🗓️ MARINA MIDDLETON POSTED TO THE GROUP CHAT FEB 24, 2026

CAREER & PERSONAL BRANDING | LEADERSHIP & IDENTITY

It almost always happens the same way.

I’m on a panel. Or stepping off a stage. Or sitting across from someone who’s just heard my bio read out loud — CEO, founder, mother — in that particular order that signals admiration and curiosity in equal measure.

And then the question comes.

How do you balance it all?

It’s usually well-intentioned. Sometimes it’s even warm. But it’s also incredibly predictable. So predictable, in fact, that I’ve started to notice something else just as consistently:

The men on the panel aren’t asked this question.
The fathers aren’t asked this question.
The male CEOs aren’t asked this question — even when they have children, even when they run companies just as demanding.

They’re asked about vision.
About strategy.
About growth, leadership, and what’s next.

Women — especially mothers — are asked about logistics.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The question beneath the question

On the surface, How do you balance it all? sounds complimentary. Like recognition. But underneath it is a quieter assumption, that something must be precarious, stretched, or on the verge of collapse.

Why does motherhood, when paired with ambition, require explanation?

There’s a name for this in research: the motherhood penalty. Multiple studies, including those published in the American Sociological Review, show that mothers are perceived as less competent, less committed, and less promotable than women without children. Fathers, on the other hand, often experience the opposite, a fatherhood bonus, where they’re seen as more stable and responsible.

And it shows up everywhere, from hiring decisions to pay gaps to the questions we ask women in public.

The imbalance we don’t like to talk about

Here’s the part that makes this conversation uncomfortable, but honest. Women are often balancing more.

According to Pew Research, women still perform roughly 65% of household and caregiving labor in dual-income households. Harvard Business Review has extensively documented how women carry the majority of emotional labor, the invisible work of anticipating needs, managing schedules, and holding families together mentally, not just physically.

The reason the question exists is because the imbalance exists.

Because many women aren’t just running companies, they’re also running households. They’re compensating. They’re absorbing. They’re making it all work, often quietly, often without applause.

And too often, they’re doing it while also taking weight off their partners, emotionally, logistically, or both, because society still expects women to be the elastic ones.

That doesn’t make the question fair.
But it does make it revealing.

Why men aren’t asked

Men aren’t asked how they balance it all because we don’t assume their ambition competes with their personal lives.

We assume someone else is holding the other side.

We assume systems, partners, or structures are in place, even when they aren’t.

Here’s the part we don’t say out loud enough: we also participate in this narrative.

We answer the balance question.
We soften our ambition.
We explain our stamina instead of redirecting the conversation to our strategy.

Sometimes we do it to be polite. Sometimes because we’ve been conditioned to believe that acknowledging the weight is the cost of entry.

But if we want different questions, we have to start modeling them.

We have to ask women the same hard, leadership-driven questions we ask men.
We have to talk about vision, power, risk, decision-making, and scale, without wrapping it in justification.

Not because motherhood isn’t relevant.
But because it shouldn’t eclipse leadership.

What actually needs to change

What needs to change isn’t whether we talk about motherhood. Motherhood is part of the story. But it can’t be the only lens, especially when we’re talking to women about ambition, business, leadership, and what they’re building.

The reality is this: women aren’t “doing it all.”
They’re building systems.
They’re planning.
They’re delegating.
They’re asking for, and relying on, support.

Just like men do.

The difference is that men are rarely asked to narrate the infrastructure behind their success. No one asks them how they manage fatherhood alongside leadership, or who’s holding things together at home, or how they make it all work. They’re asked about vision. About growth. About decisions. About what they’re building next.

Women deserve the same starting point.

The question I wish we’d ask instead

Not How are you doing it all?

Because that question flattens something complex into a performance of endurance.

If you want to ask about motherhood — ask better questions.

Ask about the systems that make leadership possible.
Ask how priorities shift, not how everything fits.
Ask what support looks like, not how much someone is carrying.

Those questions don’t position women as struggling or exceptional. They recognize intention, planning, and leadership, the same things we instinctively look for in men.

Because the truth is, women aren’t doing it all alone. They’re designing lives and careers with structure, boundaries, and support. And that story is far more interesting, and far more accurate, than a narrative rooted in survival.

Start there.