941: How to Break Free From the System That Needs You to Doubt Yourself

0:01Okay, I have been on this ruthless pursuit to purge any clothes that I'm not actually wearing. Like if I haven't reached for it in months, it's got to go. I am trying to be really intentional about what I bring into my closet right now, which means I am only buying pieces that I know I will actually wear and use. Revolve just gets it though. I'm literally wearing my brown Autry sneakers from there right now and my new suede purse. It fits my laptop in it. So it's basically a fancy shoulder bag that works for everything. I love finding pieces like that. Things that look good, but also work hard for my actual life.

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1:15So happy shopping. Female celebrities being asked who's with your kids right now. It's very much the onus is put on us as mothers and heteronormative relationships. And again, that all relates back to these historic definitions of who we're supposed to be and what roles we're supposed to fulfill. I'm Jenna Kutcher, and I help you trade hustle for purpose and build a business that gives you the life you actually want to live. From a$300 Craigslist camera to a seven-figure business I run from home, I've learned that success isn't just about what you do, it's about how you live. Here, you'll get strategies that work, systems that give you your time back, and steps that turn your effort into results and impact.

2:04If you're ready for clarity, confidence, and a business that feels as good as it looks, you're in the right place. This is the Goal Digger Podcast. What if the very systems we've been taught to trust about success, power, and leadership were actually designed to erase us? My guest today is pulling back the curtain on the narratives that have quietly shaped how we see ourselves, our businesses, and our worth. And trust me, you'll never see patriarchy, power, or your own story the same way again. Ana Malaika Tubbs is a two-time New York Times bestselling author and a leading voice in gender, race, and equity.

2:44Her newest book, Erased, What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us, is truly a wake-up call. one that challenges us to rethink everything from who gets remembered to who gets rewarded. I met Ana recently at a retreat hosted by Onsite in Tennessee, and I'm going to tell you this woman was magnetic. And the best part about meeting her is that I had no idea what she did for a career, and I didn't learn about her books until the very last day. Once I heard what she has written about, I knew she would make the perfect guest for this show. Ana has a PhD in sociology, a TED talk with over 2 million views, and she's written for Time, CNN, and The Guardian.

3:24But what sets her apart is her ability to take super complex systems and translate them into powerful stories that reveal what's been buried and to show us how to reclaim what's already ours. So if you've ever felt like the rules of success weren't written for you, or if you've struggled with visibility or making space for your full self in your business, if you've been playing small because it felt safer than being too much, this conversation is for you. Ana Malaika Tubbs, welcome to the Gold Digger podcast. Welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have you on. I'm so honored to be here, Jenna. Really, truly.

4:02Thank you so much. Okay, so let's kick this off with kind of a tough one. But so many women that I know struggle with this idea, this thought that they are, quote, too much. They're too loud, too visible, too bold. How much of that fear is actually about safety? Like, what do you wish we would understand about the relationship between visibility, worth and the very risks that women face when they refuse to shrink? Well, all of my work is about talking about the system that framed our whole nation. And we'll get into that a little bit later. But that system really taught us as women and even when we were young girls that we We needed to fit into certain boxes and that no matter what we did, really, we were doing something wrong.

4:52This was a strategy to control all of us. And so at different stages of our life, we were hearing messages. You were being too loud or you're supposed to kind of be quieter as a young girl, maybe. Or even if our families were telling us something different on a larger scale or a societal level or even what we were seeing in movies and TV shows, we were getting messages over and over again of who we were supposed to be. And a lot of that was this kind of contained individual who just listened to the boys and the men in her life or who was waiting for one of them to make a decision for her. And so, yeah, most of our lives, because that's kind of an unnatural way of being, most of us have heard these messages.

5:39And the safety side of it is that we feel comfortable there because that's what we've been accustomed to. And so until somebody kind of bursts that bubble or lifts a veil off of our eyes and tells us why it is that we've been taught to fit these different boxes, we don't think that anything is wrong with the message. We just think that something's wrong with us. I mean, I'm already seeing this. I know you're a mom as well. And we just shared a really beautiful experience together where there was a lot of inner child work happening. And it's really made me hyper conscious of even just my daughters and the messages that they're getting and the way as well as like they're receiving it, right?

6:26Like, what is the filter that you're running these messages through? And do you even have a filter formed yet. And so I do think that the indoctrination starts incredibly early and it's everywhere. It's almost like the water we're swimming in. Right. And so it can be hard to separate that from our truths, from our stories and stuff. And so you've said this and I love it is you've said patriarchy is so embedded that we don't even see it and that's how it wins. And so can you think of like one pattern in women's entrepreneurship or like their business journeys that we've been taught to call our fault, but it's actually the system working exactly as it was designed.

