Speaker 1: Welcome to Getting Rich Together. I’m your host, Shama Bunton. This show was born from my own journey. Coming out of a divorce, I reached out to 50 women to talk to them about money.

95% of them did not want to go there. That’s when I realized we need spaces where wealth isn’t hidden in silence but shared in possibilities. Here, you’ll meet women from all backgrounds, trailblazers, risk takers, visionaries, each expanding what wealth can look like. This is your place to be inspired to discover new pathways and to remember that we rise by building wealth together. Getting Rich Together is a wealth catalyst production.

At Wealth Catalyst, we bring together education, networks, and great opportunities for women to build wealth and change the world. Now, on to today’s show. I am here with the incredible Josie Cox. Josie, you are an incredible writer and someone who has used their voice and the power of the pen to evangelize so many ideas that are extremely important to you and extremely important to the world.

And while people might know you as the author of Women Money Power, which is just ringing bells into my spirit and my mind, and also your recent work as the founding editor of The Persistent, you certainly have come from a long lineage of being able to use your voice and use your time and energy in order to espouse the ideas that are most important to you. I’m so excited to have you here today on Getting Rich Together. Thank you for being here with me.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me. This is a real joy to be here. Thank you.

Speaker 1: So Josie, what I think is so incredible is to start from the very beginning. Obviously, I’m here talking to you and your New York City flat and this beautiful life that you have, but you are not originally from here. Your life stems from places much further with a totally different context of values and money and family. And one of the things that I think is so exciting is we’re so intimated with maybe the immigrant journey of coming to America, and a lot of these stories, but your story is very different. And so I would love for us to start from the beginning, Josie. What was life like for you growing up? Talk to me about your parents and let’s start talking about money. Okay.

Speaker 2: This is wonderful. I think it’s so special to have the opportunity to have conversations like this because we rarely stop to think about where someone came from. And I think particularly in this kind of fast-paced, on-demand world, what you see as what you get. And we tend to kind of think of someone as the person who they are in the moment.

So I appreciate you asking me the question. Yes, as you said, I am not originally from New York. In fact, I’ve only lived in New York for about four years. I grew up in Switzerland. My mother was from Czechoslovakia originally.

She left in 68 when the Russians invaded Prague. And my father was from a mining town in the north of England. He was a researcher.

He’d done his PhD in various kind of fields of healthcare. And my mom was actually a computer programmer way back in the late, I know, right? Way back in the late 70s, early 80s when women just went, computer programmers. She had studied physics at college. She’s such an inspiration to me, you know, leaving the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia as it was at the time when she was just nine years old, being uprooted, coming to a country where she didn’t know the language, the UK, having to kind of regain all her bearings and succeeding to the extent that she actually ended up going to college and studying physics, where she met my dad, who was from, as I said, from the north of England. He ended up going on and doing a PhD. And when they were both in their kind of late, actually mid-20s, he had this opportunity to do some research in Switzerland, this faraway country that neither of them had ever visited. And they essentially agreed that they were going to go for one year.

He had this contract, this short-term contract from one of the healthcare companies there to go and do some research. And they flew out to Basel, neither of them spoke German, which is the native language in Basel. And they just loved it. It was clean.

It was predictable. It was quiet. It was quaint. It was civilized. Things work. The trains ran on time. The salaries were good.

And one year has become 40. So my parents are still there. Well, never went back to the UK. And they really built this incredible life for themselves in Switzerland. I was born there about seven or eight years after they arrived and grew up in a household. My mom ended up going on and being a teacher. She actually ended up being one of the first teachers at one of the first international schools in Switzerland. So obviously, international schools are kind of like an institution in Switzerland now. One of the first ones was in the international school of Basel. And my mom started as a part-time teacher there initially, mainly because she spoke languages and she was an immigrant herself and just kind of understood the culture.

And my dad was, by that point, working for one of the pharmaceutical companies. We actually grew up in a tiny village outside Basel. My parents didn’t want to live in the big city. They chose this tiny little, truely a village. It was small. There was no grocery store there. There was a church. There was a post office. There was a public primary school, which is where my sister and I went. We lived this very simple, wonderful life. It was not complicated. We knew everyone in the village. We were all friends. We was telling someone about this the other day that in summer, because it was such a sheltered, beautiful little village, we would actually walk to school with those shoes on.

