My boss said it like he was telling me about a meeting reschedule. I’d worked with him for years. He’d helped me claw through a prior promotion that took forever, where the goalposts kept moving and I kept being told I wasn’t quite the right shape.

So when he said I was in the pipeline to director, I should have had a better answer.

What I said was: “Wow. Must not have a very strong group to pull from.”

Out loud.

He chuckled. The man deciding my future knew me well enough to hear it for what it was, nerves, not arrogance. But I want to be honest about how thin that margin was. A manager who didn’t know me could have heard that as ingratitude and quietly crossed me off.

I went back to my office and sat there.

“You idiot!” I thought.

Fifteen leaders had decided I was ready, and my gut reaction was to deflect it.

Underneath the joke was a calculation no one in that room could see: I had a three-year-old and a six-year-old in two different schools with two different schedules and the ever-present possibility of a school call for a fever, pink eye, or playground fall (all real calls we experienced more than a few times).

I was already at the edge of what I could hold. What does wanting more cost the people who depend on me every day?

I didn’t talk myself out of that spiral. A voice did it for me.

The Advice That Will Stay With Me Forever

A few months earlier, a mentor who was already at the next level told me something when I confessed I wanted every promotion to feel earned, never a “we need more women” box-check.

“Take the door that’s open. You’ll prove yourself once you’re through it and if you can’t, you won’t last long but when the door opens, you walk through it.”

I heard her voice in that office. So I got up, walked back down the hall, and said: “I didn’t handle that well. Of course I’m interested. What are the next steps?”

That recovery got me a year of sitting in leadership meetings before I’d earned the title. It’s the single biggest reason I made director.

None of it was just me being brave.

I had a village at work. People who knew I had little kids, knew my husband had a demanding job, too, knew I was ambitious and didn’t have to perform it for them. When I fumbled, someone had already handed me the line that caught me. When I hesitated, the door stayed open long enough for me to walk through.

I know the difference because I’ve lived the other version.

When I later went for VP, I had a good mentor who pushed me to go for it. But I’d moved into new territory. Someone opened that door. But there was no village on the other side. And it didn’t go well.

A mentor gives you advice. A village gives you cover and support.

Most women are told the answer is inside them. Believe in yourself. Want it more. Lean in.

We can’t “lean in” any more. We’re already horizontal.

But I didn’t get through that moment on belief. I got through it because someone who knew what I was juggling had already told me what to do and the people in the room knew me well enough to give a clumsy joke the benefit of the doubt.

That’s infrastructure . The village at work that knows you. And most of us are expected to build careers without it.

I didn’t give my supervisor all the details as I didn’t trust him. I gave him just enough to make the ask. He questioned it anyway wanting to know why it couldn’t wait.

Within a few weeks, another senior leader on our project needed nearly identical flexibility. His child was working through something similar to mine. He got it without a second thought. I was told, “your kid will be fine,” by the same supervisor who told him to take the time he needed.

That was the beginning of the end of my corporate career.

I didn’t have language for what I felt watching that happen. I just knew it wasn’t fair. Looking back, that was the beginning of the end of my corporate career because something in me had quietly changed. I had been pretty transparent with my caregiving duties and very flexible with family and work conflicts, often going above and beyond for work at the expense of my family. This experience stayed with me because of how easily grace was extended to one and how hard I had to argue for the same thing.

I see the same pattern playing out right now. Companies are turning conference rooms into World Cup viewing lounges for the six weeks of the tournament, adjusting meetings, flexing schedules, and celebrating the culture of it.

One has a broadcast schedule. The other has a human being who needs you. Guess which one gets automatic approval.

The blind spot is a story we’ve built where flexibility is something companies extend to mothers as a kindness, a workaround, something you’re granted if you ask the right way and your reason checks out. That was never actually the deal I saw play out in my own career, on either side of it. Flexibility isn’t a mom benefit. It’s infrastructure. And most companies are only building it for the population they’ve decided deserves it. It’s really about who asks and who gets believed.

Flexibility isn’t a mom benefit. It’s infrastructure.

Subscribe now

Years earlier, I worked alongside two senior women who were rarely in the office, certainly not 4-5 days a week like most of us. They were both primary caregivers to their children. One of them ran almost her entire week on phone calls. This was before conference calls were something anyone did casually, and long before video. I started paying close attention to them, because they were doing something I didn’t think was possible: leading, rising in the organization and having real impact without needing to be seen doing it. What I eventually understood watching them is that presence was never actually the thing that mattered. Outcomes were. Performance was. We just hadn’t built a culture or the data to prove it yet.

We have the data now, and it says something bigger than “flexibility helps moms.” According to Care.com‘s 2026 Future of Benefits Report, 67% of employees currently are, or will become, a caregiver for a child, a parent, a spouse, a sibling. Only 37% would tell you that themselves. Caregiving isn’t a mom issue tucked into the edges of your workforce. It’s most of your workforce, quietly not raising their hand.

67% of employees currently are, or will become, a caregiver for a child, a parent, a spouse, a sibling. Only 37% would tell you that themselves.

And the business case has stopped being a debate. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom ran the largest randomized controlled trial to date on hybrid work, over 1,600 employees at Trip.com, tracked for two years. Employees working from home two days a week were just as productive and just as likely to be promoted as their full-time-in-office peers. Resignations among non-managers dropped 33%. Bloom’s conclusion: “Hybrid work is a win-win-win for employee productivity, performance, and retention.”

That tracks with Gallup’s ongoing hybrid work research: hybrid employees consistently report better work-life balance, higher engagement, and lower turnover intentions than employees working fully on-site. It shows up in hiring, too. Job postings for hybrid or remote-eligible roles draw two to three times more applicants than fully on-site postings for comparable work. Flexibility doesn’t just keep the people already on your team. It widens who’s willing to apply in the first place.

None of this is fringe anymore. Just under 35% of employed Americans did some work from home in 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Flexibility isn’t a favor companies do for the employees they like best. It’s how a third of the workforce already operates.

People have full lives outside of work. All of them. Not just the mothers.

I think about that supervisor sometimes, the one who granted flexibility easily to one of us while making the other justify it. I don’t think he set out to be unfair. I think he was operating on the old story: flexibility as a favor, handed out based on how deserving, how convincing, how quiet you were willing to be about your reasons.

We don’t need a better version of that story. We need a different one. One where flexibility isn’t something you earn by asking well, but infrastructure built on the assumption that people have full lives outside of work.

Because they do. All of them.

Not just the mothers.

Subscribe now

They’ve done the math. They’ve weighed the options. They’ve made a decision, often the wrong one, for the wrong reasons. Not because they lack intelligence or judgment, but because they’re operating on incomplete information.

New data from Care.com‘s 2026 Future of Benefits Report confirmed something I’ve suspected for a long time. The gap between what employers offer and what employees actually know about is enormous. And that gap is costing working mothers their careers.

According to a recent Capita analysis, nearly 1 in 5 healthcare jobs are held by parents of young children. Same in construction. Same in protective services. The people keeping this country running are caregivers. And most of their employers have no idea how much caregiving is shaping their workday or their decision-making.

Let’s talk about what’s actually happening.

Most caregivers don’t even know they are caregivers.

Here’s a number that tells you everything: only 37% of employees identify as caregivers, even as many are actively providing care right now, and others expect to soon.

