#Fempire
#FEMPIRE explores the inspiring stories, challenges, and triumphs of remarkable women who have defied stereotypes and shattered glass ceilings. Join us as we sit down with fearless queens who’ve climbed the hill of leadership.
#Fempire
Ep 3: Moms At Work - Redefining Workplace Equality
In this episode of #FEMPIRE, we’re joined by Allison Venditti, founder of Moms at Work, a game-changing community on a mission to reshape workplace equality for mothers. Allison shares the inspiring story of how she grew Moms at Work from a small Facebook group of 400 followers to a powerhouse community of over 30,000 advocates pushing for real policy change. We dive into the motherhood penalty vs. the fatherhood bonus, pay equity, and explore how feminist nepotism can reshape workplace culture. Allison also discusses her journey behind building a company by women, for women, and how they’re driving the conversation toward more inclusive workplaces and policies. Get ready for a conversation packed with passion, purpose, and powerful insights on how we can create workplaces that work for moms.
Hello everybody, welcome to #FEMPIRE. I'm so excited to have the amazing Alison Venditti today. She is the founder of Moms at Work, one of the largest networks of working moms. Alison has been in the career space and HR space for over 15 years and is passionate about bringing women's issues to life. So, alison, I want to welcome you to Hashtag Vampire. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So I think I just want to, you know, kick off, as we're talking about moms and motherhood and children.
Julia Pennella:The other day I was scrolling on, you know, social media Instagram and came across this post about Taylor Swift and I'm curious to get a bit of your perspective on it. So this headline came up and it was Taylor Swift's status as a role model for girls is questioned because she's unmarried and childless. I found out this was an opinion piece written by an American writer by the name of John McGillian for Newsweek Magazine. There's a lot of layers that piss me off about seeing that post, but what really upset me is how women are still still today, being diminished to just baby makers. You know we're not looking at the bigger context of talking about her role as a businesswoman and how her tour generated over $4.1 billion in revenue for her brand alone, and that's not factoring in the mega surplus she's helped generate for local economies for every city she's touring.
Allison Venditti:What are your thoughts? It's a dude tearing down a successful woman. So I'm like it's you know, as sad as it is, I'm like we're used to it. I'm like nobody who's a Taylor Swift fan, nobody who's like you know, 50% of the world is women. I'm like nobody thinks that. So some dude named John thinks that. And I was like at what point did we stop caring about what John thinks?
Julia Pennella:How do you think the societal expectations of marriage and motherhood impact women's roles when it comes to leadership or role models?
Allison Venditti:Yeah, and I think that we know this and like work wasn't made for women and work really wasn't made for mothers. It wasn't designed for that. The way that we work now is designed really in like the 50s and 60s, when we had these like nuclear family households and nothing's changed. So the majority of CEOs are white men with stay-at-home wives, so not just white men, but married men who have children and have stay-at-home wives. So this is the pinnacle of success and it hasn't changed. So the issue that you know we talk about a lot is A. I am fully on board with women choosing not to have children. That is absolutely like you do. That I think that's great. I'm like I, I chose to have children. But the motherhood penalty is real. So the wage gap is not really men versus women. It's actually women without children versus women with children. So the motherhood penalty makes up a large portion of the wage gap yeah, and I think that's also.
Julia Pennella:I came across the article similarly. It didn't dawn on me. I'm, you know, a young woman, still pursuing my career, but thinking about, you know, disadvantages when a woman does go on that math leave and you know someone might take in you know that contract role, they're out of the industry for that period of time. I'm climbing up that corporate ladder while that mom is, you know, at home caring for her family and then coming back into the workforce. I can definitely see how that becomes both an economic impact, a career challenge for a lot of women to just jump back in Through your organization. How do you help women come back into these spaces when they're coming off of mat leave or maybe even just in that transition while they're going through their pregnancy? So I think it's twofold.
Allison Venditti:So one is that, like, when we talk about the motherhood penalty, we tend to ignore the other portion of it, which is the fatherhood bonus.
Allison Venditti:So women have children they're seeing as less committed to their jobs. They're seeing that you're judged whether you stay home with your kids or whether you go to work. Again, it's really that, like, people see a woman with children and they think, oh well, she doesn't want to work as hard, she doesn't want to, she doesn't want to be here. So there's a lot of assumptions made, whereas when men have children it's the opposite. It so they're more likely to be promoted to leadership roles, they're paid more, they're seen as more stable, they're seen as the ideal worker. So the fatherhood bonus then adds on to the motherhood penalty where, like, men are climbing higher and you're climbing lower. The strange thing about the motherhood penalty is that it across every country. So we you would have thought that, like you know, sweden would have taken care of that. You know they're pretty good on their policies. Nope, still exists. But the economic issues that play. So women have less money when they retire, they're more at risk of going bankrupt. There's so many issues around being paid less that have knock-on effects.
Allison Venditti:So the things that Moms at Work tries to do are twofold. One, we are one of the leading organizations championing legislation for pay transparency. It's not okay that you have two people in the same job and one person making $30,000 more. It's just not okay on anything. My background is I started in unions where everybody knows that everybody makes, and when I moved into corporate they didn't want us to talk about it at all and I remember it was written to contracts that you're not allowed to talk about your salary. I'm like the only person that hurts is women. Yeah, the only person who's that's hurting is because we're underpaying women.
Allison Venditti:So Canada is very lucky. We have a new pay equity commissioner, federally. So banks, telecommunications, airlines, whatever it's not based on complaints. So most pay equity is made like you have to make a complaint against your employer, which I don't know about you, but I'm not keen to make a complaint against my employer about my pay.
