Love what you're reading? From career growth to midday meditations, our email lineup delivers thoughtful insights, relatable data, and space to just be. Add InHerSight to your inbox today. (It's free!)
Last weekend, 2016 was trending. On social media, users reminisced about simpler, pre-pandemic times. I didn’t participate. My 2016 wasn’t that good.
At the time, I was living and working in Atlanta, where I’d moved for a magazine job that I really loved and thought would put me on the path to where I wanted to be. But within a year of me working there, our company put the magazine up for sale. Layoffs, pay cuts, and freezes began as leadership entertained prospective owners.
The office was tense, and communication, poor. Those of us who stayed on waited in silence for a long time. Then one day, I went to bed employed at one company and woke up working for another. No notice. No pause to sort out human details, like health insurance. Just a business decision that had happened overnight.
I struggled with this. I was very early in my career, and I had no roadmap for this kind of uncertainty in the workplace. When you lose your job, you look for a new one—that made sense to me. But working in purgatory until someone decides your future for you? That didn’t sit right with me, and the lack of security made every day in the office feel like an emotional fire drill.
So, I left. I wanted to work somewhere I mattered as a person, which felt a little radical at the time—mattering was never the narrative around work. But to me, any job started with a bare minimum: transparency, decent pay, and, yes, waking up to the certainty of health insurance. In a society that often normalizes less, that felt uncomfortable to admit.
Looking back, I see the choice to leave as an act of self-care, maybe the first big one I ever made as an adult. I was choosing a job that could provide for me holistically.
I know many people in the InHerSight audience right now are job searching—over 70%, actually. When you’re in that position, it’s easy to tell yourself that you can’t afford to be picky, that stability is something you earn later, or that wanting more than a paycheck means you’re asking for too much. I wouldn’t blame anyone for feeling that way in this market.
Last week, we polled you all about whether a company’s support of women matters to you during your job search. The responses were varied. Some of you say active support is a deal-breaker and others that you’ve never considered it. These are all valid responses, too.
But I want to clarify what support actually looks like in practice, based on my seven years at InHerSight. Our platform was built to measure women’s experiences at work, but our company ratings come from people of all genders. And we assess companies based on metrics that reflect many of the same needs that surfaced for me in 2016:
-
Do I have the benefits I need to remain healthy and safe? (Wellness Initiatives)
-
Am I being paid enough to support myself? (Salary Satisfaction)
-
Do I feel heard, respected, and valued—especially during times of organizational change? (Employer Responsiveness, The People You Work With, Sense of Belonging)
I didn’t have those needs because I’m a woman. I had them because I’m a person. They exist as metrics on InHerSight because many of the things that support women at work are simply the things that allow people to feel secure, informed, and able to plan their lives.
In 2016, I didn’t have a resource like InHerSight—at least not in a way I knew how to use. I didn’t even have the language to explain why my work experience unsettled me so deeply. I only knew that I didn’t want to keep bracing for impact while building my career.
Now I get it. I wanted work that could support my life, not destabilize it. That realization shifted how I assessed future employers, how I negotiated, how often I said no—and all of the times I left things behind that weren’t serving me, work or otherwise.
I also stopped believing it was radical or unusual to approach my career this way. Today I consider it very, very human.
If you’re just now coming to the same conclusion in 2026, welcome. I look forward to reading the caption on your 2036 throwback post.
