SPECIAL EDITION: GETTING TO EQUAL: Eve Rodsky on Achieving Equity and Balance at Home

been more crucial. We have two amazing leaders who are guest hosting these six episodes, Carol and Tastad, Group President North America and Diana Bass, Vice President Global Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, both from PNG, one of the largest consumer goods companies in the world. Together, Caroline and Diana have created an impressive gender equality strategy for PNG, and it's a strategy that's really breaking new ground on these issues

in the private sector. And they'll be joined by incredible guests from all walks of life. Today, Caroline Indiana talked with Eve Rodsky, author of the best selling book fair Play. Fair Play offers a solution to the fact that women continue to bear the brunt of child wearing and responsibilities at home. Caroline and Diana, thanks so much for joining us again today and I'm looking forward to hearing the conversation.

Thanks Kim. Before we start this episode of Getting to Equal, we want to take a moment to acknowledge the recent passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a remarkable woman, a bold champion for equality. Justice Ginsberg dedicated her life to helping everyone get to equal. Today's conversation shows why equality in the home is crucial to women's advancement in the workplace. It's a concept Justice Ginsburg understood well. She and her

late husband, Attorney Martin Ginsburg, embodied home life equality. There's was a partnership of shared responsibilities, and as with most topics in this area, Justice Ginsburg was ahead of her time. And that's only one of the very many reasons she'll be so profoundly missed. Gosh, you're so right, Caroline, what a great example Justice Skinsburg was. She was such an

extraordinary woman. I'm happy today that we're going to be talking with our good friend and ally in this work, Eve Rodsky, who has excellent practical ways of achieving equity and balance at home, and she's always so much fun to talk with. But to start with, I want to ask our listeners a couple of questions. Have you ever thought that there just wasn't enough time in the day to get everything done? Does getting everything done become more

complicated when children enter your family? And at the same time, have you ever wondered how your partner or spouse has time to work out, watch a ball game, or read a book while you're barely able to make it so. Kara and I are fierce advocates of shining a light on the inequalities in our homes and the fight for gender equality. We believe that we will never truly achieve

equality until there is a quality at home. Today, we're going to talk about the intersection of work and home, which has simply been compounded by the global pandemic, How to balance the taskload at home and why that has a profound impact on women's performance at work. We're going to share advice and solutions that men and women can use to free up what is today mostly women's time and allow women to accelerate their careers, accelerating their communities,

or frankly, just take a nap. So, Caroline, we're talking about equal treatment of men and women at home, but it's really a bigger issue, isn't it. It's one that ties to our overall theme of women in leadership. So how do those things connect for you, Diana? It's a it's a really a great question, and it is a much bigger issue than simply who does the dishes or

who helps the kids with their homework. You know, we know that women at all levels of achievement and in however they define what their career and their interests are, they continue to do most of the work in the home, including caring for the home, child rearing, and often taking care of extended family obligations. So these additional responsibilities, while very important, I mean less time available to concentrate on their careers or other interests, especially as compared to their

male colleagues or counterparts. And we often say that, you know, equality at work starts with equality at home, and we need to make room for both men and women to play equal or shared roles at home. Linked to that, we need companies to acknowledge that both men and women should share responsibilities and and in doing that, in courage this to happen through workplace policies that can allow for mothers and fathers to be part of a child's life

and their home home responsibilities. You know, interestingly, when women get into leadership positions, it's been shown that they're more likely to create or sponsor workplace policies or solutions, such as paid parental leave and child care policies for women and men. And not only are things like this the right thing to do, but that parental leave allows men to really understand the challenges of child rearing and what uh women in the home and at workface every day.

It builds empathy, it builds understanding, and it makes room for more equality in the workplace. Yeah, you know, I believe that paid paternity leave is the single most important benefit intervention we can make to accelerate gender equality at home and importantly in the place. We're going to talk about this a lot more with Eve, but here's some research to get us started. First of all, the research tells us that when new fathers take paid parental leave,

mothers return to work more easily. Now that's a little obvious, but more interestingly, female employment is higher in countries where they have paid paternity leave, and more significantly, the earnings gap is lower in those countries. In fact, a study done by the Institute for labor market policy evaluation. It's a European organization. UM found that for every month of paid parental leave a man takes, a woman's salary goes

up almost seven percent. And it's amazing to think that this one policy intervention can and will help equalize the effects of maternity leave and motherhood on the development and the compensation of women in our organizations. It's so important to us that at and G we just announced we're going to be rolling out over the next year a standard eight weeks paid parentally for all of our employees

in all parts of the world. It's a significant intervention for us, and it's significant for men and women as part of our gender equality initiative. But we also know from our own experience with our employees that the coronavirus

has made all of these challenges much more painfully obvious. UM. And in fact, there is this great article in Fortune that Cheryl Sandberg dig back in May where she smartly coined the phrase the double double shift, right, referring to the fact that women who are already doing a double shift, like I'm going to work working all day long, and then I'm having to come home and do everything at home.