It’s amazing. It’s kind of bizarre when I think back, but at that time, the streets were clean. There were no dangers. School was like a five-minute walk away, because school was a five-minute walk away from everyone’s house because the village was so small. And so, you know, it was this very kind of idyllic existence, also very sheltered. I didn’t have exposure to crime. I didn’t have exposure to inequality. I didn’t have exposure to racism. All of these forces that ironically have become such so kind of central to the work that I’m doing now just didn’t really exist as far as eight-year-old Josie was concerned.

Speaker 1: Well, and was it, you know, were your school friends, you know, as you were going through early grade school, then maybe even through high school, did it retain that sense of equanimity?

Was there any sort of awareness? And at what point of the haves or haves not, or, you know, my family is better than others or not as well off as these people? When did those points of contrast start to enter into your mind?

Speaker 2: It’s a great question. As I said, my mom ended up starting, well, being a teacher at one of the first international schools. And one of the pucks of that job at the time was that she got reduced tuition for her own kids.

And so, at the point where I was about to start high school, I remember having this meeting as a family, right? We’d sit down and made this decision as to whether I would stay at public school in the Swiss system, which is very good. But it would probably mean that I would never go to college outside of Switzerland. All the instruction was in German. So at that point, I didn’t, I spoke English at home, but I had never written in English before.

I had never conversed in English outside of the home. Would I continue in the public system? Or would I move into the international school, which is a very different world?

It was like a 30-minute drive from the village. And it would really change my whole experience of education. Ultimately, my parents and I, together, we decided that I wanted to go into the international school. And, you know, as you can imagine, an international school is not a Swiss public school. It is very different. It was the first time that I had friends who were from America and friends who were from the Netherlands and friends who were from Scandinavia.

It was truly international. But as you say, with that also came a difference in socioeconomic status, right? All the kids in my class who were sons and daughters of faculty and of teachers had reduced tuition.

They had a lower income than all the full tuition-paying kids who worked, who were kids of executives who had moved to Switzerland because of various corporate jobs. And that was, that became pretty clear to me. Maybe not to the extent that it would be now when I’m looking back on it, but it was certainly apparent even at that time that, like, you know, some kids in my class had really gorgeous homes with pools and others lived in small apartments. And so that kind of, like, difference was definitely, yeah, it was apparent to me at that time. And I think it really planted the seed for my ultimate understanding of the fact that inequality exists, right? And that it very much shapes the kind of dynamics of communities.

Speaker 1: And also, what, yeah, what you think is possible for yourself. So in the same sense of saying, wow, I see how different things are, it also opens up to say, wow, I might be able to actually have that. Or like, this is something that I realize I now maybe want or maybe I don’t like those Roman poles on their house. Because I think it’s rather ugly, even though it’s very expensive.

Speaker 2: And what I should make really clear is that we weren’t poor. We were very well off. We were very comfortable. We would take a family vacation once a year. We could, we could afford rent, we could afford, we didn’t own property, but we could live very comfortably. But I was going to school with kids who were going to the Caribbean twice a year, taking multiple city vacations who had several cars and several houses and did all these very kind of ostentatious things that I just couldn’t imagine ever doing. And I also didn’t even dare ask my parents about because I knew that that was just a different realm of society.

Speaker 1: So interesting. And so as you were starting to decide the path of university and your decision making process into what you would study and ultimately where you would study, what were some of the things that started to inform those decisions?

Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, as I grew up, there’s this phrase, I don’t know if you’ve come across it before, of the third culture kid, which is basically a kid who grows up in a culture that is not either of their parents culture.

So they’re transplanted. And I think I embodied that. But more than that, I spoke like this, because this is the accent that I got from my parents. In Switzerland, I mean, I also spoke perfect Swiss German and German because I had gone to public school in Switzerland, and I’d spoken that language at school. But in Switzerland, I was always like the slightly strange, not quite Swiss person, despite the fact that I sounded Swiss, they also knew that I had this British side. And I had never lived in the UK. So whenever I met someone from the UK, they would make a cultural reference that would just go completely over my head, because I hadn’t grown up watching British TV shows, we didn’t have a TV.

