The Cost of Ambition and the Myth of “Making It”

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There’s an expectation on women that we should be constantly striving to “have it all.” But as the pandemic laid bare, “having it all” usually just means “doing it all,” and doing it all…just doesn’t work. 

Samhita Mukhopadhyay, former Executive Editor of Teen Vogue and author of The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning, joins me this week for an honest conversation about where we go from here—and what type of reckoning our workplaces and family lives face as women respond to structures that no longer make (never made?) sense.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• Life Coaches episode with Elizabeth Wallace

• The Cut essay by Grazie Sophia Christie

• Having It All by Helen Gurley Brown

• The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

• Harvard Business Review piece on the myth of having it all

• Chani Nicholas careers

• Renée Rouleau’s 100% founder-owned skincare company

• “Off Days” Substack

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Katie:

A few months ago, we had Elizabeth Wallace, a life coach on The Money with Katie Show, and okay, correction, she’s my coach, so I am biased. But she shared a sentiment about the type of client that she likes to work with.

Elizabeth:

They’ve been doing everything right. So really, really driven women who have done all the things right? They’ve gotten the grades, they’ve gotten the job, the promotion, they have this good salary and a good title. They bought the house, all of those check boxes, and they’re like, I’m doing it, but my insides are screaming. It looks like I’m doing it. I should be checking the boxes. So why do I feel like…

Katie:

That is to say, from the outside looking in, you have it all. But if your day-to-day experience of life feels unsustainable or joyless, where do you go from there?

Welcome back to The Money with Katie Show, Rich People. I’m your host, Katie Gatti Tassin. And today I am joined by author Samhita Mukhopadhyay to discuss her new book, the Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning.

Samhita is the former executive editor of Teen Vogue and Feministing, and the current editorial director at Meteor. Her book just came out yesterday, so we’ll link it in the show notes in it. She writes about a particularly discordant time in her life. She says, “I was at the apex of my career, but I was dissociated from the reality of my actual life.” The bigger question this brought to mind for me, Katie, was we choosing to work in a way that leaves little time for family, friends, hobbies, even a good meal? What if we actually don’t need as much as we think we do? And what if there are entire subsets of our budget that we could do without?

Now obviously there are vast swaths of people hustling between multiple jobs who are not doing so because they have a penant for luxury goods or there are like hyper ambitious because that’s just what it takes to make ends meet. But sometimes this broader, widely accepted explanation for why Americans work so much (see also, paper thin social safety net) is co-opted by portions of the labor force that really don’t need to be approaching their lives and careers in this way. They’re simply choosing to hashtag grindset, baby. And sure, sometimes that choice doesn’t feel real in any sense of the word. I do think that it’s worthwhile to acknowledge the fact that your choice in a manufactured set of options is maybe not really a choice.

But you might be thinking, yeah, Katie, I’m choosing to work my ass off, but it’s because I want to get ahead. I want to make it. And today, Samhita and I are going to discuss what making it really means because as she says, I was shocked to learn that those in my life who look like they have it all were either unhappy, stressed, anxious, or in constant fear of things falling apart.

So I’m not sure if you’ve read the viral The Cut essay from Grazie Sophia Christie that was essentially a case for marrying a rich guy who’s older than you. It was widely trolled. And while I broadly disagree with the ideas presented in 90% of the word count, there was one particularly haunting paragraph that feels apt here. It’s a little long, but I think it highlights something that we are going to be circling in today’s conversation.

“When we decided we wanted to be equal to men, we got on men’s time, we worked when they worked, retired when they retired, had to squeeze pregnancy, children, menopause somewhere impossibly in the margins. I have a friend in her late twenties who wears a mood ring these days. It is often read flickering in the air like a siren. When she explains her predicament to me, she has raised her fair share of same age boyfriends she has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them too. At last, she’s beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood rather soon compromising. Inevitably, her original one, the same age partner equally unsettled in his career will take only the minimum time off she guesses or else pay some costs, which will come back to bite her. Everything unfailingly does if she freezes her eggs to buy time, the decision and its logistics will burden her singly and perhaps it will not work. Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window, and it’s a perfect miserable circle by midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued. It is a telling cliche that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time exactly for leisure ease liberty. There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the fifties was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation. They didn’t plan. It’s not that our efforts to have it all were faded for failure. They simply weren’t imaginative enough.”

