Laetitia Vitaud on The Future of Work from a feminist perspective

Latitia Vitaud Interview

[00:00:00] Nigel Rawlins: Welcome Laetitia. you are my first international guest and I would love you to introduce yourself to my listeners. 

[00:00:10] Laetitia Vitaud: Hi Nigel. Thanks for this invitation. I'm very flattered to be the first international guest and I am very international because I'm French. I live in Germany, but I work all over Europe. I'm a writer and speaker about the future of work. That's what I do. I write articles, books, I do podcasts on the subject of work and its transformations. 

[00:00:33] Nigel Rawlins: Lovely. So I must admit,20 years ago when I resigned from my teaching position. One of the areas that are good friends suggest I go out and meet people, was the future of work foundation in Australia. And this is where I then met my long-term mentor. And at that time, the future of work foundation was looking to create a better future for Australia. But I've got to admit after all these years, I'm still a bit confused about what we mean by the future of work. So could you tell me what you feel, that it means?

[00:01:06] Laetitia Vitaud: That's an amazing question because people use that phrase without ever questioning it. And I've realized that a lot of people focus on the tech side of things, the tools that we use and how they changed the way we work. I focus on a more profound, structural change, which is the way we view jobs and work. And we had a little talk before the podcast and you said, jobs and job, a job and work, it's not the same thing. And that's precisely what's happening. It used to be and that's what I mean with the future of work, is this transition from one paradigm, which is the industrial paradigm basically developed on the, the Fordist age with the Ford motor company and that bundle that created those jobs.

[00:01:55] Laetitia Vitaud: And that's still the way a lot of people see jobs. So the job was this, a Fordist job was this perfect bundle where in exchange for division of labor, and division of labor means you do the same thing over and over again. it's boring and quite alienating. Plus subordination, you have shifts, you must obey your boss, et cetera, in exchange for that, because that's not very appealing, is it? if you compare it to craftsmanship, it's not appealing. So to make it appealing, to make it worthwhile, you had lots of trade offs. You had lots of benefits. You had, job security, and with job security, you had the proof of solvency. With payslip you had access to banking credit. That was a novelty in the 20th century. It meant access to housing and then social protection and healthcare and paid holidays. And, in Europe, even more things because we had powerful unions. So lots of paid holidays, and lots of protections and a sense of identity, a voice, through the labor.

[00:02:55] Laetitia Vitaud: There was no questioning at the subordination. So the powerful unions and all of that made the bundle very attractive.

[00:03:03] Laetitia Vitaud: And few people questioned the division of labor and subordination that came with it. And what's happening, what's been happening for 40, if not 50 years, is that this bundle has started to unbundle, sorry, it's a bit repetitive. It's not what it used to be. So job security is not what it used to be,the share of the pie that workers get is not what it used to be. Access to housing is more difficult than it used to be. Labor unions are just the shadow of what they once were. and the list goes on. Every element of that bundle is weaker somehow, and that's led more people to question the alienating part of that deal of that,contract. Why should I put up with division of labor and subordination when the benefits are not what they used to be?

and this is this more profound, questioning that leads us to. realize that this unbundling means we need to create our own bundle. So it's more people questioning subordination and becoming self-employed. It's more people deciding they want to do something with their hands because they find that the jobs they had at the office was a bullshit job. It's people like you, and a lot of women who decide they cannot have it all in one job. So they needto have to find, that their social life in one type of activity, their revenues in another, and, healthcare in a third thing, a third activity or position. And they are multi-active people who combine all these things and they recreate the bundle their own way by putting together different things.

