Redefining work-life balance

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NEHA RUCH: It’s not like these women are serving their husbands a cocktail and a plate of cookies at the end of the day. Women and men are able to grow, not just in the minute-by-minute caregiving, which we know is demanding and leadership training in and of itself, but how they’re actually sharpening their skills in new ways such that they’re not counted out of the workforce.

One in three women working out of the home are planning a career pause in the next two years. One in two are planning a downshift of hours. Ninety percent of women on pause aim to return. So, the goal right now is to update the perception of the modern woman on pause because she is ever-shifting and ever-evolving on a more gray spectrum between work and family.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Neha Ruch, founder of the platform Mother Untitled and author of the new book “The Power Pause.” As family and career tradeoffs become more complicated — and often more expensive — I wanted to talk to Neha about her research into what makes a career pause valuable for society, for businesses, and for individuals. Her argument that time away from work can lead to a better career is counterintuitive and instructive. And she doesn’t shy away from addressing the cultural stereotypes that can plague mothers, fathers, and even hiring managers. As corporate diversity and inclusion programs recede and government support for parenting is questioned, it’s critical to understand the career reality that parents are facing. So let’s get to it. This is Rapid Response.

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SAFIAN: I’m Bob Safian, and I’m here with Neha Ruch, founder of Mother Untitled, author of the new book, “The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids and Come Back Stronger Than Ever,” and a mother of two. Neha, thanks for joining us.

RUCH: I’m so thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me.

SAFIAN: You’re on a mission to reduce stigma for women around stepping back from a career to focus on family. There’s so much uneasiness right now about challenges and choices that American families face around work and raising kids. So many labels and stereotypes. As I was introducing you, I realized that I may have fallen into some of those traps. How do you introduce yourself? Do you start with your family, your career, your education? I know you have an MBA from Stanford.

RUCH: I think we lean on the answer to what you do in place of who you are. And so, for a long time, I got to say, I run brand at a tech start-up, and in a few pithy words, I was saying, like, I run, so I’m in a leadership position; brand, so I’m somewhat creative; and a tech start-up, so I was somewhat ahead of the curve or a risk-taker. And so it conveys a lot about you. And then when you part with that, you realize, wait a second, we have more expansive identities. All those skills and accomplishments go with us. So, for a while, I would word vomit, you know, people would ask what you do, and ‘stay-at-home mom,’ for reasons we’ll go into, didn’t quite fit. And so I started to perfect, ‘Right now, I get to be with my kids; we’ll see what comes next.’ What’s been interesting as I shift back to more work outside of the home in launching this book is now I stumble because I want to say I’m mostly with my kids, but I’m not; that’s not where I am. My kids are in school, so I’m saying, ‘Right now, I’m getting ready to launch a book, and we’ll see what comes next.’

Copy LinkReframing the modern perception of ‘stay-at-home’ motherhood

SAFIAN: That term you mentioned, ‘stay-at-home mom,’ what does that term mean today? Because as you describe it, it sounds a little bit pejorative. Some people think it should be a badge of pride. Is there a better term?

RUCH: I don’t think we’ve landed on a better term, but, you know, if we back up, the phrase ‘stay-at-home mother’ just by pure sociolinguistics is flawed, right? ‘Stay-at’ implies stagnancy. ‘Working’ is an active verb. So just by the nature of the language, it sets us up to fail. Let’s look at the 1970s, and we had the second wave of feminism, right?

And we were trying to prove women’s capacity in the workforce. And the media really was able to continue to create new narratives, show women archetypes in work. And yet we left behind anyone at home with apron strings, with the June Cleaver archetype, right? To this day, if you poll the American public — we ran a survey in 2023 of a thousand members of the general population and 1,200 women in downshifted careers — when asked who they think of when they think of the stay-at-home mother, they will still say June Cleaver. When they think of the working mother, they will say Michelle Obama. One is fact, one is fiction. And so, the goal right now is to update the perception of the modern woman on pause because she is very different and she is really ever-shifting and ever-evolving on a much more gray spectrum between work and family.

SAFIAN: You coined this term, ‘the power pause,’ the name of your book. What does it mean? And what’s important about the pause part of it?

