Episode 193: Bucking the System

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Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time…rocking the boat by being honest in a way we’re usually not at work…

 “I’m just done with working in the system. I’m just - I'm sick of thinking that if I smile and grit my teeth I will get the treatment I should get. It just doesn’t work that way.”

Coming up on The Broad Experience.

Raina Brands grew up in Australia, though she’s lived in the UK for about 15 years now. She came to England to study for her PhD at Cambridge…today she herself is an academic, an associate professor at University College London School of Management.

Raina specializes in gender equality and she looks at it mainly through the lens of informal social networks at work - who are your associates, mentors, who do you go to for advice at work, and how does that work out for you?

She loves her work, knows it’s important, but for years she felt there was a problem…

“Obviously as an academic the main thing I’m there to do is produce research that is published in journals that almost nobody reads. Other academics read them.”

She didn’t just want to speak and write within the ivory tower. She wanted to help women directly. So she and a colleague started a website called Career Equally that uses their research to help women do what Raina calls de-bias their careers. By that she says she means two things: one, giving women a frame for their experiences…

“To understand that this feedback that you’re getting, which maybe I’m getting this feedback that my performance isn’t up to scratch, or people are having this negative reaction to me even though they’ve always liked me - to put that in a frame of how stereotypes work, particularly as you move up the leadership ladder…that’s really powerful. That’s one of the things we try and give women when we say de-bias your career. The other thing is within the bounds of what is possible… So gender bias is very much structural, systemic, interpersonal. I in no way am telling women they’re responsible for undoing these systems around them, but within the constraints you face, what can you do to – what conversations can you have, what data can you ask for, what interpersonal strategies can you try to reduce some of the bias you might face at work?”

For example…several months ago Raina had coffee with a colleague, another woman, and she soon realized the purpose of this coffee was for her colleague to let Raina know that some consulting work she’d agreed to do with Raina - she actually didn’t want to do it. It was an add-on to her job and it turned out she was already feeling overwhelmed with administrative and volunteer work - which was also an extra to her job. Raina found out that this woman had taken on a load of office housework. Something women tend to be asked to do far more often than men.

“The advice I gave her, which is advice I only started taking myself in the last few years, is to be really ruthless and unapologetic in cutting down on these extra commitments. And they are extra commitments. And ultimately if you don’t protect your time, do the type of work that’ll get you promoted, it’ll bleed you dry really. Bias cannot hide in data. So if you think you’re being over-asked to volunteer relative to your colleagues, you can collect data on this informally. Track who’s doing what volunteer roles, committee work, and if there is a gender disparity you can go to your manager and say, look, I’m overloaded I’m gonna drop this. You don’t need metrics from HR, you just need some data that either confirms or not your suspicions that perhaps this is an unfair gender disparity that you’re facing.”

 AM-T: “And actually I did a show on office housework once and I think this may be one of the easier areas of bias to push back on. I think what can be trickier is sometimes the comments that slip out, that an older man might say, whether it’s sexual in nature or dismissive of your abilities in some way. How would you advise someone to deal with that, because I think that is really awkward.” 

“It is awkward, but what we know is if you do confront bias it does make the person who has made a biased statement less likely to do so in the future. How do you do it? In general, approaching someone with curiosity rather than accusation. Opening a conversation with questions, wanting to understand what they meant by that…and often just that question of, you said this, this is how I interpreted it, is that what you meant? Often that is just enough to trigger an internal thought process that, ‘maybe that was not the right thing to say.’ So yes, come in with questions and curiosity as opposed to an accusation, and I think that conversation will always be less uncomfortable than what a lot of people anticipate.”

AM-T: “It’s interesting, because there are really different views on this. I think a lot of people thinking about this would say, yeah, it’s time we really confronted these types of biases and called them out, and others would say we need to surreptitiously work within the system to get around this stuff but not confront it directly. Do you think the time has passed for that kind of attitude?”

“I personally don’t see it as either/or. There’s no silver bullet for gender bias. There’s no sense that if we all start calling out bias it wouldn’t be a problem any more. Gender stereotypes are very robust, resilient, and gender bias exists within a self-reinforcing system of structures, processes, interpersonal psychology. So the broad advice I always give to women is, you have to work within your own personal style. Some people are very confrontational, some are not, some people are very funny and can use humour to deflect it, some are not. Some people are very likeable and can work within their own personal relationships, some are not, you have to work within your own style. But the idea that well, if we all say nothing and work within the system it will change, I strongly disagree with that. You have to do both. You have to call it out. You have to confront it directly, and then you also have to work in these more informal, indirect ways as well.”

 We’re going to hear more about the practicalities of de-biasing  in the next show.

Raina studies gender stereotypes for a living…and she experiences stereotyping regularly as well. Take feedback in her world of academia. She says research shows assessments of female professors are routinely biased…

“Institutions, including ones I’ve worked for, have their own internal data showing student evaluations of female professors are systematically lower than equivalent evaluations of male professors. And yet this is the way schools evaluate teaching performance. It is intensely frustrating to have one of your performance metrics be systematically biased against you and to know that and to know that everybody knows that and yet you are still being evaluated using this number which we all agree is biased against you, that is intensely frustrating…I think all women professors have had comments in their evaluations and classroom experiences that no male professor could even imagine having.”

AM-T: “When you say that…is this with male students saying things and doing things, or is it everybody?”

