CTC 013: What Does ‘Good’ Look Like? With Jess Heagren

Changing the Conversation: The People in Insurance

How can insurance companies better support working parents in the years after they have children?

How should working parents endeavour to maintain a healthy work-life balance, and what practical measures should employers introduce to facilitate this?

Despite the implementation of some measures to mitigate this, having children can be something of a kick in the teeth to working parents. This is particularly true for new mothers who typically suffer the financial burden of potentially sacrificing their career and struggling to return to it later on. These issues, and much more, underpin the work of Jess Heagren, Founder of Careers After Babies, who we are delighted to be speaking with on this episode. Jess shares her personal experience of juggling her former insurance career with motherhood, and her insights into how employers can better support their staff through this challenging transition.

Quote of the Episode

“What does ‘good’ for us look like? It looks like happy, healthy, nurtured children who have one parent around most of the time, but we both get to have professional fulfilment as well. That's our version of ‘good’. That will look different for everybody else. I think all the time we go along with a very traditional societal view of what ‘good’ looks like, which might be, the amazing mum who's baking from home and doing all the art and home-schooling, while her husband goes out to work and earns £200 grand a year. I think that's completely incongruous to today's society, and the way we are as people.”

Ultimately, Jess is keen to reassure working parents that there is no need to strive for an idealised version of their lives, where their work, marital and parental responsibilities are always in perfect equilibrium. Instead, she suggests that parents should identify their own unique idea of what ‘good’ looks like to them, which will vary from couple to couple and family to family. She is sceptical of traditional notions of work-life balance or the gender disparity of mothers remaining at home whilst fathers go to work. Of course, for certain families this may be what ‘good’ looks like to them. However, it should not remain the standard, generalised model for all society to defer to, if we are to address continuing gender inequality in the workplace.

Key Takeaways

Many women in insurance and other related industries spend years building great careers, flying through the ranks and reaching the brink of huge success, only for it all to come crashing down when they have children. Many have to resort to part time work and experience little career progression, or quit their jobs entirely. The support infrastructure within professional services businesses for mothers and fathers alike, is woefully underequipped for modern parenting attitudes and ideas around work-life balance.

For Jess, the pandemic was a key lesson for all society that work-life balance as it currently functions is wholly inadequate for sustaining a happy, healthy workforce. The system is broken. Whilst endeavours to introduce flexible working solutions have been broadly introduced across our industry, there is still much work to be done. There is, however, an appetite from many organisations to put the work in. Workplaces can facilitate change in this regard, and must evaluate the ways in which they cater to working parents, and the support mechanisms on offer for them before and after they have children. There is a financial incentive for doing so also. Not only would such support infrastructure create a more broadly happy workforce, leading to greater productivity and thereby positively impacting businesses’ bottom line; it would also enable great talent to remain in the industry, even if at a reduced capacity for a certain number of years.

It is crucial, Jess argues, that workplaces foster a culture which encourages and enables people to be their true selves. Being authentic to who you are makes one a better leader, and a better individual contributor. The dynamic of living with a work and nonwork version of oneself, and navigating between the two on a day-to-day basis, is extremely psychologically damaging. It upholds a mindset that, in the workplace, one can never really switch off, or have a bad day. Organisations that place employee wellbeing in every regard at the centre of what they do have well-performing, and more loyal employees, leading to better results for the business overall.

Best Moments/Key Quotes

“When you work in insurance, I think because I'd spent my whole career in it, I never realized that that imbalance of women to men was unusual. It's not until you get older, and you get more senior, and you suddenly start to look around and think, ‘Well, hang on a minute. Nobody else in here really looks like me or sounds like me’. And you become increasingly aware of your femininity.”

“If we're to take a positive from the whole pandemic, it's that we all learned that we haven't quite got this work-life balance thing right. Whether we're looking at mental health, whether we're looking at physical health, whether we're looking at caring responsibilities, whether we're looking at general happiness levels, we don't have it right. The system is fundamentally broken because it doesn't enable that.”

“Barristers have one of the biggest gender pay gaps going. The average is 14%. I think theirs is about 29%. For me, there's a very linear relationship… we know that there's very little gender pay gap at 30 and it quadruples by the age of 40. The average age to have a child is 32. It's abundantly clear what happens in that time period to drive gender pay gap and inequality. It all comes down to how well we cater to working parents and how well we're supporting women and having children.”

‘I think we currently live in a time where being the best at everything has a set of expectations with it that aren’t healthy or achievable.’

Resources

Careers After Babies Report: https://www.careersafterbabies.org/careers-after-babies-report

Careers After Babies Accreditation: https://www.careersafterbabies.org/careers-after-babies-accreditation

The New York Times – Millennial Men Aren’t the Dads They Thought They’d Be: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/31/upshot/millennial-men-find-work-and-family-hard-to-balance.html

About the Guest

Jess Heagren is the Founder of Careers after Babies and the author of the so-called landmark Careers After Babies report published in 2023 which went viral on LinkedIn. Prior to this, she worked in the insurance industry as a corporate strategist, and in her last insurance position she was a Strategy and Distribution Director in the commercial part of DLG.

About the Host

Sarah Myerscough is the Chief Ideas Officer at Macaii, formerly Boston Tullis. She hosts/co-hosts several podcasts and is known for her knack in connecting with people. Sarah excels in bringing out the best for video, podcast, and live events, helping clients showcase the human side of their business.

Sarah is passionate about the evolving dynamics of the insurance industry and enjoys conversing with innovators, trailblazers, and long-term advocates of change.

Website: www.macaii.co.uk