Fighting the Invisible Barriers that Hold Women Back with The Fix Author Michelle P King

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vanderkam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode one hundred and thirty nine. We will be interviewing Michelle King, who is the author of the book The Fix, which is about fixing the invisible barriers to women's advancement at work. She's also the director of Inclusion at Netflix, so we are really looking forward to talking with her. I'm sitting here doing this introduction with Henry on my lap, So if you hear any baby noises, that's we're making sure he is fed before we do the interview itself. That's what we are at, how we roll around here. So yeah, we're looking forward to that. Yeah, I'm really excited about the topic about the inclusion and all that I think. I told Laura, this is going to be my opportunity to share the happy news that I got a I don't know, it's not a promotion, it's just sort of an opportunity that I'm going to get to serve on this leadership board with in our organization. And the funny part is that until last year there were no women on it. So I was moved to do this after I saw a picture in sort of our annual yearbook with this lovely, official, distinguished looking physician Leadership Council and it was like fifteen people and they were all men, and it was just like no, no, no, yeah, that's the kind of picture like you can't put out publicly anymore like one would think. But I mean obviously people do. There's a law firm a couple of years ago that published their picture of their new partners which had a similar, similar breakdown to your physician leadership group, and I mean they were pilloried on social media of this, So you know, if you are in an organization where that is the case, don't publish that photo, just so you know. So I may have only gotten the position because I'm going to add some diversity to the photo. But that's okay. It's actually been in your area of expertise. I mean of this as well too. Yes, I am the chairperson of the Physician Wellness Committee, which really is all about work life integration and quality of life and all things you guys know I'm extremely passionate about anyway, So I'm excited, and I'm also excited because our guest today works at Netflix, and I love Netflix. Netflix could be a love of the Week and we'll get to that. But you guys have been Netflix subscribers for like a long time, like DVD and the mail subscribers. Yeah, Like we had a program where you could get I think three DVDs at once and then we would switch them out. And I have fond memories of us renting Citizen Kane for at least six months, like it's sat on there, because I'm sure the format really led itself to aspirational selections because they're like, oh, yes, future me will want to watch Citizen Kane, of course, and then I just like remember it sitting there. But luckily we were in we were able to get like three discs at once, so it wasn't holding us back. We just shuffle out the other two and we've continued to be subscribers through its current iteration, which is really cool and that Netflix has kind of reinvented itself along with the Times, and I've heard some interesting stories about how the company did that. So I'm very excited to talk to this person. But I'm still a very happy, happy Netflix subscriber. Well, we are new Netflix subscribers. We were not Netflix subscribers forever, and then Jasper asked for it for Christmas, so he has the account now. I mean, I guess the whole family does, but he's the one who uses it for the most part, and he seems to be a happy customer as well, So there we go. We recently, we've been upgrading our electronics systems. We had to buy a new television because one child may have knocked it over, fortunately not in a way that injured anybody, because it was one of these old TVs that is heavier than they are now. It's good that you have enough children that you can say that and it's like, which child did It's anonymous? Yeah, so that had to be replaced. But I was joking about how fast this replacement happened, like we have things in this house that have not been replaced forever, right, And the TV that had the Xbox on it broke and it was like replaced inside seventy two hours. You know, I thought you were gonna say, like ninety minutes, ninety minutes. Well there was there was hunting for a replacement, like within ninety minutes of it being clear that this thing was broken and not coming back to life. And it may be that another member of this family plays a lot of Fortnite and not the member you may think. Let's just there may be an adult No it's not me, but there is definitely an adult member who shall be named nameless who has been playing that. So yes, the TV was fixed quickly, all right, Well, with that, let's get to our interview. Well, Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Michelle King to Best of both worlds. She is the director of Inclusion at Netflix and the author of the new book The Fix Overcome the Invisible Barriers that are holding women back at work, And of course we all want to overcome those invisible barriers that are holding women back at work. So Michelle, could you talk a little bit about your career journey and your family. Sure. I started out my