F*ck the Patriarchy

In conversation with Bobbi Thomason

A survey of Harvard Business School graduates — ambitious, educated, the ones who were supposed to have figured it out — found that the women expected equal partnerships and the men expected their careers to come first.

The men's expectations were exceeded.

Bobbi Thomason is a professor at Pepperdine's business school, a Stanford-trained engineer, tenured ahead of schedule, and one of the leading researchers in her field on women, work and negotiation. She also moved across the country for her husband's job while studying exactly why women move across the country for their husband's jobs. 

Her conclusion, after fifteen years of research: if you're having the conversation about equality in your marriage, you've probably already lost the battle. The decisions that shape everything — who moves, who steps back, who gets the bigger career — tend to be made before anyone sits down to talk.

This conversation is for anyone who has ever been managed, undermined, talked over or passed over. Which, the data suggests, is most of us — as Bobbi makes clear, this isn't only about women.

Her book, Vows to Ourselves, publishes March 2027 from HarperCollins.

If this conversation meant something to you, share it — it's how the show gets found. And if you'd like to support the work, a paid subscription goes a long way.  Subscribe here

Want more between essays and episodes? Check out Below the Fold — shorter dispatches on the stories worth paying attention to, from the people in my own backyard to the forces reshaping the wider world.

Watch clips and video previews on YouTube 

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

There's this powerful survey that was done of Harvard Business School alumni. So you can consider this population a great sample of ambitious, educated people. And the women in the survey are saying, I expect to be in an equal partnership. And the men were saying, I expect my career to come first. And guess what? The men's expectations were exceeded.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Welcome to All That I Have Met. I'm Meredith. Some researchers study the world from a safe distance. My guest today is not one of them. Dr. Bobby Thompson holds a PhD in management science and engineering from Stanford, a master's in Eastern European Studies from Columbia, and an undergraduate degree in international politics from Georgetown. She's worked in conflict management consulting, was a research associate at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School, and was Cheryl Stamburg's international researcher on both lean-in and option B, as well as a contributor to the Lean-In Foundation. She is now a full professor of applied behavioral science at Pepperdine Pratziadio Business School, tenured ahead of schedule, and published in the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Harvard Business Review, among others. Her work has also been covered by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the Smithsonian. Her book, Bows to Ourselves, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in March 2027. It's a roadmap for the tension at the heart of every woman's working life, that we have more agency than we're given credit for, and that the structures around us are more resistant to change than we're usually told. We're recording this at a moment where everything she has spent her career building feels under threat. And I really wanted to talk to her about that. Bobby, welcome.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Thank you so much, Meredith. I'm delighted to get the chance to chat with you today.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

I'm so glad you can be with me. So I want to start kind of at the beginning of the end of the first chapter of your academic trajectory. You have told me in the past that there was a really sort of formative moment where you took a trip with your aunts the summer before your senior year at Georgetown. And I would love for you just to tell us a bit about that and why it was so influential. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

So my grandmother had migrated to the US after World War II from a German enclave that's called Gauche. And growing up, it had been explained to me as a part of Hungary, Austria-Hungary, as a part of Yugoslavia, as a part of the Habsburg Empire, and as a young woman growing up in a country where borders are pretty stable. Two of them are oceans, right, on either side of the east and west coast. This idea that one place could have all these changing names and borders evolving was always quite evocative to me and frankly confusing. And it was the summer before my senior year of college that my aunts were bringing my grandmother back. She had not been back to the house or the land that she was born on since she was a young child. And serendipitously, I was studying abroad that summer in Paris. I was a rower in college, so studying abroad during the year was a no-no. And so I had the chance to be with them for what was for my aunts, I think, a lifetime in the making, that they had wanted to bring their mom home so that she could see the house and see this town. And it was profoundly emotional. My grandfather had just passed away. My grandmother at the time was in her 80s. And we went to this place that is right on the border of today, what's Slovenia, Italy, and Austria, very rural. And the house that we went first, the house where my grandfather was born, and there was a tree growing through it. So we could not step inside. It was completely abandoned, and Mother Nature was starting to lay her claim to it. And it was really striking that there was this story that I didn't entirely understand, and that the window to understand it was fading rapidly. So I just became obsessed and went home. I, you know, had these days to talk with my grandmother, but still had a lot of questions. I mean, she was six, seven, eight years old while all of this was happening. And as I started reading, I felt like I had more questions than the books gave me answers to. And so I decided that if the book wasn't there that I wanted to read, that I would write it myself. And that led to applying to master's programs and doing masters in Eastern European history, applying for a Fulbright, and then spending a year in Austria, both going to archives, but also speaking to people like my grandmother and going into their homes and kitchen tables and hearing what that time was like for their family. And ultimately, that's the method that many years later I still love as a researcher, sitting down with people and understanding their lives and their experiences.

SPEAKER_00 5:25

Oh, that's really incredible. So after you finished almost by accident, you landed in Boston and you were at a talk given by a woman you now call your career fairy godmother. Who was she and how did that shape you?

