05:30 - Emojis
\n09:19 - Language
\n16:38 - Media
\n23:24 - Bathrooms
\n30:45 - Childbirth and Career
\n39:34 - Myth of meritocracy
\n49:00 - One-size fits men
\n59:30 - Crash Test Dummies
\n1:03:36 - Medical Misdiagnosis
\n1:15:30 - Ladybug Ratings
\nWe provide transcripts for all of our episodes. You can find them here!
","frontmatter":{"path":"/invisible-women","title":"Invisible Women","formattedDate":"February 26, 2020","episode":"Season 2 Episode 8","length":"01:20:07","description":"Imagine a world where your phone is too big for your hand, where your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body, where in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, where every week the countless hours of work you do are not recognized or valued. If any of this sounds familiar, chances are that you're a woman.","audio":"https://pinecast.com/listen/89a480bd-a0aa-4303-b680-e760803dd939.mp3","transcript":{"childMarkdownRemark":{"html":"Kelly 0:00
\nImagine a world where your phone is too big for your hand where your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body. Were in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, where every week the countless hours of work you do are not recognized or valued. If any of this sounds familiar, chances are you’re a woman. This month for the ladybug podcast book club we read invisible women data bias in a world designed for men by Caroline Kriya. De Porres. In this episode, we’ll discuss our thoughts on the book what shocked us what felt a bit forced and have a discussion about gender bias in the world around us.
Emma 0:32
\nFirst, a couple of quick disclaimers. Some of the topics we discussed relate to sexual assault and maybe difficult for some listeners. Second, we’re not looking to attack anyone for who they are, how they were raised, what gender or sex they are. We’re simply just going to be discussing the topics in the book will be quoting several studies and bits of data, which you can refer to in the book appendix. For more information. Let’s jump right in.
Kelly 1:01
\nWelcome to the ladybug podcast. I’m Kelly. I’m Allie. And I’m Emma. And we’re debugging the tech industry.
Ali 1:08
\nFirst, I think it’s important to note and something that kept jumping out at me when I was reading this is that I don’t think that there was a great distinction between gender and sex by the author. And I think that there was some problematic ness to that, that she kind of used them interchangeably, and also didn’t do enough to discuss the impact on trans or nine non binary people who definitely even probably have some magnified versions of what we read in this book for some of these examples, and so, I think it’s really important to note that before we start, another thing that I want to talk about is that we are all white woman and so the implications of data bias on The three of us aren’t fully representative of the impact on all women. And there were some examples of data bias on women of color in this book and how it was magnified for them. But I personally, I think all of us can see this as well as that we would love to see more discussion of that in this book. So essentially, the discussion we’re going to have today is only representative of us as for three Sis, white women, not all women, we can’t speak for women of color or trans women or non binary people, but this conversation needs to be had and I think this book is still important despite its
Unknown Speaker 2:39
\ndownfalls.
Emma 2:40
\nYeah, I would, I would love to see an updated version in the future, though, I think, you know, we’re in 2020. Now, and I think I personally was a little shocked that this wasn’t inclusive of all women.
Kelly 2:51
\nI agree. I do want I do want to say like these, the two original points you made were mentioned in the preface of the book. But first of all, A lot of people skip the preface and they go straight to the first chapter. So there are probably some people who didn’t even read that part of it. And second, I think it really goes to show with the data that’s available as as we’re going to be discussing through this, this conversation going through the book, you know, the, the lack of female representation in these studies, it’s even more noticeable for, you know, trans intersectional, non binary women of color, like you did, like there’s so much of an absence of it throughout the entire book, it’s, it’s it when it does come up, it’s really noticeable. Like, oh, wow, this is the first time hearing of this through this entire book, and I am like 120 pages in.
Emma 3:39
\nI also think that putting in the preface is an absolute cop out of saying like, Ah, you know, like, I was maybe just not willing to do the extra work like, I don’t know, that’s how it read to me. Like, like you said, a lot of people skip the preface, like if she had wanted it to be inclusive of all women. She could have done a little bit extra work, but that’s just my myself.
Ali 3:59
\nYeah. I also found that there were incorrect uses of women men, female and male throughout this. And that’s something that really jumped out to me and kind of was a little prickly to me was that there were examples where she used female when she met women and for those listening that might not be as educated on this, um, sex and gender are two different things like sex is kind of the body that you’re born in. I don’t know if that’s the, the anatomical,
Unknown Speaker 4:31
\nthe anatomical and then
Ali 4:34
\ngender is the societal implications of how people perceive your gender. So that would be women, men, and then sex would be female versus male. And so I think that those were kind of used improperly at some places in the book when she really meant women, in that she was talking about the societal implications and the social implications of gender, instead of actually the Bible. logical implications of sex.
Emma 5:02
\nAnd I think this is kind of sad because this is such an important topic, and it could have been such a groundbreaking revolutionary book. But I do think it fell short. And if you look through some of the Goodreads reviews, a lot of people feel the same way. And I think it was, was it voted best book on Goodreads and its category for last year or was it just a contender?
Unknown Speaker 5:25
\nI don’t know. No,
Kelly 5:26
\nI find could have sworn at one I think
Emma 5:30
\nwhich is great that this conversation has been started but again, it’s problematic. So So yeah, just keep these things in mind while we’re having this discussion. Would love to see an updated version. Let’s kind of switch. Let’s talk about one of the first examples in the preface that she discussed that like totally blew my mind because it relates to something we use every single day, and that is emojis. emojis are like actually the world’s fastest growing language and is used by 90% of the world’s online population. I feel like people who don’t use emojis are like very Stone Cold like I don’t like to talk to. Someone doesn’t use an emoji. I’m immediate, like, Oh my god, they hate me. They’re mad at
Ali 6:09
\nthree of us who use emojis And like every single tweet we put out in the ladybugs,
Kelly 6:14
\ntoo, just as it as it does flavor to the tweet,
Ali 6:17
\nvisually eye catching dude. That’s a social media tip for all the listeners. That’s why we’re social media.
Emma 6:27
\nemojis as a language originated in Japan in the 1980s. And women are its heaviest users. 78% of women use emojis versus 60% of men. And until 2016, emojis were male. So this was very interesting to me this whole history. So we have this thing called the Unicode Unicode Consortium. It sounds like super fancy.
Kelly 6:48
\nI love that. By the way, I like the idea of people just kind of like sitting around the table discussing what emotions you want to create just thrills me.
Emma 6:56
\nIt’s Yeah, it’s interesting. So they’re essentially just a silicon Valley based group of organizations that work together to ensure that universal international software standards, they kind of decide like whether an emoji should be added to the current like stable release. And they should they decide on like the code that should be used. What’s interesting from here, like once they decide, okay, this image is going to be adopted, here’s the code for it, then each phone manufacturer or platform like Twitter, or Facebook designs, their own interpretation of this emoji, but they use the same code. So like cross platform and whatnot, like you can have the same representation of an emoji. Ironically, though, the emoji that most platforms originally represented was a man right. So like they designed a runner, in no way was indicative of the fact of which gender should be used to portray this imagery. It was just called runner, but every single platform depict it as a man, which was very interesting. So like, even though the term itself was gender neutral, the default was male. And so in 2016, the Unicode Consortium decided to explicitly gender images that depicted people. This was like a super interesting to me. I don’t know what did you guys think? Are y’all What did you all think of inclusive? Sorry, I have to watch my language.
Kelly 8:09
\nI completely agree. And also, I think, although this wasn’t talked about in the book is we’re not talking about you know, the gender bias here. What’s also fascinating to me is the only up until recently there was representation of different people of color, and the emojis as well. But even still, when you occasionally see somebody use an emoji, it that’s like a different different from the default it shows like The yellow version and then just like a block of color, like it’s not properly formatted even across platforms when you’re actually using the emojis net. I that’s like a major drawback to me. Yeah. And
Ali 8:45
\nvery recently, they added the gender lists or the non binary kind of emojis to or they’re kind of more androgynous. And so I think that that’s cool, but I think this just goes to show the idea of of the mail. Yeah, the mail default where men are the default in our media and in emojis event, you know that people think of a runner, generic runners of man, and that that’s not necessarily the case I run.
