September 19, 2016 • 46 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from how stup
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristin and I'm Carolin, and today we have a super
red lady on the podcast to tell us all about
the new book she has written that you need to
(00:23):
get in your hands or on your device a sap. Yeah,
and that is award winning journalist Jessica Bennett, and she's
written a fabulous new book, Feminist Fight Club, an office
survival manual for a sexist workplace. Asterisk Uh, this book
is more expensive for dudes. That's not necessarily an official
(00:47):
part of the title, but there is an asterisk on
the front cover with a little disclaimer love a good
gender wage gap joke. Yeah, oh I I appreciate it.
And if that title sounds familiar, it might be because
you follow us on Instagram at stuff Mom Never Told You,
where we posted a while back our galley copy of
(01:11):
Feminist Fight Club, which made us feel very special that
we got an advanced copy and we wanted to share
with you all, And judging by the Instagram excitement, y'all
are pumped to check this book out. And I'm really
pumped that we got to talk to Jessica Bennett, who
is a friend of the show and whom we've cited
so many times on the podcast. And before we get
(01:32):
into our chat with her about the Feminist Fight Club,
I gotta tell a little story, Caroline. Yep, I love
the story. Sorry time. Okay, So about six years ago,
we received a letter from a listener in New York
who was this fabulous, hilarious woman who was responding to
(01:57):
something I'd said about feeling guilty of out watching Bravos
Millionaire Matchmaker. And she was just a delight and made
me laugh. And it was podcast internet friendship at first email?
Is that what you call them? So time went on
and I was heading up to New York and this
(02:18):
lovely lady said, Hey, when you're up here, I'm actually
hosting a little secret get together of women I know
who are also in media, and we talk about sexism
in the workplace and aspirations and kind of workplace consciousness
(02:38):
raising in a way. And I was extremely flattered and
also incredibly timidated. Um, because you know, I'm this podcaster
from Atlanta going up to you know, hang out and
eat dinner with all of these badass skill getters and
(03:02):
uh law there was there a little bit of imposter
syndrome at work about your own awesomeness. Oh my god,
I was head to toe imposter syndrome. And I also
made the mistake of wearing these really tall heels, which
on my already tall body made me all of six
foot two and in small New York apartments, I learned
that night, when you are towering above the rest of
(03:23):
the group, but you're also feeling overwhelmed with imposterism and
no one knows who you are, it can really amplify
when social anxiety. I was gonna say, you just end
up in the fetal position in the bathroom very much.
In fact, actually I got uh lost in the bathroom
at one point. It was it was just a hot mess.
(03:44):
I think I basically just blacked out. Um had an
insecurity blackout, and then arrived on the subway like two
and a half hours later. We've all been there. You're like,
for some reason, I'm not hungry anymore, but I also
want to throw up. I don't know where I've been,
and I think I've had four glasses of peanut so
unbeknownst to me, uh, this was what would become the
(04:08):
feminist fight club that Jessica Bennett centers, this office place
manual around and I'm so honored to I guess technically
be a member of this fight club. Caroline, I'm like,
I'm like an adjacent member, you remember, by proxy? Yeah, yes,
that that's how that works. I vote, I vote long
distance when I need to mail in my vote for leadership. Well,
(04:31):
and in the sixth years since, it's been amazing to
watch these women's careers develop and also how you know,
they've been extremely supportive of stuff Mo'm never told you
over the years as well, Jessica Bennett in particular. Um,
So it's so it's just exciting to see all of
(04:55):
our real world situations now getting applied to all of
these tactics and strategies and hilarious puns that Jessica has
compiled that can help anybody in the workplace. So I
thought we're going to kick off a conversation with Jessica
talking about the origins of that first feminist fight club.
(05:24):
I'm a journalist. I write primarily for The New York Times,
and I cover a lot about gender issues and then
occasionally blending that with modern culture, pop culture and trends
that range from the tyranny of resting bitch face to
(05:45):
the plight of female pot entrepreneurs. So try to keep
it serious but also fun. And the idea was essentially
that I think there's a lot out there and a
lot of conversation about gender issues. There are some really
great books written by really inspiring women, and then there
are also a lot of fun, youthful, millennial style books
(06:09):
that are written as handbooks. His Hipster Handbook, the Zombie
Survival Guide, UH, these types, and what I wanted to
do was blend the two create something that was smart
and had real advice that was rooted in research and
backed up by fact, but also was really easy to digest.
It was the kind of thing you could shove in
your purse, maybe even stuff in your bra tear out
(06:31):
a couple of pages, put them in there when you're
going in to ask for a raise, and flip essentially
to the section that you needed the advice on. And
so that was the inspiration for the manual style. And
I wanted to kind of take that very masculine art
of war Mortal Kombat game type style and turn it
(06:52):
on its head to feminize it. And then of course
there's a story of the Fight Club, which, as you mentioned,
you may or may not be a member of. UM.
And this is the real life group of women who
have been meeting for almost the past decade talking about
our career trajectories and the struggles we face and sharing
(07:13):
with each other a lot of tips that we learned
around along the way. Now you go into more detail
on the origin story of the Feminist Fight Club, which
is one of my favorite favorite stories of women coming together. UM. Maybe,
like you said, because I may or may not be
a member of said Feminist Fight Club. UM, but for
(07:33):
listeners who haven't read the book, can you talk about
the very first meeting, like how how did it happen?
How does one start a fight club? Well, so, the
way that it happened for this group was that there
were a lot of things happening in the culture that
made it kind of a perfect storm of us feeling
like we needed to do something. So I was in
(07:55):
Newsweek at the time as a junior reporter and was
really feeling like was struggling to get ahead. UM. The
men that I had come up with, we're getting promoted
more quickly than I was. I would pitch stories and
they would get rejected, but then I would notice that
they would be in the magazine under somebody else's byline.
I was facing a lot of frustrations, and I started
(08:16):
talking with other women in the office who were feeling
the same thing. This was at the time in late
two thousand nine, early when the David Letterman sex scandal
had just happened. He had been sleeping with his assistant.
There was a gender discrimination lawsuit at the New York Post,
and this giant report had come out from from the
(08:37):
Streiber Foundation run by Maria Streiber, pointing to the fact
that while we have made great strides in some places,
we were not anywhere near gender equality. So it felt
a bit like a perfect storm. And the original Fight
Club members of which I was not one of the three,
started meeting in their workplace, which was another media company,
(08:59):
and they would gather often in their own offices and
sometimes outside of the office, often at a midtown McDonald's
over French fries and milkshakes and diet coke, and they
ultimately came to the collusion that they needed to do something.
They were feeling really frustrated, They felt stifled, they felt stuck,
They didn't know what to do. But what they could
(09:21):
do was form a group and talk about these issues,
which sounds a lot like on this old schools second
wave consciousness raising happening exactly, and I think that that's
essentially what we were doing. You know, we were meeting
every month or a few months. We were sitting around
in a circle, we were eating snacks and drinking wine,
(09:42):
and we were talking about the struggles we faced, and
we would literally go around the circle, much like old
school consciousness raising groups did. The difference was we didn't
necessarily call it that it was a modern version, but
it employed many of the same tactics. And I think
that the idea of raising consciousness, of real realizing that
this wasn't an individual problem but a collective one, was
(10:04):
ultimately one of the purposes that the club served well.
And something that's coming to mind as you're talking about
this is how one thing that we've noticed with our
work through stuff I've never told you, especially when we
go out and talk to younger audiences, is how the
workplace is usually for for a lot of women, their
(10:24):
first face to face, day to day confrontation with sexism. Um.
And so I'm wondering if if that's part if you
think that that's common for a lot of women to where, um,
you get your job and that's terrific, but then all
of a sudden you're like, oh, wait, no, stuff is
really screwed up here, right right. I mean that was
(10:45):
certainly my experience, and the data would back that up.
You know, women excel in school. They're graduating from college
and higher numbers are kind of outpacing their male peers
at every turn. They're getting more advanced degrees. And then
we leave academia and we go to the workplace and
it's not this egalitarian utopia. We're not getting ahead at
(11:07):
the same rate. And so for me, you know, I
had a privileged upbringing. I grew up in Seattle. It's
sort of a liberal utopia. My parents are feminist. Everyone
always told me I could accomplish whatever I wanted. And
so I think in a way because of that, I
didn't realize that feminism was something that I even needed
(11:28):
or identified with. And it wasn't until I got to
the workforce and began to experience these issues that I
was like, wait, oh, like this is what people talk about.
