, which i dont really cover in my book because to me i m. Looking at the workplaces and how they can take action and what they can do today. For me simply managing those moments is something every reader can do for you when you see discrimination and marginalization and exclusion it is your opportunity to talk about it and use it as a learning moment to reset the standards and behaviors and organizations. The challenge to do that well we need the leaders turn over the barriers are so they know what to Pay Attention to and what to look out too. In order to know the barriers which i recommend reading my book, to do that you have to disrupt your own denial and think about as a leader how am i in a position of privilege and if it makes it that much easier to advance if you are a woman and a leadership role you need to consider that and understand that area in the organizations. But if you are a man youve got your masculinity in common and also middleclass and able so we need to think about what you have in common. Its important to mention nobody is saying that these type of leaders havent had to work hard to get where they have. Understand the privilege and how it makes it that much harder for anybody else to advance and get to know the barriers and manage those moments everyday. Host so much of what you are talking about is unconscious bias and some of it is outright when you are talking about the barriers. You mentioned the 17 barriers. Can you talk about the few that we have not hit on . Guest thing i will say to point out is im not a fan and i think its an important point when it comes to the barriers because Research Shows that reason is if you are raising people and telling them it is unconscious and they feel they dont have to do anything about it and there is another study that talks to this and the research by my university has now found what we need to do is to shift people from unconscious bias training to the decisionmaking and that is what my book tries to do by outlining the barriers and showing how it shows up and what you can do to navigate and prevent it from happening again. What can you do a round about . All are entering the workforce with the winners because what we find is within the first three years of working life, confidence jumped by more than 60 in terms of their ability to reach the sort of Senior Leadership position. It drops by more than 40 and that is a want. If they are told and the reason is not going to the challenges youre going to encounter because you start to think is it me or is it my workplace and you grapple with the sense that maybe i dont fit in here. Maybe i dont cut out for the corporate life and those are the challenges we see early on as the nation has come for me or performance tax. Because they ensure the process in terms of their behaviors but they also just have a look. How they look. Women have to work that much harder to be seen as constant or capable of. That can create a lot of challenges and then as you approach the motherhood, you see a whole bunch of challenges that are not designed to mothers and one of the keen reasons for that is you can become a mother it is the most prototype that you can be and thats why pregnant women try to hide her pregnancy or go to work when they are not feeling well. Ive got a great story about a colleague who was told by her boss now because she was pregnant she was seen as less capable and less confident so she needed to mean anything further and saw what happened as she was already performing at a higher rate and she got signed up for basically overworking by her doctor saying we are damaging our health and putting our baby at risk. This is the tax are bound motherhood and a lot of people may be familiar with the penalty and it plays out in the question because they dont look like the prototype and people have a lot of stereotypes so we see that playing out in terms of the reduction in wages so theyve estimated they are controlling all of the usual factors were they face a 5 reduction in wages and we really see that play out and its ironic we are penalizing the most productive workforce which is crazy. Those are challenges mothers experience and then when you look to what i see as the last phase of their career one of the challenges is once youve broken through that class ceiling that is just simply not the case because every day they go into the workplace and provide divide standard for what the leadership looks like so they faced numerous challenges like backlash and in a way that they are undermined or have the capability or where people dont supporsuffer the leadership poss and also see it played out and we label those like the sort of turns that makes it very hard for them to lead in a way that isnt associated with that. Its important to realize for women when you are reading this book ipocket is hopeful its a f a roadmap you can sort of see your sel self in sort of past experiences and then see your self in the future. Some of the barriers that might be coming up to me and it really helps i think to present that internalizing process we talked about before but seems not very confident its important that you broken down these invisible barriers because when we talk about gender inequality especially in the past couple of years theres been a focus on me to. They are interrupted three times more and the barrier that you talk about is backed up by a research but these are the things being ignored or left out of the conversation all of these but they sell 3540 years ago. But you add up all of these invisible barriers and it leads to the lack of opportunity and recognition for the women in the workplace. I want to ask something about quotas because there are a number of people and countries where theyve instituted quotas. You have strong feelings about that. Why dont you explain . Guest its funny because people love quotas and i always feel the need to apologize. I used to have a strong opinion for transparency, and then within researching the challenges women experience, and also men, i came to realize the damage that the quotas do and the reason im opposed to them is for a lot of organizations this is the go to solution. Its to mandate a certain percentage or cut copy and paste and hold the women accountable that they themselves have no hand in creating and we see that happen all the time and the reason it is damaging. I really found at the barriers compounded through the quote us and what we see is when women already have the legitimacy called into question because they dont fit the prototype so it is assumed they are less capable. Women have to work that much harder but when you cut copy and paste into the leadership position she is seen as having that role because the organization now has diversity and inclusion quote us and so instantly everybody questions the capabilities and calls into the legitimacy to be in that role and faces tremendous backlash and its very damaging because they question themselves and whether they truly are ready for that role and this plays out where the number one advancement is that of women because they diversity inclusiothediversity e that focuses on women and so for me its the ultimate solution. Theres this idea that we are going to advance into these divisions and the problem will be solved. Its the only way we are going to fix the environment of the leaders are never going to get it, but the reality is it isnt something we talk about a lot so you see the lack of sustainability in the copy paste solutions. When you put a woman into the leadership role there is something called an implicit quote us and we have to make sure 50 less likely to hire another woman and weve also found they are 45 more likely to be dismissed regardless of the performance and they are around 60 more likely to be replaced so its not simply putting women into leadership positions but simply not true and my main issue is they dont work. Not only are they damaging but they are not sustainable. It is less about looking at the scoreboard and representation and more about looking at the cultures of equality. In the environment where they feel like they can see themselves and be valued for that which is known men are twice as likely. For me its about taking a longterm approach to fixing the workplace. Host lets unpack that for a moment. This is something i dont work with corporations on gender in quality and very often the leadership will fade. We just cant find them and what i always say to them. The leadership is 80, 90 male. Its not that they all want to grow up and have babies. You need to look at every single level and see where the problem is in the organization. And i think thats what you are talking about, it leads to more innovation and more women being promote