In this episode of the Impostor Syndrome Files, we talk about pressures on working parents in the workplace. If you’re a working parent, you know how challenging it is to navigate the pressures of advancing your career while being the parent you want to be. Unfortunately, many of us put a lot of pressure on ourselves to be perfect at work and at home. My guest this week is Moe Carrick, a workplace culture expert who is on a mission to make every workplace good for people because when people thrive at work, everybody wins. Here we talk about Moe’s decision to leave corporate America, the impact of the mothering myth and the need for systemic change when it comes to working parents.
About My Guest
Moe Carrick is an internationally recognized expert in workplace culture, with her innovative frameworks being adopted by top brands like Nike and Amazon to enhance work environments and employee satisfaction. Her talks on the future of work and employee wellbeing have graced stages like TEDx and SXSW, making her a leading voice in her field. Moe has authored bestselling books and founded Moementum Inc., a consultancy focused on building workplaces that are good for people for maximum impact. Outside of work, she enjoys outdoor adventures and lives in Bend, Oregon with her family.
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Connect with Moe:
Moe’s latest book: https://moementum.com/when-work-is-good/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moecarrick/
Website: https://moementum.com/
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Connect with Kim and The Impostor Syndrome Files:
Join the free Impostor Syndrome Challenge.
Learn more about the Leading Humans discussion group
Join the Slack channel to learn from, connect with and support other professionals.
Schedule time to speak with Kim Meninger directly about your questions/challenges.
Websites: https://kimmeninger.com
Transcript
Kim Meninger
Welcome, Moe, I'm so excited to have you here today, and I would love to start by inviting you to introduce yourself.
Moe Carrick
Hi, Kim. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you. So I am Moe Carrick, and I live in Central Oregon on the West Coast. I'm a consultant and coach by companies called Moementum. I've been a founder and CEO of Moementum now for 23 years, which is hard to believe. It seems like just yesterday, I made a decision to go out on my own, and prior to that, I worked in a variety of different sectors, from health care and education to corporate in the tech industry, and I early, in my early days, I cut my teeth on group work as a wilderness guide. So I worked for our bound and knolls and project adventure, which is out, out near your way, working with groups, mostly in a wilderness setting. I'm also the mother of three, and I have a stepson as well. They're all grown. My youngest is 23. I, she was born the same year I started the business. So I have that challenge, you know, and opportunity in life as a parent. And I'm married, I'm divorced, I'm remarried, and I'm looking at the back half right now, that's my stage of life a little bit.
Kim Meninger
Wow. Thank you so much for sharing that I too, had started my business when my son was an infant and he was my older son. So it's a whole new world when you're trying to build a business and end to a newborn at the same time.
Moe Carrick
It is, yeah, it is. It seems easy at the time, right? You're like, oh, yeah, this will be no problem. They don't even walk yet. But then you're like, Well, wait a second, I like, Wait a second.
Kim Meninger
Exactly. So what were you thinking about when you decided to leave? Like, were you feeling that there was either a problem that you wanted to solve on the outside, or were you feeling like you were just ready for a change? Like, what was it that prompted you to leave behind your former life and transition into entrepreneurship?
