Episode 163: No Kids. Working Hard.
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time, when we discuss women’s careers in the pandemic we’re mostly talking about mothers. But what if you don’t have kids?
“I’m reaping the rewards of those choices and I was before Covid, and all this year has really done I feel is magnify those opportunities for me to keep working and keep exceling when others may have barriers that they’re facing instead.”
Still, not every child-free woman sees this time as an opportunity…
“When I entered this job I was banking on being able to work more hours and pick up the pieces and stuff, I was banking on all that to work in my favor. At this point in the pandemic, I don’t know that I’m as motivated as I was before to work my way up.”
Coming up on The Broad Experience.
In all the discussion we’ve been having in the last two shows on what’s happening to women’s careers right now…the conversation has really been centered around women with children. All the pressure they’re under handling their jobs and their children’s presence at home at the same time…the online schooling…the daily care. We’re gonna talk more about this in upcoming shows – because the fact is most women do have children certainly in their thirties and beyond.
But a good chunk of us don’t. And I really was curious about how these women are faring at work during this time.
In this show we meet two women, at different stages of their careers and they live in very different parts of the US. Neither has children and each is having a distinct experience of work during this pandemic.
Jennifer Szambecki lives in Wichita, Kansas. Some of you have met her before – she featured in an episode I did a few years ago called Conservative Women Speak Up.
She’s in her early 40s, married to a teacher. And she just landed a new job in July as marketing director at an architecture and construction firm.
She says she feels a lot of compassion for her parent colleagues…and has done since the pandemic began.
“And at the same time I found myself thinking wow, I probably really have an opportunity to do more of the kind of work I want to be doing, more work in general, really shine in this season, because I am not worrying about students remotely learning or anything like that, and I felt and feel bad saying that.”
In a previous episode in this series she heard LinkedIn’s Jessi Hempel talk about how frustrated she was when she realized her colleagues without kids could get so much extra work done during lockdown…whereas Jessi had only just mastered how to keep her toddler alive and entertained AND hold down her job.
Jennifer says on the contrary for her, these last six months or so have been fruitful. She took advantage of the early days of the pandemic to work harder.
“I think part of why I feel empowered and energized was after spending 5 or 6 months of feeling like I was ramping up and doing a lot and increasing my capacity to perform and achieve…I do feel like I felt more confident taking this role and taking on this challenge as a result.”
She says she has far more responsibility in this new job than she’s had before. The hours she put in during the spring prepared her for it.
And she says not having children is part of the equation.
“A huge factor of what has made it possible for me to excel in my career has been the decision that I never wanted to have kids, I never felt the desire to have kids, it was never a choice like ‘oh, maybe I want to have kids but I’m not going to because I’m choosing my career.’ I did not want to have children and never have wanted that – so it was easy to focus all that energy especially in my twenties, before I was married, on my career and thankfully I married an incredibly supportive man who loves how successful I am and loves how driven I am, so my thirties and forties are characterized by the same ability to excel in those ways. So I do feel like I am reaping the rewards of those choices anyway, and I was before Covid, and all this year has really done is give an extra spotlight on that or magnify those opportunities to keep working and keep exceling when others may have barriers they’re facing instead.”
AM-T: “Talk about context now because I was very interested in what you said in an email to me about where you live and how unusual you are in not having children.”
“It’s true. I know of only a couple of other women and they’re much younger than me who’ve gone on record saying they don’t desire to have children. Most women my age either do have children, most of them do, very few don’t, those were not by choice – so this is a part of the country, I found a map I can send you that shows fertility density and how deep red compared to the rest of the country the middle 12 states are in the US, compared to the other two-thirds in either direction. We do have more children here by and large, and we have more space, you can live like a king in the middle of the country, have all the kids you want, have all the space you want, and probably afford it on one income. So I am absolutely the outlier among my closest friends and family, having no children.”
AM-T: “Have you over the years had those questions…’why don’t you have kids?’”
“Oh yes, yes. In this very role the very first question every person has asked me is whether I have kids and when I say no, the look passes across their face, they realize they’re not supposed to ask why, and they move on to another subject. But I can just see the look pass across their face, they want to say ‘why!?’ Obviously something has gone terribly wrong in my life if I’ve made it to this point and I don’t have children.”
AM-T: “And when people do ask why, which I assume they sometimes do, what do you say and what do they then say?”
“I tell them the truth. I strongly believe the Lord simply did not give me that desire, I don’t know why. I have theories such as being a great auntie and a great friend to other women and families with kids, and also being in a position professionally to help other employees, colleagues with children and families have the resources and opportunities they want and need.”
AM-T: “Well that actually reminds me, it brings me to the last time we spoke…it was for a show called Conservative Women Speak Up, and you are a conservative Christian, which actually must make you even more unusual.”
“It’s true, yes, there are absolutely women and men in the most conservative extremes of both politics and faith who would say I’m doing something wrong by not having children. And that’s OK. I know I’m not doing anything wrong.”
AM-T: “Well this makes me wonder actually, how does faith play into your career and your career progress?”
“Oh, that’s a great question. I think my faith is something that you could say started when I was in my very late teens and early 20s, so my faith has grown literally with my career, on the same schedule as my career timeline, and as I’ve matured in my faith I’ve matured as a human, as I’ve been aging all of these years and having great and hard and wonderful life experiences, and I think at this point my faith really is the center of the decisions I make with my husband about my career and where we’re going together on this career journey I’m on, and how I treat the people I work with and just really how I think about my work.
