In 2009, a college graduate with a chemical engineering degree showed up to their prestigious new job at Dupont’s West Virginia campus. Blessing Adesiyan always stood out among her peers, now more than ever as her new colleagues looked skeptically at the 23-year-old single Black mother standing in front of them with her infant daughter on her hip.
That moment set Adesiyan on a quest to better position large organizations to support caregivers in the workplace. As the demands of what turned into a global energy consulting job required her to travel all over the world, she constantly struggled to find adequate childcare. Shortly after starting her job at Dupont, Adesiyan created an employee resource group (ERG) for working parents to try and address the issues she and other employees were facing. She eventually left that job for another, finding herself doing the same delicate balance between work and childcare, once again leading the company’s ERG for working parents.
It was that unique blend of experience and brainpower that motivated Adesiyan to create Mother Honestly, a community of parents demanding better caregiving support from their organizations. Five years later, she’s transitioned MH to be inclusive of all employees who give or need care, beyond just parents, with the company’s recent expansion into fintech and the launch of the Work Life Wallet.
Who better poised than an engineer who started her career as a single mother to help Corporate America solve the care crisis?
Blessing Adesiyan, Founder and CEO of Mother Honestly
Amy Shoenthal: What led you to create Mother Honestly?
Blessing Adesiyan: My background is technical engineering. The pivotal beginning of my story was walking into corporate America as a young mother. I’m a 23-year-old Black woman, a single mother, an immigrant driving up to work in West Virginia with my 10-month-old. I was looking for childcare but I needed to pick up my badges and credentials first. When I arrived, the people at the door said skeptically, ‘You’re the new college graduate?’
I started my career with my daughter on my hips. But that has not stopped my career from growing. I faced challenges but I saw them as an opportunity to change the workforce.
This was more than a decade ago. I kept asking questions like, ‘Is there any childcare for employees?’ and when the answer was always no, I said, ‘Okay so how are we figuring this out?’ I wasn’t the only one asking these questions. Within two weeks of joining the company, I started an ERG (Employee Resource Group) for parents and caregivers. We started talking about changing parental leave, changing sick leave and more. I went on to start ERGs everywhere I went.
At Dupont, I became a global energy consultant, traveling all over the world. When I got back from one particular trip to Morocco, I realized it had become too much. I didn’t have the right childcare structure. I had to give my daughter to my friend Patrice for a week, and that week happened to coincide with my daughter’s first day of kindergarten. I was agitated, so I called my boss and said it was time to talk seriously about childcare. He said, ‘We’d love to support you, but we just don’t have the bandwidth. And by the way, you’re the only one asking for this.’ I applied to another job while on my next trip to Morocco, and landed back in the US to find out I had gotten that job.
Once there, I started another ERG. I started wondering why I kept having to start or revitalize these ERGs every time I went to a different company. That’s when I decided to start Mother Honestly as an external ERG. We needed to create something for moms that would help them combine work and family effectively. There was such a gap at that time. Mother Honestly was formally created in 2018.
That same year, I was breastfeeding my four month old son and wrote on a post-it note, ‘What will it take for women to effectively combine work and family?’ I took out another note and wrote, ‘How do women return to the workforce after a baby with confidence?’ I put photos of these scribbled questions up on Instagram, went to bed, and woke up to hundreds of comments.
I suggested we all meet for coffee and talk about these issues. This was in Detroit, Michigan, where I was living and working at the time. When I arrived, the coffee shop was packed. That first meetup expanded to three mini events of 100 people each. Then in October 2018, we held our first conference.
Shoenthal: You recently made an announcement that you’ve pivoted MH to a fintech company, but my question is, you weren’t already one?
Adesiyan: We were already a tech company. Mother Honestly is a community built on a tech platform, focusing on caregiving and work/life navigation. We made this shift because we realized we’d been speaking to ourselves. Moms can’t come up with these solutions on their own. Employers need to see care not only as a women’s issue but as everybody’s issue.
