Episode Details

In this episode, we meet Nicolette Rubinsztein, President of the Actuaries Institute and professional board member, on removing guilt, female confidence, and overcoming busyness.

Go to: www.chiefmaker.com.au/117

Career Scorecard: www.chiefmaker.com.au/score-card

You can also get hold of her book, Not Guilty. All the author profits go towards her charity, Missionvale Australia.

Nicolette is a qualified actuary and is currently a non-executive director at UniSuper and SuperEd. She has previously held senior positions in the corporate world at Colonial First State, BT Funds Management, and Towers Perrin.

She received two awards for her contribution to superannuation policy: an inaugural FSC Industry Excellence Award and an ASFA Distinguished Service Award.

But her proudest achievement is, without doubt, raising her three gorgeous girls.

In this episode we talk about:

• The resilience learnt from losing her job twice due to overnight industry changes;
• How to balance work with motherhood without feeling guilty or putting your career on hold;
• Why lower confidence in females has led to a lower uptake of STEM careers; and
• Overcoming busyness as parents and the concept of "career mum staff".

You can reach Nicolette on LinkedIn or via her website.

Thanks to Jonathan Rubinsztein for recommending Nicolette.

• I had come from England and it was an incredibly eye-opening experience to see what was going on in South Africa. It was full-on Apartheid: separate buses, separate beaches, separate schools, separate areas. I still find it almost traumatising. So, part of what we do now is that we've been supporting a charity in a township called Missionvale for about 15 years, and I've taken the kids now a couple of years volunteering there.

• Our generation, we were really taught, the world is your oyster, go off and do whatever you want. And I think many of us did. And then it comes to the having children bit and you realise having a career and being a mother is actually really hard, and no one really told me about how you could do both of these things. And I think the guilt comes from a work point of view because you worry that you're not delivering 100%, and it's guilt from a mother point of view that you feel guilty that you're not being the best mum possible.
• I think the most important one is around the childcare and what role each of you is going to play in the childcare: what percentage of that child's time do you want that child to be with a parent as opposed to in some sort of care? Then you're able to work out how each of you can contribute to that. I think you would want more than half of your child's life to be with a parent.
• The ultimate model would be actually both parents working flexibly and part-time. And if you both do the equivalent of that four days a week, it means that your child will only be in three days of care a week. I have seen more and more couples doing it.

• My mom was a stay-at