Emma 9:19
\nWell, not just men like or I’m sorry, not just like the men are the default but also able bodied people are the default because I think just recently also, they added the accessibility emojis as well, like people in wheelchairs. And so the fact that it’s typically male, able bodied, typically sis white, is is problematic, but I think now we’re starting to become more inclusive. And this is not just in a Moji language. This also translates into languages we speak all over the world. And as someone living abroad in Europe, where I’m learning German, I’ve learned French and these languages have genders associated with nouns This is problematic in English, we don’t have genders for things you would say, the phone or the book. But in languages like German or French, you would say leave her which is masculine. And you would say, das boo, which actually is gender neutral. So German has three genders, we’ve got masculine, feminine and neutral French only has masculine feminine. And this is very problematic, especially when you’re using translations like Google Translate, because if you throw the book in the English side of Google Translate, and it outputs to French or German, by default, like, okay, that’s a bad example, because those have like assigned genders. But for example, if you put in programmer, the programmer or the lawyer, the default will be to male so it’ll be like the male version of that noun, which is problematic because then you’re, you’re not even representing women in the way we have spoken languages.
Kelly 10:53
\nThat’s always been something that’s really fascinating to me, especially as I as I’m getting Again, at Spanish, I lost a lot of the Spanish that I used to be able to speak. And I’ve actually noticed that I don’t know when this changed. But Google Translate actually did make an update at some point where if I type in the doctor, for example, in translate it into Spanish, it actually shows both the feminine and masculine version. So that says a lot about Dora or toad. So it actually shows both of them, which I think is a really good step forward. Because, as discussed in the book, before, it would just show a doctor and completely leave off the feminine version of, of the doctor lot. Yeah.
Ali 11:34
\nOkay, so I have two tangential discussions here. The first one is that this kind of goes back to what we normally talk about on this show, and that the tech industry, this Unicode Consortium, and Silicon Valley is probably majority made up of the people that emojis originally represented like white men, and that’s what a lot of the tech industry Is and so those people are the ones building technology. They’re the ones that are going to be represented by it. There are so many different examples of people not being properly served by technology because of the people that are writing those platforms. And so I think it’s good that it’s becoming more diverse. And we’ll talk about this more in the future. But of this episode, not like the future in a different episode, but later on in this episode, but have representation matters and even for things like emojis, which probably are not impactful for everybody’s lives to, you know, a full extent, but it’s really, really great to be represented, like people were so excited when they added the accessibility emojis and that was really, really big day for a lot of people. And so having people that are more represented and accurately depicted, even through these emojis really impressed And we should think about that more.
Emma 13:01
\nOne thing like we don’t have written down, we have outlines for every episode that kind of guide our conversations. But I want to go off the rails for a second. Because just talking about how men are typically, typically white men are the ones we’re the ones maybe still are the ones developing a lot of these technologies, you often forget certain functions that impact women when women are 50% of the population, let alone users. So like they in the book discuss portable fitness trackers like Fitbit, or the Apple Watch. And what was interesting there was it could what it was, it could tell you your blood alcohol content was a doubt, but they couldn’t tell you like if you were going to get your period or like wearing your Yes, recycle. You were
Kelly 13:46
\nI was actually a part of the beta test for Fitbit adding.
Emma 13:51
\nReally? Yeah, I didn’t know they added it. Yeah, they did. Yeah.
Kelly 13:54
\nSo it’s a it’s an actual thing. I have it on my Fitbit and I’m just going to show me an alley here. Because they can actually see it, or my fitness just not going to do anything but yeah, there’s actually it says like five days until you start your period Oh, and it learns over time.
Emma 14:10
\nThat’s amazing for several reasons. And I don’t think men understand why period tracking, not period tracking but understanding your menstrual cycle is important and yes, we are going to talk about periods on this. So if you get squeamish, just deal with it because this is important. This can tell you and we’ll talk about fertility issues later. But this can indicate to you whether you have a very difficult to diagnose fertility issue. Allie and I will discuss this later. But understanding your body temperature your core body temperature can tell you if you have like an issue whether that’s you’re actually growing cysts inside that can rupture and actually be life threatening. These things are very important and when you know your fitness tracker can tell you your blood alcohol content, but it can’t tell you, you know your core temperature and actually sell devices that do just that for women where you can actually wear this bracelet while you sleep in it. tracks your core body temperature. But those are freaking expensive. And if I already own a Fitbit or an Apple Watch, I don’t want to buy a secondary device. So when you only have men designing these things, you leave out half the population.
Kelly 15:11
\nThere’s so many things that I’m really looking forward to covering as we as we talk about now and deciding things. I’m like, yeah, definitely,
Ali 15:20
\nwe started with the easy one of emojis. But we have got a lot of conversations to have. My other one that I wanted to bring up my other tangent is that it’s so fascinating how impactful gender is on language. And generally, if you think about it, our pronouns are something that represent us and people used to describe us constantly. And those are based on gender. Like, why is your gender The most important thing about you that your, your whole language is based around that and that’s something that I just find fascinating, right?
Emma 15:49
\nWhy don’t we just have one pronoun that everyone uses? That’s not gender indicative? Like, I don’t understand. I mean, this goes back to how languages are developed. Yeah, I can the years when I had the Rosetta Stone. But it’s fascinating. And I would like to know more about that
Ali 16:05
\ntrying to get better about using say, when I don’t know somebody pronouns or,
Kelly 16:11
\nman, I have a small thing to talk about the word today. I, when I was in grade school writing papers, I would always get knocked down on points for using they if I didn’t know whether I was talking about a man or a woman in the context of whatever it is, and I said, I just you know, took the took the marks for it, because I kept on using it, and now I’m thankful for it because it’s still part of my natural vocabulary.
Emma 16:38
\nThat’s, I’m sorry, but that’s a shitty downfall of the American education system, which I have. I think we all have thoughts on that, but uh, okay, I Why don’t we switch into something a little different than language I guess it’s still kind of goes to language because it goes deals with how we At a young age are are influenced by some of these things and that goes to media and TV. I know I don’t know how it is in Europe, but as a child in America, a lot of times we give our children screens to look at whether that’s playing games, whether that’s watching TV, I watch TV a lot as a kid. I mean, back then I also played outside because like, you know, AOL, I couldn’t be on there all day and the Sims were just wasn’t it wasn’t where it is today. But the TV does take up a lot of time for our children and people in general. Interestingly, oh my God, I’ve said that word so many times in this episode, let’s have a drink every time I
Kelly 17:33
\nwas gonna say we just we just created a drinking game. Yes. drink your coffee in the morning here just for
Emma 17:42
\n2007 international study of 25,000 children’s TV characters found that only 13% of non human characters are female. Why even how does that even possible like That’s sad.
Kelly 17:56
\nThat’s very sad and that that completely took me by surprise. And then the analysis of G rated films released between 1990 and 2005, which were all 90 as babies. So we watched these, these films, only 28% of speaking roles went to female characters.
Emma 18:13
\nAnd for those listening who don’t know what g rated is, I don’t know if you have it in Europe. I don’t think you do. It’s basically general audiences meant for families, people of all ages. Yeah, fascinating.
Kelly 18:25
\nThat’s a good distinction to make.
Ali 18:27
\nAnd it’s also worth talking about like the bed chill test Bechdel Test. I’m going to butcher that name. I’m so sorry. But it’s this test for media to see if they pass a couple different things. It’s like if there are women who talked to each other not about a man is one of the requirements and almost no movies pass it or pieces of media.
Kelly 18:52
\nYeah, in the in the pop sugar reading challenge for this year. That’s actually one of the books he read is is one that contains a conversation. with women two women talking to each other had that where a man is not at all involved in the conversation or topic of conversation in the in the fact that it’s difficult to find this just blows my mind actually doesn’t blow my mind. But it’s very disappointing.
Ali 19:13
\nI think even the idea I read this article A while ago about how women heroines are normally super one dimensional characters and so that’s why I don’t know about you all but tend to identify more with almost the more villainous women characters because they are more multi dimensional like favorite characters of all time like Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl she’s not exactly a depicted as the scene but she’s at least got multiple dimensions and a lot of like the good girls don’t I can try to find this article. But for those who don’t know, hundred percent I don’t want to take her to the med steps. Now that we live in
Emma 20:00
\nDamn it. I’m gonna get a dog and name it Serena. Yes.
