Anna: Welcome back to the Noyack Experts Series where we deliver practical financial insights from seasoned industry experts. I’m Anna, your producer and host for the day, and today I’m joined by Brigid Schulte to discuss the impact women have had on the workforce. She’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of the best-selling book Overwhelmed. She earned her BA from the University of Portland and MS from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and she spent many years at the Washington Post, and now she’s directing the Better Life Lab at New America. What exactly does that entail, Brigid?
Brigid: At the Better Life Lab, we use journalism and storytelling and research to really try to share how critical work, family, gender, gender equality, and care are to our businesses, to our communities, how important they are in terms of quality of life. We really do a lot to try to make the case how we all need to be paying attention to these things. We need to have really excellent public policies that support women and families. We need to have workplace practices that are performance-based and work for people with care responsibilities and are fair and equitable for people across the gender spectrum. We need the cultural attitudes that can really help all people thrive. That’s what we really work for.
Anna: What are some of the most pivotal moments you can think of over the past 50 or so years that have fundamentally changed the way that women have participated in the American workforce?
Brigid: The first thing to really point out is that women have always worked. Women have always worked. It’s just that they haven’t always been able to be paid for it. Women have not always worked for pay. When you think about all of the work of raising children, caring for home, caring for a home, that is incredibly difficult work. It’s incredibly important work. Number two, women have also worked for pay throughout human history. There was a time in the middle ages that women would brew beer. They were the original brewers. They brewed beer in their homes and that was an important part of keeping their families afloat.
At the turn of the last century, most families lived in agrarian settings or in rural settings. So women always worked on the farm. They always worked, they would have kitchen gardens or they would do things that would help the family survive economically or financially. So that work has always been really important.
Getting to the point that you’re talking about, what’s happened in recent decades. There was a time during the Second World War, there were so many men who were overseas fighting, and there were so many jobs that were open here in the United States that needed filling, that women were encouraged to come to work, that you had big campaigns about Rosie the Riveter, women working in shipyards, doing really what had been considered dangerous work or complicated work that only men could do. Women were doing it and doing it really well. Interesting to note, that was a time we actually had universal childcare because there were so many women working in shipyards that they set up all of these wonderful childcare places that were free, really low cost.
The mothers, they’d send them home with a baked chicken dinner because they knew that the women were working. Then that all shifted when men came home from the war and they needed jobs and gender norms really kicked in. Women, you need to go back home so that the men can take your jobs.
That notion that men worked for pay and worked outside of the home and that men were breadwinners, that’s a very long standing cultural belief that has actually led to policy. There have been times that there’ve been marriage bars, that you couldn’t work if you were a married woman, or that for a time, the only jobs you could have if you were a woman, say in the 50s, after Rosie got sent home. You could only be a teacher or only a nurse or only a secretary. There were bars to you, or it was very difficult. That’s why there were so few women doctors or so few women lawyers.
Then what ended up happening, the ’60s and ’70s were ages of real economic turmoil, real political and social turmoil. You did have the women’s movement saying, “Listen, feminism is just about the personhood of women. We want to be able to have full lives in the public sphere at work and in politics, we want to have a voice, and we also want to be valued for what we do in the private sphere.” At the same time, men were also saying, although this is less concentrated on, men were saying we’re expected to be breadwinners, we’re distant from our families. We also want to have a role at home. We want to be caregivers, too.
There was all this roiling about people being unsatisfied with these very traditional strict lines about what you could do based on your gender. The other thing that was happening is in the ’70s in particular, a lot of good jobs started going overseas. You started losing a lot of those really good Rosie the Riveter jobs, a lot of those really good blue collar jobs that could pay a family wage where one wage was enough to support an entire family.
What’s important to remember is that that was a policy decision. It’s not that wages were so great in the 50s. There was an agreement between policymakers and business leaders and union leaders. The three of them came up and said, we need a family wage. That’s why you had in the 1950s, more families able to survive on one wage, because that was a political decision that was made. But I think it’s also important to point out that that was not all families.
There have always been women who’ve worked, and particularly for women of color, they have had to work. The nostalgic, Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver family, was really only a very small section of the American families anyway.
