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It was mid-morning when Nadine Jones got the daycare call every working mother dreadsher son spiked a fever and needed to be picked up. Jones, a senior associate at a big D.C. law firm, newly divorced with full custody of her 14-month-old son, knew what that call meant: her day was about to unravel. At the daycare, another single mother pulled Jones aside. Dont you have to work? she asked. Yes, Jones replied. Okay, this is what you do, the woman said, Tomorrow, just before you drop him off, youre gonna give him childrens Tylenol. Thats gonna bring his fever down and give you two or three hours at work. Then youll have another hour or two before they confirm its back up. Dont you need those five hours? Jones did. Working parents often scramble to stay employed while caring for their families. Cold and flu season can be especially brutal for caregivers, and this season weve had the highest number of cases in 30 years. But cold and flu season isnt just making us sickit’s disproportionately pushing working mothers to make impossible choices: either compromise their childs care or face lasting career consequences, such as stalled advancement and burnout. Or, in Joness case, send her sick child to daycare, and risk infecting everyone elseall for the sake of a partial day at work. The double load: breadwinner and on-call nurse Working mothers are facing a twofold problem. First, sexism is deeply entrenched in society so they end up doing most of the caregiving. Second, many companies dont take kindly to employees using PTO, or dont provide enough for caregivers with children. The result is a double whammy that forces mothers like Jones to make impossible choices. To the first point, women are doing the bulk of childcare. A study of 2,217 mothers by BabyCenter.com, a website with resources for parents, found that 82% handle the majority of childcare logistics. They are also twice as likely as fathers to take time off to care for a sick child. Similarly, a Pew Research Center survey of 5,152 U.S. adults found even when a heterosexual woman earns as much or more than her husband, she does more at home. On average, these women spend two hours a week more on caregiving and 2.5 hours more on housework, while their husbands have 3.5 more hours a week for leisure activities. Pews research also found that the majority of Americans say society values mens contributions at work more than their contributions at home, showing how gender bias is still a deeply entrenched part of our culture. Stephanie Steele-Wren is a licensed psychologist who runs her own practice. Even though she and her husband make roughly the same income, his work schedule is less flexible, so she does most of the sick-day caretaking for their one-year-old daughter. With a six-month waitlist for her practice, she does everything possible to avoid canceling patients, including once taking a client call from her car outside the hospital where her child was in surgery. The biggest emotional piece for me is feeling like I have to maintain my professionalism while Im just feeling so scattered and overwhelmed and overstimulated, she shares. Caregiving vs. career growth Many mothers also feel that caretaking responsibilities directly affects their career progression, with two out of three in the BabyCenter.com survey fearing they appear unprofessional and unreliable. The survey also found that 70% of moms pass up additional opportunities at work to avoid possible conflicts. Steele-Wren knows this feeling well. Since having a child, Steele-Wren has scaled back her business. There are no days off with being a business owner and self-employed. And there are absolutely no days off with being a mom. As a small business owner, taking time off to care for a sick child means lost income. But even caregivers with generous PTO banks often feel they cant actually use it. Companies may offer unlimited paid time off and family-friendly policies,” but often working mothers are penalized for using these benefits. This includes receiving poor reviews on their annual evaluations, not receiving promotions, or feeling pressure not to be perceived as a burden, shares Lacey Kaelani, CEO of Metaintro, a job search engine that runs on open-source data processing over 600 million jobs in near real time. You can have policies on paper, adds employee-law attorney Pam Howland, but if the culture rewards attendance and productivity above all else, it doesnt really matter what the policy says. In fact, in 2025, a record number of working mothers quit their jobs. Joe Mull, a consultant who specializes in increasing employee commitent, points out that the paradigm of mothers like Nadine Jones worrying about taking time off points to a bad system. If your team can’t absorb someone stepping away for a day without that person having to work overtime to recover, your staffing model is broken, he says. Managers are the first line of defense Interpreting company policy often