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You CAN have it all. You just can’t DO it all. And you certainly can’t do ALL the things BY YOURSELF.
Today on the podcast, I’m chatting with engineering consultant and non-profit founder, Erica Lee Garcia.
I met Erica in a Facebook group for engineering working moms. Even though I’m not an engineer anymore, women engineers are “my people”. I still have a very engineer-like part of my brain and it’s nice to check in with other women who get that nerdy part of me!
Anyway, Erica posted this amazing post in the group. It goes like this:
“We, as women, so often get told we can’t have it all.
I feel like I get that and get where that sentiment is coming from. Women in the eighties entered the workforce with their boxy shoulder-padded power suits and feathered hair, with their dreams of empowerment, emancipation, and equality on the basis of being there. But somehow they weren’t allowed to punch out of their homemaker roles.
So it just became a completely stacked deck. A second shift they had no choice but to work on top of their nine to five jobs. It was a sure-fire burnout recipe that was happening to everyone but somehow remained a secret and a source of shame for each individual woman who felt like she wasn’t enough.
it took until the 2000s for someone to do the math and go, yeah, there’s too much here. This does not work out. It’s an impossible task we’ve set up and it’s unhealthy and we need to drop this pretext. Hence the new narrative of you can’t have it all.
It’s just when you put it that way, it’s not really helpful. It sounds like you have to pick whether you want to have a family or a career, but you can’t have both. And we don’t do this to men, right? They get the green light to be both a dad and career-driven. It’s assumed that even with suppose workplace equality, women will take on the lion’s share of the unpaid labor at home, and won’t have one extra iota of energy to invest in herself, let alone a career.
Agreeing we can’t have it all feels like accepting those unreasonable outdated and sexist terms. It sets us up to choose. We can be ambitious, therefore unlovable spinsters or we have to be full-time homemakers, no other options. When you set it up that way, it really feels like admitting defeat.
A much more helpful take on this idea is you can’t do it all, or even more specifically, you can’t do it all by yourself. This feels much more factual and empowering and to take it one step further, the needs of the home cannot all be satisfied by one single person, especially if that person also has a job. “
Amen, sister!
In this episode, we chat about what Erica wrote and how you CAN have it all, and “all” has a different meaning for everyone. The great thing is that we get to define that.
Taking it further, we CAN have it all, but we can’t do ALL the things by ourselves. It’s okay to enlist the help of others to have what you want in life.
Totally ok!
We also talked about Erica’s nonprofit Engineers of Tomorrow. Their mission is to tell better stories about engineering today, to have an impact on the engineers of tomorrow. From Erica’s point of view, engineering isn’t just about people who are gifted in science and math. Engineer’s of Tomorrow’s vision is that one day everyone – regardless of ethnicity, orientation, religion, ability, or thinking style – understands the power of engineering to unlock and shape positive societal change.
The goal is for everyone to understand there is a place for them in engineering – it’s not all numbers and equations!
What I love about her organization is that it is really encouraging kids to look at their strengths and what they love to do and not be discouraged by an old paradigm that says you have to be a math and science genius to be an engineer. Engineers are here to make the world better, and there are countless ways to do that! Kids who see the diversity of opportunity are able to be themselves and find a place that fits them – whether they choose engineering or not.
I hope you enjoy this episode!
About Erica
Eric is an engineer with a diverse resume of experience. With the common thread being a focus on problem-solving, or simply put – making things better.
She runs her own consulting firm and also a nonprofit for kids called Engineers of Tomorrow in both her work and volunteer project. She teaches people how to break down and solve problems, empower them to believe in themselves, help define what success looks like and how to recognize when they’ve succeeded.
Learn more about Engineers of Tomorrow HERE and more about Erica Lee Consulting HERE.
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