Anna: Why do you think that that super small sector of American families became the norm in the cultural memory of what the time was like? Why did that small sector become so widespread in the memory?
Brigid: That’s a great question. Stephanie Koontz, who’s a wonderful sociologist and historian, has written a beautiful book called The Way We Never Were that answers that very question. In a nutshell, it’s because the men, frankly, who are in power, in politics, in business, in media, that’s how they were raised. That’s what they knew. That’s what they thought of as quote unquote normal. That became the reality then, the default reality that they were reflecting to everyone else. That became enshrined in public policy.
In the ’70s, you started having all these good jobs going overseas and the economist Heather Boucher has written a fabulous book. All of this working mother stigma started to spring up. Like, oh my God, these terrible, mean, bad, working mothers are abandoning their children and they’re trying to be self-actualized and going off to work and aren’t they horrible? What Heather did that was so important is that she went and looked economically and said, you know what? If women had not gone into the workforce at that point, so many more families would have fallen into poverty.
Because at that point, wages had started to either stagnate or decline, and every family needed a second earner just to keep the same standard of living. That thankfully helped to change that narrative.
What you ended up seeing really because of a couple of factors, the women’s movement certainly, wanting to have full human lives on the one hand, and opening up, pushing open positions that had been barred to women from medicine and law, things that had been very masculine fields on the one hand, but then on the other hand, you had a real need for that second earner just because that policy got broken. The family wage, no longer did you have government and business and unions working together to create good wages, and so wages fell, unions started to lose power, businesses started to really be focused on very short-term shareholder returns every quarter to their shareholders rather than investing in their workers rather than investing in their communities. There was a whole sea change in how the economy functioned that really required that second earner.
The last thing I’ll say about that is that when you think about those changes, women’s lives changed utterly. They changed completely because they were then thrust into paid work in very masculinized workplaces, expected to work like a man, long hours, if they were gonna try to get ahead. Lots of bias, lots of discrimination. We can still talk about that. Still very prevalent, even though it might have gone underground for a while. They were still expected to do all of the unpaid work at home. That was the theme of the first book that I wrote overwhelmed, like, oh my God, there’s not enough hours in the day to do everything you expect me to do.
Women’s lives changed utterly. What didn’t change appreciably was public policy to support it. We still are literally one of the only countries, it’s us in Papua New Guinea and maybe one other teeny tiny nation, that still does not have a paid maternity leave policy. Germany has had one for over 100 years. Everybody else has had one for decades and decades. We have no paid family and medical leave policy. We’ve got some states that have stepped in because that’s nothing short of cruel. We’ve still got about a quarter of mothers who go back to work after two weeks.
Your body is still recovering from childbirth at that point. We still have no, we have among the least amount that we invest in childcare of all the advanced rich economies, which again, you can just see that. We’ve got so many women now being forced out of the workplace now. Why? Because childcare places are shutting down. Why? Because a lot of pandemic aid is running out.
We haven’t changed public policy, we have not appreciably changed workplace cultures. Why are there still men in charge of virtually every single industry, every single business, every single sector? You can’t tell me that there aren’t talented, smart, amazing women out there. There are. Why are they stuck in the middle there? So workplace cultures haven’t changed and our cultural attitudes have not changed. You can see that now in this backlash that we have against DEI and the whole idea that women really should be home and having more babies.
A lot has changed and not enough has changed to make that change.
Anna: When it comes to those things in the modern workforce that have changed, what are some of the ways that women working have changed the ways that we do work in a modern workplace, not just in, oh, there’s women in the workforce now. Has there been any other intricacies of how a workplace functions that have shifted since more women have started to enter these male-dominated fields?
Brigid: You’ve got a whole lot more people who have smarts and skills and ideas and different life experience coming in. There’s all sorts of research that shows products are better because women are a lot of the consumers out there and if you’ve got more women around the table designing products or designing marketing campaigns, you end up with much better products, with much better messages so that it actually has helped businesses that way.
