The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

These women left the workforce. Here’s what they want in their next jobs.

‘People want to be treated like human beings, not like cogs in the machine’

By
December 18, 2021 at 8:40 a.m. EST
(iStock; Washington Post illustration)

In August, Annie Bishai left her job at a publishing house. After four years in the business, the 28-year-old, who lives in Brooklyn, had already been weighing a career change. But her frustrations increased along with her workload as she was working remotely through the pandemic — tasks for a new boss were mounting, she said, and it seemed like they were all all going unrecognized.

“It felt like much of my work just went into a black hole,” Bishai said. One too many large tasks in addition to the massive reading load — “and not even receiving thanks” or “a word of acknowledgment” — prompted her to leave before securing a new job.

“It made more sense to just get out and give myself time and space to figure out what I’d do next, rather than to try to figure that out while doing the unending and often unrecognized work,” Bishai said. In the meantime, she is getting by with temp and freelance work and money that she was fortunate enough to borrow from her parents, she added.

Now, she’s considering leaving the industry altogether. In her next job, Bishai is looking for “a workload that does not extend into unpaid hours,” with clearly defined boundaries. She is also looking for a different kind of culture, in which she can talk openly with her colleagues and supervisors about what she finds challenging and how to improve, she said.

“Publishing seemed like a lot of faking it to me,” Bishai added.

Women are slowly regaining the jobs they lost. But many of their career paths may change for good.

The United States remains knee deep in “The Great Resignation,” as another 4.2 million Americans quit their jobs in October, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics earlier this month. That follows a record-setting September, in which 4.4 million Americans left their jobs, which also came on the heels of the previous record of 4.3 million workers quitting in August.

Women have been leaving the workforce in disproportionate numbers throughout the pandemic. Since February 2020, 1.3 million mothers between 25 and 54 left the workforce, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s September 2021 Current Population Survey.

The pandemic has pushed U.S. workers to the edges of what they can or will tolerate at jobs that range from less than satisfactory to dismal. In addition, the persistence of the pandemic and frequent coronavirus surges have somewhat normalized a background in which working mothers, in particular, face limited options and increased costs for child care while stable in-person schooling remains elusive.

Remote work was supposed to help moms in the pandemic. Instead, it hurt them the most.

Some who can leave their jobs describe situations that may have been precarious to begin with, and then progressed into being untenable. It’s not just financial or caregiving concerns; many women who left jobs described situations that felt dehumanizing.

“People want to be treated like human beings, not like cogs in the machine,” said Marianne Cooper, a senior research scholar at the VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab at Stanford University.

To retain talent, companies can adjust to this burgeoning labor shortage by embracing flexibility, Cooper said. That goes beyond surface-level conversations.

“Just treating people more humanely in an organization has payoffs, like manageable workloads and a real ability to work flexibly,” she said. That’s not just allowing people to work remotely or on a hybrid schedule, Cooper added, but encouraging as much autonomy as possible and to determine what work hours and patterns are best for individuals and their teams.

“The value has to be on how can we organize work so that people feel that they’re being treated in a supportive and humane way and that fits their needs, as opposed to the way we always organized work, which we know doesn’t work for most people — face time, unmanageable workloads,” she said.

The September jobs report was disappointing for women. Here’s why 3 have decided to leave the workforce.

For some women, being left out of conversations about their employer’s approach to dealing with the pandemic led to the impression that they seemed expendable.

Emergency medicine doctor Arian Nachat, 48, said the pandemic and her former employer drove her to leave a full-time job with benefits as a front line worker and single mother.

“There was just a complete and utter lack of recognition of the fact that we needed flexibility,” she said. At the start of the pandemic, she said, her employer “couldn’t accommodate my being a single physician parent with two kids who had no in-person school.”

The situation she found herself in was untenable, Nachat said, so she took federal and state family leave and benefits under the American Rescue Plan. She took a job as a per diem contractor for the government and moved to San Diego so that she could have a schedule that worked for her.

She’s been interviewing for jobs, and asking specifically about the benefits, which is crucial, she said. In the meantime, she is also trying to get a start-up providing palliative care off the ground.

Quitting was her only option. She is one of 865,000 women to leave the workforce last month.

Another issue causing workplace friction and burnout stems from the invisible labor women managers often take on to support employees, Cooper said. This could be supporting workers and troubleshooting throughout the pandemic, or championing and implementing diversity policies — tasks that often fall on women.

“That work is not being recognized, and women leaders who were doing it were much more likely to say they were burned out and to say that they were considering leaving their company,” Cooper said. “When you’re burned out from working so hard, and you’re not getting recognized or rewarded, and you have a sense that things aren’t really fair, and that the best opportunities aren’t going to the most deserving employees, you’re going to decide that staying is not the best path for you.”

Go back to the office? These women would rather quit.

For Austin-based Marla Erwin, 57, a user experience designer, it was the mandatory return to the office that pushed her into a new job. She felt that this past July was too soon to return to work in-person at the large financial services firm she was working at because of the covid threat. And after working remotely and productively for a year and a half, she said, she was loath to return to a commute that could take up to an hour one way in traffic.

Erwin managed to find a job that is full-time remote for an education tech start-up whose culture she really appreciates, she said. When she first interviewed at the company, 42 Lines, she said, she learned that every Zoom meeting has the video off, so she doesn’t have to be distracted about her appearance or background. And she’s found that if a meeting is scheduled for 10 minutes, it gets done in 10 minutes and doesn’t run over. The company also has guidelines on how to communicate and when a Slack conversation, email or one-one-one conversation may be most productive. After she posted an article in a Slack channel about interruptions, commenting about how powerful women often get interrupted, a policy of pausing for a few seconds to reduce cross talk and interruptions was implemented.

“My boss listened and took the hint and started a company conversation,” Erwin said. After coming from a firm where she felt management came across as “tone deaf,” the inclusivity was something she said she really appreciates.