Women on the Move Podcast

Fatima Goss Graves, National Women's Law Center

National Women’s Law Center CEO talks advancing gender equity

 

For 50 years, the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) has been working to improve the lives of girls and women in the United States. In this episode, the Center’s president and CEO Fatima Gross Graves sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about the NWLC’s work, the gender pay gap, and how COVID-19 has exacerbated gender inequalities—plus, what she’s hopeful about for the future.

Gender pay gap and COVID’s impact

Fatima and Sam discuss the longstanding gender pay gap, with data showing that even before the pandemic women overall were making 82 cents for every dollar that men made (and for Black women the figures were much worse, with Black women making just 62 cents to the dollar). And, Fatima explains, things only got worse with the pandemic. “The COVID-19 pandemic has upended all of our lives,” she notes. “But that has been very, very true for women in this country.”

Women experienced greater unemployment than men during the pandemic, she says. That’s partly because women’s jobs are more concentrated in the sectors that were hardest hit in this pandemic, and partly because women had to leave their jobs to take care of their children as schools and childcare options shut down. Fatima calls the pandemic’s impact a “complete crumbling” of the nation’s care infrastructure.

The “impossible math problem of caregiving”

Fatima tells Sam that the issue of caregiving in the United States is both a jobs problem and a quality-of-care problem. And in both cases, it rests on the shoulders of women: because women tend to work more often in caregiving jobs, and because they tend to take on more responsibility for caretaking within families. “And part of the reason our care system is so fragile, [is because] it was kind of built out of the idea that it is okay to pay basically poverty level wages to mostly women who are caring for the most important things to us,” she says.

It’s not only women who work in healthcare or childcare sectors whose employment is impacted by the issue of caregiving in this country, Fatima notes. Women who work in sectors like retail, with both low pay and unpredictable scheduling, can find it nearly impossible to schedule or afford childcare. .  For most families, childcare is more expensive than rent or mortgage payments or even college. This is just one of the issues the National Women’s Law Center targets.

National Women’s Law Center progress

As the organization approaches its 50^th anniversary, Fatima describes the work of the National Women’s Law Center as both broad and deep. “We have litigators, we have public policy advocates, we have researchers, we have storytellers, we have culture makers,” she notes. “And all of that is to ground us in this idea that we believe we can build a better world in this country.”

As the pandemic is controlled, the Center focuses on making sustainable change by advocating for policy initiatives during the recovery. “I'm really, really proud of the relief we were able to get in the American Rescue Plan,” she tells Sam. “We have the largest increase in childcare spending since World War II. There was a child tax credit in that plan that, once implemented this summer, stands to move millions of families out of deep poverty. And the idea that that is a possible thing to do, that this country can do big and important things in this way, it was exciting and inspiring for all of us.”

Looking forward, Fatima is excited about the Center’s continuing work on building “a care infrastructure” that works for both families and employers. She notes that it will likely require third-party inputs to achieve fair wages for caregivers at prices that families can still afford. “In some ways the concept is pretty simple, if we want a stronger care infrastructure, then we're going to have to pay workers for that, and paying workers more actually helps the mostly Black and Brown women who have been doing those jobs,” she notes.

April Koh, Spring Health & Kate Ryder, Maven

The future of mental health and women’s health with two healthcare CEOs

Innovation in healthcare is one of the biggest stories of the last few years, and in this episode, host Sam Saperstein, talks with two CEOs who’ve been at the forefront of that acceleration. Kate Ryder is the founder and CEO of Maven Clinic, the largest telemedicine health provider for family health and women's health. And April Koh is founder and CEO of Spring Health, a digital wellness platform aimed at making mental wellbeing easy to navigate for businesses and employees. In this conversation, Kate and April discuss how they each drew from personal experience as they built their companies, how COVID-19 impacted telemedicine, and how sometimes knowing when to pivot is the key to continued success.

Leveraging personal experience into start-up success

Both Kate and April drew on their own experiences as healthcare consumers when they started their companies. For Kate, it was her interactions with the complex maternal healthcare systems that led her to believe there must be a simpler way for women to access the range of care they deserve. She recalls thinking in 2014, when she started Maven Clinics, that “there was a lot around the telemedicine space that was really exciting, but nothing was really geared toward women and families.” She also knew that it could be hard for women to access the range of specialty providers they needed as they navigated fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, and beyond. So, she founded Maven with the goal of providing women with a multidisciplinary care team to help them fill in the gaps that often exist in women’s healthcare. Digital health or telemedicine is a key component of that, though Maven also offers in-person options for those who prefer that experience.