comes down to managers, who can be the difference between staying or leaving for moms with kids. Your entire corporate experience hinges on who your boss is, period. Thats it, especially for working mothers, says Nadine Jones. Jones shares how in some of her most challenging years as a parent, she had a boss who created a safe environment to be vulnerable and to have a family that didnt always, you know, fall into line. She says the psychological safety and scheduling accommodations allowed her to do her best work for the organization while being present for her son. Having an understanding boss can mean everything to a caregiver. Research even shows that a manager has more influence on an employee’s mental health than a therapist and that a compassionate manager creates more loyal employees. However, few managers are getting this right. One study of over 3,700 parents (97% of whom were women) found that fewer than 4% of moms feel comfortable asking managers for what they need. Flexibility ranked among their top desires. Many managers are promoted for performance, not people skills, notes Howland. Thats why its essential to train them to understand discretion, flexibility, and the human side of policy enforcement. Turnover is expensive. Howland cautionsdo you really want to lose talent because managers were too stringent on PTO or sick-care policies? The companies who get it right There are a few companies who are managing to create a culture that allows working mothers to take time off for caregiving or designing systems that create less discrimination. For example, Vanguard, one of the worlds largest investment companies with more than 20,000 employees and at least 9,000 caregivers has an attrition rate of roughly 8%, about half the industry standard. Kathryn Larkin, Vanguard’s Head of Global Benefits, says employees actually take advantage of their time-off benefits because they’ve seen those who have gone before them continue with great careers. And so when you see that in practice, you have the confidence that if that is me, I can take the leave and I won’t be punished . . . it’s culturally appropriate, it’s accepted, it’s encouraged. Meanwhile, Workforce platform Deputy, which designs scheduling tools for shift-based workers, says sick season forces companies to rethink flexibility for roles that require coverage. Internally, Deputy emphasizes proactive manager planning and allows their workforce of around 400 global employees to take care of their loved ones, such as sick children. Those insights have informed product features like real-time shift swaps and instant time-off requests intended to reduce worker stress, Deputys CEO Silvija Martincevic, tells Fast Company. In their recent engagement survey, 94% of Deputys employees agreed with the statement, Im able to work in a way that works for me, citing flexible work hours and supportive management. What working mothers can do However, for mothers who arent at forward-thinking companies or dont have understanding managers, Mel Goodman, a career strategist for working moms and founder of WorkMom, a collective for working mothers, offers the following advice: At work, she notes, many high-achieving moms tend to protect their teams outcomes at the expense of their personal boundaries. Its better to understand that sick days are not normal work days and should not be treated as such. She informs caregivers that its better to communicate their availability windows rather than apologize for interruptions, to be upfront about slower response times, and to choose one or two meaningful outputs instead of tackling a full to-do list. On the home front, clear communication also helps. Its best when parenting is framed as a shared responsibility, not as helping mom, Goodman says. Instead of blaming partners for not helping enough, focus on making the invisible work visible, advises Goodman. Eve Rodskys Fair Play cards are a helpful tool for dividing household responsibilities. Often, caretaking isnt a true 50/50 split, as one partners job may carry more economic or professional risk. Focus on equity instead. What matters is that the arrangement is intentional, agreed upon, and revisited over time, says Goodman. At the end of the day, company policy can only go so far if a woman is in an unbalanced relationship. If one partner consistently resists stepping up, the issue is rarely logistics. It is usually a values conversation about respect, fairness, and whether both people truly believe that both careers and both well-being matter, adds Goodman. Finally, she advises, on high-demand days, try to carve out moments for personal care too10 minutes of walking, exercising, or meditatingthat can reset the nervous system. And dont be afraid to cancel or simplify weekend plans as a recovery strategy, she says. Even the most prepared caregivers can end up overwhelmed and exhausted this time of yearevidence that sick-child policies and flexible work practices are essential for real-life employees.
