How Women’s Work-Life Choices Are Evolving

1 Reply

The first thing I noticed was the number of women casually wearing blue jeans as they networked, introduced themselves and sipped their morning coffee, as though clothes did not define their role or status.

I had debated what to wear for my first professional women’s conference in over 25 years. Would skirts and blazers still be required? Given that I was taking mass transit to the event, could I get away with athletic shoes? Finally, on a chilly, gray Friday with intermittent showers, I opted for slacks and shoes I could walk in — practical and comfortable. Turns out, I was overdressed!

Between the ages of 36 to 43, I was a full-time newspaper columnist writing about women and work, with a focus on how a generation of middle-class women were navigating the personal and the professional in ways their homemaker mothers never had to do. “On Balance: Issues That Affect Work and Home” the column was called. So, when I heard about the annual women’s conference put on by RSP (Ready. Set. Pivot.) — a Twin Cities-based organization that “guides bold, unapologetic women to their next best thing” — I saw it as a chance to investigate how issues for career women have changed over the past 30 years.

Three conclusions or trends emerged that demonstrate the realities I have recognized in my 60s:

  • Progress can be temperamental, and transitory, but movements for social change do push us forward.
  • Age shifts our priorities, giving us space to quit dwelling on the inevitable regrets and instead channel them into more authentic ways to lead our lives today.

“Always concentrate on how far you have come, rather than how far you have left to go.”

Heidi Johnson

Trend #1: Finally! Flexibility Is Firm

Back when I was writing the column on women and work (a first for a local newspaper in the 1990s), once- or twice-a-week telecommuting was an almost revolutionary option provided by employers wanting to be seen as work-life friendly and to retain women struggling vainly to “have it all.” I was commuting a long way to the newsroom, with my husband as an at-home parent to our two sons. When a top-tier liberal arts college a mile from home offered me a job in communications, I used it to negotiate a partial work-from-home arrangement.

“Flexibility doesn’t mean working from home on Tuesdays,” a source told me at the time. “True flexibility looks different ways on different days.” And true flexibility, back then, was rare.

Years later, flexibility was among the trends that panelists cited at the RSP conference, organized by former Blue Cross Blue Shield marketing executive Wendy Wiesman, 50, who relishes the “insane freedom” that she gained when she left a prestigious job at a reputable company five years ago.

“Women are more ambitious than ever, and workplace flexibility is fueling them,” says the Women in the Workplace 2023 report by McKinsey & Company, produced annually in partnership with LeanIn.org.

Six key questions kicked off the RSP conference in October.

Rather than being the sole exception, as I was, the women I met at the conference treated flexibility as a given rather than a favor that could be taken away. They have the confidence, or perhaps the strength in numbers, to determine how and where they want to work. COVID and a tight labor market have fueled that trend.

I talked with two women in their 40s who are running their own businesses. Diane, a human resources specialist who was often told she “wasn’t typical,” has three children and is the primary breadwinner because her husband is a teacher. Jennifer, who is married with two daughters, lost 100 pounds a decade ago and joined Toastmasters to help her present herself publicly. Now, having tired of working in financial services, she coaches professionals in public speaking.

Wiesman, founder and CEO of Ready. Set. Pivot., says those are the kinds of courageous women her company attracts, who want to design the next stage of their career and leave a secure position if it’s not working. “The DNA is of a woman who is never quite satisfied,” she says. Or, as her website puts it: “The best talent is restless.”

“What does success mean to me now? From the perspective of today, what is most important to me?”

Randi Levin, transitional life strategist

Trend #2: Self-Care Is Not Selfish

As a young business reporter, I interviewed women who wore blue suits to work. Who pulled back their long hair. Who displayed no photos of their children. It’s almost laughable now, how earnestly we tried to blend in with the corporate male establishment (and, of course, it’s the rap against the women’s movement of the 1970s, that we white women of means were merely striving to fit in rather than working to change the system for Black and brown women, too).

Often that meant working harder for less pay and recognition, on the blind faith that someday, it would pay off.

Nowadays, Black women in particular are vocal about the importance — the essentialness — of self-care amid the myriad stressors in their lives. The inaugural “Rest Up Awards,” announced by the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota in September, are granting $10,000 each to 40 nonprofit leaders throughout the state whose organizations are advancing gender and racial justice. All recipients are women of color, according to coverage in the Star Tribune.

Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash

“That whole perfectionism thing is out the door,” said the RSP conference’s keynote speaker, Natasha Bowman, a Black attorney, bestselling author and recognized expert on workplace mental health. “Women experience mental health challenges at twice the rate of men, at least. But we women don’t put ourselves on our to-do lists.”

In helping ambitious, hardworking women to design their next phase of life, Wiesman urges them to broaden their focus — and encompass their families, relationships, volunteerism and other interests in a vision of how they want to live. “I first need them not to work 80 hours a week on their day job,” she explains. “It takes a long time to shift out of that. But you have to begin to not over-achieve in that arena. Otherwise, you make no space for the pursuit.”

And you end up in your 60s, as I have, trying to explain your workaholic choices to now-grown children who still resent that you were gone so much while they were growing up.

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”

Maya Angelou

Trend #3: We Get to Be Who We Really Are

In addition to all the jeans and easy laughter at the women’s conference, I noticed that I had never heard “shit” and “fuck” spoken so often or openly at a professional gathering. My age-related aversion to swearing aside, I took it as a brazen symbol of Generation X women’s comfort with themselves. They’re not looking to anyone else to define what is acceptable. “I’m challenging the universe to think differently about talented women,” said Wiesman during her introductory remarks at the event.

Leadership coach Susan Davis-Ali, Ph.D., author of the book How to Become Successful Without Becoming a Man, spoke during a panel discussion about the “great corporate job” she had 15 years ago before leaving to launch her own work and pursue her own path. “Transformation means to change,” she says, including “behavior and attitudes.”

“Getting personal will create risk,” another panelist said. The mostly middle-aged, mostly white women in attendance — exactly the audience for my long-ago business column — heard about negotiating for what they’re worth (“men ask for significantly more money”), about defining what they are offering the market (“generalists aren’t getting noticed; find your sweet spot”) and about speaking with more authority (less “I think” or “I feel”; “own your expertise”).

Men’s restrooms were repurposed at the RSP conference.

When a panelist asked how many of us were old enough to have been expected to “be in the office from 9 to 5 with pantyhose on,” I was among the few women who raised my hand. Later, during a breakout session, I spoke up on behalf of my Boomer generation: the ones who blazed a trail but failed to notice that some women weren’t on the path, who overinvested in work as our sole means of self-worth and self-expression.

Wiesman’s generation obviously has learned from our mistakes. “Since the pandemic, women are centering more on their lives and themselves,” she told me. “They’re focusing on themselves first and not the system.”

As a woman of retirement age who still enjoys work, I’d say it’s time to start emulating the women coming up behind us, the ones who declare (as Wiesman’s RSP website says): “This is what I want, this is what I need, this is what I’m good at, this is what I love.” And then get out there and show the world that aging women still have a hell of a lot to offer.

Can’t find a roadmap for retirement? Write your own!

5 Replies

‘Are you fully retired then?” The question, at a recent gathering of neighbors, came from a former colleague at the institution where I resigned a year ago from my decades-long career. I gave my chipper, by now well-rehearsed answer: “No, no, I actually have two part-time jobs, and as I like to tell people: 1+1=3!”

The upbeat response conceals a reality that I had not anticipated when I left full-time employment in fall 2022, three months after turning 65. Although it has been gratifying and intellectually stimulating to take on two jobs that allow me to remain visible and professionally active — in the game — in fact, there’s no such thing as a part-time career. As managing editor of a community blog and as executive director of a small, struggling nonprofit, I often feel as busy as I was before for a fraction of the pay and benefits.

Neither of these is a job where you hang up your apron and forget about work till your next shift. The demands, the brainstorming, the ebb and flow of creative energy are always with me, as are the texts and emails.

I addressed the dilemma of trying to sandwich professional roles into part-time gigs in a blog post back in March, when I was midway through my so-called glidepath year. Since then, the issues have only magnified: Who restores the printer connection when there’s no IT department to call? Who pays for professional development? Why must I rationalize being reimbursed for envelopes, stamps and other office supplies with a new board member of the nonprofit?

Now that a full year has passed, I am evaluating again what retirement really means and why I have resisted the concept so strongly.

