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Good morning, Fearless readers:
This is one of my favorite times of the year – I get to introduce the Business Record’s newest Women of Influence honorees to you all.
I’m fascinated by their similarities (an early, deep love of books seems common) and their differences.
In this week’s Fearless e-newsletter, you will find:
- One question and an answer from the Business Record’s 2024 Women of Influence honorees: What
support would be most helpful for business leaders to provide for their women and nonbinary employees?
- An in-depth news story about how more Central Iowa workplaces are welcoming employees’ babies for several months postpartum. The infant-at-work policies can improve retention – and everyone’s health and well-being.
- In the headlines: As Iowa’s six-week abortion ban looms, clinics prepare for an uncertain future.
- In case you missed it: Learn about Brooke Findley, senior director of strategy and impact at the Chrysalis Foundation, who has a hobby that is more of a
tradition in her family: she is a third-generation commercial fisherman in Alaska.
- Lots more!
– Nicole Grundmeier, Business Record staff writer
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Introducing the Business Record’s 2024 Women of Influence
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| BY EMILY BARSKE WOOD, SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR
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The Business Record’s Women of Influence awards celebrate the work of women who have made a difference. They’ve devoted their lives to doing things most wouldn’t. They’ve spent countless hours on various boards and they’ve blazed a trail either personally or professionally for other women to follow.
Now more than ever, we need leaders who operate with strength, resilience and empathy. The 2024 Women of Influence honorees exemplify these
characteristics. Their stories of work both past and present are inspiring, especially in a time when we need role models who offer humility and thoughtfulness.
This year’s honorees dedicate time, resources and effort to businesses and community organizations. They lead in top roles at large organizations and at small organizations that punch above their weight class. They plan initiatives and strategies that are transforming Greater Des Moines and its citizens. They have earned multiple degrees. They come from different backgrounds. They have overcome challenges and embraced opportunities.
They are influential not simply because of what they do or have done but also because of who they are.
This is the 25th year the Business Record has honored inspiring and influential women. They’ve amassed a tremendous amount of experience and wisdom and showcased integrity, grace and intelligence.
We hope their stories inspire you as much as they’ve inspired us.
Question: What support would be most helpful for business leaders to provide for their women and nonbinary employees?
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Rona Berinobis, senior vice president of corporate social responsibility, organizational development and internal communications, Athene USA
The same opportunity as male counterparts – ensuring women are in consideration for every leadership role. Valuing contributions as any male would receive.
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Monica Chavez-Silva, vice president for community engagement and strategic planning, Grinnell College
Pay scale transparency – a clear, shared understanding of what a particular job pays (regardless of who’s filling it).
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Jean Duffy, senior vice president and principal, CAPTRUST
I would encourage our business leaders to actively listen to their employees to determine their concerns and then take meaningful action. This includes providing them with a seat at the table, advocating for them when their voices are overshadowed and recognizing that embracing diversity strengthens the entire organization.
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Jann Freed, owner and leadership development consultant, Jann E. Freed LLC
Create an environment where all employees want to work. Creating a healthy culture that includes psychological safety is so important, and that includes: building trust, communicating openly and demonstrating
empathy and compassion. One of the main responsibilities of leaders is to build community. Especially after the pandemic, people long to belong.
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Miriam Erickson Brown, chair and CEO, Anderson Erickson Dairy
The opportunity to grow and develop during their career. Here’s why.
Our family business, AE Dairy, has had three very different CEOs who shaped and refined their skills and gifts to guide AE to the next generation. If I tried to compare myself to my predecessors (my grandfather, Iver Erickson, and my father, Jim Erickson), I might never have begun the journey to lead AE. Neither was perfect, but their flaws made them relatable and authentic leaders for us all. In the male-dominated dairy industry, which is full of leaders who have a strong expertise in plant operations, I was an outlier, yet my dad saw something in me. I have grown into my position, and it has grown into me. What a blessing that is.
