No More Menemies: Gender Equality, Bias and Better Leadership on The Six Sells Podcast. Why gender equality needs men as well as women in the conversation. In this episode of The Six Sells Podcast, Mike Nicholson speaks with Lori Meakin, founder and CEO of The Others & Me and author of No More Menemies, about gender equality, the growing sense of conflict between men and women, the biases that shape how we judge each other, and how businesses, brands and society can create change that works better for everyone.
Episode summary:
Lori Meakin's starting point for No More Menemies is that gender equality should not be treated as a zero-sum game in which progress for women automatically means loss for men. Drawing on the research behind her book and conversations with men, she argues that lasting change requires men to be part of the conversation rather than simply being told what they are doing wrong.
Lori explains how she approached gender inequality almost as she would an advertising strategy brief. First, understand the real problem rather than relying only on personal experience. Then understand the people whose behaviour or attitudes need to change, including what they already value, want and worry about.
The conversation explores unconscious gender bias and the ways the same behaviour can be judged differently depending on whether it comes from a man or a woman. Lori discusses gender-coded ideas around leadership, confidence, empathy, care, competitiveness and vulnerability, as well as the complicated interaction between biology, social conditioning and the way society rewards particular behaviours.
Mike and Lori also discuss boys and young men, Andrew Tate and the wider manosphere. Lori's view is that many young men arrive at this content looking for answers to reasonable questions about how to succeed professionally, socially and romantically. The challenge is to offer better answers rather than simply telling them what not to consume.
The episode finishes by bringing those ideas back into advertising, media and leadership. Lori argues for evaluating leaders according to qualities such as emotional intelligence, empathy, coachability and collaboration, while also explaining the work WACL is doing to accelerate gender equality across the industry.
Topics discussed include:
• Lori Meakin's career from teaching and advertising strategy to founding The Others & Me
• Why Lori wrote No More Menemies
• Why gender equality should not be treated as a zero-sum game
• The role of data, lived experience and qualitative research in understanding gender
• How unconscious gender bias can affect the way people judge identical behaviour
• Why masculine-coded and feminine-coded qualities are valued differently
• The relationship between biology, social conditioning and gendered behaviour
• Why women can experience a double bind around confidence and assertiveness
• The difference between masculine-coded and feminine-coded conversational styles
• Why some boys and young men are attracted to Andrew Tate and the manosphere
• How brands and content creators could give men better answers to questions about success, identity and relationships
• Why empathy, vulnerability and collaboration can be framed as strengths rather than losses
• How protective instincts and competitiveness might be redirected towards positive outcomes
• Whether advertising and media have made as much progress on female leadership as people sometimes assume
• The leadership qualities Lori believes organisations should actually promote and reward
• WACL's work on leadership, women's health, flexible working, career progression and safer workplace cultures
Why did Lori Meakin write No More Menemies?
Lori Meakin wrote No More Menemies because she wanted to understand why more men do not actively support gender equality when, in her reading of the evidence, greater equality can benefit men as well as women.
Rather than starting from the assumption that men simply need to be told to change, Lori approached the subject like a strategy problem. She wanted to understand gender inequality using data, identify the people who can help create change and then understand what motivates those people.
That meant bringing men into the audience for the conversation. Lori argues that a more gender-equal world cannot be created if only women are actively trying to create it.
Her research therefore looked not only at women's experiences but at what men want from their professional, social and personal lives, and how gender equality might help them achieve more of those things.
Why does Lori Meakin say gender equality benefits men as well as women?
Lori Meakin argues that gender equality should be framed as a shared gain rather than as men losing something so that women can gain it.
In the episode, Lori says the research she examined linked greater gender equality with benefits for men in areas including mental and physical health, relationships, economic outcomes and longevity. At the same time, she points to problems affecting men and boys, including suicide, employment, education, physical safety and social connection.
Her argument is that the existing system is not working perfectly for either gender. Treating the issue as a battle between men and women can therefore make it harder to address problems that affect both.
The central idea behind No More Menemies is that men and women do not need to see one another as enemies in a competition for a fixed amount of power, opportunity or happiness.
How can unconscious gender bias change the way we judge people?
Lori Meakin says gender bias can cause people to interpret similar behaviour differently depending on whether they believe a man or a woman is responsible for it.
She stresses that these biases are not something only men hold about women. Women can absorb the same cultural assumptions, while men can also be disadvantaged by assumptions about what men are supposed to be good at.
Lori uses examples from research she encountered while writing the book, including experiments involving music and professional performance. Her broader point is that people do not simply have different expectations. Those expectations can affect how they interpret what they see and hear.
The same mechanism can work in different directions. Society may instinctively associate professional authority or virtuosity with men, while assuming women are naturally better at areas such as childcare.
For Lori, recognising that everybody has biases and blind spots is more useful than turning the issue into another argument about which gender is judging the other more harshly.
Are differences between men and women caused by biology or social conditioning?
Lori Meakin describes gendered behaviour as the product of a complicated interaction between biology, social conditioning and the way society rewards or penalises particular behaviour.
She discusses research suggesting biological factors may have some relationship with characteristics such as nurturing behaviour or aggression, but she emphasises that boys and girls are also socialised differently from a very early age.
Lori gives the example of parents being more comfortable encouraging girls to play with masculine-coded toys than encouraging boys to play with feminine-coded toys. In her view, girls have increasingly been encouraged to adopt a wider range of traditionally masculine and feminine qualities, while the acceptable range for boys can remain narrower.
Those expectations then continue into adulthood. Women can be penalised for not appearing confident or assertive enough, while also being judged negatively when they display the same assertiveness that might be admired in a man.
That makes gender difficult to reduce to a simple question of nature versus nurture.
Why are some boys and young men drawn to Andrew Tate and the manosphere?
Lori Meakin's view is that many boys and men enter the manosphere because they are searching for answers to ordinary questions about success, relationships and identity rather than because they initially go looking for misogyny.
She says young men may be asking how to succeed professionally, how to become attractive to women, how to feel valued and how to understand their place in the world.
Figures such as Andrew Tate offer clear and highly marketable answers to those questions. Lori strongly disagrees with many of those answers and argues that the resulting worldview can harm men as well as women.
She describes a model of masculinity in which life becomes a hierarchy, men are constantly competing with one another for status and women become symbols or trophies of that success.
For Lori, one reason this content can become influential is that relatively few alternative voices are answering the original questions as clearly or effectively.
How can society give boys and men a better alternative to the manosphere?
Lori Meakin argues that boys and men need better answers to their questions rather than simply being told that the answers they have found are wrong.
For brands, media organisations and content creators, she sees an opportunity to create material that speaks directly to legitimate questions about professional success, friendship, relationships, confidence and identity while offering more constructive models of masculinity.