career. I did my first degree in industrial organizational psychology, which for people who don't know, is basically business psychology, so you look at through the way organizations work, and started out a career in that, and then sort of halfway through, decided that, you know what, I finished my masters, I'm working in an organization and I wanted to be a journalist, so I went back to school and did a postgraduate in journalism and worked as a TV reporter and a lot of people know that, so as a TV report in New Zealand, and you might be able to find some old video footage would be really embarrassing. And after I did that, I then decided that, you know what, I actually do enjoy industrial org sites, so I might go back into it and started working in human resources. And actually communications and human resources are quite similar fields, so it was quite a useful to have both skill sets. And then I did my MBA and was working in a range of different industries, a lot of hard industries, manufacturing oil in gas, you know, quite a range of financial services. So I have quite a sort of strong private sector background, doing a lot of diversity and inclusion work because it's quite integrated into human resources. And then as I started after my second child, so I had my daughter and then I have my son. Something happens when you become a mum and you really start to think about you know, if you're going to spend that much time away from your kids, it needs to be something that not only is worthwhile financially, but also has meaning. And you know, that's one of the things we find in the differentiator between men and women's careers. Both want meaning, but women wanted in a different way. Right. We want to contribute and sort of add back to our communities. And so I found that quite a significant shift for me after my second child, and I ready started to think about the work that I was doing and the impact it was having on women and wanting you to understand the challenges that I've faced in my career. So I started researching even before I'd signed on my PhD, before I'd done anything. You know, I'm a researcher at heart, and so I spent a lot of time trying to understand the issue and decided that that's what I wanted to do. So set out unbarked on my PhD and through a long process, started working at You and Women and I was there for four years and that role was a range of roles from diversity through deleting this big coalition, very very exciting work, and managed to sort of carve out a whole space for myself in the in the gender in organization space. And so then that kind of brought me into Netflix and where I am today. And it was about sort of three quarters the way through my research with my PhD that I realized I needed to share the story with women. So that's what prompted me then to write the book. That's great, and in your book you talk about that a lot of this conversation about women in the workplace has amounted to what you call this woman fixing epidemic, Right, So what do you mean by the woman fixing epidemic? Yeah, so look, I gotta be honest. I when I started this work was back in like twenty ten, and I think was at the peak of lean in. And it's a bit embarrassing now, but I was definitely somebody who sort of brought into the whole lean in school of thought before i'd sort of undertaken this research and when I started the research. I was really looking for, you know, what could I do to fix myself? So what is it that I need to do more of? You know, how could I lean in? What is what is it that I could do to ensure that I advanced at the same rate as my male colleagues. And there's one male colleague in particular who always kind of bugged me because he didn't have a master's degree. He had high after the experience I had. His performance ratings were pretty average, and he just consistently would get the bigger, better jobs. And like, here I was with two mastered degrees, you know, and that postgraduate quaucation. I had like really strong performance ratings, way more years of experience than him, and I just was I was dumbfounded, and so I had to find this answer. So in researching everything, there came this point. I'll never forget it. I'd all the journal articles that have around me on the table, and I remember just looking at them, thinking, oh my god, this is unbelievable. All these articles are telling me how capable women are. And it's all the things that you know, might be hard to believe at first, the things like networking. I mean, that's one of the go tos for women, we don't network enough or speaking up and asserting ourselves when it comes to things like pay. Women do that more than men. They just said, less likely to get you know, the pay increase. And there's a whole bunch of reasons for this, but consistently I would go through it, and then I found these incredible what we call meta analysis or studies of study. That's that you know, on average, women just a better leaders in terms of how we go about leading and managing others and collaborating and solving problems. So across the board. I was sort of like dumbfounded, and then it led me to want to understand, well, if it's not women, what is it. And that's kind of what led to the book, where it became very clear that organizations are just not