Pat Sweet - Host: This is the engineering and leadership podcast with pat sweet episode 35. [inaudible] Come to the engineering and leadership podcast. The show dedicated to helping engineers thrive today. I speak with engineer, author, and entrepreneur, Stephanie slogan about confronting unconscious bias and helping women thrive and engineers

Pat Sweet - Host: Hey everyone. And welcome to episode 35. My name is pat sweet. I am super jazzed to be here with you today. Super excited about today's show. Before I get into the show though, there's one, there's a little public service announcement that I wanted to make on behalf of a good friend of mine. Steve foreign. You've been a friend of the show for any length of time. Probably heard me mention Steve's name. You may have even heard the interview that I did with Steve foreign. That was back in that episode. 18 hard to imagine it was that long ago now, but that was an episode about his mission to create 1 billion happier people. That's right. 1 billion with a B and his whole, his whole message is about gratitude and the importance of gratitude in the workplace. And particularly for leaders just the, the transformational power that gratitude can have.

Pat Sweet - Host: And I wanted to bring up Steve, because he's got a webinar coming up that he's putting on for the association of professional engineers and geoscientists of Alberta, which is open to anyone whether or not you live and work in Alberta or not. And that'll be taking place on July 22nd. So just a couple days from now, I'm going to put a link in the show notes so that you can register for that note, that the webinar is taking place on the 22nd, but registration is only open until the 20th. So you've only got by the time this gets published a few hours to check that out. So, so please do check that out again, July 22nd, and the webinar's called thriving in disruptive times, which I'm sure most of you would agree is an appropriate topic for today in the midst of a global pandemic and really we'll dig into gratitude and how gratitude can help you thrive in disruptive times.

Pat Sweet - Host: So one last time do check out the show notes. I'll have links there to help you sign up thriving in disruptive times, July 22nd, by my good friend, Steve foreign do check it out. And the next thing I wanted to mention is that I was planning on having Mr. Mark Consella from open door and he's a VP of engineering and open door on the podcast today, but due to a scheduling conflict I've had to to, to push that back a little bit, but that's okay. We will have mark and a future episode, probably not long from now today. Instead the brilliant Stephanie Slocum is going to be on the show who I think you're really, really going to enjoy. Stephanie's a lot of fun we had at the beginning of the interview. We ended up chatting for 15, 20 minutes before even hitting record. She's just a lot of fun, a lot of energy. I think you're really going to like what you hear today. And with that being the case, let's jump right into the main content

Pat Sweet - Host: Your community has known for a very long time that women are underrepresented within the profession. And while efforts to address that and bring more women into the stem fold have shown some signs of helping. There are even more hurdles in place. Once women start practicing as engineers in industry, these hurdles can hinder career advancement, erode engagement, and ultimately make it more difficult for women to put their skills to work. Today. I speak with engineer, author, and entrepreneur, Stephanie Slocum about the challenges facing women in stem and what leaders can do to fight against the unconscious bias and outdated practices that work against them. Stephanie has both a bachelor's and master's degrees in architectural engineering from Penn state university. She's also a professional engineer licensed in both Maryland and Pennsylvania and sits on numerous structural and civil engineering Institute, boards and committees. Here's my chat with Stephanie, Stephanie Slocum, welcome to the engineering leadership podcast. It's an absolute pleasure to have you tonight.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: Thanks so much for having me here. I'm

