#1249 Melissa Shew: Women and Intellectual Joy

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricard Lops, and today I'm joined by a return guest, Dr. Melissa Chu. She's associate director of Teaching Excellence at Marquette University, where she's also the faculty director of their executive MBA program. And in our first conversation together with Dr. Kimberly Garcher, we talked about their book Philosophy for Girls. I will be leaving the link to it in the description, and today we're going to talk about women and intellectual joy. So Dr. Xu, welcome back to the show. It's always a pleasure to talk with you.

00:40 Melissa Shew: Thank you so much for having me, not once but twice.

00:44 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and I hope 3 times or even more. So let's

00:49 Melissa Shew: see. Sounds good to

00:50 Ricardo Lopes: me. OK, so I mean, before we get into the main topic here, which is women and intellectual joy, to pick on something that we we actually touched on a little bit in our first conversation. What do we know about discrimination and bias against women in academia?

01:13 Melissa Shew: So, thank you for that question. Excuse me. As a lifelong academic myself at this point, I'm, of course, naturally inclined to be interested in issues occurring in academia. And I will say that there are a lot of people doing great work on gender-related issues in academia. So, The state of things is, as you might imagine, not great. There's the appearance that things are getting better all the time in academia, and in reality, they're not, even though women are earning over half of PhDs across disciplines these days. We still don't see gender equity reflected in, uh, positions of leadership. And coming out of COVID, we actually see that research productivity is down even more than it was in terms of the difference between men and women researching. So research productivity is down an additional 7% for women in relation to their male counterparts post-COVID, and that's research coming out of 2023. We also see an increase in invisible labor for emerging women leaders in higher education. This is a point of, I think, acute frustration for many women in academia, and I'd say for, uh, the organizations in which they find themselves employed because this invisible labor is crucial to help. Uh, UNIVERSITY run, and yet, it doesn't seem to be valued in terms of pay, access to leadership, and so on. So, we have some research studies coming out of 2023, 2023, showing that invisible labor has, in fact, increased for women academics. And we can imagine how this is the case as Universities have to be leaner and operate more with less in our times. This labor gets taken on by a lot of faculty who aren't necessarily accustomed to doing that sort of labor. Additionally, could you,

03:09 Ricardo Lopes: could you give us examples of invisible labor for people who might not be familiar with it?

03:15 Melissa Shew: Absolutely. So invisible labor. Refers to work that is unseen or undervalued. And when it comes to women, in particular, this tends to mean labor that is crucial for an organization or household to run, that is not in fact valued in terms of merit, performance reviews, annual reviews, or in many other ways. So, invisible labor can take a couple of different shapes. We have, for example, cognitive labor, that is the labor it takes to coordinate kind of mentally all the moving pieces in a household or within a department. We have emotional labor that is taking on the relational aspects of a job that aren't necessarily in someone's job description. And what this amounts to is The state where invisible labor is crucial for an organization to run, and yet doesn't tend to count at all for someone's actual job. So, invisible labor is on the rise for women in academia for a variety of Reasons, and this is an acute problem. There are some studies coming out of 2023 showing that there remain gender barriers and expectations for women to perform this invisible labor that, again, is crucial for universities to run, but is not in fact recognized as such. I'll add an additional note here that there is a theory called congruency theory, which I think plays a role as well. So, congruency theory says that if someone is expected to act a certain way, then they are judged by their performance on abiding what that expectation is, and when they break from that, they are punished. So, for example, women still, regardless of What we might think in terms of being more open-minded about women, the expectation for women is that women will be relational, nurturing, and caring. This is also expected in academia. And women, when women break from those norms, They are punished much more than men breaking from the norms expected of them. So, I think that that also is part of this invisible labor piece as well, because it means that women are more constrained in how they need and want to act. One additional point is that there are a number of studies showing that women academics, particularly faculty members, and particularly women of color, do a lot of invisible labor when it comes to caring for students, mentoring students, being a sounding board for students. So, if we think about, for example, the work it takes to advise students, you might have a certain number of students in your advising load as a faculty member, but that tends to increase dramatically with unofficial advising by women faculty members and especially women of color.

06:15 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh, DID you have any other points that you wanted to add to this, uh, this topic because I interrupted you to tell us more about invisible labor.

06:28 Melissa Shew: So thank you for that. There are a few other barriers that I'd like to point out that are points of concern and sometimes concentrated effort for women in academia. One, which is fairly common to anyone is bias in student experiences of teaching, sometimes called course evals. And so gender bias is pervasive. There are some studies that have been done to show that when that bias is mitigated, sometimes with contextualized language to students to say, hey, just so you know, right? Your responses might be gendered in some way. When that language appears, then sometimes the bias in those evaluations goes down. Um, BUT that bias is still there. As a result, some universities have chosen to throw out student evaluations or student experiences of teaching from promotion and tenure concerns. Personally, I don't think that that's The right approach, even though I understand it. I think that student experiences should be part of a holistic review of a faculty member, but we do need to, uh, take some steps to eliminate or reduce this gender bias. And then just a few other points I make about academia, um, if you don't mind. One is, I think that we're also seeing a change in terms of the roles that department chairs play in universities. Department chairs, I I think used to hold a little bit more leadership and vision value. And now, in terms of organizational structures, they tend to be seen more as managers. So, we're seeing more women take the role of department chair, but the power that used to come with an influence that used to come with being a department chair doesn't necessarily transfer over as well. Finally, I'll say that like any other organization, And universities tend to have a good amount of what are called ERGs or BRGs. So, these are employee resource groups or business resource groups that tend to care about certain kinds of populations. I would say that as a good in an organization, ERGs do provide some value, but what ends up happening sometimes is when you have an ERG for, say, mothers or for the LGT LGBT. QIA plus populations, or, say, black academics or any other kind of identity, what happens is sometimes those people get pushed to the side and don't have as much of a voice as they would. So, I would say that this is another way that we see some gender biases and challenges in academia, because what it should be is that these resource groups are funded and have voice and have influence at the organizations that they're part of.

09:16 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, that's all very interesting, and you know, I just wanted to comment that I find it really fascinating and interesting. I mean interesting from a purely intellectual perspective because actually from a more moral or political perspective it's actually kind of worrying, but I don't know if you're aware of this, but there are people in academia who in recent years have been pushing for this sort of Feminization of academia sort of narrative where they say that over the course of the past few decades with more and more girls and women entering into academia, which, I mean, I just assumed that was something good, but they, they say that because of that there was this what they call feminization of academia in the sense that they think that women, because when, when they get into academia, women push more for things like, for example, equity, justice, empathy than a pursuit of truth, and I mean. Uh, I, I don't see any evidence of that because I mean I talk with, uh, women academics all the time and I don't see any relevant difference in terms of how they conduct their scientific research or philosophical research or research in any other kind of academic domain and also, I mean, I think that even if there were such differences. Uh, I mean, so what, I mean, first of all, that doesn't tell us anything about where they come from, because I mean it could be just from socialization and many of the people who are pushing for this narrative are actually arguing on the grounds of them being biological differences, but I, I mean, where, where is the Evidence for that. I mean, it could just be socialization and women tend to be socialized to be more nurturing, more empathetic, more and caring more about, I, I guess other people in general than men tend to be, but that's a result of socialization and then, I mean, even if there were those, let's say cognitive differences between men and women. I mean, I just see it as something positive to have more uh variety in academia because I mean, I guess that more cognitive variety, not just, I mean, differences in terms of Even personality between people, but also having more cultural variety, people coming from different cultural backgrounds, uh, is just better for, I mean, we produce better knowledge if we have people with a wider variety of perspectives. So, uh, and I mean, and all of this, not even considering the fact that. Uh, I mean, when women started entering academia, they have, and even nowadays, as with all the evidence you presented there, women have more obstacles to getting to, uh, I, I mean, to reaching a higher level of education. Also in pursuing um research or or trying to get into a tenure track career in terms of being professors and so on. So I, I mean I don't understand. I mean in a way I understand, I mean it's the sort of a manifestation of the. Typical conservative views that we tend to see and more traditional views that we tend to see in society, but on the other hand, I mean, particularly this kind of narrative coming from some academics themselves, I mean, it, it really seems weird to me. Uh, WHAT are your thoughts on that?

13:26 Melissa Shew: Thank you for all of that. I agree that it seems weird, and I think it seems weird in this case because it is weird, and I think it's a whole lot of cultural traditions and histories kind of coming home to roost. So, as you were talking, I was thinking about how the perceived value of higher education itself right now, now, granted, I'm in the United States, it's a little bit different, especially right now, but the perceived value of a higher education. HAS changed a lot in the past few years in the United States. And so, I think that there is at minimum, a correlation with the percentage of women entering higher education. So right now, we have about 60% of students kind of across the United States receiving degrees are women. And yet, at the same time, and again, post hoc ergo hoc is a logical fallacy, but at the same time, we now have a per uh the perceived diminished value of higher education itself. So, there are a lot of stories coming out of the US about is higher education worth it. And I think that we're not going to say that there's a direct 1 to 1 causal relationship between women. Entering higher education and the perceived value decreasing, but I do think it's worth examining further why we think these things. And so, there are, you know, some studies being done about that. Whereas those of us who are very committed to education, we know the value it can bring to everyone, to women, to men, to non-binary people, we know the value it brings in research. And I do think that the business world is, um, In this case, a good example of how to think about equity and inclusion, because the bottom line is that when there are women at the table, the rates of return are higher, more money is made, people are happier, and the organizations overall do better. So that's empirical data to just show it. Universities, I think, are frustratingly, um, behind the times in many ways, and this is one of them. So, if they were just to say, look, our research output could be stronger, our students are happier, more people are successful, when women are at the table, we could be making that argument more than we do.

15:47 Ricardo Lopes: Mm, yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess that it's just what we should expect. There's always these reactionary takes whenever, I mean, people, women in particular in this case, but any, any kind of minority gets access to a space in society where they were not welcomed before, and I mean, I guess that in a way they are still not welcomed, but Uh, if you understand what I mean, but anyway, anyway, I, I guess this is just to be expected, at least to some extent.

16:25 Melissa Shew: Yes, and major thanks from all of us who care about these things to the people doing this research. And so to kind of think about intellectual joy in a way, I feel grateful that there are people doing this kind of research to expose barriers that still exist. And I know we'll dive into some of that, but my work and intellectual joy really stemmed from me realizing that my entire life as an academic, my entire life in retrospect, so I'm, this is about for, call it 30 years now. HAS been about the right that everyone has to ask fundamental questions about their lives and world, and to have the confidence to be able to enter into those conversations, even if or when they're wrong. And so I realized that for me, a few years ago, what I was caring about didn't have a name, and so, you know, I, I figured, here's an opportunity, and that name is intellectual joy, or the philosophy version, the nerd version is epistemic joy. My PhD is in philosophy, so I'm, I'm constantly writing a little bit about that as well. But what I understand intellectual joy to be is The satisfaction and Feeling that one has when you know yourself as a thinker and you appreciate other people and their capacity to think as well. Now, it seems like that shouldn't be a big deal, but it is a big deal. It's a big deal, especially for people who have been long excluded from intellectual life. So, among them, of course, women and people of color in the Western world, and so my work has been on, on women. Um, SO, for me, it was important to kind of think this through, both in terms of education. I'm starting to write a book on intellectual joy in teaching and learning, and I'm halfway through a book on advancing intellectual joy for women at work, which I know is the basis of our conversation today. So, when I started talking about these ideas with people, especially as the faculty director of our executive MBA program, and in giving talks to a couple 1000 different organizations, or a couple 1000 different people at organizations, um, I started realizing that women were really resonating with this concept of intellectual joy, because it also gave them a name for something that they felt was lacking in their organizations and in their lives. You know, I work a lot with With mid-career women. And I've also, of course, worked a lot with students entering their first careers. And what they want is to be valued as a knower, as a thinker, as a curious person. And what they often find is that there aren't resources in their organizations to be able to be valued in that way. Especially when, and this is the kicker for women, especially when there's enormous pressure on girls and women. To find their value in being right and not in their capacity as a thinker. So part of intellectual joy for women then, I think means, and for girls, I think means being able to be wrong and have that be OK. As we'll talk about, women are overly punished for these things, but you need to be able to be wrong and still be valued. I don't think we can have intellectual joy if that's not the case.

19:50 Ricardo Lopes: I, I mean, I guess that for, for people to have intellectual joy, I mean, they have to incur the risk of being wrong several times because I mean we have to be wrong before we get things right and also uh being wrong uh several times and then uh I mean step by step, getting closer to get being right or getting to the truth is actually represented. INTELLECTUAL growth, right, and that is part of the process. So if we're just, uh, I mean, assuming that people should just get things right all the time or the first time they try something that, that's just, I guess, at least to some extent anti-intellectual even.

20:42 Melissa Shew: I think so too. And I think that this is where my beloved discipline of philosophy and the discipline you love too, gets this very wrong, in fact, because in the tiny bit of work I have managed to find on epistemic joy, the way that philosophers talk about it is joy in being right. So that's where you find your joy, right? In the knowledge that you are right. I think this is wrong. I actually think it's philosophically wrong, actually. Um, BUT let me share a, a story of how I talk about this with students. So I've talked about intellectual joy with a couple 100 students as well. So, for example, when I talk with students about intellectual joy, I'll ask them about the most recent exam they took, and I'll say, all right, so you all just took, say, a biology exam. You worked hard, you studied really hard for it, and you take the exam. What do you do after you've taken the exam? And almost to a student, they say the same thing, which is, we wait anxiously and nervously for that exam to come back, so we know how we did, and then we'll know whether to be happy or sad. Yeah. And I think to myself, OK, on one hand, that's very understandable, right? Like, you're, you're taking an exam, you're submitting it to an expert, you might feel a little nervous. But when I ask them about that time between taking the exam and getting it back, what I really want them to be thinking, what I really, really want them to be thinking, is almost kind of in terms of Eastern philosophy, which is cut your losses, right? This is a detachment from outcome. And what you need to do is kind of go through your own mind to consider where you might have made mistakes, what you didn't know in the way that you thought you did, and so on, so that you can gain that confidence as a knower. And yet, students are so trained, I think, to be results-driven, or in a thin way, success-driven, or goal-driven without being purpose-driven, that they just forget all of this. I think that they come to it sometimes later in life, but it's, it's not really a mystery to me that these are the people entering our workforces, who then put all of their kind of credibility and merit on what other people are thinking of them in terms of their performance, without thinking about their own relationship to curiosity, to questions, to their own efforts and studying, and so on.

