Future of work with Laetitia Vitaud

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Source: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/shake-up-the-world/episodes/Future-of-Work—Laetitia-Vitaud-e10dm42

For today’s episode, I have Laetitia Vitaud, a writer and prominent speaker about the future of work. Laetitia is editor-in-chief of the HR media Welcome to the Jungle, a leading platform that helps companies develop employer branding for the new work generation. She has published her work in LSE Business Review, Medium, and Malt.

Show notes:

• Definitions of Feminism
• Meritocracy, Anti-natalism and Motherhood
• Equity, Equality and Diversity
• Fairness in Candidate Selection
• Ideal version of feminism
• “Culture eats Technology for Breakfast”
• Future Work with professional transitions and job changes
• “Low skill” workers viewpoint
• Economic system based on measurable value
• Productive work and reproductive work
• Rise of female suicides in Japan
• Isolation for children during COVID
• Effect of social games for children using Twitch and Discord
• Feminist geographers and design of safer cities for women

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Shreyas: For today’s episode, I have Laetitia Vitaud. She is a writer and prominent speaker about the future of work. Laetitia is also editor-in-chief of the HR media Welcome to the Jungle, a leading media that helps companies develop employer branding for the new work generation. She has published work in London School of Economics Business Review, Medium, and Malt.

I discovered her writing through her Substack publication where she specifically covers the future of work from a feminist point of view. This podcast explores exactly that: How does the future of work look from a feminist point of view?

Laetitia: I define feminism quite simply as equal opportunities, no matter what gender you have, so that you can be free and have an equal chance of succeeding because there are no barriers in the path to success. That’s the first easy answer.

The second answer is more complex because what you choose to do and what you want to do is largely determined by the stories you were told, the models you have, the culture you’re a product of. You may think you want something and it’s your free choice, but it was largely influenced by the environment.

The second element is having more awareness of the influence of that environment and working on that environment for less conditioning and more actual free choice.

Depending on what culture you come from, as a woman, you will want or not want to have children. That’s seen as something so personal, so intimate—something you personally want. But it’s shaped by your environment so much.

Where I live now, many women my age do not want children because there were environmental movements saying children are bad for the environment. There was also anti-natalism—it’s not sustainable to have children, which is horrible to say because we’re talking about people, not consuming something.

In Germany, the grandchildren of Nazi Germans contributed to anti-natalist sentiment, probably linked to anti-Nazism. But there’s a third explanation: expectations around motherhood are so high. You expect so much from mothers—that they give themselves entirely to their children.

Shreyas: There’s always a trade-off between work, climbing the career ladder, or taking something for the better of the family. Usually it’s the woman’s burden to make that switch.

Laetitia: Absolutely. That’s why fewer women who are ambitious and want careers have children, versus in France, my home country, where it’s more culturally acceptable for mothers to have careers. In France, it’s actually disparaged if you have children and stop working—it’s not culturally well regarded, unlike in Germany.

This very individual choice ends up being largely influenced by community, culture, and environment. That link between individual and community is at the heart of my feminism—shedding light on biases and how our decisions are shaped by things larger than individuals.

Shreyas: I read your article about meritocracy and how ideally it’s a place where everyone has equal opportunities—not distinguishing people based on gender or ethnicity. But usually equal opportunities don’t happen because of various systemic layers in society’s fabric. What are your thoughts on meritocracy versus a diverse society?

Laetitia: Meritocracy—who would be against it? It’s the idea that based on merit, people will be promoted according to input and merit. It’s brilliant philosophically, very hard to oppose.

The reality is that organizations and groups who talk a lot about meritocracy are usually not meritocratic. Among tech companies and startups with very few women, you usually have white men telling you “we are a meritocracy,” which is saying to everyone who doesn’t look like them, “you’re just not good enough for us.”

It shows how ignorant they are about reasons and biases that prevent other people from succeeding in their organization. It starts with recruitment where you have active discrimination—a set of criteria to judge merit that excludes lots of people.

If your definition of merit is you have to climb a tree, you’ll promote monkeys. Your elephants or fish won’t get promoted because the criteria isn’t how well you can swim or use your trunk.

The way you define merit and success is generally flawed so that only one set of people will be promoted. It’s true in schools too—competitive examinations generally make it easier for people who share cultural codes. People from different social backgrounds find it much harder to succeed even when extremely talented, just because they don’t master the right social codes.

Shreyas: I’ve been through application processes where apart from qualifications, they look at likability—someone who fits the culture and understands their vocabulary. When you evaluate based on likability, it comes with biases and creates disparity.

Laetitia: Likability is a great example. Recruiters used this for a long time—whether someone’s likable determines if you recruit them. It seems like a good way because most people would agree on who’s likable.

When you look deeper, number one: you tend to find likable people who are like you—who share the same cultural background, political affiliation, body language. Number two: even things like eye contact and smiling that you may see as objectively related to likability are culturally determined.

There are cultures where people smile less, where eye contact isn’t the done thing. You exclude people who are autistic because they don’t do eye contact the same way. These criteria are very biased.

Shreyas: I was listening to your podcast with Nina Goswami about the BBC 50/50 project. She had an interesting perspective on diversity—everyone says they’re making their workforce more diverse, but if it’s not measured, it becomes a fancy statement. She mentioned when asked about the ideal feminist society, she said it wouldn’t be four women judges and four men judges, but when all judges are women and society isn’t surprised.

Laetitia: It reminds me of that quote about mediocrity: we’ll have made progress when no one is shocked that there’s a mediocre woman in a position of power, because there are so many mediocre men everywhere and that’s not a subject.

Women in positions of power are very often exceptionally brilliant because they have to fight so hard and be better. The way you can judge we’ve reached equality is when it’s as easy for a mediocre woman to get in a position of power as it is for a mediocre man.

Nina Goswami is head of diversity at BBC, in charge of a program that started three years ago—as many women as men on screen. Now they have different criteria: different ethnic groups, cultures, disabled people to be visible.

It becomes super complex when it’s not just gender. When you include other forms of diversity, where do you stop? How many people from how many different groups can you measure? BBC developed methodology for counting and defining criteria that’s super efficient.

What makes me optimistic is this idea that you need to count something to realize whether you’ve made progress. The idea that we need metrics, that we can count, that we should count to be accountable—that’s now very much accepted. Quotas aren’t taboo anymore.

Shreyas: But the dialogue becomes complex with ethnicities, races, gender, plus intersectionality where you have combinations of underrepresented minorities. It becomes difficult for policymakers and board members to formulate laws for distribution. If the goal is equal opportunities, but it becomes evaluated through diversity lens, how do we navigate these complex factors?

Laetitia: At the beginning when you start making progress on diversity, you always have that trade-off. It’s a question of image—giving somebody a position because of whatever community they belong to rather than what they did professionally.

But that’s just the first phase. When you’re at the beginning—say a political organization with no women—you have to recruit women and won’t be too picky. You’ll pick women because they’re women, not necessarily based on achievements.

But that’s just the first step. The generation after, it’s so accepted that there are as many women as men that to get there as a woman isn’t any easier because it’s the next generation. It’s as hard for any group to get there. You have role models, experience, pools to recruit from because at every level you have more of them. Then it gets as hard for everyone.

Perhaps the first generation isn’t based on merit, but it’s rarely the case that people recruited based on identity are actually mediocre. Take African Americans in the US—when there were none, the few recruited as tokens were rarely mediocre. They were often quite exceptional people.

Shreyas: Does it look like a power struggle? Like a seesaw where men have been on top for decades, and it’s important for women to get that push to balance it out?

Laetitia: There’s always a power struggle. If you’re a group with power, would you want to share it? Not necessarily. It’s very comfortable to have people you can exploit and dominate. You create stories, myths, and ideas to make your domination more acceptable. It requires struggle and activism. Power will never just be handed to you.

Shreyas: In India, we have the caste system. There were underrepresented communities completely outcast from mainstream professions, given menial work like sewage cleaning. There was huge inequality, so caste-based reservations emerged for representation. But in some cases, the law was misused—promotions given because of caste, politicians making promises for votes. We can see what happens if it’s not taken care of properly.

Laetitia: Like nepotism and corruption. You’re the largest democracy on the planet, so you also have the largest problems of corruption and nepotism.

Shreyas: In one of your articles, you mentioned that culture eats technology for breakfast. I found that interesting—how we think technology shifts society so fast, but one rebellion or agitation can really change how we look at the world.

Laetitia: That sentence is inspired by “culture eats strategy for breakfast” by management professor Peter Drucker. His idea was that culture and how you execute will matter more than vision and strategy.

My idea is that when we talk about the future, we tend to focus on tech—what will the iPhone 25 look like, flying cars, singularity. We imagine a world very different technologically. Futurists of the past did the same. People in the 60s imagined the internet, flying cars, but they were disappointed we never got them.

When they imagined the office of the future, they saw fax machines, computers, but all the managers were men. They couldn’t imagine that the largest revolution in work would be many more women having positions in corporations—not just secretaries but all kinds of jobs. This revolution of the 70s and 80s was a female revolution, a cultural revolution, not about tech.

