On this week's episode of What's At Stake, Penta Managing Partner Andy Whitehouse sits down with journalist and author Josie Cox to celebrate the launch of her new book, "Women Money Power." During their discussion, Josie recounts the journey of completing her new book, detailing the book's inspiration, research, and drafting process. Josie also shares some of her most fascinating findings, detailing pivotal moments in history that have shaped women's financial autonomy including women's entry into the workforce during WWII and the advent of the contraceptive pill.
Andy and Josie also dissect contemporary gender equity concerns such as the financial intricacies of remote work, biases in promotion and compensation, and the imperative of genuine gender equity in fostering business' success. The two also emphasize the significance of diversity as a driver of innovation and organizational resilience. Josie's book "Women Money Power" is now available wherever you buy books!
Join Andy and Josie as they unpack the history of female empowerment and reveal opportunities for progress in current and future workplace gender dynamics.
On this week's episode of What's At Stake, Penta Managing Partner Andy Whitehouse sits down with journalist and author Josie Cox to celebrate the launch of her new book, "Women Money Power." During their discussion, Josie recounts the journey of completing her new book, detailing the book's inspiration, research, and drafting process. Josie also shares some of her most fascinating findings, detailing pivotal moments in history that have shaped women's financial autonomy including women's entry into the workforce during WWII and the advent of the contraceptive pill.
Andy and Josie also dissect contemporary gender equity concerns such as the financial intricacies of remote work, biases in promotion and compensation, and the imperative of genuine gender equity in fostering business' success. The two also emphasize the significance of diversity as a driver of innovation and organizational resilience. Josie's book "Women Money Power" is now available wherever you buy books!
Join Andy and Josie as they unpack the history of female empowerment and reveal opportunities for progress in current and future workplace gender dynamics.
Hello everybody and welcome to this week's special episode of what's at Stake celebrating the publication of Josie Cox's new book Women, money Power. I'm your host today, andy Whitehouse, partner here at PENTA in New York, joined by my dear friend, josie, to discuss her process and insights from her account of the fight for female equality. The book describes how women have fought for financial freedom and details the social and political hurdles that have kept them from equality. Josie is an editor, a journalist and a broadcaster with a particular interest in business power, workplace culture and gender. Next week, pentham Worth Media will host a launch party for Josie's book. The event will feature a conversation on the books fascinating narrative account of progress, women's lives and the work still to be done for women's empowerment. Thank you, josie, for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me, Andy.
Speaker 1:So, Josie, let's maybe start with a bit of background on how the book came about. What inspired you to write Women, Money, Power. What were some of the things you came across in the process of developing the concept for the book?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I always say that the book took about three years to write, from when I started researching to all the way through to publication just now, but the reality of it is that the idea for the book was probably percolating for the best part of the last 10 years.
Speaker 2:I have been a journalist for about 15 years.
Speaker 2:I started my career at Reuters and then the Wall Street Journal, writing about financial markets, stock markets, bond markets, currencies, things like that, and one of the things that I always noticed about my reporting and about the sort of spaces in which I was moving as I was doing my reporting, was that they were still so male dominated and, of course, money and finance and banking being sort of the epicenters of power in our economies.
Speaker 2:I always thought that that was problematic, that we still, despite all the effort and all of the hard work that so many of us have been doing for such a long time over the past you know, decades there's still such a stark inequality in the money space, so to speak, and so I've always wanted to write the book. I had been working in Europe for the bulk of my career. I relocated to America during the pandemic in March 2020 and just realized that the history of inequality in this country is so rich and so troubling and still so evident in so many ways, and so I just thought that this was a wonderful opportunity to delve into that, at a really, really critical time, I think, and at a time of reckoning as well, for this country and for you know, the systems by which we all live and work.
Speaker 1:So maybe, before we talk about sort of where things stand today, I think it's important to note that this is a work of history, and so maybe you could take us back, josie, to sort of the beginning of the story, where the book begins, and sort of how you framed up and lay out the sort of the beginning of your historical narrative.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I should say, probably, that the actual trigger for writing the book and deciding that it should be a sort of chronological history was a conversation that I had, at the height of the pandemic, with a individual who is a very, very powerful business leader, and I spoke to him off the record and I asked him about his views on the gender pay gap and why it's still so pervasive, why you know, here in America, women on average still only make 82 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterpart, and the answer that he gave me really flawed me. He said that what I had to understand was that sometimes, when a woman decides to start a family, when she takes a temporary leave from the paid labor market, when she comes back, she's just not as professionally ambitious as she was before. And it really surprised me that, despite the complexity of this topic, despite the fact that this individual is so highly educated and has such an amazing acumen for business, that was the most obvious and the most appropriate answer that he deemed to this particular question, and so I thought the only way of writing about this is to go back in history and to see where we came from and how we evolved in order to understand why we are where we are today, and so that was sort of a preamble answer to your question. So what I decided to do was to go all the way back to the Second World War, and I chose that time because that was a time when women in large numbers came into the paid labour market out of necessity really, for the first time, and so it was the first time that women were making their own money, that women understood and learnt firsthand that they were just as capable of working in pretty much any profession that had previously been dominated by men. And then subsequently, when the war was over, they were essentially overnight moved back into what I call the unpaid labour market, which is the home, and they were sort of they defaulted back to this caregiver role.