Moe Carrick
Yeah, it’s such a good question. It's something I thought long and hard about. I actually had tried previously. So about five years before I actually founded and started momentum, I had made an effort to go out on my own. I remember printing business cards. I was going to call it Carrick and Associates, and had this cool like logo and, and at that time, I just really it turned out that I really wasn't ready, partly because I did love the work that I was doing. I worked with a woman, my mentor, who unfortunately died at a young age, not too long after I left the company that we worked for, but I really loved working for her. She was, she was a really good boss, and I learned, I learned a lot from her, and I loved the work that we were doing. But what finally got me was the grind of the travel and they were, it's interesting because as I think about it, there were actually two departures for me. So one was, I would say, when I left corporate America, which, you know, I had some golden handcuffs. I was working in high tech at the time that it was really growing and scaling, moving from I was in the cellular industries, moving from analog to digital, I had a lot of incentive to stay and then I had my first son, and that just brought my corporate career kind of grinding to a halt, like I, I remember going back to work after my leave, and I had to drop him at daycare, and then I had to drive 30 minutes to the office, and I had to pick him up by 530 and I just, it was only A matter of weeks that I realized, like, I just I can't do this. I can't be the mother I want and hold this job. So I I left corporate America at that time, I sort of down, shifted, took a job in, in a healthcare setting that was more part-time. And then it was five years actually, was more than five years after that, almost nine years after that, that I founded the company, which was what I think of as my second exit. And at that time, it was because I was working as a consultant for that mentor that I mentioned doing work that I loved, but I was traveling over 200 days a year, and by then I had two young children. I was getting ready to have a third, and I just, I didn't feel like I was living the life that I could, you know, around having some more flexibility, and I was really scared that I was not going to be having the impact on my own children's lives that I wanted. So I would say both times, it was connected to the tensions that I felt between parenting and mothering and also trying to make a difference in the work that I did. I think that's what got me out.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, and you, you're hitting on a really important and I think a really challenging topic for so many of us is working moms, is that navigating. Having career success and parenting at the same time. And so, you know, I think that, and I was actually having this conversation last week with a group about there's this, obviously, this drive that those of us who are achievers have to want to continue to grow our careers challenge ourselves. We also want to be great moms, and we want to make sure that we're available to our children, especially at all the major milestones. And it feels like we've been given lots of messages that tell us that we should be able to do all of that right? So there's a lot of shame, there's a lot of self-doubt, a lot of guilt that comes with really bet, not bound, not even balancing right, but just sort of navigating the, these two really important roles.
Moe Carrick
Totally, totally. And I think for me, some of that, that I now can look at in the rear-view mirror relates to what I often call the mothering myth, which is sort of the disproportionate amount of pressure that is, that is put on, and also that we put on ourselves as women, to be the iconic mother, you know, and, and I think that that's actually really increased in my lifetime, you know, I can remember, for example, my in my own childhood, I grew up in New England, where you live, and I, you know, my, my parents were, I would call the way I was raised, like, benign neglect. You know what? I mean, like, like, they, they were involved in our lives, but kind of on the periphery. I mean, they and they had their own issues. There was alcoholism in my family, there was there was career challenges. There was divorce, and so, you know, we did get raised, but kind of by the skin of our teeth. And yet, by the time I became a parent, I felt, I felt very much that there was a lot of pressure on being not just a parent, but like the perfect parent, especially as a mother. And so for me, and I think this is a phenomenon, too, Kim, I'm curious what you think I see it actually more, in a more pronounced way, impacting white women than some of my black and brown and other ethnicity women who have articulated to me that they feel much more as though they haven't been able to, just like, lean into the guilt and shame of working because they have to work. Yeah, no, I had to work too, and so, which you maybe did as well. And many white women that I talked to that, that's true, I mean, and we see this reality that women are, in many cases today, white women and women of color are the primary income earners for their family, which I think, yes, it is create. It is related to ambition, but it's also related to meeting our basic needs. And what I find so troubling about the mothering myth is that it it coincides with, with another myth, which is that the male partner should be the primary wage earner always, and that that's his job, which puts us in this binary dynamic that actually is not what's real today, where we have many women with higher earning potential, we have men who would prefer to be carers and to stay home, but we're not getting permission in both directions. Women are not given permission to have the bigger career. They're facing the same challenges men have faced, which is that it feels like they have to sacrifice their family effectiveness in order to be on a corporate track or an entrepreneurial track. And then men, similarly find that they're kind of yoked to the plow, that they're less than and inadequate if they're not working a full-time job, or are, are flexing their hours. You know, we see, for example, since I don't know what the last 10 years, many companies have been granting paternity leave as well as maternity leave, and many of my client says some don't take it. And it's not that they don't want to take it. It's that they face the same dynamics women have face, which is like, Will I somehow sabotage my career if I take it? So I think the double bind exists for all of us, but it impacts women in a in a particularly toxic way. I think that at least I was impacted by around being able to stand in my own grounded confidence about, yep, I can actually be a good mother, and I can do this really big job.
