185: Fighting for Gender Equity for Both Sides

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Well, gender equity is not just about paying women better.

There's much bigger things going on here and from all sides. And there's a real opportunity for the growth and development of your company in a lot of different ways. So listen in to this fascinating speaker as we talk about gender equity from all sides of the perspective.

Kataka Roll. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is Katica Roy. Cateka was a speaker at our Scaling up summit and she's a gender economist. She's the CEO and founder of Denver based Pipeline. They're an amazing company. She's going to tell you more about it, but we really want to look at the economic opportunity of gender equity. Is that right?

Yes. And we do. And by the way, it's Kataka Roy.

What did I say? Kattuka.

Katica. Which is very, very typical. Yeah, a lot of people do. I think only like six people in my entire life have said Katica. So it's like Nautica, but with a.

K. Well, I'm sorry not to make the short list.

It's okay. It's a pretty short list.

Listeners should know we have been struggling getting our computer working right. Getting on the show.

It's a growth opportunity for all of us to exercise our patience and persistence. Right.

Sometimes, someday. And it's always hard to help someone who's on the other end. So, Katica, you're in Denver area now.

I am. I am. Where the snow is falling and it's a good ski season.

Oh, don't tell me that. I like. I seem to have nothing, no, very little time for skiing on my calendar this whole winter and it's bugging me. I used to ski a few, two to three weeks a year and this.

Is not looking good. It's not so good. Anyway, we can go back to the gender economist.

Let's talk.

Yeah, tell us about your background, like who are you, how did you get here kind of thing. Because I think you have not a typical life story position this. Right. But talk to us about that.

Sure. So I am actually the daughter and sister of refugees and I'm also the daughter of an immigrant. So my father and three eldest sisters escaped from Hungary after the fall of the 1956 revolution. They lived in a refugee camp for just under two months when President Eisenhower sent Air Force One to bring 21 Hungarian refugees to the U.S. on Christmas Day 1956. And they were part of the 21 Hungarian refugees. And that piece of my story as well as my mother is an immigrant and she actually was born in 1939 on one of the Channel Isles of England, Guernsey, which is in closer proximity to France than to mainland England. And after France fell to the German army, she was 18 months old. Prime Minister Churchill decided that he needed to evacuate the Channel Isles, that he couldn't defend them. And the first ship off of Guernsey was 5,000 children. And my mom was on that ship and she was 18 months old, placed into an orphanage, adopted a year later and then came to the US when she was 21. And so for me, very much my.

I like you rattle, you rattle off all that remarkable stuff. It's like really dramatic and part of history and all that. Really fascinating. Not. Well, we grew up outside of Buffalo.

Yeah, well. And if anyone has seen Dunkirk or has seen the darkest hour, you know, so that is what was happening before my mother was evacuated. And so the, this pretty young experiences in my parents lives and they're really their fight for freedom. And how that connected to I think one, how I was raised. And two, based on that, the commitment to give back and take advantage of every opportunity. I mean I have three siblings who were not born in this country, they were born in another country, came here as children, didn't speak the language. And for the three of us that were born here, it was very much impressed upon us that one, we were really did nothing to deserve the fact that we were born here, but we were born here. And because of that we had privilege and we had a responsibility to give back and to take advantage of every opportunity. And so that sense of duty and that sense of giving back and service was ingrained in us from as far back as I can remember.

Pause right there for a second because I think this is a really useful point for Our listeners. And I certainly am reflecting on this. Right. I think about what are the background kind of conversation of values that are transferred to me. I'm very clear that my grandfather was deeply impacted by his experiences growing up in the Depression. And everybody in that household had slightly different experiences as their family rallied to deal with the Depression. The grandparents moved in the house and he and some siblings moved into a tent in the backyard. And he resolved then and there to not be poor, not be without money, not be without options of independence. He didn't want to ever have to do that to like, have to move in with family again. He didn't come away with, like, family's the most important and we should take care of each other. He came with, I don't want to be in that position. Right. So we all interpret something in our own way.