SPEAKER_01 5:40

Yes. So I had left the experience of studying this community history, really wanting to understand how people interact, get along, how they tell their stories. And ultimately, it's a story of community that was moved during World War II and this idea of resolving conflict in better ways. So I ended up in conflict management consulting in Boston and was coming to understand the space. And I ended up at a talk at the program on negotiation at Harvard Law School. And I saw a talk by Dr. Hannah Riley Bowles, and she studies gender in negotiation. She is one of the world's leading experts. She was presenting research that complicated this finding that I think many of us have heard that women are less inclined to negotiate. Her research shows that it's not that women aren't negotiating because they are too nervous or they don't know that they should ask. It's actually that women face a different calculus that is more complicated than the calculus that men are facing. And so at the negotiating table, what they are deciding between is I may be able to push and get a bit more economic value, but that might cost me in terms of social value. Will I be liked? And liked is more than some sort of popularity contest at school, right? Being liked is am I going to get hired? Am I going to be on brought on the team? Am I going to be someone that folks want to collaborate with, right? There are lots of consequences of this. And as she was unpacking this idea that like hit in my gut of something that intuitively I felt, but also I had never really had words to explain. To realize, no, this is actually a broader phenomenon. And let me, you know, having the experience of watching someone unpack that scientifically, showing that it was a broader experience and that this is rigorously documented, like light bulbs went off, and it was so emotionally infirming. And I also, at a point in my career where I was figuring out where I wanted to go, really just was so mesmerized by this idea that you could have a question and explore it and then share with the world this thing that needed to be figured out that you figured out. And so for me, that was a moment of going, oh my goodness, this is a career option. How do I sign up? And much to my delight, I emailed Hannah. And I still am just so lucky that she wrote me back because I don't know how I got time on her calendar. But it ended up that she needed a research associate. And so I was able to start working with her. And it really was just one of the most consequential relationships for setting my career on a trajectory. And she's still just someone that is incredibly special to me as a mentor and co-author and someone that I go to for advice today.

SPEAKER_00 9:01

That's an extraordinary story. And I'm just curious like how rare that is, because most people spend years. I mean, I kind of am still figuring out what I'm aligned with. I mean, some people really spend years, decades to figure out, you know, where their path is. And you seem to have really identified this early on from the moment that something really shifted in you on the trip that summer to Eastern Europe. Do you think that's a personality thing? Or was it the people who were around you at the time?

SPEAKER_01 9:34

Well, I actually really, your point about still figuring it out resonates very much, right? In the management literature, there's this concept of job crafting, the idea that, you know, there's a job we have on paper, and then there are the things that we do in our days, and we're all sort of tweaking the tasks we do in a day, the relationships we have and who we're working with, and even just how we think about that work ourselves. So it very much feels like a continued work in progress and new questions arise. But I do think that I had a few things that I knew were really interesting. I knew that I liked that feeling of being that that sort of revving feeling when something is exciting and interesting. And I really found that in business academia, I had this combination of dealing with exploring questions that I thought were interesting and sitting by myself and reading and working them out and writing and then coming together with people and talking them through and pushing ideas further. So while I feel like there are all sorts of puzzles to be continuing figuring out, I also am just grateful that there was a moment of being like, oh, this, I love this, and this is challenging. And I still, it's still challenging. So I feel like I have a lot of work ahead of me.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

So you did your PhD at Stanford in management science and engineering. And when you first told me that, I was like, hmm, that almost sounds counterintuitive for someone doing qualitative research on women. I'm curious how it all came together.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

Yes. So that is a fair question. That as a side note, my father was trained as an engineer. So when I ended up getting my PhD and he knew I was going to Stanford engineering, he was pretty tickled. And I had to remind him that I was probably going to be trained in pretty different engineering skills that he associated. I had some qualifying seminars to do when I got through them. But no, my training is not as a quintessential engineer. But the group that I studied under got formed in the 80s. There were some social scientists, in particular, a sociologist, Stephen Barley, and an organizational psychologist, Bob Sutton, came together. And as Stanford Engineering as a school was building, they made the case to say, as an engineering school, you need to understand not only how do you come up with technical solutions and all those traditional engineering questions you might think of as mechanical and electrical engineers sort out, but you also need to understand what happens to these technologies when they end up in the hands of people? What happens when they're in a team or in an organization? What are the social processes that get unleashed? What are the technical capabilities that do or do not come to fruition based on how they are used? There's this concept in sociology of the social construction of technology, which is to say that no technology is inherently fabulous or terrible or a silver bullet or useless. It's all about how we as people use them and make sense of them. And so this group was founded, the Center for Work Technology and Organizations. They were really founded to look at the social side of technology. A few years later, the woman that came to be my advisor, Dr. Pamela Hines, joined. And her expertise, she has many, but one area is on remote and technologically mediated work. So she will study global teams and distributed teams. And so she had this research project looking at a multinational team that was rolling out a new way of working across the globe. Given my interest in international politics, I was really interested in cross-cultural ways of working and different dimensions of diversity. So I started on this project with her studying how an enterprise software company developed teams that were more agile. Along the way, I got really interested as I was taking gender seminar on this idea that we had a lot of research on the barriers women were facing, less of an understanding of what was happening when women do make it. And I think it's important that we understand the barriers, but it's also consequential, I think, as scholars, when we're working with executives and teaching our students, that we have something to say about what works for a woman. We can't only be talking about the barriers because I think that perpetuates this concept that there's no path forward here. So I developed these tools in how do I research with actual people in actual organizations. And I had also some incredibly supportive and wonderful faculty that said, yeah, female executives, not necessarily the topic we might have expected out of an engineering school, but we see that you have the tools and the interest and the passion and gotha's access to data. And so we will support you.