Ali 20:03
\nOh my goodness.
Emma 20:05
\nBut your dog better feet my dog nicely.
Unknown Speaker 20:08
\nYeah, she better she’s not
Unknown Speaker 20:11
\ntheir dogs
Ali 20:15
\nyeah if I got a second dog though Have you named Spencer after? Pretty Little Liars?
Emma 20:20
\nOh my gosh, alley you collect dog Kelly collects limited liability corporation I’m not really sure what
Kelly 20:33
\nyou call it cat hair?
Emma 20:34
\nYeah, absolutely I do. So it’s not just media that this affects two. It’s also textbooks which is when we’re talking textbooks it’s generally as it relates to people learning language or even kids in elementary, middle and high school. 30 years of language and grammar textbook studies in countries including Germany, the US, Australia and Spain found that men far outnumber women and example sentences and it’s not just this if we take a Look at Wikipedia For example, this is this kind of shocked me a little bit. I think I knew this subconsciously but having it spelled out was like oh crap. So Wikipedia is also very gender biased. England’s national football team on Wikipedia is about the men’s national football team, while the women’s page is called the England women’s national football team, and then we’ve got noticed that too, it’s like the same thing with everything though. I mean, women’s soccer, when you talk about novelists in 2013 Wikipedia divided writers into American novelists and American women novelists it’s it’s but it’s so stupid in my opinion because like you look through these stupid articles and they’re like, the one about women include words like female woman lady but articles about men like the men’s the men’s soccer team that doesn’t exist. The soccer team of England don’t include words like man masculine or gentlemen because the male sex goes without saying the male gender. This I don’t know is gender or sex the right word to use here but men are the D I think it’s what I’m getting at.
Kelly 22:01
\nYeah. And I think the the soccer team example in particular just like really irks me, because I think we all know how good the US women’s soccer team is. And they get very little press coverage when our men’s soccer team is pretty terrible. But that’s all we talked about. I’m a
Ali 22:21
\nbig basketball fan, especially college basketball, and the pay rate of the W NBA versus the NBA is absurd. Like the W NBA players get paid. So, so so so, so much less than NBA players. And even the way that we talk about women’s basketball like if UConn women’s basketball team was instead of men’s team, they would be every single headline ever. Nobody would stop talking about them. They’d be talked about as the greatest dynasty in sports, all those seasons that they were undefeated and for you kind of woman. It’s like oh, Yeah, they’re just the best. That’s just the way it is. Nobody even barely talks about it anymore. And I think that that difference is even fascinating.
Kelly 23:09
\nI completely agree. I think we can go on and on and on about media in general and the the male default throughout all of the representation with it, whether it’s in TV, book, sports, whatever it is, but let’s kind of shift gears and talk about daily life.
Emma 23:24
\nSo let’s talk about toilet.
Kelly 23:26
\nYeah, let’s talk about toilet. So this was a really interesting part of the book to me and it makes complete sense. So there was a part in the book that talks about the the layout of, of bathrooms especially like public restrooms, and they tend to be the same size like a men’s restroom women’s restroom are the same size. yet. Men have urinals which take up a lot less space and women have to you know, we have our own stalls, and so you end up with 50 We’re like fewer stalls is fewer people being able to actually use the restroom than men? Just based on the layout? My explain that correctly.
Emma 24:09
\nYeah, it can service more people at one time because this the same email they have the same floor space. The men’s bathroom provides more ways to relieve yourself.
Kelly 24:19
\nThank you. I love talking about toilets.
Emma 24:23
\nBut okay, but why is this problematic and I think this is where it becomes more impactful. Women take up to 2.3 times as long as men to use the toilet.
Women make up the majority of elderly and disabled people to groups that generally need more time to use the bathroom. But women are also more likely to be accompanied by children or disabled or elderly people. But not only that, we had discussed periods just a few minutes ago.
\nKelly 24:55
\nThey’re bringing in periods up again.
Emma 24:59
\nThey’re 2020 5% of women of childbearing age who might be on their periods and need to change the sanitary pad or a tampon.
Unknown Speaker 25:07
\nThis is a
Emma 25:08
\nproblem, man. I mean, how many times other than at a tech conference Have you gone to the bathroom there’s a huge frickin line
Kelly 25:14
\nright about any public sports like any anytime you go to like a like a stadium to go watch like a sporting events, or a movie or a show, the women’s line is way longer than a men’s line
Ali 25:26
\nbecause it moves a whole basketball which is again all men it’s like tech conferences. But yeah, definitely agree where the lines are always out the door like airports. That’s the one that I always noticed that there’s never a line for the men’s bathroom and the women’s bathroom. It’s just like, way out the door. Always.
Emma 25:47
\nI I’m just tempted to wear diapers at that point when flying just like pilots wear diapers like Why didn’t you know that?
I don’t want to notice things now I’m like, Oh, wait. It’s not pilots. Surgeon surgeons wear diapers because when they’re when they’re surgery they can’t leave their the body and be like, you know what, hold on, like, keep them open, I’m run to the bathroom.
\nKelly 26:19
\nI just want you to know that I just google do pilots wear diapers. I’m not going to tell you what it says. I’m going to leave it to you to Google
Unknown Speaker 26:29
\nvisualize these things.
Kelly 26:32
\nIt’s kind of fascinating. They have like the things that they use.
Emma 26:36
\nPlease let us know if you google this because you you should. But again, that gets back to gender discrimination because you go look that up and guess what, they’ve got products for men. Just saying Okay, okay,
Kelly 26:47
\nanyway, also still talking about about urinals and bathrooms and toilets. One thing if you are an American traveling in Europe, one of the main things you’re going to notice is the lack of public restrooms, or the fast Do you have to pay to use a public restroom? I don’t usually carry money on me. So it’s it’s kind of, it’s something that had to get used to. And I’ve been to several different countries now. And even to this day, it’s still it’s still an issue. The thing about this is that it affects women disproportionately more than it affects men again, because we, you know, like of the women of childbearing age, they often you need to actually use the restroom to change out a sanitary pad or wherever it is that you’re using, because you can end up with like an infection, and nobody wants to deal with that. And the number of public restrooms is consistently decreasing across all countries as well. It’s not even just you know, countries in Europe, you’re seeing it in Africa as well.
Emma 27:45
\nNot just that, though, like we were in Belgium and in Amsterdam, and both cities posted his country. They both had public urinals like I shit you not we walked past the church and on the side of the tunnel. You literally are peeing on the side of the church. They have public urinals because apparently I think men would get drunk and try to pee in the canals and they’d fall in and die
Kelly 28:10
\nto this. Okay? Yeah, I’ve never actually been to Amsterdam now that I am very experienced in my evening in Amsterdam by the canals there are no like yeah, like real guard like that. Yeah, guard rails real guards guard Guild, but whatever
Emma 28:23
\nthe fact that literally public restrooms for men to pee in the public on churches, and yet there’s not enough free public or there aren’t any free public toilets for women to use this little bit absurd.
Kelly 28:36
\nI yeah, I completely agree. Um, what oh, is the township in South Africa that they they invested in adding the number of public toilets in in their township and it actually ended up being a like a six it’s like $5 million better off or something like that for the city by by investing in adding more Public public restrooms. It’s a good idea.
Emma 29:03
\nIt’s not just a good idea it will protect women from being sexually assaulted. Yes, a 2016 study found that Indian women who use fields to relieve themselves are twice as likely to face non partner sexual violence as women with a household toilet. And why this was important for South Africa. It was because originally they had and this is a township in South Africa. They originally had 5600 toilets for 2.4 million people. And that resulted in 635 sexual assaults a year and that costs the township $40 million each year. So when they increase the number of toilets to 11,300, they had to pay $12 million to do this, but it actually cut in half the distance to a toilet, and this decreased sexual assault by 30%. And so they actually ended up $5 million better off
Kelly 29:50
\nand also one of the things that was worth pointing out is, women would end up having to basically bring somebody along when they were having to relieve themselves in the field. Just to, like protect themselves from being, you know, from sexual violence, but even then, when you would go in Paris, the field, there was still plenty of cases where they were both being attacked. So yeah, I really love that South Africa, this township in South Africa actually, you know, did a study on this and invested in, in women.