Alright, keep in mind this paragraph is nestled within an essay that effectively advises surrendering your own personhood and self-discovery to achieve leisure as a rich man’s wife in your twenties. So not great, but I read that paragraph and I went, she’s got a point and then I ducked and covered. But what she did well, I think was articulate the impossibility of the modern bill of goods that many women, and I’ll say people more broadly, have been sold this reality that “having it all” often just means doing it all. The solution is not less progress, it’s not regression, but it does open the door to a conversation about whether or not what we’re all doing, what we’ve kind of collectively decided is the status quo, is it really working? And that’s what I wanted to discuss with Samhita today…right after this quick break.

Samhita, welcome to The Money with Katie Show. I really appreciate you taking the time for this conversation during book launch season.

Samhita:

I’m excited to have this conversation.

Katie:

I want to start today with my personal favorite discourse, the girlbosses. I was hoping we could girlboss a little bit. I am pretty sure I know what the audience thinks we’re about to say. And so I would prefer that we go down a different path that I think is more interesting because, in the year of our Lord 2024, every media outlet under the sun has now declared that the girlboss is dead. And I think that we are all well aware now of its shortcomings and its limitations as a sweeping political statement or ethos.

But you write about how there’s something maybe a little bit elitist about the anti-girlboss rhetoric. I knew firsthand that many young women, especially the ones who were less privileged, needed to believe they could get ahead in order to do so. And I found this to be a refreshing and also just original take on this topic that has mostly devolved, at least in what I’ve seen, and honestly participated in kind of the open mocking of female ambition. And so I would love to hear more about how you got there.

Samhita:

So when the kind of girlboss takedowns were happening, I think mid 2020, it really started and it coincided with what I think was a fairly necessary reckoning around power and the workplace. And it didn’t feel wholly unfair. I mean, you had a series of investigations into toxic work environments, and I thought that was fair, but the way that it was becoming meme’d and the way that we were relishing at the take down, it almost became this cottage industry of girlboss companies. And something about it just felt uncomfortable to me, and I had to really sit with that and investigate it because I felt like it was really easy. Of course, if you’re talking about a toxic boss or you’re talking about an equitable workplace, of course those are issues that should be brought to the surface and people that should be held accountable.

But when you’re talking about a young woman who is invested in her own ambition, invested in her own career and is earnest about it, it felt like it was mocking a kind of type of try hard ambition. And it was something that I had kind of seen firsthand when I worked at Teen Vogue, where a lot of the young women, both that I worked with and both that would come to our events and were deeply invested and ambitious about what they wanted. I mean, they wanted more from their life and they wanted more than the life that they had been given and the opportunities that they had been given. And it was really this opportunity and this narrative that, and many of them, many of the young women, especially young women of color I talked to, felt like they were left out of these girl boss narratives because there was this assumption that it was just wealthy white women.

And so I think that that’s really where I started to think about how it was this opportunity to kind of mock female ambition. And that’s something we just love to do. If we don’t catch ourselves, we’ll just do that, right? And so it felt like just the enthusiasm with which we were relishing in the downfall of these women. And the truth is, I’m sure some of them were deeply toxic. I’m sure some of them were in the wrong place at the wrong time and made mistakes.

But how many male entrepreneurs have made similar mistakes? How many have created toxic environments? I mean, being a toxic, challenging, hardworking leader is part of the ethos of entrepreneurship. And so it did kind of feel like also that women were being criticized for something that was completely normalized with men. And I agree with the idea that we should just be criticizing toxic leadership writ large. I don’t think that, I’m not like, oh, but if men can do it, why can’t women also be inequitable in the workplace?

Katie:

Why can’t we also be terrible?

Samhita:

Finally, the equality we’ve been waiting for.

So I agree with that, but it just felt like the consequences were so much more dire for women. That was really where I was coming from. And while understanding that some of the grievances were very legitimate, they’re documented, there were inequities that were flourishing in the workplace, but also a lot of those environments create that kind of culture. In order for you to be a successful entrepreneur, to be able to even raise money in the first place, it’s expected that you are one of those talents that is uncompromising on your vision, as we say in astrology. There’s a shadow side to all of that. And that’s what we were really seeing fixation on.

Katie:

Totally. Yeah. They kind of became these avatars for, oh, see, this is what happens when you let these silly girls get a little bit of taste of success. Look how bad they are at this. We should actually go backward instead, I think is kind of the, I’ll say subtext of some of it.

And yeah, I mean I really enjoyed reading your perspective on that as well as kind of the broader commentaries about how we will get to this, but how rather than turning to the workplace itself and going, huh, well, what is it actually about the way that these things are structured and the culture in corporate America writ large that might be creating some of these dynamics or very conducive to these dynamics, we’re actually going to focus in and make an example out of a few specific people and go, well, they just didn’t have it. We got to get Audrey Gelman out of here because she’s clearly problematic, but we aren’t really examining or taking that more critical lens to, as your title suggests, the myth of making it overall and what’s really required to do that.