The question I ask is: what matters more? This large cultural change with many implications, including technological, or the shape of the iPhone 34? I think culture, because it’s so hard to imagine and we think about our culture as permanent, is actually the most interesting thing.

There’s also this beautiful quote that we tend to be more interested in what changes than what doesn’t change. But sometimes things that don’t change are much more important. Phones change, water chemically doesn’t change, but water is much more important to our survival.

Shreyas: Can you tell me about your rationale for going into future of work, and how feminism and future of work overlap?

Laetitia: I started in 2015 with my own story of changing jobs, not knowing what to do, having malaise—I wasn’t happy at work. This individual personal subject I understood was larger than me. Work transitions and professional transitions would be much more common in people’s lives.

That was the first way I tackled future of work—with the angle of professional transitions, career shifts, job changes, training. I approached it first with my own case: what am I going to do with my life?

Then I moved to freelancers—I was a freelancer, so it was personal. I worked with a freelancer platform. The subject was: how do you offer the same benefits and protections to people not with salaried contracts? From company perspective: how do we have culture when people work for you who aren’t your employees?

Shreyas: As a freelancer, you might have more autonomy but not all the benefits and packages like health benefits.

Laetitia: Absolutely. Sometimes you don’t even have autonomy—you work like an employee but with none of the benefits. It made me understand the world of work was much more fragmented. People doing the same jobs have very different work situations.

In the same company, some are consultants with different employers, some are freelancers, some are employees on short or long-term contracts, some paid much more than others doing exactly the same job. What makes a team a team if no one shares the same work conditions?

In companies, you have more people with different employers—suppliers of the company they actually work for. The example I give is cleaning women. In the 60s, they were employees of that company. Today, most work for suppliers because cleaning services were outsourced.

The reality of the job is the same, but working for a company that’s not your employer means: who do you negotiate with for higher wages? Who do you talk to? Who is actually your boss? Company structures changed, but work is still the same.

They’re a lot weaker when they can’t have normal conversation with their boss about coming a little later tomorrow, because they have to talk to their actual employer first. The company who hired those services doesn’t want the trouble of managing a human being—they just want on-demand cleaning services.

Shreyas: They’re also viewed as “low-skilled” workers.

Laetitia: That concept is completely flawed and sexist, racist, anti-immigrant, because what do we value? The idea that a job is low-skilled just because it’s badly paid and given to immigrants doesn’t reflect the job’s reality. Looking after children takes a lot of skills, but it’s badly paid and not valued. That’s why we call it low-skilled, but it doesn’t make it less essential. I’m trying not to use “low-skilled” anymore.

Shreyas: Why is it that the most important jobs—caring for others, elderly, frontline hospital workers, nurses—are commendable but overworked and understaffed, not really acknowledged as much in terms of value?

Laetitia: It’s a very artificial distinction because caring requires knowing and knowing requires caring. When it comes to health, if you separate the two, you have no understanding of how the soul influences the body, how being loved makes you automatically healthier.

Someone holding your hand has an effect on health. This artificial separation between nurses and doctors goes against everything we’re discovering about how health works, how caring and knowing are related. We need both.

Shreyas: You mentioned artificial notions of what’s considered a useful employee in terms of productivity. In hospitals, we’re not looking at how many nurses or doctors are caring for patients, but metrics that don’t make sense.

Laetitia: We have an economic system based on measuring value. In some cases we can—if you produce cars, the number coming out of the assembly line is the value produced. When measurement is related to value you sell, there’s no problem.

But in services dealing with caring, teaching, knowledge, well-being, or health, we’ve developed metrics that have nothing to do with actual value. In hospitals, things measured are number of medical procedures performed, shots given, appointments made—but not the health of patients or community where that hospital functions.

Sometimes it’s quite the reverse. Measuring number of procedures creates incentive to deliver more procedures, even if that destroys patient health. The typical example: “The surgery went well, the patient died, but the surgery went well, and we can bill it.” For the hospital, it’s value because the surgery is billed. Perfect surgery, patient died, but that’s just a detail—surgery went well.

Shreyas: I see different kinds of work—creative work, knowledge work, care work like nurses, physical work like conveyor belts. There have been distinctions in what’s considered superior economic value. Where do you see this going?

Laetitia: We inherited gendered categories from the past. There was separation between productive work and reproductive work. Reproductive work includes all work going into reproducing the workforce—feeding present workers, making children, feeding children, looking after homes so workers can sleep and reproduce present and future workforce.

