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Katrina Alcorn is a writer and experience design consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her first book, 'Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink' will be publishing in September 2013 with Seal Press.
Katrina Alcorn
Katrina Alcorn is a writer and experience design consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her first book, 'Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink' will be publishing in September 2013 with Seal Press.
Blog Post List
December 19, 2013
How stressful is your job? How much control do you and your manager have to fix it? Since my book, Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink , was published in September, I’ve given dozens of interviews with print, radio, and TV reporters about the state of working motherhood in America. Over and over I've been asked whether the problem of being "maxed out" varies across different types of jobs and industries. I don’t really know the answer; I regularly receive emails and blog comments from people in a gazillion types of jobs and industries, but I don’t know how they compare. So I’ve put together...
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August 12, 2013
I am very excited to share with you the official book trailer for “Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink.” It’s 2 minutes long. Please share it far and wide (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, your living room, or wherever you hang out). Mothers are breadwinners in two-thirds of American families, yet the American workplace is uniquely hostile to the needs of parents. Weaving in surprising research about the dysfunction between work and home, as well as the consequences to women’s health, the book includes my story about “having it all,” failing miserably, and what comes after. Ultimately, I'm...
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April 10, 2013
All right. I read it. The book that everyone, including my hero, Jon Stewart , has been talking about. So many reviews have been written about this book, that people have resorted to writing reviews of the reviews . The hype has been so incredibly, hyper—The Time story ! The 60 Minutes piece ! The banner ads! The web community !—that I was ready to harbor a deep dislike for this book. But that did not happen. At the risk of giving you Sheryl Sandberg fatigue, here are my thoughts, good and bad, on Lean In. As you probably know from the title ( Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead ) the...
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November 15, 2012
Ladies, we are having a very good year. This election, a record number of women—binders and binders full of them—ran for office, and…best of all… won . In the new Congress, we will have 20 female Senators, up from 17. We will have the first openly gay senator, Tammy Baldwin, in Wisconsin. We will have the first Asian-American woman in the Senate, Mazie Hirono, and the first Hindu in Congress, Tulsi Gabbard. Last I checked, 81 women had been elected to the House, while a few races were still being counted. New Hampshire will have the nation's first all-female delegation. (Feel free to express...
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July 2, 2012
Cross-posted from The Huffington Post . By now, you’ve probably either read or read about Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic essay in which she recounts from personal experience why she believes women cannot “have it all” and calls on all of us to recognize the conditions that must change to make it possible for women to thrive in careers and motherhood. As someone who has been writing about this issue for three years, I read her essay with relief. Finally! Now, at last, we can have the dialogue we should have been having for the last few decades instead of all the bogus “Mommy Wars.” How can we...
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February 1, 2012
Almost two years ago, I wrote my first blog post . As soon as it went live, I thought, I have quite possibly just ruined my entire life. This was about a year after I went home sick from my job and then never went back. The whole experience still felt painfully raw. I was filled with shame for letting people down, for abandoning the career I’d worked so hard at. I didn’t know how to explain the fact that I was so completely burned out that it wasn’t a choice to stop working, it was a physical necessity. Like most professional women, I had always taken great pains to appear confident, together...
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June 20, 2011
Working parents have a lot to juggle, and this can create stress. But what we often overlook is that stress has real health consequences. Several weeks ago, I put together a survey * asking working parents about stress and its effects on their health. More than 600 people responded. I filtered out respondents who lived in a household with at least one stay-at-home adult, which left 560 respondents in households where all adults work . Their answers were alarming: 80% catch up on work nights and weekends 81% worry they will burn out 88% said they suffer from at least one stress-related health...
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May 2, 2011
I just put together a very simple survey about working parents and stress. It takes only 3 minutes to complete. If you're a parent and you work to help support your family, here's what I'd like you to do: 1. Take the survey . 2. Share the survey (or this post) with everyone you know. 3. Come back in a few weeks to read about the results here, or at Working Moms Break . Why am I doing this? There's a ton of research about how time-starved working parents are, particularly in the U.S. where some experts say we work the longest hours of any developed country in the world. There's also a lot of...
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March 30, 2011
What if we just stopped having babies? You know, like an ANTI-labor labor movement. This may sound like a silly, made up argument, but right now, women in their childbearing years are "on strike" in something like than 90 countries in Europe and Asia and it's creating serious problems.
