Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The gender pay gap that currently exists is a major reason that women continue to struggle with the power to change and influence our culture and society. In this interview, featuring Josie Cox, a seasoned journalist and author (of a recently published book, Women Money Power), highlights the reasons for the gender pay gap that exists today, but also the immense capacity that women have for leading change.
If you are a woman who is currently struggling financially, it is not your fault. If you are a woman who sees the discrepancies and unfairness that exists in our society and want to better understand why, then listen to this interview AND read Josie Cox’s book.
There are times that this struggle appears to be permanent, unchangeable, and utterly hopeless. But Josie leaves us with a glimmer of hope and even a basic framework and understanding for how change is possible. Interested in learning about how other women authors are leading change for women in our society today? Check out the interview with Deborah Copaken.
This interview and book are immensely valuable. Please gift yourself an hour, and listen or watch the interview.
Josie is a seasoned journalist and editor. She’s worked globally for publications like Reuters, International Financing Review, The Independent and The Wall Street Journal.
As a freelancer, her work has appeared in the The Washington Post, The Spectator, Guardian, Business Insider, Fortune, Forbes, New Statesman, Huffington Post, Quartz and several other publications. She has appeared as a commentator on Sky News, CNN, Al Jazeera, Channel 5 and Fox News, and is a regular guest on the BBC.
She was a 2020/2021 Knight-Bagehot (Baa-jut) Fellow at Columbia Journalism School in the city of New York, and holds a BA from the University of Bath in the U.K. and an MBA from Columbia Business School. She’s also an Associate Instructor within the Strategic Communications program at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies.
Her new book – Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality JUST came out!
Description of Women Money Power: For centuries, women were denied equal access to money and the freedom and power that came with it. They were restricted from owning property or transacting in real estate. Even well into the 20th century, women could not take out their own loans or own bank accounts without their husband’s permission. They could be fired for getting married or pregnant, and if they still had a job, they could be kept from certain roles, restricted from working longer hours, and paid less than men for equal work.
It was a raw deal, and women weren’t happy with it. So they pushed back. In Women Money Power, financial journalist Josie Cox tells the story of women’s fight for financial freedom. This is an inspirational account of brave pioneers who took on social mores and the law, including the “Rosies” who filled industrial jobs vacated by men and helped win WWII, the heiress whose fortune helped create the birth control pill, the brassy investor who broke into the boys’ club of the New York Stock Exchange, and the namesake of landmark equal pay legislation who refused to accept discrimination.
But as any woman can tell you, the battle for equality—for money and power—is far from over. Cox delves deep into the challenges women face today and the culture and systems that hold them back. This is a fascinating narrative account of progress, women’s lives, and the work still to be done.
0:00 Dr. Ginger Garner: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Living Well podcast. I am here today with an amazing human being, woman, author, journalist, and I am so happy, Josie Cox, that you are here with me today. Welcome.
0:23 Josie Cox: Thank you so much for having me.
0:26 Dr. Ginger Garner: I want to tell you guys a little bit about her first before we launch. Josie is a seasoned journalist and editor. She’s worked globally for publications. So many, too many to list. The Independent, the Wall Street Journal. Her work frequently appears in the Washington Post, The Spectator, Guardian, Fortune, Forbes. And the list goes on. She’s appeared as a commentator on Sky News, CNN, BBC. And again, the list continues. She was a 2020-2021 Knight Bajut Fellow at Columbia Journalism School in the city of New York, holds a BA from the University of Bath in the UK and an MBA from Columbia Business School. All amazing places that I absolutely love. She’s also an associate instructor with the strategic communications program at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies.
So again, welcome. Your new book out, Women, Money, and Power. I want to put it all together. Women, Money, and Power, the Rise and Fall of Economic Equality. It literally just came out, what, maybe two weeks ago?
1:46 Josie Cox: Yep, three weeks ago.
1:47 Dr. Ginger Garner: Three weeks ago? It’s already been three weeks?
1:50 Josie Cox: It feels like three years.
1:53 Dr. Ginger Garner: I bet it does for you because I swear it was only one or two weeks and it’s already been three. I’m in the midst of reading it. I just got it. Actually, the first one that was shipped to me arrived like this. It was all mangled. [I’m sorry. Not my fault.] Not your fault. No, they sent another one out. It was it was a magic. It was a magical mystery. The box was fine and the book was strange. But of course, the bookseller was like, no problem. We fix these things all the time. That’s great. Let me tell you a little bit about Josie’s book, you Guys, because this is the book that I feel like I’ve been waiting for my whole life.
The Price of Motherhood, Anne Crittenden’s book that came out so many years ago, kind of started the fire for me. And then I went on to read statistics from Save the Children and State of the World’s Mothers reports, and I just got madder and madder and madder. And so when I saw your book coming out, I was just like, oh, I just sucked all the breath in, you know, out of the room. I was like, oh, my gosh, this is so amazing. So let me tell you guys a little bit about it.
For centuries, as we all know, if we’re paying attention at all, women were denied equal access to money and the freedom and power that came with it. They were restricted from owning property or transacting in real estate even well into the 20th century, which is around the year that I was born. Women could not take out a credit card without their husband’s signature, getting their own loans, having their own bank accounts. The list is long. They could be fired for getting married or pregnant. And if they still had a job, they could be kept from certain roles, restricted from working longer hours, and just paid less than men for equal work.
It was a raw deal and women weren’t happy about it. And so they pushed back and we are happy about that. And although we have a long way to go, this book really is a giant step forward for us. Financial journalist, I want to hear more about that. Josie, in this book tells the story of women’s fight for financial freedom. It’s inspirational about the shoulders that we stand on now, the brave pioneers who took on more social roles and policy and law, including the Rosies, which I’ve read about just recently in your book, who filled those industrial jobs. We all saw the posters, right? But I never knew the story behind it. That helped us, of course, win World War II.
To the heiress, who I also want to talk about, who helped create the birth control pill. There are so many amazing women in the book, and I want to have time to talk about those things, because without that we wouldn’t have had landmark equal pay legislation. As we all know, that battle for money and power and just basic equity respect is far from over. And so this is what the book’s about. It’s a fascinating narrative account as your description details on your site, which is so amazing.
