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Female boss has baby, apologises to all the mums she berated

KATHARINE Zaleski once decided not to partner with a woman because of “the endless photos of her small children” on her desk. But all that changed when she became a mother.

Kate Midena
3 min read
March 5, 2015 - 4:29PM
‘Sorry to all the mums I worked with’
‘Sorry to all the mums I worked with’

KATHARINE Zaleski is the president of PowerToFly, an organisation which connects women — particularly mothers — with jobs that can give them more of a work-life balance.

But Ms Zaleski wasn’t always family-friendly. As a manager in her 20s working for the likes of The Huffington Post and The Washington Post, she was unsympathetic to mothers, regularly dismissing them and “silently slandering” their work ethic.

“I secretly rolled my eyes at a mother who couldn’t make it to last minute drinks with me and my team. I questioned her “commitment” even though she arrived two hours earlier to work than me and my hung-over colleagues the next day,” she writes in a brazen essay on Fortune.

“I didn’t disagree when another female editor said we should hurry up and fire another woman before she ‘got pregnant.’

“I scheduled last minute meetings at 4:30pm all of the time. It didn’t dawn on me that parents might need to pick up their kids at daycare.

“I was obsessed with the idea of showing my commitment to the job by staying in the office ‘late’ even though I wouldn’t start working until 10:30am while parents would come in at 8:30am.

“I [met with] Time.com’s then managing editor [to] pitch a partnership idea, but once I took a seat and surveyed the endless photos of her small children spread across the airy space, I decided this editor was too much of a mother to follow up on the idea.”

But Zaleski’s perspective changed dramatically when she started a family of her own. She admits that she “didn’t realise how horrible I’d been until five years later, when I gave birth to a daughter.”

‘Mothers are the people you need on your team’
‘Mothers are the people you need on your team’

Put simply, having a child forced Zaleski to reassess her life and her motivations. She battled the thought that she was worthless now she couldn’t sit in an office for ten hours a day, and the desire to keep working — but just not in the same way.

“I was now a woman with two choices: go back to work like before and never see my baby; or pull back on my hours and give up the career I’d built over the last ten years,” she writes. “When I looked at my little girl, I knew I didn’t want her to feel trapped like me.”

While on maternity leave, Zaleski was approached by Milena Berry, who had an idea “to launch a company that would match women in technical positions they could do from home.” This idea turned into PowerToFly, and now half of their staff are mothers who work from home.

“By enabling women to work from home, women could be valued for their productivity and not time spent sitting in an office or at a bar bonding afterwards,” Zaleski explains.

“Mothers could have a third option that would allow them to either remain in the workforce or be a part of it even from areas with few job options. All the tools exist for remote work — Slack, Jira, Skype, Trello, Google Docs. Research shows remote workers can be more productive.

“I wish I had known five years ago, as a young, childless manager, that mothers are the people you need on your team. There’s a saying that ‘if you want something done then ask a busy person to do it.’ That’s exactly why I like working with mothers now.”

“Empathy is a great teacher,” Zaleski said in an interview about her apology, which garnered worldwide attention, on The Today Show. “We need to end the idea that your work is valued on physically being there.

“One billion women are coming into the workforce in the next ten years. 80 per cent of them are going to be mothers. We see more women dropping out of the workforce now than in the 70s when they started coming in to the workforce. So there’s a clear, clear problem. This [remote working] is just one solution to the problem,” she said.

She also told the show that she was surprised by people’s response to her apology.

“The positive reaction has been amazing. I thought in a way there would be more negativity, but we have so many women, tens of thousands now, that really wanted this kind of message shared,” she said.

“Now I know who I am,” Zaleski concludes in her essay. “I’m a mother who can manage a large team from my home office or on a business trip, raise money, and build a culture for women to succeed.

“I’ve never been more productive, satisfied and excited about my future and my daughter’s. I wish I had recognised this years ago.

“For that, I’m sorry to all the mothers I used to work with.”

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Original URL: https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/babies/female-boss-has-baby-apologises-to-all-the-mums-she-berated/news-story/c23066f5ad764ecfd653107a3400ccc2