For April, it was her decade-long struggle with mental health that inspired her to start Spring Health. “I went through a really lonely and a really long process of trial and error to figure out something that would work for me,” she recalls. “And I found kind of randomly what worked for me, but I know so many people are struggling in that way today.” While so many other aspects of life were becoming data-driven and personalized, she felt that mental healthcare “felt like a total guessing game, it felt like it was stuck in the dark ages.” When she learned of groundbreaking research showing that machine learning could be used to personalize mental healthcare, she reached out to the researcher, Dr. Adam Chekroud. Together they launched Spring Health with the mission of making mental healthcare more accessible and personalized for everyone.

Navigating change and knowing when to pivot

As healthcare CEOs at a time when telemedicine was just taking off, both Kate and April learned to adapt and move fast. Recalling a time when she had found a great mental health care provider a few blocks from home, but could not make herself leave her bed to get to an in-person appointment, April says, she always knew that “the future of mental health care is virtual.” The pandemic accelerated trends toward telemedicine that had already started. Spring Health was off to a fast start, leveraging AI to provide personalized care, and benefiting from the overall trends toward telemedicine. But they faced a hiccup when their original model of selling into provider systems was being hampered by those system’s entrenched workflow issues. April’s response was to pivot quickly to owning their own provider network and eliminating the workflow bottlenecks. “It’s helped us move forward in our vision to deliver care,” she says. “And it’s one of the things I'm most proud over the past five years. I recommended a hard pivot.”

At Maven, Kate recalls a different type of pivot: shutting down a failing product. The product was birth-control subscriptions for college students, which Kate says they launched after hearing from enough parents that they would buy such a subscription for their college students. “And we realized later on, they were just being polite,” she says.  “Actually, they didn't want to think about their daughters having sex in college.” Eight months after launching the product, Maven shut it down. Luckily, they were already achieving success on other fronts and the quick pivot to shutting down the failed product spared them from big losses.

Shazi Visram, Healthynest

Entrepreneur’s passion for healthy baby products comes from a personal place

 

The healthy baby product industry has grown exponentially in the last few decades, and Shazi Visram has been a key player in that surge. From founding an organic baby food company just out of graduate school through raising an autistic son and then launching her baby-product company, Healthynest, during the pandemic, Shazi has immersed herself in the mission of protecting children’s environments. She sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about motherhood, her journey creating two successful mission-driven companies, and her roles as an investor and advisor.

A passion for entrepreneurship—and safe and organic children’s products

Shazi describes her journey as an entrepreneur as anything but pre-ordained. As the daughter of immigrants who ran their own businesses, she observed her parents’ entrepreneurial struggles and realized she wanted nothing to do with that—she’d be an artist and paint pictures instead. But by her early 20s, she realized that working for yourself is empowering. “When you work for yourself, the values that you bring into your work are your very own and you're directing the ethics of your life,” she says. “And so I realized that despite everything that I always said, I was going to… start a business.”

Shazi started the organic baby food company Healthy Baby in 2003, with the mission of impacting children's health through food. “I really saw this opportunity to kind of change children's outcomes by starting them off on the right foot with clean, healthy nutrition,” she tells Sam. She built Healthy Baby into a successful food company, but, she says, after her son was born and then later diagnosed with autism, she realized she needed to shift her focus to supporting her family. She sold Healthy Baby and plunged herself into researching the factors correlated with autism. Along the way, she developed a deep appreciation for all that impacts children’s development.

The difference a diaper can make

Shazi tells Sam that her research around children’s health and their environment was eye-opening. She realized there were many factors in addition to what they eat that have huge impacts on babies’ health. “One thing that's so exciting about the baby space is that when you can build products that live in a new parent’s home, you affect them on a day-to-day basis,” she says. 

