Better Life Lab

In this year-end edition of Crisis Conversations, Brigid and members of the Better Life Lab team reflect on the memorable stories, voices, and lessons learned from COVID-19. And we consider a bold new agenda for work-family justice and gender equity in 2021 and beyond.

Host:

Brigid Schulte, Director, Better Life Lab at New America

Guests:

Vicki Shabo, Senior Fellow, Paid Leave Policy and Strategy at Better Life Lab

Roselyn Miller, Policy Analyst, Better Life Lab

Jahdziah St. Julien, Research Associate, Better Life Lab

Emily Hallgren, PhD BLLx Intern, Better Life Lab

Stavroula Pabst, PhD Intern, Better Life Lab

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Is the pandemic is setting women back a generation? Without reliable childcare and schools, an unprecedented number of working mothers have been forced to reduce their hours. Or have had to leave the workforce entirely. As Elizabeth Gedmark, vice president of A Better Balance said recently: “It’s not a question of whether women are set back in the workplace. It’s a question of how far back we will go: 10 years, 15 years, 20 years?”

What needs to change NOW to staunch the hemorrhaging and help women and their families achieve economic stability? And how can we design systems to ensure equity in the future?

Host: Brigid Schulte, Director, Better Life Lab at New America

Guests:

Bryce Covert, Journalist and author, most recently of "The economy could lose a generation of working mothers"

Jessica Calarco, Associate professor of sociology at Indiana University who studies inequalities in family life and education. Her pandemic-related research includes "My husband thinks I’m crazy" and "Let’s not pretend it’s fun"

Kari McCracken, Mother of five who was recently pushed out of the workforce and a career she loved because of a lack of childcare

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The United States is an outlier among developed nations when it comes to supporting working families. Unlike other advanced economies, we offer no national public paid family leave, no publicly supported universal childcare, no requirements that employers offer flexible work and schedule control. Researchers and advocates have long lamented we don’t have these policies because the constituents who need them most – parents – are too stressed and busy to organize and demand them. Has COVID-19 changed that?

Host: Brigid Schulte, Director, Better Life Lab at New America

Guests:

Dasja Reed, Single parent and member of Strolling Thunder 

Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and author most recently of Daycare slots for babies are vanishing. Now their parents can’t work

Justin Ruben, Parent and co-founder of ParentsTogether

Tamara Mose, Sociology professor at Brooklyn College, director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the American Sociological Association and author of Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare and Caribbeans Creating Community

 Jennifer Beall Saxton, Parent, Founder and CEO of Tot Squad

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What role will care and caregiving could play in the 2020 election. Pundits have long insisted that care issues like childcare, elder care and paid and unpaid caregiving are not “bread and butter” economic issues that move voters or swing elections. Will that change in this unprecedented time of COVID-19? Are voters beginning to see that care work is no longer just “women’s work,” but central to a functioning economy? And what difference could that make on Nov. 3?

Host:

Brigid Schulte, Director, Better Life Lab at New America

Guests:

Abby McCloskey, Economist, fellow with the Bipartisan Policy Center, and founder of McCloskey Policy LLC. She has advised multiple presidential campaigns, including those of Howard Schultz, Jeb Bush and Rick Perry. She is a member of the AEI-Brookings Bipartisan working group on paid leave.

Amanda Brown Lierman, Managing Director, Supermajority, a progressive, membership-based organization that trains women to become effective advocates to build an equitable future for all women, and former political and organizing director for the Democratic National Committee.

Roselyn Miller, Better Life Lab policy analyst and author of The Bipartisan Case for Caregiving.

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Kamala Harris just made history as the first woman of color nominated for national office by a major party. So why, after so much time and money have been spent on diversity initiatives, and on women’s leadership conferences and the like, are there still so few women — particularly women of color — in leadership positions in politics, in academia, and in American business?

Join us as women leaders and thinkers share what needs to change to create space for more diverse women leaders, and to enable them to thrive. And why — especially now — that matters so much, for all of us.

Host:

Brigid Schulte, Director, Better Life Lab at New America

Guests:

 Laura Morgan Roberts, Professor of Practice at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and author of Beating the Odds and Race and Leadership: The Black Experience in the Workplace

Ilana Fischer,CEO of Whisps, a growing snack company where 100 percent of the C-suite executives are women

Adrienne Penta. Managing Director at Brown Brothers Harriman and executive director of the Center for Women & Wealth

Toni Irving, Professor of Practice at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and former executive director of Get IN Chicago, where she led a $45 million social impact fund to reduce gun violence

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After the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police sparked a racial justice reckoning, many American organizations put up Black Lives Matter signs. Many put out statements committing to tear down structural racism and build diverse, equitable and inclusive cultures at work. The trick is — how exactly do you do that? These business and organizational leaders have some ideas.

