How Power Moms Navigate Work & Life

Episode Transcript

Kelly: Welcome to the Two Marketing Moms podcast. Today we have a guest, Joann Lublin. Joann is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and speech and leadership speaker. She launched the Wall Street Journal's first career column and remains a regular contributor. She's the author of two books about female business leaders. The first is Earning It: Hard Won Lessons from Trailblazing Women at the Top of the Business World, and the second one, which we're going to talk about today, is called Power Moms: How Executive Mothers Navigate Work and Life. Power Moms was ranked as one of the best 21 books for working moms in 2021 by Working Mother Medium. She also won a 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Loeb Awards, the highest accolade in business journalism. Welcome to the podcast, Joann!

Joann: Thanks for having me.

Julia: It was so great to dive into a book where I felt like you were like a kindred spirit, Joann. You are a trailblazer for women and now through your books you're helping to dispel so much good stuff. So we have some questions for you that we prepared, so take it away, Kelly.

Kelly: Well, we did give a quick overview of your career, and it's a very interesting career, which I love. We like to say that your journey is not a ladder, it's more of a jungle gym, right? Sometimes it's two steps over and sometimes you fall off and you get back on. And you've had a very fascinating career, and so I'm not going to recap it more than that, but we just kind of want to get a feel for your personal journey and how did it lead to where you are today, being an author and focusing on this particular topic of power moms and executive moms in work?

Joann: Well, I think you very rightly point out that most careers are jungle gyms, they're not ladders. And certainly that was true for me. Though I spent my entire adult career at the Wall Street Journal, it wasn't a pure upward climb of the ladder. In fact, at one point in my late 20s, I was a star reporter for the Journal in the Chicago bureau, having joined in San Francisco, and the then male bureau chief asked me and three other guys in the office who were also star reporters whether we would want to be bureau chiefs next in our careers at the Wall Street Journal. That was the logical progression at the Journal, but at that point in time, I had no role models that I knew of — certainly not within the Journal because there were no women bureau chiefs at the Journal. I didn't know any women who had managerial roles in journalism and elsewhere. And I was married to a fellow journalist who worked for Business Week. We didn't have kids, we were thinking about maybe having kids, and it occurred to me that if I said yes, of course, I'm ambitious, I want to be a bureau chief, that I would get offered a bureau chief assignment in a little city like Pittsburgh, or Philadelphia, Cleveland where Business Week didn't have a bureau, and I'd lose my marriage. Plus, if I wanted to have kids, I couldn't do that and be a manager at the Journal because it wasn't done. So my response in the moment was to say not now, maybe later, rather than let me think about this. And so I never did become a bureau chief at the Wall Street Journal, because I took that question as one that had to be decided in the moment. Nevertheless, I did end up moving to the Washington bureau when I was seven months pregnant with our first child, because I had a bureau chief who believed in me and who I had asked for that transfer before I got pregnant — then got pregnant way quicker than I expected — and did so well in the Washington bureau, where I was able to negotiate not only a reduced schedule after becoming a mom for the second time, but they offered it to me on a full-pay basis. No cutting pay, no cutting benefits, working a reduced work week for three years. And out of that successful stint I was then offered a chance to move into management, became the news editor and then the deputy bureau chief in the London bureau, returned to New York because of the terms of my marriage contract, and continued with my career at the Wall Street Journal, becoming the management news editor. All of which, to make a long story short, brought me to the idea of doing my first book, which was Earning It, because I had been writing about management and women in management as well as career issues. And out of that book came the genesis for this new book, which really looks very closely not only at my experience — and there's a lot about my journey and ups and downs as not only a working mom but as a boss (I wasn't always great at being a boss) — but this book looks at 86 women from two generations who also had experiences getting into much higher levels of management than I ever did, and also having kids.

Kelly: That's wonderful. So can you define what power moms means to you?

Joann: Sure. So when I started reporting this book — and as I said, it grew out of the experiences I had reporting the first book — I decided to define a power mom as a woman who at some point in her career had worked for a company with at least $100 million in revenues, because I really wanted to talk to women who had been part of corporate America, but I didn't care where she was now working. And so that opened up the doors to talking to a lot of entrepreneurs, particularly among the younger wave, the Gen Xers and the Millennials, who had sampled life in corporate America and either didn't like it because they didn't see huge opportunities for themselves, or who had, as many women do, that entrepreneurial itch and wanted to start something of their own. And so all 86 of those executive moms, at some point in their careers, like I said, worked for a company with substantial revenue, and at some point in their careers became an executive. I didn't care when that happened. It could happen before they had kids, or it could have happened long after they had kids. But at the point when they were an executive, they still had kids, whether they were grown or not. So essentially that was how I defined the term.

Julia: So you talk about the 86 moms as well as their adult daughters. So you talk about like the first wave of power moms — I would definitely put my mom in that group of power moms because she was a tough broad working in New York City, surrounded by men. That's where I feel like I get so much of my grit and determination. So it was so fascinating to hear about these interviews with the 25 adult daughters. So for you, what were the major differences that you learned about between these two generations of women?

Joann: Well, I wasn't sure that I was going to find major differences. And to be brutally honest, the original concept of the book, the one that I pitched to my publisher when I was getting ready to retire from full-time work in 2018, was actually to do a book about the adult daughters and the baby boomer moms. That was going to be the entire approach to the book. Because some people said why didn't you write about sons? Well, because my initial concept for the book was to write about mothers and daughters, and I did reporting along those lines and submitted a book proposal and the publisher came back and said that's an interesting angle, and it could be like a chapter, but we think it would be more interesting to look at what has changed, what is the same, what is different about younger women who are moving into executive roles at businesses and have kids? And I said, okay, but I have no idea if there are any. And so that then became the different focus of the book. What I found was, indeed, there has been a profound generational shift between the boomer moms — the women of your mom's generation and my generation — and the women who were anywhere from their early 30s or early 40s when I started doing these interviews in very late 2018 and early 2019. And there are two or three reasons for that change and why I think it is easier for the younger moms to deal with the issues of being a mom and being a manager. Number one is the technology is totally different, and we wouldn't have been able to have the successful remote work-from-home experiment on a national large-scale basis that we've had. COVID-19 drove many white-collar employees to working from home, if we hadn't had things like what we're doing right now, which is Zoom. And many of those boomer moms were coming into their executive roles in the very early days of the computer, home computers, or even the internet. So you had dial-up and dial-up was hugely slow, so you stayed late at the office — you didn't really have much opportunity to work from home. The second change is that how women and their life partners or spouses or husbands or wives interact has profoundly changed. The boomer moms were very grateful if once in a while their husband would do a load of wash. They would never ask him to do dinner. In fact, there was this one boomer mom who goes on to become the first vice chair of General Electric, and early in her career she's working for a cable TV station evenings, and she gets a dinner break, and during her dinner break she runs home and makes dinner for her husband, who I believe was a stockbroker, and then rushes back to work. And I was like, why couldn't he make dinner? And she said she would have never, ever thought to ask him because he wouldn't do it, and she was a newlywed, and she had no kids at that point — this is what she thought you did to be a good wife. And the third change, of course, is the most profound one, and that is that the workplace has changed. We now have places to choose to work where they honor, respect, and treat parents as people who don't stop being parents when the workday starts, and who don't stop being workers when the parenting role begins. So we also now have many, many more women in senior levels of management, some of whom are these boomer moms who were the trailblazers to getting executive roles, who not only can serve as role models, but they can act as advocates, they can act as sponsors, they can act as door openers. They become in many cases the executive sponsor of internal employee resource groups that are aimed at parents. And in effect, there's a roadmap for women of your generation — you can see, acknowledge that it can be done, but how to do it, and where to go for help if you're struggling, so you don't feel like you're this pioneer in the wilderness. When I think back about how scary it was, in my case, to come back from maternity leave at the Journal the first time and know that while a half dozen women had all declared their pregnancy within the same two-week period, there was only one other woman that I knew in the news department who had come back to work after her leave, and we weren't really friends so I never asked her for help or support. And she couldn't have given me any because she was new at this thing called mother of two. And so as exciting as it was, I'm sure, for the women in the 1800s to be pioneers and homesteaders, there were lots of wolves out there and some of them were guys.

Julia: Yeah, well, I almost feel like your third book could possibly be power moms during the time of COVID, because that third thing that you bring up about the workplace — all of that has been blown up from COVID, right? Because we had power moms, probably some of the ones at the top of the business world, working from home with their kids.