Part of what I wanted to say earlier but I know for people who don’t share my faith it just sounds so cheesy, but I’ve been so excited this year to get to use all the gifts God gave me to just work my butt off and have the energy to do that, and I hope that continues and I’m excited for when the people around me who are struggling so much to divide their energy between home and work and family and so many things, when they can rejoin in the fullest way so we can all take our energy together and do more wonderful things together, I think there’s gonna be some pent up work energy coming in 2021 and I’m here for it.”
Jennifer Szambecki in Wichita.
Jennifer lives in a conservative part of the US. She told me there hadn’t been many marches for social justice in her area, but a lot of parents have protested against restrictions on school sports during Covid.
My next guest – Sandra – lives in the famously liberal San Francisco Bay area. She’s 30 years old, married, works for a consulting firm.
She says early in the pandemic colleagues with children scrambled to deal with work and home simultaneously. Which left Sandra filling in the gaps.
“I just sort of stopped seeing people’s availability on their calendars, it just stared disappearing so I had project manager colleagues just kind of disappear overnight.”
And at first, as the situation sunk in, she was fine with this. In fact she wanted to help her parent colleagues.
“I think for myself it wasn’t hard to be like, oh, you need to go drop off your children at your mom’s place? Of course I can cover for you on this call. It’s not a big deal. And I think it continued for a while that way, where I was like well, I have all this extra time where I’m not commuting,– so for me it felt like an opportunity, for the first couple of weeks where, ‘I might as well help out if I can.’
AM-T: “So as the months have dragged on and we now find ourselves 6 months or so into this, how have your thoughts and feelings changed during that time? I think you said you were pretty tired at this point.”
“Yes…um, I think I feel tired because now that we’ve had more than Covid happen, you know we’ve had so much unrest, and people trying to get a revolution going, there’s so much happening in society at large even beyond Covid, we have an election coming up.”
All this has been on her mind. And some worries are closer to home.
“For me, something that’s been weighing on me a lot is my parents are technically part of the vulnerable population. My parents are a little bit older, they’re immigrants, and right now they have health problems and they are too scared to go to the hospital.”
She says they need routine preventative care but they’re avoiding it because they’re so worried about picking up the virus in a medical setting.
She says just because she doesn’t have children doesn’t mean she isn’t experiencing Covid-related stresses of her own.
And look, she’s grateful to have a job at all. Several of her friends have lost theirs in the pandemic.
But she’s working so much these days, she says she’s not even sure what being ambitious means anymore.
“I think what my company does a really good job of is making space for parents, and I think that’s a huge win, in my lifetime that seems like a really big win for parents in the workplace to not to feel discriminated against and to be able to take off and be able to go pick up their kids from daycare and whatever…it just seems like young people and people without children in my experience have sort of been your resiliency strategy. Where we sort of pick up the slack when needed or if someone needs to stay late to do X Y Z, we all know who it’s gonna be. Just little things like staying late, doing just a little bit of extra work, doing a little bit of admin work…historically it’s fallen on me because I’m a woman but also a young person and someone without childcare duties – and not to downplay childcare duties because those are really important and very expensive for a lot of parents, but for me, I’m 30, and I do wonder what do things look like for me if I want to have children in the future myself? Part of me wants to cash in on this terrible system in the future and then there’s another part of me that’s…this is not something I want to perpetuate either, where we don’t make space for people without children to also have their own lives.”
She doesn’t want to make it and us versus them situation. Especially as she and her husband are thinking about having kids.
But what the pandemic has done to her workload is making her re-think everything about her job.
“I think Before Covid the benefit was I’d commute into the office. So I’d get in and It would be 8, 8.30 I would leave if I left at 6 or 7 I’d be leaving the office. And I think a lot of people experience the same thing, right. Now it’s hard to go home because you’re already at home.”
She starts work at the same time…and she tries to log off around 5.30 or 6. But she says if she gets off that early she has to sign back on later, because that’s when many of her coworkers can get work done – late in the evening.
And sometimes she thinks – am I just being inefficient? Or she tells herself, maybe this is just what a more junior person HAS to do…
“I’ve been a lower level employee at a lot of places that I’ve worked, so maybe it’s more a grind it out kind of problem where you expect the lower level people to just work hard and work your way up and eventually you can make more decisions on your own schedule, your own work, and whatever. But at this point in the pandemic I don’t know that I’m as motivated as I was before to work my way up.”
She says pre-Covid…
“Taking on more of the admin or more of the marketing work, those were little extras that I would see, oh, that might go on my performance review or that’s something I’d remind my manager about when I’m looking for a promotion. I used to keep track of these things every week.”
Now she says she doesn’t have room in her head for that kind of thing. And she’s not sure it would make much of a difference anyway.
“You know when I entered this job I was kind of banking on being able to work more hours and pick up the pieces and stuff…I was banking on all that to work in my favor and get me where I wanted to go. Because I was seeing that availability and willingness to jump in and help the rest of the team, I was seeing that being rewarded. And I was also seeing that parents were given space to take care of their kids and they took real parental leave, you know, where they were gone for a while, and all these things were really encouraging to me…but now it seems like I’ve sort of missed my window to put in that extra time.”
AM-T: “‘Cause what you’re saying is before Covid you felt like you’d be noticed for jumping in and taking things on, and that’s the way people tell us we get promoted, right, is by doing that kind of stuff. But now that’s just expected in this crazy situation, so it’s not something you feel your managers are any longer viewing as promotion material. It’s just what people are doing during the pandemic.”
“It’s what people are doing, and I don’t actually know that they’re keeping tabs on anything any more, they’re just trying to get the work done and go home. So it’s a little bit of everything. No one’s doing their best right now.”
Thanks to Sandra and to Jennifer Szambecki for being my guests on this show.
If you have ideas or feedback you can find me on email via the website or on Twitter or on the Facebook page.
Next time we’ll continue this series about what’s going on with women’s careers right now.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. See you next time.