Two: Pipeline Problems
Episode Two:
Pipeline Problems
Women are dropping out. Maybe that woman is you. Maybe it's someone you know. Maybe it's someone you follow online.
They say there's a serious leak in the corporate pipeline, or maybe it’s the lack of female representation in STEM roles. If you've ever felt like your nose was pressed up against the glass ceiling or like you had to be more "masculine" in order to make it at work, then you'll understand why women are choosing to no longer either give up and work for less money and recognition or fight it out as one of the boys -- they're choosing a third way: selling their body image to other women.
In this episode, we'll get a sense of why women feel like they have less agency in the workforce than they do in yoga pants and on Instagram -- and why the conversation around feminism has shifted from burning bras to wearing sports bras.
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 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 to pipeline problems.
I've been struggling with the question of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Since I first learned in preschool that veterinarians have to give shots to sick puppies, a realization that threw me from that potentially lucrative and passion based career path and into confusion. I'm in my 30s. And now the struggle to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Well, it's just not as cute. Nearly every woman I know has some kind of job. The primary occupation of the women around me growing up and throughout my career seems to have been dieting or working out. They don't get paid for it, of course, but it's always seemed like a much more important topic of conversation or personal pursuit than say, particle physics or politics. And now the Internet has legitimize that pursuit into an occupation giving dieters fitness addicts and anyone with a skill in controlling and manipulating the body and the opportunity to make a living, or at least a couple of extra bucks. So when the workplace grows, toxic, or prospects seem dim, or we grow disillusioned with the promises that capitalism and you can be anything you want to be culture have made, we turn to what we know best, our bodies. In this episode, we're going to talk to women who have left the workplace to pursue businesses since around fitness or nutrition. We're going to explore the good, the bad and the ugly of work culture and to discuss why a body based business fitness nutrition and the like seems like a better deal. In some cases it is and we're going to learn why. We'll ask the question if, as Naomi wolf said, in the beauty myth, dieting is the most politically potent sedative in women's history is reclaiming work through manipulation of the body actually a reclamation or is it a continuation of the beauty myth in keeping women from success? In other words, is becoming a yoga teacher or a health coach really sticking it to the man? You know, when I first started this podcast, I was mostly interested in the ways in which women persuade one another to drop out of the workforce by modeling their health focus lives on the internet. But after a conversation with Carrie and Gloria, a digital marketer, and creative director, who has been writing and creating advertising since 2003, I realized that I was looking at this all wrong. Carrie, who has also founded yoga for the revolution, and was the producer of its accompanying podcast, said something in our interview that made me realize that while the way in which women communicate with one another about our bodies certainly has an effect on why we drop out. It's not the reason I asked Carrie, why did she make a decision to drop out of the workforce?
Carrie Ingoglia 3:25
Well, I have been in digital marketing advertising agency world for the last 15 years or so as an editor, copywriter, and eventually creative director. And then recently, I've shifted from a full time advertising world and getting more deeply into my yoga practice my yoga teaching, a lot of this started. I don't know how political your audiences but a lot of this started after the recent election, where I realized that advertising has always been a little bit troublesome. But I just got to a place where I was like, wow, none of this matters. This is crazy. Like, I'm spending all my time doing this. And I don't care if someone who's selling whiskey does a Facebook carousel ad or if they do, like I just did, I didn't care anymore. And I wasn't able to do my job particularly well at that point. So I was curious how to take the skills I've learned at 15 years in advertising, and the skills and lessons I've learned doing yoga for the last 20 years. And using those tools and try to bring them out and sell them in a way that is different than the great American yoga machine is currently delivering those tools, carries disillusionment in her corporate job may feel familiar. In the past several years, especially since the election of Donald Trump. There's been a big question floating around. What are we doing this for? If our votes don't count, and the world's going to end anyway? Why should I care if the rich make more money? Shouldn't I have a reason and a purpose behind my job other than just paying the bills. With the rise of the me to movement, we've only become more aware of how women have been stifled and held back by sexual assault and male sexual control. Although to be fair, even before me to read slowly been becoming more aware of the limitations of the corporate world. conversations around the pay gap have only been getting louder and grumblings about man explaining where a man explain something to you that you're an expert in heap eating where a man repeat something that you said and gets credit for it. and other such culturally explosive port Mentos are only gaining strength is women identifying people finally air our grievances on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. It's all been simmering under the surface for a long time. And well, it feels like we're seeing a rage filled feminist explosion in politics in pop culture. It's actually been simmering underneath the workforce for years off gassing women in small bursts instead of in a single large explosion. But now it just seems natural to ask why stay in a job where your passion is stifled, your creativity is overlooked, you're paid less simply because of your gender identification. And your ideas are considered less than when they come out of your own mouth.
