Hi, I’m Alison Vennitti and this is the Moms at Work podcast. I’ve been an HR professional and a career coach for over a decade and our team has helped thousands of women grow their career. So whether you’re burnt out, underpaid, or just plain fed up, this podcast is here to feel your fire, connect you to our movement, and help you take your career to the next level. In today’s episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on what really drives Moms at Work because we’re not just a career coaching network. We’re not just a women’s group. We’re a movement.

What drives our movement isn’t tote bags or mugs, though I do have great mugs. It’s strategy, it’s persistence, and it’s the power of community and organizing. Because advocacy isn’t some side hustle for us, and it certainly isn’t a side hustle for me. It’s the core of everything that we do here at Moms at Work. And here’s the thing. What we’re doing is working. We’ve made national policy changes, major legislative changes. Heck, we helped usher in $10 day childcare. So not only are we doing it, but we’ve got the receipts to prove that it’s working.

So let’s dive in and we’re gonna talk about advocacy today with Moms at Work. Now, let me be really clear because there’s a lot of misunderstanding about Moms at Work and what we do and who we are. So Moms at Work is not just a Facebook group. We are not just a coaching program. Like I said before, we’re a movement. We are Canada’s only organization focused on supporting working mothers’ careers and the only advocacy group doing this work. So at present time, we have over 70,000 followers across our platforms.

This isn’t a humble brag though. This is a red flag. It means that this support and this advocacy work didn’t exist until we started creating it. And we’ve grown fast because we have a need that is really real. So we started in 2018 and we’ve grown into a community, like I said, of almost 70,000 people from big cities to small towns, from entry level to executives. Our followers come in all shapes and sizes. And the thing that also makes us different is that

Whether you had kids 30 years ago or you’re a new mom today, we’re all in this together. Oftentimes when I, with my kids, once you had kids who weren’t toddlers anymore, you were no longer part of a group. Now that I have teenagers, I felt it even more. As your kids start to cut you out, so do other groups where you want to talk about parenting teenagers. Those really don’t exist. And so when I built Moms at Work, I meant it to be for all mothers, even for moms whose kids who have left the house.

So I’m actually gonna start from the beginning. That’s who we aimed for and that’s what we’re talking about. But I can start from my beginning and why I started advocacy. And I’m gonna say this, advocacy is in my bones. My mother was an advocate. I was raised on picket lines and dinner table debates. I learned early on that silence doesn’t bring change and inaction certainly doesn’t. So we’re gonna talk about why we’re doing this differently, what my mom taught me, how I do it, how mom’s at work does it, and how you can do it too.

I will say that Moms at Work really does advocacy differently because advocacy doesn’t always look like yelling into a microphone. And my mom used to always say, nobody changed their mind because you yelled at them. And that has stuck with me. It’s also been proven by my children that yelling at someone doesn’t make any difference, though I continue to relearn that lesson every week. So what I do and what Moms at Work does is different. We are extremely strategic. We mobilize and we organize.

But our approach is the thing that sets us apart. We are collaborative, it’s connection driven, we work together, and that’s how things change. So people often think that chain has to be big and loud and official and that we have a huge, you have to have a sign or a press conference in to do that. I will be honest, in seven years, Moms at Work has never done a press conference. We’ve never stood next to an MP and made an announcement, and I don’t intend on doing that.

Real change can start with a few motivated people who are willing to organize, advocate, and push things forward. That’s us. So we’re doing the research, we talk to media, we do show up in every provincial legislature across the country. We wanna make sure that moms aren’t just being talked about in policy, but that we’re at the table leading that policy. For me, the hardest part though was during the pandemic. I watched

So many women have to leave their jobs just so that their families could survive. And I remember being furious when they said that moms were leaving the workforce. To be clear, moms weren’t leaving the workforce during the pandemic. They were being pushed out. So what happens is if you have a two income earning family and one of you needs to do the caregiving, we often, often, you’re preserving the person’s job who makes more money.

nine times out of 10, that’s your male partner. So this wasn’t a choice. During the pandemic, me and my husband had that exact same conversation. I’m self-employed. My husband has a full-time secure job with benefits and all of those things. We chose to preserve his job. I’m not ashamed to say that. That was a smart move at the right time. And I built Mums at Work by doing this work after my kids went to bed. So I watched my kids all day.

And then at six o’clock, my husband would come on duty and I would work usually until one in the morning. That’s nothing I’m proud of. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I was so angry that we shouldn’t have to be making these choices and working like that in order to get things done. But I hope we’re all happy that I did because now we’re here at Moms at Work.

