← The Money with Katie Show
The Money with Katie Show
The Leisure Gap, Princess Treatment, and Other Hard Truths About "Soft Life"
01:15:38
Addressing the ambition penalty.
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A
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What the data do consistently show is that burnout affects far more women than men. But it also shows that this burnout doesn't have anything to do with like not being in your feminine or any other manufactured claim of quote unquote natural gender differences. Instead, what this burnout reflects is the vastly unequal demands women still face in the process of working to realize their professional and personal ambitions to men, particularly CIS straight, white, able bodied men.
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C
Stephanie o' Connell Rodriguez is a writer covering ambition, money and power. She was the host of Real Simple Magazine's Money Confidential podcast and her forthcoming book the Ambition Penalty exposes the social, professional and financial costs that women face when asking for more. So think Chapter two of Rich Girl Nation, but like an entire book just about that and she offers us a new way forward I wanted talk to Stephanie this week because I had admittedly fallen down a little bit of a rabbit hole of her Talking Head style videos in which she discusses the implications of various economic papers. And at one point as I'm sitting there at my computer going through each one, I literally said out loud, holy, this is a gold mine. I don't know what this woman's process is for finding these papers, but incredible. So selfishly and sometimes I think this makes for the best conversations. I just want to learn from somebody. I find somebody's approach to a problem really interesting and I want to understand how they are thinking about it. So today I just wanted to learn from her and I think you are probably going to learn a lot too. She is at heart a researcher and she is bringing us a wealth of data today. Now one thing that you'll hear me say to her in the interview is that sometimes going through data like this gets a little tiresome to me because we know a lot of this is true and despite my familiarity with these statistics, there was still a lot that I didn't know and hearing the finer points from her about what is actually driving some of these trends was really illuminating for me. So with that said, please enjoy this conversation with Stephanie o'.
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Connell.
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C
Stephanie, welcome to the Money with Katie show. So happy to have you here finally. It feels like this is a long time coming.
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B
I mean, I'm so stoked.
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C
Well, there is so much that I want to cover with you today. But there's one paper in particular that I have really been dying to talk to you about, especially in the context of what you and I both do for work. It's called Neoliberal Feminism and Women's Protest Motivation, which tested the hypothesis that an emphasis on individual resilience as a solution to women's issues may actually undermine women's likelihood to participate in collective action. So I noticed that in that paper there is a citation to a different 2018 paper that explicitly studied the cultural effects of the book Lean in and found that quote, while such messages increase perceptions that women are empowered to solve workplace gender inequality, they also lead to attributions that women are more receptive, responsible both for creating and solving the problem. What do you think the proper takeaways should be from these findings, assuming they are true, that individualist messages of empowerment and well meaning career advice can actually undermine the goal of greater gender equity? I was spiraling a little bit when I read this. What were your major takeaways from this research?
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B
Well, I think the truth of these findings are borne out in the data. We can just look at the gender pay gap in the US for those working full time year round, for example, and how it grew in 2024 for the second year in a row, returning to where it was in 2005, 20 years ago. So that was the year after I graduated high school and now I'm 39 years old. So pretty squarely in the middle of the millennial generation of women who is now coming into their peak earnings years after a lifetime of this support supposed women's empowerment. And where are we collectively? We're kind of no better off than where we started our careers 20 years ago, even as women are now more educated and more ambitious than ever. In fact, we're backsliding. We're losing reproductive rights. We're witnessing the targeted disempowerment of more than 300,000 black women pushed out of the labor force in just a few months in 2025. We're seeing mothers of young children pushed out of paid work at record setting rates. We're seeing the rate of women hired into leadership positions decline for the third year in a row. We're seeing VC funding for women led businesses fall to its lowest percentages since record keeping began. And it is these outcomes set against the backdrop of our upbringing in the peak of this girl power movement and initiatives like, you know, take your daughter to work day, followed by the 2010s mainstreaming of girls corporate feminism that purported to champion women. That really prompted me to start researching and writing my book the Ambition Penalty to understand how he got here. And what I found was that in this late 90s and early aughts period that culminated in the early 2010s with the publication of books like Lean in and Girl Boss, the popular concept of women's empowerment really shifted from removing barriers and biases that limit or constrain women's access to equal opportunity and power to something that's individual and internal, where the prevailing belief became that the greatest obstacle to a woman's economic, political or personal power was herself. And all that she needed to do to access equal opportunity and outcomes was be more confident or speak up or ask for more or power pose or smile more or apologize less, and so on and so on and so on and so on. And so those of us who grew up on this advice and we started our careers putting this supposed wisdom into practice, only to face the same limitations on our opportunities and power. And what I love about these papers that you're mentioning is that they show us how this idea that we can fix gender pay, power, leadership gaps if women were just a little bit more ambitious, really distracts us from what really keeps women from getting ahead. These papers show us how this belief that women can individually self help or self improvement or self optimize their way into getting more of what they want can actually make this inequality even worse. First off, because the more committed we are to denying the ongoing pervasiveness of these gender biases, the easier it is to get women to blame themselves for whatever backlash and bias they do encounter. And the more the rest of us become primed to dismiss women's experiences of discrimination as just playing the victim or asking for special favors. So for example, in that paper you mentioned, the researchers found that exposure to messages like women have the power to address the problem. Well, it led participants to favor these largely ineffective interventions that really focus on trying to change women rather than changing the systems that disadvantage them. And as you said, it increases this perception that women are responsible, responsible for the consequences of the discrimination and bias that they do encounter. And this other paper that you mentioned really builds off of that, showing how exposure to this well meaning career advice, encouraging women to be more confident or strong or strategic and resilient actually made women more likely to tolerate gender discrimination and less likely to engage in collective action that actually has a track record of creating meaningful change. So this is a 2024 paper from researchers Laura Cray, Jessica Kennedy and Margaret Lee called Now Women Do Ask a Call to update beliefs about the gender pay gap. And not only does it reconfirm those previous findings that women actually do ask for more, they also found that the belief that women don't increased gender stereotyping even on dimensions unrelated to salary negotiation. And more than that, the people who bough into these beliefs, we're also more likely to justify gender inequality and less likely to support legislation and policies that actually address pay inequity. And so what I'm trying to do in my work and in my book is expose these myths that really sit at the heart of this individualistic self help style of women's empowerment and show how they don't just work to rationalize inequality, they effectively reproduce it by reinforcing the stereotypes that give rise to discrimination in the first place. And in the process, these show how that undermines our willingness to engage in collective action and support policies that can actually address the real barriers to women's power and pay and opportunity.
