Melissa NicholsoN INTRO

MELISSA NICHOLSON: So when Kamala Harris took the stage on The View and announced her policy for Medicare covering in-home health care, I knew in my heart this was a game changer for family caregivers, up to 70% of whom are women.

Introduction

INTRO: Welcome to Job Share Revolution. The show about job sharing—a partnership between two people to bring two minds and skill sets to one full-time position. I’m Melissa Nicholson, former job sharer turned founder of the first U.S. job share company. But it wasn’t long ago that I felt like an utter failure at work and as a new parent. Job sharing was my game-changer. I reclaimed four days a week to fully engage in my life while my capable partner handled everything. Together, we achieved more than I ever could solo. Fast forward to many lessons learned to bring you the training and support I wish I’d had to change lives and the modern-day workplace. Let’s live life and slay work.

Melissa NICHOLSON

MELISSA NICHOLSON: Hey there friend, it’s Mel, your host of Jobshare Revolution podcast. This is going to be a little bit different. It’s been weighing on my mind for an awful long time, and I’ve just gotta get it off my chest and share it with you. Before we get into it all, I want to ask you a favor. Can you please share this episode with a friend? Somebody whose life could be completely changed by job sharing. Somebody who would feel so good knowing they don’t have to wait on systemic change.

But how amazing would it be if systemic change were coming? Especially for caregivers, especially for women. That’s why I wanted to get on here and talk to you today. By now, you probably know more about my job share story and how I stumbled upon job sharing early in my twenties and self-advocated to create my own job share when my daughter was six months old. And really, how it just changed my life in ways that I thought would happen, and so many ways that I couldn’t even have imagined had I not done it myself. Job sharing gave me back my life while allowing me to step into my full potential in my career leveraging that second mind in one job with my job share partner. Your work was just more impactful.

And like most founders, I was solving for the problem that I’d experienced firsthand. Job sharing was incredible, but there were so few and I realized there was a huge gap—It was the training, implementation and support. And that’s what fueled me initially to start Work Muse.

But as I started doing the work, I realized that job sharing was about so much more than helping people find work-life balance. It was a gender equity game changer for the workplace. I know this because I experienced it myself firsthand, able to bypass the Motherhood Penalty altogether, never forced to choose between career and care and a high-impact career that was demanding, time-hungry, intensive, and client-driven. And I was able to do it in three days a week with job sharing without suffering any career penalty whatsoever. In fact, by the end of my first year, I made nearly as much as I had the previous year. I didn’t have to wait on systemic change. I was able to design a way to work that worked for me, for the full person I was.

You know, the U.S. used to be a leader in working women. We came to a dead halt right around 1989 and never made a freaking budge, while other countries jumped leaps and bounds over us with family-friendly policies around paid parental leave, flexible work, accessible affordable health care, child care, and elder care. Here we are in the richest nation on earth, and our lack of movement in any of these areas, coupled with our culture of individualism, has just royally screwed over most American, making life way too hard.

So if you’ve been feeling this way, you are not alone. I’m right there with you, friend. It’s been way too hard on me too.

So when Kamala Harris took the stage on The View and announced her policy for Medicare, covering in-home health care, I knew in my heart this was a game changer for family caregivers, up to 70% of whom are women. Daughters specifically. It’s personal to me. As a sandwich generation, dual caregiver, completely panini’d with caregiving to my children, teens that are still living at home, whose needs are much higher emotionally than they ever have been, and to a parent with Alzheimer’s. I know the personal and financial cost of care for family caregivers. The crushing expense should not be an individual burden on the backs of women and daughters forced to scale back or drop out senior level in their careers or from their own businesses.

When my mom first came into my care, I had to put everything on hold for eight months to sort out her finances, care, living, and medical. You know, it’s women who have to put their lives on hold and there was almost no support, almost no resources. It was impossible to find people to help me.

The average caregiver is a 49-year-old woman working full time with children, living at home who is caring for her single mother. I checked every fricking box, my friend. I was 46 when my mom came into my care. Suddenly, I turned 50 earlier this year. Here are just a few stats that you may or may not know, but you should know, especially if you are a woman. Women caring for their parents lose on average $300,000 in lifetime earnings. Alzheimer’s caregivers like me provide, on average one to four years more care than caregivers caring for someone with another illness. They are also more likely to be providing care for five years or longer. Family and other unpaid caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias provide an estimated 21.9 hours of care per week. I can tell you this is true. Two and a half hours of my day this morning was spent interviewing and meeting new backup caregivers for my mother.

I can’t even tell you how many times over the past several years that I’ve met new backup caregivers interviewed them and given them the rundown, only to have a new backup caregiver several months later. And why is that? It’s because paid caregivers are undervalued and woefully underpaid. My daughter who is a lifeguard makes more than my mother’s caregiver. I’m carefully navigating every single dollar and how it’s spent so that she can get a part-time caregiver in her home, to help her just until noon every day. She’s on her own after that. Luckily, she has a daughter who lives a mile away purposefully down the street, who’s available to her. That impacts my career, and my ability to help more people job share. And it impacts me as a parent and my ability to be fully present for my children.

This last statistic brought me to my knees. 40% of caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients die before the person they are caring for. Forty percent. These statistics come from the Family Caregiver Alliance.

I went into menopause without even knowing that I had hit menopause because I went two years without getting my mammogram and my annual. You might be thinking, God, that’s so irresponsible. How could you do that? Melissa, you’ve got to put your own oxygen mask on. And I’m here to tell you, between back-to-school meetings and all of the things, plus five to six or seven doctor’s visits that can arise at any point in time, or somebody falls and they need an X-ray. You have to be able to drop everything as a family caregiver and be there right away for whatever the need is. It’s a lot like having an infant in one way.

