Overcome the confidence deficit with Jamila Rizvi

0:02 A listener production. Hi, you're listening to Crappy to Happy and I'm your host, Cas Dunn. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist, mindfulness meditation teacher, and author. Of the Crappy to Happy books. In this series, we look at all the factors that might be making you feel crappy and the tools and the techniques that will help you overcome them. In each episode, I introduce you to interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field, and my hope is that they will help you go from crappy to happy. In today's episode, I'm talking to Jamilla Risby, who is an author, presenter, and editor at large of The Nine Network's Future Women platform.

0:46 She also hosts a podcast. Of the same name, and Jamilla and I talked about all the ways that women hold themselves back in the workplace and how you can overcome self doubt, learn to speak up for yourself, and start to bridge the confidence gap that. Many women experience. Jimiller, thank you so much for coming in to talk to me today. Is such a pleasure. Oh, thanks for having me. I would love to talk to you today about the confidence deficits so in this podcast. In previous episodes, we've covered kind of the self confidence issue that women face, but I would really love to focus in on the confidence deficits, specifically in the workplace. So what is the confidence deficit? Can you explain that?

1:27 So about two years ago now, I wrote a book called Not Just Lucky, and the book was looking at trying to answer this question that I just kept coming up against at work. I began my working career in politics, which is incredibly male dominated, like I'm talking like sausage fest in the corials of Parliament right and blokes everywhere, and there are very few women involved in politics, particularly behind the scenes. And then I went to women's media, where like literally you eat estrogen sprinkled on your cereal for breakfast, like that is what it is like in those offices, and complain change. And the thing that I noticed above all else in terms of comparing those two workplaces was how much the women second guessed themselves. In terms of skill level and ability, no difference that I noticed, but in terms of confidence levels, the two groups were miles apart. And I just became obsessed with this question and wanting to answer it. And when I started doing the research and dipping into the psychology and was of what was going on. I found that this is absolutely true that in the workplace, women experience, on average a confidence deficit compared to men. They're much more likely to second guess themselves, much more likely to undersell themselves, much less likely to apply for a promotion, much less likely to ask for more money, and in general that's holding women back in workplaces.

2:44 Yeah, for sure, And I know that women know that they do this and they're frustrated themselves by it. Did you come up with why why do we lack that confidence? Yeah, it's definitely a really complex why. I think the important premise to start with is that my research shows that it's not your fault. Hooray. Your lack of confidence is not your fault. It is genuinely instilled in women from a very very young age. And what I found was that the schooling environment, certainly in Australia and similar western countries, the schooling environment really works for girls. In fact, it's a separate conversation, but I think there's a conversation needs to be hard about whether or not schooling environments currently work for boys but for girls. Girls are thriving at school. There's rules.

3:28 There's really predictable patterns and predictable outcomes in terms of how to achieve. So girls are graduating from high school in greater numbers, they're going to university in greater numbers. They're graduating from university with more awards and at higher levels, higher degrees. And then they hit the workplace and something happens. And I think we all like to go, oh, well, that's because women biologically are the ones that have the babies and there's nothing we can do about that. Not true. Women come up against that gap usually for their first time. In the first year in the workplace. On average, woman university graduate in Australia earns between eight and ten percent less than a male university graduate. These are twenty two twenty three year olds. I'm sorry, but most of them don't have kids. You will sure most of them don't.

4:12 Something is happening, and there is something going on in workplaces and the way we sort of look after women and raise women and socialize women, that means that when they get to the workplace they suddenly stumble. I found that so interesting. I've been reading your book, which is amazing, by the way, thank you. But my daughter has just finished her first year of high school and at the end of the year at her awards night. At the awards ceremony at the end of last year, when it came to the top achievers for the year, my husband was sitting next to me. My daughter was up on the stage and he just said, wow, like girls rule the world because the stage was covered in girls. And at the time I thought, yeah, girls do rule the world. And it was only when I read your book that I thought this is not necessarily something to be celebrated, because what is getting them ahead in school is not what gets them ahead in the workplace.