Allison Venditti:This one requires employers to be proactive and what's happening is that they're being forced to rate correct, sometimes on average, like 20%. So they're looking at it and being like, hey, actually, whoops, we're paying women, specifically women of color, less we should probably. Now we have to fix that and I'm like so those are huge things. So, legislatively, moms at Work works around pay transparency. We do a ton of free training around return to work and your rights. So we know that more people are laid off while they're on leave. It's a little bit of out of sight, out of mind, but it's like not okay, and most of what we do is like education. So, in addition to advocacy, we like people to know their rights, know what they're entitled to, know what they can ask, what they can't ask, things like that, that we get a lot of feedback from our members on the things that they want and then we go on and do them for them. I think that's amazing.
Julia Pennella:I think you mentioned a few pieces there. Transparency is huge. I'm a huge advocate, I'm a millennial. I'm always asking people what are you making More for my knowledge, not even just in my workplace, but also more broadly amongst my friends, just to see where we're at, because I think we've been so conditioned and told well, don't talk about money. And really, like you said you laid it out it disadvantages women because I don't know, I'm doing the same work as my male colleague and they're making 10, 20 grand more than me. Where's the justification in that? What motivated you to start Moms at Work and how, would you say it's grown since its inception?
Allison Venditti:So it wasn't like I was 22 and like I decided that I want to run an organization called Moms at Work Work, and if you had told 22 year old me that I was running this, I would have called you an insane person. Like, I went to school for art, history and history but I quickly realized that, like me, being able to translate your menu into Latin wasn't going to be a secure job. I did a certificate in HR, health and safety specifically, so my area of expertise is actually in like needs management. So pregnancy and parental leave, short term, long term workers compensation. In Canada, pregnancy and parental leave are actually quite complicated. So they're protected under the Employment Standards Act. They're protected under human rights. So your right to breastfeed, your right to work without discrimination. And then, layered on top of that, is like internal policies and internal programs, such as short term or long term disability that are privately run. So there's a lot of legislative pieces and there's a lot of private pieces, and so I spent the first part of my career building those programs for big companies. So like Coke, lowe's, aramark, canada, the US Like the US. Every state is like its own country. So like understanding the legislation there. Same thing in Canada, quebec versus BC, it's like night and day.
Allison Venditti:So when I got injured which you know like we can talk about after then I was told that I was unemployable, so it forced me to have to, like my only option was to work for myself, and I needed something very, very part time because I wasn't able to work very much. And so I started doing some coaching, which I'd done corporately, but my focus was on working with women, and the only clients I had were moms, because I was a mom. So it was just a whole bunch of people and I said you know what? You really actually don't need me, you need each other. So the one thing that women desperately lack is networks, like professional networks, because you're busy, you've got kids, you're going to do something else, and what people don't realize is that they don't just want to stay in their industry. So a lot of people, by the time you're like 35, 40, you're like, okay, cool, I've been doing this for 20 years, do I want to keep doing this? And if the answer is no, it's like well, then how do I jump? And the answer is always who do you know? And if you've only ever been a teacher, you're going to know teachers, but nobody else. So that's where Moms at Work sprung.
Allison Venditti:I was working one-on-one with people and I started a Facebook group. I was like cool, they didn't have many names left. So I was like I'm calling the moms at work and like, instantly, people are like I hate the name. I'm like, well, that's too bad. So we got, so it was a free Facebook group for a while and what happened? It happened organically People. People knew me and they knew moms at work, and so then it became stupid for me to use any other name, because that's what people knew us by. What happened was I launched a really small program that I called the Insider, so it was like 60 women and I said let's see if this works. I called it like feminist nepotism, right, I'm like, oh, let's like, let's get in there. And I was like let's open doors for each other. And it was so lovely and beautiful and I started in it in October and COVID hit in March.
Allison Venditti:So this is 2020 then yeah, so I still hadn't registered moms at work. It was just this kind of like, let me float this around and see. And what happened during COVID was I had two choices. I was at home with my kids and this is the thing that, like, people didn't realize. I was like when your husband makes twice as much money as you, there's no choice as to who you're giving up. So I had a part-time self-employed job and my husband worked full-time, with benefits and whatever. We're protecting his job right.
Allison Venditti:So lots of women left the workforce the whole she-session term and I was like but when you set women up and they're paid less, have less security, of course that's going to happen. But what I couldn't stand was that this happened and as an HR person, I said they're going to lay off women. They're going to lay off women with kids and nobody's going to come and save them. Yeah, and I said to my husband I was like I don't think I can let that happen. Not everybody has the amount of face, but I'm willing to work evenings. I lost all my corporate clients, everything shut down, nobody's career coaching. The only thing I had was that group of 60 women and a Facebook group, and at that time the Facebook group had like 400 people in it maybe, but I'd known these women long enough that I said no one's coming to save us. We need to work together.
Allison Venditti:And so Deb Hudson, who's an employment lawyer, susan Cruikshank, who's a tax specialist she was live feeding as the benefits were being read out. She was like here's what they mean. This is what it's going to do. Deb was on there. She was like whatever you do, don't quit. We just said I need to figure this out. And I said who can get me into the feds? Somebody, get me someone on the phone feds. I'm like we need to shorten EI because if women are pregnant, they're not going to have enough hours to get it. Like you're going to put people in a very precarious position.
Allison Venditti:And we got connected and I said I'm a leaves expert, let me write down what I think it's going to be. I think you should shorten it from 600 to 400, like in order to make this happen. And they did Right. So it was like they did. They shortened the hours and then the prime minister and the deputy prime minister like we'd like to meet with you. I was like, ok, but I didn't want them to meet me. I wanted them to hear from people. I need you to listen to them, because these are the people who are being impacted by your policies, and I need you to listen what they're going through Social workers who haven't seen their kids in a month because they're like so hopefully that this will form what you decide to do going forward. And it was amazing. And then I registered Moms that Work as a business in 2022. And now we have 30,000 people in our network and we've done a lot of advocacy work in the meantime.
