Shoko Kawata just became the first mayor in Japan’s history to stay in office while becoming a mother. She arranged for a deputy to cover her maternity leave, without resigning and without apologizing. That was enough to set off a national debate, complete with commentators who found it “inappropriate” for an elected official to step away from her duties for a few months. Kawata summed it up with disarming simplicity: Institutions could adapt, but people change far more slowly, and she cannot turn herself into a man.
Japan has a word for what she is up against: matahara, a contraction of “maternity harassment.” It covers everything done to pregnant employees and new mothers at work—pressure to resign, demotions upon return from leave, projects reassigned, managers who treat a pregnancy as a personal betrayal. The word is so widely used that it belongs to the everyday vocabulary of Japanese working life.
The Japanese have a real talent for coining words that stick, and workplace culture has given them plenty of material. There is karoshi, or death from overwork, officially recognized and compensated by the state since the 1980s. In the late 2010s, they coined the word KuToo to refer to the movement against mandatory high heels at work, a triple pun on kutsu (shoe), kutsū (pain), and #MeToo. When a phenomenon is common enough to deserve its own word, it says a lot about what’s expected from workers. Give us your life. Be a pretty employee or else . . . and choose between your job and a child.
There’s a paradox. Japan desperately needs children. In 2025, its fertility rate fell to 1.14 children per woman, a historic low and the 10th consecutive year of decline. In Tokyo, the rate has dropped below one child per woman. Deaths have outnumbered births for 19 straight years. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi calls it a “silent emergency.” Yet women’s labor force participation still follows the same curve it has for decades: It climbs after graduation, then collapses at marriage or first birth. A country with a vital need for babies keeps structurally punishing the women who have them.
Americans might be tempted to read this as an exotic story about a faraway work culture. They shouldn’t.
America’s fertility rate is falling too, and mothers are being pushed out of work
The U.S. general fertility rate fell to 53.1 births per 1,000 women of reproductive age in 2025, another record low, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate has declined 23% since 2007. The total fertility rate now sits below 1.6 children per woman, far under the 2.1 needed for population stability. About 3.6 million babies were born last year, and immigration restrictions mean there is less demographic slack to compensate.
Meanwhile, American mothers are leaving the workforce at a pace not seen in decades. More than 400,000 women exited the U.S. labor force in the first half of 2025, according to a University of Kansas analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the steepest decline in over 40 years for mothers of young children. Labor force participation among mothers with children younger than 5 fell nearly 3 percentage points between January and June 2025. A KPMG analysis found the sharpest drop among college-educated mothers of very young children, whose participation slid from close to 80% in 2023 to about 77%. Fathers’ participation rose slightly over the same period.
In all likelihood, childcare is the main driver. Already scarce, it is getting scarcer. The average price of care reached $13,184 per year in 2025, and 46% of American children under 6 live in a licensed childcare desert. Meanwhile, immigration raids have shrunk the workforce, Head Start funding is flat despite inflation, and the July 2025 budget legislation cuts deeply into Medicaid, which covers about 40% of U.S. births.
Return-to-office mandates did the rest: The share of Fortune 500 companies requiring full-time office attendance nearly doubled in 2025, from 13% to 24%. The pandemic-era flexibility that had pushed women’s labor force participation to record highs in 2023 has been methodically dismantled, and mothers absorbed the shock.
The earnings consequences are well documented. In their landmark cross-country study of child penalties, economists Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, and their coauthors found that American mothers lose roughly 30% of their earnings in the long run after a first birth, while fathers lose essentially nothing. That penalty compounds over a career, into lower savings, lower Social Security benefits, and a wider gender gap at every subsequent stage.
Medals will not produce babies
Against this alarming backdrop, the administration’s answer has been rhetoric. President Trump has called himself the “fertilization president.” Congress created $1,000 “Trump Accounts” for newborns; a $5,000 baby bonus has been floated, along with a proposed National Medal of Motherhood for women with six or more children. At the White House, a wave of high-profile pregnancies among senior figures has been presented as proof of a family-friendly administration. Katie Miller declared that the most radical thing a woman can do is embrace her “biological destiny.”
The message behind all this is clear: Women should stay home and have children. The problem is that this model has already been tested, and it fails. Cash bonuses and honorary medals have a poor track record everywhere they have substituted for infrastructure. The demographic evidence points in the opposite direction: The countries that resist fertility decline best are those where women can combine careers and children without penalty. France long illustrated this relative advantage over Japan and Germany, where the motherhood penalty reaches 62% of lost earnings and two-thirds of mothers work part-time. And indeed, U.S. federal statistics show the pronatalist push has not moved the needle: Fertility hit a new historic low in 2025.
Japan spent three decades proving that a country cannot harass its mothers into having more babies. It even gave us the vocabulary. A nation that wants children must first accept that mothers must be allowed to remain full workers, with professional ambition and full incomes. The fact that one mayor taking maternity leave still makes national news, in Japan or anywhere else, is a measure of how far we have to go.
If you’re feeling burned out right now, you’re not alone: In a DHR Global survey of corporate professionals, 83% reported some degree of burnout. AI isn’t helping. A sabbatical can make a difference—though it’s still relatively rare for employees to t…
Want to predict how long you’ll live? Knowing is impossible, but there are simple research-backed tests—tests you can do for free, at home—that provide indications.
For example:
You can do the sit-rise test.
You can try to stand on…
After joining Amazon as a product leader in 2022, I saw a series of layoffs and return-to-office mandates over the following three years that made any semblance of presence in home life impossible. The tech industry layoffs disproportionately impacted women, and the workers that remained struggled in a workplace with lowered morale and increased expectations.
Then I stumbled upon the entrepreneurship through acquisition space. The ETA premise is simple: Rather than founding a company from scratch or climbing someone else’s ladder, you buy an existing, profitable business.
I spent the last year of my Amazon tenure searching for my first business to purchase, with a vision for a holding company that included incubated and acquired companies. In June 2025, with the help of a Small Business Administration (SBA) acquisition loan, I bought DiggyPOD, a $10 million book printing business founded in 1988. This May, I added Long Overdue Books, a vibrant book publisher with several notable titles, to my acquisition portfolio. I’m expanding these businesses into a global media organization supporting content creators.
I have dedicated the last year to empowering other tech industry veterans to purchase businesses. Here are my three reasons why this is a compelling option for this demographic:
1. Uniquely favorable financing and odds
The SBA offers acquisition financing on terms unmatched by the open market. This mechanism put my $10 million DiggyPOD acquisition within reach on a structure built around a monthly payment I could live with. Potential acquirers should know that this financing comes with a personal guarantee, but the due diligence process required by the lenders and the SBA gives these deals a better chance than bootstrapped or venture-backed businesses. Acquisitions are dramatically safer than startups. A Yale School of Management study found that between 2019 and 2023, SBA business-acquisition loans defaulted at just 1.22%, versus the 50% of tech businesses that fail in their first five years.
2. Your corporate skills are the asset
The week after I purchased DiggyPOD, our million-dollar inkjet color printer, the crown jewel of the shop, broke down. I had no idea how to fix it, but I didn’t need to. Fortunately, I inherited a team with a combined 100-plus years of print experience who run production. My years of hiring technical talent enabled me to ask enough questions to ask the right ones, and understand the manufacturer service agreements. I brought the skills that a career in tech trains us for relentlessly: customer discovery, team leadership, and AI fluency. That operator muscle that feels generic inside a startup or in big tech is the core competency for running an acquired business. After running DiggyPOD for a year, I have revamped the tech stack completely for growth; installed a tech-forward executive team, including a Head of AI); and continuously, programmatically ensured customer success.
3. The honest case for your life
I will not pretend the transition was easy. In the early months, with a complex manufacturing operation to learn, and a team in Michigan to win over, I saw my kids less, not more. But buying into established cash flow is a fundamentally different proposition than chasing it. A startup founder spends years racing the runway, hoping revenue arrives before the money runs out. I bought into a profitable business, which means the question is no longer, “Will this survive?” but, “How do I want to grow it?”
When I joined Amazon, I set three nonnegotiables as a parent: I would be there when my kids woke up, there when they got home from school, and there to put them to bed. The tech industry made those impossible to honor. Ownership is the only structure I found that lets me build that life on my own terms. The path is not without risk, and it demands real work before the freedom arrives. But for tech veterans staring at another layoff cycle or return-to-office mandate, I want to be the voice that says there is another option.
I took it, and you can too.
LinkedIn is unmatched at showing you who your network knows that you’d want to meet. A few keyword-rich searches of your second-degree connections—the people your direct, first-degree contacts are connected to—and you have a list of hiring decis…
We’ve all been there. You email one coworker: “I need this by Thursday.” You email another: “Hi! Just checking back in. Would you be able to have this ready for me by Thursday? Totally understand if that doesn’t work. No rush, except that, sadly, there is a rush. Thank you so much.”
And then you read the second email three more times to ensure that you don’t sound impatient, demanding, passive-aggressive, or aggressive-aggressive. All that mental work is the invisible labor of likability. It’s the time you spend trying to make requests less direct or criticism easier to swallow.
The work no one sees
Women have historically been expected to manage the feelings of others at work. But they’re not the only ones. Junior employees. People of color. LGBTQ+ employees. People with disabilities. Workers who don’t come from privileged backgrounds. Anyone who has ever been told, implicitly or explicitly, that to succeed in a professional environment, they must not be “difficult.” They may spend their days worrying about how they come across. Is it possible for me to just say what I mean? Or do I need to prepare everyone for the fact that I’m saying it first?
