Back in America

Women aren't ego motivated. They are purpose motivated. And what does that mean? It means that they're on the boards not because they want a fancy title. They're on boards because they sought as a channel to deliver on the promise of their passion and their purpose. If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

Welcome to Back in America, the podcast. Today we are joined by Dr. Patty Fletcher, author of Disruptors, Success Strategies for Women Who Break the Mold. Patty is no stranger to the challenges women face in corporate America, where women make up 51% of the collective educated workforce and hold a growing share of high paying jobs, yet still earn just 82 cents for every dollar earned by men and make up only 11% of Fortune 500 CEOs. Drawing from our own experiences in male dominated environments, Patty offers fresh perspective on how women can define success on their own terms and break free from traditional norms. Welcome to Back in America, Patty. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Well, Patty, let me start with why are we having this discussion? Why in 2024 in America, where women represent half of the population, are we still talking about the many systemic hurdles that keeps women from leadership roles?

This question is a great one because I've been asked it since I started on this topic about 20 something years ago. I went to right before the Obama administration transitioned to the next administration. They had this thing called the United State of Women and it was incredible. I went down to DC and I really amazed that I got invited. It was specifically for people who were doing whatever they could to disrupt the systemic biases against women. I'm 10 feet away from Biden, at the time, Vice President Biden, from President Obama, from Michelle Obama, from Oprah. It was an unbelievable experience. It was a big time during the Trump administration as well.

And so I had taken an Uber there and he had to drop me off wrapped around this very long line of people waiting to get in. This was 2016. And he asked me, you're still talking about this? And the answer is yes, because it hasn't been solved yet. And that's my answer today. So trying to be a disruptor is what you did by publishing this book. I want to come back to your journey and I want to understand where you started before you even thought of writing a book. Talk to me about your professional experience and what you did early on in your career that might have shaped your views on leadership and the gender dynamics.

Yeah. So it's important to understand where I came from. I grew up in a very small suburb in southern Massachusetts, the south coast of Massachusetts. My parents, one was a first generation Armenian-American. My grandparents were really impacted by the Armenian genocide, especially my grandmother, who was orphaned in the genocide. And all decisions in her life and her sister's lives were made by men. And then there is my dad, Boston Irish Catholic, born and raised in Dorchester. My parents grew up just a few doors down from each other.

And basically as a Boston Irish Catholic, he was really at it. But he grew up in the 1950s and had a misogyny. He had a lot of gender bias. The funny thing is, though, he's actually a feminist in how we lived in both parents raising you to be one, although they didn't really understand what the word meant. So it's important that I note that because I was raised to believe that feminism was an or equation, not an and equation. And I was born a disruptor. Maybe this is an important time to define what I mean by disruption, because the word is thrown around and it's pretty much meaningless. So when you go to the Silicon Valley and you look at a startup and they say we're innovating, we're disrupting, they use them interchangeably.

What they're saying is that they are creating something that will provide greater efficiency, right? Less time, less expensive and greater effectiveness, achieve the desired outcomes. When I look at disruption through a feminist view, I add on another eat and that's equitable. So not only can do I look at antiquated status quo's that are inefficient, ineffective, but I also ask myself, are they inequitable? Are they impacting positively the broadest number of people, overrepresented, underrepresented populations? I've just always been that person and I can't stop. And that's what a disruptor is. I can't stop until the three E's happen. When I entered the workforce, I was really groomed and conditioned.

We didn't talk about these topics until pretty recently. Quite frankly, I was in my 30s and September 11th had happened. I was almost impacted and I thought a lot about my grandmother who helped to raise me, the one who was orphaned in the genocide, and thought, oh my God, I can work this hard. And yet it all could be taken away from me because truth is going to repeat itself. And I started getting deeply curious about her. And there are many reasons why I couldn't really find out a lot about her life. We didn't talk about this stuff when she was alive. And so I tried to research the research skills I learned in MBA school and underscored it at SEP weren't helping me.

So I decided to small kids at home. I'm flying around supporting my family. I have no time. I think I'll add on a PhD. Sounds like a good idea. So I went back to school and got my PhD and my initial. On top of doing your job? No, no. Raising family. Why the hell not? Right. Yeah. And by the way, that's called the three shifts. So women have three shifts. Working women have three shifts. Right. We have our job. We run our household.

And we also have to reinvest in ourselves constantly because women are not hired for their potential. Right. They are hired for their experience. And we are all conditioned to believe that if a man doesn't know something, he'll take the job, buddy. And if a woman doesn't know something, she should probably take the class, which is why to this day, there are highly qualified women who should be sitting on every public board seat they have. But they're told to go take that board readiness class at Harvard or Stanford. Men are not told that. It's very frustrating. But anyways, my focus of my dissertation was transformational leadership for large scale category creation in tech in virtual environments. It was a very new thing. We had just acquired top tier in Israel.

I got a bunch of smart people there. Waldorf and Palo Alto were the other hubs for R&D kind of new stuff. Right. And I was here in Boston. So it was really cool. It was virtual. I didn't believe the stuff we were doing. And so one of the classes after Stan, by the way, it was two and a half years working on a proposal. I am about two, two and a half years down the road on that. And I'm forced to take this feminist leadership theory class. And again, remembering I had a very distinct view of what feminism was, and I was not that person. I was never an or person. I was an and person. And so, you know, feminism, bad. Other way, good. Right. So it was crazy. I was learning these concepts from Carol Gilligan, who is really the grandmother of feminist leadership theory and really understanding how women think differently, make decisions differently. And yet the world around them, particularly in business and in government, decisions are made so differently.

And it's why we don't have more women in the C-suite, why we don't have more women in the boardroom is really related a lot back to her work. And so I'm taking this and I'm like starting to think Stan about my own life and going, why have I never questioned why I'm the only girl in this math class? Why have I never questioned that I'm the only woman in that room? And if things keep going the way that they go, I'm going to be the last woman in that room. And I was looking at all of the different research that were focused in on technology industries at the time of me being the most technology intensive industries were tech and life sciences right now. Everything's a technology industry and the research level was like a BP and below. And I was looking at the numbers not well gathered around women on the board, women in the C-suites, and I wanted to focus in on the board level because I believed at the time that is where we've got to focus on the glass ceiling. That's where policies are made. And so there were like 15 women. And thanks to working in a place like SAP and making friends with kind of the highest level of people there who had those connections with the women and everyone who wanted to talk to, I got to interview all of them.

And that's really where the book started where it really opened my eyes and it was a really well performing dissertation because nobody had covered this before. So I did a phenomenological study of all 15 women because I wanted to understand what were those characteristics and what were those factors that got them to where so few humans were right, let alone women. And it was amazing Stan. I got to understand things like women aren't ego motivated. They are purpose motivated. And what does that mean? Right? It means that they're on the boards not because they want a fancy title. They're on boards because they saw it as a channel to deliver on the promise of their passion and their purpose. They also knew they couldn't own the whole thing. They had a domain expertise. They had relationships that they could bring to the table and their job was to assemble people who could help them knowing full well that their path to the transformation that they were going to create. Those people are going to switch out. Not everybody's going to be fully aligned with your end goal, but they may be aligned to the next mile mark. Right? So that's just one example. There are many more. Another one and that you see in the book come through in addition to the aligning their profession with their passion and how they're driven, ego ain't the amigo, that's a misogynistic view of things, is that they view every barrier as a strategy waiting to happen. And that we, despite the systemic challenges that these were women in the mid 2000s were in their sixties and seventies. Right? And so like they really are this the shoulders I stood on.

I was very aware that these women understood every single move they made would impact me. And that's how most women and every disruptor I've met, female disruptor thinks about everything I do, Stan. I think about how will my glass ceiling be the next generation's concrete floor? And that's what we do. Right? So I learned things around the importance of mindset and that no matter the systemic challenges that you face, it's simply a strategy, right? That you're going to ignore, you know, the barrier, you're going to be very over it or freaking get out of the way and create your own path. I really want to focus on your own experience to see what was the trigger. I understand your family situation. I understand how you were brought into doing that study, how you made those fascinating women. But I wonder if there is one particular moment trigger, occasion, something that happened that made you said, I need to write this book. So it goes back to the dissertation. So right. So remember, I went back to school to learn how to research like a scholar, because I wanted to learn about my Armenian grandmother, because I knew so little. So as I am researching and interviewing and doing everything I could to understand these incredible disruptors who were just like me, Stan, came from highly disconnected families, like nobody came from, you know, highly connected families. So we had really no access. Very rarely did we go to tier one schools. And yet, with everything we experienced, we were able to transform. We were able to transform not only our worlds, but had agency to enable other women to harness their own power. So we were able to climb that Maslow's hierarchy up to the top of self-actualization. At the same time, I was finding out about my grandmother and her sisters. And what I found out, right, my grandmother was orphaned at six months old. She was the youngest of 10 children. Her father had been killed when her mother was pregnant with her. Her mother had hid my grandmother in a bureau drawer and sacrificed her own life in order to save her children. The Turks were coming to her house. They were part of where they lived in a place called Harput. Her daughters were very young teenagers and were sent to church to pray, only to be forced to marry these pretty elderly Turkish dudes. So Nana's life from there, the whole kind of folklore that I found out, because my grandfather was very abusive, was that she didn't cry. And then my experience with her helping to raise me is my grandfather pushing her down, screaming at her, he's crazy man. And she didn't speak. And what was so interesting, Stan, is she knew that in order to survive bottom of the hierarchy, never climbing, that she had to be quiet. She learned that at six months old.

And it helped her survive. But she could never thrive because she was so dependent on someone else. She was never allowed to have a job, right? She was never allowed to do those things. She came to this country at 19, put into an arranged marriage with 31-year-old crazy man, right? She was never allowed to transform. And here I am, this color of my skin, let's face it, it's a racist country. I'm a white woman born in 1969 in America with two ears that can't stop listening, a brain that can't shut down its curiosity, and a mouth that will not shut. And I knew there that I personally could not live if I did not do everything I could to create a global platform. It has driven me in my writing and in my coaching in every stage I'm on. I always go back to that moment learning about my grandmother and the dissonance between the women who I work alongside with and the human who I am. I'm curious, as you were working on your book, did any inside change of your own leadership? Did anything switch a little bit as you were writing the book? No, no. Actually, wait a minute. That's a lie. I'll actually tell you about something that switched right after my dissertation that didn't change me. It changed how I wrote. And so when I, one of the first things that I did after my dissertation was I had, I was at a very large technology event with a large community of tech people, a few million people around the globe, and only 8% of those people, developer community, 8% of them were women. So I hosted a panel and the first one was in America, the second one was in Europe. And the panel bringing together the design, the concept to solve it was all about how do we get more female developers? How do we do that? And so I had people from outside, from different, you know, whatever influencers, many people, I won't name who they are, but you know, that we all know today.

It was like 10 minutes in and I'm looking at this big audience and people were leaving, all men and a few women were leaving. By the end stand, I know I'm exaggerating, but it felt like only event staff were there. I'm sorry. And over the next few days, I was getting, I was getting these awful blogs written about me and I was reading them and none of the male sponsors I had who were like, yeah, we're going to do this, go. None of them would support me. Not one. Close their door. Good luck, kids. What happened? Yeah, I think at the time they didn't have the backbone to do this. And this was, I wonder because they wanted to have that debate. They wanted to have that forum to get more women develop. So what is it you said that turned them off? What happened was they felt the men in the audience felt blamed and shamed. So while it wasn't my intention, my delivery made them feel blamed and shamed.

And I admittedly stand needed to take a few days to lick my wounds, right? I was pissed. I was pissed that I'm reading this and going, like, good, right? Like misogyny. Just so angry that they made it personal when it wasn't my intention. I looked back because you know, communication is a big deal, right? And I look back and I go, OK, so what I have to remember is when I am disrupting someone's status quo that they are either accessible in or at least comfortable in, they're going to come at me like a caged tiger. Right? Just like, you know, I love my life. If you come at me with a change that's going to adversely impact that, oh, I'm coming for you. Right? I'm going to protect it. So that was the first thing. And I thought, what am I going to do about this? These are people I need to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. By the way, the women left the room too. They also kind of set me things because they didn't want the perception. Again, this is Pre-Lenin. Pre-Lenin, which is the book from Sheryl Sandberg. Yeah. They didn't want the perception of being one of those women. I heard those words from them.

So a few days went by and then I did what I typically do. I'm a Carol Gilligan person. I am such a statistic and Carol believed in relational decision making. So I thought, and I'm also extremely confrontational. I love confrontational. And so I reach out to some of the bigger naysayers who are now some of the best feminists I know. And that's where I learned that my communication was a problem. And I also learned something else, which Harvard later did research on and validated. The best way to get these male influencers and decision makers to care about this topic is that they have a daughter, not a wife, not a sister, not a mom, not a grandmother, but a daughter. Because when they start talking, right, I ask them questions and they lead themselves on a path of, oh, shit, someone else's son is going to have more opportunities than my daughter. That is a big trigger that I definitely leverage. And so when I wrote the book, because I didn't just want women reading this, I truly believe this is a business imperative as much as societal, right? Simply by the numbers of who we are, that it needed to be written in a way not to make it okay.

I'm asked a lot on keynote stages to make it okay for the white men, but instead to explain it, not focus on the people. That's why you'll notice in every chapter, it's about the context, right? It is about here is the problem and why it's a problem. And here our way is that they're very compelling, that have like things that will be better for all of us if we make these kinds of changes. How did you feel once you said, all right, I'm going to write this book, I know I want to do that. Did you did you feel any differently once you took the decision to go ahead and start writing it? I did. Yeah, it did. You know, for me, it was because I was so focused on the boardroom for so much of my work. You got me on stages, right? It was a big deal. And then I was like, God, there are so many different forms of leadership. You know, the glass ceiling is one thing, but what about the glass door in front of you? What about middle managers who determine who gets hired, who gets fired, who gets promoted, right? Who have, you know, programs they're supposed to follow, but everything changes when they hit their desk.

We need to get stories from women from every walk of life at every stage of their career and every function to know you have agency. It starts with your feet that are planted on the floor and you never know what you can do until you take your first step. That was a big like, yeah, kind of moment for me, right? Where, you know, I'm not like anti-establishment, right? And I'm definitely anti-hierarchy. And trust me, I love boards. I understand them. But the truth is there are multiple ways to get there. And also the truth is, Dan, not everybody wants to be in the boardroom. Not everybody wants to be in the C-suite. But as women who disrupt, we want to make our purpose happen. That was a lot of fun for me. I really enjoyed that. So talk to me about the way you started writing this book. Did you, I mean, you were working on your dissertation, so I'm sure you took a lot of content from there. But did you, what was your writing process? Yeah. By the way, how did you make time for writing a book on top of everything else?

So my dissertation, you know, really helped me understand what were those factors and characteristics. And so I started there, right? And I wanted to start there, one, because I wanted to see if it was true for every type of woman, even though the content might be different, was the context the same. And, you know, I'm a scholar, right? I'm a scholar practitioner. As a scholar, I want to constantly prove myself wrong. Does that just mean I'm learning more? Right? So that was really exciting. But in terms of sitting down, and I have written the dissertation, you know, was based on research from years before, right, before reading. And so when I really sat down to write the book, I realized that the stories that I tell on stage, the questions I ask women, the stories I hear when I coach, were really good stories that they might not make a good book. And I did what most folks do is you hire an expert. And so I hired a developmental editor who looked at the book and said, run structure, not sure what we're doing here. And we structured the book. We took all of my data insights because I was writing anyway, I'm writing for a lot of pubs. And so we, I, you know, fed everything in and that's how we reformatted it, you know, make people aware. And I also as a transformational leader, deeply change happens to the person in the mirror. And so I reformatted the book to realize this book is not just a toolkit, it's a personal transformation roadmap. So make people aware, get them excited, right, with a personal desire to be part of a change, enable them with the right knowledge and know what that kind of change could look like, and then give them the abilities, that new kind of viewpoint mindset, whatever, and then help them understand how to reinforce that own behavior and belief system within themselves. I had to have someone do that for me, Stan. There was no way in heck I could get out of my own way. I was so busy in it, that I couldn't kind of work on it in that way. And everything changed once that happened. I picked up that paragraph on page 17, where you talk about the bias that women in leadership faced, which is not just part of one company or even a culture. It's inherent, it is so deep rooted that it's invisible.

And you say, it's like asking a white person, hey, what is it like having white privilege? You can't see it unless you're on the outside. It's true. I thought it was very powerful because yeah, I don't think as white men, we don't really understand how privileged we are. And understanding what women go through, unless you are a woman, you don't know that. And by the way, that brings me to another question I had about your book. It's a lot, you place a lot of responsibility on women's shoulder, when other people believe that it's really, I mean, it's more than just if we want the system to change, there is a lot companies can do, even society should do to be more flexible to women. So it's an interesting perspective, because that's exactly the opposite of what the book says. So right, lean in is what you just said. Well, women, your problem, you have to solve it by acting more like what the system wants you to act like. And by the way, when you do that, all leaders are going to say you're too aggressive, you're too this and you're too that. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. What the book is about is the understanding that women are not taking positions they want to take, whether it's upward mobility, sideward, whatever it is, they're not doing it for an ego play, they're doing it because they feel it's the best route to create their purpose.

When you have systemic barriers in the way, policies that need to change strategies that need to change reinforcement mechanisms that need to change, which is the place where every transformation falls down. What are you going to do? Are you going to spend all of your time fighting the system or are you only going to go so far until you realize, and I can give you an example from my own personal experience, when you realize that that absolutely you're on the right stage, you're what to bring to world a very worthy disruption that would be more effective, more efficient and more equitable. Maybe you're just in front of the wrong audience. Go find your audience. Right. And by the way, that might mean staying a little bit longer at this organization so you can get that title you need to go to that other organization at that level, which is what happens, which is, you know, one of those things that is a result of the leaky pipe. It's why women tend to quit once they get a promotion that was hard won. It's why people focus in on talent acquisition of female leaders, because they're so sick and tired of what they had to go through that they'll, you know, they don't have the baggage at the new place.

So it's more about how do I stop relying on someone else's systemic bias that has been institutionalized since the dawn of time, and instead, create a path forward that not only benefits me. It's gonna help the person right behind me right be able to do that much better. What are the things I can do? What are the conversations? Where where can I actually make an impact that is immediate that helps me get closer to being able to delivering on that purpose. So it's really more about I'm sure you read this part in the book. I can't stand the word in power. I can't stand it makes me sick. Because in power essentially means and whenever you're like a CEO or leader say I don't want to punch it in the face, because essentially what it means is, I'm going to give you power. And guess what else, Stan? I can take that away, right? Instead, the book is about harnessing your own power. You got it. Are you going to use it? And it's not going to be the way you conditioned and conditioned to use it. And so as an example, one thing I share on stage is this story that I call you're going to be someone's peach or honor your niche. When I was pregnant with my second child was a really awful pregnancy, high risk, all of that. And where I was working, you know, big technology company, go on LinkedIn, figure out who it is. And they changed a lot, right? Always reorganizing. It's amazing. And so I it was also a company was very dominant. And so you just moved around a lot and leaders supported you, your managers, right? It was just kind of how innovation happened. It was perfect. It was a big petri dish for me. It wasn't enough about who you know, it was all about who knows you. So I find out, you know, on one particular day during all hands that we're acquiring a company and here's a bunch of new stuff that was happening. And I'm like, oh my God, it's time for when I get back from maternity leave. I took it on. I'm so excited. The next day, the stuff I was working on basically got shut down, even though it was, you know, going to be very, it was very successful. And I was being consolidated like many others into a different group. I meet with my new people manager who is a older German guy a few hours later. And I'm ready. I'm ready to talk to him about, you know, what my what my maternity plans are, you know, who was going to take on what like, you know, the typical thing. That you do when you're going to have a leave of absence for a while. And then I wanted to ask him about what this project was. Do you know leaders, you know, what what can I do right to learn more because I want to go work on that. Instead, what happened is that he talked the entire time and told me that there was a reason that superior countries give women a year off because I'm going to do just unsolvable things.

I'm going to do all damage to my child if I don't bond with her for a year. I already had a kid. She seemed to be doing just fine. And that's why they do it. And why aren't I doing that? And what do you mean you're the sole provider for your family? That's not right. That's not what you should be doing. Your priorities are wrong. Why aren't you taking a year off? I explained to him I work in America. I get three months off. That's what our company does. And I was justifying what I was doing. And he's like, No, I'm not going to go talk to them. I'm not going to advocate for this role for you, because you're just going to leave anyway, because you're not going to be able to be a mom and do that kind of work. Right. And I'm like, look at my resume, dude, this is only the kind of work I've been doing. So it's a really like interesting thing. And I, you know, left out again, high pressure pregnancy, all that stuff. And I reached out to a few friends and just started gathering Intel, right? Going back to, I love category creation, category disruption. I think enterprise technology, which is the industry I grew up in is awesome. And that was my calling, right? That's what I do. And so I ended up deciding I'm going to honor my niche. He had me color coded in peach on the org chart. Everyone else was in blue because I was in childbirth. And then the middle bearing years were changed. He wasn't going to advocate for me or move me out anywhere. Was it insane that they put HR with that stuff? So yeah, so that was a big thing for me. I'm going to follow someone else's path, or I'm going to honor that purpose niche. And I'm going to talk to whoever I need to talk to because people do business with people. Brick buildings don't do business with brick buildings. And guess what? When I came back, that job was mine, and it was phenomenal. And I remember that you did that by yourself and you're advocating for and explaining to women how to own themselves, their career, their leadership opportunities. I'm wondering how can we also help company change their culture? That guy in that company, I mean, the change had to be at a higher level. You talk about HR, you know, men who say HR don't want that. So there is a real shift that has to happen within companies' culture. If we talk about the corporate culture, but also within our society, how do we work on that also? So the first thing is, I just want to make a slight, you know, change. You said I didn't do that myself. Women again are relational. We know that no one gets to the finish line alone. There is no hero in a hoodie. And so the people who I had had these long term relationships with, who just so happened to be highly connected people and people of influence, they always saw something in me because I worked with them, right? That experience with me. And they were the ones advocating and championing. And that's a big difference, by the way.

We get mentored as women. I don't need your mentoring unless I have 10 years in the workplace or less, right? I need you to champion and advocate for me when I'm not there. That's a big deal. So how do we change things? Dear God, I wish there was one answer, Sam, because nobody's figured this out. I will say a few things, whether it's societal or it's business. Oh, my God. Oh, what's his name? Adam Grant. I saw a recent interview with him, with Shelley's Ellis from Weft when they were at World Economic Forum, and I wanted to reach through my computer and punch him in the face. Because essentially what he said is, well, we just have to trust that leaders, CEOs and boards will do the right thing and have values that will change. We've tried that for a while. It's never freaking worked. This is when I really started, and this was around the time of writing the book, where I was like, shit, I've said I hated mandates for so long. I think we're going to have to mandate. That is because that's when change happens. And many people don't like mandates, right? IBM successfully abused them. They were the earliest I've read about who successfully did gender equity. Right? Like amazing, because of the mandates. Eventually they moved past, she only got the job because she was a, she was a woman. She was a, and instead this is the leader, right? We're not talking about it anymore. So mandates are really important. They're harder in things like the entrepreneurial world, because that's an ecosystem. It's different. As an employer, especially if you're public, this is where those investors, the ones that come in and like cause trouble, right? Because they want change. Yes, thank you, activist. That's where those changes come through. We're having stuff like that, right? Fixing it on the outside. And quite frankly, PR, but the biggest thing is, especially for business to consumer, is that women are responsible for 90% of all consumer buy decisions. 90%. Right? We have an awful lot of power. That's just one of them. We're also in America responsible for managing 51% of family wealth. Think about that. So we have so much power. We're not in power. We're in power when we use our dollar bills, when we collectively get together. That's why social media is so awesome. When we collectively get together and say, I'm taking my money from you and I'm going to put it over here. Patty, we're getting at the end of this interview, which is fascinating. We could have gone forever. Last question is, what is America to you? It's a tough question. Okay, so I'm going to give you an honest answer and keep in mind that I was raised by a very patriotic father, right? Very, you know, he loved his country and loved my country. And the American flag was amazing.

I remember going to Germany and not seeing any flags up and then going back as a worker, right, a professional and asking some colleagues, why don't you have your flags up? Aren't you proud of your country? And they talked about, you know, the nationalism, you know, Hitler times and all of that. I used to think of the American flag as the symbol of just awesome and freedom, right? And, you know, I'm a grandchild of, you know, just immigrants and all that stuff. Now when I see the American flag, I'm terrified because of what it represents. This is a country that was an experiment. We are highly flawed, but yet we have what it takes to change that. I'm seeing like the shifts with Kamala, you know, white guys were called, right? I'm seeing those exciting glimmers of hope. The thing is we get used to things very, very quickly and we very rarely follow through. We still make misogynistic decisions from the narratives we tell in Hollywood, right? Which is why Stan, I'm so excited to listen to your podcast about storytelling. Who gets to be the hero, right? What's the lesson of the story? To the policies that we have. I worked with so many people as I know you have across the globe who literally had to fight in the streets for the freedom to vote. Unbelievable. We take those things for granted and we don't understand that policies put into place not only impact us, they impact our daughters, right? They impact other representatives of the majority. We are in a country right now where the people who were in a system that was meant for them are being asked to disrupt that system and they are pissed. So that's what I think of America. We are in constant turmoil. I, you know, with the last administration realized that maybe we're not the good guys. I was raised to believe that we were. This stuff has been going on all along. Talk about white privilege.

That this stuff had been going on all along and just, you know, one last thing about the workplace. What I realized during the Me Too movement and Black Lives Matter is that the workplace became the last safe haven for those conversations. You didn't talk politics before then, right? I'm getting called by HR leaders all the time who used to hire me for large scale transformation to help them, you know, really systemically change things around DEI. Be going, Patty, how am I going to have these conversations in this organization? How are people going to feel safe? How are we not going to get sued? What does this look like, right? And all of a sudden it's become the norm. It just makes me wonder if it's time for a revolution. Unfortunately, we're seeing it, right? One wants that evolution, right? They don't want things to change. The other wants the revolution and they have money and they have platforms that they can build. We're a country of turmoil. On this note, Patty, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you, Stan. Enjoy the conversation.

Thank you.