designed for difference, and they're sort of set up in a way that was really for this sort of outdated nineteen fifties Don Draper type of man, right, you know, and that they're just hardwined for somebody is really the opposite of what women are and how women work. And so that's what creates a lot of challenges for women and anybody that doesn't conform to this outdated ideal. Yeah, and your book you talk about sort of the three different phases of a woman's career. I wonder if you could talk really briefly about what those are as we think about sort of our long term career management. Yeah. So, again, if we think of the Don Draper idea, which is your white, middle class, heterosexual, able bodied mail but importantly someone who's willing to gauge in sort of dominant, aggressive competitive behaviors to get ahead, who's sort of free from dependent care responsibilities. When you think of that being the ideal in workplaces, a typical career for that kind of ideal is really a linear one. Right, you go to work, you assert yourself, you play the political game, and it helps you climb up and you progress up and up the hierarchy to the point at which you're the leader and then everybody follows suit. So that is the model that organizations have really been designed for. But what's interesting is when you look at women's careers, they're fundamentally different from men's. And the reason for that is women have to integrate work life and home life, and also organizations were never really designed for women and women's needs. So what we find is, you know, when women start out in their careers, it's called the idealistic achievement phase, right, And this has been sort of tested by two different researchers and they found their really are these three phases, right, So when women start out, we're really idealistic about what we can achieve and work places. We believe in what I call the meritocracy myth, and they start out thinking, you know, ie, loone can achieve, ielone can push through, ilone can succeed, It'll be enough, right, And because that's what we're promised early on. So we're told in school, you work hard and you will succeed. And that's simply not the case when you hit organizations where you know, women encounter barrier like from the moment they could get into organizations where they have to try and fit this ideal and that ideal standard does not match the standard society halls for how women are meant to behave. So when women assert themselves in the way that Don Droper might to be seen as like a leader, because Don's the ideal for leaders, they're penalized, right, because society says women need to not do that, they need to be meek and mild and you know, very sort of more maternal. So right from the get go, women face a lot of challenges with this, and so that's really the idealistic phase. And then what happens is the more barriers women encounter over the course of their career, they start to sort of realize and become aware of inequality. And this shows up in a myriad of ways, but sort of one of the most amazing statistics on it is that, you know, within the first three years of working life, the the Bain study on this, women's confidence in their ability to succeed to senior level roles sort of more than half. And we see that playing out because when you confront these barriers on a daily basis, you start to question like, actually, maybe I can't get there, and maybe it is me. And so there's this whole internalization of the barriers that happened quite early on in women's careers. And then that comes like a perfect store, which is the endurance phase, which any mother will be nodding, and you know, you don't even have to be a mother to experience this. But what really happens at the midpoint in women's careers is now you know, they've seen enough. They're starting to realize, actually, maybe workplaces don't work for comitting in the same way, and there are these challenges that can't maybe put the words to them, but they're starting to see inequality and inequality moments. And it's at that point that women normally approach sort of what management levels typically. And it's also coincides with the same time that women are about to have children. And it's always say this. You know, it's one thing in organizations to let women advance, but up until the point that they're actually leading is when organizations really struggle with the idea of a sort of women leading in a way that doesn't fit Don Draper. And if you add on being a mother, where it's really evident that women are like deviating from the standard right like literally the opposite of the Don Draper ideal, that creates a lot of challenges for women. And so if women endure this and they get through this phase, the endurance phase, and they survive all the challenges that come with that, and the barriers don't go away, right, they just accumulate throughout your career, you then get to the final stage, which is where most women typically lead later on in their careers. And you know, this is called the contribution phase. And the reason for that's the thing I think makes women so incredible is that the spink going through all of that, right, despite having to go to work and not just studio job, but achievedly impossible by overcoming barrier