Better Than This Episode 2 

Show Notes and Full Transcript

Episode Overview

Why do women experience more burnout than men? Why do we keep blaming ourselves for stress that’s built into the system?

In this eye-opening episode, Meghan French Dunbar explores the deeper reasons women are struggling at work—reasons that go far beyond self-care or boundary-setting. Through stories, research, and her own experience as a female founder, she unpacks the invisible weight women carry in modern work culture—and how patriarchal norms and toxic leadership ideals continue to shape our experience of ambition, worth, and well-being.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing all the right things but still falling short, you are not alone—and you are not the problem. This episode names what so many of us have felt but haven’t had the words for.

In This Episode, We Explore:

• Why burnout, anxiety, and depression hit women harder
  
• How leadership ideals rooted in toxic masculinity reward disconnection
  
• Why “impostor syndrome” isn’t a personal problem—it’s a systemic one
  
• The double standards and outdated structures women still navigate daily
  
• What it really means to create a workplace where everyone can flourish

Why This Episode Matters

The truth is, we can’t build flourishing workplaces until we name who they’re currently failing. This episode is for anyone ready to stop pretending that the system is neutral—and start reimagining leadership, culture, and success in a way that actually works for women. If you care about equity, well-being, and sustainable success, this one’s for you.

Resources

• Books mentioned:
  
• On Our Best Behavior by Elise Loehnen
  
• Fair Play by Eve Rodsky
  
• Patriarchy Stress Disorder by Dr. Valerie Rein
  
  

Join the Conversation:

Listen on Apple, Spotify, or other streaming platforms, and let me know:

✨ What resonated with you most from this episode?
✨ Have you experienced burnout or stress in ways that felt invisible to those around you?
✨ What would a workplace built for women actually look like?

Tag @meghanfrenchdunbar on Instagram or LinkedIn and use the hashtag #BetterThanThisPodcast to share your thoughts. I read every message. 

💛 Loved the episode?

Please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps new listeners discover the show—and join the movement to build something better than this.

And if you know someone who’s on the edge of burnout or questioning their place at work, send this their way. You never know how much someone might need to hear: It’s not you. It’s the system.

Better Than This, Episode 2: Full Transcript

Show Intro

(00:59)
Hello there and welcome to Better Than This. My name is Meghan French Dunbar, and I'm going to be your host today as we talk all about why women are struggling in the workplace more than men. Yes, research backed, why women are struggling more than men. We're going to get into some of the deeper issues that are potentially hidden barriers many people aren't aware of that are actually holding women back and causing them to suffer while they're working. The reason we're doing this is because in order to explore solutions, we first need to truly understand the problem.

Now, you might be asking yourself, is this episode only for women? Absolutely not. I would argue that this is great information for any leader to have regardless of gender identity because it makes you more knowledgeable, it helps you better understand how to support your team, create a great workplace for all, and makes you a more multifaceted leader. So let's get started.

If you joined me in episode one, we talked about all of the ways in which work currently isn't working for everyone, regardless of gender identity. We covered five key issues as a little recap that are exacerbating some of the mental and physical health issues that people are contending with as a result of the contemporary business norms and the current, what I call, toxic business playbook.

Five Toxic Business Playbook Norms

(02:27) The five issues that we reviewed were:

1. Overly demanding, overly stressful, high-pressure workplaces;
2. Cost cutting scenarios that are making it so people can't make ends meet and are putting people's physical health and safety in jeopardy;
3. Hierarchical command-and-control cultures;
4. Hyper-competitive and super individualistic workplaces; and
5. The winner-takes-all paradigm that is brought to us by shareholder supremacy.

So if you want to dig into all of those, you can check out episode one if you haven't done so already. What we did was learn the ways in which these five key issues tie directly to the six key causes of burnout, some of the main drivers of mental and physical health issues, and the key causes of stress that we know of. So that's all in episode one, if you wanna go check it out.

But today, we're specifically gonna be looking at why women are struggling more than men. And this was something that at first for me started a bit as an observation. I was contending with significant levels of anxiety, depression, and ultimately full-scale burnout as CEO of my first company, Conscious Company Media.

I started opening up about this. I'd do a lot of keynote presentations. We hosted our own events and people would come to these events and I'd be pretty open about my own struggles, how I was kind of tying my worth to my work, how I was overly stressed, how I was working myself to the bone, how my identity was really wrapped up in being busy.

And then I would notice on the back end, of course, when we are open and vulnerable, people tend to feel a little bit more connected with us—there's a reason for that that we will get into in future episodes. But people would often come talk to me after I would get off the stage and relay to me a bit about their experience, talking about burnout or stress or undiagnosed medical conditions, related to work-related stress. And I started to notice that I was hearing more from women than men.

