AMY GALLO: You’re listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I’m Amy Gallo.
AMY BERNSTEIN: And I’m Amy Bernstein. Toward the end of 2023, our producer Amanda saw a LinkedIn post from one of our former guests, Marti Bledsoe, that made her eyes go wide. Marti had titled the post “A PRETTY BIG YEAR” in all caps and justifiably so. In January, the older of her two children, a freshman in high school, was still coming through a major depressive episode.
AMY GALLO: At the time, Marti was the executive director of The Kids Mental Health Foundation, so she knew enough about the disorder to quickly coordinate professional support. By March, happily, her teenager was in a better place mentally and emotionally.
AMY BERNSTEIN: But Marti wasn’t. She had resigned from her job because she was burnt out—just like so many parents straining to manage their kids’ anxiety or depression or anger while also keeping up at work.
AMY GALLO: As exhausted as she was, she immediately started applying to leadership roles elsewhere, hoping that changing workplaces would re-energize her. Between Zoom calls with people in her network, she cried and napped.
AMY BERNSTEIN: A month into that routine, the landlord of the house she’d been renting decided he was going to move in, which meant that Marti and her kids had 60 days to pack up and leave. That’s when her plans to bounce right back into the workforce really started to fall apart.
MARTI BLEDSOE: Yeah, I remember it as very chaotic and out of my control.
AMY GALLO: They spent 12 weeks at her mom’s house before she found a new house within the same school district that would fit them and her fiancé and his daughter.
AMY BERNSTEIN: The last day of the move, her fiancé slipped and tore his patellar tendon, an injury that requires surgery and a 16-week-plus recovery.
AMY GALLO: Then her mom, who lived nearby, needed emergency cataract surgery, then retina surgery, as well as a couple of dental surgeries. Then one kid was struggling to see well, another was struggling to breathe well. Each of these problems required multiple doctor’s visits and a considerable amount of Marti’s time and attention.
AMY BERNSTEIN: The grind left her utterly and completely spent.
MARTI BLEDSOE: Maintaining all the standards, the orthodontist appointments, getting the oil changed, following up on bills, making sure the mail got forwarded, renewing everybody’s prescriptions, driving my fiancé to physical therapy, driving my mom to eye recheck appointments and doing all kid driving since those two were my backup drivers, juggling summer camp for my 10-year-old, signing up, paying for, and then attending summer softball league for my oldest, coordinating at-home counseling three times a week to continue supporting my kids’ mental health, and then planning a year-end wedding and brunch to celebrate our newly blended family. That sounds like a happy one, but we actually thought we’d have to reschedule the wedding because of the torn patellar tendon and the crutches and the knee brace. We would’ve lost a lot of money had we done that.
AMY GALLO: He ended up being okay enough to walk down the aisle and got through their first dance.
MARTI BLEDSOE: And then it was the time of year for open enrollment, and I was trying to continue one set of benefits, figure out enrollment into another set of benefits because we had a qualifying event, which was very exciting, but also, the paperwork was mind-blowing and then there was more driving. I kept thinking, “Is this really my life?”
AMY BERNSTEIN: Jessica Calarco, who’s a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin, says this grind— this ever-expanding, relentless set of responsibilities—is the norm for lots of us in the US.
JESSICA CALARCO: Once women take a step back in the workforce, it can be very easy to fall into that default caregiver role and also leads to choices that then make it easier for you to be seen as the one who is logically most responsible for other types of care that comes down the line.
AMY GALLO: Jessica writes about the slippery slope in her book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.
AMY BERNSTEIN: She’s here to help Marti make sense of that “pretty big year,” as Marti called her LinkedIn post—or more like a year plus away from paid work. They’re both here to help those of you who’ve ever been consumed by caregiving understand the forces that got you there. Here’s my conversation with them.
AMY GALLO: I’ll be back afterwards to chat with you about it.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Marti, you started looking for a new job as soon as you resigned. How did you set out? What did you want to accomplish each week and then tell us what actually happened?