Amy Bond 6:10
I've had every job from retail to cocktail waitressing to adult entertainment to working in tech and I am also an attorney.
Kaila Tova 6:21
That's Amy bond, who currently owns the rapidly growing pole dance studio, San Francisco, Poland dance and now Oakland Poland dance. She's also an author, a lawyer and a number of other things. Before leaving her job to become a dance studio owner, she was involved in the Bay Area tech world. Of course, listening to Amy's experience, you might think that she hated her corporate career. That's actually not the case.
Amy Bond 6:45
Yeah, I mean, I definitely did have an ugly experience and one of the startups that I don't actually count as a place that I worked because I was only there for three months, I was hired as the Director of Operations at was my first operations role. I walked in feeling like a total badass, super excited to own something, take charge. And then I walked in on my first day and the CEO turns to me, and he says, oh, by the way, I have an impending sexual harassment case that I felt fighting. Could you help me with that? And so that was just the beginning of the worst job I've ever had in my life. I regularly get LinkedIn messages from people who worked at that company, saying, hey, I've just left I'm traumatized. What do I do now? Yeah, I'm there. And when people reach out to me, if they should work there, because they're hiring aggressively, and they can't retain anyone, I just say run, turn around and run, I have had one negative experience. But that's not uncommon, right? You hear a lot of people have negative experiences, especially women. And a lot of it is related to inequality and feeling like they can't grow because they're a woman. And you hear that from engineers. And you hear that from people who are not engineers, people who work in the operations world, or the administrative worlds, or marketing and all the auxiliary functions to the creation of the product. And, um, and so I did have one negative experience. But overall, I loved working in tech, I loved the thrill of the like, up and downs of it. And then never knowing what was going to happen next. It always felt kind of like, in a very meta way, like I was watching myself in a video game and was like, and I like fall down the chute or was like a like, level up.
Kaila Tova 8:47
Even at a job that isn't toxic, there can be some pretty toxic structural barriers to mental and emotional health. One such barrier is work life balance, especially in Silicon Valley and Wall Street. But in business in general, there's a very masculine aggressive notion that the harder and longer and more visibly you're working, the better and more deserving you are. If you're the first to show up, and the last to leave, you must be better than everyone else, right? If you muscle through your brakes, and stay in the office, past end of day or close of business, you must be a better worker meetings, emails, social media chatting over cups of coffee for many of us these prolonged and often unnecessary hours spent in an office or inhibitory to living the rest of our lives. I mean, that certainly was the case for me, I'm the kind of person who gets their work done in the first hour, and then sits twiddling their thumbs behind a computer screen until emergency email comes in.
Amy Bond 9:41
I think that one thing that I was exceptionally good at, and that probably wasn't very good for my career, either, is that I was really able to walk out the door at 536 o'clock every day. I didn't say because I wanted to show that I was going to be there all day long. I always gotten earlier than everyone else engineers will roll in around 10. And they'll stay really late. But I rolled in around eight, and I was gone by 530 or six. And that was my day. And I was I created very clear boundaries around my time without actually seeing anything. And people that always asked me people I worked with but always asked me like, how do you make time for all the other things that you do. And I would look them dead in the eye and say, I just walked out the door and saw that they saw that I just walked out the door. That said I don't think that it was ultimately, you know, like, because I didn't have that face time, I was able to have a work life balance. But it also meant that the people I worked for directly which were usually CEOs respected that and asked me to work more, which ultimately meant that I didn't get the promotion. So the phrases that everybody else getting who did put in that that FaceTime.
Kaila Tova 11:11
For Amy, that meant eventually losing her job. Although as will learn later, she was able to land on her feet because of a fitness based business. While the hustle mindset is great, if you're a bachelor engineer, or a traveling salesperson with no family obligations, houses to clean or close friendships to nurture, then you're on a path to success. But as you probably know, women are still disproportionately responsible for house making and child rearing, even when they have full time jobs. And for many women who are already feeling disillusioned with the purposeless capital raising for the CEO while seeing so few returns in their own paycheck or on their own career path. The idea of staying in the office until 7pm, or 8pm, or 11pm, instead of going to dance class or having dinner with their children or going out with their friends. Well, it just doesn't mesh up.