Kelly: And some that are leaving the workforce entirely.

Julia: Yeah, or leaving the workplace. But I mean, for the moms that were still working like crazy during COVID and balancing their whole family, that could be just such a good book.

Kelly: One of the big distinctions that you talked about in the book was this concept of work-life sway. I'd love for you to talk about what this means because this was a new concept for me, and I read a lot and I hadn't heard this before. So I want to understand what this means and how you think it's different from the words that we never like to speak — work-life balance.

Joann: Well, it is definitely a concept that I became enamored with, and when I submitted my manuscript a year ago March — just the day before the entire country shut down — it was with a very different subtitle than the one you see on the book you hold in your hands. The book was entitled Power Moms: Lessons of Work-Life Sway from Two Generations of Executive Women. And when the publisher got the manuscript, she said, like the title, ditch the subtitle. I was like, why? She said, no one will have any idea as to what you're talking about here, work-life sway. And she was right. And obviously, you and I, and many, many women have been struggling for decades with this ridiculous idea called work-life balance. And I talked about that in one chapter in my first book, Earning It. And in the chapter is a quote from one of those 52 executive women that I interviewed for the book, and the quote is "moms are not acrobats." It's this idea that work-life balance is an impossible ideal — it's the same idea as perhaps trying to maintain that great yoga pose where you have one leg balanced, and standing in that position 24/7 — no way. And that was part of the reason why I decided I want to do this next book, because most of those 52 women in the first book, including the woman who gave me the idea for that chapter, turned out to have kids, and the proportion of those who were parents was even higher among those who had become public company CEOs — women like Mary Barra at General Motors and other companies. But when I started reporting Power Moms, I was introduced to this notion of work-life sway once I started interviewing the Gen X and Millennial moms. And one of them told me a story while I was interviewing her about how excited she was one afternoon when she was at her office in Manhattan to have a text pop up on her phone that was a short video clip that her nanny had sent, and it showed her son, her firstborn, taking his first steps. And she was able to be there and be present for him. And as I was then leaving her office, she said, this is all part of work-life sway. And I was like, what? And so she kind of introduced me to this concept, which, like I said, is still not very widely understood. But the idea of work-life sway is that when we have to be 110% present for our jobs — which we all felt we had to do before COVID, and many felt even greater pressure to do so while we've been working from home — we do so with all our energy and our commitment. But when life hits — that can be a parenting-related issue, or it can be the water heater overflowing — if we have to sway out of work mode and into life mode, we do it, and we do it seamlessly, and we do it without guilt, because we know that we can sway back. By the same token, we can do the same when we're in life mode. When we're trying to do something really important with our kids and that separate phone line that you plugged into your cell phone is suddenly ringing because it's an emergency — you told everybody, I am not reachable during these hours, but there is a life-and-death crisis at work — and so you're able then to get out of life mode and back into work mode without guilt.

Julia: That makes a lot of sense now. It's beautiful. I love it.

Joann: But the question is how practical was it to practice work-life sway during the work-from-home experiment? And so one of the things I did last summer, when the book was already in publication, is I went back to three women who were working remotely pre-pandemic — and again, these were younger women, Gen Xers and Millennials — to say how is your life different now that you're not only working remotely but you have the kids underfoot? Because none of them had the kids underfoot before. And they each had to adapt, and they adapted in different ways.

Julia: Yeah, that's why I think that could be your next book. Because that is going to spur I think the next wave of changes for women in the workplace for sure. I mean, I work 100% from my home, in my home office, and so I was used to that — that wasn't weird for me during the pandemic. But having a little one playing with Barbies under my feet and two of them fighting over Monopoly wasn't part of the deal originally. So yeah, I think those insights will be very interesting. And to that, how did you cope? I mean, not well — I just told a friend, I was like, I was trying not to eat my feelings and drink too much wine. Because that sway was much harder for me during that time, just because there were interruptions. So I couldn't find a place where I could sway — it was more just like hitting the wall, hitting the wall, hitting the wall. But obviously, after a certain period of time, I got into a better groove.