23:13 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, you, you know, when it comes to that specifically, I guess that as you said, it's understandable and also because it's the way our education systems are structured, right? I mean they are results driven. We basically go to university to get the highest grades possible. I mean the. Our main goal is to get a particular grade. I mean, it's not, it's not that we are commonly thinking about, um, I don't know, developing our thinking skills, our critical thinking skills, developing or acquiring more knowledge about this or that subject. It's just that we want to get that A. Or in Portugal, for example, uh, 20 because our grades go from 1 to 20. So I, I mean it's just the way the system is structured and I guess that uh in our more results driven and particularly in our capitalist societies, we sort of lost this thing that was very common among um Pre, yeah, pre-capitalist, pre-modern thinkers, and even, I mean, I guess you, we still have that in thinkers from the 19th century as well, uh, where, uh, you need time to digest what you learn, what you read, what you study. And you need time to come up with ideas and so people used to give lots of importance to having time just to do nothing. I mean, and, and and now and nowadays, I mean, if you talk about Uh, taking time to do nothing, you've, you're looked down on because, uh, people are just, oh what are you doing with that time then are you just wasting it? But I mean, it's not wasting time. It's just that you actually need to rest and take your time to digest what you learn and to actually have time to come up with ideas, so.

25:27 Melissa Shew: I co-signed that, and I think we have a very messed up relationship, um, in terms of, quote, work-life balance in that way. I hate that phrase, but you're also making me think about the ancient Greek word for leisure, which was school, which is, right, the idea of school or scholarship, but to be able to take that time. And this makes me think about one thing that's been on my mind lately, and I'm trying to write this out as part of the book, is about what happens in our current moment where we have ideas at the wrong time. So, in our organizations, we do not tend to have a culture that can allow for the birthing of an idea or the execution of something novel, because we have KPIs, we have performances, to, we have outputs, we have goals, and the, the churn just keeps churning. However, I think that if we do care about intellectual joy in our organizations, we need to be a little more creative about what happens when, say, a talented person is having an original idea or is having a, a creative thought. I was doing a session on intellectual joy for a group of women leaders a few weeks ago, actually, and there's this woman who is just this outstanding literal rock star, and so she runs, excuse me. She runs a group called Girls Rock Milwaukee. So I'm from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and also Ladies Rock Milwaukee, and the names are about to change to Let's Get Loud, so that it's more intentionally gender inclusive. Um, BUT she was saying that what she asked for, for the last holiday from her spouse. It was a creative getaway time. She said, you take the kid, I need to go away for 3 days. I need to write my music. I need to listen to some things. I need to go for walks. I need to think my thoughts. And he said, Done and done. And she did, and it was utterly transformational for her. I also crave that time, and as it turns out, a lot of women in our organizations do. And so, one thing that I talk about with women leaders in particular, is how do we protect that time for deep work or deep focus. There's a phrase I really like that I came across in my research called, quote, time confetti. And that's the way that women, in particular, tend to have their time explode in little bits. With people needing them all the time. This is part of the invisible labor piece that we were talking about before, right? You're getting texts from a partner, from a kid, from a parent, from a coworker, just kind of constantly, your email is blowing up and so on. And so the phrase that I came across was time confetti, which is what happens when that time just kind of erupts into a bunch of little teeny tiny pieces that fall all over someone. But I was talking about that concept with a different group of women leaders, and someone raised their hand and said, you know, Doctor Shi, that is not time confetti, that's time shrapnel. And I thought to myself, that's right, right? Because confetti makes it sound like this is an enjoyable or even celebratory experience, when really what's happening is women's deep work and time for deep work is being destroyed. Which leads me to another point, which is that post-COVID, we've seen a strong return to 100% being in the workplace from an annoyingly large number of companies. And we also see this with a lot of universities as well. Faculty, of course, tend to be on different kinds of tracks and tend to have more autonomy in their jobs, but with academic staff and, uh, all of the support at universities, we're seeing this kind of return. To 100% in-person work. But in organizations, this is especially damaging for women. It's also especially damaging for women of color, who a lot of times, if they are moving in predominantly white spaces, need a little bit of time to not be on as what is called a quote, double only in terms of having multiple identity markers in a space. So, I think that what we've seen is that with the increase of technology, it should be that more work should be able to be done in an autonomous way and still be trusted to make competent decisions because that's what autonomy is, right? To be trusted as a person to make regularly competent decisions. Um, SO it should be that we have the technology to support, say, adaptable workplaces, but organizations are harming women at work by mandating unnecessarily a 100% return to in-office work. I think that there's a, a false perception going on here, which is that sometimes organizational leaders fear that work is not being done if they're not micromanaging it and seeing it. But I'd also offer that the opposite is not necessarily the case. Just because someone is in the workplace doesn't necessarily mean that they're, quote, working or working well. So, I think that if we want to talk about intellectual joy for women in organizations, we need to be thinking about what an organization values in terms of productivity and a commitment to a person's actual well-being. And if they can value women at work, then by necessity, some changes would follow. Form follows function.

31:00 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and I think that another important thing probably to mention here is the fact that in our capitalist societies we just assume that, oh, if you're not at work, then it's it's leisure time, but it's actually, it's actually not because you have not only to commute and that's also, I mean, I, I think it should be considered. Part of work actually. I mean just the time you spend commuting because I mean you're not having any leisure time then but anyway, but, but then you get home and you have housework and we have to remember also that unfortunately because of the gender roles that are still very dominant in our societies, I mean, Almost everywhere or almost everywhere, uh, particularly in the most developed societies, it falls mostly on women, and I mean just last year I saw a statistic that it just blew my mind that, uh, I mean, when you compare single men, uh, and single women to, uh, married or partner, partnered men and women, I mean. When a single man become as a girlfriend or a wife, I mean, their average, the average number of hours they spend on housework per week doesn't go up. It's, it's around 10 when they're single and it stays around 10 when they have a partner, but for the women it goes from 10. To 17, so I, I'm, I was, I was just like, really? But, but are you guys not doing anything at all at home? I mean, because it just blew my mind because whenever I have a partner in my life, I mean, I, and I Lived with them, we lived together. It never crossed my mind even once that I shouldn't be doing my fair share of housework, but,

33:05 Melissa Shew: and we, and we, so let me just pull apart a few pieces of that too. So thank you for that example. Um, YOU know, COVID was devastating to women. It was devastating to everyone, but it was especially devastating to women because men. Quote, enjoyed COVID a lot more than women. And in academia, productivity, research productivity went down a lot and set women back by at least 10 years in terms of making up these gaps. Also, the United Nations projects that it's going to take at least 50 years to, to get back to where we were. Pre-COVID with the gender kind of equity gap there. And I think you also see ways that we tend to talk about if, uh, if we're talking about a heterosexual relationship, and if there are children involved, you know, a woman taking care of the children, I mean, that's what they're supposed to do. But if a man is doing it, then he's, quote, helping. And that's a very strange phrase. I'd like to make one more point thinking about organizational culture, if that's OK. Um, SO I drive a stick shift, and I've always driven a stick shift, so a manual car, manual transmission. And I bought the last one in Wisconsin a few years ago that's not a sports car, and it was actually right around COVID. And my, because my 20-year Honda Civic had given out. And so, I like to downshift when I need to get up a hill or, you know, rough terrain or whatever it is, and it kind of makes you feel powerful in a way to downshift. So, you might think, what does that have to do with women at work? Well, if there's one thing that I've been acutely attuned to, both as someone who has studied ancient Greek philosophy, and as someone who pays attention to organizational cultures, it's been to the ways that we tend to euphemize situations going on. So in COVID, and you might remember this, there was a euphemism that women were, quote, choosing to, quote, downshift their careers. And I was paying very close attention to this because choosing, of course, um, opens this idea that, that there's either a voluntary choice being made or say an involuntary, when I think that the, the situation is a non-voluntary one to kind of hat tip to Aristotle here. So, women choosing to step back from leadership positions, which I believe the statistic was they did 40% more than men, um, this is a choice, maybe in name only, because if circumstances were different, I don't think women would be choosing to do that. And this idea of downshifting is this idea, of course, that we are going to go slower, that we're going to take our time or have more of that leisure we've been talking about, when in reality, I already gave away the lead, but to downshift means that you have to do something hard. And I would say that for women, especially in emerging leadership positions or at the top of their careers, or just trying to make it in their track, Downshifting is an extremely hard thing to do because you're trying to reconcile with your professional identity in that, and you're having to make very hard choices that are not really choices in some ways, because it's not like you have uh an equal opportunity that's kind of on a par to use philosopher Ruth Chang's language. It's not like you could choose to do this or not choose to do this. This is the situation. Right, and this is the context, and so women quote, choosing to downshift, it makes them sound like they're going out to frolic in a field and pick some flowers, when that is the opposite of reality.

