I spent part of last week in Charlottesville with a group of incredible women (thank you to everyone who came out). At dinner the first night, the conversation turned to the Envy chapter of On Our Best Behavior, where every chat about the book unfailingly tends to go. This is the chapter about women’s covert and undiagnosed wanting, and how we tend to deride and cut down the women who are provoking our envy, rather than recognizing that our dislike and aversion is not about them at all…it’s that these women are simply holding up a mirror for us and pushing on a dream we have for ourselves. (More on this here: “Sin: Envy” and “Owning Our Wanting.”)
Women also want to talk about the Envy chapter because it’s the chapter that most directly addresses internalized patriarchy and women-on-women hate, tracing it all the way back to the witch trials. In my experience of sitting with groups of women, 98%-100% have experienced women-on-women hate, most frequently at work, but in our calls for sisterhood and #womensupportingwomen, we insist there’s nothing to see here, and tend to paper over that pain. And well, we can’t heal what we refuse to acknowledge. And we’ll never be able to see or understand what’s driving us to undermine each other when the underlying issue (envy, our unrealized wanting, fears around scarcity, anger) is repressed, and not part of our conscious awareness. This is a big part of our internalized patriarchy. And to resolve this, we must begin to talk about it, finding functional ways to address that women can be vicious to each other without feeling like we’re setting ourselves back, or undermining our case for equality. (Interestingly, the etymology of vicious is vice—and, as On Our Best Behavior points out, women have been carrying the Seven Deadly Sins since 590 AD, when Pope Gregory assigned them all to Mary Magdalene.)
There are other components of internalized patriarchy as well, namely a deep-seated preference for seeing men as experts and leaders. Men have this bias, but so do women—and we’re the only ones who can understand and address this in ourselves. While men need to make their own moves to equalize society, we can’t offload our own internalized patriarchy onto them to take care of. It’s the responsibility of each of us to find it in ourselves and ferret it out—men can’t bridge this gap for us.
So much of this internalized patriarchy is invisible. Case in point, at dinner one night in Charlottesville, my new friend Valeria told me about work she had been involved with in Africa, where 25 civic leaders from across the continent gathered for a six week leadership training to fight against gender-based violence, including genital mutilation. The coursework touched on everything from DEI, to leadership, to design thinking. At the end of the program, this group of 25 fellows—half people who identified as men, half people who identified as women—assembled a panel to represent their thinking about how to help African women. The group voted on the experts amongst them who were best equipped to talk about solving these issues: What emerged? A panel of six men—a “manel”—with a woman moderating the conversation. Valeria, who was in the audience, mentioned the manel at the reception that followed, and all the participants were shocked at what they had done, completely unaware of how their bias, or preference for seeing men as primary experts, manifested. This, from a group that specifically convened to spend six weeks of their lives in protracted discussions about how to solve oppression toward women and gender-based violence.
This story doesn’t shock me, nor does it shock me that none of the participants noticed their bias in action. I see evidence of this preference for men as experts—even as experts over the lives, bodies, and experience of women—every day. So many of my female friends listen to wildly popular podcasters like Peter Attia (an M.D., who trained in general surgery), Andrew Huberman (a PhD, neuroscientist, and Stanford professor), Sam Harris (a PhD, neuroscientist), and Tim Ferriss. I know this because they send me episodes, or mention these shows to me in passing—in fact, Huberman told Time that half his listenership is women. And when I tell these female friends what I’m going to elucidate below, their jaws go slack—they hadn’t noticed.
So first, my issue is not with these podcast hosts hosting podcasts—they’re all smart and credentialed men. My issue with these men is that they do not see women as credible experts because they rarely interview them—and as their listeners, we interpret this as perfectly normal.