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E-Commerce
On the morning of January 24 in downtown Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot and killed protester Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at a local Veterans Affairs hospital. Just 2 miles away, on January 7, another ICE agent had shot and killed Nicole Renee Good, a mother. The deaths mark the first times during Donald Trumps second term that ICE agents have fired in anger and killed publicly verified U.S. citizens. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have so far said nothing on the matter. X CEO Elon Musk earlier tweeted that Renee Good had almost killed ICE agent Jonathan Ross before Ross shot and killed her on January 7. On the same day as Pretti’s fatal shooting on Saturday, January 24, Apple CEO Tim Cook attended a VIP screening of the new (Amazon-funded) Melania Trump documentary at the White House. Cook was silent about the shooting until Tuesday evening, when he reportedly sent a memo to Apple employees calling for de-escalation and saying that hed talked to Trump about the issue. Its become clear to many that Trumps ICE strategy is at least as much about intimidating citizens of blue cities as it is about removing illegal immigrants. The question is, and has always been: At what point will Trumps authoritarian urges become too much for the tech industry to stomach? UC San Diego political scientist and civil war expert Barbara F. Walter writes that historically, it is the business community that often heads off civil conflict by demanding a more stable and secure business environment. Indeed, tech leaders are credited with having persuaded the Trump administration to cancel plans to move ICE agents into San Francisco last October. AI leaders speak first Among tech leaders, it’s the heads of the leading artificial intelligence companies that have said the most about Minneapolis. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has been influential among members of Congress and people within the Trump administration, says he spoke to the president about Minneapolis on Monday, following Pretti’s death on Saturday. He wrote a Slack message to employees saying he believes the ICE shootings have gone too far. He didnt make these comments publicly, however. The memo, in which Altman called Trump a very strong leader, was leaked (intentionally or otherwise) to The New York Times, which published it. (OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman has become a major Trump donor as well.) Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei did speak out publicly. We need to defend our own democratic values at home, and some of the things Ive seen during the last few days concern me about that, he said in a Monday night interview with Tom Llamas on NBC Nightly News. He added that Anthropic doesnt currently have contracts with ICE and that the shootings dont make him more enthusiastic about working with the agency. In his Slack memo, Altman spoke directly (if unclearly) to the issue of when OpenAI will, and will not, speak out on social and political issues. The company will not get blown around by changing fashions and will not make a lot of performative statements now about safety or politics, he wrote, but rather will engage with leaders and push for our values, and speak up clearly about it as needed. Amodei and Altman may have spoken out before leaders of bigger tech companies did for any of several reasons. The research culture within AI companies has closer ties to the academic community, so researchers are perhaps more apt to speak out on moral or political issues. The competition for talent in AI is also fierce, so AI company leaders may be quick to respond, fearing the loss of valuable employees. Also, AI companies are eager to project an image of social responsibility, which might reinforce the idea that theyll be careful stewards of the technology theyre developing. They also may have less to lose. OpenAI and Anthropic are not public companies, so they dont have to consider stockholder consensus when their leaders speak out about political issues. They are also smaller than firms like Google or Apple, and they dont rely as much on federal government contracts for revenuenot yet, anyway. Listening to tech workers The backlash against the fatal shootings of Good and Pretti started not with tech executives, but with employees. Several big-name researchers within AI companies denounced the ICE killings on X. Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah, former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, and Microsoft chief scientific officer Eric Horvitz were among those who spoke out. Other researchers, including OpenAIs Michael Schade and theoretical computer scientist Boaz Barak, a member of OpenAIs technical staff, endorsed or shared the tweets. Tech super-investors Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, and Paul Graham also condemned the murders and demanded accountability. (Business Insider has a fuller list.) They join a small number of tech workers who have gone public to pressure tech leaders. More than 800 of them signed an open letter, organized by a group called ICEOut.tech, that called for tech CEOs to demand that the Trump administration remove ICE agents from U.S. cities and to cancel their companies contracts with the agency. The signatories include names from some of the biggest tech and AI companies, including Apple, Google, Salesforce, Uber, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Big Techs alliance with Trump is paying dividends Only a half decade ago, during the first Trump term, tech companies spoke out loudly against the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, and then introduced broad new diversity policies and programs. Now that many of techs most influential leaderspeople like Musk and venture capitalists David Sacks and Marc Andreessenhave turned so enthusiastically pro-Trump, the tech industry has taken the approach of flattering, appeasing, and bankrolling Trump in his second term. A unified response to the recent events in Minnesota seems impossible. What changed? I doubt that the majority of tech industry has radically changed its political stripes on social issues like race and policing. Whats changed is AI. After the appearance of ChatGPT in 2022, tech leaders could very likely see the broad transition that AI might bring, and the massive and expensive infrastructure build-out that would be needed to support it. (Big Tech, AI, and cloud companies are now betting hundreds of billions of dollars on building new data centers to run AI models.) So tech leaders ecided to get behind the candidate most likely to enable it rather than regulate it. That was Trump, and they did so knowing that a lot of odious social policy would likely come with the deal. Big Tech leaders funded Trumps inauguration and his new White House ballroom. They visited him at Mar-a-Lago and at the White House to advise him on trade and tech policy. Some vigorously defended his policies on social media. And some took roles in his administration (Sacks became Trumps AI and crypto czar and Musk led DOGE, for example). And Trump has delivered. His administrationunder the influence of people like Sacks, Musk, and Andreessenhas made it a top priority to keep the federal government out of the way of the AI infrastructure build-out. The Trump administration has stifled any chance of any meaningful AI regulation (which most Americans favor) in Congress and has even attempted to preempt states from doing so. It has canceled federal investigations into tech companies and attempted to clear away red tape at the state and local levels that might slow data center builds. But the tech industrys alliance with the MAGA crowd has never faced a threat as serious as the one emerging from Minneapolis. Wondering how the eager tech enablers of this regime, including some of my former VC friends and partners, are rationalizing this atrocity, former Andreessen Horowitz partner John OFarrell posted on X. Just the latest in a year of horrors. Is all the crypto and AI money in the world really worth this? Rank-and-file tech workers may not be as ready to swallow their moral scruples as top management is. Theyre becoming more sensitized to Trumps ICE strategy and its consequences on the ground across the country. Every additional act of violence by ICE against American citizens could agitate workers exponentially more and further pressure company leaders to respond in meaningful ways. If Trump persists, tech companies may eventually have to choose between their alliance with Trump and the loyalty of their own employees.