The thing that really stuck with me through all of this is that I looked around and thought, no one’s coming to save us. Government wasn’t coming to save us. You know, my dad couldn’t help me. Neighbours couldn’t even help each other during the pandemic. And so during that time, I picked up the phone, I tapped into my network and I did what I could. And what came from that was a round table with the prime minister and the deputy prime minister to talk about how the federal government could actually support working moms and families during the pandemic.

I didn’t show up there to smile and nod and hear what they had to say. In fact, when I organized that call, I said, we get to talk and you get to listen. During that time, I didn’t speak at all. I brought forward seven women who had their own stories about struggles during the pandemic. And we spent an hour listening to women. We demanded change. So we showed up with strategic policies that would actually help families. And we told them what we needed. The moms at work…

organization has done so many things that I’m actually sort of reticent to put this all in a podcast episode because it sort of makes it look like it was easy and it absolutely wasn’t. And I will say that for the things that we fought for, we really probably only got one in 10, which I think is a huge, absolute rocking victory because for most people it’s zero. We started fighting for EI reform for mothers because at the height of pandemic pregnant women

weren’t getting enough hours to qualify for benefits. Guess what? We got it changed. But what it took was this. I told the federal government that Mums were being fired at alarming rates during and after maternity leave. And their response was, show us the data. So we went looking for the data. Stats Canada didn’t have the data. Researchers didn’t have the data. It had actually never been looked at. So Mums at Work did it. We conducted Canada’s first and only national survey on the maternity leave experience and we proved…

that 15 % of women were fired, laid off, or had their contracts ended during pregnancy, parental leave, or right after returning to work. Once we knew that, we went and organized free legal consults for anybody in Ontario and we’re spreading across Canada who had been fired or laid off while they were pregnant on parental leave or right after returning to work. When we asked people if this had happened to them and they had gotten for legal advice, the number one response was that they didn’t think they could afford it.

So we got rid of that. You can get a free legal consult no matter how much money you make, no matter where you live in Ontario, there is no judgment. We just want you to check and make sure that you’re getting what you’re entitled to. And I think that was really important. In addition to this, we advocated and supported a $10 day childcare. Moms at Work was the only organization in Canada pushing for paid transparency legislation. We now have paid transparency legislation in British Columbia, in PEI, in Ontario, and we have a few other provinces coming.

We created the first free comprehensive guide to navigating parental leave in Canada, which is highly confusing, but hopefully our guide will help. And we published Canada’s only list of maternity and parental leave top-up policies. When you’re looking at where you want to work next, you should be looking at those policies and all the other policies they have available. When I started Moms at Work, I knew that we needed more than workshops and coaching, and we needed me to be doing more than speaking of women’s groups.

We needed systems level change. And that’s why advocacy is at the core of what we do, because I can’t be out here screaming that women need to ask for money. Women need to change. We need to change how we function for women as well. Because if we lived in a fair and functioning society, Moms at Work wouldn’t need to exist. My goal at Moms at Work is for Moms at Work not to need to exist. But the reality is we’re not there yet. Systems aren’t working for parents. They’re not working for mothers. And so we need to change them. And I think that change

is really important. We’re gonna get into a little bit more. Moms at Work, when I designed it, had to be different. We are the only organization doing this work in Canada. We have receipts to show it. But in order for us to be able to do this work, we have two things. We do not take corporate sponsorships and we do not take government grants. We are accountable to our members, not our sponsors, not our funders, not our donors. I didn’t want…

moms at work to be subject to the things that I’ve seen women’s groups subject to, where they spend 50 % of their time applying for grants, begging banks for sponsorship money for their events. I said, what would we be doing if we weren’t filling out grant applications and providing reports? The answer is a lot of frigging advocacy. We run on integrity and we run on the fierce belief that working moms deserve better and that we’re going to do it together.

Our advocacy is fully funded by our members. So when you hire us as coaches, if you take our courses, heck, if you share our content, but most importantly, when you join our collective, you’re not just investing in yourself. You’re investing in systems level change and you’re investing in moms at work doing this work. A lot of people say to me though, Canada is so much better than other places. And I was like, and I get that. And I get anybody listening to this in the United States where I do support a lot of other advocacy groups.

They have a hard time understanding. On paper, Canada looks great. We have 12 to 18 months of parental leave. We just secure $10 a day childcare. We have shared parental leave benefits. We have some job protections. Sounds great, right? But if you dig a little bit deeper, those cracks begin to show. So governments and politicians say they want to support families. Our systems are incredibly outdated, inflexible, and exclusionary. The EI system was created in the 70s. In 2025, that system is sorely outdated.

It’s a critical safety net, but it’s also sort of a relic.