Speaker 2:And I think that that sort of inflection point was really really important for our understanding of how subsequent generations of women approached labour, approach the economy, approached their own financial opportunities. And so that's sort of the opening of the book is the Second World War. I found a lady who is still alive today she's 97 years old and I spent a good amount of time with her. She actually built aircraft at Boeing during the Second World War, when she was a teenager, and she now lives in Pennsylvania and she reflects very, you know, with a lot of mixed emotions on that time. But I think that her story is so important when we talk about this narrative of female economic empowerment and where we all came from.
Speaker 2:And so, you know, after the Second World War we sort of enter the period of the 50s and the 60s, and the 60s being such a pivotal moment, because that was the time when the contraceptive pill became available for the first time. It was approved by the FDA here in the US in 1960. And, unequivocally, the access to birth control and reproductive rights are absolutely unequivocally linked to financial independence and freedom. And so one of the chapters dwells on that particular moment in history and why it was so important, and the rest of the book moves through the decades all the way up to the present day, aiming to really answer this question of why, despite all of these pioneers of women's rights and fighters for economic empowerment, why are we still where we are today?
Speaker 1:Can you tell me just some more of those stories about the sort of the World War II pioneers that you found? I'd love to hear just a little backstory of how you were able to track them down and then maybe some of the lessons that we can take away from the stories that they told you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, definitely. So, you know, I decided that this book had to be a work of narrative nonfiction. It had to be a book about individuals and about people, and wherever possible I wanted to get those stories from you know, first person sources, primary sources, and I wanted to hear how it actually was for the people who actually went through that. And so my first port of call was with archives. I looked through newspaper archives to try and determine whether you know these women who worked during the Second World War were still alive, were still willing and able to tell their stories.
Speaker 2:And this one particular woman, may, who I came across, who lives in Pennsylvania and who I ended up becoming, you know, getting to know really, really well over the course of reporting. She had done some interviews with local newspapers about being a Rosie the Riveter on you know, significant anniversaries and things like that, and I then tracked her down on social media, on Facebook. She was spending a lot of time on Facebook during the pandemic. I reached out to her and within a few hours we were on the phone and I visited her. I actually spoke to her this morning because she wanted an update on how everything was going in relation to the book and I'm just amazed at how you know, how lucid she is, considering that she's 97 years old, and how driven and passionate she still is, how determined to tell her story and to get the recognition for these women who came into the paid labor market really for the first time and, you know, changed essentially changed the course of history.
Speaker 2:It sounds like a grand statement but I very much believe it's true. And just quickly, in terms of some other characters who really stood out, there was one woman who I spent an inordinate amount of time researching, who actually was the lady who probably single-handedly funded most of the significant research and development into the contraceptive pill that became available in 1960. Her name is Catherine Dexter McCormick and she, you know, I often say she was written out of history, but it's probably more accurate to say that she was never written into history in the first place. And yet so much of the way that women were able to stake out careers and stake out a place for themselves in the economy is thanks to the determination that Catherine Dexter McCormick had for allowing them to do that.
Speaker 1:And some of you just did you all thesis sort of shift through the course of, I suppose, particularly the last three years of the actual process of writing. How did the how? If the narrative did change, how did it change? And were there any surprises along the way as you went to taking your research and sort of building out the structure of the story?
Speaker 2:Definitely yeah. So when I first set out to write the book, I really envisioned it being a trajectory, a narrative of progress. You know, here's where we were. Here's where we are today. This is the linear trajectory that we have followed, and even though I anticipated that I would discover that that trajectory was sort of shaped by progress and then set back by ups and downs, I didn't quite appreciate how dramatic those were, and you know, even just in the course of my reporting, you know certain developments in this country particularly, have caused huge setbacks to women's independence. You know the overturn of Roe v Wade in 2022 being perhaps the prime example of that, but also you know more sort of subtle things that I think we don't talk about enough.