[00:04:49] Laetitia Vitaud: And it's this idea that it's much more individualized, but the threat is, and that's where the challenge for the future of work is, that we need to put some more collective aspect into it, because if we make it into something that's purely individual, it's up to, if it's up to each individual to create their own bundle, their own unique bundle, according to their needs and constraints, the risk is, it's too much on an individual's shoulder. It's too difficult and it's too lonely. So what all the unions of the future, what are the institutions that support work in the future? What will healthcare look like? What will social protection look like? When the risks are different? We have longer lives. We will work longer. So it's all these institutional and political and collective aspects, that we, that also need to be reinvented. So of course technology plays a role and of course we work differently, but more profoundly, to me, the future of work is about changing the institutions we need to make work sustainable, interesting, enjoyable, and, more inclusive.

That's the big issue there is, how do we make that come about? Because it depends on I guess, their skill level because, there's plenty of paid jobs out there provided you can get it. Unfortunately, if you're a bit older, it's more difficult. But I know with, the tradies in Australia, they're working with their hands and their brains. And there seems to be lots of apprenticeships in Australia for men and women too. we do have women, who are apprentices and tradies as well. So they're getting the satisfaction out of that. Some of the surveys that I've seen out there about people at work, a lot of people just don't enjoy their work.

[00:06:34] Nigel Rawlins: And I think with COVID, that's made a lot of people question it, especially if they're living at home or sorry, working from home and that's changed the dynamics. How are you finding. COVID changing the nature of how people relate to work. And obviously we're talking about different types of work or sorry, work, jobs. I guess the distinction between jobs is something we get paid to do in the economy. And it's counted in the economy. Work is all the other stuff we do that we might not necessarily get paid for, but maybe we'll get satisfaction from. So what do you think, how has COVID, affected that? What do you see as the outcome of it? Is that making a shift towards, people demanding a bit more from their work? 

[00:07:18] Laetitia Vitaud: Absolutely. It's accelerated the changes that had started before. So I don't think it's a revolution and that a lot of people think things are new. It was, we already had people working from home. We already had a lot of those things, but it's accelerated tremendously.

[00:07:34] Laetitia Vitaud: And perhaps I could focus on three things that COVID changed in the way we approach work. The first wave, to use a pandemic metaphor, the first wave of future of work debates were around value. We have. in Europe, under lockdown, people who worked from home, went out every day because they knew that more than one third of the workers couldn't work from home. And were all the essential workers, nurses, doctors, people working in supermarkets, people who delivered the food that they needed, people who worked on infrastructure. So they went out and applauded the nurses or the medical personnel that was this phase, at the beginning of the COVID during the first lockdown.

[00:08:17] Laetitia Vitaud: And it triggered lots of debates around value, how come all these essential workers, those we need to hold our hands when we die to, to take care of us when we're in pain, to put food on the table. How come these all happened to be more or less the least paid in our economy. And of course this question, isn't new.

It's a question that feminists have asked over and over again, because it happens, so happens that a lot of the care work, is, identified as female work or is supposed to be female work and is less valued economically speaking. So it's not a new question, but it seemed that there were more and more debates and anthropologists, David, Graeber, who coined the phrase, bullshit jobs, also happened to die in the summer of 2020.

A lot of people were very sad. I was very sad because he was a great intellectual and a provacator, but a brilliant guy. And he, he said there are two types of jobs: there are bullshit jobs: those are the jobs for which you're quite well paid, you have lots of benefits, a lot of protection, but you find the work that you do either useless or terribly boring or even bad for society and the environment toxic;evil.

[00:09:44] Laetitia Vitaud: You have to pretend you believe in it. And all of these things,you can identify as, a bullshit job. And the second type of jobs are the shit jobs and the shit jobs, unlike the bullshit jobs are not useless. They're quite useful that the people delivering the things you order online, for example, the people waitressing in restaurants. So these are useful jobs, but they are badly paid, usually part-time, they come with no benefits. In a country like the United States, they come with no healthcare. So they mean people who are in a situation of terrible insecurity. And they also come with bad management. It's alienating, you're treated like shit.

[00:10:22] Laetitia Vitaud: Hence the word shit jobs. And in between said David, Graeber, there are few other options. It's either bullshit or shit. So it was a very provocative way of talking about jobs, but it did touch upon one of the main problems, which is this, feeling that a lot of people have that jobs are not spread evenly, that value is not spread evenly.