I would hear stories like this one from Zahra Kassam. co-founder and former CEO of Monti Kids, and she currently works at the Mushroom Farm in Pescadero, California. This was her experience as she was running her business.

Zahra Kassam's Story

(04:41)
Zahra: I was sick. I, you know, there was the mental health stuff, but my body was trying to stop me. things just kept happening. there was like a period of several months where I literally couldn't use my wrists because it was kind of like a carpal tunnel, but it was coming from my shoulders. I couldn't pick up a coffee mug. had to go get my hair blow dried, cause I couldn't wash my own hair for months.

And so that happened and then there was like a concussion and it was just one thing after another after another that my body was like, you gotta stop. And it so funny, my concussion doctor, I went to Walnut Creek to this guy who sees like all the athletes he was like, you know, a concussion, like,

you gotta slow down, like you can't. And the reason you're having such bad symptoms is because you're doing this company and you're mothering and it's like, it's just too much. And I was like, not expecting that. give me some, I don't know, something, just take care of my concussion. So I kept getting all these signals to slow down and I felt like I needed to, but it wasn't, I wasn't actively thinking about my identity. I was thinking about who's gonna,

Like I just felt like I couldn't stop.

The Reality Of Women In Leadership

(05:59)
Meghan: I was hearing all of these stories of pretty profound struggle in the workplace. And I was noticing that a lot of them were coming from women. I didn't know if this was just because perhaps women were more comfortable talking about it, or as a result of the network that I had. I started looking into the research on this, and it turns out that research actually supported my observations.

Women, in fact, are struggling more at work than men.

• Women consistently report higher levels of stress and burnout than men.
• Working women's well-being is declining faster than working men's, regardless of whether or not they have children.
• Research done by Tetyana Pedrovska found that women, as they ascend leadership ranks, their symptoms of depression increase, while men do the exact opposite. As they ascend into higher levels of leadership, their symptoms of depression decrease.

So what is going on here?

It's not, I'll say this right from the top, it is not that women are built differently and that we can't handle the stress and pressure or that you are not enough to handle the stress and pressure of the workplace. That is not what is happening here.

What is in fact happening here: there numerous issues in the business world that work against women that men do not contend with.

Why, you may ask? That's what we're gonna get into.

The Impact of Patriarchy on Business

(07:22):

So the idea of business has been around for last few thousand years. When business became a thing, something that was also more recently on the scene was patriarchy. Now, you might have heard this word. It might make you uncomfortable. It used to make me very uncomfortable. And I used to feel this way of like, "Patriarchy isn't really a thing. Men and women are equal now. I have the same access to opportunities as men, so that's not an issue."

But then I learned a bit more about patriarchy. I actually understood the definition and started experiencing some of the patriarchal beliefs that pervade the business world myself and was like, maybe, maybe it's still, maybe it's still an issue.

So, patriarchy, put simply, the foundational belief is that men are superior to women—societies or culture where men hold more power than women. This is true of nearly all present-day societies and has been true for about the last 10,000 years or so. If you want to go down the rabbit hole on this, I highly recommend Elise Loehnen's book, On Our Best Behavior. The first chapter is all about the origins of patriarchy and how this all came to be, which as I was reading it, there was a part of me that was like, "Wait, haven't men always dominated women? Isn't this kind of the natural order of things?" In fact, it isn't.

The history of our species before about 10,000 years ago when we aggregated in cities—there's a lot on this in the other book, I won't go too far into it—but before this, we were nomadic tribes, hunter-gatherers, and most research supports the concept that men and women were considered equal. And then a number of things happened, monotheistic religions, yada yada, bink, bank, bump, and all of sudden, we have societies where men are considered superior and should have all the power.

They're put in leadership positions and women are not only seen as inferior, but they're starting to be seen as their role is to support men by staying home, bearing children, and doing domestic labor. Some of these beliefs turn into things like: women should be docile and subservient, kind, nurturing, compassionate, meek, all of the things so that they obey men in their lives.

These patriarchal beliefs were already firmly entrenched in most societies worldwide by the time business became a thing. And so business, as it's evolved over the last many few thousand years, has always been under the lens of patriarchy. Nearly all present-day societies are in fact considered patriarchal societies. Don't believe me? One of the scholars on this says one of the quickest ways to determine whether or not you live in a patriarchal society is to question: are the norms in your society that, upon a heterosexual marriage, the woman takes the man's last name? How odd would it be if a man and a woman got married and a man took the woman's last name? Would that be considered atypical, against the norm, or would that man be questioned? Yes. In nearly every single society worldwide, present day, yes.

