Final episode: What's Changed in Ten Years
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
And in this, the final episode of the podcast…I look back over the past ten years with three women in different parts of the world, and ask what’s changed in the decade that I’ve been producing this show. Are things better for women at work?
“I think they're better because there's a conversation going on now about this. I'm not sure that the conditions themselves improved. Um, but we do have legislation, better legislation than we had 20 years ago. So that's good…”
“I am cautiously optimistic that we've opened Pandora's Box and there's no way we're getting those women pushed back in. Now we got a lot of work to do on men and boys. We thought we could empower women without working on men. And I think that was a huge mistake.”
“Before Covid it would've been, ‘attend every meeting in person, no discussion’, and so as a woman that is a great disadvantage. So I do think it has been transformational for women. I don't think it means that we're all gonna work at home all the time, but the point has been made that you can be effective even if you're not physically in the office.”
Looking back, and forward. Coming up on The Broad Experience.
So…here we are. It’s the last episode. And you are going to hear a bit more from me than you normally would at the top of the show because I do want to talk a bit about why I’m giving it up…and why I’m so grateful to have done it.
One thing is, I’m tired, plain and simple. This has been entirely a one-woman show and I’ve found as the years have gone by that doing absolutely everything from the planning to the interviews to many hours of editing and cutting tape and crafting a structure and all that stuff…it feels pretty relentless and I need a break. And you know we just had that show on money and that’s another thing - the show takes depending on the number of quests 20 to 30 hours to put together and I don’t get paid for it. So I need to free up that time to bring in income.
And you know this as podcast listeners, the whole podcast landscape has changed tremendously since 2012. I used to have to explain to people what a podcast was. No one has to do that any more. But the flipside for me as an independent producer is that it’s much harder to be found and listened to when there’s a new podcast every minute. And so many celebrities and big podcast companies are making them.
And also, when I started the show it felt incredibly important, what I was doing. Because it seemed like hardly anyone else was talking about this stuff. Even when I had relatively few listeners - and I was doing this show for more than 18 months and still had fewer than a thousand listeners…even then it felt vital to me to be doing it. But in recent years the attention paid to the topic of women and the workplace has just exploded - and that’s a good thing - but it doesn’t feel to me like my show is necessary any more in the way it used to be.
All that said, this is by far the most rewarding thing I’ve done professionally to date. When I started it I wanted to give listeners access to other women and their stories, and hopefully give you some ideas along the way that might help you in your own work life. Hearing from you, knowing the show has made a difference to a lot of you, has been hugely rewarding. And I’ve loved telling the stories of so many ordinary women, of different races and backgrounds and jobs - not celebrities, just regular people with great stories and experience to share.
But as one of my guests points out, progress often brings with it some backlash.
There is an alarming amount of misogyny still out there, particularly online…and as someone who’s lived in the US now for half my life, the overturning of the constitutional right to an abortion last summer felt like a blow to women. I know not all my listeners will agree, but to me that felt like a big step back.
Now to my guests: My first guest is from a country where abortion has never been legal: Brazil. Branca Vianna lives in Rio de Janeiro. She has been a listener of this show for quite a few years.
For more than two decades she worked as an interpreter at conferences, translating from Portuguese to English and vice versa. These days though? She’s a successful podcast producer, now running her own company, Radio Novelo.
Branca is 60 now - in fact all three of my guests are around that age. And I was curious to know whether some of the cultural influences I’ve been so aware of during my years making this show…from Lean In to #MeToo…have touched women in Brazil.
“I think so, and I think it's still, I think we're not as far along in this as the US or, or Europe, especially Europe. And especially the UK also because you have those transparency laws that everyone has to that I don't know, if you're a company of above X number of employees, you have to publish what you pay. And that's amazing. That's an amazing tool. We don't have that here, of course. And it's very, very sexist. The workplace here in Brazil is incredibly sexist. There are very few women on boards, there are very few women in, you know, in the hard sciences and things like engineering and of course computer science and finance. Finance is horrible. There are very few women, the women who are there have really hard time. And, and you still hear, you still hear a lot…And it's not taboo to say that it's very difficult to find women for X position. That they're, that they have tried so hard and they can't find a woman, there are no qualified women. It's still okay to say that here.”
