Working Mothers in STEM: Why The System Was Never Built for Us — Cassie Leonard | Ep 63

You're not behind. You're not doing it wrong. You're operating inside a system that was never designed for you.

In this episode, Aimee Rickabus sits down with Cassie Leonard — engineer, two-time bestselling author, executive coach, and founder of ELMM Coaching — for an unflinching conversation about why the modern workplace still fails working mothers in STEM.

After 16 years climbing the corporate ladder in aerospace engineering, Cassie walked away from the corporate world to help other working parents redesign careers that actually work for real life.

Cassie shares:
- Why the 9-to-5 was built for a 1920s family, not modern working moms
- The invisible labor she actively refused to do in corporate
- Why "equality" and "equal" are not the same thing
- What matrescence is — and why every mother deserves to know
- How to engineer your community when the modern world stripped your tribe away
- The lie of "lean in" and why hustle culture is past its expiration date
- How motherhood is the most undervalued leadership training in corporate America

Whether you're working in STEM, leading a team, raising kids, building a business, or all of the above, this conversation will give you the language for what you've been carrying — and a path forward.

🔗 CONNECT WITH CASSIE LEONARD:
Instagram: @cassie_redefining_it_all
Website: https://www.elmmcoaching.com
LinkedIn: Cassie Leonard
YouTube: @ELMMcoaching

🔗 CONNECT WITH THE MANAGE HER®:
Website: https://www.themanageher.com
Instagram: @themanageher

———

The Manage Her® Podcast — hosted by Aimee Rickabus. Honest conversations on leadership, financial empowerment, motherhood, wellness, and career reinvention for ambitious women.

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Transcript

0:07

Today's guest is someone who has lived the tensions so many women feel, but don't always have the language for. I'm sitting down with Cassie Leonard, former aerospace engineer turned executive coach, who made a bold transition out of the corporate world after recognizing something so many of us experience, that the system wasn't built to support the full reality of motherhood, leadership, and identity. Cassie brings a powerful lens to the conversation around women in STEM. working motherhood, and what it really takes to create sustainable careers that don't come at the cost of our families or ourselves. She's also the author of Beyond the Pipeline and STEM Moms, and her work is focused on helping women not just enter high-performance careers, but actually thrive within them. In today's conversation, we're talking about the breaking point that led her to leave her corporate, why the current model doesn't work for working mothers. the invisible labor women carry, even at the highest levels, and how we began to redesign work in a way that actually supports real life. If you've ever felt like you were trying to succeed inside a system that wasn't designed with you in mind, this conversation is going to hit home. Let's get into it. Hi, Cassie. Thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it. Amy, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah. So tell me, Cassie, you started your career in aerospace engineering, which is no small feat. And can you walk us through what that world looked like for you? I loved aerospace engineering. I had so much fun. I worked on military-driven aircraft for 16 years. I got an engineering degree and a master's. Slowly learned, even during that time, that being a woman in that space wasn't quite the norm. It wasn't really clear yet, but I was starting to pick up on the fact that, like, huh, not a lot of people look like me. And then when I got to my first job, very first day, walked in, the boss escorted me and took me to the first meeting and introduced me to the team of 35 people. And I was the only woman in the room. And I went, oh, this is going to be something. Yeah. Yeah. And were you always just really interested in STEM? Was that something that like as a small child, you just had, you know, were you drawn to that from a very early age? It was. I always enjoyed taking my pens apart from the second they gave me a pen. I enjoyed playing with Legos, all the things that are just very traditional, stereotypical STEM. I fit that mold. I do totally argue now that no one has to fit that mold to be in STEM, but I was very stereotypical. I also had so many women in my life, so many moms around me who were in engineering and which is weird, especially for the 1980s. And I didn't even realize that my goals of becoming a STEM engineer were not the norm for a mom. Wow. You mean like the women that were around you, like your aunties or your mother's friends, those kinds of people? Yes. My mom's is dedicated to my aunt who owned her own civil engineering business. And my dad's had bosses that would come over for play dates, bring her daughter. And she was a mechanical engineering running in her refinery. So it was just, this is what moms do. We go do STEM. Wow. Yeah. I know my mom was a STEM girl too. My mom's a PharmD, you know, organic chemist who went into pharmacology and at least when I was a small child, that's where she was at. And it was, you know, yeah, I was very used to having very scientific talks with my mom from a very young age that STEM never really, all of that stuff, you know, the career in the eighties, I think that our parents were really selling us this idea that we could have it all. we were little girls. Absolutely. The message we've been told is go do it all. There's no barriers, girl. You got this. Yes. And so you've shared that both the pandemic and the loss of your mother were pivotal moments. How did those experiences reshape how you saw your career and your life? Almost the first 10 years of my career, even having children, I have two wonderful boys and I had them early in my career, three years into the first job. And then three years after that. And for a while it worked. It was pretty okay. Other than the fact that all my managers had stay at home wives or no kids. And so sometimes I had to do a lot of translation of what my expectations were versus what they thought reality was. So that there was some layers already. But once my mom got sick, she had brain cancer and it just totally changed how much time I had available for work and how much I valued that versus the the support that needed to be done elsewhere, and the energy draw. That was the first real blatant, there's more to life than just this job. And then the COVID pandemic, which came around five months later after she passed, was my kids are home and they're staring at me while I'm on this computer for 12 hours a day. There's something wrong with this equation and we need to reformulate what our plan is. Yeah, totally. I always felt like there was kind of this... you know, feminism 1.0 kind of sold us this idea that we were almost like Cinderella. We could go to the ball, but first we had to do all of our chores and going to the ball for, for us in feminism was having that 40 hour a week job and getting to like be a grownup. Look at you, you lucky thing. You can put a suit on and put your face on and go do work. But I think, you know, the, the truth, the sad truth is, you know, we, we were sold that it was a privilege and, to go to work, but we still had to do all of the other work, all of the invisible labor as well. As you're carrying this invisible labor of your two small children, your sick mother, and also trying to carry this 12 hour a day engineering job at a very high level and trying to compete with men who go home and have dinner cooked for them and their laundry is done and their children are tucked in bed and all of the homework is done and there's always toilet paper and there's always milk. And their favorite coffee and all of their snacks. You know, there's a massive difference in the experience between the working mother and the working, you know, the original table that was built for these men in aerospace engineering was a table built for men who had these amazing