The double double shift like takes into consideration what's happened in the pandemic, that there's additional responsibilities of home schooling, of taking care of elder parents, you know, many of the things that you talked about. Yeah, you know that this is exactly true. This pandemic has the potential to wipe out years of progress that we've made in building

up a pipeline of women. A recent survey shows that four percent of women considering quitting their jobs due to family demands created by COVID versus eleven percent of men, and that pressure is even higher for multicultural women of Hispanic women and fIF percent of Black and Asian women. You know, even our own internal survey data at p AND shows that women are more concerned about caretaking than men, and it shows up in one of their top three concerns for more than fifty percent of women and a

little over thirty of men. So this shows up over and over again. Yeah, there's so much to talk about on this topic. Our guest today has even written a book on this and it's a New York Times bestseller. I'm so excited to introduce all of you to Eve rod Sky, the author of fair Play a game changing solution for when you have too much to do and

more life to live. In fair Play, Eve uses her Harvard Law School training and years of organization management experience to create a gamified life management system to help couples rebalance all of the work that it takes to run a home and allow them to reimagine their relationships, their time, and their purpose. So, Eve, I'm so glad to have you here. Thank you for having me. Can you tell our audience what got you started on the fair Play journey? So, yes,

how did this I'll get started? Well, um, yeah, I guess you can't. You can't make this stuff up. But this, this, my whole journey to understanding started with a text my husband sent me after been my second son was born. And that text just said, UM, I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries. So I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries. So I just had been at a toddler Zach at the time as well. Um I had that day that I got this text, I had a diaper bag and a

breast pump on the passenger seat in my car. I had gifts for a newborn baby to return in the back seat of my car. UM, So I had a client contract in my lap where I was marking it up with a pen, and I'm racing, racing to get my older son, Zach at our his toddler transition daycare.

And in all that chaos, which reminds me a lot of what's happening today, UM, where it feels like sort of the space and time continuum is collapsing on a lot of seth Um had the audacity to send me a text saying, UM, I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries. And it hit me so hard that day that I pulled over and if I had to pull over to compose myself because I was crying over this text. UM, you know, it was pretty bad. But what I was

thinking that day was two things. One was blaming myself that, UM, I used to be able to manage employee teams and now I'm in a position and I'm so overwhelmed that I can't even manage a grocery list. But more importantly, I was thinking to myself, how had this happened that UM, I am the default, or as I call in fair play, the she fault for literally every single household and domestic task for my family wasn't supposed to happen to me.

I'm a product of a single mom. I vowed from being her partner in life seven years old, eight years old, helping her with eviction notices and late utility bills, that I would have an equal partner in life. And more importantly, Um, as you said so nicely before, Dana, I'm a Harvard trained attorney, I'm a mediator, and I'm trained to communicate. So I think what I realized was that if this was happening to me, it was probably happening to other women.

And that's the quest that began eight years ago that I'm still on today to understand what it means to be the she fault in our society. You know, I think I think it's such a great story, and this notion of the she fault is something that um, I think many can identify with. It's your story amplifies this whole assumption that caring for home and family is women's work, or or potentially even worse, you know, the perception that women are intrinsically better at caring for home and family

than their male counterparts, neither of which is true. You know, I was at a leadership for him. This was a few years back with two uh pears in in our industry, man and a woman who used to work together. And as the conversation began, you know, they were talking about their early years together when they would do Saturday morning store visits, which was kind of a write of passage

for all of us. And as they chatted, the man said to the woman, you know, I always felt so badly about you having to leave your kids on a Saturday morning. To what she smiled and nodded, and the conversation moved on. I sat there going, wait a minute, didn't he have kids too? Why aren't we talking about that? And there's just this ingrained bias in society and in ourselves that somehow we think women are failing their families when they work outside the home or when they when

