Ashley Milne-Tyte

The Broad Experience 7: non-white and female

August 16, 2012

The latest episode of The Broad Experience is out. Catalyst has a new study out about how white men can help boost equality at work. Anything to do with diversity training has traditionally made me roll my eyes. It just has. Doing the research for this segment really made me think differently about it - just as the actual experience of going through diversity training changed midwest white male Lee Tschanz's mind about office life. In part two of the show I talk to my CUNY entrepreneurial journalism colleague Stacy-Marie Ishmael about her experience as a mixed race woman working for a traditional, white-male-dominated British company. Fascinating stuff.

Hiring mom or dad

August 15, 2012

Listen here. Aired on Marketplace.

Traditionally a son or daughter would join the family business, usually run by their dad. But things are changing. I recently met a couple of young entrepreneurs who have hired their mothers to work for them (there are plenty of people who have hired their fathers, too, it's just that I couldn't get any of them to talk to me). There are currently no statistics on this, but professors and family business consultants tell me it is a trend, if a small one. One reason is that Generation Y tends to be closer to and more comfortable with its parents than other generations, another is that there are plenty of experienced, recently retired or recently laid-off parents out there, itching for a new challenge. But just because you love someone doesn't mean you're a business match. I really enjoyed talking to all the interviewees in this piece and only wish I could have included more tape of Alexandra Ferguson and her mother, Charlotte (photo from Alexandra's studio, above) and Katie Weiford and her mother Sheila. 

Bedtime Math

July 31, 2012

Listen here. Aired on NPR's Morning Edition.

I heard about Laura Overdeck's nonprofit Bedtime Math completely by accident while having coffee with a friend of hers a few weeks ago. Overdeck was always good at math (to put it mildly - she majored in astrophysics) and wanted her kids to be too, but was concerned about the bad rap math has in this country. She wanted her children to find it fun and use it in everyday life, just as she had as a kid. So when her eldest child was two she and her husband started giving her a math problem each night. What started out as a family ritual has gone viral and now several thousand people receive her daily email containing a few kid-friendly math problems for kids and their parents to work through. Her point is that the more enjoyable and natural numbers are when children are little, the easier it will be for them to deal with math classes at school so that 'math anxiety' has less chance to set in, as it does with many children (me included). Listen to the piece to hear from Laura Overdeck, University of Chicago psychology professor and math anxiety expert Sian Beilock, and a couple of parents and their children working through some bedtime math.

There's another side to this story that I couldn't fit into the NPR piece. Laura Overdeck is particularly eager for more girls to become math fans and believes that by introducing them to numbers in a fun way at a young age, they have a far better chance of not turning away from the subject later on. Sian Beilock has done research that shows little girls pick up on older women's anxiety about math (mothers, teachers) and that this hurts their own math proficiency.