women who stayed home and did all of the other things that needed to be done. I just heard the nine to five turned 100 this month, I believe, Like, the whole concept of the nine to five job and that was established for family of four where the man leaves the house in the 1920s and goes and works in the factory. And then the wife does all the things at home. And then he comes home and gets handed slippers and a cigar. And it's just, there was and a martini but it was just such a different era. And the fact that we are now selling that as a, women, you can do this too. Oh, but you also should probably have martini ready We don't say that, but the underlying expectations still haven't been elevated to the point of this doesn't make any sense. Yeah, no, we really haven't had the critical conversation of saying, like, this doesn't work. You know, there's too much... domestic labor in a household with small children for both parents to be working full time and for the parents to be happy. It's very difficult for the woman to be able to do all of the things and not feel resentful. And then I think the men also probably feel the same way, honestly. I think that there's a part of them that still wants to come home and have dinner ready and they want their slippers, their cigar, and their martini. And That's not going to happen anymore. If you want to stay married. I feel like the 1.0 narrative that you mentioned, there are conversations happening now, but it's household by household. People are having to figure out how to shape themselves and restructure what feels right. Like my husband does all the laundry. I don't think about laundry. That's completely normal. I don't want the cognitive load. I don't have execution tasks. And it's wonderful. We had to have that conversation to reshape different than what the system says. I love in my work, I'm trying to take it past like the household by household, because that's a hard conversation when the whole world is saying, no, this makes sense. Give them a martini. And we all know it doesn't feel right. But how do we change it so that this narrative shifts for everyone instead of the people who are willing to speak up? Well, we've moved into partnership now. It's not just this old school spouse, husband, wife thing that we used to have traditional husband, wife roles. Now we're really in a partnership. And in a partnership, you share in all of the work. But when you're sharing in all of the work, there has to be a level of communication in how do we divvy this work out. And as women, we've been almost shamed into doing the invisible labor in a very quiet, invisible way where you go and you fold the laundry, but you quietly cuss everyone in your family while you're doing it. Lots of begrudging, yes. Yes. So I think that there's this level of just having the conversation, the work that you're doing, having the conversation at a larger level of how do we do this as a partnership? What does this look like? How do we share in the household tasks? Because yeah, here, I'm so glad that your husband does laundry. That's awesome. See, and I'm lucky I just hired that out. I mean, I was thinking about the last time I really had to do my own laundry and I've been pretty lucky. I don't think I've actually had to do my laundry since I was in film school because I've always just kind of had, I mean, it was part of our culture in my house growing up. There was always staff, household staff, and I've pretty much just always had household staff since I was about 25 years old. So yeah, so I'm lucky that way that my husband and I don't have to fight over who does laundry and who does the dishes. Although when staff isn't there, it's usually me. but I don't mind doing it, you know, here and there. It's kind of fine. Yeah. But that's a wonderful example of a systemic shift that we can have because in the 1920s, when the nine to five started, people don't have disposable incomes. There wasn't this availability to bring in resources. And now you can either hire things out or ask AI or there's, there's ways to reshift the workload. And I would think it's probably important to note workload doesn't just mean the execution of the tasks. It's the cognitive load. It's the planning. It's the, like, I can tell my kids to make dinner, but if I had to make the grocery list and if I had to do the shopping and then I have to tell them what they're making and then watch over their shoulder the whole time, that's not them taking the task. That's me being a teacher for a while. So it's totally different. And so say for a partner, any spouse, any partner of any shape or form, you can't say you get to do the laundry. but then make sure that there's the soap, make sure the washing machine's working, and then make sure they folded it right. It's just, you have to let some things completely shift or it's not the same. Yeah. I was talking to Dr. Daniel Dowling about this and she used the word ownership. Can you own this task? And it's almost like bigger than could you do this? It's like, can you own this? Means like, this is yours now. That means... Everything that is all encompassing from the soap to the fold to the put away. And with kids, it's definitely you have to define the measures of success for like, can you love the dishwasher? That means there will be no dishes on the counter. Like you have to define those steps. With a partner, you want to have enough conversations early so that you don't have to even define measures of success anymore. It's clear. It's out there. It's done. Yeah. And this is the essence of the manage her. This is the essence of my first book was really that women are, we're kind of, we are kind of like the central brain or hub for the household. So we tend to be the ones that allocate, you know, duties out. We are managing the household, whether we're doing it or we are delegating it or we are automating it. We are still kind of overseeing. We are the CEO of the operation and, We're still the operations manager. We may just be, you know, managing our employees that are below us in tasks. But, you know, you're still, even though your husband has taken over the laundry, you're kind of still overseeing him. Not in that case. That's his entirely. We got past that one. I got clean socks. Yeah. That's awesome. I love that. Yeah, I had another guest on last week, Deb Riegel, and she's had a very successful career. And she married the most amazing man who just took over the whole house and really everything. All of the traditional wife stuff, he just took on. And then she took on the breadwinner role in their household. You do see it. It's happening. And I think it's just a matter of communication. For some reason, I feel like even though I grew up with domestic help, I... kind of had a huge barrier when it came to communicating the things I didn't want to do domestically. When I wanted help, I had a really hard time with saying, hey, why am I washing the dishes right now? Who else can do this besides me? And so I think for me, it was, I wrote this book kind of to help me overcome my communication barrier with the management within the household. Yeah. There you're taking it back a little bit outside the individual to the system level of, we have all these external narratives that are telling us that we're supposed to be the ones that know what's going on. Like even at a baby shower, when my first baby shower, I was eight months pregnant. I'm making a human, like doing hard work here. And everyone saw my husband playing with a three-year-old and he was lovely with him. And they came up and told me over and over, he's going to be a good dad. And I'm like, well, obviously, but no one came up and told me you're going to be a good mom. And I was really upset. And everyone's like, oh no, we just assume you have it under control. I'm like, why? We're starting at the same point. We're both engineers. We both never raised a child. Like they just assume that I'm going to carry the load and I'm going to be good at it because I have a uterus. I don't know. And society says that's what it is. So if we can start shifting these