This is this thing that people talk about, and is
it sexism? Like is that really what this is? And
it took me a while to actually get to the
conclusion that, yes, it was. It was a systemic issue
(11:50):
and it's still one that exists. Well, and that's something
that jumped out to me early in the book where
you say that recognizing sexism is harder than it used
to be. Um, so why is that? Do you think?
Like and and sort of what does that mean that
we need to be on the lookout for, right? You know,
I once had this conversation with Gail Collins, who is
(12:12):
the New York Times opinion writer who has a number
of amazing books about this issue, and she said something
to the effect of we were talking about generational differences,
and she said, you know, sexism of my generation was
worse in many ways. It was more overt, but at
least you knew it when you saw it. And that
really resonated with me, because while our generation is not
(12:35):
experiencing help wanted ads segregated by gender, or actually being
smacked on the ass in an office environment and it
being okay or accepted, we face things that have a
subtlety to them, and as a result, it's hard to
know is it sexism or is it just me so,
(12:56):
for example, being interrupted in a meeting. Women are twice
as likely to be interrupted in meetings as men, and
this happens all the times, has been happening for my
entire career, and it took me a long time to
realize that maybe this was actually a product of male
privilege and of a patriarchal system in which men believe
(13:17):
that they are entitled to speak more frequently, you know,
things like having your ideas attributed to somebody else. This
is also statistically proven, it happens commonly with women. And
these things I've heard it called sexism by a thousand
small cuts. They're small things, and taken individually, they can
(13:38):
seem like not that big a deal. But when you
experience this, all of these things over time collectively, they
can be really fatal. Well. And a lot of these
conversations around especially the gender wage gap and more of
the financial manifestations of workplace sexism, really start with negotiating
(14:00):
and the whole salary negotiation issue. And for so long,
the you know, um abiding claim was that, well, women
just aren't asking for money and that's the problem. But
there's so much more nuance to this negotiation issue. So
could you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, you know,
(14:22):
with all of this stuff, there's so much nuanced to it,
as you mentioned, and even the negotiation things. So yeah,
we finally realized over the past few years that women
aren't asking as often, and so we've been trying to
solve that, and that's what I write in the book. Well,
last week a study came out saying that actually women
are negotiating. There, in fact negotiating and equal numbers too men.
(14:44):
So great, that's a good thing. We were halfway there,
but the caveat is that they're still not getting raises
with the same frequency. So, yes, you can tell women
to negotiate, you can encourage them to do so, but
it's not that simple. They have to be able to
navigate these really complicated and deeply rooted biases when they
(15:07):
get there. And some of those say that, you know,
when a woman asked for a raise, she's more likely
to be deemed pushy, she's going to be less liked
when she does so, and she's less likely to get
the raise in a man who's asking. Another bit of
research advises that women should actually smile when they go
in to negotiate because women are expected to be nurturing
(15:29):
and maternal and nice, and so if you play into
that stereotype, you're actually more likely to be successful when
you ask. So it was tricky writing this chapter because
I didn't want to advise people to play into gender stereotypes.
But by the same token, if smiling when you go
(15:49):
and ask for the raison is going to get you
the money and get you in power, and then you
can lift other women up along with you, then I
think it goes towards this larger goal of smashing down
patriarchy and taking over. But these things are really tricky.
They're very nuanced, and there's a lot of subtlety to them. Well,
and speaking of smiling, what would you say to someone
(16:09):
listening and thinking, oh, but I am really over being
expected to smile all the time, especially for you know,
women who are working in service industry jobs. I've heard
this from women in healthcare a lot, being asked by patients,
you know, why are you smiling? What would you say
to that? I mean, you know, Hillary Clinton just experienced
this with the head of the r NC. Like, contrary
(16:33):
to popular belief, women are not actually born with smiles
on their faces, and we are not required to smile. However,
there is this cultural expectation that we should be smiling
all the time, and if we're not, oh, then we
have resting bitch face. Then we're a bit Whereas the
exact same facial expression on a man would simply be
viewed as serious or authoritative. So there's a complete double
(16:56):
standard when we talk about this. At the same time,
if I have to in and Barrett literally when I'm
walking and to ask for a raise and it's going
to get me the money so I can get empower,
then on some level, I'm just like, I'm gonna do
it now. Not to get too personal, Jessica, but do
you have like I do, resting bitch face. I didn't
(17:17):
know that I had resting bitch face until I was
doing a television interview for an article I had written
and somebody screenshot at my face on the screen, and
it in fact ended up on Wikipedia as literally the
face of resting bitch face the definition. So it turns
out I do have restling bitch face, but I'm trying
(17:38):
to just own it. Yeah, I mean, you could probably
trademark that resting bitch face then, right, So yeah, my
boyfriend has it as his as my icon when I
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(19:10):
around in terms of what women can pay more attention
to in the workplace, things we have some more leverage
over than perhaps uh controlling all the variables in negotiation situations.
Is all of the unpaid labor that we tend to
do women in particular, and um, you talk a bit
(19:32):
about how there our whole overwork culture that a lot
of us are in right now, um does not benefit
women as much as men um. And also too, when
we're in the office in nine to five, we tend
to even be doing office housework. So what's going on
with all of this um on the clock but almost
(19:52):
off the clock work that we're doing right, Yeah, I
think this comes from two angles. So on the one hand,
there is what I call in the book the stenography,
and this is the guy who asked you to take
the notes in the meeting or grab the coffee and
just instinctively turns to a woman to do these tasks.
And what the research shows is that women are more
(20:14):
likely to be tasked with these things. I'm more likely
to be asked to do them, and at the same
time they are also more likely to volunteer. So the
reality is if you're always taking the notes in the meeting,
then you're probably not putting forth the ideas. And if
you're always grabbing coffee, then you're missing valuable face time.
And if you're the one who has to plan the
(20:35):
company holiday party or brings cupcakes for the birthdays, it's
taking time away from the higher productivity tasks that may
get you noticed. So, of course all this is within
the framework of assuming that a person wants to get
ahead at work, and maybe not everybody does, but at
the same time, most people, I think would probably prefer
(20:58):
to do more stimulating work than the menial tests. And
this is across the board. You know, this is not
just in an office environment. This happens. You can be
an hourly worker in a restaurant still be the one
asked to marry the catchups. Maybe that's industry speak from
my waitress days, marry the catchups or roll the napkins.
Like this stuff is taking time away from when you
(21:20):
could be bringing in tips. And so I think that
it relates to the overwork culture in the sense that
you spend hours doing this small stuff and then you
still have to do the regular work, the real job.
And so at the end of the day, you're working harder.
And for women who have children, they're already taking on
(21:40):
the quote unquote motherload of tasks at home. That's just
statistically proven. So at the end of the day, like,
how could you not be exhausted. You're doing the office
house work, you're doing the actual housework, and you're doing
your real job. So especially for someone in more of
service industry position who you know doesn't have a lot
(22:02):
of power in the workplace, or even for you know,
someone in a traditional office, if they don't roll the
silverware or they don't bring the coffee, then who's going
to you know what I mean, like, how do you
delegate those tasks out to ensure that you're not doing
all of this useless work all the time? Right? I mean,
(22:24):
one really simple thing to do is creating kind of
a spreadsheet type list or creating a rotating system for
people to do them. And I think anyone can probably
speak up and suggest that, like let's take turns. You know,
it's like the old chore chart that you had when
you're a kid, And that is one really simple way
to do it. And I don't think you have to
be in a power position to suggest that if you
(22:44):
are in a power position, it's important that you make
sure that these things are being distributed equally because you
don't want the women to get stuck with it. You know,
There's like the passive aggressive approach, which is like when
you'll get asked to do the thing, you're like, oh,
but what about Josh over here? Like Ash just great
at taking notes, So there's that, And then I've also
heard of people taking the direct approach, and this is
(23:06):
again in an office environment, but specifically saying when they're
in a meeting that is male dominated. And my one
friend who frequently does this happens to be a one
of color, saying directly, guys, you cannot ask the one
person of color and the one woman in this room
to take the notes and just approaching the elephant in
the room and being directed about it. So I think
(23:27):
that with all of the advices of nothing is going
to work for every situation. So I've tried to give
the direct approach, the indirect approach, the humorous approach, and
people can kind of choose what might work best for them. Well.
