Navigating Activism, Motherhood and Leadership, with Tiffany Lo

 In this week's episode, I'm delighted to introduce you to Tiffany Lo – a powerhouse of adaptability and resilience who is all about creating real change driven by the people who truly need it! 

Tiffany wears multiple hats as a gender rights activist, a dedicated toddler mother, and the product manager at Ever Driven, a private company that supports School Districts to build safe trips for special needs and the homeless. 

One of the fantastic initiatives she's been involved in is the Soul Medicine platform and YANA, a global collaborative resource for survivors of sexual assault. Being part of a cross-functional team at Chayn, she was crucial in building this fantastic project from the ground up. She's also had the honor of presenting at GitHub Universe and represented the youth at the United Nations Conference on Addressing Inequalities through Youth Entrepreneurship. 

In our conversation, we delve into the quiet power of patience and resilience in leadership and activism. Tiffany shares some lessons she learned on the frontlines of activism, the trials of motherhood, her own healing journey from abuse, and how that has shaped the unique medicine she now brings to the world. 

Thank you for listening to Women Rise. Sign up for my distribution list so you never miss an episode. Learn more about the Women Rise leadership program for women change-makers on my website. If you'd like to be considered to be interviewed on this podcast, please write me directly or take this survey to find out if you're a good fit.

Transcript

Claire: 0:00

Hello and welcome to Women Rise, a podcast about women changemakers that explores the emergence of a new leadership paradigm, which calls us to lead from within. I'm your host, Claire Molinard, and I live and work on the island of Corsica, in the south of France. I'm a holistic coach and therapist. teach and facilitate developmental programs for conscious women changemakers, helping them move from depleted and disconnected to resourced and interconnected. Every week, I meet with other women leaders and we explore the inner game of leadership and how, in this time of emergency, we are being called to our unique self-emergence to co-create a world that works for everyone. I am delighted to welcome Tiffany Lo on this new episode of Women Rise. Tiffany is a dedicated mother of a toddler. She is a passionate gender rights activist and a resilient leader who has been involved in a number of very interesting and fascinating projects, some of which she'll share with us today. Tiffany, it's a delight to have you here. Welcome to Women Rise, and please, why don't you get us started with letting us feel into what animates your activism at the moment?

Tiffany: 1:30

Thank you for having me, claire. It's actually a real honor to be invited to chat with

Claire: 2:32

Thank you. That's beautiful. I just love to hear the passion behind your words, tiffany, and I would say that that's a beautiful characteristic of many of the women that I interview here on this podcast is how passionate you are about your work, about what you advocate for, and, as you know, what I'm passionate about is to detect the emotion, the feelings, the heart led, energy and passion that is behind a woman's activism. To me, this is really the fire that animates your activism, that heart, energy.

Tiffany: 3:19

Yeah, I feel like I do see that this generation folks like me. They come at this with their own unique fire. I wouldn't say that I'm a part of Gen Z. I guess that's the generation that I observe now. I hear a lot about Gen Z, for example, and within my generation, that kind of cascades, whether it's taking to their neighborhoods and streets to protest, something like Robi Wave, or whether it is just fighting using the internet to fight against bigger issues that are happening. I mean. Another thing that I find interesting too is some of the allies that kind of have shown up in this generation. I'm going to name one. Actually, I can't say that maybe they're the perfectest, but it's just interesting to see this difference that women have backing them in these early generations.

Tiffany: 4:16

I was recently watching a documentary and it was an individual whose name I don't think you deserve, as you mentioned. Really, he did something awful posting people's personal things to the internet the way that the mother fought for her daughter and they all fought for themselves, and the way Anonymous got involved. It's like we're dealing with a generation of people, of women, who are not taking it. We bring a type of fire that I think is inspiring and it continues to inspire as we continue to bring more young women and girls into the world, and allies as well. I'm a toddler boy mom, so I'm trying to make sure that I don't hide or shield him from the realities. That is something that women face, girls face every day. I'm wanting him to be a part of that allyship, knowing that it can't be performative, it can't be when it's convenient, when it sounds good to say it's something that you take with you to the grave. Really, it's not meant to be uncomfortable. You think about, as I'm a black woman, you think about allyship and slavery. You know for it to change it took us and others who were willing to be crucified just for standing for human rights at that point in time, and that's something that I'm demonstrating to him.