Kim Meninger
You said so many important things there, and I want to go back to the benign neglect because I that is so I think about that a lot. I mean, my mom was a single mom for much of my life, and the things that parents get involved with today, I laugh at, because I think my mother wouldn't even know, you know, they the ways in which parents are so involved in messaging their kids' teachers and like, my mom wouldn't have been able to name my teachers or my like, we, we scheduled our own we didn't even call them play dates, right? You call up your friend and you go outside, you meet like you didn't have parents transfer, transporting you all over the place you went, you played with the neighborhood kids. And these, it feels. Like a, you're a full-time coordinator for your children's activities, on top of everything else that you're doing for your, your household and your work. And it's just such a different world that we live in today.
Moe Carrick
It is a different world you're so, right? And I think, you know, there's a lot about that that's good, right, in terms of, like, safety and wellbeing. But I think there's some parts of it that are actually really not good. And you know, if you're familiar with some research, for example, by Angela Duckworth, who wrote the book Grit, who talks about how, you know, the way we actually become resilient is through going through hard things. And so I think there's a real, a real tension around the I'm going to speak to mothering, which is the journey I know most since I haven't been a father, but which is that, like there is a place of being the heroic Mother of the year, then there is being a good enough mother, and then there's being an inadequate mother, right? And I think my biggest fear as a young mother was that I was going to be an inadequate mother, and I think sometimes I probably was, but most of the time, I think I was a good enough mother, and sometimes I was like, really, really awesome mom, you know, but I felt inside always like I wasn't doing enough, especially because I was very, very often the only person who traveled as much as I did, and worked full time and supported my family through divorce and as a single mom and all that kind of stuff on my own, I felt, I felt like the only one, and so I didn't talk about my work. I just tried to show up as if I was like the moms who were at home, but I wasn't. It was like a, it was a house of cards that that I built, that that never really addressed what was real and that. And I think some of that's changed. I hope that some of that's changed for younger mothers today, but I get scared when I sometimes see that it isn't because what is it? Yeah, what is it we can say to ourselves that helps us feel like we are good enough and also that we aren't and we can't possibly do it alone? Yes, we just can't. We need a support system, and the support system can be there the, you know, the child's other parent. It can be extended family, it can be paid child care providers. It can be school, it can be the friends. There's lots of ways. There's a whole network of ways in which any parent who's also working needs to be supported. It's somebody has to take care of the children, and somebody needs to bring in the money. And if that somebody is the same person, then they are going to need support. So I think that's the key, isn't it?
Kim Meninger
You're absolutely right. And when you talked about not sharing that part of yourself, when you were trying to just be like the other moms, anytime that we have to hide an important part of ourselves and our identities, what it does is it obviously compounds all of the stress and anxiety that comes with that, but it also shuts us off from those support resources that you're talking about, right? We can't be open about our situation. We can't, we, we can't get access to that support. And so it just becomes that much more challenging.
Moe Carrick
Well, it does. And I remember I you just read up a memory for being probably like a trauma memory. But I can, I can remember back in the day when I was working for a consulting company, before I started my own business, and I was working for that mentor I mentioned, and who was very supportive, and she had encouraged. She really needed me to go back to traveling when my second child was very young, still an infant, maybe six or eight weeks old. And she's like, I know it's going to be hard for you to travel from Oregon to Georgia, but like, Could you please, because we've got this big client roll out and, and also, I'll help you have a nanny, you know, either bring your nanny or have a nanny on the road. And I remember being like, Okay, I think I can do that, you know, talking to my partner and figuring out how I could take this newborn and still, you know, do this work. But right before I got there, she messaged me and she said, now it's awesome that you're here. So glad that we've got this, you know, Nanny arranged, but just try not to let the client see you with the baby. And I'm like, What? What? I'm sorry, you know, what do you mean? Not at the client see me, because we're going to be working from eight to six, and then I have to breastfeed this baby. We're still getting used to each other, like the baby's going to be attached to me from six to eight because that's how it is when you're when you have a newborn. I can't hide the baby from the client. But you know, the pressure she was under was, it was almost 100% male client. She really didn't feel like it would be good to have people know that there was this infant around and this nanny. And I just remember feeling so like, Okay, I'm supposed to hide that this huge thing that's happening for me, which is that I have a newborn, and I am willing to do this work, but I also have to hide this part of myself. And I think that's your spot on there. Kim, it's like when we have to orphan any part of ourselves, and I say we in the collective. I think it's true for men and people that are on a spectrum of gender identity, any dimensions that we have to hide of ourselves eat away at our notion of who we are and what we're capable of.
