Uncorking Women and Wine

Historically, women have been banned from most of the wine-making process, but it's a much different story today. Cristen and Caroline detail how and why women not only are the primary wine consumers but also are becoming viticulture's most celebrated taste-makers.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to the stuff mom never told you, from house
to folks, not color. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline. And today we are talking
about viticulture and analogy. Those are fancy words. Yeah, we're
just talking about one. Yeah. Viticulture the cultivation or culture

(00:27):
of great analogy, a science that deals with wine and
wine making, and wine itself is considered quote our original
alcoholic beverage, dating back eight thousand years, according to the
book Inventing Wine by Paul Lucas. It's also the only

(00:47):
thing that they drink in a Game of Thrones. I
think I don't think I've ever seen anyone drink water.
I think they just drink wine, probably because the water
is full of poison, full of dragon poison. Well, anyway,
um wine. You know it's it's more than just the
boxed wine that I may or may not buy on
a regular basis. Wine is actually linked inextricably, according to

(01:10):
and B madisar with religious worship, revelry, camaraderie, and upper
class entitlement. And she says that it's often been a
beverage reserved for men of privilege. Yeah, she writes in
her book Women of Wine, The Rise of Women in
the Global Wine Industry, that women regardless of social standing,
were associated with wines excesses rather than its benefits. Inebriated

(01:34):
women were frequently linked indiscriminate sexuality, promiscuity, and adultery. So
right from the get go in our conversation about wine
and women, it starts off on a bit of a
sexist foot. Yeah, Sally would not approve of this. She
would be like, oh, heaven Sally, your mom Bally, My mom,

(01:56):
uh drinks quite her fair share of wine. We're we're
big wine drinkers in our family. I say we, but
I really mean my mom and her sisters. So wine
would not be a stuff your mom never told you, right, Well,
not that we've talked about it, but I learned from
the best. Let's put it that way. Well, Sally is

(02:17):
among plenty of friends. In the United States. Americans really
love their wine. In fact, in two thousand twelve, three
hundred and forty two million cases of wine were consumed,
which is a seven percent increase from five years ago.
So not only are we drinking a lot of wine,
we're drinking more wine than ever before in the United States,

(02:40):
and by volume. We Americans consume more wine than any
other nation actually, but not so surprisingly on a per
capita basis. The French, for instance, drink a lot more
wine than we do. They drink five bottles for everyone
that we drink. And also as a nation, we may
agins are just as likely to reach for wine as

(03:02):
for beer, which is actually a huge shift from twenty
years ago. We're drinking a lot more wine now. Yeah,
And some think that the spike in our wine consumption
is due to two things. First of all, the recession,
because let's face it, two buck chuck from Trader Joe's
can get you pretty drunk on a dime. And they

(03:24):
also attribute it to changing preferences of millennials, because a
gallop pole found a thirty point drop in beer preference
among people under thirtyes. So young uns like you and I,
Caroline are really enjoying wine. More interesting, I wonder, I

(03:47):
wonder what's behind the drop in beer, Not just the
rise in wine, but the drop in beer also. I
mean they also attribute this um rise in wine loving
two drinkers over fifty and women in particular. Yeah, women
love wine. One of the reasons why we wanted to
do this episode on wine is because I feel like,

(04:08):
at least if you were to choose a type of
alcoholic beverage that women are going to go for, if
they walk up to an open bar, it's gonna be
a glass of wine, probably a glass of white wine,
or maybe a vodka tonic. But that's another episode. Um,
but women buy eight out of ten bottles of wine
consumed at home, according to the magazine Wine Business. Yeah,

(04:31):
and according to a a gallop pole that you talked about, UM,
fifty two percent of women prefer wine over beer. And
that's up from forty three twenty years ago. Now looking
at men, only of men choose wine as their favorite
boozy beverage, but even that is up five percent from
twenty years ago. Yeah. And to me, the fact that

(04:53):
women comprise an overwhelming majority of the wine buyers for
the wine that we have in our households and also
wine drinkers, it stands in contrast to that quote from
Women and Wine about the history long ago where women
were associated only with wines excesses, and as we'll see

(05:14):
in the making of wine. In the viticulture, women have
often been relegated to the side, only allowed to do
certain smaller tasks, whereas the making of wine has been
more of a thing for men, and yet today we're
drinking more of it. But maybe because of that colored