Her focus landed on diapers—those everyday products that babies often spend their first three years in, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “This is an industry that had yet to be ever regulated,” she tells Sam. “And babies literally absorb everything that you put on their skin, through their skin, and it goes into the bloodstream right away. And we think about organic food because obviously what you eat, you want it to be clean, but there you have the benefit of your digestive system. And yet the skin is actually this huge organ that doesn't have the benefit of a digestive system to detox.”

Healthy diapers became a cornerstone of Shazi’s new company, Healthynest. The B Corp company’s mission is to fulfill each child's highest potential by supporting parents in their developmental health and outcomes. “And we do that by creating really elevated routines throughout the day, using products that ideally support their biological health so that we can focus on their developmental health,” she says.

Continuing her mission

Shazi shares that her first goal when launching Healthynest was to protect and enrich. “You protect by creating the safest biological environment for baby’s brain to develop in,” she says. “And then you enrich by creating activities and games and all kinds of basically therapeutic little fun things to do with baby that are actually building deeper neural pathways, but for a mom or dad, it's just a fun game.”

Shazi also discusses her philanthropic and investor efforts to encourage likeminded entrepreneurs. She says she truly loves backing founders who have “passion and vision and the ability to execute.” For instance, she was an early investor in EpiBone, a collaboration of the scientist Nina Tandon with Columbia University’s schools of business and medicine to develop the science to build human bones from stem cells.

Brian Lamb, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

New to the job at a time of global crisis, JPMorgan Chase diversity leader talks Diversity initiatives

Brian Lamb was named Global Head of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at JPMorgan Chase in April 2020—just a few weeks after the world shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. He got rolling in his new position just as the country erupted in response to the George Floyd murder, he still hasn’t met many of his colleagues in person, and yet he calls his new role the best career decision he’s  ever made. He sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about the firm’s DEI initiatives, what inspires him, and what he hopes to inspire in others.

Starting a new role during global upheaval

Brian tells Sam that the murder of George Floyd and subsequent ramifications offered an opportunity for reflection, both personally and professionally. “There's parts of this that you can never really prepare for, no matter how much professional experience you have, or even being a Black man in today's environment, which in many ways can be scary and uncertain—there’s really nothing that prepares you for what I think many of us felt or experienced,” he says. “So I think one of the first things I did is try to really kind of bring the humanity back to what we were all experiencing, pause and slow down and take the opportunity to understand that in so many ways, our  colleagues,  friends, neighbors, and the communities that we work with have so much more in common that we can rally around.”

Brian notes that many people have drawn on  natural human resilience to bounce back during times of crisis of the past year. For him, he says, the urgency of the moment translated into professional urgency. “It felt like I had a responsibility, both for my family and for the firm, to spring into action,” he says. “Not ignore long-term strategy, but frankly saying we didn't have the time to wait.”

Diversity initiatives at JPMorgan Chase

As the firm’s global head of DEI, Brian is responsible for executing a strategy that builds on the firm’s existing work and incorporates a diversity lens into how the firm develops products and services, serves clients, helps communities and supports employees. He says this work relies on the firm’s intentionality around an organizational strategy of having DEI ladder up into all aspects of the firm. “There was a commitment both verbally and structurally that we would weave diversity and inclusion into everything that we do,” he says.

Brian notes that accountability is an equally important factor. “The structure was intended to kind of be an enabler [but] we also want to make sure there's the right level of accountability,” he tells Sam. “As we think about sustainable change, we’re really pointing to the key elements of a business around having objectives, with priorities, initiatives, and programs that ladder into those priorities and ultimately have metrics that are transparent, that we can hold our most senior level leaders accountable to.”

That type of accountability, and viewing DEI initiatives as business priorities, are already showing success, Brian says. The firm currently has six verticals, including  Women on the Move , aimed at improving diversity throughout the firm. “We're seeing improvements in our representation results, generally across the board,” he notes.

Measuring success

Making change is not easy, Brian acknowledges. “We still have work to do to make sure that we create that right upward mobility, the experience for employees, regardless of their ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation or identity, so that they feel like this is a place that they belong and that they can thrive and grow,” he says. And at the end of the day, he says, success won't be measured by strategy or an action plan, or even public perception. The real measurement is whether JPMorgan Chase employees are getting the experience the DEI team has committed to providing.