expectations. We have to. We have to. Yeah. And it's a mom to mom thing. I really think this is a woman to woman issue. This is a communication issue amongst women of how we communicate. change the language around motherhood because it's okay if it's hard. It's okay if you don't feel like you're good at it every day. It's going to be hard and you're not going to be good at it. But you'll get better at it. That's the thing. I've gotten so much better at it, but I've been doing it for 16 years. Of course I'm better at it. I think about it, the people who only have one kid and I'm like, oh, You know, I was really bad. I'm one kid, I was not at my best, you know. Now that I'm down to number six, I'm like, oh, okay, I've got this figured out now. But, you know, motherhood is mastery. Motherhood takes time. Motherhood is, you know, it's really not learned and we don't have the support that we used to have culturally within a thousand years ago within our tribe, with our aunties and our mothers and the grandmothers and the sisters. We don't have the large families like we used to have that would you know, be a support system for us. We're all left out on our own little islands trying to figure it out on our own. And the world's saying, you've got this, you are glowing, you have the joy. And you're like, I don't feel glowing. You're like, I'm not glowing, I'm sweating. Yes, I'm working so hard. I'm figuring this out by the skin of my teeth. And everyone just assumes that I love it. And I've spoken to Daniel Dowling before and she brought up the point if you don't say that I love motherhood, that translates in other people's language to I don't love my kids. And that is not the same thing. So we need to strip those two apart very carefully. Exactly. I remember when I first had Julian, I thought, why would anybody ever want to do this? Like, why would anyone recommend having a child? This is like the worst thing ever. I my first kid, I was this, the shift for me at 30 was just like, whoa, I went from being able to do anything I wanted whenever I wanted to like, literally you can't even brush your teeth or take a shower. You can't sleep. You can't eat. I was like, what is this? This is not good. And now I like have mastered motherhood, but my gosh, I have to tell you, it's a learning curve and it's not easy. It is definitely takes lots of patience and like, just being gentle with yourself too. You know, when it sucks, it sucks. And you kind of just got to, you got to surrender to the suck sometimes. And not try to pretend for others that it doesn't suck. Actually expanding that narrative. I think storytelling and sharing your truth is so important for shifting at a larger level than household to household. Yeah, totally. I think people always look at me and go, oh my God, you're like such an amazing mom. And I'm like, yeah, but I wasn't always. It took some time, ladies. It took development. I feel like you're supposed to be born a mother the day your baby's born, but I think it's more of a process of becoming. Well, I don't know if you've looked into matrescence very much, but the idea that we're going through a brain restructuring for the first three years after you have a child is not a You're magically Mary Poppins. We're actually shifting how our brain focuses and what we give attention to and how we learn. And it's a long process. And it's biological. It makes sense. We were set up to do it, but it's work. Oh yeah. Yeah. Our biology is there. I was recently talking to Dr. Mari and she is a PhD, MD. She's amazing. But we were talking about how, you know, when you're, she comes from the DNA, like stem cell side of the world. And we were talking about how these babies basically are kind of hide behind when their baby is inside of you, your body almost can't see it. Like has like around it so that you won't be rejected. Basically, these stem cells are just human. They have no identity, so your body won't reject the baby. But the amazing thing about it is that their blood and your blood are circulating together within your body system. So their DNA is circulating with yours and your blood is circulating with theirs. So we actually end up with a piece of our children's DNA in our body. But guess where our DNA ends up in their bodies? It ends up in their brains and their hearts, like forever. And we biologically really have evolved to beyond motherhood. Like we really biologically are connected to our offspring. I think raising kids in the way that we're expected to raise them in the society that we're currently living in is part of the difficulty, is not the biology, it's the society. Well, there's a full story, which is science-based and I love it. It forgets to mention that my kids were B-positive blood types, so I got a needle about this big shoved in my butt. That beautiful connection. If you're an O-negative, that's a problem. Oh, yeah. Rogam. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, no, I'm O-positive, so thank goodness for that one. If I could choose a blood type, I would choose mine. Okay. you talk about blood types on the show. I don't think we've ever talked about blood types, but O positive is definitely my our oldest daughter who's 27 is also negative and she had the same experience with her babies. I was like, Oh, negative, which means I'm the universal giver, which means I'm like a natural mom. And I'm like, this is the narrative that we don't need. So we need to shift this the universal giver But I mean, yeah, you know, I mean, I think in another world, in another time, in another place, when we were more supported as women, when we had more women around us to support us, it's funny because there have never been more people on the earth. And we as women have never been less supported. It's so true. What the heck? We lost our tribes. We need our communities. I know. There are plenty of people here. We just have to figure out how we're going to use technology to become more human and more connected rather than less human and less connected. I think it's so important. One of the things that I've really been trying to do my entire time as a parent, and it's not technology-based, is engineering my neighborhood. So every time a house goes up for sale, and I know someone is looking for a house, who's a friend, who's got a kid, I'm like, hey! And so slowly but surely, I think we have six houses in a one-block radius that have kids the same age, who have friends we can rely on, who we can walk down. Now my kids can walk down the street and babysit. But it's just, we've built a community intentionally. and it's adding so much value to our lives. And it doesn't require Zoom. I love that. Our community is very much the same. And just in the last couple of months, we've had more families that we know move into the neighborhood. And one of our friends from Idaho just let us know she wants to come back to California, and she's going to move into our neighborhood too with her kids. Once you get it going, people are like, magnetizing towards your face. I know. It's the best. I mean, we can go out on the street and my little kids, because I still have three and five, they can go and play with the other kindergartners that are on the street. And then we have other little kids. We've got like a three-year-old, a one-year-old, two six-year-olds, just like within a few houses around, like right on our little cul-de-sac. So it's so fun. I love it so much. It's the best. So classic. That's the part that's That's the traditional part that I actually like. The kids going out and playing in the street and shooting hoops and laughing. I need that. It's the best. It's so much fun. My daughter was just out here from Texas with her two boys and her older boy is seven. And so the seven-year-old, my five-year-old daughter... my 11 year old and one of our other neighbors who's like 14, they're all out shooting baskets in the front yard on the driveway. And I'm like, this is what it's all about. This is why we have kids. This is why we have community. This is why I chose to move into that neighborhood was I wasn't looking for the fanciest house in the