Twelve: Health is Wealth

Episode Twelve:

Health is Wealth

Buckle up, because we’ve reached the final episode of the podcast wherein we ask: what does it mean to do helping work in the context of a capitalist society?

Wellness entrepreneurship seems to promise to make health into wealth — but what about the other helping professions?

In this episode we look at David Graeber’s theory of Bullshit Jobs,* David Geary and Gijsbert Stoet’s study on the gender equality paradox, and continue our discussion on neoliberalism’s influence on wellness professions.

*affiliate link

Transcript

Sarah Vance 0:00

We still don't get paid what I believe we're worth

Tiana Dodson 0:03

I had secretly been wanting to try health coaching

Carrie Ingoglia 0:06

women have been dropping out.

Andi Zeisler 0:08

Your body is the next frontier of liberation.

Stefani Ruper 0:12

You have to monetize.

Sarah Banet-Weiser 0:13

We buy into this idea that anyone can do this

Victoria Ferriz 0:16

your body becomes proof.

Kelly Diels 0:17

whether or not we're trying to sell a service or a product. All women are brands.

Brenda Swann 0:21

Now I'm a health coach.

Kaila Tova 0:25

My name is Kaila Tova, and this is your body your brand. Episode 12. Health is wealth. If you've listened this far into the podcast, you might be wondering if I'm driving to the point that all health coaching and personal training and yoga teaching etc, is essentially bad and that no one should ever do it. And I don't necessarily believe that's the case. The goal of this whole podcast is to help you understand the underlying factors that are leading more and more female identifying people toward considering these careers over other means of making money. And then to let you decide for yourself and to help you and others like yourself begin to find alternatives. To fully understand the factors that are contributing to this trend, we need to synthesize what we've talked about thus far on the podcast, we've discussed how from a cultural standpoint, fat phobia, dieting, and an obsession with quote unquote self improvement through fitness are accepted and even expected of women. We've discussed the pervasiveness of self branding, and the ways in which it enables women to present themselves as consumable objects. We've discussed, quote, unquote, what men feel all the time and why women feel pressure to mirror men and their drive for financial and career equality. And we've discussed the definition of feminism in terms of how women are valued, and the ways that neoliberalism has perverted our understanding of that value. So today, I want to tie it all together by discussing why some women believe that the route to wealth is through health, and why they prefer to take a path toward coaching and entrepreneurship instead of toward traditional forms of care work. I want to start this conversation by stating that the conclusions we're about to draw in this episode do not apply to all women in general, but that they are relevant when we look at the population of women who are gravitating toward careers as coaches, personal trainers, yoga teachers and multi level marketing reps. So why would a woman feel drawn to leaving the workforce to sell health in the first place?

Sarah Vance 2:31

As far as what I do on the airwaves? I'm a body image coach, I guess you could say that but more more along the lines of just helping people reconnect with their values and just live their lives. I am touching people and helping them

Summer Innanen 2:45

what I do is I help people discover who they are.

Natalie Carey 2:48

I love waking up in the morning and working out and helping other people to work out

Jen Kruidbos 2:51

Oh, I can create a system that helps way more people

Unknown Speaker 2:55

help you lose weight

Hadass Eviatar 2:56

and I wanted to help people but I didn't know how

Melissa Toler 2:58

helps people

Unknown Speaker 2:59

help people

Carrie Ingoglia 3:00

can help those people

Pace Smith 3:01

I want to help.

Kaila Tova 3:03

As we've discussed in a NEO liberal capitalist society, there is an imperative to constantly be creating value. And how can you create value under capitalism? When you have to have a job, a career some way to make money? That's what makes you a valuable member of society. value. An economic term is quantifiable. But what happens when generating value does not fulfill your sense of values, or creates social value? anthropologist David Graber asks this question in his book bullshit jobs a theory, while Graber defines a bullshit job as a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence. Even though as a part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case. I would actually argue that there's a spectrum of bullshit when it comes to working, and that even people who can just the existence of their jobs on some level may still feel empty when going to work specifically because their job doesn't align with their personal values, or create social value. For Graber social value is about creating sociability, or doing things that help or quote unquote, give one another joy and happiness. It's about being there for one another, caring for one another. And yet, there isn't always profit and creating social value. And that, in my opinion, is exactly the problem. Graber suggests in his book that well, people who responded to him with anecdotes about their bullshit jobs may have different measures of what is socially valuable and what is not, they, quote, would have agreed on at least two things. First, that the most important things one gets out of a job or one money to pay the bills and to the opportunity to make a positive contribution to the world. Second, that there is an inverse relation between the two, the more your work helps benefits others and the more social value you create, the less likely you are to be paid for it, and quote, this quote from Graber shook me to my core when I first read it, because it encapsulated to me the exact dilemma that these women this particular population of women found themselves in when facing down the prospect of continuing their current careers, or building new ones. Over the past few weeks, we've heard many different women share their unique stories about wellness entrepreneurship, but the common thread that ran through all of them is the value that these women place on care and the way in which care is valued or evaluated in our society. Now, before we go any further, I want to make clear from the outset of this conversation, that I do not hold any gender as centralist views, nor do I endorse that worldview on this podcast. Instead, I want to look at this from a cultural standpoint, especially for women assigned female at birth and raised as women but for women in general, there is an emphasis on nurture in our nurturing. From the time we start taking care of our baby dolls to the very first recitation of the Girl Scout law. To help people at all times, we learn the value of helping others. As we grow, we are exposed to female babysitters, and elementary school teachers and nurses and mothers. As we approach our careers, however, things start to change. Many women obviously still do go into quote, unquote, women's professions like teaching social work, therapy, nursing and other care work, because it's something that's fulfilling or aligned with their skill sets. But for many of us, especially those of us who have been raised on an ideology of pushing more women into STEM in the boardroom, we learn that helping doesn't pay if we want to make it into the middle class, and today's hustle focused, merit based work centric culture. And if you live in a city or an expensive suburb, you have to find a job that helps you pay the bills. For example, the other day, I happened to go into a bank here in Silicon Valley, I met a new employee who said that she was a former kindergarten teacher, we struck up a conversation and she admitted that she loved teaching children, but that she also wanted to be able to retire. So now she's working at a bank wearing suits and talking to people about money. It's an exchange of passion for profit. And it's an exchange that isn't new or unique. It's a mundane, everyday example of how some women are forced to choose between their desire to become or stay helpers, and their need to pay the bills and provide for themselves and their families. But what happens when that new job shine wears off and this kindergarten teacher turned banker starts to miss doing meaningful work, when the fluorescent lights and the glass cubicle begin to feel oppressive, and her boss is a jerk and her customers are mean and she goes home exhausted, wanting to lie down forever. Maybe she finds a dance class or a yoga class or gets a membership to the nearby gym to blow off steam. Maybe a friend starts to talk to her about Beachbody or he starts listening to health podcasts on her break to pass the time. Or she ends up on a mailing list belonging to any one of the hundreds of wellness entrepreneurs who are living their healthiest and wealthiest lives by making money online. Think back to Episode Two when we talked to the former tech executive and pole dance studio owner, Christina Kish.