The extremity in which the patriarchal beliefs and the oppression of women varies widely based on where you live, but that doesn't mean that societies aren't still patriarchal worldwide, with the exception of a few matriarchal societies. I think there's like four—we're not going to go too far down that rabbit hole. I think if I can rein myself in. Patriarchy. Business. Yes, back on track.

So here's what happened as a result of patriarchy and business growing up together over the last few thousand years. Men have almost always been designing the way that business has evolved, from the creation of contracts and workers' rights and all the norms and the ways in which we practice business, that has almost all exclusively been established by men. Yes, there were exceptions. In the last few hundred years, there were women who owned things like brothels and boarding houses, the things that were considered below men, but still had to exist, "had to," brothels, wink, wink, yep, they definitely "had to" exist.

So women were running some of these businesses, but it isn't until the 1970s, 50 plus years ago, that women began entering the workforce in earnest beyond kind of basic entry level roles. We begin to see women ascending into more leadership level ranks and the belief that maybe women could do some of the roles that men traditionally do.

We've made a lot of progress over the last 50 years, and men are still in nearly every single leadership role worldwide on a major scale.

• 95% of CEOs worldwide are men. Yes, that was nine five, 95%.
• Women hold less than 30% of C-suite roles worldwide—22% of those held by white women, 6% held by women of color, and women hold less than 30 % of senior management roles.
• 10 largest companies in the world, all led by men.

You can see where I'm going with this. Men are still at the helm in most seats worldwide in the contemporary business world.

Why does this matter? I am not saying that men are inherently evil and because they've been in charge, business is broken. I'll say that again for those of you in the back who just really want to be pissed at me. I am not saying that men have broken business because men suck. Not saying that.

What I am saying is that men who have been societally conditioned with patriarchal beliefs about women's inferiority and, more recently, toxic masculinity about what it means to be a man—these beliefs are held by many of the men who are in positions of power and as a result they now pervade the business world.

5 Systemic Barriers for Women In Leadership

(13:50)

We're going to talk about five key ways in which they actually show up in the business world and are holding women back. These might be things that you currently contend with, are very aware of. Some of these might be things that you are not as conscious of. We're gonna go through all five of them so you can understand how these are probably impacting your day-to-day work.

Issue #1: Gender Discrimination at Work

The first and most obvious: gender discrimination.

After I did my MBA, I got a job I was so excited about it. I was on the leadership team. It was an organization that I had really looked up to. I get in there, and a few months in, I'm the director of development, and they send me our annual budget. I'm going through the line items, trying to figure out the budget for this big annual event that I'm going to be hosting, and on the spreadsheet there are of course the team's salaries. I am a curious, normal human being, so I took a look. I mean, they didn't tell me not to. And I was a little surprised when I saw that one of the male associates who was two levels below me was making quite a bit more money than me on the leadership team. And then I looked at all of the women's salaries on the team and it would appear that all of the women made quite a bit less than the men on the team. This was really one of the first times I had had exposure to the gender pay gap, which is probably one of the more obvious things in the business world that most women are aware of that is a thing: literally being paid less for the same or, in this case, a higher level of work than men. This is, of course, true for all women: 84 cents on the dollar for white women, which is the best. Women of color have it much worse and are paid much less money for the same work.

But wait, there's more. So, yes, the pay gap is an issue, but gender discrimination continues to pervade many other elements of the business world.

The United Nations just recently did their survey and found that nine out of ten people worldwide still hold fundamental biases against women—90% of humans holding fundamental biases against women.

How this shows up in the workplace:

• 40% of women have experienced direct gender-based discrimination at work.
• Women are automatically judged as being less competent and held to higher standards.
• In the tech world, a recent survey found 94% of people feel that women are held to higher standards than men for the same work.
• Women are more likely to have their work questioned or have someone else take credit for their ideas.

I remember one of the interviews I was doing for the book, Cat Perez, who is the co-founder of FAMM, was telling me about a previous role that she had back in the day. The male CEO, any work turned in by a woman, he automatically doubted and questioned and had the men on the team validate the findings of the women. But any work submitted by men, including male interns, was just automatically accepted. "Of course, they know what they're doing. They're a man!" I don't know if you've experienced anything like this in any of your workplaces. It doesn't feel particularly good.

Gender Bias in Leadership

Women are also not considered leadership material.

• Globally, roughly 40% of people feel that men make better leaders based on gender identity alone.
• Female candidates for leadership roles are consistently judged as having less leadership potential than men, making them 14% less likely to be promoted.
• There's the "think leader, think male" phenomenon where if you are asked, "Think of a leader or think of a manager," more than 70% of people worldwide will automatically think of a man—most often a white man because that's just how we're conditioned to think of what a leader is.

