Ursula Mead on motherhood & entrepreneurship
Thinking about kids, career growth, or just asking for more money? Ursula Mead (founder of InHerSight) breaks down how she negotiated for herself at work and at home - and why advocating for what you need is never “too much.”
You started your company as a young mother. How did you financially prepare for that?
I’ve been a saver for as long as I can remember. I was the kind of kid who’d save the dollar instead of buying bubble gum. So I’d long been building the cushion I needed for big life transitions like becoming a mother and, later, starting a company.
Even more important than being financially prepared for those things was aligning expectations with my partner. Motherhood and entrepreneurship are grueling ventures. The workload skyrockets, the demands on your time go through the roof, and there’s a lot of visible and invisible work involved. Creating a process for communicating who would do what was critical to making space for me to succeed as a founder. It also helped us avoid falling into stereotypical patterns where women disproportionately shoulder the childcare load.
My husband and I are both data people, so we set up a quick check-in system where we’d regularly talk about (and quantify) how we each perceived the distribution of work versus how we felt it should be. Those conversations helped us recalibrate as needed and stay aligned.
We all can agree that women are chronically under-supported in the job market. But how exactly does that show up in our day-to-day lives?
For as long as women have been in the workforce, the policies, infrastructure, and behaviors needed for them to be successful simply haven’t been there. And I’m not talking about just one area, like unequal pay. Across the full spectrum of needs women have at different stages of their careers, support has consistently fallen short.
At the motherhood stage, for example, that looks like only a minority of private companies offering fully paid parental leave.
For women focused on advancement, it looks like the fact that women make up half the workforce but only a single-digit percentage of CEOs.
And today, among many other things, it looks like widespread return-to-office mandates even though the data overwhelmingly show that remote and hybrid work arrangements help women achieve better balance and career satisfaction.
What’s your #1 tip for young women entering the workforce for the first time or just starting out their careers?
A little over ten years ago, I was listening to a panel of senior-level women give advice to young graduates. When asked this same question, their response was: “Do your homework on the companies you think you want to work for.”
I remember feeling that advice fell flat, because there was no way for women to really do that homework, unless they happened to have a close connection at a company who was in the same life stage, looking for the same things, and whose experience would be representative of their own. Spoiler alert: The probability of a young jobseeker having that kind of “in” at the dozens of companies they’d be applying to is pretty low.
Today, I’d give the same advice with a little twist. Yes, you should absolutely do your homework on potential employers (and thanks to InHerSight, that’s now free and accessible to everyone). But also, do your homework on yourself. Make time to ask the important questions about what you want from work right now. Identify your non-negotiables and your nice-to-haves, and keep checking in with yourself. These things change, just like your goals, priorities, and dreams. The company that’s right for you today may not be the same one three or five years from now, and that’s okay.
The current job market is especially rough for young people. How would you recommend young women to navigate advocating for themselves while also staying realistic about the financial realities of the current job market?
I remember the first time I really advocated for myself in the interview process. It was the first time I ever negotiated my salary. I was already at my third company when a good friend, who was helping me with the job search, insisted that I counter the offer I’d received from my dream company.
I was terrified. The job market was fairly tenuous at the time, and this was the company I wanted to work for. I couldn’t imagine putting something so precious at risk. But my friend helped me see that simply telling them what I was hoping for wasn’t risky at all. In fact, it showed them that I was confident, qualified, and the kind of person they thought they’d met in the interview. As she put it: “Think about it this way. If you don’t negotiate, you’ll disappoint them.”
It ended up being the easiest money I’ve ever made. The truth is, you can’t wait for perfect conditions to advocate for yourself - it will always be out of your hands. What you can control is how you show up: honest about what you want or need to feel supported, and sure that you deserve it. Employers want to provide that - happy, secure employees have all sorts of benefits for a business. So when they can, they will.
