Anxiety, Depression, and Working Moms in a Pandemic

MORRA AARONS-MELE: I’m Morra Aarons-Mele and this is The Anxious Achiever. We look at stories from business leaders, who’ve dealt with anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges, how they fell down, how they pick themselves up and how they hope workplaces can change.

When I read an interview with today’s guest in Anne Helen Peterson’s excellent newsletter, Culture Study, I just could not stop thinking about it. I told everyone I knew, I shared it on social media, but I simply felt I had to reach out to the article’s author, Jessica Calarco, and try to bring a conversation with her to you because her work is so important, especially right now. Jessica McCrory Calarco is Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, and she’s the author of two books, A Field Guide To Grad School: Uncovering The Hidden Curriculum, and Negotiating Opportunities: How The Middle Class Secures Advantages In Schools. Her research examines inequalities in education and family life. And she is the mother of two young children. Like me, she did her undergraduate education at Brown University. Although unlike me, she graduated Magna cum laude with many honors. My conversation with Jessica Calarco.

Welcome Jessica.

JESSICA CALARCO: Thank you for having me.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: So I want to dive right in. One of the recent studies that you worked on is called Let’s Not Pretend It’s Fun, which personally, on a lighter note I loved because I just thought it was so true. We’re supposed to love parenting, especially younger children, and it’s supposed to be the most joyous time. And oftentimes it’s not. And data, even pre-pandemic data, bear that out. So thank you for being honest, even in your title of your paper.

JESSICA CALARCO: Yeah. And certainly that’s something that’s been true for me as well. I have a six-year-old and a three-year-old and at the very beginning of the pandemic, my very well-meaning extended family members, grandparents would send us things and say, “Oh, here’s some fun craft activities to do with the kids and here’s all these goods.” And at the time it just felt overwhelming. Like now I have to try to find time to do fun craft activities with my kids on top of getting them to do online learning and trying to get my own work done, sort of this pressure to appreciate the extra time with kids. I think it speaks to the larger pressures that women, especially, and mothers, especially, face to be these perfect parents and these sort of intensive mothering norms, and then how completely untenable those are in the wake of the pandemic and the way that it has just completely disrupted a normal life.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Yeah. And I have to admit when people make those suggestions or even if you see it on the internet, I mean, I feel a mix of both sort of rage and anxiety. Rage at the fact that like, “Oh my gosh, aren’t I doing enough?” And anxiety in that my children are going to suffer because I’m not doing craft time with them. How do you feel?

JESSICA CALARCO: Absolutely. I mean, I think certainly for myself too, that mix of fear-and-anxiety-plus-rage. And I think that there has seemed to have been a shift. And certainly the moms that we talked to at the beginning of the pandemic, it was so much about feelings of failure and feelings of anxiety, about how would this pandemic impact their kids, would this affect their development because they were spending too much time watching television or on their iPads, worries about kids not getting enough social interaction or not getting the academic preparation that they needed. And I think over time, I mean, certainly the moms that we talked to were blaming themselves and feeling like failures as workers and as mothers and just struggling under the weight of this extra time.

Over time though, it seems like some of that sort of internalized frustration and anxiety has started to turn outward. And I’m a little bit hopeful in the sense that I think that this is a moment for collective rage and that it’s really only through that sort of externalized collective rage that we have the potential to change anything. If moms are just sitting at home, blaming themselves, feeling like failures, it’s very hard to change anything. But if we’re able to turn that into rage and into recognizing the larger structural forces that are pushing us into these problems, then I think we have a much better chance of actually changing the systems that were in place pre pandemic, and that have made things so difficult for mothers during the pandemic as well.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: What is your research showing about the impact on mothers’ mental health, especially mothers who work outside the home in this pandemic?

JESSICA CALARCO: Sure. So that paper that you mentioned, Let’s Not Pretend It’s Fun. We were surveying and interviewing mothers in April and May asking them about their experiences during the pandemic, asking about the kinds of challenges that they’ve faced. And certainly we found overall that across the board, many of the moms that we talked to were reporting increased stress, increased anxiety, and increased frustrations with their kids during the pandemic. We also found though that those mental health symptoms are especially common among mothers who are spending more time with their kids. And most of those mothers are moms whose child care has been disrupted and who are now working from home.