That also has me wondering that considering how more and
more people are working freelance or on a contract basis
(23:49):
sort of being their office of one. Um, do you
think that these situations apply? I mean, I work from
home as a freelancer and most of my work has
done over email these days, and I find myself dealing
with this stuff constantly, like I'm not getting audibly interrupted,
(24:11):
but I noticed subtle things like I respond to emails
in the most passive way possible, saying I feel like
and using language and exclamation points to try to soften
what I'm actually trying to say, whereas men I don't
think do that with the same frequency. So the idea
(24:33):
of free work and being asked to do free work again,
that's that's hugely common when you're a soul contractor or
an independent the employed person, because you have to decide
what's worth it for you, And you know journalism, it's
like everyone's asking you to write for free all the time,
and you have to decide, like when it's worth it
for you, Like what's the return on the investment? Are
(24:55):
I hate that chart so corporate, But I actually find
myself asking like, whats are a while on this? Is
it worth it for me to do this thing for free?
Or is it worth it for me to grant this favor.
Has this person done something for me in the past,
or do I just believe in this cause? So a
lot of it is just weighing things individually but thinking
strategically about it. So I want to go back to
(25:17):
what you said about emailing and using that hedging language
of just actually because this is I think such a
huge issue for um, women today in the workplace. There
have been so many conversations about it, so many you know,
viral pieces about words and phrases that we shouldn't use
(25:38):
as women that are undercutting our authority. But on the
flip side of that, there have been a lot of
arguments that, hey, people just need to get used to
the way women are talking. Right, So how do we
how do we navigate through this professional speech and gender quagmire. Yeah,
that's exactly what it is. I was gonna say, show, um,
(26:01):
it's impossible. This is impossible to navigate. And as I
was researching this chapter, there's a chapter on speech. Um
it's called get your Speak on the cluster of speaking
Wall Female, and that is basically what it is. It's
a cluster because from every avenue we have people telling
us that we shouldn't say like so much are the
(26:23):
tone of our voice isn't working. We are using up talk,
which is when you end up your statements in a question.
And certainly there are cases and research has shown that
these things can undermine you in a workplace. They can
undermine your confidence, and they can make it sound like
you don't know what you're talking about. But at the
(26:44):
same time, I think it's important to recognize that we're
still judging all of this by a male standard, like
that you may think that somebody sounds like a valley girl,
but in relation to what in relation to men. So
my feeling is that if since the dawn of time
women had been running things, then actually maybe we'd be
(27:06):
telling men that they should insert more up speak into
the way they talk. And it's not just that these
are all learned behaviors. Women actually do lead linguistic trends,
like we set the trends as they exist in the
modern culture, and we the research shows that we actually
do more creative things. But the way we talk and
(27:27):
teen girls in fact that if you want to learn
about speech, just look at teen girls, Like eventually we'll
all be emoging in the same way. They are speaking
gifts or whatever it may be. But I think that
it's important to way these things knowing that most of
us are in male dominated fields, so they will be
interpreted a certain way, and recognizing that and perhaps trying
(27:48):
to solve for it, but also knowing that you know,
at the end of the day, like just speak the
way you want to speak, Like, we can't constantly be
changing the way we talk to fit into some larger struck. Sure,
how can women perhaps listen to women better and also
have each other's back better? Right? I mean, this is
(28:11):
something that I struggle with two And it's not just
that women are being competitive with each other. This is
a learned behavior and what helped me was understanding where
it came from. So we'll just try to explain that
men have been running things in the workplace forever and
(28:31):
so what that led to was competition. Competition among women
for perhaps the one place at the table, or the
one spot at the top, or the one position in
whatever workplace it was. And because there were so few positions,
of course you felt you needed to elbow the woman
next to you because you were competing for the same job.
(28:52):
My feeling is that if we are able to equalize
the workplace and there are an equal level of men
and women, then there will still be comp petitian, but
it will be equal opportunist competition. You will be competing
the same amount against the men as you are as
the women. And so I think that we may not
even realize it, but we have internalized that belief, and
(29:14):
that is part of the reason why we are so
competitive with other women. And I find myself doing this
so often. Immediately, if there's another woman who is pitching
a story or writing about a topic that's similar to
what I'm writing about, I will get competitive. And what
I've tried to do is just sort of stop myself
for a moment and take a step back and say,
why am I being competitive with this person? Is there
(29:36):
a way to actually become allies and help each other?
And as you know, we had these sort of silly
rules to the fight Club, but the most important one
was treating other women as allies not enemies. And I
repeat that to myself constantly because I still need to
hear it sometimes. But I think that knowing that we've
all been in that position, if of ninety if of
(29:59):
us have felt are crated by other women, then most
of us have probably been the person doing undercutting. So
we have to recognize that we're all in this together,
and that probably each of us has been part of
the problem at one point or another, Caroline, as you
(30:19):
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the show. So it sounds like a lot of this
(31:24):
revolves around mindfulness really as we are going through our
professional lives in terms of helping other women and sort
of keeping our own unconscious biases in check. Um and
it almost sounds exhausting all of all of these things
that we have to do. I mean, it is, it is.
(31:44):
And I think that as I was writing the book,
you know, providing these battle tactics, but then saying like,
oh well, actually if you use this one, then maybe
you should tweak it to do it this way, And
it's like it's enough to make your brand explode. So
the way that I try to think about this without
wanting to throw, without wanting to throw myself out my
(32:04):
window all day long, is I try to have fun
with it. And that's where the thinking behind the playfulness
with the book comes. Their illustrations. There are mad libs,
there's profiles of feminist fight clubs throughout history at the end,
and I just try to laugh. I try to use
humor as a way into these issues and something that
can keep me going and also open up the conversation
(32:27):
to a larger audience because it's easy to get depressed,
like the ship is hard and I don't have a
perfect dancer. But knowing that we're all in it together
and maybe we can laugh about it a little bit
has helped. Like fighting patriarchy can actually be fun, and
so I think we should try to do that more
often well. And I also appreciate the balance of the
(32:51):
book being completely hilarious and also full of puns. And
for anyone who listens to this podcast knows I love
a good pun, um, But so it gives readers the
permission to be angry, which we don't hear very much
at all. I feel like as women like, yeah, go
into the office and get pissed. Yeah, yeah, totally, And
(33:13):
I mean I'm pissed, I'm angry. Um, I can still
laugh about it, like I'm not a man hater. I
believe that men are allah's but like I'm angry, and
I think that is okay. And from a very from
the standpoint of purely marketing a book and needing to
know that you have to sell this thing and you
(33:34):
need to get a publisher's buy in for it, I
was nervous first and foremost about the title. It is aggressive,
it is a fight title, and I wasn't sure that
that would go over well, but in the end it did,
and it's so rare. I think that, like you said,
women are giving permission to be angry. And in so
many cases when talking about the subject, you know, it's
(33:57):
all clouded and this empowerment speak. We have to be
so positive and it's all about inspiration and empowerment. Well, okay, fine,
that's not bad, but also we can be a little
bit pissed and anger can be a very useful emotion.
This is what my therapist tells. Think anger can be
a very useful emotion towards enacting change because it motivates you.
(34:18):
For women of color, however, they're going to be judged
differently if they're perceived as angry, and that is something
that you talk about in the book. And I also
appreciate how you have brought a very intersectional focus um
to the advice that you give. So I guess I'm
wondering whether all of these fantastic tips and strategies that
(34:42):
you lay out are potentially more challenging for people who
are not white, able bodied, this gender, straight, college educated
women like you and I to uh to follow and enact. Yeah,
I think that's probably true, and especially to your anger point.
(35:04):
You know, there's so many cases where the research looks
at women as a whole, but that is probably mostly
white women. And it says that you will be perceived
as aggressive or bossy in a certain situation if you
ask for something. Well, that is of course doubly difficult
if you're a woman of color, and if you're an
African American woman, you always have that fear of being
perceived as an angry black woman, and so it's really tough.