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C
What do you think those policies are? I think that when I think about this question and you point out the roughly 20 years of stagnation that we have seen, where there's improvements and then backslides and it feels all very fragile and I think to me that indicates like we are approaching some sort of limit to the returns on the strategy that is being used right now. Where I feel lost when I confront this, particularly in light of the information that more women than men are in college now. And I think women outnumber men in law schools and maybe medical school too now. So it's not as though women are not pursuing these paths or that there is less ambition than before. I think you probably could argue there's more ambition than ever. There's more education than ever. So the correct ingredients are there. But the individual empowerment messaging that conditions us to accept and then justify the status quo is not working. What do you think the collective action or those particular policy proposals would have to look like?
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B
So collective problems require collective solutions. And a collective solution isn't telling you how to hack your way through a pay negotiation. It's about implementing a policy like pay transparency that's proven to reduce some of these gaps. Or it's about unionization that's, that's proven to reduce racial pay gaps, gender pay gaps. It's about creating workplaces that enable greater autonomy, greater flexibility, that give us control over how and when we work that are again proven to reduce these gaps. And so one of the things that I try to do in my work and in this book again is take a very data driven approach to the kinds of interventions that have shown some promise and really use this model of a collective solution to a collective problem.
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C
Right. Okay. So unions, pay, transparency. I assume at some point we're going to talk about universal basic services, like of course, the care infrastructure or lack thereof in this country. I want to shift gears a little bit because there is another nod in that same paper. This always happens to me when I find a paper that I like is I'm like, oh, and what's this one? Oh, and what's this one? Oh, they're citing these people. What are these people find? But there's one to some 2011 research that found benevolent sexism as opposed to hostile sexism, works similarly in undermining engagement in actions that are designed to benefit the whole. So essentially my read on that then is that they're undermining our likelihood to participate and see these problems as systemic in the way that you are describing. So can you walk us through benevolent sexism and give us some examples? Because I feel like this is sort of resurgent in our culture and I would love to get into the difference and parse the benevolent from the hostile. But ultimately, like, I want us to see how these things ladder up to the same end result.
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B
Yeah. So thus far the researching I've been referencing is mostly what we'd classify as hostile sexism, which is built on stereotypes that that men are or should be aggressive and competitive and strong, and that women are or should be caring and compassionate and supportive. And what hostile sexism does is enforce those stereotypes by penalizing those who don't fall in line. And it's an incredibly effective way of reinforcing gender inequality. For example, when you demand so called masculinity to succeed in the work workplace and then simultaneously penalize women for behaving in these quote unquote masculine ways, you now have a far less explicit but still incredibly effective way of blocking women from realizing their professional ambitions, all while reinforcing the stereotypes around business and power as masculine in and of themselves. And that helps perpetuate the stereotype that men are naturally, quote unquote better suited to these roles. But I'd argue that benevolent sexism can be even more effective in doing the exact same thing. Because instead of relying on backlash and penalties like hostile sexism does, benevolent sexism uses what sounds like praise to reinforce these Same systems of gendered power and hierarchy that are built on the same stereotypes. So benevolent sexism often takes the form of a compliment. For example, insisting that a woman is just naturally better at caretaking or applauding her for leaning into her true role as a wife and a mother.
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C
CeCe Harrison Butker. Exactly. My wife's life truly began when she embraced her vocation, and she's so good at it.
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B
Textbook example, right? Yeah. But even in a work context, benevolent sexism might include things like sidelining women from promotions under the assumption that the responsibilities would conflict with a woman's family priorities, or not offering women challenging assignments so as not to, quote, stress them out, or, you know, keeping them from certain networking or career opportunities to, quote, protect them. What's particularly insidious about benevolent sexism is that these behaviors can really feel harmless, or they can even come across as caring or courteous. But it's exactly this kind of gendered treatment that effectively excludes women from equal opportunity and power in the same ways that hostile sexism does. It's just that instead of any enforcing those gender stereotypes with backlash or attacks or penalties against women who defy them, benevolent sexism uses praise and it uses promises to do the same thing. So it's like the carrot. It's like the incentive, the reward, as opposed to the stick or, you know, the disincentive or the penalty.
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C
Carrot and stick was the phrase that I was thinking of the entire time you were describing that.
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B
Totally.
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C
So I was texting the other day with Ramit Sethi about a reel that I made about the way that the quote unquote provider dynamic functions on the show Love is Blind and how after watching it and seeing how much it came up in the first episode, I was like, I think that this has something to do with signaling appearance because it seems contextually kind of out of left field in some of these conversations. And anyway, he just was like, hey, I think you're onto something here. You wouldn't believe, like, the influx of comments that I get on my YouTube channel about this, basically. And so we just had this great conversation about what effectively boils down to this sort of gender reductionist language on platforms like TikTok and in these videos where you'll hear women speaking to other women, like, you need a provider. And like, if your man is not providing, this is why you never go 5050 with a man, because if you do, he's just gonna drag you down. And, like, you need princess treatment. It simultaneously really emphasizes the role of women as better off in your feminine it staying soft. All of these traits that are intrinsic to all of humanity being sequestered off into this half of the population is allowed to feel and should feel this way. And that's what makes this work best. And this half should be this way. But it's really been interesting to watch that social force bleed into the economic conversations that people are having and even into their own feelings about the way that personal finance should be functioning in their own relationships.
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B
Well, you need that. You need to have the reward in addition to the stick if you're going to reinforce a gendered hierarchy, because you need to give women a reason to buy into that kind of subjugation. And there's actually a really great paper that was actually just published this year in early 2025 that documents how this happens. It's called Worse for Women, Bad for All.