That said, unlike the US, which has no national, paid parental leave program, Brazil has a maternity leave law…
“But, you know, the other day I was talking to a very famous economics professor, from a very prestigious university here. And he was telling me that he thinks our maternity laws, maternity leave laws are unfair to companies. And I was like, what? What? And he says, yes, it's very unfair because the company has to pay the woman six months for her to be home. That's very unfair. They shouldn't have to do that. And I was like, oh my god. We've had these laws since the end of military rule, since the new Constitution in '88.”
You can change the laws, but attitudes are still evolving. She says paternity leave is still a work in progress. Most men get just a week, with some having access to another three.
She says the most notable thing about the past ten years or so may not be any actual changes to women’s working conditions but the fact that there’s a conversation going on that didn’t used to happen, at least not openly.
“I think the advent of social media has a lot to do with that. These are conversations that happen in social media and, you know, one person encourages another and you think that you're the only one who's going through this, and then you see someone else. The Me Too movement I think was very important here, even though we didn't have one, really to speak of, we didn't have one to speak of.
We had a few cases here and there, famous cases with famous people, celebrities and actors and sort of like in the US, but we didn't have really a movement. But what happened was, this started the conversation on the part of women. We didn't have real world consequences of men getting punished for their behavior. But we did have women talking to each other a lot on social media and in conferences, events and at their companies. And it's been a while since I heard someone tell me, ‘oh, come on, that's just silly. This guy's, you know, he's just being nice to you. I mean, he just wants to date her. Can't you see that? It's nothing. It's just, it's just a joke.’ You hear that less and less.”
Whereas she used to hear it all the time. She says her former industry, conference interpreting, is female dominated.
“...and even though I worked with women all my life, I worked with women as colleagues and as bosses, but as the conference interpreter, I was working for men in the room. Especially when I started in the late eighties, it was mostly men. So you go to conferences - medical conferences, financial services conferences, legal conferences, things like that, a lot of engineering. Oil. Oil and gas is huge here…and it's men on business trips, which is, oh my God, oh my God. That was really difficult. And I was really young. I started working as a conference interpreter when I was 28 or 29. And it was like, we had - we had to use strategy and tactics, you know, like not make eye contact, try to stay in the booth as much as you can, not talk to anyone.
And sometimes they would come into the booth…a conference interpreting booth is a tiny little thing. And you would look back and there would be this guy standing at the door giving you his number, talking to you, asking rude questions. It was, I mean, my whole working life was that.”
AM-T: “I’m gonna come back to that in a minute but just for a moment…you say interpreting is a very female-oriented profession. Why do you think that is?”
“What we hear a lot [is] about women being better with languages or women being able to multitask, because of course conference interpreting is the essential multitasking. But I think that’s bullshit, you know, both women and men can do languages. Both women and men can multitask or not multitask. It's not a gender thing. I think it's just that it's a more flexible profession. And in the end, that's what women end up doing because they need time. They need time for a family, for taking care of loved ones, for having children. And interpreting does that.”
She says when she had each of her two children it was easy to come right back in and get a new gig. Since it was mostly women and most had kids, it was largely a supportive environment.
Fending off male advances often got difficult though. She doesn’t think her 30-year-old daughter or her friends would put up with what Branca and her co-workers felt they had to.
“They react more now <laugh>, they're not afraid of reacting. And I was, I thought, well, if I say something, I don't know who this guy is. Maybe he's the CEO of the pharmaceutical company that I'm working for. I don't know who it is. I can't do anything. I don't think the young women today do that. I think they would complain. And I had things like once, ugh…once I was at a conference, a political conference, and it was the vice president of the country at the time, and he was giving a speech and I was in the booth translating, and there was this guy that kept looking into the booth and looking into the booth. And I was really just creeped out about it. And I was with this older woman who had hired me.
And then like two days later I'm at home. There were no cell phones, then it was the landline. And my landline rings and I pick it up and it's this guy from the conference who I didn't know who was just staring at me. And it was my boss, my female boss, this older woman who was next to me, who I considered my mentor, who gave him my phone number. And then I called her and I said, why did you do that? She said, oh yeah, I thought maybe he was hitting on you, but he said he had a job, but I thought he was hitting on you. I said, well, you know, if you thought he was hitting on me, why did you give him my number? And that was normal. I don't think that would happen now. No, no way that would happen now.”
But at least Branca felt she could talk back to her boss, remonstrate with her about why she did that. She had some agency. But millions of women in Brazil work in other people’s homes as maids, cooks or nannies. And as we’ve discussed on this show in the past, that puts them in a vulnerable position. Especially when the usual labor laws don’t apply to them.
