Home/Notes/What five guests taught me
FROM THE HOST
I started this show because I wanted information, not inspiration. Five episodes in, the information has been better than I expected, and it has been stubbornly consistent. The same six things keep surfacing whether I am talking to an aerospace engineer, a nuclear recruiter, a professor, a fitness coach or a senior who has not started yet. Here is what I have got so far, and what I think we can all do about it this week.
Lauren Fitzpatrick Shanks chose aerospace engineering by reading a department pamphlet and picking the only discipline that looked semi-interesting. She wanted to study math. She was asked what she would do with that, said “I don't know, math,” and was steered somewhere more prescribed.
Alexandria Stylianou did not choose commercial fleet sales. Her managers moved her into it inside a year because she was a woman and the department had none.
Danielle Allen went from firefighting to aviation because she wanted to be an astronaut and thought she would work out how to get to space.
Connie Clary started her consulting firm because a client mentioned she was good at telling people how to run their business. Her words: tell me once and I will go, okay. Teaching, which she now says is where she was supposed to be, came four steps later and was never the plan.
And Amelia Christofferson, who is standing at the start of all of this, said plainly that she does not know yet, and that she will have a better idea once she has actually worked somewhere.
I find this enormously freeing, and I did not expect to. The neat career story is assembled afterwards, in hindsight, usually for an audience. What it looked like at the time was a pamphlet, a pushy relative and a scholarship.
This is the one I have not stopped thinking about. Lauren knew at the end of her first semester that aerospace was wrong. She had a 4.0. She went to talk about switching, and was told that no Black woman had ever graduated from that program.
So she stayed, and graduated, and became the first. Her own description is that her undergraduate years became about doing something people expected her not to do, rather than something she actually wanted. Fourteen more years of corporate aerospace followed.
“Just because you can do it, just because you're good at it, does not mean you have to do it.”
What people now say to Lauren, at 38
I recognize this and I suspect you do too. Being good at something is a terrible reason to keep doing it, and it is the most socially rewarded reason there is.
Danielle learned to drive a fire truck sitting on a stack of textbooks because the seat was built for someone considerably larger. The seats in the aircraft she trained in were not built for her either. In my own background across nuclear and oil and gas, personal protective equipment still is not made for female bodies.
The damage is not the inconvenience. It is the conclusion everybody draws from it.
“People just assume that you can't do the thing, you're not very good at it. But realistically it's not that you're not good at it. It's literally because none of it was designed for you.”
Danielle Allen, episode 3
Connie described the same mechanism with no equipment involved at all. She would say something in a meeting and watch it get glazed over. Someone of another gender would say the identical thing and it would land as a great idea. Nobody used the words, but the effect was isn't that cute.
Danielle makes a further point I had not considered, and it is the sharpest thing anyone has said on this show. We spend a fortune asking how to get more girls into STEM, and almost nothing examining the rooms we are sending them into. Lauren said a version of the same thing: if the space is not built with women in mind, you will not attract them, even if they would have been the best engineer you ever hired.
Lauren hit six figures at 25 and was very clear with me about what that number was doing for her. It was not greed. It was a compass she did not otherwise have.
“I really did not know where I wanted to go. I didn't have that North Star except for the dollar figure.”
Lauren Fitzpatrick Shanks, episode 1
The part worth sitting with is that she only discovered money was not her real driver after she left. Not before. You cannot reason your way to that conclusion from inside the salary, which is an uncomfortable thing to know and a useful one.
Her one regret is specific: at 25 she chose the employer-funded MBA over the psychology PhD she actually wanted, because the PhD meant three to five years out and a smaller salary at the end. Asked what she would tell that version of herself, she said go and get the psychology degree.
Alexandria sold commercial vehicles by driving around Phoenix with buckets of licorice, her business card blown up and stuck on the front, knocking on doors. She bought a customer's son a remote control car at Christmas. Her argument is that as AI makes sales cheaper and faster, that becomes more valuable rather than less, because on a purchase that size people still buy from people.
Danielle traces her communication skills straight back to the fire service, where an ambiguous instruction has an immediate cost, and says she still catches herself writing emails where the meaning only exists in her head.
Lauren built an entire company on the observation that leadership development mentions human connection as a talking point and never explains how to do it without sounding fake.
And Amelia, from the other end, is asking to be mentored as a friend rather than managed as a subordinate, because at twenty-one, in a room where everyone has twenty years of experience, asking a question feels like an imposition.
Connie's first business was a marketing firm and it ended in bankruptcy. She was young, and her own verdict is that she did not really know what she was doing. She was certain at the time that she would never work anywhere again, because surely someone would eventually ask whether she had ever failed in business.
Twenty-six years later she runs the consulting practice that grew out of the job she was made redundant from, and she teaches the thing she got wrong. She is explicit that she can only teach it because she is willing to say it out loud.
“This journey of life is not what I anticipated it would be, but it's ended up being a whole lot better than what I anticipated.”
Dr. Connie Clary, episode 2
Her image for it is a door she kept shoving at that turned out to be glued and nailed and boarded shut, for a reason she could only see afterwards. I am not a patient person either, and I have found this one genuinely useful.
I did not want to end on observations. Here is what I have taken from these four conversations, sorted by where you are standing.
Every one of these women is described, by other people, as someone who had a plan. None of them did. They had a pamphlet, a pushy relative, a department with no women in it, and a stubborn interest they could not shake.
That is not a lowering of the bar. It is the actual mechanism, and I think a lot of women are quietly convinced they are the only one improvising. You are not. The blank in this show's name moves, and so do most careers.
What do most career changers have in common?
Across the first five episodes of Women IN, none of the guests chose their original field deliberately. An aerospace engineer picked her discipline from a department pamphlet. A fleet sales rep was moved into sales because her department had no women. The tidy career story is almost always assembled afterwards, which means changing direction is normal rather than a failure of planning.
How do you know when to leave a job that looks good on paper?
Lauren Fitzpatrick Shanks knew after one semester of her degree and stayed eighteen years. Her diagnosis was that the salary was standing in for a direction she did not have. A useful test is whether you can name what you are working toward without naming a number or a title.
What can a senior woman actually do to help someone starting out?
Three things that cost nothing: reply to the message, say the specific thing you would tell a friend rather than a stranger, and stop assigning the notes, the coffee and the scheduling to the same person every time. Guests named all three unprompted.
What is the single most practical piece of advice from season one?
Shorten your decision window. Danielle Allen noticed she sits with an idea for about two years before acting, and that if it survives two years she does it anyway. Her advice is to cut that to six months, because the decision does not get easier by waiting.