#35 Women, Work, and Power: Inside Patriarchy, Inc. with Cordelia Fine

In this episode, Senthil speaks with Professor Cordelia Fine about women in the workplace and the ideas behind her new book Patriarchy, Inc. They explore how gender norms, power, and status shape modern work, why the “business case” for gender equality can fall short, and what real workplace reform could look like.

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Transcript

Senthil (00:12)
I'm your host, Senthil. Today, we are talking about women in the workplace. Joining me is Professor Cordelia Fine. Cordelia is an acclaimed writer and scholar of science in the history and philosophy of science program at the University of Melbourne. Cordelia is known for her sharp, witty critiques of popular ideas about brains, evolution, gender, and diversity. And her book, Delusions of Gender and Testosterone Rex are widely prized and have won many awards

and accolades. She was named a living legend of research by The Australian newspaper and awarded the Edinburgh Medal for her contributions to public debates about gender equality. I sat with her today to discuss some of the ideas from her most recent and fascinating book, Patriarchy, Inc., which was listed in the Financial Times, What to Read in 2025, the nonfiction category, and Best Summer Books for 2025 in the business category.

Cordelia, great to have you with us today.

Cordelia Fine (01:14)
thank you so much for having me on the podcast.

Senthil (01:18)
Lovely. I just work a few blocks from your office, but I got to know about your work.

from ⁓ Naomi Cahn and June Carbone two exemplary scholars. who have shown a lot of admiration about this scholar called Cordelia So I went and started doing research, then I started following your work. And in preparation for this interview, I got an opportunity to read your latest book, what a contributions you're making to the society and the discussions on gender.

Cordelia Fine (01:42)
Well, that's wonderful to hear because as you'll know, I feature their work in my book. ⁓ Their scholarship is a really fantastic contribution as well to understanding why it is that despite the sort of rise of women in terms of educational achievement, they haven't made the gains that one might hoped that they would have in the corporate domain. I, you know, I'm...

a real admirer of their work and found it extremely helpful for my own. yes, I love the connection, but that's how you find out about my work.

Senthil (02:14)
That's awesome. Tell me what experience or moments in your career set you on the path to the work you do today?

Cordelia Fine (02:21)
Well, going many, many years back.

I didn't work in the area of gender at all. My PhD was on the parts of the brain involved in emotional processing. And then after my PhD, I was doing work in moral philosophy and moral psychology. And the way that I found myself catapulted into the domain of sex differences in the brain and behavior was actually because of an experience parenting. I had my children are grown now, but when they were young, I read a lot of parenting books, sort of typical academic, like let's research how to do this.

and one of the books that I read

was saying that boys should be treated differently to girls, parented in very different ways because of the sort of fundamental differences between the brains of males and females. And I was quite curious about this because I'd studied the brain. I did my PhD at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. People weren't really talking about sex differences in the brain. But when I looked at the studies that were being cited as support for these claims, I was really shocked at the disconnect between.

what the studies actually could tell us and what the popular writers were claiming. And then I looked and there were these books for managers, for people in relationship books, all these different kinds of books, all drawing in very, very suspect ways. It's just very bad popular science.

claiming that the new neuroimaging technologies told us, you know, everything we already always suspected a lot, but many women were fundamentally different. And I thought, well, this isn't right. So that's when I wrote Delusions of Gender, which is my second book. And I should just add, you know, given the nature of this podcast is that there are...

There are some, I say, some diversity consultants who are very careful, based on the evidence, you know, very cautious about the way they talk about differences. But there are some diversity consultants who are partaking some of the most egregious gender stereotyping that I've seen in my career. And it's really very unhelpful and very scientifically inaccurate. anyway, to return to your question, that's what really

brought me into the domain and I've found it quite fascinating and here I am still. ⁓

Senthil (04:38)
That's interesting. tell us what is Partriarchy Inc

Cordelia Fine (04:43)
Yes, so I'm using the term, there lots of different ways of defining patriarchy. I'm just using a very simple definition that psychologists in particular often use to refer to a kind of hierarchy of status and power over resources. So it's a situation in which men collectively enjoy higher status in society and have more power over resources. And by patriarchy, Inc, I'm really referring to the sort of various cultural, economic and social

factors

that shape the gendered division of labor in our contemporary post-industrial societies or in ways that help to, are both kind of cause and consequence of this gender hierarchy or to put it even more simply, I refer to patriarchy inc as the sort of gender dynamics of who does what work in our societies and what they get in return.

Senthil (05:37)
Interesting. Such a serious topic, but the sense of humor that runs through the book is simply amazing. You are such a gifted writer. I think very few writers I've seen who handle such a serious topic, with that humor running all through the book. So just wanted to highlight that.