SPEAKER_00 15:00

So some questions aren't answered statistically, like how do women navigate a system that is working against them? I guess what you're saying is that requires you to watch and listen. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

So my research is what we would call inductive. I go and look at a phenomenon and think, what's going on here? So there are elements of both inductive and deductive work, I believe, in both the classically inductive qualitative work and the classically deductive quantitative work. I mean, life is messy and gray, and the truth is often somewhere fuzzier and harder to classify than we might think. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

So then you went to do a postdoc, which isn't what everybody does. And you chose Wharton rather than Harvard, even though you were offered opportunities of both. And it's a decision in retrospect that really wasn't about the research. And I think this might have been the first crossroads that happened where it really wasn't about the research.

SPEAKER_01 16:11

So I was in the fourth year of my PhD at Stanford. I had my dissertation plan. I was collecting data. At the time, I had just gotten married, and my husband was across the country in New York. And one of my mentors sent me an email saying, you know, I realize that you're doing this cross-country marriage, and Wharton is looking for a postdoc. It might be something to consider. And this was not really the typical career move. I was indeed on a bicoastal marriage, and the thought of being on the same coast was really quite appealing. And as there were options in different places, the factor really became my husband was really pro this job at Wharton. And there were very valid reasons for that. It is a fabulous business school. It was an institution I had not been affiliated with before. So as a young scholar, there were absolutely reasons to go and broaden my network and be back in a business school. But it also was not the opportunity that my heart was most excited about. And it's something I think where you may be going is the way that you know life and research started to mirror one another. But what is striking is Hannah Riley Bowles, who we spoke about earlier, has this concept that she has written about with Dr. Kathleen McGinn, who was her advisor at Harvard Business School. And it's called the two-level game. And it's this idea that when you're at the negotiating table, you're not just having a negotiation between you and your counterpart at the table. You're also having a negotiation with your family in the background, maybe kids, maybe a nanny, maybe extended family or elderly parents that you might be caregiving for. So that second negotiation and a husband or a husband, exactly. That influences how you show up at the negotiating table. And so for me, in this negotiation I was having with my advisor about graduating early from my PhD were shaped around the fact that I was trying to figure out how to make a career work with my husbands. We spent so much time talking about how do we make this work and what are the moments where we can give and take. And it felt like in my mind, I can concede on this one because it's hardly anything to sneeze at. I had this really fantastic opportunity to be at one of the best business schools in the world.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

You once said to me that this period in particular that you were studying work-life balance while living it in perhaps a sub-optimal way. And I find that one highly relatable, but both poignant and really clarifying in a way. Like, what does it feel like to have every theoretical tool at your disposal? And yet it didn't make the reality any less challenging for you.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

There are so many emotions that it evokes. On the one hand, so much of the literature was on the barriers. Part of me said, Oh, yeah, this is how it's supposed to feel. It's really hard. We know that Dr. Pamela Stone, she's a sociologist at Baruch, she has this line where the marriage of professional unequals leads to unequal marriages. So, in many ways, I knew that marrying someone who was accomplished and ambitious would bring challenges. And so, in some ways, the feeling at the time was okay, this is hard. It's supposed to be hard, and I'm going to work this out. This is just what life is. It also, I think, then, and certainly in hindsight, is so embarrassing. If anyone should have been equipped, if anyone should have known the importance of an early career trajectory, the importance of thinking about not just what couples say, but what they do. There's this classic book by Arlie Hockchild, The Second Shift. And one of her main findings is that just because couples say they're gender egalitarian, just because they say both of our careers matter, they often don't do that. I was reading this book and ultimately, you know, understanding these concepts and then failing to live them out in my own life. So it's, you know, both mortifying. And then I think the third emotion is somewhere between frustration and rage, that even with my eyes wide open and more feminist theory in my head than most that I still was doing these mental gymnastics, thinking that part of what mattered and part of what I was supposed to do, and part of what would make me happy and have a meaningful life was to fit a marriage into that. And I think in the process, ended up sacrificing things that I really loved and cared about and was working really hard for and gave them up at an early and precious moment in my professional life.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

I can so relate to that. And I think what's really great about actually having this conversation is that until I got to know you and started reading your work and how Having conversations with you. I didn't talk about it because I felt really embarrassed. I thought it was just a me thing. I didn't realize that this was something other people went through in their relationships and balancing professional ambitions. I want to shift gears for a minute and I want to talk about your book because it's coming out next March. And you've described it as a feminist manifesto, but one that deliberately sits between two poles, most women will recognize as we're talking about. Not lean in harder and not you're stuck for the next 200 years, but really about the tension between those two truths. And can you put into your own words what that tension actually feels like from the inside? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 22:47