4:59 That's exact clear, right, Because school has these really defined structures and rules, the path to success is really clear. Basically, if you're relatively clever and you work hard at school, you will do well. School is a meritocracy. The workplace isn't. The workplace is gendered and sexist. And I know people often flinch when they hear those words and go, oh, but is it, like, is it really that bad anymore? I don't think it's that bad anymore. I think it's far better for women today than it's ten years ago, twenty years ago, certainly fifty or one hundred years ago far better, and I think it's really important that women take pause and celebrate the wins rather than just focus on where we're falling behind. But I think one of the problems with most of the gender inequality that exists in workplaces, being less visually obvious anymore means that we think it doesn't exist, but it's still there, and it's almost more insidious because we don't necessarily see it in an obvious way. But some things that play here, And if I can give you like it, just a quick outline of why I think it's still there, please do so.

6:02 I started off with the fact that women university graduates earn on average around eight to ten percent less a year than male university graduates. That gap starts small and it gets bigger and bigger over time. The average age that a woman's salary peaks in Australia, can you guess, think of your career trajectory, when's going to be the highest point of your career. You would think around forty Yep, yeah, that's exactly the peak for Australian men. For women, it's age thirty. Wow, so it's ten years earlier. And I don't think it's any coincidence that Australian women have their first baby on average at that same age. So for women, you hit that ceiling of how much you're going to earn in your lifetime, and I'm thirty two, I'm devastated.

6:49 I've hit the peak already. You hit that peak so much earlier in your lifetime. It's going to be a lower peak, right, yeah, because you haven't had another ten years climbing a corporate ladder. You haven't had another ten years experience or education or whatever it is. So that gap widens again. Then you might have a child, you might be in and out of the workforce, you might have other caring responsibilities for older relatives. Women are five times more likely to be caring for a person with a disability or an elderly person in their life than men. That gap grows and grows and grows, to the point that, on average, an Australian woman now retires with around half the superannuation of an Australian man, and the fastest growing group of people living in poverty in Australia are women over sixty five who are single.

7:30 Is devastating. You lose your partner and you're in big trouble. If you're an older woman in this country, and if you think this is women over sixty, that's not that old. A lot of you have. Got forty forty five years of life ahead of you at that point, and you're retiring with little to no superannuation and you're going to be living on an age pension. That is it's devastating, but it's fascinating and I really am interested to unpack this now. So is this something that women are doing to themselves or is this something that the system is doing to them? I think it's kind of chicken and egg thing, right, So it's both. This is a system that we've built over time, and it is complex and that is nuanced, and it is based on a workplace that was built for men by men.

8:11 And that's not a question, right. The workplace wasn't built for women and we didn't design this for women. Childcare in Australia is something that we kind of cobbled together over the last forty years when we've gone, oh my gosh, what if people need to go to work and have children at the same time, how will we cope? And so we have this really messy system of funny payments and who offers it. And that's just one example of how we're dealing with women's entry into the workforce. In the context of history, women's entry into the workforce is still fairly recent. We're still coming to terms with it. We're still figuring out how to deal with it. And I think as a result of that, we have a system that doesn't support women and doesn't enable women to succeed. And so women, because they think we live in an equal world, internalize that and go, oh, this isn't working and this isn't working.

8:57 And they come out of school like your door will and like other girls come out of school and they are full of confidence, and they won all the awards and they were the school captains and they did all the things because school works for girls. And then they enter the workforce and they go what whoa, whoa, And so that system comes up against them and as a result, they lose confidence. And that's where that lack of confidence comes from. And then we kind of create. This vicious cycle, right where lack of. Confidence means you can't move ahead and you're not having the success that you could otherwise have, and that further entrenches your disadvantage, and this is kind of the premise of my book. I suppose the thesis of my book. It's that there's these big structural questions we have to solve. And I think they're huge questions for Australia and questions for government, and questions for business and non for profits, but they're questions for the world. But as an individual, when you're looking at you and your career and what you're going to do, and the fact that you know you feel a bit anxious at work, or you feel like you can't ask for a pay your ese, or you're worried about a certain boss, or you're having a dispute with a colleague and you don't know how to settle it. Well, that's all very well and good that there's this big st cruel inequality, but no one's solving it for you in this moment. But what you can do in this moment is take charge of you and your own confidence. And I suppose that's what I like to try and do in my writing is say, yes, let's recognize that this system exists and that it's unfair, and let's all work together to change it. But also, what can you do as an individual to make yourself feel a little bit stronger.

