We are all experiencing a big shift in the way we work. Even prior to the pandemic, more people were working remotely than ever before. Now, 42 percent of the U.S. labor force is working from home full-time, according to new research from Stanford University. Most of the stigmas about working from home have eroded as we all adjust to this new reality. Although there are some who crave a return to office or want their teams to return to the office, I think leaders can and will play an important role in creating flexibility in where we work. I am hoping that in our post-COVID world, we will have a more flexible, work-from-home economy.
I work at a place where most of the staff have been on site at the bedside or in exam rooms caring for patients. But, we still have more than 5,000 people working from home. I also sit on boards that have held all of their meetings remotely for the past 8 months. I could never have imagined this kind of shift. So how do leaders play a role in ensuring that we learn from this new normal and develop new and sustainable work habits?
It starts with modeling the right behaviors and ensuring that you don’t tolerate what I call “AWA (alternative work arrangement) shaming”. I do a combination of AWA and working on site, so that I am visible to those that need to be physically there. I believe that visibility goes a long way towards showing that I value and support their work. At the same time, I am trying to ensure that our leaders get much more comfortable with the idea that oftentimes their teams are more productive at home.
I practice and get comfortable with my new normal. When I can, I take walks if I have a break during the day. Clearing my head is really important and gives me the opportunity to think and act more purposefully. Until recently, I would have never built that time into my day. I have also been trying to create some boundaries when I work at home. When you are working from home, it is easy to start working from the time you open your eyes until bedtime. I needed to stop that behavior by putting boundaries around my work time and I needed to express that to my leadership team.
Now that 90% of my closet — the part that comprises my business attire — has been dormant for many months, I have gotten more comfortable with “dressing down”. In the past, I was much more formal at work and hence created a more formal dress code atmosphere with the people around me. That will change now that I have gotten more comfortable with a relaxed business attire at home and in the office. Today I actually wore black jeans and a cardigan sweater to work. I would have never done that in the past but I am committed to creating a new, more comfortable trend.
I do miss being able to grab a tea with a colleague or go to a happy hour networking event after work. But, virtual happy hours and cooking demonstrations have become a new evening event for me. While it is not the same as in-person connections, it is a way to meet our deep need for human connection during this isolating time.
My husband and I often remark about how lucky we are that our kids are grown and we are not homeschooling them while working from home. I’m fortunate to have a living situation that allows me to work from home successfully, but I know a lot of people who don’t have that same luxury of privacy or a designated workspace at home. I have seen some of my colleagues get very creative. One works from his garage to give him space from his children who are attending school virtually. I do worry about the long-term effects caused by the disparity in home offices, and women are disproportionately affected due to child care responsibilities.
The separation between our work and personal lives can be hard to distinguish right now, so setting boundaries anyway we can is imperative to our success and wellbeing. I am committed to making sure that more flexible working arrangements are sustainable in the future. In the meantime, we are all learning as we go and doing our best to model an “it’s okay to work from home” mindset with our teams.
This week, I was reviewing a few important projects with one of my team members, when I asked about two of the women who had been leading the work. My colleague shared with me that both of the women were on voluntary furlough so that they could care for their young children due to childcare provider closures from the pandemic. She told me about a third high-potential woman who is struggling to home school her children now that their school went back to remote learning. Later that same day, I was talking to an employee who told me that she needed to reduce her hours in order to help her daughter with remote learning. I was crestfallen to hear these stories for two reasons. One, I came to the conclusion that at my organization, we are losing the talent of these young women and two, what does this say about the future of women in the workplace?
After doing a bit of research, I realized the situation we are seeing at my organization is not anecdotal. In September alone, almost 900,000 women dropped out of the workforce in the U.S. According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress (of these, 324,000 were Latinas and 58,000 were Black women.) Millennial mothers are nearly three times more likely than millennial fathers to report being unable to work due to a school or childcare closure from the pandemic. While this massive exit from the job market by young mothers is shocking, this statistic is not a product of the pandemic alone. It represents the intersection of many complex issues.
For many decades, we’ve focused on the progress women have made in narrowing the wage gap, advancing their careers while also having children and generally, “having it all.” But when you really talk to young women who are doing this, they still feel like they’re walking a tightrope and could fall off at any moment. Women are still responsible for the majority of childcare and household duties, as study after study continues to show. Despite being highly educated and represented in the workforce at unprecedented levels, Millennial women are making less than Gen X women. This is in part, due to entering the workforce during the largest economic downtown since the Great Depression. According to the Atlantic, “The generation unlucky enough to enter the labor market in a recession suffers “significant” earnings losses that take years and years to rebound, studies show, something that hard data now backs up.”
