“Helping women close the gender leadership gap” – with Bossed Up Founder and CEO, Emilie Aries

Dr. Fox: Welcome to today’s episode of Healthful Woman, a podcast designed to explore topics in women’s health at all stages of life. I’m your host, Dr. Nathan Fox, an OB-GYN and maternal fetal medicine specialist practicing in New York City. At Healthful Woman, I speak with leaders in the field to help you learn more about women’s health, pregnancy, and wellness. Emilie Aries, welcome to the podcast. As I told you offline, the tables have turned. You interviewed me and now I get to interview you.

Emilie: I’m excited. Thanks so much for having me, Dr. Fox.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. What’s it like sitting in the hot seat?

Emilie: It’s delightful. Honestly, I think it’s in some ways, easier. We’ll see. We’ll see how it goes.

Dr. Fox: I guess I’ll ask you when we’re done. I appreciate you doing this. So you are the founder and the CEO of Bossed Up and you are the host of the “Bossed Up Podcast.” We got connected, I guess, when you invited me to be a guest on your podcast, which was terrific. Great experience. A lot of fun. And I got to learn about you guys and what you do and which I thought is pretty cool. So I said, “You know what? I think my listeners would like to hear about you, who you are and what you’re doing over there.” So cool. Thanks for taking the time.

Emilie: Absolutely. And thank you. And congrats again, on the new book, Emily Oster, such a great conversation. So I really…our listeners loved hearing from you.

Dr. Fox: Oh, that’s sweet. I appreciate it. Whether it’s true or not, I appreciate you saying it’s all my listeners. So that’s cool. I’ll take it.

Emilie: It’s true.

Dr. Fox: So I guess I just wanted to start just, you know, so my listeners have a sense, like, what’s going on today. So can you explain what is Bossed Up?

Emilie: Sure. So we are a global community that I started about 11 and-a-half, almost 12 years ago now, focused on closing the gender leadership gap. And so, we do that by working with individual women and organizations to address the kind of common challenges and barriers that women face in the workplace, particularly as they rise in the ranks of leadership and particularly in male-dominated industries, which, if you think too long about that, is pretty much every industry.

Dr. Fox: Not mine.

Emilie: Yeah, that’s true. Actually, you’re right. Actually, that’s a good point.

Dr. Fox: Not mine.

Emilie: Once you look at like, management in hospitals, you know, if you draw it beyond the OB-GYN.

Dr. Fox: Yeah, in medicine. No. And you’re correct in medicine overall. OB-GYN and maternal [inaudible 00:02:31] center is one of the few unique fields that is currently predominantly women, which is cool.

Emilie: That’s true.

Dr. Fox: You know, I’m finding my place in there and that’s all good. I’m pleased.

Emilie: Well, that’s probably what makes you such an approachable person for women to talk to, right? Because you get it. You’re around a lot of brilliant women all the time. So you’re the exception, not the rule. You know, even industries like teaching, which are dominated by women teachers, the moment you look at school administration, you know, gender dynamics, things look very male dominated at the top, same thing with higher ed. So we really focus on, okay, what happens when women transcend into leadership positions. And that’s where things get really complicated.

Dr. Fox: How did you get into this line of work?

Emilie: Yeah. So I feel like I created the community that I desperately needed myself. So when I was just starting out, I graduated in 2009 with a political science degree and went off to sort of save the world, joined the Obama campaign, became the nation’s youngest state director in the little, but critical state of Rhode Island, where I helped usher in big policy reforms as part of the president’s agenda for Organizing for America, helping pass things like the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, as it’s popularly known. And I had the opportunity to really work on the ground as a grassroots organizer and advocate, which, I still think I’m a grassroots organizer and advocate in so many ways. That took me to Washington, DC, where I became a senior digital political strategist by the age of 25.

Dr. Fox: Wow, that sounds like you’re a spy.

Emilie: It does. I know. But it was nothing more than really spending millions of dollars on Facebook ads, and it burned me out.

Dr. Fox: Digital strategy. Facebook.

Emilie: Yeah. I was like, this can’t be good for democracy. This is not why I got into [inaudible 00:04:30]. And so, you know, I had been dealing in the intersection of technology and politics to very male-dominated industries. I had been briefly lobbying in the Rhode Island State House, which is sort of known for its machismo. And even though, you know, politically, is super blue state, we’re talking about Democrats who are anti-choice and like, the women lobbyists in the state has had a buddy system to feel safe. You know, like, things were really clear for me at a very early age that we have some more work to do when it comes to making sure women, even in our professional settings, can feel safe and can feel heard and can feel like their contributions are taken seriously. And so I dropped out of politics. I basically quit politics after Citizens United was passed. I got really jaded by what was going on in our democracy. Can’t say I’ve come around. [crosstalk 00:05:29]

Dr. Fox: I was gonna say things much better now than they were then. Wow. We’ve solved all those problems. Yeah, we’re one happy, united nation right now. Democracy is kicking butt.

