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Directors focus is to change lives and impact community - Midland Reporter-Telegram

According to a survey, around 76% women working in technology believe that Covid-19 and its effects have delayed their career progression while 54% Indian women are of the opinion that gender equality is more likely to be achieved through remote working structures.

The lockdown period should have been the time there could have been a significant move towards equal gender opportunity in IT posts, but lingering social biases have hindred that opportunity.

Kasperskys new report called Women in Tech report, Where are we now? which focused on understanding the evolution of women in technology, found that almost 38% Indian women working in tech/IT industry did prefer working at home over working from the office.

A similar number said that they work more efficiently while working from home, and as many as 36% revealed they have more autonomy when not working in an office.

However, a more concerning factor that has emerged from the survey highlights that the potential of remote work for women in tech is not being matched by corresponding social progression. Almost half of the women (44%) working in technology have struggled to juggle work and family life since March 2020 a figure that is at its most prominent in India but is also a consistent worldwide trend.

If one digs deeper, the reasons for this imbalance becomes obvious. When female respondents were asked about the day-to-day functions that are detracting from productivity or work progression,

- 54% said they had done the majority of cleaning in the home compared to 33% of men,

- 54% had been in charge of home schooling compared to 40% of men

- 50% of women have had to adapt their working hours more than their male partner in order to look after the family

Adding it all up, about 76% of women in India believe that Covid-19 and the lockdown have actually delayed their overall career progression.

The effect of the pandemic broadly differed for women. Some appreciated the greater flexibility and lack of commute from working at home, whilst others shared that they were on the verge of burnout. Its paramount that companies ensure their managers are aligned with their strategy to support employees with caregiving responsibilities, said Dr Patricia Gestoso, Head of Scientific Customer Support at BIOVIA, 2020 Women in Software Changemakers winner, and prominent member of professional womens network, Adas List.

The other significant trend that the pandemic has accelerated is the co-existence of remote and hybrid employees within the same organization. This can be a challenge for women working remotely as they may experience less access to top management working from offices. This may decrease their chances to be considered for the kind of stretch assignments that lead to promotions. Employers need to be conscious of those disadvantages and plan accordingly to minimise them, Gestoso added.

Truth be told, while social disparity is not tech-specific, they point towards a barrier that is preventing women from capitalising on the opportunities and the benefits of remote work.

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Lockdown has hindered career progression of Indian women in tech: Report - HT Tech

Army service means different things to different people, but everyone will agree that this is an important institution that makes us safe and secure. It is always better to prepare for war to avoid one, and over the centuries basic or advanced training has evolved just for this purpose. Today, men or women can join the troops if they will that patriotic fire in their hearts and the unquenchable desire for serving their country. Joining the military is a big step in ones life and it shouldnt be taken for granted or as just another job opportunity. Young soldiers should know what are they getting themselves into and learn some subordination or leadership principles before swearing an oath.

It is needless to say that an institution that is designed to defend our country needs some firm leadership rules in place. These rules are all about subordination, accepting authoritative behavior, and strict discipline. Orders must be followed without questioning which may be counterintuitive for those prone to critical thinking. This is why reading any army leadership essay and educating on these matters before making your decision to join the army can be a good idea. Being a soldier is not just about firing from machine guns, but also about building a certain mindset of a warrior, and reading some essay examples can help you with that.

We all have an innate dislike for authority so those who join must understand that there is no place for a large ego in the military unless you are a five-star general. Fresh recruits are expected to obey and stay in a good shape during their basic training. Nothing will prepare you for this if you are a rebellious individual who doesnt like being told what to do. If one doesnt realize that strict rules apply in every army, maybe he should consider a different career. All great military history writers agree that to give orders one must learn to obey first.

Those in power who want to develop good relations with their subordinates learned to adapt their management styles over the course of time. This relationship between officers and common soldiers requires mutual respect and admiration. We are talking about respect and honor that need to be among core values in every modern military. College students who are thinking about army service must study any essay paper they can find about these matters for better understanding. These are basic requirements for a solid organization to exist on good values and principles.

As any army evolves, the focus of leadership shifts toward creating a more brotherhood-like structure where everyone feels equal but very conscious of their duty and obligations. This creates an environment where future soldiers accept authority better and without complaining. They know their roles and the purpose of all these rules or regulations plus they understand that orders are a part of our everyday jobs. That is a proper way to organize any institution, not just our military. Every modern army learns constantly from many corporate firms and applies their newest management principles in its practice.

As technology progresses, even military personnel must keep in touch with modern high tech solutions. Continuous education is a must these days, as military technology evolves as the traditional role of trooper changes rapidly. Many modern schools or universities offer fresh recruits a chance to research and study modern military tactics and essay papers on contemporary warfare. We require a solid fighting force that keeps evolving into an institution that guarantees the peace of our nation as well as the whole world.

Many army historians were writing about the importance of knowing your enemy or ones ability for organizing counter-intelligence. These are those principles that drive new technologies plus the evolution of military doctrine. Maybe our forces are meant to constantly evolve until we reach some Star Wars level of technology. Until then, young soldiers around the globe will have to learn about the fundamentals of subordination, respect, and leadership.

If an army career is what you dream about, then we salute you. Only the best of the best get a chance to serve their country. Just be sure to know what is required of a future soldier. Go for it, if you think that you have what it takes for becoming a modern warrior.

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Fundamentals of respect, subordination, and leadership in the army for young soldiers - London Post

For decades, the Republican Party has used what's known as "the Southern Strategy"to win white support in the region through dog-whistle appeals to racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism.

Facing South recently spoke with political scientist Dr. Angie Maxwell, co-author with Todd Shields of "The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics," about the deep history of political division in the region and the future of Southern politics after Democrats won the presidential election in Georgia for the first time in 28 years and defeated two Republican Senate incumbents in the state.

Maxwell is the director of the Diane Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society, an associate professor of political science, and holder of the Diane Blair Endowed Professorship in Southern Studies at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Can you explain what you mean by the "Long Southern Strategy"and the role it played in the evolution of the Republican Party?

What we think about the Southern Strategy in general, I sometimes call that the "Short Southern Strategy"because it helps me distinguish it. The Short Southern Strategy that most people know goes something like this: As the national Democratic Party started to embrace civil rights post-New Deal but really in the 1960s, the Republican Party, or some strategists in it, saw an opportunity to win some Southern white voters who felt like the national Democratic Party was moving very far away from the Democratic Party they knew or what their state Democratic Party was. There starts to be this big gap.

After the 1964 Civil Rights Act is signed, the Republican Party at their convention that summer is really divided between the Rockefeller Republicans, who were moderately pro-civil rights, and a growing, primarily Midwestern, anti-labor conservative wing of the party. The party did a lot of work in the late 1950s and early '60s to try to find a nominee that they could push for. They finally found one, Barry Goldwater, the senator from Arizona, who'd been one of the few Republican senators to not sign the Civil Rights Act.

Goldwater became a star in the Republican Party and the Republican nominee in 1964. Southern Democrats who were upset with the national Democratic Party liked Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, changed their party ID to Republican, and really only stumped for Goldwater and pitched Goldwater Republicanism as a counter to this increasingly liberal Democratic Party. Goldwater succeeds in flipping five Southern states [Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina]. He earned 87% of the vote in Mississippi, which is one of the most radical changes in all of American political history.

