The Power Pause: Rebranding the Stay-at-Home Mom
Episode 516 | Host: Emilie Aries | Guest: Neha Ruch
An exploration of identity and ambition through the lens of caregiving and career.
I’ve talked a lot this year about being in the thick of my “baby-making era,” juggling full-time work while also raising a toddler and an infant. The choices that went into finding the right approach for my family in this tumultuous time of trad wives and girl bosses were multi-faceted and nuanced. And that’s a good way to describe my conversation with Neha Ruch, the founder of The Power Pause, a resource for ambitious women leaning into family life, and author of the USA Today bestselling book of the same name.
Neha joins me on the podcast for a bold back-and-forth about the problem with society’s persistent motherhood binaries, the true definition of ambition, and how women can begin to exist more fully as career-driven professionals, caregivers, or anything in between.
Questioning the stay-at-home mom narrative
After a decade in brand marketing, the arrival of Neha’s son in 2016 changed things for her—as having children does for us all. When she realized that she was more fascinated by him than by her work, it made sense to reduce her hours and eventually step away from her corporate career completely.
The moment she did, the unsolicited pushback began. She would be bored; she was giving up; why did she even bother going to business school if she was just going to be a stay-at-home mom? All this pushback from the peanut gallery prompted Neha to dive deeper into the new title thrust upon her.
The socio-linguistics of “stay-at-home”
The terminology of “stay-at-home mom” deserves a brief exploration before we get to the stigma. “Stay-at-home” is a static, stagnant phrase, while “working” moms get an active verb. And anyone who’s spent any amount of time around children knows there’s nothing static about childcare.
Around the time of the feminist revolution of the 1970s, a cinematic alternative was circulating: idyllic TV moms—June Cleaver of Leave It To Beaver fame and her ilk—all immaculately aproned and self-sacrificing, ready at the door with their kids’ lunches and their husbands’ after-work cocktails. The contrast between bra burner and doting mommy dearest was stark, and it jump-started a dichotomy that’s lasted through today.
A persistent discrepancy
Jump to the 2010s era of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and the girl boss, and the cultural tropes dividing women who want to pursue a career and women who want to care for the kids were just as black and white and just as unrepresentative of the truth. Inspired by these two binaries surfacing 40 years apart but strikingly similar in tone, Neha’s organization commissioned a survey in 2023 called American Mothers on Pause. The results indicated that the image that comes to mind of a stay-at-home mom is still June Cleaver, and the image of a working mom is someone like Beyonce or Sandberg.
As Neha says, “We never corrected for the reality of today.” A reality that, the same survey showed, includes many women embroiled in their careers who are planning to go half-time or take time off in the near future to shift their focus to family. In other words, the true work/family equation is much more fluid than the societal narrative of trad wives and girl bosses would have us believe.
Rebranding caregiving and ambition
Who better to overhaul the image of the stay-at-home mom than an established branding expert who’s also a primary caregiver? Neha took up the mantle by launching Mothers Untitled, which was recently renamed The Power Pause to align with her book’s release.
Neha’s work challenges what “ambition” really means. For decades, women who step back from the workforce or never pointedly pursue it have been labeled unambitious. As if mothering doesn’t take essential and dynamic skills like organization, people management, communication, and physical strength..
The real definition of ambition is “the determination to do things.” A society focused on income earning and salary chasing will naturally assume that those things must make money to count, but the at-home parent is undeniably doing many, many things. The shift to include parenting in our perspective of ambition changes how the public views this choice—not as luxurious or unambitious but as a different kind of valuable work. It also helps reframe the situation for the one in three women who aren’t so much pulled to family caregiving as they are pushed out of their careers due to childcare costs.
When staying home isn’t a choice
Neha encourages digging to the root of why having to leave your job because it’s cheaper than daycare feels so terrible. While it’s awful to have your agency torn from you, how would the at-home parent’s perspective shift if caregiving were treated like the powerful, essential, valuable service work that it is?
If moms are told that leaving their jobs is frivolous and unworthy of support, it makes sense that change will feel negative, a career killer. Neha wants moms in these situations to be empowered to accept this forced change and then say, “How can I set this chapter up for personal growth?”
Of course, this perspective shift will take more than self-work from parents and families. It also calls for systemic changes, input from companies, and considerations from future and current moms who haven’t yet made the shift.