Emilie: Perfect. Right. Yeah. What could have possibly gone wrong? So, you know, I still have a lot of hope. But what gives me a lot of inspiration these days and still a very active advocate is state politics. I live in Denver, Colorado now, moved here from DC. Brought my business with me after I launched it in 2013, basically walking away from a six-figure salary in digital strategy in politics to see if I could create something that would help other women like myself find courage through community.

As a grassroots organizer, I saw what happens when we organize your neighborhoods, when you bring high-quality evidence-based training programs to everyday people so that they can self-actualize, so that they can make their voices heard, so that they can advocate for the advancement they want to see. Except instead of the political arena, I was now working within the personal and workplace arena, saying to women, okay, how do we advocate? And this was very much in line with the whole Lean In philosophy because I launched Bossed Up the same month that Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In.

And so for the past 10 years, I’ve been trying to acknowledge the intersectionality of feminism, which, I think Sheryl Sandberg sort of fell short from doing in her initial work around this issue, but really helping women advocate for their unique desires in the workplace so that we can become the boss of our careers even when we’re up against more systemic forces, including racism, sexism, ageism, you name it, a lack of paid parental leave in this country, a lack of affordable child care in this country. So, we’re really at Bossed Up all about holding both of those things, helping women advocate for their raises, for their promotions, for their own leadership development, and helping organizations and even broader institutions like our body politic, make it easier to remove systemic barriers that hold women back.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. Listen, I think that’s obviously really fascinating. And I love that you’re doing this. I guess I’m going to jump in, actually, just because we’ll go back and forth a little bit between like, the history of your story. And you mentioned so many things that are so interesting to me that I just want to ask you about them.

Emilie: Please.

Dr. Fox: Obviously, if you just look at the landscape, as you said, there is definitely an imbalance of who’s running the show, right, at various, if not all or most whatever places, whether it’s in business, whether it’s in politics, whether in finance, whatever it might be. And so my question for you is really, let’s say, 50 years ago, it’s pretty clear why that was. So when I look now, you know, I’m a parent and I have daughters and they’re, you know, becoming adults. And I just see how like, their generation sort of looks at things. It’s hard for me to imagine and I could be naive, but it’s hard for me to imagine that the barrier to it is pure blood sexism, like it probably was before. Because, you know, I work in New York, our governor is a woman. No one thinks twice about that. It’s not like something that comes up like, “Can you believe it?” Like, no, whatever, you know. You know, we have a woman running for president and it’s a storyline, but it’s not like, “Can you believe there’s a woman running for president?” Like, no, it’s really not that. And so, I could be naive that maybe the circles I travel in are, you know, a little bit more whatever. I don’t think so. But I was going to ask you, like, nowadays, what proportion is that versus just the opportunities were never there or there’s logistical challenges or the infrastructure isn’t there that just we’re catching up because of, you know, X number years ago, what the attitude was?

Emilie: So there’s a couple of things to unpack here. One is the question, are we just catching up? Is it just a matter of time, right? And I want to start there because I think a lot of us, particularly coastal elites like yourself.

Dr. Fox: No, I’m not an elite. I’m coastal, but I’m not an elite. I’m a Midwesterner. I’m born and raised in the Midwest.

Emilie: That’s right. I joke. I always love that term because I grew up in Connecticut, which is Ivy League school in Rhode Island. Now I live in Denver and I’m like, “Oh, what am I now? I don’t know.” But, you know, we definitely live in our own bubbles. So, you know, the way that technology works, the way that our social infrastructure is in this country, we are all living in an echo chamber that reinforces our preexisting beliefs. So wherever you live geographically, I bet your online algorithms don’t really serve up a very diverse array of perspectives. So I guarantee you there are people who, you know, have really different feelings about our new woman presidential candidate who’s running that has a lot to do with her gender and her race, by the way. But the question of are we just catching up is something I thought a lot about last year when I had my once every 10-years existential crisis, which was…

Dr. Fox: Regularly scheduled existential crisis. Okay.