Lilly Garcia 12:03
I guess I'm kind of a late bloomer, in that, um, I didn't, like do the typical like high school college, like get a career type of route. I went back to school when like all my friends were starting their graduate programs. Um, but um, yeah, like a long Well, before I even finished my first year in school, I got my first job as a marketing assistant kind of working, learning firsthand in the field, how to design things. Um, and by the time I was done with school, I was kind of jaded already with the, the typical agency structure and even working within a company on graphics. So at the same time, I was wrapping up school, I found out I was pregnant, expecting dating, you know, my first baby, and, and just kind of decided to jump into doing what I wanted to do. And running my own business, instead of trying to change the structure of the companies I was working in.
Kaila Tova 13:17
That's Lilly Garcia, the woman behind wild olive branding, though, she didn't start a body based business, she chose to go into an internet business, because at the end of the day, working for herself provided the flexibility, she needed to be a mother, and it helped her avoid the headaches of working for someone else's company. The thing is, well, some companies aren't completely terrible for a lot of employees work just really isn't a great experience.
Lilly Garcia 13:43
I was taught how to design a certain way. And I was, you know, learning from my mentors in the design field. Just like your typical process for designing things, I I hated it, I hated it so much. I felt like I was always fighting the people who I was designing things for, I felt like nobody was happy. You know, the designers were angry at the clients and the clients were angry at the designers. And I just thought, you know, there has to be a better way to do all of this. And I just happened to kind of me and or find out about some really great mentors who like I just kind of took in all their content and, and reach out to them through email and Twitter and whatever I could get my hands on and, and found a different process that I felt was much more, I'm just much better in the sense that it actually gave me the chance to listen to my clients and give them what they needed versus what I just imagined and that they would like. Um, and so in order to work with that process that I felt was the best process the right one to move forward with. I felt like I had to just launch my own thing. And so yeah, the timing just kind of worked out to where I just had to jump in and do it. And it's working out so far.
Kaila Tova 15:38
I suppose that I should take a moment to address the question of, well, What's so wrong with the structure of the workplace? Why is it creating such a miserable experience for so many women identifying people? and can't the problems just be solved by putting more women into leadership? I thought so for a long while. But after working with women and leadership, I think realized that the problems aren't just solved by individual women making it to the top, the systemic problems go way deeper than a diversity initiative that adds a few more women to the executive team.
Andi Zeisler 16:12
I do think it's possible. But again, it sort of has to come from reframing how we think about individual success versus success for everyone. And in the case of feminism, individual liberation and power, versus duration and power for everyone who needs that.
Kaila Tova 16:34
That's Andi Zeisler the co founder of bitch magazine, whom we met in episode one.
Andi Zeisler 16:39
So, you know, I, I am talking about Sheryl Sandberg a lot, and the whole Eden, which is sort of a perfect example of this sort of about, you know, success in a corporate world, built by men, for men, historically very uninhabitable, two women, individual women succeeding within those spaces, and encouraging other women to succeed within those spaces, but not doing anything to fundamentally change the way those spaces operate. That is about you know, that's about individual empowerment, that's not about, you know, changing the system, so that more women and all kinds of women can thrive. That is a system that is still going to privilege, women who become successful, you know, 85% of the time, on the backs of other women on the backs of the women who, you know, are their nannies and their cooks, and their housekeepers. So that's essentially, you know, empowering individual women at the expense of the empowerment of many, many more women who do not have choices, do not have privileged and do not have, you know, the ability to enter, enter those, you know, existing spaces. And, you know, it's, it's interesting that I, to me, this was such an obvious thing, when people have talked about empowerment in the past and sort of talked about like, the idea that feminism has worked because, you know, Pepsi has a female CEO, or Hewlett Packard has a female CEO or a woman can run for president. The idea that the sort of exceptional woman become synonymous with feminism is really faulty, because it isn't about it isn't about really thinking about liberation in a truly radical transformative way. It's thinking about, oh, you know, into individual women can do as well as individually men and make as much money and have as much power. Even if they do nothing different with that power. It's still feminism. And I guess I've always been disturbed by how few people publicly have really interrogated that until, you know, fairly recently,
Kaila Tova 19:22
one of the people who's begun interrogating that is Carrie and gola, whom we met at the beginning of the episode, she wrote an article about not wanting to see more female role models, and I asked her weight should women be moving out of corporate America?