MARTI BLEDSOE: I wanted to spend an hour or two a day on LinkedIn, looking around at folks in my network, what they were up to, following companies that might be in my line of work that I wanted to stay in, and working on all the things that it takes today to get a job because you need multiple versions of your resume so they can get past AI bots that are screening. You need your elevator speech of what you’re looking for and what you can do, and I wanted to be consulting. I really felt like, gosh, I can look for a job and I can bill out at my hourly rate and then this really won’t feel like too much of a bump.
AMY BERNSTEIN: But your time wasn’t spent just on finding your next job, right?
JESSICA CALARCO: No, not at all. In fact, it was amazing how the hours got eaten up. I was packing to move, moving and unpacking for quite a bit of that time. I moved twice in the time that I wasn’t working—once in with my mother. Of all the ridiculous things I spent time doing at that point, I remember posting on Facebook to one of my networks, “Hey, I have 13 beautiful houseplants that are in great shape. I’m moving in with my mother. She has a cat. Can anybody watch these houseplants for 10 weeks?” Of course, the woman who volunteered lived 30 minutes away. So, I literally found myself arranging care for my houseplants. I was doing all kinds of things…dropping off kids, picking up kids. For a while there we were in summer vacation, which is hell for working parents. It was a different schedule every week, and it just felt like every time I would sit down, my phone would ping or somebody would need me and the week would be gone.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Jessica, help us understand this in the broader context. I mean, this is not an unfamiliar story to you. Why does this happen to women like Marti?
JESSICA CALARCO: Yeah, so other countries have invested in policies that help people manage their care needs and responsibilities. They have policies that allow people to live with dignity, to access economic opportunities, and to contribute equitably and sustainably to a shared project of care. In the US, we instead tell people that they should be able to take care of themselves and their families without relying on the government or even their employers for support, but the reality is that we can’t just DIY society. Some people, maybe most obviously children, but also people who are sick, people who are elderly can’t fully take care of themselves, and some jobs don’t pay enough to allow people to take care of themselves as well. So, acknowledging these realities would essentially destroy this illusion of a DIY society. But in the US, we essentially managed to maintain the illusion by relying on women to fill in the gaps, to be that social safety net for our families and for our community, and even for our economy, essentially by taking care of the people who can’t take care of themselves. We get women to do that work in part by grooming them for caregiving roles from the time they’re old enough to hold a baby doll, but also by pushing them into caregiving roles and then denying them any support in meeting those roles. Like Marti talked about, in those situations, it becomes very easy for women to become the default caregivers for their families. If you are a woman in a household where you are, often because of gender pay gaps, earning less than your male partner, if someone has to sacrifice their paid work hours, you’re probably going to do it. Then once you step into that default caregiving role, like Marti was saying, the visibility of that work as a caregiver as the default, then that compiled with the choices that default caregivers have to make to accommodate their caregiving responsibilities, makes it seem logical and natural for women who are in that default position to take on even more of the responsibility for care as those care needs increase over time.
AMY BERNSTEIN: So Marti, having read the book and having heard what Jessica just said, how does that shape or reshape the way you think about what happened in your own life?
MARTI BLEDSOE: It felt like it connected a lot of disparate feelings and concepts for me. From an intellectual standpoint, I felt a light bulb. It’s not just me. It’s truly the fact that the minute somebody sees a female with “time on her hands,” watch out.
AMY BERNSTEIN: How did that mess with your self-esteem, with your own concept of who you are, Marti?