they step away from that responsibility. Somehow that gets associated as a as a female circumstance, even in today's world and in the world I've grown up in where my husband has played a much greater role in the caring for our children, but we don't talk about it that way. So we know today that women do two times more unpaid care work than men. The World Economic Forums Gender Report studies more than a hundred and fifty countries, and

in the last report there were zero countries. That's a crazy number, zero countries where men do more unpaid care work than women. And the only way to get it solveding that is by really getting at the systemic issues and and getting at this bias in our society. Even when you were putting together your fair playbook, you you did a lot of your own research. Tell us a little bit about that. As you said before, this is a systemic issue, and I think it requires understanding the

systemic bias. This really comes down to a finding that was so interesting to me, UM when I interviewed five men and women that married the U S census. UM, my core finding of fair Play was that we as a society men, women, UM, and society, we treat and we value men's time as finite like and we guard it like a diamond, and we we value and treat women's time as infinite like sand. And UM. That sounds very esoteric, so let me just break it down for

how that that plays out in the real world. Well, we know that we don't value women's time the same as men's time because we don't pay women the same for the same work. Um, if you're a woman of color, you're getting sixty cents on the dollar to a white man. So we know women's time isn't valued in the workplace. But what I was so surprised by was how much women, especially devalue their own time and the home. And so these were things that I was hearing what I call

toxic time messages. Um, women from all walks of life said things to me like, of course I am the one making the lunch is getting the call from the school because my husband makes more money than me. Well, typically se men make more of money than women because of that pay equity issue we just talked about, So that's gonna be a losing argument for women. Um, I'm I'm more trained than my husband, I have more degrees,

but I chose philanthropy. So does that mean because he chose private equity, that I'm now relegated to doing the unpaid care in my home forever. Other women said to me things like, well, you know that once you become a mother, multitask is our superpower. Where why are differently for care and for multitasking? So for that one I went to one of the top neuroscientists in this country, and Caroline Diana. That was the only other time I cried, actually,

um on this journey. The only other time I really sab was this day that this old crotch of the neuroscientists, when I asked him our women, why are differently from multitasking and care because we've heard, or at least I saw so many articles that sort of implied that. He just looked at me with a blank stare and said, um, imagine, Eve, we men can convince you women, um, that you're better at wiping asses and doing dishes? Why would I want

to change that perception? But other so other than the multitasking, the most other popular message, toxic time message was in the time I would take me to tell him what to do, I might as well do it myself. So for that when I went to Dan Arielli, my good friend, because a behavioral economist, and I said, is it a good argument to say, in the time it takes me to tell him what to do, I should do it myself? And he said that was the worst argument he ever

heard for women. Of course, it makes sense to quote unquote enlist your partner in the wiping of the asses and doing the dishes otherwise, otherwise you're doing it yourself forever at the expense of your finite time. Still, I heard women saying, and that's my husband's bettered focusing on one task of the time, and I can find the time. There's no way to find time, especially when space and time is collapsing on us as it is in a pandemic. And so what this just means is that there's a

different expectation over how women are supposed to use their time. Yeah, you know, in our last episode, we were talking to Justin Baldoni and one of the things that he said was, you know, basically you can't get mad at men about this that you have to in today's world. We have to approach equality with a sense of compassion. And like, I'm listening to your story, going, then who do I get to be mad at? Who am I supposed to be mad at? Because it's it's frustrating. I think a

lot of us are directing it at our partners. Um I called the residentometer a lot of resent as at ten. But when I think is we have to also look at our own our own bias, and part of this work,

really is this idea of UM using our voice. Because I think the thing that hurt me the most in this research UM was even more than understanding how women treated their own time as sand and didn't guard it as diamonds, including myself, where I had some of those toxic time beliefs that I was somehow a multitasking superhero for being able to do dishes and have my own firm and have pinches perfect, um clothes are my kids? You know, all these unrealistic expectations that ultimately lead us

to crash UM. The other thing that made me really sad was that women did admit to anger and rage and sadness UM, but when I asked whether it correlated to using their voice in their home, many women said it did not. It did not correlate, And I think that was a really hard finding for me to accept. You're exactly right, I mean it is I myself have

been guilty of this. And you know, one of the things that Caroline and I have talked a lot about as we talked to women that we work with, you hear things like, UM, I have to hurry up and get home and make dinner, and so I do think women carry a bit of you know, whether it is we carry the same bias that everybody else has about what our responsibility is, or we get something for having the leadership and the accountability at home. Right. But um, I do think that that women have some reframing to