Cordelia Fine (05:41)
Hahaha

Senthil (05:55)
And I think I read this in your book or your speech in King's College London. You have said, one reason I wrote the book was to prevent gender equality from becoming dead dogma rather than a living belief. What prompted that concern? Because I work in the nonprofit sector. There's a lot I hear about gender equality So when I read this, I felt a sense of disbelief.

Cordelia Fine (06:19)
Yes, so I think what really troubled me was that gender equality has become one of those things that everyone believes in. So everyone kind of thinks that gender equality is a good thing. And of course, that's a relatively recent situation. You know, wasn't quite so long ago in, you know, places like Australia or the UK where

you know, it was just taken for granted that men should be in charge, for example, and they were sort of superior, superior version of the species. But there's just so much disagreement, we don't really interrogate what it is that we actually mean by gender equality. And in patriarchy, Inc, I kind of take aim at two different visions of gender equality that I see as really

diverting us from the important path of fixing those gender dynamics that, you that I refer to as patriarchy inc So one is

this what I call the different but equal perspective, which is the idea that, yeah, we have gender gaps in wages and wealth and leadership positions. And then we have gender imbalances and certain kinds of industries and occupations, but it's not anything we should worry about. These arrangements are quite fair and they reflect evolved natural differences between males and females that were sort of genetically set.

you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago. And so we, you know, in terms of workplace or work, this isn't really a gender equality problem to fix. We already have gender equality. And then on the other side, the kind of main opponent to that.

is what I call the business case DEI or diversity, equality and inclusion, which is really focused not on what the original goal of diversity was or equality as it used to be called equality and affirmative action, which was of course to create more socially just societies and recognizing the central role of work in creating greater social justice for women and other marginalized groups, but instead focusing on the benefits to businesses

or to the economy of including women in the workplace. So this mantra, gender equality isn't just the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do. And my worry there is that there's sort of progressively been a bit of a reframing of this original problem, which was gender inequality and injustices has been reframed as the problem of how do we extract more value or profit from women's labor. And

depending on how familiar people are with these kinds of spaces, they might think, well, look, people just have to be pragmatic and it's important that businesses can't go bust solving problems of social justice, et cetera And I do recognize the appeal of business case arguments that they have their place, et cetera. But I just want to give you an example. And this was actually since my book was published of

you know, just where we've gone in this dialogue. This was ⁓ something called, there's an organization called the Diversity Project in the UK, which is around trying to create greater diversity in the financial and investment sector. And they recently published a piece of research, which was, you know, basically looking at, you know, what makes for

good decision making within teams, what kinds of dimensions of diversity really matter. And not only was it sort of really de-emphasizing the role of demographic diversity, because in fact, you know, the data on that are.

pretty unclear, there's a sort of decisive case. But really saying, making the claim that diversity was always about just creating teams that could make better decisions that could make us more profit. That was, you know, we got distracted by all this justice stuff. It was always just about the business case. And it's like, no, that's, that's what businesses that should, you know, we should take it for granted that businesses should be trying to, you know, create teams that are making good decisions.

That is not the same thing as workplaces actually striving to create genuinely equal opportunities and rewarding people fairly and playing the role that they need to play in solving this very complex problem of gender inequality and of course other forms of inequality too. to me that was a very interesting example of just how far that business case narrative has taken us.

Senthil (10:45)
Let's talk about the different but equal perspective ⁓ So one of the ideas you strongly disagreed on your book is the innate sex differences lead men and women to do different roles. Could you talk a bit of the evolutionary perspective in simple language for common audience? What is that evolutionary story? Why do we start believing that men and women are set to do different things and how it is affecting their career opportunities at modern workplaces today?

Cordelia Fine (11:14)
Yes, so one of the things that I wanted to do in the book was, you know, this is the differences between men and women, we're fascinated with it. And scientifically, it is a really fascinating question. And we often think about there being two competing camps. One is the kind of

the idea that we've evolved to have differences and those differences are sort of built into us through our biology, so through our genes and through our hormones that create different brains, that create different kinds of personalities. And then there's a non-evolutionary story that ignores the fact that like all other animals, we are also evolved. And that just focuses on how gender is socially created.