Christina Kish 8:18

So when I set up the dance studio, in putting the mission together, I was very specific when writing the mission, that it be a a place that people can come to, for self expression, self awareness, and that it's a safe place to do that. And that meant for both clientele as well as employees. Because I wanted some I know what it's like to have to, you know, leave your cubicle, and you're halfway up the door. And someone says to you, oh, wait a minute, we sold another meeting. You know, and it's 730 or eight o'clock at night, you know, I know what that feels like. And so from the day I open the damn studio, I would if you know six o'clock class 630 class in Silicon Valley, people would show up and I'm like good for you. Good for you. Or it may be it was a stay at home mom who does a babysitting swap with the woman next door and one of them comes to Monday class and one of them will come to Wednesday class and they'll swap. Those are great ways that women especially and men can start to and prioritize what that you have to have a place that you really enjoy going to to do that. Because if it's just an if you check the box thing, you won't, you won't do it. And so that's why having a space and continuing to bring inviting people and who can say, I don't really need to my friends to show up with me, I just need to be here because the people, all the people here like me, they want to be here. They're working on themselves. They're taking this moment like grab that oxygen mask. And that's how I built it, that it but it was very deliberate to try to build it that way.

Kaila Tova 10:24

If our banker ends up at this theoretical dance studio, who's not to say she isn't swayed by the grab your oxygen mask ethos of the place, who's to say she doesn't get certified to become a pole dance teacher. I mean, I literally did that. I know plenty of other people who have ended up doing some variation of this very thing. One thing that we don't talk about enough here in America is how economic instability is actually creating a need for women to become middle managers and coders. Even when many of them never actually envision themselves in those roles. I don't want to suggest that all women do not want to be in STEM or business roles. Quite the opposite. Actually. What I want to suggest is that some women feel compelled to pursue these types of roles, not because they want to pursue them, but because they feel from a financial standpoint as though they have to. And that economic instability coupled with our Neo liberal ethos, and our obsession with using health as both an escape and a marker of wellness and worth can lead to women Seeing no other alternative than to try to become entrepreneurs, especially in the wellness space. Here's Dr. Rachel O'Neill, the research fellow from the London School of Economics, whom we met in our last episode.

Sarah Banet-Weiser 11:33

So I think there is a generational dynamic to a lot of this, I think, certainly what I saw among women I spoke to who, by many measures were quite privileged, in terms of certainly their class background in terms of the kind of work that their parents did, and the ways in which they were raised in terms of their levels of education, not always, in terms of their levels of income, which vary dramatically among the court of women I spoke to. But they were all I think their lives were very much characterized by a sense of security by a sense that they didn't have a basic foundation from which to operate, everything was a bit of a push a bit of a scramble, it was one thing to the next. And that was part of the reason why they went into entrepreneurship, that why they started their own businesses, even though this is of course, taking on so much more risk than they would have been dealing with in the context of a nine to five office job. But they you know, they wanted to work for themselves, but they also wanted to individually reap the rewards that they believe would be due to them. Now, the problem is that, looking at the kinds of facts and figures that we have on Women's Entrepreneurship, we know that many women will never reap those rewards. But the idea is so seductive in the context of prosperity, particularly among a generation of women who have been raised on the idea that this girl can women can do anything, you'll be successful. The reality is that there are structural barriers to your success that you are going to come up against fairly quickly. But that's not necessarily what you've been raised to believe. So I think the fact that we have so many women kind of stuck with this model of trying to do it for themselves in a very individualized way, isn't entirely logical outcome of the way that they've been raised of the social and economic conditions that they find themselves in now of the kind of media that they engage, particularly through platforms such as Instagram, which really encouraged logics of self branding. I think this sociologically, this makes sense.

Kaila Tova 13:58

It's not like this is every where in the world, there are countries in which care work is better compensated or there are social systems in place to ensure you don't go hungry because you had the presumption to want to be a teacher. In early 2018, David Gary at the University of Missouri and high spurge, stoat, at Leeds, Beckett University published a paper on what they called the gender equality, paradox and stem. While the language leans a little too heavily on gender essentialism, for my taste, it did uncover a very interesting finding.

David Geary 14:29

So the basic question is something called the Nordic paradox. So we're looking at the Nordic countries such as, you know, Norway and Sweden, where they have very high levels of gender equality, female participation in Parliament and a variety of other other things and just kind of an ethos of equality. And in fact, that's the most gender region in the entire world. The paradox comes in with the finding that they're also one of the most gender segregated places in the world in terms of occupations for entity, for instance, or academic interests or preferences. So the belief of some people was that as you became more equal, in terms of the general beliefs about boys and girls, and men and women add the institutional things in, in place that would ensure non discrimination, and so forth, that a lot of sex differences would become smaller and smaller over time, and eventually disappear. And the paradox is, the exact opposite has happened in many, many areas, including stem participation.

Kaila Tova 16:00

So this paradox was affecting the Nordic countries, there's less gender inequality, and yet, women are choosing not to go into STEM. But what about the rest of the world? Gary and stoat looked at 67 countries around the world and compared a number of different factors, including gender inequality, economic development, male and female students scores and reading math and science, and the number of students who graduated in inorganic sciences and engineering.

David Geary 16:28

When we looked at it across the world, we find that basically the same thing that you find it in the Nordic countries, the more gender equal the country, the fewer women are, that are getting college degrees in these areas.

Kaila Tova 16:51

And this was despite the fact that girls were outscoring boys in science. And yet somehow there was gender segregation in the workforce. I asked David, what he meant by gender segregation.

David Geary 17:02

So it's not, you know, the old 1950s stereotype that sort of segregation. The segregation is really along the lines of women, preferring to go into areas that involves dealing with living things, and helping people often. But those living things can also include that medicine, biology, so forth. So if we look at all of those areas, even those that are science based, they're just as many and often more women going into those fields than men. So veterinary medicine is 80 90% women, now medical schools about 50% women. And then we see men kind of going into areas that involve dealing with things, non living things, physics, engineering, computer science, etc. So you're not directly dealing with people, I mean, you back to work in a group or whatever. But the focus of your job isn't directly dealing with people, it's dealing with how things work.

Kaila Tova 18:09

Now, again, we don't want to assign the reasons for women choosing to focus on living things to their natures, it's likely that the desire to help is coded not in our DNA, but in our upbringing. However, the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics bear this out. Women are over represented in professions related to helping and men are over represented in professions related to how things work. And of course, even in the organic sciences, men dominate and the professions that Garner higher wages, like physicians and surgeons, whereas women aggregate in the categories that pay less like nursing, but in recent years, at least increasingly, in my own lifetime, American women in particular have been pushed to aspire toward careers and quote, unquote, how things work, you know, careers that actually pay. For a lot of women getting paid what they feel they're worth is pretty attractive. So so the rhetoric of Neo liberal feminism and empowerment increasingly pushes young women towards coding camps and leadership summits, in order to get women closer to an equal wage and equal career opportunity. And yet, the weird thing that this study found was that if you actually wanted to get more women in STEM, you had to make society more unequal.

David Geary 19:22

We wanted to look at some of the factors that might produce more women going into STEM. So if you want a lot of women in STEM, we could replicate the cultural conditions going on in Algeria. I'm not sure too many people would go for that. But they do better than anybody else, in terms of getting women into these STEM fields, and Finland and Norway, are the worst. So but, but in In any case, we we also looked at academic strengths. So we looked at, okay, what's your best subject? Is it reading, science or mathematics. And that's important, because adolescents and young adults and older adults, they tend to gravitate toward coursework, college majors, and then occupations that are consistent with their strengths. And so we did that we had almost 475,000 of lessons from throughout the world. So we, so we looked at this pattern very broadly. And on average, between reading is the best academic skill of most women. And that's true in every country we looked at. and science or math is the best academic subject have more boys than, than girls, that so we have this kind of strength, academic strength till the so if we go back to Finland, as an example, the Finnish girls are out doing the Finnish boys and science test. But they're out doing the boys on the reading language comprehension, those sorts of things at a much bigger level. So little bit better in science, and much better in reading. So these girls who are good at science and mathematics, many of them are even better at reading literature, those types of areas. And people with that profile, tend to go into humanities based areas, for example. So so they're more than capable, academically, and in terms of their preparation of, you know, getting a degree in computer science. But they're choosing to go on another route, they're choosing to go with their strengths, and probably their interest, rather than what people are telling them they should do, or what's going to give them more money.