Allison Venditti:That's how it started. It was just me going I can't let this happen. And it's been collective right, like I'm not doing this happen. It would. And it's been collective right, like I'm not doing this by myself. I keep asking who the hell can get me a call with someone. Help me do something. If you can introduce me, I'll do the work right that is.
Julia Pennella:I just got goosebumps, uh, it's. It's such a selfless act and I'm so happy that you, you were able to cultivate this community, because I think community I grew up italian like community is always really important and I feel like as well with women, connect, like female connections are so precious and when we I've seen it firsthand, even just your example women coming together, we get shit done. Yeah, and it it pisses me off when we don't have more women in you know, management and senior roles, because we get shit done. Look, you changed ei with voices of women, bringing voices together and being persistent. And I also really admire how you said straight up the policymakers need to hear directly from women who are being impacted by this. What does community mean to you? You basically built your business off the idea of community and obviously a terrible world incident happening at the same time. But why do you think community is so important? For women? It's everything.
Allison Venditti:It's literally everything, and it's not just even for women. I'm in community with, like other men or whatever, but like both come from Italian families. We know how important it is to have people. And the other thing about community is I'm like I really rub against this thing. You don't have to agree on everything, absolutely. There's sort of like if you don't, if you can't be this person, you can't be with us. I am not about that.
Allison Venditti:I would never feign to tell someone who's in a completely different life circumstances that they should do something that I would do, because it's not true. So people always ask me. They're like well, how can I advocate at work or whatever? I'm like you might not be able to because it's dangerous. That's the reality. Yeah, that's the reality. I'm not advocating out here.
Allison Venditti:Like the way that I do advocacy isn't out yelling about things. I work very collaboratively with people. That's how you get stuff done. So I tell people look, if you want to build community and you want to help women, talk about how much you make, go grab that new 22-year-old who just started, or whatever, and tell them all the things they need to know about your workplace. You need to help people. And people look to do these big, massive things.
Allison Venditti:Moms at Work wasn't meant to be a big, massive thing. It actually makes it harder. But the one-on-one connections. It's taking the time, like people come to moms at work. Because I take the time still, I get on the phone with people, I'll connect them with people. We now have free legal advice. You tell me what we need, we'll do it.
Allison Venditti:But women have not been showing up, for I understand people don't believe in community because so no one showed up for them. And the one line that I remember in COVID I think they remember that woman in the bathtub, like with her kids. You know she's trying to work in the bathtub, kids are in the bathroom and I was like no one is coming to save us. And for a long time I think a lot of women were sheltered from the fact because they had a nanny or they had some daycare and they thought that they had whatever. And then when the world shut down, it was all on them. Even if you had a job, even if you had a degree, even if you'd done all the correct things, and no one was coming to save you.
Julia Pennella:And that was awful I didn't even think about that too Like what you said, where some women maybe have felt shielded because they had all these supports. But yeah, when you look at it again, C-Session caregiver community or caregiver network, is primarily women PSWs, nurses like nannies, daycares, all these elements dramatically impacting the workforce and women are the fucks of the economy. Because if we're not working or whatever definition of working is, if it's a corporate job or daycare, if we're not in some sort of capacity there, the economy is going to shut down, which I think we really saw with COVID, and then, unfortunately as well the social implications associated with that right?
Allison Venditti:Yeah Well, you're a policy person. I'm like unpaid labor. Women's unpaid labor was supposed to be part of the GDP initially and a woman said it and it was men who left it out. If we included women's unpaid labor in the gross domestic product of things, I was like we would have a fundamentally different understanding of how we value labor.
Julia Pennella:Absolutely, absolutely. That all that like invisible work and we see it all the time Like parents could, both parents could be working, but mom still maybe doing the laundry.
Allison Venditti:Also a little mental hurdles of OK, okay, gotta take the kids to the soccer, dentist, you know, all these other things that totally get unrecognized or unappreciated sometimes, as well, yeah, and like that gets into all sorts of things, like eve rodsky's, the person who put together fair play as a sort of thing, and I'm like that really works if you have a relationship and when you can tell your partner that you want to split things which most, most women don't like, not all women do, if you have a partner, which not all women do, but it's like single mothers. So everything that we do at Moms at Work, I put on the lens as like a single mother, not by choice, a single mother who is trying to navigate all of these things. I'm like, what can we do to make a difference there?
Julia Pennella:Absolutely. And again, it's so important bringing that perspective because it often gets overlooked and I'm so glad to hear that you made enough of a splash and outreach and that persistence to get those conversations at the table, because that's where the grassroots advocacy starts off with and then we start to see more changes. That's also a bit of what inspired me, just going on the theme of community, why I started this podcast. I want more women to hear your voices or reach out and just, you know, understand we're here for each other and we can share our experiences and challenge the patriarchy realistically, especially in these workplaces or in media or in politics and policy, because I think it's important and I think I felt sometimes blinded by that. I'm like, oh no, we have, we have feminist policies, we have gender parity in cabinet, but the reality is still, when it comes to the day to day, it's not reflected there and it was a bit of a, I would say, a wake up call, but it was. It's something I've been going through recently and it's still very jarring to me.
Allison Venditti:This is a bit of a different tangent, but I will say when people ask me about moms at work, they assume we're a non-for-profit. They assume we get government funding and we absolutely do not. The reason that we are able to say and do the things we do is I run a profitable business. I'm a woman with a profitable business that has social impact in it. So I don't want to run a business if I can't help change these things. So our organization in itself is a pushback against the things that we're told. So we are told everybody says, oh, have you registered for non-for-profit status? Are you a charity? I'm like no, because that requires a level of oversight and a level of commitment to things that I don't want to do. So people ask us how we do so much advocacy. I'm like getting funding from the federal government means that you cannot disagree with them, you cannot say anything about them, like there's a whole list, there's pages of rules and then you can only pay your staff a certain amount.
Allison Venditti:F that I was like. I am running a company built by women for women. All my staff are part-time. We don't work Fridays. We're closed down over Christmas. I'm building the thing that I want to see. But, believe me, some, I'm making money because I'm not going to fall into that trap where, like, I won't be able to sell my business, I don't have any value in my business, that if something happens to like my family, I won't have anything to think. And I think that we really need to fundamentally shift that narrative in the fact that, like, if you want to do good in the world, it doesn't mean that you have to do it on the back of unpaid labor of women. I am paid for what I do and I'm paid well. And I disagree fundamentally that only non-for-profits should be able to be doing this work in this space, because it's wrong.
Julia Pennella:I feel the fire. I'm loving this and I want you to scream that out too, because, to be honest, I go through life right now, at this stage in my career and age and whatnot. I need to just show up like a white, mediocre man. Come with that confidence, yeah, and not think about it. Not think about the mental hurdles, like you just said. Oh, not for profit, and how are we going to sign up and do all these paperwork and this forms to do it? No, you're coming in with a purpose, with, again, a benefit to broader society and different female and women groups, but also doing it profitably and still doing change, like they can go hand in hand. I think that a lot of times does get missed as well when it comes to when people are thinking about businesses or maybe anxious about it right.
Allison Venditti:Well, I used like Patagonia as an example and like they make outdoor gear, but they're way more than that. And so when people work with us, when you coach with us, when you join our collective, when you take our courses, there's a layer there. You're not just joining a women's group or whatever. You want to be part of the change. I want to ask this expectation that women, that you have to volunteer your time in order to be that change. When you invest in us, we do the work. Yeah, so there is that extra layer that we don't have sponsorships.
Allison Venditti:I'm not selling my list to Walmart like they can suck it. I'm not going to let like anybody put their logo on my website. We are here for a purpose and our purpose is our members. So, with someone who represents 30,000 women, who knows what their employer does to them, if I put one of those employers logos on my website, I am abandoning my people and picking their employer over them, and I will never do that. So we are trusted with that information of how they were harmed and how they were hurt and I'm like now I have no choice. So I'm like and I can't understand how women's organizations exist for women while taking bank money. I just don't, I don't understand.
Julia Pennella:Is it because of those experiences that you know some of your members have shared.
Allison Venditti:We have gone to that. We've led human rights complaints and they say I work for X and X organization. I was assaulted in the bathroom, they terminated me. He still has a job. I was pregnant with twins. I lost both my babies and they terminated me while I was on leave and I was like I cannot sit by and then, on the next hand, be like oh, here's so-and-so's initiative about wellness and whatever. I'm like you are bad people. You let that happen to someone who was struggling and I'm picking them. I'm not picking you, keep your money. I don't want it. I never want to have to make that decision. People are like oh, but you give up sponsorship or grants.
Julia Pennella:I would rather not do this than do it that way no-transcript, and you have that collective, you know view and that collective want to change things. So that's, that's. That's really amazing. This is where sometimes like oh, I have this podcast and I meet women, I'm like, ok, there's folk, there is folk.
Allison Venditti:Well, and it's not typical, right, and I was like so change isn't done, because we're doing it the same way anymore and I don't feel like we're doing that much different. When you use the phrase I believe women and then you don't, or you abandon them or you ignore them, then we're just perpetuating harm over and over and over again. And people disagree fundamentally with a lot of the things that I do. I get that, but again, you don't have to agree with everything, right? You have politicians, you have companies or whatever. We can be friends and not agree on everything, and I feel like the divisiveness that happened in a couple of things I was like is the one thing that's kept moms that work together. Listen to me, this is personal and I don't care that you voted like this last time or did whatever. You belong here with us and people aren't told that People are abandoned instantly and I'm not going to do that to people and I'm like I can even not like people and still fight for that.
Julia Pennella:Yeah, I think too, and I'd be interested on your take on this. I feel like a lot of politics has become very polarized now. Social media, we're seeing it, and why I think I admire your organization so much too, is it kind of strips away from that noise, because all it is noise. But at the end of the day, what's the basis we're trying to achieve here? And I think it's really interesting to see that you've been able to cultivate that kind of that area. It's a really like a niche I don't want to say niche, because there's so many things. It's not a small thing, but being able to kind of peel those layers back and again so admirable to uphold moral values, I think, aside from corporate sponsorship and all these things. I'm going on a little bit of a tangent here, but I'm going to bring it back. But how do you find the polarization right now when it comes to politics and do you find that might have a repercussion on women in the workplace or moms in the workplace?
Allison Venditti:Absolutely. I'm like there's some people out there saying some pretty friggin things, things that we have fought really hard like really, really hard, to keep. Um, canada's got a lot of things going for it that the us doesn't, and I work with a lot of us advocacy groups and it's scary. It is scary what is happening there. But what I've seen is I'm like there's a lot of women's organizations that have existed for a really long time and I'm like, like, show me the receipts. Show me the receipts of what you've done. And if your advocacy piece on your website is this big and you receive $30 million of government funding to make this better for women, I'm like you're not doing your job. You're not doing your job. So do I feel represented by? Do I feel that you've gained anything for me? No, and the people who do that, the people who every time, they're not the big fancy non-for-profits, they're grassroots organizers who have small teams, small budgets, whatever and like get in there every time. I made a list when I started Moms at Work. I finished that list last year and I have a new list now because it's not tied to a three-year funding model and I am accountable to no one other than my members. So when people say to me, well, what have you done? I'm like let me show you, and I don't see that in other organizations, where people have to stop believing that you're going to be the one to help them if you've never helped them, and I think that, in itself, those are the spaces where we're supposed to believe in people and we're supposed to hope and we're supposed to feel protected, and there's less polarization when you feel like there's someone fighting for you in any sense, and so I get why people are going towards certain political parties or whatever, because they feel abandoned by politicians, by their families, by whatever. We've really grown apart post-COVID, and so I keep saying to people I'm like I refuse to make that happen.