Tiffany: 5:36

Yes, he's very young and I don't have the opportunity to do something as wild as but it's the say, how I carry myself in the conversations that we have and the material that we read, right, the children's book. There is certain entertainment program that can be utilized to help support the education for myself and for, you know, for his young mind, as we kind of grow up and you know, but yet this generation, you know, just taking it back, there's a lot of opportunity to get involved in social activism in a way that maybe our forefathers and our parents might not have been able to do. But I don't say the Internet is as complete as a relatively new thing either. The Internet has been around a decent amount of time, but I think it's just like we have come to the understanding, like we're utilizing these tools now to really go in and take charge of issues and make our voice be known.

Tiffany: 6:31

And I think it's such an important time we're at right now and it's important that we continue to shine that light on the abilities that women and girls have to be able to lead this conversation, lead these initiatives that we see in our home front, our backyards, at government levels, at global levels. So this is really a global fight. We think about it, what goes on in different countries, and really sends that resounding sound of what happens when we sit here in the comforts of the United States right At least where I sit anyway, you know but it does have an impact. It does cut deep because it reminds me that I am a woman and I could barely very easily be there or have been born there.

Tiffany: 7:13

You know, it was just by birth that I ended up here, you know, dealing with my own issues and it's not to say anyone's issues are lesser or greater Issues that no one should have to, as a human, have to go through. That's, it's ridiculous. All rights are important, but we need to make women's rights equal, if not most important right now, because they're just not being listened to.

Claire: 7:34

Yeah, yeah, I'm thinking of the women in Iran, and it's been going on for decades, and more recently in September, and we hardly hear about them. No, no, no, yeah. So to bring it back to your work, tiffany, how do you reconcile your daily job and your activism and your total mom role and that's very familiar for a woman right To be playing all those different roles. How do you keep the fire going?

Tiffany: 8:07

Yeah, that's a good question. I think I've had a thought about this in the past and I think the fire kind of lights up when I ask myself are you done yet? That I kind of go, I don't know, we'll see what comes around. You know, I say that because it's been. You know, recently I was well, it feels like recently, but I guess it's been some time For about four years I had volunteered and contracted with an NGO called Chen and their mission is to fight gender-based violence on a global scale.

Tiffany: 8:37

I spent a lot of time there. I mean, I didn't imagine what life would look like not volunteering or contracting or being a part of the day-to-day there. In some way. At some point I wanted to kind of move more into product management, away from being a software engineer, and it was an opportunity for me to do that. So I took the opportunity but knew that I couldn't balance the two. So eventually I wouldn't say I entirely exited the organization, as I'm still part of the community, it's just a facet I took that time to kind of step away from being a gender-based activist and really propelled myself into understanding product management and understanding how actually product management solves a lot of the problems that we had been solving at Chen, conducting the survivor interviews to understand how to build trauma-informed designs. So that's really what propelled me. It was kind of a hand-in-hand. I think. When you spend a lot of time, when I spend a lot of time just kind of working in what I'm doing already, things, that kind of interconnect it just kind of reunites that flame.

Tiffany: 9:38

Even when I come to what I thought was a pause, getting the education at the accelerator program. I went to PM Dojo and then getting my first opportunity. I wasn't active, I was a social activist. I thought I said something wrong with that. But I believe that multitasking, if you want to call it that, kind of looks like working under parts of yourself. It doesn't have to be both hands constantly moving, like moving both my hands here, constantly moving to like state the case that you are an excellent multitasker. But it could be something about how you position yourself in your mind, right, what's up next? What are you feeling right now? Like really tapping into that soft thought and reflection and then setting out those plans and what feels right.

Tiffany: 10:23

And I think that's kind of what happened for me, just like coming out of the program there and moving into that first role and getting impacted by a layoff at some point, but still keeping my sights into companies that I felt like would be a good fit for my subject matter expertise. So why that might not be complete activism the idea of supporting children getting to from school, children with disabilities and special needs is that it's something that I thought was an honor when I was recruited to work there after being impacted by that layoff, and I think it just kind of came full like a bit of a circle here for somebody who's like part is concerned about these kind of issues. But it can be monetary, yet it's a private company, it's not an NGO. But I think all work done correctly is important and I see it as an opportunity for me to bring in some of the understandings of mental health and the understandings of some of the social issues and issues with disabilities that there is, that they're more marginalized for abuse as well. So this is the opportunity that I have being able to own this product line here at Never Driven, for example, and so on and so forth.