In many workplaces, certain employees are expected to deliver bad news with a smile, offer criticism without offending anyone, and disagree while still making everyone feel respected, validated, and comfortable. They read the room, calm down the room, and even prevent the room from exploding. That work is often invisible, but it’s what keeps workplaces running smoothly.
Valuable to the culture, invisible to the hierarchy
The problem is that it rarely helps employees get promoted. In one study, women were 48% more likely than men to volunteer for office housework. And by housework, I am talking about the tasks that are necessary but often don’t carry much status. Things like taking meeting notes, planning office parties, onboarding new employees, serving on committees, or mentoring coworkers. Not everyone can predict how a colleague will receive difficult information. Or know when to interrupt tension before it escalates into conflict. Or let an angry executive know that his idea was terrible without actually saying the word terrible.
Those employees often become defined by their soft skills. They’re supportive, they’re thoughtful, they don’t take up too much space. They’re reliable. They’re so good with people. Yes, those things are important skills, even strengths. But they are not the same strengths that are traditionally rewarded with promotions or prestigious projects.
The personality tax
You can also be penalized for not doing this work. Women are expected to behave in incredibly narrow ways. They are expected to be confident but not abrasive, driven but not self-important, direct but not rude. Other employees have narrow paths they must walk as well. A Black employee might fear that being too direct will be seen as angry. Younger workers might feel they need to soften their opinions to avoid sounding “entitled.” Male employees at traditionally masculine companies may feel they can’t complain about team morale without seeming weak.
When feedback gets personal
It can feel like walking a tightrope every day. Researchers studying performance reviews pulled data from more than 25,000 employees at 250 organizations. Guess who got notes on their personality more often? Women. Managers weren’t just assessing what women accomplished; they were spending time evaluating how women came across.
It’s not that people should be rude, lack emotional intelligence, or abuse their coworkers. But think about how much time that invisible labor takes. It cuts into the time many workers already have. A concise email doesn’t have to be proofread twice to ensure no one thinks you’re angry. Feedback can be honest instead of measured.
What employers need to change
Leaders can start fixing this by tracking who does what office housework and making sure everyone does their fair share. Who takes meeting notes? Who welcomes new hires? Who plans office birthdays? Who supports coworkers without getting credit? Who do people come to when there’s conflict in the team? Then give credit to those who deserve it.
Businesses should also watch how people are described in reviews. Are women told they’re “too aggressive” if they speak up, while men are complimented for being assertive? Are men praised for being competitive, while women are criticized for not letting things go?
Managers should also learn how to spot fuzzy feedback. It’s on them to say things like: “I know you thought this through, but Janet actually finished her part of the project two weeks ago. When you jumped in without consulting her, that upset her.” If someone comes to a manager and says, “Jessica totally disagreed with me,” the manager should ask for details. Sit with employees after reviews and help them decipher whether they’re being told to “talk less” or if their boss didn’t appreciate being challenged.
And having emotional intelligence should also count for something. Mentorship should matter. Contributing to team morale should matter. Knowing how to de-escalate situations before they become problems should matter. Companies should acknowledge that they rely on these skills, and reward them. And if they’re truly that important to the company’s success, they should promote some of the people who possess them.
How to protect yourself
Until your company culture shifts, we need to learn to spot it in ourselves. Email doesn’t need to be bubbly. It just needs to be clear. Is this rude, or are you just being direct? And before you step in and fix everyone else’s problems, ask yourself: Do I own this problem, or do I just feel an obligation to fix it? And before volunteering for another housekeeping assignment, ask: Am I taking this on because it helps my career, because I genuinely want to, or because everyone expects me to?
Being liked is important. So is getting work done. But if people spend all their time and energy trying to sound likable at work, they’ll have less left for the things that actually deserve that time and energy.
Chon Azzopardi-Brown had done everything career experts tell job seekers to do. She polished her CV, searched job boards, networked on LinkedIn, and tried to navigate a tough hiring market complete with AI screenings and applicant ghosting.
But af…
On paper, the candidate seems wonderful, and when you bring them in for an interview, things go great … at first. But as the conversation goes on, your gut instinct tells you something is off. Maybe they’re a little too polished. Maybe there are holes…
Below, Steve Kamb shares five key insights from his new book, How to Try Again: An Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change That Sticks.
Steve is the founder of Nerd Fitness, an approachable fitness company that helps busy huma…
Fully 70% of U.S. workers feel unprepared for today’s workforce. That’s not a data point you encounter and move past. It sits with you, especially when you’ve spent a career thinking about how learning works.
What separates high performers to…