You also had a lot of fun feminist history in the book, and I really enjoyed the evolution of feminist thought that you took us on. So you actually, I believe, read this Helen Gurley Brown book that we always kind of poke fun at, “Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money, Even if You’re Starting with Nothing”, this 1982 hit, which I thought was absolutely wild, I was like, wow, she actually read it. I make fun of this book a lot. I’ve never actually sat down and read this book. So I guess before I ask you anything about some of that history, any thoughts on Having It All?

Samhita:

Yeah, the book? Yeah, it was interesting because the thing that I think people really miss about Having It All is Helen Gurley Brown didn’t have children. And so the way that we understand Having It All today is work, love, family, body, all of those things. And at the time she was kind of like, you can have money. You can be an ambitious woman and be fun and flirty and sexy. And I felt like that was such a revelation, and it was so funny to hear it from someone who was literally 60. It was the saucy auntie kind book. I could see why it cut through the noise. It’s really refreshing. And one thing she said in an interview, which I write in the book, is she was speaking to a class of women that a lot of the feminist literature at the time wasn’t reaching, which was the pink collar labor. Women that didn’t necessarily go to college that were working in secretarial positions and were financial earners for their families, but they were single, they were young, they were kind of city girls.

And a lot of feminist theory at the time was a little bit more kind of college educated women that were having these broader intellectual discussions about gender disparity in some instances, which I know I talk about in the book, but I found that to be really interesting. I kind of saw her as this entry into a type of pop culture feminism where today it’s really easy to write it off and be like, that’s so clearly outdated.

But when you look at it in the context of everything else that was happening and who was actually speaking to the mainstream working woman, it is actually quite progressive for its time. And so I found that to be really interesting. And then the piece around childcare where she almost has a hostile relationship to motherhood in one interview, she says, it makes you fat or something. It’s such a funny note, and I found that irreverence to be really funny and kind of missed in how we talk about having it all today, which is really used as this cudgel a rhetorical cudgel for women to be like, well, you can have it all if you do it all. And that’s not necessarily what she was talking about.

Katie:

Yeah, yeah. It sounds like you were almost kind of charmed by our problematic queen. You’re like, oh, go off, say that terrible thing.

But you’re right. At the time that was progressive, that was more than 40 years ago. And at the time it is kind of amazing in that respect how far we’ve come in such a relatively short amount of time. You also include a Betty Friedan quote from the Feminine Mystique and the fact that that was the book and the way of thinking, the philosophy that set the tone for what the mainstream American feminist movement of the sixties and seventies would become, which is basically we need to liberate the housewife from the oppression of the nuclear family and we need to encourage her to join the workforce. And you write about how she called this the problem that has no name, and that how the kind of secret that was undergirding much of American society at the time was that a lot of these housewives were actually quite miserable in their role as wife and mother.

And you include this quote from Betty Friedan’s book: “As she made the beds shopped for groceries, matched slip cover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask herself the silent question, is this all?” And I was actually kind of struck reading that in the context of a book about the myth of making it and kind of this strident careerism, because I think we today actually kind of ask silently ask that same question of our careers in a lot of ways, and our relationship with things like work and money can take on this same sort of frenetic and self-sacrificial kind of martyr adjacent tenor. Do you think that that’s an apt parallel or do you see that too?

Samhita:

I think that’s such a smart insight that I hadn’t even thought about when I wrote the book. One of the things that I’m really grappling with throughout the book is, and using really my own experience of I had this big job sitting front row fashion week on Instagram. I have the dream life, but inside I’m miserable. I’m unhealthy, I’m unhappy. I’m not sleeping enough, I’m not eating. All of these things were happening in my life behind the scenes. I had caretaking responsibilities that were really hard to manage with my quote glamorous fashion editor job.

And I think that one of the things that we often feel uncomfortable being honest about is that we worked really hard to work even harder and then not necessarily find that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that we thought that if we worked really hard, we would get to a place where we would find the stability and the happiness and the creative control over our careers.

And many of us haven’t found that. And I think that that’s something that a lot of women are grappling with right now in terms of just, and that’s why it’s called a workplace reckoning. It really is this, we were sold a false bill of goods about what working ourselves literally to death, health problems, mental health issues, body issues, so many things that have come from us participating in hustle culture and being so self-sacrificial in our work. And if I am twice as good as the man next to me, so I have to work twice as hard as the man next to me, right? With half the support. That’s the moment we’re at right now. And I think there’s a fear because we don’t want to lose the ground that we’ve made.

Katie:

100%.