It’s why I had to read some of it to you guys right now. Just tells us that there’s so much work left to be done. And I’m so excited that you’re here. Thank you for being here. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me today. I have a question, I don’t know, maybe typical, maybe you’ve gotten it already, maybe you haven’t, but what’s your earliest memory of inequality? When did you like go, oh.
5:42 Dr. Josie Cox: That’s a great question. Thank you so much for having me on as well and for caring. It’s really quite surreal to know that after all these years of writing, typing words away on my little laptop, that someone’s actually reading them. So that’s really special. It’s a great question. So I don’t think I can conjure up the earliest memory. But what I would say is that I’ve been a financial journalist about 15 years. And I started my career as a stock market reporter. So I graduated into the financial crisis, the great financial crisis in 2009 and there were no jobs going in journalism.
I had decided through college that I wanted to be a journalist. I love people’s stories, I love talking to people, I love asking people questions, learning about their lives and so when I realized that you could do all of those things by being a journalist, I was sold on that. And so graduated in the financial crisis, no jobs available. I actually grew up in Europe, speaking German, I went to a German speaking school. So I graduated bilingually. And that was fortunate for me because Frankfurt was one of the capitals of the European financial system, and therefore also one of the sort of main centers of action during the financial crisis.
So I was very lucky in that Reuters, one of the largest news organizations took a chance on me and said, yes, we could do with an extra pair of hands. We could do with a native German speaker in Frankfurt during the financial crisis. You’re hired as a junior reporter. And so I moved out there after finishing college. I’d never been to Frankfurt. I didn’t know a soul in the city, but I got sort of deep into this world of stocks going up and stocks going down and stock markets crashing and bonds and futures and currencies and all kinds of things.
I learned an awful lot at that time about the mechanisms of the economies in which we all operate. But one of the things that I learned that I didn’t expect I would learn was the gendered nature of what I call big money. So the extent to which investment banks and trading houses and asset management companies, all these institutions that have an immense amount of power over the world in which we live, are still dominated by a certain type of person. And that person is predominantly white and predominantly male.
And so I feel like ever since, you know, I’ve held that first job, I’ve obviously been kind of aware of inequality. And I remember even at high school thinking, I want to work in some field where I’m doing my bit to fight inequality. I don’t know what kind of inequality that is yet. But, you know, being a reporter and kind of a young cub reporter, it was really the first time that I sort of started asking myself these questions of why, despite the fact that we are able to send people to the moon, you know, why, despite the fact that we are able to, you know, cure certain types of diseases that were uncurable for so many years, why have we made all these immense kind of steps and innovations as a human race? And yet money is still so gendered in so many ways.
And it’s still men who make all these big financial decisions in the home and elsewhere. And so that was kind of the first time that this idea was sort of gnawing at me. I then continued to work as a reporter. I worked for Reuters for several years. I then worked for the Wall Street Journal. I then briefly worked as the business editor at The Independent in the UK.
And one of the things that happened while I was business editor at The Independent was that the UK actually implemented a gender pay gap reporting mandate. Which effectively mandated all corporations employing at least 250 people in the UK to annually publish their gender pay gap. And so overnight, we had these troves and troves of data spelling out something that we all suspected, which was that there is still a huge cavernous gender pay gap across the labor market. And it’s not moving, right? To a large extent, like some corporations are kind of tweaking around the edges, implementing quotas, incentivizing change. But it’s large strides are not being made.
And so that was sort of, that was the first time that it really enabled me to integrate this passion for addressing the gender pay gap into my reporting. And then that sort of set me off on this course. I realized I didn’t answer your question there, but I sort of wanted to give you that as a backdrop.
10:17 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, I think that’s, Incredible. I remember the 2008-2009. I, my mouth, you know, is on the floor. I remember that my kids were really little. My oldest was three at the time. No, yeah, my oldest was three at the time. So I had a brand new second one. Yeah. And it was just a lot already struggling under the weight of being a mom at that time, which is actually when I first really became aware of the deep inequities.
I mean, I had always, you’re always treated differently, you know, being female. But I really first became aware of it when I got pregnant, which is right around that time that you were mentioning. I mean, in college, there was frustration because you would see the boys that had half the grades or half the accomplishments, but get the same positions and the same offers. But they were also my friends. So you just learned to like, ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen that an underachieving male could actually get to the same place much quicker, easier, and then, you know, excel past what you were doing just because of the parts that they had.
But getting pregnant and becoming a mom was like really, you know, it was kind of a smack to the face and it pushed me into the policy sphere of what’s going on. It’s when I started to read more statistics and seek out organizations who are working on equality.
11:52 Dr. Josie Cox: Yeah, and it was actually just based off what you were just saying now about motherhood. I actually became a mom the year after the gender pay gap reporting mandate was introduced in the UK. And it was such an interesting experience, because I had gone from being a reporter who was sort of standing back from this narrative around motherhood and the motherhood penalty and the impact that that a mom tends to have on a woman’s career trajectory. And I kind of academically knew all this.
And I also thought that I’m not, I feel like it’s sort of my duty to acknowledge this now. I thought being equipped with the skills and knowledge I had about the gender pay gap, I would never become part of that. I thought I would be an exception to the norm. I thought that I would be an anomaly in the data pool. And yet I became a mom. I realized that I wasn’t able to do my staff newsroom job in the same way that I had previously done. We, as a family, discussed the roles that myself and my partner were going to play in parenting and in breadwinning, quite frankly. And there I was falling into that same pattern that so many women before me have fallen into, which in itself is not a bad thing, but it is just shocking that I fell so quickly into that default.
13:19 Dr. Ginger Garner: Right. You penned an article on that, actually, for MSNBC on being paid less than the men you were managing. I’m going to read you guys an excerpt from that, because I’ve been doing a little bit of homework. You wrote, “two years into my last staff job in a media corporation’s newsroom, I found out that the men I was managing were getting paid significantly more than me.” Later on, you write, “of course, I was furious when I had my very own Lilly Ledbetter moment, but it also provided an unexpected sense of clarity about the infrastructure and parameters of the world in which we all live and work. The extent to which Capitalism’s nifty mechanisms still have a way of silently and systemically favoring some and disadvantaging others.”