do as well in this whole area. Yeah, I mean, I think that's so right. I think both men and women have to shift their assumptions in terms of, you know, the work at home and raising a family and all of that. I'll give you an example of that. You know, my husband is the best partner I can imagine, certainly the best partner for me when our children were younger. With both of us working, I had a heavier travel

scheduled than he did. And there was one day that I got home early, a miracle, right, a miracle happens you never get home early. And I was so excited because I was there. And so as we finished dinner, I said, who's having a bath, Who's whose homework has to get done? Let's go. I was. I was ready to roll and uh, and my kids stopped and they kind of looked at my husband, and then they looked back at me, and they kind of sat there like I was speaking a completely foreign language, and then looked

at my husband. And then at one point, my husband looked at the kids and he said, in a very loud stage whisper, it's okay, guys, Mom's home. She thinks she's in charge. He said, just just go with it. She's going to be traveling again next week and it'll all be back to normal. And the kids thought this was the funniest thing in the world, and you know, tripped merrily away to go do homework and have a bath because Dad had just um very much put mom

in her place. And and for me, what I hadn't internalized until that moment was that my husband was the one who was managing the day to day. I got other responsibilities. We both played a great role in in bringing up our kids, you know. But he got that day to day responsibility, and I got things that worked on my travel schedule, and that was theater costumes and birthday parties and the big projects and you know, the dreaded college applications. I still think he got the better

deal than I did on that one. But that notion of both of us figuring out our role, figuring it out in a way that worked for us equally, UM took some took some to and frowing from both of us, but very definitely from me. I love that so much. Yeah, you know, one of the concepts that you talk about that I found so interesting was this notion of fixed time and flexible time. So I think it's such an important conversation when you think about what women and men

do at home. Absolutely, typically women are doing work in the home that cannot be said at their own timetable. And we know that now, especially in this pandemic, that UM women are subject to far more interruptions than men are UM, and men often choose the task that they can do UM at times at work for them and so I call that in the book the Daily Grinds. So here the from my survey of a hundred men and women, what is causing the most consternation in the

home right now? Laundry, groceries, meals, home supplies, who's ordering the hand sanitizer and wipes, tiding up, cleaning dishes, and garbage. If you have children, you would add discipline in in screen time, homework which has now become homeschool watching of children, whether it's toddlers or even teenagers. That dirty doesn't are the other tasks that are the hardest, and typically those are the ones Diana, that fall on women because they're not ones that can be done on your own timetable.

You may be able to mow the lawn, who cares of the grasses a little long, But you can't put your child to bed without dinner consistently. Otherwise child Protective Services is going to come to your house. It's just the reality. And so inviting men to the table for those dirty dozen those are where you can really get the most relief. But that requires um not only using your voice, but it requires understanding that Um, this is more than just a list list of loan do not work,

but what does work is systems. And if you can treat your home as your most important organization, if you can start thinking of your home with some respect and rigor, like my aunt Marian's Magen group has more clearly defined expectations in the home. If you don't bring snack twice to that group, you're out. But the whole we're all deciding, as Carol, you're said in your beautiful story, Okay, who's doing what? Who's setting the table for dinner? Who wants

to take the first bath. We're dying in decision fatigue, and if we are not making those decisions, then it's gonna she fault right in this gendered way. So the answer is to treat our home is our most important organization, to treat it with some respect and rigor, and to customize our defaults. You don't walk into your boss's office and say, hey, what should I be doing today? And I'll just wait here to you tell me what to do. It's just not gonna fly with you. I know it. It

It would definitely not fly with you, Caroline. I know that. Um. But what you're doing, and why you're such effective managers, right is you're giving ownership to the people who work around you. You're giving them autonomy. And that's why this doesn't work for men either. Why fair Play became a love letter to men because no man told me that the current system was working for them. The number one thing men tell me they hate about home life is

quote unquote nagging. The number one thing women tell me they hate about home life is that they can't shut their minds off. The only way you do you cure that is by starting to customize your defaults. Were in advance you know who's handling a task in your home from start to finish. We'll be back after this break. I love your system for working this UM Conception Planning and execution. I'd love you to tell everybody about this