Samhita:

We don’t want to say, oh, we got too ambitious, we did too much. It’s like, no, the solution isn’t that I go back to the kitchen.

Katie:

Yeah, the tradwives are waiting in the wings like, “Say it! Say it!”

Samhita:

Right? I mean, I think that’s a really good example because I think that is a response to the failed promise.

Katie:

100%.

Samhita:

It is so shortsighted. And at the same time, if you look at it in a sociological perspective, it’s like, yeah, if you thought that you could have a child and work full time and be a career person and get educated and be a great wife, if that was what your vision of what your future was going to look like, I can understand turning your back on that and being like, that’s actually terrible. And so to me, it feels like this kind of pendulum swing reaction. And then I also feel like it’s one of those things that not a lot of people are doing, but it gets a lot of attention because everyone’s like, see, women want to be in the kitchen. And you’re like, okay, that’s not…

Katie:

We’ll get right back to it after a quick break.

I do think that what we’re hitting on here, you kind of talk about how there is still to this day a bit of a subconscious, but pretty pernicious belief that women don’t need to work to support themselves and their families the way that men do, and that women are choosing to work out of a desire for fulfillment. And so if they’re doing it just for fulfillment and not because they actually have to the way that the men do in that way, if we are kind of accepting that to be true again at this kind of subconscious level, that progress then creates this sort of impossible situation.

And to your point, it feels dangerous to acknowledge that maybe there actually are some that we have not yet figured out. For example, you write about this idea of trickle down feminism, which is a phrase that I just think that is incredible, but it’s this idea that if middle class women or I would actually probably be more specific and say, upper middle class women are going to enter the workforce, that means that poorer women and often women of color become the de-facto domestic care workers that allow these other women to have careers.

So it creates this whole new caste system for working class people. The majority of whom are women, they’re disproportionately women are overrepresented in low wage work who become the housekeepers, the cleaning ladies, the nannies. And so you basically have this problem of like, yes, there are some women that are able to go have these high powered careers, but in order to do that, it’s not that we’re shifting the responsibility necessarily onto equal partners, that we are just taking our unpaid labor and we’re making it the underpaid labor of women who are less privileged than we are. So we’re not really displacing or disrupting the power of the status quo in that way. And I think it gets at this idea that any feminism without a recognition of class is pretty incomplete.

Samhita:

Yeah, absolutely. As many of these issues are, obviously it’s complicated because this kind of underclass of labor and care workers are also a band of people that are also mothers themselves, and they also have ambitions and they also need work. And so care work, and I think that’s something that has become a more robust conversation recently. Care work is real work, but it is this matter of who gets to participate in that care work and who doesn’t.

And as you say, the source of the problem is that often our partners are not willing to take a step back in their own ambition and pick up the slack. And so the only reason that women end up having to then hire out for support is because they are not getting the support they need at home. And also recognizing, and something I talk about in the book is the way that our family structures and the kind of insistence on the nuclear family and that the mom and dad have to do everything. It’s also not tenable. Historically, families have had grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, nephews, everybody’s nearby to support each other. And now there’s this emphasis on the working mother, working father, and you guys have to absorb everything. And if you can’t, then you have to hire it out.

And that structure I think has really put women in a bind because it’s basically either or if you want to be ambitious, then you are inherently a bad mother because you have to outsource your care work. And if you want to focus on your care work, then you are not an ambitious and good workplace feminist. And I do think that a lot of people are kind of toggling between those two things. And really they’re doing both of them. They’re doing both of them, and they’re exhausted and they’re stretched thin and they’ve had enough.

And I think that’s something that I’m not a mother myself, but I talk to a lot of mothers writing this book because I did feel like that to me is in so many ways, the crux and this idea that, oh, but you chose to have a family. And it’s like, what is a choice? If the alternative is like you literally grind yourself into the ground, those are not real choices. That’s not a real choice. And so I think this false dichotomy that goes back to the idea of having it all, it’s like, oh yeah, you can have it all. I mean, even Sheryl Sandberg, she’s like, you can have it all just not all at once, but it still assumes that you can do it. You just have to make all of these sacrifices that men don’t have to make to have it.

Katie:

Right. And that I think is what I often come back to is a lot of times I find myself having these types of conversations or even just thinking about it myself and almost forgetting that entire half of the equation of like, well, how are we women going to figure this out? How are we going to make sure that care work has dignity and that it’s paid well? And to your point, there is an entire other half of the population whose problem this is to. And yet it has kind of become the de-facto position that this is women’s problem to solve. Well, yeah, you can have a career, I guess, but you got to figure out what you’re going to do with them kids in the meantime. You still have to be the one that’s going to sort this out. And obviously I’m generalizing, right? I’m sure there are plenty of women listening to this being like, no, I have a totally equal partner. We completely split everything.