And so those moms in particular seem to be reporting extremely high levels of… 80% of those who have greatly increased their time with their children report that they’re now experiencing more stress than pre-pandemic. 72% reported more anxiety than pre-pandemic and 56% reported also more frustrations with their kids, if they were experiencing this sort of substantially increased time. And so it tells us that really that extra time, as much as for some mothers – especially for moms who had still had access to childcare, were in some cases enjoying that extra time with their kids and having the time to do those Pinterest craft activities – but the moms who were trying to provide full-time childcare while also being full-time workers just felt the weight of that time in such a burdensome way.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: And you also found that increased time with their kids may have been particularly hard for moms engaging in what you call “intensive work” and what others might call “trying to conform to the ideal worker norm,” that you are a professional superstar. So why would mothers who engage in intensive work feel more stress and anxiety?

JESSICA CALARCO: So we live in this highly capitalistic society where workers, especially professional workers, are told that their value as workers and even as people is dependent on sort of their contributions to their job or their commitment to their job. And so there’s long decades of research showing this, this push toward overwork, especially in sort of professional and elite occupations, with sort of this pressure to devote as much time as possible and as much attention as possible to your job. And that requires often more than 40 hours a week of work. It requires being on call constantly, being willing to go above and beyond what you’re actually paid to do in your job in many cases. And even pre-pandemic research has shown that those kinds of intensive worker norms are challenging for working parents especially for working mothers. And this comes from the fact that women don’t just face intensive worker norms, but also intensive motherhood norms.

This idea that women should be fully devoted to their children, should sacrifice anything for their children, any of their own needs or wants or desires for their children’s wellbeing. And so those two norms come into direct conflict and you have these two norms that are telling mothers that they should be these ideal workers, and then they should also be these ideal parents. And you only have one person and especially when you’re trying to do all that.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: You can’t win. You just can’t win.

JESSICA CALARCO: Exactly, exactly. And especially if you’re trying to do all those things from home at the same time. The ability to simultaneously be the ideal worker and the ideal mother, it’s just almost impossible.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: One of the themes that you really pulled out, which I thought was so interesting was mothers’ sense of failure in all of this, that mothers very personally felt like failure. And of course, that creates anxiety. What does failure feel like for the women that you’ve studied and interviewed?

JESSICA CALARCO: Absolutely. So talking to these moms about their experiences during the pandemic, they said, like, where’s the time going? Like I feel like I’m failing as a parent. I’m not giving the time to my kids, but I also feel like I’m failing at work and I’m not getting the work done. And just feeling like the time is disappearing. And then at the same time, feeling this pressure to enjoy that time at home. And they just felt like I’m not accomplishing anything and I’m not actually even doing a decent job of any of the jobs that I’m supposed to be doing right now. And that feeling of sort of losing time and that feeling of sort of not getting anything done, and that feeling of not being able to provide even the basic level of parenting or the basic level of work that they’re expected to be able to provide, just left these mothers feeling in many cases, so shattered. And turning to food, turning to alcohol, turning to… and in some cases, turning to friends and text messages and funny memes as a way to cope with it.

But in some cases, somewhat more difficult coping behaviors as well. And behaviors that we know are symptomatic of mental health struggles.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Do you think if you interviewed these women’s employers, their employers would report that the mothers aren’t doing as good a job or the kids 20 years from now would say, “Oh, my mom was really a lousy parent during that pandemic?”

JESSICA CALARCO: I would bet, to speak to that, the second part first, I think that I think the kids know that their parents are stressed, and certainly my kids know that I’m stressed.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Oh yeah.

JESSICA CALARCO: And I think that they pick up on our moods and our temperaments and there’s good research to show that as well, that kids do recognize when their parents are facing difficult times. I don’t necessarily think that they would say that their parents are bad parents, but I think that they can definitely tell that something is wrong. And I think that that can also create a challenging cycle within families, where the more stressed out the parents are, the more stressed out the kids can be as well. And that can then make it even more difficult for everyone to cope.

In terms of employers, I suspect that a lot of these moms are actually doing a better job hiding their struggles than the struggles that they actually feel. And so I’m curious to know whether employers are as aware of the challenges that women are facing right now, especially because women may feel reluctant to acknowledge to their employers how difficult the situation is. Certainly some of the moms that we talked to are planning to leave the workforce or take time off. And in that case, employers may be aware, but those who want to keep their jobs or have to keep their jobs because they don’t have any other option, I suspect that many of them are hiding the challenges that they’re facing.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: And just getting up at 5:00 AM to get the work done and fit it in as they can.