This is true. That's totally true. But you know, I think what's interesting that is true and what I have observed in my family is that the work ethic of just always working hard, that is one how we interpret. I do agree that how you interpret situations differs for sure. What is interesting, however, is looking at my family, the two things that we were raised with is always do your best and never give up. And those two ethos essentially allowed us to push through a lot of fear and to think, okay, did I actually do my best? Did I really not give up? And when that is ingrained in you, it allows you to really push through fear that sometimes can feel insurmountable. And that is the one how we dealt with, how we were raised. I think you can definitely see that differently in my family. But that piece I see consistently across my entire family, and I think the ability to weather some weather difficult circumstances and be fairly unwavering, be very steady is something that we all are pretty consistent with.

I think that's a useful lesson right there for our listeners that this notion, I mean, whether you're dealing now with shipping delays from a supplier or some other business partner who's holding you up, or a key customer who's got you by the throat or an employee who's melting down or whatever, you're dealing with the first thing of not giving up. Right.

Yeah.

If you simply just don't give up, you massively.

It's amazing what you can accomplish.

Yeah. Just like, look certain failure in the face and just keep standing up again, just like remarkable.

It is. And those things, it also is how you, your perception of those events. That is when you get a. No, it. It is. It is actually A push in the right direction. Right. So that is that it can push you then towards what you're actually supposed to be doing. Right. So it's always good to have plans. It's always that structure matters. If you get too tied to things, must look exactly this way. You can actually miss the direction that the path that's right in front of you and what you're being pushed toward. And, you know, that. That. I think that's also something that was very much, interestingly enough, because both my parents took a fair amount of risk in coming to this country, to coming to the US and so that sort of leap of faith, if you will, that jump in the ledge will appear, was also very much part of their story, I think because of how much they had survived at a fairly young age. That was another piece of. You should be brave.

All of us in the United States, except for our Native Americans, are immigrants and some might argue, illegal immigrants. Right.

Yeah.

Some of my ancestors came here before it was country and that kind of thing. Others came later, and none of them were particularly welcome as they arrived.

Yeah, it's interesting. My sisters talk about that, just about the changing of culture. Right. So when they went to school and my children actually went to a Newcomer elementary school, which is essentially a school that has a program to support immigrant and refugee children and their families coming to the US and my children attend that school because their aunts, my sisters, were Newcomer kids. And I wanted them to have the experience of what it was like for my sisters to come to this country. That is, they didn't have clothes that matched. You know, they came here in the 50s, so they didn't have clothes that were like. They had Hungarian clothes. They weren't U.S. clothes. They didn't eat U.S. food. They, you know, it was so that whole. They didn't speak the language. So that entire empathy and what it took for my sisters really, to, in particular my two older sisters, because they were elementary school age 7 and 8, so second, third grade, to actually make that transition and survive that. That was a remarkable journey for them.

Yeah, well, anything, Right. When you're. Especially when you're a kid, and that continues with us later in life, but it really starts in, say, late elementary grade school to middle school. This desire to fit in, to be normal, to be okay. Anything like your weird clothes, weird accent, something weird in your lunch is deeply embarrassing.

Yeah, that probably made me a little stronger as a kid. But anyway, having European parents and whatever you define in your lunch is kind of a magic surprise. But. Yeah, well, and the truth is that we all, as human beings have a sense of a deep need for belonging and connection. Right. And so, you know, it's maybe more pronounced when we're kids and we are more vulnerable about it. We're more open about it. Just because we don't talk about it as adults doesn't mean we don't have it. It just means we don't talk about it. Right. And so that, that sense of. And I also think just connecting back to failure, one of the things that I've learned through, you know, my career is, and this obviously is from Brene Brown's work, but that sense of it's not that being perfect that ties us together, but it's actually one of my favorite book of hers is the Gifts of Imperfection. And it's those imperfections that tie us together. So the failures that we have, the times that we make mistakes, that. That actually is all part of the human experience. And if we can embrace that, then we have a different type of experience that's more authentic. Right. It's more vulnerable. It's a little more scary, but it is more authentic.

You know, that's the thing that's really interesting that when I. Especially when I'm working on, like, speaking skills with CEOs and executives and they're having to represent their companies and that kind of thing, whether they're men, women, whatever, like, just being okay with you, we talk about these funny things, like how you look and dress. And then often later in life, we look back at that with a lot of room to acknowledge those things. They're even kind of cool sometimes. And yet in the moment, at the time, they can be deeply embarrassing. And sometimes in looking back at them, I have this one picture that I send him show of me at like, I don't know, six or something in Hawaii, dressed in this outfit that my mom put me in with a schoolbox and stuff like that. And I'm clear she made it right. It's so cool in retrospect, it's so dorky also. And I can kind of see and appreciate all of it. And I'm kind of proud of everything that is represented by that, by that image. But I could see being a couple years older finding that and just being horrified. Nobody can see this, right?