36:54 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and then there's also that aspect to consider where, and there's also statistics on this, but usually when men become fathers, they get a salary raise, and when women become mothers, their salary usually drops, so there's also that.

37:13 Melissa Shew: That's right.

37:14 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so I, I mean, but focusing specifically on intellectual joy, what would you say are some of the main barriers that women have to deal with in their lives and jobs if you want to, you can, you, you can also mention academia when it comes to experiencing or achieving intellectual joy.

37:37 Melissa Shew: Sure, so thank you for that question. Um, THERE are many barriers to women experiencing intellectual joy, and I'd like to a little bit talk through, um, what intellectual disempowerment is because we're really talking about, you know, intellectual empowerment. So, let me talk through a little bit what intellectual disempowerment is, and then I'll talk through some ways that that tends to show up in our world, um, and then maybe we'll talk about some things that we could do about that. So, to start off, intellectual disempowerment identifies ways that people are undermined as knowers and all suffer as a result. An example I like to use is, I taught high school girls for 5 years, and I would teach the active voice and passive voice in writing. And when I would teach the active voice, um, I would use an example like, Maria kicks the puppy. And, of course, all my girls are like, oh my gosh, Maria, we have to go find her. She kicked a puppy, right? We can identify the person causing the harm. That's an active harm. Whereas if I say the puppy was kicked, The girls all want to know who kicked the puppy. Right. Whether you can identify the person doing the harm or not, the result is the same. The puppy has been harmed. Um, A quick side note, I was using this exact example in a different leadership training group I was, I was hosting the other day, and I used that exact example. And when it came to the puppy was kicked, I said, What do you want to know? And someone raised their hand and said, what the puppy do? And I was like, no, that is not the right question, right? Because it's a puppy. But the result is the same. So, intellectual disempowerment can happen by way of, say, a mustache twirling, kind of typical cartoon villain boss who creates a toxic culture, say, or it can happen in a way that you can't quite name, but the result is the same. And in this case, when we're thinking of gender, women and girls are harmed. So, my research has taken me to the domains of education, work, and art, and thinking about this intellectual disempowerment. And, um, I will say that if anyone is interested in looking at people who are absolutely killing it in terms of advocating for gender equity, people listening to this podcast should listen, uh, should look up museum archivists doing the work of trying to bring women artists into museums. So, If we can say, for example, that art, at a minimum, is a manifestation of someone's ideas, and if ideas seem to be an indication of our intellect, and there might be some joy in making them manifest, even if there's anguish, Then let's consider a study that was done a few years ago to show that there is a 47.6% gender discount when an artist is a woman as opposed to a man. So, there was a study done showing that 1.6 million works of art were put up at auction, and when those names of artists were removed, The, a work of art was valued at, say, $40,000. But when the names were put back on, and it was revealed that the art was created by a woman, that value plummets by 47.6%. So, it's about a 50% discount for being a woman as an artist. So, a conclusion from this study is that women's art appears to sell for less because it is made by a woman, not because that woman is less genius than a man. And I like thinking of Frida Kahlo here, who, you know, was married to Diego Rivera, but there's a great article from the Detroit Free Press in, you know, the middle of the 20th century, saying what that's interviewing her as an emerging artist, and the title is Wife of the Master Mural Painter gleefully dabbles in Works of Art. And in this little anecdote story about her, she says, I didn't study with Diego, I didn't study with anyone, I just started to paint, and then the journalist writes, then her eyes begin to twinkle. Of course, she explains, he does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist. And I love thinking about this because she was so, and Ricardo, to your point earlier, she was so out of her time and kind of ahead of her time, and to make this sort of change, you need these original people to be able to do these things. But the art world is really pointing out the major lacunae that we still have in terms of valuing women as thinkers and artists. A few other examples of how this shows up, um, this might be a, a known. One to your listeners. But in 2018, Serena Williams, the just superstar tennis player, um, did something kind of crazy and got into a fight with an ump in a tennis match. And she was absolutely wrung out for, um, for arguing back to the ump. Now, of course, when a male athlete does something like this, he tends to be seen as Passionate, whereas a woman, especially a black woman athlete, is seen as a stereotype as the angry woman, right? Who does she think she is? Um, I love, love, love that in response, in 2019, Serena Williams went on and founded the first majorly black private equity foundation in the entire world, which I believe is worth now half a billion dollars. So, we see these, these stereotypes and we see these consequences happen in many different ways, um, in terms of people being actively harmed or quote passively harmed, but the harm is the same. Now, if you want to talk about specific kinds of harm, the first kind of harm that I talk about in my research is, uh, what I call the punishment gap. And this is the concept that women are punished for their mistakes at a much more severe degree than men are. So, Women and people of color generally are punished more harshly for making mistakes at work than white men are. Um, SOME statistics off the bat, women CEOs are 45% more likely to be fired than male CEOs. And here's a, an, a bit of research I came across that's especially troubling, which is that future referrals decline by a third when a woman surgeon loses a patient, while no decline in referrals happens if the surgeon is male. And so, my research shows through these studies that time and again, women are punished much more than men. A 2024 study shows that women leaders are more punished than men when violating cultural gender norms. So, for example, what this means is that women are Unlikely to go for promotions or leadership positions, if they even get a whiff that there could be the possibility of backlash from subordinates. So, if, say, your peer cohort group might resent you for going for a leadership position, you're not going to go for it. And this happens to women a lot more than men. So, these researchers concluded that when backlash is possible, men are unaffected, they'll still go for the promotion, they don't care, while women are significantly less likely to want to be managers. So that's another example of, I'd say, the punishment gap, where women are subjected to a lot more retaliation or punishment than men in organizations.