“They didn't used to have their own labor law and they weren't part of the regular labor law. So they didn't have the same rights as all other workers. And this is a country where a large part of the population, especially poor women, work as domestic workers. Traditionally since the time of slavery, which we had centuries of slavery here, even longer than the US. We were the last western country to free the slaves.”
Brazil is a poor nation, where more than half of citizens identify as black. Many black women work these domestic jobs…
“So, you know, they didn't have vacation, they didn't have, severance pay, they didn't have maternity leave, they didn't have any of those rights. And a few years ago, a law was passed to protect them, a specific labor law to protect them. And that really, I think, changed everything. And at the time you would hear people saying, well, this is gonna be horrible for poor women because they won't be able to get jobs anymore. Because now the people who they work for are gonna have to pay all these charges to have them. And they're gonna have to have social security, they're gonna have to have health insurance and all kinds of things. And it's gonna be horrible. Women are gonna be out of a job. And of course, nothing like that happened. It just, what happened was that now they have their labor law. I think that was a big improvement.
Young people tend to not have maids any more and older people still do, but younger people don’t. They may have a cleaner once a week or something but mostly they don’t have live-in maids. Ike when I grew up, people had live-in maids.”
AM-T: “Interesting…Is there anything else you’d like to say about the changes that have happened in the last decade or two, or what you hope for the future?”
“Well, one of the things that made me contact you and how you inspired me to do my own podcast about women in the workplace is because I thought at the time that women in the workplace was a topic that was not being discussed as much as other feminist demands, such as reproductive health or sexual harassment, for example. Um, and I thought women in the workplace was crucial to improve these other measures of reproductive health and sexual harassment. It was crucial to discuss this. And I thought, well, I think I'm gonna do this cuz I want to, I want to have those conversations with women. I want to understand starting from personal stories, not just statistics, what is happening to these women? What's it like out there in the workplace? And I think that is still a discussion that's not as prevalent as I think it should be in terms of opportunity, education, everything. I think still what you hear most about and which is absolutely crucial is reproductive health, women's health in general, reproductive health especially, and sexual harassment, which is rampant here, I think more than in the US.”
Branca says despite some progress, macho culture remains strong in Brazil. And there is still a long way to go.
Back in the northern hemisphere…a couple of shows ago you heard me talk about age and possibility with Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. And though she told me quite reasonably that it’s hard to generalize about changes for women at work, given all the different countries and cultures in the world…on the whole, she’s hopeful.
“Where a decade ago there were no women on executive teams or just, you know, the head of HR or people or something, now, you know, good companies tend to have a very significant number, and a completely different gender balance. And they're running for politics. They're all over the op-ed pages. 10 years ago there were almost no women op-ed writers. So I think it's dramatically different.”
But these changes to the status quo haven’t gone down well with everybody.
“You know, we live in a society that perhaps underestimated the backlash from men, the populist rises, the demagogues and autocrats that are, you know, showing us what men ‘should’ be like, is in part a reaction to the rise of women. We always knew it would be a reaction. And it's partly something that I think we need to better learn how…one of my beats has been to better engage men in a more constructive conversation, which is why I don't like ‘isms’ and accusations and blaming men for everything. In all the organizations where I've worked, it's been male CEOs that have pushed for gender balance very effectively.
I am cautiously optimistic that we've opened Pandora's Box and there's no way we're getting those women pushed back in. And I read the news from Iran every day with unbelievable admiration for the courage and hope that these women carry. And I hope that these massive trends that have been unleashed will infect every corner of the globe. Girls have never been more educated. The number of girls now educated across the globe has hit record levels. We really have addressed some of those issues. Now I think we got a lot of work to do on men and boys, and I think that was a always a missing strand. We thought we could empower women without working on men. And I think that was a huge mistake and I think it's time we catch it up. Let’s help men and boys adapt to the rise of women.”
AM-T: “Yeah. And you've always said, I think you were the first person who articulated this to me in this show is that unless you know, young women, little girls are now told for the most part you can do anything you want. But young boys aren't told that.”
“Yeah, no, everything is go girls, go girls, go girls.”
AM-T: “Yeah. And boys are still raised to be breadwinners.”