[00:10:49] Laetitia Vitaud: It led, economist, Mariana Mazzucato to write this amazing book called the value of everything in which she said that, a lot of people doing the essential services that society needs and that make tomorrow's world more valuable, like teachers, they are treated as if they were a burden on society, on the economy. So it's really the way we measure value. And the work of economists that's deeply wrong and that should be reviewed. So that was the first wave value, shit and bullshit. The second wave I would say was around the work of women and suddenly, we seem to realize in Europe and the US, and probably in Australia too, that, oh, oops: it's it that this pandemic and the lockdowns that come with it, they do not treat men and women equally. and there was this, a UK based economist called Nicole C. Mason who invented the term, 'shecession' and a shecession is this recession that affects women much more than men.

[00:11:54] Laetitia Vitaud: So unlike the 2008 mancession, which affected, for example, manufacturing jobs and construction work, and that was all more male work that was impacted by the. previous crisis. This one affected women more because hospitality, jobs, restaurant jobs, healthcare work somehow was impacted,really strongly either because there was too much work or too much death. In the case of the UK, for example, a lot of NHS nurses died, at the beginning because they had no proper equipment to protect themselves from the virus. So Nicole C. Mason, basically coined this, this phrase,shecession to refer to all that, this very disproportionate impact and the discrepancy between the two.

[00:12:43] Laetitia Vitaud: And one of the things, that we seem to discover is that working from home did not mean the same thing, whether you were a mother with children or single person,living, living on their own, and that's the free, the unpaid work you do in the home has quite obviously an impact on your ability to do paid work outside or in the home.

[00:13:08] Laetitia Vitaud: And that the moment you closed schools and childcare facilities, etc, you reinternalized the unpaid work that was externalized to other women. And you present accountants lawyers, engineers, etc from being able to do their work. And in the US there were figures it's as many as between three and 4 million women, including highly paid women in good professions, and valued professions, who left their work and went either part-time or quit their work completely because there was no one to look after the children. And we seem to discover, oops, it's very unequally distributed.

[00:13:52] Laetitia Vitaud: And we thought that the millennials, that millennial fathers were more, more involved, that they spent more time with their children, which they do compared to their fathers, but the gap is still enormous. And the gap, reflects also,economic arbitrages within the home. And it was this discovery, that, that a lot of people can't get over, which is that there's a gigantic motherhood penalty.

[00:14:22] Laetitia Vitaud: And the motherhood penalty is a great sociological concept that I've been writing a lot, numerous times, that if you look at a mother's revenue's 10 years after the birth of her first child, how much in percentage. how much in revenues has she lost compared to, say the career she would have had she not had children.

[00:14:45] Laetitia Vitaud: And the figures are enormous, even in very egalitarian countries like Denmark. So Denmark is a very, it's usually lots of articles about Sweden and Denmark and how they're good with, they have one of the lowest gender gaps in the world and women are very represented in politics and etc. There are lots of wonderful healthcare and social protection systems. But even in Denmark, the motherhood penalty is over 20%. Now, if you look at countries like the UK, where a lot of mothers have to start working part-time or even quit jobs, especially at the beginning, because access to childcare is quite difficult.

[00:15:26] Laetitia Vitaud: It's quite expensive, especially in the first years, preschool is not, it's not free. You have a 40 to 42% motherhood penalty in the UK. It's roughly the same in the US. it's lower in France, my country because, because we have better childcare and it's more accessible, less expensive. Plus in France school starts at the age of three. So starting at three, you have universal free, completely free school for all children. So the tricky part is between zero and three years old. That's when it's, it can be quite expensive, but it's, but it's heavily subsidized for households with lower revenues.

