Resilience Agenda Radio – Talking About Equality In The Home And Strategies of Beating Overwhelm with Brigid Schulte – Ep. 19

Episode 19: Resilience Agenda Radio – The Mental Fitness Podcast

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Coping with the double challenge of fighting for equality at work, and struggling for equality at home often leaves many families at a disadvantage – beyond the typical narrative of the gender gap.

In this episode, we speak with Brigid Schulte a journalist and New York Times Bestselling author who writes and consults on the topic of work-life balance and the phenomena of stress, time, pressure, and burnout.

Listen along as Brigid shares with us the strategies for equalizing the partnership we have at home and beating overwhelm for an overall better and healthier way of living!

What You Will Learn:

  • How to better navigate and equalize the partnership we have at home and at work
  • How to overcome overwhelm in the practical sense
  • How the current cultural view on caregiving pits us against each other, and how to better navigate that and change the narrative for ourselves

Today’s Guest: Brigid Schulte

Brigid Schulte is a New York Bestselling author and journalist who writes and consults on the topic of work-life balance and the phenomena of stress, time, pressure, and burnout.

She had spent nearly two decades working with the illustrious Washington Post and is currently the director of the Better Life Lab at New America, and the author of the book, Overwhelmed; Work, Love, and Play When No One Has The Time which was named one of the notable books of the year by the Washington Post and NPR and won the Virginia Library Association’s literary nonfiction award.

Resources

Website: http://www.brigidschulte.com 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brigid.schulte

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brigidschulte/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrigidSchulte

The Better Life Lab website has a host of research, reports, and articles on work-family justice and gender equity
Better Work:
Brigid's put together a few different Toolkits on better work:
one, along with behavioral scientists - The Better Work Toolkit
another, on creating cultures that don’t tolerate gender-based harassment where all can thrive - #NowWhat: The Sexual Harassment Solutions Toolkit
and another on hybrid, digital & essential work - Designing Equitable & Effective Workplaces for a “Corona-Normal” Future of Work. And here’s a link to her ongoing project on work stress & the future of work, American Karoshi, a podcast, and soon-to-be-released white paper and event
Gender Equity:
They also run a project she mentioned, BLLx, or Better Life Lab Experiments, with nearly 1,000 beta testers, helping couples and families raise awareness and try small experiments to more fairly share the load of housework and caregiving at home: BLLx
She also mentioned her groundbreaking research on Men and Care. You can find it here: Men and Care in the United States
Time:
Brigid's piece that she wrote for The Guardian a few years ago that addresses many of the questions about gender and leisure we talked about:

Quotes by Brigid Schulte

"Part of the reason why people are feeling so overwhelmed is because we've got systems that are really at a disconnect between the reality of their lives."

"Remember how people at the beginning of the pandemic [used to say], Shakespeare wrote all these amazing plays during the pandemic, so you're a loser if you don't do something like that. I think that that goes to the very human notion of comparing ourselves to others and always finding ways to make us fall short."

"You will never have equality at work until you have equality at home."

"It's not that men don't want to be equal at home. We have to help them figure out how to do it. And that means our greedy work can't be even greedier with men, which it is, because our cultural expectations are still that men will be the breadwinners."