Brigid Schulte

Brigid Schulte is a journalist, think tank program director, public speaker and author of Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life, and the New York Times bestselling book on time pressure, gender and modern life, Overwhelmed: Work, Love & Play when No One has the Time, which named one of the notable books of the year by the Washington Post and NPR, won the Virginia Library Association’s literary nonfiction award. It has been translated into a number of languages, and helped spark a national conversation about the toll that outdated policies and cultural attitudes are taking on modern lives, and how to move forward.

She was an award-winning journalist for The Washington Post and The Washington Post Magazine for nearly 17 years and was part of the team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. She now serves as the director of the Better Life Lab, the work-family justice and gender equity program at New America, a nonpartisan think tank, which uses data, storytelling, evidence-based solutions, and policy analysis to highlight how redesigning work to make time for care, work-care enrichment, gender equity and well-designed family supportive policies are keys to a future of equity, innovation, productivity, well-being and quality of life. She hosts the Better Life Lab podcast on Slate, which hit the Top 50 on the Apple Podcast charts in its first season, has authored several practical Better Work Toolkits and co-founded BLLx – behavioral science-based tools to help couples and families more fairly share the unpaid work of care and home. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Slate, the Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, Vox, CNN, Quartz, Washington Monthly, the Financial Times, the Guardian, New York Magazine, Fast Company, and others. She has been quoted or featured in numerous publications and has appeared on a number of TV and radio programs, including CNN, The BBC, NBC, Fresh Air with Terry Gross and NPR’s Morning Edition.

She is a sought-out voice and has spoken all over the world about the Future of Work and Well-Being: the causes and consequences of our unsustainable, exploitive always-on overwork culture, and how to make time for The Good Life by redesigning how we work, by elevating the value of care and re-imagining gender roles for a fairer division of labor and opportunity at work and home, by rewiring public policy to truly meet the needs of 21^st century families in a rapidly changing future of work, and, instead of seeking status in busyness, by recapturing the importance of leisure and truly free time.

She lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with her husband, Tom Bowman, who covers military affairs for National Public Radio, and their two children. A native of Oregon, Brigid has a BA in English, Modern Languages and Communications from the University of Portland, and an MS from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She grew up spending summers with family in Wyoming, where she did not feel so overwhelmed or overworked.