Episode 164: Hard Conversations

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Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

This time, data shows a lot of women are dropping out of the workforce due to the pressures of Covid. It’s not surprising. And yet…

“When we start to de-prioritize our careers and prioritize a partner’s career there’s this inherent message of my career, my identity, my desire, less important.”

 Coming up, a business owner falls into that exact trap – then pulls herself out.

So before we get into the show I just want to say i really hope these shows on what’s happening to women’s careers right now are helpful – that has always been the aim of this podcast ever since I started it 8 years ago. And I know we are all individuals and different people are going through different things at the moment – last time the show focused on two women without kids because I think that point of view gets left out quite a lot with all the focus on family wellbeing. But you can also be single without kids and again if that’s you you’re probably having a different experience of these weird times than everyone else. I want to get in as many perspectives as possible, so if you feel something about the current women and work situation isn’t being covered and especially if you’d like to contribute to the show yourself, get in touch with me, I’d love to hear from you.

In this episode we’re back to the topic of partners. And I know from my listeners that plenty of you have great husbands and boyfriends who really are just as enmeshed in the work/life balance – it really is equal. But that’s not everybody.

The latest US jobs report show many more women than men left the workforce in September – 4 times as many – it’s data that reflects what we’ve already talked about on the show. That a good number of women have decided the pandemic juggle is just too demanding. They’re relying on a partner’s income to see them through while they manage the home front.

My guest this week is Rachel Garrett. She’s a coach who specializes in helping women with career transitions and getting what they want in the workplace. She featured in one of those shows I did in 2019 on the coaching industry.

And I approached her several weeks ago because I had begun to think: women are the majority of people who hire coaches and the majority OF coaches…as a sex they’re busier than ever before so you’d think they’d have less time to focus on career stuff. At the same time we’re in period of huge career upheaval for a lot of people. So maybe the coaching business is doing great?

It turns out Rachel has lived both sides of this. When Covid hit, she’d been doing well – working with corporate clients and individuals both in New York City where she lives and by Zoom in different parts of the country.

Then, in March…

“People who were about to sign on said you know what, let me come back to you. I can’t focus on this. And then some of the people I was working with, we continued to work together for a little while, but they were just so overwhelmed by what they were dealing with on a day to day with their kids and filling in all the gaps there that many of them said, can we take a pause, can we take a break? I did that and I was pretty focused on some of this corporate work but there was a moment in May where I said to my husband, you know what, I’m down to one private client, and she has Covid.”

But there was something else going on too. It wasn’t just that her clients had disappeared. Rachel wasn’t hustling the way she usually did to bring in new business.  

She and her husband have daughters who are 9 and 12 and from mid-March, they were at home.

AM-T: “What happened to you in March and April, did you find yourself falling into the same gender traps that other people have?”

“I absolutely did, and it wasn’t something my partner asked me to do, it was something I took on myself, I said, well I need to be the one helping with the school and getting them on Zooms and helping with the technology issues we were having, I need to be the one to make sure my elderly uncle is safe in his assisted living, and I need to be the one who is figuring out how this is going to work. So I was reaching out less about my business, I was writing less and I was in the habit of writing weekly, I didn’t know what to write about, I felt very stuck.”

What could she advise her usual clientele when it felt like the bottom was falling out of all of their worlds? Most of her clients are married with kids. Childcare was suddenly unavailable – unless you had a live-in nanny.

And Rachel noticed one thing right at the start of the pandemic when so many of us were sent home…

“A lot of the male partners, their employers were not responding to the fact that these men were parents. There was the expectation that women would get a little more flexibility and fill in the gaps. Whereas the men were expected to, just, you know, 7.30 to 7 still, and great, now there’s no commute, we can have them for more time.”

This same thing was happening in her own house. Rachel’s husband works in consulting. Normally he works out of an office in Manhattan – pretty long hours. She works in an office at home. But when the pandemic kicked in…

“I gave my husband the home office for the full day, he was on calls, I was crunched on my bed doing these client sessions where we were talking about really traumatic things. And there was this moment where I said, this has to shift - as someone who takes a stand for women’s careers and for women prioritizing their careers, I am not prioritizing my business right now.”

So she took a step back and really thought about why she wasn’t taking her own advice during lockdown.

“I realized that I was getting these subtle messages from the media, I was always the one the school reached out to, and it was, I’m the one who always has to be in charge. And if I’m a good mom right now to my girls I have to really be present for their every need and their every emotional need.”  

She thought about that and how she’d fallen into the same trap she would usually advise other women to avoid – putting everyone else ahead of themselves. But the pandemic had turned things upside down. It was easy to revert to stereotypes.

At this point Rachel had to think through what part was she playing in this, and what part was he playing? Yes, she was bent into a pretzel on their bed doing her work while he made his calls out of a comfortable home office…he was enabling this situation, but she hadn’t asked for anything different. So she launched a series of conversations… 

“I need a better work situation, you know, what’s it gonna look like? Looking at desks, and looking at ways I could close a door, and setting better boundaries with the girls, and asking them to do more. And my girls are at an age where that’s really possible.”

Having these discussions has made a big difference. One tricky area was screen time. Her husband was worried the kids were spending too much time on screens during lockdown. And Rachel’s like, well…yes…and their screen time allows some of MY work time.

“And I had to put it out there, I was like, ‘they’re healthy, they’re emotionally well, they have what they need. During a pandemic if they have a little extra screen time so I have more time to focus while we can’t bring in a babysitter, that may be what we need to do’, and there were some negotiations there.”

And as she reclaimed her time, she began to re-focus her business on helping women get what they want from their career during the pandemic. On clarifying their needs, particularly as working parents. Her old website copy was replaced with new copy that directly addresses what’s going on now.

She put the time into marketing. And business began to come back.