I think it’s really important also not to say, oh, because women are more this, they’re more nurturing or they’re more that, now workplaces are more like that. I think it’s important that we don’t fall back on gender essentialism, that men are strong leaders and women are caring and nurturing. Women are also strong leaders and men are also caring and nurturing.
I think the most important thing that women have done is show that women are amazing and that they can do all sorts of different things amazingly well and that they bring all sorts of ideas and experience and yes, empathy and caring. There are different leadership styles, but I think it’s important not to associate one as feminine and one as masculine, because there are men who are also very empathetic and communicative and want to have more buy-in. There are women who are much more command and control and hierarchical. I think that what women have done is they’ve complicated the narrative and they’ve made it a much more interesting and responsive and exciting and innovative place.
Anna: When it comes to those stereotypes of leadership, you know, women are more caring bosses, men are more structured, how have those stereotypes changed since women have started entering these more male-dominated fields in what we consider the workforce? How have some of those stereotypes always been there?
Brigid: That’s a really great question, Anna. Sadly, a lot of those stereotypes are still very prevalent and still have a lot of power, still hold a lot of sway. There’s a lot of social science research that I think is really valuable and it’s disturbing because it will say, if men ask for a certain salary, they’re more likely to get it. If a woman asks for the same salary, she’s considered like, well, who do you think you are? There are real world impacts of the way that we expect people to act because of their genders.
It shows up then in policies, in the way in your promotions, in whether you get the job and how much you’re paid. Sadly, those notions of men being the strong and decisive leader, that’s what the expectations are for men. There’s research that shows that when, for instance, if they have care responsibilities, either for their kids, or increasingly, what we’re seeing is that men need to care for aging parents because we have an aging society. We’ve got so many more people now in the sandwich generation trying to juggle responsibilities for parents, aging parents, as well as caring for children.
When men do it occasionally, they’re seen as, whoa, what a great dad, oh, what a great son, good on you. They get brownie points for it. But if they do it regularly or say, I need to leave work early every Thursday to pick up my mom for her medical appointment, or I need to coach my kid’s soccer team every Monday. You make it more, you’re open about it and it becomes part of what you regularly do. There’s research that shows that men are punished for that at work, particularly, not just by men, but also by women, by women bosses.
That implicit or invisible bias is very powerful, that we automatically assume men are breadwinners, women are caregivers. On the flip side of that, there was research that showed, if you walked by somebody’s office and they weren’t there, if it was a guy, people automatically assumed, oh, they must be with a client. They were doing something about work. If it was a woman, there was an automatic assumption, oh, she must be off with her kids. Oh, she must be doing something for herself.
Those biases are really real. They’re very present, they’re very prevalent. It’s really important to know about them and to know how to navigate around them. Because it’s like, our brains are just like that. Sadly, our brains are wired to sort things quickly. So it’s easy, oh, men do this, women do this.
That’s why even earlier when you’re saying like, well what have women brought? I’m hesitant to say women brought these particular things because I think we need to move into an era where we recognize our full humanity, that we’re all humans. There’s more ways that men and women are alike than they are different.
The more that we can think about what does the person bring? Is the person suited to this task? The more that we can divorce from our expectations or like, oh, they did this, I didn’t think about that. The more that we can keep asking ourselves questions about our own bias. That’s one of the key reasons why, when we think about, well, how do we change workplaces so that they are fairer? Anything that we can do to set up structures that make hiring fairer, that make recruiting or the way you promote people, the way you do performance evaluations, if you can structure them so that they’re fair and they’re tied to what the task is, the more you’re gonna clean out the noise of confirmation bias or gender bias or race or class bias that you might have.
That’s why even though we’ve got this really awful backlash to DEI, a lot of those programs didn’t really work because they didn’t really create, they didn’t go the next step to create the fair structures. There are all sorts of ways that you can do that. There are good companies that are already doing it. I think that’s what we need to be leaning into is how do we make things fair for all people.
Anna: A lot of people don’t realize how explicit these biases can be. A lot of people, oh, it’s 2025. These are issues of the past. But then you have these studies that are showing, people actually think when they don’t see someone in their office, there are very gendered ways of thinking of where they might be. I think that’s definitely something that people need to not necessarily consciously be aware of all of the time, but at least remember that yes, it is 2025. Yes, we have come a long way in many different aspects, but there’s still a very long way to go.