For me, this first year of part-time professional work has proved to be more complex and confusing than the binary choice that society offers of work or retirement, with no options in between. I have yet to find a road map for the life I have been crafting, and so — like Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road — I am looking for mentors to point the way:

  • When might I be ready to cease defining myself as a careerist?
  • How accepting am I, really, of growing old?
  • What other, nonpaid activities do I want to pursue?
  • Can I concede the disappointments of what I never did accomplish in my career?

And the scariest question, impossible to answer: Will my savings and investments outlive me?

“What gradually increases during our late teens and begins to decline after age 60? Our self-esteem . . .  when we no longer have the status associated with our careers.”

—     Bev Bachel, Retirement Wisdom blog

Part-time professional positions have been a convenient, and cost-effective, way for me to delay examining the inevitable — that my career, and the influence that went with it, are on the wane; that I am aging out of the workforce; and that it’s time to start looking for other ways I can contribute and find meaning.

Meanwhile, increasingly, I just feel outdated, one of those benchwarmers who yearns for how things used to be. When I hear a Gallup social scientist assert that “requiring people to work in the office can lead to lower levels of engagement, higher burnout and a lot of resentment,” I have to wonder whether my way of working is passé.

I miss going to an office, which on the face of it has nothing to do with part-time work, except my two gigs station me at home. I miss dressing in something other than jeans and yoga pants. I miss walking to work and wrapping my head around my day, schmoozing with colleagues, using the walk back home to decompress.

For the last eight years of my full-time career, I had the great good fortune to work walking distance from my house, which made commuting a pleasure, a value added to my mental health. I understand if people who adapted to the Zoom life during COVID or endured congested commutes now resent that employers are demanding face time — but as an older worker, I miss the sociability of the office. I liked the stimulation of younger colleagues and new ideas.

Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash
Photo by Hans Peter Gauster on Unsplash

Consider:

  • It took months for me to lose interest in Twitter (OK, X), despite watching a parade of people I respect abandon the platform as it grew more biased and businesslike. I tried Mastodon, but it literally felt too dark and clubbish — and I told myself I didn’t need another social media mouth to feed (in addition to the three email accounts for my two part-time jobs). I finally listened when a young man offered to invite me to Bluesky, which the new platform requires. I poked around and developed a profile, describing myself as “learning as I go.” But the entire process would have been less fraught if I worked in an office with younger colleagues, rather than in a spare bedroom with a dog at my feet.
  • When our young podcast editor suggested recently that we use more video at Streets.mn, I tried to sound enthusiastic but inside I was churning. By today’s standards, do I overvalue the written word? And when might the Millennials who employ me decide that the skills and perspective of a 66-year-old Baby Boomer are no longer relevant to what they need?

“One of the privileges of age is the right to live your life the way you want to, and to truthfully state your preferences.”

—     “Ask Amy” column, by Amy Dickinson, Star Tribune, September 21, 2023

Therein lies the trap of part-time professional work, the gigs that require decision-making and creative solutions, the jobs that spin your brain and sap your strength even after the day is done:

  • I’m a contract worker who bills by the hour, with monthly billing sheets tied to specific outcomes. No one has yet told me that “think time” is among them, the way it used to be when I was employed full time.
  • So, when no one is compensating you to advance your knowledge — to attend noontime seminars or weeklong conferences, to read up on current trends — do you do it on your own time at the expense of volunteerism, relationships, exercise and other self-care?

If I were younger, the answer would be an unequivocal, energetic “yes.” More of my career would be in front of me. But with retirement drawing closer — and the privilege of being able to afford to do it — I am called to examine whether professional work is worth it anymore.

One secret to happiness at this ill-defined stage of post–full-time career — my so-called glide path — is to stay as current as you can without denying your age and the validity of your experience. But for me it’s also recognizing what the career has cost, especially as a woman who broke new ground, in loss of family time, in stress, in misplaced self-importance.

As the curtain rises on my final act, I am pondering who I am becoming, and whether hanging up that apron at the end of a shift might soon be more rewarding than a fancy title on LinkedIn.

Stay Cool, You Don’t Need Air-Conditioning

3 Replies

At night during the summer, my husband sets up a big metal box fan — yellow, decades old, with three speeds powered by three dusty blades — and blows it out the west-facing window in his upstairs den. Then he sucks in the cooler evening air from outdoors by closing every window in the house except three in the bedrooms and one in the living room (to please the dog who commandeers the couch).