“It’s a dynamic issue,” he tells Sam. “I don't think and have not seen any evidence to suggest there's really one solution or even a handful of solutions that are going to address the hundreds of years that have gotten in the way of equitable prosperity. The comprehensive nature of this, and the business-led nature of [our initiatives], we believe is going to be a difference maker and is a unique approach that we haven't really seen as many do.”

Brad Baumoel, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Brad Baumoel, the newly appointed global head of the LGBT+ affairs at JPMorgan Chase brings more than 30 years of experience advocating for the LGBT+ community. He joined Women on the Move Podcast host Sam Saperstein to talk about his passion for LGBT+ rights and how it transformed into this new full-time role.

In this new role, Brad has made it his mission to make JPMorgan Chase the best in class financial institution for LGBT+ for employees, customers, business partners and communities.  He will do this by building a global multi-year strategy, which includes making sure the LGBT+ talent at the bank has the right opportunities to match their skills. With inside awareness, education and training the firm aims to create better opportunities and put increased focus on the transgender community.

Brad has created true meaning behind the “why” of his job and the lasting impact he hopes to achieve. 

Jennifer Nadel, Author, WE: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere

Honesty, humility and compassion: healthy advice for professional women from author Jennifer Nadel

How can professional women maintain a healthy balance in their lives? That’s the question that Jennifer Nadel explores in her book We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere. In this conversation with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein, Jennifer discusses the burnout she experienced in her award-winning journalism career, her path to healing, and her advice to help other women stay healthy as they pursue professional success.

 

Jennifer describes how satisfied she was in her career in the 1990s as a journalist at ITV. She brought important stories to light—stories that made real change, such as her report on the use of rape as a war crime against women in the Bosnian war. “Privileged is the only word I can think of,” she tells Sam, “I woke up every day feeling so motivated, feeling so driven because I was lucky enough to be in a position where I had a camera and a microphone and access to a nightly audience of up to 10 million viewers.

 

Success, burnout, and healing

But at the height of her success, Jennifer suddenly experienced crippling burnout. “I was so passionate about my work and I loved it so much that really everything else fell away,” she recalls. “I didn't think there was a problem with that because it held so much meaning for me and so much purpose. But in fact, I had driven myself far beyond the point at which humans can function. And, one day I just woke up and couldn't go on. And it came from nowhere. I can remember the weekend before thinking, I'm the luckiest woman in the world. I have two kids, I have this amazing job. And then one morning I just woke up and thought, I can't go on. I rang the office. And I said, I'm really sorry. I can't come in today. And in fact, I never went back.”

 

What followed was ten years “in the wilderness,” that she spent searching for health and a renewed sense of purpose. She describes those years as examining every conceivable religion, teacher tradition, and self-help practice in hopes of finding the one perfect solution. “What I really longed for was that I would find one path and that would be the answer,” she tells Sam. “And that wasn't my experience. What I did was I just took the best from every different teacher that I was fortunate enough to encounter.”

 

Manifesto for Women

That experience of burnout and healing inspired Jennifer to co-write WE: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere with her longtime friend and actress, Gillian Anderson. The book aims to help other women find holistic fulfillment—in a much less circuitous route than Jennifer took. Jennifer says she wanted to help women in high-pressure industries—women who are excited and enthusiastic and driven—enjoy success without risking their health. 

 

The book describes nine principles that women can embrace: honesty, acceptance, courage, trust, humility, peace, love, joy, and kindness. Jennifer describes honesty as one of the most foundational of the nine principles. “Truth matters to all of us,” she says. “And yet there is one person that we are often deceiving, continually, and that's ourselves. We tell ourselves that things are okay when they're not okay. We say yes, when we mean, no. We say, I'm fine. When actually we feel like weeping. And until we come into right relationship with ourselves and have an honest and authentic relationship with ourselves, it just means that we need to know what we really think about situations, what we feel about situations.”

Kathryn Valentine, Worthmore Negotiations

How and why you should negotiate like a woman

 

Kathryn Valentine, the founder of Worthmore Negotiations, offers insights—and more importantly, concrete solutions— for women to negotiate successfully for the life and career they deserve. She sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein in a conversation described as “a masterclass, both for employees looking for a more rewarding career and employers who want to retain their top talent.”