Brigid: There is, and I think it’s important, like you’re right, we have come a ways. There are women who are at the top of Fortune 500 companies. We have more women in Congress than we’ve ever had before. It’s still like a quarter, so we’re still not at 50%. So we have made progress. I think that that’s important to remember too. It’s like not to just, look, change is slow. It takes time. It’s never linear. You have a couple of steps forward, a couple of steps backward. I think the most important thing is to just keep an open mind, keep learning and keep hoping, keep, I’m always about the long game, so to speak.
What’s the world that we want to create? What’s the world we want to create for us? What’s the world we want to create for our children, for the next generation? Let’s all keep working together on that.
Anna: We touched a little bit on some of the workplace policies that other nations have. We talked about maternity leave specifically and family medical leave that some other nations have to help bring this world into fruition. What are some of the other U.S. workplace policies or lack thereof that have either helped or hindered women’s economic mobility, mobility in the workforce, all of that compared to other nations?
Brigid: That’s a great question. I think the way I like to think about it in a couple of different ways. There’s what people call family-supportive policies and there can be public policies and also workplace practices that really understand that people have lives outside of work. I say family-supportive, and then I define family very broadly. We also have families of one in this country, or anywhere in the world, because people, we’re not robots, at least not yet. So we get sick and we need time to take care of ourselves.
We can get burned out. Families of one are, that’s another really important thing that we need to make time for. When I think about family-supportive, that’s paid family and medical leave. It’s not just maternity leave. We need time to care for ourselves. When you look at the only federal public policy that we have that is ostensibly family-supportive is the Family Medical Leave Act, which was one of the first things that Bill Clinton passed ages ago. It’s unpaid. You can get 12 weeks of unpaid family leave if you’re sick or you’re having a child, if you work for an employer, a large employer, and you’ve been there a year. So it only covers about 60% of the workforce, so not everybody even gets this unpaid work.
But what’s important to look at that is when you look at who’s using it, the majority of people use the Unpaid Family Medical Leave Act to take care of themselves. That’s why I think it’s really important that when we talk about family-supportive policies, we include families of one. That’s one, we need time off when we’re sick to recover. We’ve looked at the pandemic. There are some states that have gone further than the federal government has.
There are some states with paid sick days laws or some cities with paid sick days laws. There’s some states with paid family and medical leave laws, not many, but more, and it’s growing. I think that’s great because the states are our laboratories of democracy. They’re experimenting with all that. We’ve got states who have raised the minimum wage. The federal government hasn’t raised it since 2009. The federal minimum wage is still $7.20 some cents an hour, that’s just unconscionable.
That’s what I think about in terms of how do we create, how do we make work actually pay off so that your hard work, you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor and that’s across the gender spectrum. I mean, why do you think there’s so much frustration and anger among the electorate right now? ‘Cause people are working harder and harder and feeling like they’re falling further and further behind and that affects all families.
When it comes to workplaces, what we can do. I like to say we can learn not just from what other countries are doing, because Americans are funny and they have this weird American exceptionalism. Like we think we’re better than everybody else. I’ve been in this long enough to know that when you talk to a lawmaker and you say, well, Sweden does this, well, Iceland does this, their eyes glaze over. Like, I don’t wanna care. I don’t care. I don’t wanna know what they do.
You think about it, Iceland is the population the size of Los Angeles. The United States is a very different place. It’s incredibly large, incredibly diverse. So we need to come up with our own American solutions. I think that’s where it’s exciting that the states are showing us the way, they’re showing us how we can do it here.
There’s so much good research that shows from the state paid leave programs that during COVID, the places that had paid sick days, so you could actually choose to stay home and not lose out on pay and potentially not be able to pay your rent if you were sick. They actually had, they slowed the transmission of the virus rates down. There was a real health, public health benefit.
