I know most days you have too much on your plate to think about your mental health! As you furiously work through your to-do list, lugging the kids from one appointment to the other, often not getting enough sleep as you make up for work and household chores when everyone is already in bed, you may not even consider how your hectic lifestyle is impacting your mental health.
In many instances, you may not even suspect the constant feeling of overwhelm, along with the clutter in your minds and unexplained irritability, is hiding the shadow of maternal depression…Even when you do suspect it, you often dare not admit it, because, well, who talks about the ugly secret of depression, let alone maternal depression? Isn’t motherhood supposed to just be the wonderful stuff of “perfect” social media Christmas photos? And when you appear to “have it all”, the cute family and the great career, how could you dare complain? Even if the pandemic did a number on you and your sanity. Even if working mothers are leaving the workforce in droves and suffering the most from mental health issues. Even if 68% of working mothers have sought therapy, as opposed to 47% of women without children, due to lack of childcare, the impact of COVID, and general economic instability.
Additionally, as a working mom, your mental health does not only affect you. It also deeply affects your children, as well as the environments you live and work in. As a matter of fact, research shows maternal depression harms children’s mental health more than poverty.
Maternal depression is real, and despite its stigma, does not have to be an ugly secret. It doesn’t have to be a secret at all. As a matter of fact, it’s a well-known fact the COVID-19 pandemic has tripled depression and anxiety symptoms in new moms. From catching up on work at night and on weekends, to being flat-out burnt out, having trouble sleeping, needing more support, moms everywhere have been struggling, in one way or another.
So dear working mom, it’s ok to not be ok. And you’re far from being alone if you’re experiencing it right now, or have ever experienced it. The only secret around maternal depression is the one society desperately attempts to keep in order to fuel a stigma that needs to disappear. Here a few ways that can help you cope, and support other working moms as well:
Acknowledge where you struggle mentally
Let me say this again, it’s ok not to be ok. Normal people are not constantly happy. Life happens, and it can be hard and bring you to your knees. There is no reward for overworked, exhausted, over-committed mom of the year, but there is a heavy mental health cost to pay.
So learn to recognize the signs of anxiety and depression, from poor sleep, to an over-cluttered mind, to nutrition issues, to cite a few. Check in with yourself as often as you can, your body always tells you when something is not quite right.
Seek support
Mental health struggles are not weaknesses. Neither is reaching out to get some help and support. Everyone experiences, to varying degrees and instances, struggles with their mental health. Seeking support could be reaching out to a trusted friend or family member, or seeking professional support in the form of therapy.
Whichever way you choose to seek support, remember asking for help is a sign of strength and bravery. By seeking the help you need, you are also giving others permission to do so, while getting the tools that you can then use to help others.
Make self-care a priority
I know your schedule is already overflowing, however, making your self-care a priority is far from being an indulgence. It’s a necessity to care for yourself in order to be able to remain present, be all of who you are, and be there for others as well. Your children deserve a fulfilled, healthy mom, and that may just be the greatest gift you could give them and yourself.
Do you have the tendency to put others’ needs before your own? Do you feel like in order to gain acceptance, approval and even love from others, you must bend over backwards for them? Or do you overly focus on others more than you do on yourself? If you’ve nodded while reading this, chances are you are or have been a people-pleaser. Chances are also that it has negatively impacted your career…
People-pleasing is often the sign of low self-esteem or high self-doubt, often learned in childhood from difficult relationships with parents and caregivers. It often manifests through an over-eagerness to please, a tendency to over-explain or over-apologize, and an overwhelming sense of guilt or fear at being disliked or disapproved of, among other symptoms. While these characteristics are not exclusive to women, the sad reality is females tend to be socialized as such in many cultures and societies. Although this is slowly changing, little girls have been raised to be compliant, quiet, pleasant, and attuned to others’ needs rather than their own. Research has shown more women (54%) exhibit people-pleasing behavior than men (40%).
As a matter of fact, women who exhibit these so-called selfless, borderline sacrificial, tendencies, tend to be praised and lauded for these. Especially in a society where women are still being torn between motherhood and career, often under the false pretense of “having it all”, the pressure to people-please can be particularly damaging to women, most of all those with perfectionist tendencies and low self-worth.
In a work context, these people-pleasing tendencies can be exacerbated by the professional pressure to fit in, be agreeable and foster a harmonious work atmosphere. Gender stereotypes perpetuated in the professional world also contribute to these expectations being placed more on women than on their male counterparts. Here are some ways it can manifest for working women and what we can do about it:
Over-commitment
If you’ve ever felt over-committed and over-burdened at work, chances are this may be caused by people-pleasing tendencies. Being eager to please also means being afraid to say no, which may cause you to take on more assignments, agree to aggressive deadlines, and attend redundant meetings. Most of it stems from a fear to be rejected, punished or not well-thought of. The result? Burnout, exhaustion, anxiety and even deep-seated resentment and ager at oneself and others.