Kaila Tova 22:11

Right. And so that right there, I think, is what interested me the most about this study, right is that, so in a gender equal society, that that tends to mean, money equal, right? You know, women have the flexibility to make a choice about what they want to do. Whereas in a country like the US, which, you know, we like to, you know, talk about equality, but I'll talk no action in a lot of ways. And women find that going into a stem profession, whether or not it's where their heart wants them to go, is the best way to provide for their families or provide for themselves to, quote unquote, make it if you will, in this, you know, Horatio Alger style hustle culture that we live in.

David Geary 23:06

Right, and and, and that's what what we found in places like Algeria, where, you know, the, the Nordic countries have, you know, extensive social safety nets, I mean, the US has some, it's not quite as extensive as, you know, the, the social democracies in Western Europe. But in places like Algeria, there's not much there at all. And so if you're a capable person, whether you're a man or a woman, you're more likely to go into a less risky, higher paid profession. In that's the STEM areas. And we think that's why we're getting higher proportions of women in STEM areas in these developing, you know, more risky countries.

Kaila Tova 23:56

Perhaps it comes as a surprise to you to hear that the US is on par with developing countries when it comes to social safety nets. But if you're listening to this podcast, maybe not. All of this is to say that we may be filling the wrong pipeline in the name of equalizing men and women salaries, a pipeline that ultimately becomes leaky when some women realize that they don't want to spend the rest of their lives caring about computers or maximizing shareholder value. And sometimes even when they want to be involved in these types of careers. Women run up against the proverbial glass ceiling simply because the pipeline hasn't been built for all women. I spoke about this with Sarah B'nai wiser, the head of the department of Communications at the London School of Economics is the best way to succeed, you know, being told that yes, men, women can code Yes, women should be in tech. And this is something that I've been really, really grappling with in the last couple of months is, you know, is that the answer that is just to get more women into business, get more women into tech, you know, teach every woman to code give every girl apparently a set of Goldie Blox and hope that everything kind of works itself out in the end. And I don't know if that's the answer. You know, like, I feel like something you mentioned before, it's like care work. What happens to the women who do choose to do work that involves care or community or, you know, nonprofits, nursing, teaching things that again, not it's, it's not biologically coded that women should be in these roles, right. But it is often where women end up. So if the answer is to get every woman behind a computer, what happens to the nurses? What happens to the sick? Yeah,

Sarah Banet-Weiser 25:43

yeah. And I and I think that I mean, I think that this is, you know, this is also what I was talking about, when I was talking about my definition of feminism is about value. It is what kind of labor and what kind of work is valued. So, you know, again, I feel sort of ambivalent, like you do. I want I have a 17 year old daughter, I don't want anyone to tell her that she doesn't know how to understand math. You know, if she wants to be a computer scientist, I want her to have that opportunity. But But it's not just about the addition of women into these fields. And that's, it feels like that's a very limiting perspective on revaluing women and revaluing men and society, because then it's instead of, it's just about adding an inclusion, you know, inclusion of women to these fields, rather than interrogating the logics of these fields in the first place. And I think that the computer thing is a really interesting example. Marie Hicks has written this great book about how it is that women were coders in the computing field getting right, but that wasn't seen as a valuable thing. And as soon as computing became something that was already recognized as the wave of the future, it was that that women began to be pushed out of those jobs and put into the more social services jobs, you know, or the, or the receptionist positions and that kind of thing. So it's, it's the industry itself, and you could see an unfolding industries. We, when you do history is like that, you know, that that has a gender dynamic to it from the beginning, when that job wasn't valued. So, you know, it's like, it's soon as that job becomes highly more highly valued. It's, you know, it's this this ideology about women not being capable of doing it starts to take hold. So I think that, that it's, I don't think it's a bad thing for more women to go into coding. I think that it's a great thing. But I don't think that that is going to change the logic of the tech industries.

Kaila Tova 27:52

Why should we care about changing the logic of the tech industries or of Business and Finance, because they're patriarchal? Because they're hierarchical? Because our images of success are built on masculine archetypes. Remember what Carrie Ingolia the creative director and yoga teacher from Episode Two said,

Carrie Ingoglia 28:10

I was like, great, I'm glad we're all leaning in. But like, now, all the people who are my equal are dudes. And I don't know how to be my best female leader. If all the people that I'm sitting in a room with our guys, like, it's great that I've either forced my way into that room, or I was invited into that room or whatever combination of things happen to get me in that room. But after a meeting with my boss, I want to be able to go for a walk with my girlfriend who's in the same position and be like, now how do I have this conversation? And I want to push it this way? And how do I did it to and I want to learn to be able to do that in ways that aren't amazing mimic like a female mimic of a male way to do it.

Kaila Tova 29:00

Bond, the lawyer and pull dance studio owner also from Episode Two, notice an apparent lack of growth for women who choose to go into business in tech,

Amy Bond 29:08

I have had one negative experience. But that's not uncommon, right? You hear a lot of people have negative experience, especially women in tech. And a lot of it is related to inequality and feeling like they can't grow because they're a woman.

Kaila Tova 29:24

And worse. Tiana Dodson, the health coach whose story we've been following for a little while, had to face racism, in addition to gender discrimination as she pursued a career in mechanical engineering,

Tiana Dodson 29:34

I ended up in lots of rooms where I was the only person of color, lots of rooms where I was only woman. I've been in a lot of situations, you know, since college, where the women's bathroom was only one stall, on a completely different floor in the building. Even though there was a men's bathroom with multiple stalls on a every floor, like my graduating class. Well, we weren't very big the year that I graduated, but there were four of us women, that was really a huge difference for me, was that I often felt, I guess, stakeholders remembered that I couldn't actually ever really be who I wanted to be because I had to play respectability politics, you know, I couldn't laugh as loud as I wanted to, I couldn't say what I wanted to say. I always felt like I needed to differ. I mean, not only because I was kind of the new kid on the block, but also like, because I was the only vagina on the block. And like, I actually was told by a co worker that I was hired to be window dressing. And at the time, I was just kind of like nod and smile, because I didn't really understand what he meant. But, like, down the line realized what he meant, you know, and that was really hurtful because it was like, you know, you're not here on the spot. You're here because we needed you to check off the boxes.