after barrier. Women then want to contribute back and make it easier for the next generation of women, which is why that later phase is called the contribution phase. Women want that meaning and that opportunity to contribute. So those are the three phases and truly why I think women are remarkable. Yes, but we'll get to more of that in just a minute. We take a quick ad break, all right, So we're back with Michelle Kig who is the author of The Fix. We're talking about the invisible barriers that women face at work, and we just talked through the three phases that women go through. I think we have a lot of our listeners in the endurance phase, who are you know, raising young children, sort of middle management and one of the challenges, I mean, we all know there are all kinds of systemic barriers out there. One of the reasons literature is aimed at individuals, of course, is that it's easier to fix yourself than to fix the world, or at least to try to fix yourself than to fix the world. But we do have a lot of listeners who are in management, so you know, you're not necessarily leading the company, but if you are in middle management, what can people in those roles do to contribute to more equitable organizations. I'm really curious what you are training, say, managers at Netflix, to do to make a more inclusive and you know environment that is friendly to women, of course, but to people with any sort of difference. Yeah. So look, I mean I can't speak to Netflix specifically, but I can speak generally in terms of what I think leaders should do. So on the whole you know, the whole chapter on this, and it's probably I think the most valuable chapter in the whole book because it's really the whole point of writing the book is this call to leaders to lead. Right, So equality for me is this invitation for leaders to lead, And it doesn't matter what level you're at in the organization. Quite frankly, it doesn't even matter if the CEO is brought into it. Every leader within their team can practice equality, right, and it starts with awareness. And so I always laugh because I go to these conferences and I see women sitting there with their no pads and pens, and they're wanting, like the five actions they can take to advance equality. And if it was that simple, you know, we would have solved this a long time ago. But I think the real work and the hard work and the uncomfortable work and a bit people don't like to hear, but it's true. It's the awareness. So how many leaders today in organizations understand how equality works? How many leaders are aware of the fact that there is this embedded ideal and prototype and the challenges that creates for women, and how you know, actually living up to that prototype affords them a certain privilege. Whether you're a white woman, you have your whiteness in common with Don Draper. If you're a white you know, middle class heterosexual of a body mail, you literally look and sit like the prototype, right, and we live up to it by engaging in the behaviors that I talked about, So, you know, those dominant, assertive, aggressive, exclusionary behaviors. And so I think it's it's really important to become aware of. Hey, so what is my identity, How does that fit the prototype, how does that afford me certain privilege? And what challenges does that then create for everybody who doesn't fit? And so I always say every manager and every person who is listening to this doesn't It's not just manager specific, but managers play a key role. And I'll get to wine a minute. Can spend their privilege right, and you spend it by understanding how this particular ideal and the privilege you have creates barriers to other people's advancement. So once you have that awareness of yourself and kind of the privilege you have and what you're bring table and how that creates challenges for others, you then really need to think about, Okay, so how does a show up in my workplace? So you know my book, I've identified seventeen barriers to women's advancement. I talk about how these differ for different women, how they show up, you know, throughout women's careers. Get to know the barriers, know them to name them. So if you're a manager and you're sitting there and you're spotting, you know, a negative gender nor might give an example of my book, when my boss told me to wash the dishes at work right, Like that is an opportunity for a leader to step in and say, hey, no, you know, this is not what we do because you know instantly that this is a barrier, that women encounter it, and so you know what to do. And so I think it's every leaders has a role to play and ensuring that they know what the barriers are so that they can take action in the moment. And I talk about it in terms of managing inequality moments, like there's this idea that an equality is like some you know, ambiguous thing that sets out there. The reality is it's a lived experience, so it shows up every day when you're in your workplace. There are those moments where culture's either made or it's not. And it is every leader's responsibility to call those moments out. And you're only going to know those moments if you learn them. The understanding's key, and then the final bit is rarely making it a practice. So you know, I talk about the importance of dondreprint