And I think that that is ultimately how we’re kind of solving it at the individual level is trying to fix some of those systemic inequities under our own roofs and have those conversations ourselves, because in some ways we have no other choice. But the ultimate issue that we’re pointing to here is that this atomization of the individual or of the family unit puts us in these impossible situations that then gets us almost asking the wrong questions. Like, okay, well how are we going to outsource care work then? And how are we going to pay for that? And I think to your point about well, really humans evolve to be in extended families where you have that, it takes a village mentality applied, literally, if you strip all that away, then of course you’re going to end up being tasked with solving these kind of impossible logistical problems that it becomes and quickly starts to feel pretty untenable.

Samhita:

How do we girlboss our way through an unfair pay gap, these broader legal and structural issues that I think often we internalize as well, like if I just worked harder or if I took the right opportunity or if I ask for more money. And I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrongheaded about that advice. I encourage all of my friends when they get a job offer to ask for more money. That’s a net good no matter what.

But I think this bigger question of, and it is so easy to convince women that they’re doing a bad, it’s so easy to be like, well, it’s your fault actually.

Katie:

We’re so ready to take that on. We’re like, you know what? You’re right. It is. Well, because I think if you accept that something’s your fault at the very least, then it’s within your control, which there is a slightly comforting element to that, even though it’s a bit of a self-deprecating one.

And I think that maybe I’ve had to think about this a lot, particularly as I write my book and write about the somewhat fraught advice to negotiate because I agree asking for more money or getting more money for your labor is kind of straightforwardly a good thing. But I think what I’ve landed on is that I personally bristle at the idea that there is an implied cause and effect here of like, oh, because you are having these problems, you’re not a good negotiator as opposed to these problems exist outside completely unrelated to your negotiation ability, but negotiating for more money might ease the symptoms of the problems that you’re feeling a little bit. And I think it’s that kind of implied causality that I often get annoyed with because it just kind of thrusts the responsibility back onto the woman to figure out how to make do in a pretty impossible set of circumstances.

Samhita:

Yeah, that’s super interesting. No, I think that’s absolutely right. Once again, you internalize this idea that you yourself can overcome these barriers that are structural, that unequal pay is something that happens across the board. It’s statistically true. It’s not something that’s just happening in your workplace. It’s happening in every workplace. And so the idea that us negotiating as individuals, and again, collective action is a series of individuals doing things together. If all of us said, we’re not going to do this anymore, you will start to see change.

And part of the trick of this kind of trickle down feminism is that when it becomes individual, you are competitive with those around you. Everybody is another threat to you getting your piece of the pie or you getting your seat at the table. But there are opportunities in every place that we’re working to really think about how we as women can collectively come up or even as employees or as people that are the ones that are doing the work, and what are the opportunities we have to actually plug in and say, here are the kind of work conditions we want.

Here are the kind of work conditions we demand. And that is the trend we’re seeing right now too. People are really rejecting this individualism because they’re looking at my generation and women that are older than me and they’re like, what did it even do for you? You’re tired. You’re still have student debt. You haven’t been able to buy a house, you’re still not the ceo. I don’t want it. I don’t want that. That dream is a lie to me. And I think that as that fades and as that unravels, I mean people are nervous, people are anxious, they don’t know how to tackle it. And I think a big piece of it is we have seen that one woman leader, that one woman who got paid the most didn’t actually have a trickle down effect that didn’t actually lead to all of the women at the company being paid better. And that’s a reality we’re facing now.

Katie:

Another arena in which trickle down something didn’t work. It’s like color me shocked.

Well, you mentioned choice and I like, well, you chose to have a family. And again, it gets at this idea of pitting mothers against non-mothers and pitting people who choose to, it’s like, well, that’s your problem. You figure that out as though the future of humanity does not depend on people continuing to choose to start families and have children. But I do want to talk about this idea of choice and particularly choice feminism because you write quote part and parcel of the concept of marketplace feminism is the idea of individual choice, that if a woman chooses something, whatever that thing may be, it is feminist because feminism is about our choices on its face. This doesn’t feel wholly inaccurate. Much of feminism has been about the expansion of women’s choices and fighting for their ability to make these choices. But even if feminism facilitates a woman’s ability to make a choice, it does not necessarily follow that said, choice is feminist as in reliant on the fundamental belief that women should be equal participants in society. So you point out that focusing on choice, the idea of choice tends to lead us astray. Why is that?