And what I wanted to bring out in the book is that actually there's a ⁓ flourishing scientific program that is interested in the key role of culture for our species in our evolutionary history. So this idea that to an extent that no other species comes close to

We rely on culture, rely on cooperation, and we rely on social learning to solve the problems of survival and reproduction. So what I point to in the book is this way of thinking about the division of labor as a of culturally evolved adaptation, know, back in.

history, deep history, it would have been efficient to divide labor by sex, even if those divisions were completely arbitrary, either physically or psychologically, though of course some divisions will make sense and because of the physical differences between males and females and the reproductive differences. And then the idea is that because that's beneficial,

that will be inherited, becomes part of the sort cultural inheritance of a group and it kind of ratchets on over time. And of course, as species, we are social learners, our psychologies are set up in ways that we acquire norms, we acquire identities that are intrinsically motivating and so on. And so in a sense, there's this really nice match between people who've been studying gender,

the social processes of gender, the way that gender norms influence our sense of ourselves, influence the interactions that we have with each other and are embedded into our institutions. And this isn't a kind of side story. And then there's also this sort of other evolutionary story going on. We can actually see them as all part of this.

sense of understanding of ourselves as deeply cultural creatures and for whom cultural adaptations, cultural traits like norms, practices, organisational forms, identities are actually part of our evolved inheritance. So that's one side of things. And then the other side of it is to actually just look at the empirical evidence in terms of just the sheer diversity of arrangements in terms of how we divide labour.

using sex categories to divide labor seems to be universal across human societies, but we have an explanation for that. kind of, you know, it's a very salient difference. Every, every population is going to have roughly equal numbers, et cetera.

But the way that that labor is divided is very flexible. It's sometimes counterintuitive and it's often very arbitrary. Then when we also look at the psychological traits of many women across time and place, we also see an immense amount of diversity pointing to just a great deal of flexibility in how we develop. So how the culture and environment around us shapes our development.

So this puts all this diversity puts a lot of strain on a kind of traditional evolutionary psychology story that our gender divisions of labor, even in our kind of post-industrial societies, which of course are quite far removed from a sort of hunter gatherer ancestral past, are a kind of genetic legacy of, you know, earlier evolution. The argument I make in the book is that actually when you look at the diversity that we see on the record and the arbitrary patterns and so on.

⁓ this kind of cultural explanation offers us a much better explanation of what actually is going on.

Senthil (15:39)
And I'm sure you did extensive research on the prevailing status of women in workplaces. I'd like to hear what did your research say. And I also seen recurrently that you are very unhappy with finance sector, and to some extent tech. I'm also keen to know why did you pick those two sectors?

Cordelia Fine (15:54)
Hahaha

Right. Anyone from the finance or tech sectors listening? It's not personal. It's not personal. Yeah, so status. One of the things I, you know, thank you for mentioning the humor in the book. One of the things that I also try to avoid is the sort of words that maybe, you know, we don't always enjoy hearing like, you know, privilege and things like that. But status is a really

core concept and I think when we're trying to understand gender inequality and status refers to the sort of esteem or honour or respect that's associated with people, groups and positions and you know once you develop culturally shared beliefs that men are more status worthy than women or you know whether it's other groups talking about white people versus racial minorities for example

it can be very self-perpetuating. So one reason is that these status beliefs can give rise to conscious or unconscious behaviors that exclude members of lower status groups, so discrimination, backlash, various forms of sexual or racial harassment. But another important way that these status hierarchies remain ⁓ and perpetuate is because

higher status groups also tend to have more power and so they can ensure that the way that resources and respect are distributed are in ways that tend to favor them, their attributes, what they do, their activities and their life patterns. And as a result, they just tend to have an easier time making claims on organizational resources. So, you know,

we get clues of the sort of gender dynamics of that in various ways. So, you one example is the work of economists showing that as a occupation becomes more female dominated, you know, even holding other important things equal, the wages tend to decrease, it becomes sort of lower in prestige and pay, for example.

or they can be kind of more micro level studies. So there's one really interesting study that I talk about in the book that was looking at the relationship between performance evaluation and bonuses. And what they found was that overall men would tend to get bonuses that were much larger than women's and weren't certainly weren't explained by how they were performing in their evaluations.

But this was particularly exacerbated first when measuring performance was quite subjective. So that allowed sort of much more room for buyers to creep in, but also when the leadership of the organizations was very male dominated. So there's this close link between being male and status. And in the few organizations that were actually female dominated in terms of the leadership, there was actually the reverse. saw the women like reaping, the higher, higher bonuses, even when their performance didn't merit it. So this was a kind of nice micro

example of how, you know, you know, not necessarily with any intention of bias, just being in an environment where status is associated with masculinity, or in rarer cases with, with femininity, being female, is just kind of shaping who's seen as, you know, rewarding, most meriting, you know, the most generous bonuses, the highest pay, and so on.

Now, the reason that I focused on finance and tech was that to me, are interesting illustrations of the way that there are these dynamics in our economies that when opportunities blossom, it tends to be higher status groups who flood in.