importance of leaders in the book. Leaders set the standards for what good looks like right through their silence, through what their reward, through what they encourage. They determine what the culture is right. They determine what behaviors get accepted and what behaviors don't. And so it's the inequality employees experience in work places is directly a result of leadership one hundred percent. And so we need leaders to really every day, not only through their own behaviors, but through the behaviors they reward and reinforce except the standard of what good looks like when it comes to inclusion, when it comes to quality, when it comes to a sense of belonging. Yeah, And one of the things I enjoyed reading about in the book is you mentioned, you know, challenging these inequality moments. But there's different ways to challenge these moments. And one of the things you mentioned your husband doing is asking questions. So when he would spot an inequality moment, he would sort of address it in the form of a question. Can you talk a little bit about that. I'm laughing because I always peck on my poor husband in the book, But I mean, he's like, you know, he did not sign on for this feminist journey. He's come a really long way. He is your typical you know, he's basically done right, and so I've taken him on as inequality journey sort of a feminist in training, and it's actually really good for me. It's been really insightful to learn about the barriers of benefits and organizations. Right, It's not something I knew, and you know, it's a whole different story as to how it became aware of that. But in part it's been through like trying to understand my husband's perspective on some of the stuff. And I mean, I think it's a great secret about gender and equalities. It creates challenges for men, right, So it's a great story because ultimately we all serve to benefit from tackling it. So that's sort of the why it's important for men to take action. How men take action is like all of us, we need to be allies. And that means in the moment when these issues happen, you sort of speak up. And one way to speak up that I talk about in the book is asking why. So, for example, my husband was in seat of a meeting with his leader and they were talking about a woman on the team who was looking at, you know, going for sort of a senior leader role and she was struggling with you know, getting put forward for it because she worked on a reduced schedule to try and manage sort of her responsibilities at home and work. And my husband's boss said, you know, I just don't think she she's right for it. You know, she worked on that reduce She can't be serious about her career. She's got that reduced work schedule. I think, you know, we should we should probably consider somebody else for that role. And because my husband's trained, he knew in the moment to simply ask why, So he said, well, well, why do you think that, like sort of what you know, what evidence do we have for that? Why? Why why are you making that assumption? And as they unpacked it, it was just the leader's bus right around that she couldn't do it, and she got promoted and she don't ever know that it was on the back of his advocacy. But I think those small moments like where it plays out, it's sometimes hard to know what to say. And I think when you ask why, you're actually putting the onus on the individual with their biases to sort of check themselves. So it's a really clever way to turn it around. I love that, And because questions are less threatening too. I mean, it's just you know, why why. I'm just asking a question. I'm curious why, you know, let's let's get into this. You know, obviously the question of what people are managing on the home front comes into this too, and that one of the reasons that Don Draper can be the ideal workers. He doesn't have any dependent care responsibility. And that's, you know, something that many women are dealing with. And you talk a little bit about this idea of bread sharing rather than bread winning. I'm curious what that means to you, what it looks and what it looks like for you. I love the idea of you and your husband having whiteboard conversations where you write things on the whiteboard as they come up. So talk a little about what that looks like in your house. You know, it's so tough, like this is a really tough question because I know a lot of women struggle with this. I know that for a lot of women, this is the real reason it's hard to advance the work. It's hard to advance their careers because you know, women are not valued to work in the same way as men. But I think in some households, women's careers are also not valued in the same way as their husbands or partners or you know, whoever they're instead of living with. And so I think that's the challenge is, you know, do we value women's careers, Do we value women's ambitions? Do we value women's dreams? The reality is we don't write. And so there's this process where and house. Because we've been conditioned by society to see men as the breadwinner and value men's careers above everything else, you sort of have to practice a quality at home, right, It sort of begins at home, and it starts with kind of resetting this idea that hey, my dreams, my ambitions, my career is just as