Tiffany: 11:39

I think that might answer your question there, but maybe not. But yeah, I think it's just really spending time thinking about what it is that kind of ignites that flame and maybe I'm giving myself a pause, maybe I'm quiet for about a month, and that's okay. I think I'm recharging to get back to the next thing where somebody will message me. You know, that's just kind of how it happens. I love that.

Claire: 12:02

I love that, because there is a kind of gentleness and capacity to be in the stillness. There's a way in which activism can be angry, which I think often is the shadow of activism, and what you're speaking to here is different. There is sort of a wisdom, a capacity to be in a quieter place and to still tend to the fire.

Tiffany: 12:33

Yeah, I'd say so.

Claire: 12:35

And that's actually a feminine quality to be able to wait. I mean, we carry a child in our belly for nine months. So there is this capacity to hold something, to be a container for something to be born. That's innate in us and I'm kind of recognizing that in what you just said. You know it's a great quality to have for an activist.

Tiffany: 12:59

Yeah, I can definitely agree with you on that. I think that I'll be transparent. If anyone who followed me during my pregnancy or your friend or someone I chatted with a lot online I did not enjoy waiting. It's not easy because we're human and the idea of being that container or that waiting period that some of us might have experienced already thinking about doing, might be unsure about choice for everyone. It's not. You're going to go into it and you're going to think, oh my God, what have I done? But then you're counting the days, like when can I go back to laying how I used to lay, hanging out with my friends and not feeling like, oh, I feel spent, I'm ready to go home after a couple of minutes. But I think it's like for me, it helped set me up to be more disciplined, if you will, as a person you know this is. I mean I wanted to have my child. I planned to have my child as well. I say that because I have autoimmune disease called lupus, so I wasn't able to just like surprise and like just try and they'll come when they come. I had to like okay. So I didn't get that opportunity of surprise. But you know, with all that planning. My mind was very aware, but it wasn't until I got pregnant that I was like what in the world is this like? I'm just waiting here, I'm not doing much that I'd like to do. I did work with Jen during my pregnancy, which was tough. It was like a challenge because I was tired and just not feeling. You know myself and everyone's pregnancy is going to be different too. It's another thing I do want to call out. For me, it was pretty tough, but I think what I got out of it really was just kind of unknowingly even this, able to just wait and hold out and be patient.

Tiffany: 14:38

I like to imagine that people who've experienced abuse themselves personally, such as I, have you learn to buy your time. You learn to wait and unfortunately, women are more marginalized to experience, you know, violence or abuse against them, and that for short periods of time usually. I think it's safe to say that we find ourselves in situations for a while. You know, quote unquote it's not easy to walk away. It's dangerous for us to walk to get out. If we make out, you know, make it out we don't know if they'll come after us. That's why we stay right and then we buy our time, and I say all this to say is like it's almost either built into us to do this, maybe we just get the most practice to do it, whether we want it to in some cases of abuse, but you know, I don't think anybody wants to, but that's what, something that is taken out of that.

Tiffany: 15:30

It's like that fighting your time and just being patient and waiting for your next opportunity. But when a woman is ready to make those changes, or their opportunity of waiting whether you're pregnant here and back to that kind of conversation here ends, oh, we, we turn into another person. You know again, we shift, you know we adapt. We're so adaptable to our environment, our changes, and we're so very self aware of what we need to do. I guess we grow up quickly some of us and we make the changes that need to be made, and so I like the way you kind of went with this, but this yeah, I'd like to bring a distinction, because I think there are two different things here.

Claire: 16:12

I was pointing to this capacity to be a container and to be in stillness, trusting that something beautiful is going to come out of it A child in the example of being pregnant. But also, you know, I was resonating to what you said about I. It's okay to be in the quiet, something else will come up. So there's actually a lot of power there and that's, I think, different from the quiet of a victim or an abused Person who's used to holding it right. So it's a little different. But I get what you're saying. There's also some of that in you know, being able to wait, yeah, it builds resiliency Resiliency, exactly, and that's probably the gift in the abuse. And because you brought it up, I like to ask you yeah, sometimes you know, we're animated by a sense of injustice that fuels our activism and that itself is informed by what we went through ourselves. What is your sense of how your own story has informed your activism?