Goldwater only wins those five Southern states and his state of Arizona and loses the rest of the country. But that moment was the first time the Republican Party became a real viable option in the Deep South at least at the presidential level. There wasn't much structure underneath that. There wasn't a strong Republican Party statewide, so it took a little more time. Nixon comes along four years later and manages to build on what Goldwater did but maybe not saying it so aggressively. Therefore the South goes red.

That's the story we tell. The problem with that is nothing is that simple. We forget that Nixon is successful, but in 1976 Jimmy Carter runs as a Democrat and wins the entire South back except for one state [Virginia]. Republicans have to go back to the drawing board and think of other issues that appeal to Southern whites.

There are two things in this next phase of what I call the Long Southern Strategy. They really adapted their coded racial language to fit the moment, which in the '80s became a pitch towards color blindness. Doesn't sound like a bad thing, but it's really a denial of structural racism. And then into fiscal conservatism, but not on everything just on social programs that were aimed at leveling the racial playing field, so to speak, or welfare reform issues.

The other thing that they did in rebranding the party in the Southern image, to earn these Southern white voters and cut themselves an electoral path to victory, is that they adopted a Southern style of politics, which is the politics of entertainment and big rallies, spectacle kind of politics, a real distrust of media, an us-versus-them politics. They pull some kind of George Wallace. Instead of defining yourself by what you are, you define yourself by what you're not. Sometimes they call that "positive polarization."

So it took a much longer Southern Strategy to rebrand the party, and they rebranded it in these elements of Southern whiteness. They nationalized that. Now, it's not that those elements aren't anywhere else in the country we know they are, but not at the level of concentration they are among Southern whites. But they speak to it, and it becomes the rebranded Republican Party.

In the book you argue that the Southern Strategy was not only rooted in racism but was deeply influenced by the rise of gender equality and the GOP's alliance with the Southern Baptist Convention. Can you explain how the elements of race, gender, and religion were combined to formulate the Republican Party's strategy?

As political scientists, we used to measure racism using a scale called "old-fashioned racism,"which was basically racial stereotypes. People would rank whites or Blacks on work ethic and trustworthiness. After the civil rights movement, all those numbers start to look like maybe things are different, maybe some of the old-fashioned racism was diminishing. But its more that respondents didn't want to say those things anymore. So new scales were developed looking at symbolic racism, which really got at the idea that structural racism didn't exist, that we shouldn't have affirmative action programs, that generations in slavery and Jim Crow did not have a long-term effect on upward mobility, politically and economically all that.

So the Republican Party realized it was going to have to adapt its racial appeal. It couldn't go do what George Wallace did. You couldn't even say the things Nixon and Strom Thurmond said. It wasn't going to work. It might win you some voters in pockets in the South, but you're going to lose the country. You've got to code it better. Then they also started looking to see what other issues could help break up these Southern blocs. Southern white women started changing their party ID from Democrat to Republican much later. We sometimes see that the racialized appeal works for one faction of white women kind of at an extreme end, but what about the more moderate conservative women?

When the Equal Rights Amendment was on a trajectory to be approved by enough states to amend the constitution, the anti-ERA movement really went after Southern white women, because the Southern states were the states where they thought the ERA would have the best chance of failing because theyre the same states that had not ratified the 19th Amendment for women's suffrage. So if you're a strategist for the anti-ERA group and you're going, "Where might we kill this thing?,"you're looking at places where the 19th Amendment wouldn't pass in 1920. And when they started talking to Southern white women, they really misrepresented the ERA.

They realized that Southern white women had been politicized by the anti-feminist movement led by Phyllis Schlafly, and then other movements like WWWW Women Who Want to be Women [founded by Texas native Lottie Beth Hobbs] and efforts from the Southern Baptist Convention to portray feminism as a threat to traditional gender roles. Were starting to understand a little bit more about what happened. We talk about religion and Republicans in Southern politics, and we talk about race, but the bridge in the middle was the anti-ERA movement. It was one of their big sells. It's "family values."

The Republican Party finds it works. It helps them strengthen that growing allegiance with the Southern Baptist Convention and evangelicals and social conservatives. In the 2000s, for example, you see Republican strategists putting gay marriage amendments on ballots in states to really pull evangelicals to the polls, giving them much more of a place within the party.

It's important to know that they had to do all three of those things, because it turns out a lot of people are just one of those three. When we measure racial resentment and modern sexism, which is a measure of just anti-feminism, and Christian nationalism, there are some people that are all three, but a lot of people are two of three or one of three. It's just not enough that are all three, so it really takes that whole trifecta to define a new party brand.

It creates such a brand in the Republican Party that anybody who can come in and get those three elements the best can play to that hard right in a crowded field in a Republican primary. In 2016 Southern states move up their primaries, so whoever plays to those three things most effectively can gain quite a bit of momentum in the race for the Republican nomination.

How has this strategy been used, specifically the race component, to trick many white Southerners into voting against their own interests?

There's a couple of elements of that. First, that was not new for the Republican Party to do that. That long history of white elites in the South building an alliance with poor whites in order to suppress any kind of class-based politics led to the suppression of the populist uprisings in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and had really squashed any kind of labor union organizing in the region and led to the development of the right to work states.

Even some of Jim Crow and the way it was set up was an effort to give poor whites some seeming advantage, even in their poverty. We tend to think of it sometimes as just white elites, but Jim Crow was set up to make sure poor whites sided with elite whites, instead of siding with or building a common bond of politics or organizing with poor Blacks. Slavery's over so they create a new system that puts the voters they need on one side and African Americans on the other, and that made poor whites feel like they had something, that they were better than somebody.

When people have possibilities to rise economically, it doesn't work as well, creating these kinds of faux hierarchies. But when people don't, when people have no opportunity to rise, then those faux hierarchies become more meaningful. The Southern white elites knew that, and they were able to set that up. Theres a long history we often forget. We tend to look at poor whites who vote against their economic self-interest and say they're irrational, right? But we're basing that on what political scientists say rational voting is, which is you vote based on your economic self-interest. But for some people, no matter what the government does it doesn't feel like it gets better. For some of those who are lowest income, in rural areas where there is not opportunity, they don't see this changing that much in their life. So they become "rational identity voters,"is what I call it in the book. Who do I feel like gets me? Who do I feel like would fight for me? It's irrational only if we look at bottom line and pocketbook policy issues. It's not necessarily irrational if we look at identity values and political emotions.

You argue that the Southern Strategy was used to "nationalize Southern white identity and fundamentally altered American politics as a whole."What role did the Southern Strategy play in producing the GOP's base of voters that supported Donald Trump?

What we see is over the last 40 years, on measures of racial resentment and modern sexism and Christian nationalism, is the American people have sorted themselves. That doesn't happen in one election cycle. It doesn't even happen in a few. It takes a long time.

What's happened is people have moved and sorted themselves as the parties took these polar positions, and the Republicans did that specifically to break up the electoral bloc in the South. The consequences of it are that people have sorted themselves over time to which brands they feel closer to. Now, what was a strategy to break up a few Southern states has rebranded the party in a way in which Republicans who don't express racial resentment and modern sexism and Christian nationalism are in the minority in their party and have a really hard time controlling it.

And Trump played it hard, played it really hard, coming after Obama, which also caused a major sorting effect, and running against a woman. That on top of the 40 years of partisan sorting in this Long Southern Strategy grew a Trump base that is more vocal and more extreme. Trump could be that extreme in 2016 because he was coming after the first Black president and because he was running against a woman.

How was former President Trump's inflammatory rhetoric and exploitation of the Southern Strategy connected with the recent violent attack on the U.S. Capitol?

