Have you ever felt stuck in a workplace catch-22? You work hard, play by the rules, but somehow never get ahead? This episode of Financial Feminist tackles the frustrating reality many women face in the professional world.
We’re joined by Professor June Carbone, author of the upcoming book “Fair Shake.” Written alongside her co-authors, this book explains plain and simple how the American economy is rigged to hold women back. In this insightful discussion, Professor Carbone introduces and explains the “triple-bind” — a concept that describes the limitations and unfair choices women confront in the workplace, and breaks down the three parts of the bind and how they hold women back.
Whether you’re just starting your career or looking to break through a glass ceiling, this episode is packed with insights to help you win the game on your own terms.
Key takeaways:
- High taxes on the wealthy historically led to more equality and opportunity. June discusses how, between the 1940s and 1970s, high marginal tax rates on the wealthiest Americans encouraged greater economic equality and social mobility. During this era, corporate leaders focused more on institutional success rather than personal wealth, ensuring companies invested in employee welfare, research, and innovation. This system encouraged the idea that the institution should be stronger than any individual, fostering loyalty and collaboration. The result was a more balanced society where opportunities were broader and economic security was more accessible.
- Modern corporate culture is driven by personal profit over broader goals. June points out that today’s corporate culture often prioritizes personal profit and immediate returns over long-term stability and ethical standards. Charismatic CEOs and high-stakes bonus systems incentivize leaders to prioritize quarterly gains and personal wealth, often leading to decisions that undermine institutional integrity. This focus on short-term gains, she argues, is corrosive to a company’s long-term health and employees’ well-being. It fosters environments where exploiting loopholes or colleagues becomes the norm rather than creating sustainable value.
- Understanding the system is key to navigating the corporate world. Recognizing these systemic issues is crucial for women navigating the corporate world. Knowing how corporate environments value aggressive, transactional behavior over loyalty and camaraderie helps individuals identify toxic workplaces. Strategic career planning becomes essential as women may need to move between companies to advance, rather than relying on corporate loyalty that might not be reciprocated.
- Women often face a “Triple Bind.” They’re expected to be ambitious and competitive like their male counterparts but are also expected to demonstrate caring, collaborative behavior. This dual expectation often means women are scrutinized for behavior that would be considered normal or even advantageous if exhibited by men. If they play by the established corporate rules, they are often disliked or penalized for seeking advancement, yet if they remain too accommodating, their ambition is questioned, and they may be passed over for promotions. Understanding this bind and learning to navigate it requires strategic thinking and sometimes finding allies within or outside the organization.
Notable quotes
“The change in women’s roles is an adaptation to a new economy that places a huge amount of emphasis on skills women have traditionally done. Women are now in the marketplace, performing the roles men did in the ’50s.”
“If you aren’t part of the club with somebody who’s taking you along with them, which is really hard to do as a woman, you’re more likely to be hated and may be fired for doing the same thing as the men.”
“I don’t want Elon Musk running the country. I don’t want what’s good for Tesla dictating national policy. What happens if you make decisions on behalf of the greater good instead of corporate greed?”
Episode at-a-glance:
≫ 03:04 The evolution of gender roles and economic impact
≫ 06:51 June’s legal career and background
≫ 08:18 Analyzing family dynamics, economics, and culture
≫ 10:06 The role of women in modern corporate america
≫ 14:09 Exploring misconduct and gender disparities in finance
≫ 17:07 The dynamics of corporate culture and identity
≫ 22:20 Unpacking the influence of unions and collective bargaining
≫ 28:48 Marriage Markets and economic dynamics in relationships
≫ 34:49 Business success and political ambitions
≫ 35:30 The impact of financial insecurity on men’s behavior
≫ 36:17 COVID-19’s class divide: women’s work and economic recovery
≫ 38:31 Debunking hustle culture: the realities of ‘Lean In’ and girl bossing
≫ 41:17 The rise of women in finance and the benefits of diversity
≫ 45:53 Revisiting high marginal tax rates and their societal impact
≫ 01:04:43 The Triple Bind: women’s struggle in the corporate world
June’s Links:
June’s book: Fair Shake
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Meet June
June Carbone is the Robina chair of law, science, and technology at the University of Minnesota Law School. Previously she has served as the Edward A. Smith/Missouri chair of law, the constitution, and society at the University of Missouri at Kansas City; and as the associate dean for professional development and presidential professor of ethics and the common good at Santa Clara University School of Law. She has written From Partners to Parents and cowritten Red Families v. Blue Families; Marriage Markets; and Family Law. She is a coeditor of the International Survey of Family Law.
Transcript:
June Carbone:
I see employers as exploiting women. Women are more likely to stay with the company that passes them over for promotion than a man is, and companies often evaluate women for leadership and basically on how aggressive and greedy they are, and that misvaluation of women and women’s willingness to stay even after being passed off for promotion, these women make the trains run out of time. They’re the balance, the institutional memory, and they are not paid commensurate with the value they’ve performed for institutions.
Tori Dunlap:
Rosa. Rosa. Rosa. Rosa. Rosa. Rosa. Rosa. Rosa. Diaz. Diaz. Diaz. Diaz. Diaz. Diaz. Diaz. Diaz. Rosa Diaz. Rosa Diaz. Diaz, Rosa. Rosa. Rosa.
Hi, everybody. I’m so excited to see you. We can keep the Rosa Diaz. We were recording Brooklyn Nine-Nine when we started recording. Hello, everybody. Thanks for being here. I’m Tori. I host the show. This is the most popular, and if I do say myself, say so myself, best show you can listen to about money for women. We talk about how money affects you differently and about how you can get more money, save more money, and fight the patriarchy by getting rich.
I also have a book of the same name called Financial Feminist. So if you dig this podcast, you should read the book. You’re going to learn new stuff and other stuff in the book, and we just thank you for being here. Like the show, you can share it. You can do all the things. You know what to do. You’ve listened to podcasts before. Okay.
Now, you might not have maybe recognized today’s guest’s name. That’s okay, and you may be thinking, “Well, this sounds,” I mean, depending on how we title it, “this sounds really deep.” I’m not kidding, this episode is the reason I wanted to start this show. I say it in the episode, but I felt like I was back in college for the first time since I was actually in a classroom. I learned so much. I was literally taking notes and referring back to things and asking questions. This episode is so fascinating and is going to be one that you just, every three minutes, you’re going to learn something that you did not know before.
So let’s talk about today’s guest. June Carbone is a Rubina Chair of Law, Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota Law School. Previously, she has served as the Edward A. Smith and Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and as the Associate Dean for Professional Development and Presidential Professor of Ethics and the Common Good at Santa Clara University School of Law.
She has written From Partners to Parents and co-written Red Families vs. Blue Families, Marriage Markets and Family Law, multiple, multiple books. She is a co-author of the International Survey of Family Law. Written alongside her co-authors, her new book, Fair Shake, which I cannot recommend enough, explains plain and simple how the American economy is rigged to hold women back and, boy, oh, boy, do we get into that. Okay.