So I didn’t get those references. And so when it came time for me to choose where to go to college, it was it was so the idea of going to UK was so appealing, because it meant having this opportunity to actually discover my heritage, my cultural heritage to an extent, and just kind of like engage with this country that a lot of people assumed when they first met me was my home. And so I decided to study in the UK.

I actually ended up interestingly, despite the fact that it was in a way a sort of homecoming to a poem I had never had. I chose a city that was like not in any way related to any of my family. It was in the south of the UK. So both of my parents had lived in the north, it was in the south, closer to London, a city called Bath, which is only really famous internationally because it was the place where Jane Austen would write her books. It’s a very kind of quaint, romantic, very beautiful city that is quite small and quite just sort of dainty and lovely. Now, to me, it was a huge shock even going to that city because it was so much bigger than any city I had ever been. And it felt so overwhelming.

Speaker 1: I love how your story is graduating to bigger cities and then bigger, you know.

Speaker 2: Yeah, this is definitely a theme in my life. So yeah, it was really interesting because I think that also continued this education around, you know, different backgrounds, different socioeconomic statuses.

When you get to college, you meet all kinds of people. No one was exactly like me. No one had resembled, had gone through the same or had the same upbringing as I had. So that could feel slightly isolating at times. So there were a lot of people I met at college who had been born and raised in the UK to UK parents.

And that was the end of the story. And I do feel like I never really found my crowd at college. I never really fought my gang. I don’t regret going to college in the UK. I think it really opened a lot of doors for me professionally, personally, and ultimately led me to where I am today. So definitely no regret.

Speaker 1: When you were in university, were you heads down in your studies? Were you working at all during your time at school? What was the experience and how did you land on the major and area of focus? What was the thing that was really driving you towards your areas of study?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so for context, for those people who don’t know, college in the UK undergraduate at the time that I went, which was 2006, was $1,000 a year tuition.

Speaker 1: Oh my God, Jersey, that’s incredible. I feel like everyone’s jars are going to drop.

Speaker 2: Every school pretty much in the country, even Oxford and Cambridge at the time, now I think it’s maybe it went up to three after I graduated and then I think maybe it’s around nine now. But it’s definitely not the orders of magnitude that we’re talking about in the US. Great context. Yeah.

So that’s really important to remember. So my tuition was $1,000 or £1,000 a year. My cost of living was £85 a week, which was rent in this tiny little room that I rented on campus. And my parents really wanted me to, especially for the first year, just to get accustomed to living in a different country, away from family. And they said, look, just focus on studies, don’t worry about the money, we’ve got it.

And that was huge. I also, after my first year, I got an academic stipend. So in addition to not paying a huge amount of tuition, these stipends were available at my particular college for academic performance. So if you did really well in your first year, you got a stipend to essentially help with your living costs, the idea being that it would then reduce the need for you to work while you were studying.

Money was not an issue for me at college. I did do a little bit of work. I actually started, I did my very first freelance gig as a writer, which was writing reviews of bars and restaurants, which is actually, I was going to say it’s kind of funny, it’s sad in a way, because the other thing that was happening in my life at the time was that I was battling eating disorders. So I got very sick at college, and in my last year of high school, actually, and it took me a good like 10 to 12 years to really get over all of these eating disorders that I was battling. But I managed to get myself a gig, a freelance gig as a restaurant reviewer.

So there’s irony there, of course. But anyway, so I was, that was when I first started earning money. And really couldn’t, I feel like I still have this feeling now, kind of however many years on. But I couldn’t get my head around the fact that I was writing and people were paying me for it.

What a privilege. And I still feel that way. But yeah, it was wonderful. And it really cemented my desire to want to do journalism for a living and want to write for a living. And honestly, I never, I don’t feel like I ever made a professional choice based on money, which I think is a huge privilege. I knew that I wanted to get a job and I wanted to have a career that would enable me to support myself financially to live, to put food on the table. But I never wanted to be rich. I think people who say they’re not motivated by money, I’m not sure I always believe them, because I feel innately as humans, we are motivated by money.