The verdict is that this resulted in a full decade of lost wages for this generation of women.
As leaders, it’s important to recognize that what working mother’s feel did not happen overnight. In 2018, just 28% of mothers with children under 18 said that working full time was ideal (according to the Institute for Family Studies). While I worry deeply about the long term effects of this current crisis for our young working mothers, I am also more committed than ever to supporting the conditions that lead to bringing them back in enthusiastically. This means advocating for changes in how we fund childcare and childcare workers, continuing to look for ways to close the wage gap between not just men and women, but also between women of color, millennial women and older generations, and continuing to push organizations to think about how they support parents to navigate this very complex issue.
As someone who takes goal-setting seriously, I enjoy looking back on the year, assessing progress I’ve made and looking ahead to all that I still want to do. While long lists of New Year’s resolutions often set you up for failure, I prefer to focus on one professional and one personal goal for the next year. I’m sharing mine below, but I’d also love to hear from you. Reading your comments helps me learn what’s important to you, and to get new ideas for topics to cover on this blog.
My 2020 Goals:
Personal: Take a few minutes each day to meditate.
Professional: Double my efforts to make connections with and listen to front-line staff.
My Favorite Posts from 2019:
Knowing Your Bandwidth
I began thinking about this post a few weeks ago, on a typical Sunday evening. My husband Lou and I had been traveling and we’d just returned home. I intended to use the evening to get the kitchen ready for our remodel that was about to begin, pack up everything that needed to be moved, complete the rest of my New Years cards and get ready for the week ahead. As I began this work, he became frustrated; “Madeline, you have an endless supply of bandwidth, and you have to remember that I do not.” READ MORE
2. The Upside of Vulnerability
We live in a culture with an ever-increasing focus on perfection. Whether it’s at home or in the workplace, we put so much pressure on ourselves to do everything, and do it perfectly. At work, the idea of always being over-prepared, with no question you can’t answer and nothing you haven’t thought of is likely appealing. However, this masks one of our most powerful tools as a leader – vulnerability. READ MORE
3. Developing Our Successors, Millennial Women in the Workplace
I am passionate about sharing advice for young women looking to advance their careers, especially for those looking towards the C-Suite. I offer suggestions on everything from taking stretch assignments and negotiating raises, to adjusting bad speech habits and dressing like a leader. However, I sometimes wonder if we’re expecting younger generations to conform to our workplace norms at the expense of truly letting their unique priorities and values shine through? READ MORE
4. Unlearning the Lessons of Charm School
There is nothing more rejuvenating than spending an evening out with close female friends. The camaraderie, support and laughter that accompanies these types of friendships is, in my opinion, an essential part of mental health. I recently had dinner with my two closest friends; women I can share anything and everything with, and with whom I can truly be myself. We talk about our common experience of having our children get married and laugh about how men (and specifically, our husbands!) need to find “man friends” (why do women seem to be so much better at recognizing the essential nature of supportive friendships!?) READ
5. Developing Helping Relationships, Making the Most of Your Networks
With the growth of social media platforms such as LinkedIn and endless other networking groups, we’ve seen a significant increase in our personal and professional networks. Just think about your connections. Now, think about how many of those people you actually know. How many of them could you help you advance your career or make a meaningful business connections? How many of them could you truly ask for a favor or an introduction? Probably not many. I think it’s important to learn how to develop more “surface-level relationships” into more meaningful relationships that can help us meet our personal and professional goals. READ MORE
Wishing you all a happy and healthy 2020 – please leave me a comment below and tell me what you’d like to read on the blog on the next year.
I know first-hand the demands that motherhood places on all women, and the unique challenges it presents to women who work outside the home. I returned to my career as a nurse just six weeks after the birth of my first child, but on a part-time basis. With my second child, I also returned to work with a reduced schedule and with my third, returned immediately to full time. In all instances, I felt rushed to jump back in before I was ready. Far too often women feel that they must choose between successful careers and motherhood, and either sacrifice time with their young children or drop out of the workforce entirely.
According to the Harvard Business Review, 43% of highly-qualified women with children are leaving careers or taking a career break. In another recent story by The New York Times,The Costs of Motherhood Are Rising, and Catching Women Off Guard, the author notes that despite earning more college degrees than men, entering jobs previously closed to them and delaying marriage and childbirth, women age 25 to 54 who work is about the same as it was in 1995. To me, this all points to an urgent need to make the balancing act more achievable as well as make sure we’re not penalizing women for stepping out for a time.