10:21 Yeah. And the other thing I think that our listeners have talked about, and I've talked about it before, is that there is a distinct difference between confidence in your ability and the social confidence, which is to assert yourself and ask what you you know for what you need and ask for the pay rise or speak up in the meeting. Can you talk a bit about that that difference, because I know that women find themselves really frustrated with that too. They say, I know I'm good at what I do, but I just I feel so small, like I can't. Yeah, I feel. I'm meek and mild, and I know it's a problem for me, but I don't know how to push through that. You sound like you're just quoting so many of my friends. It is it is real. It's a real thing that women struggle with, I think. And one of the most fascinating pieces of research I came across, which was out of the United States, showed that for women, there's this view that women about it negotiating right, or not as good at men as men at negotiating is simply not true. And what this piece of research found was that when women were negotiating on behalf of a company or on behalf of somebody else, they were equally as good or.

11:20 Better than men. When women had to negotiate on their own behalf, yeah, we were rubbish. Like completely rubbish, completely rubbish. And so the struggle there is in asserting your own self worth and asserting your own right to more, whatever that more might be. If I can give you an example, when I used to manage a large group of women, one of the things I noticed when people were talking about pay rises was they come into the. Office, usually woefully unprepared ladies. We can deal with that separately, but anyway, if they would come into the office and they would start making the case for why they deserved a pay rise based on why they needed it, so it would be like I'm saving for a wedding rent, it's really expensive. They'd give all these reasons that were incredibly good and valid reasons for wanting a pay rise.

12:08 They weren't particularly good reasons to give someone a pay rise, a deserving one, yeah, But. The unconscious bit there, the bit that they weren't saying out loud, was I don't want to just say I'm worth more money that's hard to say. It's much easier to say, this is why I need more money. And by referencing important things like childcare is expensive, or rents expensive or whatever it might be. By referencing important cost of living issues, they were trying to say, I'm. Not greedy either. And it's such a I think the social expectations on women and men one isn't higher than the other, but they're extremely different. And the social expectation on women is not to want money. You're not supposed to want money and you're not supposed to want success.

12:49 So do you think this all really drives right back from the earliest years in our lives, when little girls are basically taught that their value is in how they look and in being polite and all of those kind of qualities that we're just conditioned. What are the positive qualities that we should be embodying? Is that what it is? I think there's a big part of that. I think there's a lot going on. Here, But I think childhood, you know, you would know as a psychologist, childhood has a massive impact course on not only the way someone thinks, but also in the way their brain is structured. You know, we now know that the brain starts to rewire to an extent, certainly in those first five years, based on how you interact with the world around you. And if the world around you expect certain behavior and rewards certain behavior, then your brain evolves in line with that. You know, when little boys are told man up, don't cry at age three, when I've got three year old, I mean, they cry, like that's what three year olds do?

13:46 They cry? It annoys me. But him crying has nothing to do with him being a boy, do you know what I mean? And him needing to stop crying over something that is not a thing has nothing to do with him being a boy. And yet we respond to but much more quick to tell little boys, come on, come on, you know stop it. You're right, come on, let's go next. And we're much more We're much more likely to indulge little girls when it comes to politeness. A lot of university studies have now found that we expect much higher behavior standards of behavior from little girls early on. We expect them to be people pleasers. This stuff starts really early and it follows people right through their entire lives. I think it's also about how we model to children and how we model really unconsciously. And I like, I am a friend who said to me the other day, you're a professional feminist. This is what I do for a living, and I try really hard to be a good model equal parenting to my son between my husband and I, and he tries really hard as well, and we fail every day. One of the ones I noticed about a year ago was that we never discussed this.

14:50 But whenever we get in the car, both my husband drives and I drive, But whenever we get in the car together, my husband drives. Same, same, same in our family. We never really discussed this, Like we never discussed you know who is the better driver. I would argue it's me. He is definitely the better navigator, which I would argue means he should be in the passengers eat with a map. But we never discussed it. But for some reason we fell into that old status quo sexist pattern. Right, Okay, does it really matter? Not much, But my little boy sees that, and my little boy sees and clocks, oh, mummy can drive, Daddy can drive. That's an important and adult thing to do, something I can't do. But when it's a choice between the two of them, daddy drives and that's just one tiny bit of information going into his brain, and he gets thousands of them every day. So I think we just need to be so conscious of the messages that we give our children, but also cut ourselves some slack for the messages that are really inherent in us because of the way we were brought up.