Emma 30:23
\nAnd I just want to stay like we’re over here complaining that you have to pay to use a restroom when you’re in Europe. But we’re actually very fortunate because they’re a typical Mumbai, Indian slum might have six bathrooms for 8000 women that are going to even have access to toilets at all is like actually a privilege. So I just wanted to explicitly state that
Kelly 30:45
\nI completely agree. So let’s now talk about the workplace. There is a lot that we can talk about in this section. But let’s just kind of start with childbirth and career just because this is obviously a A very hot topic especially with there not being any required paid maternity leave for women here in the US. And it’s something that’s come up with me recently because I have a small business and one of my employees, his wife just gave birth bought a month ago. And so I was reading up on all this and even the family medical leave at FMLA it covers it only kicks in when you have I think like 50 employees at your company. So they’re all these small businesses that are still not required to give even six weeks unpaid leave in the US.
Emma 31:35
\nSo you’re gonna say it only kicks in when you have 50
Kelly 31:40
\nthere anything that’s not the case, but even sorry, makes me
Emma 31:44
\nthis infuriates me the fact that the US claims to be the biggest and the best country in the whole world. The ego is massive and yet you’re not providing maternity leave for people. Are you freaking kidding me? That makes me so mad.
Kelly 31:58
\nIt’s in everyone who who learns this factory? I was getting drinks with a friend in Amsterdam. And I told him this this statistic, and he just he was like, So when are you going to be moving to Europe? Just because it’s it’s unfathomable that there’s absolutely no maternity and paternity leave. It’s basically up to the company whether or not they want to, to offer it.
Ali 32:19
\nYeah, it’s one of those things that I think probably all of us have thought about at some point is how we would even handle for our careers because we’re all very career focused people, like how we would handle having a kid for our careers. And like, for me, it’s been a goal that before I’m at that age, I own my own company. So I don’t even have to worry about it’s that I work for myself. And the fact that that’s something that you have to think about and how you have to be like changing your own career plans around having a kid whereas that’s not really the case. I don’t think for most men,
Emma 32:55
\nyeah, it’s crazy because one in four Americans returned to work within two weeks of given Birth and by Americans, I mean American women, obviously.
Unknown Speaker 33:04
\nTwo weeks of giving birth, all right,
Kelly 33:05
\nyou’re still healing. You’re still recovering from the process of giving birth, whether it’s a natural birth or a C section, major surgery human
Emma 33:13
\njust like broke its way out of your body and you’re going to go back to work like nothing today’s like, Okay, I’m back. Yeah. But this can have severe implicant. Why do we go back to work? Well, let’s talk about that. It can have two to three major implications. The first being salary, you can actually you will make less money over the course of your lifetime. So in Germany, a woman who has given birth to one child can expect to earn $285,000 less. By the time she’s 45 than a woman who has worked full time without maternity leave or interruption. The second is you’re likely going to be passed over for promotions. And the third is you can even lose your job. This also made me angry. There was a British counselor, a woman counselor who went on maternity leave, and she actually lost her job because of it. Because if a counselor does not attend Council for six months, they will lose their position unless authority has approved their absence. Well guess what, that absence doesn’t include maternity leave. So this woman lost her job because she gave birth
Kelly 34:15
\nin this entire book just I’m just angry. I’m very
Ali 34:20
\ndefinitely seeing that happen to contractors. So women who are contractors, they don’t have absolute maternity leave usually. And so then a lot of them end up getting fired if they’re having or if they have a baby. So it’s awful.
Kelly 34:37
\nYeah, it’s also an issue in academia as well. You know, when you’re when you’re trying to receive tenure, which is the you know, the highest level you can receive when you’re when you’re teaching at a university. You have to put a lot of time into being able to even be on the tenure track. And there’s their requirements. It’s it varies by the university as well as far as how tenure track works. But it’s usually you’re teaching for a certain amount of time. So in the US, they have seven, you have seven years to actually receive 10 year after getting your first academic job or you can be fired. And that is in when you have women who are giving birth, and they have to be out because they’re now caring for a child. They’re, you know, they’re not able to put in the full time teaching, it affects how people are actually able to receive tenure how women are able to receive tenure. And, you know, naturally this Tet, this timeframe happens when you’re around 30 to 40 years old, which also coincides with the year as most women are trying for a baby
Emma 35:39
\nnot know not most women are trying for a baby, the couples are trying for a baby but the women has the implications of that. And that’s a big problem. And I do think that the there were a set of US universities who tried to fix this, but in all actuality I think they ended up making the issue worse. So us our academics in the tenure track system, you already said they have seven years to receive 10 year after getting their first academic job or they’re fired. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a number of US universities adopted what was intended as a family friendly policy, where they would receive an extra year per child to earn tenure. But here’s the issue with that women are going to be throwing up if they’re pregnant, or you know, if they’re, yeah, if they’re pregnant, I guess morning sickness, maybe going to the toilet every five minutes changing diapers pumping breast milk, during the first year, they’re going to be doing all of these things. They’re not gonna be feeling great for their first year, whereas men get to dedicate more time to their research. So instead of actually giving a leg up to parents, this policy just simply gave a leg up to men at women’s expense. But there are a few companies that are actually like trying to write this wrong. Allah, do you want to tell us maybe what some top companies are doing to help mitigate this? So the one that was
Ali 36:53
\ngiven in the book was Google, and they noticed that women who had just given birth we’re leaving The company at twice the rate of other employees. And so then they increase their maternity leave from three months at partial pay in a five months of full play and the quit rate dropped by 50%. So that’s one thing. And I think that it was Google as well who had child care on campus, or maybe that was a different company. But that was another example given to you.
Emma 37:23
\nYeah, that was one they offered childcare as well as convenience things on campus like dry cleaning, so you can run your errands during the day, but they also gave you a stipend for takeout food in the first three months after your baby is born, which is really cool.
Ali 37:36
\nDefinitely. I think another thing to talk about is the rise of remote work. And I have been critical about remote work in the past, but I think that it is something that will really, really help women who are mothers or parents in general, I guess, when they’re keeping their careers going after having a child
Emma 37:57
\nYeah, there were some other benefits that that certain companies We’re providing two which are really neat so Campbell’s Soup offers on after school classes and summer programs for their employees, children, Sony Ericsson and Evernote actually pay for their employees to have their houses cleaned, which is a huge benefit that maybe we don’t even think of needing. And this last one was nice American Express. It was nice, it was necessary. I don’t know why I’m saying that it’s nice. American American Express actually pays for women to ship their breast milk home if they travel while they’re breastfeeding. So that almost to me seems like a necessity. And we didn’t write this down, but they were giving examples of traveling, and how the implications of work related travel can affect men and women differently. Let’s say you’re a single mother and you have to travel for work. It’s not as simple as getting on a plane and leaving, like you would have to think about childcare and this is an added expense. Your company’s not going to pay for that. versus if you’re a male, and you’re married. I know this also works the other way around. Like if a woman is married and her husband can stay home with the kids like you’re not gonna have that expense. But like these are just things we have to think about, you know, women are it, it’s not as easy for women to be able to just like pick up and go drinking after work, maybe they don’t even want to go out drinking with their co workers, maybe they can’t afford a babysitter. And given the fact that women do the majority of household work, which I don’t think we’re going to discuss too much, but women do the primary work in a household. They don’t have the same freedom to be able to go out and do extracurricular things or to be able to travel as easily.