45:32 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Yeah, when it comes to, by, by the way, when earlier I asked you about, uh, academia specifically, and since we're also talking here more broadly about intellectual joy, uh, I, I, I was just going to ask you to comment on something. I, I, I, I don't know if you also, because of course, I, I don't, uh, I'm not part of academia itself. I talk with a lot of academics, but I'm not part of that environment. Uh, I mean, I see many times people on social media, I, I mean Twitter particularly for the obvious reasons, uh, that, uh, for example, um, uh, a female, uh, woman, a woman philosopher, a woman academic in some way, I mean, because, uh, uh, she finishes her PhD or for example, she just posts on. Uh, EX or Twitter that, uh, she's, um, a philosopher or an academic of any other kind and, and then uh she immediately uh she immediately gets backlash, particularly from men. SAYING, oh, you, you, I mean, are, are making basically the the claim sometimes it's more overtly, other times more covertly that she shouldn't be taken seriously intellectually because she's a woman and I, I I mean that's just a horrendous thing to say that just because you're a woman, you're a female, that you shouldn't be taken as seriously when it comes to your intellectual achievements as men because you should just be at all. Or you should just be having kids or whatever. I, I, I mean, do you also think that's, uh, or, or do you also see that frequently in academia and see it as a, a problem that women are taken less seriously on an intellectual level than, uh, men and look down on, uh, when it comes to their intellectual achievements?

47:44 Melissa Shew: I do see that. I don't think that people are As vocal as they used to be about those sorts of things, but I did a podcast interview, uh, a few months ago on a different topic. And, you know, the first comment on that podcast was, well, what could she know? She's a woman. And I'm thinking to myself, this is ridiculous, right? And what are you so scared of, you little men, right? Like, what are you so scared of? And And I'm, I, I don't understand it, but I think it's because, um, of what Miranda Fricker calls, and I, I love this language, credibility excess and credibility deficit. So, credibility excess happens when someone is granted potentially even more credibility than they deserve on a topic just by virtue of their identity markers. And this is all, of course, situated in terms of cultural norms and so on and so forth. So, those identity markers can change, but depending on where you are in the world and what the situation is and such, and then credibility deficit happens when someone is not given as much credit. Um, OR believability as they deserve for being in a certain space. As a woman in philosophy, I have certainly gone through this myself in a huge number of ways, and especially as a woman whose first main work was in Greek philosophy, where I was thought not to be, quote, feminist enough sometimes. But in, in terms of your question, absolutely. I find it to be day in, day out, that women are constantly undervalued as thinkers. Uh, Quick example of this, I was giving a talk on intellectual joy for women at work a couple weeks ago. Um, FUN note, during a blizzard in the middle of Wisconsin at a water park resort for an annual conference, which is just a funny thing to do. So, and you're like, what is a water park resort? I didn't know either until I went to one. But I was talking with these women whose work is in providing in-home care, um, to children, especially neurodivergent and emodivergent children, and to their families. And this work doesn't have to be done by women, but everyone there was a woman. And so everyone there doing what I would call pink collar work, that is, This is a term that describes work that gets to be undervalued because it's done by a woman, which means that you don't have to be paid as much, you don't have to have the same kinds of benefits and so on, um, because it's seen as helping work. So, you have these women doing pink collar work, who, when I asked them, who here is respected as an expert, In their field, they laughed in my face, and they said none of us experiences being um appreciated as someone with competence and value. Um, AND it's because we do have these ideas, right? And that, that some fields are more serious or rigorous than others. This is being laid out in the universities right now. Humanities are being denigrated and the hard sciences are exalted, so on and so forth. Um, BUT yeah, to answer your question in a very straight way, yes, I see this still happening. One thing that I have personally found of enormous value as I'm in the middle of my life and, you know, kind of in the upper part of my career, is finding women friends in different disciplines at the university to just kind of form a little troupe and, uh, go about your business. And so, I find that to be just counterculturally affirming, and my hope is that Um, everyone who needs friends like that, even in the middle of their life, can have them, because then you can, you know, say damn the haters and do the, do the thing you were kind of born to do.

51:43 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, you, you know, you were mentioning that certain academic fields are less valued than others, and, uh, curiously enough, they tend the ones that tend to be more undervalued are also the ones that tend to be associated with women. I mean, even that is gender. And gendered against women.

52:07 Melissa Shew: Absolutely,

52:08 Ricardo Lopes: yes. Yeah, because for example, oh, social sciences, they are not as valuable as the hard sciences. Humanities are not as valuable as the sciences in general. Philosophy is not as valuable as, I don't know, law or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

52:27 Melissa Shew: And it's, it's really shocking that universities, which should be places that appreciate sound logic and reason, um, sometimes don't, and sometimes overlook empirical evidence that shows the contrary. So, for example, since my home discipline is philosophy, you know, it's shown that philosophy majors actually make a decent amount of money, as in philosophy majors make A decent living, a very decent living, about 10 years after graduating with a philosophy major. Now, no one really thinks that, but they make more money than business majors and a lot of other majors. This is hard fact. This is evidence. This is empirical data. And yet, what is it that we're seeing cut in universities? Philosophy majors. This is also happening, um, for, I think, political reasons. Some states are cutting philosophy majors, and I will not go into juicy details about that, but it is deeply troubling for anyone who wants to stay coupled to reality and who cares about critical thinking.

53:34 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and I think that it's not just about potential future earnings and I mean, I mean how it can translate in some way economically. I mean, it's also that knowledge itself is valuable, and I mean sometimes I get very frustrated because there are, I mean, I talk with tons of scientists on the show as well, and unfortunately among Many scientists, scientists, it's they're, there's still that very common idea that, oh, we moved past philosophy, we don't need philosophy anymore, and I mean it's a silly idea, not just because historically. Uh, PHILOSOPHY was the foundation of science, but also, uh, I mean that strict disciplinary division between philosophy and science and the different sciences. I mean, it's artificial because, I mean, historically people didn't really differentiate between philosophy and science and this and that kind of science. It was all, uh, I, I mean, philosophy or knowledge or science or whatever you want to. To call it, I mean, but there was not a strict demarcation between philosophy and science. And also, I, I mean, if the scientists think that they don't need philosophy, it's just because they're ignorant and not following philosophy of science and the philosophy of the different sciences out there because they actually need that kind of, that kind of grounding work. For science to work.

55:15 Melissa Shew: So I would agree with that. And, you know, there's a reason that the highest degree is a PhD, which is a doctorate in philosophy, which, which means that on the most basic level, you can do theory in your field, and there's a meta-cognitive element there. It means that you're thinking about your field, but at its highest level, every discipline ends in philosophy. Of course, it makes it, you know, funny to get a PhD in philosophy, a doctorate of philosophy and philosophy, and there's some good jokes to be had there. Um, BUT it, but that remains true. And so, to give up on theory in a world that desperately needs it, I don't think we should be doing. And I actually, I talked with this a good amount even in my own job. And when I'm giving these different talks on intellectual joy, but even in my role as a director of Teaching Excellence, we are always so quick to action. When what we need sometimes are good ideas, right? And we need to think about what we are aiming our action toward. So the goal can't just be, for example, growth for growth's sake, right? We need 20% more business. What are we aiming toward? What is the, the T loss, the end, or the goal? So, to that end, if we go back to these different gaps that we were talking about, um, the credibility gap, and I will also say the authority gap, which is being underestimated, you know, by, by virtue of your identity markers, um, I'll say that there's a brilliant economist who actually was just fired from her job in the federal government, but her name is Lisa Cook, and I've been reading her for years. She actually had a PhD or she had a master's and undergrad degree in philosophy. And then she was hiking up a mountain. I listened to a bunch of podcast interviews with her. She was hiking up a mountain trying to figure out if she was going to go get a PhD in philosophy or not. And the person she was hiking with said, you need to get a PhD in economics. And she said, OK. And he said, so here's what you're going to do. You're gonna go to Russia for 2 years, you're going to learn Russian, and then you're going to kick ass, basically in economics. And so she did. And she, you know, was a senior advisor at the highest levels and came out of the state of Michigan. But before she got into those public positions, she was doing extraordinary work to show, and to this ROI point, we might want to say that it doesn't matter about money and so on and so forth, but this is one way that a case is made, right? So she has done extraordinary work to show that if more women and African-Americans were participating in the technical innovation that leads to patents, GDP per capita in the United States would be 0.6 to 4.4% higher than it is. I mean, just straight up higher, if some of these barriers were removed. And so, what is a patent? A patent is the manifestation of an idea that's validated in a legal way. And so, you know, if these barriers that women experience were removed, um, other studies show, and this is a study from 2019, other studies show that we would have over 4 times more inventors. THAN we have. And we need inventors, right? We need people to be solving problems and having original ideas and thinking at the intersection of multiple different disciplines. But because these barriers exist specifically for girls and women, we are worse off as a society and world. It's not just worse for women, it's worse for everyone than we would otherwise be. So we can imagine, yeah, go ahead.