I think it's directly related. I don't think a lot of Trump's language is coded. Trump really uncoded it. He was coming after eight years of a Democrat, and it's pretty common historically for things to flip after eight years. There's also the rise of cable news and talk radio just this perfect storm. Trump was able to go that far because people had sorted themselves accordingly.

Because he didn't have to code it very much, he speaks louder and clearer to people for whom the dog whistle wouldn't work because they didn't quite hear it or didn't know what it meant. But when he says it explicitly, it can draw in whole other crowds. I know it's the first time people have breached the Capitol, but when I think about the history in the South of massive resistance, when I think about governors blocking doorways and civil rights workers getting beaten to death, people getting beaten on the bridge in Alabama, dogs being turned on people, people being assassinated mob violence is nothing new in the South.

You mentioned the history of racial violence in the South. I think that the South has a duality about it that continues to impact politics in the region this history of progressive movements and then this history of discrimination and division. What are some of the misconceptions about the South that you find yourself battling in your work?

Well, first and foremost, there's not one South, right?

There's a slightly higher percentage of whites in the South who call themselves Southern, but it is barely more than African Americans who call themselves Southern. I wrote a piece on that years ago in Southern Cultures called "The Duality of the Southern Thing,"about how the label does not belong to whites, and looking at what if anything there is in common between Blacks and whites who call themselves Southern, or is it just a completely divergent identity.

There was a little bit in common that had to do with a sense of family and a sensitivity to criticism, like the South's always behind, not cosmopolitan. But other than that, it's really different, so you've got to be very specific about what South you're talking about, what Southern you meanbecause it isn't a label that belongs exclusively to whites. I wrote a piece for FiveThirtyEightright before the primaries in March talking about the difference between being a Southern Democrat and a Democrat who's part of the South. The Democratic Party in the South, in many Southern states, has got a long history of being run by African American women. And African American men too, but African American women more so.

They take into consideration these racial politics as they choose their candidates, so they're pragmatists because they are very conscious of the racial politics that play within their state. That is a more complex political vision that I think most people misconstrue. So they tend to have a much more sophisticated and nuanced and multilevel assessment going on about the long march to progress.

Earlier this month Democrats were able to win the presidential election and flip two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia, a state that for years was known as a Republican stronghold. Do you take this as a sign that the Southern Strategy is beginning to collapse?

I think that progressives in Georgia have realized that they can counter it.

It is different in every state. Some states you've got to win people over who are moderate Republicans. Some states you don't. Some states you have 50% of your electorate doesn't even turn out. In some it's urbanization, in some it's in-migration, and in some it is disenfranchisement issues. I think Georgia looked and said, "Where can we build a coalition of all folks?" I feel like they were very clear in what they were running against, but they also were saying a lot about what they're running for, right?

It wasn't just run people over who once supported Trump or once supported [Republican Sen. David] Perdue or once supported [Republican Sen. Kelly] Loeffler. They painted a new vision and built a broad coalition. They reached out to rural voters, rural African American voters. And they said, "If anyone tries to take away your vote, we're here, and we're going to fight for it." They empowered people.

What does that mean for the future of Southern politics?

This time around, I think what's happening is real development of strong two-party competition. I think you see that in North Carolina. I think you see that in Georgia. I think you're starting to see that in Texas. I think you see that in Virginia. And not just a flip from one to the other thats the difference. What happened with realignment is the parties flipped. What's happening now is a growing, strong two-party system in some of those states. That is the best thing that could happen in the region, because two-party competition and a real contest of ideas holds politicians accountable. It keeps the electorate invested. It makes it a politics of problem solving and deliverables and not just personality, whether it was one-party Democrat or one-party Republican.

In Georgia I think what they're doing is building a truly empowered, strong party option for the Democrats, and they're going to have a lot of elections that are going to be really close. For a while, you're not going to see an entirely blue Georgia state legislature. You're going to see real two-party competition, and I think the state of Georgia's going to benefit from that.

Excerpt from:
Political scientist Angie Maxwell on countering the 'Long Southern Strategy' - Facing South

Towards the end of 2020, a year spent supine on my sofa consuming endless internet like a force-fed goose, I managed to finish a beautifully written debut novel: Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, which comes out next month. And yet despite the entrancing descriptions, I could barely turn two pages before my hand moved reflexively toward the cracked screen of my phone. Each time I returned to the novel I felt ashamed, and the shame only grew as I realised that, somehow, though the story was set in the present, and involved an often long-distance romance between two young people with phones, it contained not one single reference to what by then I considered a hallmark of present-day humanity: mindless scrolling through social media.

There was something sepia-toned about the book thanks to this absence, recalling love stories from previous eras even as it spoke powerfully to more urgent contemporary issues. Azumah Nelsons narrator mentions phones in the context of calls and private text messages, but the characters are never sullied by association with Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Was this because they were too sensible, ethical or self-assured to use such things, or is the omnipresence of these platforms now so implicit, in literature as in life, that they hardly seemed worth mentioning?

After an initial froideur, followed by some adolescent fumblings, fictions embrace of social media has now fully come of age. The success of outliers such as Tao Lins Taipei (in which the internet is perhaps the most potent of all the many drugs its protagonists ingest) and Dave Eggerss The Circle (a dystopian exploration of big techs assault on privacy), both published in 2013, paved the way for Jarett Kobeks I Hate the Internet, which riffed on the way the internet perplexes the literary novel, 2017s Sympathy (my debut, about the ways our identity and actions are shaped by surveillance in the internet age), 2018s Twitter refreshing Crudo by Olivia Laing, and Matthew Sperlings aptly named 2020 novel Viral, a satirical takedown of a social media startup.

Its clear that the digital colonisation of the literary world has not resulted in its predicted death, but an exciting evolution. We are hungry for writers who can parse our present, whether in essay form, in works such as Jia Tolentinos collection Trick Mirror (2019) and Legacy Russells Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) or the fiction about to hit our shelves (or Kindle screens) that put social media front and centre.

Characters in todays novels are more likely to surprise us if they dont use social media. This is often put down to their age, or pious superiority, or eccentricity, or something very sinister in their past. In Raven Leilanis debut Luster, the narrators older love interest (met via online dating) uses retired internet slang, and is not even on Twitter. Unlike with men her own age, she cannot track his formative development online, and this adds to his allure.

Similarly, in Lauren Oylers forthcoming Fake Accounts, the narrators boyfriend appears to have minimal internet presence (suspicious), then turns out to have a secret online avatar with a considerable Instagram following. A famous author in Rebecca Watsons little scratch who is not on social media is described as seeming like a dead writer. Meanwhile, in Patricia Lockwoods debut novel No One Is Talking About This (published next month) the protagonist knows only two living people without a digital trail a former school friend, who seems to have escaped into a parallel universe offline, and her own newborn niece. Its a book Lockwood described (on Twitter) as about being very inside the internet and then being very outside of it.

Working on my novel about social media (which I started in 2014), I remember receiving numerous comments to the effect that such superficial features of what I considered to be real life would render it unserious and obsolete. Now, social media has taken over our lives to the extent that references to it in fiction furnish contemporary characters with plausibility, even humanity.