Joann: And one of the younger moms that I did reconnect with — one of the things that she did, and she had worked at a company pre-pandemic that was 100% remote globally, okay, but now she had her kids in the house while she's trying to work remote — she told her boss that she had a protected period every day, in which come heck or high water, she was not going to be reachable by the office, and it was 8am to 11am. There was no point in scheduling any meetings that you expect me to be at because I'm not going to be there. And that was her family time, that was her private time.

Julia: And putting the boundaries — I think what's interesting is that probably with the first generation of power moms, creating those boundaries was probably extremely hard.

Joann: Well, it wasn't hard, because as you remember, there's a chapter in Power Moms called "Always On" — this notion that turning off that cell phone, turning off that smartphone when you're not working anymore is really difficult. But when you didn't have a smartphone, you didn't have to worry about turning it off. Because essentially, when you got home, you were unreachable most of the time. Unless you were people like me — when I was the news editor for The Wall Street Journal and then the deputy bureau chief in the London Bureau, I was the last point of contact for the editors in New York. And there's this great scene in the book where every night at quarter to 12 my time, which was quarter to 7 New York time, I would get the call from the New York office, and the guy would say, "Hey, is it just before midnight there in London?" And I'd say yeah, same time it was when he asked me last night. So it wasn't hard to create boundaries if you weren't on call the way I was late at night.

Kelly: There were a couple of stats in the book that really kind of blew me away. And I wanted to ask you about them because they were really relevant for myself as well as for Julia. One of the stats that you cited was that a woman's earnings fall at the time of a child's birth and do not recover until their kids reach 9 or 10.

Julia: This is terrifying.

Joann: Yeah, I thought that was terrifying too. And I must have read that paper over 10 times looking for some explanation for that drop-off in earning power and none was offered. So I just in the book gave my two cents' worth of what I think it represents. And I think it represents two things — and it's also what many moms are struggling with right now. One is taking a protracted time away from work after giving birth, not taking a brief maternity leave — that's going to affect your long-term earning power. And the second is going back on a long-term basis on a part-time schedule — that's also going to affect your long-term earning power. But unfortunately, the authors of that paper, much to my frustration, did not give any explanation. But one of the things that economists have been writing about since COVID, when many moms not only lost their jobs but chose to stop work or to reduce their hours — to the extent they don't come back to the workforce soon, or don't go back to full time, that's going to have very lasting long-term effects on their earning power. And these are trade-offs — we have to know what we're stepping into when we make them. They're important trade-offs, and they're ones that are very meaningful and are appropriate for many women to take, but you need to go into it with your eyes open as to what the impact is going to be.

Kelly: The other stat that I thought was extremely important was that moms earn 10% less per child had they remained child-free. So let's say Julia and I each have three children — I technically have four right now because I have a Spanish exchange student for the year — so does that mean that people like us earn 30% less? How does that work?

Joann: That's pretty much what that finding says. But again, that's part of the mom penalty or the gender pay gap. And the gender pay gap, which many people have written about for years, is one that exists in particular for moms. And it gets back to our whole issue of gender role expectations and bias — unconscious as it often is — that moms are thought to be the primary parent. Remember that younger mom in the Power Mom book who works for a major PR firm, comes back from her first maternity leave about five or six years ago, and the first thing male and female colleagues alike are saying is, how do you do it all? And she's like, I don't. And she was really offended even being asked the question about how she did it all, because she felt it was once again putting the expectation that it's only mothers who are responsible for rearing family, which isn't the case. And in fact, she said to me, I don't like the title of your book, because she said it implies that moms have to be doing everything for kids. She said, why aren't you writing about the power dads? I said, honestly, the dads will be a very important part of this book.

Kelly: Yeah, they're there, but they're in smaller numbers.

Joann: I think the most powerful dads are the ones who choose to become stay-at-home parents.

Kelly: Yeah, or like you said, 17% of them do. That's a bigger stat than I've ever heard. Well, Julia, do you want to talk a little bit about the next section, which is the chapter on Better Mom, Better Boss, which is a huge thing that we always talk about — how being a mom makes you better at work?

Julia: Yeah, so chapter eight is called Better Mom, Better Boss. Love that, because we have an entire podcast episode called How Being a Mom Makes You Better in Business. So we are just again aligned. So there are obvious things like multitasking, delegating, setting priorities. But we believe that — and a lot of the people we interview, we ask this — a lot of people believe that being a parent requires empathy, taking on a deeper understanding of where people are coming from. And we know that a lot of moms are just better at bonding because they create that bond with their child. So anyways, I wanted to give you the opportunity, Joann, to talk about some of the things that you did talk about in that chapter, or the highlights.