15:50 Yeah, I totally agree. And that message about it's not your fault, that's one that I have I reinforce all the time to people because I think there is a tendency too for women to then get down on themselves for the lack of confidence or their body image issues, or they feel like they're you know, their body image issues, or they feel like they're being. Silly or whatever. And I say, you have to recognize that a lot of this stuff has just been imprinted in you, you know, for the longest time, and it's okay. Yes, try to change it, Yes, try to do something about it, but don't take a hundred percent responsibility for it. I was speaking to her friend the other day who has a teenage daughter, and she was saying her teenage door is having some big body image issues at the moment, and she said she was giving her daughter the lecturer on it's what's on the inside that counts, and it's not what matters, And she said as she was speaking, she realized she was lying. She was like this, I am selling her on the dream. I wish that you were only judged on the content of your character and not how you look on the outside.

16:52 There is a reality that we. Live in an imperfect world, and the solution to that is not to change yourself, it's to change world. Interesting that you mentioned that. I always remember when I was in my early twenties, I was working in a regional town and I wanted to come back to the city. And I had applied for this job, which was a pool who were applying for those. Like twenty positions available. And because I was in a regional city, I did a phone interview and I didn't get the job. I didn't get added to the pool. But then eventually the job came up again and I was able to be in the city and apply for it. And the person who gave me the job afterwards said to me, actually said to me, don't ever let yourself be interviewed by phone again. How you look is one of your greatest assets. Oh yeah, and the fact is that it is so off and so wrong, but it's true.

17:41 In fact, it is true. You say in your book, don't you that people who look a certain way are more likely to get jobs, are more likely to get promoted. Yeah, women who are taller are more likely to earn more money. Women who are thinner are certainly more likely to earn more money. There is a link between all sorts of things to do with aesthetics. In this country. For the most part, women of color or less likely to earn hir incomes and hold more positions of authority, and the same with men of color. I mean, disadvantage is more complex than just women, which we're talking. About today, of course, but the visuals do play. A role, and I think it if I can just sidesteps slightly here. To me, it's analogous to when someone says to me, when I try and talk about racism and someone says, oh, I don't see color, It's like, well, firstly, of course you do, like unless genuinely blind, you see the difference in people's skin tone. And second to say oh I don't see color dismisses hundreds of years of disadvantage that have existed on the basis of race. And if you ignore that disadvantage, and you ignore that systemic disadvantage, that means you treat everyone the same. And that means saying the money that needs to be invested right now in our health system for Indigenous Australians health outcomes and white Australian's health outcomes can be the same. Well, it can't be the same, because Indigenous Australians on average die twenty five years earlier. So if we don't recognize the disadvantage that comes from something, if we pretend we don't see it, it actually further entrenches that disadvantage.

19:14 I completely agree. And bringing that back now to the women's issue, what do you have to say to the people out there, and there are plenty of them women who say we don't need feminism anymore. I really struggle with that. I struggle to be a big person. I completely understand where that's coming from. So I think it comes from a couple of things. The first place is that when you are an individual who has experienced disadvantage or discrimination because you're part of a group that is treated as less even not particularly overtly when it comes to women, but still treated as less. It is easier to cuddle up to the majority than it is to lift that whole minority out of that disadvantage.

19:56 So rather than sitting in the minority group of women and saying, oh, hey, I want this and we need to push for this, so we need to push for that, and equalities this far away, it's going to take one hundred years to close the gender peg up. It's much easier to be. Like, oh, women and their feminism. I'm not like their, I'm like you. That's a much easier way to succeed, much easier way. So I have some empathy for the position, because I think that comes from a place of being disadvantaged and trying to lift yourself out of that disadvantage. However, I think if you personally, deeply and genuinely believe on reflection and critical reflection that you have never experienced disadvantage or discrimination in the workplace because you're a woman, I am thrilled for you. That doesn't mean that your experience is everyone's experience.

20:40 No, that's exactly right. It doesn't mean that. And I think writing off other people's experience because it wasn't yours is ridiculous. I mean We're all individuals when it comes down to it, and I think one of the most important things we need to do in these sort of modern debates about equality and discrimination is just listen. So one of the conversations that we've had in previous episodes is that women have this unconscious way of keeping themselves small, particularly in workplaces. And I know that you refer to this a little bit in your book too, and I would love it if you could give some specific examples about all of the ways that we perhaps really without even realizing we're doing it, are holding ourselves back.