When we look at EI, and many of us have had this discussion, it wasn’t designed for gig workers, freelancers, and self-employed people. And that is a huge, huge problem because more and more women, especially moms, are working in these spaces. Why? Because they’re being pushed out of the traditional workforce or because they need or want flexibility to work in a way that actually supports them being able to raise a family. What we’re advocating for is a standalone parental leave program.

Quebec has a parental leave insurance plan and we think that’s important. We think everybody should have access to these types of leaves and not just people who have a nine to five or in office job. Because here’s the question no one wants to answer. What happens to the 15 % of moms that we know of who are laid off after they’ve already used up all their EI on mat leave and are now unemployed? Where’s their safety net? Who’s gonna help them? We are advocating for a separate.

parental leave program because that would mean no more trying to calculate your eligibility hours. Instead, it would be based on tax filings. So that would make it accessible for freelancers, gig workers, and entrepreneurs. I want you to imagine that. Modern policy for modern work. And while we’re at it, we want to talk about money because it’s not enough to have access to EEI. These benefits need to help you survive. At Moms at Work, I’ve heard the 18-month parental leave where you get 33 % of your income referred to as rich people leave.

And they’re not wrong. Not many people can afford to live on 33 % of their salary for 18 months. We are in a cost of living crisis and yet parental leave benefits haven’t kept up with inflation. And we need a model that actually reflects the cost of living today. So there are already a few examples of countries that are doing it better than us. Shocking, I know. Europe seems to be leading the way on all of this stuff. Parents in Bulgaria receive 90 % of their salary for over a year.

When you compare 90 % of salary to 33, I’m like, the numbers don’t even make sense.

This is also only if you have one child and that child has no special needs or high medical needs. I have had more than one child with high medical needs. Parents of kids with disabilities or special needs should also get enhanced benefits to help cover therapy, medication, and all the extra costs that comes with it because provinces are just continuing to cut all of those programs. Same goes for families with multiples. If have twin triplets, all of it, the costs literally multiply. So.

I will also say another truth. Not every single parent wants to take a long leave. Some moms are the primary breadwinner. Some people just don’t want to stay home for 18 months. Some people are running a business. 30 % of Canadian women are now the highest earners in their household. So why are we pretending that this one size fits all leave works? It doesn’t. What we’re calling for isn’t radical. It’s fair. A modern standalone inflation index parental leave program. Transferable.

accessible, equitable, and this is why Moms at Work advocates. When we were talking about EI, the government literally said to us, what would that look like? They haven’t even started to look like this. We are doing the work. This isn’t a family issue. It isn’t even just a gender equity issue. It’s an economic stability issue. And it’s really Time Canada stepped up. One of Moms at Work’s biggest successes has been with pay transparency legislation.

As an HR person, I started my career in unionized organizations. Now in unions, everybody knows what everybody makes. We literally have a collective agreement that lists people’s hourly rates, whether that’s in healthcare or manufacturing or forestry or major industry. As an HR person, whenever I hired someone in our job postings, in our offer letters, and

Everybody talked about what they were making at work. Did they get their $1 differential for shift over time? Were they getting $2 for being supervisor on duty? Talking about money was very, very normal. Now, when I moved into corporate, that all changed. And I remember I put together my first job posting and my boss told me to take it down. I had put the salary range on the job posting. We had a book with all the listed salary ranges and they said,

We couldn’t do it. I was flabbergasted, annoyed and asked how this would help anybody. said, wouldn’t it waste people’s times if it didn’t pay enough money? Wouldn’t it help us go through resumes more quickly if we knew that these people already knew what the salary range was? And I was told that that is not how it was done. I could not believe it. And this persisted for years and years and years. And finally,

I heard someone talking again on another, on a podcast about pay transparency. And I said, yeah, that’s what that is. The radical idea that you should have to tell someone what you want to pay for them when they’re being hired. This, when I started my business, when I was asked to do speaking events, no one would tell me how much it would pay until I got on the phone. When I was trying to hire contractors, no one would tell me the rates until they got on the phone.

And I thought about the literal hundreds of thousands of hours as an HR person and as an entrepreneur, I could save by people just telling me what they charged or what they wanted to be paid. When I first put this concept out to moms at work, people were furious. They were furious. They could not understand why you would have to do that. And that it was private information and all the things that companies have taught us all the time.

because you know who wins when you don’t know what you’re supposed to be asking for? It’s companies, every frigging time, mostly at the hands of women, new graduates, and immigrants, people who do not know what their worth is in the job market, and people who are very uncomfortable negotiating. And so this lack of transparency was one of the main reasons that we were looking at for the wage gap.

