Women at Work - We’re Beyond Stretched

Episode Date: April 13, 2020

Women from around the world tell us how the coronavirus crisis is impacting them both professionally and personally. We share how we've been coping and give advice for handling all of this extra stress. Guests: Aliya Hamid Rao and Ruchika Tulshyan. Our theme music is Matt Hill’s “City In Motion,” provided by Audio Network.

Over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. I am showing up at best 50% of the time. The organization I work for has been very empathetic in understanding that there's not just me, there's many men and women who, right, are at home, young children, sage children, and trying to do their best to now homeschool and be present at work. And so there's an understanding, thankfully. So that's been breeding its own, you know, inner imposed guilt, because I like to show up 100%.

And so when I can't, it's been really stressful. And then, obviously, we get upset, we get worked up, and our kids feel that energy. So it's this sort of continuous cycle of this guilt and hurt in my heart. You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Amy Bernstein. I'm Amy Gallo. As we just heard, managing work has gotten a lot more intense for many of us. And amid this global crisis, it's comforting to be starting our fifth season, knowing that over the next several weeks, we'll have this space to process what's

going on and how it's affecting us professionally and personally. In this episode, we're coming to grips with the new pressures this crisis is placing on women, many of whom were stretched thin already. We'll talk about how to handle the extra emotional labor, family management, and self-sacrifice a lot of people expect from us. This past week, we asked women to tell us about the pressures they've been facing lately. Here's what they said. I feel very lucky, but I also feel very, very, very stressed regarding the people that I love. And I don't know if they're gonna be fine I don't know when it's going to end and I am alone the entire day so I've been

alone for three weeks now and and it's hard to be to be alone and I feel like I cannot say anything bad about it I cannot complain or I cannot voice out this anxiety because I shouldn't be anxious. I have a job. So I think also my friends and family, I am their go-to person to talk about their fears and their, oh, what are they going through so I just I kind of like just swallow my my my anxiety and a bit of my my pain and just try to stay positive for the people that are actually suffering it but much worse than I am I pretty much had the day on my own to myself doing what I wanted cooking what I wanted. Now the restaurants are

closed down. There is no place you can order in from. So they need variety. And I find myself logging away in the kitchen quite, I think almost double the time or more than that, than what I used to do earlier. I had enough of it initially. I said, okay, we'll do this. But if you each pull in your weight, and that happened for all of two days before they decided they didn't want any part of cleaning or chopping or whatever. So yeah, then I said, okay, I'm not going to be taken for granted by you guys. So each person fend for himself or herself. But then after burnt food, burnt hands, I decided I'll make it easier on me and just do all the work all around. So that's

something which is a pressure. I'm waiting for the offices to open so that they are out of my hair. We try to set boundaries about understanding when mom is on a meeting or if mom has a time blacked out that's really important but that that doesn't always that's not a perfect world right now I think one of the biggest impact I've seen and I never saw this coming was the cultural pressure now I'm back in the home and my mother's here with me. So I'm expected to be the good Mexican daughter, care for her, take care of her, but be respectful to my traditions, not talk back, not talk back to my fiance, be the model of the home, be the strength, be the pillar, and faithful to God and faithful to my studies, but at no point is mental health ever considered or how I'm feeling for personal

attainment or what that collapsing economy means for my future that I have invested literally a decade of my life pursuing. We've had this traditional role throughout our whole marriage and particularly when the children were little. And this situation now has just intensified all of it because he feels even more so that he needs to be doing his job really well for the people that work for him as well as just keeping his own job. And that takes all the focus away from what's happening in the family. And so, you know, here I am just figuring it out,

trying not to go insane. So my emails, my phone calls, everything will finish up at 10 after I put the kids to bed or after we had dinner so our days are longer and I that's something that I'm hearing from every single female is their days really long they don't have an end and they're all blending into one I'm exhausted I go to bed and I just crash to start all over again the next day. I'm so glad we were able to hear from women about what they're going through and that they were willing to share their experiences. I mean, I've been reading about the impact on women of this crisis, but hearing the individual stories is just so eye-opening in terms of what's really happening out there.

