Senate Republicans are racing to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a sweeping tax and spending bill crucial to President Donald Trump’s agenda, by the July 4 deadline. We’ll bring you the latest numbers on the bill’s price tag and popularity in today’s newsletter. But first, the latest installment in our series on America’s changing workforce, “The Age of Work.”

Seven years into her career, senior medical device engineer Joanne Hislop received life-changing news: she and her husband were having triplets. 

“They did an ultrasound, and pretty quickly were like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ And just kept asking if we were going to pass out,” she said. 

She knew that balancing work and motherhood would be tough, but didn’t know exactly what that would look like with three babies. 

“My career was a big part of who I was, and I had always intended to continue working,” she said. “But there was also so much unknown from the health side that neither one outweighed the other.”

At the time, Hislop was working for a company called Merit Medical, which makes products for heart surgeries, catheter tubing, and other medical devices.

It has about 7,300 employees, including 2,200 in Utah, where the company is headquartered.

Utah’s unemployment rate is unusually tight. The unemployment rate in the state is a full percentage point lower than the nation as a whole.

According to one study published in Behavioral Sciences, about 24% of new mothers in the United States exit the labor market in their first year of motherhood. 

So when Hisplop told Fred Lampropoulos, Merit Medical’s CEO, about her changing family situation, he said he worried about losing a valuable employee. 

“I thought, ‘oh god, we’re going to lose one of our best engineers,’” he said. 

“I kind of expected, I think, at that point, that [the company] would just write me off,” said Hislop. “But he, from the very beginning, was just really supportive and said, whatever we need to do to get you to come back.”

At the time, what she needed was flexibility. Her babies were born early and spent months in the hospital. She wound up taking a full year of maternity leave. When she did return to work, it was part-time. Her team worked around her schedule for years as she slowly ramped back up. 

“Whatever you wanna do, we’re going to accommodate it,” Lampropoulos said. 

But Hislop knew that despite the fact that she’d worked out this flexible arrangement with Merit Medical, there was a larger problem yet to be solved.

According to the Women's Society for Engineers, just 17% of U.S engineers are female.

“I had seen several female engineers who had been here for a long time, and then they just get to a certain point, start their families, and just would leave the industry,” said Hislop.

Charitable spending in the U.S. reached $592 billion last year. About two thirds of that sum came from individuals, up more than 5% after adjusting for inflation. A big chunk of giving, especially around the California wildfires six months ago, came from community members supporting each other on the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe. We had Cadogan on the show to talk about the fallout from those fires, and whether, in an ideal world, a platform like his should serve as social safety net.