21:23 Yeah. Sure, So I'm going to start it off with just some examples related to the way we talk. So this is very very narrow, and the book's broader than this, but I think it's interesting to examine the way women and men talk because so much of our language and the way we use language evolves unconsciously. So one of the first ways women make themselves smaller or make themselves lesser is we insert language of apology into our sentences. So we all know women say sorry more than men. Sure, but we also do it in other ways. And I'll give you just one example, which is if you go back and listen to the earlier parts of this podcast, you will see I have a particular problem with it, and that is. Over use of the word just so.

22:04 The word just immediately puts you in an inferior position to the person you're talking to. So think of this as I'm just a mum, I'm just the receptionist. Could I just have a minute of your time? I don't need that word in that sentence. Could I have a minute of your time is all that's necessary. I'm inserting the word just as a way of apologizing, of saying I'm less important, you're important. Can I have more of your time? And women are much more likely to use phrases like this in their language in their emails, and it makes us sound more subservient. And I went back and started analyzing my emails and taking all the words of apology out, and I just sounded awful. Like when I reread the email, I was like, Oh, that's so rude. I couldn't possibly send that email. And it's really interesting. I would show that to my husband or a colleague, a male colleague, and they'd be like, that's fine, it's just an email.

22:58 They weren't fussed at all, like it was just direct, straightforward, like come to my office is something the boss would say, whereas I'd be like, Hi, how you going? Have you got two sex? Just to drop round for a moment, I please, if you're not too busy. So true, sure, we're just being nice and polite. Maybe that's part of it, but I think it's interesting to consider how that language has evolved. Another example is that women actually talk less, we take up less time, and so we all have this view that women talk more right and in social settings that is true. Women talk more farm or in one on one conversations, and they talk far more in conversations with friends and family and girlfriends. In workplaces, women talk less, substantially less than men, and you might not notice it, but next time you're in a meeting of any sort, just take a moment to observe how the men and women behave differently. And if you want an example on live television, there was a great audit done of Q and A, the political program on the ABC.

23:54 An audit done of how much men and women panelists talked, like how much percentage of time they took up of the show, and all of the women took up less than their fair share. So if there were five panelists, all of the women took up far less than twenty percent of the talking time, and the men would take up far more. And even when the audience had complained about women who speak too much. So if you think about a women who appeared on the Q and a panel who people tend to get up in the arms about it, so, oh, she just dominated the panel, she wouldn't shut up that kind of stuff. Van Badam is one of those. Catherine Devinie, when they assessed those women's contribution, their contribution was very close to or exactly twenty percent, really, So it's about our perception and this men's and women's perceptions.

24:39 This isn't just men perceiving things unfairly. Women do it too right, which means we also apply it to ourselves. Our perception of when we've spoken too much, or contributed too much, or kind of been a bit overbearing of ourselves is very different to how we would perceive it for men. And when a woman speaks even her fair share in a big meeting or on television, we think she's a bit pushy. The other one that was brought to my attention recently was that because I have to come into the studio sometimes to record voiceovers when we have sponsors on this show. And the last time I did that, I was reading through the script and the director kept saying to me, Cass, you keep ending every sentence like a question.

25:20 It's the upspeak at your foot inflection. Yeah yeah, And I didn't even realize that I was doing it, but having somebody pointed out to you every time made me so aware. And that's another thing I know women do a lot as well. Yeah, So that's speaking like that, and you add that to the end of each sentence, and it is permissive language. Again. The reason or not permissive language, it's a permissive sound because what you're doing with that sentence is saying is that, Okay, do you mind? Can I keep going? Do you agree? And you're softening what you're saying, and it's unconscious and you've developed that because you're asking permission to be part of the conversation. And really interestingly, upspeak started to get really heavily criticized about five ten years ago.

26:04 Online. There were masses of articles. People used to call it valley girls speak. If you think of like share in clueless, that kind of thing, and that's when people started to develop a new kind of speech pattern, particularly women, which is that Kardashian drawl where you go down and you kind of I can't do it very well, taper off at the end of the sentence. And apparently that was a lot of women started from a lot of women trying to actively stop doing the up speak. Wow. Something else that I noticed that women do, Jamilla is even where they position themselves in the room, where they sit in a meeting is almost designed to keep themselves in the background. Oh yeah, absolutely.

26:45 So this comes to the physicality I suppose of confidence and our willingness to take up space. And if you think of a woman in your life who's particularly under confident or particularly kind of doesn't want to be seen and doesn't want to be noticed in the world, you tend to make yourself physically. Small, right. You sort of hunch your shoulders, You'll often wear your hair quite long, and cover your face. All of these are physical manifestations of trying to make the world not notice you. And women tend to make themselves physically small in the workplace, and one of the ways they do that is in big meetings where women will. Sit and where they choose to sit. It is very different to men.