Tiffany: 17:20

I've never really sat with this question, but I've always answered it, just simply so, if I want to be really honest here, why I do identify as a survivor abuse, there was a period of a break even. What was it? I wasn't full-on activist the day it happened, you know, it wasn't full on activists the next day. It was a period of like, just being just so. I don't know what my mind was doing. I was doing a lot of things that definitely wasn't for healing. I threw myself into therapy just because it was expected of me to do so, to prove that this happened. That was I was doing all the things approved. So it was my family to friends that, yes, something that happened that I did not want to happen to me, and Just trying to follow what I thought. Maybe the script is because I don't know the world has a script for us that I still have yet to see what their script is. But they're very quick to point your finger when they feel like, oh no, there's no way this person, this happens to them, they're lying, they're making it up. Oh, that's a great person they're trying to ruin you know.

Tiffany: 18:18

So within a period of maybe some years, a couple years maybe. I mean I had left New York City when it happened and stayed with family and realized quickly I needed to go back to New York City because it's not where I wanted to be. A brought up a lot of the childhood abuse they are too. So I wanted to go back and I've worked some odd jobs back in New York City and then I've gotten laid off. I think I was moving from one engineering job to another in which we had a layoff situation happened and I felt so defeated, like it brought up all these Feelings just a very painful time, because I thought I was gonna finally get my life on track. I had recently gotten married. I had put all that behind me, the friendships that I had lost because of my assault years and we're talking 2011 to 2016, 15 where I sat and I think if it wasn't for getting laid off, I wouldn't have explored the internet.

Tiffany: 19:10

But I guess that's looking for resources. We're always just kind of looking for something. You know, our next thing. I was looking for a job, really, and I found this beautiful website that talked a lot about gender rights activism, had resources that died. It was called Chen and I'd like to love to work here. This is the kind of space that I feel like really connected with me and, mind you, I had done no, I'm gonna get done it then had I done activism work? Maybe not really other than taking myself to groups for sexual violence groups and like sharing my story here in there, but not to the capacity. I mean I can't open up a lot of opportunities by joining them and I didn't think I'd be contracting with them Sometimes and mostly volunteering, but I signed up to join because that was where I was and from there I again I say it opened up so many opportunities.

Tiffany: 19:58

I spoke at the mayor's office in New York City and I was pretty pregnant. So you said riding the subway was not At all but I wasn't gonna take the car because it was just too much in the steering wheel and the whole thing. It's just too much. But they need to speak there on issues regarding sexual violence and some of the laws they wanted to pass and they wanted us to speak on some of the changes there. And Going to GitHub universe text space that is like. So my vibe you know to share about a platform and resources that we created, like our soul medicine platform, giving bite-size Information to people who want to take back their lives and control parts of their lives if they're in an abusive situation. Mental health guide that I had was a project lead-on we shared about there.

Tiffany: 20:43

And it's just so. I can go on and on, but there's just so many Things. I think that first four years was just like I was a whole nother person doing what I loved, but it wasn't again. It might not always be instant for everyone like, okay, this happens to you and now your childhood spoke to this because I had a use of childhood in domestic violence, being in the home and manipulation and abuse and things like that, but I Didn't take off then it wasn't until another Horrific situation and then I didn't take off even then per se, but I think it was, you know, aligning myself with the community, mm-hmm.

Tiffany: 21:19

Educating myself before I spoke, because a lot of the things that I probably might have said. We're probably not the best way to say these things if you want people to believe In your mission, to believe in why this is important, that women and girls need to be protected, we need to Be able to go out in public spaces, have our truths be heard and never questioned. And I want to thank her who sang, actually a founder Chen, who really guided and steered the organization. She is a leader like no other and now she's on the turn to you and I was. She's enjoying her time and she tears up to step through the same footsteps I went through.

Tiffany: 22:01

But you, I think that organization really provided me the space to run with activism the way I did and be here today to speak on issues I think one of the hardest and scariest time I reflect on of issues spoken on, but I think it needed to happen is again so very pregnant and went to the United Nations to speak about youth entrepreneurship.

Tiffany: 22:24

I mean, it was one of the probably larger highlights. You know, that really kind of shook me in a very positive way like this, about how important all the sustainable goals are. Gender rights activism is important and I took that as an example, which is why now I'm again partnering with Kinstead here on the board, because that's not in line with gender rights activism Exactly, but it's still, I think, something that social issue like being understanding what it means to be a social activist. Human rights activists those are more larger brother terms, I'd say, but you don't always have to stay in your jam, I have to stay here and there's a lot that connects and that can be learned if it doesn't connect and that can be connected if you just make that connection.

