‘Not going to wait.’ The pandemic is prompting more women to be their own boss
Global News
The pandemic is prompting more women to launch their own businesses, creating the flexible work arrangements they couldn't find in the corporate world.
In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tamara Robbins Griffith experienced what many working parents went through: the new work-from-home-plus-virtual-schooling routine wasn’t sustainable.
Robbins Griffith says she found herself sitting in the basement from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. in non-stop Zoom meetings while her husband upstairs tried his best to look over the couple’s two kids, then aged five and eight.
“I could hear chaos sometimes upstairs in my house … and I could hear banging or children crying and just feel like, ‘I can’t help you. I can’t do anything right now because I’m needed in this meeting,'” she says.
And at the end of a long work day, she recalls, “it would be like coming out … into the sunshine, like at dinner time, just to kind of briefly stretch your legs and see some other humans in real life.”
But as much as Robbins Griffith found herself scrambling to reconcile work and family needs when COVID-19 took away child care, she was hardly nostalgic for her pre-pandemic normal, she says.
“Pre-COVID I was often in my car for three hours a day, and I was often racing to pick my kids up from daycare or late and texting another parent, asking them to pick up my kids from daycare and ordering Uber Eats from the car to arrive at dinnertime so that we weren’t eating late,” says Robbins Griffith, who spent years working in marketing within the home furnishings retail industry.
That’s why she eventually decided to team up with a fellow mom she knew from her kids’ school and launch her own interior design company: Kerr + Field Interiors.
“For a while, I was looking for the perfect unicorn, like that incredible corporate job that would absolutely suit my skill set and experience, but also be very progressive and flexible,” she says. “And at some point I just thought, I’m not going to wait around for this unicorn. I’m just going to create it.”