11
GETTING BACK IN
“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.”
—DR. SEUSS
IN OCTOBER 26, 2003, LISA Belkin wrote a controversial cover story for the New York Times Magazine, “The Opt-Out Revolution,” about a so-called phenomenon where the most educated women in America, hitting the crux of their professional stride, were leaving the workforce to willingly and cheerfully stay home with their kids. For her article, Belkin interviewed eight high-achieving women who had all graduated from Princeton and went on to earn graduate degrees from the nation’s top universities. Their husbands earned big salaries, so paying the mortgage or paying back graduate school loans, if they had any, was apparently not a concern.
“Why don’t women run the world?” Belkin wrote. “Maybe it’s because they don’t want to.”1
The article whipped up a ferocious maelstrom—and not just from feminists. There was backlash against the privilege of the elite and backlash against Belkin herself. There were scathing critiques about how Belkin built her argument around affluent women rather than examining the systemic issues that kept millions of moms from continuing in their careers. There was no discussion about policies like the lack of paid leave, workplace flexibility, or the medley of childcare issues that impact the majority of women in the United States. After the explosive reaction to the piece, other media followed. 60 Minutes ran a segment where they focused on another group of uber-achieving women who were, as correspondent Leslie Stahl said, “giving up money, success, and big futures” to be full-time at-home moms.2
OPTING OUT: NOT REALLY A CHOICE
The narrative around opting out became framed in personal choices, ignoring the fierce societal forces and outdated workplace structure that actually pushed women out of their careers. After all, for most women it wasn’t really a choice. But even if these stories stung of elitism, they resonated with women, including me. When I read the the New York Times Magazine piece and saw the 60 Minutes report, I was a thirty-two-year-old mom with a toddler and an infant daughter. These stories tapped into a collective anxiety that whatever we do in motherhood, we’re doing it wrong. It also fed into my fear that there was no real way to have the big career that I wanted and the precious time with my children that I craved. The conversation, not surprisingly, did not mention dads or partners or a larger corporate or cultural responsibility; the burden was on individual mothers to figure it out all by themselves.
“Perhaps the popularity of the opt-out story suggests that our country still prefers to think about family and motherhood in terms of personal values and choices and not in socioeconomic or political terms; and that to do so, many believe, would require us to adopt very un-American, European-style social policies interfering with our competitive capitalist edge,” wrote Heather Hewett in a 2005 essay “Telling It Like It Is: Rewriting the Opt-Out Narrative.”3
I hadn’t opted out; in fact, I was getting back in, taking a full-time freelance position at CNN to be a producer on its morning show, American Morning. The day I started at CNN was the day my daughter turned six months old and the day I stopped breast-feeding. There was no nursing room or any space to plug in privately in CNN’s offices. I accepted the fact that I couldn’t pump at work, and didn’t feel like I had much clout as a brand-new freelancer to make waves. I was just happy to have landed a full-time (albeit freelance) position.
Coincidentally, the week I started at CNN was just days after the Times article came out. Not only was I not leaving the workforce, I was also writing my first book, How She Really Does It: Secrets of Stay-at-Work Moms, about how women take on that precarious balance of career and family. I had spent months interviewing moms about how they managed jobs and kids, while Lisa Belkin was writing about how thrilled some moms were to escape the grind. We were on seemingly opposite sides of the playground—stay-at-work-moms versus stay-at-home moms—and this rivalry was, at that moment, all the rage.
THE MOMMY WARS
There is nothing the media loves more than a catfight, and in the early 2000s we were living in the era of the “mommy wars.” In October 21, 2002, New York magazine ran the provocative cover story “Mom vs. Mom” with an incendiary sub-headline: “It used to be the battle of the sexes: Now it’s the battle of the moms. Working and nonworking mothers are slugging it out in the schoolyard over who’s the better parent—and who gets to have a sex life.”4 Yikes.