because I think it's simple. It's sticky in that it's easy to remember, and it's really easy to learn, uh. And it's a way to have such an important conversation and dialogue and just to get clear on who's gonna do what. So tell us about CPE can Option planning and execution. CPS really the basis of their play. And this is what I mean by it. What I mean is that the domestic conversation so far UM in modern history is all about fifty fifty. And I want to tell you that I think fifty fifty is a very

dangerous equation because it automatically leads to score keeping. What if we change the score keeping mindset and instead adopt an ownership mindset. What I mean is that set when we first started playing fair play, we first started to have these conversations. He genuinely felt that he was in charge of our son's extra picular sports because he was showing up to the little league field on the weekend. And so when we finally sit down and said, thank

you for executing that piece, right, I appreciate you showing up. Um. But here's the behind the scenes task. I'm serving our kids to see what sports they want to play and what sports leagues they want to be in. I am logging onto some crazy portal UM that always locks me out to try to register them on the same team at the same at six am in the morning when the portal opens up. UM. I am ordering cleats or getting cleats from friends who have outgrown their cleats and

going to pick them up. I'm returning that those cleats or though that equipment when it doesn't fit. UM. I'm organizing for three days a week practices for you know, cumulative between both of our kids, UM, and the car pulling to and from those practices. I'm organizing a coach's gift for all of us do once once every couple of times. I'm snack mom, which is I hate that term.

I'm snack parents. UM. Those are the things. I'm researching their birth certificate or trying to make five copies of it, and some I don't have a xerox copy machine in my house. Um, those are the behind the scenes conception and planning tasks that take that take us to that little league field. Those are was required to get us to that little league field, along with sunscreen and maybe a protective helmet so they don't have to use a communal helmet, because of course, my kids will be the

ones that come home with life. Um. And I think it was that understanding that your own to to move to an ownership mindset, that it would require taking over everything the conception, to the planning, to the execution of that entire task. And then if something fell through the cracks, the blame would not be the she fault. It would not come back on me. You would carry through your mistake. You don't bring the equipment you have to go back home. You don't say eve, I can't believe in and bring

me the equipment. You carry through your own mistake. That is really the basis of what CPE is. It's just another way of saying, um, we're here to start looking at the home in a different way into adopting an ownership mindset as opposed to a fifty fifty score keeping mindset. You know, the other thing on this one is that you have to be open to different ways to do things.

My experience with that, before I knew what it was called, was when my kids were older and my husband retired, and at one point my daughter came to me and said, Mom, I'm out of clean underwear. Can you talk to dad. Dad said he's only doing laundry once a week, and like, that's just not going to work. At which point I went to my husband and I said, like, really, our kids, they got to have clean underwear. And he said, no, no, no, my responsibility. The kids need clean underwear. I understand that

I'm going to do laundry once a week. We need a different solution. We're going to buy more underwear. And we did. It was a different solution. It worked beautifully and everybody was happy. But in terms of the CPE, the concept, planning and execution, you've got to be open to different solutions as long as you're clear on what I think you call it the minimum standards. You know, what's that minimum standard of care that you agree on, and then you've got to be willing to let other

stuff go. It doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be done your way. It just has to be done in a way that works. Yes, and I think that that's what so shaming to women, because every article I was seeing up until that point, Caroline was things that said, like, women, you have to lower your standards where men your standards suck and you have to raise your standards. Were Oftentimes it's just ridiculous. It just wrong. It's wrong because this is not a zero sum game.

You know, we're trying to redefine teamwork here. This is not I win and you lose. So the way what you said before is such a beautiful way to think about a minimum standard because guess what I talk about this in fair play. Our legal system, our trillion dollar legal system works on minimum standard. Our medical system they talk a lot about minimum standards of care. This is something that works everywhere else, So why not bring these

concepts into the home. You're exactly right that this idea that there's this shaming around men's standards versus women's standards is completely counterproductive. What I said to Seth is here's

what the CP is for extracurricular sports. The only thing that I care about is that when they show up, if it's possible that they could be wearing a helmet and not the communal helmet and then sets like, sure, of course, you know, I'll get them there on time, which was important for him, and that was something I wasn't doing for the minimum standard of care. I would always get them to their games when they're batting, like

second inning. He said, please, the minimum standard for me is yes, protective gear, but also getting them there on time. And that was not a hard conversation to have. One of the things that Caroline and I have been talking about a great deal is that there is a relationship between everything that you're talking about, like how do you renegotiate things at home so that there's more equity, there's more opportunity for women, for the person who's taking on