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C
Oh yeah.
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B
It's by psychologist Magdalena Zawisha and her colleagues. And so what they found is that women are more likely to embrace benevolent sexism in countries where they face greater hostile sexism from men. And it's this combination of hostile and benevolent sexism that the researchers call the quote, unquote, protection racket. Because women are actively set up to fear this growing hostility from men as a result of that hostile sexism. And so women become more likely to endorse benevolent sexism, which promises them that they will be protected from men's hostility as long as they accept their place in the patriarchal gender hierarchy and comply with the its prescriptions of femininity. So basically, it's this promise that if you just do what men want, they won't hurt you. And the more you do, right, the more you do what they want, housework, reproductive labor, caregiving, the more they'll provide for and protect you. And in this way, the paper finds that benevolent sexism winds up both legitimizing and preserving gender inequality because it undermines women's resistance through the promise of these benefits, quote, unquote, like male protection and provision. And I use quote unquote because the work also shows just how much this promise of men's protection and provision in exchange for women's compliance is not upheld in any way.
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C
Yeah, I'm like now layer on the domestic violence data from those countries.
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B
Well, let me tell you, they find that benevolent sexism correlates with a larger gap in unpaid domestic labor. Not surprising, fewer women in the paid labor force, fewer women in high level government and business roles. But it also correlates with a greater acceptance of those very things, like Intimate partner violence toward women, it's fucked. Greater restrictions on women's reproductive rights, things that hurt women's well being and then everyone's well being. It correlates with lower economic productivity, shorter healthy lifespans, more collective violence, and more anti democratic tendencies. And so when you're talking about our current cultural zeitgeist and why this is coming up, it's this protection racket, textbook hostility, misogyny on the rise, public explicit. But let me bring us back to the individualism of it all, because what's really interesting about benevolent sexism and the way that we're seeing it manifesting today, especially in these trends like this princess treatment or the trad wife, the pink pill. Yeah, even like the soft life or feminine energy, which are maybe like lighter versions of that, that is that in many ways the messaging is very similar to the girl boss. Not in terms of the kind of ideal that it's promoting, but in terms of how it says that ideal should be achieved, which is by doubling down on hyper individualism that teaches women to blame themselves for the burnout and the barriers that they still face. Except instead of telling women that they should just be more confident or assertive, benevolent sexism is telling women that they just need to be more feminine and submissive. Yeah. At the end of the day, what both of these belief systems condition us into believing is that women can just self help their way of getting more of what they want. And in the process, both of them ultimately distract us from and even enable those systems that are holding us back. Look at the trad wife. She is advocating for the hyper individualism of a fabricated nuclear family ideal and is the explicitly against things like basic income protections, affordable health care, family leave, the very policies that would actually enable more women to occupy this role that trad wives are performing. Because like as much as it might claim or sound or look otherwise, these trends that arise out of benevolent sexism are not actually about valuing women. They're not about valuing care work. They're not about valuing, quote, unquote femininity. They are designed to reinforce a gender division of labor and a gendered hierarchy of power, not to support care work. Because if care work was going to be meaningfully supported, it means that yes, women could engage in it full time, but men could too. And that would actually undermine the gender division of labor and these power structures that these ideals are really working to maintain. So I think in this way we see how individualism is pretty fundamental to the larger project of reasserting inequitable hierarchies of power across gender identity. Women do need more security. They do need more rest. They do need more relaxation. It's not a call to collective action on behalf of things like paid parental leave and medical leave and universal health care and affordable child care income protections. It becomes this fetishization of women leaning away from public life, all of which effectively keeps women limited to their quote unquote right rightful place, serving the needs of men who maintain the vast majority of economic, social and political power as is always intended.
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C
We will get right back to my conversation with Stephanie after a quick break. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Does this sound familiar? You're in line at checkout cart full of items, your toddler is screaming for a treat and you left your wallet in the car. Or was it at home? No need to panic. With your iPhone in hand, you can tap to pay using Apple Card with Apple Pay and you'll earn unlimited daily cash back when you do so if your credit card isn't Apple Card, maybe it should be subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and more@applecard.com I think we have to ask why are these messages powerful? Why are they effective? And for me it always comes back to because they are speaking to legitimate economic strain. They are speaking to real problems. I'm a comment section creeper and so I always will like if I get served those types of videos or I'll go and seek them out to be like what are the kids talking about these days on the TikTok and in the comments you often say oh finally someone's speaking to the fact that like this is all just too much and women weren't meant to work full time and also be caregivers. And it's like they are speaking to like a legitimate concern. Our current paradigm is constructed around making GDP go up, which is really not the same thing. What is that Bobby Kennedy quote? That's like GDP measures everything except that which makes life worth living. I think naming it individualism as such, giving it that label and saying this is repackaging it is. It is selling you the solution for the problem that it is creating for you. This is in no way transgressive to the status quo. I think that that does help and they use anti capitalist language often like they really appropriate anti capitalist sentiment and rhetoric.
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B
Right?
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C
And I think that that's where like from my perspective, I get so frustrated. I'm like no babe, you don't want a provider. You Want a union.
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B
Exactly right. There's a reason that their answer is not exactly that. They're not asking for universal basic income. They are asking you to get married and depend on a man. And honestly, all of the solutions they give you are things that will make your burnout and stress worse because they are doubling down on the individualism. And then what they're doing is they're isolating you. Almost all of this stuff that's supposedly self care or self empowerment or self improvement is incredibly isolating. It disconnects you from not just opportunity in the workplace, but it disconnects you from community more broadly. And it's an incredibly insular vision. So obviously with a trad wife, the nuclear family is a very, very specific vision that is almost never pictured in the context of a larger community. But even these things that are like, I'm gonna just self care my way into being more relaxed, there's this huge emphasis on the self and not on reconnecting you to your community, not onto building your support systems outwards. It's still about redirecting your focus inwards. And what that does is leave you so, so vulnerable to any kind of shock and so, so unsupported when you do find yourself in a situation where you need to rely on not just money, but other people.