Claire: 23:11

So yeah, you know, there's a way in which, when we are victims of abuse, we can stain that identification to being a victim. Right, we can be trapped in that role and as long as we identify to only that role, there's no way out, there's no possibility of transformation. It's only by integrating that part of ourselves within a larger story, within a larger script, that we can be liberated, or we can understand this part of our life within the larger script of our life. And that's the possibility of transformation, and I think that's where activism can draw its power. We all have a unique story and we all have a unique story of wounding. And in the very wound of our story there's also a script for the type of fixing, the type of healing that we can offer the world.

Claire: 24:16

I think these two are related, if we can find the golden thread that runs under. In other words, what I'm trying to say is that our wounds inform the medicine that we are able to bring to the world. That is unique to us. Because we have a unique wounding, we also have a unique medicine, a unique healing. There's a particular way that we perceive the world, that we're intimate with the world. That is going to inform our activism, our soul is equipped with the wisdom that can recognize that when we liberate ourselves from that role of the victim, that is the condition, that is the clarification that is necessary, and I think that it's the role of every activist to clarify that for themselves. And with you, I really have the sense that you are drawing from that wisdom. You have access to this guidance.

Tiffany: 25:16

Yeah, I think wisdom is something that is given to us by experiences that we will take for ourselves, whether it's a course or experiences that are literally put on our lap that we didn't ask for. But again, I think that really speaks to what the word we had mentioned earlier in this is resilience, with that birth's resilience, kind of going through these experiences difficult, even the ones that we ask for, whether it's being pregnant or maybe saying, oh, I want to go back into a world of tech and coding. That was my security blanket. This is something that I did. I went back into coding in my life after putting it down. That was something that I did as a child to protect myself from the things around me, and I coded my heart out and created my own world, built my own signs and layouts and all these things on the web, and went back and stepped through that experience of saying I want to make this professional career, I want to do this, not because I needed to protect myself from my childhood memories, but because I'm intelligent. I can do this, I've done it before. It's a good starting point for a career and all these women are strategical right. We're going to pick up something that we know if we can. Sometimes we want to pivot into things that we've never gotten to, because we're fearless as well. We have a lot of qualities for me.

Tiffany: 26:34

Strategically it made sense I did it, but I knew it wasn't going to be easy, because I was waiting into an experience of like opening a computer, getting into a coding editor and trying to keep up with what the world was at with technology was a challenge. Trying to not write lines of codes that felt familiar. That brought up memories for me, like as I write a line of code. I remember when I first wrote this line of code I was 13 and just kind of like stepping through the experience. But that's an experience that I wanted to go through. I needed to go through and out of that came resilient, so that way I could persevere through this. I think if we do that time and time again, I mean now I'm a product manager and it was a new experience that I had to go through. It was not easy, but it was one that I feel like again helped me be more resilient and all these things, these experiences of the wisdom that we gather up, I mean I was important with them. So I had to go through like hard experiences that I picked for myself, hard experiences that were given to me, but maybe even easy experiences, right, that weren't so bad, but that was interesting, that was a learning point kind of thing, and I think that's really what supports us to build out that wisdom, what to do for ourselves in the future. We get to learn more about ourselves too, what we're capable of, what we're not going to put up with.

Tiffany: 27:57

I think I've become more known nonsense as I've become a mom as well, not to say that I'm not fun, you know, but just like that, yeah, I'm not afraid to speak in front of senior leaders, I'm not afraid to do things that are scary. I say this because it's the experiences that remember that I'm human and then I you know what is. What is failure? I think that's another thing. You kind of worry about failure and want to gather all the wisdom before we traverse two things. But I think sometimes it's okay to go through the experience even if you don't have all the wisdom, because it just makes that knowledge that you're going to walk away from even more valuable. So I think that's what I have to say on that. But thank you, I'm glad you think I'm a wise individual. I never really thought of that.

Claire: 28:43

Yeah, it's my passion to recognize that and woman and reflect it to them. I do believe that we all have access to wisdom, love and power, that these are forces that we can cultivate. Again, it's about clarifying what clouds are personality and cultivating the capacity to access the love in our heart, the wisdom of our mind and the power of our bodies. These are natural centers of intelligence which we can access. It's a continual process of cultivation and it's also a capacity. These are capacities that I see are coming online in women, and in men, of course, but my work is focused on women leadership. So I really believe that it's from that integrated heart, mind and body intelligence that we can begin to be powerful agents of change for creating a world that works for everyone, and we're doing this together. I'm feeling that there is a strong wave of men and women that are really coming together, that are becoming agents of change beyond the polarities, the huge polarities that are separating, that are forces of separation in the world today.