Yeah, you can hear the frustration and stress in their voices. Yeah, it's intense. The women whose voices you just heard spoke to us from France, India, the US and Australia. And as we've been learning how this crisis is playing out for them and for other women on a personal level, we also wanted to learn what's going on at the macro level. Basically, what this time is doing is making visible all the invisible work that women are doing anyway, but in a very kind of high pressure sort of situation right now. That's Alia Hamid Rao, a sociology professor at Singapore Management University. She studies the value a couple's place on each

other's work and how that influences who does what. Her new book is based on research she did on professionals who lost their jobs due to the 2008 financial crisis. Alia spoke to our producer Amanda Kersey about the damage the coronavirus outbreak is doing to women's work-life balance and the possible repercussions years down the line for their careers. Okay, so what we know from like past crises is that with something like the 2008 crisis, what happened after that, less women actually lost jobs than men. You know, people called it the men's session in terms of the industries that were impacted. But the women who did lose jobs, they had a much harder time getting reemployment. And when they were reemployed, they actually suffered greater

earning losses than men. It was very negative in terms of their overall sort of lifetime earnings, and for wealth disparities and gender. What we're seeing right now, I would imagine that, again, something like that would occur with men and women who may lose jobs in terms of the economic impact. And part of the reason I say that is because what these crises seem to do is they seem to reinforce for professional and managerial workers this very gender traditional idea of what it means to be like a family, you know, and what it means to be a family in these times of crisis really gets consolidated as sort of like a male breadwinner, a female carer. And you're already seeing that in women kind of writing about the kind of care work,

the unpaid labor that they're doing at home now while trying to kind of work from home with sort of spouses, maybe not taking as much care of kids or whatever it might be that the labor that's usually pretty invisible is just kind of coming out very visibly during this time as both kind of couples work together at home. And so it's been about 10 years since the last crisis that you studied. Yeah. Has there been enough progress with gender equity so that the women don't have it so hard? Yeah, not at all. No, I don't see, there's no evidence that there actually has been this kind of gender progress, even though it's been 10 years, you know, that we would expect that, you know, maybe like couples are more equitable and they share paid and unpaid labor more. We are not seeing that at all. Actually,

when you look at the data, it seems to suggest that we've been, since the early 2000s, we've been actually either stalling when it comes to progress on key gender indicators or actually going back, reversing. But how can you imagine this changing over the next few months? Do you think it's just like, this is what we're going to have to maintain this labor, whether it's like emotional or other extra work? And is that just going to wear women down? Yeah, I mean, you know, it would be great if something like this would catalyze, like, you know, move towards more gender egalitarian division of labor in, you know, in households or whatever. I don't necessarily see that happening. Certainly for married families with kids, I can say that I don't see that happening.

I think mothers are more likely to say that even if it's short-term or long-term, this is just how things are. And fathers are likely to say, well, my paid work matters and this way I need to do it. So this is not my responsibility. And part of this is because people set

their kind of relationship parameters pretty early on. And it's really hard to shift afterwards interactionally, like to kind of renegotiate. It can happen. It's just like not a very common response to economic crises. So like, as you know, I studied unemployed professionals, men and women who lost their jobs. And I did interviews with them, with their spouses, with kids, and I observed them. And what basically happened, what I found from that study was that with unemployed men, even when their unemployment had been going on for two years, which is very long, it was seen in the family as a temporary thing, right? So the family would not change their division of paid and unpaid work. So basically,

what you have is unemployed men who are sitting at home and who are job searching. So they are kind of quote unquote working that way. They're trying to get reemployed. But their wives are in full-time occupation. They're working full-time. And they're still taking care of the cooking, the cleaning, managing children's activities, their calendars and stuff like that. That didn't change even over a long period of time.

What I saw with unemployed women, though, it was this kind of idea of, well, if I'm at home, I need to contribute to the home through care work, which they were already doing more of before, you know, the unpaid work of cooking, cleaning, and so on. They felt like this moral obligation that if I'm not bringing in an income, then I need to be doing this, which is not there for men. For men, it was very clear that the way I contribute to the family is I provide. So, I mean, the way I would extrapolate those research findings with gel with like the broader research in this area for this crisis is that I don't see this kind of mindset changing where it's just like, well, we are both at home and we both have work, paid work to do. And so let's kind of make this okay for each of us, you know, having this work for both of us. I mean, I think what I'm going to see happening is it's going to be that idea of like the father sort of quote unquote helping out mothers with childcare where you sort of, it's not an obligation. It's not a

responsibility. It's a gift that you're giving. But at a certain point, women are going to get tired. Do you think that people will start dropping things? Like, do you think women will be like, I'm not going to do this extra work like this is I'm done? From the research that I know, I don't really see that happening. I think like women often have like very high standards for themselves, which they kind of commit to, to the point of exhaustion. And when I talk to these unemployed men and women, when they talked about when they thought they might lose a job, you know, the months before that, for some even the years when like rumors started circulating in their industries of impending layoffs or whatever, they talk about like amping up what they're doing so that they become sort of undisposable. And with women, well, how are these women going to kind of keep going above and beyond for their paid work, whilst also

managing all this elder care, childcare, whatever it might be, you know, even the committed labor, if you're living alone, like managing the groceries, making sure you have enough toilet paper, whatever it might be. And I think what's going to get lost is sleep. I think it's going to be mental health. I think it's going to be physical health that's going to suffer here. I don't have any evidence to suggest that women's paid work will suffer.

I don't have any evidence that their attention on their kids will necessarily suffer, but I think their self-care, I think that's what's going to be the thing that we see kind of going down. So you think that like women will try to keep together like their unpaid work, their paid work, but internally we're just going to crumble? Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. Okay. I know. But I think conversations like this can help. Oh, yeah. I hope, like, you know, maybe this is what we'll start doing more of, you know? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. What does the future hold for business?

Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. Hey listeners, if you want to hear from more leaders to help you answer questions like, should I talk about my anxiety at work? Or how do I claim my leadership power? Then you should

listen to TED Business, hosted by Columbia Business School professor, Madhupe Akinnola. The show features TED Talks about everything from setting smart goals to the latest on DEI in business, followed up with a mini lesson from Mudupe on how to apply these lessons in your own life. Listen to TED Business wherever you get your podcasts. So, Aime, after listening to Alia, how are you feeling about all this? A lot of thoughts.

On the one hand, I think Alia is a pragmatist. She's being quite realistic about the situation that many women will find themselves in. And on the other hand, I want to be optimistic. I want to be hopeful that there will be some couples, that there will be some women who will be able to renegotiate all of this. And that during this time, women will be able to find a way to save some energy and take time for themselves, despite what the research shows. Yep. That is an optimistic take. I still need to chew on it. Yeah. To process all of this and to bring together what Alia just said and what we heard earlier from the different women at the top of our show, we talked to Ruchika Tulshian. She's the author of The Diversity Advantage, Fixing Gender Inequality in the Workplace. Ruchika, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. So I want to ask first, how are you doing? That is a very interesting question. I'm dealing with a number of different emotions, as I'm sure many people are. There's clearly, you know, deep anxiety and grief. But there's this other deep feeling in the pit of my stomach, which over the last few weeks I've been able to identify as shame. And the shame relates to the fact that even though it's hard for me and my family, even though life has changed in ways that I couldn't have even imagined, I keep hearing these stories of people and especially women around the world,

women of color, women with many other intersectional identities and the deep trauma and pain they're dealing with. And there's a little bit of shame there that how come I get to have it pretty decent? You know, I have a supportive spouse. I have definitely a rambunctious three-year-old, but I'm really enjoying my time with him. And so I'm trying to figure out how do I reconcile these feelings of my own personal pain and challenge of dealing with being a working mother during this pandemic and at the same time how to reconcile that with this guilt and shame that I really feel when I hear of stories of people on the front lines, those who've lost their jobs. There's so much pain all around the world. I'm feeling a lot of the same.