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Myrna Johnson, executive director, Iowa Public Radio
Mentors or coaches who can help them navigate their career.
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Rachelle Keck, president, Grand View University
Supportive work environments are critical for the well-being of employees. With regard to female and nonbinary employees, mental health resources are key, as are policies to support work-life balance.
Upon commencing my presidency at Grand View, my listening tour highlighted the need to make some policy changes. These changes included flexible work schedules and modalities as well as changes to parental, bereavement and medical leave policies.
As a working mother myself for many years, I had seen firsthand the additional loads that can often be borne by women. For example, while practicing law, I had one employee who birthed four children during her time with the firm. We sat down in advance to strategize the best approach to support her well-being while at the same time ensuring the work was done well and
on time. The situation required quite a bit of preparatory work and a shift in the typical work process, but was well worth it in the end. She was one of the most valuable employees I have ever had the opportunity to work with, and she has shared with me how grateful she was to have been able to work during that time of her life in such a supportive environment.
Additionally, it’s important to ensure women and nonbinary employees have access to career advancement opportunities, and mentorship and sponsorship support as they navigate professional progression and growth.
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Deidre Williams, vice president of organizational effectiveness, EMC Insurance
The support business leaders can offer to women and nonbinary employees involves creating an inclusive and equitable work
environment where everyone has the opportunity to succeed as their authentic selves. By ensuring inclusive policies, access to resources, support to gender transitions, normalizing gender identities, fair compensation and continuous education are all initiatives that can help to amplify the voices of women and nonbinary employees wherein they feel seen, heard, supported, safe, valued and recognized.
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Federal Home Loan Bank of Des Moines Emerging Woman of Influence
Jenna Knox, foundation director, Mission Cancer +
Blood
Mentorship, nonjudgmental space and honest conversations about career planning from both women and men in business leadership roles. Often it takes someone seeing something in you for you to recognize your own strength and gifts. Business leaders need to provide empowerment to women and nonbinary employees by helping them recognize their capacity to thrive.
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Iowa State University Ivy College of Business Woman Business Owner of the Year
Melissa Ness, founder and CEO, Connectify HR
Every individual needs consistent, caring, authentic and transparent support. We need to show care and compassion for every person with whom we work. This includes working to become aware of our own biases and actively removing them.
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As employers zero in on the health of their workers post-pandemic, more Central Iowa offices are welcoming babies
Infant-at-work policies improve retention, preserve institutional knowledge
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| BY NICOLE GRUNDMEIER, BUSINESS RECORD STAFF WRITER
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| Erin Moran, senior director of communications for the Young Women’s Resource Center in Des Moines, works with her baby daughter in her office on June 24, 2024. Photo by Duane Tinkey.
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It was time for Erin Moran to go back to work, with her baby daughter in tow as part of her workplace’s infant-at-work program.
The start was not auspicious.
“She had horrible gas, and acid reflux, and was screaming, and I thought, ‘Oh, no, I’m disrupting everyone. … This can’t be how this goes. How are we going to do this?’” said Moran, senior director of communications for the Young Women’s Resource Center in Des Moines. “I was very frazzled.”
Her colleagues made the difference, telling her that “‘babies
are going to cry; we’re going to get this figured out, and it’ll be fine,’” Moran recalled. “I feel very grateful to my co-workers who came in, in a nonjudgmental and a very genuine way, saying, ‘How can I support you? It sounds like it might be a little bit rough right now.’ … It took away that fear of people thinking I wasn’t a good mom.”
After the COVID-19 pandemic, more Iowa employers are zeroing in on improving the mental and physical health of their workers.
For women,
statistically, one of the most challenging mental health periods of their lives is the months after giving birth. Research by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows about 1 in 8 women with a recent live birth reported symptoms of a postpartum mood disorder. Postpartum mood disorders can occur up to a full year after a person gives birth.
