When Your Work Is Unpaid
Ages & Stages: How Women Work & Lead Across Seasons of Life
Our culture often ties personal worth to a paycheck. This mindset creates a quiet crisis of identity during unpaid seasons. Whether you are parenting, volunteering, or changing careers, your work still matters. Without a paycheck, we easily question our value and productivity. In this session, we will explore:
How do you separate your personal identity and self-worth from your earnings?
How can you measure the real value of your time, energy, and mind when no market price exists?
How do you spot God's creative work through you in quiet, lonely, or unseen tasks?
Which daily practices help you trust God with your identity when your work is unpaid?
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Speakers
Executive Coach
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Rebecca Johnson sees leaders flourish when their complex challenges are met with steady, reflective presence rather than heroic effort. As the principal of Story Solutions, she serves as an executive coach and strategic advisor specializing in leadership decision-making and cohort programs for corporate and social impact leaders. Drawing on decades of leadership and fractional executive experience—alongside her service on the advisory council for Women, Work, & Calling—Rebecca brings a discerning posture to help leaders navigate operational pressures and translate strategy into aligned, measurable outcomes.
Mom, Growth Operator
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Margaret Johnson is a mom and consultant with more than a decade of experience helping high-growth companies scale through strategy, operations, and commercial leadership. Today, she advises businesses through her consulting practice, LP Impact, while focusing on one of her most meaningful leadership roles: raising her two daughters. Margaret is passionate about redefining ambition, finding purpose beyond a job title, and recognizing the lasting value of caregiving as meaningful work.
Member Board of Directors & Sr. Product Manager, Meenk LLC
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Tonia Roby is a product leader, consultant, and trusted advisor with over two decades of experience collaboratively building software and guiding cross-functional teams across the US, Europe, and Asia. Known for her deep listening skills and customer-first approach, Tonia has a track record of turning strategic vision into results. She combines Agile discipline with genuine care for the people behind the process, building products and partnerships grounded in trust, collaboration, and shared success.
She currently serves on the Board of Directors and as Senior Product Manager at Meenk LLC, where she advises founders on product strategy, and brings prior leadership experience from Broadridge, Alpha Omega Financial Systems, Accenture, and IBM.
Tonia holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley.
C. JOANNA SCHLECHT
Director of Mission Communities, Mission Chattanooga
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C. Joanna Schlecht holds an MDiv and DMin from Covenant Theological Seminary and serves on staff at Mission Chattanooga, an Anglican (ACNA) church, where she leads efforts to build meaningful community and create spaces for people to grow in faith together. A mom of four, CJ is also a coach who helps people wholeheartedly flourish in the seasons and callings God has given them. She works with leaders to create purposeful sabbatical plans that maximize a season of rest and renewal, and helps women navigate significant decisions around family, work, and calling—including growing their families through IVF, adoption, or chosen singleness. She especially enjoys helping women in high-influence roles develop practices that allow them to thrive in work, family, and faith without burning out.
THANK YOU TO OUR PARTNERS
Dive Deeper
What If Your Gifts Were Never Meant for Just One Ladder?
WWC Advisory Council member, Cammie Dunaway, featured panelist Margaret Johnson's experience of unpaid work, through her LinkedIn column "Lydia Lab". Read here about how Margaret didn’t lose her ambition, but changed where she chose to direct it.
The Magic of Knowing What You Want
In this Practical Guide to Unearthing the Wisdom of your Desires, WWC25 Keynote Speaker and leadership coach, Tracey Gee, walks you through a proven framework of identifying, clarifying, and embodying your desires. With interactive exercises, relatable case studies, and thoughtful questions, Gee helps you discover what you really want, teaches you how to turn those desires into action, and shows you that a thriving, abundant life is closer than you think.
The Fair Play Deck
Fair Play delivers a time and anxiety-saving system that offers couples a completely new way to divvy up their domestic responsibilities. It started with a “Stuff I Do” spreadsheet – a list of all the invisible tasks it takes to run a home, but developed into a gamified system with 100 household tasks, and a figurative card game you play with your partner.
If the card deck is not for you, also check out the Fair Play book by Eve Rodsky or the Fair Play documentary.
Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power
In Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power, Andy Crouch's chapter "The Sabbath Ladder" explores how rest and power are meant to move together, even into seasons like a "motherhood sabbatical" where the labor is real but the paycheck isn't. Crouch reminds us that unpaid work still carries dignity and still needs rhythms of rest, because worth was never meant to be measured by a wage.
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ABOUT THE SERIES
Ages & Stages
HOW WOMEN WORK & LEAD ACROSS SEASONS OF LIFE
Many of us know the pressure of balancing professional ambitions with personal calling. Yet standard workplace advice often misses the real tensions Christian women encounter across different life stages.
Whether you are navigating unpaid labor, leading solo, managing a dual front of family care, or bridging generational divides at work, your calling is a whole-life response to God.
Join Women, Work, & Calling as we host Season 2 of Ages & Stages—a four-part webinar series exploring the challenges and opportunities unique to distinct life seasons. Each webinar features the experiences of women who are living and leading through these seasons.