While the internet and mobile phones initially posed problems for fiction writers - not least for their potential to destroy traditional plots of desire and obstruction (chance encounters, missed connections, quests), the dangers of such instant gratification increasingly appear to spark the plot itself (as in Megha Majumdars A Burning, where a careless tweet sets off a dangerous train of events) and offer novels a natural home, so long as theyre game for a little renovation. As Watson wrote recently: When I started writing incorporating this digital compulsion was one of the first issues I ran into. I was writing a book that aimed to follow the mind of a woman in her 20s, non-stop, so ignoring it would be a plot hole. But quickly, I found that it opened up my protagonist, created a portal to others while still keeping her isolated. It inspired me to shake up form; the pressures of an age of distraction making me break up prose into columns and fragments.

As with all renovations-in-progress, (and perhaps I use this metaphor as it seems to be a burgeoning genre on Instagram) alterations afford us a glimpse of how the novel works which pipes go where, which walls are load-bearing as both the structural elements and stylistic choices are rendered visible. Reading Watsons little scratch the reader must clamber over and around London Underground announcements, texts, TripAdvisor reviews, scraps of other peoples writing, emails, snippets of conversation, unspoken thoughts, sounds and sensory impressions scattered across the page with little in the way of signposting.

With no predetermined way to navigate the text, the novel could be compared to the endless tabs and incongruous juxtapositions of digital life, or it could just be like living now, as writers such as Virginia Woolf (referenced repeatedly in both Oyler and Lockwoods novels) used a stream of consciousness to convey the experience of 20th-century living. These days, and especially post 2020, there is little meaningful distinction between digital life and life anyway. As Lockwoods narrator notes: This did not feel like real life, exactly, but nowadays what did?

That terms such as real life and digital life still exist in tension, despite the extent to which they overlap, is indicative of social medias contradictions. Connection and isolation, homogeneity and fragmentation, exposure and concealment, the order and simultaneous incoherence of the timeline the list is both familiar and endless. And yet our familiarity with social media can preclude critical understanding of it. Novels, by contrast, allow us to step outside our habitual experience and reflect on what it means that real life has been so swiftly overtaken by the virtual. Lockwood, for example, calls it the portal rather than the internet, to purposefully estrange the reader: It was in this place where we were on the verge of losing our bodies that bodies became the most important. You were zoomed in on the grain, you were out in space, it was the brotherhood of man, and in some ways you had never been flung further from each other.

In Watsons novel, such dualities are woven together in a helix, pointing to the nature of trauma as much as digital experience, but where the once separate worlds of work and home, say, might have permitted a way to compartmentalise and so navigate certain dangerous triggers, the breaching of stable boundaries (exemplified by the narrators rape), make it harder to escape intrusive thoughts. The membrane that suggests a separate outer and inner life is her skin, which she scratches compulsively until its raw and bleeding. The urge to scratch, like the urge to scroll, provides temporary relief (opening a new tab to find a dog on Twitter wearing a backpack is at least a means of distraction, not dissimilar to picking a scab), before worsening the condition.

As in Lockwood and Oylers novels, the claustrophobia of being trapped in ones own head alternates with the agoraphobia and disorientation of being (trapped) online, immersed in the collective mind of everyone else. No equilibrium can be reached when the two scales are so vastly mismatched. Oylers narrator is always conscious of performing for an audience that might as well have been everyone in the world for all your brain could comprehend. Lockwoods protagonist lies every morning under an avalanche of details, the world pressing closer and closer, the spiderweb of human connection grown so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk. Oylers narrator suffers from the panic of sleep paralysis (mirroring her waking experience of scrolling). Even when she is awake, it is as though the body has become two dimensional. The husband of Lockwoods protagonist comes up behind her while she was repeating the words no, no, no or help, help, help under her breath. Are you locked in? he would ask, and she would nod, and then do the thing that always broke her out somehow which was to google beautiful brown pictures of roast chickens maybe because thats what women used to do with their days.

These are scenes that do not typically lend themselves to fictional description or plot: a character who is outwardly inert, invisibly experiencing a kind of overload. Lockwoods protagonists face has a totally dead look, as her husband describes it, when engaged in mortal combat with someone online, despite the fact moments like this are when she feels most alive. That her husband has such a different impression of this scene is emblematic of how characters in these novels, to varying, often darkly comic degrees, struggle to communicate and sustain intimacy. No other person, not even a husband, can ever know you as well as your phone. Your phone, in fact, knows you better than you know yourself and alerts you whenever YOU HAVE A NEW MEMORY. Its not much of a stretch to say the phone could just as easily be the narrator.

Social media inflected novels are overwhelmingly narrated in the first person or the close third with relentless self-awareness, in the style of confessional essays and blogs. Their protagonists scrutinise themselves through the eyes of imagined strangers, pre-empting critique so that such hyper-connection actually breeds a particular brand of interiority. This is true at the thriller end of the spectrum also: husband and wife duo Ellery Lloyds People Like Her, a cautionary tale of influencer culture, relies partly on multiple first person perspectives to drive the plot.

In terms of form, social media has shaped contemporary fiction, even in novels that make scant mention of it. The dominant trend is to tell a story through fragments. Sometimes these make a point of concision only a paragraph, or even one line, which of course makes social media comparison easy, while others may be the length of a blog. Each fragment possesses no obvious bearing on the next, juxtaposing random facts with news articles, wry observation of a stranger on a commute followed by an unrelated emotional confession, in the manner of one individuals Twitter timeline. Its that first person voice that has to do the work of holding these fragments together, but it also makes allowances for internet-eroded concentration spans, our inability to stick to linear paths of thought.

Oylers narrator calls this trendy style melodramatic, insinuating utmost meaning where there was only hollow prose in its attempts to reflect the world as a sequence of distinct and clearly formed ideas, it ran counter to how reality actually worked. She later switches to parodying the style herself, which did, at least, make it easier for me to check my phone between paragraphs. The other trend does not, demanding you read its long, run-on sentences without even stopping to breathe. This is a tightly controlled art form in Luster, which reminded me of the knowingly tl;dr (too long, didnt read) variety of Instagram caption.

Lockwoods narrator also uses and self-consciously notes the prevalence of this style: Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote. This uniform way of speaking, as recognisable as those clapping emoji hands between words, illustrates how, as Lockwood writes, if the internet was once the place where you sounded like yourself. Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone. Add to this homogenisation the sociological phenomenon of context collapse (sharing everything online with everyone and without distinction), and the capacity to break the internet by going viral, and we are ourselves broken into pieces, flattened out, sprayed through an atomiser, losing our own specificity, our own voices.

Emmy, the influencer at the centre of People Like Her, is accused by a formerly loyal friend of having become 2D like her photos. Not a person anymore, just a phony caption and a posed photo. A fucking invention. Emmy has crafted a persona, or a personal brand, that is the perfectly imperfect Instagram mother, Mamabare, aiming for relatability rather than reality. Its a Faustian pact she has made, selling her own soul as well as those of her friends and family, so that when an Instagram role player begins to steal photos of her daughter and use them to craft their own fantasy life online, Emmy has little in the way of a moral high ground, or recourse. Even Emmys furious husband admits this is a trap of his wifes own making, and that the role-player presents a pretty convincing pastiche of the way that all Instamums, my wife included, write. The mangled metaphors, the breathless over-enthusiasm. The ingenuous clunkiness. The alliteration. Emmy has become so successful at influencing people to be like her, they have literally started to usurp her.

Plenty of social media novels explore the possibilities of pretending to be someone else, devising personas or even knowingly assuming someone elses identity, as in 2018s Social Creature by Tara Isabella Burton. This kind of thing is still considered extreme behaviour, but more recent novels such as People Like Her highlight how much that personality we think of as our own is being determined by algorithm and then harvested for data. As Lockwoods narrator puts it, this is the stream-of-consciousness that is not entirely your own, that you participate in but also acts upon you. Participating involves a metastasis whereby a person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.