Hard to distill these topics, but here’s a couple of things we get into. We talk about gender roles and how the changes in the last few decades have had a profound impact across the economy. We also get into some of the reasons why women are consistently fucked over by corporations, even though we are an extremely valuable asset. We also touch on a few other things like the importance of collective bargaining, AKA unions, the answer to the question we always ask, which is, how can we really actually end systemic oppression and also socially responsible investing?
Now, I know a lot about these things. I thought I knew a lot about these things. You might be sitting there going, “I don’t need to listen to this episode. I know that gender roles are fucked.” You do, you do need to listen because the way she approaches this and the research she has done and sites is just, again, it’s going to be mind-blowing. Let’s just get into it. Let’s go, but first, a word from our sponsors.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been to Minnesota. I think I feel like I should. You’re liking it so far?
June Carbone:
Yes. I’ve been here about 10 years now, and we live next door to the ski area overlooking a lake with a recreational area in the background and gorgeous sunsets.
Tori Dunlap:
That sounds lovely.
June Carbone:
Every three weeks, it’s a new climate. The seasons are intense.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m up in Seattle and I feel like we get seasons, but not intensely, which I actually appreciate. I’m like, “No, I want to feel like it’s fall and I want to feel like it’s winter, but I don’t want negative temperatures because that does not sound fun.”
June Carbone:
But let’s cross-country ski. Negative five at my age, it’s warm.
Tori Dunlap:
Perfect. Well, there you go. Yeah, it sounds like I’ll have to come out and try it out. We’re so excited to have you. Thank you for being here. We would love, if you’re comfortable to share, your first money memory. What is the first time you remember interacting with money, and how did that influence the way you manage money moving through life?
June Carbone:
Yes. Well, I was saying, I’m sure this will separate me from most of your audience, but my husband and I, and we’ve been married over 40 years, early in our relationship, we talked about our childhood experiences. We both had the same reaction to our parents. We’re eldest children. They doted on us. They would give us anything we wanted even if they couldn’t afford it. My husband and I both responded to that by feeling the only way to be independent of our parents was never to want anything. We’ve lived our whole lives that way. I mean, in my entire life, there were two things I’ve wanted I felt I couldn’t afford ever, unlimited long distance phone calls when I was in college and a house with a nicer view in the Bay Area, but I dealt with that by selling that house, moving to Minnesota, and I have a lovely view with sunsets that after 10 years we are still in awe every night.
Tori Dunlap:
That sounds lovely. It’s interesting to think about giving you everything and so the response to that as you moved into adulthood.
June Carbone:
Yes. We’ve had a very nice life, but again, we have everything we want.
Tori Dunlap:
I grew up with a similar background where it was like I didn’t want for anything, and that was a privilege, and I really appreciated that, and at the same time, my parents are some of the most frugal people I’ve ever met. So it’s that balance of spending money on the things that you value while also the frugality of the things you don’t really care about. So your career spans so many different areas of law. You get family law, bioethics. What drew you to law in the first place, and specifically to the various forms you’ve practiced and the various forms you’ve written about?
June Carbone:
So I was certainly a nerd as a kid. I did not fit in the world I grew up in, and my parents very much were focused on the fact that my fights with my mother in high school were that I did not wear enough makeup, I did not wear my skirts short enough, and I did not pay enough attention to boys, but what I did pay attention to was politics. So one of my earliest memories was being totally for Kennedy. In fact, I went to see Bobby Kennedy give a talk when I was 12 years old. My best friend and I took the bus downtown and went all by ourselves to see him speak. So I was just absorbed by politics.
As I get older, I was a high school debater in high school and got more and more interested in law and less in politics, but this is all intellectual. I mean, I was first in my family to go to college, one of very few lawyers in the family, and I was really intrigued by the policy act, and I liked the technicalities of it, but I like teaching better.
Tori Dunlap:
When we’re thinking about your background, especially when it comes to researching family dynamics and political divides, can you tell us more about that? Because we’ve had some recent guests talk about domestic labor and families, and that is so incredibly fascinating.
June Carbone:
Well, I see it as a puzzle. I mean, looking at the broad spot, the family law, I see it as incredibly responsive to economic change. Indeed, my co-author, Nancy Cahn, and I have been at war with economists like James Q. Wilson or even the new book by Melissa Carney on Marriage saying economics cannot explain culture, and we say, “You’re out of your mind. Of course, it explains culture.” So where we’ve been pretty radical for a long time is I wanted to write an article for years. The feminist movement is a capitalist plot. When you see what happened in the ’70s and ’80s, it’s a remaking of the economy to emphasize work women have traditionally done, and to deemphasize brawn and the blue collar jobs that men have traditionally held, and that the family has changed in the ’70s and ’80s, and then more permanently. The same way it did in the 1840s.
It is the middle class were the first movers toward a new model of hyperinvestment, kids paying off brilliantly in a new economic era, and then the rest of the country catches up 100 years later, but that’s our story.
Tori Dunlap:
So I want to make sure I’m understanding you correctly. Do we believe feminism is a hoax? Is it promoted by capitalism in order to keep? Tell me more about that.
June Carbone:
The change in women’s roles is an adaptation to a new economy that places a huge amount of emphasis and skills women have traditionally done. Women are now in the marketplace. I mean, my argument in the new book is that women are the new organization man. The organization man of the ’50s, loyal, competent, self-sacrificing, the ballast that makes institutions wrong, not getting all the glory, not in the limelight, but men performed that role in the ’50s. Women are performing that role now and the institutions that value that role do a whole lot better.
Tori Dunlap:
Are we saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing for the progress of women?
June Carbone:
Both.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay. Tell me more.
June Carbone:
Sure. So let me put it this way. One of my best lines is, what are the two institutions left in American societies that still represent feminine values, not feminist, feminine? School teachers and the military? Why the military?
Tori Dunlap:
I was just going to say, why the military? That does not feel feminine at all.
June Carbone:
I have a friend who’s Israeli. He was rueful about his friends in Israel. Their children have been killed in the Hamas war, and he’s talking about the values of the military, loyalty, self-sacrifice, camaraderie, concerned about something bigger than you. Now, talk about corporate America. Who represents those values? Women.
Tori Dunlap:
If you buy in, right?
June Carbone:
Yeah, but again, the military as an institution values those things. Now, it may also value killing people and a certain amount of aggression, but it values rule following and institutional regularity. The institution is bigger than the individual, and that was lot of the mindset we were trying to capture in the book, where you see companies that represent that. When you walk into a room, your status is not how tall you are and how much you lie, but rather that you are cloaked for the mantle of institutional legitimacy.