“Yeah, and I think they’re - they are…I was in my Harvard class yesterday where this guy got accused, by a female facilitator of not leaning in and listening to something enough, and it wasn't quite true, right? And she made an assumption that he wasn't interested, that he wasn't engaged, which was just kind of, you know, sexism the other way around. Right? And we have to be really, really careful. It's been an unnecessarily divisive topic we have set. You know, this whole term I also fight of ‘male allies’ as though there are male allies and then what, what are the other men? Are they some kind of enemy?…um, it’s a real problematic approach to this stuff that hasn't been as inclusive of men as we ask men to be inclusive of us. So now that we are where we are, I think we can adapt in turn to a new situation and become more skilled in our own form of inclusion, which is to work with men to show the way forward. More gender balanced companies are now all over the place. More gender balanced couples are aspirational to all. Let's not repeat the errors of the past. I'd hate to see women get into power and then, you know, keep men out.”
Like Avivah, my final guest is an old friend of the podcast. For a long time before I interviewed Heather McGregor, I used to read her columns in the Financial Times. Heather last appeared on the show in 2021. At that point she was 59, she’d left the business she’d bought years previously and switched from entrepreneur to Executive Dean at Edinburgh Business School. It’s part of Heriot-Watt University.
Today, at 60, she’s happily ensconced in a brand new job as Provost and Vice Principal of Heriot Watt University in Dubai.
AM-T: “So Heather, first of all, before I ask about your move, you are the last person I'm interviewing for the broad experience. Um, yeah, the very last one. And it's funny cuz you were one of the first that I interviewed...back in 2012.”
“I was, I was in the very first year, I think I was the very first year of the podcast.”
AM-T: “You were, you were in the fourth episode. I just checked last night because you had published your book, Mrs. Moneypenny's Careers Advice for Women. And so I was talking to you partly about that and partly cuz I'd read you for so many years in the FT and admired your columns. But I mean, and I I know the 10 years since we first spoke, that's a very short time in the arc of women's progress. But I am just gonna ask you to look back over this last decade, ‘cause you could argue that as concerns women in the workplace, a fair amount has happened. What do you think when you look back over the last decade or so, do you think things have improved for women at work?”
“Oh, definitely. I think more opportunities have arisen and I think it's gone from people asking, you know, why do I need more women in the workplace? - when I say people, I mean mostly men, asking why do I need more women in the workplace - to nowadays, 10 years later saying, how do I get more women in the workplace? So I think we've gone from a position where people didn't really believe it was necessary to even think about it, to now recognizing that they are potentially missing out on half of the talent pool in the world if they don't actively encourage more women into the workplace and more women to stay in the workplace.”
She says all male boards and all male panels are increasingly unusual in her experience.
When I last spoke to her we talked about how Covid had upended so many working women’s lives, landing them with an extra job of managing kids at home while trying to work themselves. Heather is familiar with the statistics - she knows many women left the workforce, particularly in the US, when Covid was at its height. Plenty have not returned.
But she believes the pandemic has brought some benefits as well, including the shift to online work.
“I sit on a board of a US public company and it meets four times a year, and then there's a fifth meeting of the audit committee. So that's five meetings a year that I have to attend. And they're all either in London or the United States, and that involves a lot of travel. And after that, we went into the pandemic and of course everything had to go online. And then coming out of the pandemic, having discovered that we could have perfectly well have a meaningful boardroom debate online, the decision was made that, of our four board meetings a year, two of them will continue to be online. And so I have gained, as a woman from being able to not lose all that traveling time and just go online and then come off again and still make a meaningful contribution to that particular board. Now, the other two meetings I have to travel and the extra audit committee meeting, I have to travel. But that's about investing in my relationships with my colleagues. And so I'm very happy to do that. But that much better balance between traveling and not traveling, before covid we would've been, you know, attend every meeting in person, no discussion, and as a woman that that's a great disadvantage. So I do think it has been transformational for women. I don't think it means that we're all gonna work at home all the time, but the point has been made that you can be effective even if you're not physically in the office.”
AM-T: Are there things, particular things you’d like to see happen for women in the workforce over the next ten, twenty years or are there things you predict will happen?”
“I'm obviously very interested is still in women on boards and women in positions of leadership of companies. So I think, uh, you know, I still have things I would like to see happen in that area, very much so that haven't yet happened. So I'd like to see more women chairmen. I think that, you know, we used to count number of women on boards and now I want to count how many women chairman of boards there are of big companies. And it's still a very, very small percentage on both sides of the Atlantic.”