Allison Venditti:For me, though, organizations also have to. You know some way and I'm hoping this comes out right like they have to stay in their lane. So Moms at Work is asked to do a lot of things like get involved in this, get involved in this, get what. I'm like we are fighting for mothers in Canada. That's my target demographic, that's my audience, that's my goal, that's what I've committed to Personally. Outside of it, I do lots of other things, things that I'm committed to, but I'm like at this organization, we're only going to be successful if we stay focused. So I really really appreciate that people want us as part of their fight. But we work with specific organizations that I feel like we can collaborate well and make movements. So we usually don't work with organizations who have been around for 50 years and haven't really done much, because I was like I don't think we're going to work well together. You kind of have to. People aren't going to believe you unless you show up and do it. Yeah, talking's cheap. Absolutely Talk is the cheapest form of currency.
Julia Pennella:I want to dive into and you mentioned it briefly a life-altering instinct.
Allison Venditti:So, for context, I suffered traumatic brain injury, which is like a significant form of concussion. To preface that, I've had eight concussions. Prior to that, I played competitive sports. This is not something that people need to worry about happening on a first hit kind of thing. Like it's just not. I just want to don't want people to panic, but I did.
Allison Venditti:I got a significant concussion when I was 33 and my kids were three and one, so it's in like 2015. And I'd had concussions before. I thought nothing of it and I thought that you know, like it would get better. It didn't get better, it got significantly worse. So I ended up with a seizure disorder. I lost the use of my left arm and I lost the ability to read. So I was in full time barred brain injury recovery. Actually, I couldn't do anything for the first six months because I was I was seizing so regularly that like they can't make any improvements if everything that you try and do, then you have a seizure and fall apart. So, um, but having that and a three and a one-year-old doesn't do well together, right? Um, so it was. It was a lot.
Allison Venditti:I was off work. I was actually I was off work until 2018. So I was off work for almost three years and my rehab was, you know, 18, 20 months, like we're talking about to get to like a grade two level reading. Like rehabbing is not like back to normal, it's back to like some form of function. I also lost like a lot of long-term memory and also short-term memory. Um, and yeah it's.
Allison Venditti:You know most people when they have that, they lose the ability to like speak or do things, and so reading is a very rare thing to lose. You have no idea how hard life is when not only like can you not read, but I was finally like a voracious reader, it was my everything. I have a history degree. I like my entire world is policy, it's legislation, and I can't read any of that. I was told that I was unemployable, so I have it in a letter. So the insurance company was like you do not meet the level of function required to work and I was like, amazing, so I'm 35 years old, I'm told that I can't work, but also my kids are foreign. So it was not a good period in my life. I was not like how am I going to make this better? It's like maybe I shouldn't be here anymore.
Julia Pennella:Like maybe life would be better if I just like didn't exist because I was not okay, I'm so sorry you went through that and got that low, but I'm so also happy to see where you've come and what you're doing. I read in your blog explaining that incident and you bolded in the phrase and it was it really took me back. You said I repeatedly told my husband to leave me. It was so striking to read what was driving those thoughts and and do you, you know, have any regrets about seeing that now?
Allison Venditti:nope, I was like I, I was not in a good place and I will say, like most people who have traumatic brain injuries, like there's like there's rage issues, there's anger issues. You know, both me and my partner are like high functioning, high performance adults and I was like I'm not who you married anymore. I don't know if I'm going to be able to give you what you need. So the one thing about me is, in that moment I'm not thinking about me. I want you to be okay and I want our kids to be okay. And right now I'm not a good partner and I'm not a good. I'm not a good mother and, like at the early point, I was told I can't pick up my children, so I cannot pick them up. If I have a seizure, I will drop them. Like what are you supposed to do with that? And there is no ability for me to say I'm going to get any better than that, so you might be stuck with this for the next, like whatever.
Allison Venditti:And I came from health care. I started my career in unionized health care and we had a group home for people who are quadriplegic and about half of the group members, like their partners, divorced them because they wanted them to go on and have a life. This wasn't because they wanted whatever. I'm like I want you to have options because I love you, right, and I don't want you to be stuck with this.
Allison Venditti:And my husband, as he often does, ignored me. He was like I know what you're saying is like whatever, but between between us, I lost my mom when I was like 25. He lost his dad when he was, when we were 28. We've been through a lot together, so this just didn't seem like that big of a deal to him, but for me it was. I love you too much to let you stay here and do this. And he was like that's nice, I'm just kidding, brian. So do I regret it? No, have we been together for 20 years? Yes, I will look back and I will say that my brain injury is not the biggest thing that we've dealt with. Wow.
Julia Pennella:It's just refreshing to hear that unconditional love on both sides right, it's on both sides there. So that's really amazing to hear that unconditional love on both sides right, it's on both sides there. So that's really amazing to hear how you overcame it and with your family as part of that journey. How did you get out of that dark place Again, from where it was you said about 2018, till starting your business a few years later, to where you are now? How did you overcome it, being in that space physically and mentally right?