And even that question, how are you, feels loaded and complicated. And sometimes when people ask it, I feel like saying, great, because at that very moment, I am doing great for all the same reasons. To have a supportive partner, I have a 13-year-old who's doing great in school and doesn't need extra support. I have a job. I'm keeping busy. And at the same time, if I bring my lens out just a little bit, I just start to feel panic and overwhelmed and really, I mean, in a way, overwhelmed by the suffering that I'm seeing everywhere. I don't know. Amy B., where are you landing on that spectrum these days? I feel like I'm putting an awful lot of effort into limiting my feelings,

compartmentalizing. I feel as if those muscles are getting quite a workout. Right. And I'll just adopt your language. When I pull the lens out, when I pull the camera back, my internal optimist is at war with what I see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears. So there's that. And then the other part of it that I'm very conscious of is having to control my own anxiety because people depend on me to do that.

Right, right. You know, I do have to say that at this point, that old, you know, the saying about putting on your own oxygen mask first, that I think is going to make all the difference in the way that we cope with this, because it's, this is a long term, this is, this is long, you know, and, and we don't know when it's going to end. And so if we burn out now, almost right at the beginning of this, you know, 18 months down the line, we really won't have anything to give. So I try and tell myself that. Yeah. I do think that the levels of burnout and emotional exhaustion for women in particular, given how long this could go on, are going to be quite high. And one of the things I did this weekend, actually, Saturday morning, Friday was a really awful day for a variety of reasons. And Saturday morning, I woke up and I was like, you cannot forget to ask

yourself three times a day, what do I need? And sometimes that's basic, like that's food, because I forgot to eat a lot on Friday, right? Or sometimes it's bigger of like, I need to put my phone down for an hour and go for a walk and not be available. The other thing I wanted to bring up, because I think about it a lot, you know, there's the emotional triage of which, you know, which messages need to be responded to instantly and which ones you can put off for an hour or a day. But I also worry a lot about the people who don't reach out and who don't ask for the connection. Because I think that this isolation gets us into a place where we're just working our minds in such toxic ways. Just the need to keep tabs on everyone at this moment does seem, and not in a like evaluative way or accountability way, but emotionally just seems like such a huge burden.

And I do think there is some responsibility to reach out to people who you haven't heard from, whether it's a coworker, whether it's a friend. And I hesitate to say responsibility because it's just adding yet another thing to do. But it feels like the right thing at this moment. And I'm glad you brought it up because it's easy to get into triage mode, as you describe it, and just responding to the requests that are coming in. But then we also have to think about

who have we not heard from and how do we reach out to them? I mean, are you having to do some of that, Amy B? Yeah. And then the other counterweight is that the business context is very challenging right now. And a lot of figuring has to be done and decisions have to be made. So you have to find the space and the focus to handle the business part of your life, the management part of your life, in addition to the emotional caretaking, which manager, as a leader right now, and will really make the biggest difference between when we get to the other side, the biggest difference between

an ineffective manager and an empathetic and inclusive leader, really the biggest difference is going to be those who can really speak to a lot of those anxieties to their team, you know, and they can really say to their team, look, I know we had set these targets on January, you know, 5th, 2020, and those targets are not going to be met. And you're okay, you're off the hook for that. And the sad thing is, I'm not seeing that happen very often. You know, I'm based here in Seattle. I have a lot of friends who work in technology. My partner works in technology. And the overarching message is, you know, you have all the tools to be able to work remotely.