Emilie: Exactly. I think that’s part of like, what brings me to the doctor’s office or my therapist’s office, right. It’s like, okay, I’m due for an existential crisis. And the subject was, you know, is what I’m doing through Bossed Up working because I started this company to help close gender leadership gaps. So how are we doing 10 years later? And I wanted to really reflect on that. What I found is that in the last couple of years, new data from Pew found that in 2022, women earned an average of 82% of what men earned. And 20 years earlier, in 2002, women earned 80% on average what men earned on average. So we’ve made a 2%, you know, progress, 2% closure of the gender wage gap in 20 years. So are we making progress? Yes. Is it nearly enough? I don’t think so. So that bums me out. Similar numbers when you look at the proportion of women in leadership positions, which, since 2016 has only closed by 1-percentage point as of last year. So only 32% of leadership roles are occupied by women. And so, there’s this sort of sense of inevitability that is not actually there.

And the other underlying question that I want to unpack from your question is if it’s not overt sexism, what is it? Over a decade ago, some scholars in the “Harvard Business Review” coined the term, “second-generation gender bias,” which is a really great way of thinking about what your daughters are up against now because it’s not explicit. It’s not gentlemen only, ladies forbidden anymore, right. It’s much more implicit, which can, in some ways, make solving the problem even harder because there’s a rightful argument that people will point to you and say, “Look, you know, legal barriers from women entering the workplace are gone.” You know, you can now be a woman submariner and you couldn’t 10, 15 years ago. And so, a lot of those legal barriers to women entering industries or having a seat at the table have fallen away. So is it just a matter of time? And when you look at second-generation gender bias, it’s really this smorgasbord of implicit forms of bias. So the number one that I talk a lot about on my podcast and with my community is the leadership likeability double bind. You know, women are welcome to be assertive because we expect our leaders to be authoritative and assertive and to be visionary and to tell us what they see for the company in the next year, where they see the city or country going that they’re running to lead. But when a woman is assertive, she’s deemed less likable by both men and women alike. And it’s not a conscious choice that anyone’s making, but this is unconscious forms of bias.

And when you think about the leadership likeability double bind, it really feels like you’re tap dancing on a tightrope as a woman in power. You know, if you’re going for a promotion, you’re advocating for something you believe in, you’re advocating for God forbid, a raise for yourself because we know that the gender wage gap is still a very real thing, then you are, all of a sudden, put in a position where you’re kind of trying to be seen as authoritative and assertive and that you know your stuff on one hand. And then on the other hand, you’re trying to be liked because likeability matters. Try not to ruffle too many feathers, not piss people off. And so, those implicit forms of bias can just be really exhausting to be up against, especially for women of color who run into things like the angry Black woman trope or the spicy Latina trope, just implicitly holds women back.

And then the last thing I’ll say about this, because it’s particularly relevant for baby making, which is after all your line of work, right? When you look at ambition, women have a ton of ambition when it comes to getting into the leadership ranks in their industry. But the point in which our careers really have that opportunity, those windows of opportunity to really level up and to get into management and leadership also happen to coincide with the time in women’s lives where a lot of college-educated women start having babies. And without the public infrastructure that just makes doing both feel possible, so many women’s ambitions to be mothers, if that’s something they choose, and to be bosses, feel fundamentally at odds. And there are lots of things that our communities, our countries, and our companies can do to make that easier. Those become very real barriers in a world where women are still shouldering a vast majority of unpaid labor in the household, whether it’s elder care or child care. Even in heterosexual households where there’s a full-time working man and a full-time working woman, women are still doing twice the amount of child care and housework every week than their male counterparts.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. I mean, I think both of those points are really important. And the first point, and maybe it’s something that just requires a third generation. You know what I mean?

Emilie: Yeah, sure.

Dr. Fox: Like, the first generation was, like, explicitly biased. The second generation is implicitly biased because we’re sort of raised by the explicit biased community. And then maybe, hopefully, the next generation will just get it right. And the fascinating part about that is, when you’re talking about the second generation, this idea that’s implicit versus explicit, I see it all the time with my partners, the doctors, who are women. So when people come out of training, they’re usually, I mean, they’re not always young, it depends on your definition of young, but they’re young women and they’re treating predominantly young women, right? They’re treating their peers, essentially, you know, whatever, plus minus 10 years in age. They’re basically treating their peers, their friends, or sitting across the table from the exact same people. And the same biases exist, we see that all the time. Like, a patient will come to you like, “Oh, this doctor seemed very meek.” And they’re like, “Well, she was so quiet,” whatever. Some people, that’s their personality, whereas this one seems very cold and aggressive. I’m like, well, would they say the same thing if that person was a man? Maybe, but I suspect not. Hard to know.