Tiffany: 30:10

Yeah, there's a lot of differences now, today, and how we're coming together to make the world that we want to be. I hate to say that quote, I've said it a few times is like be the change that you want to see.

Claire: 30:22

Well, it's still relevant, it's natural.

Tiffany: 30:25

Yeah.

Claire: 30:26

I think it's an important one. This is where it starts. Each one of us is the change, but there is also a sense that this is happening on a collective level today. It's way beyond individual change. How about we change gears, Tiffany? I think it would be interesting for our listeners to also touch on parenting, as we mentioned earlier, and your toddler is about to turn four and your life has changed a lot, obviously having him. I'd love to hear from you how that affects, and has affected, your life as an activist and as a woman.

Tiffany: 31:00

Yeah, it doesn't make anything in life, whether it wasn't activist or whether it wasn't, whether anything you do in life does become harder because you are caring for such a young mind that needs to be fed and clothed and just really you are their world, especially early age. I mean you'll always be their world in some capacity as well. As they get older it just gets more complicated. So I hear from other folks who have older children you know at one.

Tiffany: 31:30

Yeah, I hear that a lot of work. I joke with my boss. I'm like, oh, I'm so looking forward to like just a different perspective right now. And he's like, oh, it just gets more complicated. It's like, thanks a lot, but to be honest, it's not easy. It definitely is a walk in the park, but I think it's important to make sure you go in with it every day with that forefront of your mind, not that it's not easy, but that you have to be adaptable to the changes of the day.

Tiffany: 31:58

I know that you might not get to do what you like to do today. I mean, I can have a schedule laid out right. My son could just want to do other things. And not because he wants to do other things, he's saying it, his emotions are just very raw at this age. The tantrums, the unpredictability of toddlers that's just how they are very unpredictable. And I think if you go into it, you being the adult, knowing that you set boundaries for yourself, knowing that, like, okay, his nap time, actually that's not true, he doesn't take a nap anymore. But let's just say, for the sake of example here for folks who have nap time still for their toddlers or their babies, I recommend taking advantage of those times, maybe to fill your cup up, whether it's sitting in your silence, whether it's working on a piece, maybe getting a nap in, doing whatever it is that serves you in those times. But like learning to I guess we talked about earlier like fighting your time in a sense right, knowing that when it's the weekend I'm not answering a whole lot of social media, I'm not doing a whole lot. And it's like setting boundaries, because earlier on, when I came into this, there was a lot of friction, frustration. I mean, we kind of want to do what we want to do right throughout our days, but we have to understand that Eventually our toddlers or our children will go to sleep and maybe we can get an hour or two we had bedtime once you put them to sleep there and to do what we like to do. But like really setting like these boundaries and putting a perspective that this is a new time in your life and you're not going to have that full run of your schedule. You might have a good day where the schedule that you've set out works out great, but also keeping in mind that it fills the cup up of your child, because they are also human beings too, and they are watching and learning the interactions between other humans, which is why you are their world and they're observing from you. And if it's time to get on the floor and put with blocks of baby, that's what you should be doing. Work can wait, I think it's just.

Tiffany: 33:59

It's very important to be very careful and intentional about how you lay out your day to day with a child. For anything to work and also seeking help. Building a village where you don't have a village, if you can Whether it's outsourcing help from parents or family, or maybe you can't afford to have a babysitter to come and visit in sporadically or occasionally to give you the breaks that you need. Or there's a care group or a nursery group that you can drop your little one off. That, I mean. Even that, takes time, because you have to build up like the.

Tiffany: 34:32

Well, my child doesn't have separation anxiety. I don't think he ever did, and it wasn't a clean on baby. He was the kind of kid that would just go hug people. He didn't know and he still does that. But these are the things that have to be worked on first, so you have to be cognizant of before you really start saying this is how it's going to be and I hate to break it to you.

Tiffany: 34:52

It changes once you get into the schedule. They grew up some more and then you're just like okay, naps are over. Like in our house, naps have ended over. Like a year and a half ago, when my mom came to visit and she saw us trying to put him down for like a 45 minute nap, I think we spent like 35 minutes trying to put him down and she said you are killing yourselves. This child is not tired. And I think it also feeding into the ideologies of like what toddlers or babies are supposed to be doing. I mean, every child is different. I think we do that a lot as humans. We script a lot Like we script, so we run with it, like it has to show us the one, just like that. It's for it to be true, right. And then we talked about it yeah you know, so yeah.