Samhita:

I think there’s many reasons. So obviously one of the biggest wins of seventies feminism was our ability to make choices, ally reproductive rights and the ability to make a choice for yourself. And so in and of itself, it’s not inherently bad. We deserve to choose all of these kind of different environments for ourselves. I think that when you’re facing structural inequality, it’s really easy to say that, well, you chose to be a girl bus. You chose to get that promotion, and now you have to deal with the fact that you chose that and you also chose having children. And all of your choices are killing you. And what is a choice ultimately? And if you are saying that if I do this, the consequence is that I will be exhausted. I will have health issues, I will have financial issues. That’s not really a choice.

And I think that that to me is really the fundamental problem with focusing a lot on our choices. Suggesting that something is a neutral choice versus something that is actually deeply entrenched in inequality is a different thing. And so I don’t think the idea that, oh, you chose to be a mother, as you say, it’s like families are the foundational tenant of how our society moves forward. We can’t just be like, people are no longer going to have children. They chose not to because making money feels better. It’s like that’s not a healthy society. And so I think it’s a fine line between, yes, of course a woman should be able to choose when she has a child, when she decides to enter the workplace. All of those things are true, but it covers over. And I think against individualizes, the fact that it’s literally impossible to be a working mother, A lot of women now we’re looking at statistics that women are having babies later or they’re not having children at all.

And that’s fine, but I think a lot of people want to have children. I think I would’ve wanted to have children, but that’s not how my life played out because those were not the opportunities that were put in front of me.

And so there was a funny piece in the New York Times a couple of months ago that was kind of like, people always tell me to date from the choices I have, but clearly they’re not dating in the same pool that I’m dating or something. And it was basically about just how out of these choices is that really a choice? And I just thought that was such an interesting metaphor for this, where it’s like, here are your terrible choices that you get to choose from, and then you have to be held accountable from these bad choices that you’re making. And so one of this economist who I quote from the Harvard Business Review wrote at the turn of the century now, she wrote in 2001 or 2002 that women who are not having children in their forties career women, it was a “creeping non-choice,” less a choice, but more of a creeping non-choice.

And that’s really to me, I think fits a little bit more this idea of choice where it’s not that I didn’t have the choice, but it wasn’t necessarily a choice. It was kind of a set of circumstances I was responding to.

Katie:

A set of circumstances I was responding to. I think that that’s a more accurate way to describe a lot of this.

And I think we have to find the language to express the shortcomings of the current state of women’s progress or workplace progress without accidentally backsliding and be able to have them in good faith because nobody is sitting here saying that women’s liberation from the home was a bad thing. I mean, 41% of mothers are either soul or primary breadwinners per the research that you did. But it sounds like what we’re circling is the incompleteness of our current state, as in we’ve made some progress. We’re not all the way there. The answer is not to go backward, but for example, you say you can’t really argue with the premise that more women should be ascending to senior positions if you believe in the maintenance of hierarchy.

And the deeper question is, what does a workplace look like without such stark power differentials? And I read this and thought that’s a really interesting point. I could hear someone listening to this and saying, yeah, you know what? I actually can’t really picture a workplace without hierarchy or without stark power differentials. So what does it mean to reimagine work in that way? What do you think about that?

Samhita:

Yeah, it’s a really good question. And I think that there are so many different ways that that could look right. And part of this project is really looking at this kind of more philosophical shift where, because I agree, I think it’s really hard to think about a workplace that doesn’t have some type of leadership structure where somebody isn’t like, this is my vision and here’s how we’re all going to make that happen. But does that relationship have to be rooted in a type of exploitation where I am working to get the most out of you that I could possibly get out of you by paying you the least I could possibly pay you? And that’s really how modern work is structured, where it’s like, how can I get you to do the most by giving you the least? And what would it look like to switch that and move to an environment where you create something where you recognize that having a happy, sustainable, successful workforce is the key to actually having a successful business?

And we know that’s true. Research tells us that when people feel connected to what they’re doing, when they feel purpose-driven, when they feel seen in it, when they feel included in it, and when they feel fairly paid for it, they’re going to do a better job. It’s just fundamentally true. And instead, what we have is this moment where it is a type of exploitation because right now it’s pretty much impossible for any person to not have work. It is a very small percentage of people that don’t have to work. And with the pressure of student loans, with the pressure of the cost of rent, the rising cost of everything. So it is very easy to exploit a group of people that need to work. It is just inherently part of the structure. And it sounds very utopian, like how do you actually incentivize it is capitalism after all, it’s about greed, it’s about power, it’s about getting them maximizing.

