The Katie Gatti Tassin interview: “Go the extra yard — not the extra mile”

“Finance bros are out, #RichGirls are in,” declares the podcast intro page for The Money with Katie Show — and there’s way more in that tagline than first meets the eye. Eponymous host Katie Gatti Tassin is the very image of the post-pandemic, personally branded, upwardly trending media entity. Strong specialism: check. Loaded hashtag with book title tie-in: check. And most astutely of all, perhaps, a meticulously crafted tone — easy, familiar, funny, distinct — that echoes naturally with her core audience. “My goal is to make finance personal for women without putting them to sleep.” Genius.

Her podcast and newsletter were acquired by Morning Brew in 2022, just two years after she launched the Money with Katie brand. Grounding it all is the exceptional content, which covers a wide range of ideas and subjects, including financial inequality (in multiple guises), the insidious and persistent wage gap problem, and that toughest of nuts to crack: pay-rise negotiations. 

Here, Gatti Tassin chats with Big Think about all of the above, and more, including the wage-gap implications of AI and her succinct formula for great leadership.

Big Think: Which leaders in business do you most admire and why? 

Katie Gatti Tassin: Generally speaking, I admire people who run successful businesses while also “standing on business” — that is, operating with integrity and principle.

I admire Chelsea Fagan, the cofounder and CEO of The Financial Diet, a personal finance media company for women. She puts her money where her mouth is: A few years ago, she instituted a four-day work week for her team with no change in pay, and as the CEO of her company, she’s the fifth-highest paid person on her team. She’s also a multifaceted person outside her role as the CEO of a successful firm: She speaks three languages, writes page-turner romance novels, and is politically engaged in her community.

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I also admire the team who started Defector Media, a worker cooperative owned by its staff following the shuttering of Deadspin with the intention of preventing a private equity takeover of their business (sadly, a common occurrence in media). Every year, they publish a financial report that shows exactly how they’re earning and spending.

Big Think: What myth about the wage gap frustrates you the most?

Katie Gatti Tassin: That women “just so happen to choose all the jobs that just so happen to be paid less.” In essence, the complete absence of a mainstream conversation around the prevalence of occupational segregation, or the way that the person doing the job influences the perception of how valuable that job is. 

When the composition of a field shifts to be majority-women, pay goes down. In other words, the popularly understood causality is backward. So it’s just simply not reflected in the data that women gravitate to low-paid work — and when they do highly compensated, highly educated work, they still earn less: The controlled gender wage gap in highly paid fields like medicine — that is, the wage gap when controlling for years of experience, level of expertise, education, hours worked, and specialty or practice type — is still around 93%.  

This is related to the idea that women simply prefer working part-time more than men, because they simply prefer being the primary caretaker or that men simply prefer working more hours. Our culture makes it hard for all people to be full human beings who can value multiple things at once — so I don’t think this is a conversation about what women or men “choose,” but rather, the systems, policies, and norms that are limiting which options they can freely choose to begin with. 

Big Think: What cultural attitude toward women in the US workplace feels the most immovably ingrained, and how can we all address it?

Katie Gatti Tassin: Our cultural attitude toward working women (and the way it manifests in the gender wage gap data) is inextricably connected to the gap in unpaid labor at home — it’s true that men do about an hour more of paid work per day than women do, but women do approximately an hour more domestic labor in their homes each day. If we don’t think that will impact a woman’s access to resources over her lifetime, we’re kidding ourselves. In her essay “Maternal Instincts,” Laura Kipnis calls this a “socially organized choice masquerading as a natural one.”

It’s astounding the extent to which our ideas about what women and men “should” do impact their outcomes in the workplace. A woman who negotiates for “masculine” goods (pay, power, prestige) is more likely to be penalized for subverting our expectations about how a woman “should” behave, but the same is true for a man who negotiates for “feminine” goods (flexibility, time with family). The difference is that the former leads to net-lower income and wealth over time, which is what I’m concerned with addressing in my work. This has ripple effects in our economy for all women — for middle- and upper-class women, it means extraordinarily high childcare costs and (usually) lower lifetime earnings. For low-income women, who are almost always the ones providing said care, it means getting trapped in a hard-to-break low-wage cycle.

Women are 65% more likely to leave paid work to care for a family member. We need to treat care work like infrastructure and, just as we need to structurally support women’s ability to have lives outside their role as caregivers, we need to structurally support men’s ability to be caregivers — so we can all live free, full lives. 

Big Think: Which countries have successfully restructured the wage disparities between men and women — and what can we learn from them?

