Maybe to deal with hot flashes, we need chill rooms, and that would have an additional benefit because there's more than a few men that I would've wanted to put in a chill room over the course of my career, right?
I mean, say nothing about hot flashes, I feel like chill rooms could be good for any of us at any point.
From LinkedIn News, I'm Jessi Hempel, and this is 'Hello Monday.' Women are about 55% more likely than men to take a career break, that's according to data from LinkedIn, and no surprise, it takes us a lot longer than the guys to come back to work. The World Health Organization tells us that women will spend more of their lives in poor health than men. Now, I don't think these two things are a coincidence. If you mapped those career breaks onto the timeline of a woman's life, you'd see they link to major health moments. Health inequity is workplace inequity, I'll say it again. Health inequity is workplace inequity. This week, I am speaking with two women I've known and admired a very long time, Melinda French Gates and Regina Dugan. Now, through her company, Pivotal Ventures, Melinda has dedicated her career to expanding opportunity for women and girls and to challenging the systems that hold us back. Regina is the CEO of Welcome Leap, where she's backing ambitious scientific breakthroughs to transform global and women's health. Regina used to lead DARPA, that's where I first learned about her career, and she worked advancing technology teams at Google and Facebook. This episode was originally recorded live and broadcast to premium members from Bellevue, Washington, it was so cool, you will hear from other people who are there, and if you're a LinkedIn Premium member, you can see an extended version of my conversation with Melinda and Regina at the link in the show notes. Here we go, we start with Melinda.
Our workplaces were designed for the past, you know, a time when generally, men went to work and women stayed home, and yet, we know now our workplaces are filled with women, but we need to redesign the workplace so it supports them in all these life stages that they go through in their health and in their family life.
Yeah, exactly, and we've seen some progress, we've seen how workplaces have adapted to women needing to breastfeed when they have children, right? And we need to think about what that implies across the full life course for a woman, like, what do we do with menopause? How do we deal with that?
We're going to get into all of that, and you're so smart to begin by calling out the fact that we have, over the course of our lifetime, seen so much progress, which is how we know there is so much progress ahead that we can reach for, right? Let's start by looking at where health inequities broadly touch a woman's career path, where at work do you see people advance because they're addressed and where do you see them get pushed aside? And maybe Regina, I'm going to start by putting you on the spot here.
Well, look, I think we have seen over the course of the years we've been making progress that we've made adjustments for things that women have to step out for, including pregnancy and giving birth. I would tell you when I was in Silicon Valley, I saw some real progress here, when, for example, we assigned parental care instead of only maternal care, and in my teams anyway, I very often had men out for as often as I had women, and so, Melinda, you've talked about this before, so when women have to reenter and they're the only ones doing it, we struggle with it, but when men and women are reentering, we start to get pathways for them, so that's an example of progress we can make when we're thinking about it properly.
I love that example, I know I'm a parent of fairly young children myself and it was so significant for me that my boss took his full parental leave and told me, 'Oh, yeah, that's not even just fine, that is the expectation here.'
That role modeling is so important, which is why we need to have parental leave policies, as Regina says, that support men and women, because the other thing we know is that then, if it is a heterosexual couple, the male then participates in the life of the child more fully all the way through, which is great for the child and for him.
Yeah, it's good for families. It starts at the very beginning. Okay, I want to talk about some of the common ways that women's health issues can be misread in an organization, there are all these terms we use like burnout, performance issues, our ambition goes away, that my gut says may actually have something to do with health as well.
Where might I be misreading a woman's performance and miss the fact that it might be tied to a health milestone?
Should we do cardiovascular? Do cardiovascular.
You're going to do cardiovascular, I would say so many things, so first of all, women are often not comfortable talking about their health with their manager and what's going on, there are 700 conditions for which women are misdiagnosed or not diagnosed, so they're going in and they're touching the health system, but they're being told, 'Well, we don't know,' and when you don't know, that also causes anxiety, so now, let's go to a specific example, Regina, cardiovascular.
Specific example, cardiovascular, so cardiovascular disease is the number-one killer of women, 100 million women in the world live with chronic or stable chest pain, as we would say, hundreds of thousands of those women go in for an invasive test and come out without a diagnosis, 700,000 women in the U.S. and Europe alone, they're told, 'Your arteries look normal, your heart is healthy, it might be anxiety.' Now, it's not surprising those women are suffering symptoms from their cardiovascular disease all the time, and they step out of the workplace, they need breaks, that is not what happens for men who have cardiovascular disease.
Yeah, that is a great example. I'd love to bring you in from a science and innovation side for this, when conditions are under-researched or diagnosed later, simply not taken seriously, what does it actually mean for women's careers and who ends up absorbing the cost?
Yeah, yeah. Well, look, one of the big problems here is that for a very long time, research has treated women as if they're small men. Women are not small men, right? We experience health differently, disproportionately and uniquely, and we see... We just talked about cardiovascular disease, which Melinda and I now have a partnership to provide research to try and get at better answers for women, but as Melinda said, so many of the conditions, differently, disproportionately and uniquely, we don't have diagnostics, we don't have treatments, and as long as that is the case, how are women going to be performant in the work? Now, I want to be just really clear about one thing, and that is we're talking about their performance in the workplace, but women have intrinsic value, we need to make sure that they get answers for their health challenges broadly, and the good news is that makes them better at work, as well.