How the workplace can help
I asked Neha to address the concern that The Power Pause is overpromising benefits and under-acknowledging the consequences of a woman leaving her job—savings, future earning potential, and so on. She says we need to stop just looking at and dissecting the problem and start taking action. Her book and organization provide a strategic roadmap for navigating the necessary changes, so women can begin negotiating their situation from day one. The Power Pause offers advice and resources on how to keep their skills sharp, maintain the bridge back to an old job, and ensure effective support systems.
Neha calls on companies to take two active steps toward building respect and acceptance for power pauses, too. First, she encourages them to be open to negotiating reductions in hours that will enable moms to be with their kids and continue the career trajectory they want. This also includes facilitating bridges back after the pause.
Second, she demands acknowledgement of the value of non-traditional work experiences, the kind moms develop during their years away from the office. The interpersonal issues they encounter daily and the PTA events they execute build skills that directly benefit any organization, if hiring managers would just look beyond the corporate conditioning. Combined with their previous on-the-job experience, most organizations would be lucky to have them back.
How can moms reclaim their power?
Moms, of course, are doing a ton already as at-home parents. Still, if and when the time comes to consider a return to the career world, skill-building and resume polishing go a long way.
Don’t just write “at home with the kids” to explain your absence from the traditional workforce. Instead, own what you accomplished and learned while you were on your “career sabbatical for family life.” What courses did you take, and what committees were you a part of? What freelance or fractional work did you pick up? You don’t need to note that it was 5 hours a week; you just need to list the skills you polished up in that time—that’s what matters.
A lot of how your power pause goes for you comes down to how you prepare for it. It takes tangible preparations, like how you’ll leave your job and how you’ll come back to it if you do, and mental preparations like reminding yourself that the work you're doing isn’t “just” diapers and laundry. It is valuable and worthy of pride and dignity. Most of all, remember that you have permission to keep growing into your own person right alongside your child, whatever that trajectory looks like for you.
Are you a full-time working parent, taking a career sabbatical, or shifting to part-time work? Or are you one of the newer cohorts that’s tackling full-time remote work without childcare? Wherever you fall on the career/childcare spectrum, I want to hear all about it! What choices did you make, and how are financial considerations playing into them? Join our Courage Community on Facebook or our group on LinkedIn to engage with other moms so we can all support each other in abolishing the stay-at-home stigma.
Related links from today’s episode:
Get “The Power Pause: How To Plan A Career Break After Kids”
Learn more about Neha’s organization
The 2023 American Mothers on Pause study
Support systemic solutions to create a care economy:
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[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 516. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up. And today on the podcast, we are diving into a bold and nuanced conversation with Neha Ruch, author of The Power Pause and founder of a platform of the same name formerly known as Mother Untitled, where she explores identity and ambition through the lens of caregiving and career. Neha took a step back from her high powered career in branding to become the primary caregiver for her family. But she didn't see it as opting out. She reframed it as a power pause, an intentional temporary shift that made space for caregiving without sidelining her ambition. But is this kind of a choice always a choice, really? Or does calling it a pause ignore the reality that many women, especially those without a financial safety net, face when they feel pushed out of the paid workforce, not just pulled into caregiving?
Today, we're unpacking all of it. Career, identity, motherhood, modern ambition, trad wives and girl bosses, and what it means to lead a life on your own terms, even when the system isn't built for us to do so. Neha, welcome to the Bossed Up podcast and congratulations on The Power Pause: How To Plan A Career, Break After Kids And Come Back Stronger Than Ever, what an incredible book.
NEHA: Thank you for having me.
EMILIE: First of all, tell us what inspired you to take what you now call a power pause?
NEHA: You know, I have so many different answers to that because it's never one thing. But if I were to think back to the moment, I'd had my son, it was New Year's Day of 2016, and up until that point, I'd clocked in a decade in brand marketing. I just graduated Stanford Business school. I was running brand at a tech startup. So, you know, my career was progressing in sort of a very expected fashion, an exciting fashion. And then I had him.