(05:36):
history that we have with wine, women are still considered
a niche market. Yeah, a lot of ways we are.
And that's interesting when I was reading all this stuff
about how we are this niche market. I mean, I
think it's obvious when you when you google anything about
women and wine, A lot of what you get is
this really sappy advertising the flag women and wine, shoes

(06:00):
and women and wine and baking and women and wine
and tools. I don't know, but you know, like I said, me,
growing up, I was surrounded by female wine drinkers. My
dad didn't drink wine. So I've always thought of like
wine as a more feminine beverage, and yet the industry
is just now catching up to that. For instance, in

(06:22):
two thousand and six, we have the launch of Wine Adventure,
which proclaims itself the first wine magazine for women. But
side note why there needs to be a wine magazine
for women, I don't really understand, right, And that's kind
of what Slate writer Mike Steinberger was talking about in

(06:42):
a two thousand five piece, where he really seemed confused
to hear the news that wine wasn't already a happily
co ed party. And he said that to suggest that
women have a distinct set of grievances about how wine
is critiqued ignores the fact that quite a few men
are equally disaffected and often leads to that kind of patronizing,
saccharine journalism that most women and men rightly abore. And

(07:06):
he said that the wine market has a consumer gap,
not a gender gap. He said, it's not so much
that we need to like capture this niche market of
women or you know, older women, younger women. Whoever, it's
more that different consumers are looking for different things. Because
there's the whole thing about like men wanting to buy
wine according to their fancy pants ratings, whereas women are

(07:28):
maybe more inclined to buy wine that they want to
share with their friends. Yeah, I mean, experts and marketers
have paid a lot of attention to how men and
women shop for wine, and so typically they say that
the way that women select wine has a lot more
to do with the food that's going to go with it,

(07:49):
the setting and what the bottle looks like, rather than
wine credentials like vintage charts and the acquisition process and
ray things that they say that men are more drawn to. Yeah,
I will fully admit here in front of you and
everybody else that I love a good type face on

(08:10):
a bottle of wine. I mean I tend to go
for like Shara's or Sara Like. But I think I've
said this on the podcast before. I can only drink
red wine, Like if I'm out, I can only have
a glass. If I'm at home, I have to be
already in my pajamas sitting down because it will put
me to sleep. But like, there's this bottle of wine
that has a like a luchador mask, a lucha libre
mask on the cover, the cover like it's an album

(08:32):
on the front label, and I just I love that.
It's like getting a happy meal toy as an adult. Well,
while your attraction to certain types of labels definitely meshes
with the research, Caroline, you are not of a stereotype
that women prefer light wines. Women. Supposedly, a woman's wine

(08:53):
is a pinot grigio, whereas a man's wine is a
broad shouldered cabinet. Sally Sally would Sally would agree with
these stereotypes. She she drinks a nice Pinot grig every
night with with ice cubes, with ice cube nice. Well,
that meshes very well. Caroline with this description in wine

(09:16):
business as to what women want in wine, wine business says,
the short answer is something balanced and drinkable, enjoyable, and
easy to deal with, screw the unnecessary complexities. Well, I
found that that piece to be kind of obnoxious. Well, sure,
because it sounds like women will just drink anything. Well,

(09:39):
but it also framed wine drinking in terms of um
like peacekeeping and conflicts and and things like that, which
was very strange and I thought, very pandering. And well,
maybe that's an example of the saccharine journalism that that
Slate writer was calling out, saying, why why all these
metaphors with wine writing if we're not just talk about

(10:00):
some grapes, I know, I mean, yeah, there really is
this movement toward treating women wine drinkers as you know,
we're all like part of this weird airhead brigade, brigade
that doesn't care about the wine itself, you know, or well,
I mean I'm saying, this is someone who buys wine
according to labels. But whatever, whatever. They're treating us all
like you know, we we only care about the name

(10:22):
of the wine itself, or like it's appealing to some
like girly sex in the city culture. Right, It's okay.
So what has happened here is that marketers have taken
the finding, the overwhelming finding that women want, say, something
balanced and drinkable. They want ripe, fruit forward wines without

(10:44):
a lot of tannin and oak as. Okay, well, you
know the way we're gonna sell this is we're going
to almost inflate that to a chick lit proportion because
I feel like you walk through the wine section at
the grocery store or and you could take labels from