If you don’t see yourself as a caregiver, you’re not going to ask for caregiving support. You’re going to white-knuckle it, manage quietly, and assume this is just what work and life feel like now. You’ll absorb the stress, cover the gaps, and eventually start doing the math on whether it’s all worth it.

81% of employees report moderate to high stress.

Their employers estimate that just 55% of their workforce is stressed.

That’s not even close.

Change starts with identifying and naming what we are living. When caregiving goes unnamed, the need for support goes unrecognized. By everyone. Including you.

The benefits may already exist. You just don’t know about them.

This is the finding in the Care.com report that I can’t stop thinking about.

39% of employers report offering child care benefits. Only 22% of employees know those benefits are available.

The benefits exist and they’re funded. They’re sitting in your company’s benefits guide right now, next to the dental plan you actually know how to use.

This is the “Brochure Benefits” reality: organizations with genuine intent to support working parents, but where that support never makes it from the policy document to the people who need it most.

Before you make any major decisions about your career, you owe it to yourself to find out which side of that gap you’re on.

Whether you get access to your benefits often comes down to one person.

Here’s the structural problem nobody wants to name directly.

Only 29% of managers are rated “very prepared” to support caregiving challenges.

That means 7 out of 10 managers, people who may be perfectly competent at their jobs, don’t know what support is available to their team members, don’t feel equipped to have the conversation, and may not even realize the conversation needs to happen.

Whether a working mother gets access to backup care, flexible scheduling, or an EAP referral often has nothing to do with company policy. It has everything to do with whether she happens to report to a manager who knows those options exist and feels empowered to activate them.

This is the “Luck of the Manager” in real time. Not a broken organization nor bad intent. Just a system that was never designed to make support easy to find or offer.

The downstream effects are entirely predictable. 53% of employees have missed work due to caregiving challenges. 48% report decreased productivity from managing care. 31% say caregiving responsibilities are the biggest drain on their productivity at work.

These aren’t personal failures. They are the direct result of a system where support exists on paper but never makes it to the people who need it.

So before you make a permanent decision based on incomplete information…

Last year, through my volunteer work with the here in Washington, DC, I watched this play out in real time.

When return-to-office mandates came down, usually five days a week, no exceptions, the calls started immediately. Moms doing the math in their heads overnight: the commute, the school pickup, the backup care they didn’t have, the costs that didn’t add up. In some cases, within 24 hours, moms went from “I don’t know how this is going to work” to “I’m quitting.” They didn’t want to leave but they couldn’t see another way.

Most of them never had a single conversation with their manager or HR. They never looked up what their benefits package actually covered. They made a permanent decision based on a problem they hadn’t yet tried to solve.

The data tells the same story at scale.

24% of employees have considered leaving the workforce because of caregiving challenges. 23% have already left for an employer offering better care benefits. 85% say at least one caregiving benefit could make them switch jobs.

I understand that impulse completely. When you’re exhausted and invisible and running on fumes, leaving feels like the only lever you have.

Here’s what the data also shows: as recently as January 2026, employers were six times more likely to be expanding caregiving benefits than cutting them. Recent announcements from large corporations remind us that trend isn’t guaranteed. Benefits that exist today may not exist in 2027. This means the conversation you’ve been putting off just became more urgent, not less. Find out what you have access to right now, before the window closes.

So let me ask you this: do you actually know what’s in your benefits package?

Three moves you can take, in this order:

Find your benefits inventory. Pull up your HR portal. Read your open enrollment materials. Go further than you’ve gone before. Look specifically for: backup care days, dependent care FSA, care concierge services, EAP counseling, and flexible work policies. Most people have never read the full list.

Name what you actually need. Not “more flexibility,” that’s too easy to deny. Specific requests get specific answers. Two backup care days per month. Permission to block school pickup on Tuesdays. Access to the EAP for caregiver support resources. Concrete is actionable and vague is easy to overlook.

Have the conversation before you make the decision. This is the step most working mothers skip. We do the math alone, in our heads, at 11pm, and we reach a conclusion without ever testing whether the organization would meet us halfway. One conversation with the right person, manager, HR, benefits coordinator, might reveal options you didn’t know existed.

You may be one conversation away from a workable situation. You won’t know until you ask.

The Ideal - the Workplace Village

“The Village” quadrant is not a fantasy. It exists. It describes real organizations where working mothers are seen, supported, and able to stay.

Getting there sometimes requires navigating a system that wasn’t designed for you. It requires knowing what to look for, knowing how to ask, and having people in your corner when you do.

If you feel like you’ve been navigating this alone, you don’t have to be. Reach out and we can support.

Data referenced in this article sourced from the Care.com 2026 Future of Benefits Report, based on surveys of 600 U.S. benefits decision-makers and 1,000 U.S. employees, conducted January 2026. Capita labor data sourced from “Parents in the Workforce,” October 2025.

And if you’ve ever walked away from a conversation thinking, “Why is this so complicated?” you are also not alone.

One of the biggest sources of friction in today’s workplaces isn’t a lack of commitment or capability. It’s language. Leaders and caregivers are often speaking from completely different realities, using completely different frames of reference.

Leaders are thinking about work coverage, client demands, fairness across the team, and expectations from their own leadership.

Moms are thinking about logistics, sustainability, and how to keep delivering without breaking.

Both are trying to do the right thing. But without translation, both feel misunderstood.

This is the art of the ask: learning to frame real needs in business terms so solutions feel obvious instead of negotiable.

What I hear from leaders: “I don’t know if she’s really working when I can’t see her.” “If I let her work from home, everyone will want it.”

What I hear from moms: “They don’t trust me even though my performance is stellar.” “He sends emails at 9pm and expects immediate responses.”

These are from the same workplaces. Different languages and both exhausted.

Here’s the shift that changes everything: When requests are framed only through personal need, they sound like exceptions. When they’re framed through outcomes, coverage, and performance, they sound like smart operational decisions.

And this isn’t just about moms. Over 70% of today’s workforce has caregiving responsibilities spanning multiple generations. Harvard Business School research shows that when you build systems that work for caregivers, you build better businesses:

“Caregiving demands decrease employee productivity at work, impact turnover and impose significant financial costs on employers. By contrast, employers that invest in caregiving support benefits enjoy measurably favorable economic returns.”

It’s rarely just a leader and one employee figuring things out. Every decision sits inside a team where coverage, workflows, relationships, and morale are interconnected. When flexibility is treated as an individual exception, it feels like a favor. When it’s treated as team design, it becomes a performance strategy.

Two scenarios I frequently work with moms and leaders on resolving demonstrate this well.

Subscribe now

Scenario 1: Return to Office Mandates

Leaders often see in-person work as essential for culture, collaboration, and visibility. Employees may see blanket return to office (RTO) mandates as ignoring the realities of commute time, family logistics, and whether the work actually requires co-location. The tension is less about location and more about the purpose of co-location.

The Disconnect:

The executive team announces “everyone back 5 days a week starting next month.” Mom hears “we don’t trust remote work” and updates her resume. Her supervisor worries if the team isn’t physically present, are they doing the work AND how will their own supervisor perceive them as a manager?

What’s Really Happening:

Leaders are measuring presence because they lack good productivity and performance metrics. Moms have proven they deliver and research shows women with two or more children are actually the most productive employees. The mandate feels arbitrary because it is. Stanford Professor Nicholas Bloom’s research is definitive: hybrid work (2-3 days in office) produces equal productivity with significantly better retention.