14:12 Dr. Josie Cox: Yeah, it’s not something I’ve talked about hugely and extensively, but I think it’s a necessary part of the story. And, you know, as I am sort of bringing this book into the world, I think I owe it to readers to spell out why I decided to write this book and the extent to which I can empathize with many of the stories that I tell. in the book. You know, and as I say, I think in the moment when you have a realization that you have been treated unfairly, for whatever reason that might be, it’s very easy to want to scream at someone or scream into the void or, you know, just scream. [Sometimes I do.]
And I think it’s a healthy reaction. But I think as I have had perspective and distance and time to process this as I write in that piece, I’ve realized that actually it’s unlikely to be the fault of one individual, that I found myself in that situation. It’s far more likely that, as I say, it’s the parameters of the economies in which we all work and live that facilitated this happening. And one very simple example of this is that when I joined that organization, I was asked what my previous salary was as a means of establishing my salary expectations. And I told them, right?
And that is the simplest way of essentially grandfathering in inequity that passes on from job to job, from level to level. And, you know, I was sort of complicit in that, in a way, because I thought that that was expected of me. I also felt very, very privileged to be even having a conversation about being offered this job. which put me in a position of being happy to tolerate any offer I was going to get, you know.
16:01 Dr. Ginger Garner: That’s what we’re conditioned to do, actually. So you were just following the recipe.
16:05 Dr. Josie Cox: I was following the recipe. It’s the recipe’s fault.
16:08 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, exactly. It reminds me of the statistics about women running for office in the US and that when men and women are interviewed about their experience and what they perceive as their qualifications for running for office. Women can be overqualified for a position and while a man can be maybe adequately or not so adequately prepared for a position and women will still report like lower confidence, lower, you know, perceived competence at being prepared to run for office. And that is part of that recipe problem. That’s part of that.
16:54 Dr. Josie Cox: Yeah. And I think it’s so important. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you there. I think it’s so important when we look at statistics like that that we also appreciate and acknowledge that we’re not placing any blame on the woman, right? This is not because a woman is underselling herself. This is not because a woman is not leaning in, right? That’s right. We cannot place the onus on a woman to fix a system and a problem that is so ingrained in our society and in our communities and in our culture.
But as you say, the yardsticks are different for men and women. And so, as a result of that, that has all kinds of effects and impacts on the way that we behave, regardless of our gender.
17:43 Dr. Ginger Garner: It does. I just did a presentation at our national conference, PT conference, physical therapy, on advocacy. Access to conservative care is a solid, scientifically, you know, evidence-based modality in therapy, and yet it’s not covered. And so the statistics were back to, again, women running for office. And so a rather large poll was done on why Americans perceive more women don’t run for office.
And so the result of that poll of many people, was that the vast majority of Americans, men and women, felt like they believed that women did not run for office more because of the thing that you just said, because the yardsticks are different, because they actually have more to prove, more to do, more to accomplish about themselves to get to the same place where for men would land without doing all the extra, you know, acrobatics, so to speak.
18:52 Dr. Josie Cox: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s, I mean, we see this everywhere from, as you say, running for certain positions to the VC community, right? There’s a chapter in the book that I spent a lot of time with female founders and female VCs and women who are trying to create their own businesses and get up and running and get funding, get money, get backing. And there was this wonderful study that was done, I believe at Harvard, that looked at, that actually recorded pitching meetings with female founders versus male founders.
And it analyzed the language use, the rhetoric used in those meetings. And what we can establish based on those findings is that women have to prove that they’re not going to fail. Men only have to prove that they’re going to succeed, right? But there’s this whole delta, right, in between those two points. And it’s kind of exactly what you’re saying. It’s just that women have to be exceptional in order to succeed, not just succeed.
19:53 Dr. Ginger Garner: And you would think that in the, you know, in the scientific and the policy world, you would think that maybe in the artistic world, you might see more equity, but we actually don’t. I just, I think I put this on my Facebook wall the other day, because as a musician, I would think And I know better. I know better than to be hopeful without the evidence, right? But the gist of the research was that as soon as symphonies started to actually have artists audition behind walls, it was genderless. The number of females who were accepted into symphonies and got the job actually exponentially increased. And the problem is, it’s whether or not both men and women are discriminating against women in that way.
20:44 Dr. Josie Cox: Yeah, that’s such an important point. The symphony example just reminds me, one of the women I profile in the book is a lady named Neil Godfrey, who was the first female executive at Chase Manhattan Bank. So the largest bank in the world at that time, the first woman effectively to be hired in anything other than a secretary’s job. and I wrote about her and I write about her story and some of the, you know, egregious offences that she had to put up with. Everything from being paid half the amount of a male equivalent to, and this one’s just extraordinarily terrible, when she got pregnant, her manager offered to pay for her abortion.
So she has seen everything, she’s seen everything. But I actually caught up with her today, earlier, just before this recording, just to catch up, I wanted to give her a copy of the book. And we talked about her name. I’d never really spoken to her about her name before. And her name is Neil, which is rare for a woman. It’s a name that we usually associate with a man. And she was telling me how she actually thinks that that was one of the reasons why she actually had these opportunities to pursue certain jobs that were reserved for men up until that point.
And often when a client would come into the room and see that Neil is actually a woman, you know, her foot was already in the door and she then had the opportunity to prove that she was just as capable as anyone else.
22:07 Dr. Ginger Garner: I think that is such a good point and I’ve often given a lot of thought to that because my name is very gendered and I’m not particularly fond of my name, good, bad or whatever, but I often think of that, you know. If I was applying for that business loan that I couldn’t get 15 years ago when I was you know, doing well and fine, but the bank would only give me like a fraction of what would have happened, you know, had my name been different. Yeah, yeah.
22:41 Dr. Josie Cox: And the last thing I’ll say about this particular chapter, I’ll let you move on, but another woman that I profile in that same chapter is Muriel Siebert, who was the first female trader on the New York Stock Exchange, who couldn’t get a job because she was applying with a CV that said Muriel Siebert at the top of it. She then made a tweak and described herself as M Siebert. And what happened? She got job interviews, right? The power of the name, the power of the identity is everything. And it’s still true today to an extent.
23:14 Dr. Ginger Garner: It’s so true. The studies just, there’s a, you know, I’m dating myself now by saying a Rolodex, you know, kind of studies. But yeah, there is {research} to support gender discrimination at work. If you just, you know, erase the name or get rid of the name, things do shift.
Ultimately, those experiences that you had, the experience that I mentioned that you wrote about, that ultimately pressed you towards your book, towards now. But what was the tipping point? What was the critical mass point where you said, I have to do this?
23:55 Dr. Josie Cox: There was one. Some people write books just because they feel it inside themselves that now’s the time. For me, it was a particular moment. And I actually write about this in the prologue. In February 2021, so about a year into the pandemic, just to set the scene, it was a time when childcare facilities were closed, schools were closed. A lot of women were defaulting back into the caregiver role to the extent that we haven’t seen since the 1950s.
There was a FT headline. I remember it so well from the time. something along the lines of, are we back to the 1950s in terms of gender? And the answer in many cases was yes. And at that time I was at Columbia, I had the opportunity to do this Knight-Badgett Fellowship, which gave me the chance to take a step out of the grind of freelancing and pitching and getting rejected and all of that. I was a mom, I was in lockdown, I’d just moved to the US, but I had this amazing opportunity to do this fellowship.
And it was during that year that I also had the opportunity to interview one of the most powerful CEOs in this country. And it was an off-the-record interview, which means that I will never be able to name the person. But I could ask him anything I wanted. And so, you know, knowing that I was in the process of conjuring up a book idea on the gender pay gap and the history of the gender pay gap in this country. I started the conversation by asking him to characterize the gender pay gap and give me his thoughts on why it still exists, why in many cases it is not moving, and where he thinks, you know, we sort of go from here.
And I said to him, why do you think the gender pay gap is still so, so cavernous? And he said, well, what I have to understand is that sometimes when a woman temporarily leaves the paid labor market for, excuse me, a maternity leave, takes time off to have a baby, when she comes back into her job, she’s just not as professionally ambitious as she was. And that was my reaction, you know, I was gobsmacked again, you know, it was one of these moments where I kind of my instinct was to scream and face plant.
But ultimately, as I reflect on it, and as I did in the weeks after that conversation, I realized that what I’m seeing here is an education gap, right. And feigned or not, this CEO was ignorant to the lived experiences of women in the labor market and within his organization, who sure, yes, maybe they had a baby and they decided that they were not going to come back into the same job and they were not going to gun for the promotion to the same extent that they wanted to before.
But why? You know, scratch beneath the surface, and in all likelihood, it’s because there’s not available childcare, there’s not affordable childcare, there’s not reliable childcare. The organization in which this woman works doesn’t offer the flexibility to accommodate her new schedule and raising an infant, you know? And so it was just this quick-willed instinct of the CEO to cast the blame on women for making a choice not to be ambitious.
And again, in the spirit of sort of this lean-in narrative that is so problematic, he was placing the onus squarely on women to fix the systemic problem. And to me, that was my sign that I needed to get going on this job of writing this book and shedding light on why this is.
Why are we still in a situation where we have a gender pay gap that sees women on average, depending on the source, being paid 82 to 86 cents on every dollar earned by an average man? Why are we still seeing a huge drop off in female labor force participation at the point of having a first child? You know, why is there such a strong correlation between flexible working and retention of women in the workforce?
All of these questions and I kind of made it my duty in a way like the book is dedicated to my daughter because that felt like the right thing to do but in a way it’s also dedicated to the CEO right because I am hopeful that wherever he is in his corner office he picks this up and no one needs to know it’s him I don’t want to embarrass him but that he reads it and he’s like okay here’s what I’ve been getting wrong. I haven’t thought about this problem from this perspective. And through all the history and through all this explanation and all of this narrative, I now understand that actually these women aren’t making a free choice. They’re making a choice by necessity.
28:32 Dr. Ginger Garner: Right. And that is the only conclusion to come to. Otherwise, that individual is just sitting in their privilege, having never had to wonder, am I going to be able to keep my job? My health care since it’s attached to the job, which is an insane concept in itself. And then be able to cover what my child needs at the time when we are the only country without any maternal or paternity leave whatsoever. We’re the only country with no postpartum standards of care.
So instead of realizing, oh, maybe women are not depressed and have anxiety because they’re women, it’s because they labor under a system that’s actually not helping. It’s actually standing on their forehead and saying, why can’t you get up? Yeah, well, if we had care, if we had policy to support it, of course, you know, we could stand.
So I think we end up being placed, a lot of labels get end up getting placed on women that are actually not the women’s fault at all. It’s actually back to the recipe back to the system of well, if you actually paved the path, even remotely, you know, like other countries have, then it’s not that we wouldn’t have the problem. We still have to overcome a lot of, you know, antiquated thinking. That’s very patriarchal. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. At least we could stand then.
30:05 Dr. Josie Cox: Yeah, totally. I think the simplest way of thinking about it is that every other country has, to a greater or lesser extent, a social security network that ensures that children can be cared for without compromising the economic empowerment of their parents, male or female. Every other country has that. Some to a lesser extent, but every country has it. In the US, that social security network is women.
30:33 Dr. Ginger Garner: On the free labor of women. and because you’re continuously socially conditioned to give up everything because we don’t have to, and you may address it in your book already as I’m working through it currently. The fact that the biggest risk factor for living in poverty in the United States is becoming a mother. That is like.
30:57 Dr. Josie Cox: Totally, yeah. And there was actually some, I go into obviously motherhood in a huge way, the impact that that has, but also divorcees, right? And the extent to which the gender play gap plays out into that and into, you know, the power that a woman has in that situation. And there was actually one of the most shocking papers I read was quite recent, it was from the late 90s. And the conclusion the academic draws, it delves into the impact of divorce on economic empowerment and on financial independence and blah, blah, blah.
And the conclusion that the author draws is that one of the best things that a divorced woman can do for herself economically is to remarry. Wow. What a slap in the face, right? And remarry a man, I should add, right? Because of course, it’s all based on heterosexual norms, right?