Category:
E-Commerce
An inclusive economy is no longer a moral aspiration or a side project. Business leaders must understand that without inclusion, we cannot create a resilient, growing economy that delivers sustainable returns for all. In places where inclusion is part of the infrastructure of their economysupply chains, procurement processes, capital access, or business ownershippeople thrive. Inclusive economies create more resilience by expanding the base of potential business owners who can build, own, innovate, and hire. They allow more opportunities for homeownership and investing in the longevity of communities. As our economy becomes increasingly stratified and volatile, we need as much resiliency as we can get. At Living Cities, our work with mayors, financial institutions, philanthropy, and community partners shows that places and companies that prioritize inclusion and equity reduce long-term risk, deepen trust, and create or identify new economic opportunities. Those that ignore the benefits of economic inclusion have capital, talent, and residents move elsewhere. INCLUSION PROOF POINTS IN CITIES Consider Memphis, where Black residents are a majority of the population but historically own only a fraction of local businesses. City and local partners supported the creation of Contractors University, a cohort model that equips small firmsmany led by entrepreneurs of colorto bid on and win city contracts. Within months, participating firms converted training into new contracts and rising revenues. Contractors University was able to take one of the largest barriers to business successaccessing procurement dollarsand turned it into a growth platform. In Miami, inclusive capital has become part of the citys resilience strategy. Local leaders were able to preserve affordable space for dozens of small, often new American immigrant-owned businesses through partnerships with community organizations and investors to acquire commercial property in a cultural district. By partnering with local civic leaders, the City of Miami preserves both a burgeoning commercial corridor and future revenue streams. In Austin, cultural incubators and entrepreneurial training programs are translating modest seed grants into new firms, jobs, and community wealthbecause they have been able to offer the targeted support that entrepreneurs have been missing for generations to unlock growth opportunities and sustainable businesses. WHAT BUSINESS LEADERS CAN DO DIFFERENTLY IN 2026 The question for business leaders and investors is no longer whether to support an inclusive economy, but how quickly to align their own practices and policies with what is already working. Three shifts can help leaders tap into the benefits of an inclusive economy: Redesign how capital moves. Replace audit underwriting and investment criteria with bias-adjusted frameworks that recognize the positive records of entrepreneurs and neighborhoods long labeled high-risk. Coupled with innovative credit productssuch as first-loss capital, guarantees, and flexible lines of creditchanging the preconception of what makes a risky investment can lead to an expanded deal pipeline and more opportunities. Treat procurement as a growth engine. Moving beyond diversity pledges toward codified inclusive procurement standards that make it easier for local and small firms to become ongoing vendors. This means simplifying contracting processes, offering technical assistance, and publishing clear inclusion metrics tied to executive performance and cost savings from more resilient local supply chains. Invest in ownership, not just access. Support models that keep wealth rooted locallycooperatives, employee ownership transitions, and community land trustsby aligning corporate philanthropy, impact investing, and civic partnerships around shared-ownership pathways. In St. Paul, for example, a down-payment assistance program has invested in families who lost homes through the execution of the Federal Highway Act, stabilizing neighborhoods and the local economy. A MANDATE FOR THE NEXT ECONOMY The past year has been turbulent, from federal shutdowns to rising costs to contracting labor markets that strain both households and balance sheets. Yet we know the path forward: Cities are proving that local economies which expand the concept of who can be full participants are more productive, predictable, and investable. In 2026, neutrality is not a safe middle ground. Choosing not to prioritize inclusivity and resilience is, in effect, choosing to operate inside an outdated standard for risk, talent, and growth. Business leaders who want to bring about the next era of American prosperity should spend 2026 re-committing to inclusion as a core economic strategy. Joe Scantlebury is the CEO at Living Cities.
Category:
E-Commerce
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