(11:04):
these wines that are overtly marketed towards women and slap
them on a beach read and you wouldn't know the
difference because it's lots of pink, lots of stilettos, ponytail
silhouettes with names like Mommy, Juice Made Housewife. And then
to me, the worst, which is this line called B

(11:28):
B E from Treasury Wine estates it's targeting women one
to thirty four, so our demographic, Caroline, this one is
for us and their flavors are flirty, just a pink muscato,
bright a pinot griggio, fresh an unoaky chardonnay, and radiant
a reasoning and then all of the language describing it

(11:51):
is like a page ripped out of Sex in the City.
It's so funny because I've I've had Bright, But I
wasn't aware of any of this that we're just talking about, Like,
I wasn't aware that it was marketed to women, or
that it was supposed to be cute see or anything
like that. I just thought, oh, well, it's just called this.
I don't think I realized how was it? Do you remember?

(12:14):
It was whiny ish, It was very whiny, tasted like wine. Well,
the fact that it was whiny and just tasted like wine,
you know, it didn't really have any distinctive flavor profiles.
It's what a lot of people would argue that it's
actually doing a disservice to women who like wine, because
a lot of these wines marketed two women are just plunk.

(12:36):
It's not very good. It's hyper sweet and not high quality. Yeah,
not just plank. Bloomberg writer Ellen McCoy says that it's
neutered commercial plank so they're really trying to sell you
on those stiletto pictures more than they're trying to sell
you on the what's in the bottle, which you know,
I I've purchased wine before, Like if I'm going to

(12:58):
someone's house and I just you know, I'm not buying
it because it's so fancy and I want to give
them an incredible wine to remember me by. But like,
you know, I went to go stay with my aunt
Savannah one time, and she's the middle Sister, and so
I bought her a bottle of middle Sister wine. Ah,
So like you know, I was like, well, a might
not be any good, or maybe it is, but it's
just but it showed that you were thinking about her.

(13:20):
It was more of a gift in that way. Um.
Another facet of the more recent approach to wine marketing
towards women is how it's not just been a focus
on labels and the titling of things like middle sister,
et cetera, but also in how they're starting to pedal

(13:40):
wine specifically to working moms, as here's your mental health break,
I just need a glass of wine. And I say
it in that voice jokingly, but I do understand the
relaxation of having a glass of wine after work. I
understand where that marketing is coming from, but I don't

(14:05):
know that saying here, women, drink all of this wine,
it's gonna make all of the gender wage gap and
the frustration with the you know, the imbalance of housework
and childcare just magically go away for the next forty
five minutes. Oh god, yeah, no, I've I have totally
come home and popped open my box of wine and

(14:25):
poured myself a triple, quadruple glass. But I mean, this
is not a joke. This is serious. Uh. There are
UK health experts who recently noted that a rise there
was a rise in alcohol related deaths among women in
their thirties and forties, and it's linked to this increase
in wine consumption. Yeah. So in a way, that kind

(14:46):
of marketing, persistent marketing, could be doing us a health
to service in the long run, saying you know what,
it's wine, it's got th same eye accidents. It's going
to give you a mental health break. Just do it.
Just drink it. It doesn't matter the all. You just
drink all of this really sugary stuff and you'll be fine.
Although moderate consumption at a glass and a half of

(15:09):
wine per day has been linked to positive health effects
and women for things like preventing bone loss, as we
read over at MPR. But again, it's all about moderation. Yeah,
I mean, I actually stopped. There was a period. There
was a period where I was going home and like
having a glass of red wine every night. Not that
that's like excessive or bad or terrible or anything by

(15:31):
any means, but it got to where where I was like,
why am I doing this. I'm doing this because I've
I've had like a string of really stressful days at
work or whatever. I just got out of traffic or whatever,
you know, and it's like, well, maybe I should just
try other relaxation methods like a bath, like some yoga,
or just lying on a couch even for a minute
when you get home. Yeah. I just I wonder if

(15:54):
the messages are being mixed in terms of with alcohol
is um and wine. It seems like it's easier for
women too. And I say this in giant air quotes,
get away with it because oh, we're just having We're
just having a glass of wine or two glasses of
wine or three glasses of wine and oh there's the bottle. Yes.