And I think for the first time in a really long time, I felt like I didn't have to climb anymore. He didn't want me to be anything besides what I wanted to be. And so I think there was a sense of peace that I was finding. Of course, I was sleep deprived and I had a milk issue and there was all those things, but I just felt like I didn't have to try so hard for the first time in my life. And I think that that was an exciting feeling that I wanted to explore more. I also was just fascinated by this little human. And I think I had been less fascinated with my work at that moment. So I want to call that out. My husband was running a tech company. His role was demanding, so there was a lot of factors, but I initially decided to downshift, so I went part-time first. And as soon as I did, I started hearing the pushback of, like, why did you bother with business school? Aren't you going to be bored all day? Are you giving up?
EMILIE: And what year was this?
NEHA: That was 2016.
EMILIE: Yeah. Okay. That's right. So, like, the Girl Boss era is in full swing.
NEHA: Very much so. And that's a good question, because I think we've come a long way in 10 years. But it was. It was sort of this crescendo effect. Lean in had been the rallying cry at graduation, I think Lean In and Girl Boss and all of it had done so much to bolster so many women's careers, but it was, at that moment, casting sort of an undue shame on anyone choosing to take their foot off the gas. And meanwhile, I was meeting so many women, by nature of where I lived.
But I came to find out they existed everywhere, these women who had clocked in a decade in their careers, who had much more equitable relationships with their partners, right? Their partners were not. They weren't serving them cocktails at the end of the day. And they had access to digital tools and technology and the freelance economy. And they were all just thinking, well, maybe I can either take a beat or I could explore this other way to stay connected. And none of it matched what I was hearing and receiving. And like I said, it was 2016, so there was this great, great content around the traditional working woman, but I wanted a space that sort of explored what it looked like to be an ambitious woman making room for family.
EMILIE: Yeah. And you, as, like, a branding professional, were the perfect person, by the way, to fill that void. You say that the stay-at-home mom title needed a rebrand. Tell me more about that stay-at-home mom.
NEHA: You know, first of all, the link sociolinguistics of it are flawed, right? Like, stay at implies stagnant. It's shut in one place. The alternative, working mom is an active verb. And if you've ever, by the way, been with a child all day, you don't stay in one place. You're very rarely in the home. And so I think just by nature of the framing, it's flawed. But I think the other piece is that it carries so much trope, so much stigma and shame, that we've sort of inherited over the years. And if you look back as to where that came from, if you're looking at sort of the 1970s, where women were really starting to rise in the workforce and we saw second wave feminism really take off. There was, you know, women were fighting for our place in the work. And we sort of said, okay, well, if women are in the workforce, they're sort of paving the way for a new way. And then anyone choosing to do care work was sort of much more domestic and traditionalist.
And what happened, and it's interesting because we commissioned this survey called the American Mothers on Pause in 2023 of 1200 at home parents and 1000 members of the general population. And if you poll the American public as to who they think of as an at home parent, they will still say June Cleaver, which is a fictional character from the show Leave It To Beaver from the 1970s. If you ask them who they think of as the working mom, they will say Sheryl Sandberg, they will say Michelle Obama, they will say Beyoncé.
And we never corrected that power chasm for the reality of modern women today, which is that in that same survey we found one in three women working out of the home currently will pause their careers in the next two years. One in two will downshift their careers, meaning going part time, flex 90% of women on pause aim to return. So really, we're looking at a much more fluid work and family equation that we just hadn't corrected for in terms of our narrative, in terms of our perception.
So when you look back at the 1970s, when women were just starting to pave their way into the workforce, at the same time there was this advent of television. And across different homes we saw TV screens beaming in different shows and sitcoms, whether it was I Love Lucy or it was Leave It To Beaver. And in both of those shows, you see these apron clad women committed to domesticated life. And so we ended up with these two sort of opposing archetypes. The woman in the home defending tradition and the women in the workforce, blazing a new trail. And that sort of began the quote, unquote, “Mommy Wars”. It began these very archaic perceptions when all the while more of us existed in between than not. And I think for all the reasons we've talked about, we've emerged in a time where more women are shifting back and forth and need to sort of dismantle the archetypes that keep us trapped.
EMILIE: This sort of like binary false choice. What I've heard you say over and over again and have read in your book is that this is one phase of your life. This is one era. I call it my baby-making era. I'm very much in my baby-making era right now. I'm doing all the things right? But it is a specific, acute time in our lives that is not defining who you are, right, forever. And so much of the stay-at-home mom mantle, I think, really messes with identity, which you get at in this book. Can you say more about the identity trip that this can cause? Especially ambitious women who find themselves untitled all of a sudden?