New York magazine likes to stoke the fire of controversy, and here it unleashed an inferno. The piece was loaded with judgments and so-called choices and went for the jugular by challenging a woman’s most vulnerable sense of self: Are you a good mother? “Motherhood, for all its well-documented joys, has become a flash point for envy, resentment, and guilt,” wrote Ralph Gardner Jr.5 The irony that a man wrote this piece was not lost on me or others. The article’s photo showed the blonde stay-at-home mom in a sleeveless shirt showing off her buff, toned arms—evidence of the ample time she has to work out with her trainer. Her sex life was also steamy, though she had other challenges. “The pressure to be thin is brutal,” she says in the story. In contrast, the working mom, a severe-looking brunette, wore a suit, her hair pulled tightly back, and her son on her hip looking absently away from the camera and his mother. This frosty, selfish wench-of-a-working mother, with her obvious lack of maternal connection, suggested all that was wrong with ambitious women. She was probably not putting out either.
While the article was arguably an exaggeration of the alleged aggression between at-work and at-home moms in the urban jungle of New York City, it continued to reinforce the damaging yet made-for-TV drama of the mommy wars. The TV talk show Dr. Phil even picked up on the playground brawl with its show on November 10, 2003, where the stay-at-home moms were literally put on one side of the room and the working moms on the other to argue over who mothers best. The tension behind the mommy wars, real or assumed, hurt all of us. Instead of raising each other up, we were smacking each other down.
In The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes a Good Mother?, feminist scholar Miriam Peskowitz dissected the issues that impact parents and the social price she paid personally to leave her tenured position as a professor when her daughter was born. “What they all have in common is that today’s mothers and fathers are caught between cultural assumptions of an egalitarian society and a cultural reality that is not exactly egalitarian. The parent problem is not a working-mom problem or a stay-at-home-mom problem . . . The parent problem is a serious structural problem. It’s a remnant of an economy that saw men as central and ideal workers and relegated women to supporting roles at home,” she writes.6
In the past dozen years since that Times article ran and the mommy wars and the opt-out generation made headlines, the economy convulsed and certain industries like auto and finance nearly collapsed. Newspapers and magazines folded. Retail and real estate were hit hard. The recession between 2007 and 2009 rocked millions of lives, leaving many families financially vulnerable. In fact, the entire economy has been disrupted since the women who Belkin first wrote about left the workforce. Industries and jobs have contracted, changed, or even disappeared because of technology. During this time, the obsessive, child-centered culture of motherhood has altered too. The “surrendering to motherhood” memoirs of the early 2000s have been replaced with the popular “sh*tty mom” books of today.
In a postrecession world, perhaps moms have cut each other some slack. Today, maybe we are less self-righteous and more prudent. Or maybe the pervasiveness of the hang-it-all-out-there mommy stories that embrace our warts and flaws has put us in a post-mommy-judgment era. Who knows? But if we aren’t “at war” and instead show solidarity of the sisterhood, there’s no doubt we will have more power to create much-needed change.
OPTING BACK IN
In 2013, ten years after Belkin’s “Opt-Out Revolution,” Judith Warner revisited those women who left their careers in 2003 in her own New York Times piece, “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In.” What Warner found was that some of the women who a decade earlier felt empowered to drop out were now struggling financially and regretting their choices. One gave up her $500,000 job at Oracle to stay home in her big house to care for her three kids. She is now divorced, living in a rental apartment across from a supermarket, and making 20 percent of her former salary.7
The married women who left the workforce in the early 2000s didn’t know that the economy would collapse—nobody did. And they also may not have prepared for the financial reality of a divorce, or the death of a spouse, or the existential loss of identity that can come with financial dependence. Back then, many of those women had the breezy, cavalier notion that their prestigious degrees were their insurance policies and they could bounce back in whenever they were ready. Sadly, that was not the case and, for most women, not the reality. Nearly one-third of college-educated women have taken time off to care for their children or for aging family members.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder of the Center for Talent Innovation, has examined just how difficult it is for women to reenter the workforce. According to Hewlett’s study published by the Harvard Business Review, 37 percent of highly qualified women leave their jobs for extended periods, and of those women only 40 percent find full-time jobs again.8 She also found that women took a big pay cut when they returned, earning on average 16 percent less than they had before they left the workforce. “It was distressingly difficult to get back on track,” Hewlett told Judith Warner in her Times piece. And time off also widely differs. A 2015 Harvard Business School report, “Life and Leadership after HBS,” surveyed its business school alumnae and found that the length of time the women take themselves out of the workforce after having children varies considerably. Thirty percent of Gen X and Baby Boomer alumnae caring for children full-time have been out of the workforce for under five years; 22 percent for five to nine years; and 48 percent for ten or more years.9
HOW MILLENNIALS FORCE CHANGE
For all of these grim numbers, the good news is that things today are changing. There are encouraging signs of workplaces motivated to bring the women who left back on board. After years of losing female talent, companies are finally realizing what that loss of brain trust and gender balance ultimately means for their businesses. When women leave mid-career, it begins to boomerang into a lack of gender diversity in leadership roles, especially at the top. Numerous studies show that businesses do better with more women in senior positions, so actively recruiting and retaining women is not just the culturally correct thing to do—it’s an economic imperative as well.