She’d also like to see more women on audit committees - she just mentioned she sits on one of these. That’s the board committee that overseas a company’s financial reporting…
“And that's the most prestigious committee. Women head up remuneration committees, which is actually a really tricky and difficult committee ‘cause you know, everyone argues about pay. But the vast majority of audit committees, which is the most senior committee, are still chaired by men. And the vast majority of remuneration committees, which is the really shitty committee to be chairing, are chaired by women. So women have got the shitty jobs, again, I want to see that change.”
Speaking of change…when I last spoke to Heather in 2021 I assumed that post at Edinburgh Business School would be her last before retirement. How wrong I was. She and her husband - who is retired - moved from beautiful but damp Scotland to hot, sunny Dubai in the United Arab Emirates last September after Heather landed the top job running the University.
She says despite what some people may think about the region, being a powerful woman is no problem.
“I think the really interesting point about me getting this job is not so much that the university was brave enough to send a woman to lead a business in the Middle East. I do think that's a, a dated view of this part of the world. There's nothing I can't do. People say, can you drive? What do you mean, can I drive? Of course I can drive. There's very little here that anybody can't do, let alone women. And I don't think there's any barrier here at all to being a woman. Everybody has accepted me and respects me for the position that I'm in.
What I think is much more interesting is that I'm 60 years old now, and when I applied for the job, I was up against 31 other people, all of whom were outside my university. So I was the only internal appoint possible internal appointment I got through to the shortlisting. And there were four on the shortlist…it was me and three outsiders. They insisted that everybody come to Dubai for the interview and I promptly got covid. So I had to interview online, where everybody else got came in person. So I felt that was a real disadvantage.”
Then, the university declined to change the time of the interview from its convenient Dubai time - so Heather had to get ready to appear on screen at 5.30AM.
“...you have to get up and put makeup on, you know, I mean, on a Teams call with no makeup, I honestly look dreadful. So it really was a question of getting up at 4:30, putting on all my makeup, preparing myself, making sure that I could, you know, first thing in the morning, you're not always very audible, <laugh> or articulate. So I had to do all of that. But actually I think the biggest barrier to my being appointed was not being a woman. It was being my age. And all the people I was up against were younger than me and they had more energy than me. Well, potentially, I suppose they could have had more energy than me.
I think in the end I was the most energetic interviewee. And I don't think people are ageist. I think they are energist. And I think that if you can show that you've got the energy of a 45 year old, which hopefully I do, then I think that people will set aside your age and where you are. That was a really big deal. That was the reason I thought I might not get it. Not that you're allowed to make an appointment on the basis of age, but more that they might have wanted somebody with greater energy and enthusiasm.”
AM-T: “Well, it's been so nice to talk to you Heather, and I think, I mean, I've definitely covered my questions for the show, for this final episode of the Broad Experience…”
“I know what a historic…what a historic podcast episode to be on. And Ashley, this has been a journey of the last 10 years and you have interviewed so many amazing, amazing women that we've all been inspired by, and covered so many angles of a woman's journey and career and from every possible angle. So I'm honored to be on the last ever podcast and I know that this won't be the last we encounter of each other. Cause I know you're going to go onto more exciting things…”
AM-T: “Well, I'll let you go cause I know it's the end of your day, but I'm so glad that, that you were able to do this and, just very lovely to, to bookend the series with you.”
“Absolutely. Well, big hug. And keep me in touch with what happens next, OK?”
AM-T: “I will. All right. Okay. Bye Heather.”
“Thanks, honey. Bye.”
And if anyone listening knows a retired person in Dubai who plays golf, Heather says to please get in touch. Her husband is desperate for a golf partner.
As ever, I will link you to more information about all of my guests under this episode at The Broad Experience dot com.
As for what I’m doing next, well I’ve always done this show on top of other work but I’d like to use the time I’d normally spend on this podcast on going back to radio…[more here]
I am going to keep the website going and keep the podcast feed going - because I don't want the past ten years’ work to just disappear into the ether. So you’ll be able to keep accessing it and I hope you will.
And I want to say thank you to all my listeners including all those of you I’ve corresponded with over the years. It has meant SO much to me to hear from people about how the show has helped them, because that’s another thing about doing an indy show - you are working in a vacuum much of the time and it gets lonely. I do this show from my closet. So all the emails and messages have really meant a lot to me.
Many of you have given me story ideas and been guests on this show yourselves, which has been fantastic, and an honor to tell your stories.
And last but not least thank you to all those of you who’ve supported the show over the years with donations. You havej helped keep things going and I am tremendously grateful.
This has been The Broad Experience. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks so much for listening.