 

The (male) art of negotiation

Kathryn tells Sam that she first became interested in the topic of women and negotiation when she was in business school. “I was blown away by the fact that my male peers were negotiating all kinds of amazing things,” she recalls. “These guys were doing it every day, to get business school paid for, to have their relocation to business school paid for (which I had never heard of), to do a one-year rotation with a really cool company that was a client of their main company, just all kinds of amazing things.”

She soon tried negotiating her own MBA internship, and she calls the result a disaster, “probably one of the worst negotiations anybody’s ever had.” So she spent a year researching the art of negotiating, and she learned that while negotiation is typically taught as if it's a gender-neutral skill, it's actually a highly gendered skill.

She emerged from her research with two major insights. One was that many women were leaving jobs for reasons that were actually negotiable, but the women just didn’t realize that they were. The second was that “negotiation is this incredibly powerful professional tool that a lot of women aren't able to fully leverage because the way that it's talked about and the way that it's portrayed as a way that feels really inauthentic to us.”

 

Reframing negotiation as collaboration

Kathryn identifies a focus on salary as one male-centric quality of most negotiations. “I think our minds automatically go to money and that’s important,” she says. “I don't want to downplay that there is a gender wage gap that needs to be paid attention to.” But often, she notes, women can negotiate something else—such as a more flexible schedule, or more autonomy or recognition—that will be “worth” more to them than salary.

She describes the importance of reframing negotiation as less of a competitive strategy and more of a collaboration. “The best negotiation ends with both parties walking away, feeling like they got something great,” she notes. “This can happen a majority of the time if we change how we think about it. The competitive strategy has seized our cultural mindset, so that's what we think of. However, the collaborative approach works significantly better for women—it eliminates the risk of backlash and enables both parties to walk away more satisfied.”

 

Practicing the micro to prepare for the macro

Kathryn also tells Sam that many women can be intimidated by the very idea of negotiating—but, like everything else, practicing the skill will help them improve. She suggests that women can practice negotiating on small, everyday facets of their work life (what she calls micro areas such as deadlines, meeting attendance, etc.) in order to be prepared for the macro negotiations that come with promotions, employment offers, and other milestones.

“I think of micro and macro in sort of two different ways. So for micro negotiations, the steps that I recommend are collect your data, craft your ask, and then get feedback because you do them so often that you can actually really improve quickly,” she says. “And then there are macro negotiations, which is a more complex process.”

For the macro negotiations, Kathryn suggests that women don’t negotiate just one thing, but negotiate three or five things at the same time. Her company offers guidelines that encourage women to focus on three areas: opportunities to increase their impact in the workplace, the support they need to be successful, and flexibility, which she notes is really “support by a different name.” She also notes that the recent pandemic offers opportunities. “You have a lot of really good tailwinds right now. COVID has proven that remote work is not the scary monster we thought it was two years ago. Now is the time to negotiate flexibility.”

 

To learn more about Kathryn’s work, go to worthmorenegotiations.com.

Katica Roy, Pipeline Equity

Gender equity leader: Gender parity is not merely a social issue, it’s an economic issue

                  

Did you know research shows that when firms increase gender equity, they see increased profits? That’s what Katica Roy, CEO of Pipeline Equity, found in a study across 4,000 companies in 29 countries: for every 10 percent increase in gender equity measures, firms saw a 2 percent increase in revenue. In this conversation with Women on the Move Host Sam Saperstein, Katica discusses why gender equity is more than just equal pay, and why she’s optimistic about expanding opportunity for women in the workplace.

 

Gender equity as an economic issue

 

As the daughter of an immigrant and a refugee, Katica had long been interested in improving access and opportunity for others. She describes her motivation as “the return of the opportunity that had been provided to my family.” As a young professional with two master’s degrees and experience in data science and human capital, she realized that she had “the opportunity to both change the narrative, but also use my skills to make gender equity a reality in my lifetime—…and make sure that somebody else had that opportunity.

 

Before starting Pipeline Equity, Katica researched the ROI of firms’ investments in gender equity. In addition to the findings about revenue increases, she learned that while 96 percent of CEOs reported being committed to equity, only 22 percent of employees reported that they regularly saw that shared and measured. “So you had this 74 point gap and how do we actually fill that gap?” she says. “The need that we were really looking to solve in the market was about changing the narrative from a social issue to an economic opportunity, but also enabling companies to essentially live their pledge or live their commitments on equity.”