“It was because in some ways I had a focus and I was speaking directly to where they were. I ended up having one of my best months in July, which was pretty incredible given where I was. And it’s in no small part too that I had childcare during July. I was able to bring in a former sitter safely…and I have almost fulltime childcare for my younger one, where that it was part of what I needed, and I think it’s important to say, because childcare is so critical to women’s career success.”

Without that babysitter, she wouldn’t be doing as well.

So Rachel has found a situation that works for her even as her children continue to attend school from home most days a week.

And to the women who say, look, this is just too hard. Something has to give, and it’s gonna be my job – at least for now. Rachel says this…

“To me the tactics are figure-outable, it’s the fear that is reinforced by a lot of the messaging we hear that we need to be the ones there. For me I think there are ways to help women take baby steps through that, and maybe that’s taking on project work, seeing if you can do something part time…”

She tells women who really want to leave, keep a toe in, or even a whole foot. She says of course you can come back…

“It’s absolutely doable but it is harder, mostly because of the mindset work and the confidence.”

Now there are different views on the wisdom of taking a career break, and I want to leave Rachel for a minute and go to Avivah Wittenberg-Cox who was here a couple of shows ago.

When I spoke to Avivah last month she too was an advocate of ‘the conversation’ – the discussion between two partners about who does what and how they work together to run things – and not just during a crisis.

“I’ve done a lot of work with dual career couples, saying bring your leadership skills home, work with your spouse as though they were part of the most important team in your life. So vision days, budgeting, future planning, scenario planning, contracting, performance appraisals. Do it, do it with your spouse, all those things are very useful – monthly sit down catch ups one on one, all the things you do automatically with your team at work they don’t do with their team at home, and actually lockdown was a good time to start dong that kind of thing including children in this kind of stuff, so they learn all the complexities of managing through really tough times. It is always a learning opportunity and can I just add that for the women who are stuck in this time and space and parenting, I still believe this generation of women we’re seeing emerge now, will have their best career years later than we expect. So post-50 I think are the peak female career years, esp for women with families who want to spend some time on them, and why not? It’s a different shape of career than the one we’ve been sold and the one that men abide by, right? And that’s OK.”

AM-T: “OK but what about the women who are right now saying, look, I just have to step away from my career right now, my family needs me…”

“Great, to them I’d say don’t swallow the cool aid of oh my God, you’re taking time off, it’s so hard to re-entry, bla bla bla, no it’s not, don’t buy that either, take all the time you want, you can always get back in somehow, I don’t say it’s easy but it’s a lot about the narrative of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And your ability and confidence of selling the package or re-creating yourself on your own, right? I do think entrepreneurship is a good solution but I do hear women so traumatized by the idea of stopping momentarily, which a lot of women in a lot of countries do very naturally right. It’s not the end of the world, as I also keep repeating, longevity means our careers are gonna be 50 years long at least, what you do with a few years in the middle is gonna matter less and less and less.”

So a different view but overlaps with Rachel in that emphasis that re-entering successfully is a lot about confidence and mindset. And it may be harder to marshal that confidence the longer you’re out.   

And if you’re still very much working, you may be so busy on so many fronts you haven’t had the space to sit down and think – to ask, how can I make this easier on myself? Or maybe you have ideas but voicing at work feels somehow inappropriate.

AM-T: “What do you say to the women who may be thinking, well, this isn’t really the time to ask for anything at work because we’re all struggling, my boss is struggling, we’re all just trying to get through this.”

“So I am really passionate about authentic self-promotion at work and so I work with women to plant those seeds often of the value they’re adding, the small ideas they may have come up with that made a big impact. So when you get in the habit of doing more of that the conversation about asking for what you need, shifts. So yes, if the conversations are always about what you need then yeah, I get it. But we need to make sure you’re balancing that out so they’re really seeing the critical value that you’re bringing. And in that conversation it’s seeing, I think people should always be networking and interviewing a couple of times a year so you know what else is out there and you know what your street value is, so it’s good to know you have options, you know what your street value is even in a pandemic, I’m seeing people get out of toxic roles and get into new roles that are a better fit for them because they’re clearer on what they need and they ask for it.”

She doesn’t just help women practice the discussions they might have with managers or during job interviews. She addresses the home front too.

“One of the things I’ve been doing with clients is helping them role play conversations with their partners to really advocate for what they need, and most often the male partners are coming from a really good, loving, equitable place but they don’t see the things that we see and so it’s on us to raise it and have the conversations, which are hard, but important if you want to keep that career going so you can create a little space for yourself.”

AM-T: “Well that brings me neatly to my next question because I was gonna ask you what is your husband doing now that he wasn’t in March or April?”

“Yeah, a lot. First of all, he is typically more the cook in our family but I did find his meetings ran longer so I’d just jump in and start doing dinner. Now I just keep my door closed until 6.30. Maybe I’m just checking on emails. And then he ends up going and getting dinner started, so he does pretty much all the cooking, which is great.”

 He’s more aware of all the school stuff too. And when she does get on a Zoom meeting with the kids’ school, and he has a work call, she sees it as a choice – that yes, she wants to be in that meeting.

She knows this is an incredibly challenging time – and that staying ambitious, asking for that promotion – it’s not easy when events are pulling you in so many directions.

But she firmly believes women shouldn’t sideline themselves.

“The key thing is that when we start to de-prioritize our careers and prioritize a partner’s career there’s this inherent message of my career, my identity, my desire, less important. And that first step to regaining that career and stepping out and doing what you want to do is saying no, I have to make the time, I have to make the time to find a job, to think about what I want, I have to ask for what I want. And these things that I want are just as important as what you want.”

Rachel Garrett. I’ll link you to Rachel’s website under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.

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 That’s the Broad Experience for this time. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.