Bonus Episode: Unpacking Sexual Harassment

“Documenting it is really, really important, if even just for your own sanity, keeping careful notes and records of what happens.”

— Jennifer Berdahl

Jennifer Berdahl

Before the revelations about Harvey Weinstein, Bill O'Reilly, Roger Ailes and Donald Trump, Jennifer Berdhahl and I sat down to talk about sexual harassment. Jennifer is a professor at the University of British Columbia who studies harassment and power in organizations. In this show we look at what motivates sexual harassment, why anti-harassment trainings don't work, and what we can do about all of it.

Further reading: Tolerating Sexual Harassment - A Personal Reckoning is Jennifer's tale of her own harassment in academia.

The original show's page contains a lot more links to articles. You can read a transcript of the show here. 

Episode 113: What's in a Name

“It’s part of how we’re formed as a society – people assume we’re male unless told otherwise. And that’s interesting and also worrying. ”

— Alev Scott

“Prior to this I had an assumed authority. People seemed to think I was capable of the job they had paid me to do and I guess I’d taken that for granted, because when I was working as Nicole that was often not the case.”

— Martin Schneider

Nicole Hallberg and Martin Schneider

Plenty of us work remotely, known to clients or collaborators by name only. In this show we meet Alev Scott. She's a writer and commentator whose first name means she is often assumed to be a man. We talk about how she deals with that, as well as her distaste for female titles - especially 'Ms.'

I also talk to Martin Schneider and Nicole Hallberg, whom you may have read about earlier this year when their story blew up on Twitter. They swapped names and identities for a week at the office. The results were...revealing. 

Thanks to radio producer Danielle Fox for taping my interview with Nicole and Martin.

Further reading: Alev Scott's FT piece on ambiguous names.

Nicole Hallberg's Medium post on the identity-swapping experiment she and Martin conducted at their office, and a longer piece for Vox in which each writes their side of the story. 

You can also read a transcript of the show.