Because money is a gauge of value. But truly, I was so fixated on being a journalist and being a writer that I just thought whatever it takes, I’m going to do it.

Speaker 1: I think what’s interesting about that, Josie, is like the most people come to that level of understanding about following passion and purpose much later in life. And they’re tired or fed up with doing the thing that they were doing for money so that they could do the thing that they were meant to do. And so you are exhibiting a tremendous amount of inner self-awareness and guided intuition around, this is what’s important to me, and I’m just going to go after it and build like that from day one. That’s really cool.

Speaker 2: Possibly. But I also think that it’s worth acknowledging the privilege of not having to worry about money. I think that someone who might not have been as comfortable as me growing up or as the fear of being poor was never there. We were always fine.

Speaker 1: Did you feel like as you were exiting your college studies and starting to get your foothold into the world and starting to have to think about really paying for things?

And certainly journalism, when you look at the list of top five professions that pay a lot of money, I don’t think journalism fits in that top five list. So how did you start to reconcile both sort of a, let’s call it a safety or abundance mindset, which is I feel comfortable, I feel safe, the world is friendly. Plus now I’m on my own and I’m getting paid real wages and there’s reconciling of sort of the realities. What was that like as you were making your way out into the world?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So I had done a bunch of internships during my studies and had gained some work experience, had hustled to meet as many people in the journalism industry as possible. And I think that was all driven by this passion for the topic and passion for the subject. So when I, just before I graduated, I applied for a job at Reuters, the news agency. And again, for backdrop, this was 2010. So this was a time, why did a four-year degree? This was a time when the world was still reeling from the financial crisis, especially in Europe. Certain industries were really not in good shape.

And I would count media among them. Jobs were not plentiful. And I knew that, but I also knew that I just didn’t want to do anything. Like I was honestly truly willing to just do any job that I could find as long as it was in the media industry. And I got very lucky in that I found this job for a junior markets correspondent in Frankfurt. Well, okay, Paul is a good reaction.

I appreciate that. But I spoke German, right? That was my superpower because I’d grown up speaking German in the Swiss public school system. And so when I applied for this job, I was like, okay, I’ve done all these internships. I have a degree good. I did really well at school. I had a really, really good grades. I spoke German and I had this desire to do this job and to move anywhere that I needed to in order to do it, regardless of anything else.

And so I remember having the job interview and just being like, I just want this job. Like I will do anything I will learn about stocks, I will learn about bonds. I don’t know anything about FX. I will learn all about that. I don’t know what an industry is, but I got it. Don’t you worry.

I’ll figure it out. And I think they probably just saw something in me and took a bet on me and took a chance and I will forever be grateful because I don’t know where I would be if I hadn’t got that early kind of foot in the door. The other thing is I know it’s crass to talk about money in our culture. And I think I’m trying to change that.

And I think that it’s important to change that. When I got the offer, they were offering me something like 60,000 euros annual for this job. This was like more money than I could comprehend.

Do you know what I mean? And so I remember they reached out and they were like, do you think this is the sound reasonable? And I was like, absolutely. This is wonderful. You’re like, I’m rich.

This is amazing. I also needed, I wasn’t supporting anyone. Frankfurt is, it’s not a, it’s not the cheapest city in Germany, but it’s certainly not a super expensive city like London or New York. And so I moved out. They also gave me, they gave me like corporate accommodation for the first few months. So I had no expenses. Food, yeah, sure. But I was like, what am I going to do with all this money?

This is crazy. What did you do with all the money, Jesse? I was just, I knew you were going to ask me that question. The first thing I bought, like actually bought for myself as a treat, you’re going to, you’re going to crack up. I bought myself a pair of skis.

Fabulous. Because I love skiing. I grew up skiing. And I’d never own, I’d own skis when I was a kid, but I was always like using someone else’s skis or secondhand skis or what And I was like, I just want my own skis. And so this was maybe three or four months into the job when I actually realized I could pay rent and had a lot left over. I went out and I bought myself these skis and I still happen. I still haven’t been really old now.