the majority of the unpaid care work. So there's a relationship between what you're talking about and then inside a company creating a culture that supports that transition. And um, it's really it's I started this off saying, you know, I'm a real I'm very committed to the concept of paid paternity leave. It's really paid parental leave. What paid paternity leave does is it's it starts to create the expertise across both people. Right, So where is the diaper

bag how do you change a diaper? To your point, we have no diapers, right, like, oh my god, how did that happen? I don't know. I'm not believing you for you know, I could have accountability as well, exactly. But inside the workplace, it also what the man has to go through is what women have to go through. So I now have to go to my boss and say, hey, my family is going to bring a child into you know, into our home, and I'd like to take paid paternity leave that I hope can we talk about is there

a job on the backside of this for me? Um? And I have to think about how my work is going to get done while I'm gone, and then I have to do the reentry into the workplace again. When men go through that cycle, they are infinitely better managers of women who go through that cycle, right it, Carolyn said, it's a big empathy builder. It's an enormous sympathy builder. But the other thing that we are like working on. I was at this conference a couple of years ago.

One of the main speakers is he's a CEO of a very large company, and he is one of the men that is, you know, genuinely out trying to have a voice in you know, in gender equality and what is the role of men. And for the most part it was a really good conversation, but at one point he said, Um, you know, I tell the women who work for me that they can have it all. They just can't have it all at the same time, right, And there's kind of silence, and then they moved on, right,

and um and right. That's so perplexing because I would bet my life on the fact that that is not the coaching that the men in his office are getting at all. Right, So it perpetuates the belief and the bias that everything that's going to happen on the back side of that child coming in is the responsibility of the woman and she's just got to navigate when and how she can have it all, whereas men get offered

it all. And so the you know, there's a lot of work that has to be done inside the workplace to support the exact work that you're talking about that needs to be renegotiated at home. And I think that you know, Dianna, you you brilliantly gave the example of parenting leave and how important that is because it really cements the opportunity for a man to be a dad all the way through a child's life. But there's so many also, there's so many other ways that men and

partners can can do this work. And you know, we spend a lot of time talking about the need for flexibility and flexible policies for start time and work from home, and certainly what we've all experienced during this pandemic is the ability to be flexible and agile and figure out how to cope with it. And what's really important is that we continue to learn that way and continue to set this expectation that we need to give flexibility to

women and two men. So we've we have this initiative called flex at Work that Caroline is talking about, and it's my own little way to, you know, try to make change over the last several years. Every time that every time we've done any sort of um visual around flex at work or um in in the materials that we put out, I'm just like, find me the man and let's put his next flexibility. I want the sure and it's it's really important, it's really important. What I

love about that is the modeling. So what was so beautiful was I got to be with you. UM in Davos that the World Economic Forum, and I had all these male ceo has come up to me, UM and ask, you know, what is the number one thing you recommend? So of course it's always you know, fraternity leave, right, but Um, but modeling is a big part of it.

So if it was a CEO of it was a very high level man that asked me that question, I say, put your put your name as first and emphasize that you are the number one only person to call when your child is sick from the score or needs something from the school, because the modeling of having a male leader be interrupted, because that is where the motherhood penalty

comes from. It comes from this bias that, um, we are women mothers, we are the responsible party for the eruptions, the daily disruptions, which makes us less committed to the workforce. And that's how we're losing five of our wages for every child that we bring into the world, where men increase their wages by six percent for every child they

bring into the world. So just in our peak earning years, when women are having children, all of a sudden we become oftentimes the secondary earners because of these motherhood penalties. So how transformational if you see the leader uh in the middle of a giant presentation where the clients say,

I had to step out, my school is calling. We know that what people see, like what they see in advertising, or what they see on film or what they see on television is enormously important in framing how we all think about this. And so Carol and you are like really at a real center point in terms of what goes on air and are advertising in North America. You want to talk a little bit about that and like why that's important to us? Exactly as you said, this

is all about setting new expectations. So whether the new expectation is woods the school phone when somebody's sick or there's an issue at school, Um, who goes to the doctor's appointment, But setting that expectation creates a new norm. It's a new normal. And one of the things that we're really intentional, very deliberate about doing is really showing men as equal partners in the home in our advertising.