What to do about it: Practice the art of saying no! For a people-pleaser, this can be the ultimate challenge. However, you can start by affording yourself more time and space to make your decisions, rather than rushing into a premature “yes” that leaves you over-committed and anxious.
Lack of boundaries
If you find yourself working through lunch or late in the evening, not taking breaks, answering emails after-hours consistently, you may need to re-adjust your boundaries. In the post-COVID era where so many of us work from home and the lines between work and personal life have been deeply blurred, this can be challenging. However, it can also be a dangerous trap for working women and moms with serious people-pleasing and perfectionist tendencies.
What to do about it: Practice setting and communicating healthier boundaries. While this can be a scary process for recovering people-pleasers, it can be made easier by starting with small steps. Start by taking back a few minutes of your time spent working during breaks and after-hours, and slowly graduate to having a more fixed and healthier schedule for yourself. Practice communicating your boundaries to your colleagues and co-workers, and sticking to them as much as possible.
Inability to take up space
Last but not least, a hallmark of people-pleasing is the inability to take up space. Whether it’s speaking up, expressing a need, taking a compliment or acknowledging a victory, people-pleasers have a hard time asserting their presence, accomplishments and overall worth. This can manifest through extreme quietness in group settings, fear to ask for opportunities or raises, or not stepping up for positions of leadership.
What to do about it: Start by targeting your mindset. What are the beliefs and thoughts you harbor that make you believe that you ought not to take up space? Identifying these through journaling or therapy can help reverse your internal dialogue, and instead replace negative, disempowering thoughts with empowering ones.
All in all, people-pleasing, which can be exacerbated and more pronounced in working women due to social and behavioral conditioning, can pose significant obstacles to career advancement for women. This is where awareness, conscious healing and support can help working women get mentally healthier, and thriving more in their careers and lives.
Have you suffered from being a people-pleaser at work?
If you’ve ever experienced stress, anxiety or even depression from experiencing or being exposed to gender-based violence or discrimination, you’ve experienced some of the psychological effects of gender inequality. Indeed, gender Inequality is not only bad for business and life in general. In addition to creating significant gaps in our economy, well-being and overall stability as a society, gender inequality is bad for our mental health. More specifically for women’s mental health…
From increased levels of depression, stress and anxiety, to acute instances of post-traumatic stress disorder, its psychological effects are profound, and profoundly widespread. This has only been disproportionately inflated by the COVID-19 pandemic, with women more likely to report poor mental health and well-being, along with increased household responsibilities and caregiving loads.
Women and girls are primarily impacted by gender inequality, which centers around genders’ differences related to status, health, power and employment. The unfair and avoidable nature of these differences is referred to as gender equity, which comes from sexism that is anchored in sex or gender-based discrimination. The latter translates into less pay for equal work, more unpaid work, lack of representation, and lower employment and schooling rates. It can also manifest as discrimination in the workplace and sexual harassment as emphasized by the #metoo movement, all of which severely affect women and girls’ mental health. For instance, a 2016 study by Columbia University revealed women earning less than their male counterparts are 2.4 times more likely to be depressed and 4 times more likely to experience anxiety.
As such, research has shown women tend to suffer more from mental health conditions than their male counterparts, including general anxiety, panic attacks, depression, and eating disorders to cite a few. Despite the impact of biological differences on the incidence of mental health conditions, research has further demonstrated a correlation between discrimination and mental health factors. For instance, trauma, which can cause symptoms such as panic, anxiety, or insomnia, is considered a psychological side effect of sexism. In addition, it appears women tend to suffer more from chronic stress than men, caused by stressors such as domestic and caregiving responsibilities. Poor body image and lower self-esteem also contribute to mental health troubles for women.
Overall, gender inequality and the resulting gender inequity are just bad business for women’s mental health. Awareness of this fact can help women, and society at large, prioritize the importance of mental health. In this sense, an increased focus on ( and the removal of the associated stigma) mental health as one of the measures and solutions to gender inequality, along with preventative and healing measures such as therapy and mental treatments for instance, is no longer optional but absolutely crucial. Talking about, and finding ways to relieve the burden of gender inequality on women, can go a long way towards improving their mental health outcomes.
Do you agree that gender inequality is bad for women?
“Girls, I know it has not been easy as I have tried to navigate the challenges of juggling my career and motherhood. And I fully admit that I did not always get the balance right. But I hope that you have seen that with hard work, determination, and love, it can be done … I love you so much.”
Her simple, yet wisdom-filled words, echoed what so many of us, as working moms, fear: not to get it right, to somehow miss it. “It” being this elusive, perfect balance between motherhood and career, this impossibly taxing juggling act we desperately try to master yet end up feeling guilty about much of the time.
It’s this heavy weight of society’s expectations, coupled with our own, that crushes us as we run from home to the office, and vice-versa. Most of all, it’s the disappointment and guilt at the end of the day, weighing our own often unrealistic plans against what we managed to accomplish, feeling it’s never enough. That there’s never enough time, enough energy, enough patience, enough discipline, to get it all done, and get it all done well…And that somehow that makes us not enough as mothers, as career women, as individuals…This can be a crippling feeling, one that can leave us constantly chasing endless tasks, to-do’s, and even recognition and reassurance…
The reality is, we never had to get the balance between career and motherhood right, for the simple reason it doesn’t exist. We may miss the baby’s first steps because we’re at work. Or we may not make the executive team because we can’t take that international assignment away from our families. There will be moments when being physically present as a mom, means not being there in our careers. And inversely, there will be times when thriving at work means missing out on some bedtimes, milestones and family moments.
Yet, what it also means, is that we get to be the fullest version of ourselves, and shine through all of our facets, skills, talents and abilities. We get to show up as all of who we are for those to whom it matters the most that we fulfill the authentic fullness of who we are, our families, spouses, children and loved ones.
As Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson showed the world, but most importantly her own daughters, the most important is that “with hard work, determination and love, it can be done”. “It” is the journey of a lifetime to overcome the barriers in one’s way, and open closed doors on one’s path so those coming behind us have a better chance. To be all we can be, so we can leave the best and most important legacy to our children, that of being our full selves.
Because, dear working moms, we don’t have to get it right, we have to get it done, and get it done well, fully, authentically, unapologetically…
As you file your taxes every year, have you ever wondered if there is an element of gender bias embedded in the tax policy? As a Certified Public Accountant and a working woman and mom, I’ve often asked myself the question. And if you have, then you definitely are on to something.
While tax policy can certainly contribute to increased gender equality, which translated into significant economic dividends, the reality is, in many countries, it’s actually doing the very opposite, thus fueling the gender tax bias. When it comes to gender tax bias, there exists a distinction between explicit and implicit bias. Explicit gender tax bias occurs when there is a legal link between tax code provisions and gender. Implicit gender tax bias, on the other hand, happens when existing gender inequalities cause tax policy outcomes have different implications for women and men. Even when gender tax biases are not overtly explicit, implicit bias remains embedded in factors such as earned income, property ownership, consumption choices, wealth, along with differences in gendered societal expectations.
According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) first cross-country analysis of 43 G20 countries’ approaches to tax policy in the report entitled “Tax Policy and Gender Equality: A Stocktake of Country Approaches”, gender tax bias is not ignored by governments. As a matter of fact, gender equality appears to be an important factor in the design of tax policy in most countries, with half of these having already passed tax reforms in favor of increased gender equity. Despite these efforts, a high risk of implicit tax bias was noted in most countries. In order to remedy this situation, more detailed gender-differentiated data is necessary. Unfortunately, much of this data is only available and accessible around income and labor participation, and more scarce around property ownership, wealth and consumption choices. As such, this scarcity of available data makes it more challenging to resolve these issues.
Watch this short YouTube video on the Gender Tax Bias:
One example of the gender tax bias, especially in our COVID-19 times, targets part-time workers, which are largely women. According to the OECD’s “Taxation of Part-Time Work in the OECD” working paper, women are more likely to hold part-time positions than men, at a rate of almost three to one. Along with this, there has been a decrease in the earnings level of part-time workers relative to full-time workers, as well as variations between part-time and full-time workers’ taxation attributable to said differences in earnings levels.
Another more implicit example has to do with the availability of deductions for unreimbursed work expenses incurred by men, more so than those incurred by women, including childcare and transportation costs for instance. Another example yet is embedded in consumption taxes such as the Value-added tax (VAT) in many developing countries, which end up raising the cost of services such as household services, thus disincentivizing women from working outside the home. Lastly, an unfair bias also exists in corporate tax incentives that do not favor sectors such as hospitality, the garment industry, micro-entrepreneurship, where women predominate. While these constitute a few instances of the gender tax bias, here are many more examples across countries and economies.
Overall, the onus is on governments, but also us all, to consider and implement measures in which tax policies and practices better promote gender equality. These measures could and should reduce both explicit and implicit gender tax bias, while supporting, prioritizing and giving tax access to women and households impacted by the COVID-19 crisis.