Kelly 39:34
\nEspecially when and not it’s not even just travel. It’s those extra curricular things that are actually taken into consideration when you’re trying to get a promotion to the company, that you’re you’re, you know, talking to your your colleagues, your team members and everything after work outside of work as well and it does have an impact on on your ability to get our promotion and it actually is kind of a good, good lead in for For talking about like the myth of meritocracy, which is to me one of one of the my favorite topics that was in the book. Okay, so just to kind of talk about what a meritocracy is, it’s it’s being rewarded for the work that you do. Just kind of running through some some stats that were that were mentioned in the book. A survey of us firms found that 90% use performance evaluations in 2002 and 90%. Had merit based pay plan in place. So the better you perform, the more money you’re going to make. An analysis of 240 performance reviews collected from a variety of us tech companies found that women receive negative personality criticism that men simply don’t receive. And
Emma 40:44
\nthe frickin times I’ve been told I’m too emotional. Oh, you don’t agree that makes me mine
Unknown Speaker 40:48
\nis always that I’m too nice. Which
Ali 40:53
\nwas the thing um, I’m not nice. Funny I’ve had that performance repeated multiple times. Like, it doesn’t mean what you think it means. And then one other one that I got at one point was executive presence that I didn’t have executive presence and I was like 22 at the time working, I googled it and I only do what it meant and every single article, none of them defined what executive presence actually was. It was just like this is a thing that were written get told that nobody knows what it means when it’s sexist and that they heard after the fact that the person was actually like planning it in my review anyways, it was it all a huge drama. But it definitely This is something that I’ve seen so many times in my career. And
Kelly 41:47
\nalso I don’t know if this is surprising, but I that one of the stat or one of the facts in the books talking about studies have shown that a belief in your own personal objectivity or a belief that you aren’t, so Access actually makes you less objective and more likely to behave in a sexist way.
Emma 42:06
\nSo what does that mean? It means that men who believe they aren’t object, sorry men who believes that they are objective and hiring decisions are more likely to hire a male applicant than identically described female applicant. And this can have severe implications on our industry because women make up only a quarter of the tech industries, employees and 11% of executives. And what that means is more than 40% of women leave tech after about 10 years as compared to 17% of men. This is due to many reasons. It could be sexual harassment, it could be not being surrounded by people like you could be lack and I would sit paid compared to your male colleagues. Yeah. I’ve noticed this in Germany in particular, where in the workplace, like I would say 98% of the people are white. So while I struggled to identify with having additional female engineer surrounding me, I have the advantage Yeah, it’s a privilege but it’s also You still have the fact that the majority people around me are white. For Women of Color surrounded by all white people, specifically, all white men, this is going to be much harder and I can’t begin to identify how that feels, or I can’t pretend to empathize with how that feels. So we seriously need to focus on hiring diverse people and put our money where our mouth is, this is a serious problem for many reasons. You should want to hire a diverse workforce like this should be something you want, I shouldn’t we shouldn’t be sitting here telling you diversity is important. It’s something that you should innately want to do.
Ali 43:36
\nA statistic that I like to bring up too is that women in the tech industry versus women in technical roles is a different thing. So women may make up 25% of the tech industry. But that number is much lower from every study that I’ve seen for women who are actually in like engineering roles. And I think there isn’t an exact number there, but I would guess that it’s probably closer to 10 percent from what I’ve seen,
Kelly 44:00
\nI think something I want to touch on is the hiring process. And I don’t actually remember if this was mentioned in the book, I think it might it might have been about doing like a blind resume review no names nothing like that, that you’re just reviewing the the answers for what they are ended up resulting in more women receiving interviews. And I think being hired I honestly I don’t I don’t have that stat written down. But I’m pretty sure that was in there. One of the things that was actually really surprising to me was at a certain company, I know that they use a part of their, their application process is answering questions on video. So you actually record yourself answering the questions. And obviously that’s creating a bias because you’re seeing exactly who it is that you’re talking to, and you’re going to be whether you are cognizant of it or not, your bias is going to play into whether or not you You want to bring them in for an interview or you want to hire them. That makes me angry.
Ali 45:03
\nAnd especially then since there have been so many studies about both gender, but also race in blind hiring and blind resume reviews as well. So we talked about that a little bit on our resume episode and whether you should put a picture on there and all that. So definitely go listen to that episode, but it’s definitely a huge problem.
Emma 45:25
\nLet’s talk about professors for a second. I definitely noticed this when I was in college because I was in a computer science program. And we actually had quite a few I would say, like 45% of our staff were women, which was incredible. Um, and actually, the head of the department was also a woman. So it was really nice, but female professors are generally penalized if they aren’t deemed sufficiently warm and accessible. But if they are warm and accessible or too nice, they can be penalized for not appearing authorities. Professional and this sucks a lot. This is
Ali 45:59
\nmy life. I know. So, overall, my students are great. And we’re talking about getting more diversity and just hacking FinFET boot camps are huge facilitator and that I tell my students normally on their last day, which is it’s actually the last day of my cohort today. So I’ll probably get this talk today that like the room that they are in for our boot camp is probably the most diverse place that they’ll be in. That’s not like explicitly a diversity place in tech. So if they go to, you know, Women Who Code or Black Code collective or something like that, then they’ll be in another diverse space, but overall, the representation, the gender split, and then also the racial split, and my cohorts is way, way, way, way, way better than the tech industry as a whole. And so, I think that that’s a huge step in hiring bootcamp grads is that they are going to lead to more diversity in tech, not just on those metrics, but also from their backgrounds. But that being said, as a instructor, usually, I’m one of The only women instructors at the company that I work at, and kind of historically as well, there have only been a couple women instructors, especially at the level that I’m at. And we get performance reviews from the students. And some of those that I have gotten have just been absurd like that. This was a while ago, but essentially, I got a review from a student that I wasn’t very smart and didn’t have enough experience, despite me having more than twice experience of anybody else on the team. That is a side note, but I was really cute. So that made up for it. So
Emma 47:38
\nlike something like that. Oh my gosh, if you if all of you listening could see the frickin dm that we joked about doing an episode or something of like showing some of the weird messages that we should. I think we should I’m not to chastise people. We obviously won’t name names. But some of this stuff and I think that biggest comment is always like, wow, people still do this or while you actually get these comments, those aren’t helping either because it kind of just counts the fact that Yes we do. And it makes it like it makes it seem like it’s not believable. But I remember when I had first started growing my Twitter following this was not last Christmas but the Christmas before I tweeted something. It was a sequel joke for Christmas. It wasn’t even something I created but it got posted on nine gag and the comments were horrific. I remember getting so upset. Like there were comments about the fact that I was wasting my looks in tech like I should just be performing really crude sexual acts on men to get ahead in life. These are not comments you would see made about a male and the fact that physical appearance plays into
Kelly 48:45
\nyour
Emma 48:47
\nwhat’s the word I’m looking for? Not efficacy, but like you’re like how much people take you seriously, what’s that word?
Kelly 48:54
\nI don’t know. So the see the way you expose your credibility, credibility,
Emma 48:58
\nthe fact that your physical action Parents plays into credibility in a technical field.
Ali 49:04
\nAnd I can see it at conferences where people never think that I’m a speaker or somebody who is a software engineer people always, you know, I one conference, I got a shirt both into the student section because they thought I was like a kid, and, or like a high school student or something. And then I also got ushered into the journalist section. I was like, I’m not a journalist.
Unknown Speaker 49:30
\nI’m just I’m a speaker.