Katie Gatti Tassin: While it’s more complex than just this singular factor, any country with universal childcare — so, most of our peer nations — is going to have a lower gender wage gap than the United States. (The OECD — Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development — average is around 11 cents on the dollar; the US is between 15 and 17 cents.) One of the most powerful examples in the data set is Norway, because they implemented systemic changes that have made a huge difference within the last 30 years.

In the late 20th century, Norway decided it wanted to have a dual-earner, dual-caregiver society where all people had the freedom to work for money as well as have a family without compromise. Rather than badgering women to lean in or hassling men to be more present fathers, they crafted policies to create the outcomes they wanted, like one year of paid parental leave and a use-it-or-lose-it paternity leave — with a catch. When dad took his several months of paid paternity time, mom had to be out of the house and back at school or work, or whatever she was doing before, so fathers would see themselves as capable, primary caregivers. (It’s really about addressing the involvement of the gestational vs. non-gestational parent, but in the heterosexual context, we’re talking about moms and dads.) After that, every kid in Norway is guaranteed a spot in a high-quality early childcare education center after age 1, when the paid parental leave ends. Even if you’re high-income, it costs a few hundred dollars per month at most. 

It worked. Today, the gender pay gap in Norway is 4.5 cents — compared to our ~16 cents — on the dollar. Women report deriving more satisfaction and joy from their jobs, and men report deriving more satisfaction and joy from their families. The lesson, to me, is that if you want society and culture to change and improve, you have to pull systemic levers. It’s not enough to ask people to try harder or do more. 

Big Think: When negotiating a pay rise as an employee, what’s every woman’s most effective tactic?

Katie Gatti Tassin: One of the biggest negotiating tips that I have for women comes from [CEO of Worthmore Strategies] Kathryn Valentine, and it’s to stop talking. Women are socialized to put other people at ease; to make people feel comfortable. But asking for more money is uncomfortable! Often, women will make the ask — then immediately begin negotiating against themselves and offering reasons why they’d understand if their request isn’t doable. But once you make your ask (in the book, I outline the specific ways to structure your ask for the best results) stop talking, and allow the uncomfortable silence. 

The other critical thing to remember is that workplaces are like glorified high school lunchrooms, and in many ways, perception is reality. So the best time to begin setting the groundwork is long before you sit down for the conversation. There are two components of how you approach this: The first is your perceived value in the company and the second is your market rate. Aside from upskilling, you have less control over your market rate than your perceived value, so there are a few tricks I like to use for disproportionately shaping your perceived value.

The first is socializing your wins. Often popular negotiation advice will encourage you to keep a list of your accomplishments, and that’s great, but it’s better if people know about them as they’re happening. This is an art and a science. There was one gal I worked with back in the day who got promoted nearly every cycle, and she was excellent at this. She communicated her team’s wins and the initiatives she was driving as part of “learnings” that others might find useful. 

The next is going the extra yard — not the extra mile, just a yard. If your deadline for three factors impacting conversion is due Friday, hand it over on Thursday and throw in a fourth. If you’re meeting with someone, send an agenda ahead of time and “manage up.” This is especially important if you’re bringing an issue to a manager — setting up a meeting and bringing an issue is no good. What’s a little better is coming with an explanation — “Here’s what’s causing this.” What’s even better than that is coming with a few potential solutions. And what’s best is coming with the issue, the potential solutions, your recommended solution, or even, “Here’s what I already did to handle this; I’m just keeping you in the loop.”

Big Think: What impact (either beneficial or otherwise) do you think AI could have on the wage gap?

Katie Gatti Tassin: I think we’re at a real crossroads moment with artificial intelligence and large language learning models, because they have the potential to completely upend the labor force. When we used to think about “robots replacing jobs,” I think most people pictured blue-collar work — delivery drivers, cashiers. Not so! It turns out AI is best at replacing entry-level white-collar workers, those who handle things like data entry, analysis, and synthesizing information.

If I’m trying to use this insight like a crystal ball, my assumption is that the economic impact of AI will be less about a gender wage gap and more about exacerbating income inequality (which is, to be abundantly clear, very bad). But it depends on who owns and controls the technology, and why I believe worker-owned firms to be so important. A firm owned by its employees — like Defector Media — is going to make very different decisions about how to implement and benefit from AI (maybe now everyone can work three days a week instead of five, but for the same pay, because they’re more productive) than a firm owned by three suits in an ivory tower who are just incentivized to cut costs. 

Big Think: What is your definition of great leadership?

Katie Gatti Tassin: Great leaders know there are three ingredients for a successful team: capacity, drive, and desire. They can cultivate all three for themselves and their team.