Kim Meninger
Absolutely, absolutely. I can't help but ask, What did you do?
Moe Carrick
Well, you know, I complied, like I tried to hide the nanny. We tried to, you know, stick to the hotel room, and I kept the baby, you know, I didn't. I didn't. I declined, like, some of the group dinners and stuff, because I had to be but it was really, really hard. I mean, I can remember coming home from that gig, just physically and emotionally exhausted. I felt sad that I had missed some long days with my newborn because I was trying to show up well for this client. I can remember one day I, you know, my milk let down in the middle of a session because I should have been breastfeeding and I wasn't, because the session went long, and I just was like, Oh God, I got these big splotches on my chest, like it was, it was hard, but I coped. I would say, I limped along and I, and I got through it.
Kim Meninger
Well, and I think in addition to when you're hiding yourself, you're, you know, you're compounding your stress and shutting yourself off from resources, there's also that, that that belief that we internalize that I'm doing something wrong, I should be doing it somebody else's way, right, like you're, you're having to pretend you weren't there with a baby, means you shouldn't be there with a baby, and you're not doing it the right way, right which, which, from a confidence perspective, When you're already in a tough situation and you're trying to do a good job, it's only going to, you know, make, make you that much more anxious.
Moe Carrick
Well, absolutely, and, and you're, you're trying to do what you what you think is right, like, that's, you know, so I was trying to earn money so that my family could keep our home and have food on the table. I wasn't I wasn't doing this because I had some outsized ego that required me to be out there proving something to the world. That's not why I was working. And for most people I know that are working while parenting, that is also true there. They need to work for, for whatever reason, they also perhaps like working. They, they value the contribution they can make. It's engaging to their brain and their heart and mind, and that's all, all good too. But I think, I think that you're right on around we make up that we are, we are broken when really the systems that facilitate this process are broken and, and I think it's true for, it's true for, for many reasons for all of us, particularly around the tension between caring for children or elders and working full time or even part-time.
Kim Meninger
So what do you see as the opportunity, perhaps, for women who are listening to this, nodding their heads, thinking, that's me? I think there's still, unfortunately, a stigma and in certain, certain companies, certainly more than others, certain industries more than others, but there are a lot of women out there who are afraid to even have the conversation with their manager. They don't want to look like they're less committed. Or, you know, ask for something that they're afraid will make them look different from their male counterparts. Like, how do we even start to address this?
