The Broad Experience

In this, the final episode of The Broad Experience, I talk to three women about what has changed for women at work during the past decade, and what remains to be done.

I began this show in 2012. Back then women and the workplace was a little discussed topic, and almost no one was podcasting about it. But my own experiences at work had convinced me this subject deserved much more attention. And while one measly decade barely registers in the arc of history, it means something to those of us who live through it. There has definitely been progress during the years I’ve worked on this show.

My guests are based all over the world. Branca Vianna is a longtime listener who lives in Rio de Janeiro. Today she is the founder and president of a highly successful podcast company in Brazil, Radio Novelo. Frequent guest Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is back in London after a stint at Harvard. She always has an intriguing take on where we are, and where we should go next. Heather McGregor, once known as Financial Times columnist Mrs. Moneypenny, was in one of my first podcasts, and I was delighted that she agreed to be in my last. She’s now living and working in Dubai.

I can’t tell you how rewarding it’s been to make this show during the last almost 11 years. Thanks for listening and for all the emails and other messages of support. It means a lot when you work alone from your closet.

Onward.

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Shame, guilt, trauma…these are just some of the words that came up in my conversations for this show on women’s relationship with money. Why IS that relationship so complicated? Two women with different money backgrounds, knowledge, and expectations, help me delve into that question.

My first guest, Sarah Wolfe, grew up with little knowledge of how to handle money and a mother who told her she didn’t really have to worry about it anyway. She just needed to find a guy who would. But that advice didn’t work out so well. Kristine Beese is CEO of Untangle Money, which helps women plan, save, and spend. Her own life experience and years in the financial services industry taught her just how poorly it caters to women. Yet women tend to work less over a lifetime, earn less, and live longer than men - if anyone needs solid monetary advice, it’s us.

The final episode of The Broad Experience will be out in January.

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Ageism and sexism are sometimes described as a double-whammy that hits women later in life. Which is a bit worrying, because I’m 52 and wrapping up this show after a decade of production. Onto new things - I hope!

My first guest lives in New Zealand and recently got back into the workforce in her fifties after being out for more than a decade. It feels like that notorious double-whammy is hitting her, yet it’s impossible to truly measure. She wants people to know that many 50-plus women aren’t coasting on a sea of contentment and financial security.

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox agrees that ageism is rampant, but says we need to re-frame things if we’re going to improve life for older workers. And that starts with educating employers about the advantages of maintaining and engaging 50-plus employees, a group that includes more women than ever before. It’s up to us to do our part as well, she says, including “recognizing that usually what got you here isn't going to get you through the next phase.” As usual she's sprouting with ideas that I plan to use in my own next phase.

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Ellen Snee decided to become a nun in the early ‘70s, which seemed an inopportune time. Society was changing rapidly, there were riots on her college campus, and as a friend told her, nuns and priests were abandoning convents and the priesthood, not joining. But Ellen felt a sense of mission and purpose that didn’t go away. She spent 18 mostly happy years with an international order of nuns, the Religious of the Sacred Heart.

In a stereotype-busting conversation, Ellen describes how life in a convent gave her a freedom her married girlfriends lacked, how she hoped to change the Catholic Church from the inside, and how taking a vow of chastity didn’t mean the end of her relationships with men. Since leaving the convent in the early 1990s Ellen has used her wisdom and insights within corporations, to help professional women “learn how to know what they know, how to recognize their desire, and how to pursue it.”

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In this show we meet three musicians, all performers and teachers, and get a sense of how much the traditional world of classical music is changing. We also hear some of their playing.

Lydia Brown, now a professor of collaborative piano at Juilliard, began her career mentored by several women who worked to established her profession. Yet despite this female influence, she says she’s had to fight to achieve the same success as a male pianist. Renate Rohlfing was one of Lydia’s students. Now in her late thirties, she has had a successful career, traveling far and wide to play. But it took her a long time to realize that performing does not have to mean sticking to old expectations of what a woman ‘should’ look like on stage. French horn player Christine Stinchi is working on her doctorate at Rutgers University. She performs in pants, and has had plenty of women mentors in what was for so long a male field. She sees a hopeful future for women in brass.

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When longtime Canadian journalist Anna Maria Tremonti was 23, she married a charming guy she met through work. He turned out to be violent, a secret Anna Maria kept from everyone, including her colleagues. This was quite a feat given his attacks would sometimes leave her with visible bruises she’d have to cover up before heading into work.

In this episode she and I talk about her long-ago marriage and the scars it left behind. We discuss the positive role work played in her life, even as she strove to keep any signs of her tumultuous home life hidden. Anna Maria is the writer and host of the six-part CBC podcast Welcome to Paradise.

My second guest is Beth Lewis, director of Standing Firm, a Pittsburgh-based organization that trains businesses to spot signs of abuse in their employees, as well as signs that they might have an abuser on staff. Standing against partner violence and abuse is a big part of health and wellness that many companies currently bypass.

You will hear some descriptions of partner violence in this episode.

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Lots of us dream of leaving corporate life to travel the world. Meena Thiruvengadam did just that, incorporating travel into her career. But sometimes following your dream occupation means flouting expectations of what you should be doing - including expectations your traditional Indian family has for you.

In this episode we discuss the exhaustion that can come from trying to make things work at work, the frustrations travelers of color often face, and the many joys of traveling alone.

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In this episode my guests Raina Brands and Aneeta Rattan share ideas about how to call out bias so it can’t sit there in the background, subtly undermining our progress.

Confronting bias can seem intimidating to many women. It means awkwardness, and making people (including us) feel uncomfortable.

But as you heard if you listened to the last show with Raina, causing discomfort is no reason not to call out unfairness when we see it. Aneeta describes how she treads the fine line of her own discomfort in speaking up, vs. continuing to exist in a biased system. Raina and Aneeta are both professors who run the site Career Equally. This show is full of ideas on how to 'de-bias' your career.

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I knew I wanted to talk to Professor Raina Brands when I spotted a tweet of hers last year in which she revealed that her CV contained some updated, and quite personal, information - information most of us wouldn’t reveal to an employer.

In this episode Raina discusses her project to help women ‘de-bias’ their careers, something she and her colleague Aneeta Rattan write about on their site, Career Equally. She explains what that means, why it’s important, and how we can get started. She also talks about why she decided to get personal in public and what the response has been.

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This time we're revisiting an episode about working women in the Nordic countries.

Scandinavia has a reputation for equality and excellent work/life balance. American women look enviously at these nations as they scrape together a short maternity leave or finish another 10-hour day. But here's the paradox: there are just as few women in powerful roles in Scandinavia as there are in the US. Three women in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark take us behind the scenes to find out why.

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