Allison Venditti:Well, I'm like I woke up every day wondering if I was going to be alive. That does something to you. I lost a lot of time with my kids. I lost a lot of time. I spent hundreds of hours in rehab. I could not get out of bed. I was like I am not going to lose any more of this, so whatever I'm going to do, it's going to be with them. And my husband was like you know what? Maybe just don't work. And I was like, well, that sounds awful. Right, I will say you know, people can knock the Canadian health care system all they want. I had a team of doctors that I swear, fucking believed in me. Right, Like really believed in me. I had a neurophysiatrist. I had a neurologist. I had an entire rehab team. I had speech therapy. I had a lot of people invested in me doing a good job. No one here was let's like, get you to a shitty place and leave you there. So it's really hard, when you're someone else's success, to not step up to them.
Julia Pennella:Wow, yeah, that's again so, so amazing, and I also hear you on that piece too. It's easy to knock the Canadian healthcare system when it's like like, okay, I need to go see my family doctor, whatever you go through the wait process. But when it comes to these serious issues, uh, family members of mine also went through cancer and seeing the, the dedicated care is is just so heroic and remarkable and so grateful when you compare it to other countries, especially our neighbors, uh, to the south.
Allison Venditti:No, I paid for none of this. Top neurophysiatrist, an 18-month inpatient program. I had home care, like I had people in my house 15 hours a week Wow, and I never once worried can I afford this? Should I be doing speech therapy? It was like no, we're doing it. I didn't have a choice. They're like you're doing this, whether you like it or not, I do. I want to read frog and toad books again on my Monday morning. No, am I doing it? Yes, but yeah, I come from health care, but I'm just like, until I've experienced it the same way you know my mom's going through cancer I'm like I have no complaints.
Julia Pennella:Absolutely, and I think the biggest thing about being seen, being seen by the healthcare system, being seen by your family and that ties into a little bit of my next question here On your website, thisismomsatworkcom, the first thing you see on the page in big, bold, capital letters is ICU. Why did you open or choose to open?
Allison Venditti:with that on the website, because I spent my entire life feeling unseen. I didn't think that anybody cared, like I have one kid who shall be unnamed. Everything is hard there. Everywhere I went, I look like a horrible mother. I'm like my kid is having, you know, meltdown and this is happening and and I experienced that and I didn't feel seen at work and I didn't feel seen at home and you know, I felt like my mother was an amazing mother. I don't think she yelled at me once. She was a kindergarten teacher.
Allison Venditti:We did crafts, like you name it. We did it. And I'm not that mother. I am craftless. I am, you know, able to do a lot of that. I was just like I don't know how to do any of these things and it's the one thing that people kept saying and I was like so you're not feeling this, you're just feeling completely unseen, and so everything that I write on that website, it's so easy for me because it is me and I don't want anybody to feel like that again ever. Moms don't work as a business. Of course, I would love it to work with you and look, but you don't need to if you follow us on social media and feel seen, if you laugh at like my memes, because those are hilarious. That's important to me.
Julia Pennella:But if you're going to spend your time with us and you're going to invest in us, we're going to invest back because we see you absolutely and, and I can 100 say, I see you in the, in the website, the way it's written, uh, like you said, the memes it's. It's entertaining but informative, but it gives me that little burst of joy, um, and it's really remarkable that you've been able to like, capture your voice and put it in this platform and share that with people, and it's so great to see.
Allison Venditti:The one thing I realized is I'm like I'm an amazing writer, I love writing and I'm very good at it. But I'm also like, very like, I don't leave a lot of room for fluff, which I think a lot of people feel like you need to do more. But I come from a place where I believe, like you're not stupid if you don't know this stuff, like no one. No one goes to moms at work when they're pregnant no one. Because you're going to be fine, everything's great. Like other people experience this, but not me. I'm not going to have this. I thought the same thing.
Allison Venditti:I'm like I remember when I was pregnant with my first no-transcript shut up, I was like thank you for that, but also shut up, and I always thought this will never happen to me. I'll never experience these things. That's other people's issues and I'm like, no, everybody, nobody gets around it. For the people who come and find us, I want them to be really happy and I want them to understand that there is no stupid questions and if you don't know this stuff, you're not an idiot, it's just you've never needed to deal with this. So every person who comes through our door, I try and make sure that, like no one talks down to you, that you're feeling seen and welcomed.
Julia Pennella:And in everything we write, in every social media post. That's our goal.
Allison Venditti:That's amazing, and music's my ear. Have you ever thought of running? I'm a strategist. Mums at Work is the first time I've ever gone out front. Do you know what I mean Like? And it came out of necessity. And I am incredibly strategic. I can pick through something and make a strategy and a plan and an execution. I can see this light years ahead of other people and I do, and I do advisory work. I advise for tech companies, I advise companies, I do whatever, and my happy place is to get in and get out.
Allison Venditti:I am not an extrovert I really am not. But people assume that because I'm on social media, I'm like, yeah, but I'm by myself in my house. I do not love big groups at all, so I don't do a lot of live events. I find them extremely overwhelming and most of that's due to the brain injury, so I cannot. It's really hard for more than one person to talk at me at the same time. I get overwhelmed and then my brain shuts down and I just need to lie in a corner for two days. And I will also say that's a hard rule in my family. I have to put my family first. I put moms at work first for a very long time and it burnt me out and made me unavailable for things because my brain could not do it. So that's been a big shift. Like to respect the fact that I'm doing this for me too, but it's hard right.
Allison Venditti:Can you keep balance? Badly, so people always see this where they're like you know, follow your passion. I'm not a good example of that. I'm obsessive, I'm annoying, I'm relentless, I'm like a dog with a bone. I'm like to work with that person in corporate is horrible, like I'm a horrible person to work with in corporate. But on the outside it's like when you look at Steve Jobs, did he have a happy family life? No, if you look at some of these guys who are working like that, and I was like this isn't what I'm working. So it takes regular adjustment and I'm very thankful I'm going to shout out I have, you know, jen's, who helps her with my marketing, and she's known me for a long time.