I'm so excited to talk about the book. So this book is a feminist manifesto, and it's specifically about women's agency. And I think of agency as how we act based on our own unique ambitions and aspirations. So inherently, it is about letting go of these shoulds that are suffocating so many of us and really figuring out what is it that I want? What is going to bring me energy and life and fulfillment and ambition can be professional. One of my co-authors, Dr. Julia Baer, writes beautifully about something called caregiving ambition. Idea that we do have ambitions to care for children and other family members and elders. Absolutely. And maybe our creative ambition. So I use the word ambition very, I intend it very broadly. And we all have to figure out what it is that we care most about acting on. But I also recognize that this is not a Pollyanna, we can just put our mind to anything. Because I recognize that women find ourselves in at best these imperfect patriarchical structures. And oftentimes downright tragic and terrible situations. Sometimes these are fleeting chapters of our lives, and sometimes they are chronic things that definitely women live with for years or their whole lifetime. And still, even in these imperfect and unjust situations and structures, women find ways to act on their agency, uh, act on their ambitions and find ways to cultivate agency and reclaim their agency even when it's taken away. And so the book looks at both what are those pieces and tools of how do we find agency even in unlikely places. And then the final section of the book looks at the consequences of those choices. Because while the book is not saccharin sweet, and I don't want to gloss over any of the hard pieces of women's lives, I ultimately think it's also a very hopeful book because I believe and the data shows that there are positive ripple effects when women use their agency. And to me, one of the greatest motivators in thinking about when I use my own agency is the idea that, okay, this starts carving a path for the women around me or the women coming after me. And that's really the hope of the book is that it becomes a tool, the broad ripple effects for lots of other women to reclaim their agency.

SPEAKER_00 25:34

How would you define agency? Because it is your default word. And I just want to make sure we're all understanding correctly what it means, what agency actually means.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

Yes. So when I talk about acting on your unique ambitions and aspirations, to me, the word action is really important there. And sometimes agency is a temporary action. It's I use the metaphor of vows throughout the book. So the title is Vows to Ourselves. And I chose the concept of vows because it is that promise to action. And that's what agency is. It's about acting. So I have a dear friend on the partner track who had a health scare and she ended up leaving, being encouraged to leave the partner track. And it really ended up having long-term consequences for her career. I'm sore. And so her vow was to get back on the partner track, make partner, and have a say when other women and other people were coming up the track so that she could guide them in a way that she had not been guided herself. I like that. And she sticks out to me as a case of agency because I do not intend to diminish the pain of what she went through. There were multiple years of her career really being derailed. And it is time and energy that she will not get back.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

But in reclaiming her agency and getting herself back into that position, certainly it matters for her, but it matters for all the other people that are in her organization when she goes and speaks for people that she mentors. The ripple effect is so much bigger than her particular career and title. And I think those ripple effects of agency to me are part of why it's such an important phenomenon to study and talk about and to be able to recognize when we see it around us.

SPEAKER_00 27:38

I also love the title Vows to Ourselves because it's prioritizing your relationship with yourself in ways that as a woman, I think culturally many of us are not raised to prioritize our relationships with ourselves. We are raised to be outward-facing and to support our husbands, our partners, our business colleagues, our children. And that's the measure of being liked, you know, which you talked about in the beginning. Like, am I going to be liked? Am I helpful? Am I collaborative? Am I respectful? And, you know, it's a dual standard. So I really love the title. I can't wait to read the book. I want to talk a little bit about the negotiation research because it weaves in and out about how we negotiate. And I know that you did research with Hannah Riley Bowles and identified three strategies women actually use to get what they need: asking, bending, and shaping. That's a richer map than most people think of. Can you walk me through what they mean and how they work in practice? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 28:47

So this comes out of years of research and hundreds of interview and survey response. And it's a collaboration with Hannah Riley Bowles and Julia Baer, who I mentioned earlier. And we were very much motivated by the fact that we, this is the beauty of qualitative work. There were so many studies on women don't ask and women aren't getting the same outcomes at the negotiating table. But we were teaching and consulting and working in executive programs and seeing these women just crush their negotiations. And so we started talking to, or continued rather, talking to women about their career negotiations, which we define as any career-related problem solving. And so importantly, one thing that came out early in the research is that we're not only talking about salary, we're talking about leadership opportunities, development opportunities, work family balance. I think that's really important because all of those things determine your lifetime earnings, your lifetime career satisfaction. The data Claudia Golden looks at she won the Nobel Prize. She's a Harvard economist. The way that it's really over careers that gender inequality develops. It's not about like, whoops, you didn't negotiate those $5,000 in your first job. This is a compounding problem over time. So the context of how do women negotiate was starting off by looking at the breadth of what women are negotiating. And from that, the first strategy we saw was when women were making a negotiation request within the range of options. So you might think of this as a vending machine, right? Do you want the Twix in B3 or the peanuts in D4? There are options in front of you, and you are simply making the case for why, you know, there are $10,000 worth of leadership development funds available. I would like to use them to attend this program. And you're making the case for the match. As one of my former Wharton students said, that vending machine is not always so transparent. Sometimes that menu or like the in-and-out secret menu where you need to know to ask for a burger animal style in order to make the request. So just because it's formally existed, it's not always transparent. And this is really particularly important for women in underrepresented groups who may be outside of these central networks that have information. Totally. That first strategy is when there is an existing menu and you are simply ordering something off of it. And sometimes that works for women, right? In my own career tenure track, the tenure standards are clear and laid out. I needed to perform at a certain level in my research. I needed to perform in a certain way in my teaching. Other forms of service were also evaluated. And to me, it was really meaningful to make my way through that negotiation so that I could say, yes, I have met these standards and I would like this promotion and this title because it recognizes my work and also gives me protection to continue exploring questions that may be riskier or take longer than some things you could study as an early career academic.

