Nova: Simons, you're a product manager. You live and breathe efficiency, innovation, and building high-performing teams. But what if I told you there's a subtle, often invisible glitch in your team's operating system that's silently killing productivity and driving away top talent?

Simons: That's a terrifying thought for any leader. You spend all this time optimizing workflows and tech stacks, but the human system is the most complex one. An invisible bug there could be catastrophic. You can have the most elegant code in the world, but if the team building it is broken, the product will eventually fail.

Nova: Exactly. And it's a glitch the book 'Feminist Fight Club' by Jessica Bennett helps us diagnose. Now, the title sounds intense, and it's framed as an office survival manual, but I think it's one of the most potent leadership playbooks out there, especially for male allies.

Simons: That's an interesting angle. Taking a 'survival manual' and flipping it into a leadership guide. I'm intrigued.

Nova: I thought you would be. So today, we're going to tackle this from two perspectives. First, we'll act like engineers and diagnose the problem: what is this 'subtle sexism' and how does it function like a bug in the system? Then, we'll switch to leadership mode and discuss the 'patch': what are the concrete, actionable strategies we can use to fix it and build stronger, more equitable teams?

Simons: I love that framework. Diagnose, then patch. It's the foundation of all good engineering and, I think, all good leadership. Let's dive in.

Nova: Alright, so let's start with that diagnosis. The book is filled with these... let's call them 'bug reports.' They're not about the big, obvious, illegal forms of harassment. They're about something much more insidious, what Bennett calls subtle sexism.

Simons: The kind of thing that's hard to put your finger on, but you feel its effects.

Nova: Precisely. And to paint a picture, she shares her own story. She started her career at Newsweek decades after a landmark lawsuit in the 1970s where the female staffers sued the company for gender discrimination. You'd think things would be totally different, right?

Simons: You would hope so. A generation later, you expect a full system upgrade.

Nova: Well, what she found was that the old code was still running in the background. The culture still whispered, 'women don't write.' Even though she was hired as a writer, she found that the real, prestigious writing assignments, the cover stories, were what 'the men' did. She found herself being asked to do tasks like pushing mail carts and delivering coffee, things that had nothing to do with her job title.

Simons: So her role was implicitly devalued from the start. The system itself was sending signals that her primary function was secondary to her male peers.

Nova: Exactly. She describes being in meetings, a room full of men, and feeling her ideas just... evaporate. She'd pitch something, and it would just hang in the air, unacknowledged. She started to doubt herself, her skills. And there were no senior women to turn to for mentorship.

Simons: That's a powerful story because it's not a single, dramatic event. It's a death by a thousand cuts. From a systems perspective, you're creating an environment where a whole class of your employees is implicitly told their core function is less important. Their confidence erodes, they stop pitching ideas... the system is actively discouraging their most valuable contributions.

Nova: You've hit the nail on the head. The system discourages their contribution. And the book gives these 'glitches' catchy, memorable names, which I think is brilliant. For example, there's 'Manterrupting.'

Simons: Ha, okay. I can guess that one. Being constantly talked over by a man.

Nova: You got it. Or how about 'Bropropriating'?

Simons: Oh, the idea steal. That's a classic and it's not limited to gender, but I can see how it would disproportionately affect women in certain environments. In the tech world, that's like someone taking your code, changing one variable name, and committing it as their own. It's infuriating, and it completely demotivates people from sharing their best, most creative work in a group setting.

Nova: The book is full of them. Being mistaken for the administrative assistant in a meeting where you're actually the project lead. Being told to 'smile more.' It's this constant stream of micro-aggressions that, as you said, amounts to a death by a thousand cuts.

Simons: And each one of those cuts degrades the performance of the individual, and by extension, the team. If your lead engineer is being treated like a secretary, her mind isn't on solving the complex architectural problem you hired her for. It's on managing the frustration of being disrespected. That's a massive cognitive tax.

Nova: A cognitive tax! I love that term. And the book backs this up with data. One study found that in their first year out of college, women earn just 93 percent of what their male peers do. Another found women are a quarter as likely to even try to negotiate a raise. It's not because they're less capable; it's because the system subtly penalizes them for the same ambitious behaviors it rewards in men.

Simons: So it's not just about feelings, it's a measurable drag on the entire system. You're under-leveraging your talent. You're creating a churn risk with your most valuable people. And you're actively filtering out the diverse perspectives that are proven, time and again, to lead to better products and better decisions. When you frame it like that, this isn't a 'social issue' to be managed by HR. This is a business-critical system failure.

Nova: A business-critical failure. That is the perfect way to put it. And that leads us directly to the next question... if it's a failure, how do we fix it?

Nova: I love how you framed that as a business-critical failure. Because that's exactly where the book pivots—from diagnosing the problem to actively solving it. And the solution starts with a powerful idea: these aren't individual problems, they're collective ones. This is what led to the birth of the 'Feminist Fight Club' itself.

Simons: So it moves from individual survival to collective action.