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Love that. And so your career is starting to take off. You’ve landed your first job. You’re getting paid pretty good for a salary out the gate, which is wonderful. And your living expenses are pretty reasonable. I think it’s so different when you’re receiving, I remember when I graduated, I was living in New York City and I was making $40,000 a year.

I was like, how is someone supposed to live here? Talk to me a little bit about sort of your financial journey now having a career and sort of starting to think about how you would build this career. And obviously journalism is one of those professions where you can be so valued in so many capacities. And it’s like perfecting the tool.

And so being able to exact this tool in these different ways. Tell me a little bit about how your career was developing. At what point in your career did you get hip to the fact that maybe 60,000 euros was good, but there was a lot more that could be made? And how did you navigate that?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so it took a while, quite frankly, because it was a lot of money. And I was paying for my first apartment in Frankfurt, which was a studio basically. It was like not even a one bed, it was a studio. I was paying like a thousand euros a month or something like that.

And this was in like a really nice area right by the office. I didn’t really have any other expenses. I didn’t really drink.

I didn’t mean nobody would in Frankfurt. I didn’t really go out. I had a few friends and we’d get dinner maybe every few weeks, but I didn’t have a huge amount of expense.

Speaker 1: So your savings account was growing then as you were…

Speaker 2: Yeah, I was saving a ton of money. And I think I don’t know where it comes from, but I think I am inherently risk of us. And so it felt good to be building up this buffer and to have the privilege of being able to build a buffer so early in my career as well was… It didn’t…

I certainly valued that. I was in Frankfurt for a year and a half. I had started dating someone from London and we were doing long distance. I’d met him in college and we were doing long distance. And well, long distance like in the US that wouldn’t really count as long distance. It’s like an hour flight, but it felt like it at the time. And after a year and a half, we were still seeing each other and I was like, you know what, Frankfurt…

I’ve had my moment in Frankfurt. It has a bit of a shelf life for me. Let me see if I can transfer. And I spoke to my boss and I wanted to stay at Royce’s. They’d been so good to me. And they told me that there was an opening for a job in London as an investment grade corporate debt correspondent. And I was like, excuse me, let me Google that. So I Google this job and realized that I could probably get my head around debt. I could probably figure it out.

I could probably read enough economists and financial times and Michael Lewis books to get my head around the lingo. And I got the job and so I transferred to London. The pay was lower because I think at the time no one wanted to be based in Frankfurt. Everyone wanted to be based in London. And the cost of living was a lot higher in London. So those two factors moved in the directions. I didn’t want them to be moving. But I moved in with my boyfriend.

So it was the first time I was living with somebody. He had an income too. He was doing an internship. Spoiler alert, this is not my husband.

He’s an ex. Yeah, but we lived very comfortably. He had an income. He was on a graduate scheme and my income was fine.

It wasn’t amazing, but we lived in this little one-bed apartment. But yeah, London is an expensive city. And so I realized then that journalism was never gonna allow me to live in the swankiest neighborhoods.

It was never gonna allow me to go on the swankiest vacations. But I loved my job. And one thing that happened during that time, bearing in mind that I’d then been a journalist maybe three, four years by the time I was really settled in London, was that I was getting job offers from PR firms. And that’s a really interesting dynamic because a lot of PR firms share a lot of the skillset.

Or PR professionals share a lot of the skillsets that journalists have. And I must say it was quite tempting. I do remember a PR firm took me out for dinner one night. And it had been like a long day in the office. And I was like over it.

We all have those days. And this firm took me out for dinner and drinks. And they said to me, come work for us, we’ll double your salary. You know? Wow. And so I feel like ultimately, obviously, I decided not to do it because I realized I just didn’t want to do that kind of work.

But along the way, over the course of the years, there have been these little like forks in the road where it’s like putting my resolve to the test that I was just talking about a minute ago. How much do you want to do this job? Like, how passionate are you still about journalism? How much do you still believe in media? And so far, I’ve been able to resist. It’s incredible.

