Episode 161: What is Happening to Women's Careers Right Now?
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time…as this year began a lot of people were making career plans…then life as we knew it came to a halt.
“Maybe they wanted a career change, maybe they wanted that big promotion, and it’s not so much those career questions went away, it’s as if they exist in a different plane in time. And we’re not existing in that plane right now.”
Coming up, the first of a few shows on what is happening to women’s careers right now and where we might go from here.
This has been an utterly weird year in so many ways and it’s not over yet. There’s the sadness and grief of Covid – for all the people who have died, and for the end of normal life, which happened so suddenly. There’s the ongoing uncertainty about what life will look like when this pandemic does – finally – come to an end. There’s the economic fallout which is happening all around us.
And in the midst of such huge considerations it’s not surprising a lot of women are putting ambitions to one side as they focus on the day to day.
My guest this week has a bird’s eye view on the world of work. Jessi Hempel is a longtime magazine journalist who is now at Linked In – in fact she hosts their weekly podcast on work, Hello Monday. We spoke a couple of weeks ago just as summer was coming to an end.
AM-T: “You have this incredible window on to working people’s feelings and what’s happening to them right now. What do you know about what women in particular are going through at the moment, whether that’s from your own show, from the feedback you get from listeners, or from LinkedIn itself and messages and forums that are posted on LinkedIn?”
“You know that’s the million dollar question and I think a lot of people, from a lot of places in the world, not just the US, many of our listeners – our show is about the future of work, where careers are going and how we navigate proactively so we have interesting work that pays well in the future. That is the goal. Before the pandemic that was a theoretical question, we did a lot of thinking way out, where’s this going in 5 years? And then the pandemic happened and suddenly in a moment we all had to figure out how to work differently. And honestly for most of our listeners, male and female, but really for women, it was an emergency that has forced many of our listeners to come to terms with where their career fits in their life, to figure out newly the balance between their work and their other responsibilities, to figure out what to prioritize right now and how to prioritize what you have to prioritize right now without losing sight of what you want for your career.”
And for many women, their priorities have shifted. We know this anecdotally and there are some studies that back this up – women have taken on more of the home stuff during this pandemic. That means overseeing their children’s online schooling in addition to doing their own jobs.
If you live in the U.S., your kids may not have gone back to school in person in the last few weeks. Or if they have, they’re just going a day or two a week – and who knows how long that’ll last?
For lots of professional women, including some of Jessi’s listeners, this crisis has made them re-think their commitment to their jobs.
Jessi has a listener in Florida called Mirna.
“And she wrote to me and said, ‘I’m a lawyer, a happy lawyer, I’ve figured out over time how to do my work, sometimes part-time and from home, and spring was terrible for my kids…telling my elementary school kids to spend hours on Zoom feels hopeless. And as I go into the fall I’m thinking about quitting my job. It’s not something I ever thought I wanted to do, I like my career, but my kids, they need this.’ And honestly that voice, that voice I hear over and over again in different ways.”
And we’ll talk more about the power of that voice in an upcoming show.
Now of course if you CAN leave your job, if you don’t need two incomes to support yourselves, you’re one of the lucky ones.
One of my listeners told me a similar story to Mirna’s but the gender roles are flipped. Her husband lost his job early in the pandemic – and with it, their health insurance. She has her own consulting business and she loves it, but she quickly landed a full-time job – with benefits – to support their family. She says he isn’t even going to look for another job until the pandemic is over – because their two young kids are doing online schooling full-time for the foreseeable future and she says someone has to manage that. She says she knows they’re fortunate, but she adds ‘we’ve turned our careers upside down because of this.’
But if you have kids and you’re not partnered, this situation is far tougher. Jessi has corresponded with another of her listeners, a nurse on the west coast – where life is even more complicated because of the wildfires raging there. She has a seven-year-old son and she used to have pretty decent childcare coverage – her parents would help out a lot, some of her friends would help. Then the virus came and suddenly her parents were out as babysitters.
And because of her job as a nurse, even friends were reluctant to care for her son for fear they might be exposed to the virus.
“What do you do? Just what do you do? Well you piece it together week by week, and it should be said for people listening who may be in this position, this is so exhausting and this is the way so many parents and caretakers are making the pandemic work. You get a few weeks leave from your office and score, you’re good for a few weeks, then you find a summer camp for your kid and score, you’re good for another week. Then you can take your vacation and you’ve got another week. And you keep piecing it together like that. And I’ve just talked to this woman in the last two weeks and she was trying to navigate the back to school piece, which is SO complicated no matter where you are in the country. The child’s school is going back on a hybrid model, and the day will start 20 minutes after her work is supposed to start, then the child will only go 2 days a week so what do you do for the other 3 days…and school will start in less than a month and she doesn’t have answers to these questions. I think it’s impossible to really understand the weight of the complexity of those thoughts as you work through them…just how much psychological time it takes to be in that unknown trying to figure it out day after day. That’s for single parents but also for any caretakers.”