Our offline lives turn out to be just as much of a lie as our online ones. Having discovered her boyfriends deception online, Oylers narrator agrees manipulative insincerity was a fair response to the way the world was. She sets up a plan involving dating apps as a purposeful critique of the system. I could be anyone I wanted (or did not want, as the case may be) and my deception would not be selfish, cruelly manipulative of innocents looking for love, but a rebellion against an entire mode of thinking, which was not really thinking at all, just accepting whatever was advertised to you. Because there is no way out, the characters of these novels usually decide its better to be an agent of their own techno-dystopian futures than simply a victim of them. Its enough to make you put down your phone and read a book.

Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic is published by Bloomsbury (14.99).

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Page refresh: how the internet is transforming the novel - The Guardian

Throughout 2021, Good Housekeeping will be exploring how we think about weight, our shapes, the way we eat and how we try to control or change our bodies in our quest to be happier and healthier. Our goal here is not to tell you how to think, but to start a conversation about diet culture, its impact, and how we might challenge the messages we are given to find alternative ways to feel attractive and successful.

The dawn of a new year is when many of us scramble to make resolutions, and in the U.S., these are often earnest pledges to shrink, tone, chisel or otherwise alter our bodies. Like years before, in the first weeks of 2021, new signups for virtual workout subscriptions and searches for diet on Google are spiking as millions of us look to detox our poor, puffy bodies of the bad food choices we made over the holidays and start the year fresh

Wait. Stop. Just there.

...detox our bodies of the bad food choices we made...

This language and the above concept implies that our bodies have been poisoned by peppermint bark, cookies, latkes, and eggnog, and that an antidote must be administered urgently, or else. It assumes that certain foods are bad and whats more, we are bad for eating them. To be totally transparent, we can fall into that trap here at Good Housekeeping too we recently published a recipe called Christmas Crack, which perpetuates a trend that equates a delicious, sugary treat to a dangerous, addictive drug that could actually kill you. This problematic nickname for a chocolatey candy concoction is a prime example of diet culture and just how easily it can sneak in under the radar.

Diet culture, a set of beliefs that places thinness as the pinnacle of success and beauty, has become our dominant culture often in ways we don't even notice since it's the water in which we swim. There's a whole lexicon, says Claire Mysko, CEO of National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA). When we say we need to burn off or make up for the cheeseboard we shared with friends; when we ponder snagging a bite of our partners dessert then immediately wonder, Is it worth it?; whenever we ascribe morality to our food choices, giggling that its sinful when we choose to eat what we crave or what comforts us, or good when we opt for low-calorie, low-carb, or other foods weve deemed healthy. All of that talk is part of diet culture, says Mysko. And it is so inextricably woven into the fabric of our culture that most of us arent even consciously aware of the daily inundation.

Even if youre not actively on a diet or trying to lose weight, diet culture can crop up in choices we think were making for health, to feel or look good, fit in, or even just make conversation amongst friends over dinner. But subconsciously, diet culture creates this idea and reinforces it at every turn that you have to be thin in order to be successful, accepted, loved, healthy: All of these things that we want for ourselves that are just understandable human desire, says Christy Harrison, M.P.H., R.D., C.D.N., author of Anti-Diet and host of the Food Psych podcast. It tells us that weight loss is the secret to that. It tells us that weight loss is a way to attain those things. And its a house of cards.

Diet culture refers to all of the messages and the attitudes around what's valued about body size and style, says therapist Judith Matz, L.C.S.W., author of The Body Positivity Card Deck and Diet Survivor's Handbook. In diet culture, there is a conferred status to people who are thinner, and it assumes that eating in a certain way will result in the right body size the correct body size and good health, and that it's attainable for anybody who has the right willpower, the right determination. In actual fact, there is no right body size, and even if there were, its not attainable to whomever does the right thing, as evidenced by the 98% failure rate of diets. This stat alone is proof of the no-win norm that we, as a society, have been groomed to abide by.

Diet culture can be found in Barbies thigh gap and 18-inch waist, which influences little ones perception of what an ideal body should look like. Its Lululemons founder saying publicly that it's a problem when women's thighs touch. Its Kim Kardashian explaining how necessary it is to squeeze into shapewear beneath a dress, saying, without shapewear, youd see cellulite and I just wouldnt feel as confident. (Her shapewear brand, SKIMS, allegedly sold $2 million of product in minutes when it launched.) Its the fact that we've all been told (or recited!) that at the first sign of hunger, you should drink a glass of water first in case youre actually just thirsty. Its the popular article here on Good Housekeeping's own website about 1,200-calorie diets that netted over two million search users in 2019 alone our second-most-read story of the year despite the fact that the number of calories falls within the realm of clinical starvation (Holocaust concentration camp prisoners were fed 1,250-1,400 calories per day).

In one fell swoop, diet culture sets us up to feel bad about ourselves while also suggesting that maybe losing weight will help us feel better. As anyone whos ever looked into the mirror and wished for a flatter this or a bigger that can likely attest, theres an unattainable and rigidly narrow Western beauty ideal to which we often compare ourselves. Nobody ever wakes up in the morning and says, Gosh, I look terrific. I feel so healthy, I'm so attractive: I think I'll go on a diet, Matz points out. It always starts with negative thoughts.

Instagram, movies, runways, and fashion ads are rife with slim, tall women living a life that somehow always looks better than our own could it be because of those perfect bodies? The sample size for many designers is 0-2, while a 2018 study by National Health Statistics Reports published by the CDC places the average American adult woman in a size 18-20, and teen girls in a size 12. While what is normal varies greatly on genetics, family history, race, ethnicity, age and much more, size is actually not a good indicator of health you can be smaller-bodied and unhealthy, or larger-bodied and fit. We're exposed to the steady stream of images and messages that reinforce diet culture and reinforce the idea that to be happy and successful and well-liked you have to look a certain way, have a certain body, and follow a certain fitness or meal plan or diet, says Mysko.

The "average" American woman is a size 18-20; designer sample sizes are 0-2.

The truth is that healthy, attractive, desirable bodies come at every size and shape. But for many people in larger bodies, people in "average" bodies, or even slender folks who don't feel that they're thin enough in the exact right places, a lifetime on the hamster wheel of feeling othered leads to people feeling a lot of shame about their body and feeling that being thin is worth pursuing at all costs, says Matz. The result: People choose from hundreds, if not thousands, of diet plans or restrictive food plans.

But its not our fault: Diet culture has long been institutionalized and is part of an oppressive system thats intrinsically tied in with racism and patriarchy. Whenever we create standards about how we all should live, these norms always benefit those individuals who are already in power, says Sabrina Strings, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Irvine and the author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia.

What constitutes good behavior is going to be far more accessible to white persons, to men, to wealthy persons, than people who do not fit into those categories, says Strings. This includes conventional thinness, and when you have been told that you should only have [a certain amount of] calories or that you must keep your BMI here, you will always feel like you are doing either good or bad, right or wrong by sticking to these dictates, Strings adds. Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths, [including the concept that] if you just restrict your food, then you'll be able to attain that weight, says Matz. The reality, as well get to, is much different.

In short, it keeps us unhappy with ourselves, chasing something we can't ever catch, and spending loads of money to do so. Heres how:

If we lived in a society where neighborhoods were walkable, and people could get access to clean drinking water and plenty of sleep, people would already be far healthier than they are now." But, she continues, rather than focusing on these larger structural issues that could have a global impact on a population, we want to target individuals and tell them to change their bodies in ways that are unrealistic and unproductive.