In the past few years, there has been a push from the law, finance, consulting, and technology industries to fold women back into the workforce. Companies including J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Deloitte, McKinsey, and several major law firms have launched midlife internship and reentry programs. These range from ten-week programs to yearlong paid internships to ease women back in to work, refreshing their skills and providing new training where needed.
Millennials, officially the largest segment of the workforce, are also helping to shift the conversation about how to make work, well, work for everyone. They are reimagining the entire structure of the workplace, from the number of hours in each workday to where they actually get stuff done. They are demanding a workplace culture that is more flexible and conducive to having a life outside of their job. Studies have found that Millennials say that they would take a pay cut, forgo a promotion, or be willing to move to better manage work-life demands. According to Pew Research Center, “If they were able to make their current job more flexible, 64 percent of Millennials want to occasionally work from home and 66 percent would like to shift their hours.”10
The bottom line is that Millennials feel entitled to have a life along with a career and believe technology can enable them to work anywhere at any time. So companies that have grown anxious about losing their female talent together with the job hopping of the Millennials are starting to pay attention. All of this may be the perfect moment for women to get back into the game without the stigma of having taken a hiatus or without feeling marginalized by a flexible work status. This way, so that they can embrace what they’ve been seeking—a fulfilling career and a family.
Equally promising is the fact that several new companies, led by women and powered by tech platforms that connect, teach, and inspire, are trying to make all of this possible.
HELPING BRING WOMEN BACK TO WORK
About two years after taking a break in her career as deputy general counsel for Major League Baseball (MLB), Jennifer Gefsky was eager to get back to work. Like many ambitious women, Jennifer assumed she would integrate her career into her home life. “I never thought I would leave the workforce, but life happens,” Jennifer says. For her, life meant getting pregnant with a third child at forty years old.
For seven years, Jennifer was the most senior female on the management side of MLB. Baseball was part of her bloodline. Jennifer’s grandfather was an all-star catcher for the Philadelphia Athletics and played for the New York Yankees, but that’s not what motivated her to become one of the top women in sports labor law by the time she was thirty years old. Jennifer had dreamed of becoming an orthopedic surgeon, but medical school cost more than law school, and she was paying her own bills. Jennifer had always worked since she was eleven years old, ironing neighbors’ shirts, babysitting, and getting her first W-2 at fourteen years old when she worked at McDonalds.
To pay her way through college, Jennifer worked as a cocktail waitress, a hospital emergency room clerk, and a valet parking attendant. After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, Jennifer got a job at the prestigious law firm Proskauer Rose in its sports practice in New York City. She quickly made her mark defending the National Basketball Association. From Proskauer Rose, Jennifer was recruited by MLB into a position she loved and in which she thrived. But with a two-and-a-half-hour commute each day, a crushing travel schedule, and a growing family, she was drowning. Jennifer’s husband David was also starting a new real estate development business and was never home. They made the joint decision that Jennifer would take a pause in her career. That pause unexpectedly lasted eight years.