Yeah.

Or arriving at school in those clothes and somebody recognizing that they were not store bought, but they were, like, made by my mom, and being just horrified at that discovery. But that, like, being able to be all of you is definitely something to cultivate, to develop in yourself. Right?

Yeah, definitely. You are all of your experiences, good and bad. And certainly the things I didn't appreciate, like, you know, like, you're talking about your story. I think we all have the stories that I didn't appreciate about when I was growing up. You know, I certainly appreciate more now. Just my name was not fun in the 70s and 80s. You know, my. My name is cool now, but it was certainly not fun. I was really had hoped that I'd be called like, you know, I was like, why couldn't I be like Jennifer or Michelle? You know, something that people knew. Yeah. And now I appreciate it. Right. But not when I, you know, my version of that was one, having immigrant parents because that certainly wasn't cool when I was growing up. And two, having a name that was unusual. Those were the two things that I probably kind of stuck with me.

Did you ever try to shorten it to Cat or Cut?

No, they called me Cutty for a while. That was, you know, but then I didn't really like that. So it's like, it's Katica done.

You know, let's see how many ways.

We could mess with your name on one.

Yeah, that's right.

Be your favorite show ever.

Yeah.

Our listeners probably wonder. Didn't you say you were going to talk about gender equity?

Yeah, that's right. Sure. So I can go down that. You know, I think it's interesting you talked a little bit about the. I think it was your uncle or maybe your dad's experience during the Depression.

My grandfather.

Your grandfather's experience?

Yeah, my grandfather was like, he didn't ever make a lot of money at any point. And in fact, he had some fantastic losses. But he became highly conservative and penny pinching, like to a pain point, to denying himself things and joy and experience of life, like really significant. And then my dad was the opposite reaction and both of those were very visible. So my dad didn't want to be ever tied down or worry about money. So he was very foolishly money and just live for the moment and all that, which caused him a great deal of depression really later in life. And I'm like, okay, I can't be either extreme. I have to somehow be in the middle.

Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. Yes. And so what's interesting about that experience is that you being. I'm the youngest of six children, five girls. And my experience, or my similar story to that, was that I watched my sisters as a little girl. I watched my sisters and the struggles that they had simply because of their gender. How inequitable opportunity impacted them and impacted their children. Right. So they were very much in that age of taught to marry well. And besides that, they just didn't have the same economic rights as men. I mean, you know, in my lifetime, things like you couldn't get a credit card if you didn't have a male co signer. You can get a business loan if you didn't have a male cosigner. You couldn't even get housing without a male co signer. And so those pieces, I watched that play out in my family. And I remember as a little girl thinking, I just will never do that. I just wanted economic independence. And I remember that so clearly from the time I was about five years old and probably somewhere behind that, realizing that my gender might impact my opportunities, but then also being determined that it wouldn't. And so anyway, so sort of fast forward to college. And also to my dad's credit, he was very good about showing us a strong female role model. So he was an entrepreneur. One of his entrepreneurial endeavors was as a developer building hotels. And we lived in Northern California, and he built a hotel in San Francisco. So he took me with him when he negotiated with then Mayor Dianne Feinstein, who was the first female mayor of San Francisco. And she was really the first strong female in the business world or, you know, in the. That I ever saw. And so that imagery stuck with me. And she. And actually in 1992 was the first election that I could vote in. And she. She. It was also the first. And it was in California, and it was the first. California was the first state in the union to elect two female United States senators, which was Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. So that was significant. I remember that being significant for me. I was a poli sci major undergrad, so that was really where I learned more about women's rights. And we learned a little bit about suffrage in U.S. history in high school, but not a lot. We learned far more. I took an entire class on it when I was a poli sci major. And I thought, well, this is interesting. And then I just thought, well, it just seems kind of outdated. Like, I'm not really sure this applies now. So I sort of tucked that away, set about building my career. And then fast forward. After I had my daughter, I fought to be paid equitably. I mean, I essentially found that I was not being paid equitably. And it was really that moment that I realized that my gender was impacting my opportunities. And I can certainly tell that story. But anyway, that really became the catalyst that confirmed everything I had learned when I was younger. And then a commitment to make something different.