This is our old-fashioned, climate-friendly version of air-conditioning, along with ceiling fans in the kitchen, the main bedroom and my home office, a north-facing spare bedroom where I sleep on hot nights because of the bed’s access to the open window. When we first moved to this old house in 2013, we occasionally used a portable air-conditioning unit in the front bedroom, but it was noisy and blocked the light during the day and kept waking me at night every time it clunked off and on. So, we hauled the dripping unit out to the boulevard, where someone quickly claimed it.

For them it was a find, like the perfectly good snow shovels I lugged home from an alley last spring. For me — raised in a household with open windows and floor fans, back when air-conditioning was a nonessential for the middle class — the portable unit symbolized the hedonistic tendencies of our self-absorbed culture. Doing without it was one small way to side with Mother Nature in a battle she inevitably will win.

Billboard at the corner of Grand and Fairview avenues in St. Paul

Where comfort counts

Air-conditioning is a luxury that the vast majority of Americans now judge to be a necessity, and far more of us, especially in Minnesota, could live without it. As a person who tolerates the heat fairly well, in part because I have trained myself to do it, I would welcome not having to shiver in every bus, grocery store, movie theater and office building — enduring this artificial, overcooled air because some HVAC company tells me it is civilized. A symbol of prosperity and progress.

That progress, unfortunately, is costing the planet — fueling the very climate crisis from which air-conditioning helps us hide.

Ninety percent of households in the United States have air-conditioning, compared with 60 percent in China, 16 percent in Mexico and 5 percent in India; versions of those data, from 2016, were cited again this July in news alerts about the record-breaking heat worldwide.

Indeed, air conditioning represents one of the most insidious challenges of climate change, and one of the most difficult technological problems to fix. The more the world warms, the more we’ll need cooling — not merely for comfort, but for health and survival in large parts of the world.

James Temple, MIT Technology Review, September 1, 2020

Summer in the city

On a cool Sunday afternoon, a comfortable 74 degrees, it’s easy to forget how daunting July 2023 has been. More than 90 million Americans were under heat alerts earlier this week, according to PBS NewsHour. The month itself was the hottest on human record.

I read about farmers trying to keep their animals cool in rural Minnesota; about a man who died at a bus stop in Phoenix, Arizona, where temperatures climbed to over 110 degrees for 27 days in a row; about wildfires blazing in Mediterranean countries. Closer to home, I smelled acrid air in my own yard from Canadian wildfires hundreds of miles north and saw more watering bags going around the thin-trunked saplings that the city planted on boulevards to replace sturdier trees lost to Emerald Ash Borer.

But still, I went outside during our recent record heat wave. I like the heat. I’m a lifelong Minnesotan. We wait for months, from late October until mid-April, for warm weather. Even on the afternoon when it was 96 degrees, with an excessive heat warning, I stood by my decision not to cave on air-conditioning, to cave in to the popular notion that we couldn’t live without it.

Front-page news in the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune on July 28, 2023

Years earlier, when we were selling the family home in Northfield, I wouldn’t budge when the Realtor said the house would move more quickly — and fetch a higher price — if we installed central air. My family had lived comfortably in the house for 20 years. “There’s always one hot week in July when we hang out in the basement,” I told her. “Otherwise, we have plenty of cross breezes and ceiling fans. Find buyers who are green.”

And that’s the point. Minnesotans readily adapt to changing seasons. We think nothing of living differently in the winter: reading more, wearing layers of clothing, making stews and soups, staying home at night with Netflix. Similarly, we can find novel and healthful ways to stay cool, if we resist or cannot afford the immediate relief of air conditioning.

I sent my husband, who is less heat-tolerant than I am, to see Oppenheimer one evening this past week at our historic local movie theater. The next day, he wandered through the cool galleries at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

There is a long history of industry-funded “deflection campaigns” aimed to divert attention from big polluters and place the burden on individuals.

Michael E. Mann, Time magazine, September 12, 2019

I chose to embrace the weather, as I do during the winter: biking to my errands with an extra side of water and sunscreen; reading on the porch at night and watching vehicles sealed up like tombs against the heat. Moving more slowly, giving myself permission to push away from the computer and relax, to call a friend. Like a snow day in July.

This heat wave, now over, was of our own making: our driving, our air-conditioning, our consumerism, our conveniences. Personal habit change won’t solve the climate crisis, it is said. But right here, today, surveying what little I can control: I see it as the only choice we have.