Nova: Yes! The story goes that the author and a few friends, all women in their twenties and thirties working in media and advertising, started meeting up. They were all feeling stuck, underpaid, and undervalued. One woman had been doing a job two pay grades above her title for over a year, with no promotion. Another got a 'promotion' but with no raise and no direct boss. They all thought it was their own personal failing.

Simons: They'd internalized the system's bug as a personal flaw. 'I'm not good enough,' instead of 'This system is broken.'

Nova: Exactly. But when they got together and shared their stories, they had a huge realization. They were all experiencing the exact same patterns. It wasn't them. They weren't failing; the system was failing them. And that realization, that it's a collective problem, was everything. It gave them the power to fight back.

Simons: That's a fundamental shift in perspective. It's moving from 'I need to fix myself' to 'We need to fix the system.' As a leader, that's the perspective you want your team to have. You don't want them to suffer in silence; you want them to flag systemic issues so you can address them. So, what's the 'patch'? What does the 'fight club' actually do?

Nova: This is the brilliant part. It's not about complaining; it's about strategy. They develop and share concrete tactics. And the most famous one, which is perfect for our discussion, actually came from the women in the Obama White House.

Simons: Okay, now you've really got my attention. A tactic from the White House.

Nova: They noticed a classic 'glitch' in high-level meetings. The women on staff felt their contributions were being ignored or, worse, 'bropropriated.' A woman would make a key point, it would be met with silence, and then ten minutes later a man would say the same thing and be praised for his brilliant insight.

Simons: Infuriating. And a terrible waste of time and talent.

Nova: So they created a system. A protocol, to use your language. They called it 'Amplification.'

Simons: Tell me more. That sounds like a specific, repeatable process.

Nova: It is. It's beautifully simple. When a woman made a key point in a meeting, other women in that meeting would make a conscious effort to repeat it, and—this is the crucial part—they would give credit to the original speaker. They'd say, 'As Susan just said, I think we really need to consider the budget implications of that.' Or, 'That's a great point, Maya. To build on that...'

Simons: That's genius. That is absolutely genius. It's simple, it's non-confrontational, and it's incredibly effective. You're not stopping the meeting to say, 'Hey, you're ignoring the women!' You're just creating a conversational algorithm that ensures proper attribution and forces the idea into the group's consciousness.

Nova: It forces everyone in the room, and by extension the meeting minutes, to acknowledge both the idea and its author. It worked so well that President Obama himself noticed and started calling on the junior female staffers more often.

Simons: A leader could—and should—do that for anyone on their team whose voice is being marginalized, regardless of gender. If you have a brilliant but quiet junior engineer, a leader can use amplification to bring their ideas to the forefront. 'That's an interesting point, David. Can you expand on that for us?' It's a tool for inclusion, period. It's about making sure the best ideas win, no matter who they come from.

Nova: That's the key! The book is full of these little 'patches.' Small, tactical interventions. For instance, if you're in a meeting and you see a female colleague being interrupted, you can jump in and say, 'Hang on, I'd like to hear Sarah finish her thought.' Or if you see a woman being mistaken for a note-taker, you can gently correct the assumption. 'Actually, Jen is our lead data scientist on this project. Bill, could you grab the whiteboard marker?' You use your status and privilege to subtly correct and re-center the group.

Simons: You're essentially acting as a real-time moderator for the human interaction layer. You're debugging the conversation as it happens. This completely reframes the role of an ally. It's not about being a passive supporter who just agrees that sexism is bad. It's about being an active system administrator for your team's culture.

Nova: A system administrator for culture. I think Jessica Bennett would love that. It's about taking responsibility for the health of the system.

Nova: So, when we look at it this way, 'Feminist Fight Club' is less about fighting and more about engineering a better, more robust workplace. We've seen how subtle sexism acts as a dangerous 'glitch' that hurts everyone's performance by creating a cognitive tax and discouraging contribution.

Simons: Exactly. And we've seen that there are concrete, systemic 'patches'—like the Amplification strategy—that leaders can deploy to fix it. It's about moving from being a passive bystander to being an active architect of an inclusive, and therefore more innovative, culture. It's not about blame; it's about responsibility.

Nova: So for all the leaders listening, especially our male allies who are passionate about building the absolute best teams possible, what's the one thing they should take away from this conversation?

Simons: Here's the takeaway. Don't just read the book or agree with the ideas. Apply them. In your very next team meeting—whether it's a daily stand-up or a major strategic review—run a quiet diagnostic in your own head. For the first ten minutes, just observe. Who's speaking? Who's getting interrupted? Whose ideas are being amplified naturally, and whose are being dropped into a void?

Nova: Just collect the data.

Simons: Just collect the data. You're a product manager, you're an engineer, you're a leader. You believe in data. Don't assume your team is a perfect meritocracy. Test that hypothesis. Once you see the pattern—and you will almost certainly see a pattern—you'll know exactly where to apply the patch.

Nova: And then you can start amplifying.

Simons: Then you start amplifying. Your job as a leader isn't just to have the vision; it's to make sure every brilliant voice on your team is heard, valued, and credited on the way to achieving it. That's how you fix the glitch. That's how you build a team that truly performs.