Normalize Career Breaks for Women
Career breaks are a reality now; I see no reason to pretend otherwise. At the start of 2020, I left a job at a company I loved, working with a team I loved because of what I was experiencing, which I now understand to be extreme burnout from years of work in the advertising industry. This burnout led me to a health crisis. I intentionally took some time off to recover for a few months and consider where I wanted to put my energy. Nearly fifteen years of advertising left me exhausted and out of balance with my values, and I wanted (and still do) to apply my skills to work that matters to me.
About three months into my sabbatical, we were in lockdown from Covid. My husband, who is a Jazz musician, could no longer work. Club closures = no gigs, so I got kicked back into play. Since I had a neurodivergent ten-year-old at home, I knew I needed some flexibility, so I looked for more minor roles than I had previously held.
While the studies are abundant and the reporting is a bit shy, the conventional wisdom of the reporting and the observable reality indicate that women took the biggest career hits during COVID-19. According to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), women spend between ninety minutes to two hours per day on caregiving tasks in the home, and men spend between thirty minutes to an hour a day on the same types of tasks. At the top of the curve, women add about fourteen hours per week to their post-employment work obligations, while men spend about seven. I used the upper end of the curve because I am a woman, and we talk to each other; I don’t know who among us is spending only fourteen hours per week on caregiving, but I will commit to believing the data.
Obviously, the pandemic presented families with a substantially heightened caregiving load that impacted women the most. Some families could meet the moment, and many families could not. The profound impact of that reality is evident in my community. I am sure some households managed an equitable balance of caregiving tasks among partners, but let’s not pretend that was the norm. We know that women have been systemically appropriated to these tasks, and creating equitable balance is a care task of its own.
When I went back to work after a short break, I first took a producer role at a traditional marketing agency, which was a bad fit for me, and I dipped out pretty quickly. I then took a project manager role at an employer brand agency. This role was another downshift in my career progression. I loved the company, the mission, and the work, and I moved up the ranks at lightning speed and became the CEO. That is its own story (for another time) and speaks to the nature of the company and my talent. While my trajectory at that company is not that common in the workforce, It doesn’t seem that strange given that I entered the company in a relatively junior role compared to my advanced experience.
The agency I ran primarily serviced tech industry clients and folded due to deep cuts in the tech industry at the end of 2022. Que sera sera! I wound the company down, offloaded clients, and took time off to grieve the loss of a project that meant a great deal to me. I took an incredible vacation, intending to return to work in a few months, but life had other plans. My mom had cancer, bad cancer. She lived alone and far away from me. I stayed with her to help her navigate cancer treatments. The cancer project went well until it didn’t, and I lost her at the start of 2024.
Everyone kept telling me that I was lucky not to be working. This was true. No job on my CV could have afforded me the invaluable time I spent with my mom at the end of her life. I wouldn’t trade that time for anything, and I have no regrets. However, I am ready to go back to work. I may be paranoid, but I get the concerning impression that the “career break” listed at the top of my resume translates to “Caregiver” and negates the hundreds of words describing my profoundly relevant experience below the career break entry. Suppose I am right about how recruiters interpret the meaning of my career break. In that case, it is unfortunate because I expanded my executive skills during my career break rather than watching them wither.
Caregiving is a legitimate and vital skill in any family and in society at large. I am as proud of that work as any other resume element. However, it isn’t all I did during my break. With 40-60 hours of formerly occupied time, I could recenter my attention in previously impossible ways. As an ultra-full-time, high-performing worker, I developed habits of constant quick response that defied my instincts and sensibilities as a leader. As a CEO, my time and attention were fractured into fifteen to sixty-minute segments. I took harried calls on my way to pick up fmy daughter rom school. My learning was shallow, and my reflections were necessarily the same. I knew I needed to protect my time better, but I no longer possessed the ability to do it.