NEHA: Right. Well, I think ambition has been correlated so closely to title and salary. And so when we part with that, we have to reconcile, are we still striving, are we still ambitious women? Are we still feminist women? And you know, what we're talking about right now is a recalibration of it all. And I think ambition for so long was tied to those metrics, when in reality ambition by definition is the determination to do things. And that's it. The reality is we're going to do things we care about a vast many things over the long game of life. And so by redefinition, ambition is really the alignment of how you're spending your time with what you care about and then being able to come back and recalibrate strategically over and over again to set you up for a long, sustainable career and life.
And you know, to that end, feminism, for the reasons we talked about, right? Second wave feminism. Amazing. Incredible. Thank goodness we were able to prove our capacity in the workforce. I think this next iteration is, we tried so hard to show that we were just like men. And I think now we're saying, well, we proved that we were really strong in the workforce, but now we need to make the workforce work for us. And that has to include supports for our unique needs, whether that be nursing, whether that be healing post birth, whether that just be the reality of family life that is demanding, pauses included, right? And so we're seeing this recalibration of it all. And so I encourage women to really step into that sense of right now we're making this choice and we're going to recalibrate over and over.
But I think the identity piece is interesting because our 20s, early 30s are often committed to our careers and building that foundation of experience. And in our culture, what do you do has come to stand in for who are you? And if you don't have like a pithy quick way to respond to that, you feel like you're in some way lacking. And so I offer women instead that all of those skills and experiences say, you know, you're a 10 year brand marketer that goes with you, you're still a 10 year brand marketer and now you're actually layering on this other sort of chapter of non-traditional experience. And I think knowing that you bring that skill with you, that it's not disappearing and that this is another layer, so really it can be a really empowering way to step through this chapter.
EMILIE: So much of what you're saying reminds me of Anne Marie Slaughter's book Unfinished Business, right? Which is not only about, I think you're sort of bringing it to the individual level, the identity unfinished business of feminism, of saying, yeah, I'm going to be unapologetic about caregiving and the role that that requires or the effort, the intellectual challenge of caregiving in addition to, you know, you know, it's not just diapers, it's not just running around, you know, chasing after toddlers, although that's included too, like, kind of standing confidently in the value of caregiving as part of your identity. And Anne Marie Slaughter's case is saying, look, the infrastructure of care, the systemic unfinished business of feminism is making, to your point, the workplace work for caregivers and the world work for caregivers.
NEHA: And I think Ann Marie, when she, so she reviewed the book, which was, which was a gift, and honor. And I think you know, what that was one of the pieces that we talked about is that, you know, there's sort of this systemic change and then there's women having to just change the narrative on the ground and the two forces have to work together, but really rely on this deep understanding and value for the work and the very, and owning the very valid wants of, you know, the three reasons, top reasons women pause their careers, finances, less stress in the home, and wanting to spend time with their children. Those are all very valid reasons. And I think I no longer accept a world where that has to be antithetical to ambition.
EMILIE: I love that. I want to talk more about choice, right? Because this, this idea of I want to spend more time with my children, I'm making this choice to me is so, so critical to unlocking choice for everyone, ideally free from financial constraint, which we'll talk about in a moment. You mentioned earlier some of those archetypes of motherhood, the June Cleaver versus the Beyoncé, right? I wonder what you have to say about the current moment that we're seeing play out on social media. I've seen you get this question before. But I'm curious what you make of the pushback against the girl boss era, the anti sort of girl boss energy that's manifesting in this like hashtag around tradwives. You told the New York Times, trad wife is a hashtag. It's not a reflection of the majority of American women. Can you say more about that?
NEHA: Well, I think it's so interesting because we always swing to extremes and we still go back to black and white. So if it's not girl boss, it's trad wife, right? Like, and the reality of modern women is that all making very complicated choices. We're making the right choice for right now. We are not subscribing and don't want to subscribe to boxes or titles, right? We certainly, some of us are more feminine and like dresses. Some of us like baking. Some of us may like aprons. I don't really know or care. I just want women to be able to be seen for being able to make a downshift or take a pause in their career. And by the way, 90% of them are still staying connected in some sort of online learning or volunteering or freelance and consulting work and be seen sort of for the multitudes and the reality of their sort of modern existence.