Claire: 35:36

Yeah, yeah. Great advice and the emphasis on self care while caring for your child and realizing that you have a unique human being in front of you and that's a new phase of your life. It will never be again the same as it was before, so there's no need to resist how it is and try and bring it back to some normality. The normality is changing all the time.

Tiffany: 36:00

Yeah.

Claire: 36:00

Exactly, yeah, hopefully one day, having a nursery in the workplace will be a common thing and not an exception. I know that it exists already in private organizations in many cultures, but having access to a nursery at your workplace is still a big luxury.

Tiffany: 36:21

I think that says a lot about society and our culture. You know, I came into motherhood like really feeling everything I heard about. I hear about oh, it's so hard being a mom. Let's just put it in perspective. Right, we're going to put it into the United States because that's where I can only base my experience off of Right, but I think it's safe to say that this is probably the most non-family-centric country, despite people always saying, oh, america, family values. I mean, what are their values? I'm not sure then, because we lack so much in healthcare for women. We just gotten our healthcare rights punched in the gut.

Tiffany: 37:04

no, more than a year ago, yeah, and then there's, like you mentioned, there are nurseries in some places. That's a good model to go off of, but I mean because it's not taking notice and saying, hey, who's the pillar of our society? Children and women. Families are the pillar of our society, so let's support them. They're not doing that. I mean, I think food stamps I had recently and I've heard about it before, but I just never really sat with me, because I've actually used the government benefits before, on and off throughout my life as I needed it.

Tiffany: 37:38

But there's a timeline and I probably should have looked this up before I say this. But, like about seven years, you can use it. After that you can't use it anymore, from what I understand, and then go free to back this up with sources, but I was reading something of that nature. Let this stop familiar. After you've used it like they could use it for a year, you're good, your life goes back on track. Two years later, something catastrophic happens. You've got to get back on it. Okay, now you're back on it again for another year, and each year that you're on it, I guess they count that as the year. Okay, we had stamps this year and if it's consecutive, obviously it's consecutive but, like you know, maybe for three years you were good, but it adds up to this.

Tiffany: 38:17

I think it's about seven years and I'm not sure it's by state. But I've heard this and I'm thinking like, wow, this is to say that people would never find themselves. I mean, if you find yourself in a situation, let's just say seven times, you know, does that? What are we saying about people? Or we're so quick to judge. How could you not figure it out seven times? Right, that just puts more. I think that's just a conversation like what that says. I think it should be something that anyone can use without having any kind of cap, because you can't say what people's needs are or what they're going through, and then you think about, like, the elderly population and what they need and anyway, the way we're set up here, it's just not really thinking about the struggles of parent life and the motherhood and of the companies. Oh yeah, go ahead.

Claire: 39:07

No, I was just going to say, and of course the most vulnerable are the single.

Tiffany: 39:10

Others Exactly, Involverable social places, often of color, yeah that's spot on, and the resources that we do have are dropping the hatch to a resounding problem that we have throughout this country. I remember, like when I recently had my son, we were looking to go out to eat with friends and we were still living in New York. I think he had like four months or so, maybe five months, and I'm over here scouting to check for changing tables in the bathrooms so we could decide on whether we're going to eat here or not. I mean, we hear about men's bathrooms not usually having changing tables, which I think they're trying to be better about here. I haven't kept up with it, but we change the baby on the bathroom on the table it folds out.

Tiffany: 39:56

Some restaurants don't even have, and I guess it's to say that parents aren't supposed to go out to eat and children are not welcome here. What does that say? I don't know, it was just an afterthought, like, oh, we didn't think about it. I mean, to be fair, new York doesn't have the best space for things either. I mean, apartments are the size of the shoeboxes, to be fair, but maybe that's what happened in the bathroom just wasn't going to fit. Something that falls out, I don't know, but these are the things that we are cognizant of, you've become cognizant of as a mother, as a parent. We hear literally trying to scatter out your day of what's going to work for you, what's going to be a space that is going to work for your family, which is going to get a meal, who's going to be around, what time of day it is, because you don't want your child crying and disturbing other people, going to the store, getting judged. I think as a society we see crying children, we just think, oh, what a failure of a parent.