She also argues that qualities such as empathy, vulnerability and collaboration need to be presented as gains rather than as evidence that men are becoming less masculine.
One of Lori's ideas is to work with motivations men may already value. If competitiveness is important, for example, empathy could be framed almost as something to become exceptionally good at rather than as the opposite of competitiveness.
She makes a similar point about protectiveness. Rather than attacking men for wanting to see themselves as protectors, Lori argues that the instinct can be redirected towards challenging behaviour from other men that makes women unsafe.
The broader principle is to start with what people already value and help redirect it towards outcomes that work better for everyone.
What does Lori Meakin say makes an effective leader?
Lori Meakin argues that effective leadership is more closely associated with qualities such as emotional intelligence, empathy, coachability, self-awareness, curiosity and collaboration than with traditional ideas of toughness or dominance.
She refers to the work of organisational psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, whose research challenges the tendency to confuse confidence with competence.
Lori says that if organisations genuinely selected people according to the characteristics associated with effective leadership, more women would currently reach leadership positions because women tend to overindex in several of those qualities.
But she is careful not to argue that women are automatically better leaders. Men can possess those qualities, and women do not automatically possess them simply because they are women.
The practical opportunity is therefore to change what organisations recognise and reward as leadership. That can improve gender balance while also giving men a clearer picture of the behaviours and skills that can help them become more effective leaders.
What can advertising and media businesses do to improve gender equality?
Lori Meakin recommends starting with real data rather than assuming an organisation has already achieved gender equality because women are visible in some senior positions.
She argues that people can overestimate how balanced an industry or leadership team has become, so businesses should look directly at representation, promotions, pay, career progression and who is reaching decision-making positions.
They can then examine the qualities they reward when selecting leaders. If organisations continue to associate leadership with confidence, aggression or traditionally masculine-coded behaviour, they risk reproducing the same patterns even when they are consciously trying to become more inclusive.
For Lori, the goal should not simply be to install women in senior jobs. It should be to build cultures where the most effective leadership behaviours are recognised regardless of whether they are displayed by a man or a woman.
How is WACL trying to change leadership and workplace culture?
WACL's ambition, as Lori Meakin describes it, is for women to hold 50% of CEO positions across every part of the industry while ensuring that those women also reflect the full diversity of women in society.
Lori explains that one of WACL's five levers of change is a new language of leadership. This challenges traditional assumptions that great leaders need to be tough, dominant or aggressive and instead encourages organisations to value the behaviours that evidence suggests are more effective.
Other areas include promoting for potential rather than relying too heavily on previous career history, addressing women's health, supporting flexible working and creating workplace cultures where people can operate safely without harassment.
Lori ends with what she calls an "every little helps" approach. Every piece of content, product, service, technology and workplace conversation creates an opportunity to make things slightly better.
Her argument is that those changes do not need to benefit women at men's expense. Businesses can build stronger organisations while helping create relationships, workplaces and societies that work better for everyone.
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Full episode transcript:
Mike Nicholson: Hello and welcome to The Six Sells Podcast. My name is Mike Nicholson from Six Sells. Today I'm going to be speaking to Lori Meakin, the CEO of The Others & Me and author of the book No More Menemies. Firstly, before we get started, a big thank you to Lumen Research, the sponsor of this podcast. Lumen Research are an eye-tracking technology company that are expanding our understanding of human attention and enabling brands to plan, buy, optimise and measure according to real human attention. So thanks very much to Lumen Research. Lori, welcome to the podcast.
Lori Meakin: Thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here.
Mike Nicholson: Thank you very much for coming. I very much appreciate it. So traditionally, we start off by taking a little trip down memory lane as it relates to your career. Perhaps you could give us a bit of an idea of what you've been doing and what you're doing now at The Others & Me, please.
Lori Meakin: Yeah, absolutely. So I've had quite a long and varied career. Interestingly, what I'm doing now brings together elements of all of it. I started off as a teacher. I never quite meant to be a teacher. I meant to go into law and I almost did a couple of times. I studied jurisprudence at uni, hated it and left, almost went back to study law again. But that sense of, how do we make the world work a bit better, is something that's always driven me. And that's what I wanted to do in law, and family law in particular.
So then I was a teacher, teaching English, media studies and cultural studies. I've always been fascinated by how we understand each other and how we empathise. How do we walk around in others' shoes and just learn a bit more about who we are by learning a bit more about who other people are?
Then I decided to go into advertising, slightly on a bit of a whim, I'll tell you. I obviously presented it to the people who were interviewing me as a very strategic decision, but it just always fascinated me. So I did that and became a strategist.
Since then, I've moved around a little bit into management consultancy, brand consultancy and worked inside media organisations. I worked at the BBC for a while, founded or co-founded an agency that I very happily, absolutely loved building with my co-founders for a decade.
It's only in the last couple of years that I decided to take the next leap, which is to leave that place and go and scratch the itch that I'd been building for a while, which is to try and understand something really important, hence the book. And then I built a consultancy off the back of that to use what I'd learned.
Mike Nicholson: Okay, fabulous. So I loved the title of your book, No More Menemies. Just for those listening, I woke up about five o'clock one morning, quite bleary-eyed, looked at LinkedIn, as I always do. That's basically where I live professionally. I'm not a weirdo. Well, I am, but that's where I live professionally.
Karen Stacey, a mutual contact of ours, had shared one of your posts, and your name was familiar to me. I wasn't entirely sure why at the time, but I read your post and I thought it was really inspirational, and I really loved it.
The idea of trying to reduce the adversarial nature of almost gender wars sometimes. It's almost us against them and vice versa. And so can you give us a bit of an understanding? For those that are watching rather than listening, this is the book, No More Menemies.
Full transparency, literally last week I met Lori for the first time and we spoke for the first time on Monday, and it's now Thursday. So I haven't read the book yet, but I have researched it. Hopefully my questions will make sense. So, yeah, just full disclosure on that one.
Could you give us a bit of an idea of how long it took you to write it? What did the research process look like? I've got a little bit of experience in writing a book, and the research process sometimes is almost the longest bit because there's just so much to unpack. Why did you decide to write it in the first place, what did that research process look like, and why did you think it was an important thing to do?
Lori Meakin: Yeah. So I'm glad you like the title. It felt like I really wanted to try and get something that almost emotionally, as well as rationally, just hits at that thing that a lot of us are feeling, even if we don't articulate it.
Call it culture wars, call it gender wars, call it zero-sum game thinking, whatever you like. But this sense that men and women are locked in some kind of battle for supremacy and, if one is winning, the other must necessarily be losing, and that it's a difficult situation for everybody.
Interestingly as well, it's quite a high-stakes game. A lot of the time there's a lot of anger, there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of frustration, and I wanted to really explore that.