MARTI BLEDSOE: I think it was very psychologically destabilizing, if that’s a way to explain it. I felt gaslit, but by myself and people around me. It was like, Oh, you had two or three full-time jobs. We’re going to take one away, and then the other two are going to fill in a lot of that room. But don’t forget, you should be trying to replace the third full-time job with another full-time job. The beginning of my job search, I looked back through all of my cover letters and I was applying for executive director, CEO, COO roles in mental health organizations, in child-focused organizations. Then I would think to myself, If they called me tomorrow to interview for this, how would I even manage it? Let’s say they offered it to me. Who’s going to go pick up the plants when it’s time to move them back to the house? I know that I can’t ask anybody else to do that, and if I did, it would probably be another woman who would fit it into the 57,000 things she has to do. So, I started to back off the level of what I felt like I could look for. I stopped going to the top of the org chart openings, and I started looking for director, associate director, senior manager type titles. Now, these are titles I haven’t held in my own career in 15 years, but I thought maybe I’m not going to be able at this time of my life to deliver what it takes to be at the top of an org chart because clearly everybody needs me. Even the people around me who benefited from it I don’t think were sitting around going, “Wow, we’re so lucky that you are caring and doing all these things.” I often think, Oh, my God. What if I had been working?
AMY BERNSTEIN: What if you had been working? So play that out for us. What if you had been working full-time?
MARTI BLEDSOE: I think it would’ve had to be either a role where I could say, “look, for the next, whatever, six months I’m going to have to work part-time or I’m going to have to use some short-term disability and some, you know, FMLA or somehow construct a scenario where I can give you part of the time, hopefully still quite a bit of the value. But I just cannot be available the way I would normally be or would like to be.” But I wonder sometimes, certainly had I been in a new job in that time where you’re learning so fast and you’re trying to meet everybody and you’re trying to prove yourself and get settled, that would’ve been a total disaster. So, it would’ve had to be somewhere where I’d been a while where they had those kinds of time benefits, where I had an understanding manager. I mean, you cannot overemphasize the importance of the individual manager and how they can make that viable or not viable. At the end of the day, I still might’ve lost my job because I just hit a wall of contribution. I think that’s one of the things that I often reflect on when we talk about balance, work-life balance. I’m often like, “Okay, fine. Let’s just say that you get your partnership and your parenting and your working and your self-health in some balance.” But if you, the person, are the fulcrum in the middle, I have a feeling you’re pretty worn down on all sides.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, because I struggle with picking up my dogs from daycare at the end of the day. So, I don’t know how you have made it through the kinds of demands you’ve had to face. Marti, your experience flies in the face of the advice all of us got in Lean In. I’m wondering how you think about that.
MARTI BLEDSOE: Lean In was published at a funny time in my career in that I had one young child and I thought I could sustain the pace I was living forever. I thought I could probably lean in. I bought the DIY guilt of Lean In, the come on girls, ask for the next thing, take the next project, take the risk. I guess I would say by the time some of the societal feedback to that concept had really started to get loud about it’s not just leaning in and it’s really not that easy for so many women… by that time, I had another child and I thought, Yeah, you know what? I actually want to rethink that because I don’t want to lean in any further. Not only at work, but I didn’t even want to lean in anymore at home. I wanted to lay down. I was like, can we stop leaning and take a rest here? So it does fly in the face of all of it.
AMY BERNSTEIN: So, Jessica, what Marti is saying I think is a more universal experience. I’m wondering from your perspective, is there a narrative that’s taking the place of Lean In and what is it?
JESSICA CALARCO: I mean, unfortunately, the Lean In narrative, I would argue, is still very much with us. Even if some people have pushed back against the specific notions of the book, for example, I think there’s still very much this expectation. Many of the women that I talk to for my research—first-time mothers or those who are just starting out in their careers—still very much feel this pressure to have it all, to try to be it all, to chase every opportunity, and also to set an example for other women as well, to be that leader in the workforce while also being that Pinterest perfect mom at home. If anything, it feels like the only narrative that is threatening to unseat Lean In at this point is maybe the tradwife narrative, in part because of how unsustainable it is to lean in, especially over the long term. I think that is part of where the… I talk a little bit about in my book about how some young women are leaning into the idea of being a housewife, instead of leaning in at work, in part because they realize that it is so unsustainable and they see one of the things that Lean In did was to deeply devalue the work of care and to ignore both the value that that brings to families and communities and even the joy that many of us can get from doing that care work, particularly when we have the time and the energy to do it well.