58:56 Ricardo Lopes: I mean, you've already talked about the punishment gap, I guess that earnings we've already touched on that, and in your work you also talk about the authority gap, right? So could you tell us about that

59:08 Melissa Shew: one? Yes, so the authority gap means that it takes a lot more for women to be seen as having credibility and authority than it takes for men. So there are some studies that show, for example, that in an organization, even when a black woman speaks and says anything, she's not even attributed her ideas correctly, about 45% of the time. And so, the authority gap means that women, when they do have ideas, are often kind of dislodged from them, and they're not seen to have the authority that men are necessarily granted. So, when we were talking about credibility, excess, and deficit, um, I often share that a lot of times when I'm teaching philosophy 1001 classes to a bunch of usually first year traditional students, I will, at some point in the middle of this class, as I'm talking about my love of philosophy, I will at some point go over to the board and write something in Greek on the board, and then turn around, and I see their faces calibrating. Oh my gosh. He knows something I don't know. And over the course of 25 years teaching Phil 101, I have kind of taken this up, not just because I love it, and I love to write Greek on the board, which I do, but because I know that I need to establish credibility and authority in a way that some other people don't. Even though I'm no longer a 29-year-old professor, I'm still doing these things. And you can see them kind of calibrate. I can think of another example. Where I had a student who had his phone out, quote, secretly, it's never secret. This was a long time ago. And I was, um, teaching something, and he had his phone out and he was fact checking me with something that I had written, which was very strange, because I, I got to ask him, I said, do you know who wrote that? And he's like, oh, I found it on the internet. I think some guy. And I said, it was me. This person right here, wrote that thing that you're just trying to fact check me with. Now, the authority gap is devastating to women at work, and, um, What I've learned from surveying a couple 1000 women at this point is that this authority gap tends to come from not having a supportive workplace that helps them find their voice. It also comes from not having champions of them as leaders or workers or producers in any given room. So, when we think about countering the authority gap, one way to do this is through amplification. And an easy way to amplify someone's ideas, and this is just a quick trick, consider it, but an easy way to amplify someone's ideas is to connect their name to their idea 3 times. It's kind of like a commercial, right? So connect their name to the idea 3 times. In President Obama's White House, his staff actually started doing this on a regular basis. So when one of them would have a good idea, then that idea would be repeated with the person's name 3 times. This is a way to increase credibility and authority, especially for people who've long been marginalized.

1:02:26 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Yeah, and I guess that this would then also translate into who gets attributed the merit for their own intellectual work because I mean we know historically and even contemporarily unfortunately that many times it's women doing the actual work, but men. Taking credit for it. I mean, even just two famous examples, uh, we always talk about how Crick and Watson discovered the structure of DNA, but it was actually Rosalind Franklin and her students. So, but everyone always says it's, it says it's Cree and Watson, where, where. COULD just say, OK, so it was like a, I mean it was not actually collaboration because they just stole her work, but I mean they could just give at least the same level of credit and merit to Rosalind Franklin, but people just decide to ignore her and The other example I was going to give was when Marie Curie was about to be to get the Nobel Prize. I mean actually originally they were going to give it or attribute it to Pierre Curie, her husband, but fortunately she had a a proper husband and he declined to receive the Nobel Prize unless it was shared with shared with, shared with her. So you know it's. Yeah, yeah, so, so it's always this kind of, uh, I mean, this kind of mess where, uh, women many times are the ones doing the actual work, but it's always or almost always a men getting the credit for it.

1:04:18 Melissa Shew: I think that many I would say, I would say that the vast majority of people I talk about this idea with, because intellectual joy just resonates as a concept, especially with women. They're like, that's the name of the thing. A vast majority of women with whom I have discussed this idea and who've done work around this idea would 100% co-sign that. And in fact, I'd say that that's something like a, A secret or undernoticed or invisible, if you will, plight of women, especially in middle management positions, is that they do a bulk of the work. The teams do a bulk of the work, and then someone else takes credit. And we certainly see this in academia as well. And this is why I think, like, there's some good work being done on citation politics and kind of doing your due diligence in terms of citing people appropriately and. Properly, something that is, and we will not talk about this, certainly going out the window with AI, but citation politics, um, you know, is very alive and well, and to the best ability that we can, we should, we should do the work of excavating who originate, who originated an idea, um, who sustained it, what their contributions were, and so on, without necessarily having to be 100% accurate all the time.

1:05:40 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and how do you think that these barriers that we talked about, I mean, like, for example, the authority gap, the punishment gap, the earnings gap can be broken down?