(35:28):
There needs to be more research in this realm. And
I wanted to make sure that every single piece of
advice I gave them this book was rooted in data
and research, because I come from a journalistic background and
I don't believe in just giving bullshit advice. So I
hired a Harvard researcher to help me, and we literally
sifted through all of the studies that exists out there,
and I had her help me to make sure I
(35:50):
wasn't missing anything. And the reality is there is not
enough research on women of color. Things look at women
as a whole, but you can imagine that most of
at is white women, and so I think that certainly
some of these things are going to be much more
difficult if you're a person of color, and that needs
to be taken into account. I also think that this
(36:11):
is a subject we're talking about more of these days,
and there is new research coming out. I saw a
study recently about how African American women are actually more
ambitious than their white counterparts. And so the more we
talk about it, the more we research it, then hopefully
the more battle tactics we can come up with that
are specific to them, because you can't really solve all
(36:33):
of these problems with a one size fits all approach.
That's just not the way the world works. So you know,
I've done my best while trying not to white splain
what women of color should do in these scenarios while
also looking at all of the research. But at the
same time, I don't have all the answers, and there
needs to be more. Yeah, I mean, and it also
(36:53):
seems like a lot of this could apply pretty equally
to men of color as well, who, at least from
what I see, are rarely spotlighted in these kinds of
studies totally, and all of the stuff about impostor syndrome
like that, for example, that affects people of color, as
with justice high rates, as it affects women, And the
(37:16):
idea is that it's impacting anyone who has the pressure
of being a first things like stereotype threat. You know,
a lot of these issues really do affect both women
and people of color. And so some of these tactics,
you know, there are some like writing affirmations or power
(37:36):
posing to increase your competence that can work for anybody.
The research sex it really does. Um So, what stat
You've been knee deep in research and studies, which Caroline
and I love to do here on the show. Um So,
what stat would you throw out at a dude who
(38:00):
is like, that's all fake? You so emotional? Are you only? Period?
So while I was writing this book, I had this
nineteen seventy anthology sitting at my desk that was written
by Robin Morgan. It's called Sister Who Is Powerful. It's
amazing and retro and it inspired me so much. One
of the things she has in that book is a
(38:22):
section called verbal karate, and verbal karate is just a
list of statistics. And I have learned over time that
people cannot argue with statistics. So while you can try
to appeal to a man or a woman who doesn't
believe this is an issue by saying this is the
right thing to do, you know, don't you want equality
between men and women, you can also hit them with
(38:43):
verbal karate or statistical karate, which is, guess what, companies
are more successful, more profitable, and more collaborative when they
have women in power. Our economy would be better off
if there were an equal number of men and women
in sations of power in politics and in businesses. The
(39:04):
g d P would actually rise by twenty scent were
their gender equality. So there are all these stats that
you really cannot argue with, and so I try to
just throw those in their faces and then sit back
and like man spread Oh my god, I love it
so much. Um. Well, especially as someone who has spent
(39:26):
so long reporting on issues related to gender and feminism,
was there anything that especially surprised you that you were
really not expecting? Um In the process of researching for
and writing the book, you know, none of the stats
really surprised me. It was surprising to me that nobody
(39:47):
had gone through and distilled the information in a way
that could be really tactical because a lot none of
this research is new. You know, a lot of it
has been out there, but it's very academic. It's hard
to sit through, and so a lot of what I
spent time doing was just reading studies and trying to
translate it into colloquial language and then like inserting a
bunch of cheesy puns, but that and also learning about
(40:13):
these underground women's collectives of the past. You know. I
have a section at the end of the book that's
called Feminist bike Clubs of your and I spent a
lot of time just digging through old manifestos from the
nineteen seventies and interviewing women who had been involved in
the women's movement, and learning about all of these amazing
underground collectives that are not in the history books. You know,
(40:36):
groups that banded together to fight for the rights of
women in color in prisons. There's a group called the
Subjournal Truths Disciples, you know, women like which the Women's
International Terrorists Conspiracy from Hell, which is the name that
they could never get away with today, But they used
to stage all of these crazy protests. They glued shut
(40:58):
the doors to the new York's Stock Exchange one time
and called the media so that they would be there
when the Wall Street bangers would show up and not
be able to open them. You know, all of these
really colorful protests that combined both humor and action. And
I think that at the end of the day, that's
what I hope that this book does. It provides humor,
(41:19):
but it also provides action. I think it absolutely does
um And while I am biased, I'm also journalists too,
so there's my objectivity. So aside from our original feminist
fight club, which one of those is the Nearest and
Dearest to your heart or that you you drew the
(41:41):
most inspiration from, I did really love which because they
were so colorful. They also released a hundred white mice
into a bridal fair in Times Square in the nineteen seventies,
which I thought was hilarious. And they would go into
Playboy clubs, which were popular at the time, and they
would put as liquid cement in their purse. They would
(42:02):
fill their purses with liquid cement and it was a
fast drying cement, so they would rush into the ladies
bathroom and dump it down the tobilet lolock up to
toilets so I love the women of which, um there
are the Lesbian Avengers who tried to bring attention to
lesbian causes in the early nineteen eighties and they would
go into Central Park and they would hand out her
(42:22):
She's kisses that would say you've been kissed by a lesbian. Um.
And then there's the modern day clubs that I found
out about, like the brew Husts, which are this group
of Latina skaters in the Bronx who are trying to,
you know, break down male dominated skate culture and are amazing. UM.
So those are a few of my favorites, but there's
(42:43):
lots more. So is there anything that I haven't asked
you about that you would like to make sure that
listeners know about the book before we wrap up? I
think just that you know, this is the story of
my hour fumine a spike club. But anyone can start
a fight club. There's no rules. You can make what
(43:05):
you want of it. It doesn't have to be women
all in your same industry or in your workplace, and
we're so much stronger together. So you know, forming a
fight club I think can be fun. But also you
know that these women have your back. What if guys
want to join a feminist fight club. I would love
for there to be an all male feminist fike club. Um.
(43:27):
But yeah, invite men to join your feminist fight club.
Like anyone who believes inequality is going to be an
ally and I think we should welcome them all despite
the fact that they have to pay more for the book. Well,
I'm really excited to hear about all the feminist fight
clubs that people listening are about to go off and start. Yeah, Jessica,
thanks so much for coming on the show, and please
(43:50):
tell us where you can find more about the book.
Order the book, uh and learn more about you. You
can go to Feminist fight Club dot com um and
there's all sorts of information there. We can find us
on Instagram. We post a new feminist fight club from
history every Friday. Find club Friday at Feminist fight Club. Well, Jessica,
(44:12):
thanks so much, thank you, so thank you so much
to be absolutely delightful and bad talking with us and
sharing her awesomeness with our audience. So thank you so
(44:34):
much to the absolutely delightful and badass Jessica Bennett for
talking with us and sharing her awesomeness with our Sminty audience.
I hope you guys really enjoyed that interview as much
as we did. And if you did enjoy it as
much as we did, you should look for Jessica online.
You can find more about her book club com, and
(44:54):
of course you can find and in addition to providing
the info, you could also find her on Twitter at.
Jessica and her team are doing a fabulous job too
of really collecting related news and current events happening around
sexism and the workplace and just feminist culture in general,
(45:18):
so be sure to check out everything that she and
Feminist Fight Club are doing. So with that, listeners were
curious to know if you have a feminist fight club
of your own or if this is something it sounds
like you could seriously use in your life. Let us know,
Mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com is our
email address and for links to all of our social
(45:39):
media as well as all of our blogs, videos and
podcasts with our sources. So you can learn even more
about fighting the man or the who man I don't know?
Head on over to stuff Mom Never Told You dot
com so you can learn even more about biding the
(46:01):
man I don't know, full man, I don't know I
don't know avert of stuff I'll never tell you. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from how stup
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristin and I'm Carolin, and today we have a super
red lady on the podcast to tell us all about
the new book she has written that you need to
(00:23):
get in your hands or on your device a sap. Yeah,
and that is award winning journalist Jessica Bennett, and she's
written a fabulous new book, Feminist Fight Club, an office
survival manual for a sexist workplace. Asterisk Uh, this book
is more expensive for dudes. That's not necessarily an official
(00:47):
part of the title, but there is an asterisk on
the front cover with a little disclaimer love a good
gender wage gap joke. Yeah, oh I I appreciate it.