Speaker 1: And so as your career was evolving and you’re starting to think about obviously, London is expensive and New York is expensive and sort of starting to think about your life holistically and were there opportunities for you? And if so, at what point within these various professions that you had to start to put money away for a pension or for these different programs? And did you find at any point that your savings that you had built up was really necessary to draw down on? Or was that something that you were able to consistently build on over time?

Speaker 2: No, so pretty much as soon as I moved to London, we started, I say, we, my boyfriend, who I was living with at the time, we started shipping away at my savings. We bought furniture for our apartment.

We took a vacation. And I think that was probably the time when I realized that I also wanted to just live a little and he wasn’t earning a ton. He was on this graduate scheme and London was expensive and pretty quickly, the money that I had saved in Frankfurt was no longer. So what happened and what I would say about kind of pension and those sorts of things, the workplaces, my employers always had pretty good like workplace pension schemes. And I feel like those are more sophisticated in Europe generally than they are in the US. And so I was lucky in that I always opted in. Again, this is like my risk aversion. I was like, yep, that sounds good.

The highest contribution, I’ll put it in. But what happened was that a couple of years after I moved to London, my boyfriend and I broke up, I ended up moving in, moving out and moving into an apartment with a stranger, quite frankly, was just like a, I was just looking for a roommate and we lived together. The rent was not super high. The apartment was not super nice. And I went back to saving a little bit, but it was still London, so expensive. But then pretty soon after that, I met my now husband. And that changed everything on many levels. We became my husband.

So how could it not? But he was, I should say, he is a few years older than me, was more established into his career at the time and was working in finance. And so right off the bat, like I remember the first time we went out for dinner, he was like, I’ve got this. And I was like, oh, no, like we’re splitting this. And he was like, no, like I earn a multiple of what you earn. We didn’t have that explicit conversation because that would have really put me off at the time. It was clear to both of us that socioeconomically, we were in different worlds.

Speaker 1: When you’re starting to then realize that, wow, like there, there are other ways that this unfolds, right? Or they’re like, life has so many interesting twists and turns. And I think as women, there’s can often be this need to.

I also want to pay for half because I’m trying to assert my independence and I’m wanting to make a point in many ways or kind of show, show that what I can do. And then there are these really beautiful moments of saying, OK, wow, this is what partnership might be able to really look like. And this is what it looks like when we have shared resources. Not certainly, I don’t know if you met him and then got married overnight. But, you know, that that’s sort of an interpersonal, I don’t know, partnership or this way of looking at the world from the perspective of two and not one is really powerful. So continue. What was it like to start to come together and see a different, maybe financial picture for yourself than you ever had before?

Speaker 2: Yeah, it was mind blowing, actually, because he owned an apartment. I didn’t know anyone who owned an apartment in London. So that was in itself already just like mind blowing. And then, yeah, what you’re talking about is so real. I think that I always wanted to assert myself. I always wanted to be financially independent. But we started dating and then a couple of years later, we got engaged. And then when we got married, we combined all our finances.

Like all of that is fungible. We decided that we are one unit and we are one family and we knew we were going to have kids and he, to his credit, has always really appreciated something which I really care about, which is this recognition of unpaid labor as being labor. And he will, I am almost certain, always work in an industry that pays better than the industry I work in.

And as a result of that, I have taken more steps out of the paid labor market and into the unpaid labor market. And I say that very intentionally, particularly around having our daughter raising, raising a family. It makes me feel better that we have all our finances combined because I feel like that is an acknowledgement of the fact that we both bring equal value to this relationship and this household, even though the dollar signs that each of us generate are not the same.

Speaker 1: What are the conversations like at home as you guys are talking about money? Is it often frequent? Is it periodically? How do you guys approach money as a household?

Speaker 2: We do talk about money very openly. There’s definitely no kind of stigma or taboo around it. We are both pretty clued in to what we have, like the assets we have as a household. We don’t own property. We don’t really have, we like all our assets are basically like liquid cash. And we do have some stocks and investments.