So, I think if anything, what we need is to go back to an older narrative that has actually been around even longer than Lean In, which is essentially the one that feminists gave us in the 1960s and 1970s and that really got co-opted by the corporate world when it came to messages like Lean In. I mean, to give an example, I mean Black feminist writer and activist, bell hooks was one of the vocal critics of the Lean In message drawing on her long body of work on these topics. She wrote a critique in 2013 of Lean In. She said, Sandberg sees women’s lack of perseverance as more of the problem than systemic inequality. She effectively uses her race and class power and privilege to promote a narrow definition of feminism that obscures and undermines visionist feminist concerns. Essentially, she’s pushing back against this notion that we should try to do this so individually. Really, that’s part of what my goal is to do with my own research too—is to help un-gaslight women, to tell women that guilt and stress are not normal or necessary parts of womanhood or parts of motherhood. I mean, essentially, we can help women to see that they have been tasked with serving as a social safety net in a society that has forced them to make do without the support that they need.
My hope is that I can show them how women’s self-help culture in particular deludes us into thinking that if we’re struggling to manage it all that it must be because we made the wrong choices, because we didn’t lean in, didn’t wash our face, didn’t get out of our own heads, didn’t “let that shit go,” to use some other popular book titles, for example. I mean, in reality, it’s that we are being pushed into doing this work, that we are being worked overtime and underpaid on projects that other people have designed for their own gain and certainly not for ours. So, I think this is a place for one of the core messages of the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, is that we really have to hold it together collectively and not on our own. It’s about recognizing that we are strongest when we work together, and we are strongest when we fight for those who are most marginalized among us, as opposed to trying to just individually get ahead as far as we can, because that’s an easy way to fall into the delusions and the divisions that are designed to keep us scrambling as opposed to seeing how investments in stronger policies, for example, could better support us all.
AMY BERNSTEIN: At the heart of what you just said is the acceptance that there are indeed systemic inequalities and inequities, right?
JESSICA CALARCO: Yes, very much so. I think those often get overlooked in these conversations in the sense that in our DIY society, all of us have an incentive to push as much risk and responsibility for care as possible onto someone else downstream. For men, they’re often economically in the most privileged positions to be able to do this, to leverage their higher salaries, their bigger titles, to get the women around them to do more of that work of care, to persuade their wives, to persuade their administrative assistants, to persuade their colleagues and coworkers to do more of that work that isn’t as economically profitable, so that they can focus on doing that most profitable work themselves. Now, for women, those who are in the most privileged positions can offload some of that work also by pushing it onto oftentimes women from systematically marginalized groups who have very little choice but to do the underpaid work of childcare, of home healthcare, of food service, of house cleaning. Though of course we can never outsource all of the care responsibilities. It often takes, as Marti was saying, a great deal of management on the back end as well. But this creates a morality trap in the sense that, oftentimes, getting ahead for individual relatively privileged women means exploiting someone else.
AMY BERNSTEIN: So you’ve talked, Jessica, about how the really hard work of care, childcare, family care gets pushed onto women routinely. I wonder how you deal with it in your own life. You have kids, right?
JESSICA CALARCO: I do. I have a 10-year-old and a seven-year-old. I think it has varied very much depending on the support level that I’ve been able to access and certainly the level of support that my husband has been able to provide given his work situation as well. I mean, when my oldest daughter was born, we were living in Indiana, and at the time my husband had just started a new job. I was a relatively new assistant professor, and I had access to paid leave, to paid family leave, but my husband didn’t. So, I ended up home with my daughter for the first almost six months. Then what ended up happening though is we hoped to get her into childcare when I had to go back to teaching, but like many people, we ran into a childcare crisis in the sense that the first spot that we could find for full-time childcare wasn’t open until my daughter was a year old.
So, I spent that first semester back teaching, cobbling together a few hours a week of childcare from college students who would watch my daughter while I was teaching and trying to finish my first book, trying to do my research. Really nothing got done. I mean, I was worried I wouldn’t get tenure. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to keep my job. I wasn’t sure how things would go with my relationship because things were so unequal and stressful at the time. I remember there was one point where I was so exhausted that I slammed my bathroom door in my bedroom and it’s like a pocket door. I managed to slam my fingers in the process and lost two fingernails because I was-
AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, my gosh.
JESSICA CALARCO: …just so exhausted and stressed out during those early years. So, it was not an easy time, and certainly things got better when I was able to get my kids into full-time childcare. Certainly, when my husband was in a position, by the time our second kid was born, he had access to six weeks of paid family leave and it made a world of difference, but it was hard in terms of navigating those times, even for those of us who are relatively privileged in the process.
MARTI BLEDSOE: Jessica, I keep coming back to the employer as a potential solution. Do you think that’s naive of me? I think about wellness benefits or even the idea as simple as making parental leave non-gendered, same amount of time for either parent or care subsidies or backup care, accounts where they can book a backup babysitter and pay with a copay. Some of this stuff is out there in the HR world. Do you think it’s going to go anywhere?
JESSICA CALARCO: I think there’s two parts to this answer here in the sense that yes, there are things that employers can be doing and should be doing to make life easier for caregivers, and that those kinds of investments can go a long way in making life easier. Things like access to healthcare, access to support with childcare, to access to support with flexible work policies that these can make a difference and can make life easier when it comes to the ability to combine full-time paid work and caregiving responsibilities. At the same time, I think we have to be careful about trusting employers to be the ones to solve this problem, particularly on their own.
What we know, for example, is that when it’s up to employers, like with things like healthcare, oftentimes the benefits of that kind of a system go disproportionately to the most privileged workers in our economy, in part because they’re the ones who have the power and the privilege to demand better benefits when it comes to healthcare, when it comes to which workers have access to paid family leave, when it comes to which workers have access to childcare benefits or access to decent retirement benefits, that those are disproportionately the most privileged workers in our economy, and that it’s the workers who are the most precarious, who are disproportionately women and especially women of color in our society, are the ones who are often most disadvantaged when it comes to access to those kinds of benefits.
So, I think we have to be wary of treating employers as capable of solving this problem on their own. I think we have to recognize that that’s a function of the fact that even well-meaning employers, ones who want to put in place those benefits for their workers, face profit pressures that often discourage them from giving workers the support that they really need to live healthy, happy, and productive lives. This is a place where policymakers can step in to essentially help take the burden off of employers.
We know that other countries have shown that policies are things that allow people to live with dignity, to access economic opportunities, and to contribute equitably and sustainably to a shared project of care, both allowing people to have the well-being and the time and the energy and the education to contribute to the workforce, but then also having the protection from paid work, to keep it from demanding so much of our time through access to things like paid leave and paid vacation time, and even things like 35-hour work weeks or four-day work weeks—that that balance of policies can leave people not only better off in a health sense or a mental well-being sense can avoid burnout, but can also lead to better productivity, can make workers more successful in their jobs in the end.
So, I think this is a place where policymakers have often been hesitant to push back against those same billionaires and big corporations who brought us the DIY society, in part because of how our politics are funded in the US. I mean, compared to other high-income countries, people in the US are sicker, sadder, and more stressed. We don’t live as long. We have higher rates of burnout and we’re not as productive in our jobs. So, this is a place where we need to think critically about, “Is this system working and is this emphasis on employers as the only solution the right way to go?”
MARTI BLEDSOE: Man, I want to put all that on a very large poster because it’s so interesting when we talk about healthcare. I mean, there was a piece from the Maternal Stress Project several months ago in the New York Times that said, childcare is healthcare. Let’s quit calling it a social service or even a personal thing to solve. It is healthcare. When women are stressed by the precarity of it and the inconsistency of it… even coming back from COVID, it’s not consistent or you’re on a waiting list, like you said, Jessica, I mean that stress can last for years.