When Jennifer’s youngest child Blake started preschool, she began itching all over again, determined to go back to work, but was shocked that she just didn’t know how to get back in. After all, getting jobs had never been hard for Jennifer. At thirty years old, she was profiled in Crain’s New York Business magazine as a “40 Under 40 Rising Star,” but now at forty-five, Jennifer felt lost. “I didn’t know where to begin, and I realized there were tons of women exactly like me.”
In 2016, with her cofounder Niccole Kroll, Jennifer launched the digital recruiting platform Après. Après connects women (mostly Gen Xers) who took time out raising kids with companies seeking talent and diversity. The platform does more than list jobs: It helps to empower women and position them in the workplace. It offers access to career coaches, interviewing tips, and resume writing experts who will rewrite a resume and bio for a fee. The site also helps women message and explain the gaps on their resume and shows how to package volunteer work into transferable skills that have value in the workplace.
Once a fierce legal counsel for sports management, Jennifer is now a champion for Gen X women returning to work. Part advocate, part evangelist, Jennifer meets with companies to persuade HR executives and senior leaders as to the strong value proposition this group of female talent has to offer. She argues that these women, unlike Millennials, won’t be looking to opt out—their kids are older now, and they have the skills, gravitas, and motivation to be strong leaders and team players in an organization. It’s low risk and high return.
“It’s insane to me that companies don’t give women like me a longer look, because there is such value,” Jennifer says. “We educate companies about not only the value in the employee that you’re getting in terms of skills and life experience, but you’re also getting reenergized women who are excited to empower others, who won’t be opting out again, and who bring loyalty.” And at a time when culture is everything, Jennifer believes that bringing these women back on board is adding value in other critical ways. “You’re sending a message to your younger workforce and a message to your customers and clients that you believe in gender diversity and that you believe in women and in family values—that’s what Millennials are demanding of companies today, a strong culture,” Jennifer says.
Finding Value in the Gap Years
One of Après’s standard lines is “Don’t run from the gap.” Jennifer says that the gap in a woman’s resume is common and is not going away. Millennials are taking time out too, and the gap period will become just another part of the rhythm of the workplace. Jennifer recommends that women be open and honest and say, “Here’s what I’ve done while I’ve been out of the paid workforce.” Companies don’t want to hear that you’ve baked cookies for your school bake sale, but they do want to hear about your organizational and people skills and how what you’ve been doing is translatable to the position you’re looking to be hired for. “Packaging the volunteer work in a way that transfers back into the workplace is extremely valuable. Women have to understand that there is value there,” Jennifer says.
Jennifer is also trying to dispel the myth she often hears that these women don’t have the drive or staying power to be strong hires. She says that there is a gross misperception that the women are bored and looking for something to do. Still, Jennifer says most of these women have come back to work out of necessity. Whether it’s because they are now divorced or their family circumstances have changed, women need jobs. And given that the span of a career can run forty to fifty years, taking three, five, or even ten years off shouldn’t permanently hold women back. “These women are either financially motivated or personally motivated to come back, which are both great for employers,” Jennifer says. “They also have something to prove: both their ability and the idea that ‘you’ve taken a chance on me, and I’m going to prove you right.’ All of this is very compelling and makes them strong employees.”
FROM THE MONKEY BARS TO THE CORNER OFFICE
It’s been nearly impossible to book lunch with Jessica Spira, forty- five, whose jammed work schedule as a business development executive at a digital publishing company is packed with meetings and too many conference calls to count. I first met Jessica when our sons were just weeks old as we headed to a “new mommy lunch” on the Upper West Side in New York City, where a sorority of postpartum moms got together each Wednesday to bond over sore nipples, Kegel exercises, and the newness of motherhood. Jessica was my first real “mommy friend.” Her baby Zachary slept soundly, while my colicky son shrieked from his stroller.
