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Here’s a career pattern you’ll recognise: first, you’re young, ambitious and driven, then kids arrive and you step back. A Nobel prize was actually awarded for research into that step back – so it’s officially very common. (Side note, Your husband’s career carries on uninterrupted while you manage everything).
Then as the kids get older, you step forward again. And if you had school-age kids during the pandemic, that was a huge couple of years of homeschooling and – generally – pretty difficult work experiences.
This path describes today’s guest perfectly. Sarrah Le Marquand is Head of Entertainment at News Corp Australia, founding editor-in-chief of Stellar, and host of the award-winning podcast Something To Talk About. She’s also an ambassador for Women’s Community Shelters, supporting women and children experiencing domestic violence.
Now, she’s got teenage kids and is navigating separation – all while running this incredible career she’s built back up.
She’s here to talk about those distinct career chapters, and what comes next when you’re not starting over but you are starting fresh.
In this episode we discuss:
- Feeling mum guilt even when you reject it intellectually
- The whole new ballgame of starting a family in your mid-30s
- Sarrah’s transition from part time and working from home to launching Stellar magazine
- The four day fallacy, and what women sacrifice to maintain flexiblity
- The blurred lines when we work from home
- Task switching, and how hard it is on our brains
- Sarrah wants her children to see their mother working in a challenging, rewarding job
- Sarrah’s separation and single parenting
- The mix of opportunity and loneliness that comes with time away from her kids
- Acknowledging that some days it is all too much
- Why she says to tell your daughters that all men are bastards (spoiler, it’s because you need to maintain financial independence, and you never know what might happen even if you stay in love)
- How keeping a hand in at work helps you hold on to your own identity
About Sarrah Le Marquand
Sarrah Le Marquand is the Head of Entertainment at News Corp Australia, overseeing content, strategy, commercial partnerships and multi-platform distribution.
She is host of the award-winning podcast Something To Talk About, a television panellist, keynote speaker and event MC.
Prior to being appointed to the newly created national role of Head of Entertainment in mid 2024, Sarrah was the founding editor-in-chief of Stellar, growing the title from its launch in 2016 into Australia’s most-read Sunday magazine and then into a multi-platform storytelling brand and the country’s leading publisher of exclusive interviews and agenda-setting content.
Having worked across print, digital, video, audio and broadcast media, she has been responsible for leading teams through times of immense change and disruption, maintaining an unwavering commitment to quality and integrity while simultaneously surpassing the expectations of audiences, stakeholders and clients.
Her 25-year career has also included three years as editor-in-chief of Body+Soul, during which time she transformed the title from a liftout into a standalone premium magazine, alongside record digital performance and the reinvention of Healthy-ish as a daily podcast that proved such a runaway success the supplementary series Extra Healthy-ish was created to keep up with advertiser demand.
For 10 years she wrote a popular column for The Daily Telegraph covering everything from politics to pop culture to parenthood and in 2014 she was appointed opinion editor, and the following year, the national digital opinion editor.
She has been a regular guest co-host of The Project, a radio presenter for ABC Radio and was the resident film reviewer on Sunrise for several years.
She is a panellist on the Today show and has appeared as a commentator on Q&A, BBC, 60 Minutes, Today Extra, Sky News and The Morning Show among many more.
Sarrah is the ambassador for Women’s Community Shelters, an Australian charity providing crisis accommodation for women and children experiencing domestic violence.