Allison Venditti:It's been really helpful to have someone be like why are you doing this, not for everybody else? Who's taking from you and benefiting for you? And I was like I want to spend time with my kids. I want to spend more time with my husband. I want to have flexibility and autonomy. Two of my kids are still sick kids patients so I every month, I reestablish what I want and I have had to hire people to help me, so it gives me more time. What I really love is I love being in the collective, and when you're in the collective with me, I'm like, dm me anytime, ask me anything. I am literally there to have my brain picked and it's my favorite way to work with people because I don't have, to like, cut them off at the 50 minute mark, right, I am so invested in these women. It's gross, right, and that's exactly how I like.
Julia Pennella:I love it, I love it. I would say I definitely have like very similar traits too, like I could just like I'm sure you and I could just talk for hours. There's a few things that was really interesting to me. How did you know you were a strategist? Was this something you always know or was it something you grew into? Was it people telling you, or is it just you woke up one day and you're like fuck, I'm good at this.
Allison Venditti:I love being thrown in the deep end like hard Always. I'm huge in competitive sports. I am incredibly competitive, like unnaturally competitive. It's actually a problem. My dad is also, but he's calmed down as he's gotten older, so I have hope that I will calm down too.
Allison Venditti:I don't like things that are easy. I like big, bad, weird problems, and so the things that I did at work that I loved were huge program development. So they'd be like we have 70,000 employees. We're trying to like level the benefits across all of these employees in four countries, in 50 states, in whatever. How do we start? And I'm like, oh my God, this is the best thing ever and I would have files of papers. I just obsess about them and get them, and nobody else would touch it with a 10-foot pole except for me and a few people, and that's why I really loved working. I did some contract work in tech and there are no rules, there's no parameters, there's no things. And it was only really when I started doing some advisory stuff where I was like how do people not know this? And I'm like, oh right, because I'm the expert, right, like I'm the expert now and that's a place that I'm really comfortable in.
Allison Venditti:I also have a really high tolerance for looking stupid. I do not care. I love wearing Star Wars shirts, I will always wear Converse, I will always do whatever, and when I'm wrong I say I'm wrong and we try again. But most people there's so much performance, there's so much other things they have to be right. It has to has to be perfect. I'm like you're never going to get anywhere if you're waiting for perfection. So that is a strategy thing and you have to be okay with it not working. What people don't see is 90% of our advocacy work fails hard like nothing. Nobody. People are very angry about it. They don't want to talk to us. They're offended by the fact that we're asking for these things so like we have a whole list of wins but to get there it's a whole stack of failures.
Julia Pennella:Absolutely, we're both. You know, we're both history nerds. History is written by winners. Yeah Right, and that's what was drawn to me for history is. I wanted to learn about the losers, because understand how they lost helps the greater part of whatever you're trying to achieve. What advice would you have for anyone that maybe is feeling stuck in a career or stuck with?
Allison Venditti:you know some sort of mental barrier that they can't do it. No one thinks their way out of anything. So when I talk about career change, I'm like you have to do it. Well, what does that mean? Have coffee with people, chat about it, go volunteer and do it. I didn't think about moms at work, I just did it. Open up, start a Facebook group, open it up, and you'll just you do it again and again and again. So every day you're going to show up and you're going to do something. That's going to suck and it's going to be hard. So I think that's the hard part is people like but I don't know exactly what I want to do, and you never will until you try it and do it and it's going to suck. So that's my advice to people.
Julia Pennella:Why do you think I'm a victim? I know a lot of women are. Why do you think women tend to get in their heads about not just doing it and they have to think it all through and not take the risk? Why do you think that is Because we're punished?
Allison Venditti:when it's not perfect. So there's different levels here. But not everybody is thick skinned and not everybody has a supportive partner and not everybody has financial means to do the things they want to do. So, yes, these things may be impossible for you. I have lots of people who are like I want to make a difference in the world, I want to do this thing, and I'm like, yes, but you need to make $140,000 in order to do that. Welcome to capitalism. It's not designed for this.
Allison Venditti:So maybe you don't do all the things that you love at work. Maybe you do a job that treats you well and gives you great benefits and then you do the other thing over here, like it all doesn't have to be tied to work. People don't believe me, but I'm like. Moms at work is on my everything. I have a lot of things that I'm passionate about, other than moms at work, that I don't need to talk about on social media. I don't need to do whatever. I am a complex and entire human being and I love that. People love moms at work, but I am not moms at work, wow.
Julia Pennella:Very well said and I think that that brings a lot of questions to pushing yourself and, like you said, having that thick skin and not worrying. If you have to look stupid, you look stupid.
Allison Venditti:But also LinkedIn is the best and the worst thing ever, so people use it to compare themselves. Someone graduated, they did this. So I'm like let's stop comparing ourselves to people who have a lot more time, resources and energy than ourselves and expect that to be like a fair playing field, because it's not. Yeah, do I want it to be? Yes, is it not? No, but like beating yourself up about it isn't going to get you what you need. Um, I also think it's fair for me. I have a high tolerance for looking stupid, because I bounce back really quickly. Other people don't, and it takes them a long time to process things, and that's a very dangerous way for them to exist, and so that's why I was like the things that work for me and the things that work for other people are not going to be the same. So people have to really know themselves and respect their personal boundaries and the things that they're able to do, because it's not fair to tell people, as a coach or whatever, to do things that they're incredibly out of alignment with.
Julia Pennella:Yeah, and I think too, there's a piece of like, acceptance, like just being okay and accepting okay, I can't do this, but that's fine, I can do something better than somebody else, and whatever that is, or you have a different strength, but I think that's where I know. Personally, I get caught up sometimes and just having to take that step back and be like okay, it's okay, this is how things are, this is how I am, and that's fine, let's just find a different avenue.