JESSICA CALARCO: Exactly. And that’s one of the reasons that I worry a little bit about seeing flexible workplace policies as the only solution right now, because so many of the moms are trying to do in order to be able to provide full-time care for their kids and get their work done. When they have workplace flexibility in place, it often does mean that they’re extending their own days, getting up at 5:00 AM or staying up until midnight to get their work done and not getting enough sleep as a result of it. And then waking up more tired and more stressed and less able to do their work the next day as well.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: You also talked about self-blaming, which I think is probably a sister to feeling like a failure. Do you think that the self-blaming is sort of new to the pandemic or it’s sort of been drawn out? Talk about what women told you about blaming themselves in all aspects of their lives and do they feel responsible for fixing things?

JESSICA CALARCO: Absolutely. And there’s a terrific book called Making Motherhood Work by sociologist Caitlyn Collins. And she did interviews pre-pandemic with mothers in four different countries. And the US was one of them and the other countries had much more developed, robust sort of social welfare programs and safety nets for families. And what she found was that the highly individualistic culture in the US pushed women to blame themselves for the challenges of navigating or combining paid work with parenthood in a way that she didn’t see among mothers in other countries. That there was sort of this distinct difference in the way that US women and US mothers blamed themselves for facing challenges and being able to be a full-time paid worker and also a full-time parent. And so I think kind of extrapolating to the pandemic context, this kind of self-blame for mothers in the US, it’s certainly not new, and it’s not surprising given that sort of culture of individualism, this idea that people in the US should just sort of self-care their way through problems, as opposed to recognizing the deeper structural roots of many of the problems women face. Yeah.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: You even write, and this was actually a quote that I pulled out because as an author of self-help books, I was a little offended, but you also say that we, especially women and people from other systematically marginalized groups are taught to, “Self-help book our way out of structural problems. That only if only we could follow whatever path or plan our problems would go away.” Like, why do you feel that way? And what evidence do you have for that?

JESSICA CALARCO: Sure. I mean, I think there are certainly individual solutions that can help people in terms of putting in place kind of structural or kind of step-by-step plans that people can follow. They can be highly beneficial in terms of giving people a system to follow or a set of structures to put in place in their own lives. But my concern is that when we rely too heavily on those, we ignore the challenges that some people might face in being able to benefit from those solutions, if they don’t have the resources in place to have the stability necessary, to follow a routine for example. The fewer resources that people have in place and the more uncertain their circumstances, the harder it is to develop routines, the harder it is to minimize stress and the harder it is to sort of navigate through changes in your life.

And so I think my concern isn’t that those programs never work out or that self-help books are not helpful for anyone. Certainly, they help many, many people. But I think if we push those as the universal solution, that it ignores the challenges faced by folks who… and especially by people from systematically marginalized groups and including women who might not have the kinds of structures and contexts in place that are needed to be able to benefit from those kinds of plans or programs.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: So it’s almost like these mothers and many of us are facing two kinds of anxiety. I mean, we’re facing this global anxiety of what will next week look like? Will my kid have school in January? The big things that we absolutely have no control over. And then this internally created anxiety of “I’m a bad mother, I’m a bad partner, I’m so angry all the time, my boss hates me, I’m not doing anything right.” Which creates a totally different kind of anxiety.

JESSICA CALARCO: Absolutely. And I think that it is important to stress, too, that the health-related anxieties… and that’s something we look at in some of our other research is sort of how those concerns about the pandemic itself are a source of anxiety for many mothers, especially if they have partners who are not supporting them in those anxieties and who, in some cases, even gaslight mothers and deny the seriousness of the pandemic. That then creates a whole other sort of set of frustrations and anxieties for many mothers as well. So we find, for example, one of the women that we talked to, she’s an ICU nurse. And despite that fact, I mean, she has seen patients die from COVID-19. And despite that, her husband refuses to wear a mask, refuses to take the pandemic seriously, doesn’t think it’s a big deal and thinks society should be reopening as quickly as possible. And that the title of the paper that we talk about her in is called “My Husband Thinks I’m Crazy.”