Kaila Tova 31:20

Even when you feel like your job creates value in the world. Even if you don't see it as bullshit. It can grow tiring to constantly be thwarted in your ability to derive value from your job, whether it's higher pay a promotion, or even respect from your peers. So when you feel like your job actually creates no social value, that can be even more frustrating. I mentioned the book bullshit jobs at the beginning of the episode and I want to stick with this idea for a little longer. According to Graber bullshit. Jobs are the kind of knowledge work middle management paper pushing types of roles where the employee sits behind a desk and completes their tasks, knowing that even if they disappeared tomorrow, nothing much would have changed in the world, they may not even be noticed. Working in marketing, for me felt like a bullshit job. Not at first. At first, when I started working in marketing for startups, I actually thrilled to the idea that I was somehow making a dent in the world. We were disrupting industries and innovating and all of the other bullshit that startup founders now putting their mission statements. But after several years, behind desks and in cubicles, I grew disillusioned. I was commuting for hours to just sit at my desk and answer emails and circle back and follow up and go to meetings that I wasn't really needed for and scroll through Twitter until 5pm when I was allowed to go home. With the tacit caveat that I must still be available to answer emails that were sent during regular working hours while others were circling back and following up and going to meetings that they didn't have to attend. And my ultimate impact on the world was helping CEOs develop their exit strategy so they could make more money and hire more people to do the same thing at another company in a few years. If I ran off and join the circus, the only immediate impact on the world would be that my boss wouldn't have another blog post or white paper sitting in the to approve pile for months until they hired someone else. I turned to health coaching because I wanted to wake up and feel like I was making a difference in someone's life. If you remember from our multi level marketing episode, Dana shore, the essential oils consultant felt the exact same way when she moved to California,

Dana Schorr 33:24

I got a job at a startup accelerator, things I really disliked about sort of that corporate culture. And it wasn't specifically this place I worked at I think this happens anywhere is that if I was given a task or project and I finished it quickly, or just in less time than I anticipated, or whatever, I then had to spend the rest of the day looking busy, right and looking like I'm and I you know, I could ask for more stuff, but they don't have anything else for me to work on. Then they don't have anything else for me to work on it. I wasn't trying to intentionally just waste time and sit, you know, on the internet all day. But on the other hand, I finished what I was supposed to do. It already got turned in and approved and all that. And yet I couldn't go home, I couldn't go grocery shopping. I couldn't go to my doctor's appointments that I needed or like whatever other things, you could think you could do that like 2pm that. So I just felt like, well, it's great that you're paying me whether you know, regardless that I'm not doing anything, but I'm just going to sit here for another four hours looking at the clock trying to look busy. Just because I have to be here

Kaila Tova 34:36

in bullshit jobs. Graber talks about how all of this quote unquote free time behind a desk has an I quote, sparked an efflorescence of social media, electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else. And quote, I can tell you from personal experience, the siren song of coaching is loudest during the 3pm slump when your work is for all intents and purposes, this is finished for the day. But you still have to put in FaceTime until you can leave at five. It's the reason why there are so many business coaching podcast popping up each day. People want out and wellness coaching opens a door for women who are predisposed to wanting to help. Now, you might ask if these women want to help, why don't they just become teachers or nurses or social workers or, or or Well, some do some leave and follow their hearts into roles that command significantly less money, authority and respect. And they do so because they feel better contributing to social value than asking to be economically valued in return. But the 3pm social media slump has unearthed a seemingly more lucrative way to do what Graber says most people would want from a job, yes, to make a positive contribution to the world, but also to pay the bills. My friend Sarah Vance, the body image coach loves being a nurse, but expressed her frustration with lack of paid during our first interview for the podcast about two and a half years ago.

Sarah Vance 36:00

You know, we don't get paid enough period as nurses for how much we do especially bedside nurses, with all the stuff that we adore.

Kaila Tova 36:09

And knowing that care work doesn't pay but care feels good. My friend who das avatar who now works as a network marketer made the decision to join her diet, MLM.

Hadass Eviatar 36:20

I come from a family of therapists, but I wasn't going to go into a psychology degree and become a therapist. So I was looking for some way to do good in the world work with people help people. And what happened is that through this company to this product that I was using, I met a woman who was a life coach, and she's also a psychologist, and I listened to a call that she did about emotional eating. And it just blew me away. And I said to her, kind of jokingly, because I'm actually I'm older than her. I said, You know, I read when I grow up, I want to be just like you. And she said, Well, I can send you tour I did my life coach training. So I went to the website watched a few videos, so totally in love with the woman who was running it. And I did it I did the life coach training took me about a year, it was pretty intense. But I was fortunate I was able to do it online, so I didn't have to go anywhere for it. And and then I found myself with a bunch of tools to be able to help people with the stories in their head. And I found myself at the product which could make people feel better physically, which is a large part of the whole thing. And that's where I've been going with ever since.

Kaila Tova 37:35

And Jen Kruidbos, the essential oils, marketer and yoga teacher turned to care by leaving the corporate world and starting her own yoga business.

Jen Kruidbos 37:42

Well, I loved the work. First of all, I mean, I was just like, oh my god, like my work. It feels like a vacation I love. I have like I have my book, my parents worked in the form of social work and helping people with addiction based, mostly. So I realized, oh my god, this is where I, I feel very aligned inches my back. So already that provided so much energy and fulfillment.

Kaila Tova 38:04

As Graber says in his book, our society has reached a point where not only is the social value of work, usually in inverse proportion to its economic value, the more one's work benefits others, the less one is likely to be paid for it. But many people have come to accept this situation as morally right. they genuinely believe this is how things ought to be and quote, and those who don't accept the situation is morally right. Those who do want to perform care work and want to get paid for it, seek out the solution, the only way they can see to do it, by aligning care work with entrepreneurship, essentially remaking the realm of care in the image of neoliberalism. I spoke with Dr. Rachel O'Neill, who's looking into precisely why wellness entrepreneurship is on the rise among this cohort of women who wants to care and also want to get paid for it.

Rachel O'Neill 38:52

I think there are good reasons as to why women want to do this kind of work. So you mentioned earlier about the idea of care. And the way that that's translated among women I've spoken to is very much about wanting to do something meaningful. And what is meaningful, in part is defined through care. So whatever kind of businesses they might have be that some kind of a food business or exercise or health coaching, there's an idea that they are caring for other women, they are doing something for other women, or for other people, many did frame it specifically in terms of working with and for other women. So I think there is a feminist sentiment that certainly running through wellness, which is why wouldn't entirely characterize it simply as a commercial endeavor. There's clearly social logics that are that are running through this movement market. And yet at the same time, ultimately, all of the women I spoke to were engaged in quite individualistic forms of meaningful employment, they were trying to create their own businesses into Italy, very few were actually working in coordination with other people, none of them at all we're trying to develop businesses that weren't profit weren't motivated by profit. This wasn't about creating kind of cooperatives or collectives, this was very much about creating individually individual businesses that are commercially oriented.

Kaila Tova 40:29

The problem is that to make it in this world, you do have to be motivated, at least in small part by profit. But how do you reconcile the desire to get paid what you're worth with a desire to help those who might not be able to pay? To that end, I had a conversation with Carmen cool, a therapist who focuses on eating disorders and health and every size.

Carmen Cool 40:50

And being really honest, it's also a little frustrating as a therapist with years of training, which doesn't make me better. I'm not saying that. But I get frustrated, coaches charge twice as much as therapists, like that's just a personal beef of mine.

Kaila Tova 41:05

So Carmen has had to start thinking of her practice, like a business. In other words, she had to start thinking like a health coach to start getting paid what she's worth,

Carmen Cool 41:15

well, this, this gets into a whole other conversation in a way about what does it mean to do healing work in a capitalistic society, right end of the day, we do have to make money and therapists, at least most of them that I know, aren't in and thinking of their practices as an actual business. So there's a way that I've neat, you know, I've had to train myself to actually think about money a little bit more, because this practice is my livelihood. So it feels like, Oh, it's that both and thing again, that I am, I am running a business. I mean, I remember early on. I've always kind of considered myself and a feminist therapist, and that's what I want to I want to practice and the biases that I bring, and hopefully an intersection of social but there's, there's a way that this idea of, of charging money, or therapy is it's just a rub, I'll just say it that way. It's a rub. And I think it's a rub that we I may always be rubbing up against. But I remember very early on reading a book called The fee and feminist therapy, you know, like, it's a thing, how do we reconcile? How do we reconcile all of this? And what does it mean, if I'm charging a certain amount? That's maybe half of what somebody can make in a day, or as much as someone makes in a day? And how do we make it so therapy isn't just something that only people who are wealthy can afford? That's, that's just something and I have a mortgage right? And so I think I'm just in a constant state of how do I do this in a way that takes care of myself and my family, and his social justice centered? And I can't, I figured it all out. But those are just questions that I'm continually coming up against.