More Iowa workplaces, including the Young Women’s Resource Center, are using an innovative solution that can improve the health of new parents and their infants: Why not invite the babies into the office, at least for a while?
The employers are able to retain employees who might have quit, taking their institutional knowledge with them. The women are able to remain in the workforce, saving for retirement and working toward their career goals – there is no “broken rung” climbing the corporate ladder due to a long
caregiving break. It’s a scenario that happens to countless new mothers.
Caregiving meant 5 years out of the paid workforce
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Michelle Book was one of those new mothers in the mid-1980s. Book is now the CEO of the Food Bank of Iowa. But decades ago, living on a farm outside Atlantic, Iowa, during the height of the Farm Crisis, her family counted on her income from her job at an Omaha hospital, about an hour commute. “Back in those days, it was hard to arrange to leave the office for a dentist
appointment,” Book said. “The corporate culture really was [being] in your seat from 8 to 5.”
Book was an accountant and auditor, and her employer expected her to return to work not long after her first child was born. “I had arranged for an acquaintance in Atlantic to provide infant care for Whitney. … I knew she would receive good care,” she said. “I just absolutely, positively had to go back to work because we needed my income. I planned for it all along.”
The day came.
“My alarm went off. I went to the shower. I’d packed my lunch the night before. I’d packed the diaper bag the night before. I had my clothes laid out so I could be efficient,” Book said. “I showered. I dried my hair. … I dressed. I was drinking my coffee.
“And I just remember putting my coffee cup down on the counter and just went to the couch, slumped on the couch, and I just sobbed. I sobbed and Whitney had woken up by then, and I think I was holding her, and I was sobbing, and then she became
upset. And I just looked into that little face. … Nobody was there but Whitney and me, and I just said, ‘I can’t do this.’”
Book quit her job after she and her husband decided they could figure out a way to manage. They were working to expand their farrow-to-finish hog operation. Instead of driving to Omaha, she drove the tractor, castrated pigs and kept the farm books – she’d graduated from Iowa State University and had expertise in business administration and accounting. “But also, it was five years that I put my career on hold,” she said.
Her children were 5 and 2 when she eventually got a new job at the Cass County Memorial Hospital in Atlantic.
Over 30 years later, the Food Bank of Iowa is helping offer a different solution for parents, an infant-at-work program.
Book posted about it recently on LinkedIn, including part of the story about her children’s early years. Ellis Lowe just joined the Food Bank, the fifth baby in a little over three years to come to the office. “He gets a name tag, he gets a graduation certificate. He is part of the crew here,” Book said.
The workplace leaders interviewed by the Business Record for this story said the babies seem to improve everyone's morale.
Where it all started
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Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa is often mentioned as the first or one of the first local employers to pioneer the infant-at-work idea. CEO Beth Shelton said a lot of work had been done before 2018 on improving culture and internal support for a little
over 50 full-time local employees. And then, “we had a lot of employees who happened to be pregnant all at once,” she said.
One woman came to Shelton and asked whether she could eventually bring her baby to the office while she worked. “And in my head, in that moment, I was like, ‘Hard no, absolutely not. Have you ever met a human child?’ … But I didn’t say that. I’ve learned a little bit in leadership about pausing and listening. I listened, I heard her out. And even after our meeting, I was like, ‘This is crazy. There’s no way we could have babies at work,’ but I said, ‘Let me reflect on that a little bit.’”
She researched motherhood’s contribution to the gender pay gap and logistics for how it might work to bring in babies.
“Within 24 hours, I had done a complete 180,” she said. Leaders started thinking about what it would take to make the idea a reality: “Where would you put diapers? What if it’s disruptive? How long could children cry? Where do you put them? And I’m like, ‘Well, let’s make a list of everything we would have to address.’ And we started doing that. So today we have a 12-page document that outlines all of those kinds of questions: Who can hold them? How long can
they cry? Where do diapers go? What if it’s a colicky baby? All of those things. All of the proper liability of who can hold them and when. What if they’re sick? In January of 2019, the first baby came, the first of eight in a row.”