Speaker 2:In the 1970s and 1980s, we had a huge amount of legislative change, really really significant Supreme Court rulings on things like women not being able to get fired for getting pregnant, women not being able to be denied credit purely on account of their gender, things like that. You know women women getting business loans. Up until 1988, a woman had to have a male cosigner to get a business loan, and it was so extreme that there's there's one example in my book of a woman who actually had to get her. She was a widow and she actually had to get her teenage son to cosign in order to get a business loan which, if you think about it today, I mean it's sort of ludicrous to deem her less credit worthy than her dependent teenage son. So a huge amount of progress.
Speaker 2:And then we hit the 90s and I think the one thing that sort of seeps into the equation in a really obvious way is culture. The 90s were really characterized in American society as a time when, you know, media became really dominant. The number of people who had TVs released rapidly it was the dawn of the internet in the late 90s and that sort of translated into a real culture of misogyny across mainstream media. We also obviously during that decade have things like the Anita Hill hearing, the Monica Lewinsky affair, all episodes that really demonstrated in a pretty crass way that it's societally acceptable to undermine the credibility of women and to normalize that. And to me, delving into all of those examples really demonstrated the extent to which the trajectory shifted and the direction of progress really really took a sharp, you know, hairpin turn in that decade, which is quite depressing.
Speaker 1:I mean it is depressing, but I know that you found sort of points of light and reasons to be cheerful as you were working through your research and writing the manuscript. So there's a lot here for us to work on, there's much for us to do as we seek to build a stronger, better society. But what sort of what points of encouragement and optimism can we draw from from the book, from from your research today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think it's. It's really important to retain perspective and to understand that, despite all of these setbacks that I've talked about, you know we've come an awfully long way since the beginning of this book. Since the 1940s, you know, the law has certainly made huge strides. You know, up until 1993, marital rape wasn't outlawed in every single state. So, considering that that was so recent, we have come a really, really long way. Women are also, you know, very visible in leadership positions. There are more women who are at the top of fortune 500 companies than ever before. It's still only 10%, but it's a dramatic increase from where we were even just 20 years ago. So you know, and I say in the book, that one of our duties is to be hopeful and to be optimistic and not to give up hope for, you know, this continuation of a trajectory of progress, and I also sort of touch on some of the the areas where we can all kind of do our bit towards ensuring that the future does look more equitable.
Speaker 2:I think one of the big things that I touch on is that education is still very much lacking. You know, it might feel like we've been talking about the gender pay gap for years and we've been talking about DEI initiatives for years, but I think you know the anecdote I told you earlier about the business leader who said to me that the gender pay gap exists because women who become mothers are less ambitious at work. I think that just illustrates that the nuances of these gaps are really not understood at the highest, actual ends of business in the way that they should be, and I think you know. Relating to that, I don't think business leaders actually fully understand the financial incentives either, the extent to which global GDPs could be bolstered if female labour force participation were equivalent to male labour force participation. And if we had those mechanisms in place, you know, around childcare, around flexible working, whatever it might be, that could really be something that you know offers financial benefits to everyone, regardless of gender.
Speaker 2:And then the other thing that I think you know should be a source of hope is that I do think we're getting better at communicating. We still have an awfully long way to go, but I think that you know, in this world of extreme polarisation, you know, at a time that is extremely charged, I mean you know, you know as well as I do how many huge national elections are happening in 2024. This is really a time of political change and political upheaval and uncertainty, but we can use communication as a force for good. We can use it as a way to establish common values, establish respect, to establish empathy and to get people to understand the other side of the story. You know what it's like to stand in someone else's shoes and ultimately, I hope that you know my book contributes to that narrative and to that dialogue.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Josie. Let's take a very quick break and we'll be back to talk some more about women-only power.
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Speaker 1:Welcome back to this week's special episode of what's at Stake, marking the publication of Josie's new book Women, Money Power. Thanks again, Josie, for being with us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. It's great.
Speaker 1:I wanted to ask a question about young women who are going to read the book and thinking about their careers. For aspiring female writers like people like you journalists, people interested in documentary film, traditional business jobs and finance or professional services what kind of advice would you have for them as they think about their professional lives, the way that the labour market is working today, based on what you've learned from the process of researching and writing the book, and how, perhaps, has the book changed your mind about the way the gender equity concerns are addressed in the context of the labour market?