7:07Absolutely. And I think it really relates back to even this parenting message. And I often say to address the first thing you were saying, that when we bring children into the world, when we're raising children, we often feel that we have to teach them how to fit into those boxes as well, right? And to fit into that safety. So a lot of times parents or even our parents didn't realize when they were replicating something that was actually very controlling and very limiting, but it was because they wanted us to be safe. So we might have heard messages like, you know, maybe quiet down or we want to make sure that you get home safely, like these kinds of messages that actually made a lot of us feel very controlled or unsafe or again, like something was wrong with us.

7:55And so that's where a lot of the in our business and in our work where it shows up for women is even, for instance, when we become mothers and many of us might feel, oh, I'm now no longer succeeding at my job or I feel like I'm being pushed out in some way or I feel like I have to hide the fact that I am a mother. Maybe I have to I'm trying to come back to work faster than necessary or I'm running to the bathroom to pump all of these things that, you know, hopefully have gotten better over the years. But these are not universal guarantees at different companies. And so a lot of times when women become mothers, they think that, again, they're failing at their jobs, but it's actually systemic to keep women from being able to do all of the things that they want to do if they make decisions to also start families.

8:52And we can trace that back to policies where in the U.S., when women were married, they were no longer allowed to work. When women had children, they were no longer allowed to work. A very particular example that I talk about in my first book is that the mother of MLK Jr. was a teacher and she had a bachelor's degree, a teaching certificate. This is a black woman in the early 1900s, you know, this incredible feat. And when she got married, there was a law, it was a marriage bar that said that married women could not teach. And so she had to give up her career. She was happy to start her family and she uses her teaching to really teach her family and her husband, actually.

9:37But there's a lot of history there that we could get into. But those kinds of policies were in place for a very long time in the United States. And so we actually still see remnants of that. So that's a perfect example of a system and a law or a policy that is continuing to affect us. But if women are unaware of that history, and instead they think they're just not doing enough, if they feel like they're falling behind, it's actually that they don't have the supports in place. and strategically so. There are a lot of different people who do not want us to raise families as well as work outside of the home.

10:16And we're seeing a lot of that rhetoric right now. And so my passion, I have several of them, one of them is to make sure women don't think that we are imagining the issues around us, nor that we have done something wrong, but instead that we pay attention to what brought us here. What are the connecting lines to the history of the United States and the systems that we are still very much recovering from? Because our country is really young. 250 years is not that many years. And so, of course, we're still being affected by things that we haven't really called out and paid attention to. A lot of people are completely unaware of the marriage bar, for example.

11:03Wow. I mean, it is wild to think that, you know, I think that nowadays there are so many women that are like, you don't have to choose. Right. You can do both. Right. But like that is something that was an actual choice. Right. Back then. And so it is wild to see like, yes, our generation is saying like you can do both. But I agree with you. You have to have support. There is no way to do both and do both well without proper support. And that's where so many stigmas come in. That's where women get quiet about the support they have or feel uncomfortable sharing it. You know, it is. It's all set up to keep us insulated in our own little experiences so that the collective doesn't acknowledge the truth behind all of it.

11:55It's just wild. I mean, exactly something you said around the fact that we feel we can't say that we have help or we have support and we don't realize why we might feel ashamed of saying something like, oh, my kiddos have a nanny when I am working. You know, a lot of people ask me, how is it that you have three kids under the age of six and you have two books out, you know, that came out in those same years? How did you do that? And I get that the question is really because in the U.S. it is a bit of a mystery. how we all do it because these things aren't guaranteed, right? In some other nations, they're kind of written into the system.

12:33So you have parental leave or you have child care when your kids are two years old, they all have somewhere to go that is going to take good care of them. But in the US, we don't have that. So when other women are asking me that, I understand where the question is coming from. We're all really trying to figure out how is everybody doing this because it seems so difficult to do. And for me, it's really incredibly important to say, I have support to do this. My husband and I have support to do this. I have a wonderful partner. We can afford child care and we have extended family that steps in when we need them to.

13:10And also those are the things that we should be advocating for on a national level because we have to get rid of the mystery of it all. Even in my books, I thank our nanny in my acknowledgement sections. I couldn't do this without her. There is no way I'm sitting here typing books and doing my research while my three kids are running around. That would be impossible. And so it's also just time that we speak more about how we're doing this, but asking and advocating for this to be more of a guarantee rather than those of us who have the privilege to afford it. You know, what's funny that just popped into my head is I bet there are very few men out there who are asked that question.

13:58Definitely. I mean, you see it on the red carpet all the time, you know, female celebrities being asked who's with your kids right now. It's very much the onus is put on us as mothers in heteronormative relationships. And again, that all relates back to these historic definitions of who we're supposed to be and what roles we're supposed to fulfill. Yes. Oh my goodness. When I think back to when I bought my first little Craigslist camera, I had no clue that it would change my entire life. Like I didn't have this big plan. I just took the first tiny step. And that's what the new year is for. A clean slate.

