A perspective from the hollow middle on IWD 2023

Last week, IBM and Chief came out with a study that found that pipeline of female talent has hollowed out in the middle; there have been increases in C-Suite and Board representation (12%) and an increase in junior roles to 37% but the pipeline for top leadership levels hasn't recovered from pre-pandemic levels, with 14% of women in Senior Vice President and 16% in Vice President roles.

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2023-03-01-IBM-and-Chief-Study-Finds-Women-in-Leadership-Pipeline-has-Hollowed-Out-in-the-Middle 

I've been reflecting on this study a lot... first, I'm a new {female} Vice President... so what's a first hand perspective from the hollow middle?

First, I'll start with the fact that I'm optimistic. The culture of the work world has changed A LOT over the past several years, and I can state with first hand experience that the culture at IBM has shifted a lot. The shift to remote in the pandemic certainly helped me with this culture shift - making the ability to accomplish my personal and professional goals a lot easier. 

That said, there are a couple of challenges that I think we all still need to tackle:

1) Culture around paternity leave - More and more companies are offering paternity leave, and yet I've spoken with many men who feel like they cannot take their leave... for the same reasons that it disadvantages women to take leave. They are on the partner track, they feel like they can't take away, other male leaders will look down on them, the male leaders make jokes about what are they doing on maternity leave, etc. 

I very firmly feel that the single biggest thing that we can do about creating a culture that enables women to succeed is enabling a culture where men can take parental leave. Aside from evening out the immediate time away, paternity leave also creates another gift that lasts a lifetime (or something) which is enabling the Dad to be an equal caregiver - or at least creating the opportunity to flex those muscles more. 

I can wax poetic about my own wonderful husband, but as literally incredible as Johnny is, when I was on maternity leave with Charlie (our oldest), I finally started to "get" why women become the de facto caregiver - I was home. I was breastfeeding. I did all the doctors visits. I got up in the middle of the night (see: aforementioned breastfeeding). So, I was the person who figured out how to jiggle her just right when she had gotten herself too worked up to eat so that she could finally calm down enough to eat. Etc. 

I came back to work pre-pandemic, and after a bit of time re-acclimating, returned to travel. And, for me, travel was a gift because it meant that I had to force myself to give up control of schedule, food choice, etc. etc. It was never that I didn't trust Johnny; it was that I didn't trust myself and so I tried to exert control over things that I could control, and ceding that to someone else allowed me to be an equal parent with Johnny.

So: if we want more women in the hollow middle, we need to enable more equal caregiving. If we want to enable more equal caregiving, we need to start at the beginning by giving Dad's the opportunity to get the "reps" with the kids.

The action I take personally here is encouraging every single Dad on my team to take leave more than once - and making sure that all who take leave have a great role to come back to, have great career opportunities, and are not penalized for taking leave.

2) Caregiver challenges - The hollow middle isn't just about childcare. It's also about other types of caregiving that we have to do, especially parent care. I lost my Dad a little over one year ago after {what felt like an exceptionally long} 3 year illness. Two weeks before my Dad died, my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's (November 2021 was a very hard month). It isn't just that I have to figure out how to care for my kids: it's also that I have to figure out how to care for my mom.

This is a different layer of confusion and hard. My mom is often mad at me because I am the one who has taken away her independence - or at least she perceives it that way. While caring for my kids is something I {usually} enjoy doing, I'm almost embarrassed to admit, I really don't enjoy caring for my mom. I would like to be the caregiver who is doting and enjoys caregiving, and I'm just not. It is really thankless and really hard. I approach it with a sense of duty and love for who my mom was, but frustration with who she has become.

Being a caregiver to my parents and a mom to little kids is an extra juggling act - emotionally and from a time perspective. Do I prioritize my mom's doctors appointments? Which ones? Do I answer when she calls and I'm on a call? What about when she calls 4 times in a row? What about 8 times? Does this change when I know that she does it because she wants to talk about why she doesn't have a car any more? How do I answer her question about it being "really hard to reach me" during the day? How do I answer my own question of whether this means I'm a "good" daughter or not? 

We don't really talk about parent caregiving as part of the mix of challenge of being a "middle" woman but from my own experience with it, the emotional burden of caring for parents is different from caring for kids, but hard too.

My action on this one? Mostly grace for myself. I am a good daughter. I do what I can. I am a good mom. I do a lot more than I can!

3) It gets easier and harder with older kids - It's hard to leave your baby; but it's also hard to navigate it with a kid who "gets it" - who knows you're leaving, or knows you are saying no to going to the playground that all the other kids + moms are going to, or knows that you can't go on a field trip but other moms are. When your kids are little, you have more physical challenges (not sleeping, pumping, etc.), and as they age (and I know I'm only at the beginning of this), you have more emotional challenges. 

This is something I wade through every day and, to be honest, I'm not sure I do the best job with it - especially around managing my own guilt. I traveled a lot for work in January and so I had to pass on a trip with some of my best friends and I felt super guilty about it. I'm not traveling as much this month because we have a lot of family birthdays and so I missed a go live this week and I feel like I should've been there. 

Really the easier / harder piece of older kids is managing their emotions and my guilt. So my advice to myself is to give myself grace - and recognize that I'm still flexing the muscle of managing this emotion.

So where does this leave me?

This morning, I participated in an IWD event with one of our global account teams, and they asked two questions of each of the panel, that I will answer here:

• What does IWD 2023 mean to me? IWD 2023 is both an opportunity for celebration of the progress we've made and the achievements of many amazing women; it is also an opportunity to recognize that there is much left to do. 
• How have I fought bias & challenges in being "the only" in the room? On the call this morning, many other panelists mentioned working hard, demonstrating your skills, taking extra time to study up - and I think all of these things are true. But a big part of me fighting bias is sharing my personal experience - which is part of the reason I started this blog. I haven't written a lot lately because of 2 & 3 above + a very vibrant and exciting time in my business. But part of changing the culture is having the hollow middle share the good, bad, and ugly experiences so that others can see themselves there - for moms, dads, sons, daughters, and everyone in between.