Hi Rulers! Thanks to everyone who spoke at or attended our event on Thursday. Here’s a recap of some of the takeaways: Women are more likely to work from home. It’s still not clear if that’s an advantage. Thursday, Women Rule held an Exchange meeting — a regular meeting of business executives, thought leaders and advocates. The topic? Setting women up for success in the workplace. The discussion revolved around the benefits and pitfalls facing women who have decided not to make a full return to office. And — spoiler — that decision usually has a lot to do with childcare. Since the pandemic, women are more likely to do their jobs from home — even as men head back into the office. In 2022, 41 percent of female workers spent time working at home compared to 28 percent of male workers — and women in egalitarian heterosexual marriages still do more caregiving and housework than their husbands. So, while the option to work remotely allows women more flexibility, they may be spreading themselves thin, participants said during the panel. They also raised concerns that women who choose to work from home to take on a larger parenting role might miss out on important face-to-face career growth opportunities – and ultimately end up in an (all-too-familiar) workforce that rewards men over women. “We have for too long pushed people up the ladder because they literally had extra time to do their work, because they had extra support at home,” Tami Forman, a workforce development expert and founder of Path Forward, said during the panel. But participants also said that there are ways to safeguard women who work remotely from some of the possible harmful outcomes — like creating a workplace that’s designed to allow people to connect online. “[Virtual mediums are] not a 100 percent replacement for personal interactions,” Heather Crofford, treasurer and vice president of strategy and financial planning at Northrop Grumman, said. “But it comes back to that you have to have a culture that is talking about it, embracing it and being more deliberate about the new mediums and the way that will change how we get to know each other.” Staying home to care for children may become even more necessary for many mothers in September, when the childcare funding that was enacted as part of Congress's pandemic relief packages will expire. Childcare could be disrupted for three million children. “We've got to find a way of extending some of that funding,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said. Reshma Saujani, the founder and CEO of Moms First, a non-profit that advocates for care policies, has been disappointed with the lack of action from Congress around the lapsing funding. “Quite frankly, Congress acted faster having Taylor Swift hearings on Ticketmaster than they have on the childcare cliff, and that is absolutely unacceptable.” Khanna and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) launched a new caucus in May called the Congressional Bipartisan Affordable Childcare Caucus, with the aim of finding some middle ground on childcare. “It should be a policy issue, but in the post-Roe era, it is a political issue,” Mace said. Both Mace and Khanna acknowledged their chances of passing legislation are slim with a bitterly divided Congress. But, in the short term, they said, they have two goals: making sure that the childcare discussion plays a part in the 2024 presidential race and making sure that the issue is getting more attention in general. Mace said she’s even spoken with some GOP presidential candidates before they declared and asked them about their position on child care. “If that is not part of their platform next year, we're gonna have a lot of problems,” she said. “It's gonna be very challenging. It'll be a huge uphill battle.” “We have to make child care and paid leave voting issues in the 2024 election,” Saujani, of MomsFirst, which endorsed the caucus, said. Election aside, the representatives are also just hoping to get some more people in Washington talking about childcare. “In Washington, how the town works, is once someone starts saying something over and over again, then you get legislation,” Khanna said. “So we got ‘infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure’ and we got infrastructure. Now the whole thing is ‘AI, AI, AI.’ We gotta get ‘childcare, childcare, childcare.’ “It's not loud enough.”
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