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C
On the note of the being in your feminine and you know these things speaking to supposedly practical and rational differences and or legitimate concerns. One common refrain in this conversation about work life balance for women in particular is that there's like no way to win, really. Like you're gonna be burnt out kind of no matter what you choose. And so I think there's a bit of a fatalism at play here or like a resignation to that fact for most people that no matter what the system is putting you in a position where it's gonna be tough, but that this strain of thinking will often point to paid work specifically as the source of the burnout. And I think you see this manifest in different ways from these benevolently sexist objections that skew into like, pseudoscience of like, ooh, you need to be in your feminine. And like, email puts you in your masculine to the supposedly practical, which is the things that we've already covered. So what do you typically say to the valid complaints that like, well, it's too much. Like, if it's too much and the individual empowerment thing doesn't work anyway, then fuck it, right?
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B
What the data do consistently show is that burnout affects far more women than men, but it also shows that this burnout, it doesn't have anything to do with like not being in your feminine or any other manufacturing fractured claim of quote unquote natural gender differences. Instead, what this burnout reflects is the vastly unequal demands women still face in the process of working to realize their professional and personal ambitions relative to men, particularly CIS straight, white, able bodied men. So if you are someone whose identity remains marginalized within these existing power structures, you are not spontaneously experiencing some kind of burnout that came out of nowhere. You are on the receiving end of a years long campaign of consistent bias that has slowly and I argue, purposefully chipped away at your professional ambitions, making your working life so frustrating and toxic that you are justifiably burnt out. But that feeling that you would would rather leave it all behind than continue to pursue it in your current environment is not an accident. It is the point. In place of these like explicit and honestly illegal bans on women's participation in the public sphere, this kind of systematic, long term undermining of women's ambition has become its own culturally palatable form of gender discrimination. So one of the most surprising things that came up for me in the research for this book was just how much gender inequality outside of the home depends on gender inequality within it. And the data on heterosexual relationships here is pretty damning. I think. For the purposes of this discussion, I think we should talk about one of the most under recognized aspects of it, which is the gender leisure gap. So we often talk about paid work and unpaid work. But if you really want to understand why debates about burnout or having it all and work life balance and whether they're even possible, are almost exclusively had among women, the gender leisure gap is the one to look at. So according to an analysis of 2022American time use survey data, the free time gender gap holds in men's favor across race, ethnicity, education, marital status, employment status, age and children in the household and leaves women with an average of 13% less free time than men. And between the ages 35 and 44 that rises to 23% less free time than men. And those gaps hold in men's favor across so many scenarios. So I'm going to quote the report, they say for full time workers it's as if men get a month more a year of vacation compared to their women peers.
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C
Jesus.
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B
And that is on top of men maintaining their outsized access to professional rewards and public public power. All the while like women are being run ragged and stuck in these debates over like whether we can have it all, whether that's even a worthy goal. Meanwhile, we have men across income levels, education, parental status, combining their family life and their paid labor with an extra month's worth of leisure time to spare.
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C
I want to get to this idea too, of when it comes to in the workplace, the idea of meritocracy, it's this idea that, like, no, we are committed to objective excellence. We're committed to objective superiority. You have pointed in the past to a 2024 paper that indicated something called goal post moving happens in these situations where people are saying, well, we're just choosing the objectively best person for such and such role. Can you walk us through the findings of this paper and why it's it feels relevant to this conversation for you?
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B
So one of the studies that this 2024 paper you just mentioned builds off of is a 2005 paper with a really great name that I just have to share. It's called quote, Constructed Criteria Redefining Merit to Justify Discrimination. Great title. And that's exactly what is happening. It's by Eric Ullman and Jeffrey Cohen. And as part of this study, what they did is they looked at how merit was defined and evaluated for men and women applying this stereotypically male job of police chief. And what the authors found is that, you know, evaluators wouldn't actually explicitly discriminate. Believe it or not, they wouldn't discriminate in the a woman can't do that job kind of way. What they did instead is they shifted their definitions of quote, unquote merit, or what it takes to do that job well, to reflect the qualities of the person that they actually wanted to hire, in this case case, the man. So when the male job applicant had more formal education and the woman had less, evaluators prioritized formal education as the most important indicator of merit when hiring. But when the situation was reversed and the man had less formal education, men were still more likely to be chosen because formal education suddenly was no longer defined as the most important way of determining suitability for the job. So I'm going to quote the study authors here. They write, Participants who exhibited the most pro male bias in their hiring criteria also proved the most confident in the objectivity of their decision. They perhaps felt they had chosen the right man for the job, when in fact they had chosen the right job criteria for the man. So back to this 2024 paper you referenced. Similar pattern again. This is last year, right? So 20 years later. And what they did is they simulated a hiring experiment where participants were either assigned the role of employers or job candidates, and these employers were given the task of making a series of anonymous hiring decisions between pairs of candidates and for each candidate the employer received a mini resume with information about the candidate candidate's gender and two possible qualifications like a little mini resume. And then employers were incentivized to hire the better job candidate so they would receive a fixed payment if they hired the candidate that performed better in the job task. And even with all of that in place, the study found that the only scenario in which there was no gender bias was when one candidate profile was so clearly more qualified than the other. Then the qualified candidate was hired at the same rate, irrespective of gender. But when both candidates were equally qualified, meaning they had identical qualification profiles, there was a significant gender bias against women. And even more tellingly, when both profiles were differently qualified. For example, if both candidates had a certificate but they were different certificates, and in one scenario the certificate A belongs to a woman and certificate B belongs to a male candidate, and in another scenario those attributions are reversed. The researchers again find significant discrimination against women, so much so that the magnitude of the gender bias against women in this scenario was about as large as for the decisions where employers had have no information upon which to differentiate candidates other than their gender.
- [37:13]
C
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B
Right.
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C
But one of the, one of the kind of popular pieces of pushback that I hear today is, well, men's participation has actually never been higher. Like, yeah, you're talking about how bad it is, but it's actually never been better. Men have never participated more. What do you say to that?