Yeah. Interesting. So talk to us about the. I mean, I just don't know what to say. I'm a straight white male, right, From North America. I live a life of unrecognized privilege. And sometimes as I go around, I have glimpses of the privilege that I lead as I venture into little corners of the world where I feel a little more exposed. Not the dominant thing or like I don't know who I am or where I am, or like I'm not safe and it's not easy to find yourself. I've been To, I think, 68 countries now around the world, and I. I'm counting.

Well, 68 is pretty specific and for. Right.

So I'm trying to get to 100. And as a goal, so I give preference to any work opportunity or travel opportunity to a new country. But every now and then, I find myself in a place where I'm the only face and I don't know what the rules are, and I don't know where I stand and I don't know what I think of me. And I highly feel very conspicuous. And then I remember as a boy, for a while, we lived on the North Shore of Oahu where we were called Holly Crap. Holly is the whites or Caucasians, and beaten up and taunted and stuff by the Polynesian kids who weren't exclusively Hawaiian, but Samoan, Tongan, whatever, and being terribly afraid of the fairly large Samoan and Tongan girls in my school learning to run and feeling bad about that whole. But that was like a reaction to the privilege that we were, even in that environment, we were arrogant and smug and privileged beyond what we recognized and that kind of thing. And then I think about, like, I don't know, like, every time I see a movie or story or something like that that really depicts this, I see a human being, someone capable and lovable, but a young girl who isn't treated the same or is talked to in a way less than capable. And I think of my daughter. I think of my wife. I think of my mother and my grandmothers and the more narrow roles. You know, as a kid growing up, the message to me, always in the background is, you could be whatever you want to be. You want to be that astronaut walking on the moon, you could do that. You want to be president of the United States, you could do that. And the things that I saw said that, yeah, maybe I could if I wanted to. Right. If I Worked at that. But that isn't the same message or hasn't been.

Yes. So let me unpack some of what you said. Yeah, so it's true in terms of white straight men have more privilege. However, this is one of the things that Pipeline talks about, which is that women are. We do not view gender equity as a synonym for women's rights. Women are 50% of the conversation and men are the other 50%. And it's not just because they hold the majority of all leadership positions in corporations. It's because gender inequity actually impacts men too. We just don't talk about it. So some of the ways that it impacts men. So there's an expectation. Right. So while you could be anything that you wanted to be, there is an expectation that we place on our boys. And then they grow into men around what their role, essentially what it means to be a man in our society and what the role is then that they must play in terms of being strong, in terms of not being vulnerable, in terms of being the provider and step outside of that role. And you are. We talked about connection and belonging before. Now you are completely alone. And there are two instances where we see this most pronounced one is in caring for children. So we know from research that 48% of working dads would actually like to stay home with their kids. And they can't because of this identity, who I'm supposed to be and this isolation, who will I talk to? We have experienced that as a family because my husband has been a stay at home father for the last 11 years. And that's a very, you know, you don't really go to the mom in need groups or when you take your child to Gymboree or music class. You're probably the only, not only the only dad in the room, but probably the only guy, you know, the only, the only man in the room. Right. And so it's a very. It can be a very isolating experience. We know.

No, and the question can be like, what's wrong with that guy? Can't he cut it? Why is he doing that? Yeah, you're not. It's not.

Yeah, right, right. Yeah, exactly. And so we know that with the whole talk about paid family leave, really needs to be about paid caregiver leave. There should not be a gender differentiation between the paid leave that we give to new moms or new dads. It should all be the same. I personally also believe it should be mandatory because then at least we can get away. We can at least start to move.

Away from but it's the constraint, the constraint of your gender role is what you're speaking to. It's like, I can't do that. It's not okay. It's looked at with question. It's not allowed. Sometimes I also can't share any fears that I have or feelings of sadness or whatever. I need to be stoic and put on a, Keep my face together and like that.

Chin up. Yeah. And man up is essentially what we man up. And so when we talk about gender equity, we talk about this too, because this is actually one a key mental health issue in the US that we must deal with more starkly. Men account for 79% of all suicides in the U.S. men and boys, they're four times more likely to die from suicide. So these are things that we must begin to grapple with if we are going to achieve gender equity that we otherwise what we essentially do. So otherwise what we essentially do is inclusion becomes invasion. That's how it feels, right? Inclusion becomes invasion. Because if we don't. Right. And so if we don't begin to grapple with the entire piece of it, you know, of what gender equity looks like for men and women, then we haven't really created a new reality, essentially.

