In the first episode of a podcast series focused on six books about the scientific workplace, Cordelia Fine tells Holly Newson why she wrote Patriarchy, Inc: What we Get Wrong About Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at Work.

Fine, a psychologist and workplace gender-equity researcher at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers a blueprint for a fairer society that does not single out women as “a problem to be fixed.​​​​​”

Describing the gender pay gap as largely a “motherhood pay gap,” she outlines how employers can support staff who return to work after a career break, without fostering resentment among colleagues. She also explains why many workplace diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, including unconscious bias training, are ineffective and can sometimes be offensive to the groups they aim to support.

Fine also draws on historical examples of women being pushed out when men enter professions in larger numbers, and the effect this can have on the workplace culture.

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In his role as research director at NielsenIQ, a consumer intelligence company based in London, Josh Balsters helps global brands drive product innovation.

Balsters relies on expertise he gained in psychology and neuroscience, both during his PhD and as an assistant professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

But when he made the decision to quit full-time academia in 2020, Balsters struggled to tell his colleagues because he worried that he had let them down.

“There’s a feeling...that you’ve taken up a space, taken an opportunity away from somebody else who would have wanted it more,” he says. “I felt much more comfortable talking to people who had done it, who had already left.”

Ashley Ruba took a different tack. After completing her PhD in psychology at the University of Washington, Seattle, she spent three years as a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, before doubling her salary in an industry role.

After sharing her story on social media, Ruba was bombarded with messages from early career researchers who felt they couldn’t share their misgivings about remaining in academia with colleagues.

“It seems like there’s a lot of shame, a lot of fear,” she tells Adam Levy in the final episode of Off Limits: an eight-part podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace.

Previous episodes have covered religious faith, alcohol dependency, bereavement, fertility challenges, and coming out as a transgender scientist.

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Alison Behie was approaching 40 when she underwent multiple rounds of IVF, enduring the mental and physical turmoil of miscarriage and uncertainty along the way.

How good is the academic workplace at supporting women like Behie, a biological anthropology researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra? “The primary feeling was just this guilt that I had prioritized trying to get where I was in my career over my family. That’s not a way anyone should ever feel,“ she says.

Behie is joined by Karen Jones, whose research focus at the University of Reading, UK, includes women’s career advancement and gender equality in higher education. Jones says the precarity of research careers is often most pronounced at the point when many researchers are contemplating parenthood, telling Levy: “It’s not uncommon for people to be employed on one temporary contract after another possibly for several years. And this often coincides with the age at which people are making decisions about having a family.”

Finally, Wendy Dossett, a professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of Chester, UK, describes the pressures facing women in academia to juggle career and family ambitions, saying: “I suffered a bit from the assumption that I must be a child-free career woman, when, in truth, I was a broken-hearted, childless woman.”

Off Limits is a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace.

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