I’m not sharing this for your sympathy. I’m not sharing this so you think, “Oh God, this sounds awful. I’m glad I’m not there.” I’m sharing this because if you’re a woman, you’re likely to experience the same. Women in our careers should not be the sacrificial lambs. It’s sexist.

Without caregiver support in the US. it can feel isolating, deflating, and impossible for family caregivers to hold on to their professional and personal lives, let alone their personal well-being. I couldn’t believe I slept and missed my annual. But it wasn’t surprising at all, given everything on a family caregiver’s plate. My journey has lit a fire in my belly to help women do well caring for aging parents and children. They are up against a wall, with next to no chance of advancing their careers with their new caring responsibilities, job sharing can give family caregivers the time they need to care for their loved ones and the space they need for respite, and to stay present with their children while their talented job share partner takes the baton to handle everything 100%.

So Kamala Harris’s policy for Medicare covering in-home health care is a game changer because you’re very likely, if you are a woman, to become a caregiver to a family member, to have to take that time away from your career, likely at a time when you are at the highest moneymaking and retirement savings of your career. So this policy could change everything. It would be game-changing. Game-changing. So this is a very personal episode because my life has taken a dramatic turn, and I’ve been highly impacted by the lack of any social safety net that we have in the US.

On the other side of this coin, I want to talk about the rising cost of childcare and the childcare crisis that’s happening. During the pandemic, there was support for private childcare centers. This support lapsed on September 29th, 2023. And when it did, the US fell into a childcare funding crisis instantly leaving millions of children in the US without care with license requirements, food, equipment, facilities, professional development, and staff costs. The price of child care far outweighs what the average family can pay.

It breaks my heart. Early childhood educators doing some of the most important work are woefully underpaid. Other countries provide care for both children and the elderly as a human right. This past summer, a staggering study revealed that the cost of child care in all 50 states was more than the cost of two months’ rent. It is a moral and systemic failing of the U.S. as one of the richest countries, not to put care as a top priority

Moms have had it. Our children deserve better and women have had it. We are tired of being the sacrificial lambs whose careers and long-term retirement savings suffer as a result, leaving us in poverty by the time we become elders ourselves. It is time for a dramatic transformation of how we pay for care in the US. And if you have noticed that care has become a more talked about subject during this past election cycle, it’s because care can’t wait. We are fed up. No help came to us during the pandemic. It was just an assumption. Put the care on the backs of women. They can handle it. And women sacrificed their careers. They did everything that was needed. And they came back. They came back. They made a plan. They took care of it. We shouldn’t be taken advantage of because we’re great planners. Good God.

So this work is in large part to a lot of pressure that moms have been putting on the candidates. And I encourage you to keep it up. I want to share some organizations that I’m very thankful for that are doing this work starting with Moms First, Chamber of Mothers, Caring Across Generations, Moms Rising, and the Care Gap by Mother Honestly.

Eve Brodsky’s work with Fair Play is all about equity at home and equal distribution of labor, including the mental load at home. It’s really the other half of the work that we do with Work Muse. Job sharing creates a level playing field at home with the mental load and unpaid labor. Because when people start job sharing at work, they trust their partners. They lean into their strengths. They give up control, so they divide and share the labor. They start doing the same at home with their parenting partners.

And as part of that work, they have coaches that they’ve trained in, the Fair Play Method. And there’s a coach that I’m just so very impressed with. And you can find her on Instagram at the handle @Sheisapaigeturner. So our last two episodes of the podcast have been about supporting you. Whether you have faced a return to work, feel a layoff is coming, or you’ve been laid off. These layoffs, they happen. Paige was recently laid off. So here is Paige Connell’s post from LinkedIn.

She said, “Layoffs happen. We see them in the news all the time. But what we don’t often hear about is the immense pressure they put on working parents, especially when it comes to childcare. One of the toughest decisions parents face after a layoff is whether or not to keep their kids in daycare. People often suggest pulling them out to save money. But it is not that simple. Without childcare, parents can’t focus on job hunting or interviews.

Plus, many spend years on daycare waitlists. If you take your child out, you may not get them back in when you can secure another job. It’s a vicious cycle. You need childcare to get a job, but without a job, affording childcare is a struggle. The catch-22 adds to the already significant stress of unemployment. For parents, it’s not just about finding work again. It’s about balancing financial survival with the long-term needs of their families. Childcare is essential for working families, and the struggle to maintain it during a layoff is a reality too often overlooked. This is why we need to push for the care movement.”

Oh geez, Louise. I know I can just get into it all. I hope that you have found this episode valuable. I hope it’s given you a lot to chew on and think about. My work in advocating for and progressing job sharing has so much to do with gender equity. I am a woman. I am a caregiver. I’m very fortunate to have an incredible co-parenting partner, but we can’t do it all alone on our own folks. We need paid parental leave. We need flexible work policies. We need caregiver support for child care and elder care, and we need it ASAP.

Our families need our incomes. Our families need us, and we need to be able to be part of a society that allows us to be able to do both. Doing valuable work that matters. Okay, I’m getting off my soapbox now.

If you want to dive into these resources that I’ve shared today, go to workmuse.com/21. And if you’re interested in exploring job sharing for yourself, you don’t have to wait for policy change. Although it would be really freaking nice. Congress. You can simply grab our free guide at Work Muse: The Work Muse Guide to Job Sharing: The Step-by-Step Blueprint to Creating a Successful Job Share.

All you have to do is go to Workmuse.com/guide to get it. I would love to hear from you—your thoughts about the care movement, what you would like to see, and what would make an impact in your life. I’d just love to hear from you; how you are navigating it all and what you’re hopeful for.

Until next week, I’m sending you a lot of love, friend. Especially all you caregivers. Bye for now.