Its no coincidence that in November 2020, the CDC reported that more people are dieting now compared to 10 years ago yet obesity rates have increased by nearly 10%. Diet culture conditioning leads us to assume that more diets must mean better population health, but trending upward right alongside the growing number of dieters, mean weight, waist circumference, and BMI in adults have increased over the past 18 years," according to a 2018 study. Theres also evidence that yo-yo dieting (or weight cycling) may be responsible for all excess mortality and cardiovascular risks for diseases associated with being in a larger body. But perhaps the larger problem is that because of diet culture, when we do gain the weight back, we have learned to internalize it as a failure of self.

98% of diets fail Why do 100% of dieters think they'll be in the 2%?

A 2008 survey sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill showed that a whopping 75% of women reported disordered eating behaviors that cut across racial and ethnic lines, and occurred in women in their 30s and 40s ... at the same rate as women in their 20s. That means disordered eating is the norm in the U.S. for women of all ages and colors. Its a staggering statistic, and one that goes under reported since a lot of these behaviors support the very underpinnings of diet culture itself.

The first step is understanding the science of the matter: Dieting is biologically set up to fail, and the human tendency to regain lost weight is ultimately a success for evolution. Our bodies are really designed to protect us against famine, says Harrison. The message this culture gets is that you can decide what weight you want to be with enough willpower, but its just not true, says Matz. Our weight regulation system is beyond our conscious control. According to a 2010 F1000 Medicine Report, there is an active, biological control of body weight at a given set point in a 10-20 pound range. When people diet, they mess with that, says Matz. Diets work in the short-term, but then our weight regulation system kicks in to help us out: To keep us alive.

Anti-diet does not mean anti-health.

Anti-diet culture aims to dismantle this oppressive system of beliefs ... so that people have the chance and the choice to be able to be free of those stigmatizing and body shaming beliefs, says Harrison. Its discarding the broken vacuum and investing in one that works beautifully and will last a lifetime. The anti-diet movement tosses out the bones of conventional dieting (i.e.: restriction, rules, omission, strict adherence) and replaces these with flexibility, acceptance, and ultimately peace with food and our bodies. Here are some aspects of anti-diet culture that can actionably put an end to the restriction and guilt cycle of diet culture:

Getting reacquainted with your bodys natural hunger cues, cravings, and needs can free you from the learned shoulds of diet culture. The irony: Most find that once you grant yourself permission to eat the things you want when you want, your "fear foods" (you know, the things you declare you cannot have in the house or Ill eat the whole bag!) have less of a siren song. When the scarcity mindset drops, so does the need to overeat out of fear of never having it again. Remember that we come into this world born knowing how to do this, says Matz. Babies, when they're hungry, cry. So really, we're going back to the way we were born: Eating.

Amazon

Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

Strings adds that HAES is built upon the belief that you are worthy of love and respect, regardless of your size. In a society that demonizes fatness, its a simple but novel concept. As Strings says: Just to love yourself and to know that you can be healthy regardless of your weight is really a revelation to probably most Americans.

Anyone feeling like they are suffering from disordered eating or an eating disorder can and should reach out for help immediately. The NEDA helpline at (800) 931-2237 is available daily via call or text, and officials also are on standby in digital chats, ready to help you find resources in your area. If you are concerned about a loved one, learn more about how you can help.

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What Is Diet Culture? The Reasons Why Diet Culture Is Toxic - GoodHousekeeping.com

There is a stillness that comes over you inside Glenn Murcutts MPavilion. By stillness, I mean a lack of unharmonious noise, visually and acoustically, as if the architect has hit pause on the spacetime continuum, allowing you to fully take in the spectacle of Melbournes city skyline, with the greenness of the Queen Victoria Gardens in the foreground.

Among the Naomi Milgrom Foundations MPavilions, and indeed in the evolution of modern pavilions, Murcutts is unique. In Pavilion propositions, authors John Macarthur, Susan Holden, Ashley Paine and Wouter Davidts frame the pavilion through the existential question, Is architecture art?1 Indeed, many pavilions around the world are artful objects that form backdrops to cultural programs for visual arts institutions; sometimes, this creates an inherent tension between their function as event spaces and their whimsical form-making.

Murcutts pavilion, in its arresting simplicity, does not conform. While it is no less artful, the artistry lies in the coalescence of its pure architectural expression and functionalism. Nothing is there that doesnt have a purpose. As Murcutt explains, architecture is a science, and the process of design is akin to a process of scientific discovery, of observing and synthesizing omnipresent experiences through an architectonic lens.

His design for the MPavilion was born, subconsciously, out of one such experience sheltering under an aircraft wing at the edge of the Yaxchiln ruins in Mexico.

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Although Glenn Murcutt has been described as the pavilion architect, he explains that his houses are not designed with the idea of a pavilion in mind.

Image: Timothy Burgess

Glenn Murcutt: The shade from the wing had established a place in all this sunshine. We put a tablecloth down, which further established a place. We sat around it and we created not only a place but a room. And I thought: How fantastic this little wing has brought me all the way out here! It was a fabric-covered wing of a six-seater Auster aircraft.

Then I forgot about it altogether. [But] as I was designing this pavilion, I thought: My god, this is starting to be like my experience in Mexico. Here, Ive laid the tablecloth [with the paving], Ive got the wing and Im using aircraft fabric.

Linda Cheng: Youve often been described as the pavilion architect, particularly in relation to some of your houses. What does a pavilion mean to you? And what does it mean to actually design a pavilion?

GM: I read the [dictionary] definition of pavilions. Theyre essentially open structures made from poles and ropes with cloth draped over them. Now, thats very different to my houses, which are not really pavilions. But they are light in feeling. They dont feel impermanent, as such, but they look as if they could perhaps be moved and most of them can. And theyre off the ground.

But these buildings are designed not with the idea of a pavilion in mind. These buildings are designed more as instruments. Ill give you an example. When you go to a concert, youre listening to the work of a composer thats being conducted through an orchestra and you are the recipient, listening to this wonderful score.

I design buildings that are located in relation to the climatic conditions, so that in winter, they get beautiful sun penetration and in summer, they get cooling breezes. And when the breeze is accompanied by some rain, then youre going to get the smell of the forest. You can listen to the sound of the rain on a metal roof, from a beautiful pitter patter to a heavy sound to the gurgling of the water as it gets into the gutter and the throbbing of it as it goes into the water tank.

In other words Ive designed the score for the building. The nature is the orchestra and youre the conductor inside, opening up certain aspects of [the building] to perceive the landscape around you. Its an instrument; its much more than a pavilion. But it looks like a simple building.

Remember that simplicity is the other face of complexity. Im trying to achieve many environmental responses that you can perceive from a level of safety out of the rain, sometimes out of cold winds, sometimes in beautiful cooling wind. And you can adjust [the building], like sails on a yacht. If you can sail a boat, you can work my buildings. Now, thats more than a pavilion.

LC: It certainly is. Hearing you talk about the breeze, the rain, the sound of the water, the birds and the smells its quite apparent that you do a lot of observing and synthesizing

GM: Its my learning. Im a great observer. I dont learn from books. People often ask me: Is there a book thats been highly influential? Absolutely not When I left Ancher, Mortlock, Murray and Woolley [Murcutt worked at the practice from 1964 until 1969], I said I will not subscribe to a single journal because its too influential; I want to think things through in my own way. And people thought I was mad.