And but we’re open about it. And I think as a result of knowing that I contribute less financially to the household, I am probably slightly less and probably a little bit more of a spendthrift. Like I am more cautious in terms of spending. And I will always be the one who’s, oh, if we take a vacation the following week, it’ll be like 200 bucks cheaper.

Do we really need to get like this fancy brand toilet paper or whatever it is? I don’t know. I feel like I have more of an eye for that. But it’s always a conversation.

It’s never a conflict. And we are like to be fully transparent. Like he’s in finance in New York City. We are in a very fortunate position. We live in a nice neighborhood. We pay, we’ve decided my daughter is now six. And for various reasons, we were weighing up public business private school. We decided to put her in a private school, which is a huge expense.

Like essentially pretty much the vast majority of my income goes on school. But for various reasons, we decided that was the right thing. Everything’s conversation. And I think I love that. Yeah, that is the key to having a fair, equitable relationship and being on the same page in terms of money.

Speaker 1: That’s so beautiful. I think that there are so many paths and money, no matter how much or how little you have is such an intricate part of our life. And whether that is enabling us or giving us more opportunities to say, I want something or really feeling vulnerable and saying, OK, we’re a shared household and how do we combine things and build together? It’s a really beautiful way to see how money flows in and out, but it’s always there. And so turning it now to the work at hand and what it is that you’re building with your life. And like I opened up today, there’s so much power to when you’ve perfected this tool.

Right. And so when you have a tool like that, you can apply it to a number of things. And you’ve decided to apply it towards your most recent book, so Women, Money, Power, and then obviously the work that you’re doing to amplify women’s voices at the persistent. I’d love to get some insight into your book and this chapter, which to me feels really profound and really big.

And if I were to say, without you saying, I’d say stepping into some greater purpose in terms of how it is you’re choosing to amplify people, ideas that you believe in. So spill the tea, Josie. Where are things going right now? I’ll unpack the book a little bit.

Speaker 2: Perfect. Yes. So the book, what I should say is that after I had my daughter in 2018, I decided for various reasons to freelance. I’d always been on staff at news organizations. But knowing that we had a steady flow of income from my husband’s work, it just made sense for one of us to take a step out of the paid labor market and to be there and to be available, not have to pay for, I always say, like, daughter’s childcare. That was just not the right thing for us.

It is for some people, it wasn’t a threat. So I decided I was going to freelance and I didn’t really know what that would look like. Again, I’m very risk averse and I never thought I would be a freelancer. But what I quickly realized was that it brought with it this immense freedom to actually choose what kinds of projects I wanted to work on. And pretty quickly, it became apparent to me that the thing I care about most is financial equality, economic independence, the gender pay gap, everything that should not be there anymore.

Like, how have we still got a gender pay gap? We’ve achieved so much as a humanity. We have cured all these complex diseases. We’re sending people to the moon. And like, still we can’t figure out how to eradicate this gender pay gap, how to shift the parameters of the labor market so that people don’t have to make this decision that I had just made around choosing between professional fulfillment and personal success. And why can’t we do that? And so I really wanted to make that the focal point of my reporting.

Fast forward to 2020, which was obviously we all remember the pandemic. My husband had this opportunity, had been offered this opportunity to relocate to New York. We thought that was a phenomenal idea. Neither of us had ever lived in New York. We always had both wanted to. Our daughter was one and a half at the time. And so, lo and behold, we flew into New York on the 13th of March, 2020. Okay. The day, the World Health Organization, I believe, declared COVID a pandemic. That’s a little side story for you. Anyway, but what I was going to say was that, you know, when I got to the US, I really emboldened me to pursue this project in a meaningful way, because I was seeing that a lot of the problems around inequality that were shaping the labor market in the UK and elsewhere in Europe were just tenfold in the US and also exacerbated by race.

So not only was the gender pay gap pernicious and profound, it was also being exacerbated by race. And so I really had this deep resolve to start thinking about a book project. I got very lucky in that I was offered this fellowship from Columbia Journalism School to go back to school. I’d always wanted to go back to school. I never could make sense of it financially. That was, again, one of these, it felt like such an expense, such a luxury to go back to school.