But I do think we’re starting to see examples. And so one of the companies I talk about is Chani Nicholas who the astrologer, her and her partner and CEO Sonya, made this really explicit decision to have a very work centric set of job descriptions. And they went viral because they had things like and universal, no matter what your position is, you never get paid less than $80k. They had a certain office closures, they have a four day work week, they have a stipend they give to their employees to build wealth. And it sounds wild. People were laughing. They were like, this is such a joke. How is this even real? But it turns out they have an incredibly successful company. They have an incredibly successful business model with an actual profit. And when you use an engage with any of the products, they’re clearly made with love.

They’re clearly made with a team of people that are deeply invested in the product. And so it is possible, right? It’s possible, but it’s not easy. It does require you to say, what would it look like for me to not become a billionaire? What would it look like for me to, and that’s where it becomes a little bit like, oh, no one’s going to be that inherently altruistic, but ultimately the way that we’re doing things now isn’t working.

People are miserable, middle managers are miserable, employees are miserable. It is a prime opportunity right now to really rethink what does it look like to actually support a workforce to actually make work, not to be the end all be all. I think part of this girl boss ethos and hustle culture is the idea that work is your whole life. And we certainly feel that, right? I mean, freaking, I wrote, I’m promoting a book, work us my whole life right now and exhausted.

Katie:

You’re like, I’m working right now in fact.

Samhita:

We’re having fun, but it’s work for both of us. So I think that that also pulling a back from the idea that the only way you’re successful in your career is working 70 hours a week. I don’t think that is sustainable. And I think we’re really seeing that. And so workplaces really need to start thinking about what is productivity? What does that look like and what would success look like in that?

Katie:

And I think something that we’ve focused on a lot today, most of our conversation has pertained explicitly to system level thinking. We’ve used the words collective action, we’ve kind of criticized the intense and myopic focus on individual choice as the end all be all. And there is this little voice in my head that is kind of the voice of the critic in some ways where I’ve been doing this show for years. I know what some people are going to hear this conversation and think about, which is basically, well, when you talk about systems as much, you’re saying that people don’t have agency to make choices of their own, or you’re giving people excuses. You’re enabling a victim mindset. And I think about that a lot because I hear that anytime I entertain conversations like these, and maybe it’s just because this is a personal finance show, and so there’s an expectation that we’re going to be rigorously focused on individual autonomy and choice.

But there’s a quote that I heard recently, Ursula K Leguin, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable, but then so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art very often in our art, the art of words.”

And just, I don’t know, I guess I feel compelled to say this because if anyone is listening to this going, oh, stop complaining, just make better choices, just lace up the bootstraps, pull ’em up a little tighter and just move on with your life. I do think that there is an element of this that’s like we have to be courageous enough to imagine something better that the more we adhere to this idea that all of this comes down to what we are personally choosing is kind of in a sense turning our back on the idea that there could be a better way of doing things.

And that maybe our subconscious assumptions that we’ve just accepted as the divine truth, that bigger is better, faster is better growth at all costs, that these things are actually not true. And you include this anecdote in the book that I thought was really telling and kind of illustrative of this idea, this founder out of Austin, Texas named Renée Rouleau, who had I believe a skincare brand, and she had the opportunity to sell it for a boatload of money and she chose not to. And people were kind of like, why wouldn’t you exit and become a multi multimillionaire? This is kind of an obvious decision within the construct of modern capitalism and founder culture. And she said, please tell me why bigger is better other than it just being an American ideal. And she talks about, I want to maintain control of the product. The product means a lot to me. I don’t want to lose control of that, and I also want to run a really happy work environment where I get to choose how people are compensated and what the culture is like. I don’t want to sell this to someone else that might taint that. And I’m curious what you found powerful in that anecdote, why you included it and what you think kind of the main takeaway is there.

Samhita:

I found, I mean, Renée is just fantastic and her product is great, and she has a really devoted user consumer base. And I just found that to be so fascinating that she had the opportunity to be bought by bigger stores and distributed more widely and kind of made the decision to stay smaller. And it’s not because she’s less ambitious, she’s super hardworking, she’s super ambitious, but she wanted to retain both control of the product and the quality of the product and the branding, but also the kind of happiness and creativity of her workforce. And just saw too many examples of people that grew too fast and paid the consequences for it. And I saw it as such a contrast to the kind of growth at all costs, girl boss culture that we were seeing the kind of entrepreneurs that were rising fast and falling hard.