Emilie: It’s really hard to know. That’s what makes so hard to combat because women are just as likely to have internalized patriarchy because we were raised in a world that taught us doctors are men who are older than me, who wear white coats and tell me what to do. And, you know, your entire philosophy that you shared on my podcast about joint decision-making, which was a punchline, because I’m in Denver and we were talking about joints, right. So, collaborative decision-making is a radically different approach to this authoritarian, masculine, traditionally masculine, I should say, form of leadership. So like, even what we think of as women, what we are taught to conceive of as leader, reads masculine. And so when women are redefining and frankly, men like you and lots of men right now who are navigating a world that requires more soft skills now than ever before, more emotional intelligence than ever before, like, we are all collectively redefining what leadership looks like. And it’s butting up against unconscious, implicit connotations and associations we all have in our brains that makes that really tricky.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. I mean, it’s on the one hand, people have to rethink sort of what is the expectation of women in the workforce and at the home, sort of what is expected and what is sort of, you know, norms and, you know, biases and stereotypes and all those things. But like you said, it’s you have to flip it also on the workplace. What is the expectation and stereotype of a leader, of a boss, of a manager, of a CEO, whatever it is? And so, if the only sort of experience we have of that and impression we have is this sort of idea, this form, you know, this platonic form, what a boss is supposed to look like, then maybe nobody can match that or maybe women can’t match that. And so, let’s really redefine that. Like, does being a CEO mean you can’t be away for three or four months if you have a baby, are they not congruous? Like, that’s sort of the part we have to think about. And these are, you know, I guess is what you’re working on, huh?

Emilie: Yeah. I mean, it’s so relevant too, because COVID really upended that question for us. We saw for a lot of white collar workers, a lot of knowledge economy workers in particular, this transition to the remote workplace. And what we found is that when the rules of the game are equal, when everybody’s fully remote, right, then women thrive with that level of flexibility. But now that we’re entering this sort of return to office era where a lot of mostly male tech leaders, Elon Musk was sort of famous for being the first to say you’re back to the office full-time everybody, you know, now that that movement is bringing folks back to the office, this creates a real imbalance. Because when flexibility, which has been the number one demand from the women who I’m talking about, who want to lead, who want to succeed, but have caregiving duties and have other duties and lots of hats they wear in their community to balance with it all, flexibility is something that workplaces can provide when possible, that really helps level the playing field for women to excel and step up into leadership and for their skills to be seen as valuable. But if we’re returning to a butts-in-seats mentality where whoever’s around the office and like, socializing on the basketball courts or whatever, becomes this implicit way that we access power and promotions, and women really suffer. And so there’s a lot of concern around that.

I know that so many healthcare workers, including my mom, a labor and delivery nurse, has worked 12-hour shifts in the hospital this entire time. So that’s not applicable to every industry. It is really interesting to see how there’s some very timely conversations about remote work. And when the rules of the game, like, how you get a raise and how you get a promotion, only can be as explicit in terms of defining a meritocracy as possible, women tend to excel at equal rates. It’s when things become really informal that we see patriarchy do its bit. Nobody’s plotting against…although maybe some would argue with me that some in our politics are plotting against women as we speak. But I like to think that it’s very unconscious. It’s very implicit. It doesn’t take malicious intent for gendered stereotypes to persist. It just takes women’s lives and realities being invisible to the predominantly White men who are making the rules and management still for those traditions to continue. So I don’t think that we’re on this generational certainty. I don’t think every generation is getting a little bit better. I have hope that it can get better, but we need to be advocating not just for unconscious biases to change, but also for systems to change that remove barriers that hold women back.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. And if the men are plotting, I wasn’t invited to the meeting. That’s all I can tell you. So maybe it’s happening and I didn’t get the Evite. I don’t know. So if I do, I’ll let you know. I’ll let you zoom crash it. It’s interesting because I think that there’s so much to this conversation and this struggle that we have. And one of the aspects I wanted to ask you, and I don’t know if this comes up. So on the one hand, you have women in the workforce who are trying to…balance is such a bad word, but whatever, I’m going to use the word balance.

