Former Executive Says Boss Suggested Second Nanny After She Asked to Go Home to Her Son
A request to go home after a demanding week prompted an answer Julie Fedele says she has not forgotten.
Fedele, a former C-suite executive who spent about two decades working in London and Melbourne, recently shared a collection of experiences from her corporate career. One involved a week in which work had kept her away from home.
She wanted to leave and put her son to bed. According to Fedele, her boss had another solution.
“My boss once told me to get a second nanny when I said I wanted to put my son to bed. I hadn’t been home all week,” she wrote.
The exchange is one of several incidents Fedele has described publicly while reflecting on the demands and contradictions she encountered in senior corporate roles. Her account also includes a large pay discrepancy with a male colleague and a disagreement over the use of a private jet.
The individual employers and executives involved in the anecdotes have not been identified in the reporting reviewed for this story, and the incidents are based on Fedele’s account.
The issue was not a lack of childcare
The distinction at the centre of the nanny story is an important one. Fedele was not describing a situation in which she simply needed somebody to care for her child while she worked.
She wanted to be there herself.
Her boss’s reported suggestion effectively treated a parent’s desire to spend time with a child as a staffing problem. That response has helped the story travel online, where it has fed a broader conversation about the demands employers can place on senior staff and the limits of outsourcing responsibilities at home.
Fedele, now based in Australia, is the founder of Polywork Careers Platform. Her recollections draw on roughly 20 years in corporate life, including time in executive positions.
The nanny episode was not the only experience she described.
An accidental contract exposed a pay difference
In another account, Fedele said human resources mistakenly sent her a male colleague’s employment contract.
The colleague was doing the same job, she said, but the document showed that he was being paid considerably more.
Fedele said the discovery gave her the information she needed to challenge her own compensation.
“I once got a $50k pay rise and my MBA paid for because my HR accidentally sent me my colleague contract. Same job. He just happened to be a man,” she wrote.
According to Fedele, the dispute ended with a $50,000 salary increase and her MBA being paid for.
The circumstances surrounding the contract, the size of the original pay difference and the employer involved have not been independently established in the public reporting reviewed for this story.
Still, the episode sits alongside the nanny comment as part of Fedele’s wider account of the less visible pressures she encountered while climbing the corporate ladder.
A private jet became another point of conflict
Fedele also recalled objecting to the use of a company private jet for a meeting that she said would last about an hour.
She said she was reprimanded after refusing to take the flight.
There was an additional reason for her objection: Fedele said she was serving in the C-suite of a sustainability technology company at the time.
In her telling, using a private jet for a short meeting did not sit comfortably with the environmental principles associated with the business. Her boss, she said, did not share her view.
The disagreement adds a different element to her recollections. Unlike the nanny episode, which centred on the boundary between work and family, the private-jet dispute involved a conflict between workplace expectations and the values a company was supposed to represent.
Twenty years of corporate stories
Fedele’s posts include other memories from her career, ranging from late-night presentation reviews to unexpected promotions and disputes over bonuses.
Some stories, she indicated, are being held back for a future memoir.
Taken together, the anecdotes do not amount to a general description of every senior corporate workplace, nor have all of the individual incidents been independently verified. They are Fedele’s account of the culture she experienced during a long career across London and Melbourne.
The second-nanny remark, however, has proved particularly resonant because of what it reveals about the expectation she says she faced.
The proposed solution assumed that another employee at home could compensate for more time spent at work. For Fedele, the point was simpler: she did not merely want childcare covered. She wanted to see her son.