31:49 Dr. Ginger Garner: Right. Yeah, of course they would write that. And the truth of that is women usually never make up the financial loss, you know, that they incur because of divorce unless they’re in a unique situation where, you know.
32:04 Dr. Josie Cox: And I think, you know, whenever we talk about this, we have to acknowledge that there are exceptions. We talk in terms of generalizations because ultimately that’s all we can do right now. But yes, of course there are exceptions, there are female breadwinners, of course there are women who greatly, vastly out earn their male spouses, but the general picture is still very much of
32:29 Dr. Ginger Garner: is not that, is not that. And that puts us in the situation of looking at our neighbors, friends, and family members and realizing that that is the typical norm. Is not to be able to be financially independent because of whatever you gave up. In looking at how much childcare costs, because we don’t have any social safety net versus going back to work and then spending, which is what I ended up doing, 100% of anything that you would make in my small business on childcare.
33:01 Dr. Josie Cox: Yeah, it’s what I do. Yeah.
33:04 Dr. Ginger Garner: So I want to read some praise for your book from one of my favorite people and authors that I recently had also the privilege and honor of interviewing, Deb Copaken. [Love her.] I love her so much. Who I kicked off this entire season of the podcast talking about medical gaslighting and women’s health. And she like, should receive a PhD in that for all that she’s been through and experienced.
She writes, Deb writes, “Josie Cox’s Women, Money, Power should be required reading, period. I agree with that. For all genders, it’s really two books in one, both an analysis of how far we’ve come in our fight against gender inequality, as well as a scathing critique of how far we still have to go. As Cox brilliantly maps out point by point, we are failing women again and again, and she has the receipts, rigor, and storytelling chops to prove it.”
And for those of you listening, if you haven’t read Deb’s book, she is a New York Times bestselling author and she wrote Lady Parts, which is her memoir. And it is fantastic. So I just wanted to read that because that is, I have a lot of fire and love for your book and support for your book and so many other women out there too and I hope other people as well.
So my question is talking about, you know, so many people loving your book. Somewhere along the line, I mean, was there pushback? Was there, was it hard writing it? Like, are you currently, what’s, what’s happening? Like, did you feel having written not, you know, textbooks, not a book of the caliber that you’re writing, but boring textbooks. I know how much heart and soul and energy and blood and sweat and tears go into it. Tell me about the process and tell me if you did experience any of that along the way, more kind of gender discrimination, if you will.
35:11 Dr. Josie Cox: So definitely some gender discrimination. I write about it in my epilogue. There’s actually a piece that I was working on for the BBC when I was also working on the manuscript and the findings from that piece also filtered into the book around this crisis in female leadership that we’re seeing. There’s data out from the last couple of years showing that our trust as a population in female leaders is actually declining.
There are various reasons that it is happening. One is, not surprisingly, that we have an awful lot of world leaders who are demonstrating that casual misogyny is totally acceptable. that are very, very publicly undermining women, that are making the point that bodily autonomy is not a reality and should not be a reality for women. Waging a very public war on female reproductive rights, all of that. So that’s certainly one thing.
The other thing is that wars are raging, and we live in a time of immense uncertainty and chaos, and that as humans, male and female during times of uncertainty and chaos we like to revert to defaults and we like to latch on to the knowns and things that we’re familiar with and our model of leadership that many of us are most familiar with, be that a good thing or a bad thing, is that leaders look white and look male and so subconsciously or consciously that is something that is happening.
So anyway I wrote this piece for the BBC, it’s very relevant obviously to the narrative of the book so it features in the book, as well. And when I published the piece on the BBC, I got an onslaught of mail and comments from readers questioning the credibility of the data I used, because the data was not online yet, because it was an exclusive. I had been offered the data under embargo from a very reputable news organization, public analysis firm. And questioning my credibility, questioning my authority, accusing me of making it up. I think the irony is so blatant, you almost have to laugh, otherwise you’re going to cry.
So yes, pushback for sure, people who are questioning the veracity and the existence of the gender pay gap. Surely we’ve fixed that, it’s all a myth, you know, whatever. But when you were asking the question, you know, another thing that sprang to mind was not pushback from humans, but pushback from the system, right? And what I mean by that is that I, when I set out to write the book, I really thought that I would be writing about this trajectory of progress, ultimately, in the grand arc that it would be, you know, that it would lead us towards a brighter future.
Now, a few months before I handed in the final manuscript, the Dobbs decision came down. So having written extensively about the immense impact that contraception and abortion rights have had on female economic empowerment. I then had to recast the narrative in my brain and acknowledge that the trajectory was changing and had changed and that the impact of that would be tragic. And that it would cause us to have to reassess where we’re at, where we’re going, and all of the above.
And so, you know, emotionally, this book is not about me, but it has a lot of me in it. And that was a moment that I really struggled to retain hope and to retain sort of a perspective beyond the immediate future, which I think as the writer of this book, it’s almost my duty to leave the reader with something that resembles hope despite everything that’s happening.
And so after that decision, after the Dobbs decision, I filed the initial manuscript of the book. So my editor, he read it and he did actually come back to me and say, this is really grim. We’re in a really hopeless place. And I added another chapter after much debate and self-reflection, and the chapter is called Hope or Something Like It. And I couldn’t quite get myself to admit to hope.
But in that chapter, I elaborate on what happened after the Dobbs decision and specifically what happened in Kansas. And I don’t know if you recall, but there was a vote in Kansas, I think in the August of 2022, so a couple of months after the Dobbs decision, on whether to enshrine abortion as a constitutional right in Kansas. And a lot of people expected it not to go through, Kansas being a very republican state with a rich history of being a sort of stronghold of the anti-abortion movement. And against all odds, it did go through. Abortion was enshrined as a right in the Kansas Constitution.
And I sought out one of the women who was instrumental in leading that campaign. I sat her down and I just said, look, how did you do it? What can we learn from you? And her response was so inspiring. She talked to me about the importance of tapping into values in the importance of having a dialogue that’s rooted in respect, of seeing beyond the ideological polarization that is blinding many of us, preventing many of us from even wanting to try and bridge divides, you know.
