There was a quote that stuck with me this week as I had the opportunity to attend Tory Burch’s third Embrace Ambition Summit in New York. Tory started talking about the chaotic times we’re currently living in – the pandemic, the tragedies in Afghanistan and Ukraine, a global economy that’s sinking, threats to our democracy, and so much more. She went on to say that as women, there has never been a more important moment in history to stand up for what we believe in; what is right.
But the statement she made that really drove home to me was when she said,
“When you change the life of a woman, you can change the trajectory of a family. When you change a family, you can change a community. When you change communities, you can change a country. And when we clear the obstacles that stand between women and their dreams, we can change the world.”
And right then and there it dawned on me; “when you change the life of a woman you change the trajectory of a family […]” Her words spoke directly to my heart, and as the day progressed, despite my reservations about leaving my kids for a few days during their last week of school, I knew I was in exactly the right place at the right time.
For the past few years, I have minimized the toll the pandemic has taken on my family. After all, we have been incredibly lucky to have come out of it relatively unscathed – almost as bystanders watching the world fall apart. It’s not like any of us got terribly sick over the past few years or were in a situation where we were scrambling for necessities like food, water, medicine, or toilet paper.
When the shutdown hit, my husband was still in his stable job of 15 years and not much changed for him work-wise. I had just started a small business in 2019 and was only planning to stay home with my daughter for another year; my goal was to get back to a full-time corporate position by 2020. When the pandemic hit, I hadn’t yet made the next step to return to the workforce and was still running my own business. I only had a few clients, but it was just too much for me to manage. While I didn’t really want to, I stopped taking clients so I could help my 6-year-old son get through distance learning for what I thought would just be a few months.
For me, the toll of the pandemic wasn’t so much about being home and quarantined 24/7 – because there were many silver linings in all the time I had with my family that I soaked up. My frustrations, fear, and feelings of overwhelm came from the fact that I did not feel cut out to educate my son through first and second grade, especially with a needy toddler crawling all over me every second of the day. I felt like he wasn’t getting what he deserved – a good quality education. He was barely taught anything the last few months of the 2020 school year and teachers were still scrambling to figure out how to teach elementary-aged children their curriculum as the pandemic carried on into 2021. I was left feeling as though I was now his unpaid second- grade teacher, working full-time. It was a job I wasn’t cut out for and my smart son deserved better than me.
There were a few times I made my son cry because of my impatience with him, specifically when it came to writing. It just took so long for him to get the words down on paper. And while his handwriting is still a little difficult to read (after all, he learned to type before he could write), I had a very “proud momma” moment when I received an email a month or so ago that he was selected to be a part of the gifted program at his school.
Maybe I wasn’t such a bad teacher after all. Maybe juggling everything throughout the day for my kids – school assignments, meals, doctors’ appointments, pandemic-approved extracurricular activities, and an attempt to maintain a clean, safe, loving home, wasn’t a wasted effort. Maybe it was the exact opposite. But as moms, we’re trained to believe that putting our children first is the most important responsibility, we could and ever will have. While I believe this is true, we still live in a world that was not created to ease a little of the extra responsibilities that come with being a caretaker.
That’s why I was so grateful to be in the room at the Embrace Ambition Summit with the most inspiring group of speakers I’ve ever been around. I felt as though the speakers were telling my story out loud to everyone in the room– and messages that needed to be screamed to the rest of the world.
When speaker C. Nicole Mason got on the stage, I was in absolute awe by her personal story of tragedy to triumph – having been born to a teenage mom who did her best but unfortunately experienced periods of “episodic homelessness” and poverty where Mason describes her first meals usually taking place at school. Mason was the first in her family to graduate high school, then go to college, and end up with a PhD. Among her long list of accolades, she is the CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and a professor in the Women’s Studies department at Georgetown University and continues to push the needle when it comes to advocating for women’s rights.
But it wasn’t until she broke down the raw numbers this week at the Embrace Ambition Summit that I realized how much work we really have to do. According to Mason, in January 2020 we were celebrating a moment in time when women made up 50% of the workforce. By March of 2020, the economy had lost 40 million jobs and women bore more than 70% of those losses, she told the audience. In addition to this loss, women began taking on double and triple duties including caretaking while working from home. Essential workers who actually had to show up to work faced an impossible choice – provide for their family or take they’re of them. Women exited the workforce or were forced to put a halt on their careers.
Mason rightfully claimed that the pandemic has forced ALL of us to rethink the economy and work. What might an economy for women look like? To her, just a few ideas include investing in paid, sick, and family leave; making invisible work done at home VISIBLE, universal childcare, equal pay, and a workplace free of harassment and discrimination.
She said, “An economy that works for women includes real choices.” Let’s work towards it together. When you can change the lives of women, the world will change too.