Okay, and finance and tech are really good examples of that. So one of the things that I talk about in the book was the way that

computer science, for example, didn't start off as a kind of masculine coded occupation. It was in many often seen as being quite suitable for females and often described in, you know, it's very routine work. just requires people who are conscientious. It's like embroidery because it's, you know, requires all these patients, et cetera. And of course, it's a fairly complex story, but to simplify it, it's as computer science began to sort of the opportunities started to rise. That's when it, you know, this masculinized

process began and the women started to be crowded out. There's another, I didn't talk about this in the book, but there's another really interesting example of this that comes from Australian science. So this is a work by historian Jane Carey who studied women in Australian science and discovered somewhat to a surprise that women actually used to be very well represented prior to

sort of in the pre-war era and it was actually only when science became something that was seen as being not just sort of an interesting hobby but something that became professionalized, something that was useful and that was valuable, that was when the men began to crowd in and the women were kind of pushed out. So again a really interesting story of the way in which as an occupation starts to gain status, gain opportunities to

acquire wealth, then it starts to be kind of become created in the image of the most powerful groups in society. know, finance has, dreadful statistics when it comes to the marginalization of women in leadership positions.

you know, major institute, financial institutions, banks, et cetera. And I don't think it's a coincidence that, some of the best salaries and opportunities come from that sector.

Senthil (21:43)
I get the gender dynamics, but the other way to look at the same problem is power dynamics, you've subtly touched upon, which cuts across many ways, people can discriminate based on race or migration status. Did you explore the other dimensions as well, or it's purely a gender-based lens?

Cordelia Fine (22:02)
Yeah, that's a really great question. So I was focusing on gender and one of the reasons for that is that of course those particular dynamics

in some sense have ⁓ a commonality across the many different countries that I was interested in looking at. So it's not specifically looking at Australia or the US or any particular country in Europe. And I think to do a sort of decent job, for example, of looking at racial hierarchies, you know, I don't know how helpful it is to look at those in a very homogenous way, but there, you know, there are examples through the book where

always these hierarchy, gender hierarchies are always intersecting with in particular racial hierarchies and hierarchies of class. So of course, the experience, there's no sort of singular experience of being a woman.

And in terms of how women are doing in the workplace, it's the white middle-class professional women are doing the best, and it's the immigrant women or women ⁓ who have less education who are doing the worst. And even when it comes to caring responsibilities, those differences are quite different. So for example, for professional women, it will be the norm of the ideal worker who is working really long hours and constantly available. That will create difficulties

for women who are in heterosexual households where gender norms mean that she's more likely to sort pick up the slack at home, whereas for women in, for example, casual work

with the sort of pushing of the risk of supply and demand onto workers with sort of, know, irregular schedules or, you know, just in time scheduling that creates these sort of horrific clashes between caring responsibilities and getting to work, not to mention lower wages that make it harder to, outsource any form of childcare. So, know, throughout the book, there are different examples of ways that these play out differently depending on, you know,

all women are the same, all men are the same, have these sort of intersecting categories. yeah, the idea is we have both kind of what are called diffuse status categories. So these are ones that are of culturally educated across society. So

status categories around gender, race and class, for example, or ability and disability. But then we also have our kind of local status hierarchies that for within our organization. So, you know, my organization, that would be, you know, we have clear hierarchies in terms of the academic staff, and then we have our, you know, our executive and our, our senior leadership, etc. And what I'm trying to explain in the book is that, of course, it's not, you know, people aren't just looking at gender, they're looking at

they're looking at status is infused into lots of the different identities that we belong to. But what you start to see is that when you have, for example, a position where the people who hold those kinds of positions tend to belong to members of culturally lower status groups, whether that's to do with gender, race, education, or a combination of those things, those groups, all else being equal, are going to have a harder case.

making a claim on organisational resources. And so, you one of the really interesting quantitative studies that I looked at was looking at this sort of inequality between production workers and managers. So you can look at, know, what's the average wage of the production worker? What's the average wage of the manager? And you can look at the inequality between that.

And what this particular research found was that, know, even holding, controlling for things like education and experience, when production workers tend to be female dominated or in Australia, I believe it was tend to be sort of native English speakers. ⁓

there tends to be this larger inequality between the production workers and the managers, or if the managers tend to be, you know, white, native English speaking males, then there tends to be this higher inequality. So it's an example of how there can be a lot of variation among workplaces, and the way in which the kind of status and the

the recognition and the rewards that particular groups of people will get within an organization is kind of going to be subtly shaped by, who's doing that job. So it moves away from that sort of hope of the economists that employers and the mechanisms of supply and demand will ensure that people are getting kind of a fair wage for their contributions to the organization. This is showing how this kind of cross cutting of

the kind of local status hierarchies and the sort of broader cultural hierarchies are shaping who gets what in return for their labor.

Senthil (27:01)
Is patriarchy inc relevant to workplaces only in developed or OECD countries or it's applicable across? Because when I was reading some of the examples you have cited, I saw an inclination towards developed economies. Just wanted to clarify that.

Cordelia Fine (27:18)
Yes, I did. I was focusing on those economies. And the reason is that those are the places where people are saying, we're done. We've we fixed this. We fixed this problem now. And I think probably to some extent.

I'm not sure if this is the case, but my sense is this is where we're hearing a lot of the business case DEI So the sort of two targets that I had for the book, the business case DEI and the different but equal, I see as being very dominant across the sort of OECD countries. So that's why I was sort of focused on those data. Yeah.

Senthil (27:57)
That's great, very clear, thank you.

You have not been kind at all for this idea of DEI, but many believe that DEI is a path to equity, whereas your argument seems that it works against its own goals. I'm keen to understand what led you to this conclusion.

Cordelia Fine (28:16)
So one thing I think it's important to do, and I do this in the book, is I kind of distinguish between what we might call small D diversity, small E equality, and small I inclusion as principles, which I'm 110 % in favor of, versus how they can manifest in

organizations, so capital D, capital E, capital I, and in particular, focusing on this kind of business case narrative. So I think, you know, I acknowledge that the way that organizations go about diversity and their diversity initiatives can be, can be very varied. I think there are some organizations that are doing really good things. And I am aware of examples of that.

But I was sort of really paying attention to, as I said, the sort of business case narrative and the kinds of diversity initiatives that I think are, that we tend to see falling out of that business case DEI. So as I said, my concern with business case DEI is that it's reframing this problem of gender inequality.

as a problem of not extracting enough value from women's labor. And of course, we can extend that to other marginalized groups such as racial or ethnic minorities or the LGBT community. For example, you see these kind of business case arguments there as well. And I think because of this reframing, it's sort of reframing it as we're not recognizing or fully utilizing female labor.

Diversity initiatives tend to focus on individuals, so we might have leadership or development programs to try and help women lean in or be better about showing off their skills and their expertise or to develop it. We might have, we create flexible work policies so that women can kind of fit in full-time work around caring responsibilities or we bring employers in and give them anti-bias training or we set gender targets.

or we focus on gender representation in top management teams because we've read consultancy reports that suggest that when we do that, we'll sort of somehow magically start to make more profits. And, you know, the issue with that is that, as I try and explain in the book, so these inequalities tend to be embedded much more deeply and

these kind of initiatives aren't going to be enough to really fix the problem. So for example, you know, leadership and development programs, first of all, there's relatively little evidence that they actually work.

They can foster resentment and divisiveness because the men can be like, how come the women get to go to the scene and we don't? ⁓ But they also don't address things like what's been called the motherhood penalty in job quality. So that's where this is work from the Global Institute of Women's Leadership at King's showing that mothers tend to be in jobs that are less well paid, have less opportunities for promotion or training or, you know, and worse, worse conditions. You can create flexible work policies, but unless

do what is actually very difficult hard work of reforming these norms around having ideal workers, you're really going to kind of end up sort of channeling people who perhaps take up those flexible work policies sort of channeling them into lower status ⁓ tracks.

or just enabling people. Hee Jung Chung, who is the director of the Global Institute of Women's Leadership, describes this as flexibility is enabling, facilitating self-exploitation among a professional worker. So it gives us the flexibility to work everywhere all of the time. We can encourage managers to sort of...

better value traditionally feminine traits and abilities like empathy and collaboration and teamwork.

But again, first of all, this is kind of stereotyping. It's a bit insulting to men. Men are capable of empathy, collaboration and teamwork. But also if you don't actually change what gets rewarded in your organization, is it the team workers and the capacity builders and the facilitators that actually get rewarded in advance or is it the sort of ruthless self-promoting types who get rewarded? You can't just sort of pay lip service to feminine

⁓

without actually doing the work of making sure that those qualities do actually get recognized and rewarded. And of course, focusing on having women in leadership positions. One thing that's really interesting about this from an academic point of view is this is a way in which the business case values have sort of permeated academia too, in terms of what we study, what we think is interesting to study. There's a lot of research trying to look at whether having, you know, gender diversity on top management

management teams does enhance profit or performance or innovation, relatively little research looking at to what extent it actually helps other women in the organization and same with racial diversity. ⁓ And, know, simply putting women or a racial minority in a group in the top management team isn't necessarily going to have trickle down effects in terms of, you know, helping

you know, the immigrant worker who's on a zero hour contract cleaning, for example, or the part time workers who are in low paid work with, you know, non negotiable pay and few prospects for training or promotion. So yeah, I just think the business case, DEI has really taken off the table.

sort of deeper of the kind of deeper reforms we really need, while at the same time, perhaps creating the false impression that simply by appealing to the self interest and economic interests of managers and key decision makers will get the job of gender equality done. And I think that's really quite overly optimistic.