Kaila Tova 43:07

And it's not just paid care workers who are suffering from a lack of pay. If you're listening to this podcast, there's a good chance you already know that motherhood is one of the hardest jobs and it's pretty nearly always unpaid. And you probably also know that when middle class women, you know, the coders, the marketers, the sales people, even the nurses and teachers go to work, many turned to domestic workers like nannies, babysitters, and housekeepers to maintain their households and raise their children, often for little pay. Because quote, unquote, mothering work, despite being some of the most important work a person of any gender can do has, in Marxist terms, little productive value in a capitalist system, reproductive work, the work of creating and raising new workers, new human capital, is seen as secondary work in a capital based system. Here's Catherine Rottenberg, author of neoliberal feminism,

Catherine Rottenberg 43:57

although critical theory has talked a lot about care work, right. And it's being undervalued. One of the things that I'm now working on with a group of other scholars, we're called we call ourselves that care collective is precisely addressing those questions. Because I think that we are experiencing, we all do in this crisis of care and a crisis in an acute care. And this, and there are lots of reasons for this. But one of the reasons that I would say, is precisely neoliberalism, which makes which has no vocabulary with which to address reproduction and care work, and also helps to invisible eyes, the women, the many women, mostly women who are carrying out the care work, and so it's, it's really, really important to bring sort of care work back into the public. Back to public attention into to talk about the care crisis, because the care crisis is also about the fact that many more middle class women are going out to work, right. So that the care crisis, actually gestures to lots of fault lines in contemporary society. And it's really, really crucial that and it also points that the fact that to the invite, you know, we're facing looming and environmental catastrophe, right. So the care crisis is is is huge, and it goes well beyond sort of mothering or parenting, but it's one it's a way of addressing some of the catastrophes that have been brought by neoliberal rationality and neoliberal economic policies.

Kaila Tova 45:30

Recall with Dana Schorr said in our MLM episode, I think

Dana Schorr 45:34

that's why a lot of moms and like, you know, stay at home moms or young moms get into it, or whatever, or teachers as well who are around a lot of moms, things like that, is because you need more money, you need to help your family. But you also don't want to spend that money on a nanny right away or babysitters or daycare, you want to be home with your children. And this, the whole point is right. This allows women to do that.

Kaila Tova 46:04

blogging and online entrepreneurship in general and wellness in particular, have opened the door to women who want to get paid. This phenomenon started with middle class white women, but now even low income women, people of color and queer people are getting on the bandwagon, although the barriers are much higher, and the price of failure is much steeper. But this phenomenon promises to make you feel valued for the work you're doing, and that the work you're doing is valuable. I had a conversation about this very thing two years ago with Eleanor proto, who describes himself as a spiritual counselor and coach, a storyteller, poet, singer, an artist, a spoony a Marxist, an intersection a feminist, a mystic, a geek and a queer gender fluid bisexual, which, when blogging first started, right, blogging was a free thing. The blogs that people provided were free. So there were just mostly white hetero systems, women who got famous first, you know, were blogging about their oatmeal in a jar and how fast they ran that day. And they were growing these huge followings of people who wanted to look and live like them. And as soon as advertisers and marketers got wind, that there are these like huge swaths of highly engaged people who are commenting who are sharing who are emailing who are looking at this free resource as a community, right? They're building community with other people in the comment sections in the forums. And later on Facebook. All of these advertisers started to say, Hey, how about I just emailed the blogger and say, will you wear my shirt in your next picture, it's free, you can have it, will you, here's a sample of this oatmeal, will you cook it and write about it and just make sure to link back to us it's free, will pay you a little bit. If other people buy it, you can make some money. And so these these, it's so exploitative. And I, I hate the idea of affiliate marketing. At the same time, I wish that people would give me money to, you know, promote stuff, but you know, but at the same time, I don't think I could take it now.

Elinor Predota 48:18

And it's so it's so insidious, because if you're somebody who is just you at home, writing on the internet, somebody pays attention to you, he actually thinks what you're doing is worthwhile, or he tells you that what you're doing is what they think that what you're doing is worthwhile. That's, that's such an amazing boost, especially if you're a person who has low self esteem, or who has been. And I think a lot of my perception is that in the early days of blogging, there was a lot of what's called mommy blogging, which is white says hetero women who had given their lives to their husbands and children effectively. And now we're getting some attention for themselves and their skills in writing and presenting themselves. So it, it's, it's very insidious, because in in one way, yay, great. Somebody gets to have their self esteem boosted and some income from something from their own labor. But on the other hand, the triggers that that make them popular, and that those advertising and product placement, people recognize as ways to get their message in to get their product in RR supporting white supremacy, hetero patriarchy and capitalism. So it's on an individual level, it's like, Yay, but on a systemic level, it's, oh, this is really difficult. And I think that that's a dance. That's really that's really, that relationship between what individuals need and what systems do is a really hard one.

Kaila Tova 50:32

In bullshit jobs, Graber refers to something that he turns the revolt of the carrying classes. This revolt, he suggests should be happening because people in bullshit jobs realize that they're not doing the work that they believe is beneficial to others. And human beings are naturally primed to do caring, empathetic or interactive work. Outside of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which he references and discussing this quote, unquote, revolt, there really hasn't been a large coordinated movement to take down the industry bullshit jobs, or demand better pay for caring labor, for example, the teacher protests and walkouts that have been happening in 2018, and 2019. They took place in a few states, but there was no national coordinated effort to demand better pay across the board for educators. As a result, only a few states saw modest increases in teacher salaries. And many teachers are going back to school this fall with classrooms full of supplies that they bought with their own savings after working extra jobs to carry them through the summer. Why hasn't there been a greater revolt of the carrying classes before now? And in a world where you can coordinate a giant social media campaign to gain national or international attention for a movement? Why not give it a try? Well, Sarah Banet-Weiser or gave me a pretty good idea of why we haven't attempted it.

Sarah Banet-Weiser 51:47

Well, I sure I mean, I think that it has to do with I mean, you know, I hate to be kind of boring about this. But I think that that that is the premise of capitalism, I mean, it that that as a our identity is as workers, it's also a gendered, a historical gendered premise, about what the roles of men and women in a kind of hetero, normative way, are in society. So the fact that there's this idea about, you know, being a so called breadwinner that is always assigned to men means that when men don't have work, they feel a loss of self. Because people say, You're not fulfilling your job and your identity as a man, you should be working, you should be providing this idea of being a provider, you know, so, so those are deeply embedded ideologies, that that come with living and in a context in which the more money you make, the more successful you are seen, to be. Right. I mean, so. So that's, you know, another and so and so certain certain jobs are then given more money right are then offered more money. And that's the issue with nursing. I mean, it's clear that we need nurse, you know, more nurses in the United States that it's a it's a national problem. And it's also clear that they're still not paying them anything you know, so it's like their value, the value of that job is if we measure value through dollars, then then that job is not seem to be valuable. So no wonder more people aren't going into it.