[00:16:08] Laetitia Vitaud: So it's not perfect far from it, but it's quite good. And women are incentivized to go back to full-time work very rapidly after the birth of their children. So in France, motherhood penalty is around. I couldn't find the exact figure, but my guess is it would be around 25 to 30%, which is bad enough. Now I get to the juicy part, look at Germany where I live now. And that was my own personal revelation during this pandemic, Germany is the U S in the 1950s, Germany now is like Germany in the 1950s, the motherhood penalties as high as 62%. So women who have children basically have to work part time, more than two thirds of the women who have children work part-time. A lot of them quit work, but most of them basically have very low paid part-time jobs. And when they do want to go back to full-time work, after 10 years or something like that, because school is only half a day in Germany. So it starts very early in the morning. You have to get up at six and then it starts at 7 30 or 7 45 in the morning, and it ends at 12 or one or 2:00 PM for all the children. Which is ridiculous. So not only do you have to get up extremely early, but then, everything ends at one, so there's no way that with young children, a woman can have a full-time job because, there is, there has to be someone in the home, and those who have their children stay on their own at home, are viewed as really bad mothers.

[00:17:45] Laetitia Vitaud: And for a couple of years now, there have been new options for, full day schools, but mostly it's immigrants who choose it, immigrant families like ourselves and not German families or very few German families who go to such schools, probably because there is a cultural problem. And so in Germany, there is this choice between career and children, that's still very stark.There is a tax system that will create incentives for family to have very unequal revenues in the household, because from a tax perspective, it's much better to have one big breadwinner revenue and a small one, someone who works part time and can, pay for little things. and so the economic inequalities between men and women is enormous, and it's really shameful for a country, so rich and developed, not to have changed things enough to make these inequalities lower because not everyone's married.

and even, there are lots of single women who, or single mothers, even who, for whom life is extremely difficult because of this, unequal, society. For a single mother, who has to work full time when all the institutions, including schools were designed for nuclear families, with mommy and daddy, with daddy working outside the home and mommy, working part-time or not at all, then it's even harder. And imagine what the discrimination is in companies for women against women of childbearing age, even if they do not want to have children. And a lot of career women, educated women, ambitious women do not want to have children in Germany because you cannot have both. So that's why the fertility rate is fairly low compared to France.

When you have, when you're forced to make that choice, it's hard for everyone. It's hard for those without children. It's hard for recruiters who cannot have enough people to do the work with,the demographic situation in Germany is that the population is quite old. So median age is around 46, I think 47, so more than half of the population is over 46 or 47. So that's a fairly old population. So a lot of people are retired. So you don't have enough people to do the work. There aren't enough teachers, there aren't enough nurses, there aren't enough engineers, there aren't enough tradies. That aren't enough any job, basically you can think of. If more women could work and could work full time and be paid for it, the whole economy, the whole GDP could grow, enormously. It's a reservoir of wealth and development that remains largely untapped, underexploited. So my point, the one that I want to make is that empowering women to have to work more, to have more wealth is good for everyone.

[00:20:48] Nigel Rawlins: And it's a wonderful thing. You were telling me about school in France from an age of three, because one of the big concerns in Australia, and I guess in a lot of places is that, the potential of children, young children is their brains are growing from that age. So if you can get them into full-time care, care or education, they will grow.

[00:21:07] Nigel Rawlins: And it'll even things up. Whereas in Australia, it's a bit haphazard, I think there's only part-time kindergarten for three year olds and then four year olds, and then you're off to state schools, but we've also got a split system here. We have private schools, but our schooling is all day, and you can get some after-school care as well. And there is a lot more childcare in Australia now. but, I think you're dead right in this particular, COVID with the Delta, variant, a lot more women have left work or are underemployed at the moment, but there is a lot of underemployment in Australia anyway, a lot of people are working casually and then not getting enough hours.