Host:

Brigid Schulte, Director, Better Life Lab at New America

Guests:

Melonie Parker, Chief diversity officer at Google, whose team produced the 2020 Diversity Annual Report

Anselm Beach, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Equity and Inclusion, spearheading Project Inclusion

Sarah Todd, Senior reporter, Quartz and Quartz at Work, author of What an anti-racist workplace looks like

Tim Cynova and Lauren Ruffin, COO and Chief External Relations Officer for Fractured Atlas, a New York City-based nonprofit that helps artists access funding

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In the era of coronavirus, the notion of work-life balance can seem a dream for those who still have work. But the gut-it-out model is bad for workers, virtual and otherwise, and bad for employers.

Host Brigid Schulte talks with behavioral science workers at ideas42 — a nonprofit that seeks to use behavioral science insights to improve lives and drive social change. We'll hear about efforts at ideas42 to research and re-design workplace culture in an innovative pilot project ideas42 is collaborating on with Accion, an international nonprofit working with microfinance programs, We'll explore what role the concept of “scarcity” plays in how we go about our pandemic workdays, and in how we design work in the first place. And we'll consider whether something called "the party principal" could make some of us better, happier virtual workers in the time of COVID-19.

Guests include:

Matthew Darling, Vice President at ideas42 and a teaching fellow at Harvard University

Lynne Curran, Senior Vice President, Human Resources, at Accion

Antonia Violante, a Senior Associate at ideas42

Uyhun Ung,a Senior Associate at ideas42

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One American in five takes care of another family member or loved one. That's more than 53 million family caregivers in America. Members of this vast, largely invisible workforce were already under pressure prior to the coronavirus pandemic. Many were forced to choose between inflexible or unsupportive work environments, and caring for loved ones who need care. These caregivers are not supported by public policy – the emergency paid family leave law Congress passed last spring actually excluded those caring for aging or chronically ill loved ones. And many people, including those in the so-called sandwich generation, never get a break to take care of themselves. As the pandemic rages, and with a coming aging crisis, how do we begin to care for our family caregivers?

Host:Brigid Schulte, Director, Better Life Lab at New America

Guests:

Debbi Simmons Harris, A family caregiver in Minnesota who had to stop working to care for her son, who has required complex medical care for more than two decades.

Jennifer Olsen, DrPH,Executive Director of the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregiving.

Jessica Mills, A family caregiver in Georgia who put off her college plans to care for her mother with dementia.

Karen Lindsey Marshall, J.D. Director, Advocacy & Engagement, National Alliance for Caregiving.

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Schools, summer camps and childcare centers are closed — and many may not reopen until next year. How are parents supposed to manage work, childcare and homeschooling? The childcare crisis is about to become even more acute, as many parents who lost their jobs due to the pandemic have already exhausted the temporary 12-week paid leave Congress passed in early spring. What will it take to build a truly high-quality, universal system that benefits everyone?

Host:

Brigid Schulte, Director, Better Life Lab at New America

Guests:

Caitlyn Collins

Sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis and author of Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving

Renée Boynton-Jarrett

Professor of pediatrics at Boston University, social epidemiologist and the founding director of the Vital Village Community Engagement Network who focuses on the role of early-life adversities as life course social determinants of health. 

Marla Schuchman

Entrepreneur, mother of two, struggling to launch a start-up with no child care.

Alycia Hardy

Policy Analyst on childcare and early education for the Center for Law and Social Policy who wrote about including parent voices in policy solutions and her struggles with remote work for her two children and caring for her nieces while her sister and husband risk their health as essential workers

Adriana Y Garcia

Furloughed salon and social justice worker, and mother of four, living in Portland, Oregon.

Maria Cancian

Dean, McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown who researches the dynamics between public policies and family wellbeing

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Pregnant workers already face discrimination on the job, Before the pandemic struck, the United States was the only advanced nation without a national paid maternity or parental leave policy. Now, pregnant workers have to navigate workplaces that pose real infection risks — often without recourse. Delivering a child in the pandemic has become fraught and isolating. And for many new moms whose low-wage jobs are considered "essential," the emergency paid leave law Congress passed doesn’t even apply. So what can we learn from the pandemic about how to better protect pregnant workers? How can we ensure healthy outcomes for new mothers and children, and, in particular, for new African American mothers and children, whose rates of infant and maternal mortality are alarmingly high?

Host: Brigid Schulte, Director, Better Life Lab at New America

Guests:

Gabrielle Caverl-McNeal, Director of Workforce Development at New Moms

Dina Bakst, Co-founder and co-president of A Better Balance

Khushbu Shah, Interim Editor in Chief, Fuller Project

Rebecca Pontikes, Principal of Pontikes Law LLC

Dr. Ashley Deutsch, Director of Quality and Patient Safety for the Department of Emergency Medicine at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, MA

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