Jessica was also one of my first interviews for How She Really Does It. When I interviewed Jessica for my book, our boys were just about eighteen months old. I interviewed famous and regular professional women, but I also spoke to moms like Jessica who had left their careers to stay home with their kids full-time. For six-and-a-half years, until her daughter Elizabeth started preschool, Jessica was home. “I was very much in the moment those first couple of years until I started making the decision to go back, and then I was projecting ahead,” Jessica says.
Jessica says that as her kids got a little older, she became very thoughtful and deliberate about how she would transition back into work. She knew that applying her skills in a volunteer capacity could also translate on a resume. So for nearly three years, Jessica got involved in raising money for Hippo Park, a playground on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She served on the board for the park’s annual fair. She sought strategic partners and sold sponsorships. Revenue grew and the park’s programming expanded. “This wasn’t about the check you could write, it was about the energy you brought,” Jessica says. “It was a diverse group of women, and I had a great time doing it.”
Her experience with Hippo Park inspired Jessica to take some classes at New York University on fundraising. Jessica says that she worried that she wouldn’t easily land a job again in the private sector because the economy was shaky and the news for women trying to reenter the workforce was depressing. “I didn’t think there were any doors open to me,” Jessica says. “In the press there was a lot of talk of women dropping out. I assumed I’d have to go into nonprofit. I thought maybe it was a more flexible lifestyle, but then I learned that you work longer hours and they actually pay you less, so that was no longer an option.”
While Jessica was growing weary of the full-time at-home routine and thinking of how to get back in, she was also paying attention to the bleak economic forecasts. “During the summer of 2007, the economy was showing some cracks, and I thought, I have ceded all of my financial independence to my spouse, but he’s in the financial industry and that’s really not dependable anymore, so I better get my shit together and figure something out,” Jessica says. “I had been on LinkedIn and had a decent network and always kept up with people, so I was able to re-light that really quickly.”
Jessica tapped into her network. She had people who she trusted look over her resume and offer feedback. She listed and detailed her volunteer work and explained the big gap in her professional life. Within weeks of first connecting with former colleagues on LinkedIn, Jessica was interviewing. “When people asked me what I was most proud of professionally, I would say the Hippo Park work. I really pounded the pavement,” Jessica says. “It was business development, just in a different way than I had done before. But I went on interviews and parlayed that experience into my conversations.” Within six weeks of first interviewing, Jessica had found a full-time job. She says that women need to realize that time doesn’t stand still when you take time out. Your new boss could be younger than you and your title could be frozen, if not downgraded. “You have to check your ego and be prepared to eat a little bit of crow,” Jessica says. “I went back to the level I left at. You have to be okay reporting to someone your age or younger. And your comp and title can take a big hit too. You have to get comfortable with that.”
Coming Back Stronger
Jessica was thrilled to have found a full-time position just as the economy started tanking. She was cognizant about working hard. Even though her company gave Summer Fridays, she rarely took them. She knew there were times when she would need to leave early for soccer games, doctor appointments, or other kid stuff, so she intentionally worked later when she could. “I just thought, from an optics perspective, I wanted them to see that I was all in,” Jessica says. “I never wanted to be the person where they say, ‘Yeah, she’s the mom’ and ‘Oh, she’s not here or she’s always late.’
Jessica has been back to work for six years now. She’s had three jobs and several promotions and has recently reached the level she believes she would have been at if she hadn’t taken time off. She doesn’t apologize for staying home with her kids or regret what for her was a true choice. And like many moms in the workplace, she sees an added benefit to motherhood.
“Frankly, I’m a much better employee now that I am a mom, and I am better able to manage people,” Jessica says. “I have a different way of approaching things than a lot of my younger colleagues. It sounds like a cliché, but I am older, wiser, and more confident, and I don’t get rattled by the small stuff. I’m also a lot more fearless than I was before.”
This is exactly the message Jennifer Gefsky wants companies to hear and what Après is preaching. The mom who takes time off comes back as a stronger employee and a better manager. The Gen Xer is going to over-perform to show her value and loyalty. She also brings a level of experience and maturity to counterbalance the younger, less experienced Millennial workforce.