[00:21:45] Nigel Rawlins: But one of the biggest issues we've found in Australia, which is a terrible undercurrent is domestic violence. And apparently, in Australia about one woman per week is being murdered by their partner. And that is horrific. And yet we spend all this money on terrorism and we haven't had a terrorist attack in Australia for a long time, the terror is at home, But, yeah, so I didn't understand about Germany, half day a week. That's, that's very different to anywhere else. I guess it actually comes through when you were talking about the single mothers who are trying to raise children, and especially if you've got a half day of school, two of the women I interviewed were single mothers and they had to find well-paying work, so that they could look after their children and get them off to school and things like that.

[00:22:31] Nigel Rawlins: So they were single mothers and both professional women, and their careers,really took off and they worked really hard, but they were on their own, doing it on their own and with not a lot of support. and one of the women, who I interviewed twice,had a single mother, she as a child went out and earned money as the child model to bring in money because there was no money for single mothers in those days.

[00:22:54] Nigel Rawlins: And I'll have to admit when I was a child, when we emmigrated from England, when I was younger, I used to go home with my sister and we'd be on our own for hours until my mother came home from work. They were called latch key children. 

[00:23:06] Laetitia Vitaud: yes, even in the 1980s, even in the 1980s, when I was a child, I was born in the late seventies. we would go home on our own. We will walk through the streets on a road. It wasn't seen as,that big a deal to leave eight or nine year olds alone for a couple of hours. And today we've, over-invested parenthood in such a way that it's a full time job, that you have to have an eye on the children constantly, because anything could happen if you don't watch them a hundred percent of the time, it's crazy, no one wants to be a parent under those circumstances. And we forgot that old motto, that it takes a village, it takes a village to raise children. You cannot, if you're a single mom, probably it's easier for you to understand that you cannot do it alone. And if you accept that, you take all the help you can get, that's professional help when you have enough revenues to pay for it. But that's all the entire family that you recruit, and friends and the neighbors, which means you have to have that dense network of people who could support you and help you. It's easier in cities than it is you live far away from everybody else. it's easier if you have your family around you, parents, aunts and uncles and cousins and brothers and sisters, takes a village. 

I think you're dead right there. what advice would we give to young women today? Obviously things are different in Germany and Europe, and that's why I wanted to talk to you about the European things. All we tend to hear in Australia is about America and, and the American hustle. when, we were talking about the book, The Hundred Year Life by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, we're living longer and they're talking about a number of transitions. What advice would you give to a young woman today from a feminist perspective? What would you say, that they might like to think about in terms of careers? Now, not all women can get professional work. 

[00:25:04] Laetitia Vitaud: No, but you're right to mention the 100 Year Life, it's a, it's an interesting take on this transition from the old work paradigm to the new one, because it adds the demographic change. That is a change of enormous proportions. So when our pension system was created in France in 1945 after World War Two, the average life expectancy was around 60. So most people would not even enjoy a pension when the system was created. Today. obviously we've, gained about between two to three years of life expectancy every decade for two centuries. So today it's around 85 in France and there are differences between countries, but We're getting close to 90. And also this is. life expectancy at birth, because if you're 50 or 60 today, your life expectancy is actually more than 85. It's actually often 90 or something like that. Children born today. young people who are young today have a life expectancy that they generally underestimate, because if they base it on today's figures or on the life expectancy of their parents, they underestimate it.. And then it has an important consequence that usually they do not save enough. They're not good at handling their personal finances. So I think that's definitely one of the skills that young person today should have in mind when they start their careers. How can, get those skills to manage a long life and a long career? How do I learn to learn? How do I develop a growth mindset? How do I think about finances in a way that's dynamic?

[00:26:52] Laetitia Vitaud: The choices that I made now have an impact, have a longterm impact on my life. So this is very different skills that we didn't think about. and the other thing that the young woman should have in mind is that her life will be full of transitions and different professional moments. Whatever her job is now she'll have, she may have a completely different one. She may work part-time for a couple of years, but she can go back to full-time work after that. And if she does find that the labor market discriminates against her, because she supposedly has less ambition than a man who's never quit work at all, then she may find that it's easier to start her own company and work with those companies as their clients, rather than their employers.