About ten years ago, I was going through an intense 400-hour yoga training. At the time, I was the director of operations at an agency, so I was both doing too much and committing to intense, deep work (while parenting). My house was a disaster, and I came home one night and had what I now know was a panic attack. I hired someone to help me clean and reorganize my house, deep clean it, get rid of things, and create a peaceful living space. All these years later, I have maintained the systems set up during that time, and my life is forever changed by it. I will never again feel swallowed up by my environment. That is how I think about the transformation that occurred during my career break. I will never again lose sight of the space I need to do my best thinking.
Over the past year or so, during this break, I achieved creative flow, learned to protect my time fiercely, and reconnected to deep work. I finished, on average, a book a week. I walked my dogs twice daily, met new people at the dog park, talked about what they did, reconnected with my yoga community, and started teaching again. I consulted with VSBs for fun. I recommitted to my creative work, started painting again, and set up a small pottery business. I developed new systems for staying relevant and connected while divorcing from hustle culture. I have never before been more on top of my game than I am today.
But I can’t pretend that I am not discouraged. I know it’s simply a tough job market, but I can’t help feeling like I am subject to a conspiracy. I don’t think recruiters and leaders held a meeting and collectively decided not to hire me. Instead, I feel like a strange bias is at play. I mean, my resume is factually great, and my references are incredible; yet, they have been of no service to me so far.
I can’t help but notice that I left the job market at the top of my game with significant experience that transfers to many industries, and yet, I am not attractive enough to the job market to land a role. All of this occurs at a time in my life when there is an abundance of care obligations for young people and elders in my family. I am GenX and I cannot escape the reality that, the aging boomer population has increased caregiving responsibilities on women of my age, as they are more likely to care for elderly parents or relatives. Balancing caregiving duties with work responsibilities can be challenging for women, particularly as they navigate the demands of the "sandwich generation" – simultaneously caring for both children and aging parents.
According to studies (I looked at McKinsey and ILO), women are disproportionately on the hook for caregiving responsibilities. The 2019 US census reports that women are responsible for 80% of single-parent households, and a significant (though difficult to capture) number of women contribute equal amounts of working time (though still making lower wages) as their male counterparts in dual-income families.
I did engage in research, but I don’t think I am stating anything here that defies intuition or what is plainly observable. We know that women in the workforce have substantially changed the face of business in the US and worldwide. We all know that women leaders foster collaboration, improve DEIB efforts, and promote sustainability. Research suggests that companies with more gender-diverse leadership teams tend to perform better financially.
Here are a few facts:
A study by McKinsey & Company found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to have above-average profitability than those in the bottom quartile. Studies have also shown that diverse leadership teams, including those with gender diversity, are more innovative and better able to adapt to change.
A Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report found that companies with diverse leadership teams generated more revenue from innovation than companies with less diverse teams. Gallup research has found that employees who work for female managers are more engaged and report higher levels of well-being compared to those who work for male managers.
Female leaders are often more likely to prioritize corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and stakeholder engagement. Research by Catalyst found that companies with more women on their boards tend to score higher on CSR measures.
Women leaders can positively impact organizational culture, promoting diversity, inclusion, and a supportive work environment. Studies have shown that companies with more gender-diverse leadership teams tend to have more inclusive cultures and lower turnover rates.
We know all of the benefits of having women in the workforce. We know that women are disproportionately saddled with caregiving tasks (which is why we come into the workforce with that yummy high EQ). A theory I have about why a career break can look like a red flag is that it gives the impression that the candidate in question has not recently invested in learning and may be less relevant. This could not be further from the truth. Employers have to take notice of professional women who invest in career breaks. These women, and I am one of them, have refused to let burnout dominate their careers. They have instead taken the time to turn a potentially crippling social bias into skill expansion.
My LinkedIn feed suggests recruiters already know this, but do hiring managers? I would love to hear from women leaders in any industry who have taken career breaks and learn about their experiences. I would also love to hear from recruiters. Let me know what you think.