What Does it Mean to Be A Woman in Leadership, Life, and Work?

A new interview series launching in 2017 featuring entrepreneurial women and men raising children, launching businesses, and undergoing creative revolutions.

What does it mean to grow businesses and babies? What does it mean to press forward in feminine leadership, while also contemplating starting families?

The best place to begin is with stories about what it means to parent, what it feels like, as women, to be pregnant, and how these life-altering events affect the way we feel about, show up for, and create our working lives.

These interviews seek the personal details as a way to inspire new thinking about what it means to “be pregnant” to “do work” and to “be creative.” Outdated cultural thinking about what work looks like and traditional gender roles leave both men and women tired and searching for a different kind of meaning.

The idea that maternity leave is a burden on businesses, and “dealing with the issue of motherhood” as a line-item to be addressed in the budget and sighed over during corporate meetings — this isn’t helping any of us.

What if, instead, we thought about being pregnant and working as an asset to the company, as well as an asset to your child?

As part of the research for my forthcoming book on the same topic, I’m putting together a publication called “Startup Pregnant” that talks about what it means to be a woman in leadership, in life, and in work.

The interview series features women (and a few men) about what it means to go through the life-altering journey of trying for, having, or not being able to have children. We ask thoughtful and vulnerable questions about how growing both businesses and babies is an utter act of transformation, and how it can wrench you open from the inside and reform you at the core. Being an entrepreneur or a parent is not a to-do list. It is a radical act of transformation, one moment at a time.

The interview series ranges from the personal — looking at the intricacies of pregnancy, motherhood, and raising babies, to the cultural — what our collective assumptions are, where we are wise and where we can grow richer, and why entrepreneurship is so uniquely suited to parenthood (and vice versa) in many ways.

I’m excited to bring this interview collection to you, and launch this new series of stories throughout 2017.

Know someone that would be great to feature in an interview? Email hello@startuppregnant.com to connect us.