[00:27:48] Laetitia Vitaud: And that's a huge shift in the professions by the way, that I've noticed in a lot of Europe is that, it's been a lot of women in their fifties find that the labor market is very unwelcoming. And then that the management is very toxic and when they have the network and the connections already, and when their work is valued, but they are discriminated against because of their age, those companies find it a lot easier to work with them as suppliers and that's, that's a strong movement in all of Europe. but that means you need to be able to run a business. Do your accounting, sell your services, do marketing. it's a lot of skills that you do not have when you were a salaried worker all your life. So these are things that I think should be taught at school.

[00:28:34] Laetitia Vitaud: And if they're not, let's learn them on our own. learn to, as I said, again, be like a financial advisor to ourselves, learn about investing, saving, spending, be literate about money. Understand that because the little things that we do now, financially, because of the compounded effect, they have a huge effect on what it adds up to at the end of your work life, right?

[00:29:02] Laetitia Vitaud: This is why, by the way, the gender pension gap is more relevant to me than the gender revenue gap, because it's usually three times as high because of, because it adds up all those little things during your life. So that's really one piece of advice that I would focus on.

And then, if you have a life full of transitions, compared to the old model that Andrew Scott talks about in the 100 Year Life, so the old model is that you used the first have training education, then you worked, and then you got a pension. You were retired, this three stage life and institutions for each stage of your life. Now that. doesn't exist for anyone anymore. And for women, it was never a reality because often they had children and that was an extra stage in their lives or extra stages in their lives. So if you have this multi-stage life full of transitions, you'll have different challenges that are professional, but that are also in terms of, what networks do you have to support those transitions?

[00:30:05] Laetitia Vitaud: Most of the jobs you get, most of the clients, you get are through your network. So if you continue to develop a heterogeneous network full of people who do different things and who are based in different geography, that will make your future transitions easier. How do you densify that network of relationships? How do you look after the people you love so that these relationships will continue to matter and support you and make your life better throughout a longer life. This is another skill that's super important is, look after your relationships, take care of the people you like and meet new people and continue to meet new people throughout your life.

[00:30:51] Laetitia Vitaud: This is the networking part. So we have the finance thing and we have the networking thing, and if I had to name a third, idea that, I would recommend you focus on if you're a young person today or young woman today, it's the, the identity challenge that multiple transitions represent. If you. If you dedicate hours of your life to just being a mother and a lot of women do that, and then your children grow up, and first they're very busy at school and then never at home anymore. And so it's an identity challenge. Who am I, if I'm not a mother? If I did only that? So look after your identity. And what I mean is you have multiple identities and never put all your eggs in one basket.

[00:31:39] Laetitia Vitaud: So be careful to not just be a worker or just be a mother and prepare for these transitions that are identity transitions. And to do that, the best tool for me is to develop the immigrant mindset because what immigrants do when they leave the country and move to a different one is they often, it's not just the language.

[00:32:04] Laetitia Vitaud: Sometimes there's a language thing. They have to learn a new language, but they basically have to learn a new way of looking at things and putting themselves in other people's shoes to understand because everything's different when you go to a different country. Moving from the UK to Germany, I found that, it's not just a words to describe things, it's other realities, other methods, other way of looking at life, a completely different culture. And that immigrant mindset is very helpful to help you with these identity transitions, because when you develop that challenging the way you look at things, have the humility to listen for a very long while because you just don't know that helps,transition your identity multiple times throughout your life.

[00:32:50] Laetitia Vitaud: And perhaps also then, do the storytelling that you need to, because you have a narrative that you develop after that, perhaps that could be the fourth skill. You have to be able to, develop that narrative so that you can understand who you are and understand this adventure that that you went through with these multiple transitions and identity challenges.