fanciest neighborhood with a wealthy... I didn't want to do that. I grew up in that and it was cold, it was sterile and the neighbors were not the kindness wasn't there. What I really wanted was a neighborhood full of younger parents, lots of young kids, kids playing in the streets. That's how we picked our hood. That's how we picked the house. What a wonderful way to make a choice. Yeah, man. Because we're living in a time where it's really hard to get your kids to play outside, especially if there's no one else outside playing. There's so many kids inside playing now. Exactly. And so we work really hard to have play dates and like the orchestrated part. But just when you hear some kid bouncing a ball outside, it's really loud. And it just kind of calls all the other children out. And then it's like, oh, we didn't need a phone. We didn't need a text. We didn't need them to connect on a switch together. It's just basketball called them. Yeah, you can hear the basketball. The basketball will call the kids outside. Definitely. I know. Yeah, we have a couple of basketball. We've got one in our yard and then our neighbors have one just a few doors down and you can hear the basketball. You know when the kids are out playing or riding their bikes. I can usually hear them if they're like riding their bikes or they're skateboarding because they're so loud. Exactly. I'm like, oh, they're playing. Let's go. All my little kids want to do is play outside in the street. But let's get back to corporate for a second. So the system breakdown, one of the things that we talk about is the invisible labor all the time on my show. So how did that show up for you while you were working at corporate? There are two pieces. The invisible labor, of course, shows up at home because when you come home, the job doesn't stop. Whereas like we were saying before, some of my colleagues probably did have a little bit more rest and relaxation when they got home. But also in the corporate life, there is invisible labor threaded through everything from taking notes in a meeting to making sure that the little kitchenette area is clean to someone has a baby shower or a baby. Should we give them a present? And every, there's just this natural draw as a woman to be like, well, that needs to happen. No one else is doing this. Okay, fine. And I've actually worked really hard not to do that. And it killed me to watch the culture be like, oh, that person just had a baby and didn't get a card. But no one else did it. It was like fighting every natural bone in my body to be like, I'm not going to organize that. You're like, I'm not going to take on extra work, unpaid labor. No, not going to do it. I'm sure I did tons of unpaid labor that I didn't recognize. But anytime I could see it, I said no. And I fought all day. the urges. So you never brought a birthday cake in for your co-worker? I brought one for me. Good girl. We had one where they rotated every team member had to bring cookies for a team meeting. So there was a rota and every man did. And then when it got to the 35th person, which was me, I did. So I brought cookies in, but only if it was scheduled and planned and just like everyone else. I like it. Good job. way to be aware of it. It's so easy to just fall into it, you know? It's this, like, social conditioning thing that we have. Yes. And, I mean, you see people looking over your shoulder their shoulder at you, just like, seems like you could do that no like no i'm not you really could. You're highly capable so why do you believe the current corporate structure is fundamentally unsuitable for working mothers? I think that the current corporate structure is unsuitable for most people, including working mothers. It was designed for a time where we were really excited that freeways were being built. It was just a completely different era. And the idea that meetings are scheduled almost around the clock in corporate. I had meetings that started at 6.30 in the morning. I had meetings that went at 5.30 at night. It was just inconsiderate to the fact that we might not be 100% dreaming of working every second of our day. It just assumed once you were inside these walls, you are a professional and you don't have a real life. And that's not reality, especially now when we have cell phones and everything has started blending and creeping into all the spaces and you can't just put up your blinders and assume someone else has my kids, it's fine. Although that's nice when you can. You have to have a little bit of grace for people who have daycare drop-offs, people who have school pickups and drop-offs. They never recognized that my daycare had a dollar per minute fee if I got there after 6 p.m. And they would be like, why are you leaving? I'm not going to pay someone extra time to make my kid miserable being the one kid who's sitting there. This is not valuable for my life. But we're in a meeting. You have to look at the system out set up and look for the idiocracy because it's there. A lot of it just doesn't make sense anymore. Oh, totally. Yeah. I love the way that we have our company set up now because we really got rolling with our bigger IT company during COVID and our employees are all over the place and everybody works where they want to work when they want to work. They really set their own schedules. They set their own pace and I don't worry about them. Everybody is excited about what they do. But I think because we've decided that Tomahawk is going to be a lifestyle company, like this is, we're an IT company, but we really are about having the life that you want to live. I can't even imagine. My husband and I have both gotten to a point in our, I mean, I've been running companies since I was 22. So 25 years, more than half of my life. And I've gotten to a point where I'm like, wow, you really don't have to grind that hard to do really big things. In fact, the less you grind on things, kind of the easier it is. You just create really good systems and have really good people. Happy people work harder and they work better. You don't need to sit at your desk and shuffle papers around. My stepdad was an electrical engineer and he worked a corporate job for a very large electrical company for years. I mean, Emerson Electric for 30 years. And then when he finally retired, he didn't actually know how to be productive. He would sit at his desk and move papers from one pile to the next because he married into entrepreneurship. So we were going to put him to work in the real world as an entrepreneur. And we're like, Al, you're not really doing anything. You're just moving papers around on your desk. When you work for yourself, you actually have to do stuff that, you know, get things actually done. And when you work a corporate, you can put kind of like, you spend a lot of time reorganizing the paperwork, maybe. One of the biggest challenges is exactly that. In corporate, the easiest way to measure someone is by looking at, are they sitting in their chair? Like it's a very visible, very tangible measurement. It's like, yep, they arrived at nine. Yay. They left at five. Okay. They must be great. Measured. Check. It's really hard to measure productivity and passion and creative energy and being the glue and doing all the things that no one can see that are really critical. And so that's one of the big shifts we need to get to is either giving up on measuring, but I don't think that's going to happen. Figuring out how we actually measure results and productivity versus measuring time on station, because that's not helping anyone right now. Well, I think we can probably use AI to quantify data on how much productivity is actually done by each employee. But in my company, you don't even have to do that. You can just see it, you know? True, I'm seeing it. Yeah, but when you don't have a ton, we don't have a ton of core employees. We have a lot of subs and they're based, you know, it's all project-based. So if they get the work done, you know, they get paid. And the same thing with our core employees, they are on sales jobs. So if they sell, they make more money. So there's this level of