And for Après, the timing may be perfect.
“No one bats an eye when I say I took a six-year leave. It’s more accepted now,” Jessica says. “But my advice is that your network is the most important thing you have. Whatever you do, leave on good terms and stay close to the people who you work for, because you don’t know when you’re going to need them. Also, try to keep up your skills if you can or be able to position your skills in a way that’s relevant. It’s incredibly important.”
THE WORST QUESTION. EVER.
“So, what do you do? I hate that question,” Lisa Skeete Tatum, forty-seven, tells me as we sit in a Corner Bakery booth in a mall on the outskirts of Princeton, New Jersey. She’s not alone. I hate that question too. Sometimes, it’s been easy to answer. I’m a TV producer! I’m a Capitol Hill press secretary! I’m an author! I’m an editor-in-chief of a website! Hooray! And then other times, when I was working in public relations but not wanting to call myself only a publicist (because well, I’ve always had a complicated relationship with that job description), I would want to say, “I work in PR but I’m also an author and a producer.” But that sounded lame, like I was apologizing for PR, making excuses for my current gig. And I felt like a loser to be living in the past. But much worse is when I’m not gainfully employed and have no legitimate title or paycheck and call myself a freelancer or consultant. That feels like a euphemism for: “I can’t find a job. No one will hire me.”
It doesn’t feel liberating; it feels small.
For many women who are underemployed or unemployed or employed in areas they don’t want to be, the “What do you do?” question strikes at something deeply personal, a hidden reservoir of messy emotion teeming with anxiety. Typically an innocuous question (though at times cloaked in judgment), it can be a painful reminder of some unfinished business in a woman’s career ambition. It can unleash feelings of inadequacy, insecurity, and existential angst.
“It stirs an inner conflict,” says Nikki Kessler, forty-four, a seasoned Los Angeles entertainment producer, who co-owns 99 Arms Productions, a full-service independent production company. A feast-or-famine industry to begin with, Hollywood’s digital disruption has forced many entertainment veterans to scramble and figure out their next move. “I hadn’t intentionally retired, but we weren’t getting work,” Nikki says. “My kids were little, and I started to accept the fact that maybe this was my ‘mommy time,’ and I tried to disassociate myself from my work identity. But I struggled with that because I spent a big portion of my life creating that identity for myself, and that is hard to release.”
After nearly three years of not having a project in prodjection, Nikki and her business partner Jennifer Gore were recently asked to produce a scripted comedy series for Warner Bros’ digital division and LeBron James’s production company, SpringHill Entertainment. Despite a tight budget, terrible pay, and even worse hours, it was an opportunity they couldn’t refuse. “We did it because digital is the future, despite the fact that there’s no money in it,” Nikki says. “Ultimately, it felt like [we should] jump in and get on board and then afterwards reassess if we want to do it again, because this is where entertainment is moving. Either we need to embrace it or it will pass us by, and we go the way of the dinosaurs.”
Karen Shnek Lippman, a managing partner at executive search firm Koller Search Partners, would agree with Nikki’s instinct to seize the opportunity—even if it’s not initially lucrative or ideal. As industries like media, marketing, and entertainment change rapidly, you may have to play the long game if you hope to get back in. “Once you dip your toe into the water and say you can beat this, you can be very successful,” Shnek Lippman says. “But it requires opening up your mind and teaching yourself to accept that you have to forget about the past somewhat and just go guns blazing into the future of whatever industry you’re in. You will have to figure out how to get the skills and experience you need in order to thrive again.”
GETTING UNSTUCK
More than forty million professional women will find themselves at a crossroads in their career, says Lisa Skeete Tatum, the CEO and cofounder of Landit, a digital platform that launched in 2016, aiming to be an amped up LinkedIn for women. They will hit these “inflection points,”—as Lisa calls them—moments of change—because of a whole host of issues that are personally and professionally driven. Landit bills itself as an entirely new approach for women who are stuck, looking to make their next move, or simply wanting to achieve more. The question every woman faces, the website says, is “Where do I start?”