JESSICA CALARCO: This is a place where I would say really the push could and should be to move away from employers and to say, “How can we make these universal policies instead?” in ways that… things like healthcare. If we had universal healthcare, that wouldn’t have to be something that employers worry about when it comes to competing for workers. If we had universal affordable childcare that, again, wouldn’t have to be something that employers had to worry about when it came to figuring out, can employees afford to live in my community because there’s no childcare here? So, these are things that we can solve systemically with childcare.
We had national childcare, national public affordable childcare during World War II, and this is how we got mothers to enter the workforce to be the Rosie the Riveters. We’ve proven that it’s possible here, and yet we dismantled that policy in part because we didn’t want to have to pay the higher taxes that would’ve been needed to expand and maintain that system over time. So, I think this is a place where we have proven that these kinds of care-based services are most effective when they are universal.
One of the ironies of that too is that when these kinds of benefits are universal, there’s less stigma in using them in the sense that right now, yes, childcare we know is great for women, but women also feel guilty using childcare in part because we treat it as a benefit for women and not also as a benefit for kids and for society. We know that kids benefit tremendously from access to childcare when it comes to developmental benefits, the cognitive benefits, the social benefits, and the benefits of having less stressed-out parents in terms of the quality of parenting that they can provide. Yet we maintain these stigmas, and I talk in the book about how there’s a long history of fear-mongering around childcare, trying to persuade mothers that kids aren’t safe with childcare providers. But I think the reality is that the vast majority of kids in these situations are better off than they could be with a much more stressed-out parent at home. So, this is a situation where investments in that care can help destigmatize it and can help it be more sustainable for all.
AMY BERNSTEIN: I think it’s important to point out that a lot of people don’t work for companies. They work for themselves. So, that argues for the universal care policies that you’re talking about, Jessica, but we’re talking about care not just for children. We’re talking about care for parents, for relatives who cannot take care of themselves. Marti, you’ve cared for your fiancé, you’ve cared for your mother. What policies, Jessica, would you recommend to take care of caregivers all the way around?
JESSICA CALARCO: This is another place where public investments in care can help to make sure that the kinds of care services are available, whether they’re childcare services, whether they’re home healthcare services, whether they are nursing home care facilities, whether they are afterschool care for kids, things along those lines. When we invest in those kinds of policies at a universal level and when we put a decent level of funding behind them, we can ensure that they provide not only the high quality of care that people need, but also that the work of caregiving is sustainable. We have examples. Things like, Washington State has the WA Cares program, which is putting in place publicly funded long-term care insurance for everyone within the state, or places like Minnesota that have invested in universal affordable childcare to take the burden off of individual families and individual employers.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Jessica, given that those policies aren’t entirely available, how do women prepare themselves for the caregiving that they’re going to be called on to do? It’s so unpredictable.
JESSICA CALARCO: Yeah, I mean, one of the things I try to do with my work is to un-gaslight women, to essentially help to prepare them for this idea that the messaging in our society. I talk about the myths that we use to delude Americans into believing that we don’t need a social safety net and to keep us divided by race and class and gender and politics and religion in ways that keep us thinking about ourselves as opposed to coming together to demand the safety net that could better support us all.
I think this is a place where helping women to not blame themselves, to recognize that this is a system that is stacked against them, but also to help them stay hopeful because that’s not a particularly hopeful message, and to remember that we are strongest together and that this is a place where we can be using the energy that we do have to say, Okay, who are the other women around me? How can we be collectively organizing in ways that can demand better policies, better support from our employers, from our communities, from our policymakers? Because essentially, I mean, yes, individual women can to some extent hold it together on their own, but what that risks enforcing is this idea that I talk about in some of my research that good choices can save women. That if women just pursue the right career path or find the right partner or live in the right community, that they will be able to protect themselves from falling into these kinds of expectations, from becoming the default caregiver, or from having to face these kinds of inequalities when the reality is that, even as in Marti’s case, good choices can’t necessarily always save women. Oftentimes those kinds of good choices also require a great deal of privilege to make. So, I think helping women to remember that we are working in a system that is not designed for us and that, if anything, is designed against us and to see how really it’ll take us coming together and finding allies to be able to fight for the kind of system that would better support us all.