I've known for a long time that I love understanding things starting from data. I think lived experience and qualitative research are really, really useful, but I love having real data as well and going, what am I missing? Where are my blind spots? What does the picture actually look like?
So I'd been asking myself a question quite a few times, particularly amongst my female friends. Every so often I would go, bloody hell, the data is really clear, right? Gender equality benefits everybody. It carries real benefits to men in terms of mental health, physical health, economic success, happier relationships, better longevity, all kinds of things, even better sleep and better sex.
There's data coming out of our ears about gender equality genuinely benefiting men as well as women, and yet there's a lot of data that shows that, in some ways, we're going backwards. There's a lot of stuff that's really harming men.
So when we look at male suicide rates, male employment, how boys are doing at school, men's physical safety, et cetera, in a whole bunch of areas, it's not working for men either right now.
So gender equality works for all of us. Right now, it's damaging all of us. And I was just like, why on earth is this happening?
One of the questions I'd forever asked myself rhetorically when I was with the girls was just like, why do men not just lean in? And then, after I'd asked it in exasperation a few times, the strategist in me kicked in and was like, well, why do they?
It kind of doesn't make sense. But then we all know that smoking is not great for you and a lot of people do that. And we know that eating five a day and going to the gym is good for you, but that doesn't mean we all do it. So I shouldn't be surprised that a lot of the time we all go about doing things that aren't necessarily helping us.
I think what I thought, and it sounds a bit ridiculous to say it, but the strategist in me who's worked in advertising, media and comms for years was like, if gender equality was a brief, how would I answer it?
Once I'd started thinking that, I couldn't unthink it. So I was like, well, what I do is what I always do. The only way to actually solve a problem is to genuinely understand the problem, not what we think the problem is, because often what we think it is is not the same as what it actually is.
Then put that to one side and go, who are the people who can help create change? Who are the people we want to affect? Who's our target audience, effectively?
And I was like, well, our target audience has to be men as well as women because we can't create a more gender-equal world if only half the world is trying to do that. It's just not possible.
The principle I've always used in my work is the only way to really create change is to understand what people want, what motivates them, what they already care about. Then you kind of hack those two things together and go, right, how can we get our target audience, if you like, to get more of the stuff that they value, crave and love, and solve the problems that they have, in a way that helps us solve this business problem?
So I was like, well, if gender inequality is the equivalent of the business problem and our target audience is men as well as women, what I need to do is two things.
I need to go away and really understand the problem and not just what I think it is based on my own lived experience and the conversations I have, largely, with other women. And I need to understand men and understand what motivates them in all kinds of ways, how much they understand, but really what drives them.
Because what became really clear is most of the conversations the feminist movement has been having with or about men for years has been about telling men what they're doing wrong and how it needs to be better, identifying a system that's built to prioritise men and a male point of view.
It's not really been inviting men into the conversation and starting by going, well, what is it that men want and how do we motivate them to want to change, not just tell them that they should create change?
Mike Nicholson: You mentioned a couple of times there that sometimes you think the problem is one thing, but it's actually another thing. What did you mean by that?
Lori Meakin: I know from all of the work that I've always done, it's very easy to think that when we look at the world, we have to acknowledge that we're all partial and we're all biased and we all have blind spots. We're all likely to notice the things that confirm what we believe and not notice the things that don't.
There's also a whole bunch of stuff, as I started researching this, that I've discovered goes way deeper than I thought it did.
So, for instance, the way that we understand our bodies, our attitudes, what we think is more valuable than other things, even how we judge exactly the same behaviour when it's manifesting in one person versus another. We are incredibly partial.
So really trying to understand not just what the world feels like to me through my gendered lens, but what the bigger data picture actually says. What are behavioural economists, academics, behavioural scientists, science and technology telling us?
In the book, there's about 650 data points that I gathered from publicly available data out there in the world. There's probably twice that much that's still sitting in little files in my Google Docs.
For me, really understanding that and not just looking for what I wanted the answers to be was really important.
Mike Nicholson: It's definitely been my experience that people project their own lived experiences and thoughts and biases onto things that they see, read and hear. I obviously do it as well, but it's really hard to see it in yourself, right? So how do we get better at understanding where our own biases are so we can understand other people's points of view more clearly and fully?
Lori Meakin: Yeah, it's a really good question. I think part of it is just being aware of that and finding some compelling, interesting examples that can make us stop and think.
There are a few. One of my favourites that I often use with people as a useful start point is that there's all kinds of data and loads of experiments that have been done that show that when we, and by we I mean women as well as men, see women doing something, or who we believe to be a woman doing something, we will often value it less than when a man does it.
There are experiments about books, commentary, football and music. So I'll use the music as an example.
An orchestra, Boston Symphony, I think it is, realised that there was something weird going on with their audition technique because they knew that when you look at performance of people of different genders generally, there is not a massive performance difference between boys and girls, men and women.
But in terms of their auditions, they kept ending up overindexing on men. And so someone at the university said, why is that happening?
They did some experiments where, first of all, they said, let's do blind auditions because then we won't be projecting onto it what we think that person's like. We'll just be listening.
And still, it didn't make as much of a difference in the data as they'd expected, based on a whole load of other data and evidence that they looked at.
What they then did was ask everyone who was auditioning not just to be invisible, but also to take off their shoes as they walked into the audition.
When they did that, they ended up with a much more gender-balanced set of people who'd made it through the audition. And that's because they were so good, their hearing was so finely attuned, being musicians as well, that subliminally they were recognising the difference between a man's footstep and a woman's footstep. That was making them believe, or mark, the man's performance higher.
And we see it in all kinds of things.
The really interesting thing is women do it as well, for a start. So this is not me saying men judge women more harshly. We all do it because for centuries, for generations, we've been taught at a really fundamental level that there's a whole bunch of things in the world that men are better at.
Interestingly, in the domestic sphere, it works exactly the other way around. So we will watch a man looking after a baby and presume that he's not as good at it. Because we presume he's not as good at it, we judge the exact same reality more harshly.
That bias doesn't just make us expect different things. It makes us read exactly the same data in a different way.
Mike Nicholson: So going back to the Boston orchestra then, was that because it was one of those jobs that had predominantly been done by men historically and so people assumed, wrongly, that men would be better at it? They were subconsciously hearing the footsteps of a man and thinking, he's probably going to be better?
Lori Meakin: Yeah. There's an amazing book by Mary Ann Sieghart that I summarise a fair bit of the learnings from within my book, No More Menemies. It's called The Authority Gap, and she is one of the world authorities on this particular phenomenon.
But yeah, that is exactly what happens. It's so deep-rooted over generations and centuries that there are a bunch of things that we assume men are better at. We are so convinced that that's the case, partly, that we assume that's the case. We guess that that will be the case.