Emilie: Blend, some people…

Dr. Fox: Blend, yeah. I hear harmony, you know, harmonize. But whatever it is they’re doing in the workforce and they’re doing, you know, at home, family, they want to have kids and, you know, God bless. And you mentioned, you know, things that some of the potential ways to make that more manageable and make it more doable and more productive is things like, you know, you said, paternity care, child care, all these things that are terrific, right? Full disclosure, I’m a man. Here’s my question. Do you ever get pushback from women in the workforce who say, listen, I can’t have children, let’s say, or I don’t want to have children or whatever it is, and why would we do all these policies to help a subset of women that’s not only not going to help me, but might also make it harder for me, meaning that somehow I’m getting punished for either the choice or the inability to have children? And I’ve always wondered, like, how does… Again, I’m neither of these two groups, right? And so it’s very hard for me to understand how that conversation goes. And obviously, I’m not in the middle of it because I shouldn’t be. But I imagine you are. Do you ever get that back-and-forth?

Emilie: Well, it’s even more nuanced than that because, you know, first of all, you’re alluding to what they called it in the ’80s, the mommy wars, right? Like, women who want to be child-free by choice, feeling left out of the conversation when it comes to motherhood, because they have a bunch of social stereotypes they’re up against, you know. Like, in a society that equates womanhood with motherhood, if you choose to not become a mother, that’s a violation of gender stereotypes. And that feels isolating and invisible-making. And, really, you know, I can understand how that population of women feels left out of the conversation and unheard and unsure of like, how to even enter that dialogue. Then there’s being a mother and wanting a full career at the same time, right? Or whatever a blended life looks like for you and balancing both, which is where I find myself. And then there’s also women who really want to be mothers and who envision themselves being wives and mothers and homemakers and who feel completely left out of the conversation because they do not aspire to have a paid labor force career in a traditional way.

And here’s what I’ll say first and foremost, when we allow the culture wars to pit those populations of women against one another, none of us win. So if we see each other as like the enemy, then that’s patriarchy doing its thing. Again, I’m not saying this is men perpetuating this, but this is a patriarchal underlying philosophy that says a woman’s worth is defined by fill in the blank.

Dr. Fox: Yes. One of my patients referred it to me as a woman-on-woman crime.

Emilie: Exactly. Yeah, definitely a woman-on-woman crime. So, you know, I have to be conscientious of the fact that my swim lane, as I like to call it, at Bossed Up is really focused on that middle population, women who want to pursue a career and are balancing it usually with some caregiving responsibilities, whether it’s motherhood or elder care, caring for a sibling, caring for a community member, whatever that looks like, you know, life beyond the career exclusionary mindset, right?

Dr. Fox: Right.

Emilie: Right. But that’s not all of womanhood [inaudible 00:27:26]. The other thing is, when it comes to public policy, you’ll hear this from men and women, which is “Why should I have to pay for your child care? Why should I have to subsidize with my tax dollars, your maternity leave,” let’s say? Those are fair questions. And I’m not a full-time policy wonk. I’m a part-time policy advocate. But here’s what I would say. That first and foremost, we are the wealthiest nation in the world, United States, right. We’re not coming after your dollars. Odds are we’re coming after the 1%’s dollars when we talk about raising taxes to fund social programs. We’re not coming after, you know, even millionaires. We’re talking about taxes on the billionaire class in this country that can fund entire social programs like that.

And second of all, why should we? Why does it matter if every other democracy and every other developed nation in the country has social programs like child care subsidies or paid parental leave? We are among a very short list of countries that have no federal benefits, no paid federal benefits for parents, we’re talking about men and women here, fathers and mothers, right? “What’s in it for me if I don’t want to have kids?” And here’s what I would say is that a healthy society benefits us all. You can judge a society by how it cares for its most vulnerable populations. And when we look at babies and we look at preschoolers and we look at children and granted, each state has its own way of treating those populations. When we look at the elderly, we decided as a nation many years ago, right, that we believe our elderly should not be living in poverty and being on the streets. And that’s why we believe, as a country, in systems like Medicare and Medicaid, right. Like, because it’s not good for our society if we have hordes of elderly people just slipping through the cracks.

Similarly, back in the 1980s, we came really damn close to under a Republican-led presidential administration passing nationwide socially-funded child care programs. And it was single handedly killed. Like, it was vetoed even after a Republican Congress passed the bill. It was killed by Pat Buchanan, who made it into a the government is going to brainwash your children campaign, who kind of rose up and said, if you believe in traditional femininity, and women should be the ones raising our children, not the government telling your children what to do. And that was the end of affordable child care being nearly passed into law in this country. And I think we’ve really lost something when we lost that possibility, which is, I do better when my neighbors’ children are fed, when my neighbors’ children are being well educated. If we invest just a little bit upfront in early childhood development and early childhood education, we see less crime on the back end. We see less hopelessness amongst our youth who are navigating a volatile economy upon graduation from high school or college. And so what’s in it for me to subsidize all of our children in this country, it’s not just about, you know, making sure that your colleague can take a luxurious paid leave, which I would argue, parental leave is not any of those words. But it’s to make sure that we’re raising a healthy society.