I recently sat down with CHOP’s AVP of Board Relations and my Chief of Staff, Ellen Dean, to discuss her experience of leaving the workforce, twice. Below is a summary of our conversation.
MB: What drove your decision to leave the workplace for a time? Did you intend on returning?
ED: When I first left the workforce, my children were three-and-a-half and one. My husband was traveling a lot for his job and I was feeling extremely overwhelmed trying to balance work and motherhood. There were very few female mentors for me at the firm where I worked after law school, and certainly none in leadership roles. And there was most definitely no option for part time or flexible work arrangements. So seeing all that made it very hard for me to understand how I could even begin to think about juggling that type of career and a family. Iknew in my heart that I had reached a juncture when I had to make a decision. The choice that was right for me at the time, for a variety of reasons, was to step away and focus on my family. I was very fortunate that my husband fully supported that decision and that he was willing to shoulder the burden of supporting us financially. I always intended to go back to work when the timing was right for everyone, which I eventually did when the kids were a bit older. When my kids were in high school I again started to feel the tug of not being able to adequately juggle everything. At that point I was in a very demanding and consuming full time + job that left me with little energy or time to really focus on my family. I was desperately afraid that I was going to blink and realize that I had missed important milestones in their lives and that I would regret not having been more present with them. I again made the decision to step away for a while – but I always intended to return to work when my youngest child left for college.
MB: What were some of your fears leading up to that decision? Was it clear-cut?
ED:I think my fears were the same ones that all women contemplating this type of decision feel. I worried about the impact of losing our second income, about not feeling fulfilled being at home, about not having enough stimulating adult interactions and a clear routine, about what my friends and family would think about my choice, and about not being able to get another job when I was ready to jump back in. In both instances my decisions were not clear-cut and took a lot of soul searching and mental back and forth before I could really articulate what I wanted to do and why.
MB: Did you find it difficult to re-enter the workplace?
ED: Despite all of my fear and anxiety about finding a way back in, re-entering not once, but twice, was much easier than I expected it to be. Having a large network of people to reach out to was extremely helpful in terms of identifying opportunities and opening doors for constructive conversations. However, when I told people that my intention was to go back to work as soon as my youngest left for college, many of them laughed and said “good luck making that happen” or “things don’t always work like that you know.” I started networking and talking to people about nine months before my daughter was going to leave for college and I went into my job search with the benefit of having had time to clearly define what I was looking for and enough self-confidence to know that I could bring value to an organization and that I wasn’t going to settle for something that didn’t really excite me. I got my offer from CHOP and started my job two months before she left for school!
MB: How does it feel to be back in the workplace? What did you learn?
ED: I am thrilled to be back at work and I am extremely grateful that I didn’t just get any job – I truly got my dream job. As an employee I always gave 100% to whatever I was doing, but it feels very different to me now that I am not trying to juggle different priorities. I think the most important thing I learned is that there isn’t one path for everyone. We all have to make decisions that work best for us and, as women, we need to be supportive of each other. While Sheryl Sandberg encourages everyone to Lean In, we also need to understand and accept that Leaning Out is an equally acceptable option for many of us. I also learned that it is possible to lean back in once you’ve leaned out for a while.
MB: What would be your advice to women who are mid-career, but are feeling the pressures of work-life balance and might be interested in taking a pause to prioritize other things?
ED: The first thing I would suggest is that they speak with their employer to see if any options exist for alternative work arrangements that might provide more flexibility. While I know that this won’t always be possible, I think that there are a lot more employers who are open to these arrangements than there were even 10 or 15 years ago. If a flexible schedule isn’t an option, or if someone is committed to taking a pause like I did, then I would encourage them to find ways to continue developing their skill sets while they are out of the workforce – through volunteering, working on projects, or consulting. And, lastly, I would highly recommend that they keep in touch with their co-workers, bosses, mentors and other professional connections so that they have a network of people to reach out to when they are ready to go back to work.
Thank you to Ellen for taking the time to share her story. How do you think we can better support women so that taking a break isn’t a career death sentence? How should we advise women to be strategic in how they take that time off, so that returning isn’t impossible and that they’re not unemployable? One thing is for certain – having more women in leadership positions will go a long way in pushing this conversation forward.