27:25 Men are much more likely to take a seat at the head of the table or in the center of the long part. Of a table. If you think of like the you know, the big long tables. If you have a round table, everyone gets to be even. But if you've got one of those big long tables, there are power positions on that table. Some positions are worth more than others. When I worked in Canberra in politics, I worked for the Rudden Gillard governments and I had a period during the gillad government where I was chief of staff to one of the ministers, and I used to have to attend these chiefs of Staff meetings which were in this big boardroom adjacent to the Prime Minister's office. So if you're talking about intimidating spaces like this is an intimidating space right, big oak table overlooking the Prime Minister's courtyard. And it didn't have enough seats around that oak table for all the chiefs of staff, so there were another ring of seats, just kind of ordinary office chairs around the edge of the room for if you needed to sit there. So we would go into this meeting and I always found it fascinating watching who would sit where. I think I attended that meeting probably a couple of dozen times, and it was only on the last meeting that I got the confidence up to sit at that main table, and I think I did it for about ten seconds.

28:34 I went, oh, nope, don't belong here. I went and sat on the edge. And one of the things I noticed was the very few women in that room. Was mostly men who were chiefs of staff to ministers and the prime minister. But even men who were chiefs of staff to very junior ministers or parliamentary secretaries were very willing to sit at the table, very willing to literally take their seat at the table, whereas the often the women chiefs of staff to quite senior people were quite happy to sit on the outside. And that assertion of status through your physical place in the room, it's really interesting, and I think it's worth saying to women who feel under confident and going what can I do? Well, why not try sitting somewhere else just through a day. And I say that having been too scared to do it myself, so it's okay if you wimp out.

29:18 Well, that leads me to another question. I wanted to ask you, which is for anybody listening to this, they may well take on board the message, well, okay, well, obviously I need to just be more assertive, and I need to change how I speak, and I need to ask for what I need and all of the rest of it. But oftentimes, when women go ahead and adopt those what we would consider to be the typically masculine kind of behaviors, they're actually not rewarded for it. Yeah, they're punished for it. That's absolutely right, because we like men to behave like that, we don't like women to behave like that. We actually don't have a formula yet for what a socially likable, powerful woman is in the workplace. We haven't come up with that as a culture yet. We haven't evolved to that point, and that's so depressing. And one of the things we see is that male executives are often very well liked when they're very senior, whereas female executives generally aren't.

30:11 They're often feared and respected, but they're not necessarily liked. And women have to choose between success and lackability in the workplace, and that comes down to all of those cultural confidence issues that we've talked about before, and I think I should make I should really make the point here because it sounds a little bit like I'm criticizing and saying, don't do this, and you're doing this wrong, you're doing this wrong. I'm pointing out these things that we do unconsciously, and we do them in response to a sexist environment. Some of them you might want to change. Some of them. Just by being aware of them has made me feel more confident. And that's, you know, just being aware that, oh I do that, or I do that, or I feel like that, or I respond like that, not because I'm less, not because I'm bad, not because I'm not good enough, but because the world has socialized me to think I've got a respond like that.

30:59 I think that is a great point. I'm really glad that you made that point because I agree. I think once you become aware that this is not it's not something wrong with me, it almost it takes that I can stop that in a self critical voice and realize that, Okay, well this is why I feel this way, and that's okay, and I can you know, I can still get on and do what I need to do and realize that it's do you know. Do you know what the descriptor is that most powerful women will use to talk about themselves. First, hard working? If you ever called yourself hard working? Yeah, probably, I always call myself hard working. Now, that sounds like a really good thing, and it is a really good thing to work hard. Like, I am not telling everyone to like slack off now, but hard working is a really interesting way to sell yourself in the first place, right, because working hard is something you want from your employees, absolutely, but working hard isn't actually what the employer wants. The focus is on working hard to get a result, right, And men are much more likely to say I got to where I am based on I'm really good at it's something, whereas I think women say I.