Carrie Ingoglia 19:36
I mean, for me, specifically, that article was came to me more in a time of I don't necessarily want to see more super high achieving executives, I think women should take all the positions, right, like, yes, let's have super high achieving executives, please, of every just gender formulation, and color and ability that exists, right, like, I'm taking that as an A priore. What I was missing is where my peers, right I at the time, as a female creative director, which is what I do for freelance now. And I worked with a group called the 3% conference, which is about female Creative Leadership in advertising specifically, and at its start, the reason why it's called the 3% conference, is because only 3% of all advertising creative directors are female, which means 97% were male, which is way more equivalent to the percentage of women that run the household pocketbook, right? Women are doing the buying, and men are doing the selling. And there's a problem with that. So that conference specifically has grown out of that, and it discusses diversity in a number of different ways, and it in a more variety of ways. At the time. Now 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 happened 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 do it? And I want to learn to be able to do that in ways that aren't mimic like a female mimic of a male way to do it. Right? Like if you think about the 80s. And like the push for women in the workforce, what did fashion do? It created suits for women, right? Like, here are your shoulder pads, dress like a dude act like a dude, and you'll get far I was still want to act like me and get far. So I don't want to parrot what my male counterpart might do, which is like you walk in there, and you tell him what's fun and like, okay, maybe, and that might work. And I don't mean to make every single interaction gendered. But in this, in this case, like I wanted to know, where my girls at, like, I want peers, like I want a community of women who are all doing what I'm doing. Like, I don't necessarily just want to look up and have mentors, I needed peers to.
Kaila Tova 22:56
I'm wondering, you know, so how do we do that, though? With out? I mean, so the thing is, corporate America is mostly male, right? I mean, we just know it. And that's what it is. So how do you create a space where you're not being a female mimic of male patterns? Right? Because it's it already is that so without breaking free of that world? How do you even start?
Carrie Ingoglia 23:26
I mean, I think that's part of the reason why this is a small slice of why the gig economy is flourishing, or maybe not flourishing. But is it is a thing right now. And I think that women have been dropping out of the corporate world for a really long time. And not everyone is having babies, right? Like they're doing it for any number of reasons, because the structure doesn't necessarily work for them. So people are building their own structure. You know, we talked earlier about people going business for themselves and trying to be their own boss, and all of that. And some of that, I would imagine, is a reaction to will like, this structure doesn't work for who I am. So I need to build my own structure to try to make things work for whoever I am. And again, like how to change work culture, I don't know.
Kaila Tova 24:20
I think that that really is the central thing. And I think it's also kind of the central thing that this podcast is trying to ask, because specifically, women are dropping out. Yeah, you know, I just dropped out yesterday, you know, like that, I'm done. I can't do it anymore. Trying to navigate, the male conversation was so exhausting. And what's interesting is I did have female peers. But at least at my last job, the way in which my female peers tended to handle my male bosses, or male co workers was too acquiesce, to be quieter, to give up, to internalize the stress, or to manipulate in coated ways, so that they didn't realize that they were like, the male, co workers or bosses didn't realize that they were, you know, being manipulated, and they still felt like they were in control. So when I pushed back, just, you know, was just like, this doesn't work. Why are we doing it like this? I got in trouble. Right? And I couldn't go to my female peers and be like, Hey, can we try all doing this? You know, I had one other co worker who did that, and she just ended up rage quitting. So you know, because it got to the point where it was like, if you push back, the the main boss will say something passive aggressive about you, in the group in a group meeting, well, then praising all the male, your male co workers. And it just got to the point where it's like, this is toxic. I can't do this, you know, no, in a previous job, I got man splayed how to do my job by someone who'd been in the industry for 10 minutes. So that was fun. You know, it was just like, it got to the point where it's like, I can't have these conversations anymore. I don't want to do this.
Carrie Ingoglia 26:13
And I often I agree, I mean, I would have to say, the number of times that I've been explicitly failed, right? Like, someone fails me, I don't want to say that I have failed, but like that I have been explicitly failed. Because I'm a woman are few. It's way more for me, in my personal experience, just a systematic, invisible force that is incredibly visible when it's all focused on your achievement, right. But, but it is, it is really nuanced. And I don't necessarily think that the men that I have worked with in my life, and even the women I've worked with in my life, were intentionally trying to keep me from doing my job. And anyway, And that, to me is almost even more frustrating. I have wanted to say, to, you know, women I work with or female bosses, like, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, what are we doing right now? Why are you doing this? Can we please be a team and at the same time, as a boss, and I have been a boss and manage people I have, you know, worked with people where I'm like, Well, I don't know, like, I don't know how to move, help this woman move forward in the system. I don't know what to tell her to make this work for her. And that's a failing on my part. But it's not because I didn't want her to succeed. It was because I, you know, hey, like, with the rate, the way this road is built, I don't know how your car travels on it. And, and that's because I have felt the same way. But the way this road is built, I, I can get pretty far You know, that there's always a cost of like, then I go home, and I have to just lay down down for the rest of my life that are not at work, because it's exhausting to just be fighting all the time. And not even again, to your point, like not even outward, or like, vocally but just trying to hold your ground and like trying to fight for the creative work in a way that's acceptable, but also, right, like I need a table sipping moment, but I also don't want to offend anyone like it's that's a tough balance. And I'm sure that both men and women have to deal with that balance. I only know my experience, I can see I can have compassion, I can imagine that everyone deals with that to some extent. But in the same way that my life is easier. Because I was born white. You know, my brother's life is easier. She was born a white man.
