Felix, Mihir and their colleague Kathleen McGinn discuss the role of gratitude at work and at home. Gratitude can be incredibly effective, so why don’t we thank others more often? What goes wrong when a thank you seems shallow and inauthentic? Can gratitude even be an impediment to change? Plus, we debate early retirement. Clearly, it is what people want. Why don’t we give it to them? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Welcome, everyone.
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Felix.
I'm Mihir.
And I'm Kathleen.
Kathleen McGinn.
So great to have you.
It's wonderful to be here.
Thanks for inviting me.
Kathleen is a dear colleague of ours at Harvard Business School.
For our listeners to get to know you a little bit, tell us what you're working on, a project that you're excited about.
So I studied gender and employment, and I have a big project that looks back into all of the archives of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, everything that's been written since the passage of the Equal pay Act in 1963.
Oh, my God.
It took us a while to get the data.
It was a small research project, and we're looking at all the articles that have anything to do about women and employment.
And the reason we're doing this is because after decades of shrinking gender gaps in every dimension, around 2000, everything got stuck, and we're now actually starting to see some increasing gaps again.
And so the question is why?
And there's lots and lots of research on this, but we really wanted to go back and try to understand the social discourse, what's happened in the discussions around women's employment that have led us to this place we're in.
Super interesting.
That sounds like a great project.