That’s true not only of COVID, but of flu and other sicknesses. When you are sick and you stay home, you do not spread diseases. You get better, you come back to work. Everybody benefits. I think that’s important. When states have had paid family and medical leave programs, it shows that when you have enough time to recover after giving birth, to set new norms for your family dynamics, more women actually come back to the workforce. For women in lower wage work, more women are able to come back to work because the replacement rate is high enough that they can stay and recover and bond with their child and get that child off to a really great start rather than losing a job and then requiring public benefits. There’s so many benefits.
From research, I’m gonna go overseas just ’cause we don’t have really good universal childcare policies here. But in Canada, they have created a policy where universal care, no one pays more than $10 a day for really high quality, excellent childcare. They did some really deep dive research in Quebec where that started. They found that the programs paid for themselves because you had more women able to go back to work, able to stay in really good paying jobs, able to work the kinds of hours that they wanted to work, not nutty hours, but they could work more than part-time because they had access to high quality care. Then if women were able to work, they were able to buy stuff from their local stores, which then helped the tax base. They were able to pay taxes. The whole economy, the whole economy worked better because they had decided to invest in childcare.
There’s really great lessons to learn overseas and here. When it comes to what workplaces can do, look at what we learned through the pandemic. Listen, I’ve been covering flexible work and how work can change for a couple of decades now. Boy, all of the things that so many CEOs said they could never possibly do, they did it overnight because they had to, and we learned how to work differently.
For hourly workers, all of a sudden their work was visible and valued and we gave them hero pay, and oh my God, you go and stock shelves, that’s amazing, thank you for doing that. You deliver my groceries, thank you. So all of this work was more visible and for people who could work, desk workers, they had so much more flexibility about when they worked and where they worked and how they worked and it was so unbelievably trying ’cause you also had so many people trying to do Zoom school or Zoom childcare.
The wild thing is even under those incredibly difficult circumstances, productivity either stayed the same or improved. That tells you right there, we can work differently. We did it before. What’s just so enraging with all of these return to office mandates that are not based on research, that are not based on any kind of data or science, that are based on the belief of that leader who likes having people in the office because that’s the way he, which is typically a guy, that’s the way he rose to power. You judge the best worker by how many hours they’re sitting in an office, a button, a chair.
Part of what I’m trying to do with my latest book, which is coming out in paperback in September over work, it’s really showed that when you switch the focus from an old style, oh, you’re a good worker ’cause you’re here and you’re putting in long hours, which will always benefit people who don’t have the care responsibilities that women mainly do. If you switch it to them, what’s your performance? What are you producing? What is your output? What is your impact? If you switch the focus, that’s when women can really shine. That’s when anybody can shine. That’s when people with care responsibilities can shine because then it doesn’t matter how many hours you put in or where you’re working, it matters what you’re doing.
That’s what’s so enraging to me about so many of these return to office mandates is that they’re not focusing on what’s important, particularly for a 21st century workplace or 21st century work. It’s just the what of work. They’re still focusing on really a 19th century when, where, and how of work. It’s just really going backward in a way that the research shows does not improve productivity, does not lead to higher profits. There’s no reason to do it other than that’s what leaders believe they should do and wanna do.
The last thing I’ll say about that is the research shows that those leaders aren’t even in the office. They’re the ones that work the most flexibly of anyone, and they are also the ones that are not returning to office. So it’s really hypocritical and it makes me nuts.
Anna: It seems like there’s two things that seem to be obviously not true in every case, but true in a lot of the cases that you mentioned. Number one, policies, both workforce and otherwise, that would help women with their economic growth, with their personal development, growth in the workplace, really just help everybody and other groups too. Then the second thing is a lot of the other non-workplace policies that help women have that this economic and social mobility don’t necessarily stem in the workplace. They stem in other aspects of life that then in turn help lead to more, just having more time, more ability, more means to be able to put in the time in the workplace. So it’s not necessarily always an issue with the workplace, it’s there’s other factors at play that are preventing this gives women, but also other people too, from allowing their full potential in the workplace to show. Does that seem about right?
Brigid: Well, it’s interesting, you’re talking about time, right? You’re talking about the time for our lives. I think that that’s really, when you ask about what I do or my mission or the Better Life Labs mission, it’s really thinking about how do we create the conditions that give you the time and enable the choices for you to live a good life the way that you choose, the way that you want, whatever that looks like. I think that that’s really, that’s the job, that should be the job of policymakers, that should be the job of business leaders, and that should be all of our jobs as we think about ourselves and the kind of society that we wanna have.