valuable as yours, So let's treat it that way, which means kind of sharing out the activities that take away from that, all the activities that require sharing. So it's the whole idea of being a bread sharer rather than seeing there's one breadwinner in a family. And what it means in practice is trying to manage the mental and emotional loads. So studies fine, you know, with mental load is sure to do list strike you mentally, the number of items that you have to think about. And I think there was that Bright Horizon study that shows that any one time, men and women have about one hundred and fifty items on there to do list s rights. It's ridiculous. Like most of us are walking around with a lot of activity, and that can cause a lot of stress. But interestingly, the thing that I talk about in the book that's kind of news, this idea of emotional loads. So not only do women have sort of a dish proportionate number of things to do in terms of managing the household and sort of children's schedules and everything that comes with that, but women also manage their children's emotional needs, and that creates a huge amount of stress. And if I think about it, in my household, my husband is very functional, right, so he's great at like doing functional things and picking up things and managing tasks. He's not so great at managing some of the kids' emotional needs. So I'm the one who spends like half an hourvery night with my daughter and they're talking about her day and hearing about who she might be having an argument with, and you know the challenges that's creating for her. And so you actually have to manage both of these and that requires in my household, at least that we talk about it, so you know, while it might seem that he is a disproportionate number of admin tasks, you can actually complete those in the same half an hour that I'm required to, you know, spend some time with my daughter, and I want to do that. I'm not saying it don't, but I think it's important to alligate that and talk about it because otherwise what happens is you end up carrying an unfair sort of load. The other thing I will say, with the whiteboard, you know, every week we sit down and allocate the task, can we talk about what we're carrying and it's a really eye opening sort of moment because we see how much each of us are doing. I think the important part about it, and something Eve Brodsky talks about in your book fair Play, is that it's really important to own the task end to end. So it's not about the number of tasks necessarily that you have, but whether or not you take accountability from end to end. So you know, for men who might be listening to this, that means, like, you know, if you're taking your plate, you have to put it in the dish washing and not loaded like next to the sink or like as it's the case with my husband where he'll put his washing literally on the washing basket, not in it. And it's just little things like that, you know, just see the task end to it, like complete the task. That's sort of the main piece around the whiteboard. Yeah, that end to end thing is that. I remember that from Eve's book. One example even was forgetting your kid's batting helmet for practice. They have to borrow one, they share it, they get lace. The lace is your problem. But that is so there you go. So we'll just leave that one at that. So, Michelle, we always end our interviews with what we call our love of the Week, where we have our guests say something that's you know, going great for them this week. Sarah and I can share ours first. But since you are at Netflix, we thought we're gonna have to ask you about your favorite stories, so Sarah, I can go first, so we can we can share share that. So my favorite recent Netflix airing is actually the two movies based on Jenny Hans's books. So to all the Boys I've loved before, and then part two is to all the Boys PS, I still love you. Total candy, totally fun to watch, good to snuggle up with your partner in and enjoyed those. Yeah, so we were actually really new to Netflix ourselves. I'm sorry about this, but Stranger Things is on Netflix, right, is that? Yes? Okay, so my son, my middle school age son, is watching. That's what. I'm not entirely sure it's age appropriate, but I will just put that out there. He is loving it. So how about you, Michelle's what's your your big glow fan? Which is Woman Wrestling? It's brilliant. That was a prior love of the week Nan, It's just the best that Scott Griina Davison, who I'm a huge fan of, so I think it's just brilliant. But my latest said I'm watching is The Witcher, so I'm also a Game of Foreigns fan. I don't know if you've seen The Witcher, but it's brilliant. It's like basically a version I suppose of that. It's just so good. So yeah, love it awesome. Well, thank you so much for joinas Michelle. I hope everyone will pick up your book, which is called The Fix, and thank you this month. Thank you all right, and now we have our listener question for the week. Sarah, do you want to do you want to read this one sure, because this is definitely a question for Laura, who has much more personal experience with the answer. This person writes. My question has been percolating in my head for a while now, and hearing Laura's goal of building her speaking engagements urged me