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Murcutt emphasizes the need to understand the discipline of other built environment professionals, such as engineers and lighting consultants, when designing a building like MPavilion.

Image: John Gollings

LC: Youve said that architecture is not created, that its there to be discovered. In observing and synthesizing, how do you know what to distil in order to discover the architecture that is there?

GM: Well, when youre nearly 84, you know what to distil and what to leave out. For me, its no different to science in scientific theory, theres a process of discovery. Its finding the essence. The design has to go through the mind with visual clarity, and a visual understanding of the spaces: how much prospect, how much refuge, how much light, what sort of materials, what sort of colours, where is the view, where is the air coming from?

When you start to analyze all these, they become what I call limiting factors. And I love limiting factors, because theyre the things that you know are right. There are certain things that are unarguable.

Take this building here [MPavilion]. Ive got a site theres no argument about that. I have a northern aspect theres no argument about that because you want shade in summer and, wherever its relocated, you need to get winter penetration as well. Thats why Ive got such a big overhang. If it was just the fabric at the end, the water would be falling off in curves. I wanted to regulate where water is coming off, which of course is like the aileron on an aircraft. And it has very much an aircraft-wing quality. I was very conscious of that.

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Flaps on the pavilions roof, shaped like the ailerons on an aircraft wing, help to regulate rain run-off.

Image: John Gollings

It was also an absolutely critical principle for me to frame the city, because its about the city. I wanted the ceiling to be convex to throw sound out each way, but also to lift the roof so you get the feel of the forest and the city. That was extremely important.

And Ive got to design a building that can be pulled down without a single loss. Even the paving would normally be lost because it would be on a concrete slab with a cement mortar bed. Theres no slab here. The pavilion sits on reinforced ground, so all that paving will come up and it can be laid in the future in its new place. Because theres no slab, you cant rely on it for bracing. So the steel cupboards at the end are connected up to the roof trusses and braced all the way through to the other side to stop the structure from twisting. So, another aspect of our work is understanding the discipline of others [other built environment professionals].

We can use the ceiling space now and install globes that bounce light up into the white roof. The sunshine coming through can bounce down through the aircraft-fabric ceiling. You can clean it, you can change the globes, the panels are all hinged and they unclip. Theyre all givens. Theres no argument. I dont know why people dont think like that.

So, distillation is knowing what is important and how the work responds to its environment, and not imposing on that environment. Its a response, not an imposition. Im not doing it because I want to. Im doing it because its reasonable. And it must be done beautifully. You cant get any more simple than that. Thats really distilled.

LC: Youve also said you wanted the pavilion to be something that possessed serenity and calmness. Why is that important in this particular project?

GM: It allows every activity to take place without the building screaming at you, Look at me! Melbourne is full of look at me buildings and I dont like it. Its not going to last.

[Mexican architect and engineer] Luis Barragn said, Any work of architecture that is designed without serenity in mind is in my view a mistake and when serenity possesses joy, it is ultimate. I hold to that and I think we may have achieved a level of serenity and joy in this work. This is incredibly important because we can always create something other than serenity in a serene space, but we cant create serenity in a rugged space.

Architecture can really lift your spirits. Thats the essence here. I cant take anything out. Its absolutely raw. Its honest. I can tell you its honest because I know I havent put anything in thats there for the sake of it.

Most of the architecture Im critical of [occurs] when the architect has done something that he or she wants. Im not interested in what you want. Im not even interested in what I want. Im interested in what the elements call for. Im interested in what the brief calls for. Im interested in what the human wants.

LC: What is your opinion of the role of a pavilion like this for the city?

GM: The pavilion is for cultural events. Its not for itself. Fancy being able to have a fashion parade where people could do figure eights and circuits [as occurred at the RMIT Master of Fashion (Design) Graduate Showcase on MPavilions opening night]! Thats one thing that I had never planned. I have another principle: if you get the basics right, many other things that you never expected can take place. The role of a pavilion is to be able to provide the flexibility for many cultural events. And, of course, to give shelter. [MPavilion was] designed specifically for summer shelter here but it will go to another place and therefore it needs to be thought about in the wintertime situation as well. But its essentially a summer pleasure ground.

LC: And what do you think is the pavilions place in the architectural discourse?

GM: Ill leave that to others to discuss. Some would say it has no place. But for me, as a personal experience, Naomi [Milgrom] gave me the opportunity to do this pavilion. And I saw it as incumbent on me to do something Id never done before not for the sake of it, but to extend my learning and my architectural development. Even at age 83, I have curiosity still. Curiosity is really important as an architect. I am filled with joy being with nature, because nature has so much to teach us.

Following its intallation at the Queen Victoria Gardens, Murcutts MPavilion was gifted to the University of Melbourne.

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Glenn Murcutt, the 'pavilion architect,' on his MPavilion - Architecture AU

In Pass It On, two seasoned entrepreneurs help women navigate modern-day career conundrums. In this installment, we ask how should women deal with pervasive sexist microaggressions in the workplace?

Sexist microaggressions are fairly common in workplaces around the world, especially when theyre directed at a womans competence and talent. Here, we sit down with The Swaddles founder Karla Bookman, and investor/strategist Rupa Pandit, to find out the best ways to address them realistically, within a male dominated workplace.

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Rajvi: Hello, welcome back. So starting off, when we think of sexist microaggressions, what have they looked like in your career?

Rupa: To me, microaggressions always seem like the ones that are subtle, or disguised as a compliment. Ive had plenty, but I really need to think about which ones were micro, and which ones were aggressive. I remember when I first moved to India, I remember sitting down to lunch with a colleague for the first time, and he said to me in this hushed voice, So, can you tell me now when was your divorce? And I was like, What divorce? And when I unpacked it, I realized there was this assumption that if I moved as a young twenty-something to India, it must be because I was running away from a problem. Why else would a single woman live in India otherwise?

Karla: I have the same thing to me they have all felt so aggressive that none of them felt micro. Things as blatant as in a salary negotiation, for example, you get this classic thing of, Oh youre not the breadwinner, you dont need the money so why are we having the conversation? This, I find out and out extraordinarily sexist, obviously. The more subtle ones are the ones the men in the room dont pick up on. For example, when youre the youngest person in a room, and the only female in a room, and the men are all talking to each other, and often over you and theres this thing of not letting the young woman in the room have her time to speak, and interrupting her, not giving her the floor. So, a major one is having your voice overlooked or sidelined.

Rupa: I would say, like Karla said, in those meetings where youre the only woman and Ive had instances where Im the most senior person there I would ask a question and inevitably the counter-party I was meeting would turn to my male colleague to answer the question. As if, it was his question I was representing. And I would constantly maintain eye contact, and in my reaction show I was the one who needs the answer to my question, so can you please look at me? Even my male colleagues sometimes would signal to me, look at me to show it was my question, but it wouldnt phase the person continuing to give the answer. Ive also been asked to make copies of things, to take notes, to book travel for a group of people who are traveling even when Im the most senior woman there. Another thing is, especially in India, people trying to explain India to me like I havent been working here for the past 15 years. A lot of it is also in these negotiations where I am arguing, male colleagues, will try to soften what Im saying, with things like what shes trying to say or what she means to say. In the beginning, I thought maybe its a good cop or bad cop tactic, but now I just stop them, as Ive already said what I was trying to say. I dont need the interpreter sitting next to me.