1:05:56 Melissa Shew: So I think They can be broken down by a in a few different ways. First, I think that individual people themselves can work to break them down, but that is not going to be sufficient for systemic change. So, second, I think that leaders need to work on changing. Their organizational culture for a variety of reasons. And a lot of the reasons we've already talked about, given that organizations, especially for-profit organizations, do very much care about turning a profit, which is, on one hand, totally fine. It's shown that workplaces that um are more inclusive and do these sorts of things that we've been talking about, have a higher rate of return. Major employee satisfaction surveys show that only 6% of employees think that their organizations are doing a great job in terms of retention, climate, culture, and so on, and organizational leaders should be persuaded to care about those things. Now, what do I think it would take kind of bigger than that? I think it would take an existential shift in paying attention to, um, paying attention to our just most basic humanity and curiosity and realizing that a lot of what we're Caring about in our day to day life is, um, a little bit of a sham. So, I think that what you can do is, is really pay attention to seven different elements of intellectual joy. Um, AND I've written a good amount about this. I actually have a white paper that I wrote in 2023 about intellectual joy for women at work, and then I have a workbook that, uh, is an accompanying part of that. I'm turning all of this into a bigger book right now. But I've had organizational leaders use this work on intellectual joy in their organizations, for example, to change how they do performance reviews, to have different discussions with people on their teams. Um, AND in fact, for some of them, for the very first time, I've had them advocate to upper leadership about caring about intellectual joy, and I've had students even work on how to change an entire organization to care about intellectual joy. But in short, I think that there are what I've called 7 A's, um, to increase intellectual joy. And so, when I started thinking about these constitutive elements, and I'll just run through them very quickly, I started thinking about Really practical, yet theoretically viable ways to increase intellectual joy in our lives and work. And so, these components are autonomy, advocacy, access, amplification, authenticity, accountability, and adoration. And I've talked about these with thousands of people at this time. So, I think that each one of them is an absolute requirement for intellectual joy to a varying degree. I also think that what's necessary for intellectual joy in any organization is what's called psychological safety. Psychological safety is a term that I think a good number of people are familiar with now, but not everyone. Psychological safety, I would say is like an a priori condition to intellectual joy in an organization, that is, it has to exist in order for organ for intellectual joy to take hold in an organizational in an organization's culture. So, psychological safety means that a person is not just allowed, but expected to speak up with ideas if they see something that's going wrong, um, if they notice something that's not right, if they have an opinion, that they're expected and encouraged to speak up. This is especially important for women who, as we've discussed, are overly punished for their ideas and certainly are overly punished for being wrong. So, psychological safety then is really important. Psychological safety doesn't mean that everyone feels good all the time, that is not the point. And in fact, in the literature, there are some people who talk about psychologically brave spaces instead of psychologically safe spaces, but, um, I actually think these are the same thing. I think too that a psychologically safe space means that organizations are paying attention to the kinds of employees they have and how they need to be communicated with. So, for example, if we think about neurodivergent employees, they need a different kind of communication often than a neurotypical employee does. Sometimes they need more direct communication, sometimes they need Um, certain kinds of schedules and so on. I also think the same thing about emo diversity. If there's one thing that I cannot stand in a workplace, it's toxic positivity. Someone jumping out of the bushes and saying, hey, isn't it a great day to work at Marquettes, and you kind of want to die inside. Um, YOU know, so that toxic positivity, where, where it's assumed that you can't say anything critical, or just have a bad day or not be in a great mood, that will tank a psychologically safe organization as well. So, to kind of work backwards from that, I think that what's needed for intellectual joy in any organization is for there to be a culture of psychological safety. But then to increase psychological to increase intellectual joy, we need to think about the seven A's. Um, AND there are things that everyone can do, right? So, we can think, for example, about who has access to information. IN an organization. A lot of times, it's just who has access? Well, the people who've always had access, and then we're kind of reinforcing the status quo. But if we think about how intellectual joy is caring about increasing knowledge and feeling kind of your capacity as a knower expand, then to do that, of course, you need to have access to information. If we think about authenticity, for example, as a requirement for intellectual joy, to bring your authentic self to work does not mean that you get to say and do whatever you want, because it's possible that sometimes you're just a jerk and you're being your authentic self, but you're Authentic self, in that case, kind of sucks. But authenticity does mean that a person tends to be aligned between their values and how they act. And I think that authentic people tend to be more trustworthy, um, than inauthentic people. If we think about accountability as a component of intellectual joy, I hope that there's a day when organizations can Have employees who can be held accountable both for their great ideas and for their not so great ideas without accountability always being negative. So, a word that I hate these days is feedback. It has yet to be The case that an employee has ever heard from their leader or from a coworker, Hey, Ricardo, I have some feedback for, for some feedback for you. And you say, oh, great, this is going to be wonderful. No, it always has a negative connotation. When I think about, for example, when I taught those high school girls, um, it would occasionally happen, and by occasionally, it would fairly regularly happen that a student would fail a paper in my class. And they ended up being OK with that. Their parents did not, um, because I was trying to provide education and not just success. But I wanted students to be accountable for screwing up a paper. I can look back on my own life and think about the ways that I have failed a paper, and we need to be able to fail a paper without failing as a person. And so, I think that accountability is really essential for intellectual joy. So, all these different components, um, I think are really crucial to intellectual joy, and these are things that we can do something about. So, for example, if we take the elements of adoration, which is the 7th A, and by the way, no one likes this A really except me, but adoration as a requirement of intellectual joy comes from the Latin a adorare, which means to call to someone held in high esteem. So, I think about adoration as the little unglamorous, unsexy ways that we recognize the inherent dignity of other people on a regular basis. I think this is also required for intellectual joy. If you're not feeling valued or seen, it's hard to feel that kind of joy, that satisfaction, that calm, that peace that comes with expanding as a person.

1:14:53 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I, I mean, two things I wanted to say about that. I mean, first of all, when you mentioned, for example, toxic positivity, it reminded me of the Uh, phenomenon of emotional labor that many people do not even know about because I mean, for example, this is even more, uh, I mean severe I guess when the, when people work in customer service and or when they have to deal directly with customers in any way because I mean sometimes you just might. If you like crap, but you still have to be amicable and polite and patient and all of that. And I mean, that takes a toll many times on people and uh I mean, sometimes it's one of the reasons why people get burnt out because they have to do that on a daily basis even if they. Feel really, really, really bad and depressed and all of that, and they don't really want to smile, but they are forced to smile, otherwise they will get fired or something like that. So that's one thing. And then the other thing was that, I mean, when you were talking about feedback. That sort of corporate talk, I mean, it really pisses me off because sometimes it's like, can't you just talk like a normal person? Can't you just use like normal language? And I mean if you're going to For example, if you're going to fire me, why is it that you're faking empathy and you're faking that you care about my future when it's obvious that you don't give a crap about my future? I mean, just, just be honest. And authentic and say what you what you want to say because I mean people don't, people from human resources many times because they are like, I mean indoctrinated into that kind of corporate talk and all of that and that kind of approach to employees and all of that and corporate environment and and that kind of thing. They, they think that oh. If we just say that we care about him or her, then he or she will feel better after they get fired. And many times people even feel worse because of that, and they post, they post videos on the internet before they're called up to a meeting on Zoom because they are already suspecting that something like that that they're going to get fired or something like that, and then They get even angrier because people are not honest.

1:17:47 Melissa Shew: Yes, and that honesty is a relational process that has to happen over time. And I would just hazard a guess, because I know those videos that you're talking about as well, but I, I would hazard a guess that people who are posting videos in advance of being fired already are experiencing a bad situation at work, and that's why they're posting those videos, because there's not that trustworthiness or that value, um, that they've experienced over time, you know, and a lot of what we're talking about, is doing the non-glamorous work of showing up, cultivating those authentic relationships, being mindful, and so on. And in fact, when I was talking with a couple of different Classes of executive MBA students, they took this work on intellectual joy, and some of them for the first time were having conversations with people on their team that they'd never had before, right? And it brought them closer together as a team. So you can wield something like this as an element or tool of power or a way to be inauthentic, but that is certainly not the intention. But you're also making me think about a statistic that, Um, says that 85% of CEOs and leaders in organizations feel like they live their purpose and mission on a daily basis at work, whereas 85% of everyone else does not feel that way. And so, we should be thinking about this, you know, of course, it's good to be king or queen. If you're at the top and you're the one establishing the vision and you're saying what's what, of course, you're walking tall for the most part, even if you have a lot of pressure, and you feel a sense of purpose, but everyone else is kind of subjected to that. When in reality, as the Pew and Gallup research polls show, what 97% of younger people want is some kind of purpose and meaning and joy in their work. And so, we have this major gap here, and it's not going to be that, you know, leaders will just suddenly be able to make everyone happy at work. And in fact, There's an argument saying that that shouldn't even be an organization's concern. But the reality is that the nature of work itself has changed, starting in the middle of the 20th century, so that younger people, especially people who are going to college, they do want some kind of identity maker at work. They do want a challenge. It's not that they're afraid of a challenge, and they are thinking about purpose and meaning. So how can organizations help bring this together so that we don't find ourselves making angry videos in advance of probably being fired, right? As, as funny as they are, how can we not harm ourselves and each other in that way?