motivation just in the way that the company is structured that keeps people working and keeps people happy because at least they can do it when they want to. I don't care if you're sitting at your desk or driving in your car. If you're on the beach, go ahead and do what you want to do. If you want to bring your laptop to the beach and do your work from that, that's fine with me. them and showing them that you see them as a whole human, they are going to do better work for you because they see you as a whole human and they want to help you and your business grow. There's a reciprocal value and love that really drives good businesses. Oh, yeah. I couldn't agree more. I think we're one of the very last value-added resellers that's like a mom and pop shop still, like family owned with those kinds of vibes. But we've really... to the table with this new school post-COVID way of doing work, which is, I just think it's so much healthier even for us at high level leadership. It's a top-down thing. And it's my husband and I want to spend more time with our kids. He wants to coach baseball and he wants to do jujitsu and he's been golfing a lot. And I'm happy that we have created a culture of corporate culture where you can do the things that you want to do, where you can spend your life the way you want to spend it rather than sitting at your desk from nine to five, grinding it out, shuffling papers just to check a box on was your butt in a chair? I was here. I was supposed to be here and I was here. You don't go home that day feeling like you had a good day at work. Totally. So there's this narrative that women just need to lean in or manage their time better. But That's not the full story, is it? That's not the full story at all. Not a problem. Girl, you can have it all. Just try harder. We're past that point. We've gone so far past that point. And I assume those messages had value at one point. They must have. But at this point, we are asking people who have demanding jobs, who've chosen to have children, who have chosen... hopefully a few hobbies to also carry all the weight of making a functional household. Also all the weight of making schools functional because you better be on the PTA. And there's just so many layers stacked up that leaning in, working harder, but this hustle culture idea is just going to wear us out. And I love the, you can have it all idea. When you think of like a buffet idea, like walking into a soup plantation to eat myself. I don't think they still exist. You walk in and they give you a plate and you're like, oh, you can eat, but you don't hit the first thing and take all the lettuce. And then you don't go to the next thing and take all the carrots because you don't want it all. You want to go through and be intentional and choose what you actually value and choose in your life. And so I'll go straight to the cheesecake. But you've got to find some things and not take it all and just get a little smarter. Not that you're not smart now, but get a little sharper on what you really value and what success is for you. And eating a nice round meal instead of the whole bucket of lettuce sounds more valuable to me. Yeah, totally. I know I always talk about this, you know, as we move forward with technology, as we move into the future, it's going to be about how we set our time with our attention and our intention, right? It's like, what are we going to focus on? Because now our attention is being pulled upon us. by technology in a bigger and more diabolical way than ever in human history using AI algorithms. It's like, okay, are we going to Netflix and chill? Are we going to scroll through TikTok? Our attention has never been more of a commodity. So it's how are we going to set our intention? What are you going to put on your plate? And then your attention, I got a thumbs up. I see that. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. Like being intentional about, yeah, you're at an all-you-can-eat buffet, but let's be intentional about what we really want. Like, what's going to really nourish us in our lives? Because we can have all of these things. It might be a different season or a different answer every season. Every time you go back to that buffet, right now, I want to focus more on my mom who's sick. Or right now, I really want to focus on my kids who got sent home from school for 18 months. And yes, I'm a high professional, powerful woman, and I love my career, but right now, kindergarten is not learning how to read. So that's more important for this moment. And so allowing yourself the grace to shift what all means as well. Don't set it and forget it, but keep growing and checking in on what's valuable. Heck yeah. Couldn't agree more. I know at that point, I really shifted when my kids came home on March 13th of 2020. Two weeks later, Yeah. Two weeks. All right. But now they've been home for six years. But I had to learn how to teach them how to read. That was one of the things. I was like, oh, wow, you're learning how to read? I actually don't know how to teach that. But I was so lucky that we have so many fabulous tools nowadays because of the internet technology and there's so much great curriculum. But that was one of the things that I had to shift from go mode to mom mode. And I did, it was not just, it was really fun. We hired a teacher in the fall after 2020, that fall of 2020, we hired a teacher and I was the assistant teacher in the classroom. And I got to be the assistant teacher for like nine kids from the neighborhood. Job you never thought you're going to have. I know my kids, one of the kids came over, he's the 14 year old that lives a couple doors down now. But at that time he was in, he was in first grade, he was like, hey, it's the principal because they only called me the principal. The principal of the school. Yeah. So you never know. Motherhood takes you in strange, strange directions. But from your perspective, what is missing? What is the system missing when it comes to supporting women, especially in high performance fields like STEM? I think there's a few things that the system is missing. Right now, it still doesn't do a good job of recognizing how much bias and friction still exists. There's a growing narrative that we fix that. But the more and more I ask questions and the more that I learn from other people, like the book that I just put out, Beyond the Pipeline, launched last August, and it talks, it goes through 24 different chapters with different authors and different narratives, just shining a spotlight on all these different biases and systemic barriers and ways where It's just not right yet. People not seeing that and understanding that we have all these barriers in place. The system's not set up for us. We have imposter syndrome, but we also have microaggressions. We have intersectionalities of all our different identities and how each one of those brings different stigmas and judgments. Until we get to a point where we can recognize that and acknowledge that this is a problem we need to start changing, the system's not going to get much farther. So we need to change and pivot. Yeah, absolutely. And then for me, I think the childcare issue is huge too, because I really do see childcare as a primarily female issue, I guess, because I come from a feminist background. But I think these corporations could write off childcare and they could have great schools even. Imagine if If Boeing had a school for science for the kids of all of their employees, they could. They could have a fabulous private school and they could write the whole thing off. They could. Before we get to that point, and I'm not against that path, but before we get to the point, even just acknowledging when the people walk in the door that they're not parents anymore and they have kids and that they are real and have emotional and energetic drain, that would be a huge step forward. just recognizing the whole person. And then yes, there's a lot of systemic and functional tasks we can do to ease some of that burden. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're so right. Yeah. We've, we have to get back to the basics. We're still really kind of living in a world where no men and women are equal now. Go ahead. You're fine. What do you mean you have daycare pickup? Yeah. What do you mean? No, I'm the wife. No, no, I'm the wife. Exactly. We're still, you know, honestly, we're still the default parent generally, not always, but generally I would say very high percentage of women, more than 90% I would guess are the default parent. So yeah, we're still working with that, you know, so it would be nice if our employers could understand that we do carry this very important work of society of raising the next generation of their employees. Exactly. And on that point, you're right. It's not always the female that carries this burden. And so making these shifts and recognizing that there's whole people, even if it's not caregiving for a child, if it's caregiving for an other parent or caregiving for a sibling with a diagnosis or a hobby, heaven forbid, all people have other commitments and other things in their life. And by shifting these, it's going to be good for everyone, not just for the working women. That is good for the working women, but it is good for everyone. Yeah, absolutely. Even the single guy who wants to go to the gym or maybe wants to go to jujitsu or, you know, have a hobby. It is healthy for people to have hobbies other than work. Work is not a hobby. In a society where we're all getting more isolated and more lonely, what if we had time to actually talk to people? Yeah, what if? It would actually be really, really good. Well, we're seeing real mental health crisis in America because I think that social isolation... is driving people crazy. Absolutely. And we had that whole social experiment in 2020 where we saw it drives us crazy. And then we didn't make big pivots afterwards. Yeah, we didn't. And we should have. I feel like some communities and some pockets have. Like my neighborhood definitely made a big pivot during that time and has continued. And it sounds like you're set in an intentional community as well. Yeah. Some people do. So you're raising two sons while building a business. How has motherhood shaped the way you think about leadership? I think that motherhood and leadership are so intertwined. There's a nonprofit that I love and I've been learning a lot from recently called Motherhood Intuitionship, headed by Dr. Laura Marie Rivera and Dr. Mindy Orsino. And they have a whole philosophy on how motherhood is a form of leadership and how How come all these documents and all this research that they put out on servant leadership and, you know, tactical leadership, there's so many philosophies. Why isn't motherhood one of them? Absolutely. I mean, you look at a duck with her little ducklings following behind her. If that isn't the visual representation of leadership, I don't know what is. Well, that's part of leadership. And then when one duck gets stuck in the road, she manages to keep all the other ones safe and go rescue. That's true leadership. She has the whole system under control. She really does. Yeah. And it really is. I think motherhood is the most amazing leadership training and emotional IQ training course that humanity ever has had. And I think it's so undervalued still today in the corporate world. I love that you call it a course. It's not an innate, you're just a mother. Well done. It's work. And you build those skills and they polish those skills. And then you realize they're broken and you refresh those skills. But yeah, we keep going. And it's a course that we're on for a very long time, but we get a lot of skills out of it. Yeah, we really do. I mean, my communication skills have gotten so honed through motherhood. It was always one of the things I think I struggled with the most was kind of communicating what I needed. And I don't feel that way anymore. I feel like I'm very able to communicate what I need, especially for my children, as far as what my expectations are. I feel very comfortable saying no, where I think, you know, I was kind of raised to be a little bit of a nice girl where nice girls don't say no, but good moms say no. No. I brought that into the workplace because I was a nice girl and a pleaser as my saboteur. So I'm like, I just want to make you guys happy. But once I had kids who weren't putting on their shoes, it's like, put your shoes on. I could be very direct, very clear, no room for confusion. And then I go back to work and I have all these. At my first leadership job, I was managing a team with 33 people. I think three of them were women at that point. But I got to be very clear. And that was something I drew from motherhood. and then applied in the corporate workspace. And it made my leadership so much stronger. And I think they very much appreciated it. And I had no idea that I was learning it from a three-year-old. It's amazing what you can learn from a three-year-old, honestly. It's more than patience. It really is. You're really honing your emotional IQ because you've got to see how far you can push them without pushing them to the break, you know, because they will. If you go too far too fast, they're going to have a full meltdown. Mommy... went too fast, you know? And so you're really, you're measuring them. You're watching them. You're learning from them how much pressure you can apply to communicate the most effectively, calm, assertive communication. A lot of times I'm bilingual. So I switched to Spanish when I really mean something like, we're leaving now, you know, like, sit down. We're going to put, it's time for your zapatos. You know, we're, we're getting out of here. When I switched to Spanish, the kids know for sure, like, This is like absolute calm, assertive mommy telling us that this is absolutely what's happening right now. Yep. I'm from California, so I'll switch to Spanish or Italian and say, and they go, oh. And it's just a little mental shift, a little click you, and it works. I love it. It does. It really works. I know that's my little secret skill. I feel like for me, as a small child, I always had a caregiver and my caregiver always only spoke Spanish. So for me, the language of children is Spanish. It's my like primary caregiving language for some reason. So I really, when I need to, I'll shift into that mode and that the kids really seem to respond to it. So if you don't speak a foreign language, maybe pick up a few words. I had a friend who lived in Hawaii and when she was raising her daughter, Aole means like no. It's like, oh, absolutely not. She never used the word. No, she would use. And that was kind of where I picked up this whole, oh, if we switch to another language, you'll get a different response out of the children. Yeah. I know you're serious. You mentioned something powerful about the goal being to raise competent adults. How does that influence how you structure your work and your time? I think that it's so important to raise happy children, but also keep that end game in sight, that you want these to be competent, capable humans. And that's a non-negotiable. That's the end goal that we're going for. That helped me in the early years when I was dropping kids off at daycare and I was going to work. I wanted to see that their mom goes to work and that she is following her passions and her degree and using it and putting it into something functional that I was passionate about. I love airplanes. I enjoyed the work I was doing and it was wonderful. And I wanted to see that. I also use this goal of them being competent, capable adults to draw them into my entrepreneurial work. So I have them when I have a new branding strategy, I pull up a picture on Canva, I bring them in and I say, does this look okay? And they give me insights and feedback because they know what social media is. They can help guide and steer me. And the fact that I respect their input and I make choices based on what they say helps to embolden them to feel like they can start making more decisions. And that has turned into my older kid joining DECA, which is a program. It's national, but I don't know if all schools have it. So it's all about entrepreneurial