Anna: When it comes a little bit broader, when it comes to full gender equality in the labor force, what does it do for GDP, productivity, workplace culture? Is there anything specific that other than having more people, having more voices, having more ideas, more earning power, is there anything more specific that having full gender equality in the labor force that brings to the table, that brings to the GDP and all of the stats?
Brigid: Well, yes, so there are two things that I’ll say about that. First, if we’re talking about GDP and your traditional economic measures. You bring up an excellent point. There’s really great research that shows that if women worked at the same rate as men and were able to work the full-time hours, because many women really are forced to work part-time hours because of their care responsibilities, because we don’t have good care infrastructure, we have not invested it in the United States, or because we have workplaces that still expect women to work or expect people to work as if they didn’t have any care responsibilities at all. That the quote unquote ideal worker with no care responsibilities. Well, guess who that is? Nobody. ‘Cause everybody has increasingly care responsibilities.
If women were able to work at the same rate as men, there have been research that shows you would add trillions, trillions of dollars to state GDPs, national GDP, global GDP. So that’s one thing, just by traditional economic measures. If you are also to include the value of all the unpaid labor that women do, the caring for others, keeping homes, cooking, cleaning, not even counting the mental labor of trying to keep all that in your head and making plans and organizing things, just the actual labor that you do. That would also add additional trillions of dollars to GDP. That is incredibly valuable work.
So the full personhood of women would make the world a much better place. So that’s on the strict GDP side. Then what I will say is there’s a new movement that I write about in my latest book, and it’s looking at how do we go beyond GDP? Because GDP counts as valuable things like the production, like if you produce pollution, but that’s a byproduct of your factory. Well, that counts in GDP. But if you take care of your aging mother, that doesn’t count. What if we moved to a GDP that valued and recognized the health and wellbeing of all people rather than just what we make in the marketplace.
There’s a nascent wellbeing economy movement that I find really fascinating. They’re looking at what are different metrics that we could use. So yes, sure, use GDP in the traditional measure because we’re used to it, but it was never, ever designed to measure the health and success of an entire nation. So what are some of those other factors? So I went to Iceland, which is part of this wellbeing economies government movement, and they’re looking at things like child poverty or gender equality or the gender wage gap, all sorts of things that in their mind, they’ve said, this is what we value as a society. This is what we want. We want people to be able to live good lives here. One of the things that they’re working toward is a shorter work week.
I wanted to understand, well, how are you doing that? How are you getting as much work done in a shorter amount of time at the same rate of pay. So it’s not shorter work hours at less pay. So you get a full week’s pay, but in shorter work hours. We go, well, how does that work? It was fascinating. What they did is what I’d said earlier. They went from valuing input. Are you sitting there? Are you at a meeting? Can I just check the box because you’re sitting in front of a desk somewhere? It went from input to looking at output and they really redid all of their systems. Like, well, like if we’re gonna really focus on output, do we need that meeting?
I spent time not only at businesses, but childcare centers and police stations. I mean, everybody’s done it. 82% of their workforce now works a short work week at the same rate of pay. What’s exciting about that is in terms of wellbeing is like, stress levels are down, people are healthier. Their wellbeing, their quality of life is better, but their gender equality is also better, which is so interesting. I talked to this one woman who was one of the architects of the short work hours movement. She said, “We were really worried that if we gave men more time, that they would just go to the gym, that they wouldn’t spend it investing in their families.” She said, “That hasn’t happened.”
I spent an afternoon with this one guy who, a single father of three. He works a short week every Friday, and he calls his Friday afternoons his sacred day. He just goes, I’m a father first, and I’m an employee of the city of Reykjavik second. He goes and everybody knows it.
What’s so interesting is that as men are working fewer paid work hours, women who had also been working more part-time hours, those part-time hours are now considered full-time hours. So there’s more parity that women and men are working the same number of hours. What that means is that there’s less economic division, there’s more financial stability for women over the course of their lives, because now they’re working full time. They’ll have better retirement, better pensions. They’re really seeing equality at home and equality at work, and they’re counting that as a measure of success in their economy.