The Workplace Village Solution (What You Can Do as a Leader):

RTO mandates implemented poorly lead to talent loss. RTO designed strategically builds stronger teams.

Designate specific in-office days for genuine collaboration. These include client presentations, quarterly planning, and onboarding. Give teams autonomy to determine the collaboration days based on project cycles. Your software team might need Tuesdays and Thursdays for sprint planning. Client services might need Wednesdays for account reviews.

When teams identify which work truly benefits from being together and allow flexibility for focus work, everyone wins. Intentional presence creates better collaboration than mandatory presence.

And be sure to right-size your space. Do you have desk space and parking or public transportation options to satisfy all team members? If you truly need everyone 5 days a week, have the data to support this in your discussions with the team and ensure they have a seat when they arrive.

The Workplace Village Solution (What You Can Say as an Employee):

“I hear you. I’d like to understand the business objectives behind RTO so I can help our team meet them. If the goal is collaboration, I propose our team commit to Tuesdays and Wednesdays in-office for meetings and working sessions. For the other three days, we work where we’re most productive. We have some who prefer the office most days and some who prefer a hybrid mix. We tracked our metrics. Our delivery is up 15% with our current hybrid model. Can we pilot this for Q1 and measure results?”

Notice the structure: State the goal. Acknowledge the constraint briefly. Offer a solution. Reinforce commitment.

This benefits everyone: the evening MBA student, the volunteer fire chief, the employee training for an Ironman, and the panini generation employee coordinating parent and child care.

Scenario 2: “Always Available” Culture

Many workplaces have drifted into constant availability without explicitly deciding to. Leaders often model responsiveness because they feel accountable to clients and senior leadership. Caregivers experience constant low-grade pressure to monitor messages, even when not urgent. This “always on” mindset leads to exhaustion and lower productivity. Clear norms on when leaders expect their teams to be available and responsive change everything.

The Disconnect:

A leader sends emails at 9pm and expects immediate Slack responses, unconsciously creating an “always on” culture. Mom has definite windows for caregiving but feels anxious about being unavailable.

What’s Really Happening:

Leaders often don’t realize their communication patterns create pressure. They are likely catching up after meetings and don’t expect an immediate response but the team doesn’t know that. Meanwhile, moms have literal hard stops (school pickup, bedtime routine) but are working 5:30-7am and 8-10pm to get the work done around caregiving. The measurement seems to be response time, not results.

The Workplace Village Solution (What You Can Do as a Leader):

Establish team working agreements. Core response hours (9am-3pm) for urgent items. Twenty-four hour turnaround for non-urgent. Define “urgent” clearly. A client emergency is urgent, a routine status update is not.

Leverage time zones as a strength for the team. The East Coast handles 8am-4pm ET, the West Coast covers 11am-7pm ET. Suddenly you have extended coverage without anyone being “always on.” Use status indicators: “In client meetings until 3pm” or “Focused work time. I will respond by the end of day.”

Use async communication as default. Email for updates. Slack for quick questions with “no rush” noted. Video for complex discussions. Reserve “urgent” tags for genuine emergencies.

When teams define response expectations, clarify escalation paths, and normalize true offline time, focus improves and burnout decreases. Research shows employees who have some control when they work while meeting deadlines are more productive and far less likely to quit. Sustainable performance becomes a competitive advantage.

The Workplace Village Solution (What You Can Say as an Employee):

“I want to ensure I’m available when the team needs me while maintaining focus time for deliverables. I’m fully available 9am-3pm for urgent items, 24-hour response for non-urgent. I do focused work between 5:30-7am and 8:30-10pm for complex projects. For our multi-timezone challenge, I’ll be ‘on point’ for East Coast hours Mondays-Wednesdays if Marcus covers the West Coast those days. For true emergencies, I’m reachable on my cell. Does this coverage model work?”

Again: Goal. Constraint. Solution. Commitment.

The Art of the Ask Is Really the Art of Translation

Notice what’s happening in these reframes: The conversation moves from “How do I accommodate her?” to “How does our team design for sustainable performance?”

Caregivers translate their personal realities into business impact and frame their requests with that lens. Leaders translate the business needs into clear expectations. When this happens, tension eases, trust builds and the discussion is less accommodating individuals and more alignment for all.

One of the biggest risks in any organization is concentrating knowledge, relationships, or decision authority in one person. When work is designed so teams share coverage, build cross-training, and plan together, flexibility stops being a favor and becomes smart operations.

The discussion changes from making exceptions for moms to building teams, villages, if you will, where everyone has a role in making it work.

When we speak the same language, the answer is much more often yes.

What conversation can you start with your team this week?

I laughed for a second. Then I said, “Be careful what you wish for.”

She laughed. I didn’t.

Because that sentence captures something real. It’s a tension that plays out in workplaces every day, yet almost nobody talks about it openly. There’s an assumption that parents have a trump card. A suspicion that flexibility only flows in one direction. And underneath it all, quiet resentment building on both sides.

This is one of those conversations that usually gets whispered in break rooms instead of discussed in meetings. I think it’s time we changed that.

I was on your side

Before I had kids, I was the one staying late.

I was the junior person finishing the proposal at 10 p.m. because someone else had to leave for pickup. I watched colleagues disappear at 5:30 while I was still buried in deliverables. I didn’t say anything, but I noticed. And yes, I resented it.

I remember thinking, Their time counts more than mine? I wasn’t proud of that thought, but it was real.

Then I got dogs.

Yes...dogs. Stay with me.

Suddenly, I had two living beings relying on me. Once a week I had to leave by 5 p.m. to pick them up from daycare (yes, dog daycare). And I felt the chill immediately. The raised eyebrows and the unspoken judgment: That’s not a real reason.

It wasn’t kids. It was dogs. And it still felt like I was asking for something I hadn’t earned.

Looking back, I realize it was a preview of something I wouldn’t fully understand until years later.

Then life handed me a different perspective

Six months after returning from my second maternity leave, I was placed on a high-profile project. My days were packed with client calls, team meetings, and deliverables stacked on top of deliverables.

There was never enough time during the workday to connect with my manager, so we created another workday. I started waking up between 4:30 and 5 a.m. At least once a week we’d be on the phone by 6 or 6:30. Sometimes for ten minutes. Sometimes for an hour. Then we’d hang up because one or both of us had kids to wake up and get out the door.

Only then did the workday everyone else saw begin.

By 8:30 a.m., I’d already run a marathon getting two kids under four fed, dressed, and to daycare. I’d take a deep breath when I got to my desk (working from home wasn’t an option back then) and dive into a full day of work. Then came the second marathon: dinner, baths, bedtime, and hoping everyone was asleep by nine so I could squeeze out one quiet hour before doing it all again the next morning.

Here’s what I wish more people could see: those hours before and after work count too. They’re just invisible.

Here’s where I may lose some people

I think both sides are right.

Non-parent time is not “free time.” Your evenings, your weekends, and your capacity belong to you. You shouldn’t automatically become the backup plan because someone else has caregiving responsibilities.

At the same time, workload creep is real. When someone leaves early, the work doesn’t magically disappear—it gets redistributed. If that redistribution keeps landing on the same people, something is broken.