[00:33:10] Nigel Rawlins: That's amazing. And I think that's the best advice I've ever heard. and look it won't be an easy journey because we're talking about some of the relationships in there, there are divorces in there, relationship issues. and I'm assuming what we really need young women to do is get out and get some work experience. The difficulty of working from home is you're not getting the dynamics in a business and you might not always get the promotions that you require, but they need to probably,clock up a few years of experience and try things out and see what they like. 

[00:33:45] Laetitia Vitaud: if you're home do working for a client and 

[00:33:49] Nigel Rawlins: I think that's pretty exciting. 

[00:33:50] Laetitia Vitaud: Yeah, you're right about working from home, by the way, maybe I can add a few words about that because working from home can be a trap because,you're there, you might as well do the laundry and you might as well clean up the bathroom and do the groceries. and then the more you are at home, the more chores you will do in the home, because obviously you're the one at home. And so it amplifies the gap, and the way things are organized in the household and the family. If there are multiple people in the household, it amplifies the gaps. It's a trap, it's a trap, it's a comfortable one because it's easier to integrate work in life. And if you do it well, it's a wonderful solution, but it's also a trap because you will not develop those networks of relationships that will support you through future transitions that will help you to find those people who will be your clients, if you become self-employed. Those people will be your future employers if you're fed up with your current job. So you need to be out there and do that. And probably you need to get out of the home, more as a young woman, even than as a young man. so as not to be forced to stay at home in the future, right? To have more choice in the future, you might have to spend a little bit more time at the office if there's a hybrid work situation, and not have that world where, women choose the work from home option, when men do the politics and keep the power in at the office. That's the danger of hybrid work. If, more women choose to work from home.

[00:35:23] Nigel Rawlins: Oh, totally agree. I think it's a better option when you're older. If you are working for yourself, provided you are disciplined and that there's a whole way of learning to work from home and I've done it for more than 20 years now, but yes, I hang out the washing and you could be surprised how long it takes to hang out washing. But yes, it's very easy, but there are ways around it. But yes, I think when you're younger, it's better to get out, build that network, build up those skills and I guess build up that reputation too, that people can trust you and you're good at what you do, but it does take a few years. It could be 20 years of work or something.

[00:35:59] Nigel Rawlins: Is there anything else you can think we need to cover? Because I think we've done pretty well. 

[00:36:05] Laetitia Vitaud: Yeah, we have, perhaps, my French piece of advice to women would be, really what I mean, don't neglect money. Don't neglect money in the name of love. Of course, love is superior, but it's used and it's been used for centuries to deprive you of money. And so keep that in mind, also doing something you love or doing something, with a nice management and nice working conditions doesn't mean you should be paid less. If you do the work properly. And sometimes there's a little bit of that mindset that, if I do something I love, if I do something love, or I do something in conditions that are full of love, I should be paid less. And that's a little bit of that is in the hands of women to change. 

[00:36:48] Nigel Rawlins: That sounds good. It's just the freelancer's limit. You're expected to work for nothing to prove yourself. No, you don't do that. Laetitia. How can people find you? How would you like them to find you?

[00:36:59] Nigel Rawlins: And I will put all these in show notes and things and promote it for you. 

[00:37:03] Laetitia Vitaud: So two things in English, it's my laetitia@work newsletter. So it's laetitia@work, dot sub stack.com. So it's on the newsletter platform, sub stack and the Building Bridges podcast. And now the two are combined. So if you have the laetitia@work newsletter, you should have everything. 

[00:37:23] Nigel Rawlins: I'll put all those details in. So Laeticia, thank you for the wonderful conversation. I love the fact that I'm getting a European perspective and I'll be honest, not an American one because we get way too much American stuff. So it's very important for Australians to look out into the world and come across new ideas and interesting ideas and different perspectives. So thank you again. 

[00:37:44] Laetitia Vitaud: Thank you Nigel for this lovely conversation. I had a lot of fun it was a very nice way for me to start the day, bye Nigel.