Rajvi: Thats really interesting. Youve talked about microaggressions not feeling micro, but I also want to ask whether the subtlety of the sexism sometimes prevents women from identifying any microaggressions as sexist, to speak up about it as a problem. What do you think?

Karla: So, I personally never had that problem. I always saw it as a very sexist attempt to not pay attention to what the woman in the room had to say. The evolution, for me, is I didnt call it out earlier in my career and I would have gone with it, internalized it, and dealt with it. The difference is that now, I would react differently, I would assert myself.

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Rupa: For sure, the ability to not second-guess and speak up evolved when my seniority evolved in the room. But also I think the conditioning came into play for me in the form of me willing to be the person who takes one for the team, willing to get my hands dirty. I never saw these qualities as something inherent to my gender, but just qualities that one needs when building a business. I would think okay, I can be the one to book something or I can be the one to do the call nobody wants to do or I can do the admin stuff really quickly because it needs to get done and I never saw any task as too small. And I started to see that was sometimes negative and there was a cost to that. I had to deliberately say no, like okay, it doesnt matter that Im willing, there has got to be someone else on the team who is also willing. And everybody needs to learn that to be a part of any team.

Rajvi: So, tell me about the decision to start saying no, or to call someone out when something sexist was happening. We are told that just speak up, but more often than not it is detrimental to the person who speaks up. How do you reconcile this?

Rupa: Ive heard plenty of advice around what you should do in a situation like that, mostly along the lines of go against the grain to assert what you deserve. But to me, that didnt work. What worked better was to be better at my job. Unfortunately, when youre any kind of minority, you have to always prove youre as competent, even when youre more. Just be prepared for that meeting, be more ready with what to say, be more ready with the responses youd give to your colleagues. When you say something and they dont even have an idea of what youre saying, so they cant mansplain, Ive found it to be much better than calling someone out. Its much easier to make sure I was ready every time. I would say no to the admin things, albeit with a gulp in my throat, but to be better at your job Ive found it to be easier.

Karla: I dont think its possible to call these things out when youre a junior. I cant envision a scenario in which youre called to a meeting with senior men, where nobody is making eye contact with you or speaking directly to you, and you stop the meeting and say I just think this is incredibly sexist, why isnt anyone looking at me? I mean, you would destroy your career at that organization. You cant have an outburst in the middle of a professional setting. Its easier to enforce boundaries when you get senior. But that said, even junior people who are relatively disenfranchised in the organization, there are options you can go to a senior manager outside of the context of that meeting, and say hey listen, this is happening, how can you help me? Another is to make sure you work in teams that are diverse, and where some of the bosses come from whatever minority you are. That way, it helps to have people who understand what youre thinking and feeling, and are sensitive to your experiences. But other than that, just know your shit inside and out. Because if youre the only person who can answer questions well, then they will have to look at you, have to listen to you.

Rajvi: Youve talked about being in junior positions, but youve also made it to managerial positions. So, as people who have managed teams, and have the power to help people, how do you handle situations when someone comes to you with a problem, like theyre being dismissed within a team?

Rupa: So, when I manage teams, I see this happening to women, but also to anyone against whom there are biases. So whenever were in a team meeting, I ensure I walk away from any biases even I might have, and make sure I give that person a chance to speak, a chance to contribute. For women in a meeting, there is this assumption that women may not know things, or they may not have an aggressive enough viewpoint or be willing to go against the consensus. These are biases a manager has to step away from, to allow people to have their voice. Anytime Im in a group where someone is not going to be as vocal, I do ask them to voice their opinions, to encourage them to challenge people who are more vocal. Essentially, pass the mic to someone. As a manager, you always know who has important things to say but are just not telling me. And one thing thats important to remember is not to try to emulate the most vocal or more aggressive person in the room, to be comfortable and confident in your own skin. Even if you dont have ten things to say in a meeting, but have one important thing to chime in with, good managers will notice it. It carries a lot of weight for people who have been in hundreds of those meetings before.

Karla: And youre also more capable of identifying those people when youve gone through the same thing. And give those people an opportunity to speak.

Rajvi: I also want to touch upon sexual microaggressions, which can be sexist, but may not attack your competence, but instead simply your existence as a woman. What have those looked like in your careers?

Karla: I worked in environments that had a boys club feel. Especially in my start-up experience, where senior management was all men and things were laxer than in a staid corporate environment. This may sound controversial, but those didnt bother me. Theyd sound something like, Lets send Karla to that meeting because the client likes young women. But they werent said with disrespect, or to negate what I would bring to a meeting substantively. They always felt like a commentary on what that sleazy client is like, not me. And so I never felt like I was being taken less seriously. The times that made me feel undermined were the other types of microaggressions that arent defined as sexual harassment per se.

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Rupa: I had the same thing, colleagues would be like why doesnt Rupa go see this person, shell change their mind. The ones where I wasnt taken seriously were the times that bothered me a lot more, but I think one evolution Ive seen in the 20 years Ive worked is the acceptance or willingness to let comments like that fly about anyone has reduced and thats a good thing. Just the fact that people are a lot more conscious about what they say, thats a good thing.

Rajvi: But what if a woman today doesnt want to accept a culture like that? How could she go about it? You know, in pop culture, theres this trope of a woman who can give it back, like shes risking a comfortable relationship with a colleague for a more combative one. I was wondering if thats actually possible to do in reality?

Karla: Again, I feel thats a personality thing. And it also takes some level of seniority in an organization to be allowed to behave that way, with impunity. I would say its probably better for everybody if we dont aspire to be that, and actually aspire to rein in some of the behavior that makes everybody else feel uncomfortable. But, of course, we need to draw a line between microaggressions that would be totally inappropriate to speak out in the middle of a meeting, and when there somebody engaging in predatory behavior, going after junior women in the office. In that instance, speaking up and speaking out is important, finding a female manager who can help you walk through the POSH reporting process, to have some managerial or leadership support. To make a complaint, and see it through the process is really important.

Rajvi: But speaking up and speaking out is also not so cut and dry. Often, people who speak up are let go a few months later for mysterious reasons or are deemed dangerous to work with, as happened with several women in corporate environments after #MeToo. If these are real consequences for speaking out, then what can they do?

Karla: I dont have a great answer for you. A lot of times corporate structures make it difficult to report the person who is harassing you, and sometimes your boss is on the POSH committee. Lets not underplay the blowback, the consequences can be severe. Its not easy, and every person needs to individually weigh it. But the more people stand up and say something, we can try to create a culture in which there are consequences for the harasser, and not just for the accuser of the harasser. Its how more people will be incentivized to keep people in check.

Rajvi: So, in the end, whats the ideal scenario, both from an employee and employer perspective?

Rupa: Id say for somebody who is starting out in their career, be conscious when youre choosing a place of work. Be conscious of whether or not you respect the people you work with, and you see them embody values you care about. To me, theres a lot of crossover between how someone appears in an interview and how they run their business. When you meet someone senior in an interview setting and you feel theyre disrespecting you, know that there isnt going to be this huge divide between how they act personally and how they handle their team. People should make decisions based on that, even the job sounds great. The job will ultimately not end up being great if you ignore your instincts. Thats where you have a choice, where you have agency. And then, as people get senior, to hire for integrity and kindness than any particular words you want on a CV will end up being better for your business. The same bar you have for friends you let into your personal life, to an extent should be the same bar you have for people you work with.

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Pass It On: To Counter Sexist Microaggressions In The Office, Set Boundaries And Find A Mentor-Ally Who Can Help - The Swaddle

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December 10, 2020 01:20 ET | Source: Balboa Press

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