Redefining work-life balance, with Neha Ruch

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1:26Women and men are able to grow not just in the minute-to-minute of caregiving, which we know is demanding and leadership training in and of itself, but how they're actually sharpening their skills in new ways such that they're not counted out of the workforce. One in three women working out of the home are planning a career pause in the next two years. One in two are planning a downshift of hours. Those 90 % of women on pause aim to return. So the goal right now is to update the perception of the modern woman on pause because she is really ever shifting and ever evolving on like a much more gray spectrum between work and family.

2:14That's Neha Rush, founder of the platform Mother Untitled and author of the new book, The Power Pause. As family and career trade-offs become more complicated and often more expensive, I wanted to talk to Neha about her research into what makes a career pause valuable for society, for businesses, and for individuals. Her argument that the time away from work can lead to a better career is counterintuitive and instructive, and she doesn't shy away from addressing the cultural stereotypes that can plague mothers, fathers, and even hiring managers. As corporate diversity and inclusion programs recede and government support for parenting is questioned, it's critical to understand the career reality that parents are facing.

3:02So let's get to it. This is Rapid Response.

3:10I'm Bob Safian, and I'm here with Neha Rush, founder of Mother Untitled, author of the new book, The Power Paws, How to Plan a Career Break After Kids and Come Back Stronger Than Ever, and a mother of two. Neha, thanks for joining us. I'm so thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me. You're on a mission to reduce stigma for women around stepping back from a career to focus on family. There's so much uneasiness right now about challenges and choices that American families face around work and raising kids. So many labels and stereotypes. As I was introducing you, I realized that I may have fallen into some of those traps.

3:53How do you introduce yourself? Do you start with your family, your career, your education? I know you have an MBA from Stanford. I think we lean on the answer to what you do in place of who are you. And so for a long time, I got to say, I run brand at a tech startup. And in like a few pithy words, I was saying, like, I run, so I'm a leadership position brand, so I'm somewhat creative. And a tech startup, so I was, you know, somewhat ahead of the curve or a risk taker. And so it conveys a lot about you. And then when you part with that, you realize, wait a second, we have more expansive identities.

4:28All those skills and accomplishments go with us. So for a while, I would word mama, you know, people would ask what you do and stay at home mom for reasons we'll go into didn't quite fit. And so I started to perfect right now. I get to be with my kids. We'll see what comes next. And what's been interesting as I shift back to more work outside of the home in launching this book is now I stumble because I want to say I'm mostly with my kids, but I'm not, that's not where I am. My kids are in school. So I'm saying right now I'm getting ready to launch a book and we'll see what comes next. And that term you mentioned, stay at home mom, like what does that term mean today?

5:08Because as you describe it, like it sounds a little bit like a pejorative. Some people think it should be a badge of pride. Is there a better term? I don't think we've landed on a better term, But, you know, if we back up, the phrase stay-at-home mother, just by pure sociolinguistics, is flawed, right? Stay at implies stagnancy. Working is an active verb. So just by nature of the language, it sets us up to fail. Let's look at the 1970s, and we had the second wave of feminism, right? And we were trying to prove women's capacity in the workforce. and the media really was able to continue to create new narratives, show women archetypes in work, and yet we left behind anyone at home with apron strings, with the June Cleaver archetype, to this day.

6:01If you poll the American public, we ran a survey in 2023 of 1 ,000 members of the general population, 1 ,200 women in downshifted careers. And when asked who they think of, when they think of the stay-at-home mother, they will still say June Cleaver. When they think of the working mother, they will say Michelle Obama. One is fact, one is fiction. And so the goal right now is to update the perception of the modern woman on pause because she is very different and she is really ever shifting and ever evolving on like a much more gray spectrum between work and family. You coined this term, the power pause, the name of your book.

6:41So what does it mean? And what's important about the pause part of it? Well, when I stepped into my own chapter of stay-at-home motherhood, I was gobsmacked by just the sheer amount of pushback, whether it was from peers or family members wondering, like, what are you going to do all day? Are you going to be bored? Did you really waste that education at Stanford that you mentioned before. And the reality was I was hearing from them that I was in some way giving up or being counted out. And the reality for me, like 90 % of women on career pauses today, is that I did aim to return to the workforce.