 

Katica launched Pipeline Equity with the mission of helping firms increase financial performance through closing the gender equity gap. “We have historically treated [gender equity] as a social issue or the right thing to do rather than a business imperative,” she notes. “But if you can improve your revenue by one to two points for every 10% increase in equity, that's a significant lever to maximize shareholder value.” 

 

Measuring the pillars of performance

 

Pipeline uses analytics to guide firms’ decision-making across several pillars of performance. “One of the things that we found is that you can't close the gender pay gap by starting with pay,” she tells Sam. “We found that pay is actually the symptom. It's not the disease. So in other words, pay is this quantitative value that you place on your talent. But the actual value happens before that in performance and potential.”

 

Katica identifies three key decisions that companies make across their talent each year as performance, potential and pay. At Pipeline, she says, they often start by addressing performance and de-biasing performance reviews. “In performance reviews, there are two types of recommendations we provide,” she says. “One is the actual language itself. That's in the performance review. We call out bias phrases. And then the second is actually calibrating those ratings to ensure that they are applied equitably, equitable performance, equitable rating.” She notes that Pipeline has found that about a third of all performance reviews within companies contained bias and four percent of the time that bias leads to lower performance ratings for women.

 

Encouraging internal hiring is another approach Pipestone employs. Katica notes that in 86 percent of all job requisitions that Pipestone’s customers post, they find five or more qualified internal candidates. And internal hiring has been shown to benefit women. “There's a fair amount of mobility and opportunity that actually exists for existing employees,” she says. “And employees don't have to apply for that position. We're actually proactively giving that [list of qualified internal candidates] to the talent acquisition team. And then they contact the employees to interview for those positions.”

 

Remote work and gender equity

 

Katica also discusses the current trend toward virtual work in her conversation with Sam. She notes that many people assume that the increase in remote work is good for women. And while that might be true for some, she notes that for many, it’s led instead to an increase in non-paid household labor competing for their time, as well as more subtle impacts. “There are really three key issues with remote work and equity,” she says. “One is that women become more invisible. And if they’re invisible, they are less likely to be promoted. The second is managers tend to undervalue employees that work remotely. And then the third is you have to now speak up over Zoom.” She notes that it’s already harder for women to speak up in person, and remote meetings increase that disparity.

Episode17: Melinda Yee Franklin, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Career paths and fostering community engagement with a JPMorgan Chase Leader

 

With a deep history in both the public and private sectors, Melinda Yee Franklin stepped into the role of community engagement and corporate responsibility executive for the west region at JPMorgan Chase in late 2020. In this conversation with Women on the Move’s Sam Saperstein, she talks about her career path and why she thinks the time is right for bold corporate community engagement. A longtime advocate for Asian Americans, Melinda also reminds us why we celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage month in May. 

 

Path from public to private sector

Malinda’s interest in government and public policy started when she landed a college internship in D.C. with her hometown congressman from California. She began her career at a telecommunications consulting firm, and in less than five years found herself working at the White House—with stops along the way in civil rights advocacy, at the Organization of Chinese Americans, the Democratic National Committee, and on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign.

 

She soon took on a senior role at the U.S. Department of Commerce, where she stayed for several years. “At that point I had been in D.C. for about 10 years, and I thought, wow, it's been a ride,” she tells Sam. “And to me, it was time to come home back to California. And that's what I did.” Her next stop was in San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s office, where she stayed for four years. At that point, she says, she decided she wanted to explore the private sector.

 

Melinda began that part of her career at a startup called Meet China that became Meet World Trade, doing international B2B work. “And then I took time off because I had a child, and still continued consulting with clients that were both public and private sector,” she recalls. “There was an opportunity to be able to work with United Airlines as the head of corporate and government affairs for the west region. And I felt like, yeah, that's a good job for me because that combines the skillsets I've learned in the public sector. It was a really good fit for me at the time, and I stayed at United for 14 years.”

 

She hopes her career journey is inspiring for women looking to make a big career change. Her advice is to think about all the skills you’ve acquired from different roles. “I think when you package yourself, for lack of a better term, or create the narrative of your journey, just think about how that translates into other things that are related, but not necessarily the same,” she says.