Kaila Tova 28:50
Carrie hit upon a really interesting observation. The struggle of trying to either present as masculine without getting called a bitch or use your feminine wiles to quietly subvert politics is exhausting. It's very possible that if you've worked in a corporate job, at any point, you felt the desire to just go home and lie down for the rest of your life. As with any form of exercise, when you over exert your lean in muscles, you probably are going to burn out. Sometimes that manifests emotionally sometimes that manifests physically. Personally, when I was undergoing a particularly stressful time at work a few years ago, it actually triggered an underlying chronic illness that I live with to this day. According to a report from the American Psychological Association, women are more likely than men to report having a great deal of stress eight, nine or 10 on a 10 point scale, and almost half of all women surveyed said that their stress has increased over the past five years, women are more likely to report that money in the economy or sources of their stress. And they're also more likely to report that their stress manifest physically as an headaches and stomach aches, as well as emotionally, those emotional and physical health problems take a toll. Yet recent reporting advice, the Atlantic and other sources suggests that doctors are less likely to take women's pain seriously. So women turned to alternative sources for pain and stress management, holistic sources, if you will. We change our diets, we start doing yoga, we find God via Soul Cycle. And then when people start to notice how our demeanor and our health and sometimes our weight has changed, we discovered that we can monetize. And that's really where our story begins.
Christina Kish 30:34
Well, I didn't visit for a very long time, I don't remember a time when I didn't have a job.
Kaila Tova 30:39
That's Christina Kish, the former owner of potential a pole dance studio in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Christina Kish 30:45
And I went to school to study business as well as information system. And so I started in high tech. And I started in soft software, consumer software. And I spent a long time building software for people to use, it was all consumer. And so I got a chance to talk with a lot of people about how they use things, what they want to use what makes their life easier. I spent a long time in that industry doing that. And when I decided to leave, I knew that I wanted to have my own business, I had been doing a lot of startups prior to that. And so I was very used to having to start something from nothing. And I learned a lot about all of the different facets of starting a business, not just what I was doing or what my responsibilities were. And my family had always my dad was always a manager, he always like had that kind of experience. So I always knew that I needed to learn all facets of everything in order to be successful. And so when I left high tech, I kind of let whatever was going to guide me guide me was from a personal standpoint, it was managing a chronic pain issue. And in managing the chronic pain issue, I left high tech and started looking for like what was good for me. From a body kind of standpoint, health is a tricky thing. So many women move through this world hurting because their pain isn't believed. They're told that losing weight is the answer to most major health problems are that exercising and staying fit is the key to staving off illness and disease. fitness classes, juice cleanses, supplements and diet challenges all feel like ways to deal with the symptoms of burnout, stress and chronic illness. And it's not wrong that many of today's office jobs are extremely high stress while being extremely sedentary to get out of the office and just move can sometimes feel like a revelation. And so I got really into plot ease. And I was trying every day I tried yoga, I tried, I tried all kinds of kind of mind body, so to speak things. And I thought I was getting back into shape again. Because when you work hi-tech, you don't always have time to work out. And I was like I'm getting back in shape. I feel good. And someone had said to me, oh, we have this birthday party for one of our friends. And it was at a pole dance studio was like wait a minute, that sounds like fun. Like I was just looking to move and have fun. And I hadn't really incorporated dance so much into my repertoire yet. And I had been interested in doing that. And so I gathered a whole bunch of women together from the Pleiades studio, where not only was I client, but I was also teaching by that time. And we went for, you know what they call a hen party and a party and I took it and I was on set too high afterwards, it was like I got to move, I got to dance, I got to test my muscle strength, I got to do just everything that I love. I was in a space for an hour and a half where I wasn't thinking about my to do list, I wasn't thinking about how I looked or what I was wearing, or it was just so I think all encompassing of mind body, it was the first time I really had done a quote unquote workout where I felt like I didn't want it to end. Like a lot of times when you work out a lot of times you couldn't work out you're like okay, I'm going to watch the clock in a bit in this. But in this, I just wanted the music to keep going like I didn't want it to end and I'm looking forward when it did in to go into the next one. And so I participated in that for about a year. And after about a year I started thinking about what I was going to be doing with my career was I going to go back into high tech or what was I going to do and it just kind of happened that I decided to open a dance studio.