When you think about that as a value, women do very well in those environments. If what you’re celebrating … Jack Welch is the exemplar of this, Jack Welch, the former CEO at GE, who represented the modern shareholder primacy area. It’s about, can you break the rules and get away with? Can you beat the market by manipulating numbers? Can you reach into the ranks and pit the person who will break through the bureaucracy to do what the CEO wants, but not necessarily what’s good for the institution?
So that mindset, that mindset that represents a lot of modern corporate America, the rules and get away with it, perform today and walk out the door tomorrow with a huge bonus and who cares what happens after you leave, that mindset is a kind of mindset that you could associate with Nietzsche, you could associate with some of the traits in the authoritarian personality. Today, we might call that toxic masculinity.
Tori Dunlap:
I was about to say, “This sounds pretty toxic masculinity to me.” Okay. So to tie it back to women, oh, my God, I’m so fascinated, and we have so many more questions and I’ve gone off script. So what we’re saying is women are becoming more stereotypically masculine. Is that what we’re saying?
June Carbone:
Well, no, we’re seeing something different, and it goes through what we try to capture in the book. If you’re in that environment, you’re in an Enron, you’re working for Elon Musk, the only question is, “What did you do for me today?”
Tori Dunlap:
Sure. It’s transactional.
June Carbone:
It’s transactional, stabbing your colleagues in the back to get ahead. Our argument about this is, yes, there is. I mean, if you do a statistical analysis of men versus women, they’re different. I mean, there’s Mark Egan at Harvard Business School. We talked to him about a study he did about misconduct in financial services. He told us he want to predict misconduct in financial services. There are two things that jump off out of his regression analysis. One is prior misconduct. The second, men are more likely to commit misconduct, less likely to be fired, more likely to cause their bosses bigger dollar losses, less likely to be rehired. Now, if you ask the question why, I mean-
Tori Dunlap:
Is it because men are more comfortable taking risks? I mean, that’s my hypothesis.
June Carbone:
We argued there are a couple of things. What is the ability to get away with it? So one bottom line, and those statistics represent that, is women are much less likely to get away with it. They’re more likely to be the scapegoats. If you look at Wells Fargo, which institution has the biggest gender disparities in who is fired for misconduct in the country? Wells Fargo.
Tori Dunlap:
Finance? Yeah.
June Carbone:
Finance in general, but Wells Fargo in particular. They reran the numbers on Wells Fargo after the scandal broke. So they had published these studies before and then they went back and said, “Let’s look at Wells Fargo in particular, number one in the country.” Now, watch, again, if you’re selecting for misconduct, most institutions, especially finance, do it by dog lists. You’ve got a bonus system that rewards it. If you hit your numbers, the institution looks the other way at how you get there. Walmart does this too.
If you don’t hit your numbers, you’re audited and you may be fired or report it to the authorities because guess what? There’s gambling going on in Casablanca, but we only fire the people we want to fire anyway. When you have that kind of system, you need a mentor who will protect you. At Wells Fargo, some of the women we talked to got fired because their mentors were fired. Then they were totally vulnerable, even if what they were doing was a lesser misconduct than the men around them. If the men had protectors, they weren’t fired or the boss doesn’t like you.
I mean, Carrie Tolstedt at Wells Fargo had a lot of enemies. She’s probably taking more of the fall for this than anybody else. Her sense is she was a good soldier. She made the trains run on time. She didn’t invent the system, but she has probably taken a bigger hit than anybody else involved in it. Again, when the crisis hits, everybody is expendable except the boss. Women are more likely to be fired, again, because they don’t have protectors or because they’re more disliked for what they do than men who do the same thing.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s a good episode when I have pulled out the notepad so that I can write down all of my thoughts so I can ask you about them so I don’t forget. Okay. One of the things you said though is, okay, the perpetuation of the dog whistle of telling on each other in order to get ahead, but that seems directly counterintuitive to what you said before about camaraderie and the focus on camaraderie and teamwork. So what is that friction there between we’re promoting a culture of telling each other, get ahead cutthroat, but also we’re one big happy family, which is the conversation in a lot of corporations?
June Carbone:
Yeah, but when is it real and when isn’t it? Now, I love Walmart. The reason I love Walmart, biggest sex discrimination class action in history. Went to the Supreme Court, five-four vote denying class certification in 2011. The advantage of a class action is it has all this information, great data, and what did it tell you? Well, with Walmart, again, and I like spelling this out because it’s how the system works. Then at other corporations like GE, Jack Welch could have borrowed his system from Sam Walton, and I think that suggestion would make Jack Welch turn over in its grave, but let me explain what the system is.
So Walmart, why didn’t it promote men? 18% of store managers were women. Close to 70% of hourly personnel were women. Lots of women applied for these jobs and didn’t get them. They selected them, tapped on the shoulder by an existing manager. They had rules, one point fairly rigid, then they got rid of them so that they couldn’t be accused of sex discrimination, kept them in practice. Walmart has a policy. You can never be a manager at a store where you are an hourly employee, have to be willing to move, and they routinely move, especially successful managers every, three to four years, hundreds of miles away with very little notice.
They also delight hiring B-sub students or C-students, not A-students. Women are more likely to be A-students, especially at the universities where they recruit, which are not top universities, but the branch campuses of the state university women are definitely the A-students in these universities. Now, why do they do that? Well, Walmart, which micromanages things like the temperatures in their warehouses, delegates HR entirely to individual stores, they don’t believe in HR, they don’t believe in rules on hiring. They’re relatively opaque about hiring and promotions, but high stakes bonus system, up to three quarters of the salary of a store manager comes from bonuses that are measured by total sales divided by labor costs and only labor costs.
What does this do? An incentive to commit wages and errors violations. Walmart is number one in the country in wage theft, and you have lots of managers say, “You can’t really do it unless you’re cheap, unless you don’t pay overtime to people who put in overtime.” They’re chronically understaffed, and that’s a national policy, and now what you do is you encourage workers to clock out and clock in, et cetera. What’s the art to doing that? First, you can’t care about your employees. That’s why they don’t want you working at a store where you’ve been an hourly employee. You have friends.
Secondly, you have to do it without getting the employees to rebel. They have to like you while you’re cheating with them, okay? That’s tough to pull off. Now, what about camaraderie? Sam Walton, and we talked to some people who said when Walton was still alive, it worked. It works a little bit less well now. Walton made a point of hiring women to be hourly employees because they would care about their stores, they would greet their neighbors, they would have deep roots in the community, and he would give them, he had a whole propaganda campaign, Walmart TV, morale-boosting sessions in which you identify with Walmart, designed for female hourly employees.
Betty Dukes, who brought this case, she’s African American, went to work in a store in Pittsburgh, California, which kind of like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is an old steel town where the mills have closed. She was alive when she got there. She had hit rock bottom, contemplated suicide, found God, become a Baptist minister, and when she went to work for Walmart, she thought, “This reflects my Christian values,” and couldn’t figure out why she could never get into the management training program. The answer, Christian values is for female hourly staff who identify strongly with Walmart as an institution, but it’s not what they’re looking for in their management candidates.
Tori Dunlap:
You’re blowing my mind a little bit. The word that I wrote down in all caps is just unions, which feels like part of the answer to a lot of these issues is unionizing or collective bargaining. Is that an answer? Is that the answer? Tell me more about that.
June Carbone:
It is. I mean, so one of the things when you look at modern corporate America, the rights of shareholder primacy, which means, for executives, a high stakes bonus system touched share price. Crushing unions is absolutely part of this. I’m a lawyer. When I look at the Supreme Court, what is absolutely clear, particularly Samuel Alito’s decisions, but John Roberts, the Chief Justice, is not any different. Wholesale effort to crush unions is the focal point for employee camaraderie and for the Democratic party and a wholesale effort to promote particularly evangelical churches, Catholic churches, fundamentalist churches as the bulwark, the union halls of the Republican party.
This is politicized because both kinds of organizations, unions and churches, it’s not just that unions can fight back against employers. Unions supply an identity. That is a focal point for organizing. So without unions, the employees, I mean, Walmart has an incredible turnover rate. In some areas, it’s like as high as 77%, and that means there is very little in the way of a stable workforce that identifies with the job that can be a counterpoint to management, and unions. Where unions are strong, you have that identification.
So it’s not just organizing in the sense of imposing the employer. It is organizing in the sense of supplying an identity that translates into the political sphere as well as the individual workplace.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and when the power comes from the people or from the collective, not from top-down organization as well.
June Carbone:
Right, and we see Me Too in similar terms. I mean, the power Me Too is identity, mobilization, spontaneous mobilization.
Tori Dunlap:
I mean, probably Black Lives Matter too. Any social movement comes from a certain level of focus on the collective, a focus on identity, and a direct opposition to some sort of greater than power or institution.
June Carbone:
Right. So when you look at Walmart, Walton made a real effort to create an identity associated with the institution, but again, it was gender. The identity he sold to women hourly employees is quite different from the identity being peddled to the management trainees.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and if you’re comparing it, like you said before, to the military, what I wrote down was there’s this huge element of control, where especially unions feel like you have more agency rather than being controlled. I imagine there is a weaponization of the identity too, again, of we’re all a family. I don’t know if anybody feels this way, but maybe somebody’s like, “I’m so pro Walmart. I love it. It’s my favorite thing in the world.” I don’t know. It’s how I feel about Costco, and it’s how I think a lot of Costco employees feel. I mean, I’m in Seattle, so I’m just like, “Costco,” but I imagine that control is used and identity in a negative sense to get you to buy in, get your loyalty, and to get you tallying on everybody else in order to promote yourself.
June Carbone:
Yes, and that’s, again, one of the changes we try to highlight in the book is the move toward high stakes bonus systems, but the Trump White House also did a lot of the same things.
Tori Dunlap:
They did.
June Carbone:
We have a lot coming out this week comparing Trump, the businessman, in terms of tactics with Trump, the politician. Keep everybody insecure.
Tori Dunlap:
Can you give us a little sneak peek into that? Because I’m really curious.
June Carbone:
Sure. It’s in the Hill, but it’s basically keep everybody insecure looking over their shoulder at what other people are doing. Feel you’re losing. I mean, that insecurity ties into a loss of status or threaten loss of status, but then identify with the leader who’s going to save you, who walks on water, who can shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not losing supporters, who the charismatic CEO in the corporate sphere, who will produce above average returns, and the focus on today.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m laughing because you’re describing, I can’t say who because I might get a lawsuit, but one of my previous corporate experiences, almost to a T. I almost got fired because somebody else threw me under the bus in order for them to progress in their career. Yup, charismatic, CEO, who was also extremely misogynistic and abusive. Oh, yeah, you’re describing an actual corporate experience I had in my early 20s.
June Carbone:
But it comes with the territory. So Don Langevoort at Georgetown, who’s a law professor, but heavily into psychology, and these are the post-Enron, post-financial crisis studies, high stakes bonus system, boom-bust cycle, everybody’s insecure. Who is attracted to that environment? People with a high degree of narcissism, optimism bias, amorality.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and a ton of privilege too, probably men, straight White men who can most likely succeed in that environment.
June Carbone:
All of those qualities are more common among men than women, although even if you look hard enough. When you put that group together and empower them, sexual harassment and bullying increase, so does stabbing other people in the back.
Tori Dunlap:
Right, because there’s not a culture of vulnerability, there’s not a culture of coming forward. It’s just like shame in shadows and coverups. I grew up Catholic, so I know this very well. Yeah, I do want to transition because I’ve got so off script that I want to get back to some of our questions that we did have for you because I could sit here for six hours and talk to you. So we’re talking about your book Fair Shake, but I am also really interested in hearing more about your previous book, which is called Marriage Markets. It seems like some of the research from that book may have supported the thesis for Fair Shake. Dive into that book a little bit and what you learned about the dynamics of economics and partnerships.
June Carbone:
One of the things we were struck by, I mean, one of the connection between the two is we found out when we ran numbers on marriage and women, that the only group in American society whose marriage rates have increased are the top 10% of women by income. That’s stunning. That used to be the group least likely to marry. Now, it’s the group most likely to marry. When we’ve started looking at why, and our whole theory is Marriage Markets, that’s how men and women match up. Same-sex partners may soften the effect, but when you say, “Where are the men?” the men are at the top and the bottom that you have a dramatically more unequal society. What that society has done is increase the number of high-income men.
We were shocked to discover the gendered wage gap for college graduates as a group has increased steadily since the early ’90s. We were surprised. Big, big improvement for college graduates came in the ’70s and ’80s. After the ’90s, college graduate women have lost grip. Where women have increased on men is at the bottom because the group that has taken the biggest hit, our blue collar men are used to have good union jobs. In relative terms, their position in society has decreased.
Tori Dunlap:
I don’t mean to interrupt you, but I can connect that back to why Donald Trump is so successful politically in America with those blue collar workers who it’s the, “You’re taking away our jobs back to coal.” It’s very much that sentiment. It appeals to stereotypically a blue collar male probably, what, in the Midwest. Stereotypically, that’s probably who he appeals to.
June Carbone:
Yes, and the thing about rural areas, I mean, [inaudible 00:31:05] nuts because what’s … Well, in the meantime, what’s increased? Where could you, even with AI, have unlimited number of jobs? Healthcare and education. What does the right attack with a sledgehammer? Healthcare and education. The demand is unlimited only with public funding, and public funding can take the form of increased insurance, but none of us can, other than Elon Musk, can afford cancer treatments, state-of-the-art cancer treatments without some degree of cross-subsidization.
So again, where are women? Healthcare, education, entertainment, restaurants, the growth of the service economy, and service can be high-end. I mean, women are doing really well in medicine in part because with hospital consolidation, a lot more doctor’s jobs are routine. They pay well. They may pay $400,000 a year, but if you work for the hospital, your hours are capped. They’re predictable. If you want to make a million a year, you need a private practice. That’s what’s under your assault.
So again, the whole point of Marriage Markets was you’ve got more of these high-end jobs that are really competitive, and you’ve got more of the low-end jobs that women have a lot of low-end jobs, but it is the mid-rank jobs that have become much more heavily female. Now, what does that do to Marriage Markets? Well, there’s two pieces of it. First, if you want to predict marriage, Bertrand, an economist, did a wonderful study that says the likelihood a random person you bump into in the street, if the man is more likely to make more than the woman, marriage rates go up. If the woman makes more than the man, marriage rates go down.
We’ve spent a lot of time looking at this, and our thesis in Marriage Markets goes like this. There are two deals that work. One, mostly the guys who make a whole lot of money and a wife who’s quite willing to trade the money and taking care of the kids, a very traditional role, and two, two people make about the same and trust each other. They can trade off. My husband and I, over the course of our marriage, in the beginning he made more and now I make more. He’s getting ready to retire, but we trust each other. We don’t care. I mean, we have a very strong relationship. Those marriages work.
What doesn’t work? A woman who makes more than the man and is the primary caretaker for the children. Getting married is a fool’s errand, and what really destabilizes relationships, economic instability. Who is hardest hit by the financial crisis? Something like the people who permanently lost jobs, something like 75% are blue collar men, especially in construction. It’s the single biggest factor in the decline of Latino births in the US is the financial crisis.
Again, nobody talks about that. We bailed out Wall Street. We didn’t bail out Main Street. Not bailing out Main Street and bailing out Wall Street has more to do with radicalization in US politics than almost anything else that’s happened. So what we did was to put together this picture and say, “Why is marriage a merger of class?” You have to look at how men and women match up, but you also have to look at instability in income, the change.
For men, I like to say it this way, but it works for blue collar men too. What’s the difference between Mitt Romney and George Romney? George Romney was the dad, who is governor of Michigan. He and Mitt both ran for president touting their success as businessmen and then having been governor of a major state, but for George, the sign of success as a businessman is the health of American Motors, which no longer exists, but was profitable in that era. For Mitt, it was how much money he had in his bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. No one cares about bank capital except as an extraction device. The editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal were saying, “If Mitt was really a good businessman, he’d have more than 200 billion in the Cayman Islands.”
If money is the marketer of male status and money income is insecure, men at the losing end of the downturns behave badly. They behave badly towards partners. They’re in a funk. They’re online more, pornography usage goes up, and they vote for Donald Trump.
Tori Dunlap:
I was going to make a joke because I’ve actually never seen George Romney. You’re asking what’s the difference, I was going to be like, “Better hair,” but George Romney still has pretty good hair. Oh, gosh.
June Carbone:
Yeah. They both do.
Tori Dunlap:
So fascinating. Well, the followup question I do have for you regarding that though, it might be too early to tell, but you just said the radicalization of the financial crisis or the financial crisis being the driver of politics and the radicalization of so many people, I imagine COVID is having a similar effect, but we know that women are the ones who lost their jobs. Women are the one who are suffering in terms of the emotional labor and in terms of giving up careers because no one was able to caregive. So do we know?
June Carbone:
That’s actually not true.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, tell me more.
June Carbone:
Yeah. Claudia Golden has wonderful studies on this. This is a class divide, not a gender divide. The group least likely to quit, and the group that was back the soonest following COVID recession is college graduate women. The reason, again, this is why women are the organization men of the current era, women college graduates don’t quit because what they do is they graduate from school, they get the initial job, then they have their kids, and when they have their kids, they need a job that cuts them slack. That is where they’re not competing against the guy in the next cubicle to put in 60-hour weeks.
So women who have earned some respect in the organization they’re in when they have kids, they try very hard not to quit because you can’t switch jobs with a two-year-old and a four-year-old for the first year on the new job. You’ve had to prove yourself all over again. Those women with good jobs and some flexibility were the least likely to quit during COVID, and they were among the soonest to return to full-time employment afterwards.
Now, women, blue collar women, different story. I mean, the whole restaurant industry was decimated. One of the problems for women who had been working as waitresses, cooks, et cetera, is they discovered they could get better jobs. My daughter was a chef for a while. She’s now a preschool teacher. Being a chef, you can’t combine with kids. So her friends got better jobs during COVID and didn’t go back. The restaurant industry has only recovered recently.
Tori Dunlap:
No, I appreciate you clarifying that because it’s less of a gender divide and more a class divide within gender.
June Carbone:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Okay. I would love to talk about your book Fair Shake. It’s sort of, I don’t know, an anti-hustle culture, anti-girlboss book. Actually, I was revisiting Lean In recently because I listened to another podcast called If Books Could Kill, and they were talking about Lean In, and how I feel like there was so many honestly good things that came out of that book, and I feel like in many ways it progressed us further. Also, you read it and the whole time you’re just like, “But what about systemic change?” You’re like, “Okay. This is all on the individual,” and it doesn’t even seem like there’s much acknowledgement because I wrote an individual book too. I get it. There’s a balance there. So I would love to discuss why the idea of hustle culture, girlbossing or even lean in fails so many women in our economy.
June Carbone:
Well, that’s what we try to capture in the book. Now, our stories are taken from real cases, people who filed lawsuits. We were struck that every story was the same story. We talked to women, whether they were managers in a dental office or general counsels to a unit at GE or in finance or Betty Dukes at Walmart. They all thought, “Hey, I got this job. I really believe in the company. I’m doing well. I get regular promotions,” and then either, “I hit a glass ceiling,” or, “I’m pushed out.” Most of them didn’t see it coming.
When we went and we looked and we dug deep, what we saw was, okay, this is a company that is transactional, no loyalty to employees, there’s a hustle going on, and if you aren’t part of the club with somebody who’s taking you along with them, which is really hard to do as a woman. Again, a woman in a male dominated space is the men aren’t going to trust you.
So a lot of these women were doing well until they weren’t and didn’t see it coming. The final step that pushed them out, they didn’t see coming. We go through and say, “Lean in has no solutions to that,” because what you need is a powerful group protecting you or the ability to make yourself invaluable to the boss every day by breaking the rules if necessary, and if what you’re doing in breaking the rules is illegal, you may be the person who goes to jail. They’re quite happy to have you go to jail instead of them. So you can’t win the game.
On the other hand, one of the things we see happening starting around 2014 and accelerating after 2016 is ESG investing and an increase in women across the board in the upper ranks of mainstream finance but not private equity, and big companies, they’re now 10% women as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and they outperform the men. Women co-founders in Silicon Valley startups, and while the percentage decreased with the downturn in venture capital funding, startups that have women co-founders do better.
Now, why? Again, my radical take on ESG investing is that it isn’t woke. It’s good business. It’s not progressive, and it’s not woke. It’s that the ability to manage diversity is a tell for healthier management practices. Diversity is good for business. Gender diversity, in particular, all kinds of diversity, but gender diversity, NASDAQ has a 2020 study that firms with where women on boards, less securities fraud, just fewer errors that require corrections in financial reports, less earnings. It’s called earnings management. I call it earnings manipulation, more transparency. Why? Because to manage diversity, you need all those things. So diversity is a tell for a longer term perspective as to in comparison with a short term, “I’m going to cook the books, get my bonus, and be gone.” BlackRock knows that.
Tori Dunlap:
I have a long held belief, and I appreciate you saying this. It’s one of my most controversial takes as a finance expert is that ESG or socially responsible investing is just a way for these companies to make more money off the backs of women and minorities because those kind of people, women, people of color, et cetera, are more likely to want to do the right thing, and I put that in quotes. So typically then, the ESG funds have a higher fee, you’re able to make more money. So for me, it’s like this continuation of a system where it’s like, one, it costs more trying to be more ethical, and two, they’re trying to limit women’s actual money and their portfolio performance by saying, “Well, you should be feeling like you have a moral or ethical responsibility to show up and invest differently.”
So it’s one of the reasons, actually, I don’t personally invest in a lot of socially responsible funds because I’m like, “Yeah, but you’re still making more money off of me, so I’m going to play the system and I’m going to invest like normal, and then I’m going to take that money and do other things with it.”
June Carbone:
Well, good for you. I want to emphasize, you asked why gender differences. The initial studies were about risk. The next set of studies where it’s not risk because hedge funds, female-managed hedge funds, which are all about risk be better than male-managed hedge funds. So the next set of studies, it’s about competition. Then the studies after that showed, if you’re talking about competition, to be on a team that’s going to invent a cure for cancer, lots of women sign up. If it is team-based competition or company-based competition, the old days of the ’50s, women sign up. It’s if it’s competition against the person in the next cubicle, then the number of men … Of the gender disparities in applications increase by something like 50%.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s no longer collaborative, which that tends to appeal to women.
June Carbone:
They’re accurate. They are going to be stabbed in the back. If you’re in a male-dominated space as one of relatively few women, who’s expendable for the guy who is clawing his way to the top? You are.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m about to ask a question that I often ask on the show, which is basically solve systemic oppression and solve our entire economy, but my answer to you-
June Carbone:
Oh, I have an answer.
Tori Dunlap:
Great. Tell me the answer because my answer to that is it’s like, well, this is the thing of capitalism is you have to participate. You have to get a job in order to pay your rent or mortgage, in order to buy your groceries, but also, we know that the system’s rigged, we know it fucking sucks. Excuse my language. So tell me about, what is the answer?
June Carbone:
90% marginal tax risk. Now, bear with me a minute.
Tori Dunlap:
Sure, yeah. Talk to me.
June Carbone:
So in the academy, I’m a professor. I get attacked from the left all the time, even though I am from the left.
Tori Dunlap:
Also, it’s really funny you say taxes because I literally, if people didn’t hear, but I jumped on this conversation, I was late because I was so angry at all the taxes we have to pay as a small woman-owned business, but anyway, I was joking. I’m a good socialist until I have to pay my own taxes.
June Carbone:
Oh, I’m the same way, but here we are. I think we need to rediscover what happened between 1940 and the early ’70s. I say I get attacked by the left even though I’m of the left. I’m not allowed to say good things about the period from 1940 to 1970 without saying it’s racist or sexist, but I have news for you. The two best periods in American history for Black men in particular were the ’40s because of the war in 1965 to 1975 in the South. When you ask why, I mean, just giving you the big reasons, but here’s the thing. Because of the-
Tori Dunlap:
Can I stop you really quick?
June Carbone:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
We’re saying war for Black men was good?
June Carbone:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Tell me more.
June Carbone:
Oh, well, this is the thing. So everybody says, “Oh, yeah, the defense industry needed workers and now hired Black workers,” particularly Black men when they wouldn’t have otherwise, but it’s not just that they had more jobs. It’s also Franklin Roosevelt made a point of insisting that defense plants be located in pro-union states, and that means the people getting hired, Black or White, got decent union jobs. If they got union jobs as opposed to simply defense plant jobs, many Blacks kept them after the war.
Now, when the Whites returned, the soldiers returned home from the war, the late ’50s were not a good period for Black men in the Roosevelt North, but people who got good union jobs, the UAW, for example, their kids went to college. So that was an important basket, but I want to say not just unions, but I wanted to get to the tax rates.
So coming out of the Depression and then World War II is the whole period from 1940 into the ’60s, marginal tax rates averaged above 80%, and what that did, and you see it, I mean, it starts during the Depression discrediting Charlie Mitchell of Citi, National City, who got a million a year for causing Great Depression. That’s an overstatement about causing it, but he was a major player in this. Big bonuses were discredited. High marginal tax rates came in because of the combination of the Depression and the war, and they stayed high.
Kennedy in ’63 lowered them for the first time since Roosevelt. What that did, when I described how for George Romney it’s the institution, for Mitt Romney it’s the bank account in the Cayman Islands, it’s that with 90% marginal tax rates for much of this period, getting a bonus didn’t mean anything. The bragging rights of the organization, man, were, “My company is bigger than your company. My company is Bell Labs. It’s more prestigious.” The critiques of the organization men of the ’50s is how terrible. College seniors don’t ask how much they’re getting paid, and they’d go to work for GE over a sales firm that would give them bonus pay where they could make maybe two or three times as much. They didn’t care. They wanted the security and the prestige of a company like GE or GM.
Again, why? Because the institution is bigger than the individual. There are no Elon Musks. The hero of the era is Robert McNamara, the technocrat, but guess who’s into Vietnam, but the point is the institution is bigger than the individual. GE’s management training program in the ’50s is you need to cooperate, cooperate better than they do that other company we’re competing with.
Now, in that environment, women do quite well. Women aren’t averse to competition. They’re averse to stabbing their colleagues in the back as the tournament form of competition that dominated corporate America, the part of corporate America with high stakes bonus systems. So that’s a big part of the book. This has a pernicious effect. Inequality has a pernicious effect on the entire society. We disinvest in institutions. We disinvest in the future. We invest in, “Hey, what’s going to be on my 401(k)?” What happened to the stock market today? We look at the immediate stuff. The future, that’s for fools. We’re BlackRock.
Tori Dunlap:
So really, you’re saying tax the rich.
June Carbone:
Yeah. I mean, if you have a society with greater equality, you invest in things that pay off down the road. You invest in the [inaudible 00:51:24]. You invest in healthcare.
Tori Dunlap:
To your point, we basically made a game out of how much money can you earn as an individual, what is your personal net worth, back to the Romney example, and that is success and face and very stereotypically for men. Again, I don’t know why I’m linking everything back to Donald Trump, but that part of why Donald Trump has been successful is this perspective or the belief that he is a multi, multi, multi-millionaire billionaire, but really, he has, what, $500 million in bail he is about to pay. Oh, gosh, this is so interesting. So yeah, we’re saying tax the rich and start to view … Well, is that the answer? Start to view success not again as individual net worth, but rather how are corporations doing? Is that right?
June Carbone:
Military, and again, the corporation man thought this way too. They believed. I mean, my husband’s stepfather worked for Ford Motor Company. He wouldn’t dream of buying a car that wasn’t made by Ford’s. His identity with Ford was incredible to the day he died, and his identification with the UAW was next to his identification with Ford.
Tori Dunlap:
But the answer can’t be like get a [inaudible 00:52:36] tattoo like buy in that hard. Is that the answer is buy in harder to the corporations that are feeding off of us? I don’t know.
June Carbone:
No, I’m saying something else. I’m saying that, again, when I talk about marginal tax rates, I’m not talking about taxing the rich so we have more money to spend than other people. That’s a complex economic issue. I’m saying I don’t want Elon Musk running the country. I don’t want Elon Musk deciding whether we’re going to share military information with Ukraine. I don’t want what’s good for Teslas. I mean, and Elon Musk, again, terrible for his workers, but also sacrifice car quality for ramping up production to attempt to dominate the market. What happens if you just go a little slower, but you’re making decisions on behalf of the greater good?
Tori Dunlap:
I mean, we’re seeing this with Boeing right now too, again, Seattle, Boeing’s the perfect example of they are now so focused on profit and on margins that they’ve sacrificed the safety of their aircraft.
June Carbone:
Boeing hired a series of Jack Welch acolytes trained at GE. How did Jack Welch make his reputation at GE? Earnings management. Earnings went up several hundred percent when he was CEO. Share price went up for a thousand percent because he beat earnings expectations every time. What’s the easiest way to beat earnings expectations? You cut the research labs. Anything that doesn’t pay off short term, you get rid of. You get rid of your more expensive senior employees who have real expertise. You emphasize bottom line reductionist metrics quarterly earnings. You don’t give a damn about quality defects that will show up five years from now. That’s what Boeing did. It destroyed a high quality engineering culture. By the way, Carly Fiorina tried to do the same thing at Hewlett-Packard, and was hated for it.
Tori Dunlap:
Yes, she did.
June Carbone:
More so than any of the men.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. I mean, my personal belief is I want both. I want what you’re saying, and I also want to tax the rich. I will take both. I don’t want Elon Musk influencing everything else besides what happens to Tesla, and I would also like to tax the hell out of him. So I will take both, please. Why not both?
June Carbone:
Good, and if you do that, if you just level, again, level the top, then you have a group of leaders whose personal status depends on institutions, and institutions depend on collective well-being. Elon Musk’s individual well-being does not depend on how the country does, at least not in the next 10 years. In the long run it might, but not in the short term, and that’s what they’re doing. They’re selling out our future.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. His individual well-being now fully hinges on whether Twitter is going to be a turnaround to be a success.
June Carbone:
[inaudible 00:55:38]
Tori Dunlap:
One of the things that I want to talk about that’s in the book is, I mean, I kind of danced around it. Once women see the rules of the game, they’re like, “I don’t want to play. I don’t want to participate,” and I see this in the personal finance realm with, again, capitalism in general of just like, “This system screws me over every day, so I’m not going to participate.” We’re also told every time we do ask for more money, “Okay. You’re greedy. You should just sit down and shut up,” basically. Talk to me about that of once the rules of the game are revealed to us, we don’t want to participate.
June Carbone:
Yeah. I mean, the easiest example is the study I mentioned that said there are both natural experiments with actual ads and efforts to manipulate this in the lab. So again, I want to join a top flight research team that’s going to cure cancer competing against other teams, women sign up, high stakes, bonus culture, lots of opportunities for advancement, highly competitive. The number of women declines, I think one that said by 95%. That’s what I mean by women taking themselves out of the running.
In some cases, it’s also recognizing what the company you’re about. Now, but this happens to men and women. One of the big debates in the literature is about women whistleblowers. We talked to a number of women whistleblowers, but a number of women, when they recognized what was going on, just either quit or sued, but the women who complained … Wells Fargo, one of the best whistleblowers back in 2011, she complained and said, “Hey, people around me are cheating, and I can’t make these quotas unless I cheat.” What did they do? They fired her, trumped up charges because she was complaining. She sued.
What did the Court of Appeals say? “Oh, you weren’t making your quotas. They had reason to fire you.” They didn’t take it seriously until, of course, the scandal erupted on newspapers all over the country, but the women we’ve talked to in finance is really quite interesting, and we’ve talked to more than one in the course of doing the book, but the woman who was fired at Wells Fargo that we talked to, Michelle [inaudible 00:58:02], she had tried to thread the needle. She cared about her customers.
So what she did was to give talks on how, “Look, Wells Fargo wants you to open multiple accounts for every customer. Here’s why customers might be able to use multiple accounts. Don’t do fake accounts, talk them into it,” but there was some concern for trying to train employees to listen to what people needed and tailor the services to what they need in the context of completely corrupt institution.
We talked to a number of women, especially women in finance. They care about their customers. The customer service end is simply more important to them. They often gravitate toward areas of finance where that’s more important, where you can be clever by designing products your customers need, and then they talk about how they’re getting bonuses that are less than men who are simply ripping off customers or how they’re the ones who are fired because they’re more expendable. I think figuring out how you can have institutions that do care about customers, and some institutions do, but they’re not necessarily as profitable.
Tori Dunlap:
I feel like all of this, it’s calling back to earlier things we’ve said too around, yeah, it’s not as profitable to invest in socially responsible companies, but then, of course, or at least for the women it’s not as profitable, but then it’s more profitable for companies because, yeah. I talked a lot in my book, and it would actually be interesting to hear your perspective that altruism is kind of ingrained in women or girls at a very young age based on the toys we give girls, like toys we give boys, it’s Legos. Again, I’m talking in stereotypes and I’m talking in gender binary here, but boys, it’s Legos and things to build, and they’re taught resilience, and they’re taught failure and getting back up again and their own ingenuity, and then women are taught or girls are taught, okay, easy bake ovens, bridal veils, doll houses. They’re told that their value to society is how they give to others like we give a two-year-old child another child to take care of. That feels bonkers to me.
Then for me with personal finance, when women start having the audacity to say, “Okay. Yes, I’m going to advocate for my raise,” or, “Yes, I’m going to show up in these spaces,” or, “Yes, I’m going to charge this amount,” society and the patriarchy then weaponizes that altruism and says, “Well, you’re greedy. You should just want this for the collective.” I mean, my Instagram comments still are just like, “You should do this for free if you really loved this. Why don’t you care enough to just do this because you want to do it?”
So I feel like that’s a bit of what we’re talking about here too, where it’s like even in you were talking about cancer research or whatever, women are going to be like, “Yes, this is for the good of the world. Great,” and then the moment they might want to get paid for something, society is just like, “Well, why are you a terrible person for wanting money?”
June Carbone:
Yes, and that’s what I was saying about women or the new organization men, that the mommy track, which has its own dynamic. A lot of women are willing to trade lesser opportunity for advancement or for raises for a secure job that gives them time to spend with their kids. Not a bad deal. I mean, I went into teaching. I love teaching. I much prefer it to law practice, but when I did it initially, I took a salary cut and did it in part because I had a young kid. So I had more control of the hours, and I worked for it now than I did then, but again, I’m in a job, great job security, and I choose when I work, and I was quite happy to make that trade off.
I see employers as exploiting women. Women are more likely to stay with the company that passes them over for promotion than a man is. Companies often evaluate women for leadership and basically on how aggressive and greedy they are, and that misvaluation of women and women’s willingness to stay even after being passed off for promotion, these women make the trains run out of time. They’re the balance, the institutional memory, and they are not paid commensurate with the value they performed for institutions.
Tori Dunlap:
Or even non-compensated working parents, stay-at-home moms, that’s what keeps society running. The emotional labor, the physical labor, it’s all unpaid, and society would fall apart if women decided tomorrow, “You know what? I’m not going to do this anymore.”
June Carbone:
Again, do you know that in the ’70s, Congress passed by overwhelming margins a child care bill that would’ve invested in universal pre-K, federally funded child care subsidies dramatic increase in just the entire federally funded institutional support for childbearing and Nixon beat at it?
Tori Dunlap:
Fucking hell. Of course he did. Of course he fucking did.
June Carbone:
Because he was wondering to the Christian right and to low tax, low spend conservative Republicans.
Tori Dunlap:
So both houses?
June Carbone:
Both houses of Congress.
Tori Dunlap:
Both sections of Congress? House and Senate passed it? So it went to his desk and he was like, “No.” Fucking hell. Okay. God, I’m so angry.
June Carbone:
You should be.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m so angry.
June Carbone:
Universal pre-K. So if you want support for all of that, universal pre-K. I mean, it’s been passed by Florida.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s passed in Florida? That’s the last place I would’ve expected.
June Carbone:
I think may have passed in Oklahoma. I’m trying to remember whether it was that or Medicaid expansion, but again, Medicaid expansion, a lot of money, I mean, not just for … Medicaid pays for 40% of births in the US. The COVID relief package paid for an additional year of postpartum benefits. It took Mississippi forever to adopt it. Again, conservative states with high maternal mortality rates and maternal mortality tends to be postpartum rather than during childbirth. States with some of the highest rates of maternal mortality are least likely to adopt these provisions, but if you were to say what gives you the biggest bang for your buck in public spending, it’s early childhood, maternal health, child health, child care.
Tori Dunlap:
One of the concepts you have in the book, and we were talking about before of like, okay, once women see the rules of the game, they don’t want to play, this is part of it, is this concept of the triple bind. Can you break this down for us and give us some examples of what this looks like too?
June Carbone:
Sure. First, women don’t compete on the same terms as the men. They lose. What does that mean? Again, a number of women never saw it coming. Betty Dukes is just wonderful. She works for Walmart. She thinks that shares her Christian values. She brags she has deeper roots in the community than Walmart does. She had been in Pittsburgh, California longer than Walmart, and what she only gets when she becomes part of the class action is that those are qualities Walmart viewed as disqualifying for promotion.
Secondly, if you play by the rules of the game, you figured them out, you’re more likely to be hated and may be fired for doing the same thing as the men. One of the women we talked to at Wells Fargo described how she was teaching her employees how to do it right. Why did she get fired? Because the Wall Street Journal wrote a story that profiled her. She didn’t do anything illegal. She was doing things that weren’t less egregious than what the men around her were doing, but she made the mistake of attracting the attention of the Wall Street Journal. If you don’t have a powerful protector, you’re toast when the company gets in trouble.
Third, the triple bind is that women who fully understand that what it takes to get ahead is stabbing other people in the back often don’t want to do it. So our advice is be sure you know what you’re getting into before you commit too much to a company. The name of the game is using the first job to get the next job, and if you feel the company doesn’t share your values and is not loyal to you, you should be looking for the next job.
Tori Dunlap:
As a career and finance expert, a plus one on all of that, we talk about all of the time that job hopping is not the evil thing that people said and even my parents’ generation of like, “Oh, you should stay in a job and loyalty pays.” It does not pay.
June Carbone:
It does not pay.
Tori Dunlap:
Does not pay. It just fucks you over.
June Carbone:
I’ll say the women who succeed are more likely to rise through the ranks in a single company than men who succeed.
Tori Dunlap:
Interesting.
June Carbone:
If you find a company that does share your values, go for it.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, totally, that treats you well and that, yeah. It’s more the job hopping of realizing, “I’m getting undercompensated. I’ve asked for more money, they won’t give it to me. I’m taking on more tasks with no more compensation. There doesn’t seem a path for advancement.” Yeah, totally. I am so endlessly fascinated by your work. I’m so excited to go read your book. I mean this as the highest compliment because I was the kid, a little nerdy as well, who loved school. This is the closest I’ve felt to being back at college since I was actually in college. This conversation with you is just so insightful and really, really interesting, so thank you. So Fair Shake is the book. Where can people find it? Where can people learn more about you?
June Carbone:
Okay. Well, it’s coming out from Simon & Schuster beginning of May. You can preorder now. It’s on Amazon. It’s easy to find. I’m at the University of Minnesota, and the thing about professors, we’re very easy to find. Website, just June Carbone, I will come up.
Tori Dunlap:
Amazing. Thank you for your work. Thank you for being here.
June Carbone:
Well, thank you. Great fun. Good questions.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you so much to Professor Carbone for joining us. One of my favorite, most fascinating episodes we’ve done in a long time. You can get her book, Fair Shake, wherever you get your books, ebook, hardcover, audiobook. I have a copy of it and I’m really excited to delve into it. It’s going to be really, really good reading. Thanks for being here. As always, Financial Feminist, we appreciate you and we’ll talk to you soon. Goodbye.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields. Associate Producer Tamisha Grant, research by Ariel Johnson. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf.
Marketing and operations by Karina Patel, Amanda Leffew, Elizabeth McCumber, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Taylor Chou, Kailyn Sprinkle, Sasha Bonar, Claire Kurronen, Daryl Ann Ingram and Jenell Riesner. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolf, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K team and community for supporting this show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests, and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over one million women negotiate salary, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of almost 250,000 on Instagram and more than 1.6 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
