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You are a business owner who wants to prioritize people and planet over profits (without sacrificing success). That can feel lonely—but you are not alone! Join host Becky Mollenkamp for in-depth conversations with experts and other founders about how to build a more equitable world through entrepreneurship. It’s time to change the business landscape for good!
Faith Clarke (00:01.336)
Hi everybody, Faith here, part of the Feminist Founders series on invisible labor, the weight we carry. This has been an incredible time of storytelling. You know those times when stuff is going on for you but you get with another person and stuff is going on for them and just the sharing of the common story helps you to feel seen and heard?
I think that's what's happened. Every time I interviewed somebody, every time I talked about it, it was like you too, you know? And so, Becky and I are excited about what the stories have, have kind of brought alive on the inside of us and where we want to go. Because I think that stories don't come our way for none of us in our world, in our practice as business owners and leaders, as founders and in our work in the world.
When stories repeatedly come our way, I believe that there are invitations in those stories to engage, to see our common humanity and maybe to engage in collective truth telling and collective co-creation of new ways and new approaches, right? So the story was rushing in and we're like, what are we, how are we going to be part of the story that's told about how this thing shifts around?
So anyway, before I go, I'm gonna, I'm ahead of myself. This is, I wasn't planning to start this way. I want to start with a section from a Desmond Tutu book, The Wisdom of Forgiveness. I have not read the book. I have heard the quotes and I went to look it up and saw it listed in this book. Um, my spiritual director went and spent some time, um, in South Africa with people who were, um,
mentored by Desmond Tutu. And it was just so life-changing to hear how, how you hold your integrity and your love for people and your love for creating a more human world alongside injustice, injustice that's happening right now. Right? So anyway, I'm going to just read this quote and then we're going to get started. In our country, we speak of something called Ubuntu.
Faith Clarke (02:22.358)
When I want to praise you, the highest praise I can give you is to say, you have Ubuntu. This person has what it takes to be a human being. This is a person who recognizes that they exist only because others exist. A person is a person through other persons. When we say you have Ubuntu, we mean that you are gentle, you are compassionate, you are hospitable.
You want to share and you care about the welfare of others. This is because my humanity is caught up in your humanity. So when I dehumanize others, whether I like it or not, and faith will add whether I know it or not, when I dehumanize others, inexorably I dehumanize myself. When I dehumanize others, I dehumanize myself.
For we can only, by human, we can only be free together. To forgive is actually the best form of self-interest. Desmond Tutu, the wisdom of forgiveness. So let's get started. Part of what I believe so much as we go through all the various things that we're going through as a world, as a group of people, trying to...
navigate life on this planet at the same time, the only way to hold each other's deep humanity across difference is to deeply listen to each other's Because when we've made the other person who's different from us other, as in separate, as in not us, then we run the risk of building that chasm so much that we can't bridge it. And therefore we
we want to kind of double down and protect ourselves and that means not protecting the other. And I think if we understand that this, the only way to build a truly human world is to not dehumanize others by not dehumanize and therefore not dehumanize ourselves, that just this our common humanity Ubuntu. I think the only way to do that is to expose ourselves to more stories, to listen deeply to each other's stories. I think that our tendency towards
Faith Clarke (04:45.646)
commonality and sameness and to mask and to hide and to the way supremacist ideology kind of holds us is by stripping away our nuanced differences because we know it's dangerous to kind of let those things be seen. And so we want to build our ability to build bridges across difference. And I have a whole thing I could go into on that. But one of the key ways is to expose ourselves and to build a practice there. I see a spiritual practice.
of listening to human stories. And so, one of the things that I really enjoy, and I recently had a conversation with one of my mentors and she was like, you're the listener for the world. And I don't know, people tell me stuff, like all the time. I end up in conversations in the super random places and people are telling me stuff, but maybe there's something about me that lets people know I want to hear.
I do want to hear. want to hear about the cat and the dog. I want to hear about the kid. I want to hear about what happened when you were sitting at the traffic lights. I do want to hear. And it makes me a good researcher around qualitative data because it's about story and it's about the thread of the story that you start to see. don't believe data is, there is no such thing as unbiased data. This is nonsense. And there's no such thing as the unbiased researcher, whether
The research instrument is like a form or it's a person. And so what shows up in the data is a reflection of me when I'm looking and I'm listening to the story. cannot help but reflect on the story through the lens that I have of the world. And then people also get to share their story through their lenses. And then we have this meeting of these two, the story that you shared sitting here.
but through the lens that you share it with and me receiving through the lens that I have, these are two different things and yet together it can create such beauty, such richness, right? And I discovered, like I've ever been a listener, but I discovered the structure of thematic analysis, qualitative data analysis, phenomenology and ethnography in graduate school.
