In this opening segment of the "Gender – Short Bites" Episode #3, host Virginie Glaenzer conducts a rapid "tour de table" where each participant introduces themselves, outlines their professional background, and explains their personal interest in gender and identity issues. The panel includes: - Jennifer Brown, founder of Jennifer Brown Consulting and author of "How to Be an Inclusive Leader," who focuses on moving beyond binary gender definitions and modeling inclusive language. - Marc Sherman, emeritus psychology professor who has studied gender since the 1970s, highlighting the overlooked struggles of boys and men and expressing personal concern for his sons and grandsons. - Leah Glaenzer, a junior at Bard College working in the Office for Gender Equity, dealing with campus gender misconduct and Title IX policies. - Jason Rosario, founder of The Lives of Men, a social‑impact agency that integrates modern masculinity insights into brand strategy and runs a curriculum for young boys in NYC schools. - Michael Flood, researcher at Queensland University of Technology, whose work spans men’s studies, masculinity, violence prevention, and the positive roles men can play in gender equity. Virginie frames the discussion by referencing the origins of #MeToo and emphasizing the personal, generational, and cultural dimensions of gender debates, setting the stage for deeper conversation. The segment serves to establish the diverse expertise and perspectives that will inform the episode’s exploration of gender, identity, inclusion, and cultural change.
And let's begin as we always do with what I call a tour de table and have each of you tell us your name, what you do, and why you're interested. Let's try to be brief and keep your comments to 1 minute. So let's start with Jennifer.
Hi everybody, it's, it's Jennifer Brown. I run a consulting company called Jennifer Brown Consulting. And I have two books. My latest is behind me, How to Be an Inclusive Leader. We focus on organizational diversity and inclusion strategies. And my interest in the topic of gender as a member of the LGBTQ+ community is, and as a woman, is how can we move beyond the binary definitions of gender and have a truly inclusive framework and language to use when we refer to our gender our gender identity and also our gender expression. And it's something that I think about a lot. I think about how my gender expression is perceived in the world and how it impacts the message that I'm here to deliver, as well as how it affects others in terms of our credibility and our confidence and how we need to role model an inclusive definition of, of all of these things. So I'm really excited for the conversation today. Thanks for having me.
Thank you, Jennifer. Marc.
Oh, me. OK. And if I don't seem to be looking right at people, it's because my camera's in a different spot than I'm used to. I'm Marc Sherman. I am an emeritus professor of psychology at the State University of New York at New Paltz. And I became interested in gender probably in the mid-1970s. My first interest was on an aspect of sexuality that had never been really discussed before. Resulted in a book by a male colleague and I called After Play: A Key to Intimacy. And it was an example, by the way, the fact that a couple of men knowing pretty much nothing began to understand something that women were very well aware of, the importance in sexual activity of what comes after, so-called after. I then became very interested in male-female communication and wrote a paper in Psychology Today that had a lot of attention. And I was always fascinated by what was going on with women. Now what happened on fortunately, is in the early 1990s, I began in my research and observation to see that boys and young men were struggling. And what I also noticed is that nobody seemed to be noticing that at all. And it really troubled me deeply. It's now been 25 years. I have not seen a radical change. In that interim, through a genetic quirk, I have had— my first son was born in 1964 in my first marriage. I have had 3 sons, um, I have 3 sons and I have 5 grandsons. So I have to admit that along with my academic interest, um, there's a very heartfelt human interest in the well-being of my children and my grandchildren, all of whom happen to be male. And so that's a problem I have, is that males these days, it seems to me, my observation is, are really not talked about in a very becoming way, and it troubles me. I also will say one more thing very quickly. Unfortunately, this is a difficult field because I see the other side, and I realize, being probably the oldest person in the meeting here, that things were really not good at all in the '60s and '70s. I think they've improved, but where these concerns came from for minorities, whether it's racial or gender, is well felt and very— I really do understand this. So it puts me in a difficult position, but very important stuff.
Thank you, Mark. Leah?
Hi everyone, I am— is this loud enough?
Yes.
I am Leah Glaenzer. You might recognize the name from the host of the podcast. I am Virginie's first daughter, eldest of three, so I am a junior at Bard College right now, which is in upstate New York in the Hudson Valley area. My interest with gender I suppose, is not as purposeful as some of the other people present here, because I feel like I— it's a question that a lot of people in my generation are asking themselves already. So I work for Bard's Office for Gender Equity, which deals with gender misconduct policy and the Title IX policy, so I've become quite familiar with how to continue education about gender and sexuality on a college campus. And that's my experience thus far.
Thank you very much. Jason?