Speaker 2:It's a good question. So the first thing I would say before answering the question is that this book has literally got women in the title. Women, money, power, but that doesn't mean it is a book for women, it is a book really for everybody, and from the outset, that was my goal. I wanted to write a book about the labour market, about gender, yes, but about equality, predominantly, and inequality, and so I would urge you know, I've told many people about the book and a lot of business leaders who are male have said great, I'll buy this for my wife. And I say, well, why don't you buy it for yourself? You know, I'll buy it for my daughter and I'll say, well, maybe I can't be for your son as well, because it really is a common effort. And you know, we're not going to move the needle if we continue to make inequality in the gender pay gap a woman's issue. That being said, you know, speaking to women in the labour market, especially women who are coming into the labour market, having done all the research for the book, having read all the research, having done the interviews, having seen the statistics and the data, I would say that, you know, I would really encourage them to have those conversations that are perhaps difficult and awkward, but to challenge things in a way that is rooted in respect. You know, if you think that you are in a position where you are being undervalued economically, how might you have a conversation to acknowledge or address that in a respectful manner? You know, I strongly believe in the power of effective communication and I think generally most of us don't communicate enough. So having conversations, understanding that we're all humans, voicing concerns, voicing frustrations, voicing anger or sadness or those emotions in the workplace, I think is totally okay. And also just considering the other perspective you know I talked about this a minute ago but understanding why something is the way it is and who might have come up with that and why they might not have had the full picture.
Speaker 2:And I'm thinking specifically around things like hybrid and flexible working. You know it's so topical after the pandemic. A lot of workplaces are having returned to work in person mandates now, but those don't work for everyone. And if you are, you know, a parent who has caring responsibilities and you found that a hybrid schedule really enables you to reach your full personal and professional potential at the same time, then you know if your manager is mandating you to come back into the office rather than complain about it and say this is so unfair and resort to that sort of you know reaction. Why not sit down and explain the factors that are at play here and that you know, if you were given the opportunity to continue working flexibly, why that would make you such more of a valuable asset to the firm?
Speaker 2:So just having those conversations and doing whatever you can not to entrench division and polarization even further in the workforce and there's no blanket rule for everyone. You know every individual is different and every organization is different. But I think that just having those conversations and sort of breaking the taboo around topics like that is really, really important. And then for, for organizations specifically and for businesses I would say, you know, ensuring that you really appreciate, as a business, this untapped opportunity of creating an environment in which gender equity is not a nice to have and that sounds cliched, but like a real strategic priority.
Speaker 2:And you know, we know, we know all the data, sort of academically and cognitively, I think we know all the data that having a more diverse team in which everyone can thrive, regardless of their gender and background and whatever, is just better for an organization at home. We know all that. So let's make sure that we're actually implementing, that we're actually leveraging that knowledge and that understanding for our own benefit. So just education, discourse, debates, communication, but always making sure that everything is rooted in respect and in these common values and common interests.
Speaker 1:I love that and as a obviously painters are communications firm, we obsess around here about intelligence and analytics around employees and consumers, political leaders, investors and the like, and at the same time think really hard about how it is that you have the right persuasive conversations and so that sort of that obsession we have here around talent and human capital the points are making really resonate with me. I think companies have struggled a great deal to figure out how to manage the return to work. Clearly, some have done much better than others and are benefiting competitively as a result. So so it's.
Speaker 2:It's in everybody's interest from a competitive basis, as well as being fundamentally clearly the right thing for people to do Totally, and I think you know, I think what we can't underestimate is that through the COVID-19 pandemic, we really went through something extremely traumatic as a workforce, as an economy, as a society, and that shouldn't be forgotten and it shouldn't be underplayed.
Speaker 2:I saw some data recently around the remote working tax and how people who are still taking advantage of the opportunity to work remotely actually see themselves making less money on average than those people who are going back to being in person. And now that is probably, you know, on account of biases, heuristics that play into decisions around promotion and pay. But I think it's really really important to understand that. You know, if someone chooses to work remotely, it doesn't mean that they're less committed, it doesn't mean that they're less of an asset to a particular team. It's probably because of circumstances that they're choosing to do this. So, you know, I would really encourage managers who are making those decisions to see things for what they are and to have conversations and to, you know, truly understand that individuals have been through an awful lot over the last five years and to respect that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's pretty clear to me that women money power needs to be compulsory reading for managers from coast to coast.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm slightly biased, but I would tend to agree.
Speaker 1:So maybe, as we sort of wrap things up a little, jesse, tell me a bit about the rightsing process. I know this is your I mean you write every day your prolific journalist and broadcaster but this is your first full length book and the task of I don't mean to downplay the sort of the task of every day writing for your newsletter, for print media, for digital media, but obviously it's an immense task to put together a book like this. So what was the process like? What was surprising, what was interesting, what was what was frustrating about it? I'd love to hear just a little bit about the history of the history.