We will talk about the wage gap in another episode, I’m sure. But to be clear, women are paid 82 cents to every dollar that a man earns. That’s a big gap. And when we were asked for how to close that gap, the ideas were really, really wishy-washy. None of them talked about salary negotiation and none of them talked about pay transparency. So those are the things that we dug into at Moms at Work. So pay transparency just means

non-complicated that the employer has to post the salary range on the job posting, that you don’t have to wait for your first interview in order for someone to tell you why you’re there and what you’re going to be earning, and it has to be within a certain range. The fact that I have to say that it should have a $30,000 range is because companies tried to do this fun thing where they say this job posting is between 50 and $300,000.

which is the most insulting and ridiculous thing a company can do because that’s not real pay transparency. When I started doing this, everybody told me that it wasn’t possible, but we put together a four page document, a pay transparency handbook for people to talk about pay transparency, to give the facts about pay transparency and how to advocate for that. Within 36 months, we had won pay transparency legislation in Prince Edward Island in British Columbia, and the legislation is coming into force in Ontario.

in January, 2026. This means that most of Canada will be covered by pay transparency legislation in addition to pay equity legislation at the federal level. So all federal employers will have to not only be more transparent with their salaries, but produce a pay equity report to show that they’re paying people equitably. For me, this was way more than I could have ever imagined. And it was simply because of the fact that

tens of thousands of women were asking, what is the salary range? Why won’t you post the salary range? How much is that going to be paying? When tens of thousands of people work together towards one thing and won’t stop talking about it, that thing usually happens. So no, I never talked to an MP about this legislation. We did send drafts and samples to all sorts of peoples, but we never met with them. And

we were speaking to companies and HR practitioners about this. The people who make changes in organizations are people just like you, anybody who’s listening to this podcast. You don’t have to be special. You don’t have to have two PhDs. You just have to be someone who cares about a thing. And that I think is the most important lesson for advocacy. I was not a pay transparency expert. I became one over time and I’m really glad that I did. So we’ve talked a bit about

pay transparency, we’ve talked a bit about EI reform, and I want people to understand that out of kidding for mothers is not a niche issue. It’s not just about mom stuff. It’s economic policy, it’s social policy, it’s work first participation, it’s frigging GDP. When we support mothers properly, everyone benefits. And that’s our goal. The goal is simple, to fix the damn system.

but we’re not waiting for people to ask us to come and sit at a table with them. If we were doing that, we’d be sitting here for years. We’re not taking money from Bay Street, big banks, Walmart, and we won’t trade our voice for grant money. That is sort of the crux of advocacy. When we’re looking at advocacy organizations, we have to look at who’s behind them and what their purpose is. The truth is, the people who benefit from our current system, they’re doing just fine. And it’s time that we did that too.

So I want to give you a few tips before we go. If you’re hearing this and you’re like, yes, I want to do something. I want to do something with this. My advice and how I’ve always run advocacy is with this in mind. I build the plane while flying it. You will never, ever, ever get to a point where you feel like you have enough information or enough energy or enough time or enough connections. It won’t happen until you start doing it.

When people reach out to moms at work to ask us for help with their advocacy, the first question out of my mouth is, have you done so far?

One out of a hundred people have started a thing, have started the thing. Other people just have an idea or they want us to do it, which I totally appreciate. But advocacy is grounded in the act of doing something. That something is not signing a petition, we’ll get into that many episodes later. It isn’t sharing something online. It’s more, it requires you to move and make an action. And I totally respect that some people have not a lot of space and not a lot of time, but for those of us who do, I’m like,

My advice is to pick one thing and go for it. The second thing I want to remind people is our policy here at Moms at Work is two out of 10 is amazing. People when they’re looking at policy change get very, very rigid. It’s one of the reasons that $10 childcare was not approved 40 years ago is they were looking for perfection. They couldn’t get it and the whole thing sort of fell apart.

So when we have $10 to childcare, we’re pushing through policy that isn’t perfect, but it is an excellent, excellent start. Same thing with pay transparency. The legislation we have, we know there’s going to be hiccups. We know that there’s going to be changes that need to be made. We intend to stick with it for the long run because that’s how policy changes work. It’s not one and done. It’s not put it aside and wash your hands of it. It’s that you have to watch it grow and change. That’s what we’re asking for free EI. But what I want to leave you with today,

is if you believe in what we’re doing. Just share this episode. You can sign up for our newsletter, you can follow us on socials, you can do all of those things, and you can check out our free resources. A key pillar of what Moms at Work is to make sure that we have a lot of free resources for people who are ready to learn and grow. Or you can join the waitlist for our collective. Change doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because people like you demand it. I’m Alison Vinditti, reminding you that you’re doing a good job.