Kaila Tova 53:23

In a society where maleness and identifying with work is exalted, and capital is necessary for living a middle class comfortable life, women feel that they need to find ways to attain this quote, unquote, male level of success by doing their best to mimic quote, unquote, male ways of earning. So even as the caring classes are finding new pathways towards earning by translating care work into entrepreneurial ism, I would argue that internet businesses based around wellness have actually done more to erode women's empowerment than to build it up. In fact, I would argue that women's empowerment in the form of Internet Marketing is specifically what's keeping women as an umbrella group subdued and distracted from coordinating efforts to actually gain financial empowerment. Here's Rachel O'Neill again.

Rachel O'Neill 54:08

And this is something actually that some of the women I spoke to described concerns about. So one use the term pyramid scheme, she was very much worried that because so many of her clients as a health coach, are other people in the health, field health and wellness, health and fitness, many of whom were themselves either in or moving into coaching, she had this concern that effectively they were all selling to one another. And yet, what was interesting was that selling to other women and buying from other women was how you demonstrated support for other women. And this again, gets that this this tricky dimension, whereby there is a desire to help and support other women. But the only way that many women can conceive of doing this is through financial means it's through buying another woman's products or paying for her services. And so we have a version of a kind of a proto feminism, desire for solidarity, a desire to be among to support other women that can only be expressed or affected in commercial terms. Because I think the sense of wanting to support other women was there. And the idea of wanting to belong to female, humanity was definitely there. So I've been doing interviews, but I've also been going to many of these events, so events that are kind of wellness days, or business and entrepreneurship, seminars for women in the wellness space, these kinds of things. And the desire for female community is absolutely there. It's unequivocal, you can't walk into a room of 100 women talking about how they can help each other grow, which means help each other's businesses grow, and not get the sense that they genuinely do want to help and support each other as entrepreneurs, but also the other women that they're reaching through their health businesses. And yet, at the same time, we again, keep coming back to this problem whereby the only way of doing that seems to be in commercial terms.

Kaila Tova 56:25

If you think back to the episodes on multi level marketing, it was the built in sense of support that drew women toward the business model. The feeling is even though they were ultimately working towards their own personal economic gains, they were somehow part of a larger collective. But neither multi level marketing nor wellness entrepreneurship writ large offers a true supportive collective in which everybody profits. Instead, the business model continues to do what Neo liberal feminism does, it pretends to be feminist by including women, while continuing to model patriarchal and capitalist systems create winners and losers. With a long and wide ranging background in activism, community development, spiritual counseling, ritual work, and both formal and informal education. Elinor gave me a really interesting primer on what they see the differences between business and capitalism, and how we're missing the point with entrepreneurial ism.

Elinor Predota 57:18

So may, I firmly am of the position that capitalism is inherently unjust. And a lot of people have difficulty hearing that, because they hear me saying that running a business and making money is unjust. And that's not what that's not what I mean by that at all. Because capitalism is very different from business human beings have been doing business for thousands of years, even, even before there was a there was money in any of our culture's, there was a certain amount of specialization. So you had somebody who was really good at, you know, blacksmith, you had somebody who was really good at getting horses to do what you wanted them to do. There was someone who was really good at growing Herbes, and those specialisms of what we now call business. So now it would be you know, someone has a business as a blacksmith or has, you know, or the equivalent would be has a business as a mechanic, or has a business as a herbalist or in retail, whatever. And these businesses great, because it is a way to create a container to bring our genius to the world. And for those of us who are, there are many, many of us who find it very difficult to work for other people, for various reasons. And business is really the only way that we can support ourselves and our families and our communities. Without having to go into a working environment that is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult or impossible for us.

Kaila Tova 59:20

While Elinor describes capitalism as a differentiation between who does the work and who profits from it, I asked how that applies to individuals engaging in wellness, entrepreneurship. I mean, if you own your own business, aren't you doing the work and therefore don't you deserve the profits? Elinor sees nuance here, even if we're not engaging in businesses, capitalists, we are still engaging in neoliberal capitalism, by the very fact of participating in this economic system,

Elinor Predota 59:46

all we can do is try to make spaces for justice in the work that we do. And I think if you're a sole trader, that that's not you're not a capital lyst. But to get to get technical and Marxist debated, you remember the petty bourgeoisie. So you still you still benefit from capitalism and the systems of capitalism, because you go to a bank, to get a loan to develop your business, or you. If you go to an investor, the way most people think about if my business gets big enough for me to have to need external investment to expand, I will make a share machine, which immediately then puts you into the world of capitalism with a big thing. So it's not so much about, if you're a sole trader, it's not so much about your current business, it's about the way we think about our business, it's the way we think about it is, this is my business. And if I want to expand it, I either have to employ people, or sell off bits of it to a whole load of people who don't necessarily care about it, which are both which are basically your options under capitalism. So, so for me, there is a way to even under capitalism as a system, there are ways to be to work against capitalism. And most of them involve expanding the circle of the people to whom the business belongs.

Kaila Tova 1:01:39

It's not enough then to create a business that's about empowering other similarly privileged women to also become entrepreneurs. It's about recognizing that the system itself is inherently flawed, and not trying to parrot it even as we seek to subvert it. We don't even realize we're doing it. I mean, when you exist under the ethos of neoliberal capitalism, how do you see outside of it, I want to offer the benefit of the doubt and assume that most women who embark on this journey to wellness entrepreneurship don't do it to become famous. They do it because they want to help. The only problem is they just don't see any other way of doing it. Because all of our role models are internet famous CEOs. Here's Tana Dodson again,

Tiana Dodson 1:02:21

no boy internet famous. Mmm hmm. Man, would I love to be internet famous, but I don't know if I want to. If I really want that, you know, I'm saying like, like, on paper, it looks like oh, yeah, internet famous, be awesome. Who doesn't want to be Danielle Laporte. But I don't know that I want that life. You know, like, I like being here with my kid. He's too, and he's a fucking handful. But like, we have so much fun, and His face is so sweet. And I love seeing it as much like, Hey, man, you know, and I enjoy cooking my own meals. Sometimes. You know, I, I don't want to have to jet set, I don't want to have to have 300 emails a day, like, I don't want that. I would like my business to be sustainable financially. And I would like to live comfortably off my business, and contribute to my household with what I'm making, but you know, like, do I need to be internet famous for that? Not necessarily. I mean, would that be nice? Yeah, I guess I would not say no to. But, but like, you know, I mean, for me, my goal is not to just like, I don't want to be Tony Robbins on a stage, you know, just for the sake of being on a stage. Like, I want to be on a stage because I am touching people and helping them become who they really are. You know. And, and for me, that's the thing is like, I'm I want to help people not help myself. Like, my mission is not for me to become famous and rich, my and well known. My mission is to help people. And if I can eradicate fat shaming along the way, I'm all about that.