I think where we get into this sort of dangerous trap is we're finally doing this work to dismantle the false narratives around stay-at-home mother, right? That she in some way is shut in, that she's a martyr to her family, that she is in servitude to her domestic partner. We are trying to move toward a much more nuanced framing, which is what The Power Pause shares where this an ambitious modern woman who had an established, as an established career and or experience or interests that we've shifted priority and time and energy and focus to family life for a season. And we are finding ways to grow and stay connected and stay empowered during that period.
And I think the black and white tropes risk us being counted out of the workforce. And what we need is a world where women feel empowered to say, I'm shifting priorities and I'm still contributing and I still want time and support to explore these other interests. And by the way, when and if I want to return to the workforce, please see and recognize the ways in which I stayed connected. We want to diminish the sort of shame and penalty and we also want to dismantle the sort of, the wars and divides between women because I think for too long we've all hid behind these mommy wars saying, well, working is better for our kids because a model's ambition or staying at home is better for our kids because all the research in this world shows that there is no one right choice for your family. There's only the right choice for yourself.
So by the way, for any woman leaning into sort of the traditional family structure and really enjoying the baby baking and the homesteading, fine. And that is not every woman and I think when we as a culture love caricatures, we assigning that caricature to everyone.
EMILIE: Right. And I think what your narrative does is it really gives that person power and agency no matter where they're choosing to spend their time, right? Like, let's make that a, a powerful choice. And what I find sort of troublesome about that is how constrained that choice is for so many women. Because in an ideal world, stepping back to become a full time caregiver for a period of time or for a long time, like for a decade plus, isn't necessarily a choice. It's a financial necessity because of the outrageous cost of childcare and the lack of infrastructure around paid leave and affordable health care.
So you wrote, you know, “there's power in choosing, but also power in telling the truth about when we didn't get to choose”. And so I'm wondering, like, how do you reconcile the agency under underpinning the power pause concept and how important that agency is to your identity when so many women feel like they're being not pulled to caregiving but pushed out of a workforce, that's just not making it feasible to raise a family and survive without two incomes.
NEHA: You know, my biggest challenge with language is it very quickly takes away power. And I think for too long we were seeing dropout fallout, opt out, right? And these are all finite words that count women out as opposed to I had to or I did shift to family life for a chapter like, I'm taking care of my kids right now. And then you can explain that decision or not. But I think one in three, knowing that one in three women feel forced into at-home parenthood because of the cost of childcare is a really important piece of this because so often we have conflated stay-at-home motherhood with luxury,
EMILIE: Right.
NEHA: And when we deem sort of one side quote unquote a luxury, we insinuate that it is frivolous, that it doesn't have value and it doesn't deserve support. So then women, whether they came to it in choice or not, step into it and think, I'm not contributing and, or I don't deserve support. And so you see how very quickly our sort of, our tropes set up an entire generation of women who need more valid choices on the table to feel like, well, that one's off limits. The reality of the very complicated choice to either pause or return to the paid work first or exist in between is that it's very nuanced. It relies on a number of different intricate decisions. But it's a privilege to get to choose.
If you are not choosing, there is a way to accept and then say, how may I set chapter up for personal growth? And what. And I certainly have look of like, if you were laid off or if you had to leave, how can you sort of rewrite the narrative for yourself to gain back the agency? But I think it first starts with our cultural framing around privilege and luxury and really recognizing that there are many hard choices that we have to make as families to do the best we can. And career pauses are one among the many valid options.
EMILIE: Yeah, I really like your chapter on, early on in the book around finances and how much that plays a role and how recognizing the immense value that caregiving brings to a family unit is like step one. Because I do worry about power. Like I'm an organizer, right? I've got a background in political science, and so I worry about women losing power, whether that be in society or in their relationship. And it's so interesting to hear your last answer to that question because privilege and power go hand in hand, right? And to think that women who you're sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't like, if you have a lot of money and luxury and are choosing consciously to stay-at-home or to focus on caregiving, you're kind of slandered in the ways that you mentioned. Or you run into these identity tropes to your point, right? Of no longer having any economic value, which is BS.
And then if you're forced into it because I'm paying $4,500 a month, Neha, for childcare for two right now, right? And if that bill makes it economically impossible to have two working parents. And of course that doesn't feel very good either, right? Maybe full time caregiving isn't for you, that's the category I would put myself in. So it's sort of like you're damned if you do either way.