RUCH: Well, when I stepped into my own chapter of stay-at-home motherhood, I was gobsmacked by the sheer amount of pushback, whether it was from peers or family members, wondering like, what are you going to do all day? Are you going to be bored? Did you really waste that education at Stanford that you mentioned before?

And the reality was I was hearing from them that I was in some way giving up or being counted out. And the reality for me, like 90 percent of women on career pauses today, is that I did aim to return to the workforce. This was just one chapter, and I wanted time with my child. I wanted time to surround myself with new experiences and see what came next.

But by no means did I intend to stop growing. And the goal of the Power Pause is really to reframe the conversation as one chapter where you’re shifting priorities. You’re shifting your time away from paid work to focus on family life, on raising children, mental health, family health. And yet, you’re still holding room to move forward towards more authentic goals, expand your network in new ways, explore new ideas, and ultimately really reshape your perspective, so that when and if you’re entering the workforce again, you’re bringing with you a whole new portfolio of experiences.

And what we want to do is be able to dignify that stage of life so that when and if women need or want to pause, they can be respected and supported, and ultimately have an easier time getting back in.

Copy LinkThe evolution of parenting roles

SAFIAN: You’ve said that the title of the book and the premise were controversial when you took the proposal to publishers. What made it controversial? Because, as you talk about it, it sounds quite logical.

RUCH: Well, you’re looking at, first of all, a generation of women, oftentimes at publishing houses and in the media, who have clocked in a lot of time in the workforce. And we’ve all been served these sort of black-and-white ideas of stay-at-home versus working. And for so long, especially among women.

And I want to say now that one in five stay-at-home parents are fathers, actually, and that number is ticking upward. But stay-at-home and working mothers were pitted against each other for a long time. The sort of rise of the “quote-unquote” Mommy Wars happened in the ’80s and ’90s.

That label was invented by media to talk about how one side was associating with staying at home because they wanted secure attachment with their children and the other side was working out of the home because they wanted to model ambition for their children. And the reality is, we made it about the kids, which naturally, as soon as you make things about the kids, it’s gonna raise your defensiveness, right? And then you dig in your heels and say, well, my way is better and my way is better. And what we know now is, first of all, all the research shows that whether you’re working out of the home, or in the home, or existing in between, you can produce healthy and happy outcomes for your children.

Also, what we know is that from our research last year, one in three women working out of the home are planning a career pause in the next two years. One in two are planning a downshift of hours. Those 90 percent of women on pause aim to return. So really, we are real ever-evolving and ever-shifting.

But for a while, we were sort of facing those black-and-white notions and having to convince, whether it was media or publishers, that this work was not anti-feminist. It was not about setting women back to defending tradition in the home. It was about introducing new valid options to help women be able to step into a career pause or downshift and be able to remain active and engaged so they could ultimately have more choices available to them on the other side and less penalties.

Women are having children at the average age across the country of 30, and that skews higher on the coast. So they’re clocking in more education, more work experience, like myself, right?

I’d already done a decade in brand marketing, and then they have more equitable relationships with their partners. Like what we just talked about, dads are spending three times the amount of time with their kids than any generation prior. So it’s not like these women are serving their husbands a cocktail and a plate of cookies at the end of the day.

We want to showcase how women and men are able to grow, not just in the minute-to-minute caregiving, which we know is demanding and leadership training in and of itself, but how they’re actually sharpening their skills in new ways.

Copy LinkThe undervalued work of caregiving

SAFIAN: I’ve often wondered why a pause to take care of kids isn’t looked at as just another job experience. Why isn’t it on a resume? There’s plenty we learn from parenting, and people’s careers take all kinds of other twists, not necessarily family-related, that we put on resumes. Is this just cultural stigma?

RUCH: I think we’ve diminished the value of care for a long time. First of all, just economically, it doesn’t have a line item on the GDP. I know there are peers of mine who are working on that. Eve Rodsky, with her tremendous work with Fair Play and the Fair Play Institute, is really advocating for that. But when you don’t have a place in the GDP, then it gets diminished. And then you add to that that it’s work that is assumed to be done out of love, which of course it is, but it still comes with value, so salary.

So salary.com, did their own survey and their own math to say, well, if a home parent was assigned value based on all the roles, chauffeur, chef, educator, then they would be making $184,000 a year. No one’s assigning that salary, but the work that data was meant to signify that this is actual work of value, and parents doing that work should be valued and respected as such.