AMY BERNSTEIN: So Marti, you are now back at work full-time.
MARTI BLEDSOE: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: How did that shift go? How did you do it?
MARTI BLEDSOE: It didn’t go well. It didn’t go badly. It’s amazing to me how still when push comes to shove, I am the one typically who accommodates. We enrolled our high schooler in a school that’s quite far away from our home. It’s a long drive, and it’s through the city, and there’s construction and traffic jams. There are days where I would really rather not do that at both ends of my workday, and I shouldn’t even say ends, at the middle third and second third of my workday, because school is of course shorter than work. At the same time, I find that where I work now, people are willing to say, “Okay, that’s fine. Go be there at the right time, get your student home.” I get them home in a timely way so they can get on another class on Zoom. So, I juggle the time.
So, last night, that looked like I worked 90 minutes at home in the evening while my kiddo was on their Zoom class. This morning I worked 60 in the morning before I got the youngest on the bus. So, there is flexibility in the sense of I’m being trusted to get the work done where and when and how I can do it, but there is no reduced workload. There is no transportation option for my child or even letting my child take their Zoom class at the high school building and stay there all evening, those kinds of things. In fact, I said this morning, I said, “Your school really needs a co-working office right there. If I could drive you, drop you, take all my calls, pick you up and leave, we’d be an hour and a half ahead.”
So I think to me, that idea of co-locating some things and making it possible for people to study and work and eat and get services done all in the same place, it didn’t really take off after the pandemic like I hoped it would. I know there’s a lot of neighborhoods that aren’t built for that. They just are not set up to have those kinds of things together, but it really splits people’s lives up when they have to commute to everything. More often than not, it’s the moms in the drop-off line.
AMY BERNSTEIN: It’s utterly exhausting. So, Jessica, I wonder, having heard what Marti’s dealing with now every day, if there’s anything you can offer her? Is there context, is there advice that would help her out here?
JESSICA CALARCO: I mean, I think this is, again, a place where I am hesitant to put the onus of responsibility onto individuals, in part because that’s the message that we’ve been sold so long, is if you just make these right choices, you can find some seven-step plan that will get you out of the stress. I think, unfortunately, what I can offer is solace to some extent—in the sense that you’re not alone in this struggle, that this is a system that is not designed to help us, that is designed to extract from us and to get as much from us as possible while leaving as little behind as is necessary to survive, but not necessarily thrive. This is what we’re up against.
I think what maybe does give me hope, and maybe can offer Marti some hope, is that I think we are at a moment politically and socially where there is growing recognition of these challenges and growing recognition of the need to do something about the care crisis that we are facing, because I think we’ve reached a tipping point where it has become deeply unsustainable, where this is not just affecting those who are in the most precarious position, but where even those with extremely high levels of privilege are struggling to make it through day to day. I think this has shown us how unsustainable this is. I’m hoping that this will lead to policy momentum, to change both at the individual level of employers, but also at the broader societal level.
We’re seeing some states move in that direction, which I’m hoping will provide a testing ground to show that these kinds of changes can be made at a broader level to put us in a place where we’re actually able to get the care that we need for ourselves and the support that we need to care for others, and to have that better negotiation of the parts of our lives—as opposed to maybe the balance that might be too elusive to get.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yup. We’ve got a long way to go, but there’s hope if the right people can hear the message and hear the need.
JESSICA CALARCO: Indeed, indeed.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, I want to thank you both, Marti, for sharing your story, and Jessica, for sharing all your insight and wisdom. Really appreciate it.
MARTI BLEDSOE: Thank you.
JESSICA CALARCO: Thank you.
AMY BERNSTEIN: All right. You heard our conversation. What struck you?