I did an audit of these shows and others like them at the end of last summer. Almost every big male podcaster in the loosely categorized “health and wellness” space who interviews experts posts similar guesting rates, save for Dan Harris, who programs 10% Happier exceptionally well across every diversity metric (truly, Dan and his producers deserve a lot of credit—it certainly doesn’t deleteriously affect the show’s popularity either). While I knew these men would all fail on the gender equity scale (and probably every other diversity scale, though I didn’t measure them), what I found still shocked me. Here are the numbers, through the end of last summer: Of Sam Harris’s 376 episodes to that date, spanning across a decade, he had hosted fewer than 60 women (about 15%). Tim Ferriss had platformed fewer than 100 women, across nearly 700 episodes (about 13%); Dr. Peter Attia had found only 28 women across nearly 300 episodes (11%) worth interviewing—one being his young daughter. And in two years as a weekly podcast host, Andrew Huberman had interviewed only a dozen women total (8%).
That’s really sad. Sadder still? That we don’t seem to have noticed.
What’s also worth noting? When female researchers and physicians are invited onto these shows, they’re generally limited to talking about women’s health, hormones, sex, and relationships—they’re rarely allowed to speak to health in general, across gender. A gender-based restriction—as evidenced by the bizarre photo below—that does not apply to men. They get to talk about everyone.
I mean, what is this?!
I can predict what these men might say in response to this criticism: We’re gender- and color-blind in terms of our guests, we simply choose the “best” ones. Or, there aren’t enough high-caliber, qualified women to interview. Huberman, Attia, and others who are speaking directly to health—and who flex their rarified credentials as part of their appeal—should do much better, particularly in a healthcare industry whose spotty history in attending to the concerns of women demands conscientious attention, if not over-correction.
And also, they would be flat-out wrong.
If these men were to look beyond their own fraternities for experts, they would find legions of equally credentialed academics, researchers, and doctors who do not identify as men, ready to be handed a mic. After all, 54% of medical school students are women, and women are out-earning men in doctoral degrees by a similar spread (in health and medical sciences, it’s a whopping 71% to 29%, women to men). This isn’t a new trend: Women have been out-performing men in school for a century, across the globe.
As one example, when it comes to the conversation about menopause above, why not interview Lisa Mosconi, a neuroscientist who has 11 grants to study menopause, including four from the NIH? She has a new book—The Menopause Brain—coming out next month, and yes, she’ll be on Pulling the Thread.
Yes, Lisa’s genius is rare, but I promise you, there are many more of her.
While these men make me cranky, I’m mostly cranky with myself—because I can disavow it, but I know I have this bias, too. Despite writing a book about gender, it’s only been in the last five years that I even started paying attention to panel make-ups, or guest selection, or where I found myself tuning my ear. While I hope these men evolve their programming choices, as listeners, we have choices too. We can shift where we apply our attention. If we’re devoted listeners, we can send emails or post comments. I’d prefer to believe that these guys are unaware of their own bias, rather than that they’re conscious of it and still choose to do nothing in response. So maybe once they know, they’ll shift.
Here’s what I can offer to the rest of us: Once you start to see this bias in action, you can’t stop. And the more we bring it to conscious awareness, the faster we can fix it. Seek out and listen to female experts. Put them on your panels. The world might change as a result, if only because we might all become more attuned to hearing women as authorities on the human experience, and not just hormones. Ladies, this is on us too.
THE LATEST FROM THE PODCAST:
2/8: On maintaining sexual desire with Emily Nagoski PhD
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2/1: On the essential nature of relational conflict with John & Julie Gottman, PhDs
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1/25: On our fat-phobic culture with Kate Manne
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1/18: On growing ourselves up with Aliza Pressman, PhD
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1/11: On being with each other’s pain with Rabbi Sharon Brous
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1/4: Embracing the Shadow with Connie Zweig, PhD
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12/26: What motivates change with Carrie Wilkens, PhD
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12/17: Reducing harm and saving lives with Maia Szalavitz
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12/14: The malleability of the brain with David Eagleman
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12/10: Breaking the addiction binary with Carl Erik Fisher, M.D.
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My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
Oh that bizarre photo is just too much. Thank you for SHOWING it to us. I'm also thinking about the length (!) of these male hosted podcasts ... 3 hours and 46 minutes? And women are told to get to the point :)
The work to change the world always includes making what's not being seen, seen, and then hopefully understood....I so appreciate the many ways you're working to lift the mist that covers accepted norms and views, thank you.