But it's so fundamental that we read exactly the same thing as if that were true.
It's interesting because it can be quite complex sometimes. Things like creativity can, in some areas, be seen as quite feminine-coded. But actually, when you get to a level of virtuosity, then it suddenly flips into masculine-coded.
For instance, the difference between a cook and a chef. A cook will be feminine-coded generally because that operates within the domestic sphere. But as soon as you take it out of that domestic sphere and into the kind of virtuoso, the creative genius is often something that we tend to code as masculine.
So it's relatively nuanced sometimes, but yeah, you're right.
Mike Nicholson: One last question on the orchestra, if you know it. What was the gender split of the interviewers, the people doing the judging on the performance?
Lori Meakin: It's an excellent question, and one of the things is no data is ever complete, is it? One of the things I find fascinating is that every bit of data that we look at raises as many questions as it answers as well.
And, as I said, a lot of this is done by women as well. So many of the data points that we look at don't gender-disaggregate the data as much as you want them to.
In this case, they're looking at gender as a question, but the studies that I have seen so far, and it may be if I go deeper I might be able to find it, don't report the gender of the panel except to talk about mixed gender and that it's the same in all genders.
Mike Nicholson: Okay. So would you expect the judgement of that performance to be different based on other data points that you have and other studies that you've seen?
Would you expect a woman to judge another woman more favourably because they felt that the woman would need that because this is a male-dominated profession? And would you expect a man to perhaps more harshly judge her because of the same reason? Or would you think across both genders they would both have the same idea in their head that this is a male-dominated thing, so men are probably better?
Lori Meakin: It's a great question. I think, first of all, if they're even asking that question, that's a helpful thing, because most of the time no one's actually asking that question and they're just not even aware that those biases exist.
The other thing is all of the data that I talk about is overlapping distribution. So it is not all men are like this and all women are like this. It's just if you're a man, you're more likely to behave in that way, and if you're a woman, you're more likely to behave in that way.
That's really important because one of the things I often get whenever I talk about any of this is that someone will say, "Yeah, but I know someone who's a bloke and he does this," or, "I know a woman..." And you're like, yes, overlapping distribution. That is always going to be the case.
What we do know generally is that when it comes to these kinds of things, often women are more likely to be more aware and to judge in a slightly less biased way.
Again, I sound like I'm biased. I would say that, wouldn't I? But I think part of the reason for that is that women are generally the out-group. Most societies have been patriarchal. There are a few matriarchal societies in the world, but not many.
And when you're the out-group, there's fascinating data that says you are generally better at understanding the full picture than you are when you're part of the in-group.
So I, as a white girl, am much less good at understanding whiteness than a person of colour because I'm in it, and I have to keep reminding myself of it.
So that's going on. Women are just more attuned to some of this stuff than men, but it doesn't make it exclusive.
There are a couple of other data points that I think are quite interesting that show the picture can be a bit mixed.
One is about children and babies. For instance, parents are much more likely to assume that their boy children, their sons, are cleverer than their daughters. They overestimate it on average by about 10 IQ points.
Mike Nicholson: Both parents?
Lori Meakin: Yeah. Both parents are likely to do that. Men are more likely to overestimate their boys' intelligence than mums are to overestimate their boys' intelligence.
But again, there's not enough evidence to be able to really dive into those variables. It's interesting to go, generally, men will tend to be even less aware of those kinds of biases and to get things in that area wrong a little bit more often than women. But who knows why that is? It may be for a whole bunch of very complex things that we've not yet pulled apart.
The other thing is, in some areas, you see the data a bit more extreme.
There's another bit of data that a lot of people I talk to find fascinating, which is a study done quite a long time ago, but there have been other studies that have found similar things in different ways.
There's a myth, and a lot of women will say, "Yeah, this is how the world feels." Is it right? In this case, it is right. Men tend to dominate conversational space much more than women.
Ironic, I've barely stopped talking.
Mike Nicholson: I was going to say!
Lori Meakin: There was this study done that looked at how much space people are actually taking up in a conversation, men and women, and how much space they think they're taking up in that conversation.
What they discovered in that study is that the women were pretty good at estimating how much space people were taking up. The men were really bad at it in this study.
Again, I think part of the reason for that is probably because public spaces have been taken up by men for centuries, for generations. We all judge things according to what feels like normal.
What's happening in public spaces now is that women are taking up a lot more space than they used to. For men, loss aversion is a very real thing. Men are much more likely to notice, and to overestimate, how much space women are taking up.
What the data says in this thing is that when they asked how much conversational space women were taking up, the men in that study thought that the women were dominating the conversation when they took up about 30% of the airtime.
And the point at which they thought it felt about equal was when women took up 15% of the conversational space, which is kind of fascinating.
Again, there's lots of reasons why that happens, but the answer, as ever, is not simple.
In some places, women are almost equally as likely to be prey to these kinds of biases. In some areas, women are much more likely to see things more clearly as a more accurate reflection of reality.
But I think the really important thing that I always come back to is this is not about men judging women more harshly or women judging men more harshly.
The really useful thing is to go, there are biases and blind spots that all of us deal with. And if we can all make an effort to try and understand that better, it would just be helpful for all of us.
Mike Nicholson: Yeah. I was listening to the Jordan Peterson interview with Cathy Newman this week, re-listening to it. I thought it was a very good interview.
He talks about the personality trait of agreeableness and disagreeableness. He said that, at a general level, and obviously every human being is different, men tend to be less agreeable and women more agreeable.
So when we put that into a career context or into a boardroom and we're having a meeting, women are less likely to want to interact and put themselves forward. Sorry, disagreeable people are more likely to do that and agreeable people less likely to do that.
If it happens that women tend to have that more agreeable personality trait, which is not a negative, if anything it's a positive, but in that setting it's going to manifest differently, right? Would you agree with that?
Lori Meakin: Yeah. Again, I wish the answer was a really simple yes or no and things like that were really binary. It is always quite complex.
But yes, the data definitely shows that women and girls are much more likely to overindex in those kinds of qualities, in qualities of empathy, emotional intelligence, putting other people first, wondering about how everybody else is thinking and feeling.
They're likely to interrupt less. They're likely to be more worried about and concerned about and careful about how everybody else is feeling than men and boys are.
As you say, there's a really interesting thing about that already, which is that as a society, we tend to undervalue those qualities.
And thank you as well for having such an open conversation. It's just beautiful.
I think society has, over the years, tended to value masculine-coded qualities more highly than feminine ones. There's a whole bunch of data that does that.
So you're right. Interestingly, those things that we talked about, emotional intelligence, being aware of other people, caring about how other people are feeling, making sure everyone else feels comfortable, there are huge positives in that that a lot of studies show, particularly around the business context as well as relationships. Men could really benefit from leaning into more of that.