With one in four women having to return to work less than 10 days after giving birth, we have a real problem in this country when it comes to giving women the time they need to recover and bond with their babies. However, even for those who are able to take 12 weeks off, there are huge challenges that are often not recognized by many employers. Sometimes referred to as the “fifth trimester,” the first three months of work after a maternity leave has the potential to make or break a woman’s commitment to her career.
I knew I wanted to keep working after having my daughter. However, when the time came to get back to work, it was extraordinarily difficult. I was not getting any sleep, my brain felt in a fog and I worried over her childcare. During days I was on the road, I pumped in my car between meetings (not uncommon – my sister-in-law uses her 1.5 hour commute to pump each day!). I felt overwhelmed by the demands of running a start-up business and learning how to be a mother, and I worried that maybe I couldn’t handle doing both (of course, this is a privileged viewpoint to even be able to consider what that would look like.) I discovered after talking with so many of my peers that this anxiety, fear and stress over learning to balance both new motherhood and career was nearly universal.
Excerpt from The Costs of Motherhood Are Rising, and Catching Women Off Guard in the NYT written by Claire Cain Miller.
A recent New York Times article called, “The Costs of Motherhood Are Rising, and Catching Women Off Guard,” discusses new research showing college-educated women in particular underestimate the demands of parenthood and the difficulties of combining working and parenting. It states, “The researchers documented a sharp decline in employment for women after their first children were born.” Additionally, it shows that for most of these women, stopping work was unplanned. I began to wonder if employers were aware of these challenges, and what companies are doing to help employees transition during the “fifth trimester.”
One of my closest friends had been back at work for about three months after a 12-week maternity leave, when she confided in me how miserable she was. She even considered quitting, or at least looking for something part-time, despite having worked hard for so many years to get where she was in her career. She eventually decided to approach her employer and laid out what she needed: more money, to leave an hour early a few days per week, and the ability to work from home on occasion. Happily, they gave her everything she asked for, and avoided losing a high-performing employee.
Two months postpartum. Hazel’s first business meeting with Gram!
Realizing just how common this struggle is, I asked Madeline (my mother-in-law & someone who employs over 13,000 people) what advice she would give as an employer to women struggling in their return to work. She advised, “Don’t hold it in. Rather than feel frustrated and resentful, I’d prefer for someone come and talk to me about it, especially if they are considering leaving their position. If they’re the right person for the job they have, I’d rather have half of them than none of them. I’d tell someone to come to their boss with a plan for what they need, how can they can make that work for the organization, and set a time to revisit the plan. If the answer is no, consider your options and decide if that’s the right place for you to work.”
If businesses can be more open to this type of a dialogue with their female employees during this life-changing, but temporary, phase, perhaps we can see more women continue on in their roles.
Amy Bell Hou is a writer, early childhood educator and mother living in Oakland. She is a co-founder of Drop Leaf Press, a women-operated poetry press based in San Francisco.
March 8 is International Women’s Day.
It’s also a day that multiple organizations for the advancement of women are calling for a women’s general labor strike. They’re calling it “A Day Without a Woman.”
The purpose of the strike is to shine a spotlight on “the enormous value that women of all backgrounds add to our socio-economic system–while receiving lower wages and experiencing greater inequities, vulnerability to discrimination, sexual harassment, and job insecurity.”
Women are a vital, often undervalued sector of the labor force in the world. At our paid jobs, women typically earn less than men in the same roles and suffer career setbacks if they decide to have children. Women also typically take the lion’s share of domestic work, like cooking, cleaning, and child care. Such unpaid labor is vital to a functioning economy and ought to be recognized as such, yet motherhood remains the number one predictor of poverty.
At Heels of Success, we endeavor to support all women as they balance careers, partnerships, children, and their own growth as individuals. We hope our posts can help bring more women into positions of leadership, because we believe the goal of widespread gender parity in the American workplace — nothing less than a major cultural shift — is only going to come when women have an equal number of seats at the table where decisions are made.
As such, we stand in solidarity with women, trans people and their allies for A Day Without a Woman.
While many women, particularly those in the fields of healthcare, childcare, and elderly care may not be able to strike, there are still ways for women and their partners to show solidarity.
The Women’s March organizers have set up a good FAQ and resources page, which will guide you through ways to show your support. Read the full International Women’s Strike platform here.
Summary:
Avoid shopping on that day, unless the business is local or women-owned.
Can’t strike? Wear red to show your support.
Men can participate by bringing up equal pay and paid family leave with decision-makers at work, leaning into housework and care work for children, and reflecting on their own expectations of women co-workers.