marketing and they have tests and they can compete at state and they can compete at nationals. But he's really excited about This idea that he could open a business or that he could have a side business even, but it's growing his ideas from the traditional, he could be a nurse, he could be a doctor, he could be a lawyer, to I could kind of be anything. And it's fun to watch. Oh, it's so much fun. I know our kids helped us grow. these two IT companies and my nutrition company from the roots. And so it's so cool to see that the way they interact with adults, because we've always had them around our clients since they were little itty bitty things. And we recently had a client in town just a couple of weeks ago. And it's just amazing to see them now that our older boys are like 16 and 14. And it's amazing to see what amazing young adults they've become and how they can hold a conversation with such high level people at high level corporations. I mean, our 14 year old knocked this guy's socks off afterwards. He looked at us and he goes, well, I think you got one. You've got a kid who's going to take care of you guys when you get old. Thank you. Yes, we do. Knocked his side. Like it's neat to see how raising your kids to be adults. I really want them to have the skills to, to go out and start their companies, to be able to communicate with people. I don't want to go into a job interview with my kid. Go into. He can't handle the job. So that was the wrong place to go anyway. Well, I see, you know, we're hearing about that now. These like millennials kids with their, you know, parents coming in to the job interviews with them. And I'm hoping that at least we can raise a couple kids that don't need that. I'm hoping so. The job of a parent is to teach and give them the skills so that they can fly, not so that you can hold them the whole way along. Similar to coaching. The coaching as an executive coach is about giving insight, feedback, reflecting back what we're hearing, offering insights, and then letting them fly. It's not about being a tugboat, pulling them the whole way along, owning their journey for them. Absolutely. I know I had another executive coach on. I had a Amanda from Novus Global on my show. And the same thing, we ended up talking about how executive coaching is so much like raising children. It's like very similar as you're just, we're here to guide our children, just like executive coaches are here to guide their clients. Sometimes mom can see things that the kids can't see. And the same thing with your coach, your coach is going to see your blind spots before you can see them. One of the big things I've learned from becoming coach that I've applied, and I think it's very useful with teenagers, you never advise. You never tell them what to do. You have to ask questions and actually be curious about the answer, not lead up to an answer. Just help them to eliminate what they're working on because they're never going to hear your advice and go, oh, good call, mom. That sounds great. I'll go do that. Could you give me an example of that? Oh, yeah, absolutely. How about talking about college, like what college to apply to and what degree they want? You can't say, well, I think you mentioned you want to be an engineer. You should go to Boulder. Hell no, I'm not going to Boulder now. If you start asking questions about what is it that you're interested in? Oh, that sounds like a few different engineering degrees. What sorts of things are you looking at for your return on investment? And they go, what does that mean? And you have to talk that through. And then what sort of climate are you interested in? Because this is four years of your life. What sort of climate sounds interesting? And do you like big cities? So you just guide them through the thought process. And then maybe they might be like, well, that sounds like Denver. So you need to help them without handing them information. I love that. That's great advice, Cassie. You might actually come up with Boston if you lead them through that. And that's okay, too. That's awesome. Awesome. Do you see opportunities for bringing children into the ecosystem of entrepreneurship in the way that actually supports both your business and your family life? I think there's always opportunities. I really try to help my kids see what I'm doing because I don't want them... Otherwise, I don't work many hours when they are home. So if they would just see me hanging out, eating breakfast... breakfast with them, and then hanging out on the deck reading a book. And so if I don't draw them in and show them the clients that I'm talking to and all this, they might just be like, mom is lazy. So we don't want that perception. Not that it's not okay to have some self-care, but I do have self-care and I want them to show I'm also really using my brain and putting good work out in the world. I like what I'm working on and I value the mission. Drawing them into that so they can see it is useful. But there's so much fluency that they can also gain from being part of the business. I don't think kids get a lot of money fluency these days, especially because we swipe a credit card and we go home with the groceries. Like it's all so digital that I like to actually talk about numbers with them and like what I'm pricing things at and how that connects to value. So bringing them into that thought process is helping them just see what money is. Of course, just the digital age. I've been talking about AI a lot, how I'm using it, how I'm not using it, making choices. Like I will never use AI to do anything creative. That is me. That is my brand is creativity, thought process, coaching questions. And so that's a new fly zone for me. Whereas if it's mundane tasks, like figuring out which travel insurance to buy, that one, you take care of that for me. So helping them think through my thought process with me, I think is eliminating some of the entrepreneurial world. I love that. I think that that's a really important conversation to have with kids nowadays too. I think that's one we have a lot too. How do we use AI? What's the right way? What's the wrong way? That's a big conversation. But we're definitely, you need to be smart. You're still smarter than the AI and don't forget that. Exactly. Yeah. We're still the artist and it's just the brush. Exactly. Just the brush. So in your opinion, what does true equality look like you in practice, not just theory, as far as coming from that feminism 2.0 perspective? Equality is not the same as equal. It never has been and never will be. And that's a really important point to make. I think that the current society is shifting back towards this meritocracy idea that if you work hard, you should be able to get just as far as the person next to you. And it doesn't see the whole person. It doesn't represent the fact that some people start with more advantage. Some people continue with more advantage. There's privilege and there's so many different aspects of a person that you can feel very, very privileged most of the time. But in this one aspect, you're not. And so just representing the whole person and seeing that we need to find ways to make opportunity for everyone and not shut people down when they are trying to make good progress. That would be equality. Absolutely. Agreed. And if you could redesign the corporate model from the ground up, what would it look like? Oh, it'd be so pretty. If we could redesign the corporate model from the ground up, I think we had a fantastic global experiment just a couple of years ago. And we were on the cusp in like 2022 of, could we let people work where they want them from? We've demonstrated the tools work for this. It's just, how do you measure at that point? And the system shut down and went, we measure time on station. And if we could have pivoted to training our leaders to look at productivity, look at outcomes and results and let go of some of the really outdated what success is, we could have got to this really beautiful point. And I think some of the companies made that pivot. And I think they have a very loyal workforce and they're