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15:11Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash gold digger. Go to shopify.com slash gold digger. That's shopify.com slash gold digger. Here are your first this new year with Shopify by your side. So power in America has been built around kind of this specific image, right? And for those of us building outside of that mold, what is the most dangerous myth that we have inherited about what it takes to truly lead? Mm hmm. Yeah. Power in the US has really been in this first individual kind of stance where one person you're supposed to take care of yourself. Every person for themselves, usually the saying is every man for themselves.

16:00It's this very masculine thing. It's about dominating other people. It's about kind of cutting off your empathy towards others so that you can rise as high as you need to. And the thing that we can shift and should shift is this notion that power belongs to individuals and rather power belongs to all of us. And that in order for us to have more strength, we actually have collective power and we can work together. And women who have ascended through the ranks in business have often been told you need to fit this traditional notion of power. We need you to be that kind of dominant personality. We need you to stop caring about other people.

16:46But then at the same time, if you do that, we're going to say you're too bossy and we're going to critique you for, you know, not again fitting this role that we've assigned to you as a woman. So it's all going back to that kind of cycle of no matter what you do, you're going to do it incorrectly. But what we actually see succeed the most really are the companies where women lead with more of that feminine strength where they are thinking about their employees. They are being innovative around these notions of power, where they are considering our interconnectedness to each other. I recently saw something on Instagram about actresses and writers who were on a staff where the head writer was a woman, and they all were able to get home in time for dinner, That there were possibilities where you didn't have to constantly grind and deny your connection to your home or your family.

17:45You can still lead, you can still have a successful outcome, whether that's your film or your company, without having to replicate these notions of every person for themselves and dominate, dominate, dominate and deny your connection to each other as well as your connection to who you are at home. All of those things have been taught to us, but there are many other ways to exhibit power. And actually, we can go much further when we consider our collective power. Okay, I love this so much. And I think a lot of people can get confused between like masculine and feminine energy that lives in every being, right?

18:29And I know for me, like my business was born out of straight grit, right? Like hustle. And those first few years, that was like the only force I knew. And I think it was the force that was really taught to us, right? Like just push harder, do more, work harder. It's all going to come. And I feel like over the last few years, I have learned an entirely new way of being and a new way of doing business and a new way of even just being in relationship. Like one of the things that I consistently say to myself is I am softening. Like I am softening as a mother. I'm softening as a wife. I'm softening as a boss.

19:09And I feel like softness can often be associated maybe with weakness where hustle can be associated with strategy and different things like that. And it's so fascinating to me because I've also been researching what happens when more money gets in the hands of women. And statistically speaking, it is reinvested into community. Like it is recirculated into causes and other businesses and mothers and things like that. And so it's interesting because I feel like in my own work, I've been dissecting like, here's why I want more women to get rich. It's not so that women can hoard personal wealth. It is because I truly believe that when women get into powerful positions and have the opportunity to have choice, the choices they make are different than their counterparts.

19:58This is not shaming men. This is just the reality. Data backs this up. And so it's been really interesting for me to reconnect with the cause of like, this is why I want to liberate women into positions of power and to get wealth into their hands because the money is going to go somewhere. And I want to get it into the hands of women who will redistribute it. And so it's been interesting as I've been unpacking, what is my deeper why. It is so much more rooted, not in women getting wealth so that they can do fancy things. Go on, you do it, you earn it. But also because I truly believe that if we want to change the world, women of power is going to be the force behind it.

20:40Yeah, and I completely agree. And I would say that this notion of what's feminine and what's masculine, so much of it has been just made up, right? And then we've been socialized. I'm a sociologist. So this is always the mindset that I'm coming from. We were taught these things. It doesn't mean that men can't learn how to be more considerate of community. It's just that for the last 250 years, the messages we've been hearing in our nation have been that men are supposed to dominate and that women are supposed to take care of things at the home. And I feel like I have to dive into the definition that I keep referring back to, because it is the basis of so much of what we're seeing now and relates so beautifully to everything you were just so articulating so well, is that when our founding fathers won the Revolutionary War, they were actually very insecure that this revolutionary spirit was spreading to other groups that were also subjugated.

21:39And they were nervous that they were going to lose power in the nation that they had fought to win. They were the underdogs. Nobody was expecting them to win, right? This was an incredible feat. And so that was the mindset with which they were kind of setting up who was going to be considered human in the U.S., who was going to have access to resources, who was going to have access to power. And so in the Constitution, they decide that men are the ones who will have power. They say men can own land, men can vote, participate politically. Men can be elected. Men can represent themselves. And then they completely leave women out of the Constitution.