Speaker 2:The history of the history. Well, I did. I approach the task with an awful lot of respect because I knew, you know, the, or I had an idea at least of how ambitious it was to write a book in this world, where everyone seems to want to write a book and it's a very busy space. So you know, you really want to differentiate yourself. I had, I was very fortunate in that I had some incredible mentors. I, when I actually started the process of putting together a proposal for the book which is generally what you do with nonfiction books I was actually on a fellowship at Columbia Journalism School. So I had some infrastructure in place and some guidance from, you know, very established book writers, and one person in particular, professor Sam Friedman, who runs a book seminar at Columbia Journalism School, was really instrumental in kind of giving me that first push and saying, yes, this is a good idea, you should dedicate the next few years of your life to doing this. And then you know, when I pulled together the proposal, when I sort of knew what I wanted to write about, I really, you know, ironically it's it's funny when I reflect on this Ironically it was a lot of powerful men who helped me get this thing off the ground and make it a reality. Not that gender matters in this context, but I think it's important to note that they were on this journey with me and, you know, I think it's very illustrative of the fact that that the the debates that we have around gender inequality should never be us versus them debates. We're all on the same side here and I think that was sort of demonstrated beautifully in the fact that I had this team of people, essentially, who was, you know, willing to put in the call, willing to refer me to someone, willing to give me advice, whatever it was.
Speaker 2:I was fortunate enough to find a great agent who believed in this project, and then subsequently, a really great editor who had experience writing or editing books on social justice, on gender, and really understood what I was trying to do. He also was a person who pushed me to be ambitious in my reporting and to make this, you know, truly a sweeping history of female economic empowerment in America, and for me, you know, to go there as a writer, despite the fact that I had been in this country for about five minutes. But he, you know, made the point that perhaps it was precisely that that made me the right person for this, because I came to it with fresh eyes and I was able to look at it in a in a sort of critical way. And the book writing, the research and the writing I mean every author does this differently.
Speaker 2:I like to write as I report and sort of start capturing words on page while I'm actually in the process of reporting. Other writers, other authors, like to do all their reporting up front and then come away with stacks and stacks of notes and then somehow put it together into nice sentences. But I, you know, I really put pen to paper the first day that I went out to report and I'd say that whole process took about about 18 months, two years almost, and then editing and and getting feedback and having to maybe kill some parts of the book that I thought were brilliant, and with hindsight it was probably the right decision to leave certain parts out. And that sort of brings us up to the present day and publication day.
Speaker 1:So we're recording this together towards the end of February, but this will be, this pod will be be hitting our audiences ears sometime around March 6th, and I think I'm right in thinking that the book will be out and in bookstores physical, digital and other by the time people are listening to this. So, as a last question, josie, what are you, what are you looking forward to most about the book now being out in the world and what comes next in the process?
Speaker 2:So good question. So, yes, the book is out March 5th in the US and Canada, wherever you buy good books, and available across Europe from the 14th of March. And you know, I think I'm already seeing now some of the great things that are stemming from this project. There's one of the characters who I put profile in the book was this amazing civil rights activist, paulie Murray, who was one of the first people to really recognize the intersection of race and gender.
Speaker 2:And in the course of promoting the book and, you know, posting about it on social media, one of her relatives got in touch with me and I actually had a long conversation just this morning with this lady's niece, who is in her eighties herself and is really trying to.
Speaker 2:You know, she's on the same journey as I am, in the sense that she's trying to elevate these women who have been written out, or not even written, into history and give them the recognition and the acknowledgement that they deserve, and so I really look forward to continue making those connections and seeing where the stories that I tell in my book take me and the introductions that it can make. So I think that will be really exciting. I do have ideas for other books I want to write in future, but I think that you know, the work to elevate women through history who are not known is never done, unfortunately, because there are so many of them. And so you know, after maybe a few days of pause, I would really be ready and eager to throw myself into the next reporting project and to continue on this mission of elevating women and, you know, exploring this really interesting intersection of women, money and power.
Speaker 1:And so I think that we'll chose. Here is to say we are a penta obsessed with questions and understanding the dynamics and the labor market, questions relating to talent, and thinking about how it is that the way we structure and organize our society leads to bad outcomes, to great outcomes, to social progress. So it's been just such a thrill having you come on to the podcast and tell us a little bit about the book. So thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:It's been fun. So, to our regular listeners, thank you so much for listening to the conversation with Josie today. Please, as always, remember to like our content. Subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. Follow us on X at Penta Group and on LinkedIn at Penta Group. I am your host, andy Whitehouse, and, as always, thank you for listening to what's at stake. We'll see you next time.