And most parents aren’t playing a trump card. They’re making up those hours in ways many people never see: the 6 a.m. calls, the laptop reopening after bedtime, the email sent at 10 p.m. The flexibility isn’t free. It’s borrowed from somewhere else.

What I’ve come to believe is that this isn’t actually a people problem. It’s a workplace design problem.

We’ve created systems where flexibility feels like a scarce resource instead of something we intentionally build for everyone. If flexibility only exists for parents, we’ve failed non-parents. If parents have to hide the hours they’re making up, we’ve failed them too. Everyone loses.

If you’re old enough to remember smoking breaks at work, you’ll probably remember this. People who smoked regularly stepped outside for ten-minute breaks several times a day. No questions asked. Non-smokers didn’t.

Eventually people started asking why one group automatically received something another group didn’t. We’re at a similar moment with flexibility. We’ve accepted that parents receive accommodations while non-parents often don’t, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best system.

What I’d love to see happen on Monday

Here’s the good news: most of this doesn’t require a new policy. It starts with a conversation.

If you’re a non-parent who’s feeling the imbalance, say something. Not in the break room. Not on Slack after hours. Have a real conversation.

“I want to talk about how work has been getting distributed. I’ve been picking up extra lately, and I’d like to understand whether this is temporary or becoming the new normal.”

If you’re a parent, don’t assume your workarounds are invisible. They aren’t. Acknowledge them. Thank the people who cover for you.

“I know you’ve been carrying more when I have to leave early. I really appreciate it. What can I take off your plate?”

If you need a mediator, bring one in. A manager or trusted colleague can help keep the conversation focused on facts instead of assumptions.

This is the lesson I’ve had to learn over and over again: we almost never know the whole story. There are usually hours no one sees, responsibilities no one talks about, and trade-offs nobody else knows exist.

And if you’re the manager, this is your cue. Don’t wait until resentment becomes the culture. You don’t have to solve everyone’s emotions, but you do have to create clarity. Who owns what? How is work being distributed? What needs to change? That’s leadership.

The Village

One last thought.

Someone is raising the next generation of workers. Future engineers. Future nurses. Future consultants. Future leaders. Maybe even the person who will care for you one day.

That’s not just a parenting issue. That’s all of us.

I don’t believe parents and non-parents are actually fighting each other. I think they’re reacting to the same workplace design. One group feels guilty. The other feels overlooked. Neither created the system. Both are trying to succeed inside it.

That’s why I keep talking about building a Workplace Village. Villages are designed so everyone can contribute and everyone belongs. There aren’t winners and losers.

That’s a workplace worth building.

My friend who couldn’t wait to play that “mom card”? I hope she never feels like she has to. And I hope she lands somewhere that sees the whole picture—including the hours nobody else sees.

If this resonated, share it with someone on your team, whether they are a parent or not. This is a conversation that needs to happen in more workplaces.

Subscribe now

“The playing field is not level for women, and the system is not fair for women. And understand that to get the best out of the performance of every employee, you need to make sure the system is working for everyone.” - Sheryl Sandberg

We’ve all seen it, maybe even lived it ourselves. A sharp ambitious woman is with the company for nine years. She’s delivered every time, through a reorg, through a merger, through a pandemic. Her manager has flagged her as high-potential for three consecutive cycles.

And then, somewhere between manager and the C-suite, she’s gone.

Not fired or poached. Not laid off. Just quietly rerouted. A lateral move here. A reduced role there. A maternity leave that coincided with a reorg. A flexibility request that got translated, somewhere along the way, into a lack of ambition.

The Executive team looks up and wonders why its senior leadership doesn’t reflect the talent it spent a decade growing.

This is the promotion pipeline leak and it is costing companies far more than they realize.

The Numbers We Need to Sit With

The woman above, quietly sidelined, won’t be with your organization much longer. She will find an organization that appreciates her talents and provides a system that works with all facets of her life.

More than 455,000 women exited the U.S. workforce between January and August of 2025. In comparison, the male labor force grew by 572,000 in the U.S. 2025 differed from the pandemic years when jobs were impacted across genders. A new national survey from Catalyst released in January 2026 reveals why.

Among women who left their jobs, 42% cited caregiving responsibilities, including the cost of childcare, as the strongest factor. Nearly four in ten said their employers did not offer flexible work schedules. In contrast, only two in ten women who stayed in the workforce worked for organizations without flexible scheduling.

Women aren’t leaving because they lack drive. They are leaving because the math stops working.

The average cost of daycare has increased more than 40% over the last decade. Infant childcare now exceeds rent in 17 states and surpasses public college tuition in 38. As Catalyst’s research director put it: “Women are not ‘opting out,’ they are leaving because many jobs are not designed around the logistical and financial realities of childcare and women’s lives.”

Then there is the McKinsey and LeanIn Women in the Workplace 2025 report, the largest annual study of its kind, drawing on data from 124 organizations. It landed a headline finding: for the first time in eleven years of tracking, women reported less interest in promotion than men. McKinsey called it an “ambition gap.”

Catalyst’s data offers a sharper diagnosis. The 2025 McKinsey report was also the first in 11 years to omit the terms “caregiver” and “caregiving” entirely and provided no breakdown by parental status. When the Catalyst researchers looked at the same pattern through a caregiving lens, the story changed completely. Women are not less ambitious. They are doing the math on whether ambition is survivable inside their current structures. Too often, the answer is no.

McKinsey’s own data confirms this. When women and men receive the same level of career support from managers and sponsors, the ambition gap disappears entirely. At every career level.

The ambition gap is not with women. It is in the career support infrastructure around them.

My own experience supports Catalyst’s interpretation. When women feel as if they are barely hanging on with their current responsibilities, at work and at home, they are less likely to consider, let alone advocate for, a different role they believe comes with more work. I felt that many times and coached countless women over my career in the same predicament. I was fortunate to have great supervisors, mentors and sponsors to help me navigate these periods and not unintentionally get “off” the promotion track and helped others do the same.

The Economics of Disappearing

Harvard economist Claudia Goldin won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics for research that named this dynamic precisely. She calls it “greedy jobs,” roles that pay disproportionately more for long hours and constant availability. The gender pay gap, she found, is no longer primarily between men and women in different fields. It arises largely within the same occupation, and it emerges with the birth of the first child.

When caregiving falls disproportionately on women, and it does, still, they are the ones who shift to more flexible, lower-paying roles. Not because they are less capable. But because someone has to become the household infrastructure when other systems don’t hold.

Goldin’s solution is not to tell women to push harder. It is to redesign the work: create shared coverage, reduce the structural premium on always-on availability, and build teams where no single person is the only one who can do the job. This, she noted, is already done in obstetrics, anesthesiology, and veterinary medicine. It can be done in yours, too.

This is the Workplace Village™ applied to career design.

A Tale of Two Pipelines

In 28 years of management consulting, I watched two distinct patterns play out inside organizations facing the same talent pressure.

In one firm, women with children were quietly managed out of high-visibility project rotations. This was never explicit and always through the language of “protecting” them from travel or demands they “might not be able to handle.” The pipeline was diverse at entry level. By VP, it wasn’t. The firm spent years hiring external senior women at enormous cost to replenish what it had quietly allowed to drain away.

At another, one senior leader made a single deliberate decision: she redesigned how her team covered for each other. No single person owned a client relationship alone. Coverage was shared, documented, and distributed. Flexibility wasn’t a favor for moms, it was how the team operated. Women moved through the pipeline at the same rate as men.