Kaila Tova 1:04:28

But do you have to be the CEO of your own business to do that? And can you actually achieve that goal by offering wellness only to those who can pay you? Here's Rachel O'Neill, again,

Rachel O'Neill 1:04:39

the question I would raise is, why do you want to be the CEO? Why do you want to have the kind of structure in place, that means some people are the CEO, some people are running the show, and everyone else is just working for them? I think that entrepreneurship, as well as being highly individualized, is necessarily interested in sustaining, it is necessarily indicated with hierarchy. Because to be an entrepreneur means to be the one who's going to take the risk. And only some people have the ability within an uneven social structure to take risks. So those people are going to have to be the ones who have a relative degree of privilege who have a certain amount of income that they can put into a business who have the requisite connections in the business world, who have the cultural capital, to be able to build a brand that becomes visible on Instagram, to circumnavigate the algorithms, you need to have all these things. So if you're going to be successful, as an entrepreneur, as we've currently conceived it, no matter how much good you're doing, you are invested in hierarchy necessarily, because entrepreneurship is necessarily invested in the idea that some people take the risks and get the rewards.

Kaila Tova 1:06:12

At this point, in the podcast, you're probably like, oh, my god, there's just no solutions and everything is terrible. What do we do? Well, there are solutions to the problem of uneven social structure. It's just that Western society as we're practicing it right now, is not necessarily at a point in its development, where those solutions are easy to implement. I discussed this with Rachel O'Neill. So I mean, do you? Do you think that there is a future in which this is not the case? And if so, like, how would you envision that?

Rachel O'Neill 1:06:45

I think there is a past in which this is the case, we have business models that we could look to, for example, in publishing, we've had lots of very successful feminist collectivity operating, certainly in the UK, those kinds of business models are available. The problem is that they don't really fit with the kind of individual brand narrative that people are encouraged to take up, particularly through platforms such as Instagram. But the models themselves exist. I suppose it's that therefore, they become further and further out of sight. Within this overarching, Tina space, this idea that there is no alternative and there's only one way of conducting oneself successfully, as a woman and as an entrepreneur. And even the idea of entrepreneurship, I think, Wolf, as well as being extremely gendered. It's also extremely individualized. entrepreneurs, almost always a singular. Or when we're talking about entrepreneurs, we're not really talking about people who are working collaboratively. We're talking about individual entrepreneurs, you know, congregating in the same room,

Kaila Tova 1:08:00

it's hard to imagine a world without capitalism, because we've been raised on the idea of Tina, there is no alternative. There are alternatives. It's just that we have consciously and unconsciously been engaging in the system as if there are no alternatives. So how do we solve it, we have to stop engaging. Many feminist critics and scholars see the solutions rooted in collective work. In fact, most of the critics and scholars with whom I spoke during the course of recording this podcast suggested collective models, I asked Elinor about what a collective model of work would or could look like.

Elinor Predota 1:08:33

And it looks in short, it looks like a lot of hard work. But then isn't everything. I mean, I will just talk from my own experience, I guess, of workers cooperatives, and community groups. And I've been in a few different ones of those. And when I talk about workers, cooperatives, what I'm there are lots of different models of workers cooperatives. What I mean by that is a model of workers cooperatives, where everybody who works in the business owns the business. And no matter how much money they invested in the business, they have the same right to make decisions about the business. And the workers cooperatives that I've been, I was in I've been in workers cooperatives and groups that were made decisions by consensus. And I've been in a workers cooperatives that made decisions by democratic one person, one vote. So there are all sorts of different models, and you have workers cooperatives, where there's an executive board that's voted in once a year. And you have workers comp choose where everybody's involved in decision making. So there's a huge diversity amongst them, but the main thing with workers cooperatives and other collective endeavors is that people come in with a power over and power and dissent, disempowered and power over model in their brain, almost in the hind brain, because it's so prevalent. And so I mean, what the very first workers cooperative I was a member of was a modified Community Supported Agriculture scheme, where those of us in the workers cooperatives, real organic vegetables, from a cooperative of farmers in a local rural area, to people around the city would have been, what was different about working in it as a workers cooperative was that we were all responsible for the decisions that we made. That is such a different way of thinking. And not everybody wants to take on the responsibility for decisions, even if they want to take on the benefits of profits. So it's like if you can, if you're going to have if you're going to be able to say what happens to the profits, you also have to take responsibility for the decisions. So that that's, that's one of the main things about community organizing, whether it's in a business context, or a charity context, or whatever it is, is taking responsibility. And that's why I think why so many more people don't do it. Because we don't learn positive models, because of capitalism, because because of all the because we have such a top down model of system it. And because it's either somebody telling me what to do, or on a rugged individual, it's kind of that is the binary that goes on, in the way that we're raised to think about power. And that it's very hard for us to kind of debug our thinking, to make it possible to have enterprises, social enterprises, community groups, etc, that work along that level where people have control over the means of production in the case of business, or community resources in the place of community group, and to take responsibility together for for the consequences of those decisions.

Kaila Tova 1:12:55

So I asked Rachel, what would help us stop engaging in this idea of Tina, what would help us learn to think more collectively,

Rachel O'Neill 1:13:03

I think stepping away from the platforms would would definitely be helpful for many people. And yes, I am saying that we could look to the past for for for alternative kinds of business models, but we could also just look elsewhere. These there are many people there are many businesses that operate in a collective collaborative fashion and and who run on a not a not for profit basis, workers collectives, for example. So these, these options, these these models are available. But again, they're not the kinds of ones that you see, really highlighted and put forward on Instagram that you see highlighted and put forward for even wider viewers via the mainstream media, via Instagram. And so again, I think it's about the fact that these kinds of logics just don't really fit with the images of highly individualized female success that we see celebrated in contemporary culture. When we see female success celebrated, it is typically the individual woman who's being celebrated for her individual achievements and accomplishments. or potentially, the individual woman with a good man behind her.

Kaila Tova 1:14:25

These images, these logics that social media, blogs, and other visual platforms, influence and acculturated us to the idea that this is the best or only path forward. And it's, I mean, that's how we're many of us are raised. I mean, that's just it, that's the language with which were raised. So having to unlearn that language and then figure out a language that is both. You know, it's both true in a lot of ways, but also something that feels true. And what I what I mean by that is like, you know, so you and I can talk about like the building a non profit and a collective and all of these things. And then we go back out into the world and see individual people being the one successful and it doesn't feel true, if that makes sense. But it is true. And then we just have to figure out a way to kind of translate that and somehow make that visible in a culture that relies so much on visibility for narrative building,

Rachel O'Neill 1:15:25

I think there are also generational logics here which are which are worth talking about. So, as much as I am saying that, yes, we can look at actually existing alternative business models. And yes, we can also look to the past, we should be particularly taking inspiration from the kind of care collectives and health collectives that we saw, for example, with movements like our bodies ourselves. But there is a generational component to this, which means that for younger people today, it is very hard to do those kinds of things, because they do not have the base level of financial security that was available to women who occupied a similar social positioning to them, say 30 4050 years ago, they don't have the same kind of base level of financial security. And so we have this generation of young women who want to do good, they want to do something that they find meaningful for themselves for their own work. And that is beneficial to other people, particularly to other women. And yet, they need to make a living. And it becomes harder and harder in that context to think in more collaborative ways to think in nonprofit ways. Because you are continually scrambling for any piece of the pie, the gluten vegan pie,

Kaila Tova 1:16:58

and that gluten free vegan pie, maybe allergy friendly, but it is not accessible to everyone. In one of the first conversations I had with Sarah Banet-weiser, we talked about what it means to visibly sell your success.

Sarah Banet-Weiser 1:17:10

It is true that when you have when you leave the traditional workforce, and you have constantly around you messages and ideologies about being your own entrepreneur, the entrepreneur, the self, you you know yourself brand, you can do this, and then you have, you know, a lot of visibility on those few people who actually get make a lot of money being a beauty blogger, or, or the woman, you know, on on Oprah, you know, building a self brand. So those exceptional cases, and you know, kind of circulating so visibly that we you know that we buy into this idea that anyone can do this, anyone can be a success.