We rarely think of a woman automatically when we think of leadership. There's kind of this fundamental bias that's just ingrained in many of us because of the societal conditioning. This also shows up as women just automatically being considered as a more junior level person. Women are twice as likely to be mistaken for someone more junior.

I still remember multiple years ago, I went to a business conference with the chairman of the parent company that I sold my first company to. I was the CEO of a wholly owned subsidiary brand. He was the chairman of the board of this larger parent company. And as a CEO with CEO on my name tag, more than a dozen times, I had men ask me while I was standing next to the chairman if I was his assistant.

Women are also judged more harshly.

• More than 75% of high-performing women receive negative feedback from their superiors compared to, wait for it. Just guess. What percentage of men do you think are receiving negative feedback from their superiors? The high-achieving men, two! Did you guess two? Yeah, it's probably even less than you thought—2% of men are receiving negative feedback from their superiors.

Women tend to be judged more harshly. Women in the workplace are essentially considered incompetent until proven overly capable. We have to prove ourselves constantly. And even when we do, our work is ignored. Our ideas are dismissed. You're sitting down at a table of men, and no one's making eye contact with you. No one's asking for your opinion.

There's these subtle micro-aggressions that we're constantly dealing with and also just blatant gender discrimination as well. I don't know how this aligns with your experience, but it doesn't feel particularly great to be discriminated against solely based on gender identity. And if you might remember from episode one, discrimination is one of the key factors that often leads to people developing mental health disorders. That was issue number one.

Issue #2: Expected Gender Roles & Double Standards For Women at Work

(20:10)

Issue number two is what I call expected gender roles and double standards. So, when I was thinking about this one, one of the stories that came to mind was when we first sold our company, Conscious Company Media. We sold it to this larger company in New York. I think as a young woman founder, I was proud of myself for what I had done, sure. And I still had this idea that someone else, some other leader, would have been able to come into my organization and within a few weeks, like whip it into shape and identify tons of revenue opportunities and that I wasn't really like a real leader yet.

So when we sold to this parent company, they had a lot of highly experienced former finance people. People that I was like, "These people are just going to, well, they're going to save us." I really wanted to impress them. I wanted them to believe that I was a "real" business person. Wow, like even just talking about it, I'm like, geez, Louise.

The parent company owned four organizations total, us being one of them. And we did our first summit with the CEOs of all of the subsidiary brands. All four of us happen to be women. We get into this workshop and we're going through figuring out how we can build our revenue lines together and support each other. Like, "Here's our plans for the next two years. How are they going to align with your events?"

We're figuring all this out and trying to, you know, have very strategic conversations around running a business. And one of the men from the parent company stops us in the middle of a conversation and just says, "I just feel like you're all being so emotional. You're all getting so emotional that we can't think about this rationally." And I'm looking around like, "This isn't even emotional. This is me just like having a basic conversation about business and feeling passionate about it and probably excited. I'm a total business nerd. I love talking about this stuff, so you know, I'm probably very engaged. There's probably a lot of—if you're watching any video of me, you see—there's a lot of hand motions." I'm a very engaged person when I'm having a conversation, but he just reads this as all of us being highly emotional.

When he drops this word, "emotional," I felt like my stomach sank out of my butt. I was so embarrassed. Like I said, I really had wanted to impress these people and to be labeled on the first day as being emotional when we're all together, I went home and couldn't stop thinking about, "What did I say? Was there something specific I did?" I kept questioning myself.

So, the next day I showed up like with my stoic mask on. Like, I'm not going to show any emotion in this session. I'm just going to be robotic and answer the questions. I'm not even going to smile. And then later that day, of course, the leader comes and asks me, "What's wrong. What's wrong with you? Are you upset?" And I'm like, "I can't win here!"

Ever experienced something like this? Yeah, this is the wonderful lose-lose that many women are in in the workplace from the expected gender roles and double standards that we're contending with. When I talk about the lose-lose, we still have the patriarchal belief system that has societally conditioned young women, often starting from a young age, that we are to be quiet and agreeable. That we're to smile and be kind and be meek and docile and nurturing. We're supposed to be compassionate. We're given our baby dolls and taught how to cook and bake. Everything is about molding you to be a very agreeable, subservient, delightful, pretty wife and delightful mother, right?

And then you get into the workplace and, holy macaroni! Since it has, for thousands of years, been led by men who are also, since a young age, being conditioned to have "masculine" traits when, in fact, all of these traits, the feminine and the masculine, are in fact available to us all as humans. But we decided, since the whole patriarchy situation, to just take a buzz saw, cut them down the middle. "Here's the masculine traits, here's the feminine traits." 

Young men are told "boys don't cry." They are to be tough. They're to be competitive, aggressive, dominant, strong. All the masculine traits, they are conditioned to embody those from a young age and often even made fun of if they display anything "feminine" or sweet or gentle or nice. These are the same men then that are still in positions of power and are deciding how we do business.