And we’ve been taught because of American individualism, this idea that, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, that if you can’t figure that out on your own, something that was never designed to be done on your own, raising children, then you’re a personal failure. And I just think that as a society, we can do better. And it behooves us all, including women and men who never want to have children, to make sure that your neighbors’ children are getting their basic needs met. Because when they don’t, your life gets worse, your neighborhood gets worse, your society gets worse. And when we’re seeing crime and, you know, the public-school-to-prison pipeline, you know, to me, like, becoming such a thing, we just have to ask ourselves as a country, like, what do we value and what do we think is important? And that’s where the public policy piece really comes in.

Dr. Fox: Why can’t you just be running for office?

Emilie: I will eventually.

Dr. Fox: I mean, this is so compelling. I’m like, you know, I’m going to get up and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I mean, this is unbelievable. Why? How come you’re not running for office?

Emilie: I do love this country. I do think we can do better. And I’m in such a mood after the last week, just to be clear to your listeners, it’s been one week since Kamala Harris took top of the ticket. And I’m like, ready. You know, the Olympics are going on. I’m ready to wear my red, white and blue. I love this country. I just think we can be better. And I will probably run for office someday. But right now, I’m in my business owner and baby-making era. And I know that I want to do things well, but I can’t do them all well at the same time, you know.

Dr. Fox: Well, you heard it here first, listeners of the “Healthful Woman Podcast.” You know, when we’re seeing you on the debate stage, whatever years from now, we’ll say we knew her when she was just, you know, talking to Fox about pregnancy. And here we go. All right. Cool. So, tell me about your own journey in this space.

Emilie: Yeah. So as of today, I should probably start there. I’m 31-weeks pregnant [inaudible 00:33:10] child. Yay. It’s a very wild deadline or like, milestone because if you follow the apps or what have you, today was the first day that I had a single digit countdown with weeks left. I was like, “Oh, my God, we only have nine weeks to go. Wow, that’s not a lot of weeks.” So I’m feeling really grateful to be here because last year has been a really challenging one, both in business and as it relates to fertility. And perhaps those two things are related. I don’t know. But I experienced recurrent miscarriage last year, 2023, while I was also navigating my biggest business downturn in 11 years, right. So it was 10 years as of then. So last year just was not going the way that I was hoping it would. And throughout this entire time, I have another child who’s 2 years old who will be 3 this September. And the baby’s due right around that time, too. So it’s been a very challenging season in terms of my personal life, but I’ve been here before.

I joke about the every 10-year existential crisis. I also have the every 10-year complete and utter burnout. I’m completely burnt out. Back when I was an early career politico, I was living with and in love with someone who struggled with addiction at the time. And so personally and professionally, I really was in a very challenging situation that I had to learn how to advocate for myself while also caring for and loving other people who have to take care of themselves. And so, this season of challenge over the past year-and-a-half or so kind of reminded me, took me back to my early challenges of figuring out addiction and codependency and what kind of life I wanted to actually live and how to navigate that, which I actually get into in great detail in my book, Bossed Up, which is all about overcoming burnout and learning to advocate for yourself.

And when it came to navigating the medical world, you know, when I was 2 miscarriages in, so 2023, I was like, “Okay. This is that time again when I have to really take care of myself, be compassionate to myself, ask others for help and advocate as a patient for what I needed to make sure we were getting to the bottom of this.” Even though, like you chronicled with Emily Oster in your book, miscarriage is not something that you can always get to the bottom of. So it’s been a really wild time, but that’s why I’m just so on like, cloud nine here to be at 31 weeks and counting down the days.

Dr. Fox: It is amazing. And I’m glad you’re doing well. And because we spoke about this when I was on your podcast and you have basically have a 2-year-old son, your career is like, going in circles. And at the same time, you’re trying to build your family. So it’s not only are you not getting the balance, it’s like, you’re getting the bad end of the scales on both ends. You know, you’re figuring out your career and you’re trying to figure out your family. What did that experience or set of experiences, like, what lessons did you learn that you could take with you moving forward that you could also impart on others in terms of again, both family and career, because we’re talking about both of these?