I would go one step further, though, to say that it’s not just those care tasks that I think we deem as easily out-sourceable. It’s the really intellectual and emotional labor.

And so, it’s much more complicated work, and I think if we can start to not just assign it value, but I think we can start to elevate our perception of how that work can shape professional experience and perspective on the other side.

Copy LinkHow time away from work can lead to a more impactful career

SAFIAN: I mean, you said that time away from work can lead to a more focused, more impactful career in the long term, which seems counterintuitive.

RUCH: Our careers, and you know this, I think you’ve spoken to this before, are getting longer.

So we’re looking at a longer game, and pauses help make that a sustainable long game where you have to be able to reset your perspectives and bring in non-traditional experiences so that you’re rounding out that portfolio of work. And what we see women report on returning is that the number one thing they say that has changed is their perspective, their ability to understand their relationship to work, to hold it with less urgency, but be more efficient and be able to manage their time and their priorities.

And I think that that can be a real superpower. But I think beyond that, what we see is women report how it shapes their desire to do work over meaning. Time at home gives you a front-row seat to the day-to-day issues that come up in your community. A lot of women will change their positions and their industry upon return, and they may actually, and we see this in the data, find value, flexibility, and more meaning, even salary.

Copy LinkRe-evaluating financial decisions in a single income household

SAFIAN: Your work isn’t just about families with means. This is a challenge for middle and working-class families. Childcare is so expensive. It can eat up a full-time salary. After we had our second child, my wife’s teacher salary barely covered daycare.

And she opted to take care of our own kids instead of teaching someone else’s kids. Do you have any advice on the financial decision to embrace a single-income household?

RUCH: One in three women feel forced to pause their careers because of the cost of child care. For so long, stay-at-home motherhood was conflated with luxury. And as luxury, we assume that it is not work worthy of support.

And we don’t pay attention to it in the really complicated conversation about how we support caregivers. As partners shift to provide the unpaid work in the home, what we want to assume and really reiterate is that the partnership, in the case of a two-parent household, now takes on this idea that it’s an interdependent household because whether or not you are pausing your work because of financial considerations, a lot of women contend with this idea that they’re giving up their financial independence.

And when you feel like you no longer have financial dignity, it can really make it hard to invest time back into yourself. So before you pause, as you make that decision on how you are going to support your family in this next chapter, ideally, that is a conversation you’re having three to six months out.

You’re going through that budgeting exercise together, and you’re making really conscious decisions, whether it’s we are together going to reduce our spending on travel or entertaining our friends to be able to accommodate that loss of income because we together are deciding that one partner at home makes sense for us.

And that joint household investment, that joint household interdependence, then has a ripple effect of the home parent being able to say, ‘You know what? I deserve breaks as well,’ because too often we see women, and I was guilty of this as well, saying, ‘Well, if I part with my paid work now, my entire value is in taking care of the house, and I no longer deserve support, and I certainly can’t invest in paid help.’

And obviously, that is a flawed mindset because what we know is our children are best served with whole and healthy parents. And so, what we want to be able to do is also rethink then when we’re investing in maybe 10 hours of a babysitter or we’re saying, let’s block and tackle on the weekend so we each get breaks. We’re saying both parents are contributing, both parents deserve care and support, and no one should be working 24/7 without breaks.

SAFIAN: Neha embraces the value of both caretaking and career, which has been a tricky dance for many. But as she says, there’s no reason for a one-size-fits-all approach in our modern world. So, what are the implications for fathers in all this? And how should employers and hiring managers respond to people coming back from a career pause? We’ll talk about that after the break. Stay with us.

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SAFIAN: Before the break, we heard Mother Untitled’s Neha Ruch talk about the advantages of mothers taking a career pause. Now she discusses how career pressures are both the same and different for fathers, how she personally transitioned back into the workforce, and her advice for employers and hiring managers in assessing what she calls ‘returnees.’ Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkThe evolving role of fathers in caregiving

SAFIAN: As you mentioned, there are an increasing number of men who stay at home, one in five. Are the challenges that men face different?

RUCH: I think there is still a recalibration around ambition and success. There’s still a roadmap. We all need to be able to walk through those rooms with our heads held high and be able to answer that question, ‘What do you do?’ and rethink, “Well, if I’m not making income, and I’m not getting promotions, how do I define success so that I feel like I’m not stuck and I’m moving forward towards goals that will orient me in the right direction, right?”

All of that holds true. I think what I’ve seen anecdotally is that men and women face different dynamics around societal expectations of what caregiving looks like. I had a brilliant writer write this for me, Thao Thai. She talked about her own experience where her husband stayed at home for two years, and then she stayed at home for two years.

And when she stepped into stay-at-home motherhood, she was so excited because her husband seemed like he had such a fun time. Except she was worn to the bone because she was baking cookies, she was on the PTA, she was doing crafts, and she was totally run ragged. And finally, her husband looked at her and was like, ‘Why are you trying to get the approval from some nebulous good parenting committee? I didn’t do any of this.’ And she realized she was operating at some standard where, to prove her worth as a stay-at-home mom, she needed to be a super mom.

Copy LinkHow Neha Ruch’s father inspired her work

SAFIAN: I noticed that you dedicate the book to your father. Why is that?

RUCH: So my dad immigrated with a company called Infosys, and he built that company in the States and then became a venture capitalist. And when he and I were walking around Union Square and I was pushing a little toddler around, I shared this idea that most people thought was like, ‘Oh, she’s giving up her Stanford business school degree and this impressive salary to write a mom blog.’

And he looked at me, and he said, “I know that you’re taking on a big mission.”‘” He saw the worth in it when no one else did. And I think sometimes we need that other person who believes we can do it, and he believes that something doesn’t have to look big to be big. But I think beyond that, he was really in the start-up grind through my early years in America and then through my teens.

My mother, who had paused her own work to be at home, she was his unofficial head of human resources, right? She would get the new employees set up in the school system. She would entertain all of the partners. She would sort of be the emotional sounding board. And I remember in my teens being so mad at my mom, as teenage girls will be, and I was like, “It’s not even your money.” You know, she probably didn’t give me money for an Abercrombie shirt.

I have no idea. But I said something about it not being her money. And that day, I’ve never heard him really lose it on me, but he just turned around and he said, “Never say that again. It’s more hers than it will ever be mine. She’s done more to establish us in this country than the rest of us.” And I think he really instilled that in me, such that when I made the choice to pause, I was able to do it in a way that I was really secure in my contributions.

Copy LinkInside the origins of Mother Untitled

SAFIAN: You chose to take this pause and then you kind of took that personal experience and turned it into a career, right? Talking about it on social media, gaining a following, writing a book.

RUCH: Well, our skills don’t evaporate, right? And our interests don’t evaporate when we step into a career break. And I say this to all women. Like, audit the things about your career that you are really proud of when you step into a career pause. Because you don’t want to lose sight of those.

Those go with you and your identity, even if you don’t have that pithy title. And I loved brand. I loved marketing.

I really found content and content that women absorbed fascinating. And then when I stepped into this career pause, I thought, okay, well now I’ve already parted with the ego of leaving my career, I might as well start dabbling with something else.

And I will tell you that in this culture, we have a way of diminishing small projects and passion projects and lifestyle businesses and little blogs. And I remember going to my five-year Stanford business school reunion and overhearing people whispering or snickering about that ‘little blog.’ Of course, I wanted to say to them, ‘No, this is how I’m taking on a big cultural change, and this is how I can do it in a small way while my kids are napping.’ I think it was maybe Jeff Bezos who said, ‘You have to be willing to be misunderstood for a long time.’ And I think that was the gift of parenthood because you’re always making choices that not everyone understands.

And I got to plant seeds for this work. I wanted to dabble in content. I wasn’t making money early on, and so I set those sort of clear success metrics that were learning, impact, and networking. And so I would say I will go to a different motherhood content entrepreneur networking event each quarter.

I will write three blog posts a week. I will start this Instagram channel, and it was small early on. There is an irony in trying to build the first platform for women on career pauses while you’re on a career pause. I would get to a new year. In 2017, it was really growing, and then 2018, I had my second child, which brought me to my knees. And then 2019, I was like, “Well, this is my year.” The pandemic happened, but then timing is everything because I came out of that, and the world was finally reexamining work and family, and my children were aging into school, and so I was ready to put more in, and I was ready to step into it all.

I took a thought leadership position on this because I had been living it and writing about it and researching about it and interviewing for all those years, even if it didn’t look impressive on the outside.

Copy LinkPolicy changes to support families and caregivers

SAFIAN: Are there policy changes for mothers and families that your organization, Mother Untitled, advocates for?

RUCH: If we can get to a place where we can give stipends for families who opt for one parent to be at home, then we can reduce the burden on the childcare system. We can start to make pausing a real financial possibility for parents at the base level. I love the work of Moms First because I think that paid family leave allows parents to make this choice, whatever their choice may be.

I think there’s another side to this. I really talk a lot about universal health care because I think if we had that as an option, more parents would be able to shift into freelance and consulting — opportunities so that both partners would get the flexibility they need to raise their family in different seasons.

The work that I’m most closely tied to is actually within the employers, in really changing the minds of HR managers. I don’t see a world where we’re getting to a place where they’re going to sit across from a returner and say to them, ‘Tell us about that career portfolio of non-traditional experiences and how it added to your skills.’

But I think we can get to a place where we can reduce the bias when they’re looking at two resumes side by side.

Copy LinkStrategies for parents seeking to return to work

SAFIAN: If an HR manager doesn’t have this approach, should a returner — a great term, by the way — should a returner bring up themselves what they learned and grew from? Is there a mindset that parents who want to go back to work need to adopt?

RUCH: If a parent is looking to return, I highly suggest they start that process as soon as they feel that little nudge. If they can, take some time to really crystallize what it is they want to do. We offer resources on-site to be able to work with coaches or resume writers, but even before you do all of that, you can look at all those skills and accomplishments that we talked about auditing.

And when you’re ready, start auditing how you spend your time on a week-to-week basis and what the moments or activities are that you feel the most proud of, whether you advised your partner on a marketing campaign for their tech company — that was me, I did that — whether it’s volunteering for your school’s family education forum.

Whatever those activities are, start to be able to take stock of those because those dots, after a year, start to connect backwards. I spoke to a woman who had coordinated a new bus route for her local school system, right? And what that revealed to her was that when she wrote down ‘Implemented highly complicated infrastructure update for local community,’ right?

A, that sounds impressive under the bullet of ‘career sabbatical for family life,’ and B, what it revealed to her was that she was really strong in project management. That ended up being a talking point on her resume. So, you don’t have to go word vomit on them about how you grew in terms of, you know, personal growth and therapy, and you finally healed all your wounds around reactivity.

But you can sort of extract the bullets that are applicable to the job you’re looking for. But that requires being able to really take the time and intention to take stock of those over the course of, ideally, the entire time you’re at home, but at least in that year beforehand.

SAFIAN: This has been great. Is there anything that I didn’t ask you about that I should have?

RUCH: I would just say, so often people feel like they’re stuck or they’re in one place and they’re not moving forward. I think when you step into a career break, we can very easily feel like, well, our success metric is now how well our kids behave or how well they do in school. And the reality is our job is to be present and do our very best to raise our children aligned with our values. But our success in this chapter is also our own. Part of the strategic roadmap that I share with the Power Pause is being able to set your own personal and professional goals that are authentic to you, right?

And giving yourself those small metrics of success allows you to feel like you’re moving forward in a way that will ultimately be the right direction, and it’s going to lead you to the next step where you’re meant to be.

SAFIAN: Neha, this has been great. Thank you. Thank you so much for spending the time with us.

RUCH: I really appreciate it.

SAFIAN: Listening to Neha, I’m struck by how many of our decisions — personal and professional — are colored by the opinions of others. Even the most confident and successful among us are impacted by whispering and snickering among old classmates and colleagues.

Neha’s point is that, while our emotional response to that noise is natural, it shouldn’t ultimately play into our decisions — about our family or about our career. Clarity about what we want, for our kids, for our relationships, for our finances, can move us past the chatter of others.

To me, the parent business is the most important business of all. And the most meaningful. But that doesn’t mean I don’t aspire for success and meaning in other realms. We each need to make our own choices. One of the great privileges of modern, developed society is: we can. We can thank our mothers and fathers for that. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.