So, when we have the whole "think leader, think male," or "think manager, think male," you think of a man or you think of masculine traits because that's what we've become accustomed that leadership means: masculine. The business world rewards people for displaying, "masculine" traits because that's what most of the men have been bringing to the table for the last few thousand years.

So when women get in there, we're told, "You need to pretend like you're a man. You need to wear the power suit. You need to assimilate and show that you can hang with the boys. You're not to show emotions. You need to be strong, aggressive, competitive, dominant. You need to be masculine." But then when a woman does this, what happens? I'm sure you've experienced something like this. "What's wrong?" "You're too loud." "You're too emotional." "You're too bitchy." "You're too bossy." "You're too angry." "You're too much."

They don't like that version of you. The woman who's doing the whole "masculine thing" makes them uncomfortable. "Could you go back to being the meek, subservient woman?" Even though you can't succeed either way—these are the double standards that women are contending with. This is why we're labeled as emotional, if this has ever happened to you.

• Roughly 90% of high-performing women receive feedback about their personalities compared to 12% of high-performing men.
• Women are also twice as likely to have someone comment on their emotional state and are two and a half times more likely than men to have someone comment on their appearance.

Because we "need" to be pretty. Everything is about appearance and us being cute and sweet and delightful and wonderful little women. But we can't actually win like that. So then we try the masculine leadership traits and we aren't likable.

Social psychologist Dr. Sydney Hurston-Dupree's research into this found that when women use language that is powerful and dominant, others view them as being cold and less likable. Patriarchy! While these findings applied to all women, unsurprisingly, they found the effects were strongest for Black and Latina women. Women of color continually are at the receiving end of additional micro-aggressions and judgement. Everything that they're doing is under this microscope of having to prove themselves, more and more than anyone else in the workplace.

Even when women do ascend the ranks and achieve success at work, research continually shows that we're less likable and penalized for violating traditional gender norms. Seeing a woman in a position of power makes many people uncomfortable because of patriarchy. We're so conditioned, we're not used to it.

Expected Gender Roles Outside of Work

When I think about this, I think about the fact that every single email with a birthday invitation from one of my children's friends or classmates is immediately sent to me, the mother. Women are the social chairs of the house, expected to do many of the continued domestic work in the house and the emotional labor: the social invitations, the PTAs, organizing social events, taking care of friends and family, groceries, cooking, all of those things.

Author Eve Rodsky, in her book, Fair Play, found even in the most equitable heterosexual households, women still take on a disproportionate and inequitable amount of household responsibilities and emotional labor as compared to their male partners.

"We have more work outside of work that we have to do, and we have to prove ourselves more in the workplace. So there's just this constant feeling that we have to do more. We're never enough. We're constantly being judged on both sides of the equation.The societal expectations on women outside of work have not evolved to support women being successful in the workplace."

And it makes us feel like garbage. Fannnntastic.

Barriers For Working Parents

(29:52)

Many workplaces and contemporary business norms don't support working parents. There's working hours that don't align with the school day hours. There are rigid, inflexible working policies that parents can't leave at certain times of the day or they have to be in the office. There's limited sick leave. There's all sorts of these barriers that are built with the expectation that the woman is staying at home taking care of the children and everything at home, and the man is at work and does not have to worry about being a parent because it's being taken care of for him.

These barriers continue to persist in many workplaces worldwide where. If two working parents are working full time, it's very hard for them to succeed without external help in some way. So there's continued barriers for parents, expected gender norms inside and outside of the workplace, and this double standards with women's behavior. I don't know if this aligns with your experience, if you've felt any of these gendered expectations, either inside or outside of the workplace. Or gone on a work trip or been somewhere and had someone ask you about who's taking care of your kids, where they're definitely not asking your male colleague the same thing. Or being guilt tripped for traveling and leaving your children home or been given negative feedback about your personality.

I still remember our former nanny was telling me about a previous role she had where she'd been asked to come in for feedback from her superior. It was not typical performance review time and she was a little bit nervous about it. She comes into his office and he says, "Listen, you're exceeding— above and beyond—on all of the expectations that we have for you. But I have some feedback for you that I think you need now because I don't think it can wait for your performance review." She's like, "Yeah, of course. I'm all ears." He says, "I think you need to smile more. People say that they feel intimidated around you because you don't smile all the time." And she's like, "Mmhmm, yeah, great, fantastic. I'm sure that he's telling the male colleagues here that they need to smile more." Nope, not happening. Anyway, I digress.

