Episode 54: Power and body language

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December 17, 2014

“You take a normal body and you make it even more compact and that’s a sign of, quote, femininity, and it’s also a sign of low power.” - Marianne LaFrance

“Quite often I get pulled in for a kiss. And I’ve had one person tell me not to be so formal. I think...some men think a handshake is something you do with men, and kisses are something you do with women." - Elaine Moore

20 minutes.

Christine Lagarde and former Greek Prime Minister Lucas PapademosIn the summer I produced a show about communication at the office. But that show left out one glaring component of all this: body language. So today we tackle hunching, spread legs, eye contact, and kissing - by gender, and all in a business setting. I speak to Yale psychology professor Marianne LaFrance about how men and women play up their power, or lack of it, through non-verbal communication. And Financial Times journalist Elaine Moore talks about how she deals with unwanted male kisses at business meetings. 

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Episode 53: A technical problem

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December 1, 2014

"It's not just about women not feeling engineering is their thing...it's about the culture of the place that makes people not want to be there even when they have the skills." - Hannah Kuchler

"The team I'm on, we have a fair number of women programmers...but even then I've had the experience of I say something, and it's just not believed until it's repeated by a guy."    
- Talia Fukuroe

21 minutes.

This has been a big year for stories about women in tech, ranging from depressing tales of sexual harassment at startups to controversy over egg freezing and advice from a prominent CEO on *not* asking for a raise. The spotlight is shining on women in technology far more strongly than when I first covered this topic on the podcast in 2012. Hannah Kuchler

In this episode we focus on Silicon Valley, the tech capital of the world. My first guest is Financial Times reporter Hannah Kuchler. She says women making their way in the heavily male tech space face obstacles large and small - and not all of them are discussed publicly for fear of retribution. Talia Fukuroe knows some of this first hand. She works for a Silicon Valley company she says is trying really hard to get things right for female employees. But the gender ratio means that just being female can present a few problems on the job - problems that can't be taken care of by company policy.

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