Moe Carrick
Oh, I wish it was farther along. Kim, you know, like, I sit here at my age and with children that are mostly grown, and I think, gosh, it was supposed to be better by now, like so I have, like, a deep amount of sadness that it isn't. But how do we get there? I think we get there by having conversations like these. I think we get there by reality testing what it takes to help people that have children or elders that they're caring for contribute through work while also caring I think we have to have to really look that in the face around. What does that take? And how can we design our systems, our workplaces, to be good for people in that phase of life, which is temporary, right, those 20 years or 18 years? It's not, it doesn't go on forever, but it is. It is part of our lives. And I think that COVID, of course, has brought that all the post-pandemic reality has brought it all crashing down where, you know, it used to be, mostly women were saying, like, we need flexibility as a currency. Now the whole world is saying we need flexibility as a currency. And I think the organizations that I see that are really being responsive to the workforce needs of tomorrow, are really looking at how they do what they do, to create the kinds of support that can help carers do both, and they're doing that with a mindset that says this employee is valuable to me. Right? And they're going through a stage where they can't maybe work the hours that they once did, or they need more flexibility, or they need help with childcare, which there is a childcare crisis right now happening as well, where people can't find the care they need, which doesn't help. So I think it does come back a lot to employers getting really creative and getting real with how they can support employees through this phase. And I also think for the individuals, we have to get a lot braver with what we're willing to talk about and name and, and own, and recognizing that there are some consequences to that, but it, but that it too is temporary, and I'll give you an example. So when I was working as an external consultant, I, I had two young children, and I was work traveling a ton. So before I left that job to go out on my own, I made a request of my boss to drop down my hours because I was traveling so much, and I just felt like I needed to have a different pace in terms of my family and I could afford, at that time, my husband, I had talked, we found a way that we thought we could afford for me to work less than full time. So I approached my boss, and I said, I'm thinking of dropping down. Could I go down for like, 30 hours or something, for a period while the kids are little? And she was great. She was like, Absolutely, you can totally do that, and I just want to talk through what that's going to look like. And I was like, Okay, what do you mean? And she said, Well, right now you're our, one of our senior most consultants. You get a lot of the plum gigs. You traveled last year to Singapore, to South Africa. You're on the top gigs that we get if you're working 30 hours, realistically, you probably will be not on those gigs as much. You're going to be more on the closer in gigs that are maybe in your region or in your state that can be accommodated with a part-time schedule. And you probably won't be the lead on as many gigs, because the lead needs to be full-time. And I remember thinking about that and going, oh gosh, like, I don't want, like, I worked really hard in my career to be like the top dog, and she's saying to me that I'm going to have to be not the top dog if I want to work part-time, which on the one hand felt like, Oh, that's good. That feels horrible, but on the other hand, it is what was real. It is what was real. I actually couldn't do that Big Top Dog Senior Consultant job while also working a part-time schedule. So I said, Yes. I was like, Absolutely, I'm in. Let's do it. And she worked with me, and I got came off some plum projects, but I got some other interesting work, and for a couple years that that worked, but I appreciated her reality testing that with me, because it wasn't the employer. In that case, couldn't actually do all the accommodating. I also needed to do some of the accommodating to get what I wanted and, and it was, it worked, you know. So I think sometimes we have to, you know that that was a palm-sweaty moment because I didn't expect her to say that. I kind of thought I could just still be doing the kinds of work I was doing, but do less. [Yeah, scale it back. Yeah.] Right, yeah. Now that's probably not realistic. And, you know, it reminds me of, I have a client who is a neurosurgeon, and she's the only neurosurgeon in her community, and she's a parent as well, and she's like, so, you know, I can want to work less, all I want, but the reality is, if somebody needs a neurosurgeon in my community, I'm in. [Yes, yes.] So I've gotta figure out how to handle that, and I've gotta have support going back to that issue, so that if my children, who also need me, while someone needs neurosurgery, can have their needs met and be loved and cared for. It's on me, you know, she, she was like, it's on me with the support system that I have to make that work. So I think that's where the courage comes in, and I, and one of the biggest barriers I see for women like you and like me is that we, we it's hard. Let's face it, it's hard to ask for help. [Mm-hmm] It's hard to ask for help, so we instead hustle to try to do it all as if we don't need help. And if I had a do-over like, that's one of the things I would do really differently, I'd get better at asking for help.