Kelly 49:33
\nI’m not a journalist, but I’m going to write about
Emma 49:37
\nwhat one thing that also kind of annoyed me the other day, and this might just be me, like nitpicking at this point. But I was having a conversation with someone and they’re like, oh, what do you do? I’m like, I’m a software engineer. They were like, Oh, you mean developer? And I was like, I was like, actually, I have a computer science degree, and I’m classically trained like
Ali 49:53
\nmy contracts. Software Engineer. That’s one of my biggest pet peeves. Yeah,
Emma 49:56
\nbut I know I know. Titles is like a big shit show. conversation but like the fact that it was hard for him to believe that I could actually have completed a program as a software engineer, computer scientist was kind of shitty. Yeah, I don’t know. I like he probably meant it as a joke. But like for me that it’s not funny. It’s like, it’s not a joke. Can you ever like, throughout my like college program, there were instances where we’d have a group project and like, one of the guys who thought he was the smartest had hugest ego was like, Oh, you can just write the docs for our program. I’ll write the whole thing. And I’m like, okay, like, Yeah, sure. That sounds great. Like, I didn’t say anything at the time. I’m like, What am I supposed to say? It was very uncomfortable. Like I was in a group with all men. And for him to be like that. I should have gone to the professor like I should have called him out. But like I didn’t at the time. And that led to me being severely under skilled I guess when I graduated because I never spoke up and was like, actually, I want to do some of this development work. I don’t know there was like a whole deep seated issue going yet
Ali 50:54
\neven at work too. I’ve had I had somebody say in a client meeting like, look at Her Look how she pretty she is. But she’s still good at math or something like that. Like it was in a client meeting in front of all these people. And somebody said that about we and that’s the way that things go like people think that because we’re relatively young women in tech that we’re not technical, and we they stereotype us in some sort of way. And the things that people say to us at conferences or tech events in general, like I stopped going to conferences for a long time, and stopped speaking for about a year because somebody talked about how you wanted to get me pregnant, and like our first conversation, and it totally freaked me out. And that was like just one instance of sexual harassment at this one conference. There were multiple and multiple others one conference and so I stopped speaking for a while and I think that that’s probably an experience of a lot of women in this field is not just at work during the work day, but also if we do anything outside of work to build our brands. It’s gonna blow back on us on some sort of way
Emma 52:02
\nlike that I, what the fuck? Like, I’m just gonna say that because like, actually, why would anyone go up to you and say they want to get you pregnant Sir, you should not be procreating.
Ali 52:13
\nLike, exactly like
Kelly 52:15
\nI see it a lot in my in my line of work. There’s a lot of reason why most of the clients that I work with are women. And there are a lot more women business owners and in the e commerce space as well, which is really great. They’re really fun to work with. But I will never forget the time that I sat in face to face on a lead meeting in a meeting room at my co working space. And I asked if he has any questions. And his question was how do I know you’re not going to is going to take my money and run and run off and get pregnant?
Emma 52:46
\nOh my god. What? Like I laughed because that’s how I handle awkward. Yeah, I didn’t but like why wish
Kelly 52:53
\nI had been like, you know what, that’s a really good idea. I think I’m going to go do that steal everybody’s money. That how he responds to it. Yeah, let me just let me just start making all this money as who we great, but just like this, this is reality. This is this is what we deal with on a day to day basis why
Emma 53:10
\nmen look at us and they think that we’re just like waiting to get pregnant. It’s like, we’re that’s all we’re never like sitting around like thinking like, Oh my god, I want to get pregnant. Like That is my life goal, like sex objects,
Ali 53:23
\nlike, people, we’re not engineers. We’re,
Unknown Speaker 53:29
\nwe’re, yeah.
Ali 53:33
\nOur careers which have also been successful, and which we have a lot of work into and still people see aka looks worse and put that on us instead of our experiences. And I think that that’s so messed up and something that I don’t think that we can overcome. And like even just fearing for our personal safety, whenever we go to any of these tech events, like I have had so many bad experiences and so much People treating me in awful ways or going even further than that. And it’s just something that I don’t think that men have to think about. Whereas for me, it’s some, it’s like my first concern when I go to a conference is I have to make sure that I have a lot of friends that or there’s that I’m never alone and that I don’t go to certain events, if I’m not going to have a group around me that I know. And even, you know, going to a foreign country that scares me more than place in the United States where I would be more likely to know more people like it’s just kind of a reproduction and
Emma 54:39
\nit’s like, it gets scary though. It’s not just conferences so like, I remember I was walking into a restaurant in Austin once like I was just I had parked down the block, I was walking. These guys were kept calling me and I just ignored them. And then they started to yell like really profane things at me but I was actually worried they were going to follow me down the street, but I was on the train. You know, one day, like, a long time ago, maybe six months ago in Germany, and this drunk, I think he was drunk. He sat next to me I was very uncomfortable. He kept trying to talk to me. Well, he started a conversation in German and I, if I feel uncomfortable, even though I speak German, I understand German, I’ll pretend like I don’t. And I was like, sorry, like, I don’t speak German. And he then proceeded to speak English. And he was very close to me. And he was like, I don’t know what we were talking about. But I had mentioned all I’m married, and he was like, he went off on me. He was like, you’re too young to be married, like, your parents are probably disappointed in you. He got like, really aggressive and was like trying to, like exchange contact information. And then Luckily, we were at a stop and someone with a bike came on and I was sitting in like, we were sitting in the area where like you the bikes would go, so I was like, Oh, sorry. Like, I’m going to give them my spot and I ran away. He ended up actually causing a massive scene and yelling at the people. Like I was worried he was gonna like actually assault someone. But I was so scared like, I’m Everything that scared and the people around us were just watching no one was doing anything. I know it’s like the inactive bystander or the some kind of like the bystander effect. Yeah, the bystander effect. But I’ve never been more like afraid in my life and men don’t realize that we go through these things because we don’t talk about it. And people don’t think it’s real. And like I actually, like many women will change the way that I commute to avoid being alone at night, like on shady streets like yeah, it’s crazy. Oh, hundred percent. I feel like if you work late company should cover some sort of very safely to get home and I don’t even know what that would be. Because like Uber and Lyft drivers, they sexual harass people, like I’ve had so many of them, say inappropriate things or asked me out while they’re driving me and I’m like, I’m stuck in your car right now. Like this is not a safe situation. You know where I live? I don’t know if there is a safe situation like walking home people catcall all the time. walked to sweet green which is at the end of my block and two people cattle called me on my own block the other day like so not even a full block walking and to be ball trains Emma was just saying that all that happens and those one honestly public transportation scares me more than anything because you’re so stuck and you can’t get off if you need to and you can be trapped with one person or something like that. So I don’t know if there is a safe option for transportation other than like driving yourself which is not an option cities it’s
Kelly 57:31
\nYeah, there’s there’s a lot that goes on there. I have one more kind of tangent here and then we can get back on the topic on this you know on the same thing. I actually like I used to be because I work where I can work from wherever is much more easily from you easy for me to work from home. So when we have somebody come out to let’s say like an exterminator come out to just you know, spare houses we usually do for the quarterly service. It got to the point where I was so uncomfortable by the person who was coming to the house, you know, telling me I was really pretty If I have any pretty single friends and I’m like you’re in my house right now, and I feel unsafe in my own house. And after I finally told my husband about what was going on there, he’s like, you’re not you’re not doing this anymore. So now my husband takes time off of work to go home and be there for the exterminator destroyed the house. So I’m nowhere nowhere in the general vicinity. It’s just this is this is reality. It’s not just
Emma 58:24
\nyeah, and that that’s really shitty. And that kind of something’s not that. But like, I when I moved apartments, I hired a moving company. And it was basically like three guys, I don’t think they were German. They were also like, immigrants like myself. So we couldn’t really communicate very well and I about an hour into the whole thing and the guy turns to me, he goes, you’re going to go buy us some sandwiches and drinks and excuse me, and he goes, I’ll pay you when you get back. Go buy us like this is what we want go. And I was like, I know your English isn’t that good, but I’m fucking paying you. I’ve hired you. You’re now Ordering and I felt so uncomfortable that I actually went did it. I went and bought it for them because I was like, I don’t know what to do. And then I come back, they never paid me for it. And then on top of that, they tried to charge me more money because they were trying to take advantage of the fact that I’m a single woman. And like I said, Absolutely not like I was going to tip them. Actually, I was gonna give them 100 euro tip because it was a lot of work. But as a result, like I didn’t end up giving them anything because they tried to charge me and they did up charge me. It’s scary. It’s like it’s not just about feeling like violated in terms of sex, but also, like, physically, I am afraid for myself sometimes. Should we switch to something a little lighter and talk about crash test dummies, which was a very fun area of this book.