SPEAKER_00 32:19

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 32:20

But of course, it's not only negotiating off of a set menu that women need in their careers. They also sometimes need exceptions, particularly because women, as we've, I think, been discussing in so many parts of our conversation today, do not fit in the archetypes that organizations were made for. There's this concept called the ideal worker, an archetype who is always available for and devoted to their work. And surprise, surprise, that archetype is implicitly male. And so when women come into these jobs where just in terms of hours or ability to travel or willingness and ability to move your family, sometimes the things and the qualifications and attributes expected of promotion do not align with women's lives. And so they may need to say, you know, I would like to take this promotion and I want to talk about how the travel is going to work. I'm going to take this promotion, but you know, I can't move to another city hours and hours away. And these exceptions or workarounds ended up being really important in women's careers.

SPEAKER_00 33:27

I just want to jump in and say something here is that there are plenty of men who have these conversations with no consequences. And having worked as I was a senior managing director at an investment bank, and I was the only woman. And my kids were at boarding school. And if I got a call and had to take a meeting from my car because I had to jump in the car and drive up the looks around the table, yet I was the one spending months at a time in West Africa negotiating energy contracts. You know, so it almost was like if you slip once, if you ask for anyone to bend to you, it's somehow everybody has memory failure about all the other things that you do above and beyond. But if a man said, something's happening at school and I have to jump in the car, everyone would say, Well, what can we do to support you or don't worry about it? That was my experience. And I just really had to get that in there because what you're describing is human issues that make human beings not ideal workers. And somehow it becomes a girl problem. Or am I imagining that in some parallel universe?

SPEAKER_01 34:40

No, you're spot on, Meredith. I, as you're talking, I'm citations are just popping in my mind that back up what you're saying. And one of the things about bending negotiations that was quite interesting to us is that we found that they were primarily about work-life balance. Of course. Sometimes about being an atypical candidate, like, okay, I came up this, you know, the tech field, and I want to apply for this job in finance and I need to make a case by a fit. But primarily bending was about work-life balance. And it was overwhelmingly a strategy used by women and not men. And if we wanted to be cheeky in giving that paper a title, it could have been men don't ask. They just do, right? They just do. There's this power move. Totally. I think sometimes of not negotiating. And it actually inspired an entirely separate study. And Hannah and I are collaborating with a fabulous scholar, Dr. Mark Graubrau in Barcelona. We specifically interviewed dozens of fathers about when they do and don't negotiate.

SPEAKER_00 35:42

When's that coming out? Because sign me up for that. I would read that one.

unknown 35:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:47

So just underlining everything you said. And part to your point that it's human, part of what motivated us is the fact that this is not only bad news for women, this is also bad news for men. So we need to figure out not just how women can negotiate work-life balance, but also how men can. And the third strategy was shaping when women realized that in order to act on their unique vision and their strengths and often to make a claim to leadership, they needed to build something permanent. It wasn't about a workaround for themselves or a one-time exception. It was about fundamentally changing how work is done. And that might be building out a new vertical. It might be ultimately starting a new company. And so what this paper was really in the context of organizations and careers, but more broadly, this asking, bending, shaping, finding is one that I really carry with me in so many situations in life because I'm able to ask myself, okay, is there a formal institutionalized path here that I can get something out of? If no, okay, do I need a bend, right? Is there a one-time exception? Can I tweak this in a way that works for me? And finally, when neither of those are the case, like, okay, so do I need to build something myself? And obviously there are transaction costs and effort.

SPEAKER_00 37:07

That's when the MMs get stuck in the machine, even though you push C3. That's the last one. Like, what's coming out? Because it's not the MMs, but okay. Exactly. I needed to think about it that way.

SPEAKER_01 37:20

I love it.

SPEAKER_00 37:22

All the things popping up in my head. Decidedly more lowbrow than the things popping up in your head. Your research seems to keep finding this uncomfortable truth that women who are competent face a trade-off that men simply don't. The more capable you appear, the less likable in a way you become. Why does it seem to come on the heels of being told how wonderful you are?

SPEAKER_01 37:50

You have just identified so many core concepts from social psychology. You're exactly right. So the first thing you outlined was this trade-off between being nice or being competent. And this is something called the stereotype content model. Psychologists Susan Fisk at Princeton and Amy Cuddy, who spent was her doctoral student, spent many years at Harvard Business School, have, along with a few co-authors, have developed this model called the stereotype content model. And what they find is that when women are rated as more likable, warmer, more focused on others, they are seen as less competent, less capable, less of a go-getter, less agentic. Simultaneously, when women are more competent, they are seen as less warm. Importantly, men don't face this trade-off. You really like that guy that's super smart. You would also like to go get a beer and play golf with him. Amy Cuddy wrote a Harvard Business Review article explaining this concept for a beyond an academic audience. And the title is just because I'm nice, don't assume I'm dumb, which I think brilliantly captures the unfairness and uh and inaccuracy.

