Mother's Monday 2024: Poverty

"We want to hire a diverse team"

We hear this all the time. But there is a lot that actually goes into building a truly diverse team, complete with a range of lived experiences and backgrounds. Today I’m unlearning assumptions about poverty. Without doing this work - I’m not confident in my ability to build a safe enough space for folks to work with me.

This Mother's Monday, I learned that 40% of parents are in debt to pay for childcare costs. And 1 in 4 (so 1mil+) birth parents go back to work within 10 days of giving birth because they can’t afford to risk their jobs and/or the income. So today I’m thinking and learning more about poverty, and especially how it intersects with Talent, Team Building and the human stories behind them.

Poverty and how every decision hits differently than ones based in comfortable wealth is a major factor for how most Americans live. If we're hiring "diverse" teams, that means that we're hiring teams of people who are either in poverty themselves, or have significant segments of their families living in poverty that they're supporting on this salary.

»»»»FOLLOW and SUBSCRIBE to Robin Divine's Substack Poverty Sucks.

The purple image below is from this insightful post of how harmful jumping into “problem solving” mode vs. listening/handing over cash is when someone tells you that money is the solution to a problem can cause. (link to full post)

ps - we should always pay to learn from someone's lived experience - esp. if it's tied to oppressive forces that we've personally benefitted from.

»»»»READ Mikki Kendall's book Hood Feminism. It’s very enlightening as to what we'd actually focus our talk tracks on if we cared about poor and Black moms. (pssst - it's not pay transparency... it's food, housing and gun violence). Table of contents at bottom of this article for reference (quiz- did you guess any right?)

»»»»FOLLOW TechEquity Collaborative and their work doing big educational, community building, and policy writing work bridging these dual economies that continue getting farther apart. I’ve personally learned a ton from their book picks, events (both virtual and in person) and been proud to vote for policies that were put together our of their advocacy and research. They are based in theBay Area, but their learnings and years of data points are really valuable for those in cities that seem to be gentrifying with tech $'s since remote work expanded more.

From my seat on a mission to “diversify innovation” as a recruiter and team builder for dynamic startups, I’ve seen this lack of understanding play out in job descriptions that don't include the salary, in short bereavement leave periods, in expense policies and other micro/macro aggressions in many workplaces (esp. in the tech + startup spaces). I’ve made these mistakes often too, and need to keep unlearning and re-learning here.

In addition to the resources above, here are some snippets of conversations with candidates who graciously shared the “why” behind the questions they were asking, that totally shook me out of my financial and whiteness privilege to start unlearning and examining my assumptions around some basic life concepts:

• “I’ve had 3 close family members die from covid-19 in the past 6 months… I can’t work in an office.”

• “My grandmother passed and I wasn’t just grieving, but also sorting and paying for all of the funeral and burial logistics. AND I was in charge of her estate, belongings, and how to carry out her wishes within our family. My company had an unlimited bereavement policy, but after I was out for 5 business days, they sent around a company-wide memo stating that the policy is now 3 days maximum. They didn’t check in on me at all, just sent that.”

  NOTE: Black and brown communities were hit the hardest with respect to casualties of covid-19 for a variety of interlocking reasons. These conversations have stayed with me for years now, and have had me rethinking how I think about both in-person interactions, as well as bereavement and how infrequently I’d found myself apparently “expecting” to have an employee suffer a loss, and also making assumptions about different roles within this process (based on my own experiences).

The team at Mother’s Monday put together this helpful guide for standing in for Mothers in our workplaces and on our teams if you’re reading this and in a leadership capacity!

I’ve tried to close this post out a few times, but decided to just leave this here instead of my own words. Sending love, solidarity (and when I can… CASH) to all of those who are in uncertain economic times.

Table of Contents from the book Hood Feminism: