S. Mitra Kalita is the ideas editor at Quartz, the global economy startup of Atlantic Media, and the author of numerous books. She worked previously at the Wall Street Journal from 2008 to 2012, first as deputy global economics editor, then as senior deputy editor, and finally as senior special writer. She also launched Mint, the second largest business paper in New Delhi, and became its national editor and columnist for two years.
In one of my first newsroom jobs, I had this amazing editor. She talked to me every morning and would take kernels of observation and help me shape them into real stories. She’d respond to my weekend or even middle-of-the-night e-mail pitches with great enthusiasm. She sheltered me from other managers asking for busy work and encouraged me to keep thinking big.
And yet early on in my career, I vowed to never be her.
She had three kids but worked all the time. That was not a life I wanted.
When I moved on to the next paper, I had a similarly fabulous manager, also a woman with two kids. She also worked insane hours, always making time for me in the middle of it all. And again, I said the same—I don’t want to be her.
A funny, unexpected thing happened ten years ago: I got pregnant. And my boyfriend at the time was freelancing and not employed. So quitting and staying home was not an option for me.
These days, as I juggle calls from the nanny, the bus driver, the school nurse, El Salvador’s finance minister, and Morgan Stanley’s head of emerging markets—and I curse the open office plan that means everyone can hear me—I think back to my vow and smile at how naïve and judgmental I was. Perhaps those yesteryear managers of mine justified their hours because their husbands stayed home, a mother lived with them, their mortgages were huge, or they wanted to set a good example for their kids. I know all these excuses because, by now, I have used them, too. And I, too, work all the time.
What I don’t think I understood back then is that those women actually picked me to join a small, lonely sorority of motherhood and management. All that time I spent judging them was also spent dissecting the juggle: Host the company Christmas party so it can be on your schedule. Work from home in the middle of the week because your kids will miss you less. If you must bring the laptop home, leave the charger behind so there’s a limit. Offer every member of your team one day a week she or he can go home early. Schedule conference calls with other mothers at 10 p.m., after everyone’s kids are asleep.
I fell into management accidentally, but the fact that it happened to be within a startup was a blessing. When I moved to India in 2006 to launch a business paper, I discovered startups are all in, exhausting, and take a huge toll on family life. But if you are ambitious and want to leave the world a better place (especially for said children), then the decision to join one is pretty easy. They expose merit and work ethic in the purest sense—great for women.
If you work from home (which I try really hard to do the equivalent of two days a week), there isn’t as much a question of whether you are actually working or at the grocery store. When I have played more individual contributor roles in larger organizations, it is easier to mask laziness or lack of productivity. And very importantly for women, it’s much harder for someone else to take credit for your work when an operation is new, lean, and dependent on breaking old models.
Quartz is my fourth journalism startup (Mint, the business paper in Delhi; the Greater New York section of the Wall Street Journal; and the New York World, a government accountability project at Columbia University, were the others). Some people might dispute my calling these ventures “startups” since all have been embedded within large institutions and I have no so-called skin in the game. I, too, dream of starting my own company, but have chosen the financial security of my family over those ambitions. (My husband works full-time now, but I remain the breadwinner in our household.)
A certain type of person gravitates toward innovations that attempt to disrupt the status quo. And it’s especially hard for women, with the high stakes of leaving a steady paycheck and time with children behind, to embrace risk. When people ask me why I keep doing these new projects, the common theme that has emerged is that women are a necessary part of any industry trying to innovate or reinvent itself. Startups need women. And the ones I have done happen to need me. I hate the term “office mom,” but I do think we have this ability to nurture and mentor, give tough love, be blunt in our criticism, and also keep going the immediacy, the need for decisive action and precision. We’re good at keeping the trains running and figuring out where they’re going. So I might not want to be the office mom, but I suspect a lot of women like me look around and are happy to play the role or fill the void that’s needed, to do what needs to be done. And startups are all about what needs to be done.
There’s a lot of talk in the tech world of needing to “diversify,” a code word for the inclusion of more women. Considering we are 50 percent of the population, this euphemism is ridiculous. In my case, race plays a bit of a role, too, because I decided long ago to try to change institutions from the inside out. Since the days of minority scholarship and internship programs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which helped me enter the newsroom, diversity in the workplace and issues of fairness and representation today actually seem to be getting worse in American institutions, not better. On my worst days, I look around the table, where I might be the only woman, the only person of color, and get pretty disgusted. But then I take heart. At least I’m at the table.