Well, I think when you talk about it that way too, it makes it so. I know quite a few men, and it may be ignorant in some respects who get really defensive around gender things because it's like all women and they're like. But I have problems too, man. And why is it always about the women? And, and I'm making fun, right? But I do hear those kinds of things a lot. And not, I think by broadening it, you make it more accessible and you deal with a bigger thing than just raising employment, which is useful in its own right. I mean, to suppress or constrain half the population is not good for either our society or our businesses, right?

Either or 50%.

And then to suppress or constrain 100% in different ways also doesn't make any sense.

Right. And one of the things that we talk about at Pipeline is that we look at gender equity not as a social issue, but rather as a massive economic opportunity. And when you look at it through that lens and look at your, at gender equity through the lens of data, you actually then really discover that it's about equity for all, but that by actually solving this, we will make it better for everybody. And there's specific ways that that plays out, but that becomes really important. And what's interesting, you obviously heard me speak and I do different lengths of keynotes, but one of the things that often happens when I speak is that women appreciate what I say because we're no longer the charity case. Right. We're no longer the damsels in distress that need rescuing. So that's one piece. And then the other piece is that men come up to me and say, one, thank you for talking, thank you for talking about my lived experience. And then two, thank you for not making me the problem. That that is also critically important in this conversation.

I think that's one thing that men, especially heteronormative men, will feel a lot is like, why is the boyfriend, husband, the butt of the jokes, the evildoer, the stuff all the time? I don't want to. I'm not a bad guy. And I think it can be easy to go there before we run out of time. Give us, give us some takeaways and actions and things that questions or actions that people can take and apply to themselves and their companies.

Sure. So one is that we've discovered at Pipeline through our implementations, there's a lot of talk about the gender pay gap. One thing that we've discovered is that you can't close the gender pay gap by starting with pay. And the reason is that pay is the symptom. It's not the disease. In other words, it's the quantitative value that you place on your talent. The actual value you place on your talent happens before that in performance and potential. So there's two key takeaways from that. One is that there's a broader solution that you need to put in place in order to close the pay gap. And two, it's not women who are broken and need fixing. It's actually the system itself that undervalues women that needs fixing. So those are, that's a couple of key takeaways that I would share with your listeners. The second is really through looking at the lens of gender equity as an economic opportunity. So we, you know, in the US we know that if we close the gender equity gap, we could realize we could increase our GDP by $2 trillion. Pipeline actually did research and found that for every. Across 4,000 companies in 29 countries. And what we found was that for every 10% increase in gender equity toward parity, toward 50, 50, there's a 1 to 2% increase in revenue. So there is actually the opportunity to improve the financial performance of your company through closing the gender equity gap. It's not only the right thing to do or a social issue. It's actually a key lever that CEOs can pull in order to maximize shareholder value.

Mm, that's interesting. Yeah. I'm just back from a couple of visits in the Middle east where I've been working on getting business accelerator programs going in Dubai, Kuwait most recently and Bahrain. And a substantial number of the participants in those programs are early stage female entrepreneurs. But. But all of them are doing businesses outside what we know of in the region, pushing the boundaries of what's normal and typical around large oil based businesses and that whole supply chain. And now they're going to or creating a software company and we're doing in different and we've got some light manufacturing and they're swinging way out of there in both the roles and their thing. And people, when I come back to the States are so surpr to hear what it is because it doesn't fit the western narrative that we have about the region and pushing the boundaries of all expectations, gender and otherwise. Which is really cool.

Yeah. Which is good. I mean, in terms of it's good to challenge assumptions.

Well, so we're out of time and we've just begun to scratch the surface.

We are.

But I want to tell folks, if you want to go, of course we'll have stuff in the show notes about it and you can read about Catecha, but go to pipelineequity.com, we'll put that link in the show notes so people can read more about you and the work and how you help companies to see the opportunity in this area. Pipelineequity.com thanks, Katica.

Thank you.

I'm like reflexively, somehow I'm going to train myself.

It's okay. But you caught yourself, so we're good.

Thank you so much.

Like Nautica, but with a K. Thank you.

Talk to you later.

Bye bye.

Okay, bye bye.

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