Like Jennifer Gefsky’s Après platform, the Landit business was birthed from a personal place. Lisa felt stuck. She may be the last woman who you would imagine would feel that way. After all, Lisa defied all types of odds, bushwhacking her own unconventional path from Newark to Cambridge. Born to a single mom in Newark, New Jersey, Lisa and her mom left Newark when she was five years old, after race riots engulfed the city. They hopscotched between Europe and the States because of her mom’s job as a military nurse. Lisa landed at Princeton University, where she majored in chemical engineering—as an African American woman in engineering, she was a minority among a minority at Princeton. After graduating, she worked for Procter and Gamble and then joined a start-up, which led to Harvard Business School.
For eleven years, Lisa worked in early stage health care venture capital in a three-person firm in Princeton, New Jersey. She sat on prestigious boards and had an enviable pedigree, and yet this mother of two boys felt unsure of what to do. Despite all of her connections and experience, she wasn’t clear what she was looking for or even how she should ask her contacts to help her. Simply, she didn’t know her next move. “As we progress, figuring out that next pivot is challenging, and you may have the clarity on what doesn’t fit, but you may not know what it is that does fit,” Lisa says. “When you are young, you have the whole world in front of you. But when you have a little bit of history and a track record, the world looks a little different.”
Lisa was preaching to the choir. It’s exactly what I’ve experienced and frankly what inspired this book. Even with strong networks and job experience, you may not know what path to take and who could help lead you there.
In 2012, Lisa was nominated for the Henry Crown Fellowship Program through The Aspen Institute. The goal of the program is for fellows to create positive change in the world. They need to leave with a big, ambitious project. “As I was going through this personal transition, I realized my project was me,” Lisa says. “I realized how many millions of women were in similar positions and in many ways suffering in silence because you don’t want people to know that you don’t have it figured out or you don’t know what’s next, and you’re feeling vulnerable.”
Lisa is not afraid to show that vulnerability—in fact, it’s what she thinks makes Landit so powerful. The issues wrapped up in women’s career pivots, reentries, or total relaunches are complicated and often loaded with feelings of insecurity, fear, and anxiety. All of this can lead to depression or inertia or both. Landit wants to help resolve this cocktail of conflict.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone around the room and people say, ‘Life is great.’ But then someone starts talking and the confessions come pouring out,” Lisa says.
On Landit, women input information about their goals, paid work, and volunteer experience, as well as their work schedule preferences and skills so they can receive personalized job listings, a career “playbook,” and access to services from resume writing and interviewing to brand-building. Landit gives value and legitimacy to the PTA and soccer mom experience. Aside from helping women build confidence, Landit, like Après, shows women how their volunteer work can translate. Just as Jessica Spira successfully wove her work with Hippo Park into her resume, Landit models how to effectively explain the non-paid piece of what many women have pursued.
Will You Be My Mentor?
For years now, mentors and sponsors have become popular concepts in the workplace. A sponsor is someone in a senior position who is willing to make a bet on your behalf, spend the time to get to know you, and would use some political capital to pull you up through the ranks. A mentor, on the other hand, can give feedback on how to grow your career. She can offer advice and wisdom about your industry, help you network, and teach you new skills. Ideally, it would be awesome to have a squad of people to help raise and support you as you grow and actively advocate for you. And that’s exactly what Lisa wants Landit to help cultivate. The platform walks you through creating a personal “board of advisors,” which it sees as critical. Lisa is trying to reimagine the mentor and sponsor relationship. “I have never seen a wildly successful mentorship program, because it’s too heavy—that whole ‘Will you be my mentor?’ approach. You can’t force it. Instead, you need to create a relationship, and then say, ‘I am coming to you because I need this,’” Lisa says.