 

Fostering community engagement at JPMorgan Chase

Melinda came to JPMorgan Chase in January to help launch the firm’s office of community engagement, which combines three vital functions within the corporate responsibility team: community re-investment, community partnerships, and the office of nonprofit engagement. She says the goal is to localize much of the office’s work of going into the communities and working with nonprofit leaders. “We’re really developing a narrative around what we're doing, how we're showing up into the community and working really closely with our philanthropy colleagues, as well as our government affairs colleagues, to really shine a light on the good work that JPMorgan Chase is doing,” she adds.

 

Post-pandemic, she says, she’s looking forward to helping rebuild small-business communities in cities such as San Francisco, where 50 to 60 percent of small businesses have disappeared since the start of the pandemic. “So how can we help to rebuild… these small businesses of color, women-owned businesses,” she says. “How can we really help them rise again?”

Episode 16: Romy Newman, Fairygodboss

Pandemic aftermath: hybrid schedules and work-life satisfaction

 

As the president and co-founder of the digital career community Fairygodboss, Romy Newman has a front-row view of emerging trends in the workplace. In this conversation with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein, Romy discusses the impact of the pandemic on the workplace, how women can negotiate for flexibility, and her hopes for the hybrid office of the future.

 

The origins of Fairygodboss

Romy Newman already had a successful finance and marketing career including a stint as the only female vice president at the Wall Street Journal when a friend approached her about a start-up idea in 2015. The friend, who was pregnant and job searching at the time, was realizing how hard it was for women to find information about workplace policies supporting women. She was finding that her ability to collect information was only as good as the people she knew,” Romy recalls. “So if she didn't know somebody who worked at J.P. Morgan, she wasn't going to be able to find out what the maternity leave policy was . . . or whether the company had paid leave or infertility benefits or anything like that.”

 

With two young children at the time, Romy said she was looking for a change herself, so she jumped in to co-found Fairygodboss. At first Romy and her partner focused their new digital community on employee reviews, having women anonymously report their experience at different companies, but they soon changed the focus to be a forum where women can ask and answer specific questions. “What we've found is that women feel isolated as they rise up in the workplace and they have questions.” She says, “They don't know who to go to for answers. So was it okay that my boss said this, or I'm asking for a raise and I don't know the best way to approach it, or is now the time to apply for a lateral move or is now an appropriate time to ask for a promotion.”

 

Once the pandemic upended the workplace in 2020, the concerns being voiced on Fairygodboss centered more and more on the anxiety, burnout, and exhaustion of maintaining work-life balance while working from home, often with kids at home. “We have definitely seen it kind of rattle through our community,” she says. “Starting with kind of the shock of how am I even supposed to help my kids with homeschool at the same time that I'm doing a full-time job to the anxiety of I'm worried that if I am not available all the time, I'm going to lose my job to just like pure burnout and exhaustion.”

 

Negotiating for flexibility, and success in the hybrid office of the future

One positive to come out of the pandemic, Romy says, is a new appreciation for working from home. “I think this has been a wonderful experiment in how flexible schedules don’t impede productivity,” she says. And though she recognizes that there is value in the personal connections made in an office, she hopes the future will include more hybrid arrangements where women can set their own schedules according to their own strengths and needs.

 

For instance, she notes her own preferred work schedule: work early in the morning, then drop her kids at school, then work out, then get back to work mid-morning. “Instead of feeling like behind the ball, I feel ahead of things and I feel invigorated and happier,” she shares. “I think just being able to design my work around a schedule that works for me is so much better.

 

Her advice to women who want to negotiate more flexible schedules with their own bosses is simple: express it in a way that highlights the value it would bring to the company. “What is it going to do for them?” she asks. “If they help you have the flexibility that you want, I think helping them see that it's going to help you do better work, that you're going to be available to them, that you're going to get them everything they need is really important.”

 

For women currently searching for jobs, Romy advises focusing on areas where flexibility and hybrid schedules might be more available. Right now, she says, job postings are more than double what they were a year ago. “I know people don't want to hear this, but it's all digital, it's all technology,” she notes. “So I think for women who don't have those skills, the great news is they are so easy to acquire.”