7:18This was just one chapter. And I wanted time with my child. I wanted time to surround myself with new experiences and see what came next, but by no means did I intend to stop growing. And the goal of the power pause is really to reframe the conversation as one chapter where you're shifting priorities. You're shifting your time away from paid work to focus on family life, to focus on raising children, mental health, family health. And yet you're still holding room to move forward towards more authentic goals, expand your network in new ways, explore new ideas, and ultimately really reshape your perspective so that when and if you're entering the workforce again, you're bringing with you a whole new portfolio of experiences.

8:04And what we want to do is be able to dignify that stage of life so that when and if women need or want to pause, they can be respected and supported and ultimately have an easier time getting back in. You've said that the title of the book and the premise were controversial when you took the proposal to publishers. What made it controversial? Because as you talk about it, it sounds quite logical. Well, you're looking at, first of all, a generation of women, oftentimes at publishing houses and in the media, who have clocked in a lot of time in the workforce. And we've all been served these sort of black and white ideas of stay-at-home and working.

8:42And for so long, especially among women, right? And I want to say now that one in five stay-at-home parents are fathers, actually, and that number is ticking upward. But stay-at-home and working mothers were pitted against each other for a long time. The sort of rise of the quote-unquote mommy wars happened in the 80s and 90s. That label was invented by media to talk about how what sort of one side was associating with staying at home because they wanted secure attachment with their children. And one side was working out of the home because they wanted to model ambition for their children. And the reality is we made it about the kids, which like naturally, as soon as you make things about the kids, it's going to raise your defensiveness, right?

9:21And then you dig in your heels and say, well, my way is better and my way is better. And what we know now is first of all, all the research shows that whether you're working out of the home or in the home or existing in between, you can produce healthy and happy outcomes for your children. Also, what we know is that from our research last year, one in three women working out of the home are planning a career pause in the next two years. One and two are planning a downshift of hours. Those 90 % of women on pause aim to return. So really, we are ever-evolving and ever-shifting. But for a while, you know, we were sort of facing those black and white notions and having to convince, whether it was media or publishers, that this work was not anti-feminist.

10:05It was not about setting women back to defending tradition in the home. It was about introducing new valid options to help women be able to step into a career pause or downshift and be able to remain active and engaged so they could ultimately have more choices available to them on the other side and less penalty. Women are having children at the age of average age across the country of 30, and that skews higher on the coast. So they're clocking in more education, more work experience like myself, right? I'd already done a decade in brand marketing. And then they have more equitable relationships with their partners.

10:43Like what we just talked about, dads are spending three times the amount of time with their kids than any generation prior. So it's not like these women are like serving their husband a cocktail and a plate of cookies at the end of the day. What we want to do is be able to showcase how women and men are able to grow not just in the minute-to-minute of caregiving, which we know is demanding and leadership training in and of itself, but how they're actually sharpening their skills in new ways. I've often wondered why a pause to take care of kids isn't looked at as like just another job experience.

11:18Like, why isn't it on a resume? There's plenty we learn from parenting. And people's careers take all kinds of other twists, not necessarily family-related, that we put on resumes. Like, is this just cultural stigma? I think we've diminished the value of care for a long time. First of all, just like economically, it doesn't have a line item on the GDP. I know there are peers of mine who are working on that. Eva Rodsky with her tremendous work with Fair Play and the Fair Play Institute are really advocating for that. But when you don't have a place in the GDP, then it gets diminished. And then you add to that that it's work that is assumed to be done out of love, which of course it is, but it still comes with value.

12:01So salary.com did their own survey and their own math to say, well, if a home parent was assigned value based on all the roles, chauffeur, chef, educator, then they would be making$184 ,000 a year. No one's assigning that salary, but that data was meant to signify that this is actual work of value and parents who are doing that work should be valued and respected as such. I would go one step further, though, to say that it's not just those care tasks that I think we deem as easily outsourceable. It's the really intellectual and emotional labor. And so it's much more complicated work. And I think if we can dignify it as such, we can start to not just assign it value, but I think we can start to elevate our perception of how that work can shape professionals' experience and perspective on the other side.

