Three Initiatives Target Employers, Entertainment, and Utah’s Gender Gap

For the SHRM Foundation, the case for supporting caregivers at work is not only a moral one. It is also a business argument employers may be more likely to act on.

Clayton Lord is a sandwich caregiver supporting his 82-year-old mother and 16-year-old daughter. He said the foundation’s project, Reframing Care at Work, starts from the belief that “every career is connected to care.” He cited a disconnect: three in four U.S. workers are also caring for someone, but only about one in three say their employer takes good care of them.

The project’s premise is that the way care is discussed can affect whether employers respond. Lord argued that narratives casting businesses as villains may leave employers feeling they are being asked to choose between doing what is good for people and what is good for business. “No one is the villain in their own story,” he said: employers may want to do the right thing while also facing business objectives and shareholder values. The aim is to connect care with business success rather than frame support for caregivers as a cost that conflicts with those objectives.

Working with the Topos Partnership and the Elizabeth Dole Foundation, SHRM Foundation plans to develop and test narratives connecting care with business success. It will distribute them through its network of 340,000 employers, alongside a national communications campaign and a policymaker education initiative. Those efforts are intended to drive thousands of employers and policymakers to a Cultures of Care Action Hub, where they can access tools, training, and resources designed to help turn the narratives into meaningful, measurable action.

Nayantara Sen described a cultural gap between the scale of caregiving and its visibility in entertainment. She said about 130 million people in the United States are in active care relationships, most of them working women. Caring Across Generations calls them “the caring majority.” Yet, Sen said, care is often invisible in film, television, and digital content—or portrayed in ways that limit the possibilities audiences can imagine for working women. She cited a figure of 10% of TV shows having care storylines, with an even larger gap for stories about disability and aging.

Caring Across Generations has spent about 15 years developing solutions for caregivers, including a decade of work with the entertainment industry. Sen named projects including The Pitt, This Is Us, Dying for Sex, American Fiction, and Nightbitch. Its newer effort, Give Not Take Media, is an entertainment company intended to scale that work: developing and producing stories, and building impact around them, for audiences whose lives include caregiving and work.

The subject matter ranges from parenting and disability to aging and life in the “sandwich generation.” Sen emphasized that the work is meant to be entertaining, not merely instructive. Its forms include horror, thrillers, vertical dramas, and romantic comedies. One example is Catalina, a short science-fiction film about AI, robots, and caregiving that Sen said was in the film-festival circuit.

Her stated strategy is to change cultural norms by changing stories at scale: working with artists, filmmakers, and content creators, expanding production and distribution, and building what she called a “360-degree narrative environment.” Give Not Take Media speaks directly to the care audience and, in Sen’s account, harnesses the scale of the 130 million people in active care relationships.

Melanie Jones used Utah’s rankings to contrast economic outlook with women’s equality. She noted that the state had been ranked number one for economic outlook for 19 consecutive years, while also claiming the rank of 50th in the nation for women’s equality.

One explanation offered for women’s low representation in corporate leadership, Jones said, is that Utah’s women are at home raising children. She countered that the Utah Department of Workforce Services says women make up 45% of the state’s workforce. Jones said, “We don’t have a pipeline problem, we don’t have a talent problem, we have a story problem.”

Sego Leadership’s project, The Motherhood Advantage, will spend the next two years researching community narratives about motherhood and work. The organization plans to use those findings to develop a campaign and workplace recommendations aimed at encouraging more positive narratives about women, motherhood, and work. Jones presented the project as a response to Utah’s assumptions about mothers and leadership, with the goal of supporting mothers, families, and workplaces.

The three projects treat narratives as consequential, but they do not work through the same channel. SHRM Foundation is addressing employers and policymakers directly: it plans to distribute tested messages through an employer network, a communications campaign, and policymaker education, then connect those audiences to practical resources through the Cultures of Care Action Hub.

Give Not Take Media is working through popular culture. Its intended audience is the caring majority, and its mechanism is developing and producing entertainment with artists and creators, then building impact around those stories. Sego Leadership is focused on Utah: it will research local views of motherhood and work, then translate its findings into a campaign and workplace recommendations. The projects therefore differ in both whom they seek to reach and what they offer—employer tools, cultural storytelling, or research-based guidance for workplaces.