to ask. I was wondering if you and Laura could maybe talk about what factors you weigh when you make career decisions. I've been a freelance stage manager for over fifteen years wow. And while I would when I started, I'd take any job that was offered. When I had one child, she'd travel with me, or i'd leave her at home with my husband. If I had a short job, often too, my parents would fly into help. But now I have three children and the idea of going out of town for a six or twelve week stint is daunting, and I haven't done it since my second was nine months old. I often wonder if I've done my career a disservice by turning down gigs that would require lengthy out of town travel. There is very limited work for me where I live, so I currently am working about twenty five to thirty weeks per year. The rest of the time I stay home with the kids, I get to volunteer, go to school events, make dinner, and I enjoy having that time to be with family. But I'm still wondering if I should work more, and how I weigh the value of a gig against being away from home. I'd love to hear how you guys, particularly Laura, make decisions about what work to take on. Is it affected by family events or life logistics? And do you say yes and then figure the home logistics out or do you figure things out before you say yes. Yeah, I mean work travel in general is obviously more challenging if you have a bigger family. But you know, people make it work. I mean there's people she says she has three children. I mean there are people who go on deployments who have three children. So I mean certainly this is something that parents will will make happen if they need to. You know, For me, it's I'm more gone for short since my husband's gone for short sense too. I mean, neither of us really ever goes anywhere more than a week, so that's kind of a different matter, I think than the like six week gigs that her work would be talking about. For me, the question of whether it is worth it is a pretty straightforward one in that I speak professionally to audiences, so like, are they paying my going rate? Like if they are, then great, it's worth it. Like that is the definition of being worth it, you know, other things like conferences that aren't compensated. I've pretty much decided not to do so much anymore, just because there are a lot of conferences in the world. So it's only like the really big ones that I'm kind of worth taking on as as networking opportunities, so I do maybe like one or two at most a year of those. But I would want to put out here that she shouldn't have the story in her mind that parents can't go take a six week, nine week whatever job elsewhere, Like, yes, it will be complicated, but it can be done. So if this is something that you do want to do, I think you should figure out what would make it like worth it to you and both in terms of pay and like maybe a really really awesome show, like your favorite show, the one that got you into theater in the first place, Like maybe that would be a good one to start with. Listening to Henry here making his noise, but yeah, you know, and take that one on as first gig, and then you know, figure out what sort of support you need and are people on board, Like, are your parents willing to help out again? Maybe you could hire a little bit of extra childcare for this time. Is your husband on board with this idea? If he's like, don't assume he'll say no. I mean maybe if you have the conversation, you'll be like, I can't envision that ever happening, in which case that's a deeper conversation than that you guys need to have. But if he doesn't say that, if he'sas like, yeah, actually, I thought, you know, it'd be great if you got back into this because you seem to really be missing it, well that's that's a different matter. And then you guys can just figure out the logistical pieces to make it work. I mean, my guess is you will come home at some point there. Maybe you'll come home, you know, two to three times in this so it's not like you won't be there at all. It's just that you know, you'll need to figure out something for the day to day. But probably you can do it. I mean, if you were gone for say twelve to fifteen weeks, a year, you know, doing two shows away from where you are, you know, that's only twenty five percent of the time, so that's that's not huge. I I feel like I just wanted to weigh in that. I feel like I learned that from Laura, like really looking at the big picture of the year and how many weekends there are, and that has helped me feel better. Now. I don't work away from home at all on the scale that either of you were talking about, but it made me feel better about the times I do go away because I just remember, well, if there's fifty two weekends and even if I'm gone for ten of them, which probably not, that's not that huge of a percentage. So really looking at that big picture and objective numbers, not just sort of your gut instinct or your guilt coming through. Yeah, well this has been best of both worlds. We've been talking with Michelle King, the author of The Fix, who's the directory director of Inclusion at Netflix. We'll be back next week with more on making work in life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time from more on making work and life work together.