You are expected to deliver literally the same way. And I think, you know, a lot of these tech leaders have come out and said, no, not at all, not at all. But I'm very much hearing that on the ground, the message is very different. Or at least individual managers are having very different conversations than whatever their CEO comes out and says in public. And it's heartbreaking. You know, women are having to manage young children and deliver at the exact same level as when they had a full setup of childcare and other help, etc. So there's the expectation, like you're saying, Ruchika, that we produce at the same level

we were three weeks ago, which never mind trying to do it virtually, we also just have all this emotional burden, our own personal anxiety on top of that. And I think there's a lot of pressure we heard from our listeners to perform even more, you know, even excel in this environment as a way to prove yourself, especially in the face of layoffs, in the face of an uncertain economic future. I feel like the pressure hasn't just been no interruptions. That's the message I keep hearing from people is like no interruptions, business as usual. But then there's also the like, take it up a notch in this environment and show you can excel when times are really tough. I think that a lot of that comes from managers. I also worry that women sometimes place a lot

of burden on themselves in this situation. What do you guys think? You know, I agree. At the same time, I see it so much more with, you know, my friends and people I speak to who are women of color or women who wear other intersectional identities in the workplace. You know, they may have told their boss that I'm dealing with some mental health challenges in the workplace. You know, they may have told their boss that I'm dealing with some mental health challenges in the past. They may have become new mothers or whatnot. Sometimes I think those extra pressures they put on themselves is kind of valid, right? Because the message they've been getting all this while when business was as usual was you really have to work twice as hard, right? We know some of the

stereotypes that women of color deal with when it comes to being considered, you know, either incompetent or less reliable or lacking leadership skills. And if you're hearing that message communicated often in the workplace, then at a time like this, when you actually can't see your managers, you're not meeting your team regularly, it's very stressful. What's your advice to women of color who are facing these dual pressures now? My advice is more to managers, as it always is, you know, to check in with people who wear historically marginalized identities and really, really make it clear that we understand the situation is unprecedented. We're not operating business as per usual. And please let me know what you need.

What does the future hold for business? Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. I want to ask about that advice you gave to managers to sort of ease up a little bit on the productivity. Because Amy B., how have you been talking to your team around flexibility, deadlines, productivity?

We're really lucky because we work in an industry where it doesn't matter where you get your work done and at what time you get your work done. So we have a certain amount of built-in flexibility. But about two weeks into this crisis, I was starting to worry that people were burning themselves out. I was seeing them online at 8 a.m. and at 8 p.m. And I wouldn't want to see that in the best of times, but certainly not now when everyone, they're dealing with more responsibilities for more of their time than they ever have. And what I believe is that family comes first

and that if we have to move a deadline, we will move a deadline. And we need to keep all of this in perspective. That if you have a kind of a basis of trust in each other that, you know, no one on my team slacks off. No one. And I don't ever suspect them of slacking off. So if someone asks for an extra day or an extra week or for a little bit of wiggle room, I'm happy to make sure that happens. And we're also lucky that we work in an organization where no one second guesses that sort of thing. Yeah.

But we are lucky and that is privilege. Yeah. And I do think that the family comes first is hard for a lot of people, especially I'll tell you in the many hats I'm wearing right now, the hat I feel most competent in is my work hat. So that's where I go to under stress. And so it's very easy for me to just work and work and work because it's where I get a lot of great feedback. It's where I feel competent right now. And it's where you can finish something. Exactly. There's an end. There's an end. Yeah. Because somehow the dishes never seem to stop. That's for sure right now. But I think about those, especially some of our

colleagues who have really young children at home. And I want to ask you about this, Ruchi, because I know Aliyah talked a little bit about what it's like for people who have toddlers at home and the pressure they're feeling. Let's listen to what she had to say. Here, what you see is like, you know, women sort of being like, I have to kind of pretend like I'm not at home because as soon as a toddler realizes I'm here, he wants my attention. So I just need to be super quiet on my meeting. So working from home, I think it raises these new kind of questions about, you know, who is seen as a professional, who is seen as prioritizing work and able to continue with work as if nothing has changed. And I think it's going to be easier

for men to do that for women. So, Ritu, what did you hear and what Aliyah had to say? Yeah, so two different points. One is, I think for women with toddlers, this situation, or with young children, let's not even say toddlers, because I've heard it can actually be really difficult across the board. But if you have children for whom, you know, if you say, don't come in, they're definitely going to come in and they're definitely going to try and disrupt the meeting that you have with their latest painting or whatnot. I think the situation is really very difficult. And it depends then, at least for me, it really depends on who's at the other end of the line. And again, back to this idea of like how you're viewed in terms of your competence and your reliability. You know, Amy B,