And that’s a quote from her talking about how her husband sees her fears of the virus and her efforts to keep her family safe. Those couples are not the majority of couples, but there’s a pretty substantial number of them at least in the mothers that we talked to, where mothers are taking the pandemic more seriously than fathers and their partners. And in those kinds of households, what that ends up meaning is that moms are not only in some cases questioning their own fears about the virus, but also having to be the ones, if they decide that they are confident in their fears, that they’re then the ones who have to take the steps of protecting their families, of making sure that things are cleaned, of making sure they have enough protective equipment, of trying to nag their husbands into wearing masks or washing their hands even in some cases. And thinking about the extra burden that that then places on mothers on top of the other work that they’re already doing with childcare and with their own paid work as well.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: I want to talk a little bit about norms and I want to talk about the systemic impact of sort of overwork and the drive to be the ideal worker and the ideal parent and the intensity of it all. And of course there are class and privilege implications in all of this. But one of the things that really why I wanted to talk to you so badly is that I think that a lot of us, especially white people, have woken up the past few years to the mental health impact of systemic bias on marginalized groups. And I’ve done episodes of this show where I’ve talked to experts on black mental health, for example, and who’ve talked about the years and years’ impact and anxiety created just by being black in America. That just the existence of it can create strain and anxiety and depression.

But one of the things that your work touches on and that we’re never taught to consider often are the structural and systemic forces that create anxiety in us because we feel this drive to work so hard and to meet norms that are created by patriarchy. Like did you have an “Aha!” moment about this or what led you to pursue that?

JESSICA CALARCO: That’s a good question. I mean, I think, so as a sociologist, I mean, we’re taught to think about the world, that there’s this concept of the sociological imagination, and it’s this idea that the people’s lives are shaped by… C Wright Mills talks about it as history and biography, which is essentially about this idea that people’s lives are shaped by their social position within society. And then also by the context, kind of the historical moment and physical space in time where they happen to operate and sort of the intersection between those two things. So who you are and where you are essentially is what determines your ability to make choices. It determines the level of power that you have in society, it determines which norms you’re held to, and it determines your agency to some extent in making choices and pushing back against the larger structures that exist around you.

And so being trained as a sociologist, I think it’s somewhat easier to see those larger structural forces, because that’s what so much of the work that we do is focused not on looking at individual… Certainly we do our research often with individual people, but we try to see how those individual people represent the larger forces at play and how their lives are shaped by these larger forces at play, as opposed to just saying, “Did they make a bad choice here?” It’s “How was their choice shaped by forces beyond their control?” So certainly I think coming into the pandemic with an understanding of those structural forces, of things like capitalism and patriarchy and white supremacy and how those forces operate in many cases to create the kinds of norms that we’re held to. I mean, certainly we can think about how the ideal worker norms that we have in the US are created and maintained for the benefit of our capitalistic, patriarchal and white-dominated society in the sense that they push workers to work as hard as possible for as little pay as possible.

And who does that benefit? The people who own, and own shares of, corporations who are overwhelmingly affluent white men. And so we can think about how those interests, capitalistic interests, patriarchal interests, white supremacist interests have an interest in enforcing these kinds of norms that push us all to work as hard as possible. And so what that does… the whole idea of norms is that they enforce compliance and that they push us to continue behaving in ways that often benefit people who enforce those norms and especially people in power who’ve created and maintain those norms for their own benefit. And so it’s easy to judge women or to judge workers who are following these norms to see them as sheep who are just sort of following what everyone else tells them to do.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Like, why are you answering emails at 5:00 a.m.? Why are you so overly responsive? It doesn’t really matter if you reply within 30 minutes, that kind of stuff.

JESSICA CALARCO: Exactly. But essentially the way that norms work is, is that people who break norms are judged for doing so. And we’re also taught to judge ourselves in the sense that we are taught to define that the whole way norms work is that they teach us to define our own selves and our own self-worth by whether or not we’re complying and following the norms that we think everyone around us is following. We feel out of place. I mean, just like if you step into an elevator backwards, you feel awkward and that’s kind of a very minor breach. And you can think about how on a much grander scale, if you feel like everyone else in your workplace is putting in 70 hours a week, and you feel like you’re only putting in 35 because that’s all you can possibly do, or even less than that, then you’re going to feel out of place and awkward and like a failure. And that’s where those feelings of failure come from. It’s feeling like you’re not living up to the standard that is set for everyone else who is like you.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: And that creates anxiety.