But, as you say, also there are downsides to it. So if it's about not being able to assert yourself, that's really problematic.
Now, the jury is still out as to how far that is nature versus nurture.
There are some studies that show higher levels of oestrogen tend to overindex with people having more nurturing, emotionally empathetic qualities. Testosterone is more likely to overindex with more combative, confrontational approaches and aggression.
Some studies question what's chicken and what's egg in that situation, but I think the really important thing is the way we nurture and socialise boys and girls is fundamentally different.
Society takes a lot of time teaching girls to do all those things that we just talked about and teaching boys to do the opposite.
Still now, and I would have thought that things have changed quite a lot, but when you look at the data and see what's going on, there's a brilliant LEGO study that looks at masculine and feminine-coded toys.
It makes it really clear that parents, again it doesn't split out the gender, but it says it happens for all parents, are much happier encouraging their girls to play with masculine-coded toys than they are to encourage their boys to play with feminine-coded toys.
So even now, we're teaching girls that they can be assertive and confident and do all of that stuff and be empathetic, et cetera. We're still tending to keep the range of emotions, behaviours and attributes that we expect in boys a bit narrower.
But then what also happens, which I think is another thing to really layer onto this, is there's a bit of biology, there's a lot of social conditioning, but then there's what happens to people. How do you get rewarded and how does society treat you as a result of that?
Fascinatingly, when women in the workforce are expected to be more compliant, to make other people feel comfortable and feel happy, that's how we code women and girls.
When women do that, there's this weird double bind that happens. This is particularly exacerbated for women of colour.
Women are penalised for not being assertive enough. And often we overread how unassertive they are.
There's a myth that women don't ask for pay rises. Actually, a lot of data says that's not true. They tend not to get them as often, but they ask for them just as often.
There are other studies that say women actually tend to display a lot more confidence than people think they do. They don't suffer imposter syndrome at any higher rate than men. It's just we talk about it and we notice it more.
But what also definitely happens is that when women do display more confident, assertive qualities, back to what we were talking about before, we read those very differently.
So a woman will be seen to be being aggressive or a bit of a ball-breaker or a bit of a harridan if she does things that in men we read as assertive or charismatic or whatever.
Again, there's a very complex balance of nature, nurture and our reward structures and how people respond to things that are all impacting on a lot of this.
Mike Nicholson: Yeah. So if we bring it back to our industry and the structure of our companies within the industry, the brilliant Karen Stacey is the reason we met each other.
I think she's a brilliant leader. It must help. I don't work within their organisation, they're a client of ours, but from everything I've heard, it must help to bring those more feminine qualities or personality traits to the very top.
I think we're agreed, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, that women tend to be, on a general scale, more empathetic, a little bit more caring, a little bit more nurturing of people, maybe a little bit better at understanding how the other person's feeling, potentially.
Again, wide generalisation. I can give you a great example of when this happened to me and it happened to be a man.
There was a round of promotions. I didn't get one. I didn't actually go for it, but it was a round of promotions. One of the senior leaders came over to me and said, "Can I have a word? You're doing really well. Don't feel..."
I was thinking, wow, that's amazing that you even thought that I would be disappointed about that because it wasn't like I went for a job and didn't get it.
I thought that was brilliant.
But generally speaking, I think women tend to have... Well, actually, let me ask you the question because that's another thing that came out of the interview I saw with Jordan Peterson, where he said that women, again it's a generalisation and every human is unique and I'm not trying to stereotype anybody, but just have an open conversation.
Women tend to care about people more than men do on a general level and men care about things more than women do.
If I take that to a household of four, me, Karen and the kids, I love my Apple phone and my gadgets and the car and stuff like that, and Karen couldn't care less about that stuff. She's like, "I need it because I need it for work. I don't care what model it is or what flashy camera pixels it's got." And I do, right?
That's a really small sample size. But would you agree that, at a general level, that is the case?
Lori Meakin: Yeah, definitely. Again, if we go back far enough, there are fascinating studies happening now into prehistory and really early history. How natural are those gender differences and how far have they been things that have been created?
People have unearthed ancient tombs and looked at bones and burial sites and a whole bunch of things. There's a body of evidence showing that actually, if we go back far enough, there weren't the same kinds of gender differences naturally. Women would fight as well. The size difference wasn't as great. The bone density was the same.
So if we go back far enough, there's not that much difference.
But absolutely, because of years of social conditioning, we are definitely in a stage now where women tend to overindex on a lot of those qualities.
I think the really important thing is that men have those qualities as well. There are a lot of men who are brilliant at empathy, emotional intelligence, nurturing and caring, and who are interested in people, not just things.
But again, overlapping distributions mean there is definitely that tendency.
That's why there are some really fascinating ways that it manifests. I think if we get quite practical, because it's so easy to get fascinated by the scale of this stuff, but if you go really practically in the comms industry or in business generally, one of the ways that manifests is men tend to have a different conversational model to women, which is really interesting.
Men will often have what's called shoulder-to-shoulder conversations, whereas women tend to have more face-to-face conversations.
Mike Nicholson: I must tell you, because I thought about you on Tuesday evening. I coach an under-sevens football team, and Angel, my assistant, and I went for a pint afterwards.
The Liverpool game was on telly, and we were sat side by side on a bench with a pint each, looking at the football, talking to each other. And I thought, oh my goodness, this is what Lori's talking about.
Lori Meakin: Exactly. So, side-by-side conversations, and there's often a thing that you're talking about. The classic is two guys sitting next to each other in a bar with a pint watching the football or something. That's how men feel more comfortable talking.
That's got interesting implications for, for instance, therapy. We know mental health is a big issue for men and they're much less likely to seek help for it.
Again, there are some interesting conversations going on around therapy that say one of the problems might be that the therapist model imposes a conversation model on men that they're not comfortable with in any regard, and so that may just make an additional extra barrier.
So there are all kinds of therapists going, how do we design therapy for men in a way that meets them where they are and starts with side-by-side conversations while you're doing something rather than trying to impose the more feminine model on that conversation, which is generally a model of, are we further together or further apart or closer together? How are we understanding each other?
That's a natural model.
Fascinatingly, I think for comms as well, that even plays out in things like humour.
If you understand banter, banter is a very masculine-coded conversational model. That's because it's often about sitting side by side, looking at something.
Often it also has this kind of who's up, who's down, who's winning, who's losing. We code boys to be competitive. Who's alpha, who's beta? That even manifests in a conversation, in the way we think about humour.
A more feminine-coded humour might, for instance, be something like Ted Lasso, I think is a brilliant example, or Schitt's Creek, or some of those big Emmy Award-winning shows.
Not just their subject matter, but the actual conversational model and the kind of humour that they use is technically more feminine-coded than masculine.
