Brigid Schulte

Washington, D.C.

Director and Host at Better Life Lab

Writer. Speaker. Director @BetterLifeLab @NewAmerica. Author of Over Work and Overwhelmed. Work + Care + Gender Equity.

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Articles

Manar Morales on Creating Flexible Work Cultures

2 weeks ago | newamerica.org | Brigid Schulte

By Brigid SchulteManar Morales has been working to help firms shift to flexible cultures since 2006. The one-time employment litigator-turned Founder and CEO of the Diversity and Flexibility Alliance, has just published a new book, The Flexibility Paradigm: Humanizing the Workplace for Productivity, Profitability and Possibility, that’s designed to help others make the change. The goal, Morales says, is to create human-centered workplaces of the future.
Siri Chilazi on How to Make Work Fair

3 weeks ago | newamerica.org | Brigid Schulte

By Brigid SchulteSiri Chilazi’s life’s work is to advance gender equality in the workplace. And at a time when the Trump administration is attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and when many corporations are dropping or backing away from previous commitments to equity, Chilazi is surprisingly hopeful.
Trump’s Anti-Trans Moves Steal From Putin’s Playbook

1 month ago | usnews.com | Graeme Reid |Sabra L. Katz-Wise |Brigid Schulte

President Donald Trump recently upped the ante in his attacks on transgender people. His administration said on Thursday that it was cutting $175 million to the University of Pennsylvania since the school had allowed transgender women to compete in women’s sports. The move builds on the flurry of anti-trans executive orders Trump signed at the start of his second term.
How To Be More ‘Time Affluent’ This Year (Even When It Feels Impossible)

Jan 17, 2025 | huffpost.com | Brigid Schulte

Do you feel constantly time-strapped, with too many items on your to-do list but not enough time to actually do them? You’re not alone: The majority of working Americansreport feeling “time poor.”The opposite of time poverty is “time affluence” — defined as the subjective feeling that you have sufficient time to pursue leisure and other enjoyable, meaningful activities. Subjective is the keyword here.
Philipa Nwadike-Laster

Dec 3, 2024 | newamerica.org | Brigid Schulte

Philipa Nwadike-Laster, 51, a widow, lives in Philadelphia with her two children. Her son, Emmanuel, 20, is nonverbal, autistic, and requires special care. Her daughter, Cecilia, is 14 and in middle school. A few years ago, Philipa, a certified nursing assistant who cares for elderly and disabled clients, joined Global Women’s Strike when she took one of her clients to a meeting, and she was inspired.
Mariam Dewi

Dec 3, 2024 | newamerica.org | Brigid Schulte

Mariam Dewi, 36, works as a certified nursing assistant in Minnesota. She came to the United States from Ghana with her parents in 2002 at the age of 14, and they wound up in Minnesota because they knew people there. She loves it here. Her husband, who immigrated from Guinea, and their three children feel the same way. “It’s a safe haven. There’s so much opportunity,” she says.
Ruaa Sabek

Dec 3, 2024 | newamerica.org | Brigid Schulte

Ruaa Sabek, 40, came to the United States from Syria in 2016. Her husband, a Syrian who was living in Venezuela when they met, works as a manager and cook in a fast food restaurant, King of Wings. They have two children, Perla, who is six years old, and Raam, who is four. The two met on Facebook in 2013 and became engaged when he visited her in Syria in 2014.
Blessing Aghayedo

Dec 3, 2024 | newamerica.org | Brigid Schulte

Blessing Aghayedo, 43, is married and lives with three children and one college-age stepdaughter in Hanover, Minnesota. She’s a Licensed Practical Nurse working at a nursing home and the breadwinner for her family. Because child care is so expensive, she and her husband, a handyman who has been taking on odd jobs like plowing snow in the winter and repairing cars since he lost his job several years ago, trade shifts.
Kel

Dec 3, 2024 | newamerica.org | Brigid Schulte

Kel, 45, lives in Michigan. She’s been a single parent of four teenagers, ages 15 to 20, since her marriage “imploded,” as she puts it, in 2015. That, and a series of cascading adverse events, from housing difficulties, unreliable child support, and increased medical care needs to dwindling income from a struggling business that she had to close down, has meant that the family has been living on the financial margins. Kel uses she/ they pronouns and identifies as intergender.
The Quest to Imagine a Workplace that (Actually) Values Work-Life Balance

Sep 24, 2024 | behavioralscientist.org | Brigid Schulte

Changing entrenched work culture is hard. I had a front-row seat to a project that tried. In 2018, the behavioral design firm ideas42 kicked off a project to better understand what drives people to overwork and to test interventions that would improve individual work-life conflict and well-being. My colleagues at ideas42 set out to talk to employees at nonprofit organizations who wanted to reduce work-life conflict. Nonprofits are often classic overwork and burnout cultures.