Senthil (34:10)
Ideas such as motherhood penalty on one side. But on the other side, there are ideas like reverse discrimination. think one of the statistics I read in your book about one in two Australian men feel that this is getting too much. Talk us through what's really happening there. How are men feeling?

Cordelia Fine (34:29)
Yeah, so when you look at the data on sort of gender attitudes, as you say, you're getting with Australia, UK, I look what's happened in the US. There's obviously a lot of resentment and a lot of feeling that men are being discriminated against.

So one thing we have to recognise is there is a lot of variation in how men and women are being treated across kind of different industries and occupations. So for example, one of the studies that I looked at was looking at gender bias in apprenticeships across a range of different industries. Now there wasn't a single industry that was biased against men.

And there were some particularly male dominated ones like construction where there was a very severe bias against female applicants to apprenticeships. I don't think you would see a sort of similar level of bias in sort of intake, know, entry level jobs in certain kind of corporate sectors. But I think the larger, point here is that

When you're thinking about diversity initiatives, think there have been initiatives that the evidence suggests are not particularly effective, or there isn't good evidence that they are effective, but at the same time can be a bit divisive. know, anti-bias training, there's a lot of research suggesting...

just dragging people in, giving them mandatory training, and then sending them out again is not effective, but it makes people feel like they're being told that they're biased and they're prejudiced. You know, these leadership and development programs, again, there's not much evidence that they're actually effective. And it makes it feel like women are getting special treatment. And on the other hand, there are kind of things that you can do that are going to be particularly beneficial to

perhaps to women or people with caring responsibilities who tend to be women, but that are not sort of singling out women for a particular focus. So it might be something, know, flexible work would be one kind of example, but actually creating norms where flexible work becomes ⁓ actually acceptable. Or to give you an example that I heard about since writing the book, this was an IT

professional services actually in Australia. And this is not a gender thing or a diversity thing, but they kind of explain to their clients before they come on board, say, look, our consultants will work really, really hard for you during business hours, but they're not available at evenings and they're not available at weekends. And, you know, they provide a really excellent service. They're not getting burnt out. They're not delivering, kind of doing a lot of unnecessary busy work, but they're,

creating that boundary around the consultants time, and they're explaining that to the clients. Now that's kind of beneficial for everyone. It's probably kind of make it easier for women to do really well in that organization. But it's not a sort of singling out of women for gender targets or for, you know, for special training or anything like that. So I think

when there's going to be a change in status and power, there's always going to be backlash and hostility and resentment. You're just not going to be able to avoid that. But there are probably ways of creating positive change and creating more genuinely equal opportunities that are both more effective and less divisive.

Senthil (37:53)
I was also reading a recent statistic that say more women graduate out of college now in many parts of the world. Even in schools, girls outsmart boys in their academic scores. What is leading to these changes? What would you attribute this to?

Cordelia Fine (38:07)
Yeah.

⁓ yeah, that's a great question. And I, I feel like I'm probably not very well equipped to answer it. We need like a historian of education to give a really, a really solid answer to that. But I think one thing that it's probably worth saying is that, you know, gender norms harm everyone. So they, they undermine everyone's ability to sort of

pursue things that are important to pursue, including education. And I think that people who look at the way that gender norms play out in schools find that there's a lot of, can be very, just as there are variation in organization, there's variation among schools in, for instance, how much...

being a good student, kind of diligent student being interested in studies is coded as being like a girly thing, know, like you're a girly swat if you actually want to learn and pay attention and do well. And I think schools allow that kind of gender norm, sort of feminine stigmatizing of learning and education, allow that to proliferate are really doing boys a very...

grave injustice. I don't think there's any intrinsic reason that there should be fewer young men going on to tertiary education. it is something that needs to be fixed. At the same time, we should also be aware that there are the better paid trades, plumbing, being an electrician, et cetera.

at the top of this manual labour, at the top of the best paid jobs in the manual labour sector, those are male dominated. So it is still possible to not get a college degree and still earn a decent wage. Though of course, you know...

I don't know what the data are like in Australia, but of course in the US we do know that non-college educated men, you know, they're really doing very, very poorly. And, you know, it's hard to promote equality for everyone where you've got a group that is, you know, really falling backwards.