Right, I mean, we're talking about this in the context of our careers, but what we are talking about is the way that we live our lives.
Okay, so when you think about how leadership paths are structured with long hours or constant travel, where do these models just collide directly with health realities that women might experience in their lives?
Well, think about it, women in... Just take the United States, but really around the world, we are the ones who are expected to care for the children, or when the parents get elderly, the first one to step in when you have elderly parents, so just over the course of a woman's life, if she chooses or can have children, but then, okay, she's got aging parents, sometimes, she's expected to take care of her partner's aging parents, so that affects everything about her and her work life, right? And there are things we can do, just like Regina said, okay, we support breastfeeding now in many workplaces, but we can also start to say, 'Look, we're going to allow for more flexible work conditions so people can take care of this whole life cycle that she goes through,' a woman might need to leave for a health issue she has or she may need to leave early because she has a sick child, but you know and you support that she's going to be online later, so she misses two hours during the work day, she's going to make it up that night or the next day, like, we need to have some trust and realize that, like, women are juggling a lot of things, but they're going to make up the work, they are conscientious, totally.
And men too, if we start creating that kind of flexibility, it will be better for men, as well. I think that one of the things I want to be really careful about here is that my experience has been, even despite significant health issues, women typically suffer in silence and perform at work at the highest levels, so I don't want anybody to walk away from this conversation without being sensitized to that. I mean, if we think about something like heavy menstrual bleeding, this is a condition that affects one in three women. I have heard so many stories from women at the peak of their careers who suffered heavy menstrual bleeding episodes, went to work, did the presentation anyway, and then, went to the emergency room afterwards, so I mean, we don't even realize it, every minute in this country, a woman goes to the hospital for a blood transfusion because she's menstruating. Every minute, so these are the kinds of things that women are enduring and still performing in the workplace quite often.
I think that's so critical that you raise that, because we would never want anybody to think that adding flexibility means letting go of the bar for excellence, right? Adding flexibility empowers the bar for excellence. Okay, this question comes from Michelle, I think it's actually representative of a bunch of questions on the topic that are coming up, 'How do we move menopause from a personal health conversation to a workplace infrastructure conversation?'
I was thinking about this this morning, so we have mother's rooms now, maybe to deal with hot flashes, we need chill rooms, and that would have an additional benefit because there's more than a few men that I would've wanted to put in a chill room over the course of my career, right?
I mean, say nothing about hot flashes, I feel like chill rooms could be good for any of us at any point in our careers.
Exactly. Exactly. I think one of the things we just need to do is recognize there's a full life cycle for women's health, and instead of acting like it's this moment in time, we know all women go through it, just like all women get a period, for the most part, when they reach puberty, right? And so, let's plan for it, let's help get the information to women, let's do the research to help women, right now, women are shooting in the dark trying to find the right healthcare resources and figure out which hormonal treatment do I need? What do I need to do? It shouldn't be a shot in the dark, it should be a normal part of life that we say, 'Here are the resources, and here's what we do know and what the health interventions are,' and we're just not there yet.
We have a bunch of unknown questions about menopause that we just need to solve for. For example, here's the gap, 99% of the studies on the biology of aging don't include the transition of menopause. Now, how can...? Right, that's the shocked look you should have, right? How can that be? 51% of the population and we don't include it in studies of the biology of aging? We've also got to deal with the gap we have in knowledge for women's health broadly. We have been under-invested for decades. We don't have small gaps, we have chasms in our knowledge for women's biology and we've got to fix that too.
And we are in this golden moment, this golden moment for discovery, what do we need to realize it?
Yeah. Well, I think we've got to change the scale of the investment, and Melinda and I are trying to do that, we're starting, right? So Melinda and I announced a partnership for a 100-million-dollar investment in women's research last year, together with that investment and Welcome Leap's investment, we're at a quarter-billion dollars of investment in women's health research, but we're just starting, there's a long list of things we need to get after on the women's health research side.
And folks, if you don't know enough about Welcome Leap, you need to spend some time on the Internet, but it is such an exciting endeavor, can you give us a quick overview for anybody who's maybe new to it?
Yeah, sure. Well, the entire mandate for Welcome Leap is to generate more breakthroughs and faster, and the particular model that we use is adapted from the one at DARPA, that's when we first met, of course, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has a long history of delivering breakthroughs, so what we do in our programs is we challenge everything, we are trying to generate breakthroughs, not in a decade, but in years, and everything that we do is designed to deliver that.
What I love about this, what speaks to me personally is that you start with the assumption that of course, with the right resources and the right minds, we can crack this in a short period of time rather than putting it out there as some long goal, right?
Yeah, well, I mean, I think the most exciting thing about a gap is that it's also an opportunity, right? That's the hopeful part of it. There's a gap, but if we fill it, we can get solutions for women so that they can live better lives.
I see this too as an opportunity, we have an opportunity to change women's lives, to change the workforce, to change the way we think about this, because it's been underfunded and under-resourced for too long.