- [41:11]
B
What I like to do when I talk about metrics, whether it's household inequality, workplace inequality, pay inequality, wealth inequality, is kind of take a look at what's the rhetorical strategy being used in these responses and what you see happen in this particular response is we're shifting the conversation away from the present day rampant inequality that is burning women out, that is making them not have enough money to meet their essential needs, making them not have enough time to get sleep, making them really unhappy. And we're now saying, well, it's better than it used to be. And we're saying, well, it's better than it is, like in this country, or like, just be glad you weren't born in the 1960s or whatever it is. Right. What do you do is reframe the conversation from what is happening between men and women in heterosexual relationships today, and you instead make the benchmark what men do in heterosexual relationships today relative to what men in heterosexual relationships did 50 years ago. So it's an incredibly disingenuous way of framing this argument.
- [42:28]
C
So basically, I think you're comparing men's household labor now to men's household labor decades ago when women were less likely to work, as opposed to comparing working men's labor now to working women's labor now. You're shifting it to a degree that essentially, like, makes it look as though it's not a problem. And I'm curious in particular with the tendency to think about these things on a very individual basis of translating these trends or what we're seeing at the aggregate to, like, individual marriages, if you can speak to that. That.
- [43:03]
B
Yeah, I think that as much as we've been talking about the inequality in heterosexual relationships for years, and it feels really tired, the truth is that most people are still severely underestimating how bad it still is. So I want to be clear that when I talk about household inequality, I'm not talking about it personally, I'm not talking about it individually, I'm talking about it statistically. And when I do that, I'm not just talking about women having to manage slightly more in a majority of cases, like a slight majority of cases, I am talking about the data showing us that women doing about twice as much household labor as their male partners remains the norm in heterosexual relationships, even as the vast majority of women are also employed. And how even the most optimistic estimates, estimates suggest that the percentage of heterosexual relationships in the US where men contribute at least half of the physical household labor are only around 10%, if that. I think it's really important for us to always come back to these broader patterns and remember, like, what do our excuses actually enable? Who does it serve to pretend that this isn't really as bad as it is? And I think on an individual basis, basis, I Get it? Like any of us can get away with explaining away a little inequality when it comes to our own day to day decision making. That's what a division of labor is. And we really do have different schedules, distinct skills, personal preferences, personality traits, you know, so on and so on and so on. But I think whenever we talk about these things, whether it's household inequality or anything else, it's important that we're going to step back and look at this stuff collectively. And in the case of household inequality, that's collectively over the course of our own relationships and more broadly across all relationships. And then we see just how much household inequality falls along the same gendered lines, even when all of the excuses fall away. This reframing of inequality is fair. Doesn't do anything to advance policies that enable men, women and all marginalized genders to integrate their personal and professional ambitions more sustainably. What it does is undermine interest in collective action to challenge this unequal status quo.
- [45:32]
C
It is really bananas to think about that leisure gap. Like that statistic to me is painful. Essentially like the group that maintains the most economic power, the most professional prestige writ large also is the one that has the extra month off every year. My God, that's just so unjust. And on that note, I want to talk about Dr. Corrine Lowe's book Having it all, which I see on the shelf behind you. You this is a book that covers more of this. Well trodden time use data that you and I have been talking about that shows how heterosexual couples with female breadwinners are the only couple type in which the breadwinner does more household production than the non breadwinner. We learned in the National Bureau of Economic Research paper Winning the Bread and Baking It Too, that like every other couple type, heterosexual couples, where men are the breadwinners, lesbian couples, gay couples, whoever is the breadwinner is doing less work at home. Like they are rationally dividing their household labor. They're looking at what each person is bringing to the table in terms of resources and then assigning the rest of the work appropriately. Like there is a more economical approach. But in these heterosexual households where women are the breadwinners, that is not what we see. That to me is the like canary in the coal mine that everything that you've said about who does it serve for us to pretend that this is not a problem, that to me is the screaming siren of the problem. And I'm really curious what you make of this because I constantly come back to like, why does this persist? Why is this Reproducing itself. Maybe it really does come down to the settle down, boss up or whatever the line is in that new Taylor Swift song. Maybe it really is that, that individual, individualist culture. But it feels frustrating to me.
- [47:29]
B
I mean, I think there's some insight there. There's a cognitive dissonance between perceiving yourself as someone who's an inequitable partnership and then experiencing this kind of inequity. And it takes something to resolve that. And I wound up dedicating a whole chapter of my book to this.
- [47:47]
C
Ooh, say more.
- [47:49]
B
It was coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her book the Second Ship. It's called the Myth of Mutuality. And it's really a coping mechanism for resolving this cognitive dissonance between perceiving yourself as a woman to be maybe feminist or someone who would not tolerate being treated as though your time doesn't matter, and someone who perceives themselves as being in an equitable partnership. And after the many, many failed attempts to try to, to bring your reality in alignment with your identity as that kind of equitable partner with someone who is not willing to meet you in that same place, what happens is the construction of a story that justifies it away. And that story often takes the form of these supposedly gender neutral justifications. Right. It's just that iron link less my work is more flexible. I'm just better at it. But what we see in the data is just the extent to which these divisions of labor and heterosexual relationships overwhelmingly wind up privileging men's leisure. They wind up privileging their power. They wind up privileging their professional lives and their finances. And it often comes at the direct cost of women. So let me tell you about a 2018 study where we looked at Americans perceptions of responsibility for housework and for childcare. What happened was. Yeah. Study participants were presented with a vignette and they either described a same sex couple or a heterosexual couple. And then the respondents were then asked to assign the childcare and the household chores to each partner based on information about relative income, gender, and their gender expression. And gender was the primary factor that drove Americans beliefs about who is responsible for the household, household labor and the child care. By contrast, who earned more had little influence. And what was interesting here is in same sex couples, the delegation of chores and childcare would even be a little bit more consistently associated with gender expression as opposed to earning power. So I find that really interesting. Yeah, so that's still like the heteropatriarchal stereotypes about like masculine and feminine gender roles. Roles still influence this distribution of unpaid labor. Those gender roles, of course, being men as provider, you know, your primary, if not exclusive role is like, to secure financial resources, and then women as caretaker whose primary role is to care for the home or everyone in it. And yet anytime I talk about these findings or household inequality and all the data around it and this totally inequitable division of unpaid labor labor, I get these endless comments just appealing to this idea that household inequality just makes sense. And it starts out, yeah, with the fact that women are on average paid less than men. And so it starts with that economics argument. And then when I bring up what we see in this NBER paper, that, you know, women who are financial breadwinners and heterosexual relationships still do the vast majority of household labor in their relationship. To point out one wild stat from that paper, men who earn half as much as their wives do do about as little housework as men who earn twice as much as their spouses.