But do you ever worry that the narrative around The Power Pause is over promising for women who we know, and you recognize in the book that being someone who is focused on caregiving and out of the paid workforce has consequences, impacts retirement savings, impacts employability and lifetime earnings with the unemployment penalty, which is not fair, but is a real thing. And so it sounds to me almost like there are parts of the book where you're saying like, this doesn't have to be you, right? Here's how to make that not you.
But for a lot of full time caregivers, they will run into those outcomes. And that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface when it comes to a relationship in which they lose their power and agency there. And you kind of talk about in the book not so healthy relationships are a dynamic, are a factor in this. So I worry for women's sense of power over their own destiny when you are not making your own money. And I'm just wondering if you like, how does, how does that play into this narrative here? And if you ever feel like, are we over promising the power in a power pause?
NEHA: I think there's something interesting about admiring a problem for too long, like just sitting and looking at the problem like, oh, let's look at these women who choose to stay-at-home and like, too bad they lose their, or we can do something about it and the power pause intends to do something about it instead of just admiring the same age old problem. Because the reality is women do need to pause in some cases, sometimes financially or because their child has developmental needs or one parent is in the active military and can't be, like, there is a wide spectrum of reasons men and women need or want to pause their careers.
So when we then say, let's stop just admiring this problem and saying they're going to put their career at risk, then we can start coming up with active solutions. And the power pause is the active solution, right? Which is, we have never had a strategic roadmap until this book of how do you walk through this stage of life not just change language for the sake of language, but change trope by trope and then lay out a framework such that women can negotiate their financial dignity from day one by planning actively in the budgeting and the negotiation. Avoid any pitfalls should they not be in a stable or even just they can suss out the risk in their marriage and set themselves up, whether that be from a postnuptial agreement to downshifting to the middle ground, not fully pausing. How do you resign such that you're keeping the bridge back? How do you make sure that you are negotiating for effective solutions for support so that you can actually grow alongside your family? How do you strategically stay connected to your network and or small, low lift ways to keep your tools sharp so that you can package this all up and preserve your optionality when you return, right? That is the goal. It's not to say that pausing is the right solution. It's not to say that there isn't risk with every choice we make. It's to say that this needs to be yet another option that is respected and supported in the long game of work and family. So women have more options available and more supported and empowered options.
EMILIE: Totally. And that comes through loud and clear in the book. It's so practical and tactical and very much a “how to” guide to sort of mitigate that risk which I can understand. What is from your vantage point, the role that companies play, right? In terms of being more inclusive of the comeback career woman.
NEHA: I think there's a couple of things that could happen from even before that, right? And one is, if a woman comes to me and says I really want to pause, I would actually say first, have you, what are you optimizing for? Like is it just more time with your child and have you considered an in between, right? If you love your career and you want to stay connected to it, there is a vast gray area in between fully pausing and fully in the corporate world, right? And what are the sort of options available to you and how might you explore all of those options?
So I think before, you know, before you even consider fully pausing, I downshifted to two days. I really encourage women to consider that option with their employer. Should they really enjoy their work, should they be able to afford the support to be able to pull that off. I encourage women if their office, like, you know, if they're a more traditional employer that does not have a part time solution. I always use this example of a woman in our community who negotiated a two day work week at JP Morgan. How did she do that? She called a friend of a friend who had negotiated a two day work week at HSBC and she presented that template to her manager. Now my ask of the manager would be that they be open to trialing that if they preserve this relationship.
The other pieces is how can we as managers offer that bridge back as our employees say, you know what, I want to take this career sabbatical for family life for one, two years. How might they stay engaged with one another if it was a positive relationship? I think there's something really interesting about the returnships, but I caution that, you know, don't diminish the fact that someone has 15 years experience, they took three, five, eight years. They were running a fricking PTA at like and like dealing with a child with a diabetes diagnosis and insurance, navigating insurance, like, they got this. They're good, they're good. So like how might we look at non-traditional experiences and recognize that they add to that career portfolio?
