Welcome to the Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success.

I'm Ashley Milne Tite.

This time on the show, what can we learn about attitudes to women in the workplace

from people who have experienced work as both genders?

As a creative director and as a male creative director, I started to notice differences with the way women were treated.

But when I was a woman, I didn't really notice.

And I figured, oh, well, it's probably because I'm junior.

Maybe that's why I'm being treated that way.

Coming up on the broad experience.

Music being treated that way. Coming up on the broad experience. Christian Schilt is a sociology professor at the University of Chicago, and her research focuses

on all things gender-related.

About a decade ago, she began studying how transgender men fare in the workplace,

so that is men who had been born in a female body.

The rest of the world saw them as female, but they had never identified as female.

They'd ended up transitioning, usually in their 20s, 30s or 40s.

Often this meant starting a series of operations and taking hormones as well as dressing like men.

They came back to work presenting as male with a new name and different appearance.

Kristen's book, based on her research, is called Just One of the Guys, Transgender Men and the Persistence of Inequality.

And these guys had fascinating tales to tell of their experiences at work.

They were the same person with the same abilities they had when the outside world saw them as women,

but their workplace experiences were quite different.

First, I asked Kristen why she decided to focus on this particular group to begin with.

...