So yes, let’s think about what women can do and what a true human equality can do for the economics of our traditional GDP. But let’s also think about what that can do for our larger sense of well-being and all of us having access to a good life.
Anna: This actually ties in perfectly to my next question. I always love when that happens. Is there anything else other than this potential new way of measuring success that you see as potentially the next frontier of transformation in the workforce that is driven by trying to bridge some of these gender gaps over the next decade or two?
Brigid: I do. I mean, I think that, honestly, I think what’s really gonna matter is continuing to keep our eyes on that, on the prize, which is like, what’s the world that we wanna create? What does that fair world look like? How do we make it available to all people? How do we enable people to have, to be able to participate, have a voice, have a say, be able to make their mark in the public sphere, in paid work, in politics, in civic life. That also means like really valuing the volunteering that people do in their neighborhoods, in their communities. How can we ensure that all people also have that ability to have time for care and connecting with other people and time to get to know your neighbors and to make friends?
When you think about human happiness, what we’ve learned is what common sense told us all along that humans are really social creatures and our happiness depends on our ability to have connections with other people. We’ve all read about this really awful loneliness crisis and people feeling isolated, particularly in the United States.
A lot of that is because people don’t have time and they feel busy and their workplaces are eating them alive because they’re expecting these ideal worker hours. That’s my hope is like continuing to think what is this vision that we’re working toward and then working together to get there and looking at those really exciting examples of the small bright spots, like who’s trying to do it, who are the change agents, who’s doing it at the state and local level in public policy,
Who’s doing it in businesses? What cool things are they doing that focus on output and performance and not input and looking like an ideal worker? That focus on worker wellbeing and making sure that people get a living wage and that they can control their hours.
Because so many, if you’re in a low-wage position, and let’s face it, a majority of women, if you look at low-wage work, the majority of those workers are women. So if you really care about feminism and equality, you’ve gotta care about low-wage work. A lot of them have no control over their schedules. They don’t know when they’ll work or how many hours. You can’t live a life that way. It’s chaotic.
How can we, there are really great policies about fair scheduling and fair work weeks. The state of Oregon passed an entire law that you have to give people two weeks notice what their schedule is. If you’ve promised them X number of hours, you have to give it to them. It actually not only makes life better for workers, it’s actually made businesses more profitable and more predictable. So again, if you do right by people and you put your focus on worker and human well-being, everybody benefits. Everybody benefits.
Anna: That seems to be a very big common thing, is these things that, policies in the past that have been put in place to help these gender gaps ultimately benefit everybody. I think that’s something a lot of people who might currently be working in the workforce are a little scared of. It’s like, oh, we’re changing the policy, we’re gonna have more people in the workforce, is that I don’t know, what are we doing? Why are we helping out these other people? But these policies will help you ultimately as well.
Brigid: I think that you’re so right. There is this fear, it’s the zero-sum thinking, that if somebody else who’s not like me gets ahead, then maybe I’m gonna pay the price or if somebody gets ahead, somebody else is gonna fall behind. I think that’s what’s so great about having actual research that shows like, yeah, uh-uh, you don’t have to have zero-sum thinking, it isn’t like that. The pie can get bigger, that there’s room, and that’s what’s exciting.
Maybe not at the top, but then maybe leadership can change. It doesn’t have to be this command and control structure, maybe there’s a different way to think about what effective leadership looks like in the 21st century. I mean, we haven’t even started talking about future of work and AI and robots and how all of that’s gonna change the way we work. Will there be enough work to go around? It is time for us to really rethink work and how we support the human element because everything is changing really rapidly.
It can be a time of real transformation and change for the good. That’s my hope. Otherwise it could be pretty dystopian if we keep going with the status quo. I think that this is really a moment of opportunity and really a moment to keep our eyes on that North Star of what kind of world we want to be creating.