SPEAKER_00 39:05

Yeah, I hope the subtitle is just because I'm smart, don't assume I'm not nice. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 39:11

I think you're exactly on point. And part of why this can be so tricky is many reasons, but you identified one of them, which psychologists call benevolent sexism. There's this women are wonderful effect. You know, we're talking on the heels of Mother's Day, which in many ways has become just a bastion of benevolent sexism. It's when we say, oh, moms, you're so great. You, you're the family cheerleader. You hold it all together, you sacrifice everything. You're so kind and intuitive and warm and loving. But no, we will not give you any support or help. And no, I don't think those are skills that we're going to hire you in a job for. And no, that does not give you. We don't think you're smart enough to know what's going on with the family money or translate this into a full-time job after you've been out of a workforce to be so wonderful caring for those kids. So this warmth competence trade-off and the stereotypes that we have, which importantly, stereotypes are not only descriptive describing how things are, stereotypes are prescriptive, telling us how things should be, and proscriptive telling us how things should not be. So these stereotypes about women that seem so lovely, being, you know, nice and warm and caring and loving, those are all great things. Where they become problematic is when it's that women should, they better be warm and loving. And also, you better not be too assertive or too you know pushy bossy, fill in the blank with all these words that get applied in a negative way to women. A difficult woman. Difficult, yes. It's a prime one.

SPEAKER_00 40:59

So your Harvard Business Review piece, stop telling working women they just need an equal partnership at home was a revelation for me. I read that, and my immediate instinct was to send it to my sons. My daughter-in-law has a master's in social work and works with early childhood learning. And my soon-to-be daughter-in-law is a lawyer. So, you know, I have two professional, highly educated daughters-in-law. And I loved this article. Thought it was really important to share and specifically with my sons. Can you talk about this and the enormous reaction you've had since it's been published?

SPEAKER_01 41:41

Yes, that article was inspired by an enormous reaction I had at three o'clock in the morning. It was what As one does. Yeah. As one does. A friend once told me, if it's not a good time, it's a good story. So maybe if it's not a good time, it's a good essay. I was in the midst of my divorce. I was at the time, due to various complexities in my case in Connecticut. I live in California, but Connecticut taking jurisdiction. So I had been in Connecticut for months and trial was not yet scheduled. So I knew that I was going to be in Connecticut for many more months. So I was not sleeping much at all. And it was three in the morning, and I was scrolling through Twitter, and I came across this brilliantly researched piece in the New York Times called The Primal Scream, looking at mothers, working mothers during the pandemic and how the caregiving was falling onto them and that women were drowning. And we saw all sorts of headlines like this during the pandemic. And in the comments on the Times and then in the comments on social media was this chain that I had seen many times before and would see many times since of, you know, why don't women just ask their partner? Women just really need to stand up. Why don't women know what they deserve? And then the nice sprinkling of, I'm so glad I have a 50-50 partner. I really just love my equal partner. I thought to myself, if anyone wants to hear my primal scream, just tell me what my to get a 50-50 partner because damn, I tried really hard and I had these conversations and I thought that's what I was headed for. And look, here I am regularly away from my three-year-old daughter in so much debt and stuck in the tailspin of family court with no sense of when I was getting out. And in sort of a fever pitch, I opened up my laptop and wrote this essay that became the essay you read. I mean, it went viral. Yeah. And I think it really hit a nerve because this, I think, is in many ways this place of intersection between individual and structural solutions. When we just tell women, no, you've got a choice. It's about your action here, overlooking the fact. That so many women go into marriages thinking that they're going to be getting equal marriages. And the data backs us up. There's this powerful survey that was done of Harvard Business School alumni. So you can consider this population a great sample of ambitious, educated people. And the women in the survey are saying, I expect to be in an equal partnership. And the men were saying, I expect my career to come first. And guess what? The men's expectations were exceeded. Even more of their careers came first than they thought. And the women were sorely disappointed. And my point in at the end of the essay after my scream is to come back to this idea of structures that we shape, that we build ourselves. And I think one of the most important structures that women can build themselves is to find the people that lift us up, that offer community. Sometimes that is strategic help that have that knowledge. And also it's just the people that are aligned with us in the vows that we're making, whether that's combining career and family or prioritizing one or the other. But the solution is not telling women that they should be smarter or braver or more feminist by just asking their husband to help more. Because it's just not that simple.

SPEAKER_00 45:21

The ripple effects of what you're describing, you mentioned this when we spoke another time and it stayed with me when one woman uses her agency and what happens to the women around her.

SPEAKER_01 45:32

Yes, I think that given these archetypes and stereotypes that really box women into making choices, one of the things that we can do is set out paths and precedents, whether that's in our organization or in our friend circle. So if I'll use my own life, one exception that I ended up negotiating was to go up for full professor early. After I made tenure, I realized in going through the credentials and making the case, I felt like I had not only met the standard of tenure, but I met this next promotion. I decided to go up early for full professor. It didn't earn me more money, but I wanted that recognition of the fact that I had performed at a very high level as I filled up forms and word got around. I actually had a senior colleague invite me for a conversation. And in the course of that conversation, say, you know, it might be seen as boastful that you're doing this. And I said, Well, I think it would be really helpful if you would write a letter in support. And she declined. And so I had this really tough moment of saying, Oh my goodness, I know this, I know the science and I haven't always lived it so well. So, like, is this not worth the trade-off?