Senthil (40:18)
Another question, again, you may not be an expert in this, but because you said, you your transition to this area of work started from your parenting experience. So I ask you as a parent, I have a son and daughter at home, and your work touches on culture a lot. As parents, what are one or two simple things we could do in our own households, to ensure that kids learn from their childhood about some of the biases and the things

Cordelia Fine (40:44)
⁓ yeah, great. So again, I also don't feel like I'm a parenting expert, ⁓ despite how wonderfully my children have turned out. I can't really take credit for that. ⁓ Yes. Well, I think, I think so things like, I mean, children do watch what's happening, of course, in their household. So they, they do see who is

caring for them or doing the domestic labor and I guess whose paid work is getting priorities and things like that. I think children are very, just from a very early age, from the earliest age, they're picking up correlations between gender categories and other categories.

But at the same, so, you know, I guess it's for each parent or all parents to decide for themselves the kind of gender related values that they want to impart to their children. So it's really not for me to, I guess, to tell people how to raise their other, how to raise their children. But.

I think the other thing to say is that we also have to recognize that parents can also only do so much. And so sometimes people will say, ⁓ you know, I did everything to try and raise my children in gender neutral way, but they still kind of conform to gender stereotypes. And we do need to recognize that parents aren't the only source of information about gender in their children's lives. Children live in hugely gendered cultures, of toys, games, media.

As soon as they go to kindergarten, they start to be exposed to gender stereotypes. This is just a little example, but I remember when one of my son's kindergartens used to have a dress-up day and there was ⁓ a little girl at the kindergarten and she went to the dress-up day as, I can't remember, like as a pirate or something like that.

and all the other girls were dressed up as princesses and she was the only girl who was dressed up as a pirate and of course I noticed that the next dress-up day they had, you know, she was a princess too so she could see like

this is how girls dress and children are very, you know, they're very sensitive. Once they get this sense of, I'm a girl, I'm a boy, they are very sensitive to what it means in our culture to be a girl or a boy. you know, parents can be alert to that, but there's only, in some sense, there's only so much you can do. We live in a very gendered culture, so we can't take up all the burden ourselves of sort of de-gendering our children's lives. I guess we can just give them the language and the concepts to notice it

them.

Senthil (43:20)
If you are advising a CEO today, what is the single highest leverage structural reform to make workplaces fairer?

Cordelia Fine (43:29)
Ooh.

It's hard to give that sort generic advice because I do think there is so much variation in organizations. For some, might be really long hours, greedy jobs that demand constant availability, that are over delivering, for example. For others, it might be that you have

you know, casual workers who don't have control over their schedules. And that's, you know, creating, you know, terrible clashes between, you know, getting to work and caring for children or the pay is so low that families are having to work really long hours or work a third job just to just to survive.

others might have one of the things that I talk about and this comes apart from the work of June Carbone and others, this pay for performance schemes which can create terrible inequalities and all sorts of exacerbate in-group biases, for example.

I think my answer is that there probably isn't a single answer. And that's maybe part of the problem is that organizations tend to sort of just bring in kind of off the shelf solutions like diversity training or things like that, without really taking a close look at their organization and thinking about how and where are these inequalities being generated? work isn't being properly recognized and what can we do about it?

That's a very unhelpful, very unhelpful vague answer, isn't it? But it's hard to pull out one single thing because I think there is so much variation in organizations. And some organizations are probably doing pretty well.

Senthil (45:11)
Okay, now we got a few minutes left. This is the final section. I call it as how I did it. So I ask all my guests three standard questions, So first question, how did you manage differences of opinion at your work, particularly the area you work, I think you'll face disagreements almost every corner. How do you manage them?

Cordelia Fine (45:31)
well, this is, yes, it's a very controversial area. And way I deal with it is just to do what academics are trained to do and paid to do, which is to focus on evidence and arguments and leave personal attacks or speculations just out of the picture.

So, you know, in my book, I didn't want to just preach to the converted. I wanted to prevent, present evidence and arguments to people who are pretty skeptical, who might belong to the kind of different but equal camp, for example, or think the business case is the right way to go. So that's how I do it. I think academics have not.

always been or not always very good at that. There can be a lot of like, you just hold that belief because of your political values or because you're on the other side because you're a bigot or sexist. I don't find that very helpful. think academics just really need to focus on evidence and arguments and also recognize that there are legitimate differences of opinion. Like these are complex issues. And, you know, when it comes to, for example, objections to a particular diversity initiative.

yes, the sexist and the bigots are going to be against it, but not everyone who's against it is necessarily against it because they're a sexist or a bigot. They might have really legitimate reasons for thinking that this isn't a good idea. it would be, yeah, I think it's really important to try and listen to other people's point of view without making assumptions about, you know, sort of, you know, evil motives that might be driving their, driving their opinions.

