Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Today's guest essay comes from Fortune's Megan Leonhardt, who shares her new story about the domestic support at home that allows female executives to rise to the C-suite. Plus: Taylor Swift will direct her first feature film and Peru gets a new president. Have a great Monday.
- How she does it. Female executives are among the hardest-working people I meet and interview. They seem to be in constant motion—dashing from meeting to meeting, sprinting through weeks of corporate travel, shuffling through dozens of impactful projects, and yet still carving out family time. But when I ask how they accomplish it all, the typical response is to deflect.
There’s an answer that goes unsaid: most have help at home. So why do women still shy away from openly talking about hiring the help they need to lean into their careers? Why are recommendations for daycares, cleaning services, housekeepers, assistants, and even personal trainers found via whisper network rather than out in the open?
I dive into those questions in a new story for Fortune. Over the years, many female executives admit they’ve quietly agonized over hiring help and suffer through a lot of "mom guilt" when they do. "Women have been given this idea in how we were raised—or what we saw in the media—that our job is to make other people's lives easier and to take care of other people," Sarah Bond, Microsoft's corporate vice president for game creator experience and ecosystem at Xbox, told me. "Fundamentally, it sort of runs through all of these little subtle messages that you've been given. And so when you do something to take care of yourself, or give yourself balance, you feel bad about it."