And I thought, you know, when we’re talking about the abortion debate or anything else, really, we need to get better at having conversations, at constructing dialogue, at hearing people, at empathizing, at seeing both sides of the story. And so I thought that that was the closest thing I could offer to hope and optimism for what is no doubt going to be a very difficult few years to come.
41:08 Dr. Ginger Garner: That story, and when that vote happened, I still get like tingling and all the feelings about it because it is in many ways such a hopeless, violent, chaotic, polarized time. And I think that here’s another cultural norm, and it makes me cringe. It makes my right eye, when I say cultural norm, to be taught, you know, not to talk about religion and politics at the dinner table. And that’s the problem. Yeah, we’re taught not to do that. We don’t know how to do that anymore. We don’t know how to have a conversation.
And I think back to the experiences that I’ve had in policy, which feel like a privilege to be involved at that on any level, to be able to change policy. And in every one of them, none of the things that we did at all happened without full bipartisan support. That’s the way it had to be. And I’m not sure where we lost that where people are now losing their seats, losing their reelections, the incumbents, because they’re willing to actually reach across the aisle. The willingness to work across the aisle is causing them to lose their seat. At some point, there has to be a critical mass point that people begin to reconsider how they’re going to speak to their neighbor. It’s not just throwing out a yard sign and shooting the evil eye at each other.
42:42 Dr. Josie Cox: Exactly And acknowledging that we’re all multitudes, right? We can’t be reduced in terms of our identity to one issue or one particular politician who we follow, or a gender or a skin color or a belief or a religion. We are all so complex. And that complexity is actually kind of what unites us, right? So why don’t we try and at least tap into that in some way.
43:09 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, I think that her response about values is so true because I once had and this is the super, super short version of the story, but I was actually I had run for office. And I was at a polling station and I was greeting voters as they came in to vote. And the long and the short of the story is when she asked me what I was running for and what party I was running for she immediately with anger said I would never vote for you with like. And I think she thought I was going to match her energy, but I didn’t because I had met enough people already that it didn’t bother me that she said that. I was more excited. I was like, well, just tell me why. And we had a conversation. The conversation probably lasted 10, 15 minutes. She actually did go in and change her vote at the end. She actually did go in and vote for me. That’s amazing. Yeah. It was just a values conversation. That’s really all that we had. And so, your Kansa story is so true. It’s everything.
44:17 Dr. Josie Cox: It’s scary. It can be scary coming out of your comfort zone. And it can be scary listening to someone else’s perspective. But I feel like it’s our duty to do that. And in the course of writing this book, I actually spent some time in Youngstown, Ohio. I was there for various reasons, but one of the things I did while I was there was I went to church, I’m not a regular churchgoer, and I sought out a conversation with a pastor who is very anti-abortion.
Now, I happen to believe that abortion is a fundamental right and that it’s inextricably linked to a woman’s ability to reach her full economic and professional potential, but I thought it was my duty to sit and listen and be in the presence of someone who I would consider ideologically opposed to me. And it was a really powerful experience. I didn’t change my mind and she didn’t change her mind. But I gained so much from that encounter.
45:19 Dr. Ginger Garner: This the conversation of reproductive rights and access to health care is one that is, of course, it’s very close and near and dear to my heart. It’s why I actually started the podcast is why this this season is happening on medical gaslighting and women’s health and in pelvic health. Because specifically that usually boils down to reproductive organs and prenatal, postpartum and all the care that surrounds it. You know, gender affirming care, et cetera. There’s so much vitriol and polarization that gets tossed around over that.
So I was, and like I said, I am getting started with reading your book now. I wish that I could like speed read my way through it. But at the same time, I want to actually savor it because I’ve just been waiting on a book like yours for so long. I want you to excuse me talk to us a little bit about some of those unknown heroines that we don’t even know about in history, like Katharine Dexter McCormick.
I had no idea that she just like funded birth control, like the invention of birth control. I had no idea. And I know you have so many stories. So I would love to hear about that specifically of, you know, what is forwarding women’s ability to be empowered and independent and contributing members of society in the way we want.
46:45 Dr. Josie Cox: Yeah. So Katharine Dexter McCormick, I mean, I’m just delighted every time I get the opportunity to talk about her. Because, I quite frankly just can’t believe she’s not a household name. So as you say, she was, I mean, the short story is that she single-handedly funded all of the R&D into the oral contraceptive, the first oral contraceptive that was available. It was approved by the FDA for use here in the US in 1960.
She was born at the end of the 1800s in Michigan, actually, raised in the Midwest. and became obsessed with healthcare and biology and the human body after both her father and her brother died at an early age. She fought to be one of the first women to graduate MIT. She had to do all this prerequisite work, which, I mean, she had to do like four extra years of study in order to get admitted to the biology undergrad course that men could just sail into, but she did it. She persevered. She persisted. And she met her husband, Stanley McCormick, shortly before she graduated.
They got married. And then just after they got married, he was actually diagnosed with schizophrenia. And she became obsessed with this idea of what would have happened if she had had his child and if she had passed this disease on to the next generation. So she thought about this idea of birth control, how you could, would there ever be a way of separating sex and reproduction? Right, or were the two things always going to be inextricably linked?
She cross paths with Margaret Sanger, which adds a really interesting dimension to her story, not least because Margaret Sanger is obviously recognized as a racist, someone who was motivated by eugenics, who had a very, very dark side to her story. But Katharine and Margaret work together on what they conceived as a magic pill, So they wanted women to be able to take a pill that they had full control over, that they could do, you know, sort of in private, secretly, that no one had to know about, that was easy, that was easy to remember, that was affordable.
And they started working with a whole host of researchers and academics, many of whom had just been sort of ejected from the mainstream academic community because birth control was such a stigmatized notion at the time. The Comstock Act and the Comstock laws were very much in place in the US, which not only banned contraception and birth control, but also banned things like pornography from even just being like talked about or circulated.
And so, you know, very, very stigmatized area of study. It couldn’t get mainstream funding. It couldn’t get funding from government or institutions. And so Katharine effectively started funneling money from her family fortune into the pursuit of a pill that would prevent women from getting pregnant if they had sex and didn’t want to have a baby. She is not known. Very few people have heard her name. She is probably best known as one of the first women to graduate MIT.