I wish everyone I worked with had that level of empathy and inclusion. But the reality is I know in situations where I really have to up my game and, you know, in those moments, I'll lock my door, I'll, you know, I'll put up a gate. It'll be very, very clear that, you know, I cannot be disturbed because I really can't show that side of me, which is a mother to a young child. And then I take a very different approach in situations where I feel that psychological safety, where I know, you know, me bringing a child to the frame, if he does happen to interrupt us, is not going to count against me and not going to count against my competence and ability to deliver on the project. So it's a pretty challenging situation. And across

the board, I feel like it's extremely, again, important for managers to keep communicating that to women, you know, that I understand you're in this, you know, whatever situation you're in, and, you know, I've got your back. It's going to differentiate the good managers from the not so good ones. One last point I wanted to make is I really hope that managers don't assume that a woman doesn't want to do something because she has a child or she has elder care or she has other priorities that you know about and responsibilities. You know, don't assume that, you know, let her make that choice. And so the way that you could phrase it could be, you know, there's this new, really new, big, ambitious project that we're going to embark on. I don't know if it's a good idea at this time,

but are you, you know, is this something that you're able to do right now? You know, you have the full choice. It's not going to count against you if you say no. And I really think that sort of language and messaging is key right now. Yeah. I mean, one way to do this is to say, can you take this on? And don't press for an explanation. You can say, can you take this on? It's totally okay to say no. Yep. I love that. It's totally okay to say no. And I think, wow, that can we like, that's our mantra from now on maybe. But you better mean it because I've heard people say stuff like that and not mean it and ding people for not taking the thing on.

And can we as women really, when we're offered that solution, can we actually take it where possible? You know, back to this idea of like, we don't always have to be super women. And if someone offers you an out, take it. That's hard to do. And again, because of the expectation that we either we put on ourselves or others put on us, that we should be able to handle it all. I mean, dropping the ball right now just doesn't really seem like an option. And yet it feels like exactly what we need to be doing in certain areas of our life. And Alia said that when women feel all this pressure to do both their informal and formal work, what they sacrifice is sleep and mental health. And that's just not sustainable.

Yeah, it's not sustainable. And then, yeah, and the pressure. I mean, I had a Zoom call with some high school friends, all women this weekend and afterwards, and people were talking about what they're doing in quarantine, how they're handling schooling, how they're handling their work. And afterwards, one of my close friends texted me and she said, I just feel like I'm doing it all wrong. It broke my heart because I feel like we've just started the pressure when you look at social media, my Instagram feed of these moms who are like doing it all. They have these crazy schedules and they're, you know, baking bread and they're, you know, like they're doing everything. It's the comparison is so easy to make, and yet it's so damaging. And if you were to try to keep up exactly like you said, Amy, we would not sleep. We would not take care of ourselves.

I will say that socialization is very, very deep. And we heard from one of our listeners who identified as a Mexican-American woman and talked a lot about the cultural expectations. I'm of South Asian origin. I grew up in Singapore. And it's very, very, very deep and very challenging. And sometimes, you know, for example, I'm like, oh, okay, now I'm home. So that means this is a great time to teach my toddler Hindi. This is a good time for him to learn how to ride a bike, you know, without the training wheels. This is a good time for him to learn how to ride a bike, you know, without the training wheels. This is a good time for me to perfect this recipe and that recipe. And the first week of being in lockdown, I actually was starting to see myself doing that. And now I've had to step back and say that's unsustainable, right? And you are enough. You are more than enough in whatever situation you're in, right?

