Through Yo no Reuncio, Laura is changing the labor-maternal system by activating mothers, companies, public administration, and educational institutions as changemakers, so that no woman has to choose between family and a professional career. To turn her vision into reality she has developed a strategy based on four levers that influence both the demand and the offer of conciliation and co-responsibility measures: 1) Knowledge development to create awareness of an unquestioned reality; 2) Capacity building for empowering mothers as changemakers; 3) Market development to strengthen a corporate network of early adopters; 4) Advocacy to create new laws and policies.
1) Knowledge development to create awareness of an unquestioned reality
Laura has launched seven large-scale studies to create awareness around parenthood and work-life balance, a reality that most women did not even question. This has uncovered for the first time a sad reality: society had led most women to believe that they had to either adopt a “superwoman” role looking after both their family and work responsibilities or choose between a professional career or a family.
The far-reaching sociological studies undertaken by Yo no Renuncio are an x-ray of the state of work-life balance and co-responsibility in Spain, making it clear that conciliation is a social, economic, and political problem. They explore issues such as the cost of work-life balance for women (economic, emotional, and personal), the organization of families during the pandemic (with women bearing all the weight of childcare), and the extent to which women feel alone, with a lack of emotional support and resources to carry out domestic-family care.
With the data from these studies, Laura developed powerful reports that describe the day-to-day reality for more than 12.000 women and the urgent need for action to change it. She has taken the conversation out of the academic realm and into real women’s lives making them aware that actions for real conciliation must be taken at a political, economic, legislative, corporate, familial, and individual level.
These studies have laid the foundations for an evidence and data-based narrative, that Laura uses to work closely with different cross-sector allies and bring these data to the right decision-making forums, both in the public and in the private spheres. She has also motivated thousands of people to sign petitions to pressure on public administration and companies to implement measures that favor the balance of personal, family and work life.
2) Capacity building for empowering mothers as changemakers
The best allies of Yo no Renuncio are the Malas Madres themselves; committed women who want to experience motherhood in their own particular way and who fight for real conciliation and co-responsibility. Laura unlocks the potential and the resilience of mothers through monthly training sessions that are taught by the Malas Madres themselves and other experts, offering tools to turn participants into agents of change of work-life balance and co-responsibility. She has created a membership model with 600 fee-paying members (€50 a year) that enables the creation of open-access training and other support resources. The network, however, goes beyond the members, with more than 1,200,000 active Malas Madres creating a critical mass in the digital space and with a regular presence in Spain's most relevant mainstream media.
To make women fully aware of their rights, Laura has created the Yellow Conciliation Telephone, the first free, legal service that can be accessed by anyone who has doubts and questions about their entitlements as parents in the work sphere. During the first two years of operation, the service, led by volunteer lawyers, has attended more than 10,000 queries from all over Spain. During the months of the pandemic, she also set up the Green Emotional Telephone, a free psychological care service for mothers who seek mental health support.
3) Market development to strengthen a network of corporate early adopters
Laura has created the “I'm not giving up!” corporate seal, an initiative that brings together companies and institutions highly committed to work-life balance. This is a network of early adopters: “familiarly responsible” companies that, with their campaigns and internal measures, want to set an example for society, showing that a different working model with flexibility and conciliation at its core is possible. The network “I'm not giving up!” has already gathered 15 member companies, including Danone, Seat, Ikea, and Microsoft, among others.
Yo no Renuncio works with these companies through awareness-raising, workshops, and employee engagement, in order to allow in-depth reflections on how to set and improve the highest standards of conciliation and flexibility in the workplace. On the other hand, Yo no Renuncio holds regular meetings with them to document, validate, share and disseminate their good practices, such as online working and flexibility. In the short term, Laura’s goal is to create an open-access database of best practices, so that any organization that wants to improve family-work conciliation has a sound and successful benchmarking tool to use as a reference. Additionally, this network of companies is creating the first job bank for mothers who lost their jobs and cannot return to work.
To keep increasing the number of companies with the “I'm not giving up!” corporate seal, Laura is leveraging her enthusiastic community of Malas Madres, creating an “Ambassador” model where committed women carry out specific actions to raise awareness within their own companies and bring them closer to the initiative.
4) Advocacy to create new laws and policies
Laura is weaving alliances with all organizations that promote and work for equality at a national level to create proposals and political pressure in a collaborative way, with the common goal of having conciliation measures entrenched in law, ensuring flexibility, the protection of mothers in the labor market and the proposal of new mechanisms that put care at the center in all work environments.
To do so, she has co-created the Care Advisory Board, together with the Spanish Ministry of Equality, comprising 50 organizations from all sectors (non-profits, companies, universities and advocacy groups) to jointly prepare The White Paper on Care and the roadmap to create and implement public policies in Spain. The biggest milestone of this group so far has been succeeding in matching paternal leave to maternal leave. The co-parent's leave has risen from 2 weeks to 16 weeks by law since January 2021.
Laura is also pushing public institutions so that they monitor compliance with equality plans and parenthood balance measures implemented in private companies since Gender Reports have recently become a legal requirement in Spain for companies but there is a lack of follow-up in their compliance.
To turn Yo no Renuncio’s vision into reality, Laura has identified the need to create transversal measures that change the current work model and its relationship with caregiving and life.
For this reason, she is leading the drafting of a State Pact for Conciliation with the consensus of political parties, trade unions, companies and families, to create a conciliation plan with the National Congress. Discussions are currently underway to refine and approve the proposal and the budget with the Minister of Territorial Affairs.
Laura tabled the following proposals, most of which are included in the draft of this conciliation plan: a) Recognition of the social and economic value of motherhood, including tax incentives to companies that favor the flexibility in working hours; b) Reincorporation plans in companies after maternity/paternity leave; c) Working from home whenever is possible; d) Review the right to reduce and adapt working hours; e) Leave for the parent when a child is sick; f) Revision of all public policies with a gender and parenthood perspective; g) Fiscal aids to hiring caregivers; h) Reduction of working hours without reducing salary; and i) Tax incentives for companies that have conciliation plans and measures (which has already been accepted in the budget of the regions of Madrid and Valencia). The implementation of this framework is a key lever to bring about the pattern change sought by Laura, having parenthood and care understood by society and a collective and public responsibility and reframing work as a conciliating element of life.
To further scale deep her impact, Laura is starting to raise awareness among children at school about co-responsibility, in order to change those traditional roles and stereotypes that are responsible for gender inequalities. To do so, she is currently working with educational experts and co-responsible men to create guides to cover co-responsibility themes so teachers can work on this aspect inside their organizations. This summer she is piloting this project with the autonomic government of a southern region in Spain.
Laura’s key scaling lever is creating networks of distributed and localized Malas Madres chapters. Within these, there are more and more women taking leadership positions both in Spain and in other countries to promote the adoption and reinforcement of this new model of motherhood, conciliation, and co-responsibility in their territories.
Besides, Laura is forging alliances with existing organizations in other countries, such as Ecuador (with organizations like Girls in Tech or Lila Working Moms) and Mexico (with the CEE network working for early childhood). These partners are playing a key role in the replication of Laura’s solution, especially for the expansion of the “I’m not giving up!” corporate network and for the design of new public policies.
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