Kim Meninger
I think that's a really good I mean, hopefully people who are earlier in their careers and in their lives are taking that message to heart, because I do think that so many of us get to the point where we look back and think if I had it to do over, I wouldn't have tried to do it alone and, and I appreciate the conversation that you're sharing with us too, that you had with, with your manager, because I think there's a difference between reality as you're describing it, and unfair penalties. Yeah, and I think it's hard sometimes to separate that out like we have to be realistic about the fact that if you're going to spend more hours at. Work, you're going to spend fewer hours at home. [Yes.] There are only three hours in the day. And vice-versa. If you're going to spend fewer hours at work to be able to spend more hours at home, it's going to affect your career in some way, right? And I think from a mindset perspective because we've often been told we should want and should be able to have it all, that doesn't feel right to us, and it feels like we are doing, you know, doing something wrong, or that we you know, there should be a better way. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, how do we make peace with that?
Moe Carrick
Yeah, it's a tough one. I think part of it comes down to recognizing that although we are told we can have it all, that doesn't mean we can have it all at the same time. You know, like there are stages in life. I was talking to one of my kids about this the other day because they were reminding me how important my mother was in their upbringing. Because after I had my third child, my mother was semi-retired, and she ended up jumping in, in a pretty, not full-time, but like, a pretty intensive care way. And I said, Absolutely, thank God. You know I had her to do that, because at that point I was a single mom, but also before she did that, there were nine years of the juggle, you know, that I had to figure out without that support, which was much harder, and that's largely when I had to pivot to part-time. I think the other thing that has to happen is, and this, this is this might trigger some of your audience. It might even trigger you. Kim, I don't know, but it's something I'm passionate about, and yet I've had to look at in the face myself, which is, until we as women can really get our head around believing and acting as though our male partners are competent carers, we will never have equity or equality at work. And I'm going to give you a little example of what this means. So I mentioned that I've divorced from my kid's dad, and we're co-parents. We have been co-parents, both from a custodial care perspective, we had halftime care, and also from a decision-making perspective, which was hard, real hard, but also good. Yeah, and I'll never forget when early in our divorce process, we were at an event, and for my youngest, our youngest, who was singing in like, her little she was like, in maybe first grade, she was singing this little concert, and she was with him that week. So I showed up when in the audience and sat with him and our boys, and we're watching, and she came onto the stage, and to me, she looked like, she looked like a ragamuffin. Her hair was like, you know, all over. She had like, socks that didn't match. She had an outfit that wasn't in sync with all the other outfit. And I, my first reaction was Shane. I was like, oh my god, everybody's going to be looking like our, our kid looks like the one who is not, like, well taken care of, really. I mean, she was clean and everything, but she, she just looked like a little funky. And I said, and, but I didn't say anything. I was like, All right, Moe, just sit with it. And of course, as soon as she opened her mouth, she just, she started singing, and she was so happy. And I saw this little face just up there, just with pride, performing with her school and, and I just got swept up into the like, Oh, this is so amazing. And how much she loves, you know, school. And she came up afterwards, and she was so excited. And, and my her dad turned to me, and he said, this was after the show. He said, You know, I could really use your help with something, with two things, actually. And I'm like, what? And he says, first of all, how do you put tights on a first grader? Oh, doesn't who doesn't want tights on? And the second is, how the heck do you French braid hair? Right? And I he was like, this, these two things, like, we barely got out the door. I'm lucky she has clothes on. This is tough. And I remember thinking, yeah, it is tough. It is tough. And good job you, you got her here. She you were on time. She has clothes on. She had fun. She was singing. I had to let go of my crap. It's about this idea that there's a perfect way to do that. He was perfectly adequate, loving, caring father, who was still learning about some of the custodial care that I tended to over dominate in and it was better for their relationship and better for it was better for me that we had shared custody because I actually could make the kind of money I needed to support our family fully with him having primary care. But it wasn't easy, you know? And we joke now, because the kids look back on the river, they're like, Yeah, whenever we were at dad's house, we had four meals, they rotated. And I'm like, But you lived. [You were fed.] We're fed. You lived. And I think. There's a lot of perfectionism. I'll speak about myself. I had a lot of perfectionism that actually kept my kid's dad from the beautiful, magical primacy that comes from being the actual carer, until we were divorced, and at that point, there was no longer a protection. He had to do the things, and he did a good job, and it was different than how I did it.