Emilie: Yeah. I mean, and the lessons are similar, right? Like, my business, to give a little more context there, which will make sense in a moment, is, you know, in 2023 experienced a downturn for a few systemic reasons that had nothing to do with what we were doing in our business, right. But it had to do with the fact that diversity, equity, and inclusion has been pushed back on in a really vocal, significant way in the business community. And so, my programs focused on closing gender leadership gaps, all of a sudden, were not on the top of the priority list for a lot of companies that had hired us previously. We had also been focused a lot in the tech sector. We had tons of recurring clients in the tech sector who were hiring Bossed Up to train their first-time women managers and their aspiring first-time women managers in leadership programs specifically designed for women. And all of a sudden, those went away because tech has been laying people off for the past two years in like, a really volatile way. And we also had quite a few higher education clients, notably the Stanford School of Medicine that had, with our support, hired us to create and launch a program known as the Stanford Women in Medicine Program. And so, we were growing leaders in higher education. And then the U.S. Supreme Court said, actually no more affirmative action. And a lot of universities got really scared to do anything that focused exclusively on women. And so those clients went away.

So this business I’ve been running for 10 years, I’d grown a staff, we had an office in downtown Denver. I had hit revenue record breaking years every year for 10 years, all of a sudden, had a massive downturn and I had to lay off 2 of my 3 employees. It looked like I was going to have to lay myself off too for a while there and looked like we were going to have to shut our doors. Concurrently, I’m like trying to pivot, trying to ask what can we do? How can we adjust? Because this was 2020 for me all over again. We had to completely redefine our business model in 2020. And we did, we nailed our pivot. We made a record profit in 2020 and nothing was working. I was pivoting and pivoting and pivoting and nothing was working. That is not something I’m used to as a high achiever who really believes in hard work paying off and has been firsthand witnessing my hard work paying off for my whole life. That was really foreign to me.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to get pregnant. I’m losing pregnancies and nothing that I can control is working. Because like most miscarriages, I’m fairly certain that my recurrent miscarriages were due to genetic abnormalities. I’m in my mid-30s, that happens. And like your book says, the answers are sometimes you cannot do anything to control for this. And as a type-A Virgo overachiever, that did not sit well with me, right? I took all the tests, just like I was trying everything to pivot my business. And I just had to really be humbled by the limits of my own personal agency. When I talk about burnout prevention, I go back to how important it is to feel some sense of agency over your life. We have to feel some semblance of control, like, what I do will have an impact on my life. If I want to get in shape, I’m going to start going to the gym every day and that will have an impact on my life. What if you’re going to the gym every day and you’re not losing weight? What if you’re going to the gym every day and you’re not feeling stronger? What if you’re showing up, you’re putting in the work and nothing seems to be working for a while? We’re talking like, all of 2023. That spun me out into a very productive, a very real crisis, existential and otherwise, which was like, I am a human being. I’m not a human doing, right? Like, I’m not just about what I do personally or professionally. Like, I can be doing all the right things and still be struggling.

And that was really the lesson I took from last year, which was to have real deep compassion for myself, to allow myself to struggle and recognize that even though I really wanted to hit the fast forward button, because I knew this shit wasn’t going to last forever. Dr. Fox and I knew, like, it’s going to get better, right? Eventually, maybe something will turn around, something. I just need a break, you know what I mean? I need something to go my way. But just showing up every day as a parent, even when showing up as a boss wasn’t working, and showing up as an aspiring second-time parent wasn’t working, you know, showing up for myself, showing up for my son, showing up for my family and asking others to show up for me, that is what I learned from last year’s absolute maelstrom that I would like to not repeat, if I can.

And so, just like, recognizing there’s so many more powerful forces in the world than what I’m doing. And it makes you feel kind of small in both good ways and bad. Like, there are significant limits to what I can control. So, I’m just going to focus on what I can control and let go of the rest. And that is a lesson that continues today to serve me well. And it’s a hard one to learn. It’s a hard one to live through.

Dr. Fox: Wow. And so obviously on the family side, you are due in a couple of months.

Emilie: Things are looking up.

Dr. Fox: So, that’s awesome. And then what about where are you professionally right now?