(16:16):
And it's part of this like cultural idea of what
is acceptable and sophisticated and normal and feminine and female
when it comes to like drinking and relaxing. Because if
somebody goes home every nine and downs half a bottle
of vodka, you're like, oh, well you have a problem.

(16:36):
And if someone goes home and drinks a six pack
of beer, it would say, oh, that's so unlady like,
why would you be doing that? Yeah, and you're going
to get a beer good exactly, But there's no we
don't hear about wine bellies, you know. Um, So that
that is something. It's something that I have started to
keep in mind more for myself because I've experienced the

(16:57):
same thing as you, Caroline, of getting into those pattern
of how easy it is to go home have the wine.
And while again in moderation it's not a bad thing,
I'm uncomfortable when I realized that it's so much a
part of my routine. I'm almost reliant on it that
I don't like. And often what you need, and I

(17:19):
mean let's not sound like a broken record here, but
often what you need is like a break when you're stressed,
out like that you need a break, well, I mean,
you know, if I get home from work and after
I've been sitting in traffic or whatever, it's just well,
not just as easy, but it's much healthier to head
down to the gym downstairs in my apartment complex and
get on the you know, the stationary bike for thirty minutes.

(17:41):
That's the same kind of break, but I've exercised instead
of you know, down in a bunch like half a
bottle of wine exactly, and just as one final side note,
rather than just springing always for the two buck chuck.
One thing I am trying to get better at is
learning more about wine and learning how to enjoy wine,

(18:05):
because when you have a glass of really, really really
great wine, you are going to drink it more slowly
and you're gonna savor it, whereas you might if you're
poured a glass of flirty, pink muscato, you're probably just
gonna gulp it down because it might not be so good.

(18:26):
But speaking of taste, getting getting back to this conversation
on men, women and wine, we've established the stereotype of
women preferring the lighter, sweeter wines and men wanting something
bolder and redder. Do men and women taste wine differently?
Are women just drawn to wine because there's something in

(18:47):
our palette working differently than men's. It seems to be. So.
It seems to be that men and women do taste differently.
And I mean, one thing to look at is that
wines than elves are often described as masculine or feminine
in their weight and flavor. Yeah, and for people who

(19:08):
are deeply immersed in wine culture, there is this idea
that women do have a finer palette. For instance, Matt
Kramer of Wine Spectator told at age that women have
more taste buds than men, which makes them inherently better tasters.
And then in another article in Wine Business, it says

(19:30):
as women wine judges, we might be unfairly harsh. We're
quick to dismiss any wine that comes out with sharp elbows,
too much tann and too much acid, or too much
wood and increasingly too much alcohol. So that seems to
be an example of how perhaps our tongues are a
little bit more sensitive to certain flavor profiles. Right, and

(19:52):
sensory psychologist Marcia pell Chat at the monl Chemical Census
Center in Philadelphia backs up some of these taste differences,
she says that women to have more acute senses of smell,
We flat out prefer less carbonation and wine, and we
tend to be more sensitive to bitter flavors, and just
like butterflies and hummingbirds, prefer slightly sweeter wines. But when

(20:15):
Letty Tie, who is a wine calumnist for the Wall
Street Journal, when she sought out an answer to a
scientific answer as to whether men and women women taste
wine differently, and she spoke with a number of smalley,
some of whom were husband and wife couples, to kind
of get that his and hers comparison. Her conclusion was

(20:37):
that when it comes to wine tasting, the palate seems
to be more a product of exposure and training rather
than biological sex. So while there might be some sensory
differences in the male versus a female tongue with the
preference for sweeter wines, for instance, I can understand how

(20:57):
that exposure can change your pre friends, because I remember
in my younger years, in college days, of course, I
wasn't being exposed to many fine wines, and from the
get go I would want something more of like a
sweeter reasoning or a lot of white wines. I hated Marlow.

(21:18):
But now as I've gotten older and I've had more wine,
I drink almost exclusively read and I wanted to be
a richer case. I don't really like sweet all that
much anymore, right, Yeah, And I mean I think the
same could go for any type of thing you are
training yourself to and buy. I mean, you know, it's
the same for beer. I never liked beer when I

(21:41):
was younger, and then when I went to college, not
to like completely give away to my parents when I
started drinking, but when I went away to college, you know,
I'm just drinking the free junk that's in the keg.
And you know, I hated it, and I would try
to drink like, you know, vodka, tonics and stuff like that. Well, like,
as I got older, I really really started to like
better beer. And now I spend way too much money

(22:05):
on beer. And it's funny because I dated this this well,
this jerk, and we were talking about beers one time
and he actually asked me, so, what guy in your
life introduced you to good beer? So after he picked
himself up off the ground, I informed him that I
just developed a palette for better beer as I got older, Yeah,

(22:27):
and it it does make such a difference. And I
also don't want to seem like I'm trying to gang
up on white wines. I've had experiences too of drinking
a better Pinot Griggio and or better chardonnay, and it
does make a difference in it, even though that's not
normally what I spring for tasting it, I get it.
It's delicious, it's buttery, it's light, it's summer, not all that,

(22:52):
but it was still very refreshing. Um And I mentioned
that Letty to you talked with Somalia is both male
and female. And the thing is is that women are
not only making strides in terms of consumption and the
wine industry catching up slowly but surely, and in kind

(23:13):
of roundabout ways to women liking an appreciating wine maybe
in different ways than men do, but we are also
making strides in the actual production of wine. Although women
have been involved in viticulture for a long long time, well,

(23:33):
I mean women may have been involved in viticulture for
a long time, but it's not like we were always
permitted to do some of the uh, you know, heavy lifting,
so to speak. Wine making itself has actually long been
gender segregated. Women have been not only considered bad luck
for the wine, but we've been considered too chatty and
inefficient and weak. Yeah, a lot of times women would

(23:58):
not be allowed to harvest, crush, or stomp the grapes
for fear that our delicate physique would mess things up.
But we were allowed to pick and sort grapes. But
then when it came time to age the wine and
the seller, ladies, you keep out because and I tweeted

(24:18):
this out when I read this in the book Women
of Wine because I found it so hilarious. Some wineries,
even to this day still ban women from being around
fermenting wine because of the long held menstrul myth that
women on their periods can turn wine to vinegar. That's uh,

(24:43):
that's interesting, um, because I feel like I am around
a lot more wine on my period. I don't know
about you. I have a feeling a lot of women
can relate. But that's not to say though, that there
weren't a number of early pioneers. We've on an article
over at the Wine Institute just highlighting some women in

(25:04):
the US and specifically in California who were making wine
and running vineyards in the nineteenth century, such as in
eighteen eighties six we have thirty one year old Josephine
Tyson who founded a California winery, which was pretty unheard
of in the day, and she was actually the first

(25:25):
woman to do so. Not to mention the youngest who
did not note inherited from a family member like a
husband or a father. Yeah, if you go over to
Italy or France. Um, for those really old wine making cultures,
the women who would be involved in the family business,

(25:45):
even if they were next in line to inherit it
a lot of times because of those outdated ideas about
women really not being up to snuff for making wine
would often be pushed to the side and running the vineyard.
But um gradually over time clearly that has changed. And

(26:06):
even in the eighteen nineties I thought this was a
pretty interesting around ten percent of California winemakers were women.
So we headed west and started making wine. And in
the past fifty years there has been a lot of progress,
especially starting in the nineteen sixties, women really began emerging

(26:27):
as prominent winemakers, owning wineries and assuming management positions outside
of those family ties. Yeah, in nineteen seventy three we
have Marianne Graff who becomes the first American woman to
graduate in analogy from a university. And moving forward up
to the nineteen nineties, we see the growth of women
in the ultra premium luxury wine industry. That sounds fancy.

(26:51):
I'm imagining them in totalnecks and blazers with the crests
on them. And don't forget like the elbow pad things. Oh,
some elbow pads. But in all seriousness, in Diane Nurray
became the first woman chairman of the Wine Institute since
it began in ninety four, and the same year Napa Valley,

(27:12):
Vin Nurse and Sonoma County Wineries Association also elected women
board presidents for the first time. And then in the
year two thousand, in the year two thousand, the first
woman was admitted to the world's oldest Bordeaux brotherhood, which
is called the Gerade of Saint Emilian. And that was

(27:32):
actually a really big deal because this brotherhood had been
around for centuries as a man only thing. Going back
to what the author of Women and Wine was talking
about in terms of wine being that longstanding beverage of
men of privilege, and they would have these drinking groups