That includes care work, teaching, training, nursing, looking after children—historically defined as reproductive work and given more to women. Much of it was unpaid, supposedly paid for by the spouse’s productive work.

Because of that legacy of reproductive work being unpaid, reproductive work is valued very little, paid very little, in competition with unpaid work in the home. That legacy is super hard to transcend and still extremely gendered.

When you look at nurses today, it’s 90% women in most European countries. Nannies: 90-100% women. People who look after elderly: 99% women in France. I’m sure it’s mostly women in India too.

Shreyas: The classification of productive and reproductive work—I never thought of it this way. Reproductive work is giving birth to future generations who will add economic value.

Laetitia: Today it’s not as relevant because a lot of reproductive work is actually productive—it’s paid, creates revenues, part of the economy, a service you can sell. How do you distinguish between the two? Very often it’s a mix.

If you’re a craftsman with a workshop making furniture, cleaning around the workshop and feeding yourself is part of one thing. You won’t separate those two things. It’s what enables you to create value and make something.

I’m not making that distinction—I’m criticizing that distinction inherited from the 19th century.

Shreyas: Since your work is about future of work, I see that the future has already come with remote work and COVID restructuring things. What are your perspectives on the pandemic and how we’re witnessing the future?

Laetitia: The future of work is the present of work. With the pandemic, it’s hard not to see it. Things I wrote about years ago—fragmentation of companies, workers no longer having benefits of work contracts, more precariousness, less collective negotiation—are very much made visible by the pandemic.

One thing worries me, one thing reassures me. What worries me is that inequalities rose super fast—gender inequalities and all sorts. This “she-cession” idea, originally American, is true across the world. In India, it’s probably one of the worst because most women work in the informal economy without official work contracts. With lockdown, all informal economy was hit immediately.

Shreyas: Because of the pandemic, men who work have lost jobs and are sitting at home frustrated, venting frustration on women, leading to more domestic violence and abuse.

Laetitia: What’s true about India is true to lesser extent in other countries. Even in Japan, one figure I find terrible: the rise of female suicide. It used to be that more men committed suicide than women because women had better networks to talk to about psychological difficulties. But during the pandemic, that network disappeared, became fragile. Women faced with increased isolation but same burdens and responsibilities just collapsed. Suicide rate went up 15% in less than one year.

In the US, it was different—women left the workforce because there was no one to look after children with schools closed and online schooling. Nearly three million women left voluntarily, though that’s not the right word because they had no choice.

In every country you have different forms, but she-cessions that encapsulate problems affecting women particularly.

Shreyas: You’ve written about adapting to environments where social and emotional needs aren’t being met during the pandemic. How is isolation affecting women and kids, and what are possible solutions?

Laetitia: I’m convinced that children, teenagers, and young adults are suffering most from social isolation. They die least from COVID but suffer most from forced isolation because they don’t yet have networks of relationships they can count on. It’s the moment when you build those networks.

You build your identity—you don’t exactly know who you are because you haven’t interacted with as many people yet. You need these interactions to find out who you are. That happens in early teenage years and childhood through interacting with others, finding what groups you like and don’t like at school.

When deprived of this, they’re not only alone and sad, but don’t develop cognitively and socially and don’t find who they are. The impact we’ll feel for a very long time. Those generations will be lacking something.

My 12-year-old daughter’s social life is on TikTok. Thank God she has TikTok—I’m not going to say bad things because algorithms connect her with people from her geography. She has sense of achievement because what she posts generates lots of views. She can contact people she can meet in the park with social distancing and masks.

That’s been her one source of relationships—not school, not neighborhood. We moved to Germany during the pandemic, so she doesn’t know many people. It was TikTok. She’s met several people, some she calls friends now. It’s not just virtual—it moves offline because the two are connected.

For many children, they found belonging and serendipity in video games. That’s why Twitch and Discord were so important during the pandemic. Young people found sense of belonging, being in a space where they can randomly meet people sharing interests, building something, feeling they exist and can relate to others. Gaming definitely helped a lot of people.

Shreyas: Previously we had discourse that social media might not be advisable for teenagers because of disadvantages and different forms of self-identification. But now with the pandemic, they don’t have social life meeting people, so there has to be some trade-off.

Laetitia: You’re right, but bullying and harassment happen in real life too—at school, in any social relations. What’s true about social media is true about regular life networks. Children and young people are at risk of being abused, but it’s also true at school with regular bullying that doesn’t require computers.

Shreyas: It’s interesting seeing games emerging as social networks, bringing kids together where they can chat and play. It’s more fun and entertaining.