Kim Meninger
You bring up such an important point, and I think that this is something I think about a lot because certainly over the course of my lifetime, the I've seen a lot of changes in how we think about women's identity in the world, in the workplace. There are a lot more options available to women, everything from being a half-hour executive to being perfectly you know, it's perfectly acceptable to just take some time off and be with your kids, [yes,] but men do not have that range of options available to them in terms of, you know, sort of social acceptance and their, their ability to do that with pride and with confidence. And so we absolutely in the same way that we want change in the workplace so that we can, you know, sort of tear down some of the barriers and stereotypes that keep women from achieving the highest levels of leadership. Need to be doing the same thing at home on the caregiver front, to be, to be able to say, men can be caregivers just as effectively as women, even if they do it differently.
Moe Carrick
Absolutely, and in some cases even better and but there's a lot that needs to change for that to be, I think, like viable for men. And I've known men who have taken on primary caregiving, and they see, they tell stories that are really tough, like, gosh, you know, I take the kids to the playground and I'm the only guy there, or I go to a company event in support of my wife. She won an award, and all the activities are spa days for the spouses, which doesn't really appeal to me. Or I'm asked if these are my nieces and nephews, or I'm told that I'm babysitting my own children, you know, and, and so I think that we have, I think we as women have a big role in that around, you know, getting our head around the fact that this is a partnership, that their children need their father or their parent, their other parental figure, as much as they need us, and that there are different ways that we can do It that matter. But I think the mothering myth is what gets in the way of that. At least for me, it did. I had such a strong notion. I don't know where I even got it. I don't think my mother taught me this. I think I just like inherited from the world at large, which was like, I have to be all things to my children all the time, and it was a lie. It was a lie. For one thing, I only was half the parental unit.
Kim Meninger
Yes, and when you come to, to believe that, like, that's liberating.
Moe Carrick
Yes, it is liberating. It is liberating because there's less pressure, no on, on you, and it gives room for more variety of how the parents can, can show up, because it does take all hands, you know, at least for me, which then also frees up because here's the other thing, Kim, and I bet you see this all the time, and talk about, I know you talk about this on the podcast, it also frees up some space, if men can be seen as skilled and loving carers, it opens up a lot of permission for their own mental health and wellbeing and shared partnership, etc. because they don't have the unrelenting pressure to only be the earner. That's right, men are making the money like come on. And so what that also helps then, is for women to step into the economic power of being the earner and also of having ambition to solve real problems that matter. Because if all the women opt out of the big jobs that solve the real problems that matter, well, guess what? We're not going to get the solutions that we need. [That's right.] So that but I think women, in many cases, because of the social pressure on the mothering myth, if they are childless by choice or by not or they are choosing their career, even though they're a parent, they end up feeling diminished for their ambition and their earning. Women are seeing negatively for those two things, where men are revered. So for to me, when we think about men as competent, carries it emancipates a lot of things, including, let's get real with women's ambition and earning power because it matters.
Kim Meninger
Yes, oh my gosh, you're so right, and so many levels to what you're saying. And I think if men believe that their only option is. Is to be the primary wage earner and to be a, you know, as successful in their careers as possible, they're going to fight like hell to keep the their status and their leadership positions within organizations, which is going to make it that much more challenging for us to reach any kind of gender diversity on a broader scale. And like you said, we get left out of the problem solving and all of the important decisions that are being made, and then men are also left out of the really rewarding family experience that so many of them, and I talked to them who wish that they had more, more time for.
