Rethink what's family friendly

Many jobs can be flexible if you want them to be

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is to rethink what is family friendly. Sometimes jobs
that aren't known for being family friendly can be more

(00:24):
doable than you think. Today's tip, like some others this week,
comes from my book I Know How She Does It,
which came out ten years ago this month. For this book,
I collected time diary data from one thousand and one
days in the lives of women with big careers and
families to see what life really looked like. It turns

(00:47):
out that in the one hundred and sixty eight hours
of a week, there is time to work, have family time, sleep, exercise, read,
or whatever else people choose to do. Lots of women
and men quietly and successfully do have it all anyway.
I collected data from women in all sorts of fields
that have not historically been known for being family friendly, law, medicine, finance, tech, consulting,

(01:15):
you name it, and yet these women often had a
ton of control of their time, and the higher of
the latter they were, the more autonomy they had. They
also earned enough that they could afford the help they
needed to deal with any potential challenges. For instance, a
woman working at a hedge fund told me that despite

(01:36):
her field's reputation, she basically worked market hours plus ninety
minutes on either side. That means that on a normal
day she worked from eight to five thirty. Her time
log showed that she did not work at night, she
did not work on weekends. She got paid a lot.
Not bad, right. Or Consider a physician who told me

(01:59):
she cringed when she heard young and women say things
like I'd like to go to medical school, but I
also want a family. She noted that no one says
I'd like to be a teacher, but I also want
to have a family, using that loaded word but. But
the physician had arranged her life to have way more
flexibility in her practice than her friends who were teachers

(02:20):
turned out to have, and she noted she earned multiple
times what her teacher friends were earning. I am sometimes
asked what the best job is for working mothers, and
I like to say, CEO, I'm kidding, but only sort of.

(02:41):
Because when you run the show, the meeting will happen
when you want it to happen, And if you want
to leave early for something, you will and other people
will figure it out, and if you don't feel like
cooking dinner, well, you can use some of your extra
cash to sort out that problem. That is to say,
the evidence from time diaries is that many jobs that

(03:04):
aren't known for being family friendly can indeed be quite
family friendly if you want them to be. So, don't
rule anything out. If you find something intriguing and you'd
like to try it, you could. If you are offered
a job, you can always negotiate to work however you'd like,

(03:27):
or you can simply work for organizations that focus on results,
especially if you see that other people there tend to
be enjoying full lives as well. They are in on
a little secret. Sometimes things are family friendly that aren't
known for being family friendly. Maybe you can take advantage

(03:47):
of that secret too. In the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of
our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've

(04:08):
got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at
Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a
production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to

(04:30):
your favorite shows.