SPEAKER_00 46:51

The trade-off of being successful or being liked. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 46:56

So if everyone thinks that I'm a boastful pain in the neck, is that really worth the recognition? Is that going to make my life here harder? Or maybe there's something else I'm going to care about more down the road? And I'll have developed a, you know, reputation as you said it before, difficult woman, right? And I ended up asking a friend, like, what should I do? And she said, Bobby, what would you tell your students to do? And that made it very clear that I would tell them to advocate for themselves, but also to do so based on science. And this is again why I call Hannah my career fairy godmother. Another piece of research that she did looks at something called relational accounts, which is that when women are advocating for themselves, these very risky moves, they need to be clear that what they are asking for would benefit the collective and also that it is based on some sort of external valid standard. So I ended up talking about why do I care about being in this more senior role? How can I better serve my institution and my field? That was one part. But the second part was showing the standard. And so I went and made a table of all the publications of the full professors and how I stand up and by saying, I'm still on the high end at this level, which is a bit of an awkward undertaking, but it worked. I got the promotion to full professor. And to come back to the point of Ripple Effects, the following year, two of my female colleagues, who are fabulous scholars, went up before the 15-year mark. And I was so delighted to write letters for them. And I want to be very clear that they did the work in the course of their careers. But importantly, they didn't have someone saying, No one has done this, you're going to seem boastful. They had the precedent of I had done this the year before. So amazing. That's what I mean by uh a ripple effect. Sometimes there are a few people around you.

SPEAKER_00 48:57

Can make all the difference in the world.

SPEAKER_01 48:59

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 49:00

You have tenure now. Congratulations. Thank you. On your promotion. But more than that, you've built this wonderful infrastructure around you, which you call the Wab Mop. I would love you to talk about it and how it all started.

SPEAKER_01 49:15

Well, I love talking about the Wob Mob. And they're a perfect follow-up to this idea of ripple effects because really I have built a piece of our existence, but it was very much standing on the shoulders of giants. So about a decade ago, a faculty member Katie DeCellis started this Facebook group for female management professors and created, I just think one of the most magical constructive corners of the internet where female management professors come together, can share information, ask each other advice. It's become this really beautiful online community. In 2021, one of the members had a book deadline and wanted some social accountability to meet it. So she posted saying, I have this deadline and I would love some company who would write with me. I'm gonna make a public promise. I'm gonna write every morning this week. I ended up joining. This was also back when I was reading about the primal scream. And we work in Pomodoros, which are 25 minutes of work. So we are video off, muted, just doing our writing. And Dolly Chug started these writing sessions as she's a professor at NYU Stern. And she framed it as whatever needs focus. Right. So focus could have been a shower, a walk, do your dishes, or your writing. So she set this very inclusive come as you are tone from the very beginning. So I started joining as I was in the midst of my divorce, feeling incredibly not in control. I just wanted a community that I could be a professional in because at this point, my I was on the opposite coast from my job. I had cried in front of pretty much every colleague. I just wanted to be a functioning professor that got things done. Ironically, that whole just being a professional thing did not last very long because over those hours of writing, the five-minute breaks were the magic. We would ask each other for advice. Do you know a paper or a scale that I could use or a I'm going up for 10 years? What did you do about your letters? Or I've got a colleague. How would you navigate this situation? My daughter has been crashing those five-minute Zoom breaks since she was three years old. So they have watched her grow up. These women really became just such supportive. It was quintessential matriarchy where everyone's looking out for the most vulnerable. We just want to make sure things get done. It doesn't matter who's taking credit for it. And it is all about first the children and then the collective. So I started writing with this group when I was in Connecticut. Once my divorce was over and I was back home with my daughter in California, I continued to sign on and write with them. These women were, gosh, I still remember the first morning after the decision that my daughter and I would be able to return home to California, you know, talking to them on a break and all of us crying together. I still remember signing on the first time when I was home at this very kitchen table with them. And it was very clear to this idea of after a shock, we can reevaluate what's most important. That after this really hard chapter, I just needed more of the good things. I was burnt out on conflict and stress. And this was something good. And I wanted more of this good thing. It was productive and getting my work done, but also really fun and just curious and constructive. And so on a whim one morning, someone had said, like, gosh, I need more of than two hours of this group in my day. And I said, Well, come right in Malibu. I met Pepperdine that day and called up our conference center and reserved a block of rooms and sent them an email that afternoon saying, Save the day. And that year, 30 women came. Oh wow. We are coming up on our, we'll have our fifth annual writing retreat this next February.

SPEAKER_00 53:25

Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 53:26

We still see each other most mornings and during the week. Not everyone signs up on the same time, but there is a consistency in that group. And for me, even just that time to be with them during the year, something that fills my battery and really sustains me until the next time we see each other at a conference or until the next time they come to Malibu, the writing and the retreating is just as important. So it is focused time to do our work. As academics, we I think share this commitment that we came into this field because we had questions we wanted to answer and then things that we wanted to say and write, but also the retreating is equally important that we have time being in a professional space that is collaborative instead of competitive. And so it's been of all of the infrastructure that I've built, they're one that's really, really important to me.