Pat Sweet - Host: Super jazzed. You and I have already spoken for 15, 20 minutes before, before getting started there. There's, there's a ton we, we can get into and should get into. But where I want to start is actually with a, with a blog post, you wrote about a year ago where you described yourself as an unlikely entrepreneur. And that just got me thinking, I'd love to know a bit about, about your story and about your business engineers rising and how all that came to be.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: Yep. There's a story there. So fabulous, fabulous question for, for starting out there. So first I got to go back before I started this company. So this company, I started three years ago we do career and business training for women in stem. And before that I spent 15 years working as an engineer in private consulting firms. I have two architectural engineering degrees about horse masters and I was working in structural engineering. So I was designing the parts of buildings and hold them up. Even my story getting into that field was almost entirely by accident. I was the person that had four different college majors. I knew I wanted to be somewhere in stem. I started in biochemistry at some point. I'm like, well, maybe music education would be fun. I loved I played the saxophone growing up, also love to sing.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: But I really liked science and math. I really liked problem solving. And so it seemed like that was a natural place for me to be, but I couldn't decide if I would be science or engineering. And then I went into engineering, like the general engineering major, and I'm sorry to all the mechanical and electrical and all the other kinds of engineering majors I tried. And I'm like, no, this is not quite right. And so one day I was playing, I bet a classmate who was in my physics and calculus class after class, we both came directly from class. We were going to play tennis whacking tennis balls is great stress relief. And he shows up with this architectural model. So it's like made out of balsa wood. There's like, it was a house, there were little trees, there were little people, there were grass.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: Like you could open it up and see what was inside. And I'm like, what engineering? Like I knew I was an engineer, but I didn't know what kind I'm like, what engineering major do you get to do physics and calculus and you get to build little models in architectural engineering. So that's where I went. And so I'm like, okay, I have my major now I just have to do all the things that I think I'm supposed to do. So, you know, I graduated with, you know, between a three, five and four GPA, pretty respectable. I got my first job in a well-regarded firm and I started doing all the things and you're gonna notice a trend here that I thought I should do. And I referred to this as yourself to death because we, we come through the edge educational system with very clear version of what success is.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: You take this class and usually other classes are laid out for you. You pass a test, you do projects you show up for office hours, you get an a in that, and hopefully you'll get a, get a good job. And then I got out into the corporate world and I'm like, okay, like what, what is success here? It's not clearly defined. Sometimes like it would be clearly defined on projects, but you know, what, what is getting the promotion like to just get the promotion? And so I, as many of us do learned a lot of things, the hard way, some of them about leadership, some of them about management. So some of them about being a woman in engineering. And I had to figure out a lot of things to navigate, like how to navigate this for myself. So to give listeners perspective I graduated college in 2002.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: And yes, I can tell you exactly where I was, what I was doing. I was actually about to walk into my forensic structural engineering class when I saw this sign on the door that said classes canceled. The twin towers are coming down. Wow. And, and yeah, that, that moment is imbibed in my mind forever. So there was a recession after that which made it tricky to find a job. So, but anyways, this timeframe, so there was no talking about women, very little discussion about minorities in stem. And I actually had people tell me that some of my experiences I was too sensitive. I was, I wasn't flat out to what I was imagining things, but it was definitely implied that I just need to kind of like suck it up and deal with it. And, and I thought it was me.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: I thought there was something about, you know, maybe I just wasn't good enough. Technically, even though I was staying late, working overtime, doing all the things and I was, I was like promoted up the chain relatively quickly. And so if I fast forward in time here through, you know, a series of personal crisis, professional crisis, career stagnation, all of those things and navigating those I had three kids while I was working in this field. And I think really the kids kind of catalyzed it for me. I have three daughters and they were starting to show an interest in, you know, they love building, like it's, I love doing all of those things. And I found that I was mentoring other women, especially also some men, but other women, especially and all the things I had learned, the hard way, and that they were still struggling to navigate.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: And I'm like, okay, if somebody doesn't change this, my kids are going to have to deal with the exact same thing. Like they're going to be blindsided by the lack of meritocracy in a lot of our work cultures and they're, and they're going to have to deal with it too. And so I wrote a book called the engineer's complete side project. I actually never intended to turn that into a business. I never went into my field thinking that someday I was going to be an entrepreneur. And that's where this unlikely entrepreneurial blog is coming from, that you referenced. In fact, I actively resisted for a very long time, starting my own thing. I didn't want to do it. I had this perception that this was not a safe thing to do. And then I lived through the great recession when I realized it didn't really matter how good you are. Technically, if you wanted to really own your path, you had to understand the business side of the field. And for some people that allows them to go up the chain and, you know, be principals owners of their firms for other people, the right path, following that realization is to start your own. So

Pat Sweet - Host: Is this, this paradigm shift where you realize the safe path, isn't all that safe per se, it's one path and maybe the risk profile is a little bit different, but, but it's not, it's not without risk. It's not risk-free compared to entrepreneurship is risky. Yeah. Okay.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: Yeah. And the other thing I do that kind of the other thing I learned along this path is that like our technical disciplines, the internet has been around for a while now. And there are people out there that have figured out frameworks and strategies and ways you do this ways you start online businesses, ways, you know, the right ways to market and do all those things you need to do to bring clients into the door. And so once I realized that, oh, an entrepreneur doesn't have to be Elon Musk, an entrepreneur doesn't have to be bill gates, you know, building your computer in your garage. An entrepreneur doesn't have to have venture capital funding. Once I realized that an entrepreneur can simply be someone who wants to make a huge difference in the world and you know, is willing to work hard and put in the effort that you know, that that could be a thing.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: It, it completely opened my eyes. And so for me, like I published the book, I was still working at that point I was one level below an ownership position at the firm I was working in. So I was very client facing this was not, I mean, no stem job is ever 40 hours a week, but this is way more than that. And so I wrote this book in my non-existent free time, three little kids at home complete side project because it a buck, it had always been a bucket list project for me to write a book. And so it came out in January of 2018. Pretty quickly after that, I got asked to go do speaking for young professionals groups, and also women's groups. So some mixed gender actually some like colleges, universities for like getting started in your career, those sorts of things.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: And that's when I realized, I learned that sometimes people will pay you to go talk on topics you are really passionate about. And I'm like, whoa, like, aha. Like it is odd. I'm like, okay, I have the book that's used to be taking off. People are like willing to pay me to come and speak on this topic that caveat here at this, at this point in time, I've had pretty much three years straight practice of public speaking. At that time that was petrifying to go and stand in front of an audience, especially if college students, cause they don't even pretend that they're listening. If, if you're not engaging and keeping them on track, like they don't even pretend at least your peers often will pretend that they're listening to you. But I was, I was petrified of doing this. But six months after that, I resigned from my engineering job to focus on this business full-time and here's why I have always been usually driven to make a difference.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: This is why I went into stem. This is why I knew like the whole problem solving aspect, how the fact that what we do can literally change the world. That's why I came into this field and I looked at what I was doing in day to day in my engineering position. And I thought to myself, okay, like here's what I'm doing. What sort of impact can I have here? And then with the book and taking that and turning that into a business, what sort of impact could I have here? And that was a really easy decision for me because with what I'm doing now, I can impact women in stem, not just in engineering, but across all the different industries. Because what I found is our struggles are really, really similar. Our exact stories are different, but the struggles are, are the same. And so that, that is why I started my business. And that's why I call myself an unlikely entrepreneur because I had no intention of going this route. This was not, if you'd even talk to me five years ago and said, do you think you'll start your own business? No. Interesting.

Pat Sweet - Host: So it makes sense to me that what, you know, once you had this book, this, this stake in the ground and people were calling you, you say, okay, well maybe there's maybe there's something to this. I see, I see how, how the business could flourish from that point. What I'm, what I'm wondering about is, is this idea that you had this book and you as a, as a bucket list item, because I've spoken to a number of authors here on the podcast. And, and, and personally, I would love to hammer out a book, if not a few in my time, what I've learned is that it is a heck of a lot of work. It is anything but straightforward. It's, it's a laborious, tedious thing that you've really got to put your head down and, and, and, and, and trudge through a times, it's a little bit, it's surprising to me that the original idea was to create this book and put it out there and then say, huh, okay, I'm done that. It wasn't part of a bigger picture. I, I I'd love to know more about that. How has it, how is it that the book became it's it's own goal before, before there was ever this idea of a business?

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: Yeah. So, so let's, let's talk about that one a little bit. So I had hit a point in my career where I was really looking to figure out what was next for me. I was in a job that I was relatively happy in. Like I was doing well on paper. It looked wonderful. Like I was getting all sorts of really good experience, but I just had this like, feeling I'm like, there's something more for me out there and I don't know what it is. And so I started kind of exploring different things. So I like volunteered for different industry groups. I did what a lot of us do when we encounter these sorts of situations. I'm like, well, maybe, maybe I just needed a job. I'll go interview for that. But nothing, even the jobs that I'm like, oh, this would have been my dream job a couple of years ago.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: I'm like, no, I don't really want that now. And so one day I then ordered his child was in second grade. She came home from school and she's like, we're doing this really cool project at school mom. We are writing a book and I'm like, huh, that's interesting. So school is about 20 minutes. Give or take from school to my house. So I had picked them up that day. And, and so we had this 20 minute conversation where she's like, well, well, you always wanted to write a book. I'm like, yeah. I've like always wanted to write a book from when I was about your age and my second grader. And so you can learn anything from anyone here. And I'm about to get schooled by my second grader. I'm gonna foreshadow this for you. My second graders, like, well, mom, you're always telling us that if you want to do something, get started now, like take the, take the little step, get started, get moving, and then take the one after that.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: And you should just go do it, like stop talking about it, just go do it. And I looked at her and I'm like, wow, well, first if I had, I was like, wow, I just got schooled by my second grader. I bet I like swatted her because I was like, so impressed that she had like put two to two together and like turned it back on me. And I'm like, you know what, you're right. Like, I, I cannot be teaching you these things and not walking, walking. Well, look on this. And so interestingly about a week later, somebody I had met at a conference a couple of months ago. Must've been friends with someone who runs a self publishing school. Cause I got an email saying, Hey, you know, we, we have this self publishing school. We have this program that helps you write and self publish your own book. And I kind of looked at that and said, okay, like, I, I can be pretty stubborn. Like I am the person that probably sticks with things long after they should. But I also know when the universe is like whacking me in the side of the head and saying, okay, the time to do this as now. And I kind of took that as a sign in and started writing

Pat Sweet - Host: And, and the rest, the rest is history here, here we are. Yeah.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: Yeah, it is. It's just crazy. And I would also say that by the time I finished the book, I had done enough research on, okay. Like, are there other books out here? Which I already, I already knew there weren't other books out here like this one, because the, one of the reasons this kind of book is what came out of me. So the book is called she engineers. I realized I haven't actually said that name. The book is called she engineers. One of the reasons that this book came into fruition is because when I went looking for resources to help me, I couldn't find them. And so this is the book I wish I had had when I was much younger in my career. And so by the time it got done and when I sent it off to editing, I had started thinking to myself, well, what if, you know, what if I put this book out there and it does really well, like what would my plan be in that?

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: And so I started doing all the scenario, planning that us engineers aren't really good at doing right. We consider all the situations, what could go wrong, what could go. Right. I think some of my book publishing people thought I was crazy. They're like, we're dealing with this engineer who really wants to nail down all the possibilities here. And so it was, it was at that point that I started thinking, okay, well maybe like I allowed myself to start thinking, okay, what if this does well, which is actually really hard to do, right? Because as engineers, as technical people we are really good at working in constraints. You give me a problem. You give me some geometric constraints. You, even, if you tell me like, this is impossible, like we can still figure that out. But completely imagining something from scratch. That's challenging. But that's, that's what I did in this situation. I'm like, okay, what might happen? And I allowed myself to kind of start, start dreaming about what might be possible for me.

Pat Sweet - Host: So th that's that's great. And, and I really do want to get into in, in a little bit here, this idea, and you did allude to it earlier this idea of defining your own version of success. And I, I think, I think this idea of dry dreaming and starting to think outside of, outside of the box leans into that. But, but before we get to that, I wanted to talk a little bit about your book. You already mentioned it called she engineers, outsmarting bias, unlock your potential and create the engineering career of your dreams. And I really, when I, when I read, I I've known about your book for a while, but when I re-read, the subtitle outsmarting bias really stuck out to me. And I think it's because in a recent interview, I interviewed a psychologist, Dr. Robin Rosenberg, and she was telling me quite a bit about unconscious bias and the context there was as leaders.

Pat Sweet - Host: It's important to, to understand that bias is a fact of life and it's there in, in, in many ways to help you, but, but it kind of has a dark side to, it was interesting to me, and it really stood out to me that your book was geared toward people looking to outsmart the biases that leaders may not even be aware of. It's like, how do I, how do I deal with the fact that my leader, my boss, my manager probably has these biases and probably isn't aware of them and probably isn't doing anything about them. And it struck me as really inter sad of the way that, that anyone has to, has to buy a book to come up with strategies to deal with these biases. So I, I'd be curious to know a little bit more about the biases that, that maybe you've observed or, or, or had been at the receiving end of in your own career. What, what, what kind of biases should we, as, as leaders and people in stem be aware of that maybe we just are totally are totally in our blind spots.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: Yeah. That's such a great question. And I want to, I'm going to answer this question, but before I do, I want to hit back on the point you just made with your interview with your other interview about bias being a fact of life I'm biased, you're biased. Like we are a human, therefore we're biased. And I think one of the biggest problems with the bias is that we have turned even the word bias into like a dirty word that we're not going to talk about at work. Because if we talk about it, then we might be accused of being racist, sexist, whatever is, do you want to put on the end of this? And I think that is a huge problem because when we don't talk about something, we give it power. And so like the first part of the outsmarting bias is being aware of it.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: I, the analogy I like to use is if you are standing in the middle of a burning building, you don't pretend that the fire is not there, but yet that's what we do with bias, right? All the time. We just pretend it's not there. It doesn't exist. And so and this manifests itself in all different ways. I mean, I'm going to give some examples for women. But really any time someone is making an assumption bias is at play. So be aware of assumptions. And we see this. So like, if I were to say, okay, I saw a police, a police person, I'm going to say instantly, every person listening, like imagine a police person in your head, you have a gender, you have a race. If I say, okay, someone working in an elementary school or a daycare center, you also have a gender and race.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: That's unconscious bias at work. And so we make all these like snap judgments of people based on to kind of boil all those down, how similar they are to you. And so things like, you know, you're sitting in a meeting and having a discussion did you know that women are 75% more likely to be interrupted when they speak in that team meeting? Then a male is with same level of experience. If you don't believe me, please take a notebook into your next meeting in person or virtual and keep track. The one exception to that are women leaders. And I I'm, and I'm talking about women leaders in Pedro. I completely believe that anyone can be a leader wherever you are, no matter where you are in your career. I want to say that upfront, but the women who have gone up through the ranks have learned to interrupt back.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: So that's the exception to that. So interruptions talking over, I would say that's like a super common, a common one having your judgment questioned or, you know, should you even be here? So one example I can give is that a walking on, and this was my first solo construction site visit. I had designed the project in terms of like, I had done all the analysis, all the calculations on it. And, but it was a really small project. So I was going to this project for the first time I talked to the contractor on the phone, but when I show up at the, at the job trailer for which, oh, by the way, I had to go like find work boots because they didn't make women's work boots. I had to like go find guys work boot section. So I could like find something to put on my feet for the construction site.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: But the, the contractor I get there, it's like, oh, nice to meet you. And I think he was trying to make small talk. So his next series of questions were something to the effect of. So I don't really understand why a woman would be interested in engineering. Is your, do you have like, is your dad in charge of the firm you're working for? Like, are you, are you pinch hitting for someone else? Like he went down this whole series where I was like, I don't even know what to say to this. And so I kind of like smiled and nodded my head. Like I completely froze. I didn't know how to address it. I'm like, ah, finally I laughed. And I said, no, I don't have those sorts of connections, but thanks for the compliment. And then we went on our way, right. My very first engineering job, there were two women myself and another person.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: We were actually in the same graduating class. We were hired into the engineering department. There were like 30 people. We were the only two women engineers in this department. I took in some baked goods into, cause I love to bake. That's just, you know, cookies, cakes, breads. If we want to have a discussion about sourdough, we can do that on a different podcast episode. Yeah. I love to bake. And I took some brownies into work open office floor plan. I put them in like the open food area in my cubicle area was like right next to the food area. One of the senior engineers goes over, takes one bite of the brownies, big smile on his face. He's like, this is why we need women in the engineering department. And I have to say, like, I went on to work with him and many other people that I experienced some of these unconscious bias situations with very well on projects like these aren't I've had the good fortune to work with a lot of really, really good people.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: And so I, I share these stories because I hear these stories every single day and what I knew now people just having being assumed that they don't belong in the room, that, that the woman in the room is the secretary. That she's the one that's supposed to take notes in the meetings. That one one of the biggest challenges we actually see with this is in small consulting firms where most of your clients are men, because what happens is there's a bias there too. And somehow the the women's projects when the women are project managers just don't seem to go quite as well as their male counterparts and no one can figure out why. And so it looks like an objective thing, even though it's not a, so those are a couple of examples from my own experience.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: Those are really, well-documented also statistically speaking across not just for women in stem, but women in the workforce. The, the statistic I do want to share, like I'm not going to bring up statistics. Anybody can go Google. Any of those they want, you can come to my site. I have a lot of them there. Is that in stem specifically more than 50% of women have reported being discriminated or sexually harassed at work? Wow. That is not okay. And this is not a 20 year ago survey either. One of the, this one is from the pew research center. And so they've, they've found this, I think it's 2018 and I've seen reports from as recently as once done in 2020, this is still a problem. And we all have a responsibility to speak up and put a stop to it. When we S when we see this, th

Pat Sweet - Host: Those are shocking numbers I think, I think, I think any, any number ought to shock but that the, the, the, the scale, the extent to which that's experienced by women in stem is, is, is, well, like you said unacceptable in any, in any way, shape or form given, given that that is the, the status quo that that's where we are today. What do you, what do you recommend to women who are on the receiving end of this and, and, and what, what do you recommend to leaders in stem organizations with respect to, to try to, to try and make a dent in this, to, to take a step forward? W w where do you even start?

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: Okay. and so I'm going to talk about the individual women first. Sure. because I would say one of my specialties is helping women who are the only so it's estimated what's, what's an only, it's estimated that approximately 40% of women in are still, usually you're often the only one in the room. And so when you're in that situation, it, you're actually more likely to experience some of either like straight up harassment or even like more unconscious bias, because if you're the only woman that other people have been exposed to, or, I mean, it's not just women either. Like if you are the only black person, if you're the only Indian, like, if you're the only parent, you know, there's all these assumptions people make, and you can be like the stand-in for everyone of your gender or race or whatever identity you have.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: And so for the individuals a lot of it is first deciding what is okay, and what is not with you and then getting really, really good at setting boundaries at kind of holding your own and making the business case for whatever you want to do in the organization. Because here's the thing. And we've seen this, I mean, if I, if I go out into the broader world, I mean, look what happened in the United States with the presidential election and all the going back and forth about what is a fact and what is not a fact, okay, I'm not going to go into it any more than that, but I have learned if someone does not think they're, if someone is not even willing to explore the fact that they might be making decisions partially based on gut feel non like measurable metrics if they're not even willing to discuss that, you're not gonna be able to convince them and going down that road is not going to be helpful to you in your career.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: So it's a fool's errand. It is, it is because even when I'm teaching people about unconscious bias and how it shows up, it's all about meeting people where they are. And if you don't want to be educated on it, then you can't convince someone that it's the old lead, a horse to water. You can't make them drink. That's exactly what we're dealing with here. And so for that individual person, that's struggling with this there are some situations where the reality is you need to go find a job at a different company or for a different manager there that, that, that happens. But I would say with the women, I talked to you, that's only about a quarter of the time. Often you can basically you can either job craft roll into something that works better for you, or you're doing more of the things you love to do.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: And then when in combination with getting really good at setting boundaries and saying no which also helps increase your confidence, that you can realize you can't say no, because there's a lot of social socialization of women. And that we are often feel like, are expected to say, yes, we can't say no. There's a lot of that going on as well, which could also be an entire another podcast. So but for those individual women no, if you're listening to this first, you are not alone in these struggles, not at all. And if you feel like you are, you really need to get connected to some sort of community of other women, because you'll find real quickly that no, you're not alone. And no, you're not crazy. You're not imagining it. If someone's telling you to suck it up or you're too aggressive or too assertive or all of those things again, it's not you.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: But it, it, it has largely been left up to the individual women to figure out how to navigate this themselves. And that's one of the things I specialize in helping people do. Now on the flip side of this, what can we do? Like managers, leaders, you know, ladies who have gone up the chain and, and fought all these battles, like, what can you do to set it up for everybody else? I would say the first thing is don't to not Gaslight people or pretend this doesn't exist. I cannot tell you how many times I've tried to have a conversation about this in some cases with leaders in the industry and the response has been well, I haven't had that experience. So therefore this problem can't be as big as you're saying it is, they will take the statistics I just said, and they will try and disprove them, pick them apart, show why they are not, you know, statistically to their standards.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: And that is a huge problem. It's a huge one, because again, if we can't talk about it, we can't solve it. So that, that is the first thing. After that clear, transparent paths for hiring and promotions is a big one. And that doesn't just benefit women. That benefits everybody. When I talk to people about why they leave a firm and go somewhere else the top two reasons are work culture and unclear expectations for promotions and advancement. And so anything you can do to make sure that everyone in your organization knows, okay, if you want to go from, you know, that first level to the second level, here's what you need to do. Here's how we're measuring this. Here are the metrics that you can, you know, know if you're on track or not same thing with hiring.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: So something as simple as, as getting rid of the names on the resume there's been numerous studies that have shown that if you have a female name on a resume versus a male name on a resume even with the exact same resume qualifications, the male is assumed to be more competent than the female is again, that is a relatively simple, low hanging fruit to fix. It doesn't cost a lot yet many organizations struggle to do that. And then find the immunity of a third one, which I think is going to dovetail into what you were talking about earlier about the individualization. Understand that the days of a one size fits all career path are long gone. There are some people that are super ambitious. They want to run the world. They want to be the CEO of the company, and they are willing to work however many hours they need to do to get there.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: There are other people that want to work 30 to 40 hours every week on work that is meaningful to them and go home and spend time with their families. There are other people that are happy to work as much as you want, but they want to be able to travel the world while they're doing it. And so understanding that like what you wanted, you know, manage your boss, what you wanted at that age may not be what this person wants and really having those conversations with your people to find out, okay, what drives them. What's going to help them be happy and fulfilled at work, because when people are happy at work, they give you their best stuff. They stay. And when you don't struggle with recruitment and retention which, you know, right now we have stuff all over the internet about the great resignation.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: You'll be paying the paper if you haven't already for not individualizing career development for your people. So just, you know, talking to your people, there's one-on-ones are really, really important, especially if we're talking about a hybrid or virtual workforce, because I can guarantee you that if you do not have those one-on-one relationships with your people, they have thought or are thinking about leaving your organization, because people don't leave organizations when they have friends there. They leave them because there's all these other things going on. And they, they need a place that is better for them.

Pat Sweet - Host: So you've anticipated my next question here is that this idea of, of individualized success, and I know reading through your material and just, and just speaking with you that this is, this is one of the core tenants, one of the big ideas that I think that you, you, you share with the world is that success means different things to different people. I think a lot of people struggle with the idea that, that they need to that there's value in actively choosing what success looks like for them. There's a lot of, of well we've, we've used the word a bunch already. There's bias towards a traditional climb, the corporate ladder manage more and more people manage more and more money. That's, that's what success looks like. And I think, I think a lot of people don't realize that that might be climbing the wrong ladder until they've already started.

Pat Sweet - Host: Yep. So for people listening, what might you recommend in terms of exploring different definitions of success and how might you, how might you capture that in concrete terms? Because the traditional, the traditional view of success I'll use my, my buddy here is not great for a podcast, but buddy, his traditional version of success it's it's, it's it's handy. It's convenient because it's very easy to measure. I got this promotion by this age, I manage this much money by this age. There's a lure there because it's so easy to hang your hat on it. What, what other things could people measure or look at or think about in terms of defining success for themselves,

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: Right. Yeah. Cause I noticed what you didn't measure, what you didn't say, you know, you hit these money metrics, is that you also gained a hundred pounds by this age or are I all sorts of drugs for high blood pressure by this age? So the first thing to think about here is when you are running and you're busy all the time your brain is essentially in survival mode. And so what happens, and we see this a lot of times, like if you've ever gone on vacation and all of a sudden you have like all sorts of brilliant ideas you realize that, oh, now that I'm away from work, I didn't really like that job or that project all that much, but you don't stop to think about it when you're in the busy, busy, busy, busy every day. And so giving yourself some space to think about it and what do I mean by that?

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: Because I know there's people out there who, like, she's talking about giving myself some space. I have no time for anything. I barely have time to listen to this podcast law and working out and walking the dog at the same time. And I, I get it. I have three little kids like I've navigated career and kids, and I have a professional spouse. Like our, our schedule has always been crazy. But even giving yourself 10 minutes to journal on this in the morning before work, you can make significant progress on figuring out what your priorities are. Now I am going to give a very fast shameless plug here because I actually have a career guide that we have developed. That's entirely free that you can get on my website, based on my work with walking, I have like a five step process.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: I walk people through to figure this out and so completely free come over to my site, which I'm sure we'll be dropping in the show notes underneath, underneath this. It's called the, our career guide. If you can't find it for any reason, just hit the contact button and I'll email it to you. But it will help walk people through this. But what I find when we're even starting to have this conversation is that so many of us have been so busy running on the treadmill for so long. All we know is that we don't like what we're doing right now. And that's exactly how this manifested itself for me at first is that unlike, I know there's something more, I don't know what it is. And so what, what also helps is to look out there for role models of people who took a different path that you're like that path looks cool.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: So for example I met a woman who was also in my field who had been promoted to a principal level at her firm. So that was like an ownership level. And relative to titles in my particular engineering field while working part time, I had never heard of such a thing. I didn't even know that was possible. And then I, I met other people who are like, yeah, I was doing, you know, engineering, working for someone else. But then someone offered me this like freelancing opportunity where I could still do engineering, but I could work from wherever I wanted and didn't have to go into an office anymore. That wasn't a time that was pre pandemic before we kind of all proved that we can work from home. And so like, even thinking back to like, when I started my own career, the internet, like Facebook didn't exist, Instagram didn't exist.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: Amazon was still selling books, like actual books. And so like the idea that you could start and run a business from your house, you'd never, you were not able to do that. Like that, wasn't a possibility. And so if you are struggling to figure out, okay, like what is my definition of success? A good place to start is give yourself a little time to reflect journal, talk to your phone. I really liked to use voice memos and just talk to my phone when I'm like taking a walk. Give yourself a little, a bit of that reflection space try this document that we'll post for you, but then also look for role models. So you can start to see what might be possible for you. And then from there, it's a matter of thinking about, okay, like what are my priorities in life?

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: What do I want people to say about me at my funeral, which I know is a bit more bit but it really starts to put maybe some of the challenges have at work in perspective. Right. I think we sometimes sometimes we struggle to get perspective. And one of the things I've also found that gives me perspective is talking to technical people in other areas of the country, other areas of the world, because then you realize that for example, the non-existent maternity leave in the United States is not at all the norm if you are in Canada or in Europe. And again, you start to realize that, okay, what I see as normal and what I see as well, I have to fit myself into this particular corporate world at this particular company. That's not true. That's not actually real data backed up by facts. And so imagining the possibilities for yourself I think is really key here to figure out, okay, like, what is success mean to me? What does my ideal day at work look like? What am I doing? Who am I doing it with paint that picture for yourself? And you'll start to be on your way towards what, what is success for

Pat Sweet - Host: Me? I really liked that a lot that, that, that idea of getting outside of yourself removing yourself from the day to day talking to other people. I think that's brilliant because it's, yeah, it's so easy to, to imagine the rest of the world being just like your world, which I suppose is this theme that, that, that is emerged from this chat is no, it's not just like your world and, and recognizing that as the first step toward oh, about broadening the way you see things. Yeah. One of the things you mentioned there was, was the COVID-19 pandemic. And one of the things I wanted to ask you about is, was it has been fairly well documented that yes, of course the COVID-19 pandemic has been objectively bad for almost everybody, but it's been disproportionately bad for women. And there was a report that came out of November last year from Royal bank of Canada that said in a matter of weeks during the spring, COVID-19 rolled back the clock on three decades of advances in women's labor force participation three decades. And I look at that and I think, you know, as a, as a leader in stem, I have a certain responsibility to, to help fix that. That is, that's a major, a major issue. What, what can, what can people in stem, what can leaders in all industries do objectively concretely to, to help reverse that trend so that we don't have to wait another 30 years just to get back to where we were pre pandemic.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: Yeah. so I, this, the single biggest thing is going to be workplace flexibility, flexible hours, job sharing. However you want to handle that because let's look at why, what happened? Why did we roll back three decades so quickly? So in a matter of very short period of time here schools, at least in my area, schools went first school shut down first childcare centers followed very quickly behind or in front of, depending on where you are of schools. So all of a sudden we have all these childrens in the United States. It's estimated I think 65% of us households have a child under 18 in their house. I don't know that number for Canada, sorry. But that's a lot of households. So all of a sudden, the already very much flawed childcare system or lack there of that we have was completely exposed, disappeared overnight.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: Someone has to take care of those children and that typically is going to be the woman. And that is true, even in dual professional households like my own. So I am married to an engineer. Yes, we have really exciting dinner table conversations about engineering stuff. And, and interestingly, women who are professionals are statistically more likely to be married to someone who isn't a professional, whereas a male who is a professionalist statistically, more likely to be married to someone who is staying at home and taking care of the children. This seems to be one of the last stages of you actually could be a stay at home parent. If you wanted to needed to in some someplaces. I mean, it depends on where you are. So all of that happened and now we're all going to work from home. And now we have my situation where I am trying to do work.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: I'm trying to do zoom meetings and I have kids popping in for one thing and another kid popping in for another thing. And I have a good situation because at the time I at least had a five-year-old imagine juggling a toddler and a newborn in that situation. Meanwhile work expectations didn't like completely change overnight. I think most of us would agree that pre pandemic, if we had brought a crying baby onto our team meeting that wouldn't have been well-received. And so finding a way to make flexibility work for everyone because the interesting thing that happened here and I got this anecdote from actually a female leader at an engineering firm. She's like, here's what I noticed all my female project managers who've been asking for years for more flexibility, the ability to even work from home one day a week, so that they could balance this stuff some more the pandemic happened.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: And all of a sudden the men started showing up on zoom calls with a child in tow and within a couple of months, that became normal. That was now, okay. Now, should it have taken that to do it? Absolutely not. But it also under school, hers, the need for flexibility for everybody, because it's not just people taking care of kids, it's people taking care of elders. There's a whole lot of caretaking responsibilities here beyond a small, small children. So I would say like, if you are a leader, a manager who is committed to retaining the best and brightest in your workforce of which at least a few of those people should be with him that making sure that you have work place, flexibility policies in place that allow people to caretake and do a job because you know what caretaking is not drained. My brain cells, just just saying it doesn't drain anyone's brain cells. It doesn't make me less competent at work. It doesn't make pat less competent at work cause he has a six year old at home. Just saying, so yeah, we can, we can make this work for everybody and create a more inclusive work culture as well. That's much more aligned with the demographics of the world in which we serve.

Pat Sweet - Host: Yeah. It's a really, really interesting ideas. And, and I w one of the things I've really appreciated is, is there are some really relatively simple and very concrete things that we can do in terms of, well, th this, this most recent question here about reversing the toll that, that COVID-19 has taken on, on women in the workforce, but, but also combating unconscious bias. This doesn't have to be magic. This really can be some concrete steps that, that leaders just, just need to make some, I was going to say bold decisions, but not even that bold, not even that bullet, just, just concrete, concrete steps in the right direction. I suspect many folks who are listening to this right now are going to be interested in learning more about you and your work and your book. If people did want to reach out, what's the best place for them to go to,

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: You should come check out my website, engineers, rising.com. From that site, we have links to my book. We're actually doing a promotion where you can actually get a free signed copy from me. If you're willing to pay a couple bucks for shipping there's a lot of free blogs, free resources that a career guide to figure out like, what success looks like for you. I talked about as well as, you know, other podcasts interviews, we also do free social events and training. For example, last night I did one on how to manage personality, clashes, and conflict at because we all know none of us went into engineering to deal with that. And so, yeah, come on, check out my site and enjoy a lot of the free resources as well as you can see some of the programs that we offer as well.

Pat Sweet - Host: Fantastic. And I'll have links to all of that in the show notes and everything we talked about today, any of the relevant links. So it'll be easy for people to check that out. Stephanie, thank you so much for being with me tonight that this was an absolute blast. We'll have to do it again.

Stephanie Slocum - Guest: Yeah. I appreciate you having me, pat. I feel like we could have talked for another couple hours on some of these questions. Great questions though.

Pat Sweet - Host: Very good. Thanks so much. Thank you very much, Stephanie. As I mentioned right off the top of the show, lots and lots of fun. Stephanie has lots to say some great stories, some great experience and wisdom to share with us a few things that jumped out at me as I really listened to this interview and did the editing, one of the, what are the terms that came out that I wrote down was shooting yourself to death, which I thought was, was just great. There, there were so many instances in life and, and I'm no different where you make choices, you pursue a path because you think you should, without any real objective evidence or discernment on your own to make sense of whether or not a particular should quote unquote really applies to you, or really makes sense for you and your own definition of success.

Pat Sweet - Host: The next thing that stuck out to me is this concept of the onlys, which I'd never really heard before, but make sense. And Stephanie pointed out that well, she defined the only as, as being the only person in the room who fits a particular demographic, the only woman, the only person of color, the only person who practices a particular religion, being the sole person, representing a particular demographic, puts you in a very vulnerable spot. And it means that it could be very, very difficult for, for leaders to understand whether or not they're being inclusive. It can be very difficult for that only to speak up. So I guess the thing that, that stuck out to me and the thing that that is in the back of my head is trying to make sense of who in my professional life may be an only within their team and trying to think through actively, what can I do to ensure that the, the risks and vulnerabilities are, are addressed?

Pat Sweet - Host: So, so this is something that I think is really, really important to take away from from this particular chat. And finally what are the other ideas? And, and I should comment on this. A lot of the ideas that Stephanie suggested or presented are really quite simple. It doesn't have to be rocket science, for example, to remove people's names from resumes before evaluating them. There there's no, there's no magic software code that to be written. It really can just be someone's job within a human resources department to do that, to make sure that when you are evaluating someone on their experience and their education and their skills, that, that that's all that comes into play. But that's not ultimately what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to talk about is the idea of the importance of clear and transparent paths for hiring and promotion, because that benefits certainly women in our profession.

Pat Sweet - Host: But frankly it benefits everybody when there's clarity about what it takes to succeed, what it takes to thrive, what the expectations are. Good things happen. Stephanie mentioned that people leave for poor work culture and unclear advancement expectations. And that's a real risk when you have people leaving your organization who are maybe quite good, or, you know, want to stick around if it weren't for these unclear advancement expectations, honestly, it's, you know, it is some work to set a system like that up, but it's not insurmountable. What it takes is dedicated time and effort to at least put something on paper. And I know that from personal experience setting setting these kinds of things up myself for, for teams that I've taken over, that it, yes, it can be worked, but it's not, it's not rocket science. So I do want you to walk away thinking about that as is usually the case. You can check out all the links and resources mentioned during this episode in the show notes, that's engineering and leadership.com/episode 35. Next up, we have the engineering and leadership mailbag.

Pat Sweet - Host: One of my friends, you know how this works, this is the part of the show where I read your messages and answer your questions. I promise to read absolutely everything you send me. And I promise to read my favorites right here on the podcast. First up from Igor Gomez, who wrote me on LinkedIn. He said, I have followed your work and enjoyed your publications. I'm an electrical engineer from Brazil. I still can't speak very well in English, but I'm trying to improve. I even follow your podcast to improve my English and improve my skills. Well eager. This is great. And, and eager wrote he and I traded a few messages because I noticed Igor had liked and shared quite a bit of my content on LinkedIn. So it just goes to show that that when you do interact with people on a social network like LinkedIn it does get noticed, and it does open doors and it does pave the way for at least a conversation.

Pat Sweet - Host: And I thought it was great that Igor was, was out there following my work and listening to the podcast and getting frankly more out of it than what I expected. I, I, my hope is that most people listening are able to develop their leadership and management skills when it comes to leading engineers. But the idea that Igor also benefiting from English language development, I think it's just great. That's fantastic. Good for you, Igor. Thank you so much for reaching out looking forward to to chatting with you again soon, for sure. Again, on LinkedIn, Gina, Covarrubias wrote to say she, she left a comment on one of my previous episodes with Neil Thompson about public speaking. And she said, fun fact about one of your interview comments. And this is in reference to something Neil said, I've not witnessed this myself, but at one time I came extremely close to passing out.

Pat Sweet - Host: Well, speaking lesson learned as part of my preparation process consider the fact that my body temp will rise. I, which I thought was, what's really fun, Gina. I totally appreciate where you're coming from. It, it is really important to pair in mind that when you're getting up in front of an audience to really understand your environment, and that includes the physical environment. So doing things like dressing a particular way, understanding whether it's going to be hot or cold, having water with you, all these little things really do add up. If you're a comfortable speaker, physically comfortable, it's going to be much easier to actually deliver your message. So it couldn't help the chuckle a little bit with that. Gina, thank you for sharing that. If you'd like to leave a comment on anything that you heard either during this episode or any other, there are a few ways to reach out to me. You can contact me on LinkedIn and of course I'll have a link to my profile in the show notes, or you can go to the show notes and leave a comment at the bottom of the page. Again, I love hearing from people. I love hearing your ideas, your comments, your questions. If there's something you disagreed with during today's show, I'd love to hear that always interesting to to engage in those kinds of discussions and debates. Sure. Hope to hear from you soon.

Pat Sweet - Host: Sadly, that is all the time we have for the show today. I'll be back next week with our next episode. If you enjoyed the show, please do leave me an honest review and let me know what you thought was most interesting from today's episode reviews helped me make the show better and help others find the show as well. For more information and links to the resources mentioned today, just go to the show notes@engineeringandleadership.com slash episode 35 until next time, this is pat sweet reminding you that if you're going to be anything, be excellent. [inaudible] I've been listening to the engineering and leadership podcast with pat sweet. If you'd like to learn more, go to engineering and leadership.com where you'll find more free articles, podcasts, and downloads to help engineers thrive. That's engineering and leadership.com. [inaudible].