32:02 Got there because I worked really hard. And look, I'm sure you did work really hard, but something else was going on too, Right, Like, if tomorrow I sat down and worked really, really, really hard at being an engineer, I wouldn't be one and I wouldn't be any good. If I worked really really hard to be an Olympic swimmer, I would not become one. This is not in my skill set. That takes a level of skill and ability and innate honing of those skills. And there are things that we're born better at and we developed to be better at than others. And I think as women we often use. Hard work to sort of be more humble, because hard work isn't bragging, Jimilla. There'll be some people listening who say, but some people, some women do make it to the top, Like some women are very successful in their careers. So if there's this so called glass ceiling, like, how come they're busting through it? What attributes do those women have that the rest of us apparently don't.

32:58 When we come down to the individual level, there are always outliers. There are always people that are unusual and extraordinary and circumstances, circumstances that lead to their success. But until a woman at the top isn't something of note, But it's just me, another woman. Until I can look at my tee towel of Australian prime ministers and it not be entirely white men with black hair in black suits and one woman with red hair and you notice her first. Until that's not unusual, we haven't got anywhere right. And the first is important, The first is terribly important, and so the second's important too. But while the women who make it to the top are in such a minority, such a minority. Until that changes, we haven't got there, right, we haven't got there.

33:47 Of course there are outliers. Of course there are women breaking through, and those are the women who are carving the past for the rest of us. So I'm very excited by those women. But we haven't got there yet. Our boardrooms are still absolutely dominated by men. Of the top two hundred most profitable companies in Australia, there are more CEOs named Andrew than there are women. Wow, don't tell me we've got there, no, Jimila. I'm often asked to provide quotes for media articles things like that, and one of the things that I was recently asked to comment on was this thing called the queen Bee syndrome, which is essentially where a woman rises to the top, she achieves a position of power, but then she kind of guards her territory and she actively holds other women back. It's not almost like she wants to be the only queen Bee, the unly successful woman. Now, before commenting on that, I really wanted to look into it to what was going on there, And I'm wondering from your perspective, Do you think this queen Bee syndrome actually exists?

34:44 Or is there something else going on there. This question, or some version of it, I get so much from women, and it's often asked in this really tentative like I don't really want to I'm sorry I. Should this is probably anti feminist. I probably shouldn't ask. This, And it's a really good and valid question because for so many women, the person who's treated them the worst in the workplace has been a woman at the top, and that's a really difficult reality to sit with. There are three things I'd say in the response to that. The first one is yes, I do think we hold men and women to different standards. And the reason I say that is from my own experience. So stop for a moment and imagine you are in a workplace and you've just had a baby.

35:27 You've gone off on leave. You've enjoyed your maternity leave, and you want to come back to your position, but you don't want to come back full time. You want a bit more time with that baby at home. So you ask your boss if you could come back part time, and your boss comes back and says, so sorry, we can't make your position part time. You can come back full time, or you could come back part time at a lower status job. With a lower wage. How do you feel about that boss? Not very good. We don't like our boss right now, right now, make that boss a woman. We like her just that little bit less like I'm that little bit more angry because I feel like she should get on. You should get it, you should be on my side here. Now, make that a woman with young children who was able to return part time herself. And she is a monster, right, She's a monster. But she made the very same decision as that first bloke. She made the very same decision as that first bloke. Now, I'm not saying it was a good decision. I think it was a rubbish decision. But I think we need to hold men and women to the same standard, and we need to look at the way we are responding and question ourselves. Am I holding someone to different standards? And I know I'm guilty of it myself. I've definitely done it. And I think the answer is not to lower the standards we hold women to, It's to raise the standards we hold men to. In that scenario, great point. I think one of the one of the problems also is that when we're in an organization, particularly a big organization, and we look to the top, we often see very few women at the very top.

36:59 So say there's a boardroom with ten seats and there's only one woman in that executive boardroom of ten seats. We go, we look up and we go, I want to be that. Do you look up and say I want to be in that boardroom or do you look up and say I want to be her? Because as soon as you say I've got to get me one of those women spots, every other woman becomes your competitor, and the men kind of fade away as competition rather than saying, hey, we've only got one of the ten at the top. I could have any of those ten spots. There could be five women in that executive suite. Hell, they could be ten. But I think our our minds perceive it in a way that means we see very quickly other women as competitors. And the third thing I wanted to mention with that Queen Bee syndrome is often to fight your way to the top. For women now in this system that still really pushes back against them, you have to have been pretty steely, and you have to have been pretty single minded.