“Yeah, so, it’s everybody. People’s prototype or stereotype of a professor is older and male. So if you, particularly when I was starting out, if you walk into the classroom as a young woman, you are violating people’s expectations for who is the expert who is going to teach me. What that means is women get a lot more resistance and questioning and disrespect. So that is a kind of professional disrespect you face which just sucks up a lot of classroom time to be frank. Then there’s the other end of the spectrum, which is uncomfortable experiences with male students, um…uncomfortable comments on your evaluations about how you dress, how you look, and that again - male professors just aren’t subject to that.”

In a moment, Raina talks about a decision she took to reveal something on her CV that most of us would not.

One of the reasons I was keen to talk to Raina was because of a tweet of hers I’d spotted last year, in which she reveals something a lot of us would consider too personal to write on a resume, or CV.

Although a lot of outsiders think of academics’ main work as teaching, that’s just part of what they do. As Raina said at the beginning, their main occupation is research…and writing up that research for review by their peers. So professors’ CVs are full of information on their research and where it’s been published. But many women professors end up pausing that research at least once in their careers…and they address those pauses on their CVs.

“It’s very common in academia for women to note when they had children. So in academia your performance is really on publishing, it’s publish or perish, and having children is a good way to put a big dent in your publication pipeline…so a lot of women note they had children in these years, and that explains the gap. Because publication gaps are seen very negatively. As soon as you have a pause in your publications people start to wonder what’s going on, have you veered off track, are you no one now?”

There’s this pressure to explain yourself. Last year, Raina did that when she updated her own CV.

“I decided to include a period of a couple of years where I was experiencing recurrent pregnancy loss.”

When you look at her CV, under the word ‘publications’ as well as listing her published research, she notes a maternity break:  2021 - birth of son. Under that you read: 2019-2020, recurrent pregnancy loss.

“Look, the reason I decided to do it is because it really, that period of time had a profound effect on my productivity. Now that I’m out of that sense of loss and trauma I can see that my ideas were just not very good. And even though at the time I was having these days where I’d just be walking down the street and I’d start crying, or days where I’d be lying on the couch just staring into space…or my partner would walk into the room and find me crying on the couch…and even though objectively I would have said of course it’s affecting my work, at the time I probably didn’t think it was. But now I’m out of it and feeling really generative, I’ve got lots of great ideas again, I can look back and see how profoundly it affected my research output. Doing research is about having good ideas and that requires positive affect and energy which I was just lacking.”

She says if people note when they had children, to show there was a reason for their lack of productivity, why not record pregnancy loss? Why not bring it out into the open?

“I’ve just reached a point in my professional life where, you know you were talking about isn’t it better to work in the system…I’m just done working within the system. I’m sick of thinking if I just smile and grit my teeth I’ll get the treatment I should get. It just doesn’t work that way. So I’ve become a lot less apologetic and a lot more brash on these issues. And when people look at my CV the truth is in that time I was being less productive because I was experiencing this profound trauma – which if you haven’t experienced a miscarriage it’s this profound trauma because the physicality of it intertwines with the emotionality of it. And I thought, the only reason I’m not talking about that is because nobody talks about that, and nobody talks about it because it’s uncomfortable, and I’m really not interested in making people comfortable.”

Raina  thinks it’s strange that so many women lose pregnancies and we’re expected to just get on with it, act like it never happened. She wants to go some way to making this very normal experience SEEM normal, rather than like some shameful secret. I told her I’d done a show several years ago on pregnancy loss and the workplace.

AM-T: “I got the sense that some of the comments I got on the miscarriage show, especially in the US, they would never have said anything because once you’re talking about some of the things your body does, whether it’s miscarriage or a serious illness…you’re immediately taken less seriously, can we rely on her, that kind of thing. In your position do you feel quite safe in your job in a way that someone who works for a US company that could be dropped at the drop of a hat might not? I wonder if it is easier to be honest in your situation?”

“Yeah, and I don’t know if that’s - if it’s easy enough to just say profession, national context stuff, in my current position at UCL I do feel very safe, partly because they have a miscarriage policy, which is amazing and forward thinking, it’s a very progressive institution. Yes, companies differ. The only caveat I’d put to that is, the idea that if you don’t talk about your miscarriage to make people feel comfortable, and you suffer in silence, that that will somehow, when you come up for your next promotion and you’re a little bit short, playing the game will somehow get you through that system no, all they’re going to see is, ‘she is another woman who’s underperforming.’ So I question the assumption that there is a way to yeah, play it safe.”

AM-T: “When you tweeted about this line on your resume you got a lot of support from other women, particularly in academia…”

“I did, I was surprised—two things surprised me: I didn’t really get trolled, some men wrote slightly trolly comments, but what surprised me was how viciously the other women came for them so I didn’t even have to engage…I got so may DMs from women in academia saying thank you so much for doing this, this is happening to me right now, there is no way I could talk about it, but this is the experience I’m having, of trying to be productive,…turn up in the classroom, be positive, be on, and going through this trauma at the same time.”

Everyone who’s worked through a miscarriage knows what that feels like. If you’d like to revisit the show I did on this topic, that’s episode 137 - it’s called Pregnancy Loss and Work.

I posted on the Facebook page asking if anyone would or has included information on their resumes about time taken off for medical reasons, or citing a period of illness. Several of you said no you’d never do this because it wasn’t employers’ business why you weren't working for a while…and that if we could normalize these gaps, employers would stop asking about them. One of you in the US said you wouldn't say anything because too many people are inclined to draw ‘irrelevant conclusions from sharing personal information on a CV.’

I did a show back in 2016 called Illness and Secrecy, where we discussed this dilemma of how open to be about your health in the workplace. That’s episode 92.

Next time, ideas on how to de-bias your career with Raina and her colleague Aneeta Rattan.

That’s The Broad Experience for this time. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.