But finally, I'm really bullish and I often, I mean I talk about this at the end of the book. Just the data shows that the sort of best way to transition back to the paid workforce is actually small to medium businesses, women run, and I think that's because there's this ecosystem of women pivoting and building their own businesses for flexibility. And because women understand, sort of, efficiency and time management gleaned in raising children, they then hire fractional workers who you know, may have stepped away from the paid workforce for a chapter. But you know, there's sort of a shared understanding of the skills. And so there's sort of all of these different environments to consider. But I think in the traditional management route it's being open to trialing flexible solutions and recognizing and appreciating non-traditional experiences as part of the career portfolio.
EMILIE: I hope every HR leader listening is taking that to heart, right? Because like that flexibility and that openmindedness is really how we tap into 100% of the workforce and don't count them out or put them on a mommy track on the way, way back. Which I appreciate.
In your book you also talk about what moms themselves can do to really navigate talking about, in an empowered way, that career sabbatical. And a question that I always get from listeners of this podcast you address explicitly is should you include your pause on your resume? And you say resoundingly, yes. Tell me more about the advice that you have.
NEHA: I actually had a couple options there. I think there's a few different ways. Yes and...
EMILIE: Yeah, that's truly what you wrote. Yes and. [LAUGHTER]
NEHA: …I think if you were fully at home for an extended period of time, writing career, sabbatical for family life and or I offer a number of framing is powerful. I think giving a very, I think what I said resoundingly yes to is not putting lipstick on a pig and pretending you were doing something that you weren't. I think people want to understand. I use the example of Chinue Richardson who is a woman in the Bay Area who transitioned back to law. She went from a law firm to her career break for family life, to a tech employer, as internal counsel. And she was advised, just own, as soon as you own the reason you are away from the workforce and especially with caregiving, it eliminates the confusion potential recruiters. So that part resoundingly, yes.
I think there are two ways to package your time away. One, if you were to write career, sabbatical, family life, the sub-bullets under that are all of the non-traditional ways you expanded your learning that are relevant to your future employer, right? Whether you are freelancing, whether you are creating a project, whether you are volunteering at the school, whether you are navigating a family relocation that was complicated from, you know, China to Israel, whatever that case may be, those all belong there. And there's a way in which to sort of, assign it language that translates to the workforce. And we obviously talk about that more explicitly in the book.
The other choice though is if you were working even ten hours a week, five hours a week as a fractional copywriter or legal counsel or advisor or an accountant. That is what's relevant in the case of employment, right? You don't need to put your whole life story on your Resume or your LinkedIn. You can feel free to include what's relevant. So if you were a consulting accountant, include that in that section and then talk about the relevant bullet points.
EMILIE: Right. Without having to explain that you did it super part time while caregiving at home, right? Is that what I hear you saying?
NEHA: No one cares whether you work ten hours or twenty hours.
EMILIE: I totally agree. And just to speak to that story you mentioned earlier on that person in your community who put a caregiving sabbatical on their resume, I just loved the response that she got from hiring managers. One who she spoke with said, I was so happy to see that on your resume. Putting it on there conveyed a sense of importance of that role because it is very important. It came off as, quote, “I'm proud to have done this work”, which I was and I am, and I think people respect it if you respect it. So I do think there's so much power in that way of framing your power pause unapologetically.
NEHA: You know, and there's another woman in there who is a former NASA engineer and I include her whole LinkedIn resume, right? And she is really explicit about what she did in her community as a community organizer alongside family life in this sort of. And she's a great example of someone who is really away from the workforce for ten years after having an extremely prestigious career, right? And so it's an interesting example to say none of this can be taken for granted. We can't diminish the fact that you can't just write, quote unquote, “stay-at-home mom”, leave it empty and hope for the best.
There needs to be sort of a, I often encourage women to spend at least a year preparing for that return when they're starting to feel the nudge and sort of building out the sub-bullets that make that transition easier. And by the way, we have resume writers on our site, we have career coaches. And even if that feels like an investment, it's a way in which, if you haven't gotten the book and you don't have the language readily available though, now ChatGPT can do this. They can take all of that non-traditional experience and gear it toward former employers.