22:18And this was intentional. They did not mean for the word man to mean human. They did not want women to participate politically. Instead, in the letters that they wrote to their daughters and to their wives, they say that women are supposed to be docile. Women are supposed to be protected. Women should not participate politically, but that women should focus on being able to reproduce the power of men through children and that that was the role that they should be focused on. But we know from this kind of binary that's problematic and that they're setting up that's really flawed already, they're not including everybody in those two definitions.

22:56So they're not thinking about people who are enslaved. In fact, the Constitution has language to protect the institution of slavery. So we know they're not thinking about people who are enslaved. They're not thinking about their indigenous counterparts. They're not thinking even about poor white people. They were very big on them being the elite people that they were speaking to. And they're not thinking about immigrants from that point forward. And so in order to keep this system alive, they are thinking always about how they maintain power in their own hands. And so we then realize now, if that's the system that everything emerged from, then we actually were never really a part of a true democracy where power was vested in all of the people.

23:47Because at the beginning, not every person was being included in that. Women were not being included in that. So our democracy was actually what I define as American patriarchy. That's what we've been living in all along. And it's been incredibly harmful, not only for women, it's also been harmful for the groups that were not considered as human beings. And it's also been really harmful even for those who were supposed to be the primary beneficiaries of this, because they had to cut off their notion of their interconnectedness to other people. They had to deny vulnerability within themselves. And then all the young boys who were taught this same notion, then we're thinking it's natural that I only care about myself.

24:37It's maybe natural that I am supposed to make decisions for other people. Or if we're talking about relationships with girls and women, they are supposed to listen to me, I'm supposed to have power over them. If these are the messages that we've been taught, then you actually also see the groups that were denied any of that power within this made up system of American patriarchy, they become more focused on collectivity and community. And how can we actually envision something beyond what we're being offered and really achieve true democracy. And so that's actually why the groups that were denied power are the ones who can say, let's do this differently, actually.

25:24Let's care for other people. And so that's what speaks to what you've noticed and what the research is showing us is that girls, women, particularly girls and women of color, will spread those resources. They don't think that the way we move forward is to replicate what we've been doing thus far, because that's excluded so many people. It's hurt so many people, even those who have gained a lot of money from it. If they're not giving that money away, there's all this research that points to higher levels of depression or higher levels of drug dependency. It's actually really unnatural to us to only care about ourselves.

26:06And so it's then been painted as if this is a man versus woman problem. And that's not true. We actually all have been hurt by a system that really elevated notions of domination over other people. Wow. That is so beautifully said. Thank you. you oh i just i just love you love you so let's talk about your thought of women especially mothers and how they have been erased and when i met you i got to spend so much time with you without knowing the context of the work you do and i fell in love with just who you are as a human And then when I found out the work you do, I was like, dang, it makes sense.

26:56And so, so many women listening are building businesses. A lot of them are doing so while raising kids. Again, we've already talked about this. It's like, you know, work like you don't have children and mother like you don't have a job, right? It's this dichotomy that we are trying to live through and wondering why we can't do it. And so let's talk about your thought of erasure and also then talk about like, how can we start to write a different story? What does that look like for us? Yeah, it's a perfect segue from our last conversation is that in order to make something that is made up seem natural, seem like the divine order and seem like the only thing that we can choose and so that we're all protecting this thing that actually is hurting all of us is to erase anything that shows us differently, that shows us that we can choose something else, that shows us we can live differently, that things don't have to be this way.

27:56And so that's been very intentional on behalf of those who wanted to protect that social order. It's been very intentional to make sure we don't know what else is available to us. And the way that that shows up in terms of erasure of women and mothers is to keep us from seeing examples of women and mothers who have worked outside of the home and had support around them, had community support around them, and were able to be there for their children, where it wasn't this notion that they were the only person that was supposed to take care of the child, that they were the person who was supposed to have all of the pressure on their shoulders, but instead that the children that we bring into this world are our community children, right?

28:48We're not actually supposed to be the ones who are just alone in our home without any support around us. That is in service of the system and less in service of that mother and less in service of that child. And then also when we're thinking of the story we're told that men are supposed to be in power and women don't get to have any power, the role of motherhood was presented to us as if it was something we were just supposed to do. And then we were robbed from feeling the power and the capability that comes from this all important role. So that's why women who stay at home with their children, who are doing some of the most important work in our society, were told this role is unproductive.

29:39But then women who were wanting to work outside of the home were told, well, now you're not a great mother. You're not spending that much time with your children. So it takes us back to we wanted the message to be no matter what women do, they're doing it wrong. They are always kind of the flawed individual. There's always something that they need to fix. I mean, it even comes up in, of course, a capitalist society, people telling us to constantly buy things because we're just not good enough as we are. That is the message we've been told in order to maintain this notion that men are naturally supposed to have more power.