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

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 sprout

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.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information

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

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. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In her early twenties, bored by her office job, Kelly joined the British Army for a life of adventure. This was just before 9/11. She’d grown up a relatively conflict-free world. Suddenly everything changed. Kelly spent almost 19 years in the Army doing multiple jobs in different parts of the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan. She loved much of what Army life gave her. Other things were less appealing, from sexual harassment to fellow officers who couldn’t handle women in authority...to the loneliness of being a woman in command when one of your soldiers is killed. In this show Kelly - who asked me not to use her last name so she could speak freely - looks back on her career, what she learned, and what she wishes could have been different in the ultimate male environment. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Business and economics reporter Stacey Vanek Smith has not only reported on the gender pay gap and other workplace discrimination, she’s experienced it firsthand. But it hasn’t put her off the workplace. Far from it. In her book, Machiavelli for Women, she explores how women can thrive in a setting that was not designed for them.In this show - the tenth anniversary episode of The Broad Experience - we focus on a few areas that are rarely discussed, in particular the relationships women have with other women at work, and how to manage them when things get tricky. We delve into the inequities mothers face after coming back from parental leave, and our shared experience of receiving vague, discouraging and useless feedback - and what to do next. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Bobbi Thomason studies gender for a living. She was aware of the pitfalls couples can fall into, even those who assumed their relationship would be absolutely equal. Still, when her own marriage foundered over career equality (or the lack of it), she was gutted. At the same time she was reading social media comments urging women to demand a ‘50/50 partner.’ ‘I tried that,’ she thought, ‘and it didn’t work.’In this episode we hear Bobbi’s story. She says sticking to her belief that she deserved a partner as willing to sacrifice for her as she was for him, has cost her a great deal. But she’s learned through academic research and personal experience that support comes in many forms, and that all women need a ‘village’ to get ahead. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Two years into a pandemic many of us are overwhelmed at work, feeling we have little control, and dealing with a lack of support from our organizations. Burnout rates are up all over the world. But they were bad even before Covid-19 came along. So what can we do about it?In this episode we meet three women who know burnout first-hand. Danielle Fried works for a small business that exploded during Covid. It took a health crisis for her to realize she was a frazzle of her former self. Jennifer Moss is the author of The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It and a longtime expert on happiness and unhappiness at work. She says it's up to leaders to solve this problem, and there is plenty they can do about it. Jamie Hand is one such leader, managing her own stress levels while tackling burnout one team member at a time.Jennifer's pandemic dog Maple made her presence felt during our interview. For an outtake, go to the episode 188 page at TheBroadExperience.com. See acast.com/privacy for

Work has changed forever. Our host Melanie Green is on a journey to learn how we can thrive in work through 2021 and beyond. We'll share stories about the challenges and possibilities those changes bring. We'll hear about the tools, tech, and best practices that power flexible work. Produced by Citrix. Follow along @Citrix See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It's the start of a new year - a time when a lot of us think about changing our lives. In this show we re-visit a conversation with two traditionally successful women who left their old work lives for the unknown. But jumping meant leaving their identities behind as well as their paychecks.Radio journalist Tess Vigeland left her job at the top of her game, and initially wondered if she was nuts to have done so. Whitney Johnson was itching to move away from her comfortable existence at Merrill Lynch and challenge herself in new ways. She invites other people to do something similar, even if you may not think you need disrupting.This conversation feels just as relevant in pandemic times as it did when we recorded it, as more and more people re-consider what success actually means. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The culture of winning pervades our lives. From sport to the classroom to the workplace, we're supposed to 'kill it' or congratulated for 'crushing it.' But all that crushing can take a toll on the psyche, as Olympic athlete Cath Bishop can attest. Cath spent years training in her sport, rowing, and competed in three Olympic Games. When she left sport she thought she'd left the obsession with winning behind. Instead she found it was pretty much everywhere.In this episode we discuss what winning actually means if you want to achieve long-term success (which looks a lot different than what most people think of as 'success.') We talk about the gendered language around winning, and the young female sports stars who are rejecting the winning narrative.Cath is the author of 'The Long Win: the search for a better way to succeed.' See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this show we're talking about women getting paid. Two business owners weigh in on how to charge for your services and how to respond to people who ask if they can 'pick your brain.' We tackle a question from a woman who knows she's paid less than the last man who did her job, but asks if she's happy, how much should she care? And we hear from a negotiation expert on how to use the negative voice in your head - the one that says 'you can't ask for that much!' - to help you get what you want.This episode distills some findings from past shows. I'm using it as a springboard to more coverage on women and money in 2022. Guests today are Adrienne Graham, Kathy Caprino, Jacquette Timmons and Natalie Reynolds. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A lot of people are quitting their jobs at the moment. In the US, more than 12 million people left jobs voluntarily between July and September. They are fed up, burned out after months and months of pandemic working, and some are wondering, what am I doing this for anyway? Is this what I really want to do with my life? If not, what do I want to do instead?In this show Dorie Clark helps us answer some of those questions, which all involve the need for long-term thinking. She talks about the ideas in her new book, The Long Game: how to be a long-term thinker in a short-term world. We discuss how to carve out time to think about the future, identifying what’s most meaningful to you, and casting off the expectation that you ‘find your passion' (too much pressure!)We also meet consultant Tom Waterhouse, who had a long-term plan to have a family before it was too late. But realizing his dream meant infuriating his bosses. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Rejection plays a part in everyone's work experience. But women are socialized to seek approval, and as my first guest says, 'rejection is the opposite of that.' In this show I speak to Jessica Bacal, author of The Rejection that Changed My Life, about the sting of rejection and what we can learn from it. We also meet nonprofit leader Amy Campbell Bogie. She talks about two searing rejections she went through, and how to emerge gracefully from what can feel like a slap in the face. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.