And if that title sounds familiar, it might be because
you follow us on Instagram at stuff Mom Never Told You,
where we posted a while back our galley copy of
(01:11):
Feminist Fight Club, which made us feel very special that
we got an advanced copy and we wanted to share
with you all, And judging by the Instagram excitement, y'all
are pumped to check this book out. And I'm really
pumped that we got to talk to Jessica Bennett, who
is a friend of the show and whom we've cited
so many times on the podcast. And before we get
(01:32):
into our chat with her about the Feminist Fight Club,
I gotta tell a little story, Caroline. Yep, I love
the story. Sorry time. Okay, So about six years ago,
we received a letter from a listener in New York
who was this fabulous, hilarious woman who was responding to
(01:57):
something I'd said about feeling guilty of out watching Bravos
Millionaire Matchmaker. And she was just a delight and made
me laugh. And it was podcast internet friendship at first email?
Is that what you call them? So time went on
and I was heading up to New York and this
(02:18):
lovely lady said, Hey, when you're up here, I'm actually
hosting a little secret get together of women I know
who are also in media, and we talk about sexism
in the workplace and aspirations and kind of workplace consciousness
(02:38):
raising in a way. And I was extremely flattered and
also incredibly timidated. Um, because you know, I'm this podcaster
from Atlanta going up to you know, hang out and
eat dinner with all of these badass skill getters and
(03:02):
uh law there was there a little bit of imposter
syndrome at work about your own awesomeness. Oh my god,
I was head to toe imposter syndrome. And I also
made the mistake of wearing these really tall heels, which
on my already tall body made me all of six
foot two and in small New York apartments, I learned
that night, when you are towering above the rest of
(03:23):
the group, but you're also feeling overwhelmed with imposterism and
no one knows who you are, it can really amplify
when social anxiety. I was gonna say, you just end
up in the fetal position in the bathroom very much.
In fact, actually I got uh lost in the bathroom
at one point. It was it was just a hot mess.
(03:44):
I think I basically just blacked out. Um had an
insecurity blackout, and then arrived on the subway like two
and a half hours later. We've all been there. You're like,
for some reason, I'm not hungry anymore, but I also
want to throw up. I don't know where I've been,
and I think I've had four glasses of peanut so
unbeknownst to me, uh, this was what would become the
(04:08):
feminist fight club that Jessica Bennett centers, this office place
manual around and I'm so honored to I guess technically
be a member of this fight club. Caroline, I'm like,
I'm like an adjacent member, you remember, by proxy? Yeah, yes,
that that's how that works. I vote, I vote long
distance when I need to mail in my vote for leadership. Well,
(04:31):
and in the sixth years since, it's been amazing to
watch these women's careers develop and also how you know,
they've been extremely supportive of stuff Mo'm never told you
over the years as well, Jessica Bennett in particular. Um,
So it's so it's just exciting to see all of
(04:55):
our real world situations now getting applied to all of
these tactics and strategies and hilarious puns that Jessica has
compiled that can help anybody in the workplace. So I
thought we're going to kick off a conversation with Jessica
talking about the origins of that first feminist fight club.
(05:24):
I'm a journalist. I write primarily for The New York Times,
and I cover a lot about gender issues and then
occasionally blending that with modern culture, pop culture and trends
that range from the tyranny of resting bitch face to
(05:45):
the plight of female pot entrepreneurs. So try to keep
it serious but also fun. And the idea was essentially
that I think there's a lot out there and a
lot of conversation about gender issues. There are some really
great books written by really inspiring women, and then there
are also a lot of fun, youthful, millennial style books
(06:09):
that are written as handbooks. His Hipster Handbook, the Zombie
Survival Guide, UH, these types, and what I wanted to
do was blend the two create something that was smart
and had real advice that was rooted in research and
backed up by fact, but also was really easy to digest.
It was the kind of thing you could shove in
your purse, maybe even stuff in your bra tear out
(06:31):
a couple of pages, put them in there when you're
going in to ask for a raise, and flip essentially
to the section that you needed the advice on. And
so that was the inspiration for the manual style. And
I wanted to kind of take that very masculine art
of war Mortal Kombat game type style and turn it
(06:52):
on its head to feminize it. And then of course
there's a story of the Fight Club, which, as you mentioned,
you may or may not be a member of. UM.
And this is the real life group of women who
have been meeting for almost the past decade talking about
our career trajectories and the struggles we face and sharing
(07:13):
with each other a lot of tips that we learned
around along the way. Now you go into more detail
on the origin story of the Feminist Fight Club, which
is one of my favorite favorite stories of women coming together. UM. Maybe,
like you said, because I may or may not be
a member of said Feminist Fight Club. UM, but for
(07:33):
listeners who haven't read the book, can you talk about
the very first meeting, like how how did it happen?
How does one start a fight club? Well, so, the
way that it happened for this group was that there
were a lot of things happening in the culture that
made it kind of a perfect storm of us feeling
like we needed to do something. So I was in
(07:55):
Newsweek at the time as a junior reporter and was
really feeling like was struggling to get ahead. UM. The
men that I had come up with, we're getting promoted
more quickly than I was. I would pitch stories and
they would get rejected, but then I would notice that
they would be in the magazine under somebody else's byline.
I was facing a lot of frustrations, and I started
(08:16):
talking with other women in the office who were feeling
the same thing. This was at the time in late
two thousand nine, early when the David Letterman sex scandal
had just happened. He had been sleeping with his assistant.
There was a gender discrimination lawsuit at the New York Post,
and this giant report had come out from from the
(08:37):
Streiber Foundation run by Maria Streiber, pointing to the fact
that while we have made great strides in some places,
we were not anywhere near gender equality. So it felt
a bit like a perfect storm. And the original Fight
Club members of which I was not one of the three,
started meeting in their workplace, which was another media company,
(08:59):
and they would gather often in their own offices and
sometimes outside of the office, often at a midtown McDonald's
over French fries and milkshakes and diet coke, and they
ultimately came to the collusion that they needed to do something.
They were feeling really frustrated, They felt stifled, they felt stuck,
They didn't know what to do. But what they could
(09:21):
do was form a group and talk about these issues,
which sounds a lot like on this old schools second
wave consciousness raising happening exactly, and I think that that's
essentially what we were doing. You know, we were meeting
every month or a few months. We were sitting around
in a circle, we were eating snacks and drinking wine,
(09:42):
and we were talking about the struggles we faced, and
we would literally go around the circle, much like old
school consciousness raising groups did. The difference was we didn't
necessarily call it that it was a modern version, but
it employed many of the same tactics. And I think
that the idea of raising consciousness, of real realizing that
this wasn't an individual problem but a collective one, was
(10:04):
ultimately one of the purposes that the club served well.
And something that's coming to mind as you're talking about
this is how one thing that we've noticed with our
work through stuff I've never told you, especially when we
go out and talk to younger audiences, is how the
workplace is usually for for a lot of women, their
(10:24):
first face to face, day to day confrontation with sexism. Um.
And so I'm wondering if if that's part if you
think that that's common for a lot of women to where, um,
you get your job and that's terrific, but then all
of a sudden you're like, oh, wait, no, stuff is
really screwed up here, right right. I mean that was
(10:45):
certainly my experience, and the data would back that up.
You know, women excel in school. They're graduating from college
and higher numbers are kind of outpacing their male peers
at every turn. They're getting more advanced degrees. And then
we leave academia and we go to the workplace and
it's not this egalitarian utopia. We're not getting ahead at
(11:07):
the same rate. And so for me, you know, I
had a privileged upbringing. I grew up in Seattle. It's
sort of a liberal utopia. My parents are feminist. Everyone
always told me I could accomplish whatever I wanted. And
so I think in a way because of that, I
didn't realize that feminism was something that I even needed
(11:28):
or identified with. And it wasn't until I got to
the workforce and began to experience these issues that I
was like, wait, oh, like this is what people talk about.