And I’d never really given myself the license to think about it in a meaningful way. And then when I got to the US, I realized I had won this fellowship. So it was amazing. And it was really in that fellowship year that I started thinking about this book and how it has to be written and I really wanted to do it. And the trigger for writing it, and I think this is a really interesting telling story, was an interview that I did with one of the most prominent business leaders in this country. So it was an off the record interview, which means that I will never be able to say who the person was. But he is a very well known CEO of a very large multinational organization. And I was already thinking about the book project. So we sat down on Zoom and I kicked off the interview by asking him why he thinks the Jenna Pagat still exists.

And his response was that I had to understand that sometimes when a woman leaves the paid labor market temporarily to have a baby, to take maternity leave, when she returns, she’s just not as professionally and economically ambitious as she was. No way. True story. And to me, that was a wake up call. Yeah. I felt many emotions.

I was obviously fuming, just so angry. But I was also really sad that was kind of accepted knowledge at the higher search lines of business was that these economic gaps exist simply because, you know, a woman’s choice. And so I decided that was actually the way in to this book that I’d been dreaming about. And I went home, I wrote the prologue and Women Money Power became a narrative history of women’s economic empowerment since the Second World War in this country, highlighting the women who fought for economic empowerment in a meaningful way, women who are not household names, who I don’t say have been written out of history, but it’s probably more accurate to say they were never written into history in the first place.

And the mission of the book is to essentially answer this question of why are we where we are today? Why do we still have CEOs of very large companies who think that inequality exists because of the choice? Why do we still have a gender pay gap of 82 cents to the dollar in this country?

You know, why do we still live in a country where, you know, a lot of women feel like they have no choice but to leave the paid labor market at the point of having a first child? I don’t have all the answers, but I do feel like the book casts a light on some of the lessons that we probably should be paying close attention to.

Speaker 1: I love that, Josie. And as you’re sort of looking from a, let’s say a young age of 103 and you’re looking backwards on legacy and what I would say would be this new chapter or new anthology, new book in the series of what it is you’re building now. What is some of your hopes of legacy to leave on this planet?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think courage. I have a daughter, so it’s easy to kind of conceptualize that question in a very real way. I want nobody ever to be faced with their own gender, their own sexuality, their own identity as a barrier to economic success. I really want to contribute to educating the world people, the economy about bias and heuristics and stereotypes and norms and these harmful mores that have held us back. And I just hope that my writing can embolden people and give people the courage to resist and say, actually, no, this is wrong or dig their heels in or speak up or whatever it is. Just practice their own version of activism and resistance, whatever that might look like.

Speaker 1: And I love that, Josie. That’s beautiful. And so as we wrap up our conversation today, I’m curious, what is it in life right now that you are really calling in? How can the audience support you? What is it that you need? How do we help evangelize the work or give you the next introduction to X ways you’re looking for? What is it that you need? My book came out in March.

Speaker 2: I would love for people to buy it, to look it up, to gift it, to talk about it. It’s called Women Money Power, the rise and fall of economic equality. And it’s available on as an ebook. It’s available as an audio book. It’s on sale in various bookstores at the moment. It’s available wherever you get good books. And I really think that this book is sort of a portal into the next stage of my career.

And I believe so fully and wholeheartedly in the callers of equality and helping lift women up and elevating women. And I just feel like this book is my way to do that. Be so appreciative if even just one listener goes out and buys it. And then I’ve also been doing a lot of speaking engagements. So I love doing that. I love spreading this message of what we can all do, how we can all play a role in leveling the playing field. I’d be so thrilled to talk to anyone who has an idea or wants to get me in for speaking engagement. I have a website. It’s joesiecox.com. And I’m on all the socials. I’m sure you can, you could put that in the show notes and things.

Speaker 1: You got it. Josie, you’re incredible. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for being here on Getting Rich Together. I’m grateful for your time and energy. I’m so grateful. Thank you for having me. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Getting Rich Together. My hope is that you leave every episode feeling more inspired, more powerful and more connected. Until next time, remember you have everything it takes to create wealth on your terms.