Moe Carrick
Well, and we see like when we look at one of my favorite studies is the Harvard longitudinal study on wellbeing, which has been going on now for 75 years, longest running study of like the conditions for human thriving. And what it says is that what really matters in the end is the quality and Canberra of our relationships. And that study, of course, for many years, was mostly on men, because they were the ones that graduated from Harvard. Now it's we got both all genders represented, but it's a great tragedy to me, and we see right now in the meta world of living in a time when we have a loneliness epidemic, men are suffering disproportionately from many of society's ills, from drug addiction to mental health crisis and high suicide rates for men and boys. So we've got some issues with how men are being supported for their identity of being enough if you're not a high earner and, and unfortunately, I think what happens is that this separation happens at a very young age, where boys get on the track of, I have to be the earner, and women get on the track of, I have to be the mother, with the mothering myth, and now we're off to the races. And if that happened, if you're a woman and you're working, you know, maybe you go to college, or maybe you don't, and you get into a wage that's, you know, a minimum wage as an adult, it takes her clean effort for you to actually uptick your earning power by the time you're 30. Absolutely, right? And so the track happens. And so then, pretty soon he has more earning power. He's trapped in he has to be the earner because she doesn't have earning power, and she's also trapped too, and is then very vulnerable if the marriage doesn't last, right? So I think that there's a whole different mindset, isn't there, around saying, hey, we need to create ways for it to be okay, for women to up their earning power early, yes, and for men to be having healthy relationships early, so that we get longer thriving. And of course, you know my lens is, I'm a consultant and coach, helping leaders make their workplaces fit for human life. And so all of this gets talked about in a healthy workplace for all gender identities and the childless and the people who have families to be able to talk about it, and it's vulnerable.
Kim Meninger
Well, and to that point, are the, where are the organizations that you're I mean, maybe there's a selection bias there. I don't know if you're dealing primarily with the ones that are willing to have the conversation. But what are you seeing in terms of their openness and willingness to even think about things in this way?
Moe Carrick
Well, I think it's interesting because what I'm seeing happening for particularly around this issue of like equity, is that the policies and laws have changed faster than the mindsets. So for example, men are being given paternity leaves, and they can take, you know, there's, there's, there's parity around how we are legally able to take leave and have flexibility, but we see a disproportionate under-utilization for men than we do for women. And so I think that, I think there's that, I don't think there are enough organizations that are helping us shift the mindset. And I also think that there's a lot of work to be done around supporting men. One of my TED Talks is called loving men women's role in healthy-masculinity. I think that a lot of this work around real equity comes with, again, our courageous conversations in our homes as wives partners and mothers about debunking outdated notions of the masculine and feminine because that's how we get ready to have it be more equitable at work.
Kim Meninger
Wow, I truly could talk to you all day. I really, truly such an important and such a timely conversation. And. I made is offline. Talk to you about having you back where we continue it. I love that, but I really just, in the interest of time, I want to give you a chance to tell people. How can people find you if they are really interested, as I am in your work and want to learn more about you?
Moe Carrick
Thank you so much for asking and thanks for having me. I feel the same way, like we could just go on. We could just go on and we need to right, because these, these things matter. We want it to be better for our children than it was for us, you know. And so I think there's just so much there. So thank you for like, having the brave conversations to help people unpack and uncover, like, the wholeness of themselves, you know, so people can find me at my website, which is momentum.com, it's that funny spelling because my name is spelled M-O-E, so it's M-O-E-M-A-N-T-U-M. And I'm also very active on LinkedIn and also on Instagram, just in my name, Mo Carrick. And one of the things, there are two things that I think people might be interested in. One is that we have a free people and culture, health, health check. It's on the resources page of our website, which is for anyone who's a leader or an entrepreneur who wants to assess, how am I doing in making my workplace fit for human life around things like this, how do we navigate flexibility? And the other is, we have a really awesome guide that's actually a guide for gossip, rumor and triangulation. We didn't even talk about that, but that's one of the tensions that comes up, I think, for women at work, because of how we're enculturated to solve conflict, we kind of we learn to do it in a diffuse way. So there that could be an interesting just PDF. If anybody wants that, you can just message me. Send me the guide for gossip, and I'm happy to share that with you as well, but I'd love to engage with your audience on any of those locations. Just let me know that you heard about me through Kim's show.
Kim Meninger
Thank you so much, Moe, and I'll make sure the links are in the show notes as well. And just thank you for doing this work. It's so important, and I really appreciate your sharing it with us.
Moe Carrick
Oh, thank you so much for having me great to talk with you.