It’s been five years, and the 21st baby came to the Girl Scouts office earlier this month. The Girl Scouts have shared its infant-at-work policy with other Central Iowa employers as interest in the approach has gained steam.
Girl Scouts employees also get 12 weeks of paid parental leave. Babies can come in after that until age 6 months. “We have shared the policy, oh gosh, probably 300 or 400 times,” Shelton said. The Girl Scouts got helpful tips at the outset from a Kansas City insurance association that’s had a similar policy for two decades, Shelton said.
Shelton, too, said she’s grateful to provide an option that wasn’t available to her early in her tenure at Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa: “Being an executive female and having a baby was so challenging. This was before we had the policy.”
People shouldn’t assume that only narrow categories of employers can provide the flexibility to welcome infants, Shelton said.
“Come visit us. You will see that it’s a real workplace,” she said. “We have cubicles and computers, and everyone’s working all day long. No one’s sitting around campfires – maybe our camp director who lives somewhere else – but I think there’s this notion that somehow nonprofits are not doing real work or something. In my case and most of the people I know, it’s the opposite.”
Planning and culture
Moran’s infant daughter is the third
baby to spend time at Young Women’s Resource Center under its policy.
The policy sets clear expectations for workers, she said: “Flexibility and accountability are two very essential components of being able to be a full-time employee and a full-time caregiver.”
But that doesn’t mean that the experience is always a smooth ride.
“At first, I felt a lot of guilt of, ‘I’m not being a good enough employee, I’m not being a good enough mom.’ Which I think a lot of people probably feel,” Moran said. “So it made a big difference to have a workplace that was like, ‘Nonsense. Babies cry. This is what babies do.’”
Caring for an infant at work means a lot of logistics and planning, Moran said, including a baby carrier, safe sleeping space, a safe play area and room for changing diapers. Her office is small but meticulously planned – every space has a purpose. She often uses a soft-sided infant carrier to wear her baby while she works.
Like many workplaces, the Young Women’s Resource Center has had a hybrid work schedule, with Moran’s team in the office three days a week and working remotely two days. She had an extra day at home each week during the infant-at-work period.
Improved retention due to the program
Although Girl Scouts of
Greater Iowa’s policies have been shared throughout the state, each organization tailors its rules and tools to match specific needs and resources.
“We didn’t have a set room when we first started this,” said Shelton, the Girl Scouts CEO. “We call it the quiet room now. We don’t have a lot of resources, and we were very limited on our square footage or infrastructure. And so we made a choice when one of our C-suite roles turned over and we had a vacant office … we said, ‘No, this is more important and we are going to convert this to be the quiet room.’”
One benefit of an infant-at-work program for employers can be improved retention. Shelton and Book said they’ve seen good results at their workplaces.
Helping somebody along as they continue to bond with a child and recover from childbirth benefits everybody, Shelton said: “This policy is here to support that new parent or caregiver. And the expectation is not that the employee is performing at 100%. …
“When you can show
someone a little bit of grace for being human for those three months, the payoff is incredible, not only for them personally, but for the organization. This is not a forever thing. So if someone’s performing at 85% for three months … is that really going to be detrimental, or could we find a way to accommodate for that?”
Book said her experience with her own children contributed to wanting to have formal assistance at the Food Bank of Iowa office. She and her staff explored setting up a child care facility at the office, but it would have been cost-prohibitive.
The Des Moines office has a lactation room with a sofa and a comfortable chair and appropriate lighting. “It really hasn’t bothered anybody else there in the five babies that we have sponsored; there’s never been a complaint,” Book said.
Babies can stay at the Food Bank of Iowa office until they’re 6 months old or until they’re mobile, whichever comes first.