Yeah, well, good morning everyone. Thanks again for having me, Virginie Glaenzer. This is, this is incredible. My name is Jason Rosario. I rolled my Rs on purpose. I am from the Dominican Republic, born here in New York City, and I run a social impact and creative agency called The Lives of Men, which essentially does Men's Work, we work with brands to help unlock the best of their brand from the inside out. Externally, helping them think through product design and strategy with modern masculinity insights in mind, and internally, helping them think through diversity and inclusion and using the conversation around masculinity to have broader conversations around gender equity, racial equity, etc. So I also do a lot of work with young men. So Mark, I'm interested in talking to you about that a little bit more. I created a curriculum that I partnered with Department of Education here in New York City to deliver with their young boys across the more underrepresented school districts throughout New York City. And I'm excited. This is work that I think is necessary. Whether you're male identified, female identified, what have you, I think this is a humanity issue, and I'm interested in helping explore what that looks like broadly.
Thank you very much, Jason. Michael? And thank you.
My name is Michael Flood. I'm an academic, a researcher at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, which is in the, I suppose, on the east coast of Australia. And I've had a long involvement in research on men and masculinities, but I've also had obviously a personal involvement as, you know, as someone living as a man and sort of figuring out how to be a man in today's world. But also, I've had a kind of activist and community involvement. So, my first sort of explorations in men's issues were, I was in a men's group. I was in an anti-sexist men's group for about 2 years that was sort of questioning men and masculinities. I was going out with feminist women and being challenged on my sexism. I was involved in student politics and we, the men in the group, were being challenged on our sexism in various ways. And I really developed a fascination with issues of gender and sexuality. And so I've done a number of different forms of research on men, masculinities, gender, sexuality. For the last few years, I've been involved particularly in work on the positive roles men can play in stopping violence against women. So, stopping what is some of the kind of bluntest expressions of gender inequality. And I've written a book, Engaging Men and Boys in Violence Prevention, and also written a number of other things about the positive roles men can play in workplaces, about the impacts of pornography on boys and men, and so on. So, I'm an academic, I'm also, I would say, an activist and an educator. And yeah, absolutely fascinated by these issues and delighted to be part of this conversation.
Great, fantastic, thank you so much. So this morning I was doing a little bit of research and I'm not sure if you remember, but the activist Tarana Burke first used the phrase #MeToo on MySpace in 2006 to expose her sexual harassment, which since then has unleashed a global movement. The challenge that I found with this topic is that it's a very personal topic, so it makes it difficult to understand others' feelings and experiences experiences, which is why I'm so pleased to have all the generations represented today. So let's start, Martina. Let's begin with the context. If you can please share about, you know, who you are and what you're interested in this topic, I'd love for you to lead the conversation perhaps by defining the context. You know, what is happening in our culture today? Why is the gender and identity debate becoming so prominent.
Sure, okay. I have to say I'm really happy to have the conversation with so many diverse speakers. It's brilliant. I've been meaning to really have this conversation for many, many years as my interest in gender and identity is actually quite multi-dimensional. So it's personal, it's also academic, and it's also professional. I'll tell you a little bit more about who I am. So I am a social scientist, brand consultant, cultural strategist, also a semiotician. So what I normally talk about is more sort of brand related, but I'm really happy to finally have the chance to unleash my inner social scientist a bit more and talk about things that really matter. So I have my own consultancy called Meaning Global, which essentially reacts to what is happening in our culture today and helps brands and businesses sort of adapt to the quickly changing cultural context and adapt to the changing meanings, cultural meaning, symbolic meanings, in order to become more relevant in the world today and create new value. So that's what I'm interested in business-wise. Personally, my interest in this topic is quite simple. Ever since I was a little girl, I sort of felt that I wasn't really standing up to the social norms of what femininity is supposed to look like. To me, it was always sort of presented as a very restrictive set of rules and gender norms, and I really, as my own sort of identity and energy is very expansive and kind of not really loud, but sort of big, you know, populating a lot of space, I didn't really feel sort of allowed to be myself authentically. It sort of felt like having a size 2 little clothes on that you sort of have to fit in and it sort of represses who you are as a person. So that to me has been always sort of an ongoing struggle with how to be myself and myself first and then populating sort of a gender identity at the same time. And academically, I also have an interest in gender identity because my doctoral dissertation was on the topic of gender and media in the age of postmodernity. And I was looking at specifically gender stereotypes, so masculinity stereotypes, but also femininity stereotypes in advertising and understanding how the social reality and the media reality that's presented back to us sort of affect each other. And where gender stereotyping actually comes from.