- [51:22]
C
Oh, my God.
- [51:23]
B
So you have that kind of reality, and then all of a sudden the argument shifts. Well, it's not really income that matters anyway. It's really about, well, hours worked or schedule flexibility. And then we look at this data and we see that, oh, well, women do have less free time than men and they have less access to workplace flexibility than men. And. And yet they still do more in the home. And then. Okay, well, it's not about that either. It's really just because women have different and unreasonable preferences.
- [51:51]
C
Yeah, bitches love vacuuming. Right? I mean, as we all know.
- [51:55]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [51:57]
C
You're getting at something really critical here, which is the shifting of the argument depending on what data like. Cause it's not about data.
- [52:05]
B
It's not.
- [52:06]
C
It's ultimately just about bias. It is about, at bottom. Bottom, a belief in that biological determinism of the argument of the role of women in the home that we basically got post industrial revolution, that this is somehow our evolutionary destiny.
- [52:25]
B
But even that you can't argue because you have in this NBER paper, we see heterosexual men's housework falls when they marry and rises when they divorce, while women's household labor falls when they divorce, even though they're more likely to have primary custody of children. So it's not like some fundamental biological skill issue. It's not a preference issue. It's not a lack of interest in having a functional home. No, it's really just that we do not value women's labor, we do not value their time, and we are willing to exhaust them to support the power and privileges and leisure of men. I think that's another piece of this conversation that doesn't get talked about enough, is that this devaluation of women's time and labor is something men directly benefit from. So there's a 2020 paper called Gender Wage Gap and the Involvement of Partners in Household Work. And it studied heterosexual couples across Germany, Italy, and the U.S. and it found that not only did the greater share of unpaid labor borne by women negatively affect their own earning power, it increased the earning power of their male partners. Because all of these extra hours of unpaid responsibilities being borne by women, like cooking and cleaning, you know, managing the household, taking care of children, elderly relatives, it not only limits the hours that women have available to pursue their public. Their professional ambition, but they enable men to devote more time, energy, and resources to their own pursuits as a direct, direct result. So this household inequality consistently privileges and protects men's time, their energy, their leisure, their joy, their ambition at the direct expense of women's. And I think that's unacceptable.
- [54:11]
C
Hell, yeah. Something that was quite chilling to me, but I think worth pointing out, is that Dr. Corinne Lowe, who wrote this book. Book. She includes personal narrative within her analysis. And the big bombshell to me about this personal narrative woven into this data is she got divorced. Like, she was like, yo, this is very much not working for me. Heterosexual marriage is creating a power dynamic in my life that, like, I can no longer look past. And you pointed out in the past that often, per the neoliberal feminism conversation earlier, these things are often discussed as though they're logistical or communications problems. You have pointed out that the unfortunate reality is that heterosexual relationship dynamics are overwhelmingly predicated on women's implicit submission within them to these dynamics that it's less about, oh, I'm just not communicating my needs well. Or, like, ooh, I'm just. I just need to do fair play one more time. And we need to divide playing cards out. Again, it's a logistical problem. And you're. You point to the fact that, like, it really isn't, though. That's really not what this is about. Yeah.
- [55:29]
B
I think one of the things that became really clear to me as I reported on the data and I also conducted a lot of interviews for the book of women experiencing this. And what I realized is that most women aren't caught between their work and their family. They're caught between their partner's unwillingness to change and not wanting to end their relationship or marriage. Marriage. And that's a very different tension.
- [55:52]
C
Yeah.
- [55:53]
B
But we frame it as a work and family conversation because it's really hard to face that patriarchal power dynamics are the default setting of heterosexual relationships, even when we don't want them to be or intend for them to be. And I didn't start from this perspective. I want to be clear. But the more I dug into the data in my book, the more it became clear to me that for women to be entitled to their ambitions in the same ways that men are, we have to acknowledge this setting because it takes being honest about them to do something about them. Consider the fact that the children of heterosexual couples in the US receive their father's last names about 96% of the time, even though women do the vast majority of childcare, they're far more likely to be primary and single parents. Parents and only 33% of single women say they plan to take a partner's last name when they get married. And yet nearly 80% take their husband's last names when they get married. So it's just a name. It's not that big a deal, I can say. But if it wasn't that big a deal, these supposedly egalitarian men would not be so opposed to doing it differently. And if something as seemingly simple as a naming convention is this hard, hard to talk about honestly or even call out without being gaslit with claims that it's just tradition, you know, consider how hard it's going to be to hold the whole of heterosexual relationships accountable for these fundamentally unequal institutions that they are. Because in the same way that women are not being forced to change their last names or endow their children with the last names of the kids fathers, women are not forced to shrink their ambitions. But there's this coercive control of patriarchal partners that work hand in hand with a broader patriarchal culture to effectively constrain women's so called choices until they align with the status quo. And this is where the work of sociologist Allison Daminger has been really, really illuminating for me. She looks at even again self identified egalitarian couples and she shows that these couples who claim their ideal is to share household labor equally wind up experiencing, yes, the same familiar household inequality in practice with women bearing most of the load. And to reconcile that lived inequality of their relationships with their ideals of egalitarianism. She finds that couples would explain this fact that women still did most of the child care and the housework by again, appealing to these so called gender neutral ideas. We're just maximizing household efficiency. It's just what makes sense that's always a red flag if you hear it, by the way. Or we're just optimizing for personality traits. It's just how we're wired. And she writes, respondents insisted any resemblance between their behaviors and traditional norms was coincidental. And yet in case after case, she chronicles just, just how quickly these supposedly gender neutral justifications that these couples are relying on aren't gender neutral at all. They totally fall apart. So she talks about this woman named Lisa. She's a stay at home mom. And Lisa's take on doing the