We don't see as much of that as we could. It's a huge opportunity for brands and content creators to lean into some of that.
Mike Nicholson: Yeah. If I go to the opposite end of that spectrum, I've mentioned Jordan Peterson a few times, Andrew Tate, possibly the polar opposite of what you've just explained there.
But he's getting huge audiences of young men who are feeling a little bit, not worthless, but a little bit disenfranchised and they don't really know what their place is in the world anymore.
What are your thoughts or your findings through the study for the book on that?
Lori Meakin: It is impossible to have a conversation about gender without Andrew Tate coming up.
There are a few things that I think are really important. Again, I'll tell you what's my opinion and what's the data showing.
I said I studied law. I'm a very firm believer in, I will not comment on his legal situation at all because I'm a very firm believer that we must uphold the principle that somebody is innocent until proven guilty.
So I'm not going to have trial by media. What any of us can think is up to us, but I'm not going to get drawn into whether he is guilty of the crimes or not. I'm going to leave that to the courts.
The court system is problematic, but again, I'm just going to park that for a minute.
What I will talk about is the cultural impact of him and his content.
You're right. There are two things. What he's most famous for, I guess, is his misogyny.
One thing that's really important for us to understand about that is that most of the men who follow Andrew Tate don't go there for the misogyny. They end up being radicalised by the content that he creates and by the algorithms that serve it up.
As you said, what a lot of the men who I talk to who will skirt around and consume what's often referred to as the manosphere are going there for a couple of really important reasons.
One is they go, I want to get on in life. I've got ambitions and I don't really know how to get on in life.
It feels like it can be quite difficult, especially if you're a straight white man, to even say that out loud sometimes because people are telling me that I've got too much privilege and straight white men have had an unfair advantage for too long.
So part of what's driving them is professional. How do I thrive professionally?
Part of what's driving them is a desire to be, if they're straight, how do I get a girl? How do I be what girls want me to be?
I always say to people that the questions that are driving men are fundamentally reasonable and positive.
They're the same questions that we all ask of ourselves. How do I get on? How do I thrive socially, professionally, romantically, whatever it might be?
Now, the answers he gives men are horrific in my opinion, and there's a lot of data that says quite how they're horrific.
The thing that we don't talk about enough is, we talk a lot about how horrific his misogyny is and the very real impact it has, as well as the world of pornography, which is a million miles away from where pornography was for anyone of my generation.
The lack of consent, the aggression, the abuse that's being normalised and consumed by really young boys and girls. There's a load of stuff going on that's really damaging to women and girls. Sex crime, sexual abuse, it's a horrific problem, way bigger than most people think it is.
But the thing that gets talked about even less is the impact of what Tate sells on men themselves.
They are being radicalised not just into misogyny, but also into a kind of vision of the world that's back to that thing I just talked about. It's like a pyramid. It's like The Hunger Games, is what we're selling men and boys, and we have done for centuries.
Life is a rat race. You have to compete with everybody else. You need to get up, you need to push other people down in order to get there.
The competition in life is to get as close to the top of the pyramid as you can, and the only way to do that is to fight other people, literally or metaphorically, to get yourself up to the top.
When you look at it through that lens, interestingly, the misogyny is almost like collateral damage and trophies in this project of masculinity.
Mike Nicholson: Which is, are you the Top G or not? Are you the alpha or are you beta? Are you a simp?
Lori Meakin: Tate, sorry. Oh my God, this is two days after Trump just got made president again, so I'm sure we'll come on to him.
But what those guys are selling is really damaging men as well because it is selling this idea that women are something that you possess and can abuse, or that you possess and become your trophies for success in life.
And what matters in life is you defeating other men or looking impressive to other men.
That's really unhelpful because it does a ton of damage to a lot of boys' mental health, their social skills, their ability to admit vulnerability, their ability to help each other and connect.
Again, when we go back to all that stuff where we say men aren't already great at being able to talk to each other and go, "How are you doing? How are you actually feeling? Are you really okay?"
It ignores the fact that actually to really thrive, we all need to work together.
Life is not a zero-sum game. Again, this bit is not my opinion. There's a huge amount of data that says the more we collaborate, particularly across genders, in relationships, in businesses, in societies, at state level, at national level, the more gender-equal we are and the more gender-balanced we are, the happier everyone is, the healthier everyone is and the better off everybody is.
So what Tate is selling men is damaging men as much as it's damaging women.
Mike Nicholson: Yeah, for sure. So how do we change men then, and boys?
You're right, men don't seem to, and again it's a generalisation, but men don't tend to open up about the bad things that are going on in their life.
Everyone has challenges. They tend not to talk to too many other people about that. They just kind of bear the cross, off we go.
"How are you?"
"I'm fine."
"Yeah, you're all right?"
"Yeah, yeah, I'm good. Not too bad."
And that's the end of it. Then let's talk about what the football match is or what's going on in sport or something else.
If you're a young man or a boy and you're seeing Andrew Tate, and that's probably the best advice you're getting because you're not asking anybody else about anything, you're finding your way through social media and you've got people like that that you're basically listening to.
You're probably spending more face time with Andrew Tate than you have with your dad in terms of proper, real conversations.
How do we change that? How do we get boys and men to open up and talk more?
Lori Meakin: I think there are a few things.
One is we need to give them some better answers to the questions than the likes of Tate are serving up.
I think there's a massive opportunity. In a vacuum, the bad agents will fill that space. He's doing brilliantly and he's a brilliant marketer as well. He's got a brilliant business model. He's very good at knowing how to sell it.
But there are very few people who are offering an alternative.
So I think the first thing is anybody who makes content, thinks about audiences, we need to create stuff that answers those really legitimate questions that men have about how do I thrive professionally, socially, romantically, sexually, and gives them better, more positive answers than Tate.
It's much easier to give something as an alternative than it is to say, don't do that.
I think a second thing is, and this goes back to some of those superiority myths that we were talking about, we need to position some of the things at the moment that men and boys aren't doing as gains and not losses.
What I mean by that is even language is fascinating.
A lot of the time, what men are hearing is that women want to emasculate men. They want to teach them to be more like women.
And they see that as a loss. They see it as a lack. It's like we are being curtailed and all these wonderful things about who we are that we want to feel proud about, we're being told that they're evil and that they're bad and that we've got to be more like women.
Now, importantly, if we go back to those conversations we had where we immediately see things like empathy and vulnerability and softness as inferior to toughness, confidence, aggression and fighting, it's no wonder men are hearing that what we're selling them is, can you please be a bit inferior in your worldview because we're trying to take away the thing that you see as powerful and turn you into something else?
I think that's fascinating because that's not how feminism felt for women over generations.