JESSICA CALARCO: Exactly. That kind of minor stress that gets amplified if day in and day out, you’re not able to follow the norms that are set for you.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Who benefits from the overly-amazing-on-all-fronts mommy norm? Like our generation, I feel you’re a bit younger than me, it really has the double whammy of having to be super attentive. Moms who cook and really nurture children while being ideal workers. But who benefits from us doing crafts with our kids? I mean, our kids might, I hope they do, but you know what I mean, from a societal perspective?

JESSICA CALARCO: Absolutely. I think these ideal motherhood norms came out of two sets of forces and benefit two sets of forces. They really stemmed in large part from backlash against women’s increased participation in the workforce. We saw sort of the height of women’s workforce participation in the 1990s where we had sort of the highest rates of women’s overall labor force participation that we’ve seen in US history. And that created and sparked what’s often referred to as sort of the Mommy Wars, debates between working mothers and stay at home mothers over who was the better mother, whether it was better for their children, for mothers to be working or to be at home. And in the wake of that, mothers who were stay at home mothers really glorified the work that they were doing and said, no, like the work we are doing at home is valuable.

The work of taking care of children, of raising children is valuable and it’s understandable why they would want to feel valued for the choices that they are making, and to amplify sort of the value that is put into doing educational activities with your kids and doing enrichment activities like craft projects with your kids. And certainly there is value in that for kids’ relationships with their parents and kind of enrichment in their lives. But that also served those kinds of norms of pushing mothers to define good motherhood as spending all of this time with their children. Also arguably served capitalistic and patriarchal interests in the sense that if mothers feel like they have to put their children first, it’s much harder for them to advance in their careers.

And so if you have women increasingly entering the workforce, if they have to then also be providing high levels of care for their children at home, it makes it more difficult for those mothers to compete with men for those top-level positions within corporations or within companies. And so it continues to give men a leg up in the workplace if women are still seen as too devoted to their children to be the ideal workers in the workplace. Exactly. And then even within individual families too, if women are the ones who are the default parent, then that gives men more power to be the primary breadwinners and to have more power that goes with that in the home as well.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: So if you’re a listener and you think, “Well, okay, I get it, I get it. But I like my job. I want to be successful. I want to have money. I like feeling like a good mom and working out so that my body works a certain way, et cetera, et cetera. But I’m also ridden with anxiety right now. And I know it’s not healthy.” Is there like a baby step that you can take to sort of, I don’t even know how to phrase it, almost like have a clear view of how you came to have this model of perfection, and what you could maybe do to loosen the rules. Does that make sense?

JESSICA CALARCO: Yeah. I mean, I think I’m reluctant to say that people should just be stepping back from these norms and that we should put that burden on people because there’s so much power in norms and because there’s so much risk involved in not meeting those norms, in terms of chastisement from friends or family members, or criticism from employers or coworkers or sanctions at work. I’m wary of the possibility of just telling people to step back.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Or actually, sorry, little stupid comments from family members about, “Wow, your kids are certainly watching a lot of TV.”

JESSICA CALARCO: Exactly. And those comments are so harmful and it’s hard to just brush them off because these are people that we care about and we are socialized to care about how other people think of us. And so it’s really hard to just step back from the influence of these powerful norms in society. And so I think my hope is that people would recognize that they’re not the only ones in this situation.

They’re not the only ones who are feeling the pressure of these larger norms and to think about how they can potentially work together, especially if they are people with relative amounts of privilege or resources in our society and how they can band together with others to say, “Can we change the system? Can we change how many hours we’re expected to work?” The official policies and the culture as a whole, and doing that collectively and making those decisions on a larger scale than just the individual has more potential to shift the norms, and also to shift the official policies that keep those norms in place and make it easier for individuals to then step back themselves once the rules are laxer as well.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: So what should someone listening, who’s a boss, or an owner, or founder who has systemic power, what’s something they could do?

JESSICA CALARCO: I mean, I think one key thing that every employer I would argue should be doing right now is finding ways to reduce, recognize and more adequately distribute workloads. This is something that a group of us at my university have been working on making recommendations to the administration on really simple things that would reduce the amount of work that has to get done. For us, for example, one of the things that we recommended was eliminating letters of recommendation for internal fellowships and grants. Faculty members that, at our university, spend a great deal of time writing letters of support for graduate students or for colleagues to get little pots of money, to do research or to get an award and that just takes up so much time. Wouldn’t everyone’s time be better served if we just checked a box saying, “Yes, we testify that this person has our support for this application.”