Same talent pool. Same industry. Same decade. Two completely different outcomes.

The difference was not the women. It was the infrastructure.

The Broken Rung Is a Design Problem

McKinsey’s research has long identified the “broken rung,” the moment early in a career where women are promoted at lower rates than men, creating a deficit that compounds with every level above it. For every 100 men promoted from entry level to manager, only 81 women make the same move. That gap doesn’t close. It widens.

By the C-suite, women hold 29 percent of roles, up from 17 percent a decade ago, but unchanged from 2024. Meanwhile, at entry level, only 31 percent of women have a sponsor, compared to 45 percent of men. Only half of surveyed companies say women’s advancement is a high priority. One in six have cut DEI staff and resources.

We are dismantling the infrastructure and are surprised the pipeline is leaking.

McKinsey’s chart helps highlight this:

What to Do

If you are a working mother: Know that the pipeline leak is a systemic problem. You are not the problem. But you have agency.

• Name your ambition explicitly. Do not assume your manager knows you want to advance. Say it, in business language: “I want to be considered for director-level roles in the next 18 months. Here is what I’m doing to prepare, and this is the support that would accelerate my path.”

• Cultivate a sponsor, not just a mentor. Sponsors advocate for you in rooms you are not in. They are built through demonstrated results and deliberate relationship investment. Make that investment.

• Frame flexibility as team design, not personal accommodation. Don’t ask for permission. Propose a coverage model that benefits the whole team.

If you are a leader: Audit your pipeline data by gender and caregiving status at every level. If women are leaving at predictable transition points, that is a design signal, not a talent signal.

• Sponsor deliberately. Identify two or three high-potential women and actively advocate for them in promotion discussions, not by lowering standards, but by making sure their contributions are visible.

• Redesign your highest-visibility roles so coverage is shared and no single person’s availability determines their advancement ceiling.

• Say it out loud: the pipeline is not leaking because women lack ambition. It is leaking because we have not yet built the infrastructure that holds them.

The Pipeline Is Not Empty. It Is Leaking At Every Level.

The talent organizations need is already inside their walls. It entered at entry level, delivered consistently, and is quietly rerouting itself toward more supportive organizations, or away from work entirely because the infrastructure to sustain it was not there.

Claudia Goldin proved this through five decades of economic research. McKinsey has documented it for 11 consecutive years. Catalyst confirmed it with additional data: caregiving pressures, not lack of ambition, are driving women out.

The pipeline is not leaking because women are not ready. It is leaking because too many organizations have not yet built the system that would hold them up.

That is a fixable problem. And it starts with the leader willing to ask: who on my team is quietly rerouting? What would it take to keep them?

What would you fix first: sponsorship, greedy jobs, or how your organization tracks pipeline data? I’d love to hear what you’re seeing from where you sit.

But here’s the thing about villages: they don’t build themselves. Someone has to decide they matter

That someone might be a working mother who’s tired of going it alone. Or a manager who’s watching talented women quietly check out. Or a leader who’s finally connecting the dots between burnout, attrition, and the absence of real connection at work.

Wherever you’re sitting as you read this, I want to ask you two questions:

Are you building a village? And are you working in one?

What a village actually looks like

A village isn’t a wellness app. It’s not a women’s ERG that meets quarterly for a lunch panel. It’s not a motivational Slack channel or a one-size-fits-all EAP benefit.

A village is the infrastructure of being known.

It’s the peer who texts at 7:45 a.m. because she saw your name on the revised weekly meeting agenda and knew you were up all night with a sick kid. It’s the manager who knows pink eye is running through your house and checks on you rather than assuming you want to present at a client meeting with your red eyes. It’s the executive mom who doesn’t just ask “how are you?” but means it and then offers a few ideas that worked for her in the same phase of motherhood.

Most working mothers will tell you they’ve had glimpses of this. A team that covered for each other during a hard season. A manager who fought for their promotion instead of quietly removing them from succession plans. A community that helped them think through a negotiation or career pivot, or simply survive a really bad week.

They’ll also tell you it wasn’t the norm. It was the exception.

And that gap, between the exception and the norm, is exactly where talent walks out the door.

Most organizations aren’t starting from zero. They’re somewhere on this matrix. And where they sit determines everything about the experience of the people working there.

Most organizations aren’t starting from zero. They’re somewhere on this matrix. And where they sit determines everything about the experience of the people working there.

Not sure where you land? Here’s a faster test.

• Brochure Benefits: You’ve read the parental leave policy twice trying to figure out if anyone actually uses it.

• The Village: You’ve referred someone here and meant it.

• On Your Own: You’ve learned not to mention your kids in meetings.

• Luck of the Manager: Your coworker in the same role has completely different flexibility because she has a different manager.

Wherever you’re sitting right now, this article is for you.

64% of working parents say their caregiving responsibilities negatively impact their ability to take on extra work or business development opportunities.

For the working mothers reading this

You already know what it costs to go without a village. You’ve felt the loneliness of being the only mom in the room, or the exhaustion of having no one to reality-check whether what you’re experiencing is unreasonable or just... your life now.

Research tells us what you already live:

64% of working parents say their caregiving responsibilities negatively impact their ability to take on extra work or business development opportunities.

This is not because they lack ambition. It’s because they lack support. The ambition is there. The infrastructure isn’t.

As a mom, when an exciting professional stretch assignment is available, there are two simultaneous scripts running through your head. The first is work-related: can I do this? Do I have the right team around me? What would success look like? Failure? The second is home related. Less visible but no less important. How does this schedule change impact the household rhythm? If late nights or travel are required, who steps in to handle pick-up or the sick call from school?

Here’s what I want you to hear: the absence of a village is not a personal failure. It is a design flaw in the systems around you. And you have more agency to build one than you’ve probably been told.

That starts with being intentional about who is in your corner, at work and outside of it. It means finding the people who will hold your career aspirations while you’re in a hard season. The ones who will tell you the truth, make introductions, and show up when the job posting drops or the performance review comes around.

You don’t need a village of hundreds. You need five to ten people who actually know you, the full version of you, not just the professional-facing one.

It isn’t a question of whether you need a village. It’s whether you’re building one with intention or waiting for one to appear.

You don’t need a village of hundreds. You need five to ten people who actually know you, the full version of you, not just the professional-facing one.

For the managers and frontline leaders reading this

If you manage people, especially working mothers, you are either part of someone’s village or you are part of the gap.

There is very little neutral territory here.

The manager who schedules a 1:1 after a grueling week completing client deliverables is doing something that research cannot fully quantify but that retention data absolutely reflects. The manager who quietly changes the deadline when a team member’s daycare falls through is not “going soft.” They are doing the work of a village. And they are building the kind of loyalty that doesn’t show up in an engagement survey because it runs too deep for a 5-point scale.

We talk a lot about what managers need to do differently, provide feedback, drive accountability, develop their people. All of that matters. But the foundational skill underneath all of it is simpler and harder than any framework: it’s the practice of actually knowing your people.

This doesn’t have to mean group dinners, family potlucks or deep emotional offsites. It means genuine conversations to understand what they are carrying. What they need to do their best work. What support looks like for them specifically, in this period of their lives.

You don’t need to solve every problem. You need to be the kind of leader people don’t have to hide from. Be the kind of leader whose “open door” policy is more than words.