1:20:43 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, YEAH, actually, I don't find them funny. I, I get angry and because I feel empathy for those people that are getting fired and treated like that. Uh, BUT anyway, anyway, it's, it's, it's a sort of Let's say anthropological work watching those videos

1:21:04 Melissa Shew: for sure and I'll, and so to co-sign that, and I didn't mean to say that you were finding it funny and I'm very sorry about that.

1:21:09 Ricardo Lopes: Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

1:21:12 Melissa Shew: but in the, in the same sort of way I do. I have a lot of sympathy for people who post kind of reject rejections from job applications too, where they've gone through, you know, 4 rounds of interviews, they've had to take a week out of their own job to go provide a free service for this other place, only to be fired. It is too much. And I guess, um, you know, So, maybe we could both agree that we can, we can, in fact, do better than this. As people in our corners of the world, wherever we may be, we can, in fact, do better than this. I think there's a great deal to be hopeful for in those ways, um, by being able to name these situations, by being able to find like motivated people, and to realize, essentially, three things at base. First, we need to grow. Just as people, we need to grow. And kind of necrophilic ways of firing people, this nourishment of death, this is not going to fly. We need to grow. Through all our jobs, through all our experiences, we are growing anyhow. So, how can we affirm that? Second, I'd say that, um, most of us tend to move in cycles. And so, by this, I mean, for me, every 5 years, I, as I look back through my life, every 5 years, I start to get a little itchy, and I start to need to have a new idea or a new project. For some people, it's 6 months, for some people, it's every year. But I'd say that one thing we could pay attention to is, is our own kind of cycle of when we feel like we need that intellectual joy or we need a new project. And I think you probably satisfy this in your podcast quite frequently. I listen to a lot of your episodes, and they're constantly life-giving. And then 3 is a point we've already talked about, which is that we burst forth just as people who have jobs, many people, right? So, so, for people who have jobs, we have regular jobs, there are expectations, but we also burst forth. And I think about Athena bursting forth from the head of Zeus fully formed, right? And I think about how untimely and painful that was. A question I would have is how can we make time for the, for the untimely in our own lives? And so, how can we change maybe our organizations and cultures to allow for these good ideas to do the, do the hard work of being born. So, you know, we need to grow, we move in cycles, and we burst forth. I think those are also kind of big picture existential ideas related to intellectual joy.

1:23:48 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. By the way, uh, I think we've already covered for the most part the topics we decided on for today, but it just came to mind when we were talking about intellectual disempowerment. Would you consider epistemic injustice a form of intellectual disempowerment, because it came to mind that for example, when it comes to the context of work, uh, many times I see. That if people are suffering a form of epistemic injustice in the way that they do not have access to the proper epistemic tools to empower empower themselves as workers, uh, I mean, they are even more vulnerable to exploitation and for example, when people learn, uh, this is just an example, it can be done through several different kinds of ways, but when people learn, for example, About concepts and ideas coming from socialism, Marxism, communism. I mean, they suddenly get the proper epistemic tools, intellectual tools to empower themselves as workers. I mean, in that particular case, if we're talking about socialism, communism, it's usually in a more collective way, but of course I think that you would agree that Even for the other cases, I mean, when it comes to experiencing intellectual joy, it's not necessarily something that we need to do just on an individual basis. We can do it collectively and so I mean, after saying all of that, do, do you, would you consider epistemic injustice also a form of intellectual disempowerment?

1:25:40 Melissa Shew: Absolutely, 100%. And so, that's the harm that comes when you're undermined in your capacity as a knower. And I love Miranda Fricker's work on this. I really, really do. And I remember when I read her book, um, Epistemic Injustice back in like 2008, it Immediately put a name to something, right? Um, AND I appreciate that very much, because it makes me think of, uh, one of my favorite theorists, I suppose, Paulo Freiri with pedagogy of the oppressed. And it makes me think about how, He was exiled from Brazil because his work, which was born of wanting to help provide literacy to adult peasants, was seen as threatening to those in the status quo and in positions of power. We can think of Socrates in this way too, of course, and the lineage is long, but absolutely, the The method and tool to keep people from advancing is to divide and conquer. Make sure that no one ever learns from anyone again and that people are isolated, then absolutely, just reinforce the status quo. But if we encourage dialogue, if we empower through naming the world, which then enables change, then, Then, we have cause for resilience, resistance, and resonance. And resonance is really what happens when the world breaks forth, and we vibe with it, as the kids might say. And we recognize that there's something a little bit out of our control in that resonance, um, and that little bit out of our control means that something is possible. Otherwise, we're just reinforcing the status quo. So, I 100% agree. And I think, again, that there are just some very straightforward things that people could do to make marginalized people's lives better, like, much better than they would otherwise be. And it wouldn't even be all that hard, but it could be perceived as threatening.

1:27:46 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I just wanted to say just for us to wrap up our conversation that I mean people also have these very, even when it comes to intellectual or intellectualism more generally, people have this sort of very Eurocentric view and very male-centric view of things where, oh my God, if it wasn't for the Greeks we wouldn't have any philosophy. I mean, just go listen to Peter Adamson's, Adamson's, uh, podcast History of philosophy without any gaps, and we, we would, we would very much have philosophy because there was philosophy in India, China, Japan, I mean, the Middle East, Africa, and so on and so forth. So, uh, but also, I mean that idea that if it wasn't for, uh, Particular men doing philosophy or doing intellectual work, we, we would, uh, we wouldn't have philosophy, science, and all the other disciplines. I, I mean, I, I sometimes when people say that I, I just, uh, reply, yeah, don't, don't worry, don't freak out. If we didn't have if we didn't have Plato, we would have Ipatia, so.

1:29:02 Melissa Shew: Yeah, and Aspasia and a whole bunch of other people who, um, we've just managed to forget about because we never cared to look where they happen to be living and writing, um, for sure. I mean, that's why the end of Virginia Woolf's book, A Room of One's Own is always so beautiful. And it, it brings a tear to the eye. I actually gave away my copy of this book to someone the other day, but She says, um, did you know that Shakespeare had a sister, right? It's this kind of famous concluding line, but she was busy doing all these other things that women did, and we never cared to, to look for her. But I'd like to think that she's still living now in our time, you know, and, and this work on intellectual joy, it's about work, it's about life, it's about education, and My hope is that it continues to resonate. My other hope is that I actually finish these books I'm working on and that maybe we can do another, uh, follow-up conversation because you're always a wonderful interlocutor. So thank you.

1:30:03 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, thank you so much. And by the way, uh, would you like to tell people, uh, where they can find you and your work on the internet and do you already have any rough idea about when your next book is going to get published?

1:30:18 Melissa Shew: So, my hope is that this book on intellectual, the power of intellectual joy for women at work, um, will be out in about a year, but I am still about 2/3 of the way through writing it. My work that I completed in 2023 is available freely online, along with a workbook on advancing the seven A's for intellectual joy. And I have a TEDx talk that I gave a few years ago in the COVID times, um, so the audio is actually terrible, but I, I do like the talk, and that's called Women and Intellectual Empowerment. So, thank you for asking.

1:30:54 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, sure, I will be leaving links to all of that in the description of the interview, and Dr. Xu, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been very fun and stimulating to talk with you, and I hope to have you on when your upcoming book is out or about to get published.

1:31:13 Melissa Shew: So I would welcome that. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you.

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