Kristin Maschka
Blog Post List
March 15, 2013
I refused to be one of those people who criticized – or even commented too much – on Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead , until I’d read it. Since my week included client crises, a non-profit board meeting, tap and drum lessons and oh yes, recovering from the hour we lost to Daylight Savings Time, I didn’t even pull it up on my iPad until late Thursday. I was pleasantly surprised to find many things I agreed with, yet often in the next paragraph I’d find something very wrong. Here are four of those Right/Wrong pairs. 1. RIGHT: Subconscious bias is at the...
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September 13, 2012
I am so fed up with advice from people telling women that if they just make the right personal choices at the right time in the right order then there is no problem fitting career, marriage, and kids into our lives. That's a load of crap. If anyone had been able to figure out a way to PLAN her way through this mess it would have been me. Let me just take one example of this kind of advice - Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg tells women in commencement addresses and TED talks: " The most important career choice you'll make is who you marry. I have an awesome husband, and we're 50/50...having a...
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July 20, 2012
What’s stunning about the reaction to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article “ Why Women Still Can’t Have it All ” and the news that new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is pregnant is the size and scope of the reaction itself. And I can explain that reaction with a screen shot. Those two tweets. The first one she sent broadcasts competence “I’m a new CEO tomorrow.” And the second one suggests warmth and caring “I’m going to be a mom.” Right next to each other. Tweeted within 7 hours of each other. A woman who embodies competence AND warmth and caring. In our collective cultural subconscious that does not...
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July 20, 2012
When I speak to groups of young women and men, more and more frequently the question I get isn’t “Can I have it all?” it’s “Should I have kids at all?” Young women and couples watch as friends have children, and see new mothers and fathers completely stressed out juggling work and family, marriages unraveling, bank accounts strained, careers derailed, and hobbies and exercise and sleep and friends pushed aside. They wonder if they really want to sign up for that. Couples that already have one small child ask me a different question, “Can we afford to have another child at all?” They know from...
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July 18, 2012
Why do women themselves say that women “Can’t Have it All ?” We say it because, as one mother told me, the phrase resonates as being “Shockingly, earthshakingly true.” We use you “Can’t Have it All” because it reflects a reality, our frustration with the impossible goal of trying to be both June Cleaver and Modern Career Woman at the same time. But we have to stop using that phrase, because the CHA-CHA-CHA mantra is an outdated code for telling a woman she can’t have what men have traditionally had—namely, a challenging, time-consuming, financially rewarding job and a well-cared-for family...
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April 17, 2012
Equal Pay Day and Tax Day both fall on April 17 this year due to a simple calendar coincidence . But the connection between the two and the financial impact for women and especially mothers is no coincidence. April 17, 2012 is the day that symbolizes how far into 2012 a woman has to work to match what the average man made in 2011. The typical wage gap statistic used to illustrate the wage gap is that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns . However, that statistic is misleading. The wage gap has dramatically closed between young men and women who do not have children. Some data...
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March 23, 2012
March is women's history month and I wanted to share a few tidbits of women's history that are even less commonly known than most, and history that is still impacting the lives of women and mothers today. Did you know that… When the Social Security act was adopted in the late 1930's, the Council that recommended its structure wanted to discourage women from employment so they noted that their proposal would " take away the urge [of married women] to go back to work." in addition they argued for lower benefits for widows since a single woman "is used to doing her own housework whereas the...
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February 12, 2012
Today’s mothers and fathers have an uphill battle. Here we are struggling to share parenting and employment in a world that still expects us to be in traditional family roles, and a government institution comes along to tell us that when dad takes care of the kids it’s "babysitting", but when mothers do it, well, it's just what mothers do. A recent post to the Motherlode blog at the New York Times, The Census Bureau Counts Fathers as ‘Childcare’ highlights the practice of the Census Bureau to assume that the mother is always the “designated parent” so if the father is caring for the kids...
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November 21, 2011
1. Don't choose what to do. (Choose what NOT to do - quickly.) My career has been propelled most by the times I started down a path, realized it was not a good fit, and quickly chose NOT to do it anymore. Even when that decision was painful, risky or counter-intuitive. Four months in, I realized I didn’t want to spend seven years getting a Ph.D. and then be a professor. I walked away from a fellowship, and walked into a K12 teaching job that introduced me to strategic planning, education and technology – three areas I found passion and would become constant throughout my career. A job I moved...