Allison Venditti:But also like, success changes fundamentally. I'm like now teaching career school because one of the topics is success. Like, and success has fundamentally changed. Like, what you thought was successful in your 20s is different than in your 30s and the thing that you trained at school for might no longer be in alignment over here and the things that are important to me now, like right in the thick of parenting, are going to go right out the window in 10 years. But I will say this as someone who talks about work all the time, and work is not your everything and it shouldn't be. And to place that much expectation on a thing that is not your everything is incredibly unfair. So people are looking for these perfect, passion-driven, well-paid, great co-worker jobs and are so disappointed when that doesn't happen. And I was like what else do you have going on in your life going to protect you when that thing isn't perfect? Like, what else is there? And I really push people that in their 30s and 40s because it's not your everything. Yeah, not.
Julia Pennella:I think I needed that too as a little pop talk, because because I find I get in that rabbit hole sometimes and then you know having to take that step back and your family, your health, those have to work first above everything else, right? And it's so easy to get into that loop.
Allison Venditti:I'm also not saying like your job is the thing that feeds your family, oh yeah, the thing that you went to school for, right? So other people are like maybe I shouldn't care about my job. Of course you should. You invested five years of your life. But let's not be a whole Hail Mary here where it's everything and all the things. It's okay to take steps back, steps forward. It's okay to try different things. I always tell people blinders on. Stop looking at what your neighbor does. Stop looking at them as the comparison for happiness. Right, you have no idea what's going on under the curtains and it's never ending.
Julia Pennella:Going back to social media, I see a girl in a bikini and I'm going to think about my body and it's just like it never ends. So just what's the point? I feel like I'm slowly pushing myself towards that. What's the point? Just be happy. It's finding, I think, that balance as well, like what you said about work and family and all these other pieces.
Allison Venditti:And I will say I'm like never in my life have I seen people so invested in moms at work, like people have expectations and desires for my company that I don't, and so when I make changes, people are like what? And I was like no, no, no, no, no. This is for me too. As the woman I'm allowed to say I don't want to do this anymore. So watch yourself in what your expectations are being put on other women.
Allison Venditti:I'm not a major bank. There's not 30,000 people. This is very much still me, and so every couple of months, I have to sit down and go. Is this working for me? And I think that's very hard for people to accept because they're so invested in it. Right, when people are so invested in you, like the same way, your parents are right. We just want you to be happy, we just want you to be whatever. And people say to me they're like why did you do that? Why did you shut that down? I'm like because it's not working for me and I need this in order for me to keep moving like this, the way that people want me to. It has to be working for me.
Julia Pennella:What would you say is next for you and moms at work?
Allison Venditti:So many things I will say, and I've been working on it for a while. We put out my Parental Leave as a resource to teach people their rights during maternity and parental leave, and it's not enough. So the next phase and again I have the ability to do this stuff for free, right, I'm just giving this stuff away because I choose to Everybody's like you should monetize I'm like be quiet about the monetization of, like knowledge. Our next phase is going to be my hope is to train what I call helping professions doulas, nurses, frontline care, physicians, like if women are coming to you and they have questions, you know you go to fill out forms, so you go to your social worker to fill out a form for work and I'm like you should understand how to advocate for your patients. You should understand these things.
Allison Venditti:So our goal is to train my personal goal 500 helping professions, so that we're not caught in this loop of nobody knowing what to do to try and help people right, and my hope is that, because these are the people who interact mostly with these individuals, that then they will be able to be better advocates for them. I think that's the way to like really move this forward so that I'm pretty excited about. And then also all the EI changes that are coming down the pipeline are phenomenally exciting. They redistributed parental leave for people who are self-employed. You can now take parental leave, which is something we fought really hard for. So that's super exciting. But they're going to be making big changes in how EI's rolled out. That we've been waiting for for a while. But that's big things I'm excited about.
Julia Pennella:That's, you know, so amazing. I felt like I was just always on the edge of my seat here, like I was like, but what else is there to do? Like I mean, there's so much to do, but it's just. It's so remarkable that you're doing this and I really want to commend you for it because it's so like refreshing. It brings me hope as a future mom hopefully one day. I do.
Julia Pennella:Really, you know, value family and want to have that one day, and it's really inspiring to see someone like you out there doing the work and being our voice for women now, but also for future, because it I feel like just been put off too long. So it's really great to actually see your perseverance and everything. So I just want to thank you so much, alison, for being on here and answering my questions and sharing all this amazing work you're doing, and not just for moms, but changing our ecosystems and our social systems and our social welfare system, because it's long overdue. So I want to thank you for and being vulnerable as well sharing some really challenging pieces in your life. It helps people relate, um, and it's really, again, inspiring to see. So I want to thank you so much for being here. Make sure to follow allison uh on all social media platforms. Moms at work allison venditti. Any other closing thoughts you want to share?
Allison Venditti:yeah, just people come to me and they're like how can I help and what can I do? The best thing you can do is to pick 10 people and help them. You have women at work, talk to them about money. You have someone who's got questions. Take the time. The world is changed by small acts of kindness. So I know everybody wants to be up here doing the big thing, doing the whatever, and that's not how it works. Moms at Work doesn't work like that. It works. It's like incestuous, it's just like in the cracks. People talk about pay transparency, all of those things. I'm like that's how change is made. We fundamentally shift how people think by collectively talking about it. Women need to be in community with each other, but men need to be in community with us as well. But we need to start really talking about these issues, and the way you change someone's mind is not by yelling at them. It's by discussing it and having conversations and answering questions, and I think the world needs a whole lot more of that Very well said, alison, thank you.
Julia Pennella:Thank you so much for this. That was great, so that's a wrap.