Issue #3: Male-centered Workplaces Excluding Women's Needs

So my beloved friend, I'm not going to use her name because I'm sure she doesn't want me to be identifying her, but she works for a construction company. They have these obscure job sites all over in remote areas that she drives to. When she's on her cycle, she has to drive 25 minutes to go find a bathroom at a gas station that she can use because, on the construction site, they only have one porter potty. She's the only woman there, and does not want to have to take care of her bodily needs in the porter potty where all of her male colleagues can see the evidence of said bodily functions. So she has to consistently, when she's on her cycle, drive to gas stations to find a bathroom and then come back because of course this need is not taken into account.

As she was telling me about this, I was like, yes, I still remember pumping breast milk next to a public toilet at a company in New York that didn't have space for me to pump. When I was four months postpartum, just, you know, casually pumping breast milk next to a disgusting public toilet.

These things are, in fact, what I call male-centered workplaces or professional environments that do not take into account women's bodily needs. They are built for men.

One of the more obvious examples of this is: how often have you headed into the office in the middle of summer and you see every single woman in there wearing a shawl or a coat or wrapped in like a sleeping blanket because she's freezing to death because the air conditioning is being pumped to 58 degrees?

Research shows that five to 10 degrees higher temperature than men is where most women are comfortable. But the standard office temperature formula for that is based on the metabolic rate of a 40-year-old man's body, even though the standard office temperature that is commonly recommended by OSHA is 75 degrees.

I thought, "You know, it's annoying, but it's not that big of a deal, right?" Then I looked at research. One study showed reducing the temperature from 77 degrees to 72 degrees in a room of women cut their productivity in half and doubled their mistakes. It's not kind of annoying. It's actually impacting the quality of your work and your ability to focus when an entire workspace or a professional environment is being built around men's needs.

The other kind of "subtle, not-so-subtle" message that it continually reminds you as a woman is "You don't belong here. You're the exception. This space was built for men. We're 'letting' you be here. Please don't complain or ask for any special treatment or accommodations because you're lucky enough that we allowed you in here," right? A sense of belonging is a key human need that we all have and having any sort of sense of exclusion or othering directly results to higher rates of depression and anxiety. It doesn't feel good to constantly be reminded that you are the outsider.

Issue #4: Objectification and Sexual Harassment

This one is fairly obvious to most women because most of us have experienced this. And it genuinely impacts our ability to thrive at work or in our career.

I still remember we were invited as a female founded team to come to a pitch event that was supporting women. We did a dinner and then some of the companies were supposed to stand up and tell a little bit about what they were looking for, what their company was, and hopefully a bit of an investor, founder, meet and greet. I'm seated next to this man, I've met him before, but only in passing. I sit down next to him. He asks me what I like to do. I go through all the typical things, snowboarding, hiking, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, "What do you like to do?" Excuse, there's a curse word coming up. He looks at me straight in the eyes, he looks at me and goes, "I like to fuck. Do you?" What do you say to that?

I know that this man is best friends with one of the investors that I have met with and that I am trying to get to invest in my company. So all of a sudden there's power. I don't want to say anything. I don't want to make this uncomfortable. I don't want to call him out in middle of this dinner and "make a scene" as, again, the "emotional woman" who's overreacting about a comment that a man is saying when I'm sure if I said anything, he'd say, "I'm just joking. You can't take a joke." I don't even know what he would've said. I just look at him and am like "what are you gonna have for dinner?" Then I stand up to do my pitch five minutes later, and I'm absolutely rattled at this point. I'm starting to look around the room and look at all of these other investors here and think, "Are they all the same? Are they all here to prey on the female founders?" I don't even know. I'm so stressed. I stand up, I completely bungle the pitch. Unsurprisingly, zero investors come and express interest in our company because I've just like word vomited this stupid pitch up there because I'm so nervous and I'm so angry about what this man has just said.

How many times has this happened or something like this? And this is just a bad comment. Women are being sexually harassed. They're being sexually assaulted. We are being victimized, objectified in the workplace. Present statistics say:

• 54 to 81% of women have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace.
• Unfortunately, more than half of women aren't reporting that though, because they are worried about having potential job loss, being labeled as a troublemaker, or having their concern not taken seriously.
• Roughly 50 % of women report that sexual harassment has hurt their career in some way, causing them to quit a job, lower rates of job satisfaction or engagement, or suffer from increased financial stress.

When I think about sexual harassment hurting my career, I can point to this example where I'm like, yeah, I just destroyed an entire pitch event because of one comment. And this is one of many stories that I have, as do most women. I imagine you or someone that you know has a terrible story. Constant low-level anxiety and fear that women experience: you step into an elevator with a strange man, or you notice a man is following you down a dark street, or you're all of a sudden alone in a room with someone that you don't know.

