Why the Childcare Crisis Is a Business Issue for Leaders to Solve

Call us biased, but this season of the podcast truly lived up to its promise to challenge preconceived notions of leadership. To prove it, we’ve compiled our favorite insights gleaned from a few notable guests, including Moms First Founder Reshma Saujani and Olympian Allyson Felix. Learn how the childcare crisis will stifle business growth, how maternal health impacts the C-Suite, why gender parity is so elusive, and so much more.

Trust is an essential feature for any successful relationship, but it’s often missing at work. Company leaders overestimate how much their teams trust them by as much as 40%, and women grow especially wary of their employers as their career progresses, according to research from Deloitte. Here, Wenny Katzenstein and Jasmin Jacks, Deloitte executives, explain why this trust gap exists — and what companies can do to close it.

Men still dominate the ranks of corporate leadership, which means they have an integral role to play in making workplaces more equitable for everyone. But they often underestimate the bias women face and overestimate their own efforts to confront it. Lindsay talks to Dr. Bill Kapfer, Global Head of Supplier Diversity, Community Engagement at JPMorgan Chase, and a participant in the company's Men as Allies program, about the business benefits of allyship and how men can play an active role in achieving gender equity at work.

Neurodiversity advocate Margaux Joffe has something important in common with our Co-Founder Lindsay: Both women were diagnosed with ADHD as adults. It inspired Margaux to launch Kaleidoscope Society, an organization to support women with ADHD, and to help companies like Nike and Yahoo support their neurodivergent employees. Here, Lindsay and Margaux discuss the business benefits of embracing our brain differences and how they’ve grown as leaders since being diagnosed.

Too young. Too old. Too invested in their life at home. There’s never a “right” time to be a leader — for women. That’s the key finding from the latest study conducted by gender bias expert Dr. Amy Diehl. In this episode, Lindsay talks to Dr. Diehl about how bias around caregiving plays a big role in our perceptions of women leaders (even for women without children), and what we can do to dismantle it.

Despite decades of progress, women make up only 10.4% of Fortune 500 CEOs. Why? In this episode, Carolyn talks to IBM’s Salima Lin about the troubling explanations revealed in the company’s Women In Leadership study, conducted in partnership with Chief. From looming pipeline problems to lingering bias against women leaders, the conversation is an enlightening look at must-solves for executives who care about equitable workplaces.

Sallie Krawcheck knows a little something about the ups and downs of career turns: She began as an investment banker before becoming a research analyst, CEO, CFO, and, now, the Founder and CEO of Ellevest, one of the biggest investment platforms for women. From overcoming bias to building your own personal Board of Directors, she shares with Carolyn her best advice for planning and executing a successful career pivot.

Pregnancy-related deaths for Black women are three times higher than they are for White women, and more than 80% are preventable. So why aren’t we preventing them? In this episode, Carolyn talks to Track and Field Olympian Allyson Felix about how her traumatic path to motherhood inspired her to become a maternal health advocate, how her fight against Nike led to better maternity protections for athletes, and how she’s now changing the game with her footwear brand Saysh.

Business leaders are demanding employees return to the office — right in the midst of a crisis that’s making childcare more costly and inaccessible than ever for working parents. Reshma Saujani, Founder of Moms First and Girls Who Code, explains why a workplace that supports moms benefits everyone.

Stay tuned for an all-new season of The New Rules of Business by Chief, the network that connects and supports women executives. This season, Chief Co-Founders Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan dig into complex leadership issues around neurodiversity in the workplace, the ongoing childcare crisis and its impact on business, the art of the career pivot for leaders, and why there’s no such thing as equity without male allyship to support. They’ll be joined by the best minds in business and research including Sallie Krawcheck, Reshma Saujani, and Allyson Felix. Learn the new rules of business with Chief. Season 4, coming soon.