We need people to understand that we actually can support this in a way that’s flexible, unique and inclusive, that impacts the bottom line by allowing employees to remove obstacles that cause stress in their lives. What we have now is not sustainable. We’re not supporting moms, Black people, or other segments.
The golden rule is to treat others the way you want to be treated. The platinum rule is to treat people how they want to be treated. Employers make assumptions of what everyone needs. But employees should have enough flexibility to choose what they need. It’s really not one-size-fits-all.
Some companies actually do offer support but it turns out, less than 6% of employees are utilizing these Employee Assistance Programs. Workplaces offer all kinds of things like Talkspace for mental health, gym memberships, backup childcare and more, but almost no one is using those resources.
Shoenthal: Wait, only 6%? Why is that number so low if these programs already exist? Where’s the disconnect?
Adesiyan: The clunky processes frustrate employees so much that they just give up on trying to use them. It’s difficult to get reimbursement for costs that can be covered through stipends, to remember to keep receipts or for employees to navigate the systems in general.
I spoke to a dad who works at a Fortune 10 company and said his company provides a $3,000 stipend for childcare. He thought he’d submit all the receipts, then got Covid and missed the deadline.
These bottlenecks have made it so difficult. HR is also responsible for too much. They have to go out and choose all these different programs, but then HR also becomes responsible for selling it to employees. We’re solving this by removing all the middlemen. Let’s just give people the wallet so they can make it happen for themselves.
Shoenthal: So what exactly is the Work-Life Wallet? Is it like flex spending where employees contribute pre-tax dollars?
Adesiyan: Employees can link a debit card to their own personalized Work-Life dashboard. On the back end we scan for care-related expenses. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to remember to save that receipt anymore.
The system scans your debit card for eligible expenses like eldercare, pet care, housekeeping, fertility, adoption, medical travel, gender affirming care. We do have a way to upload your receipts if you’re using cash for these services, or ways to add a care provider to the wallet. You can even add grandma to your profile if you’re compensating her for childcare. We’ve just built flexibility into the program so it’s seamless. We catch the transactions or you can request it.
One of the biggest issues we wanted to address was privacy. Women don’t want to be put in a position where they have to ask for that compensation the company offered to pay for their abortions. This way, they just use the Work-Life Wallet. The employers don’t get the data of who is using what and when. The individual details are none of their business.
The aggregate data is what we collect. That’s the care index. It helps employers see where the needs of their employees really lie. When you choose benefits for people en masse, you don’t really know if you’re meeting their needs. Now employers can see data like, 50% of the dollars allocated went to childcare, or if they see elder care shooting up, that should inform an organization on other policies to consider.
If you realize half your workforce has kids, maybe don’t hold that mandatory off site smack in the middle of back to school season. Or if fertility and surrogacy and adoption costs go up, it helps flag how you can better support employees. This is an opportunity to prevent care disruption.
Shoenthal: What do you think the future of work, life and care looks like?
Adesiyan: We are building a care ecosystem. It goes beyond mothers because care is not a women’s issue. We need a platform that unifies all employees. That’s why Mother Honestly is rebranding as MH. All employees are impacted by some sort of care at some level. I’m excited about all the employers coming to us saying they want in. We have a waitlist!
We can no longer talk about our commitment to DEI without talking about how we level the playing field for everyone. My needs as a parent are different from your needs as a single woman, or single man, or an LGBTQ family. This gives us the opportunity to tailor employer benefits for our unique and specific needs. It’s not enough to throw money at the solution. What is going to make work work in this new and distributed workforce? How do we level the playing field once and for all?
This country has no social safety net. 72% of employees are living paycheck to paycheck. We need to make sure we give people the opportunity to manage an unexpected care crisis. From formula shortages, tampon shortages, childcare to elder care, there’s no shortage of crises. This is how we ensure we’re better prepared to manage the next crisis.
I do believe that the future of work is care. When employers lean into care they see more productivity, more loyalty from employees, and it truly affects the bottom line.