So yeah, that's what I try to do. And I think that's sort of what I try and teach my students how to do in the classroom when we talk about these issues. know, present them with the best case for both sides and leave it up to them to decide. And it's a really useful skill because we need diversity of opinion to get to good answers to try and seek the truth.

Senthil (47:34)
The second question, this may sound redundant. What is the key skill that's required for business leaders today? So the earlier question was about your scope of work, but this question is more broadly. If I work in the business space, what is the skill you recommend that leaders must have?

Cordelia Fine (47:53)
I'm going to call it moral muscle and there's a term that comes from

someone called Mary Gentile who has developed this extraordinary business ethics curriculum called Giving Voice to Values. You might be familiar with it. And basically what she wanted to do was she tells this story wonderfully. She talks about how she was teaching ethics in top business school and feeling that it was an exercise in hypocrisy because there are all these sort of corporate scandals. She felt like it was just window dressing.

What she wanted to do was develop something that was not about kind of, you know, the usual ethical frameworks, but starting from a different point that people experience these conflicts between their own ethical values, responsibility, fairness, compassion, et cetera. They can see something going on in their organization that doesn't seem fair, that's not taking responsibility, that's not honest, whatever it might be.

Once you know what the right thing to do is, once you think you know what the right thing to do is, how do you get it done? And it's a really great curriculum for thinking through.

How would I get this done? What would I say to whom? What information do I need? How do I do it? What kind of approach do I take? Do I need allies, etc. And then, know, scripting, practicing, strategizing, and she calls us, you know, developing moral muscle, we'll, you know, we can role play what we might say. And then it means when we're in the moment, or the time comes, you know, we're ready to say, you know, to take action to try and reform our organizations, to make them.

more ethical. And when I was teaching business ethics or ethical leadership at the Melbourne Business School, I would teach this as, you know, had sort of more theoretically based stuff, but I was also teach this very practical stuff. And the students found it really helpful. So these were often executive or senior executive leaders.

being, you sometimes being on an MBA, it's just an opportunity to have a break from your work to get away. And they would often use their own situations and use this curriculum to work through it to think about what's at stake for whom, what their strategy might be, who they need to talk to, you know, what the series of events might be, and to really sort of think about what pushback they would be likely to get and how they would respond to those objections. It's very, very practical.

It's a really nice system. I use it myself sometimes. I found it quite effective. So yeah, I think that's a very, very important skill for leaders who might often see something in their organization that they think needs to needs to change. And it's just a really practical set of skills and ideas for

thinking about how you might implement that change effectively and safely, because these things always come at a risk to oneself, of course. And part of it is thinking about how likely am I to succeed? What are the risks? And then making a decision about, you know, whether you you would go ahead or not, because it's a sense of fear and futility that I think that stops people from speaking up like.

I'm not going to be as futile, I'm not going to change anything and I'm going to alienate my, I'm to be alienated or even lose my job. So this is a way of trying to combat those two factors that tend to prevent people from speaking up and doing something.

Senthil (51:08)
One book you recommend to our listeners.

Cordelia Fine (51:11)
I am going to recommend a book that I read recently called Empire of Pain, The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe. I came onto it because I was teaching a course on bad science and I became really interested in the opioid crisis and the Sackler family, as many people listening will know, are the owners of Purdue Pharma.

that created and aggressively marketed the opioid pain medication Oxycontin. And Empire of Pain is the sort of story of the Sacklers. It goes right back to sort of earlier generation, but it tells the story of their role in sort of creating Purdue pharmaceuticals and how they responded during that sort of growing opioid crisis. Fascinating book.

reads kind of like a crime novel, a real page turner, ⁓ impeccably researched. It's a really extraordinary and very fine piece of work, so really recommend it.

Senthil (52:14)
Thank you, that sounds great. Cordelia, what a pleasure and honor talking to you today and deep dive into your work and get exposed to some of the new ideas which shook some of my own assumptions about gender at work they say that a great book should leave you as a changed person when you end it and your book definitely did that and I'm keenly looking forward to continue reading your work and follow your work. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Cordelia Fine (52:42)
thank

you, that's very generous. was a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you.

Senthil (52:46)
Excellent. That was Cordelia Fine sharing insights on her amazing new book, Patriarchy, Inc. You have been listening to Business and Society podcast where we explore diverse ideas about business and society with leading thinkers and practitioners. If you enjoyed this conversation, please follow or subscribe wherever you listen and share it with someone interested in the intersection of business, purpose and impact. Thanks for listening and see you next time.