That’s what a village manager looks like. And it is the highest-leverage thing you can do for retention, performance, and your own legacy and growth as a leader.

For the senior leaders and executives reading this

Here is the business case I want you to sit with:

42% of employees who considered leaving their jobs in the last year say they stayed because of their employer’s support of their caregiving. Not the salary. Not the title. The support.

And yet only 22% of working parents say they feel “very welcome” to express their identity as caregivers at work. Only 21% say their benefits “mostly” or “very well” address who they are.

That is a culture problem, not a benefits problem. And culture is built, or eroded, by the decisions leaders make about what they normalize. It looks like leaders modeling using the paid leave for their own caregiving needs, periodically asking the team what is working and what isn’t, and being willing to take action on some of their ideas.

When you design a workplace where people can only bring part of themselves, you get part of their performance. When you build the conditions for a village, a place where people are known, supported, and set up to grow, you get their best work, their loyalty, and their referrals. This ROI is not theoretical, it is documented.

The question at the leadership level isn’t just: are we offering support? It’s: are we building a place where people actually feel it?

That’s the difference between an organization that talks about being a great place to work and one that actually is.

The question at the leadership level isn’t just: are we offering support? It’s: are we building a place where people actually feel it?

The village is not a metaphor

It’s a decision, repeated over and over, made at every level. It’s the mother who reaches out to a peer instead of suffering in silence. The manager who chooses empathy over the narrow black and white reading of a handbook. The executive who measures culture by more than engagement scores.

I’ve spent much of my career watching what happens when working mothers finally have the community and support they need: real access to people who understand what they’re navigating, who can help them think strategically, advocate for themselves, and keep moving forward even in the hard seasons.

The transformation is not subtle.

The working mother who finally has a village doesn’t stumble through the juggle. She strides through it.

That’s exactly what I’m building with The Village, a community designed to be the strategic support system that working mothers deserve but rarely get. Not a network. Not a newsletter. A village. If you’ve been looking for yours, I’d love for you to find it here.

Where does your workplace fall on the Village Matrix? What would it take to move one square closer to "The Village"?

You didn’t imagine it.

The meeting you were pulled from after your maternity announcement. The succession plan that quietly changed. The promotion that went to someone with fewer results and fewer responsibilities while you were told the timing just wasn’t right.

You didn’t imagine it. And it wasn’t your fault.

The workforce was never designed for you. It was built for a worker with no sick kids, no aging parents, no school pickups, and no caregiving responsibilities of any kind. And for decades, the ask has been the same: contort yourself to fit a structure that was never built for you, or be quietly sidelined from the “top talent” discussions.

I’ve spent 28 years in boardrooms, consulting rooms, and strategy sessions watching this happen to colleagues, clients, and women who were the smartest person in the room and were still quietly rerouted out of it.

And I’ve spent the last year building the thing I wish had existed for all of them.

This membership community was built specifically for working mothers who are done navigating this alone. It offers practical support, strategic guidance, and peer connection to actually make integration of our personal and professional goals feel possible.

This isn’t another course or program that adds to your busy weeks. It’s a community of like-minded women who get how hard it is. It’s a safe place to share challenges, offer ideas, and celebrate wins, big and small.

It’s called The Village. And it launches now.

Then 2025 happened.

When I finished writing The Power Lane at the end of 2024, mothers’ labor force participation had hit its highest point in history, particularly mothers with children under five. The momentum felt real.

Within months, that started to reverse.

By the end of 2025, 455,000 women had left the workforce while men’s labor force participation grew by 572,000. This wasn’t a soft economy hitting everyone equally. It was structural and preventable.

What happened to the workforce in 2025.

Childcare costs that make working a financial loss for many mothers. Return-to-office policies that ignore years of evidence that flexibility works and works for more than parents. And the quiet rollback of workplace programs designed to keep women in leadership pipelines erodes years of progress.

The conditions that allowed mothers to stay in the workforce and thrive are being systematically removed. This is not by accident. It’s by design.

The economics have never been clearer.

Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, said it plainly: countries could boost the size of their economies by 35% by closing gender gaps in the workforce. Increased female leadership correlates with more stable banks, stronger capital buffers, and lower risk. And this is the line I keep coming back to: gender equality is no longer a social issue. It’s macro-critical.

The company-level data is just as compelling. Research from the Peterson Institute for International Economics and EY analyzed nearly 22,000 publicly traded companies across 91 countries. The finding: companies with at least 30% women in leadership positions see a 6% increase in net profit margin. Not revenue. Profit.

Companies with at least 30% women in leadership see 6% increase in profit.

Marcus Noland, director of studies at the Peterson Institute, put it bluntly:

“No matter how we torture the data we get the same result: women in the C-suite are associated with higher profitability.”

The research also revealed what they call the “pipeline effect” more women on boards leads to more women in leadership, which drives the profitability gains. But here’s the problem: if women are being quietly rerouted out of the pipeline before they ever reach leadership, those profits never materialize.

The business case isn’t theoretical. It’s sitting in the data, waiting to be captured.

Women aren’t a nice-to-have. We are an economic engine that the world is leaving on the table.

And I’m done watching it happen.

So why am I building this now?

Because my 16-year-old daughter is watching.

And so is my 19-year-old son.

I refuse to hand them a workplace where they will spend their careers refighting the same battles their grandmothers fought. My daughter deserves to walk into a room and be seen for what she brings, not managed around what she might someday need. My son deserves to work alongside women who aren’t exhausted from surviving a system designed against them.

I built this because I watched you struggle.

I built this because my daughter is watching.

I built this because the data confirmed what we have known for generations.

I also know what made staying possible for me.

I was fortunate in my early career and when my kids were young. I had managers who knew how to organize work effectively and lead with compassion. They didn’t treat flexibility as a favor. They treated it as good management.

That’s not a soft skill. That’s infrastructure.

And it’s an area where most organizations are failing everyone, not just mothers. Frontline leaders are promoted for technical skills and left to figure out people management on their own. The result is inconsistent support, burned-out teams, and talent walking out the door.

The mothers who stay often have one thing in common: a manager who knows how to make it work. The ones who leave? They rarely had that.

This is what The Village actually is.

Not a conference. Not a course. Not another thing on your calendar that takes more than it gives.

The Village is a membership community built specifically for working mothers who are done navigating this alone and want the practical support, strategic guidance, and peer connection to actually make integration work.

Think of it as having a career coach, a management consultant, and a strategic thought partner in your back pocket. Without the hourly rate.

Here’s what the membership offers:

• Two live sessions every month focused on the real challenges working mothers face. Moving beyond theory and inspirational quotes, this includes scripts, frameworks, and strategies you can use the week you hear them.

• One monthly resource: a guide, a checklist, a template built around what’s actually hard right now. Because sometimes you don’t need a conversation. You need a tool.

• Direct access to ask your questions whether you’re navigating a return from leave, a difficult conversation with your manager, a career decision complicated by family responsibilities, or a moment where you just need someone who has been in the room to tell you what they would do.

• A community of women who get it because they’re living it too. A space where you can ask the hard questions, offer what you know, and find out you were never as alone as it felt.

• Bonus expert sessions with other leaders brought in specifically for topics that deserve dedicated focus: paid leave strategy, returnship navigation, career coaching, and more.