thriving. The companies that did return to work, but oh, we're all going to be on Zoom calls sitting next to each other. In our cubicles, talking over the cube wall. Those are the ones where they didn't, they were trying to return to the 19, not 1999, 2019 era. But they just, they went so far backwards because they didn't drop the Zoom. They didn't get the inhuman contact. They kept the impersonal without the benefits of the impersonal. Absolutely. I can see how, yeah, they adapted only the worst. The worst, the worst paid. That's the best, the worst. got lost. The things that helped working parents got lost. Yeah, unfortunately. Because if you're going to be in the office, the best part about being in the office is let's have in-person meetings. Let's get face-to-face. You have a whiteboard. You have pens and markers so you can talk. They're like, well, Zoom has a whiteboard. It's really not the same. Yeah, it's not the same. Yeah, it's one of the things I do miss and One of the things, the only thing that I miss about having everybody in the office is that I do miss those moments of being able to come together and really collaborate and really get visualized. You know, I think that's just like, and maybe a couple of times a year we get together and do a strategy, you know, spend a few days together and really think through how we, how we're going to grow, you know, really get together and have that sales meeting like, what's our growth strategy look like, you know, and get on the same picture, like where we want to go, how we're going to grow it together. Or if we have a big project, something big that we're working on, I do love being able to get everybody in the same room. But other than that, most of the time, as far as quality of life, you know, working wherever we want to work, having our laptops with us and our phones do everything. It's just the best. It sounds like a beautiful blend for the future of corporate is recognizing when there is true value in bringing people in and getting people together, even if they live in different sides of the world right now. Sometimes you need to bring them all into one single space, but it's not every day and it's not four days a week. It's sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. We see that a lot in our industry. We'll do like a sales kickoffs and everybody will get together, you know, and spend a few days together. And a lot of it's just like building that corporate culture too. Like, making sure you're doing some fun stuff together. Everybody knows each other, keeping those lines of communication kind of light and fun and making sure that you know what your coworkers hobbies are, their kids' names and those kinds of things. So you've got a little bit of bonding going on. That's important. One of my bosses, when I first became a manager, I had a goal because I worked with suppliers all over the world. And he said, before, are we allowed to cuss on this program? Yeah, go for it. Before the shit hits the fan, you better know someone face to face. And so it was, he flew me. I had to go to London. I had to go to Vermont. I had to go to Italy, India. I went all around the world just having these conversations. I'm like, I don't know what the value of this is, but I'll take the trips. But when I, when the shit hit the fan, I could call up and someone and specifically say, and they have that, the in-person does add trust. It does add the familiarity that you need to run effective business, but it doesn't have to be every day. And we have the tools now to make that work. Yeah. All personally. Yeah. I think being, we need corporations to be more intentional about how they're using their human workforce. You know, it's, it's really important for us to know each other, to bond with each other, to have a level of trust with one another as people who work together as coworkers, but that everyday grind is, I really would love to see that a thing of the past. I do not think it's serving the men or the women. No, everyone is being challenged by this. The commute is not a joyful part of most people's life. Yeah. And I'd love to see the freeways lightened up a bit too. We live in Southern California and it's like, wow, people went back to work and now there's traffic again. 405 doesn't move much, does it? No, it does not. Yeah. And I rarely have to drive on the freeway at rush hour, but I was dropping my daughter off at LAX and I had to drive home in rush hour traffic. And I was just thinking to myself, I can't imagine spending my whole day in the office and then sitting in traffic for two hours each way. And people do that. Think of your health. Your mental health. Mental health, physical health, all the health is just gone with that. Yeah. I mean, just that amount of sitting, it's equivalent to smoking a pack a day of cigarettes. Yeah. Right? Yes. That's just what's expected of you. You're going to sit in your car, and then you're going to sit at your desk, and then you're going to sit in your car, and then you're going to go home and drink a bottle of wine. Oh, no. good for you. Not me, but I imagine that's what they're doing. Cause that's what, I mean, if that was my life, I mean, that might be me too. Oh my gosh. So tell me what inspired you to start Elm coaching and who do you primarily serve? I serve is in the name. So Elm coaching is an acronym for engineers, leaders, moms, and mentors. So I primarily serve working parents in the technical field, men and women. we, I wanted to start this business because I feel like there's a missing narrative in this system. We've been talking about it already today. I was at an event last night and I had STEM moms, my book, my first book that I put out, Honest Easel. People are like, oh, that's a book to help moms get their kids into STEM. Like, no, there's moms who are in STEM. And people, every time I get that, they're like, oh, I should have thought of that. But we're not in the narrative right now. The fact that There's women in STEM, people are starting to come around to STEM, science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine. But the fact that there's moms like that, that doesn't check out because there's competing media narratives. One is that women aren't really in STEM, but we're trying to get girls in. So that's one. I'm like, okay, girls, yes. There's the other narrative that scientists are a lonely, smart, They were in the lab all the time. They're nerds. They don't have personal skills. How could that become a mom? So it's like all these different narratives that are crushing the ability to grow and retain women in really cool jobs that are rewarding and come with opportunities to use your brain and travel the world to visit suppliers. And they're fantastic, but they're not in the narrative. And so we keep losing women out of these jobs because they're isolated and because everyone else has left or because no one else joined them to start. And so I wanted to start a business that's shifting that and opening space. I love that. Cassie, you're awesome. This is such a powerful and honest conversation. And what I appreciate the most about your work is that you're not just pointing out what's broken. You're actively helping women build something better. Cassie, this was such a powerful and honest conversation. What I appreciate most about your work is that you're not just pointing out what's broken. You're actively helping women build something better. If this episode resonated with you, I highly recommend connecting with Cassie and diving deeper into her work. You can find her on LinkedIn under Cassie Leonard and learn more about her coaching at elmcoaching, E-L-M-M.com. And as always, If you're enjoying the Manager podcast, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple and Spotify. It helps us reach more women and continue this conversation at a larger scale. Until next time, remember, you're not behind. You're not doing it wrong. You're operating inside a system that was never designed for you. And the moment you see that clearly is the moment that you start to build something different. See you next week.