37:57 And I don't mean that in a negative way. I think all power to you if you got there, But I think once you're there, it's very easy to focus on battening down the hatches around you and holding on at all costs. And you're probably fighting. Some pretty serious battles at the top there, and I think that can come at the expense of helping other women. And my favorite story is the one from Michelle Obama who says, once you're at the top there, once you've cracked that glass ceiling, your job is not to close the trap door like a queen bee. Your job is to let down a ladder and help up as many women as you possibly can. This is a really enlightening conversation, Jamiller. And one thing that our listeners have come to love about our show is that we always give them some really practical tips that they can go away and start applying in their lives.

38:40 So if they're recognizing themselves in this conversation, that they can take away some tips and some strategies and some things that they can reflect on. So what would be your kind of top tips I guess for women listening ah. I've got so many tips, I've got so many suggestions. I just love doing the research for this peace of work, so I came out of it with so many ideas, and the book is full of a lot of practical stuff how you can get around this. A few ones that I think have been really helpful. The ones I'm going to focus on are around confidence and around asking for more money, because that's what I get asked the most by women. So firstly, when you are asking for more money, prepare. You will be more confident if you are prepared. And by that I mean keep a record between when your pay is set and when you're going to ask for a pay rise of things you did and things you achieved, because it's kind of like having an argument with your partner and then you get to the point where you're like, and you did this like seventeen other times and I can't remember any of them, but you did it. You can't remember any of the good stuff you did in the year and a half since you last had your pay set. So keep a record every time you have a moment of particular praise from your boss, or you get an award, or someone says you were outstanding or you achieve something at work, just file it away in a folder so that when it comes time for you to ask for more money, you have evidence, so be prepared. The second one is when you're asking for more money, talk about why you deserve more money, not why you want more money. That's really greatly important. And third, you're more powerful in a

40:13 group than you are on your own. So if it is possible to work together in your workplace to ask for more money, if it's possible to contact your employer association or your union, if it's possible to work with other colleagues, do that because you have more institutional power the more of you there are, So that's the pay rise front great in terms of more general confidence space. I really love Amy Cuddy's power posing video. It's a ted talk on YouTube. It's one of the most watched YouTube videos of all time, which is just ridiculous and awesome. And she has run a study that showed she actually gave people money to gamble right, and before the gambling, she would try and raise their courtisol or not raise their courtsol by getting them to do powerful posing in the mirror for two minutes.

40:59 It sounds really absurd. But the group that did more powerful posing that included like posing like one wonder woman or a Facebook executive or she has all these brilliant names for them, a silver back guerrilla. The ones who did this posing for two minutes in the mirror looked at themselves and said I am powerful and held these powerful positions. They had evidence of increased cortisol in their system, which gave them more adrenaline, which made them feel more powerful, which meant they. Were more likely to gamble. Now, if you're about to go gambling, that is bad. But if you're about to go into a big meeting and you need a confidence boost, that's only going to be helpful, right, So I reckon that's worth giving a go. It sounds ridiculous, but I think it's helpful. And my challenge would be to figure out what your equivalent of the word just is, Like mine what your word of apology is, and try to not include it in just your emails. Don't have to do it in language, that's really hard to do it in spoken word, but just try and get rid of it from your emails for a week and see if it changes the way people respond to you.

41:57 I think that is a fantastic one, and I know I do the same, and in fact, I've almost done the opposite. Like if I'm on the hop and I'm writing an email and it's very direct, I will actually go back and go, oh god, that was a bit hard. That's a bit harsh. I better soften that a bit. And you're adding the little niceties to soften it all down. So great point, Jamilla. Thank you so much for coming in today. This has just been the most interesting and enlightening conversation. I really appreciate your time. I know our listeners are just going to love this. Oh thank you, It's been so much fun. Thank you. I absolutely love Jamilla's straight up practical ideas for how we can start to be more confident in the workplace.

42:38 You can find loads more of her practical wisdom in her book Not Just Lucky, And of course you can find Jamilla on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook or at her website jamillaisbe dot com. We love hearing from you, so if you love this show, please give it a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, or get in touch with me personally hello at castone dot com. Also, if you're interested in the Crappy to Happy book, which I've just released. It's available for order. And the link is in the show notes, or you can come to my website cast. Doone dot com. In the next episode, I'm talking to Rebecca Sparrow, who's the author of the Asking Me Anything books, and we're talking about the issues facing tweens and teens and how to improve our relationship with our kids.

43:23 Crappy to Happy is presented by Cash Dunn, produced by David Lenski, Audio production by Darcy Thompson. Listener