Faith Clarke (07:02.626)
And I was like, they're words for this type of research that I love, right? So when I was pulling the interview transcripts out for my dissertation and I interviewed several people on a team, although I had some open-ended questions, in no time I wanted to change the questions because I started to see things in the narrative that I was like, I want to find out more about this and I want to find out more about that. And I was so excited that
In the case of my dissertation, the team was so diverse age-wise and gender and just like bunches of stuff. And I, yeah, I just kind of sunk in. And so I say all that to say that it gives me complete delight to be again, setting up with Becky some qualitative research, some storytelling around this question of invisible labor.
because I think the human story needs to be told. And there's lots of research on invisible labor, but when we design solutions that are not based, when others design solutions that are not based on our stories, no guarantee that those solutions will fit us. And so within Feminist Founders, we're asking the question for us now, this group of people who are gathered in 2025, what is our experience of?
invisible labor of the weight that we carry and what are the solutions that we can create together and to figure out what these solutions are that we can create together so that we can relieve the situation that we're in so that we can not just relieve it for ourselves but we can create infrastructure that has less of it for others who are coming with a behind after whatever the people who are going to be engaging with us how do we help them
relieve it for themselves? And how do we create businesses that don't, are not set up to track people in this weight? To answer that question, we need to spend some time in collective storytelling, collective truth telling about this matter. And so as Becky and I have been talking to individual thought leaders and experts and so on, and ourselves, we've been talking and sharing our own stories. We're like, what if we pulled, we teased out, we invited,
Faith Clarke (09:29.174)
you all listening to this podcast to engage with us in a deeper conversation about, about invisible labor and the weight that you carry. And so in the show notes, we can tell you that date is there. We're going to be having a kind of open forum where as many people as possible are going to engage in probably a really large focus group. We're going to, with your permission, record a conversation and just listen for
the elements of the stories that start to come on so that we are representing more of us. Because what we've been finding is that our story is represented in some other people's stories out there, but our story is our story. So let's get us together and listen to our collective story. And then we're going to start to use the tools that we have. And then we'll invite you into the analysis to say, what are we noticing? What's in these stories?
because we want to write a white paper. We want to kind of pull together your story, our collective story and document it and just say, first of all, this is what we're noticing. Founders in 2025 of this group of people, this is what we are noticing. We're going to add that to some in-depth interviews with those of you who want to participate. We're going to add in a survey or two.
depending on the nature of it. So you get to say, once you show up at the event, you get to say how you want to participate and whether, you know, whatever, whatever your commitment is, whatever time commitment you feel. So if you have an hour and you just want to show up at the event, perfect. If you have an hour and 20 minutes and you're going to show up at the event and you're to fill out a survey, excellent. If you have two hours and you're willing to show up at the event and then get into a one-on-one conversation with either me or Becky, where we're going to tease out some more of the
What's the experience and what are you craving? Excellent. All of that, we're going to kind of put together in a big thing and we'll use all the tools and skills that we have and share with you what we're noticing the state of affairs to be. But more than that, we're going to invite you further if you want into a conversation with us about co-creating the solution and the solutions that we want to co-create. We really want to design them.
Faith Clarke (11:51.553)
Not in the ways that industrial models have said, as if there is a solution that works for people. What we want to do is to set up a community, a micro community where we are creating the solution that works for us. And so, we can, we're going to give you a ton of details about this on, let me see what the date is. Do I have the dates here? I don't have it here. It's going to be in the show notes, in September, somewhere in that fourth week of September, you will see it. I'm atrocious with dates. I'm atrocious with dates.
but yeah, I'm, I am in that we are inviting you into some collective truth telling, where we will frame the conversation around invisible labor as relevant to us in this here location and in this here time as founders who identify as feminists and then just say, given this truth that we are telling, what's the solution and what's the way forward.
Because like I said, in one of those episodes that I did before, % of the invisible labor done on the planet is done by women. And the largest impact on us is our physical health. And so if we are going to turn the needle, if you're going to change the landscape on some of this work, we're going to have to start with us. And how do we do this, right? So this is my invitation.
I hope you come and join us. I am looking forward to building out this kind of documentation of cases. Your all confidentiality will be honored depending on what you say. We're gonna give a ton of space for you to say, yeah, I want complete anonymity, just a data point, the sentences that I use. And.
So if you want to be, you know, where you want a little blurb with your name and your business as part of the white paper, we can offer that too. So let's be in conversation. I am a big fan. There's a book here on one of these books called Decolonizing Methodologies. It's a research book and like there's a bunch of rules around how research can and cannot be done. And I am going to out myself as a rule follower light. And so while this is not official,
Faith Clarke (14:15.247)
scientific rigor research. I am so against this idea that human stories are not quality data. It feels insolent to me. What is important to us though is that you have agency around your story. So come and share and then let's come to agreement about how much of your story you want shared.
and whether you want to just contribute it to general data and thematic analysis or if elements of it you want to say, yeah, no, this is me, this is me. And I want that acknowledged in whatever publications or anything that Feminist Founders is going to be doing. But yeah, we look forward to this. Yeah, we look forward to doing something, to listening and to acting together in Feminist Founders. Talk to you soon. Bye.