I’ve always been obsessed with predicting the future. So, the question on my mind these days is: After completing two degrees and landing a job — what’s next?
To answer that question, a good friend of mine (who goes to MIT and is also just a next-level badass) sent me the following series: The Ambition Interviews. Published by The Atlantic, it’s a seven-part series that looks at high-achieving women in the years following college and asks: Had they become the people they’d dreamt of being when they were 21? Who are they now?
The results were surprising, to say least. The 41 women, interviewed nearly 23 years out of school, initially had near-identical rates of career growth — that is, until they decided to have kids. It was after childbirth that their professional lives changed, for better or for worse (but mostly, it seems, for worse).
These women could be broadly classified into one of three categories: “High Achievers,” “Scale Backers,” or “Opt Outers.” The names are kind of self-explanatory, but in short — “Opt Outers” were defined as women who, post-childbirth, chose to give up their careers and stay at home, buttressed by the income of a husband who could support the family. “Scale Backers” were women who mutually agreed with their partners to not totally give up, but rather, “scale back” on their careers post-childbirth. These were the women seeking to “have it all,” to enjoy a balance between work and family life but often finding neither. Instead, these women reported that, with their energies scattered between their professional and personal commitments, they had no time to satisfy either.
The last group was the elusive “High Achievers.” The smallest pool of them all, these women achieved distinction in their fields — but at a personal cost, whether that was forgoing kids, hiring expensive nannies, or marrying a partner who was willing to be the primary caregiver in their stead. Indeed, these women seemingly exclusively married men willing to scale back their careers and take care of the kids. Not being physically present as parents wasn’t a choice for these women, but a necessary sacrifice to climb the professional ladder.
I’ll be honest — I don’t particularly love any of those outcomes. All of them sound depressing in one way or another. But these findings seemed to underscore a pretty key, if oft-overlooked, part of the conversation around women and ambition — namely, while talk of empowerment flows freely, honest discussions about the barriers which still exist and the sacrifices which must be made are not being held.
I have no intention of letting my twenties be a “warm-up” decade of any kind. I want to hit the ground running. But reading something like this gives me pause.
Gloria Steinem once famously mused that some women “are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” I’m suddenly not so sure that’s a good thing, or that we should even be using male careers as a measuring stick for our own at all. Not in terms of what we accomplish in our professional careers — women deserve to rise the ranks and lead just as much as the men have — but rather, our lives outside of it.
How can I build a career that gives me growth but doesn’t push me over the edge? Is there a cap on ambition between partners? Is work-life balance a myth, after all? I don’t know these answers yet. And I’m trying to make peace with just that.
A silver lining in all this? Of the women interviewed, every one of them described her life, complete with compromises and chaos, as a good life. And at the end of the day — well, that’s all that really matters.
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