You know, we are the world's largest advertiser. We have a an amazing portfolio of brands, so we need to show men doing laundry, changing diapers, swiffering floors, and we when we do that, we do that in a way that's very natural and just part of the everyday living. We show dads as caregivers, but we're very intentional in assuring that we we have walked away from these outdated stereotypes and we really make room to create this better,

more equal world. I'm proud of so many of our brands for that tied swiffer, Pampers, you know, Pampers, ads have moved their target from moms to parents. It's you know, it's it's wonderful, and it's modern, it's relevant for today's world. It's about it's about diapering parents. It's not about diapering moms, you know, cleaning homes. You used to only see mums doing dishes. It's like, no, we're not going to do

that anymore. We are really going to showcase this new world and this new expectation that men can play an equal role here. Uh. And that's good for everybody, you know. I think the conversation CPE is so important and and when families and couples get it right, it has huge impact. You both know that I got divorced when my kids were very young. I mean they were eight, four and three when Tony and I split up and when we first um. When we first split up, we had um.

Back then, it was a really traditional way of thinking about, you know, split families. Tony had the kids every Wednesday night for dinner and had them every other weekend. And but what that meant for me was that I had them all the time. And I love my children, but I was exhausted. I was literally exhausted because the cpe predominantly fell on me. You know, at some point, Tony and I, for a lot of reasons, for him, for me, for the kids, moved to a week on, week off

model of parenting. I had to let go of everything I believed I was supposed to be as a mother. I mean, we've talked about this all through here, that women have to really reframe their role at home. Um, if you want to get to equality, but I will tell you this, my life changed when we made that decision, and so did Tony's. But for me, it you know, I got to get some sleep. Um. I knew when

I could travel, I when it was my week. I knew that doctor's appointments and parent teacher conferences and sports were my responsibility, but when it was his week, they were his responsibility. And UM, and you know, I say it was life changing, but it also changed the trajectory of my career because my ability to do my job, to plan my weeks, to um, you know, be excellent at what I do at home and excellent at what I do at work. And I wouldn't recommend that, you know,

people get divorced in order to get that. I mean, I think, Eve, what you're laying out for us is a way to navigate the equality at home and equality at work without having to be drastic. UM. But I think it's a really really UM. The intervention of CPE is such an important uh concept for everyone to take on. Even this has been such a great converse station, Like, you're so amazing. You have a podcast coming up this fall. You want to tell us really quickly about it. Oh,

thank you. It's called the fair Play Files. Um. We're basically looking at this idea that the home presents itself really small, but recognizing that, UM, the presenting problem is never the real problem. So really looking at these greater issues, whether they be issues about UM, the three things that seem to prevent people from getting to this place of equity, and those are really boundaries that you know, women believing that they have a permission to be unavailable for things

that they care about. Systems, as we talked about a lot um, the idea of owning the full grocery situation, the CPE, and then also communication, how do we use our voices? So I'm really excited to explore um what I believe is really the key to mental health for women, and that's boundaries, systems, um and communication. So that's what we're gonna be doing in the fall with the podcast. I can't wait to hear it. Thank you so much, Eve, It's been such a delight talking with you today. I

appreciate your being here. So is there one final thought you'd like to leave us with? One final thought? What I'd like for us all to take a moment to think about is do you believe an hour holding your child's hand at the pediatrician's office is just as valuable to society as an hour in the boardroom. If you believe that, then you also believe that all time is created equal, that women and men's time are both diamonds and it should be treated as such. That's amazing, beautiful.

Thank you so much. Eve, It's been delightful talking to you today. What an incredible conversation. I learned so much today listening to Eve, Caroline Indiana. Here are my takeaways. First, equality at work begins with the quality at home. As we've said in other episodes, now is the time to reframe our thinking and debunk old stereotypes. Both men and women can play an equal role at home, and children

and families will be the better for it. Second, to encourage equality at home, consider a system or tool that actually gets you there, such as eaves CPE. It's a simple and effective plan that calls for owning an activity from start to finish, conception, planning, and execution. Finally, we need to carry this message into the workplace. We need policies that treat men and women equally on topics ranging from flexible work for men and women to paid parental

leave that equally supports new moms and new dads. Join us next week, when Caroline and Diana talked to Tina Chen, president and CEO of Times Up, about dealing with harassment at work and creating workplace is that are safe, fair, and dignified. You're Listening to Seneca Women Conversations on Power and Purpose Brought to you by the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio with support from founding partner

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