But without her, without her determination and without her fearlessness, birth control would not have been a reality until much later, I’m convinced. She’s also, you know, just such a colourful character. I say in the book that she’s stranger than fiction. One of the things she did was at one point, because she was so desperate to make birth control available, even before the pill came onto the market, she posed as a medical supplies buyer. She spoke languages, she was very educated.
She traveled to Europe and she bought diaphragms, which were readily available in many European countries at the time. And she sewed them into the linings of her coats and dresses and smuggled them back into the US and sold them here on the black market. Which is just, I think, testament to what an unbelievable character, how gritty, how ambitious, how fearless and how principled she was.
When she died, she endowed a building, a dorm at MIT, and it’s called McCormick Hall. And I spent time in Cambridge and in Boston reading her documents in the archives, reading her diary entries, et cetera. And one afternoon I went to McCormick Hall and I stood outside McCormick Hall and I asked everybody going in and coming out whether they knew who Katharine, or who the dorm was named after. And nobody knew. They all thought it might be the McCormick family from Chicago, which was her husband’s agricultural machinery empire. But no one had heard of Katharine Dexter McCormick. And it’s a tragedy considering the vastness of the contribution that she made to women’s health and therefore female economic empowerment is just unthinkable. So she was and continues to be a hero of mine.
51:46 Dr. Ginger Garner: When I read her story about smuggling diaphragms back, I was like getting sweaty, like a sympathetic nervous system response. I was like, Oh my gosh, I hope this turns because I didn’t know what the story was. You know, here I am reading that story actually last night. The page turner is like one more, just one more page, just one more page, hoping that it turned out all right. And she actually didn’t have all of this diaphragm seized and got into a lot of trouble. But yeah. Wow.
And yeah, I feel like some sense of guilt because I don’t know about it, right? And I’m a person who’s constantly thinking about equality, you know, on a daily basis. And I don’t know how most people feel, but I think that until it touches their lives personally, they’re just not thinking about it.
52:30 Dr. Josie Cox: Yeah. The, the, the other person I know, I know I don’t want to take up too much time, but the only other person I feel like I have to mention here, because it would just be a crime not to, um, is Pauli Murray, who, co-founded the National Organization of Women with Betty Friedan. Betty Friedan being a household name, author of Feminine Mystique, architect of the women’s movement, you know, many accolades Betty Friedan holds. But Pauli Murray was a brilliant legal scholar who crafted loads of the legislation that was adopted by the, that was fought for by the ACLU, by the NAACP, that essentially became equal rights legislation that enshrined women’s rights in the constitution.
She was the first black woman to be hired by a white shoe law firm in New York. She was probably gender fluid, though didn’t have the terminology to describe it at the time. She was a mentor to RBG. RBG was her summer analyst. She taught RBG so much of what she, you know, built on. And she was lifelong friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. And Roosevelt actually credited her when she was on her deathbed with teaching her so much about civil rights movement, about the women’s rights movement, about the importance of intersectionality.
And again, Pauli Murray, because she was likely queer, likely gender fluid, black, a woman, you know, or perceived as a woman, at least at the time. Just completely, you know, in many cases, not even written out of history, never written into history in the first place, which it just floors me.
54:10 Dr. Ginger Garner: It does, it’s, you know, the labels, it just reminds me of how people are so easily demonized, discarded, because of gender plus whatever label they’ve been assigned. You know, feminism, people having all different kinds of ideas and opinions and over the label feminism, for example, you know, yeah.
And it makes me think back to over 100 years ago with the suffragettes and what they went through and forced feeding. And it makes me stop breathing, actually, to think that someone wouldn’t, you know, take that opportunity to vote, you know, as a woman because of, you know, what they fought for on both sides of the pond was incredible. But I wonder, I mean, when you wrote that article that you’re mentioning for BBC, were people, was the system, were you getting thrown those labels at that time, at now, especially with this new book?
55:27 Dr. Josie Cox: That I’m being essentially
55:30 Dr. Ginger Garner: A rabid feminist who just hates men, right? That’s typically what we mean.
55:36 Dr. Josie Cox: Yeah, I mean, no, for sure. I mean, you know, ugly things happen on social media and probably always will happen on social media. I think we need to remember that while we can’t control what happens, we can control how we react. It’s a lesson that I have learned the hard way and that I continue to learn every single day.
I think that I have tried really, really hard in the conversations I’ve had and the reporting and writing that I’ve done to make it clear that I am not supporting an us versus them narrative. I am definitely not demonizing men, you know. I am fully aware of the fact that women’s rights is not about empowering women to the detriment of anyone else. and that if we actually want to, you know, achieve progress, we all have to work together because ultimately the benefits are going to be there for all of us if we do that.
56:38 Dr. Ginger Garner: Right. One would think that, just speaking bluntly. One would think that men would have figured out that if we support equality, they’re going to be wealthier. Because their partners, their spouses, their wives are going to actually bring home more money. What’s not to love about that for them, right? Have they not figured that out yet?
That’s the quizzical thing for me. Women are in the workplace. If we are actually giving them some kind of credit for the free labor that they’re doing to work towards the gross domestic product, is that not happy and healthy for everyone? We become a more prosperous country and world because of that.
57:17 Dr. Josie Cox: Yeah, I think it’s a fair question. I think the one thing that I always point out is that, you know, in a way, it’s not a popular line or soundbite, but we’ve also failed men, right? In that women have made immense strides over the last 100 years, whatever way you look at it. They have made strides into the paid labor market, women now lead Fortune 500 companies, women are doing, can do all the jobs that were previously reserved for men.
Men have not had the experience of seeing and being part of any kind of similar seismic change, right? So there’s a fantastic book called Of Boys and Men by Richard V Reeves. That somebody actually said, you should read this, you’re going to hate it as a way of like revving me up. Because this is actually saying like, yes, you know, we still have gender inequality, but actually the real victims are men. That’s obviously an oversimplified version of what he’s saying.
His argument is far more nuanced than that. But to me, when I read it, I didn’t actually feel anger or frustration. I agreed with large parts of it because I think it addresses the fact that we often only see one side of the equation. And that equation is focused on women who have not historically had the opportunities that men have had. One of the statistics that, or one of the facts that Richard reviews quotes in the book is that we have more female fighter pilots than we have men working in early childhood care, right? In nurseries and daycares.