(27:53):
kind of like if we think about cigar clubs where
you know, men go and like have cigars and expensive
scotch and such, and it would be the wine versions
of that. And finally in two thousand a woman was admitted, Yeah,
it's a shame that all that wine is going to
turn to vinegar. Well, and it's also a shame that
when she was interviewed about it. I don't have her
name in front of me, but when she was interviewed

(28:14):
about it and someone brought up feminism, she was quick
to dismiss it. She was, uh put off at the
idea that it had anything to do with gender equality whatsoever.
So yeah, there's that. Yeah, well, I mean some now nowadays. Nowadays,

(28:35):
in the in the teen year, some of our most
prominent wine writers, importers, and winery owners are women. One
of those is Mary E and Mulligan, who's the president
of Manhattan's prestigious International Wine Center. And in terms of
taste making, small Yais are seeing more and more women
joining their ranks, possibly helped along by the those stereotypes

(29:00):
about women having those finer palettes and also just with
women having more interests and opportunities getting in there because
the somalia Is, I mean to talk about a niche occupation.
Um and Bloomberg reported earlier in that of the prestigious

(29:20):
Institute of Masters of Wine group in London, there are
now eighty seven women among the two hundred and eighties
seven worldwide masters living in twenty three countries, and in
both eleven and twelve there were more new female Masters
of Wine than male, and nowadays more than of Somalia's

(29:41):
or women. Although it hasn't always been an easy climb.
One Mave Pascuera, who's a wine director for several restaurants
in several states, says that it's basically taken women a
generation to work up through the ranks of Somalis because
they just faced such bad attitude. Yeah, she said, many

(30:01):
people used to think that I was just the hostess.
But a lot of people though, who are growing familiar
with women Smalia's working say that they actually prefer sometimes
women to be selecting and suggesting wines for their fine foods,
because they say that women tend to have a more

(30:23):
hospitable approach, which could actually help take some of the
snooty edge off of wine culture. Because I don't know
about you, Caroline, but it is rare that I would
find myself in a restaurant that would have a Smalley
right approach my table, at which point I would say,
I'll have the house read yeah. No. I actually just

(30:45):
had sort of an embarrassing moment the other night. I
was out at dinner, and you know, they're having the
right Okay, obviously I'm not in a restaurant with a
Smalia either, but having the right server to kind of
walk you through, you know, if they know your preferences,
having a right person can make quite a different. It's
because the other night, my boyfriend I had this waiter
who was so like spastic and clearly not really paying

(31:06):
attention to what we were saying. He didn't really care
about us. He had these other big tables that he
was worried about, and he like rushes over and he's like, well,
you know, did you want a glass of wine or something,
or like a bottle? And I was like, well, yeah,
I was considering having a glass, And I mean he
just rushed me through the whole thing, and at the end,
I mean I got this wine that was just so
so I had no idea what I was drinking. And
so it can be nice to have, you know, a

(31:28):
kind uh empathetic, sympathetic person walking you through the wine list, right,
because when you know more about the wine, you appreciate
it more. It probably pairs better with the food, and
it makes the entire experience more pleasant and worth the
sixteen dollars plus that you're spending for that tiny bit
of liquid in that giant glass. I heard these so giant.

(31:52):
I mean, I know why they are, but oh I
like the giant glass. I do too. I'm afraid I'm
going to break them. I do have a set of
really really nice like giant wine glasses that I do
not pour the recommended amount into. Fill it filled on up.
It's like the fish bowl fish bowl glasses a hurricane.
Sometimes you have fish bowl glass kinds of weeks. It

(32:13):
just happens. So that's about it for our conversation on
women and wine. We've looked at wine from the drinking
and sort of taking it back to the making and
the taste making of it. So now we want to
hear from women wine drinkers out there and men wine

(32:34):
drinkers too. Guys, do you like a white wine as
much as a broad shouldered cabernet. I love that description
for some reason, shoulders broad shouldered cabinet um and thoughts
as well on this normalization of not just the drinking
of wine, but the drinking of wine to excess. And
for Europeans listening to do we sound like a couple

(32:57):
of wine crude sitting here be because we're fretting a
little bit over having a glass a day. Well, to
be fair, I'm also calorie counting at the moment, So yeah,
I sometimes I just I put wine with you know, water,
just like well it's it's in its own calorie free category.

(33:18):
So with that, send us your thoughts. Mom Stuff at
Discovery dot com is where you can email us. You
can also message us on Facebook and tweet us at
Mom's Stuff podcast. And we've got a couple of messages
to share with you when we come right back from
a quick break. And now here's some letters. So I

(33:40):
got a couple of letters here in response to our
episode on Women and Negotiation, which was our kickoff to
our special four part series on lean In airing on Fridays,
which you should really check out if you haven't already.
And this first letter is from Rihanna. She writes, I
took a lot of psychology cla us is in college,

(34:00):
and in one of them, the graduate assistant passed out
a photo copied chapter of Women Don't Ask. It was
so eye opening to me that I've kept the chapter
ever since, and I've tried to actively fight my urge
to avoid confrontation and negotiate even though it scares me.
I have conflicting feelings on this, though, because as a millennial,

(34:21):
I've heard constantly over the past several years that I'm entitled, demanding, impatient,
and ambitiously disloyal. So the thought that maybe I just
expect more than I deserve it's kept me from negotiating
as much as I could, because I'm not sure I'm
really worth what I think I am. What do you
think about that conflict? Being a woman who, in perception
and reality probably doesn't know how to ask for what
she wants or deserves, as well as being a millennial

(34:43):
who's perceived as whiny and demanding and unrealistic. How do
we reconcile those two facts or perceptions. I think that
the way to reconcile that is to still follow those
four steps that we outlined in the Negotiation podcast on
how to really understand and evaluate your own worth and

(35:06):
make the approach without coming across as being too entitled
or demanding what you can't. You can't appear like you're
just out for yourself. You know, you have to express
your word not in a dollar figure, but you're worth
in terms of what you have contributed and what you
can contribute over and above um, and then you can

(35:28):
make it about the dollar figure exactly. I think that
making the collaborative approach, as we talked about in the
podcast will probably serve you doubly, not just as a woman,
but as a millennial woman. Yeah, and you know what
I mean, Like, I'm so tired of this millennial stuff,
Like it's just, you know, every older generation thinks the

(35:49):
generations below them are just idiots. So you're already, i
hate to say it, like fighting an uphill battle as
far as stereotypes go of this generation. So all of
uh to say, I mean, I didn't mean to sound
like all negative and jumpy about it, but you know,
all of that to say you kind of even have
to work a little bit harder at the negotiating table

(36:11):
to let them know that you are there for them.
You're there to make the company better. You're there to
you know, do the best job that you possibly can't
and really help them out with your impressive skill set. Um,
you know, so they don't just think you're some college
kid coming to wine to them exactly. So good luck negotiating, Rihanna,
and thanks for writing in. And I have a letter

(36:33):
here from Cat. She says, I'm twenty three years old
and in the second job of my career. With my
first job right after graduating from college, I didn't even
try to negotiate my salary. I wasn't particularly confident in
my skills and was only slightly knowledgeable thanks to my
mom and information from salary dot com about how much
I should expect to make. I pushed back a bit
with my second and current job, but was shut down

(36:55):
almost immediately because of my relatively little amount of experience.
Within the first month, I've already gotten lots of feedback
that I've been doing such a great job and it's
only been getting better. I actually discussed this very topic
with a coworker yesterday and can kind of regret not
pushing back for more money, especially given all the positive
feedback I've been getting. My coworker and I were discussing
how long I should wait, if at all, until I

(37:17):
approach my lead for a potential raise, how to go
about doing it, et cetera. Whenever I decided to pull
the trigger on that deal, I'll definitely be keeping the
points you ladies made in mind, which is awesome. Cat.
I hope you, I wish you the best of luck,
and I hope you keep us posted. Yeah, and thanks
to everyone who's been keeping us posted with your emails.
Mom Stuff at discovery dot com is where you can

(37:39):
send them, and also connecting with us on Facebook and
Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast. You can also follow us
on tumbler stuff Mom Never Told You dot tumbler dot com,
as well as our wonderful Instagram. We are at stuff
Mom Never Told You. And speaking of negotiation and lean in,

(38:00):
don't forget This Friday is the fourth and final chapter
in our series all about Boston US, So tune in
for that and tune in as well to YouTube, where
you can check us out four times a week. YouTube
dot com, slash stuff, Mom Never Told You, and Don't
Forget Do you subscribe for more on this and thousands

(38:24):
of other topics doesn't, how stuffs dot com