Kelly 59:44
\nYes, this was a super fascinating area for me but me You talk about crash test dummies. I just talked for like 45 minutes. Let’s let Ali talk about
Ali 59:55
\ncrashes dummies that were introduced in the 1950s. And for the decades after that, were based around the sizing of men and 15th percent dial men so that like the average size man, and it wasn’t until 2011 that the United States started using female crash test dummies and there are different tests that cars was passed before being allowed on the market for safety belts and collisions and lateral and all these things that I know nothing about is not a car person at all. I’m I’m living up to stereotypes right now. I okay. Dr. CRV that lives up my parents house. But only recently were female crash test dummies required and it made it so that the how a lot of different cards performed on these tests, they performed a lot worse after women were or female crash test dummies. I mean, they’re not they don’t actually have genders. They’re like, you know, dummies, but
Emma 1:01:10
\nthe dummies, I think it was meant to be more anatomically correct. But in actuality it wasn’t at all they literally took the male crushes me, I just made it scaled it down. It’s like transform scale point five. But guess what? We’ve got breasts, okay, gonna come out and say it. Some men have some men have breasts too. And they don’t account for that either. Like anatomically speaking, it’s not just having breasts, right like, there are other things we have different muscle mass distribution, lower bone density and different vertebrae spacing.
Kelly 1:01:42
\nI was really surprised by the statistic about how much more often women end up with whiplash from being in a vehicle accident of some form just because of the again like the distribution bone density, just the way there were built. Our heads are much more likely to No whip around. And that’s not at all a big brains. That’s it getting yours very heavy.
Emma 1:02:08
\nBut not only that, like, yeah, I think they do test with not anatomically correct women female dummies, but they’re not putting them in the frickin drivers.
Kelly 1:02:16
\nThey’re not they’re just on the passenger seat.
Emma 1:02:18
\nYeah, they’re in the passenger seat like Tommy. Like, I know, historically, men were the ones driving or whatever, but we don’t live in that day and age anymore. And not only that they don’t test with pregnant crash dummies, even though car crashes are the number one cause of fetal death related to maternal trauma. Like we still haven’t even developed a damn seatbelt that works for pregnant women.
Kelly 1:02:37
\nLike I have not I’ve never had experience being pregnant. So I don’t really know what it’s like, but I can only imagine just how uncomfortable it must be to buckle a seat belt when you’re pregnant, especially when you’re like eight months pregnant and quite ready to I don’t know how to best say this ready to pop.
Emma 1:02:58
\nThey actually and I didn’t write this down. down, so I don’t remember. But they took some of the leading car manufacturers in the EU and the US, I think, maybe just the EU and they ran them. Like they they ran the tests on them using a female crash test dummy. And they all frickin failed. Like their, their ratings plummeted when they did that. And that’s unbelievable to me. And they’re just like, you’re just testing. Yeah, they’re like, whatever, you know, it’s fine. Women don’t drive we don’t have rights. It’s not a big deal. We’re just gonna sit in the passenger seat anyway, right and take selfies and do all the things that women participate in society.
Kelly 1:03:36
\nOkay, one more topic to cover here. And I am going to let the two of you really cover this because I’m very thankful that I don’t have to suffer with the same the same Well, okay, medical misdiagnosis is what we’re going to be talking about. There’s a lot that can be encompassed, that can be covered in under the topic of medical misdiagnosis. But I think one of the things that we’re That’s really important to cover here is endometriosis. And I don’t have endometriosis. And so I would rather let somebody who does actually talk about what that’s like,
Emma 1:04:12
\nI think I’m gonna let you handle it, Kelly. I’m kidding. I’m totally kidding. I’m so awkward silence. So there’s a syndrome called the Yentl syndrome, I assume that’s how you say it. I don’t actually know. It describes the phenomena where women are misdiagnosed and poorly treated unless their symptoms or diseases conform to men. This is so john, I’ve had a lot of male gynecologist in the past and a lot of times they will miss diagnose you so basically I found out first of all, I didn’t find out I had endometriosis till I frickin came to Germany. Okay, so let me start with that. I was never diagnosed until I came to Germany when I was 2524 when I was younger, so first What is endometriosis? It is a disorder, a technical anything as qualified as a disease where womb tissue grows somewhere else in your body. And this can cause extreme pain and sometimes infertility. And it takes on average eight years to diagnose this condition and the K and 10 years in the US, even though it affects one in 10 women, which is nuts. So like, I never got a period growing up, and I was always really concerned about that. Jerry was just something wrong. And I finally went to the doctor, and they’re like, Oh, you have a huge cyst on your ovary and I was like, cool. So I had surgery, probably when I was maybe like, 15. And then I had to go directly on birth control to stop it. So I didn’t really have a choice in terms of birth control. I had to go straight on it. And then for years, I always felt like something was wrong. I’d get really sharp stabbing pain, like I get really bad cramps. I’d be tired all the time. And I had no idea why. And when I was in Austin, I would tell them, you know, like, hey, I’ve had this in the past and they were like, You’re totally fine. Like there’s nothing wrong with you. And for three years, I was just made to feel like I was crazy. And I moved to Germany and within several months, I was like, Okay, I physically can’t even touch my, my lower abdomen like it really hurts to touch. Like go to the doctor, we go to the hospital. She takes one look at me and she’s like, you’ve got a cyst the size of a baseball, like it’s bigger than a baseball. And the whole time in Texas, I’ve been telling my ob gyn I’m like, there’s something wrong with me like I can feel it. Like I know there’s something wrong with me. She was like, you’re totally fine. They never caught it. I mean, this thing’s been growing for years. And you can’t even tell me like what’s going on. And so I had an emergency surgery, because when you get cysts that big, your ovaries can contort, like contort themselves, and actually cut off blood supply to your ovaries and it can be life threatening. So they did emergency surgery in the hospital for four days. And she said you have endometriosis. And what that means basically is I’m going to continue to grow sis for the rest of my life. Even if I get a hysterectomy and have my own reason my uterus removed it can it still grows, I can still grow. It’s a lifelong thing. I’m going to continue to have to have surgery. So that’s my long story. But yeah, took what I would tell I was, let’s say 15 to 24, almost almost 10 years to get diagnosed. Yeah, that’s on par at the 10 years in the US.
Ali 1:07:18
\nYeah. So for me, I also have endometriosis. And I’d started as soon as I got my period, so I was like 12 or 13 and had to go on birth control pretty much immediately because I got cramps so bad and even then being on birth control didn’t really help that much. And everybody was just like, it’s just POS everybody deals with it. Everybody deals with it. I would have to skip school. I had days where I literally was lying on the ground, the wood floor because it was colder and would not get up. I passed out like fainted. I almost went to the emergency room over it. My blood pressure would drop. It was really, really bad. And people were just like, it’s just cramps. It happens to everybody, like you’re just being dramatic or whatever. But it was really, really impacting my life. And I would go to doctors all the time. And they were just be like, well, you should change what birth control you’re on. And so I tried all these different birth controls, and then finally went to a doctor who considered that it was endometriosis. But then even then it was like, yeah, even if it has endometriosis, we just treat it the same way. So you’ll just go on different birth control. And then I went on medication at one point that made it to that I essentially went through like feek meta pause for a while, but like me, my hair fall out and I had all these awful side effects. And then finally, I had surgery a couple years ago, and then they found growth on my digestive, urinary and reproductive system. So then Demetrius says had kind of spread onto all those systems which affects all of it. And, again, it’s a chronic illness, so it’s going to follow me my whole entire life. And I may have to have surgery every couple of years, I’ll probably be on birth control for most of my life. And then in addition to that, it also really impacts fertility. So that’s something that I’ll have to think about as well if that’s the route that I decided to go on, but it’s one of those things that you get questions so much and they always say it’s just you know, PMS and it’s just cramps. Like, if you are going through this every month and you were having severe pain that’s not normal, no matter what they tell you. You should not be going through that even though you’re a woman. That’s not normal. Make sure to press them on that and hopefully you will get a diagnosis and treatment that will help you
Unknown Speaker 1:09:53
\nand sometimes it does require going to see a different doctor. Some some doctors was refused to Except that there’s anything wrong part of the problem with that though is like not everyone has great access to health care or even has health care and afford exactly these endometriosis specialists are very, a they’re not in the vicinity of where you live and be they can be really expensive.