The Village is about making the hours you’re already spending on your career, on your family, on figuring out how to hold it all feel less like you’re doing it in the dark.

We were never meant to do this alone.

When we build villages at work and at home everyone thrives. Not just mothers. Not just women. Everyone.

The Village is a collective of mothers who look at the progress made in the last 50 years and recognize, with clear eyes, that it is not enough and that the pace of change is too slow for what our daughters and sons need now.

We are mothers who are done waiting for the system to change and have decided to become the business case for that change ourselves. We lead not with the language of rights, though our rights matter, rather with the language of economics, of ROI, of organizational performance. Because that is the language that moves systems.

We will work alongside other organizations, amplify research, and show up in rooms where these decisions get made armed with data, with stories, and with the collective voice of women who are no longer willing to disappear quietly.

Along the way, you’ll find real support. You’ll feel genuinely seen. Make no mistake: this is a movement, not a moment.

The Village founding member launch is open now. If you want to be part of what we’re building and be first to know when doors open, join my email list here or drop a note below.

Share this with a mother who needs to hear it.

Because we are just getting started.

"Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women."

Jessica Calarco

I vividly remember sitting at my kitchen table reading this quote in late 2020. I chuckled at the accompanying image of a mom trying to get a little exercise in her dining room as her young kids played around her. Then I teared up as it hit me how true this quote is and how alone I felt trying to raise tweens, keep family members healthy, and work full-time all at once.

By December 2020, the breaking point arrived. The New York Times launched the “Primal Scream Line,” a hotline where parents could call to “yell, laugh, cry or vent for a solid minute.” One mother’s message captured what millions felt: “This pandemic has made me realize that maybe I’m not cut out to be a mother. I love my kids, but I don’t like being a mom in America, because it’s just so much more clear that America hates women and hates families. We don’t have support.”

That wasn’t a personal failure. That was infrastructural collapse.

We Fund What We Value

In my book The Power Lane, I talk about how we collectively fund broadband, bridges, and banks because we understand they’re infrastructure, foundational systems that enable economic activity and daily life. When a bridge fails, traffic stops. When broadband goes down, most work becomes impossible. When banking systems freeze, the economy grinds to a halt.

We invest in these systems not because they’re “nice to have” but because they’re essential. We maintain them. We have contingency plans when they fail.

Yet we treat care, the system that enables everything else, as if it’s optional. As if it’s a personal problem. As if working parents should just figure it out on their own.

Why This Is Infrastructure, Not Soft Skills

When President Biden’s infrastructure plan included $400 billion for in-home care, critics pushed back: “That’s not real infrastructure. Infrastructure is roads and bridges.”

They’re wrong and the evidence is overwhelming.

Infrastructure is any foundational system that enables economic and social activity. Roads enable commerce. Broadband enables digital services and remote work. Banking infrastructure enables transactions and investment.

Care infrastructure enables workforce participation.

Research shows that accessible, quality childcare provisions make it possible for women to remain in or re-enter the workforce, improve child outcomes, and generate tax revenue that more than offsets public investment. During the pandemic, the absence of care infrastructure hurt individual families while costing the entire economy billions in lost productivity and workforce departures.

Academic research calls this an “infrastructural disruption,” exposing both “the background work of care as well as its vulnerability and invisibility.”

In simpler terms: We’ve been building our economy on the invisible, undervalued, unpaid or underpaid labor of mostly women. We’ve been treating the foundation like it’s optional. And when it predictably failed under pressure, we acted surprised.

Care isn’t kindness. Care is the infrastructure that makes everything else possible.

What Care Infrastructure Actually Looks Like

Care infrastructure isn’t just childcare centers and eldercare facilities, though those matter enormously. It’s also the informal networks that keep families functioning: the grandparent who picks up the kids from school, the neighbor who helps in a pinch, the leader who asks “How are you managing?” without career consequences. It’s workplace flexibility. It’s the friend who brings dinner when life gets overwhelming. It’s feeling psychologically safe enough to say “I need support” and know your job isn’t at risk.

Amy Edmondson, Professor at Harvard Business School, characterizes this as interpersonal risk translating into business risk.

“When employees are afraid to speak up, we miss out on insights, preventable mistakes go unchecked, and opportunities for innovation are lost.”

During COVID, this entire patchwork system collapsed in what researchers called a “cascading failure,” when one part of a system breaks, triggering failures throughout interconnected systems. Daycares closed. Schools went remote. Grandparents couldn’t help because of infection risk. And workplaces largely shrugged and said “work from home” without acknowledging that “home” had just become a full-time childcare center, remote learning classroom, and care facility.

Yet we learned. As the COVID risk declined, women and especially mothers of young children, returned to the workforce in droves, reaching record numbers of labor participation in December 2024. Care improved and practices that were required in 2020 such as remote work, flexible schedules, and understanding team members continued to be embraced, enabling moms to find the combination of supports they needed for their family and professional responsibilities.

And like a boomerang, in early 2026, we are back to early COVID days with women leaving the workforce in high numbers. The return to office mandates of 2025 combined with childcare still not back to the even then insufficient 2019 levels, and less flexibility in schedules and work locations across many industries drove many moms to make the tough decision to put their career on hold to care for the family’s needs.

McKinsey’s 2025 Women in the Workplace report noted that mothers reduced their work hours 4.5 times more than fathers in dual-earner households.

Not because they wanted to, but because someone had to become the infrastructure when all other systems failed.

The Cost Equation That Changes Everything

Here’s the reality that should reshape how every leader thinks about care: You can invest very little to put caring practices into motion. You will pay a lot when it isn’t.

What it costs to build care infrastructure:

• A five-minute conversation: “How are things with your father’s recent diagnosis?”

• Explicitly stating: “Your job security isn’t tied to pretending you don’t have a life.”

• Flexible meeting schedules that acknowledge people have lives outside work.

• Permission to be visible about the juggle and model ideas to make it work.

These cost you minutes. Sometimes seconds.

What it costs when care infrastructure is missing:

• Lost talent as women leave because impossible logistics don’t work.

• Productivity collapses when people operate in survival mode.

• Innovation declines as trust erodes when there isn’t a fundamental presence of care.

• Turnover costs of 50% to 200% of annual salary per employee, plus lost institutional knowledge.

• Health and burnout with long-term costs on individuals and teams.

Organizations with better support structures for working parents have significantly higher retention, particularly of women in leadership pipelines. They also experience:

• Increased productivity when people aren’t in constant crisis mode

• More innovation when psychological safety allows risk-taking

• Competitive advantage in talent markets where skilled workers have choices

According to Pew Research Center, women make up a larger share of the college-educated workforce than men and are still underrepresented in leadership. The primary reason isn’t ambition or capability, it’s the absence of infrastructure that would make advancement sustainable.

Put simply: You can’t afford to ignore 50%+ of the workforce’s structural needs and expect to remain competitive.

The Dual Script—How to Activate this Today

If you are a working mom (or any employee), start here:

In the next 3 days:

• Have one honest conversation: “Here’s what’s going on in my world. Here’s what I need and here’s how I’ll keep my work commitments.”

• Check in with a colleague: “How are you really doing?”

In the next 3 months:

• Map your care infrastructure: who can you rely on when current systems fail?

• Build reciprocal relationships with colleagues, friends and neighbors: offer support and receive support.

