Laetita at work Newsletter

Hi everyone, We treat egg freezing as a fertility story. It’s really a timing story and a societal story. The years when a career demands the most (promotions, visibility, stretch assignments) land most often exactly on the years when fertility starts to narrow. It’s as if private time and professional time ran on separate clocks. For women those clocks are permanently out of sync.

Hi everyone, Hi everyone, The heatwave here in France seems to have no end in sight and I’ve started wondering what weeks of days above 35°C (95°F) do to our collective ability to think (and I won’t even mention all the other ecological disasters, including devastating forest fires, unfolding around us). My brain works in slow motion, everyone around me seems quite foggy, and yet a lot of us keep pretending we’re operating at full capacity.

Hi everyone, I’m quite the pessimist when it comes to the impact of AI on work and on our cognition. I also know the AI gender gap well: who builds these tools, whose knowledge they encode, whose jobs they eliminate first. There’s plenty to be worried about, and I’ve written about a lot of it. But this week I (cautiously) want to open a door to an unexpected positive possibility.

Laetitia@Work #100 Hi everyone, This is the 100th edition of Laetitia@Work 🎊 and I wanted to mark it with a piece that feels genuinely important to me. When I first came across the concept of the sticky floor, it was eye-opening. We’ve spent decades obsessed with the glass ceiling: counting women in boardrooms, tracking female CEOs, debating who gets a seat at the table. And yet the majority of women — and of people — are nowhere near the top of the pyramid.

Hi everyone, We talk about age constantly — in politics, in hiring, in retirement debates — and yet we almost never ask what we actually mean by it. Workplaces that treat it as a single number could be making a costly mistake. Age and work is a topic I keep coming back to, because the more I look at it, the more I see how much damage our lazy assumptions about age do — to individuals, teams, and organizations.

Hi everyone, AI is remaking culture as much as workflows. As AI mediates more of our thinking and collaboration, questions of recognition, trust, and accountability take center stage. There’s also a cultural gender gap that is rarely mentioned: the digital Matilda effect, which shows that women’s AI use is frequently discounted or misattributed. Using Erin Meyer’s eight cultural dimensions, here are eight AI-driven shifts reshaping how we lead, speak, decide, and relate in business.

Hi everyone, While the U.S. President is promising to commit war crimes in Iran and destabilize the international order even further than he already has, I’ve been watching The Boys, an extremely gory, dark, funny, cartoonish series about superheroes (all villains in some ways) and the corporation that runs them. Surprisingly the show is disturbing mostly because it feels close to reality.

Hi everyone, By using AI less than men, are women opting out of the future or are they in fact seeing it more clearly? Are they more risk-averse, as is often said, or rather more risk-aware? The gender gap in AI use seems to be real. The numbers are striking enough to demand an explanation. Women are somewhere between 20 and 25 percent less likely than men to use generative AI tools, according to a Harvard Business School meta-analysis.

Hi everyone, At 47, I find myself thinking more and more about what it means to grow older as a woman at work. I want to be able to look forward to that future with confidence, not with anxiety. Yet the reality is hard to ignore: ageism and sexism remain a powerful combination that pushes many women toward lower pay, fewer opportunities, and greater financial insecurity as they age. Still, when I wrote this piece for Fast Company, I was struck by how strongly it resonated with readers.

Hi everyone, I admire people who protect their focus fiercely, who move through the day with calm linearity: one task, then the next, everything in its place. But that has rarely been my lived experience. I’ll often interrupt myself to put on a load of laundry, stand up to make tea, or find some small practical excuse to leave my desk for a few minutes. And yet, paradoxically, I’m also capable of disappearing into a task and being “in the flow” for hours when I’m writing or thinking.