Mira Sørensen is forty-one. She trained and worked as a midwife in the Danish public system for nine years. In 2019, after a paper she wrote on the actual working hours of hospital midwives was cited by the national union, she was offered a policy role at the Danish Nurses' Organization and now writes for a living. She lives alone in a two-room apartment in Frederiksberg, gets up at five thirty most mornings, and stops answering work email at nine — exactly nine. Not nine-fifteen. We spoke on a Sunday, in her kitchen.
Q You are famous, in a very small way, for stopping email at nine. Why nine?
A
Because eight was too early and ten was already midnight. I don't want to be dramatic about it. The choice was not spiritual. My working day starts at seven and I want to be a person who eats dinner. Nine gives me the meeting after the meeting — the last emails from the boss who works late, the reply from the person in Australia — and then it stops.
Q What happens at nine, precisely?
A
The laptop closes. The mail on the phone is on manual refresh. I do not read anything work-adjacent — Slack, WhatsApp groups from the office, a call from a colleague — until seven the next morning. If something is genuinely urgent, my number is on the file, and one person in ten years has called me on it. He was right to.
Q Did you always work like this?
A
God, no. I was a midwife. Midwives don't stop. A woman doesn't stop delivering because the shift ends. So I brought that habit into the policy job, which was the worst possible move. For two years I answered every email in ninety seconds. I was the fastest replier in the building, and it turned out that being the fastest replier in the building is a small career trap. You do not become the person who writes the paper. You become the person who forwards the paper.
Q The paper — the one that changed the union. What is it, briefly, and why did it change things?
A
It is called, unromantically, Actual hours of active clinical work performed by midwives in three Danish hospital regions. It is thirty-two pages. It is not literature. What it did was, for the first time in a Danish public document, disentangle "scheduled hours" from "active clinical hours" from "pre-shift handover" from "post-shift reporting" from "administrative overhang." The scheduled hours, for a full-time midwife, are 37. The actual hours were 51.4, averaged over eight weeks. That's the sentence that changed things. Every midwife in the country had known it privately for twenty years. It had not been written down. So I wrote it down.
Q How long did it take to write?
A
Fourteen months. I did it in the evenings and on Sundays, mostly, and I wrote at least half of it on the specific train between Roskilde and Copenhagen — a forty-minute train I took twice a week for a course. I read the interviews on the train back. I wrote the paragraphs on the train there. If you ask my body, the paper is a train.
Q You have written that a woman's career, in a public system, is often "a graph of missing hours." Can you say more?
A
Sure. Every working woman I have interviewed can name three or four hours a week that are worked and not paid — the pre-meeting where the actual decision is made, the post-shift where the incident report is written, the Saturday morning where the deck is finalised. Over a decade, that's about 1,500 hours. That's a full year of unpaid full-time work. My paper counted those hours. The union used the count. It went into the collective agreement. That specific 14-hour weekly gap now has a name in Danish policy, and having a name is halfway to being paid.
Q What happened to your salary after the paper?
A
It went up about 34 percent over two years. Not because of the paper — the paper is not a bonus scheme. Because after the paper I could say, credibly, "I am the person who wrote this" in the room where the salary is decided, and because after the paper I was a policy writer, not a midwife who had opinions. The title changed. The number followed.
Q Do you miss being a midwife?
A
Every day. Not the shift. The work. There is a particular quality of attention to a woman in labour that is the most awake I have ever been in my life, and I do not get that from a paper. I get something else — a slower, patient, forensic thing — and I like it, but I do not confuse the two. If you ask me the question I ask myself once a month: would I go back to a shift? No. Would I keep my license current? Yes. I do. It costs me eighty-five hours a year of continuing education. It is worth it.
Q How do you write? Ritual, hours, place.
A
Five-thirty. Coffee. Two hours at a small round table by the window. No email until seven-fifteen. On Saturdays, I write from seven to eleven, then I take the rest of the weekend off. I do not write in the evenings. Evenings are for reading and dinner. I have not written a good sentence after 8 p.m. in six years.
Q What's on your desk right now?
A
The manuscript of the second paper. A cup of coffee that has gone cold. My mother's fountain pen. A book by Anne Enright I have read three times. A note from a colleague that says "Mira — the numbers on page 14 are wrong." The numbers on page 14 are wrong. I will fix them tomorrow at 5:45.
Q If a young midwife — or any young woman in a public system — is reading this, what would you say?
A
Write down the hours. Just the hours. Not the feelings. The hours. Do it for six months. On a single sheet of paper. Not on a phone. Do not show anyone until the sixth month. Then show it to one person who has power in the room. Say, "This is what my week actually looks like." Do not soften the number. Do not apologise for it. Then let the number do the work you have been trying to do with your own goodwill. That is the whole of it.
✦ End of Interview N° 04