Oct 21, 2023
If you've ever taken time away from your career to care for a child, a parent, or anyone who needed you, your resume has a gap.
But because the skills you built during that time (empathy, adaptability, crisis management, emotional regulation, leadership under pressure, multi-stakeholder communication) are systematically invisible to the employers who need them most. The organizations that will win in the next decade are those that stop penalizing caregiving and start regarding caregivers as people with one of the most competitive skill sets in the modern workforce.
That argument, urgent, research-backed, and deeply philosophical, is at the heart of this conversation.
In this episode of Good Is In The Details, Gwendolyn Dolske and Rudy Salo welcome back one of the show's most popular returning guests: Kate Mangino: gender expert, professional facilitator with over 20 years of experience working with organizations across more than 20 countries, co-host of the Equal-ish podcast, and author of Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home (St. Martin's Press), featured in The Atlantic, CNN, the Washington Post, BBC World News, and The Guardian, with writing appearing in Time, Slate, and the Harvard Business Review.
Kate's first appearance on Good Is In The Details tripled the show's numbers. She's back!
And this conversation goes even deeper.
In early 2025, more than 212,000 women left the U.S. workforce following a rise in return-to-office mandates. Among mothers with young children, workforce participation dropped nearly three percentage points in just six months. The women behind those numbers didn't stop working. They started caregiving. And when they're ready to return, they'll face a workforce that sees their gap as a liability rather than the asset it actually is.
73% of Americans are currently caring for someone: a child, a parent, a sibling, a neighbor. That is most of us. And most of us have never been told that what we're doing in that role is building a skill set that translates directly, powerfully, and immediately into the workplace.
What we explore in this episode:
- What caregiving actually is, and why our culture's tendency to treat it as unpaid, unskilled labor is both economically wrong and philosophically revealing about what we value
- The 18 caregiving skills that map directly onto the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' 17 core workplace skills — including adaptability, critical thinking, interpersonal communication, leadership, and detail orientation
- Why the "maybe baby" bias double-penalizes women in the workforce, and what the philosophy of equal partners has to say about how we redistribute both the burden and the reward of caregiving
- Why caregiving triggers selflessness, empathy, and humility; and, why our culture's decision to discourage men from participating in caregiving relationships is unfair not just to women but to men
- What gender norms have to do with the caregiving crisis, and how the same cultural scripts that assign caregiving to women also deprive men of some of the most meaningful experiences available to them
- What philosophy says about the relationship between caregiving and the good life, and whether a society that systematically devalues care is capable of producing eudaimonia at scale
- What employers, hiring managers, and organizations can do right now to stop treating caregiving gaps as red flags and start treating them as the competitive advantage the research says they are
- What Kate has learned from working with organizations in over 20 countries about the universal patterns of gender and care, and what the best-performing workplaces do differently
This is the episode for anyone who has ever felt the need to hide what they were doing during the years they weren't in an office. You were building the skills the workforce needs most.
Guest: Kate Mangino — gender expert, professional facilitator, and author of Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home (St. Martin's Press). Co-host of Equal-ish, the podcast devoted to the intersection of marriage, work, and parenting. Over 20 years of experience working with international organizations to promote positive social change, delivering curricula in over 20 countries on women's empowerment, healthy masculinity, HIV prevention, and gender equity. Featured in The Atlantic, CNN, Washington Post, BBC World News, and The Guardian.
Good Is In The Details is hosted by Gwendolyn Dolske, Ph.D. and Rudy Salo: a philosophy, books, and ideas podcast exploring the examined life in the spirit of Socrates.
Learn more about Kate Mangino: https://www.katemangino.com
Support the pod: https://www.patreon.com/GoodIsInTheDetails
https://www.goodisinthedetails.com
Thank you to our sponosor: http://www.avonmoreinc.com