Women are also unsure how to engage with their mentors or sponsors. It can be an awkward relationship. So Landit wants to help women frame the conversation and the “ask” before they set up a meeting. Early in Lisa’s career, her boss told her that she would arrange a conversation with a more senior person at the company, and her advice was “don’t waste that bullet.” That’s stuck with Lisa ever since. Be armed and ready for the moment. People generally want to help but are busy and can’t be bothered to think too hard about what they could do for you. Specific, directed requests are much more effective. “You have to come prepared. And yes, you form a personal relationship because it can’t be all transactional, but if you’re going to take somebody’s time you better come with an ask or with a question,” Lisa says.
Sell Yourself
As we discussed in chapter 9, branding today is important for everyone, but arguably more so for those who have had untraditional career paths or interruptions. Landit seeks to help women craft their narrative. It walks women through what Lisa calls a “Mad Libs” fill-in-the-sentence approach to building a brand statement, distilling it into meaningful messages. “We notoriously undersell ourselves. But if you don’t tell your story well, and you don’t frame your successes and interruptions, and you don’t present your accomplishments to an employer, you can look risky and you won’t get a shot. When the conversations are happening, your name isn’t in them,” Lisa says. “I also think when you have a brand identity, it helps inform some of the choices that you make. There’s a plan and you’re being intentional.”
After opting out or getting pushed off the career track, many women want to get back in. Taking the shame out of not having a job or feeling unfocused is something Lisa takes to heart. For her, Landit is personal. “I feel like everything I’ve done in my life has led me to this,” Lisa says. “If you’re isolated and you don’t have a way to talk about it, and you think that there are no options, and you feel like you have no skills, even though you used to do all of these amazing things, it’s terrible. I’m doing this because I feel so deeply and I’m so passionate about it, and because I can. If not me, who?”
A DIFFERENT MODEL FOR GETTING BACK IN
By 2020, it’s anticipated that more than 40 percent of the workforce will be freelancers, contractors, and temporary employees. The phenomenon of the “free agent” professional was discussed in a 2012 Harvard Business Review article, “The Rise of the Supertemp.” In it, Jodi Greenstone Miller and Matt Miller wrote about how the best and the brightest were leaving the full-time workforce and upending the economy.11 Valuing autonomy and flexibility over the endless grind of meetings and long commutes, they were choosing a different path—a project-based one. They could work when they wanted and how they wanted and still earn high-paying incomes. Sound elitist and unrealistic? Perhaps. But the trend in talent-based, project-based matching is on the rise, and for obvious reasons it may be most welcomed by moms who feel shoved out of their careers and want back in on their own terms.
It is this model that former college roommates Kate Motley, forty-one, and Laxmi Wordham, forty, are creating with Athenity, an online marketplace they launched in June 2015 that connects professional women with project-based work. They’ve discovered that the sweet spot for finding temporary work across industries is from smaller groups within large companies or smaller midsize companies. However, they make it clear that Athenity is not just for moms, but for all women seeking a more accommodating work-life situation.
Like Après and Landit, and perhaps all businesses guided by a true mission, Athenity’s origin story emerges from its founders’ own struggles. Kate’s last job was leading marketing and product development for a toy company. Laxmi worked as the chief digital officer at the Michael J. Fox Foundation. Moves from New York City to the suburbs—Kate to Connecticut and Laxmi to Westchester, New York—meant long commutes, little time with their kids, and, ultimately, them both leaving their jobs. The urgency of finding an alternative solution for themselves and for their female friends who also felt pushed out of the workforce inspired Athenity.
“We’ve been struck by how many women would be working and could be working but aren’t; and the longer they are out, the more intimidating it is to step back in,” Laxmi says. “Where we come in is pounding the pavement to find the work and to get companies to say, yes, this is a model that we believe in. The gig economy is growing and a whole switch is underway, but a lot of companies haven’t fully embraced that yet.”
Like Jennifer Gefsky and Lisa Skeete Tatum, Laxmi and Kate are evangelists for folding women back into the workforce and rethinking how to retain female talent, especially after they become mothers. “We really are mission driven and that’s what gets us up in the morning, that’s what we really care about, that’s what excites us,” Kate says. “We want to advocate and change the model and get more companies to buy into this sea change. Providing an alternative model for women is important for all of us.”