If you get up in the morning and you make it through the day, you do not have to deliver and you do not have to be overproductive today. And that is still more than enough. Yeah. I think that's a good exercise. I don't even remember where I learned it, but is to, at the end of the day, my natural instinct is to look at all the things I don't even remember where I learned it, but is to, at the end of the day, my natural instinct is to look at all the things I didn't get done and to try to flip that and think about all the things I did get done. And sometimes that's feeding myself three meals. You know, sometimes it's getting one really critical edit done, but the to-do list at this point of all the things we could, should, want to do is so long.

And if you focus on that, it's going to just put you down further. And setting expectations is usually half the battle. Right. Well, let's talk about these expectations because I think it's not just yourself and your coworkers. It's also your partner at home who you might be negotiating with. And we heard from Alia about in times like this, women's paid work is often taking a back seat to men's. And I'm curious, just what was it like for you to hear that? And how do we process that? For me, it was really painful to hear about all of this. This time is like no other.

You have to recontract. If you have always been the person who did all the sort of housework and all the cooking, all the housework, all of that, managing schedules in the past, that was under normal circumstances. You have to recontract now. Yeah. And I think one of the hard things about that I'm finding is that for me and my husband, for example, it took us years to get to the agreement that we have currently and that we both feel comfortable.

And it is a constant renegotiation. But this situation has sort of made it all implode. And it sometimes feels like we're starting from scratch. I had a friend, I asked how her weekend was and she said really hard because I had to admit to myself and to my husband that he was not carrying his weight. And we had to have serious conversations about what he could do to step up. And that's not a fun conversation. And we're also in our house all the time with our children. So there's no privacy to have that conversation. Oftentimes, I'm seeing this across the board with couples, you know, whether they're different genders or same gender, like they're just this constant who's going to take on what there's no outsourcing now how as we heard Aliyah said, there's just more childcare, there's more housework to be done.

And everyone's exhausted. Exhausted and emotionally, like my patience is whisper thin at the moment, like whisper thin. So like having these conversations, which sometimes are happening typically in the therapist's office. You're out to dinner, right? Under the best of circumstances, these are hard conversations, but to have them now is even harder. And yet I feel like, Ruchika, your advice of like, you have to have them, you can't avoid them. Yeah. I did want to say one thing that I think is helping me think about this is reframing the narrative. We're not working from home. I read this on, I think somewhere on Twitter, it was making the rounds. We're not working,

we're not all working from home. We are at home in a pandemic trying to work. I love that. Right? And it's a very different framing. And so whether it's your productivity at work, whether it's, you know, turning into the best baker in the world, those things are absolutely need to be on hold right now. We were talking at the top of the show, you know, are the narratives going to change? Are the structures going to change?

And partly we play a role in that. So it's not even about sitting back and hoping those changes happen. It's about us having the conversations about how it needs to change. Not that it's on us solely to do it, but by having conversations like these, I think we can really make the optimistic view more likely and the pessimistic view that this is going to make things worse, not better, less likely. At the same time, I really hope that people who are managers, I hope a lot more people who identify as men and people with sort of workplace privilege, they really have an opportunity to listen and see the collective

sort of suffering that women are facing right now and develop that empathy or at least start asking that question, have that curiosity. Again, I'm hopeful because I don't think those conversations or that awareness was happening in quite the same way. And right now we have a unique opportunity for more people to ask those questions and develop that curiosity and build that muscle. Absolutely true. Ruchika, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a great conversation. Thank you. That's our show. I'm Amy Gallo. And I'm Amy Bernstein. Our editorial and production team is Amanda Kersey, Maureen Hoke, Adam Buchholz, Mary Du, Tina Tobey-Mack, Erica Truxler, and Rob Eckhart.

Next week, we'll hear from a behavioral scientist who's studying how working at home and online because of the pandemic is affecting our well-being. She'll tell us what parts of this new way of working might stick and which might benefit women over the long term. Until then, take good care.