In the next year:

• Advocate for specific policy changes such as flexible Fridays or core working hours that respect school drop off and pick up times.

• Mentor others navigating the work-care integration.

• Build a reputation as someone who values the whole person.

If you are a leader, start here:

In the next 3 days:

• Ask your team: “What’s happening outside work that I should know about to support you better?”

• Remove one unnecessary meeting or deadline adding stress without adding value.

• Say out loud: “What we’re dealing with at home comes to work with us. I care about you as a person, not simply a productive employee.”

In the next 3 months:

• Audit your team’s workload. Is it sustainable for the 70% of your team with caregiving responsibilities?

• Create patterns of flexibility that are predictable for all.

• Celebrate creative risk-taking and collaboration, especially if they didn’t work as intended. These are indicators that psychological safety exists.

In the next year:

• Track what matters: retention of caregivers, wellbeing scores, innovation rates, and discuss how to improve.

• Advocate for organization-wide policy improvements informed by asking your team what would have the biggest impact.

• Model work-life integration publicly: your team watches what you do!

Building the Village

This makes the case for care infrastructure. Now the question is: Are we building it, or are we asking individuals to be their own infrastructure?

We already know how that story ends.

The good news is you can start tomorrow. Pick one action from the lists above. Have one honest conversation. Make one policy change. Show one act of visibility that normalizes the reality that we all have lives, responsibilities, and needs.

You wouldn’t run a business without investing in your technology infrastructure or your facilities. Don’t run a business without investing in your care infrastructure.

Because infrastructure isn’t built all at once. It’s built one conversation, one policy, one act of recognition at a time.

And right now, we desperately need to build.

The system wasn’t built for us, and pretending otherwise is costing companies talent, trust, and revenue.

So what now? My instinct as an introverted mom is to retreat into cozy socks and wait it out. But what I’ve learned is that thriving at home or at work requires a village.

I call it a workplace village.

What a Workplace Village Actually Is

We all know the phrase: It takes a village to raise a child. Today’s moms (especially in a Western world) would argue many villages feel very small, if they exist at all. But we understand the point: raising a child alone is brutally difficult. Teachers, daycare providers, neighbors, friends, and family become the infrastructure that makes life possible.

Now apply that logic to work.

The organizations that perform best with lower attrition, higher innovation, and stronger engagement are not collections of individual operators. They are workplace villages.

Great Place to Work research in 2024 backs this up:

• When employees say their colleagues care about one another, they’re 1.7x more likely to give extra effort.

• When they feel managers care about their lives, they’re 1.5x more likely to stay long-term.

• When cooperation is high, people are 6.7x more likely to go above and beyond.

That isn’t soft. That’s infrastructure.

A workplace village is when someone gets pulled into an emergency childcare pick-up, and their team quietly redistributes work. No guilt, no performance penalty.

It’s the manager who says: “Go. I’ll cover you.”

It’s the colleague who asks: “How can I help?” instead of “Where’s that deliverable?”

The work gets done. The coverage is automatic. The trust runs in every direction. It’s not goodwill. It’s an operating system.

What 30 Years in Corporate America Taught Me

I’m a recovering corporate executive on a mission to build more empathetic and profitable workplaces, not just for moms, but for anyone carrying responsibilities outside of work. Here’s what three decades in management consulting taught me:

Your workplace is either a village or it isn’t. There’s no middle ground.

And if it isn’t, you are bleeding talent, trust, and revenue whether you see it or not.

Over 70% of today’s employees are caregivers. Leaders at all levels are navigating unprecedented change. Industries have been upended. Dynamic policies and return-to-office mandates were made with little consideration for caregiving realities. Meanwhile, childcare availability has still not returned to 2019 levels (insufficient then) and affordability has declined. Between 2020 and 2024, the cost of childcare rose 29%, outpacing inflation.

Here’s the real issue: we’re still training leaders to manage performance, not build villages.

Employee handbooks don’t cover what people actually face. When someone is navigating a crisis outside of work, productivity inside work collapses. You can’t handbook your way out of that. You need a village.

A Tale of Two Leaders

Years ago, when my husband faced a serious health diagnosis, I worked inside a workplace village. I trusted the leaders I worked with, shared what our family was navigating, and outlined how I’d balance doctor’s appointments, his recovery, and my workload. Their response was simple: Take more time than you think you need. Nothing here will fall apart.

That trusted relationship gave me the peace of mind to focus on my family and still deliver for my team. No martyrdom. No penalty. No whispered commentary.

Fast forward several years. Different leaders. One of my kids needed both medical and mental health support. When I shared the basics, I got a curt: They’ll be fine. My kid dealt with that too. There was no flexibility, no trust, and no village. I was left scrambling, scheduling appointments, handling logistics, and worrying about my job every step of the way.

The message was clear: handle it, but don’t let it interfere with work.

Same mom. Same work ethic. Same commitment. Same company. Two completely different systems.

Leadership at Every Level

The thing about workplace villages is that leadership isn’t a job title. The most junior team member can offer to cover a meeting for a colleague in need. That’s leadership. Middle managers aren’t just delegating tasks, they’re creating the culture that determines who gets support and who suffers in silence. Executives don’t need every answer, they need systems where everyone cares for each other.

Villages don’t have saviors. They have infrastructure.

And here’s the good news: caring, cooperative cultures don’t require big budgets. They require choices. Permission. Empathy. And a belief that no one wins alone.

We proved during COVID that we could work from anywhere and what we couldn’t do was work without each other.

The Village Test

If you want to know whether your workplace is a village, ask this:

When someone on your team is struggling, do they have to choose between their life and their job? Or does the village hold them up?

Villages retain people. Villages generate referrals. Villages reduce burnout. Villages outperform.

That’s a measurable ROI.

If You’re a Working Mom, Start Here

Don’t underestimate your leadership. Villages aren’t built top-down. They grow through:

• Small offers of support

• Connection

• Visibility

• Care.

If You’re a Leader, Start Here

Tomorrow morning, ask yourself:

Am I building a village or managing a spreadsheet?

Then look at your team. Who’s struggling? Who’s isolated? Who needs connection or permission?

Village-building starts with one conversation that:

• Normalizes asking for help.

• Redistributes work temporarily.

• Protects flexibility without penalty.

• Rewards cooperation, not heroics.

You are allowed to expect a village. You need to build one. You want the resiliency it creates.

What This Newsletter Is About

This newsletter is about building workplace villages at and around work. After 30 years in the working world, this statement remains true:

Villages create power. And we need that power now more than ever.

What’s one conversation you could have this week to build your village?

They certainly weren’t built for moms at any stage of the motherhood journey.

So I left and I built The Power Lane.

Since then, I captured my ideas in a book. I tested my messages on stages at conferences and leadership events, and I continue to coach working mothers on how to frame their asks with language that gets an obvious “yes” from leadership.

But I kept running into the same wall: you cannot build a sustainable work and life without a village behind you.

The research is clear. I’ve lived it myself for over 19 years as a working mom. We were never meant to do this alone.

That’s why I’m here on Substack.

This is where I’ll share what I’m learning, what I’m building, and what’s coming next, including The Village, a community for working mothers who are done going it alone.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re holding it all together with band-aids and wine while wondering if anyone else sees how hard this is, you’re in the right place.

Welcome. I’d love to know where you are in your motherhood journey.

We’re building something here and I’m glad you are here.

— Heather