And while that is kind of part of startup culture, I thought it was very interesting to look at a model where it was not necessarily about how much can I have and less about having a really good time with the experience of building the company and building the culture of the company. You don’t see a ton of examples. And I thought, so that’s part of why I included it. And I think this bigger question that I think is such an important one that you bring up of people being like, stop complaining about these kind of structural issues. What I think is fascinating about that, because as a manager, I really do struggle with this, and I think this is, it’s true. I think it is very easy to be like, well, this is a structural issue and I personally can’t do anything. And one of the things I come back to a lot in the book is this idea of the margin of maneuverability where it is both keep your eye on the bigger goal, keep your eye on that bigger goal, but also understand and recognize what are the daily things you can do in your own life to make not just your personal workplace better, but workplace is better in general.

And for each one of us, that’s something different. There is a class of people that are deeply exploited in their labor and they have very few options. For me, I have some options and there are opportunities I have when I’m in a management role, I can always advocate for the most amount of money for one of my employees racists. It’s not my money, it’s not coming out of my pocket. It does no harm. It’s a power trip for me to do anything other than that, assuming that the person is performing where they’re supposed to perform. And there are small things and everyday resistances that we can do in our own lives and in our own workplaces, and I think it’s easy to conflate this larger structural analysis. So I can sometimes relate to that. God just make better choices. I have struggled with that. I’ve talked about that.

Katie:

These dang Zoomers in their mental health days. Yeah.

Samhita:

Yeah, literally I’m just like, oh God, if I had a mental health, I need a mental health lifetime. What are we talking about? Mental health year? Your mental health year. Yeah.

I get that tension and I try to speak to that tension and then to bring that back to Renée or Chani, they are not coddling their workforces, right? They are very active in talking to both of them in how they thought about even hiring, how they think about hiring. It’s really about someone who is going to be passionate and excel in that position, and they have the support they need to be really good at it and recognizing what people aren’t good at and having all of those really honest conversations that I think we’re really afraid to have. We have this very one model of this is what success looks like, this is what we’re going to hold you to, and if you can’t do it, it’s like a sink or swim model. So really thinking, and that’s I think where it gets back to this worker centric piece where it’s like, what does it actually mean to create a worker centric workplace outside of just unionizing and demanding for labor rights, which I think is important, but that’s not going to be possible in startups. That’s going to be possible in a four person company. So then what does that look like?

Katie:

Yeah. Yeah. I think those examples are really powerful and to the point of imagination, have to have examples to look to know that these things are possible. And much like the girl boss ethos in the 2010s might have inspired someone who otherwise felt ashamed of their ambition or unsure whether or not they could become a founder. They didn’t really see other young women founding companies. I think this is the equal but opposite side of the spectrum, which is you can actually be an entrepreneur or work for a business that does have a worker centric model and doesn’t make growth and profit the number one priority literally at all costs. So thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Samhita:

Yeah, this was great. That’s such a thoughtful conversation. Thank you.

Katie:

I want to close today with quoting…myself. I wrote this over the weekend for my new Substack, it’s called Off Days. I just really wanted a creative outlet online to be able to publish thoughts that are not related to money, both in the explicit sense and also not related to my income or earning me money, my job. A girl has other interests! But we’ll link that in the show notes if you’re interested in checking it out. It just felt like an apt inclusion given the conversation that we had today:

“On a recent episode of You’re Wrong About, host Sarah Marshall lamented the assumption that work has to happen in the shape that men in capitalism invented in the Industrial Revolution. We hear about how remote work increases feelings of loneliness, and it’s assumed that the solution is to go back to an office eight hours a day, five days a week. We hear shoehorning women into a world designed for men’s preferences, has predictably bad outcomes, and the solution that liberals don’t want you to know emerges that it must feel this way because a woman’s rightful place is actually in her husband’s home with her mouth shut.

But maybe our core problem is a lack of imagination. It’s not that our progress in these areas has been in vain or that we’ve been plotting along in the wrong direction. The transformation is simply incomplete. The Industrial Revolution was what created the divide between work and home in the first place, paving the way for a gender division of labor and as work and home collapse into one another. Again, it’s no surprise that the a historical ideal of the leisurely life of the housewife has reemerged with such force, but dreaming of the past, whether it be an idealized version of the 1950s or 2019, isn’t a compelling vision for the future.

And it’s this transitional state of change that provides us an opening, I think, to imagine something new and better.”

End quote…of myself. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how new and different approaches to work and careerism and integrating them more fully into a well-rounded life will represent different levels of accessibility for everyone, but that those of us who have the ability and have the privilege to shape work within our lives more intentionally can lead the charge in re-imagining what it might look like and resetting the cultural expectations four day work weeks or four hour work days, or a prioritization of the health of the whole human with a desire for fulfilling productivity as just one component of the self. I’m not sure how we get there, but I know we won’t get there unless we talk about it. So thanks for being here to do just that.

And that is all for this week. I will see you next week, same time, same place on The Money With Katie Show. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.