What women felt, and again, if you make it really practical, you go, most of the time, most people that I've talked to and most studies that exist, if a little girl starts playing football, most people will go, that's really cool. Great. Go her.
Mike Nicholson: Yeah, she should be allowed to do that. That's brilliant.
Lori Meakin: Girls being able to take part in things that were traditionally seen as masculine-coded, we all kind of go, that's brilliant.
Partly that's because she's not having to do that instead. She's allowed to do gymnastics and football.
But it's also because in that instance, we value football much more than we value gymnastics. So we go, oh great, effectively she's doing superior stuff, and we should allow girls to do that.
Now, when you look at it the other way around and go, if a boy wants to do gymnastics or wants to do ice dance or wants to do ballet, those things that are coded feminine, even though boys do them as well, we see that as a kind of inferior thing as a society.
I'm not talking about you and me. I mean in an incredibly deep-rooted way.
So it feels like what we're selling men is, A, please can you change and be ashamed of the things that you are? And B, we're trying to sell you something that you think is inferior.
That's a real problem.
What we need to do is two things, I think.
Mike Nicholson: Going back to your advertising strategy briefing.
Lori Meakin: Exactly. What we do there is, one, we need to go with the flow, start with where men are, and instead of telling them that they need to change, we use some of the things that they're already proud of but slightly redirect those.
One, for instance, I started off by going, actually, this is a really interesting thing as I started interviewing men, as I did for the book, because a lot of the book is a qualitative debrief of my conversations with men.
The idea that empathy is a really valuable thing. If men have been coded all their lives to see life as a competition, telling them not to be competitive and making them ashamed of their competitiveness is not going to be effective, right?
We can talk about what separately, if you like, but I'm like, how do we make things effective?
So I would go, the advertising strategy would be, okay, how do you use competitiveness but slightly redirect it?
I was like, right, if empathy was an Olympic sport, men would suddenly be brilliant at it, most of them, because you've immediately gamified it. You reward it. You work with the things that men already tend to overindex in and are proud of.
Because I think giving men things to be proud of is really helpful. At the moment, a lot of what they're hearing, even if it's not always what we're saying, is you should be ashamed of all the things that are coded masculine.
Another example is protectiveness.
I spend a lot of time following things that a woman and a person of my generation wouldn't normally follow because I think it's really important to understand and get out of the echo chamber that I'm in.
Protectiveness is something that's a really powerful motivator for men. They want to protect.
Meanwhile, the other part of the world that I live in more naturally, a lot of women are going, do you know what, dude? Men are spending a lot of time trying to protect women without noticing that the thing that you're trying to protect us from is you.
Not you personally, again, each man, but the biggest threat to women's safety is actually other men.
Men then hear that as an attack and it's just like, oh my God, you've chosen the bear rather than me. You must hate me. All that kind of stuff.
Mike Nicholson: For those that don't know, the bear rather than me?
Lori Meakin: Yeah. So this was a thing that was huge on social media where somebody asked somebody, if you had to choose between being alone in the woods with a bear or with a man that you don't know, which would you choose?
A phenomenal amount of women choose the bear.
There's a whole bunch of reasons why they do that, but for the purpose of this conversation, I think what's really fascinating...
Mike Nicholson: It wasn't Paddington Bear, was it?
Lori Meakin: It wasn't Paddington Bear, no. And you weren't allowed to ask any qualifying questions.
But I think there are two things.
One is that men vastly underestimate and don't realise just how much danger women are in as the result of the behaviours of some men.
It's not the majority of men, but the majority of sexual offences, the majority of harm that is done to women is performed by men.
Again, it's way over 90% of sex crime, et cetera. Violent crime, whether the victim is male or female, is committed by men.
So women want to be protected, or they want to be safer, rather.
What women tend to be saying is, if a guy really wants to protect us, can you protect us from the men who are causing us harm?
Men, meanwhile, are saying the role of protector is something I feel really proud of, and that's a valuable thing. But they're not sure how to direct that because they hear all this stuff going on about men being much more likely to be perpetrators of abuse and it feels like an accusation.
We haven't taught men and women to have better conversations about it.
So I go, one of the things we can do in a very practical sense is, how do we teach men how to use some of those protective instincts that they have, but use them to fight back against the likes of Andrew Tate rather than trying to fight back against feminism?
Because it's not feminism that's actually causing the problems.
So it's that kind of thing, just redirecting the things that men are proud of or want to be proud of, but redirecting them in a way that is actually positive and useful for all of us.
Mike Nicholson: Okay. Bringing it back, I feel like I could speak to you for another two hours at least, but we have other things to do, sadly.
Bringing it back to our industry then, I think we both agree that as an industry we've done quite well at putting women in the most senior role, which has to help, right?
It's much easier to be something if you've seen it. Like the five-minute mile or four-minute mile, whatever it was. Nobody thought it was possible, it can't be done. It's done once and then loads of people do it.
Women as CEOs, I don't know what the numbers are, you probably do, but it seems that across media agencies and media owners there's a lot of female CEOs, which is good, right?
Lori Meakin: Yeah, not as many as we think, interestingly.
Mike Nicholson: Is that right?
Lori Meakin: Yeah. Again, back to that point about the 30%.
We tend to generally assume that when about 30% of any industry or board or exec or whatever is female, we tend to think that that's pretty much there, almost 50/50.
Part of that is things like the 30% Club existed for ages. But we tend to read it as almost half and half, where actually men still tend to outnumber women about two to one in most, on average, across the industry.
There are pockets where actually there are more women than men. There are others where women are virtually nowhere.
Across the industry as a whole, it's about 17% at the moment when we look at advertising, comms, marketing, brands and media owners.
But in advertising, in agency land, it's generally a bit better. Media and creative, it's 30-something per cent, I think, the figure.
But we've come a long way over the years, for sure.
Mike Nicholson: I know a lot of the things that you talk about are trying to give people ideas or practical things that they can actually put into place.
Maybe we could finish with a little bit of advice on what individuals can do, whether they be men or women, and what organisations can do to perhaps help us move in the right direction.
Lori Meakin: Yeah. There's one thing I think that's really helpful. Well, actually two things.
One thing I'm going to say is look at the actual data.
Again, back to our point about in any industry, in any company, it's really easy for us to think we know what the picture is, and actually to get proper, robust data is just enormously helpful.
Know whether you are in a company or in a sector where women are making up the majority of the promotions or the majority of the people on the board, or the minority, or something in between.
And again, just be aware that sometimes, a lot of the time, we tend to think we've come further than we have.
That's the first thing.
But the really practical thing you can do, there's a guy called Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic who I absolutely love, who's an academic, and he does a lot of work around leadership qualities.
What are the most effective ones and how does that play out across different genders?
Again, this comes back to a theme we've been talking about quite a lot.