Laetitia: It was already true before the pandemic, but it was frowned upon. You looked at young gamers with clichés that they’re nerds who are socially awkward, kids just in front of computers not seeing anybody. In fact, they were already interacting with others because many games were cloud-based and based on interactions.

What happened isn’t that it emerged—we’re looking at it differently. We’re now seeing what we weren’t seeing before: some positives of those interactions in video games.

Shreyas: I want to touch on your recent article about perceiving urban landscapes from a feminist point of view. You mentioned that if cities could be designed with feminist perspective, there could be more restructuring. One thing you mentioned is how women sometimes take a step back when taking care of babies—if the city is well-planned so women could support each other during caregiving situations. What do you think about those aspects?

Laetitia: Cities in themselves are dense enough to provide networks that help women who are caregivers find support. Whether institutional—like childcare facilities where they can drop children, hospitals with nurses for medical problems—or private—like friends in same situation who can look after children while they do something else.

Cities have density so you can meet lots of people’s needs within limited distance by lots of different people. Whereas if you have very spread geography, you have more space—looks comfortable to have big mansion and huge garden with no one around. That’s a dream for someone who lives alone and is introverted.

But for someone with caregiving responsibilities like children or someone diseased at home, you need help, friends, support. It’s much better to have denser environment with lots of people because you can share many things.

Say you have neighbors with children—with a group of neighbors, you can hire a nanny and it won’t cost much because you share the cost. If you live alone, you cannot have a school. If you live where there are five households, it’s hard to have a teacher and school. If you live somewhere very dense with lots of households, it’s possible to build institutions based on mutualized services, collective services for groups of people. You can improve quality because you share costs with more people.

It’s not always easy because sometimes cities grow so fast that services are insufficient. Sometimes needs can’t be met because there are too many people and too little space. But cities are living organisms that adjust and adapt.

Shreyas: But it’s not really considering women’s perspective where they could be prone to sexual assault in corners not well designed.

Laetitia: Exactly. There were lots of discussions recently about lighting, how cities should be designed, sports facilities. When you take gender element into account, usually 80% of sports facilities built are built for men. When you look at users, everybody pays taxes, but those who get something in return are mostly men.

This idea that there’s gendered impact on things you invest in is now widely acknowledged. I read this morning that many cities with new mayors in France now look at urban planning with gender lens: what’s the impact on women versus men? If we build this bridge, who will use it? That’s now much more common.

Shreyas: On a closing note, what have you been reading lately, especially about future of work?

Laetitia: I read several amazing books recently. One was about housing by Diana Lynn, an American woman who looked at how housing is changing profoundly because of strong cultural shift. She examined how housing with cultural perspective—in the US and UK, for decades there was focus on nuclear family and housing for just parents and children, not multiple generations.

There was this idea that as young person, you need to make it out and succeed on your own, leave parents, have your own household. But that’s not reality in America anymore because more young people—25 and 30-year-olds—because of increasing housing costs, are staying home.

But it’s not just costs. It’s also because the alternative is being so lonely. Multiple generations under one roof are becoming more common for cultural reasons too. So many people are lonely and literally touched by no one that it’s affecting choices we make. Perhaps we’re better off with parent, grandparent, aunt, nephew, even if not perfect and sometimes annoying, but the alternative is living in super small housing unit alone with no social interactions whatsoever.

More people are acknowledging that multi-generational housing, quite common in other cultures and which used to be common in Western cultures, is actually the way of the future.

Shreyas: We called it joint families. It used to be there with previous generations, but then we became more nuclear families and now live very isolated. What’s the alternative—loneliness, which definitely isn’t a better option. Previously, grandparents stayed with us, all different brothers and siblings, all families stayed together. They shared wisdom from experiences. They were respected and revered—the fabric around which joint families functioned where elders were respected and their words were heeded. It’s interesting how everything changed with information and became so fragmented.

Laetitia: The book I mentioned is called “Brave New Home”—about developments in housing and changes. I’ve read another beautiful one called “The Power of Rituals” by a writer called Casper ter Kuile. It talks about how religion is declining in many countries and cultures—religious practices aren’t as strong as they used to be. But the need we have for rituals, communities, and spirituality is as strong as ever. So we need to find it somewhere else.

It’s about how we find rituals in different places. That inspired me to write pieces about how rituals at work are super important. Perhaps the reason we want our work to be more spiritual is because we need to fill needs not met by religious institutions the way they were before.

Shreyas: Thank you so much, Laetitia. I’m very glad to have had this conversation.

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This interview explores Laetitia Vitaud’s perspectives on the future of work from a feminist lens, examining how gender intersects with workplace dynamics, urban planning, technology, and societal changes accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.