majority of the domestic chores is, well, it seems ridiculous to me to have my husband who put in a 10 or 12 hour workday than to have me say, hey, please like come make dinner. And then there's Meg, who works full time from an office while her husband is at home. Home. And she basically says the same thing. She's always trying to do just as much of the household labor whenever she's home, just to quote, give her husband that break in addition to taking on the majority of the cognitive labor, like even when she's on her commute to work or on her lunch breaks, then she'll take on the majority of the mental load there. Or even more strikingly, she interviews a man named Alan who goes on explaining away the unequal division of labor in his marriage by claiming that he's just the quote unquote ideas guy and that his wife is the quote unquote. Oh yeah, right. So his wife is the quote unquote project manager. Right. So she's the one who's like, she's just more of that kind of research person, type A, making plans. Meanwhile, Alan's full time job is being a project manager for a major insurance company. And he wasn't the only one. Like the same thing happened over and over. There's this guy named Steve. He's like, yeah, yeah, I'm a, I'm a project manager by trade, but sometimes I just don't want to plan for the weekend. And sure, I don't want to plan either. But if you don't plan, what does it do? It says that's not my job and someone else should have to pick up the slack. And I think what these, do these disclosures reveal is how these individualized excuses that couples use to justify the inequity in their own relationship are often just a cover for maintaining those same old patriarchal practices in their relationships as evidenced by their divisions of labor. And of course, it goes beyond divisions of labor. It's like when we have to Move for someone's job. It's overwhelmingly for men's jobs. Even if women make more, even if they have more opportunity, it's all of these things that basically compound the inequality in the relationship and then in the world beyond it.
- [61:26]
C
I want to define patriarchy really quickly because I think that that word can be used in a way that feels really squishy or almost like the linguistic equivalent of, like, the Ruth Bader Ginsburg bobblehead. It's like, ooh, down with patriarchy. And it almost has become like a joke. Patriarchy is defined by a society or community that organizes itself down patrilineal lines. That the men's identity is what determines the line of the thing. It's the organizing principle of society. So when you're speaking to the naming conventions and like, oh, it's just a name, right? It's very easy to write. It's just tradition, right? That is literally the definition of what we're talking about. A society that decides to organize itself according to the patrilineal line. The other piece of the definition is a system or society in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it. And to that, I would say we've never had a woman president in the United States. There are other countries in the world with women presidents, women prime ministers who have had women in charge of government for decades. At this point, we still never have. So I think, like, for all of the American exceptionalism that, like, we point to as being a place where, like, equality is a value that we have, have freedom, egalitarian like these, that these are things that we value in the United States, I think that we are kind of a profoundly patriarchal culture here. And I do think that it's important to just even state that outright, that if you're ranking us amongst other countries, this is a very, very patriarchal country.
- [63:06]
B
It is. And I think another thing that becomes really clear when you look at the totality of this data is the. That in this kind of system that. Actually, Sarai Chemali has a new book coming out. It's called All We Want Is Everything. And she calls it male supremacy, which I think might be helpful in terms of helping people understand what we're really talking about. I think what's really clear, too here is the way women's time, their labor, their energy is really just perceived as a resource source for upholding men's access to that power and access to that leisure and protecting their opportunity. I think we might feel really uncomfortable with that idea, but it's pretty hard to reckon with, seeing how consistently these patterns remain in place and the willingness to justify or explain them away as not a big deal.
- [64:06]
C
Otherwise. Otherwise.
- [64:08]
B
So you have women, like, they are put in this position of trying to convince a male partner that taking care of his own children is not babysitting and cleaning his own toilet is not a favor. And I think part of the reason that norm remains so chronically in place is not just this individual willingness to explain it away, but the way in which the world outside the relationship really, really upholds that norm and rewards towards those who comply with it, specifically the men. And then they can reinforce that norm by making it so difficult for women to find some sense of stability in the workplace, reward in the workplace, that when it comes time to, let's say, have a kid and somebody's career has to scale back, then of course couples are going, okay, well, it makes sense for you to be the one doing it. And so it becomes this, like, mutually reinforcing system between the private and the public sphere. And, and that is a theme that came up a lot in all of the things that I wound up researching, was that when we talk about these inequities, it's really easy to think of them as, like, kind of separate things as opposed to, like, mutually reinforcing. And so I think it's important to think about them as there's like, this interpersonal level of it, there's this institutional level of it. And then you have, like, the social and political level of it, and they all work together to continue to reinforce the system.
- [65:41]
C
When you put it like that, it kind of makes it clear why trying to solve it at the interpersonal level is going to feel like such an uphill battle and such an uphill climb. And I think that ultimately that might be why I think some women probably are aware of these dynamics, maybe living them, and still may be like, and I'm too fucking tired to do anything about it.
- [66:05]
B
But I think sometimes we let the interpersonal off the hook.
- [66:08]
C
Hook.
- [66:09]
B
You'll see this, for example, when it comes to conversations around child care and leave, you say, oh, well, you know, men are going to be penalized at work if they take the flexibility or the paternity leave that they're entitled to. But we talk about it as though women are not facing dire consequences for a motherhood and aren't being hurt considerably. And so what we're effectively saying is like, oh, there is a real price to be paid for parenthood. And instead of finding ways, ways for us to make that better for everyone across identity. What we're going to do is shift this cost onto women exclusively or nearly exclusively, and then the system can just continue to stay in place. And that doesn't do anything to change the system. It doesn't do anything to help anybody. And then it reinforces the culture of overwork, the culture of not having a meaningful social support, support system that locks it all in place. And so I think these things work together. And I don't think we should let the interpersonal off the hook, even though it is amplified by the institutional and the political and the cultural.