Claire: 40:49

Yeah, what I'm thinking of is that, to bring it back to leadership, which is kind of an umbrella topic, there is a way in which and I've had that conversation a few times now with women who work in international development what they tell me is that, even though there is a desire to respect the quotas, often in international development you see that women leaders are secondary and the leadership is still quite male-dominated. What happens is that when you put more female leadership, the projects are different. They are more focused on community development, on certain needs that are often not addressed. I think that you're actually speaking to that. There's a way in which women perceive reality from a different angle. Therefore, they bring solutions that have never been thought of by men.

Claire: 41:48

In one of my podcasts, I'm speaking with this woman who works in the blue economy in Southeast Asia. She was making an important point. She was basically saying we have 10 years and we need to bring more women here because they bring solutions that are working and that are actually responding to the issues that we have, and we don't have a definite time to address these issues.

Tiffany: 42:11

It makes a lot of sense. I think for a moment as a product person, you think about users who have the pain points and the experience and who are constantly going through the issues constantly and what a solution looks like. We are a perfect example of these experiences, our pain points. We've lived it. We are aware of our reality that in order to get through what we need to get through, we need to do XYZ and this is how it's going to be.

Tiffany: 42:38

Maybe our counterparts, men they don't have these experiences. They're going to come in with oh, we want to do all the right things, do the good things. That's just a very vague umbrella to what a solution really looks like that solves the problems for families. Families aren't just men. Families aren't just children. Families aren't just mothers. We need to look at a holistic view of breaking it down. Who are each of these different groups of children, fathers, mothers, even families who may not identify to heterosexual norm, really coming in on some of these pain points or these problems that they have and letting them share those problems?

Tiffany: 43:22

Because I find that in my work, when I listen to what the problems are, it helps lead me to the solutions. Like, wow, 25% of these people are saying the same thing over and over again, or 50%, so on and so forth, and it really guides me to okay, this is what a solution looks like. But in this case, as you mentioned the woman you spoke with on the last podcast that I'm pretty sure we can roll out with a solution ASAP, because women have been doing this for so long. There's really nothing to test out. Let's just do the work now.

Claire: 43:51

Let's just get there. Listen to them, yeah, yeah, listen and get there.

Tiffany: 43:55

Yeah, exactly, yeah. So, but I think one of the things that we can do and we think of taking it back as far as being a leader, being a woman who leads, isn't really trying to get that buy-in from our whether our process above us or identifying as this white male, or maybe you just aren't cognizant to our issues, but really having these kind of conversations on a human level and maybe you could be the one to bring in something that's more focused to the needs of women like childcare usually falls on women to figure out right. So if a company starts to open up some type of nursery or like partnering with a, I know there's like apps like Urban Sitter and Citr City where you can they have like an employment thing where I guess they could add that to the benefits. Maybe your child's out sick and you need to get a nanny to come, someone who will work with children who are sick, because some of them won't because they're sick, but you know you could have them come in so you can at least get like four to eight hours of your day of work done. So there's that support right, and I think it really comes down to us continuing to do what you best and making our case and getting that by and building those relationships first right with our bosses or people around us that may have more influential power than we might.

Tiffany: 45:09

And that's what leadership can also look like. It's not always like, oh, I'm a leader, so I'm gonna like draft up this proposal that's gonna change all these things. Leadership is a movement of getting people to understand and believe what you believe in, maybe even feel or sympathize very deeply with you, and to motivate and move people from places to places in their hearts to help you enact change. And I think that's where it starts kind of keeping up that collective thought there, really just getting people to, persuading people to have to help you and other women benefit from what we need, whether it's childcare, whether it's resources to become a better leader. And I think that we just really should lean into that, those feminine qualities, lean into our heart and just really speak from a place of these experiences. I think those are some of the things that really is going to set apart whether we move into a direction that really benefits women or we continue to have these wishes and goals that we're aspiring to.

Claire: 46:17

Beautiful. I think this is a good place to stop. We could just go on forever. I mean, there's a lot of. I will kind of reflect to you right now the vulnerability that you speak to. Thank you so much for this conversation. It was beautiful. Thank you, claire.

Tiffany: 46:35

It was lovely to be here.

Claire: 46:37

Thank you for listening to Women Rise. If you enjoyed the show today, please leave us a review. To get announcements when a new podcast is published, send me an email at Claire at unixelfemergencecom to be added on my distribution list. If you're interested in being a guest on my podcast or you would like to join my private free group for female leaders, go to my podcast description for the links to apply. Thanks again and see you soon on the Women Rise podcast.