Work culture is toxic to women. I’m finding joy anyway.
When everything feels awful, badass friends help us through. That’s why we’re making No, You Go — a new podcast about sticking together.
On Friday, I watched my president, who has bragged about sexually assaulting women, send well-wishes to a disgraced White House secretary, who resigned after two ex-wives accused him of gruesome physical abuse.
Soon after, a stranger tweeted at me to tell me that my book, along with those of five other women writing about bias in tech and design, were nothing but complaints, and “could be summarized in four words.” Of course, he’d never actually read any of them.
Later that night, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens published an op-ed desperately concerned about the “smearing” of Woody Allen. His argument? That Dylan Farrow — who says Allen sexually abused her at the age of seven — should have had more proof of the crime before speaking up.
By the time I went to bed, yet another White House staffer had resigned over yet more domestic violence allegations.
It’s fucking exhausting. No matter how good I am at my job, no matter my expertise, no matter what I wear or what I look like or whether I do every goddamn thing right, someone’s always about to tell me that my concerns aren’t valid, my work isn’t legitimate, and my experiences aren’t real. Someone’s always about to tell me that a mediocre man’s mediocre career is more important than my safety.
The world is hard on women who dare to want things.
And yet, I’m still here. I’m still managing projects and cooking dinner and writing articles and hitting deadlines and making it to the gym. And I’m not just working hard. I’m doing the most meaningful work of my life. I’m angry, and I’m raw, and I’m anxious about the future. But I’m also, somehow, thriving.
Sometime last year — somewhere between Uber’s sexual harassment scandals and James Damore’s misogyny memo and Harvey Weinstein’s non-apologies — I realized that my ability to weather the political and cultural shitstorms of our time isn’t rooted in some kind of exceptionalism. It’s not because I’m brilliant, or superhuman, or whatever people say about “strong women.”
It’s simply because I don’t feel alone. In private Slack channels, in group texts, over drinks, over long runs, on weekend trips, on my couch, everywhere: I am surrounded and supported by more badass women than I ever thought possible.
Not all of them have the same concerns, not all of them are in the same place in life. But we all share a profound commitment to sticking together through whatever bullshit comes at us next — a commitment to reclaiming some space, and some joy, in a world that often feels like it’s trying to grind us into dust.
That’s why I’m so excited about No, You Go — my new podcast with two of those women: Jenn Lukas and Katel LeDu. Because I want everyone who’s been marginalized in their work to know that they’re not alone, either. There are people out there who want to celebrate your successes, and commiserate about your anxieties. People who will help you figure out what you’re doing with your life. People who will be generous with their time, their knowledge, and their love.
Those people might not be in your group text yet. But dammit, at least we can put them in your headphones once a week.
No, You Go is all about how we navigate choices and tradeoffs in pursuit of our ambitions — and in spite of all the people who’d prefer we stay in our place.
It’s about challenging narrow perceptions of what success can look like, and how work and life should fit together. It’s about lifting each other up, and about recognizing the work we have to do to ensure that our success doesn’t come at the expense of folks who are more vulnerable than us.
In our first month, we talked with a web strategist who runs her business from a small farm in Northern New Hampshire and takes off to go hiking every Tuesday morning, the CEO of a company making wearable tech that girls can code themselves, a designer who ditched her job to help a community of young women relax and recharge, and, coming tomorrow, a public radio reporter and new mom who is now kicking ass as a candidate for the Pennsylvania legislature.
Coming up, we’ll interview authors and writers, designers and community advocates, scientists and programmers. We’ll interview people you already look up to, and people you’ve never heard of. All of them are doing amazing things. But all of them are normal people, too: full of anxieties and flaws and frustrations. That’s what makes them great: they’re real. They have limits. And they’re getting shit done, anyway.
The other day, we invited a person I admire to be a guest on the show. They wrote back flattered, but concerned: they weren’t sure they qualified as ambitious. They weren’t sure they had enough name recognition. They weren’t sure they’d done anything worth talking about.
A year ago, I’d have chalked their response up to impostor syndrome — the belief that your accomplishments aren’t real, that you’re a fraud, that you don’t deserve praise. But I’ve realized we’ve been looking at the problem all wrong. This person isn’t afflicted with some kind of disorder. They’ve just spent their life in a system that, over and over, has told us all that only certain accomplishments qualify. That ambition only looks a certain way: found a company, raise capital, get promoted to VP. Chase money, chase status, chase fame. They’re not doing any of those things. Of course they don’t feel ambitious.
But they are. They’ve become a leader in their community — a leader who challenges their peers’ assumptions, who advocates for marginalized groups, who relentlessly pursues justice. That work will never get them a corner office, or an IPO, or a six-figure book deal. But it’s ambitious as hell.
That’s why they’re exactly who I want to have on NYG.
I’m done with a world that flattens our passions and dreams—our visions for our lives and our communities—into a dollar figure and a job title (if it allows us to have them at all).
I’m done with media that’s so quick to center the story back on another boring white guy. I’m done with “progressive” podcasts that never engage with the issues facing women, non-binary folks, and trans people of all genders.
I’m done with apologizing for being ambitious. I simply don’t have time. There are too many issues I want to talk about — and too many amazing people whose voices I want to make sure you hear.
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