Yet still we remain an afterthought. Companies will set up senior leadership, look around, and then realize, “Oh wait, all the jobs at the top are white guys. We need a woman, maybe a minority.” Recruitment of diversity in this eleventh hour is too late. It diminishes the role of the last hire and always raises the issue of how “qualified” they are in the first place. That’s the worst way to enter an organization.
But beyond workplace culture, there’s also an issue I’m surprised doesn’t resonate more with managers: the bottom line. I think the fact that tech, for example, skews male means nobody is actually designing products for us (rhinestone-studded iPhone cases don’t count as innovation). In my own writing, I’ve railed against touchscreens as terrible for women who keep long nails. And please, can someone make an iPhone or Samsung that won’t break when a child so much as looks at it?
For all their need of women in their ranks, startups are hardly friendly places for mothers. Youthful workplaces have happy hours, late nights, weekends of work. When your children are young, as mine are (ages nine and two), there is no putting them in front of the couch to watch television while you work. They need you all the time. I wonder if my colleagues without children (most of them) have a sense of that. I can be all in, but I can’t be always on. I wonder if they look at me and vow never to be me.
Our workplaces don’t talk about these divides openly. We don’t talk about feeling self-conscious about working from home. We don’t mention that yes, we ran out to make it to a soccer game but then logged on at midnight to catch the India team in the morning. We don’t talk about how our careers delay family planning or might cause miscarriages. We don’t tell colleagues we are pregnant until we are out of the worst of the need for understanding and flexibility.
Indeed, that was the script I once followed. When I was an editor on a new section of the Wall Street Journal, I was six weeks pregnant and nobody knew. I was editing a story about Fashion Week when a nurse called from my doctor’s office with bad news: one hormone count was really, really low and it appeared that I had lost the baby. I broke down at work, literally telling my supervisor in a quiet but tearful gush by the coffee machine what had happened. I walked out the door. For three weeks. It turned out I was having an ectopic pregnancy (meaning I conceived in my tube), but until that was diagnosed, I was convinced I had lost the baby from working too hard. My workplace responded perfectly. The executive editor sent flowers and set up a meeting with me; “We’ll do whatever we have to do,” he said. They asked if I wanted to scale back my role (I did). “You at 50 percent is like most people at 100 percent,” one senior editor who took me out to breakfast told me. It was clear that the idea of a woman like me leaving the management track was better than leaving the organization. They did right by me.
But this is where the “not having it all” reality really hit home—I went from manager to reporter. Thankfully I got pregnant again. And had a healthy baby within fourteen months of the miscarriage. I was lucky. After the baby was born, I wanted to stay a reporter, to be there for her. I feared returning to management. And yet I feared not returning.
Once you’ve had a taste of the power and effectiveness of management and know you are good at making things happen, it becomes hard to stay sidelined. But those bigger roles are hard to do with children because they demand face time and real leadership and being “all in.” When I directly supervised twenty-two people (the most I have ever managed), I took home all their problems with me and fretted over their stories, their futures, their careers, their breakups. I tried to do what those managers who helped me along the way did. Unlike my husband, I don’t really shut off when I come home. It’s a good and bad thing.
So last summer when I got a call to join Quartz, the global economy site of the Atlantic, and be in senior management and work from home a few days a week and still write books and still teach, I took it. But somehow I think women feel we should be grateful to be accommodated. I concede I am self-conscious of having a “deal.” I think a white guy in my position would think the organization would be grateful to land him.
When Quartz launched, I was still pumping breast milk for my daughter. We had a retreat in our president’s apartment. I pumped in his master bedroom. We went out for a Chinese banquet dinner. I pumped in the supply closet. We went out for drinks. I pumped in the bathroom. I was determined to be there, though. Those are the sacrifices you make to do it all, have it all.
It’s still a really lonely existence. I am constantly looking to infuse our newsroom, and our industry overall, with more female and minority talent. The struggle to do so makes me incredibly grateful to those managers who took such a great interest in setting me up so well, so early on in my career. The least I can do to pay them back is plod on and hope to fill those empty seats at the table.