Author Dr. Valerie Rein, in her book, calls this "collective trauma." This is what women share. the collective understanding and experience of how traumatic it is to be concerned and fearful for your safety, for your bodily autonomy. The concern about what men can get away with and often do when they feel like they have the right to women's bodies. 

Issue #5: Toxic Masculinity Creating Profit-at-all-cost Cultures

I mentioned earlier about toxic masculinity. So I grew up absolutely idolizing my older brother. He's four years older than me to the day. And because he's my only sibling, I wanted to prove to my brother and his friends that I was cool and I could hang.

So what this meant for me, I was tough, I competed in everything, I played basketball and soccer, I was very good at sports, my brother and I physically fought a lot, and I really liked to show how great of a fighter I was. I was strong, I was tough, I was a total tomboy. Don't cry, don't ask for help, never show that I'm weak. I would make fun of girly girls or anything feminine. For some reason I really wanted to be a stockbroker. It's like, they are powerful and they have money I don't even know what they do, I just know that they make money and people like them because they're masculine and I wanted to do that.

What I didn't realize at the time was that a lot of the behaviors that I was attempting to show, "manly behaviors" are toxically masculine behaviors. When I became leader of my company. I tried not to show emotions or weakness. I never asked for help. That was very much how this showed up later in life as an adult. I really wanted to be infallible. I was tough. You know, put my game face on. I was competitive, and one of the reasons that I brought these into the workspace is because these are in fact widely accepted and in fact encouraged in the workplace.

When we look at what toxic masculinity actually is, and this is from the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, there are three key tenants of toxic masculinity:

3 Elements of Toxic Masculinity

1. The first being toughness and authority. This is very much that to be a man, to be manly, men need to be dominant and tough and controlling and are to be obeyed. That showing emotion besides anger and pride, but showing any other emotion is a sign of weakness. Men need to be mentally tough, physically tough. Violence demonstrates how strong you are. And asking for help is weakness. So this is toughness and authority.
2. Element number two is anti-femininity. This is hostility, objectification and violence against women.
3. The third element is around power and success, that your self-worth and the respect of others is gained by accruing money, power, status, wealth. Everything is a competition, winner takes all.

So we have toughness, anti-femininity, and power and success are the three elements. When I really dug into this and then thought about the business world, I was like, wait a second. I think, connect this dot and this dot and wait a second, I see like a really interesting picture here. These beliefs directly relate to many of our present day contemporary business norms. Wanna like do a little side by side comparison? Let's do it.

Toxic Masculinity's Influence On Business 

So your sense of worth is defined by power and money. How are businesses judged? What is the success metric for business? Profit and power. The largest organizations are the most profitable. Everything is about power, influence, and money. And individual success. Many people base their individual success on how well they're doing in their career solely on their salary, their title, their influence, their power, their money, their wealth.

Number two, strength is defined by aggression, domination, and toughness. We see leaders who come to the plate and they think that effective management means being aggressive, dominant, competitive. They're using fear-based tactics to keep people in line. There's all of this inherent competition that's baked into organizations themselves with individuals competing against each other for promotions or titles, people actively sabotaging their coworkers so that they can climb the ladder faster than them. There's also competition in crushing or dominating industry competitors. Any other organization that is in your industry is considered a competitor that you are supposed to crush, take down, you're supposed to win the competition, whatever the competition is. So everything is about strength and domination, competition, aggression.

We also see this element of the dominant leader having all the power, making the decisions. have command and control culture and hierarchy, where there's one leader at the top who's making decisions for everyone and everyone underneath the leader is to be obeyed. We see leaders who feel like they have to have all of the answers. They never ask for help. They never admit when they're wrong because of course that's a sign of weakness. They have to have as large of an ego as possible to be this proud peacock. And they feel like they are solely responsible for the success of a company without giving any consideration or acknowledging the people who have helped them get there.

We see anti-femininity as well in the workplace, not only gender discrimination, which we've already discussed, but also emotions not being welcome in the workplace, right? You're supposed to keep your personal life at home. You're not supposed to show emotions. Any feminine traits, such as being compassionate or empathetic or nurturing, those are not valued in the workplace. They are sometimes seen as being inappropriate in the workplace or more recently, they are considered soft skills that like might have some value, but really let's call them soft skills because they're still inferior to anything masculine.

We also see that you must win at all costs. If you lose, you are weak and winner takes all. This of course is the shareholder supremacy paradigm. Winner takes all. The most profitable companies, that is the entire goal of the game, short-term profit maximization, and once that happens and once a company is successful, all of the winnings, all of the spoils go to the victor who are in this case the shareholders.

So there's toughness, competition, anti-femininity, power, success, everybody must win. These are all inherently baked into the way in which that we are currently working. We went to a hedge fund a few years ago and did their women's executive forum. I talked a little bit about this side-by-side comparison of toxic masculine beliefs versus some of the ways in which we're currently doing business, and I had tons of women after this presentation come up to me, especially like in the hedge fund world, and tell me how uncomfortable it was making them that they'd never realized how toxically masculine their workplaces were. I'm wondering if you've seen this in your career, any of these issues showing up for you? As soon as I started to acknowledge these and knew what they were, I started seeing them everywhere.

So we take all these issues, perhaps you might be starting to see like, yes, have their work cut out for them. This isn't the easiest road to follow. Women are constantly feeling like they have to prove themselves. They're being judged more critically. They have to go above and beyond. They have to be perfect and infallible. They have to do so while taking on extra work outside of the workplace. Otherwise they'll be judged outside of the workplace as well.

they're doing this well, also feeling like they can't ask for help or accept help because then they'll be weak. They are feeling they never truly belong, like they're never accepted, that they are constantly being discriminated against, harassed, objectified, potentially even being forced into positions where they're sacrificing or compromising on their values. And yeah, don't worry about it. She's feeling like she constantly has to change herself because

No way in which she's showing up is actually good enough for anyone. She's constantly worried about judgment, how other people are perceiving her, and social acceptability. It's great, right? It's just a fantastic, yeah, yeah, but if you complain about any of this, what's gonna happen? You're gonna be either gaslit and told that you're overreacting and that this isn't really an issue.

or that you are asking for special accommodations for being a woman, or people aren't even going to believe your experience in the first place and say that you're overreacting or that people were just joking. You're just going to be kind of shamed and embarrassed and ignored, and no one's ever really going to do anything about it. So it's good stuff.

This is, of course, much of the foundations of what I call the old playbook. There are better ways to do this. There are many, many business leaders around the world who have figured out ways to build organizations that don't have all of these issues inherent within them. We will dive deep into many of these practices, workplace and management structures, tips, insights, all this stuff we're gonna get.

really deep into this in future episodes because today I've talked for so long we're not going to do it today but I'm hoping today that at least you can take away three key insights from this conversation. Number one, just because it's the norm doesn't mean that it's right. I'll say that again, just because it's the norm doesn't mean that it's right. Toxically masculine beliefs are in fact toxic.

patriarchal beliefs that we see within the workplace, also very harmful to many people within organizations. When you have the opportunity, you have microagency. You can change your behavior, especially if you're a team lead or in a management position or in a decision making role. You can start leaning into doing things like asking for help, leaning into some of your quote more feminine traits, which

We'll do another entire podcast episode on all of the ways in which there are healthy masculine and feminine traits that make super effective leadership qualities. Stop disregarding things as soft skills, share in your success with others, focus on rising tide lifting all boats. Don't dive into the competition driven mindset. There's so many ways for you to subtly begin to push back against the ways in which we have just accepted that we do business. We don't have to do business this way.

Insight number two, stop and just begin noticing if you're holding women in your workplace to higher standards. Notice if a young woman comes into the room and you automatically assume she's in a junior position.

Many of us have been conditioned like this. It is not something to be ashamed about. It is something to begin noticing, labeling, and begin changing the assumptions, the judgments, all the ways in which these belief systems have infiltrated any beliefs that you have. Notice them, name them, work on letting them go. Insight number three. This is my favorite one. If you are a woman,

Listening to this, at least this was my experience. I felt so damn powerful after I learned all of this stuff. This felt so validating to me. I felt like I had been swimming this entire time, competing, doing my best, barely keeping my head in my water. And I looked back and realized that someone had tied a damn weight to my ankle that I didn't even know was there.

And it made me understand that, holy crap, the fact that I have been swimming, keeping myself afloat, doing pretty well, successful in the business world, ran my own company, done my own thing. The fact that I have been able to succeed with the weight tied on my damn ankle is incredible. Same is true for you. We are all existing in a system

that is harming every single person in the system regardless of gender identity. And if you're a woman, you're doing it with these additional barriers as well. If you are a woman with an additional marginalized identity, you have even more barriers. when I talk to women who are succeeding in the workplace, I'm just like, do you even understand what a miracle you are? It is against all odds.

that we are doing this and we are crushing it and you are an absolute badass if you are doing, if you are even waking up and conscious going into the business world at this point. Whew, just gonna end there.

it's like a soapbox on top of a soapbox with a little pep talk added in. And I'm not going to apologize for it. thanks. Thanks for hanging in there with me. And I hope some of these insights potentially are helpful. Like I said, we're going to get into the solutions in future episodes. It is not all gloom and doom. There's

tons of hope on the horizon. There are many ways to make work better so that we don't have to struggle like this and contend with these issues into the foreseeable future. Until next time, thank you.