What he finds in his data is that a whole bunch of those things that we talked about earlier are proven to be the most effective leadership qualities.
Things like emotional intelligence and empathy. Something he calls coachability, which is the instinct to go, hang on a minute, maybe I'm not perfect. What have I missed? Is that right?
Which we often code as self-doubt or imposter syndrome, and actually it's an incredibly valuable leadership quality.
Curiosity.
Every screw-up in the history of the world has probably been preceded by someone being overconfident, going, no, I've got this.
Those things can be incredibly valuable.
Collaboration. Having a clear vision that you can rally people around and get a team feeling like they want to work together.
He's mapped out what are the most effective leadership qualities according to the data.
Then he says, fascinatingly, if we were to promote as a pure meritocracy, just on the quality of those characteristics, 70% of leaders right now would be women.
Because, as we said before, women tend to overindex in those things, maybe slightly for biological reasons, but mostly probably because of social conditioning.
Now, I think there are a couple of really important things about that.
One is that 30% of those would be men. And I would go, if we can have more men in leadership being men who display those qualities, that would be super helpful.
And not all women display those qualities.
Sometimes I get torn apart by trolls for daring to say that not every woman in leadership is someone who embodies those more feminine-coded qualities that are incredibly effective.
Mike Nicholson: I've known women in the industry that would be quite the opposite of that. You would say that. Harridans and ball-breakers, I think you'd refer to them as, quite masculine in their personality traits.
Lori Meakin: Yeah. And I grew up in the era of Thatcher. I was a young girl in the era of Thatcher.
If you look at organisations like the Met Police, Cressida Dick was the leader at a time where, when you look at the report of the institutionalised misogyny as well as racism and homophobia, you are not guaranteed to have a thriving culture just by having a woman CEO.
It depends what qualities and values she brings.
But I go, there's a really simple answer to a lot of these problems when it comes to leadership.
If you promote people according to those proven effective leadership qualities, you are going to solve a whole load of problems all at once.
You're going to get a better gender balance because right now, because of the way we code gender into people and behaviour into people, women overindex in those qualities.
You're also going to get more effective because you are promoting on the basis of the most effective leadership qualities.
But something else really important happens as well, which is you give men a vision of what they can do to thrive and to get promoted and to do well.
What we're saying to men is not, you're discounted from this conversation just because you're a man.
What we're saying is, if you're a man who wants to thrive in a really effective business and in society the way that it is now, here's what you need to do.
You need to really be proud of and develop your emotional intelligence, your ability to have self-doubt and to ask other people in, to collaborate.
If you do all of those things, that's how you can thrive.
And it stops it being, right back to where we started, this kind of menemies mindset where we're like, we've got a little piece of pie, we've got to share it out, and then we need to get more women in there.
Then the men feel disgruntled because they feel like they don't even have a chance.
Then the likes of Tate can take that and use it and weaponise that as if women are the enemy.
Men are assuming that the women who get there are only there because they've been given a free pass just because they're a woman.
Meanwhile, the women are furious because they know there's all kinds of barriers they needed to overcome, that they've had to work even harder than most men have to get to that position.
You just get past all of that by going, this is what great leadership looks like.
Right now, women overindex in those qualities, so let's start teaching boys to be prouder of those qualities and better at that stuff because it's really valuable.
Let's encourage that in our leaders. Let's promote for that and let's reward that.
And you'd suddenly make a huge difference.
Mike Nicholson: I said that was the last thing, but maybe one last thing that came to my mind there. How is WACL helping with that?
I know you and Karen Stacey are heavily involved in WACL. What's the mission for WACL and how are you helping the women in our industry, but perhaps both genders?
Lori Meakin: Yeah, great question.
Our ambition is to have 50% of CEOs across every bit of the industry, all of the different sectors, be women. So it's proportionate to the population.
Importantly within that, we reflect the full diversity of women because we know, again, women who look like me get disproportionate advantage and a lot fewer systemic barriers than women who may walk around in a less white and less middle-class body and life.
So that's what we're trying to get to.
One of the things is we've got five levers of change that we talk about.
The first one we call new language of leadership, and that is exactly these kinds of things that I've been talking about.
Until very recently, and still in most businesses, we tend to assume that the model of what great leadership looks like is one that's based on a whole load of assumptions from the past and a whole load of language about being ballsy and being tough and being a killer.
That's not what makes the most effective leadership.
It prioritises masculine qualities and it makes it more likely for us to promote men into those positions who don't have the most effective qualities.
And it makes us more likely to either encourage those in women, which is not what we're wanting to be doing, or to penalise women for either not having it or having too much of it.
So that's our first pillar, our first lever of change, new language of leadership.
The other really important thing to say is there are other systemic things that we need to address.
Promote for potential is one, where we go, at the moment we have a system where women, for instance, are much more likely to be the ones who take time off their career to be the primary carer.
That creates a leadership and pay gap which is then exacerbated as we go through life because when women do come back to work, we tend to promote and pay people based on what they did previously.
As soon as you start doing that, you're exacerbating a divide that already exists and it never really closes.
We also look at things like be a women's health hero, because women's bodies are different from men's and that doesn't mean we're less able.
It just means that actually in some ways there are superpowers about that.
But we need to take account of things like periods and endometriosis and menopause and just make sure that those aren't creating unnecessary barriers for women.
Flexible working is another one.
And then we say, work like the world is watching, which is about creating safe cultures where people can be themselves without having to face things like sexual harassment.
So we do #timeTo, an industry initiative that we helped to set up, along with Represent Me.
That's another part of our work that goes, the industry has a disproportionate power to affect change.
This is where I love to end on this because I think it's where WACL and my work come together again, in all kinds of ways as well.
But there's a lot to change, right? We could talk for hours about it. We've barely scratched the surface.
Sometimes that can feel really overwhelming.
But I think what's really interesting is, if we adopt an every little helps strategy, every single bit of content we create, every product and service that we sell, every piece of tech that we develop, every conversation that we have, is an opportunity to do it in a way that creates a better economy, business, society and relationships for men as well as women, and to solve all of these problems.
Every single one of these things is an opportunity for businesses and brands and content makers to do things better.
And the data is all really, really clear that if we do that, businesses get a competitive advantage.
Mike Nicholson: Fabulous. I've really enjoyed this.
I wish we had longer because, as you say, we've just scratched the surface.
The book, for those watching, I'm going to hold it up, No More Menemies. I'm going to read it. I haven't yet. I apologise. But I only found out about it a week ago, so I think I could be excused.
Lori Meakin: I always feel like an English teacher again when people are apologising for not...
Mike Nicholson: Yeah. Sorry, miss. Sorry, miss. Please don't write "see me" in my book.
But thank you so much for your time. It's been a really lovely conversation and thanks for being on The Six Sells Podcast.
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