This is this thing that people talk about, and is
it sexism? Like is that really what this is? And
it took me a while to actually get to the
conclusion that, yes, it was. It was a systemic issue
(11:50):
and it's still one that exists. Well, and that's something
that jumped out to me early in the book where
you say that recognizing sexism is harder than it used
to be. Um, so why is that? Do you think?
Like and and sort of what does that mean that
we need to be on the lookout for, right? You know,
I once had this conversation with Gail Collins, who is
(12:12):
the New York Times opinion writer who has a number
of amazing books about this issue, and she said something
to the effect of we were talking about generational differences,
and she said, you know, sexism of my generation was
worse in many ways. It was more overt, but at
least you knew it when you saw it. And that
really resonated with me, because while our generation is not
(12:35):
experiencing help wanted ads segregated by gender, or actually being
smacked on the ass in an office environment and it
being okay or accepted, we face things that have a
subtlety to them, and as a result, it's hard to
know is it sexism or is it just me so,
(12:56):
for example, being interrupted in a meeting. Women are twice
as likely to be interrupted in meetings as men, and
this happens all the times, has been happening for my
entire career, and it took me a long time to
realize that maybe this was actually a product of male
privilege and of a patriarchal system in which men believe
(13:17):
that they are entitled to speak more frequently, you know,
things like having your ideas attributed to somebody else. This
is also statistically proven, it happens commonly with women. And
these things I've heard it called sexism by a thousand
small cuts. They're small things, and taken individually, they can
(13:38):
seem like not that big a deal. But when you
experience this, all of these things over time collectively, they
can be really fatal. Well. And a lot of these
conversations around especially the gender wage gap and more of
the financial manifestations of workplace sexism, really start with negotiating
(14:00):
and the whole salary negotiation issue. And for so long,
the you know, um abiding claim was that, well, women
just aren't asking for money and that's the problem. But
there's so much more nuance to this negotiation issue. So
could you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, you know,
(14:22):
with all of this stuff, there's so much nuanced to it,
as you mentioned, and even the negotiation things. So yeah,
we finally realized over the past few years that women
aren't asking as often, and so we've been trying to
solve that, and that's what I write in the book. Well,
last week a study came out saying that actually women
are negotiating. There, in fact negotiating and equal numbers too men.
(14:44):
So great, that's a good thing. We were halfway there,
but the caveat is that they're still not getting raises
with the same frequency. So, yes, you can tell women
to negotiate, you can encourage them to do so, but
it's not that simple. They have to be able to
navigate these really complicated and deeply rooted biases when they
(15:07):
get there. And some of those say that, you know,
when a woman asked for a raise, she's more likely
to be deemed pushy, she's going to be less liked
when she does so, and she's less likely to get
the raise in a man who's asking. Another bit of
research advises that women should actually smile when they go
in to negotiate because women are expected to be nurturing
(15:29):
and maternal and nice, and so if you play into
that stereotype, you're actually more likely to be successful when
you ask. So it was tricky writing this chapter because
I didn't want to advise people to play into gender stereotypes.
But by the same token, if smiling when you go
(15:49):
and ask for the raison is going to get you
the money and get you in power, and then you
can lift other women up along with you, then I
think it goes towards this larger goal of smashing down
patriarchy and taking over. But these things are really tricky.
They're very nuanced, and there's a lot of subtlety to them. Well,
and speaking of smiling, what would you say to someone
(16:09):
listening and thinking, oh, but I am really over being
expected to smile all the time, especially for you know,
women who are working in service industry jobs. I've heard
this from women in healthcare a lot, being asked by patients,
you know, why are you smiling? What would you say
to that? I mean, you know, Hillary Clinton just experienced
this with the head of the r NC. Like, contrary
(16:33):
to popular belief, women are not actually born with smiles
on their faces, and we are not required to smile. However,
there is this cultural expectation that we should be smiling
all the time, and if we're not, oh, then we
have resting bitch face. Then we're a bit Whereas the
exact same facial expression on a man would simply be
viewed as serious or authoritative. So there's a complete double
(16:56):
standard when we talk about this. At the same time,
if I have to in and Barrett literally when I'm
walking and to ask for a raise and it's going
to get me the money so I can get empower,
then on some level, I'm just like, I'm gonna do
it now. Not to get too personal, Jessica, but do
you have like I do, resting bitch face. I didn't
(17:17):
know that I had resting bitch face until I was
doing a television interview for an article I had written
and somebody screenshot at my face on the screen, and
it in fact ended up on Wikipedia as literally the
face of resting bitch face the definition. So it turns
out I do have restling bitch face, but I'm trying
(17:38):
to just own it. Yeah, I mean, you could probably
trademark that resting bitch face then, right, So yeah, my
boyfriend has it as his as my icon when I
call him listeners, are you hiring? Do you know where
to post your job to find the best candidates? And
(18:00):
we know that posting your job in one place isn't
enough to find quality candidates all the time. And if
you want to find the perfect higher, you need to
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never told you. Listeners can post jobs on zip recruiter
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(19:10):
around in terms of what women can pay more attention
to in the workplace, things we have some more leverage
over than perhaps uh controlling all the variables in negotiation situations.
Is all of the unpaid labor that we tend to
do women in particular, and um, you talk a bit
(19:32):
about how there our whole overwork culture that a lot
of us are in right now, um does not benefit
women as much as men um. And also too, when
we're in the office in nine to five, we tend
to even be doing office housework. So what's going on
with all of this um on the clock but almost
(19:52):
off the clock work that we're doing right, Yeah, I
think this comes from two angles. So on the one hand,
there is what I call in the book the stenography,
and this is the guy who asked you to take
the notes in the meeting or grab the coffee and
just instinctively turns to a woman to do these tasks.
And what the research shows is that women are more
(20:14):
likely to be tasked with these things. I'm more likely
to be asked to do them, and at the same
time they are also more likely to volunteer. So the
reality is if you're always taking the notes in the meeting,
then you're probably not putting forth the ideas. And if
you're always grabbing coffee, then you're missing valuable face time.
And if you're the one who has to plan the
(20:35):
company holiday party or brings cupcakes for the birthdays, it's
taking time away from the higher productivity tasks that may
get you noticed. So, of course all this is within
the framework of assuming that a person wants to get
ahead at work, and maybe not everybody does, but at
the same time, most people, I think would probably prefer
(20:58):
to do more stimulating work than the menial tests. And
this is across the board. You know, this is not
just in an office environment. This happens. You can be
an hourly worker in a restaurant still be the one
asked to marry the catchups. Maybe that's industry speak from
my waitress days, marry the catchups or roll the napkins.
Like this stuff is taking time away from when you
(21:20):
could be bringing in tips. And so I think that
it relates to the overwork culture in the sense that
you spend hours doing this small stuff and then you
still have to do the regular work, the real job.
And so at the end of the day, you're working harder.
And for women who have children, they're already taking on
(21:40):
the quote unquote motherload of tasks at home. That's just
statistically proven. So at the end of the day, like,
how could you not be exhausted. You're doing the office
house work, you're doing the actual housework, and you're doing
your real job. So especially for someone in more of
service industry position who you know doesn't have a lot
(22:02):
of power in the workplace, or even for you know,
someone in a traditional office, if they don't roll the
silverware or they don't bring the coffee, then who's going
to you know what I mean, like, how do you
delegate those tasks out to ensure that you're not doing
all of this useless work all the time? Right? I mean,
(22:24):
one really simple thing to do is creating kind of
a spreadsheet type list or creating a rotating system for
people to do them. And I think anyone can probably
speak up and suggest that, like let's take turns. You know,
it's like the old chore chart that you had when
you're a kid, And that is one really simple way
to do it. And I don't think you have to
be in a power position to suggest that if you
(22:44):
are in a power position, it's important that you make
sure that these things are being distributed equally because you
don't want the women to get stuck with it. You know,
There's like the passive aggressive approach, which is like when
you'll get asked to do the thing, you're like, oh,
but what about Josh over here? Like Ash just great
at taking notes, So there's that, And then I've also
heard of people taking the direct approach, and this is
(23:06):
again in an office environment, but specifically saying when they're
in a meeting that is male dominated. And my one
friend who frequently does this happens to be a one
of color, saying directly, guys, you cannot ask the one
person of color and the one woman in this room
to take the notes and just approaching the elephant in
the room and being directed about it. So I think
(23:27):
that with all of the advices of nothing is going
to work for every situation. So I've tried to give
the direct approach, the indirect approach, the humorous approach, and
people can kind of choose what might work best for them. Well.
That also has me wondering that considering how more and
more people are working freelance or on a contract basis
(23:49):
sort of being their office of one. Um, do you
think that these situations apply? I mean, I work from
home as a freelancer and most of my work has
done over email these days, and I find myself dealing
with this stuff constantly, like I'm not getting audibly interrupted,
(24:11):
but I noticed subtle things like I respond to emails
in the most passive way possible, saying I feel like
and using language and exclamation points to try to soften
what I'm actually trying to say, whereas men I don't
think do that with the same frequency. So the idea
(24:33):
of free work and being asked to do free work again,
that's that's hugely common when you're a soul contractor or
an independent the employed person, because you have to decide
what's worth it for you, And you know journalism, it's
like everyone's asking you to write for free all the time,
and you have to decide, like when it's worth it
for you, Like what's the return on the investment? Are
(24:55):
I hate that chart so corporate, But I actually find
myself asking like, whats are a while on this? Is
it worth it for me to do this thing for free?
Or is it worth it for me to grant this favor.
Has this person done something for me in the past,
or do I just believe in this cause? So a
lot of it is just weighing things individually but thinking
strategically about it. So I want to go back to
(25:17):
what you said about emailing and using that hedging language
of just actually because this is I think such a
huge issue for um, women today in the workplace. There
have been so many conversations about it, so many you know,
viral pieces about words and phrases that we shouldn't use
(25:38):
as women that are undercutting our authority. But on the
flip side of that, there have been a lot of
arguments that, hey, people just need to get used to
the way women are talking. Right, So how do we
how do we navigate through this professional speech and gender quagmire. Yeah,
that's exactly what it is. I was gonna say, show, um,
(26:01):
it's impossible. This is impossible to navigate. And as I
was researching this chapter, there's a chapter on speech. Um
it's called get your Speak on the cluster of speaking
Wall Female, and that is basically what it is. It's
a cluster because from every avenue we have people telling
us that we shouldn't say like so much are the
(26:23):
tone of our voice isn't working. We are using up talk,
which is when you end up your statements in a question.
And certainly there are cases and research has shown that
these things can undermine you in a workplace. They can
undermine your confidence, and they can make it sound like
you don't know what you're talking about. But at the
(26:44):
same time, I think it's important to recognize that we're
still judging all of this by a male standard, like
that you may think that somebody sounds like a valley girl,
but in relation to what in relation to men. So
my feeling is that if since the dawn of time
women had been running things, then actually maybe we'd be
(27:06):
telling men that they should insert more up speak into
the way they talk. And it's not just that these
are all learned behaviors. Women actually do lead linguistic trends,
like we set the trends as they exist in the
modern culture, and we the research shows that we actually
do more creative things. But the way we talk and
(27:27):
teen girls in fact that if you want to learn
about speech, just look at teen girls, Like eventually we'll
all be emoging in the same way. They are speaking
gifts or whatever it may be. But I think that
it's important to way these things knowing that most of
us are in male dominated fields, so they will be
interpreted a certain way, and recognizing that and perhaps trying
(27:48):
to solve for it, but also knowing that you know,
at the end of the day, like just speak the
way you want to speak, Like, we can't constantly be
changing the way we talk to fit into some larger struck. Sure,
how can women perhaps listen to women better and also
have each other's back better? Right? I mean, this is
(28:11):
something that I struggle with two And it's not just
that women are being competitive with each other. This is
a learned behavior and what helped me was understanding where
it came from. So we'll just try to explain that
men have been running things in the workplace forever and
(28:31):
so what that led to was competition. Competition among women
for perhaps the one place at the table, or the
one spot at the top, or the one position in
whatever workplace it was. And because there were so few positions,
of course you felt you needed to elbow the woman
next to you because you were competing for the same job.
(28:52):
My feeling is that if we are able to equalize
the workplace and there are an equal level of men
and women, then there will still be comp petitian, but
it will be equal opportunist competition. You will be competing
the same amount against the men as you are as
the women. And so I think that we may not
even realize it, but we have internalized that belief, and
(29:14):
that is part of the reason why we are so
competitive with other women. And I find myself doing this
so often. Immediately, if there's another woman who is pitching
a story or writing about a topic that's similar to
what I'm writing about, I will get competitive. And what
I've tried to do is just sort of stop myself
for a moment and take a step back and say,
why am I being competitive with this person? Is there
(29:36):
a way to actually become allies and help each other?
And as you know, we had these sort of silly
rules to the fight Club, but the most important one
was treating other women as allies not enemies. And I
repeat that to myself constantly because I still need to
hear it sometimes. But I think that knowing that we've
all been in that position, if of ninety if of
(29:59):
us have felt are crated by other women, then most
of us have probably been the person doing undercutting. So
we have to recognize that we're all in this together,
and that probably each of us has been part of
the problem at one point or another, Caroline, as you
(30:19):
and I both know well, to do lists can seem
out of control. There's so much stuff Mom never told
you ing to do in so little time to do it.
But there's one thing we can check off our to
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(31:04):
a digital scale. So don't wait. Go to stamps dot
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that's stamps, dot com enter stuff, and now back to
the show. So it sounds like a lot of this
(31:24):
revolves around mindfulness really as we are going through our
professional lives in terms of helping other women and sort
of keeping our own unconscious biases in check. Um and
it almost sounds exhausting all of all of these things
that we have to do. I mean, it is, it is.
(31:44):
And I think that as I was writing the book,
you know, providing these battle tactics, but then saying like,
oh well, actually if you use this one, then maybe
you should tweak it to do it this way, And
it's like it's enough to make your brand explode. So
the way that I try to think about this without
wanting to throw, without wanting to throw myself out my
(32:04):
window all day long, is I try to have fun
with it. And that's where the thinking behind the playfulness
with the book comes. Their illustrations. There are mad libs,
there's profiles of feminist fight clubs throughout history at the end,
and I just try to laugh. I try to use
humor as a way into these issues and something that
can keep me going and also open up the conversation
(32:27):
to a larger audience because it's easy to get depressed,
like the ship is hard and I don't have a
perfect dancer. But knowing that we're all in it together
and maybe we can laugh about it a little bit
has helped. Like fighting patriarchy can actually be fun, and
so I think we should try to do that more
often well. And I also appreciate the balance of the
(32:51):
book being completely hilarious and also full of puns. And
for anyone who listens to this podcast knows I love
a good pun, um, But so it gives readers the
permission to be angry, which we don't hear very much
at all. I feel like as women like, yeah, go
into the office and get pissed. Yeah, yeah, totally, And
(33:13):
I mean I'm pissed, I'm angry. Um, I can still
laugh about it, like I'm not a man hater. I
believe that men are allah's but like I'm angry, and
I think that is okay. And from a very from
the standpoint of purely marketing a book and needing to
know that you have to sell this thing and you
(33:34):
need to get a publisher's buy in for it, I
was nervous first and foremost about the title. It is aggressive,
it is a fight title, and I wasn't sure that
that would go over well, but in the end it did,
and it's so rare. I think that, like you said,
women are giving permission to be angry. And in so
many cases when talking about the subject, you know, it's
(33:57):
all clouded and this empowerment speak. We have to be
so positive and it's all about inspiration and empowerment. Well, okay, fine,
that's not bad, but also we can be a little
bit pissed and anger can be a very useful emotion.
This is what my therapist tells. Think anger can be
a very useful emotion towards enacting change because it motivates you.
(34:18):
For women of color, however, they're going to be judged
differently if they're perceived as angry, and that is something
that you talk about in the book. And I also
appreciate how you have brought a very intersectional focus um
to the advice that you give. So I guess I'm
wondering whether all of these fantastic tips and strategies that
(34:42):
you lay out are potentially more challenging for people who
are not white, able bodied, this gender, straight, college educated
women like you and I to uh to follow and enact. Yeah,
I think that's probably true, and especially to your anger point.
(35:04):
You know, there's so many cases where the research looks
at women as a whole, but that is probably mostly
white women. And it says that you will be perceived
as aggressive or bossy in a certain situation if you
ask for something. Well, that is of course doubly difficult
if you're a woman of color, and if you're an
African American woman, you always have that fear of being
perceived as an angry black woman, and so it's really tough.
(35:28):
There needs to be more research in this realm. And
I wanted to make sure that every single piece of
advice I gave them this book was rooted in data
and research, because I come from a journalistic background and
I don't believe in just giving bullshit advice. So I
hired a Harvard researcher to help me, and we literally
sifted through all of the studies that exists out there,
and I had her help me to make sure I
(35:50):
wasn't missing anything. And the reality is there is not
enough research on women of color. Things look at women
as a whole, but you can imagine that most of
at is white women, and so I think that certainly
some of these things are going to be much more
difficult if you're a person of color, and that needs
to be taken into account. I also think that this
(36:11):
is a subject we're talking about more of these days,
and there is new research coming out. I saw a
study recently about how African American women are actually more
ambitious than their white counterparts. And so the more we
talk about it, the more we research it, then hopefully
the more battle tactics we can come up with that
are specific to them, because you can't really solve all
(36:33):
of these problems with a one size fits all approach.
That's just not the way the world works. So you know,
I've done my best while trying not to white splain
what women of color should do in these scenarios while
also looking at all of the research. But at the
same time, I don't have all the answers, and there
needs to be more. Yeah, I mean, and it also
(36:53):
seems like a lot of this could apply pretty equally
to men of color as well, who, at least from
what I see, are rarely spotlighted in these kinds of
studies totally, and all of the stuff about impostor syndrome
like that, for example, that affects people of color, as
with justice high rates, as it affects women, And the
(37:16):
idea is that it's impacting anyone who has the pressure
of being a first things like stereotype threat. You know,
a lot of these issues really do affect both women
and people of color. And so some of these tactics,
you know, there are some like writing affirmations or power
(37:36):
posing to increase your competence that can work for anybody.
The research sex it really does. Um So, what stat
You've been knee deep in research and studies, which Caroline
and I love to do here on the show. Um So,
what stat would you throw out at a dude who
(38:00):
is like, that's all fake? You so emotional? Are you only? Period?
So while I was writing this book, I had this
nineteen seventy anthology sitting at my desk that was written
by Robin Morgan. It's called Sister Who Is Powerful. It's
amazing and retro and it inspired me so much. One
of the things she has in that book is a
(38:22):
section called verbal karate, and verbal karate is just a
list of statistics. And I have learned over time that
people cannot argue with statistics. So while you can try
to appeal to a man or a woman who doesn't
believe this is an issue by saying this is the
right thing to do, you know, don't you want equality
between men and women, you can also hit them with
(38:43):
verbal karate or statistical karate, which is, guess what, companies
are more successful, more profitable, and more collaborative when they
have women in power. Our economy would be better off
if there were an equal number of men and women
in sations of power in politics and in businesses. The
(39:04):
g d P would actually rise by twenty scent were
their gender equality. So there are all these stats that
you really cannot argue with, and so I try to
just throw those in their faces and then sit back
and like man spread Oh my god, I love it
so much. Um. Well, especially as someone who has spent
(39:26):
so long reporting on issues related to gender and feminism,
was there anything that especially surprised you that you were
really not expecting? Um In the process of researching for
and writing the book, you know, none of the stats
really surprised me. It was surprising to me that nobody
(39:47):
had gone through and distilled the information in a way
that could be really tactical because a lot none of
this research is new. You know, a lot of it
has been out there, but it's very academic. It's hard
to sit through, and so a lot of what I
spent time doing was just reading studies and trying to
translate it into colloquial language and then like inserting a
bunch of cheesy puns, but that and also learning about
(40:13):
these underground women's collectives of the past. You know. I
have a section at the end of the book that's
called Feminist bike Clubs of your and I spent a
lot of time just digging through old manifestos from the
nineteen seventies and interviewing women who had been involved in
the women's movement, and learning about all of these amazing
underground collectives that are not in the history books. You know,
(40:36):
groups that banded together to fight for the rights of
women in color in prisons. There's a group called the
Subjournal Truths Disciples, you know, women like which the Women's
International Terrorists Conspiracy from Hell, which is the name that
they could never get away with today, But they used
to stage all of these crazy protests. They glued shut
(40:58):
the doors to the new York's Stock Exchange one time
and called the media so that they would be there
when the Wall Street bangers would show up and not
be able to open them. You know, all of these
really colorful protests that combined both humor and action. And
I think that at the end of the day, that's
what I hope that this book does. It provides humor,
(41:19):
but it also provides action. I think it absolutely does
um And while I am biased, I'm also journalists too,
so there's my objectivity. So aside from our original feminist
fight club, which one of those is the Nearest and
Dearest to your heart or that you you drew the
(41:41):
most inspiration from, I did really love which because they
were so colorful. They also released a hundred white mice
into a bridal fair in Times Square in the nineteen seventies,
which I thought was hilarious. And they would go into
Playboy clubs, which were popular at the time, and they
would put as liquid cement in their purse. They would
(42:02):
fill their purses with liquid cement and it was a
fast drying cement, so they would rush into the ladies
bathroom and dump it down the tobilet lolock up to
toilets so I love the women of which, um there
are the Lesbian Avengers who tried to bring attention to
lesbian causes in the early nineteen eighties and they would
go into Central Park and they would hand out her
(42:22):
She's kisses that would say you've been kissed by a lesbian. Um.
And then there's the modern day clubs that I found
out about, like the brew Husts, which are this group
of Latina skaters in the Bronx who are trying to,
you know, break down male dominated skate culture and are amazing. UM.
So those are a few of my favorites, but there's
(42:43):
lots more. So is there anything that I haven't asked
you about that you would like to make sure that
listeners know about the book before we wrap up? I
think just that you know, this is the story of
my hour fumine a spike club. But anyone can start
a fight club. There's no rules. You can make what
(43:05):
you want of it. It doesn't have to be women
all in your same industry or in your workplace, and
we're so much stronger together. So you know, forming a
fight club I think can be fun. But also you
know that these women have your back. What if guys
want to join a feminist fight club. I would love
for there to be an all male feminist fike club. Um.
(43:27):
But yeah, invite men to join your feminist fight club.
Like anyone who believes inequality is going to be an
ally and I think we should welcome them all despite
the fact that they have to pay more for the book. Well,
I'm really excited to hear about all the feminist fight
clubs that people listening are about to go off and start. Yeah, Jessica,
thanks so much for coming on the show, and please
(43:50):
tell us where you can find more about the book.
Order the book, uh and learn more about you. You
can go to Feminist fight Club dot com um and
there's all sorts of information there. We can find us
on Instagram. We post a new feminist fight club from
history every Friday. Find club Friday at Feminist fight Club. Well, Jessica,
(44:12):
thanks so much, thank you, so thank you so much
to be absolutely delightful and bad talking with us and
sharing her awesomeness with our audience. So thank you so
(44:34):
much to the absolutely delightful and badass Jessica Bennett for
talking with us and sharing her awesomeness with our Sminty audience.
I hope you guys really enjoyed that interview as much
as we did. And if you did enjoy it as
much as we did, you should look for Jessica online.
You can find more about her book club com, and
(44:54):
of course you can find and in addition to providing
the info, you could also find her on Twitter at.
Jessica and her team are doing a fabulous job too
of really collecting related news and current events happening around
sexism and the workplace and just feminist culture in general,
(45:18):
so be sure to check out everything that she and
Feminist Fight Club are doing. So with that, listeners were
curious to know if you have a feminist fight club
of your own or if this is something it sounds
like you could seriously use in your life. Let us know,
Mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com is our
email address and for links to all of our social
(45:39):
media as well as all of our blogs, videos and
podcasts with our sources. So you can learn even more
about fighting the man or the who man I don't know?
Head on over to stuff Mom Never Told You dot
com so you can learn even more about biding the
(46:01):
man I don't know, full man, I don't know I
don't know avert of stuff I'll never tell you. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com.
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