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October 25, 2011
Every October, National Work and Family Month gives me flashbacks. When I became pregnant, I was a manager at a high-tech company. My job was at least fifty hours a week and, given a recent merger, would now include coast-to-coast travel. With my husband working crazy hours as a new associate at a law firm, we knew something had to give. No problem, I’m a valued employee. I’ll just propose a part-time schedule for myself. So I did my homework and put together a proposal to go part-time based purely on business reasons. Doing my best to hide my queasy stomach, I flew to the East Coast and met...
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September 27, 2011
Last week reading a few new articles on worklife fit, brought to mind a mantra I have about organizational change. In the battle between well-intentioned policies and the unwritten rules of any workplace, unwritten rules win every time. From the Sloan Center on Aging and Work came this Fact of the Week, Few Employers Provide Training on Workplace Flexibility . Specifically only 21% of employers train managers, and only 17% train workers. In the Wall Street Journal, Penalized for Balancing Work and Family highlighted a new study showing once again that even in companies that offer worklife fit...
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August 25, 2011
A divorced janitor, a 27-year employee and the mother of a seventeen-year old son with the mental capacity of an 18-month old, fails to report for mandatory overtime one Saturday when her son’s caregiver could not work because of a sick child. She calls twice and leaves a message for her manager. She gets fired. As I read about this woman in Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter by Joan Williams , I wondered what this mother’s take would be on Jonah Goldberg’s proclamation in the Los Angeles Times this spring that “Feminism as a ‘movement’ in America is largely played out...
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June 1, 2011
I noticed that a number of people find my blog because they are searching for information on dealing with a gap in their resume due to time out of the workforce to care for family. They land on this post, How to Explain Gap in Resume: Caring for Family or…Coma? , which tells the story of one mother who was advised that she’d be better off telling a prospective employer that she’d been “in a coma” than saying she’d been caring for family and “doing nothing.” I knew THAT wasn’t good advice. While I give some tips in my original post, I decided it was time to go to the experts for more advice...
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May 6, 2011
What an amazing way to celebrate my 10th Mother’s Day! Watching my own story on the big screen! Whew, I’m glad I already have the evening gown I’ll need for the premiere. I bought it for the day my husband and I renewed our vows to celebrate our new commitments to each other as parents. My only complaint about the movie trailer is that there’s too much focus on me. Really it’s an ensemble cast, as it was in real life. Real change, big change, is built upon relationships and the belief that together we can do things none of us could do alone. I’ve found that this applies in spades to mothers...
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April 18, 2011
When our daughter was born, my husband had just started his second year at a law firm and I had just been laid off from a part-time job. We sat down together to decide whether I should look for a new job or not. The question we asked ourselves was, “Could I make enough to pay for childcare?” If not, we reasoned, it would make sense for me to take care of our baby myself. Little did we know that the question had nothing to do with the cost of childcare and everything to do with tax policy. You see, before World War II, the United States used an income tax system of separate filing for married...
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April 12, 2011
Photo by Ian Bratton at Freefoto.com A divorced janitor, a 27-year employee and the mother of a seventeen-year old son with the mental capacity of an 18-month old, fails to report for mandatory overtime one Saturday when her son’s caregiver could not work because of a sick child. She calls twice and leaves a message for her manager. She gets fired. As I read about this woman in Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter by Joan Williams , I wondered what this mother’s take would be on Jonah Goldberg’s recent proclamation in the Los Angeles Times that “Feminism as a ‘movement’...
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April 20, 2010
I'm frustrated by Equal Pay Day. Yes, I think it's important to point out that the wage gap between men and women still exists, and that a significant chunk of it is unexplained - likely sex discrimination. Yes, I think using a day in April to symbolize how far into 2010 a woman has to work to match what the average man made in 2009 is a nifty way to get the message across. But Equal Pay Day targets an outdated version of the problem and obscures one of the primary factors behind the remaining gap. Today, the big wage gap is between mothers and everyone else. Before I had my daughter, I’d...
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