- [67:18]
C
Speaking of men's men being penalized, I think most of us are familiar by now with the phenomenon in which having a child tends to affect people's earnings differently. We know on average that a woman's average earnings tend to go down after she has her first child, whereas a man's average earnings tend to rise after he has his first child. But it's actually even more dramatic than that. This is one statistic that you called my attention to. A paper from the Federal Reserve of Dallas found that if men were unable to marry, prime age male work hours would fall by 7%. So married men's wages go up compared to single men when they are married to women relative to single men with the same education and experience level. So in that sense, this would indicate there is a controlled wage gap between single and married men, which I found. I don't know why I found it shocking because it is kind of like the logical extension of everything that we've been talking about. And so I went and I read the paper in question because I was trying to deduce, like, do they assign correlation to these things? Are men working harder once they're married because, like, oh, they want to support their family? Or are, you know, men with higher earnings more likely to find a wife? Or like, are they simply able to work more because they have someone at home who's just statistically bearing more of the load for them? My interpretation of the paper's findings was that they weren't really sure. Like, they didn't seem clear on the correlation. But I wanted to ask you about your read on this paper and what you made of their conclusion.
- [68:53]
B
Well, it is true that men who are higher income are more likely to get varied. But you also mentioned that you can control for these things and that marital wage premiums still exist even if you are controlling for education and experience and all of that. So my take on the fact that this paper really didn't come to A conclusion is that these economists desperately need some gender diversity on their research team.
- [69:22]
C
They were like, we don't know what could happen.
- [69:24]
B
It be there's, it's pretty shocking to me. Yeah, it really is. If men cannot sustain their earnings advantages without marriage, I think it shows us how much access to women's unpaid labor subsidizes men's careers, incomes and opportunities. You know, and I mentioned a similar study earlier, but this is another one. It's called Care and Careers Gender Inequality in Unpaid Care, Housework and Employment, which finds that both men and women's overall housework and care burden lowers their labor market participation and working hours. It also found that a more equal care and housework distribution boosts gender equality in employment and that increasing men's share of chores enhances women's employment and working hours. But as we know, based on everything we've already discussed, we know how rare it is for men to do even half of the unpaid labor in heterosexual households. So again, all of this data really goes back to my conclusion that gender inequality outside of the home depends on the gender inequality within, within it. And I think that this can help us really understand why there is such a moral panic about marriage right now, about fertility right now, and this so called male loneliness epidemic right now.
- [70:42]
C
It really, for me put it in terms of, oh, there is economically speaking, an intense amount riding on this, persisting on the status quo, carrying on. This really isn't about preferences, about people's personal lives. The society as constructed now crumbles without this institution. When I look at how precarious things look already economically, I look at the labor market compared to the stock market, I look at the overvaluation of these artificial intelligence related companies, I look at the tariffs and the trade war, I look at the systematic dismantling of the public infrastructure of this country. We really are hanging on by a fucking thread. And so the fact that now there is this obsession with birth rates and women embracing their role in the home, it's like, oh yeah, because if work hours fall by 7%, that's it, it's over. Right? If we're not reproducing at the same time rate, the whole house of cards, the whole pyramid scheme crumbles. You have to keep creating new recruits for this to work properly. And so I think it just reveals not how fragile it is, because obviously we've just spent so much of our time together talking about how entrenched and how consistently this system manages to reproduce itself and how every force in society is pushing us in this direction. But I also go, oh my God, what a rickety ass system we're looking at. Like, it feels like with like one strong gust of wind, the whole thing is just going to come crumbling down.
- [72:22]
B
As much as this has been entrenched, we see how much things that are systemic can and do change all the time. What happens though, is that that change is usually happening to preserve the power and the privileges of those already at the top. So I think, I think coming back to the beginning of our conversation when we were talking about women's education, right, Women are more educated than ever and they have been for the last like four decades. They've been going to college at higher rates than men, but only now that their educational gains have so far outpaced their male peers are we starting to question, like, really what's the value of all this education, right? And this is not an argument about higher education or what it costs or its value. It's just to say, hey, hey, we're going to change what metrics matter. We're going to change what meritocracy looks like. We're going to move the goalpost so that we can make sure the system still protects the power and privileges of the people that we want it to protect. So I think we sometimes think of things as systemic, as unchangeable, but actually the only way you can reproduce the system is to constantly change things and to shift things, things.
- [73:40]
C
That's a bar. The only way that the system continues is to be constantly changing things to accommodate the fact that this isn't working for most people, right? Because like, people are going to push back.
- [73:53]
B
And to be fair, like, it really doesn't work for men either. Most men either. It works for the very wealthy, the very powerful and the very privileged. And most men are not that either. But what it does is it incentivizes men to maintain their relative, relative privilege over their absolute well being. And I think we really, really need to come back to this idea that what we want is better, absolute well being for everyone and get rid of this idea of relative well being. Because all that is doing is reinforcing these unnatural natural hierarchies that hurt all of us.
- [74:39]
C
Hell yeah. Sister Stephanie, thank you so much for joining me today. We are going to link every paper, every study that we talked about today in the show notes because that was a lot. But I think that the evidence mounts.
- [74:55]
B
The citation section of my book. It's nuts.
- [74:59]
C
I'm sure it is. I bet you that took, it took.
- [75:01]
B
Me a month forever too because, yeah.
- [75:03]
C
It takes a really long time.
- [75:05]
B
A good percentage of those links were removed in the last six months since the Trump administration. So I went on a wild goose chase.
- [75:16]
C
This is like an ongoing theme on this show is I'm like, let's go back and find that DOJ paper that found this. And it's like, oh, that revisionist history that doesn't exist. It is very 1984. I saw a. A picture of somebody for Halloween put out the basket and it's like, please take one. Somebody had a basket of 1984 by George Orwell, and it said, One copy of 1984 per child. I was like, yep, that's where we are.
- [75:41]
B
We really are.
- [75:44]
C
Well, thank you so much for joining me. That was amazing. That is all for this week and we will see you in two weeks. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henna Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassan, with audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is president of Morning Brew. Additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.