The concept is a win for everybody, Book said: “I would just
encourage other Central Iowa leaders to be open-minded, to take a look at it.”
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“YOU SHOULD NEVER LET YOUR FEARS PREVENT YOU FROM DOING WHAT YOU KNOW IS RIGHT.”
AUNG SAN SUU KYI
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| Photo courtesy of Melisa Fonseca.
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Marshalltown residents elect first Latina to city council: Political newcomer Melisa Fonseca made history as the first Latina ever elected to the Marshalltown City Council and, at age 27, one of the youngest to occupy a seat after she defeated engineer and businessman Mark Eaton in a 4th Ward special election to replace the late Al Hoop, according to this story in the Marshalltown Times-Republican. “It was just getting out there, for sure, and I think that that really helped, especially starting it in Spanish and English from the get-go with all of my things — flyers, invitations, videos, it was all in the two languages that I can speak. ...” she said. “I think that it definitely will show how much Marshalltown is headed to [becoming] a more inclusive, more representative type of community.”
As Iowa’s 6-week abortion ban looms, clinics prepare for an uncertain future: In the final days before one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country is expected to take effect, the atmosphere at Iowa abortion clinics has become emotionally fraught. As health care providers prepare for this new uncertain reality, what they say they dread the most are conversations that are personal, intimate and searing – speaking with individual women who come to them seeking care, according to this story in the Des Moines Register.
Des Moines’ new skyline art to be dedicated to Teree Caldwell-Johnson: New permanent art was recently added to the top of Mainframe Studios. “Inhale…. Exhale.…” is being dedicated to Teree Caldwell-Johnson, a longtime Des Moines school board member and CEO of Oakridge Neighborhood who died earlier this year. A sunset dedication ceremony will be at 8:15 p.m. on Aug. 2 at Oakridge, according to this story in Axios Des Moines.
As a baby bust hits rural areas, hospital labor and delivery wards are closing down: Rural regions like the one surrounding the southern Iowa town of Oskaloosa used to have a lot more babies and many more places to give birth to them. At least 41 Iowa hospitals have shuttered their labor and delivery units since 2000. Those facilities, representing about a third of Iowa hospitals, are located mostly in rural areas where birth numbers have
plummeted, according to this story by NPR.
CORRECTION:
Information about the scholarship of a volleyball player was incorrect in the “Leading Fearlessly: Dare to Dream” column published July 15 in Fearless. The volleyball player received a scholarship to a Division 1 school.
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How a Des Moines boutique is uplifting plus-sized women using fashion shows (Des Moines Register). 1 in 10 people infected during pregnancy develop long COVID-19, study finds (Washington Post). More women are working than ever. But they’re doing 2 jobs. (Wall Street Journal). How female entrepreneurs are using technology to solve real-world problems (Forbes).
When that job promotion is really a ‘glass cliff’ (New York Times). Texas sends millions to crisis pregnancy centers. It’s meant to help needy families, but no one knows if it works. (ProPublica).
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Learn about a hobby embraced by Brooke Findley, senior director of strategy and
impact, Chrysalis Foundation
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BY EMILY BARSKE WOOD, SPECIAL PROJECTS
EDITORTell us a little about your hobby.
I’m a third-generation commercial fisherman in Alaska, a tradition that’s more than just a hobby — it’s a fundamental part of who I am. Each year, I take time away from my work at the
Chrysalis Foundation to join a crew on the Kenai Peninsula, catching thousands of pounds of halibut and salmon for restaurants and grocery stores. What makes it even more meaningful is sharing this tradition with my daughter, who joins me in Alaska every year.
Continue reading
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At its core, Fearless exists to help empower Iowa women to succeed in work and life. We believe that everyone has a story to share and that we cannot progress as a society unless we know about one another. We share stories through featuring women in our reporting, featuring guest contributions and speakers at our events.
We are always looking for new stories to share and people to feature. Get in touch with us!
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