Kaila Tova 35:10
This movement of women towards fitness, healing health and community and away from the cubicle farm and the rat race is only gaining steam. And while most women don't have the money, the time or even the desire to invest in a whole dance or yoga studio or CrossFit gym, they can still create community and monetize their search for health by selling it back to one another using the internet.
Summer Innanen 35:34
So I mean, my my transition went from corporate job to nutritionist to life coach. So you know, start from the transition from corporate to nutritionist because I think that that's probably where you know, the the influence of the eating ideologies came into play as it relates to changing my my career.
Kaila Tova 35:57
That's summer innanen a body image coach, the host of fearless rebel radio.
Summer Innanen 36:02
So I, I at that time, I was working in a corporate job. And I remember it was when I turned 30 years old. And I thought I can't do this for 35 more years, I was just like, I can't, I can't do this job for 35 more years, I can't, I was like selling chocolate not selling chocolate bars I was working for I was working for Cadbury, like the corporate office and I was managing the relationship with la blondes, which is one of the biggest retailers in, in Canada and and I just was like I was just done with the whole, you know, just pushing products and caring about pricing and just trying to sell more stuff. And but I didn't know what else to do with myself. And at the time. That was when I was quite obsessed and disordered as it relates to my relationship with with fitness and food. That was when I was like really heavily into paleo, I was really heavily into CrossFit. And I remember having a conversation with a girl that I went to the gym with. And she said that she was pursuing a career as a nutritionist, and I thought, hey, Wow, that sounds like something that I might be interested in doing too. And I just started to you know, pay attention to other people who were nutritionists and the online world. And I think, you know, it gives off this really kind of fairy tale of what your life could be like, if you became a successful, you know, nutritionist or coach or somebody in that in that sphere, it seemed like a really attractive thing to do. And in an aligned with my ideologies, I was so obsessed with the stuff myself, I was like, wow, I can make a career out of this. And so I, you know, went back to school and became a nutritionist. And I did that for a couple years. A few years. You know, I started, I started my own business seven years ago, and I quit the corporate world five years years ago. So you know, I've been I've been doing this for for a while. And then obviously, I mean, you know my story. So I shouldn't say obviously, because other people listening may not but you know, when I realized my issues with food and exercise, and I realized how disordered it was. That's when I pulled back on coaching people around food and nutrition and went back to become a life coach.
Kaila Tova 38:30
for summer for Christina, for Amy, for Carrie, leaving the corporate world in favor of a body based business felt like the right decision. And for these women, it's opened up pathways to financial success, social capital, and better emotional and physical health. In the next couple of episodes, we're going to explore the pros and cons of turning to a food fitness or body image based profession in lieu of a more corporate path. And we're going to ask why this path is no longer the road less traveled. We're also going to talk about money, but not just about the gender pay gap. I mean, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably already know about it. No, we're going to talk about the ways that investments of capital actually affect the way that we create identity. But to put a button on this episode, I suppose we have to ask if you did drop out because of motherhood, health or gender issues in the workplace. Is it really worth it to go back?
Christina Kish 39:26
We haven't been in the corporate in a corporation for a while now. But from what I've seen just from the outside looking in, because I try to keep my finger on the pulse because I don't know exactly what the future holds for me. I try to keep my finger on the pulse. It's like, could I go back into this? What would it be like? And boy, I just don't see anything that changed since I was there. I don't know about this.
Kaila Tova 39:55
Christina isn't wrong. Even though the focus on the pay gap and hashtag me too and women in STEM and leaning in has intensified over the last several years. Women's collective ability to succeed just hasn't changed all that much. So we look to alternative income streams like health coaching and yoga instruction because success in the patriarchal system just doesn't happen for a lot of women. So I'll give Carrie the last word,
Carrie Ingoglia 40:22
I guess is that my vision of success will look different and that you know, I will stay dropped out to some extent.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai