Intro

Welcome to the Mental Offload Podcast where we talk about women balancing work and life. It's the podcast that combines leadership, feminism and coaching tools so you can tackle it all with more confidence and less stress. Here's your host, Ivy League MBA, certified feminist coach and corporate warrior, Shawna Samuel.

 

Shawna Samule

Hello, offloaders. I am here today with a special guest. I have Dr. Shaheena Janjuha Jivraj, who is an associate professor in entrepreneurial leadership and diversity at Ashesee Paris in Doha. She is an expert in gender diversity and leadership. And I am so excited for what we're going to talk about today. So welcome to the Mental Offload podcast, Shaheena.

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

Thank you, Shawna. It's such a pleasure to be with you and your listeners today.

 

Shawna Samuel

It's a pleasure to have you here. I was introduced to Dr. Janjivaj's work at a talk where the former minister of gender equality in France was talking about gender issues in the workplace and she mentioned Cinderella Syndrome. She was talking about it as, you know, this thing that a lot of us come into the workplace and how it impacts women at work. And as she was talking about it, everyone in the room, myself included, we were all nodding our heads in recognition of what she was talking about. And as I started to look into this, all roads led to to your work. You wrote an article several years ago that I think really coined this term and started our thinking about this. So I'm honored to have you here to talk about Cinderella Syndrome. So can we talk? First, let's just define what we mean by this because you describe it as a sort of corporate fairy tale that you've observed. So what do you mean by Cinderella syndrome?

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

Absolutely. And you know, I'm going to start off by saying the reaction from the women in the room, the reaction you experienced, it is consistently the reaction I experience when I talk about it. And that article is, I think it's about seven or eight years old. And actually I was developing the term in 2015 with my co author from a book championing women leaders. Kitty Chisholm and I were doing a lot of work and we needed to find a way to help women understand one of the behaviors that they hold that holds them back. So to deep dive into what Cinderella syndrome is, you know, it's the thing where I normally start off by asking women, how many of you are team players?

 

How many of you are proud of being team players? And they'll all nod their heads and say, yes, very much so, and then start to dig a bit deeper and talk about the fact that women struggle with sometimes getting attention, drawing attention to their. What they've done well, their accolades, their success. So when they talk about their success, they talk about we as a team, we achieve this. We. We hit our sales targets, we delivered really well on this project, we brought in this new client, whatever it is, we. There's. There's a lot of collective sharing. And in doing so, it diminishes their success. And what women expect is for their results, for their performance to be identified without them drawing attention to it. And so they wait and they wait and they wait, and it doesn't happen. And if we think about that in relation to Cinderella, there are a lot of similarities. You're working really hard, work is thrown at you. You do it. Depending which version of Cinderella you've. You've read or you've watched, you might even be singing as you do it, with a smiling face. Absolutely. Sort of, you know, great, great team player.

 

There's no pain, despite the frustrations you might be feeling, and you expect to be recognized. And you, you're waiting, literally, you are waiting for your boss to turn up with that glass slipper of promotion and say to you, my gosh, what an amazing job you've done. Here, let me promote you. And actually, when you look at it, and again, a question I always ask, how often do you see or have you witnessed that happening? And it's very rare. Somebody says, I have experienced it or I've witnessed it. So the Cinderella syndrome is about doing a brilliant job, being a phenomenal team player, but not drawing attention to yourself or to the work you're doing, really the impact of the work you're doing, and waiting to be recognized, waiting to be acknowledged for the work you're doing. And then, of course, the frustrations that then occur when that doesn't happen.

 

Shawna Samuel

Yeah, so true. This, like, idea that if you just keep your head down, work hard without complaint, take on all the extra chores that are thrown your way, you know, smile in the face of some evil stepsisters who are not treating you well, Someday Prince Charming will arrive with that glass slipper, a promotion, and you'll be taken out of the message. And that's not what's actually happening, right?

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

No. And, you know, I think it's a really difficult one because when you talk about it, there's a lot of. You're shifting the conversation from, okay, my boss does this, or my colleagues at this, to, okay, how am I holding this? And that's really challenging because we have to be more introspective with that and be aware of the responsibility we hold to ourselves. If we give away all our power in terms of our career progression, in terms of our impact, then we're lost. We have to hold that responsibility. And. But at the same time, the challenge with this is when we think about the experience. For most women, it comes down to gendered social norms. You know, a lot of this is rooted in the idea of the good girl syndrome, which. Which is kind of a. It's a very popular term to explain these gendered social norms. And it's something that's been around since 1987.

 

So it's been around for a very long time in terms of understanding the behaviors, the patterns, the attitudes women have that go back to their childhood. As a girl, you are socialized and expected and taught that your value comes in pleasing others. You know, being a good girl. And it goes across everything. So, you know, being compliant, being the one who kind of adheres to whatever the family expectations are in terms of gendered norms. And then again, I think it also becomes even more complicated when we think about education. This is when it gets really kind of messy because, you know, school is a place where it's very clear. You do this, you get your A stars or your A's, you get a sticker color in the lines, rightly read the books, and you just get sticker after sticker after sticker, which works very, very well for compliance. Okay. It is shifting in certain education systems, but by and large, this has been the. The norm for decades, right? So you do what's expected of you, you get rewarded, and you keep moving up to the next level and next level. And pretty much that kind of happens at university as well as a university professor as well. Same thing happens.

 

And then suddenly you're thrown into the workplace where the rules have completely changed. So you keep working well, you might get a bonus, you might get a employee of the week recognition, whatever that stuff is, Right. But you're not necessarily going to keep moving up unless you start to draw attention to yourself, because we're suddenly in an environment which goes from being this sort of very nurturing, empowering, educational perspective into, look, this is. It's competitive, it's cutthroat. You need to be able to say, this is what I'm earning. This is my impact, okay? And actually being able to draw attention to the. To the resources, to the. To the. To what you bring to the mix.

 

Shawna Samuel

So can I pause you there for a second? Because I think this is a super, super important point for us to take away. I think what I'm hearing you say is that these behaviors, they don't just start in the workplace. We actually are kind of being trained and socialized from pretty early on in our lives to play by this rulebook that doesn't end up serving us in the workplace.

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

Absolutely. And, you know, again, we see it. You know, you look at the data that talks about socialization with girls, there's some great work that was done. And I think we all know this research now about how we treat younger boys and girls. By the age of five, children have opted out of certain career paths. Okay? It's not 9, it's not 10, it's not 11. It's by the age of 5, subconsciously, kids have opted out of career paths based on gendered norms. Now, that comes down to family, primary carers, their education settings. Right. But predominantly families. It's not even social media, really. It's. It's. It's the significant impact of who they're interacting with and the expectations we put around children. And then that continues. A

 

nd that continues. You know, I'm a mother of three boys, and my, the joke for me has been, I look at school and actually, I think it's been one of the most challenging situations, having boys growing up in schools, because, you know, my boys would say, but the girls seem to get their handwriting licenses. I mean, they used to get penman licenses. They would get their pen licenses earlier than the boys. And you can see the structures work very well if you, if you follow the rules and you don't challenge. And we know this, right? Ken Robertson's done amazing. He did amazing work in this around the impact of education and how it stifled creativity. And so you socialize, you learn very quickly, right? If I do. If as a girl, you learn, if I do this, I can achieve the next level. I can keep going. I can keep going. We've seen it in terms of education levels, higher education levels of girls versus boys across the board, right? Not just, you know, this is globally, we're seeing the shifts. And then when it comes to the workplace, the rules have changed.

 

And no one has stopped to tell the women that the rules have changed. Right? You're socializing to a certain way of doing things, and you're looking around and you're waiting and you realize, okay, you know, I'm not necessarily going to get the recognition here, but. But there is also that double standard, right? If you talk about yourself too much, you come as being too ambitious, bragging. So we then get into the double bind. You're unlikable because you're, you're too much, right? You're too this, you're too ambitious, you're too pushy, you demand too much attention. And you have to be likable, right? You have to be likable. So you're then sitting there saying, well, you know, I've got to be a good team player. I'm. I'm valued for being a team player. I'm valued for facilitating this group, but I'm not getting recognized for the work I'm doing.

 

And, you know, it can be as extreme as. And again, we know this, right? When managers are making decisions about promotion, it's one of two things. It's under pressure when you're looking at decision, when you're trying to make decisions, yes, you can have all the performance measures in place, but sometimes there's just a bit of whoever's making the loudest noise, they're the ones when time is short that you shortcut to and say, you know, literally who's banging on their chest saying, me, me, me, right? The other side, which again, we don't always like to talk about. Sometimes it's easier to get rid of the most difficult people. Right? You know, the narrative is Sean is an amazing team player. She really, she, she has that group so well handled, she knows what she's doing with them. But my God, if I promote her, who's going to take her place? And the other thing we have to get better as women is doing the job, owning it, but ensuring we make ourselves relatively dispensable, that we can move up.

 

Shawna Samuel

So tell me, like, as we're thinking about this, I mean, I think you've articulated so well this double bind that we end up in and the way that we absorb these rule books that really don't work necessarily in the corporate sphere. But can we just back up for one moment and I want you to maybe tell us about how this ends up impacting women's careers and maybe even their ambition. If you've seen impacts on ambition.

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

Yeah. So look, I think we kind of know the story, right? We all know what happens when we look at the pipeline. And this is across the board in almost every region and most sectors. I've done work across 52 countries, currently doing a ton of work in the Middle east and Europe. And the patterns are very, very similar. You have strong, strong at graduate level. So early stage careers, you see that and then it just drops off.

 

You know, you have that cliff and it drops off at middle Management. And then it carries, you know, you've got that very slim pipeline that carries on into senior leadership. I think also what was interesting, having a look, having reviewed the work of Claudia Golding last year, the Nobel Prize winner in economics, and the work in 2023, the work she had done, she really emphasized the cost. It's interesting because she emphasized the cost of flexibility, which we know is absolutely critical for women. But again, you have to be equipped with the tools to say, I'm working flexibly. That might be part time, it might be remote hybrid working, whatever it is. But I still need to get really comfortable in owning what I do, the space I have. And I think what is, what is consistently missing is we have had women who have contorted themselves to stay part of the workforce, to adapt to the changing demands, both in terms of managing work and domestic responsibilities. And that's increased exponentially, particularly since COVID But at the same time, that narrative around owning your success, we still struggle with it. It's that icky factor, right? We still don't really want to talk about it.

 

And I remember we run a lot of women's leadership programs across the world, and there was a great conversation I had with a group of women last year in Europe. Right at the end of the program, this thing came up about bragging, you know, and one of the women said, I, I hear what you're saying, and I hear you're talking about owning my success and what I've done. Well, but to me, this sounds like bragging. And it was such a negative connotation. And again, yes, it's bragging. And sometimes we talk about humble bragging. You know, we use the phrase humble brags, right? Or you see it on LinkedIn or social media, people will be like, you know, it's almost taking permission.

 

I'm going to say something amazing. But actually, if we start to shift it to I'm earning my success, right, I'm earning or I'm earning my impact, right? If I don't hold this space, actually, no one else is going to hold it for me. My leader just doesn't have the time and the bandwidth to understand everything I'm doing. So it becomes my responsibility to explain to them what I've done, why I've done it, how I've done it. Because if I don't make it easier for them, how will they know?

 

Shawna Samuel

Oh, I think you just dropped two absolute gems there. That first one of reframing how we think about bragging as just owning the work that we're doing the contributions that we're making, that I think just takes a little bit of that ick out of it to think about it as I'm not necessarily bragging, I'm just owning what I'm doing. But I think that second gem that you just dropped there is around taking responsibility for talking about this stuff that, you know, our leaders are busy people. I wish that every leader had time to be sitting around thinking about each week, what their team is contributing and looking for the things that they're doing well and their wins. But they're busy people as well. And so I think your note about our responsibility is to make that easier for others to understand so that hopefully they can then amplify what we're doing.

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

Absolutely. You know, I think we sometimes forget, we think leadership is this position that once you're there, you know what you're doing. Right. I mean, in reality, most leaders are learning on the job. It's, it's a long process. It's not perfection, it's learning. And there's a huge amount of complaints complexity there. And I love this great quote by Michelle Obama which talks about running at altitude. Right. You've got to have practice beforehand because when you're, when you're running, there is no time to practice and perfect. Right. You've got to get that done before you actually get into that role. So I think sometimes, again, as women in particular, and I see this in lots of programs, there is an assumption that, you know, it kind of fits into that, that, that sense of Cinderella as a victim, which is, my boss does this to me, my leader does this to me. It's not fair. I don't get X, Y and Z. Those feelings are hugely valid. But we need to go through a process of reframing to say if you sit and wait, then with all due respect, you could be waiting for that promotion for weeks, months, years. And then you will just get burnt out and fed up.

 

Shawna Samuel

Yes.

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

Right. So taking a more proactive approach to your career, really important. Owning your space, and again, it's not always easy to do it, but being able to look at what you're doing and being critical, self critical enough to say, am I taking on enough stretch roles? Am I doing things that are really demonstrating my flexibility, my creativity, all these things that we know are increasingly important. My agility, these are so, so important in terms of where our new skills are required in terms of career development. The other thing which is so, so important and it's almost kind of how you deal with the, with the Cinderella syndrome, because, you know, we don't have fairy godmothers. They don't exist. Don't tell the little kids that. But, you know, it doesn't exist. And Prince Charming, we don't necessarily need Prince Charming to come along and save us. But what we do need are senior leaders in the form of champions who can understand where we have potential, where career paths can take us. And back to that point about leaders, you can only attract champions if they can understand and clearly articulate the value you bring. So again, it's up to you to be able to demonstrate that, show it consistently. There's no getting away from it. I mean, at some level here, we're talking about how you brand yourself, how you position yourself. Right.

 

Again, some people find that very difficult because we're talking about something that feels very sort of consumptive and consumer ish. But people are so short on time. We have to make life very easy for our leaders. To say, she is brilliant at this. Her impact is this. This is where I can see her trajectory as a leader. And actually, I want to align my brand with her and I want to try and push her as much as I can. Right. And that's when you shift. That's literally the glass slipper effect. Okay. That's when you shift from waiting to be safe to a leader saying to you, I'm happy to champion you. I want to get you into these structurals because you've already shown that you have a track record in here, and we can take you further.

 

And, you know, one other piece here, and this came out in the most recent book I've co authored with colleagues at Ashesay. The book's called Take the Lead. The framework for us is a boat for women's careers. It's a boat, and we use seven Cs in our framework and we talk. Championing is one of those areas. Courage is another. And we talk about a boat because we also recognize that for most women, their careers are not linear. You very rarely go from there. You sort of. You do something. Sometimes you have to take a sideways move. And one of the most amazing things I learned when I was writing this book with my co authors was when you're sailing, if you try to go into strong wind straight on, you're likely to capsize. Interesting. But when it's windy, if you actually go, lean into the wind and you navigate. And I'm zigzagging with my hands right now. If you navigate away along with the direction of the wind, although it looks like you're Wasting time, you actually go faster.

 

Shawna Samuel

That is fascinating.

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

Yeah. But again, it comes back to you need to know yourself to be able to say, I can take this. So from the outside it looks a bit crazy. You know, it doesn't look like she's got focus on her career. But the Cinderella piece is really all about owning your career and it's about owning your skills, your impact and being able to demonstrate that. And sometimes it requires that zigzagging in order for you to be able to move faster, but then also being able to communicate it to others.

 

Shawna Samuel

Oh, I love it. So as we're thinking about actually breaking the grip of Cinderella syndrome, I'm hearing a couple things, but tell me if there are other things that you would advise. I'm hearing really owning your career and advocating for your career and your wins. Are there other things that you think are important for leaders to do to really break the grip of Cinderella syndrome?

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

Yeah, that's, that's kind of, that's a really, really critical question and it's a really interesting one because I think we're at a certain point in time right now. So if you're thinking about what your lead, what leaders can do in general, then you know, recognizing how short we are on time and resources and all of the things we've talked about, I think still for leaders to have a better awareness that it's sometimes quite difficult for women to hold that space and to promote themselves. Often what happens, people mistake hesitation for lack of ambition. And this is really important, especially when we talk across the genders to men and women. So, you know, often I will have men saying to me, well, you know, so and so she's really got great potential, but she's not really ambitious enough. I don't see her pushing for promotions or X, Y and Z. What we know, and this is really important. And when we, when we talked about championing, we actually defined the framework, the champ framework. The H was for hesitation. Because what happens, leaders mistake hesitation for lack of ambition. But actually women, it's not that women are not ambitious, but women do not like ambiguity. So often I'm told. So the story goes like this, right? You know, somebody's not ambitious, they're risk averse, they don't want to take another job or whatever. But actually women don't like ambiguity.

 

So if you're asking a woman to go say for an internal promotion, if she doesn't trust the process, if she doesn't trust how it's being done, if there isn't enough clarity, she won't put herself forward because it feels like too much of a risk. But this is about ambiguity. The moment you make it clearer, and we've seen this, it's, you know, when you look at how appraisals or internal promotion prospects, when they do change within organizations, this is one of the big things. So greater clarity, which means you trust the process, means you're more willing to go for it. Right. So it's these small things. It's not huge. Right. It's about shifting behavior through nudges and awareness. To say, don't confuse hesitation with being risk averse with, with ambiguity, because the ambiguity actually is on the side of leaders to make sure that they're being clear about what they're doing.

 

Shawna Samuel

Ooh, that is such an interesting one. So when leaders are able to reduce the ambiguity for their teams, we see some of that hesitation potentially reduce, maybe a little bit more willingness to take a risk, career wise.

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

Yeah. And if you then follow that through as a leader, if you're signaling to your team, these are the values, these are the attributes that are important for progression. Because really, nowadays most of us are doing multiple roles. We talk about agility, we've talked about it in this podcast. We talk about lots of different demands. But if a leader is signaling, look, these are the things that really matter, and it comes in through this reducing ambiguity. Then it also becomes easier for a woman to step back and say, yeah, I have this, this and this. I have this, this and this. And shifting out of that mindset from waiting to actually, I need to start promoting myself. So that's kind of, you know, the behavioral shift at leadership level.

 

The other thing that I think is really important for leaders, and I'm, you know, I'm talking from middle management leadership upwards, right. And especially for women, it's to role model this behavior. You, you know, we know this so well. You cannot see what you cannot be. Now, that doesn't just mean you have these women who in leadership roles because again, they have the glass zipper or whatever, whatever we think happened. We know there's a huge amount of work that's gone on, but actually demonstrating how they got there, demonstrating how they promote themselves without resorting to the icky factor, you know, and it's so powerful for somebody to see somebody who self promotes, somebody who asks for help, asks for resources, without it seeming tacky to then say, well, if she can, I can. And you know, one of the things that we talked a lot about in the Take the Lead book was, and I love this, it's the idea of composite role models, we don't just have one role model who inspires us. We build a range of role models. And it was Tamara Box, actually, who, senior partner at Reed Smith, who talked about this. And I loved what she said because she said, you know, we start to build, you know, we take different types of women and men who. And we create this composite role model. Now in that it's not just what kind of leader do I want to be, but it's also how am I going to get there?

 

So when you start to see women asking questions, when you start to see women saying, actually, you know what, I'm really proud of this book I've written, I'm really proud of this project we finished, or X, Y and Z. It can be done in a way that you're holding your space. You are bragging, but you are bragging from an impactful perspective. And you're saying to everybody, I'm holding the success because it's really important for you to know this was me.

 

Shawna Samuel

I love that. So getting really tactical for a moment here because I do think that for many women there is this sense that it's maybe safer to under promote rather than to go to the potentially too braggy, too difficult to demanding side of things.

 

Can you maybe share with us an example or two from your research of people who have successfully sort of walked that tightrope a little bit? Like, what is, what does that look like in terms of advocating for yourself or sharing a win in a way that's not, quote, unquote, too much?

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

Well, you know, there's a little voice in my head that says perhaps there is. I don't think we can ever risk. There is a risk of being too much because again, what defines too much? But I think that's a whole other conversation to get very practical, I think. Look, you know, again, it's something I love. We do this in our program and I think it's phenomenal. And I would encourage women to do this, right, because I know there'll be women who are listening to this saying, yeah, this all sounds great, but how, how, how am I going to do this? Ask others what your impact is. So we actually do an exercise in our program where we get women to go and identify three or four people and they have to ask them three questions about their impact at work, their values as a leader, why they're valued at work. Right now, by and large, you are going to pick people who are supportive of you. And you know, we've had women picking line managers Senior leaders.

 

But I also say pick peers, pick your colleagues, right? Don't just pick your girlfriends or friends who are going to give you the best possible answers. Go kind of vertical and horizontal. It is phenomenal what comes out, I cannot tell you. It's, it's the one. I mean, I have shivers as I'm telling you this. When we run the programs, we give them the ladies, so we collect the responses and we share it with them. On day four of a five day program. It is unbelievable. They are so emotional because what has happened, they've been working on their own sense of what's strong for them, their brand. And I can tell you 90% of the time, what they think is completely aligned with what's said about them. But it's just bigger, it's extra. So they are so on course, but they're like, oh my God, they said this about me. Literally the same words or they'll say they think even more of me than I realized. Right. So it's very, very positive and it's very powerful.

 

And you know, at a time, especially in today's world where there's so much negativity, the space around women's leadership is constantly being hit. You know, there's a lot of second doubting yourselves. This is huge. So I would say really practically get others to give you feedback on your impact, right. And just have the conversation and not in, you know, it's managing it. So it's not necessarily you want people to talk about what you do well, because I think we all know what we don't do well, but get people to talk about what we do and not just, oh, you're great because, you know, you bring a sunny disposition to work. Yes, that's great. But what's my impact? Okay, if you were to describe me to somebody in a minute, what would you say my impact is? Somebody who's never met me, what would you say my impact is at work? What are the things?

 

And just listen to what comes out. And if it doesn't fit you and work for you, then you know you've got some great, great feedback to figure out how you change it. So that's one thing. The other thing that I think is really important, to find where those glass slippers of opportunities are. You need a really, really strong network. A really, really strong network, really strong connections. And again, this is a whole other topic, but it's so important because we, I think in this day and age, we are struggling to find time to build our connections. We have a lot of virtual Connections, Yes. But we need to spend time recognizing there is huge value in building connections. One of my, my big phrases at the moment for women is build platforms, not pedestals.

 

And I say that because I think the risk is we put a woman up at a pedestal, we look at her, we think she's amazing, then when she does anything wrong, we knock her off. And we see this in politics, globally, we see it in business, we just consistently see it. When you build a pedestal, it's very hard to knock that pedestal down and you build a diversity of role models. Back to the composite piece. As a woman, when you start thinking about building that platform, you then start building. There's composite role models, different women. But you put yourself up there and, you know, it's a shift from, I'm competing for that space on that one pedestal that we're on a platform. They're going to help me find those opportunities. They're going to start talking about me.

 

Shawna Samuel

I love it. At the mental offload, I refer to that as relationship capital, you know, because it is a form of capital that we can leverage in the workplace. And it really goes to the heart of the Cinderella syndrome in the sense that as we're going through our schooling, what are we taught? We're taught that performance is really the only thing that makes the grade. And that's true in school. But in the workplace, we need those relationships to help amplify our work, to help uncover opportunities, to help build teams that function well. So I, I think that that sense of like leveraging our relationships and really developing them with intention is so important. But I love the way you talk about it as well, about that platform of role models.

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

It's, I think it's completely aligned. And I think, again, I love the, the, the, the, the, the, the phraseology of relation, relationship capital because we, we recognize there's a ton of work on different forms of capital. Social capital has been a big one. But relations, a doing action, you've actually got to do something and invest in it, right? It's, it's, it's live. It's not just, okay, I've got this in my back pocket as a result of the family I've been born into or the society I live in.

 

So relationship capital is really important. And again, I see this consistently. I will get a lot of pushback from women who do not want to talk about this because they feel it is exploitative. They feel it is, it's, it's sort of, you know, you're asking me to think about my friendships and my family and what I'm going to get from it and what I gain from it. And my, my view is. But yes, because this is all part of your value. And you know, you can't complain that other groups in society, men in particular, are benefiting from this. And it's unequal when you have access to resources and they could be activated and cultivated. Feeney, I'm not talking about exploitation. I'm talking about. It has to be reciprocal completely. Yes, but you need to go and I, you know what you said again, building the networks, building the, building that capital, but doing it with intention. Not just to take, but also to give. I mean really, you know, we recognize that Cinderella syndrome is still there, but actually the best fairy godmother or prince, that slipper, it's for us to fix it for ourselves.

 

Shawna Samuel

That's such a meaningful way to think about it that it's for us to really give ourselves the glass slipper instead of waiting for someone else to show up with that, with that, you know, magical thing on the cushion waiting for us.

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

Absolutely, absolutely. And you know what? It may not even be a glass slipper. It just might be a wonderful pair of Doc Martens or trainers or boots or whatever, like, who cares, right? But actually we, we have that power. We have the ability. We just need to bust the myths, the self limiting beliefs. And you know, coming back to what we talked about earlier with education, you see, here's one of the big, big things that's on my mind at the moment. There has been a real shift in access to education for girls.

 

We're seeing it, we've seen it globally, but it has not translated into the workplace. And this is one of the big challenges. You know, we're seeing more girls than ever being educated. And education is recognized as a lever for social change, economic change. But we know the gender gap is worse than it's ever been and it continues to get worse. I think we're at 131 years. Globally it is, it's bad. Right. So we, we can't assume being highly educated will automatically lead to strong economic participation in the, in the workforce. Right. Something has to be done differently.

 

And there are too many institutional barriers that are just, have always operated the way they have. So in order to make those changes, the shift has to come from the women themselves, which is hard because it's another thing we're putting on women. But if you wait for somebody to make those changes, it ain't gonna happen.

 

Shawna Samuel

Yeah, it's so true. It's something that I hear a lot from women. Sometimes when I give talks, they say, well, isn't this just one more thing for me to do? And how fair is that? And what I always say is, well, no, it isn't fair, but I prefer the ROI on this to doing nothing. Because if you're doing nothing, we're going to get more of the same. We're going to replicate the systems that are not working for women. And I think you're really encouraging us to take ownership, take responsibility for our part, while holding institutions accountable.

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

Yeah. And you know, I was a student who came up with a fantastic quote from Audrey Lord. The master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house. And I just, I heard that and I was just blown away because again, we, we know things need to change, but you need a different perspective for that change to occur. We're at such an important point. I think there's a real inflection point right now. And I think all the pushback on women's leadership, on DNA strategies, it's happening for a reason. And it's happening because that change is really, really, really occurring. And it's deep seated. But the thing is, if you sit on the sidelines and wait, it's going to take a lot longer and it will probably go backwards again.

 

Even our careers, we have to be, you know, I say this to men and women, you have to be so much more proactive, so much more entrepreneurial in the way you develop your career. And if you can do that and get into the mindset of what your leaders need in order to promote you, you actually can start navigating, zigzagging around these barriers. It all actually starts to fall into place when you think about it from that perspective. Rather than waiting, getting proactive and saying, okay, what do I need to have in front of me in order to move forward? And some of this, you know, a big part is really shedding that good girl syndrome. I'm not saying you get rid of everything. Yes, you want to be somebody who is great to get on with at work, but you can't be likeable at the expense of your career. And, you know, we see it time and time and time again. And it's hard, right? It's not easy when you have to stand up for yourself and say, no, I'm not willing to do this or push back on it. But after, you know, first few times it's harder, then it gets easier, and then it gets easier.

 

Shawna Samuel

I'm here nodding my head along because this makes so much sense and I think is exactly the way that I encourage people to think about their careers and taking ownership. I could talk to you all day, Shaheena. This has been a fabulous conversation, but I also want to be respectful of your time knowing that you've got a busy research and teaching schedule as well. Can you tell us if people want to learn more about your work, where can they find out more about you?

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

Well, the best place is our friend LinkedIn, which is where I found out about you and connected with you and the amazing podcasts you're doing. So LinkedIn is a is a good place to start and then my social media is pretty active. So from there you can find out more about my books, my website and and then also the work I do at Ashes in Paris.

 

Shawna Samuel

Wonderful. And I will put links to Shaheena's LinkedIn as well as her books in the show notes. So for anyone who's interested in connecting, you'll have it all there in the notes. Thank you so much for being here today and for this really enlightening conversation and I think some of the things that a lot of women are facing in the workplace.

 

Dr. Shaheena Janjuva-Jivraj

It's been such a pleasure. It's always great to talk about these things, to kind of take take that thinking out of the box a bit more and just pull different ways to think about it together. But please get in touch and thank you for the opportunity to have this conversation with you, especially at the start of the new year.

 

Shawna Samuel

Such a pleasure.

 

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