12:58I mean, you said that time away from work can lead to a more focused, more impactful career in the long term, which seems counterintuitive. Our careers, and you know this, I think you've spoken to this before, are getting longer, right? So we're looking at a longer game. And pauses help make that a sustainable long game where you have to be able to reset your perspectives and bring in nontraditional experience so that you're rounding out that portfolio of work. And what we see women report on returning is that the number one thing they say that has changed is their perspective, their ability to understand their relationship to work, to hold it with less urgency but be more efficient and be able to manage their time and their priorities.

13:49And I think that that can be a real superpower. But I think beyond that, what we see is women report how it shapes their desire to do work of meaning. You know, time at home gives you a front row seat to the day-to-day issues that come up in your community. And a lot of women will change their positions and their industry upon return. And they may actually, and we see this in the data, value flexibility and more meaning, even over salary. Your work isn't just about families with means. This is a challenge for middle and working class families. Childcare is so expensive. It can eat up a full-time salary.

14:29After we had our second child, my wife's teacher salary barely covered daycare, and she opted to take care of our own kids instead of teaching someone else's kids. Do you have any advice on the financial decision to embrace a single-income household? One in three women feel forced to pause their careers because of the cost of child care. For so long, stay-at-home motherhood was conflated with luxury. And as luxury, we assume that it is not work worthy of support. And we don't pay attention to it in the really complicated conversation about how do we support caregivers. as partners shift, provide the unpaid work in the home.

15:17What we want to assume and really reiterate is that the partnership in the case of a two-parent household now takes on this idea that it's an interdependent household. Because whether or not you are pausing your work because of financial considerations, a lot of women contend with this idea that they're giving up their financial independence. And when you feel like you no longer have financial dignity, it can really make it hard to invest time back into yourself. So before you pause, as you make that decision to how are you going to support your family in this next chapter, ideally that is a conversation you're having three to six months out.

15:56You're going through that budgeting exercise together and you're making really conscious decisions, whether it's we are together going to reduce are spending on travel or entertaining our friends to be able to accommodate that loss of income because we together are deciding that one partner at home makes sense for us. And that joint household investment, that joint household interdependence, then has a ripple effect of the home parent being able to say, you know what, I deserve breaks as well because too often we see women, and I was guilty of this as well, saying, well, if I part with my paid work, now my entire value is in taking care of the house and I no longer deserve support.

16:39And I certainly can't invest in paid help. And obviously that is a flawed mindset because what we know is our children are best served with whole and healthy parents. And so what we want to be able to do is also rethink then when we're investing in maybe 10 hours of a babysitter, or we're saying, let's block and tackle on the weekends. So we each get breaks. We're saying both parents are contributing. Both parents deserve care and support, and no one should be working 24-7 without breaks. Neha embraces the value of both caretaking and career, which has been a tricky dance for many. But as she says, there's no reason for a one-size-fits-all approach in our modern world.

17:22So what are the implications for fathers in all this? And how should employers and hiring managers respond to people coming back from a career pause? We'll talk about that after the break. Stay with us.

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19:29Before the break, we heard Mother Untitled's Neha Rush talk about the advantages of mothers taking a career pause. Now she discusses how career pressures are both the same and different for fathers, how she personally transitioned back into the workforce, and her advice for employers and hiring managers in assessing what she calls returnees. Let's jump back in.

19:57As you mentioned, there are an increasing number of men who stay at home, one in five. Are the challenges that men face different? I think there is still a recalibration around ambition and success. There's still a roadmap we all need to be able to walk through those rooms with our head held high and be able to answer that question, what do you do? and rethink, well, if I'm not making income and I'm not getting promotions, how do I define success so that I feel like I'm not stuck and that I'm moving forward towards goals that will orient me in the right direction, right? All of that holds true.

20:40I think what I've seen anecdotally is that men and women face different dynamics around societal expectations of what caregiving looks like. I had a brilliant writer write this for me, Tao Tai. She talked about her own experience where her husband stayed at home for two years and then she stayed at home for two years. And when she stepped into stay-at-home motherhood, she was so excited because her husband seemed like he had such a fun time. Except she was like worn to the bone because she was baking cookies, she was on the PTA, she was doing crafts, and she was totally run ragged. And finally, her husband looked at her and was like, why are you trying to get the approval from some nebulous good parenting committee?