Joann: Well, in the larger context, we should also remember that one of the reasons there's so much about me in this book is that the publisher said, I want you to start every chapter of your new book with an anecdote about your experience as a working mom. I said okay, but what if I don't have a relevant experience? I was never an executive, I was a first-line supervisor. So then you're just going to have to tell the readers why. But what was really nagging in the back of my mind was, when it came time to talk about my experience in the Better Mom, Better Boss chapter, I didn't think I had been a very good boss. And I had kids before I became a boss, and how was I going to explain to these readers how this person who was so successful in a career didn't think she was very successful at being a boss. And so what I share with readers is that it turned out that one of the most successful ways I was as a boss was as a mentor — and as somebody who not only mentored people who worked for her, but I mentored colleagues, and it's the comment I got the most at the point when I was leaving full-time work for the Journal. In fact, at the Loeb Awards banquet, before I got up and spoke and got that really special prize, individuals who were getting prizes for their media accomplishments got 90 seconds to talk about why their piece was nominated. And one of those women who had worked at the Journal took half of her 90 seconds talking about how important my mentoring of her had been. And she wasn't somebody who worked for me. So I think in addition to being empathetic bosses, moms in being empathetic not only walk in the shoes of the people who they work with and who work for them, as they do for their kids, but they're able to experience their feelings. And they learn that from parenting. When we become new parents, new moms, we don't know one cry from another from that newborn, but we learn fast that the cry for "I need my diaper changed" is very different than the cry for "better feed me now or this cry is going to get a lot louder." And so when we then turn that empathetic bonding power and make it work in other ways, we can not only be mentors, but we can also serve as role models who act as people whose ethical behavior should be imitated — not just this is how you get ahead, but this is how you practice good business practice and how we treat people fairly. And we also, because we have been able parents, are able to be good teachers of people who work for us. We're able to let people see it's okay to fail. And in fact, failure is where many of our best successes will come, because we learn from mistakes. How many times did your kid fall down, your eldest, when they were learning how to walk? If you don't walk, you can't run.

Julia: Yes, I agree. Okay, here's another question. So since you interviewed the power moms — the first wave of power moms — and then the daughters who were mostly Millennials, I wonder what the biggest lessons of the research can be that are passed down to Gen Z and younger. Like you mentioned in the book that we will not find salary equality until like 2050-something, right? And I started doing the math, and I'm like, oh my gosh, my oldest daughter is going to be about 40. Whoa, mind blown. So what do you think — what are the lessons, and then maybe be a little bit of a futurist — what can they expect?

Joann: Well, what they can expect is that they will be the third generation of women to rise up into high levels of responsibility and power, and they should use their power. The whole idea here that we are somehow grateful when we get a raise is totally ridiculous. And I devoted an entire chapter in my first book about the importance of pushing and negotiating for what you deserve. And the theme of that chapter was "if you don't ask, you don't get." And shortly before that book came out in late 2016, I was speaking to a colleague of mine at the Journal who did a lot of coaching of Journal reporters before they went overseas for international assignments. And I said to him, now it's changed, right? The young women and men who you were advising, they ask for what they deserve. Because when I got offered that promotion into management, I was given a 10% raise, which was a double-digit increase, and I was used to single-digit increases as a member of a unit. And it never occurred to me to find out whether that was a good increase, whether that was what everybody would get who became a second-in-command of a Wall Street Journal bureau. And what he said, to my great surprise and consternation, is that no, nothing had changed. When he would talk to women who were going over as foreign correspondents and ask them if they'd been offered a raise, they would say yes, and he would say, did you take it? And they said, of course, I was so grateful. And when he would ask the male correspondents who were about ready to go off to Tehran or Jerusalem or wherever, they would say, of course I didn't accept the first offer. I did my journalism and I asked for a couple days to think about it, and I did research and found out what the guy whose place I was taking made and what the guy at the New York Times bureau made, and then I came back with a much higher counteroffer that was way in excess — I knew what they would give me, and we split the difference. And you know what? If you ask, you can get. So many women who have read Earning It have — in fact, some of them are ones who have been reaching out to me now over Power Moms to say, you know, I still have you to thank for that pay raise that I got after doing the negotiating. And yet in my own case, I didn't look out for myself in other respects. So when I went back to my bureau chief in Washington and interviewed him for this book to say, why did you give me a four-day schedule with no reduction in pay and no reduction in benefits when I offered to work a reduced work week and take a 20% cut in pay and benefits? And he said, we offered you that deal because we were afraid you would quit and go work for the competition if we didn't. Really? I did not know the power to achieve that I had. And so we don't ask for power, we take it — based on doing our homework, based on knowing what it is that we deserve to get. And then you negotiate from a powerful position of strength. But these younger women — the Gen Z's and younger, and some of the adult daughters, by the way, who were in their early to mid-20s — are going to benefit. So those were essentially two and a half generations that I was talking about in this book. But those younger women are going to benefit from what your generation is achieving and what my generation achieved. Because frankly, each generation stands on the shoulders of the women that came before us. And lots of times I've been asked, why did all these women speak on the record to you? And particularly for Power Moms, which was a much more personal journey for many of them, I said it's because they believe in paying it forward. And if that's the only lesson that readers take away from this book — that we can pay it forward — because remember, the woman who joined the company yesterday is a lot more junior than you are. Let's pay it forward to the woman who got hired yesterday.

Kelly: That's wonderful. And the entire reason why we started our Two Marketing Moms podcast. So we believe in the concept, absolutely. And it's great to hear from you as well. Well, our last question is, you had a list of the top 10 life hacks for allaying mom guilt. Can you highlight some of those? You don't necessarily have to do the top 10, but can you give us your favorites?

Joann: Sure. And again, remember that mom who gave me the title for that chapter about working moms in Earning It — "manager moms are not acrobats" — she's making a repeat appearance in this book. And she's the one that said you need to have a chapter on ditching working mother guilt. So hats off to her. She, by the way, was the first female head of North America for Procter and Gamble. I have four favorite hacks. Number one, carve out time for yourself. Because you know what? Self-care is not selfish care. If we don't take care of ourselves, we can't possibly take care of anybody else. And we certainly can't do our jobs well. The second one is give your children a voice in your work life — whether it's making sure that you compare your work schedule against what they've got coming up for school and making sure you're making time for school events. Or even getting them involved when we start traveling again, to see what it is that's going to be happening in their lives that you maybe don't want to miss and can reschedule that event for. But it's also a way of letting your kids understand why work is important to you. Because kids by their very nature are selfish creatures. They want everybody to revolve around their universe and they want you 24/7 — can't blame them, you're wonderful parents. But if they have some sense as to why work is important to you and why you are making a difference in other people's lives, then they won't be so clueless as to why they feel like you're not always there for them. The third is arranging work-day getaways with your child. I love this younger power mom who takes three days of vacation every quarter for her three little boys, each one of whom gets to have a mama day. And in my own case, I tried to do that when we were in London. And the first time I did this, I gave each kid during their spring break a mama day and I said you could do anything you want. And my then — I guess he would have been about eight-year-old — son said okay, and we spent eight hours at a toy store. And one last hack that I think is really important is at the end of the day, we have to accept our imperfections. That's why this idea, this notion that we can have work-life balance, this idea that somehow we can have it all — it's pretty good. And if we understand that we're just human beings who are striving to be better human beings, it kind of goes away. I can't tell you how many guys have interviewed me for this book who are working dads, and I asked each one of them, do you have working father guilt? And they go, no, but my wife has working mother guilt — should I have working father guilt? And I say, until we come to a day in which dads have working father guilt, we haven't reached gender parity.

Julia: That is very true.

Kelly: This was a wonderful interview. If people want to learn more about you or order your book, can you give us all of your credentials in terms of website and all that good stuff?

Joann: Well, my website is www.joannlublin.com. At the top of the website are six places you can click on if you would like to order the book from an online retailer. And for those of you who have the time to read it in hardback version, if you would email me a mailing address, I would be happy to send you a personalized autograph book plate.

Kelly: I've got all sorts of notes all over mine so I'm keeping this one.

Joann: Did I get you a book plate? If not, I'm happy to send you one too.

Julia: Oh, wonderful. Well, thanks again, Joann.