And so those kinds of like simple reductions in workload have the potential to allow us to keep doing the core work of institutions while at the same time, reducing the oftentimes busy work that so many of us spend a lot of our time on. And then in terms of recognizing the work that gets done, we know that especially women and workers from other systematically marginalized groups, do a great deal of unpaid work, mentoring colleagues, serving on committees, coordinating events. And to the extent that we can compensate workers who do that often unpaid labor, or kind of make it officially part of someone’s job title and hire more workers to do that work instead as a way to sort of recognize the work that’s being done and equitably redistribute and compensate that extra work as well.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: I love that. I love that. You could almost even do sort of an audit of busy work in your organization. One of the things that I took a sort of, like… it was almost an experiment and it sounds silly, but I’m just going to throw it out there as every Wednesday, I’m with our pod and I’m supervising five kids’ remote learning. And so I put an out of office on saying, “I’m teaching kids today. Sorry, I can’t get back to you.” And people really responded to it because it does break a norm. It breaks the norm that you can’t reach me because I’m admitting that I am with kids trying to be a teacher today and I can’t do both.

JESSICA CALARCO: Absolutely. And I think especially if the higher-ups within organizations are willing to take those steps themselves, that that then sets a culture that says that it’s more acceptable for other employees to do so as well. There’s some interesting pre-pandemic research on paternity leave, showing that in organizations where CEOs and CFOs and other top level executives, when they are willing to take paternity leave themselves, other workers within the organization are more likely, other men within the organization are more likely to do so as well. Whereas if the workers at the top, if the owners and the managers at the top of the system say, “No, I’m too important to take paternity leave. My job is too important to take that time off,” and other workers, that sets the norm for the organization as a whole and other men, even below them are less likely to take paternity leave as well. And so I think it shows the importance of people with power and resources within an organization, how much of a role they play in setting those norms for other workers within the organization to then follow.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: It’s a model. Well, I want to try to end this on a little bit of a hopeful note, which is, do you think that the just epic and universally disruptive nature of this pandemic will do anything to help shift some of the ideal worker/ideal parent crippling norms for working mothers?

JESSICA CALARCO: I think it has the potential to. I think the rage that I’ve seen among women and among parents in the wake of this pandemic, if it turns into pressure, especially pressure on legislators and pressure on business leaders, it could lead to a large scale shift, a large scale shift toward more workplace flexibility, a large scale shift toward things like universal accessible, affordable childcare from birth through schooling. To even things like better funding for public education to make sure that mothers don’t have to feel like they have to be constantly volunteering at school or donating money to keep schools going and keep the quality of education high even in normal times.

I think there’s all sorts of ways that we could be putting pressure and channeling this frustration and rage into demanding action from employers and from our government to really provide the safety net and the social infrastructure that our country so desperately needs right now. And that would reduce our reliance on the unpaid work and the underpaid work of women and people of color who do the work of keeping our system running on a day-to-day basis during the pandemic and pre-pandemic as well.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Yes. And also I think would just really help alleviate the self-blame and the pressure that causes so much anxiety, depression, and mental health damage.

JESSICA CALARCO: Absolutely. And I think to the extent that we can recognize those larger structural forces and see the challenges that women and especially women of color are facing right now, not as a product of their lack of coping skills or of their inability to manage challenges, but rather as the direct product of our lack of investment as a society in women’s wellbeing.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: Oh gosh. Well, amen to that. Thank you so much, Jessica.

JESSICA CALARCO: Thank you. It was great to chat with you.

MORRA AARONS-MELE: That’s it for today’s show. Thanks to my producer, Mary Looe, and thanks to Liz Sanchez for her help producing. Thanks to the team at HBR and the studio team who make the audio happen. I’m grateful to our guests for sharing their experiences and their truths, for you, our listeners and for our advertisers. Please send me feedback. You can email anxiousachiever@gmail.com or tweet me @morraam. And if you love the show, tell your friends or subscribe and leave a review.

From HBR presents, this is Morra Aarons-Mele.