Ali 1:10:14
\nI’m really lucky that I grew up in New England and so I can go into Boston Children’s Hospital. Boston Children’s Hospital treats you until you’re like 21. So it’s not just like eight year olds. And my doctor there was a professor at Harvard about endometriosis. And he was incredible, like incredible. And my, I guess I was part of like a study for them and all that that’s really cool, that hopefully it’ll help other women down the road. But at the same point, I had to go to this doctor who was a complete specialist and I was really lucky that I had insurance at that point, and also, that I lived in the vicinity of a doctor who’s a real expert on it. But the first couple of doctors that I went to, you know on camera, Because I was in college at the time and like primary care providers, they were all really dismissive and didn’t really have any cure that they could do. So it really took going to an expert to finally get the help that I needed.
Kelly 1:11:13
\nMy favorite time go into the university clinic when I was gaining weight after switching birth control was the doctor telling me birth control can’t possibly cause you to gain weight, you’re just eating too much you need to change your diet. Like I really have not changed my eating too much. It’s all hormonal. And it took me so long to find a birth control that works and the reality is that birth control it I know at some point can also stop working the way it currently does. And I’m gonna have to switch again. I have run the gamut on pills
Emma 1:11:47
\npeople take for granted how horrible birth control can be like we’re not just talking the pill here. I had the injection in my arm. It’s like a little metal or plastic rod in my I had the IUD. Yeah. And so yeah, and to get it out she literally had to take a scalpel. And cut my arm open it and I’m going to have a scar there for the rest of my life. But then you’ve got things like the IUD and like all these other things that can be really painful and dangerous is literally
Kelly 1:12:07
\na you you borderline pass out, it is so painful to actually get the IUD inserted and I after that one completely mess with my system as with my body, I I got to remove and I swear I will never I will never get an IUD ever again. So here I am taking a pill every single day for the rest of a long time of my life,
Emma 1:12:27
\nwhich I just also want to mention is really freaking hard when you switch time zones. Like Yes, yeah. Well, yeah,
Unknown Speaker 1:12:34
\nanother part.
Emma 1:12:36
\nHow do you maintain taking your birth control at the same time every day when you travel for work or for conferences, this is something I’m struggling with. And it’s really hard. I physically have to take this birth control or I’m going to grow massive cysts on my ovaries. It’s something like I don’t have a choice. But when you travel for work, like you have to like, figure this out. It’s something that men don’t have to think about. Yeah, so in any case, I think the whole issue We summed up this whole conversation, I think women’s rights, all women’s rights, not just straight white women, all women, all women’s rights are human rights. So we need to get rid of this default mail.
Kelly 1:13:10
\nAnd one final thing is to make sure you have women at the table to make to help make decisions, because all these things that keep on getting forgotten and just forgotten is because there aren’t women involved in the conversations. And I know we’ve just reached the end of the episode, I so desperately want to talk about one more topic. So I’m just gonna make it really really really fast. There are certain places where after disaster occurred, earthquake, hurricane, whatever it is, they had to rebuild. And in these certain countries, there were no women actually involved in the the planning process, and they completely forgot to build kitchens inside homes.
Emma 1:13:51
\nThis is a stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I’m sorry. How big of an idiot Do you have to be to build a frickin house and forget to kill Like
Ali 1:14:04
\nI don’t really have a kitchen.
Unknown Speaker 1:14:07
\nThat’s fine. But I
Ali 1:14:12
\ndefinitely agree. Like how do you forget I kitchen? Well, it’s
Emma 1:14:16
\nbecause it’s no it’s because the men aren’t the ones doing the cooking. Yeah. They don’t cook it
Kelly 1:14:22
\nwhen they can figure something out.
Emma 1:14:24
\nYeah, exactly another to that point to like in disaster areas. This really made me angry as well. And I think this happened with New Orleans when the Hurricanes hit maybe you know, Houston a lot of the lower income housing was wiped out. They wanted to rebuild it with more gentrified housing and this really kicked out especially women of color who, you know, maybe couldn’t afford it and also not only it’s not just about the money it’s like they’re like their community was was ravaged. It was gone. Yeah. So when you are rebuilding these things, a build a frickin kitchen in your homes. It’s necessary and be like, please don’t destroy the ecosystem that was already there. I mean, like, you’re literally displacing people and now they have nowhere to go. And that’s,
Kelly 1:15:09
\nthat’s nowhere to go, they have to go further out and they actually end up losing their jobs because they cannot get to their current jobs because they’re so far out because they’re depending on public transport or walking is no longer available to them. So let’s leave it at that. And let’s conclude with just like I do we do the ladybugs reading of the book
Unknown Speaker 1:15:30
\nlast time we did Oh, I think
Ali 1:15:32
\nYeah, we did. We did.
Kelly 1:15:34
\nOkay, I’m going to give this a solid three ladybugs. I think the book could have been a whole lot better if it was two thirds of the length. It went on and on and on it. It was there’s a lot of really good points in it. I think I have to say that there were some there are some statistics in there that honestly felt like a stretch to be concluding that you know that correlation does not mean causation kind of situation. But I think is it was still a very good eye opening rate overall,
Emma 1:16:04
\nI’m with you on that I gave it I gave it a solid three, especially because it wasn’t fully inclusive. Again, I did think a lot of it was a stretch, but started a conversation that I think it’s very important.
Ali 1:16:16
\nYeah, I would third that, where I also think it’s really boats. I think that there were a lot of statistical things in there that I was a little bit questioning of, there’s this idea of spurious correlation, which is when you take two unrelated things that have similar trajectories and kind of put them on a graph together and are like, Oh, these two things are related. Like yesterday, I saw one that was like, having a dog in your house will make it so that your kids are better readers or something like that. And that’s like, it’s not necessarily what that means. It means that these two things are potentially correlated, not that one’s causing each other or not even that they’re related, just that these are two things that have a similar graph anyways, so just thinking about that. You can make two things that are unrelated look related, if you look at statistics certain ways, so I think that’s something to be cautious of. And something that definitely I was noticing in this book. Another thing that I noticed a lot is the and I like to say the plural of anecdotes isn’t data. And sometimes you can string together stories and make it seem like there’s this massive trend there. But you need to have an actual statistical study and survey in order to make a full point. And so that’s something that I noticed as well as that sometimes, like anecdotes were placed together in order to drive home a point. And I think that it would have been better if there was actual data there. That being said, I think that it It brought together a lot of good conversations, and this episode is really great. So I think that that’s important and this book brought up a lot really important points. So overall, I think the three Ladybug rating is good. I also wish that there was some sort of overarching narrative, because I think that it got a little bit dry at points. And if there was something stringing it together that kind of made it a little bit more interesting. And I think Kelly’s point, a little bit of a shorter book may have been actually more poignant as well.
Emma 1:18:15
\nYeah, agreed. Well, if this conversation made you as angry as it made us, there was a lot of stuff we didn’t touch as well. So I definitely would recommend reading it just with the caveat that it is not fully inclusive. But yeah, I think this is probably one of the most important podcasts that we’ve done.
Kelly 1:18:32
\nAgree, completely agree. And if you made it all the way to the end of this, because I’m currently seeing an hour and 20 minutes, yes, awesome. It’s a long episode, but
Ali 1:18:42
\nhopefully helpful, and hopefully some interesting conversations.
Emma 1:18:45
\nAbsolutely. And next month’s book, so March, we’re going to be reading it doesn’t have to be crazy at work. And I believe this was written by the guys who founded Basecamp. So I think
Kelly 1:18:57
\nyes, I don’t know their names, but it’ll be on our Goodreads page, which was We will link in the show notes. It’s a phenomenal book. I am really excited to reread this it’s a very quick read which is great after reading this one you can I read the entire book in a day it is a very fast rate the
Ali 1:19:12
\nE book says it’s only three hours long. So it should be quick
Emma 1:19:16
\nand the audio the audio book is also very good
Kelly 1:19:18
\nand it is so good so please follow along we’ll have the will have the post on Goodreads so you can add your comments and your thoughts about we’d love to include your your thoughts and when we record that episode.
Emma 1:19:32
\nAwesome. And with that we hope y’all have a great day and are just just fired up about this as we are let’s
Ali 1:19:38
\nIf you liked this episode tweet about it will be giving away Smashing Magazine books which is really really exciting and they are awesome. We’ve already given a bunch away. Also leave us a review. We love reading your thoughts. See you next week.