Anna: I have one question more geared towards younger women just entering the workforce. This focuses a lot of on your research and work with time as well. A lot of younger people in general, but mostly women, are seeing on social media and a lot of the narrative that’s being passed down from family members, family friends, so on and so forth, that it’s yes, you can be a mother and also take care of yourself and also have your full-time corporate job and also do this and also do that. That seems very difficult. What advice would you have to younger women just entering the workforce who have been told that they can, they should be able to do all of these things and find themselves struggling. What would you tell them?
Brigid: First of all, somebody wants to ask me like, what is my biggest, ’cause I do a lot about time and time research. They’re like, what’s your biggest time hack or your best, the best advice you would give people for time management. Honestly, what I would say, particularly to young women is compassion. There are so many messages coming at you to do more, to be more, to be perfect, to be beautiful, to be, follow your passion, to do the, to have these degrees, to have your finances all in order, to be perfect.
Get Botox when you’re gorgeous and you have no wrinkles and all that stuff. There are so many cultural messages out there. What they all boil down to is trying to tell women, “You are not enough.” That’s where I say compassion and taking a deep breath, and recognizing you are enough right here, right now.
The more you can spend time with yourself, getting to know yourself, what’s important to you, what do you value, what kind of life, what kind of day do you want, the more you’ll be able to shut out that noise because that is what it is and it’s relentless and it is incessant and it will never stop. It is really important for you to put some of those boundaries around that.
If that means you need to filter your social media, or journal about it and like, okay, these feelings are coming up or get therapy or go for a walk, whatever it is you need to come back to yourself, to take those breaths, to come back to like, this is who I am, this is what’s important to me, to understand, I mean, the first step to any change is awareness, so understand what the world, how it works.
What works for you, how the deck is stacked against you, to find your tribe, find people who can support you, to find your mentors who will help clear the path for you and not be afraid to ask for help. I mean, if I look back as me were entering the workforce, it was I graduated from college back in the ’80s. I’m dating myself here right now. But I was told the same thing. It was, oh, women, you can do it all. I was so ignorant. I had no idea.
I didn’t know that we didn’t have a paid maternity leave program until I went to go like I was pregnant, I was about to go off on. My employer is like, no, you don’t have any paid maternity leave. Oh, you’ve got a C-section, we’ll give you six weeks of disability. Here you go. I was like, what, that’s it?
I do feel like there’s at least, and I hope I’ve been part of this, at least more awareness and discussion about how unfair the systems are and how much that needs to change so that you don’t blame yourself for it. A lot of women, my generation, we felt like we were the failures. Like everybody else had it wired and if we couldn’t figure it out, I mean that was the theme of my first book. It’s like, oh my God, what am I doing wrong?
I think that’s the other thing that I would tell young women is that it is not all you. It is not all your fault. The systems aren’t working and you need to put on your oxygen mask and take care of yourself. Then we all need to work together to change those systems.
Anna: Thank you so much for sharing your valuable insights with us today on this episode. Before we close out, are there any last thoughts you have or things you’d like to share with the audience?
Brigid: Well, just that life’s pretty amazing. We’ve talked a lot about challenges, but there’s also so much to be joyful about and grateful for. Sometimes if you start your day there, it can just, it flows from there. There’s always gonna be roadblocks that will be unanticipated, but there’s also gonna be surprising wonders and joys.
Yes, it’s difficult to combine it all, but I’m a mom, I’ve got two kids, and it’s one of the things that has given me the greatest joy in my life. That’s why I think I’m fighting so hard to try to make our systems work for people if that’s the choice that you wanna make. I also wanna honor the people who make choices that are different. I think that’s the world we want, is for people to be able to make the choices that feel right for them, and we can all honor the different ways of being that we wanna be.
Anna: Thank you so much again for spending this past hour with us, talking about women in the workforce, gender in the workforce, things we can do to make the workforce better in general. To our viewers, if you found this conversation interesting, helpful, insightful, anything like that, I encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter Noyack Wealth Weekly at wearenoyack.com. We deliver you financial literacy content that empowers you to make informed decisions about your life in general, not just your finances. It’s more about more than just understanding terminology. It’s building the confidence to take strategic action both with your money and your life. We’ll see you in the next episode.