AMY GALLO: I mean, so many things. Obviously, of course, deep, deep empathy for Marti and what she went through. You wouldn’t wish a year like that on your worst enemy. I think as a woman who relates to being the person in many people’s lives who keeps things running, a kid having an unclear illness, I just could immediately think of the four conversations that involved with the doctor and waiting for the callback and stepping out of a meeting and the sheer number of logistics that Marti has had to deal with, never mind the emotional content is just so intense.
AMY BERNSTEIN: For me, what I really chimed with was this idea that if one ball drops, they’re all going to drop.
AMY GALLO: I kept thinking as I was listening to the conversation, how many women are bending time every day just to find the hours to do their job? You add in these caretaking responsibilities, whether it’s for dogs, children, parents, husbands.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Spouses, right?
AMY GALLO: Yeah, like plants. We can talk about the plants in a moment, but all of this caretaking goes unacknowledged. It’s supposed to be in the curves of the rest of the things that we do.
AMY BERNSTEIN: I mean, everything Marti was dealing with was legitimately urgent.
AMY GALLO: Except maybe the plants.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Maybe the plants. Exactly.
AMY GALLO: I have to say, I literally said out loud, Marti, let the plants die.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Plant murderer.
AMY GALLO: Yes, but you know what? Marti probably loves those plants. Who cares? Stop judging which balls she’s choosing to keep in the air. That’s her choice. I think the message is not, “Hey, women, let’s stop our perfectionism. Let’s drop some of the balls.” It’s, “How do we help build a society where it doesn’t feel like everyone’s building a house of cards?” I actually have this pretty extreme example, this woman I know, and I’ll be careful to preserve her privacy.
AMY BERNSTEIN: So, her name’s in the show notes.
AMY GALLO: Her name and LinkedIn profile’s in the show notes. But she’s married. She and her husband have the same job. They have two young kids, and she and I see each other every few years. The last time I saw her, I was like, “How are you managing?” She said, “We’re not. I just refuse to accept any expectation from my husband or from society. Our house is a mess. Our kids don’t have clean clothes. Oftentimes we are hobbling together crackers for dinner. The school has to chase us down for every permission slip.” She’s like, “I’m sure everyone at my work and in my life thinks we’re a disaster, but I refuse to do the perfectionist way.” I’m like, “What are you doing with all the time when you’re not being perfectionist?” She’s like, “I’m reading.” She gets to read novels.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, wow.
AMY GALLO: She comes from a pretty unconventional family that’s challenged a lot of society’s expectations. So, I think this is a path she’s slightly comfortable with, but she recognizes that to outsiders who have bought into society’s expectations that it looks bonkers. I mean, I think every time I’ve signed something for Harper or I show up for something, I think, Oh, my friend is not doing any of that.
AMY BERNSTEIN: I think there’s a lot to be learned from your European friend.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. I loved Marti’s offhand suggestion that the school have a co-working space.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, I like that idea.
AMY GALLO: I was like, this is brilliant actually. And it was such a good metaphor for everything Jessica was talking about. How do we make the system just easier on all of us in a collective way? One piece of homework I’m taking, and I think—I hope—some of our listeners will as well, is to read Jessica’s book and really understand what she calls this “DIY society,” how it’s come to exist. I mean, she has solutions in there—policy level solutions of how we can change it.
AMY BERNSTEIN: The link to Jessica’s book will actually be in the show notes.
AMY GALLO: Yes. She wants to be found.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yes.
AMY GALLO: That’s our show. I’m Amy Gallo.
AMY BERNSTEIN: I’m Amy Bernstein. HBR regularly publishes articles with advice for managing work and family. One we recently published is a superb roundup called, “Your Employees Are Also Caregivers. Here’s How to Support Them.”
AMY GALLO: Women at Work’s editorial and production team is Amanda Kersey, Maureen Hoch, Tina Tobey Mack, Rob Eckhardt, Erica Truxler, Ian Fox, and Hannah Bates. Robin Moore composed this theme music.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Get in touch with us by emailing womenatwork@hbr.org.