EMILIE: And folks should get their hands on a copy of this book and your website. So we're gonna, we're gonna end there in a moment. I've got one more kind of tough question for you, which is, and I don't think this is by any means the intent of the message, but I have seen some stay-at-home moms respond to all of this messaging, everything you've just shared and said, oh my gosh, am I not doing enough? Is being at home with my kids not enough? Do I have to also be a community organizer or do fractional work? Do I have to like, justify my stay-at-home time by adding to it so that I don't completely jeopardize my future marketability? And so, I wonder if there's like an undercurrent of anxiety driving this. I mean, obviously society makes this an anxiety inducing experience for women. But what would you say to the stay-at-home parent who is staying at home because they want to fully immerse themselves in parenting and full stop.
NEHA: I mean, I was that parent like you see me now, but I have a 10 year old, right? And, and I think a lot of the book is about how do you prepare for it, how do you walk through it and how do you unlock the full possibility of it. But it's not meant to be done in a day. You know, I think that we as a culture love black and white things and we love things done yesterday. And the real reason for this, and I think I talked about this in the last chapter, that if you are enjoying this chapter of your life and you want it and you don't feel an itch to return to work, then the work you're doing is immense.
You are, by the way, and I give a lot of examples for how we as a culture have diminished caregiving down to diapers and laundry. And we have failed to recognize that it's actually the emotional work of understanding your child, raising yourself so as to not respond to that child poorly, managing the complicated relationship with your partner and the communication to your community and facilitating healthcare appointments and navigating really complicated education systems. And that's the real work of parenthood. And it's awe inspiring. And I did it for a real fricking long time. And, and I, by the way, wouldn't say I'm returning to work now. I'm, I am still holding space for that work because it's still the most important thing in the world to me.
And so, the real goal of this book is never to say, here's how to do this so you can exclusively get back to work right away. It's to say, how do you set yourself up to feel proud when you've associated so much of your worth with paid work? How do you set yourself up in your marriage or partnership so that you can feel financially dignified? Because that is a huge part of being able to walk through this stage with joy, even in the middle section around goal setting and creating rhythms and getting help. That's not so that you can get back to work. That's so you can walk through this with permission to grow alongside your kid. And I think that's the big piece of it that applies whether you're going back to paid work or you're not, or you're working on your own thing or you're not. It's, we have been sold this idea that if you pause your career, you are in servitude to your family, but you are allowed to remain whole and healthy and growing. And that's what this work is to acknowledge and to support you to do because that we all deserve.
EMILIE: Absolutely. I just went out to drinks with one of my best mom friends here in Denver, Tracy. And she was telling me how her 3 year old was asking her, where are you going, mommy? And she said, mommy's going to be Tracy tonight. Tracy's going out for drinks with Emilie. And I was just like, my mind was blown. Which is just literally I think what's so radical about this, whether you're someone who's taking a career break, a full time working mom, or something in between, is like, your identity matters. Your identity deserves space and not subsuming like or sort of melting into the background, your personhood in servitude of your family while still being a full time caregiver is a very radical act. So thank you for sort of carrying the torch forward for that. Where can our listeners catch up with you and get their hands on a copy of The Power Pause?
NEHA: You can follow Neha Ruch on Instagram. You can come to ThePowerPause.com, we have tremendous free resources. You can subscribe over there and you can get The Power Pause wherever you like to get books, preferably a small bookstore.
EMILIE: Amazing. Neha. Thank you so much.
NEHA: Thank you.
EMILIE: For more links and resources, head to bossedup.org/episode516 that's bossedup.org/episode516 and now I want to hear from you. Are you a full time working parent trying to juggle it all like me? Are you someone that's taking a career sabbatical or has shifted to part time work like Neha has over the course of her career? Or are you somewhere in between it all doing fractional work while chasing kids around the house? Or I'm really interested to hear from a few of you I've already chatted with in my DMs about being a full time remote worker with no childcare. Tell me all about it. What kinds of choices have you made or are you thinking about making if starting a family is on the horizon for you? And how constrained were those choices by financial realities?
Let's keep the conversation going as always in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook or in the Bossed Up Group on LinkedIn. And feel free to DM me your experience on Instagram or tag me in the comments where you see creators talking about how any of us are trying to juggle it all when the system clearly wasn't designed for us.
For more details on how you can advocate for family friendly policies like paid family and medical leave and affordable child care, among other issues.
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Don't forget about Bossed Up's Take Action page that highlights the kinds of systemic solutions that drive gender equity that we all can be advocating for more. Head to bossedup.org/takeaction to learn more. And until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose and together let's lift as we climb.
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How we can all advocate to close the gender wage gap.