21:22I didn't do any of this. And she realized she was operating at some standard where to prove her worth as a stay-at-home mom, she needed to be a super mom. I noticed that you dedicate the book to your father. Why is that? So my dad immigrated with a company called Infosys, and he built that company in the States and then became a venture capitalist. And when he and I were walking around Union Square and I was pushing a little toddler around, I shared this idea that most people thought was like, oh, she's giving up her Stanford Business School degree and this impressive salary to like write a mom blog.

22:03And he looked at me and he said, I know that you're taking on a big mission. He saw the worth in it when no one else did. And I think sometimes we need that other person who believes we can do it. And he believes that something doesn't have to look big to be big. But I think beyond that, he was really in the startup grind through my early years in America and then through my teens. My mother, who had paused her own work to be at home, was his unofficial head of human resources. She would get the new employees set up in the school system. She would entertain all of the partners. She would sort of be the emotional sounding board.

22:48and I remember in my teens being so mad at my mom as like teenage girls will be and I was like it's not even your you know she probably didn't give me money for an Abercrombie shirt I have no idea but you know I said something about it not being her money and that day I've never heard him really lose it on me but he just turned around he said never say that again it's more hers than it will ever be mine she's done more to establish us in this country than the rest of us and and I think he really instilled that in me such that when I made the choice to pause, I was able to do it in a way that I was really secure in my contributions.

23:24You chose to take this pause and then you kind of took that personal experience and turned it into a career, right? Talking about it on social media, gaining a following, writing a book. Well, our skills don't evaporate, right? And our interests don't evaporate when we step into a career break. And I say this to all women, like audit the things about your career that you are really proud of when you step into a career pause, because you don't want to lose sight of those. Those go with you and your identity, even if you don't have that pithy title. And I loved brand. I loved marketing. I really found content and content that women absorbed fascinating.

24:03And then when I stepped into this career pause, I thought, okay, well, now I've already parted with the ego of leaving my career. I might as well start dabbling with something else. And I will tell you that in this culture, we have a way of diminishing small projects and passion projects and lifestyle businesses and little blogs. And I remember going to my five-year Stanford business school reunion and someone like overhearing people whispering or snickering about that little blog. And, you know, of course I wanted to say to them, no, this is how I'm taking on like a big cultural change. And I'm just, this is how I can do it in a small way while my kid's napping.

24:40And, you know, I think it was, maybe it was Jeff Bezos who said, you know, you have to be willing to be misunderstood for a long time. And I think that that was the gift of parenthood, right? Because you're always making choices that not everyone understands. And I got to plant seeds for this work. I wanted to dabble in content. I wasn't making money early on. And so I set those sort of clear success metrics that were learning, impact, and networking. And so I would say I will go to a different motherhood content entrepreneur networking event each quarter. I will write three blog posts a week.

25:18I will start this Instagram channel. And it was small early on. There is an irony in trying to build the first platform for women on career pauses while you're on a career pause. And I would get to a new year in 2017, It was really growing. And then 2018, I had my second child, which brought me to my knees. And then 2019, I was like, well, this is my year. And the pandemic happened. But then timing is everything because I came out of that. And the world was finally reexamining work and family. And my children were aging into school. And so I was ready to put more in. And I was ready to step into a thought leadership position on this because I had been living it and writing about it and researching about it and interviewing it for all those years, even if it didn't look impressive on the outside.

26:08Are there policy changes for mothers and families that your organization that Mothers Untitled advocates for? If we can get to a place that we can give stipends for families who opt for one parent to be at home, then we can reduce the burden on the childcare system. we can start to make pausing a real financial possibility for parents. You know, at a base level, I love the work of moms first because I think that paid family leave allows parents to be able to make this choice, whatever their choice be. You know, I think that there's other sides of this. I really talk a lot about universal healthcare because I think if we had that as an option, more parents would be able to shift into freelance and consulting opportunities so that both partners would get the flexibility they need to be able to raise their family in different seasons.