Emilie: Yeah. So things are looking up professionally as well. I really had to ask myself like, 10 years is a long time to be doing anything. And so, it’s funny because before the bottom fell out of my business in 2023, I had just come back from a vacation with a girlfriend and I had been doing some reflection a year postpartum of like, who do I want to be in this next chapter, you know, this next decade of my career. And I was already at that time, starting to think beyond Bossed Up. Like, if I could do something next, if I could do something different, what would that look like? And I allowed myself to be curious. And then I came home from vacation with COVID and then came home to no sales. Like, all of a sudden our P&L looked really bad. And then all of 2023 was a nightmare. And it’s sort of ironic, right, because I feel like I whispered something to the universe, maybe I’m ready for something new. And the universe was like, here you go. Now you’re going to have to figure out something new.

And so, what I’ve done is I’ve kept in place the things I love most about Bossed Up, notably my podcast, which comes out weekly on Tuesdays, some programming that we’re doing for amazing organizational clients, and occasional programming that we have available to the public, like our Level Up leadership accelerator, which is enrolling for this fall. It’s an amazing six-month program for women who want to, you know, step into management. But I’ve pulled way back on my obligations there, because I’ve actually created space to take on a full-time role in leadership development in an aerospace company here in the Denver metro area that is part of a global company now. And it was a really interesting, but very exciting pivot for me because now, I’m in-house and seeing corporate leadership development on a global scale from a vantage point I’ve never really had before.

Dr. Fox: Right, you’re on the inside.

Emilie: I’m on the inside. And I found a dream employer who’s totally flexible with me about making sure that yes, I’m delivering what’s expected of me and I can still do what I do at Bossed Up. So, that was like an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. And it’s just created so many more options for me in terms of what I want to do at Bossed Up and taking a lot of pressure off for my family right now. And I’m not going to lie, I like having some W-2 benefits for the first time in a decade. I’ve got paid parental leave and the state of Colorado passed paid parental leave, but I also have like, company-funded parental leave. It’s like, wow, this is a luxurious perspective. I think, you know, entrepreneurs, I’m always going to be thinking like an entrepreneur. I always have a million different revenue streams going. That’s just how my mind works. But, you know, entrepreneurs kind of feel pigeonholed to constantly be entrepreneurs or business owners. And I think building a blended career where we have multiple hats that we wear, can be, not always, but can be just as rewarding as building a blended life where your roles that you wear in your community and your family can coexist peacefully with your work life. So I just don’t believe in kind of like, limiting myself. Sometimes necessity is the greatest, what is it, inventor of creativity, right?

Dr. Fox: Yeah.

Emilie: I found a really creative path forward because I had to, to keep things afloat. And now Bossed Up is back from the brink of extinction. We are, as of this month, totally debt free as a company, it’s a small business, which is a major feat after last year. I still have a full-time employee, Irene, who runs all of our programs alongside me, who’s an absolute rock star. And so it’s just evolving into a new era. And I get to also pursue my activism and get more involved in Denver politics and Colorado politics and advocacy in ways that feel manageable and don’t feel like overwhelming in my era of life right now.

Dr. Fox: It’s amazing. I love it. What a nice bow on that story.

Emilie: It is kind of a turnaround story, isn’t it? Yeah. I’m glad you caught me now instead [crosstalk 00:46:52].

Dr. Fox: Six months ago it would have been a very dark podcast.

Emilie: Absolutely.

Dr. Fox: Oh, dear, no. Listen, really, I think it’s terrific and I love what you’re doing and it’s really interesting to talk to you. It was interesting before. It’s interesting again. And you are not only a great podcast host, but you’re a great podcast guest.

Emilie: Oh, well, thank you. Thank you. Likewise.

Dr. Fox: And I know I speak for all of our wonderful listeners who wish you the best, obviously with your health and with your pregnancy and with your career and to continue to help women navigate that. It’s a really important thing you’re doing. And again, there’s a lot of work to be done and hopefully, we’re just all going to move in the right direction.

Emilie: Yeah. Thank you so much. We’re all in this together. I feel like we all can do better. And when women do better, men in our lives do better too. So it’s like, the world does better when women do better.

Dr. Fox: Hear, hear.

Emilie: So we got to do better.

Dr. Fox: Thank you for listening to the “Healthful Woman Podcast.” To learn more about our podcast, please visit our website at www.healthfulwoman.com. That’s H-E-A-L-T-H-F-U-L-W-O-M-A-N.com. If you have any questions about this podcast or any other topic you would like us to address, please feel free to email us at hw@healthfulwoman.com. Have a great day. The information discussed in Healthful Woman is intended for educational uses only. It does not replace medical care from your physician. Healthful Woman is meant to expand your knowledge of women’s health and does not replace ongoing care from your regular physician or gynecologist. We encourage you to speak with your doctor about specific diagnoses and treatment options for an effective treatment plan.