And that illustrates part of the problem, right? We are not teaching young boys and young men that it is actually perfectly acceptable, commendable even, to go into professions and fields that were previously associated with women. We need to address that side of the equation as well. We need to normalize it. And I think that that is going to be one of the ways in which we actually encourage men to be primary caregivers to take more of an assertive role in the household, in domestic labor, in unpaid labor. So, you know, in every iteration, I struggle with this. Men do this, women do this narrative, because I think it can be a slippery slope. And we can quite quickly reach for generalizations that are just counterproductive to…
59:52 Dr. Ginger Garner: Right, because then it’s just us versus them. It’s a she versus he. And everybody just likes to argue and get defensive. And then nothing happens. I was smiling while you were saying that about encouraging women, men being in caregiving professions. I’m in the caregiving profession as a PT. And I’m a mom of three boys, which we were talking about before we started recording.
And I feel like that, I mean, I just had that conversation in the car today with one of my sons on the way home. Caregiving is everybody’s job. It’s genderless and should be. Just like when my oldest son’s teaching team for eighth grade was all men, I was thrilled. I was thrilled that they have multiple, it maybe even, it feels like it’s 50/50 at their high school now with men in teaching professions because young boys and men need to see people like them teaching in those caregiving positions.
And it also actually teaches our society to value what we haven’t valued, I think, and that is caregiving because those early childhood education positions aren’t well compensated. And they should be, they’re nurturing the next generation, right? Just like our teachers at high school levels are, and they should certainly get paid more. I’m in North Carolina, one of the lowest paid states for teachers. So that’s a whole other, that’s a whole other caregiving issue, but I could keep talking for so long. But I wanted to just finish with a couple of questions I had. These are light actually, but you’re such a brilliant writer and investigative journalist of everything that you’ve done, I’m wondering, like, what are you reading right now?
1:01:44 Dr. Josie Cox: I kind of dread this question, because, like, the expectation is so high.
1:01:48 Dr. Ginger Garner: Nothing? You can say nothing.
1:01:49 Dr. Josie Cox: No, I’m reading a lot. I think what I always say is, rather than, you know, naming particular authors, I’m actually, I have a list of all the books that I read this year, I’m just gonna pull it up from, as a little memory jog. But what I always say is I try and read broadly, you know, I just mentioned that book by Richard V. Reeves of Boys and Men that came out a couple of years ago, which someone said, someone raised, someone mentioned it to me in the context of, wow, this is really gonna challenge your thinking. And it did challenge my thinking, but I loved it, right?
So I think it’s important to embrace the discomfort of being challenged in your own views. Along those lines, when I was writing and working on the book, I kind of felt like unable to read fiction because I felt like it was so indulgent and I only wanted to read books that were going to make me smarter on the topic that I was writing. And so over the last few months, I’ve really tried to read more fiction. It can be such an incredible source of inspiration and perspective as well, even though, you know, fiction’s made up to a large extent, like there is still value in that.
I recently read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, which is just this incredible portrayal of women and power and money, incidentally, but obviously through the lens of fiction. And I was just so inspired by her writing, and I just thought she did a phenomenal job.
But honestly, anything that critically examines a theme, that challenges thinking, that helps you see things from a different perspective. I just finished Lyz Lenz’s new book, This American Ex-Wife. I highly recommend many of the themes, you know, that I touch on, she touches on too, but from a very different perspective. And then, you know, obviously Deborah Copaken’s writing is incredible, all of that intersectionality between financial empowerment and healthcare and, you know, all of those sort of dynamics are just so important to our understanding. And yeah, I just try and read whatever I can get my hands on. And sometimes just indulge in some Nora Ephron.
1:04:14 Dr. Ginger Garner: Oh my gosh. Well, two things, two things as we wrap up. When I got on, I noticed you were wearing pink and then you mentioned that you were wearing pink and you mentioned that you had reclaimed pink. And I just felt this instant sense of connection because as I shared the story with you, I had spent my entire life, as I turned 50 last year, like pushing pink. I never bought pink. I refused to buy pink. I would not do my fingernails.
It’s like I was buying, I was buying the recipe, like, right, like, don’t embrace being feminine, because you’re going to get discriminated against even more. And so when you said that, I was like, Oh, this is so fantastic. You’re my Shero on multiple levels, writing this book, reclaiming pink, all of the amazing things. And so my last question really is, what is your hope for will happen as a result of putting the book out here into the world of it being published?
1:05:10 Dr. Josie Cox: I want as many people as possible to read it, of course, because who doesn’t? But I particularly hope people read it who don’t think they need it, who stumble upon it, who are gifted it. Ah, there it is. The power in pink. And I want it to spark conversations. And I want people to say, hey, you’ll never guess what. I just read this story in this book. And I didn’t know that women couldn’t get a business loan until 1974. I didn’t know that marital rape wasn’t outlawed in all states until 1993. That we’re tuning into how far we’ve come. and that we’re using that as an inspiration not to lose hope and not to undermine the efforts of all of the individuals who came before us and who fought this fight before us.
1:06:08 Dr. Ginger Garner: Perfect ending. All right, everybody, you’ve got to go out and you’ve got to buy this book. I am going to be working on this again tonight. It is a page turner. I love every moment of it, every word of it so far. Thank you, Josie Cox, for joining me today.
1:06:22 Dr. Josie Cox: Thank you so much.
https://youtu.be/u8QFPB7MqAk Follow us for Free: About the Episode: What if your pain isn’t “normal” — it’s been misunderstood? In this episode, Dr. Ginger sits down with Dr. Madhu Bagaria, a...
https://youtu.be/04zjmpV1td4 Follow us for Free: About the Episode: Men’s sexual health is often misunderstood and reduced to quick fixes. In this episode of The Vocal Pelvic Floor, Dr. Ginger...
https://youtu.be/p3A1foLw6wI Follow us for Free: About the Episode: What if your desire isn’t broken — it’s just been misunderstood? In this episode, Dr. Ginger Garner sits down with Dr....