It’s a depressing conclusion to come to, that women’s careers seem to be suffering more than men’s during all this…but at least on the surface it does seem like that’s happening.
“Yeah, I think that’s true. I also think this is very much a gendered issue and it’s also an economic issue. And it can at times be hard to split those things. I’ll give you a very personal example. I’m married to a woman and we have a two-year-old, actually he’s one and a half. And when we got ready to have a kid we sat down and said how are we gonna do this? We live in NYC, it’s expensive. We realized we needed two incomes in our family but we also needed for one parent to be the dominant parent to make sure the bills got paid every month, and one partner to be the dominant parent to make sure the child got to every doctor’s appointment. And we were going to have to divide the labor. So we’ve done that. Over course of the pandemic my wife’s career has suffered and mine has not. You see that playing out in same-gendered families the same way you do in differently gendered families.”
AM-T: What industry is your wife in, what kind of thing does she do?
“Oh goodness, she’s the director of a preschool, and heavy sighs, because it’s a really, really difficult time to be in the business of child-care.”
AM-T: “This makes me think about my next question which is, is anyone rising in their career right now, is anyone getting promoted? Is that even happening?”
“Yeah in fact it’s totally happening and I hear from a lot of those folks too. I hear from folks getting jobs which is not the story line you expect, right, we’re in a moment where it feels like most people around us are furloughed, laid off, but in fact lots of places are hiring.”
She recently talked to a startup CEO who’d laid off a bunch of staff in May, but now he was hiring again.
“Another listener, longtime listener, she was offered a job at McKinsey the first week in April, she started in May. So there are two things I’ll say about the job market as it exists right now. It is porous and weird and changing all the time and up and down and in moments like that, there are opportunities. So people who are trying to get up one rung on the ladder, that’s still there for you. And then once you’re at the job, it’s a weird thing about getting ahead right now. People for whom there are not a lot of other things going on in their lives have had more time to devote to the actual work of work, like so much time, right? And that has led to some people spiraling ahead.”
We will talk more about that in a minute.
So if you don’t have kids it’s likely that as Jessi just said, you have had more time, more headspace, to devote to your career since the pandemic started.
She says her own team at LinkedIn is one example of this. But just to backtrack for a minute… everything shut down in mid-March she and her wife realized…we can’t expect our nanny to come to our house every day. Like so many others, they had to work out how to juggle in their case a toddler, with two jobs.
“And over the next couple of weeks I never took any days off from my job, and luckily LinkedIn is an incredibly supportive company, my manager was great about saying just do what you can do right now. But at same time as I did my job I packed as much of my life as I could into my Subaru, my wife and I drove 15 hours to her parents’ house in Mississippi. We figured out how to live in her childhood bedroom upstairs, we figured out how to adjust my son to a new routine, still doing the job, right, just early in the mornings and late at night, and it took about a month and finally I was like I got it, I feel normal again.
And I looked up and all my colleagues without kids, suddenly they weren’t just doing the job, they were doing the job plus, they were doing all the extra things that were allowing them pilot into this moment, and take advantage of all the trends going on and move our product forward at work. And I was like oh man, it wasn’t enough for me to figure out how to do this, I’m competing with people who don’t have this set of responsibilities who just bested me, and I didn’t see it coming. And I don’t know, I found that really frustrating.”
And again, I’ve heard anecdotes along these lines. They’ve often come from female academics. These women say their career progress has stalled during the pandemic because focusing on their research is pretty much impossible when they have young children hanging off their chairs…while they say many male professors have been submitting papers as if nothing were happening.
As one of you pointed out on Facebook, this does make you wonder what’s going to happen at annual review time, when some people have just been more able than others to get work done.
And talking of children’s antics, if you DO have small children, one thing you probably hope to avoid but don’t always is having your offspring appear on your screen, sit on your lap, when you’re in a meeting. Jessi says even though her colleagues make all the right noises, she hates it when this happens and says it really is a last resort…
“So you put your one-and-a-half year old on your knee…if I have Jude on my knee it’s because everything else has failed us. It’s because he did not eat breakfast, it’s because his caretaker did not arrive on time, it’s because my wife is on an even more important call and it’s because he’s mad. And my colleagues who don’t have children, they want to be supportive so they say cute things about him and that is the right way to be supportive…but the thing they don’t understand, it’s like the secret code that goes with that experience of the parents, is that this is awful. That this cute child sitting on my knee is making this meeting impossible for me to be present at.”
She says she can’t pay attention more than 20% to the meeting, or 20% to her kid. The rest of her mind is taken up with worrying about being both a bad parent and a bad employee. But at least she has a supportive boss.