SPEAKER_00 54:20

That's amazing and a great takeaway for all of us thinking about building community around ourselves. Another gear shift. You wrote for MIT Sloan Management Review in 2023 that business leaders need to stop the semantic gymnastics around the word woke and just do the work. That was almost three years ago. Given what's happened since DI gutted executive orders, the rollback in institutions you and I both care a lot about, does the argument still hold? What does a leader actually do now?

SPEAKER_01 54:59

This is a horribly scary time for anyone that cares about diversity, equity, and inclusion. One of the things that worries me as I watch this space, not just as a scholar, but I see what's happening in organizations, is that there are not only formal explicit attacks. So academia, for example, has come under attack by the Trump administration, but we're also seeing various organizations have this preemptive complicitness about women's leadership programs being cut or anything having to do with diversity programs and podcasts that are just ending before there was even an attack. And so, in many ways, like wow, I wish we were still arguing about the semantic gymnastics. I think we're at a point now where the threats are so much more explicit and fundamental. I've been saying gender and other underrepresented groups in this role of stereotypes, the task is to prove that these stereotypes are not constraining us. But I think now we're all dealing with something much more profound about remembering our own moral compasses and human dignity that we expect our neighbors and fellow citizens and colleagues to be treated with. So we need to be careful of muffling out the noises suddenly.

SPEAKER_00 56:32

Your book makes the argument that we need to stop trying to fix ourselves and start understanding the architecture we're actually in. In this political moment, I'm assuming that feels more urgent.

SPEAKER_01 56:47

It does. It feels urgent. It also feels overwhelming because so much of my book is looking at okay, there's an impossible structure, but let's work within it and find your own corner. But I mean, I think my brain is going to the ice raids right now. The whole problem was that people couldn't find their corners and were are are being detained. And one solution that I find really beautiful and inspiring is the city of Minneapolis. And absolutely from what I've read and heard, that was a matriarchy. That was the, you know, wine moms got used as a derogatory term, but I'm gonna use it with all awe and admiration. That was wine moms sitting in coffee shops with their phones and their apps, keeping an eye out. And if something was up, it was not about getting credit, it was not about being the boss, it was about making sure that person was safe and mobilizing for the collective. I mean, the challenge feels so immense, family weighty and immense. It feels so high stakes. I think that the you know corners of hope that I see are matriarchical. Let's think about how do we protect the people who are most vulnerable and not be worrying about who's in charge or who's getting credit for it.

SPEAKER_00 58:22

Before we wrap up, I really just have to ask you about the trad wife aesthetic, which you describe to me very precisely as not your mother or your grandmother, but something far more calculated. It seems to be having this cultural moment, and I'm wondering, what do you make of it?

SPEAKER_01 58:41

There's so much to say. One in the context of agency, part of why it just pains me so much is that it is the place where I think is dangerous, is where women are being able to present as triad wives on social media, buoyed by financial support and in fact not actually being trad wives because they are making a lot of money having a career, and yet promoting this content to their followers, advising women to make choices and trade-offs that will make them vulnerable in a way that the woman with millions of followers saying to get happiness for making sourdough, she's got some leverage and trade-offs that followers are not. And so I really worry about women being sold a false promise in a way that they would be giving up agency. So that bothers me. But I think there have been some interesting cracks in that trad wife persona.

SPEAKER_00 59:45

And one that I was gonna say myth, but yeah, you're being more gracious. The trad wife myth. Yes, myth one that I'm following.

SPEAKER_01 59:54

I am absolutely absorbed in the secret lives of Mormon wives.

SPEAKER_00 59:58

And they too. Okay, full disclosure, me too. It's unbelievable.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:04

The complexity, the contradictions, and what I love about it is that's women's agency. It is messy and full of contradictions, but these women that came in many ways, this side hustle of making videos with their mom friends that presented you know, some of them as trad wives, let's say season one. Now these women, they are some of them are separating and divorcing, they are the family breadwinners. And even the women that are not leaving their marriages have voice to request dynamics in their family where their spouses are moving for their opportunities or leaving the paid workforce to care for their kids. Absolutely. Even just in, I don't know, in the most recent season, when the dads get into talking about dad talk, that the women remind them, you are surfing on our coattails. And so what I hope is happening, I hope we are at a moment of realizing that this trad wife facade, which was so, so hot, is not actually a thing. And even in Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, this last season, right? There's a quote where I think it was Jesse said, We're not trad wives, we're breadwinners. And so my hope on the trad wife thing is that it caught everyone's attention. And actually, what we're realizing is that that is a chance to see female breadwinners and all the messy complications and opportunities and challenges that come with it.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:35

Vows to Ourselves comes out next March from HarperCollins. Bobby, I really hope you'll come back when it's out and we can speak again. Thank you so much. It's been a genuine pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:47

This has been such a delight. Thank you so much, Meredith. I look forward to continuing the conversation next spring.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:54

Okay, I think we're done. Thanks to Dax and the team at Speech Docs for the sound editing and Ilia Kuznetsov for the music. If you found value in this conversation or in any of my writing, a paid subscription is the best way to support my work. Just go to all thatihave.substack.com or click the link in the show notes. Finally, please share this episode or leave a rating on Apple Podcasts for Spotify. It makes a real difference to how the show gets discovered. See you in a few weeks.