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March 15, 2011
In the first ten weeks of this year, we've missed 11 days of work due to school holidays or a sick kid. We're not even through the first quarter yet. If the rest of the year is like this quarter, we'll miss more than 40 days of work by the end of the year. How can that be?
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February 24, 2011
As a mom who works to support her family, good childcare is an absolute necessity for us—without it, I couldn't work. And if I couldn't work, we couldn't pay our bills. I'm lucky I can afford childcare, because there are hundreds of thousands of families who can't. They rely on programs like Head Start to be able to work or go to school, and know that their children are in good hands. Now the Republicans want to strip more than a billion dollars from Head Start and childcare assistance , leaving an estimated 368,000 children without early learning support, and leaving their parents unable to...
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December 6, 2010
It all started a few months ago when a friend of mine made a confession: Sometimes she fantasizes about getting into a minor car accident so that she'll have to go to the hospital for a few days. My friend doesn't have a death wish, she's just so stressed out working and taking care of her kids that a hospital visit sounds tantalizingly restful.
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November 19, 2010
As you may have heard, women still make only 77 cents on every dollar a man earns, and in recent years, progress on closing the pay gap has nearly ground to a halt. On Wednesday, the Paycheck Fairness Act, which was supposed to right this wrong, was defeated on the Senate floor . I’ll try not to get too wonky about this, because it’s Friday, but there are a few things I think you should know. What often gets left out of the whole pay gap discussion is that it not just about women , it’s about mothers in particular. Here’s how the pay gap breaks down: [1] Women without children make 90 cents...
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November 11, 2010
Recently I did a radio interview about working moms and talked about why I stopped working. My closest friends said I downplayed my nervous breakdown, making it sound like a really bad day (instead of a really bad year). It's true that I played it down. I was embarrassed. It's one thing to write about it, it's another to talk about it, live . On the radio . With a million people listening. But I've realized that if I'm going to talk about what happened to me at all, I should be more specific. I should define what "nervous breakdown" meant in my case. I'll start with what it did not mean. I...
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October 6, 2010
Do you compare your insides to other people’s outsides? Most of us do, even though we know better. We’re social creatures. It’s natural to make comparisons. But we rarely get to glimpse other people’s insides . When we make our comparisons, we inevitably wind up comparing how we feel to how other people seem . This may partly explain why so many mothers feel so much guilt. We look around at the women we know from the office or the kids’ school and see patient parents, happy marriages, and well-adjusted children. And we think, What’s wrong with me? I let my kids watch too much TV and I snap at...
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September 28, 2010
I recently got an email from a blog reader who said she had been obsessively reading and re-reading my first post , and all the comments that followed it. After years of managing what sounds like a challenging career and raising young children, she said she feared she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She wanted to know if I could see my own breakdown coming, and if so, what were the “warning bells”? There were warning bells. I’ll tell you all about them, and perhaps more importantly, what I tried to do about them. They started almost as soon as I took a full-time job, when my daughter...
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August 11, 2010
Under health care reform, all employers are required by law to accommodate the needs of breastfeeding employees. But ignorance about breastfeeding still prevails in the workplace. Here are the basics that every employer should know. Please send it to your boss, your HR director, and anyone who is in a position to support women breastfeeding when they return to work.
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July 27, 2010
A quiet revolution has been taking place in Sweden for 15 years, affecting everything from the gender pay gap to workplace culture to relationships between parents and children. It all started at home. Here’s a link to the fascinating New York Times story about this phenomenon. Now here’s my distilled version—with original illustrations! This Swedish family* doesn’t look very happy. That’s because for decades Sweden has had the same problems we have in the U.S., with men and women seemingly confined to traditional roles when it came to working and raising kids. Although the country had paid...
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July 19, 2010
Thanks to everyone who took my "Who clips the nails?" survey. The results are in! Below is a summary. I'm posting the detailed results, comments, and analysis now and throughout the week on my blog: workingmomsbreak.com . Overview Even though studies show fathers are changing more diapers and folding more laundry than ever, mothers are still bearing most of the "psychic burden" of parenting—the scheduling, organizing, and myriad little tasks that fall to the primary caregiver. A month ago, I put together a survey asking parents how they divide certain responsibilities at home, and linked to...
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July 14, 2010
Many of our employers and coworkers remain woefully ignorant about breastfeeding; without realizing it, they put us in situations that can be thoroughly humiliating.
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