“Yeah, here’s the thing about Dan, my manager Dan Roth, who runs the news team at LinkedIn. He has three sons. He’s also trying to keep his 3 sons engaged over the course of this crazy summer. When school was in session he was responsible for some of the school day…on the regular his sons make appearances in Zoom, they just show up, they want his attention, they want to play video games, he sometimes has to stop a second, deal with them, turn his volume back on, I know it’s as aggravating for him as it is for me when my son is on my knee, but it is because he does that, that I even feel safe talking to you publicly about how hard this is, like it is that modeling. We shouldn’t give him extra credit for being a man on this one, but we should give him extra credit for being a manager that models being a great parent.”
And I should have asked Jessi whether she had any inkling into her boss’s level of guilt – or not – when he wasn’t paying attention to his home-bound kids. Because she has a LOT – and yes she’s a relatively new mother, but she’s wrestling with this constantly.
“It’s amazing how at the same time I can feel like an awful mom because my one and a half year old has been watching 2 hours of Sesame Street, and that is more screen time than he ever had in his entire first year of life, and also an awful colleague because I haven’t read the notes in preparation for a meeting. But at the end of the day…if I have to choose being good at one of those things instead of being bad at both, I will choose my child. And I will do it to the point of bankruptcy, I’ll do it till I can’t not do it. And I don’t want to speak for all women, I want to speak for myself, I didn’t expect that about motherhood and it turned out to be true for me.”
But other people have been forced to make hard decisions because of a parent, rather than a child. More and more of us are taking on this kind of caregiving.
“I know another woman, she’s had to make a similar decision because her mother has Alzheimer’s, she doesn’t have a partner or children, and she got to the point where her mother needed fulltime care. And we have seen how the pandemic has decimated facilities for older people. And she had to make the difficult choice, do I stop out of my career for a while to care for my mother? And she’s done that.”
In a world that feels so abnormal, lots of plans don’t seem to fit any more. Our horizons have shrunk.
“People began the year thinking about the next thing they wanted to do…maybe they wanted a career change, maybe they wanted that big promotion, maybe they were on the cusp of finally starting their own company. Then within a week there was a massive swing to safety and security. Now, all of those questions, maybe they haven’t even been murmured since March. Now it’s can I take care of me? Can I take care of my family, of the people who need me? And it’s not so much that those career questions went away, it’s as if they exist in a different plane in time. And we’re not existing in that plane right now. It’s just on pause.”
But will that pause damage women’s progress? I think a lot of us are worried about this.
Maybe it’s too early to tell, but I asked Jessi anyway.
“So as a journalist I will tell you I have no empirical data on the macro trends that might shed light on this. As a woman in the middle of my career and as someone who is ambitious and wants great things for my own career and for women in general in the workplace, I’m terrified. Economic recessions are times when companies pull back on all the hard work they’ve done around diversity and inclusion, all the more so in a year when they’re being pressed to direct all their energy on that front toward people of color, which they should be doing. But often women fall through the cracks in that conversation. Now add to it that many women don’t even have the energy or the attention to focus on that because they’re trying to keep things together at home right now, and yeah, I’m scared.”
That said…Jessi points out there are also some hopeful signs for women who may have lost a job or someone who’s chosen to step out of the workforce to help her family get through this time.
“I think you see women able to see more models of other people who have gone before them, and stopped out and stopped back into the workforce. More coaches and specialists who exist to help them do that, programs, and you see the beginning of, not a playbook, but a sense that this doesn’t have to be getting off the highway but rather taking the pause, and coming back. And the coming back by the way, that’s where I want our podcast Hello Monday as a podcast about the future of work, to really focus its energy, because the truth is, like, there are a lot of things that we can and should be doing right now that are light lift, that are not hard, that set us up for an easier future transition.”
Thanks to Jessi Hempel for being my guest on this show.
You can hear Jessi’s conversation with Mirna – the lawyer in Florida who was close to giving up work for now - in a recent episode of Hello Monday called How to Take a Career Break Without Giving It All Up.
In the next few weeks, we’re going to continue the discussion of what’s going on with our careers right now.
“I realized that I was getting these subtle messages from the media, I was always the one who the school reached out to…and if I’m a good mom to my girls right now I have to be present for their every need and their every emotional need.”
But does she?
And when your organization’s expectations barely change even when everything else has…it can leave a bitter taste in your mouth…
“Work did put a lot of pressure on us to work full-time from home despite the fact nearly everyone had small children at home as well. We’re back in the office now. I still hold a lot of resentment though and they haven’t given us an outlet to talk about it – yet.”
But for some firms, the pandemic is an opportunity to get better…
“Good companies with strong leadership innovate, re-create, leapfrog forward – they’re inventing new ways of working, new definitions of flexibility…”
More perspectives coming up in the weeks ahead.
In the meantime, you can always reach me via Twitter or Facebook or by emailing me at ashley at the broad experience dot com. I’d love to hear from women who don’t have children about how your work experience has been during the last several months. And from men as well – whatever your family situation.
Thanks to all those of you have supported this one-woman show in the past and to those of you who do this every month. You can contribute to the show and make a donation of any size via the support tab at TheBroadExperience.com
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. See you next time.