Kaila Tova 1:18:00

But not everyone can be a success. That is how hierarchy works, which makes this pyramid scheme of selling wellness, entrepreneurship to one another unsustainable instead of empowering. Rachel O'Neill and I discussed this idea.

Rachel O'Neill 1:18:14

I think this has been a really interesting conversation.Particularly, I think around what we might describe as the kind of false promises and potential dangers of wellness, entrepreneurship and health entrepreneurship for women, as much as it's being billed as something that is a kind of a fix. It's an individual fix. It's a health fix. It's a meaning fix. There is this overriding on sustainability that you and I seem to both be seeing on the horizon. And it's that question of how will that actually be meted out?

Kaila Tova 1:18:53

One way that on sustainability will be meted out is that there will be failure? I failed. And though the monetary loss was painful, and the toll it took on my emotional health was high, I was very lucky to have a safety net. Not everyone will be so lucky.

Rachel O'Neill 1:19:07

So if we recognize and I would agree with you that it's not sustainable. But how will that unsustainably be realized? I imagine, or I would venture to guess, that much of the unsustainability, the injury of that will be borne by individuals, individuals will fail and see themselves as having failed as individuals, because their businesses, again, our sole woman operations. And so if they don't make it, I wouldn't be surprised if there was been a tendency to see that as as an individual failing a personal failing, that they haven't worked hard enough that they just didn't have the the right aptitude or the right skills. And so I would agree with you that it's unsustainable, but my concern is that that will still that let that unsustainability will still be kind of carried out or realized at an individual level, such that you have individual women feeling that they are failures that they've been on successful. But we'll still see the spotlighting of those, those few who have made it which will continually feed new cohorts to arrive and say, Yes, I will, I will, I will go forth, I will try and create a similar kind of business, whether that's wellness or something else remains to be seen.

Kaila Tova 1:20:26

And that is why I started this podcast, to give those of you the cohort of wellness entrepreneurs who have yet to arrive or who are already on the journey or who have wandered off the path after a setback, awareness, awareness so that you can instead of focusing on the content of your dinner, or the content of your Instagram, go out and fix the problem. And I know that it's not going to be easy. I acknowledge this in my first conversation with Sarah, you know, so if I were to go to somebody and I have had friends who have tried to convince me that the best way to make money is to sell a multi level marketing product or whatever. And, you know, and I've had conversations, frank conversations where I've listened, you know, and what I've heard is, Well, sure, I'd love to not be able to sell this, but what else can I do? Right, you know, and it's not a question of will do you go back and get a STEM education, or get your MBA for a lot of women, there's not that kind of access or the interest to be honest. And people still don't hire them anyway.

Sarah Banet-Weiser 1:21:29

Yeah, you know, there's, I mean, everyone's like, oh, there's a pipeline problem, there really isn't a pipeline problem. There's a hiring problem. You know, but yeah, I mean, it is it that that's why I that's why I think that it's really important for us to approach this with a nuanced perspective that, you know, that there are that there are, you know, ways that there are only so many avenues, especially for women, and, and for, you know, people of color that there are only so many avenues. And where, where we are seen as being sort of authentically creative. And, and and and so what happens is that you you had developed an industry about, again, about a curation of the authentic self online, that isn't authentic in the sense that it isn't necessarily a reflection of that person. But it is a performance of authenticity,

Kaila Tova 1:22:24

the performance of authenticity, the allure of the self brand is going to remain strong until we fix the systems that are making it hard for women, for people to care and be cared for in other ways. Until we fix our broken corporate culture that creates bullshit jobs until we stop rewarding business and stem so disproportionately over caring professions, until we acknowledge that there really are few spaces for women to be authentically themselves. In a world that has largely been carved out for and by sis had men, women will turn to their bodies to create value and receive validation. Tiana dollar sums it up.

Tiana Dodson 1:23:01

Nowadays, I mean, I can be who I am. and say what I want to say and like everything that I do now is centered on my values, like, my business is who I am, and the way that I perform my business is who I am. And I don't have to worry about like, ooh, is somebody judging me? Okay, yes, I am worried about that. Because of course, like, I want people to trust me and give me their money so that I can help them. But less about like, I'm going to get fired from this job, because HR is going to see this tweet. So in that way, like, I really am happy to be working. So I can be who I am.

Kaila Tova 1:24:10

Listening to Tiana, I know that there's more to this than simply dismissing wellness entrepreneurship as a toxic byproduct of neoliberal capitalism. While we're in and under this system, we need ways to cope with it. We need ways to be who we are. And for those who want to be a part of the carrying classes who want to help. This is one very visible Avenue. I don't want the conclusion of this podcast to be that women should stay in the home in the kitchen and in domestic roles are that our goals of having more women in leadership or tech are misguided in the context of a neoliberal capitalist society in the context of a world in which business and tech literally roll. We absolutely need more women in leadership in tech, we need more equality in the workplace. In a decentralized, globalized society where knowledge work is power and hierarchical privilege determines who wins and loses, asking for anything less would be to redefine the hierarchy instead of undermining it. But as the Western world becomes more obsessed with health and wellness, with prolonging our already long lives, or staving off diseases that may in part be caused by unhealthy diets and exercise, there is a yearning for a time when our lives were more centralized and care where could be shared or even performed consistently. If we want to make actual change. If we truly want to help people, then we have to consider what it would mean for us to reject neoliberalism and begin collective rising again, to view health as something that is accessible to everyone and not an entrepreneurial goal. At the same time, I also don't want the conclusion of the podcast to be that all health coaches and yoga teachers and personal trainers are bad or wrong for pursuing these paths. I know so many coaches who are doing such good and positive work for the people who come to them for support they are doing helping work in the context of the world in which they live. I don't want to fault any anyone regardless of my own worldview, because I don't believe that this is something for which individual actors deserve blame. My call to action is not to cancel wellness entrepreneurs or to call out particular people, but to torch the system and to responsibly figure out solutions before we start lighting the flame. And while we work on the solutions, to proceed with caution with awareness about what it means to become a brand, about what it means to brand our bodies, about what it means to sell that body brand to others. I want to end on a thought from Alan live in events, the author of the gluten lie whom we met in Episode Five, because I think he sums it up pretty perfectly.

Alan Levinovitz 1:26:41

The funny thing is branding, for all the negative attention that it gets. It's also fun. It's a it's a part of how we live our lives. But we we also have to at once be immersed in it and aware of it. And finding that balances is hard. But I don't think I don't think that you go wrong by by trying to cultivate a little bit more awareness, especially in an area like food.

Kaila Tova 1:27:08

And that's it for season one. Although, stick around for an epilogue, where we'll debrief on Jennifer Semin Nathan's yoga, teacher training, and also here follow up interviews with a few of the wellness entrepreneurs whose voices you heard throughout the podcast. Even though this season is concluding, I'm already gathering stories for season two, if you are a teacher or a nurse or doing any kind of domestic or caring work, and you're also considering or already performing wellness, entrepreneurship, if you're a member of a marginalized population and wellness coaching has adversely or positively affected your life. If you're a man who is hitting their body image issues or disordered eating behind coaching, if you're recovering from an eating disorder and still blogging about wellness, or even if you're not a member of any of those categories, but you have still been affected by wellness entrepreneurship in some way. I want to hear from you. Please send me a text, email or recorded voice memos at your body, your brand at gmail. com and thank you for listening

Transcribed by https://otter.ai