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Single Employed Female: The Invisible Years

I used to work at one of the largest corporate behemoths in the world. As small and insignificant as it can make a person feel to work at a company this size, there were certainly perks. The first year on the job I had three weeks of vacation--one week more than the typical two I'd had elsewhere. Half of my gym membership was paid. The cafeteria food was actually good, and subsidized. Our department had an automatic coffee machine with good coffee; the pantry was full of an unlimited supply of fig newton bars (the Fat-Free ones, as per my request). I was outfitted by an ergonomic specialist and had black puffy things surrounding my work area. I was paid more than I had asked to be when I interviewed. I suppose they couldn't go that low in good conscience, even if I'd asked for it.

The first year I wasn't yet aware that I hated the job. I was a magazine addict and fed off one of the other major bennies of the company, free subscriptions to the company's 20+ titles and heavily discounted CDs. I went to shows at MOMA for half off. And, by virtue of working at this media behemoth, I could attend parties, and people would talk to me, thinking I might get them published. It took nearly two years before I realized how tired I was from nights of insomnia, particularly on Sunday nights, and that I was a jaw-dropping size four because my nerves burned off more calories than I consumed.

"It's hard to believe you were so unhappy," my girlfriend tells me, when we remember those days. "You looked phenomenal!"

Looking phenomenal was, in fact, my job, not being an editor, per se. I'd made enough money at that point to step up the wardrobe and look, for the first time in my life, like a woman, not just a girl. I had a bevy of professionals to help me, including a hair stylist, a colorist, a career coach, a massage therapist. There was one professional that I was lacking, however: a mentor.

Paralyzed: The Life of the Mid-Career Woman, The Final Chapter--At Least for Now

While in a career exploration phase, I was referred to a woman with an unusual first name (privacy issues prevent me from sharing her name, so I’ll make one up—“Rourke.”) “Rourke” also had a very strange last name, “Annette”. When a friend had given me her contact information I thought, “what an unusual name.” I was eager to speak with her; she had risen in the ranks of the field I was exploring, organizational psychology, and was now an established practitioner and professor.

I called her, not sure what to ask. I didn’t know if I could accomplish what I wanted—to be a leadership consultant—with a Masters in OD. I had been told that many people with an OD degree go into human resources—something I didn’t want to do; only a sliver of them consult. I was almost certain that this woman would try to talk me into working in a corporate HR department. Her advice wasn’t what I expected.

We set up a time to talk on the phone. Immediately after our hello’s I commented on her name.

“Rourke Annette is so unusual; I like it,” I said.

“That’s not my real name,” she said. “It’s really Annette Rourke.”

I figured she just wanted to be different, but I asked her anyway, “So why did you change it?”

“Back when I was in school, twenty-some-odd years ago, there were no women in my field. I wanted the good jobs, but I wasn’t going to get in the door being a woman, so I changed my name.”

It chilled me to think that, even now, when women are getting key positions in what was considered a man’s field, she still went by her pseudonym.

I was wondering whether I should get my credentials on the East Coast, where I had been accepted into a program at a “name” school, or do a commuter program in the Bay Area, where I was and still am living.

“Don’t do the commuter program,” Rouke said, “You need the name behind you.”

“But if I get the education, why does it matter?”

“It will always matter for you, for us. We need all the degrees and prestige we can get because we are women, and we’ll always have to do better, be better, to be on par with men in the corporate world.”

This advice sounds so generalized when it’s offered up like that. But honestly, isn’t that the philosophy by which so many of us women subconsciously abide when making our choices? We won’t always have the luxury of picking the best schools, or the best companies to work for, but we always have that lingering feeling that, perhaps, if we just stick it out a little bit more than men we might get an equal reward.

Paralyzed: The Life of the Mid-Level Career Woman (Part IV)

Nope, I'm not done yet...

For women who decide that they want to leave the corporate world there are two options: one that I mentioned earlier, full-time motherhood (or in the cases of those who can afford to leave but who don’t want kids, full-time philanthropy) or entrepreneurship.

A woman I know started her own IT consulting company in the wake of the imploding tech boom. What balls. Here most of us were sending 200-300 resumes to companies for underpaying contract positions in the Bay Area, and she just up and decides to start a company.

I asked her how she did it. She looked at me, as if to say, “What did I do?”

“I just started the business,” she said. I’m sure that hard work and brains helped move things along, but what was key is what she didn't have, what so many women (and men, too, I suppose) feel they must have—total security and a guarantee of a payoff—before taking the leap.

Paralyzed: The Life of the Mid-Level Career Woman (Part III)

I read in Laura D’Andrea Tyson’s column in Business Week that women at the top of corporations are making just as much money as their male counterparts. That’s great news! The not-so-great news is that the River Styx separates Carly Fiorina from us bright, professional girls, who lack the proper floatation devices we’ll need to get across the cruddy waters of career advancement.

It’s a long journey, and a lot of us “career women” are not only getting tired, we’re resenting Ann Taylor and the drop-everything attitudes we need to get there.

I don’t have a piece of gold jewelry, a tweed two-piece, or a sensible haircut. Frankly it’s not my style. And I like my weekends! And I like wearing Campers to work! I’m not sure how I turned out like this, a dissenter. It just happened eventually; I started going to work to work, to earn a paycheck, not to tread the path to Carlydom.

Paralyzed: The Life of the Mid-Level Career Woman (Part II)

Recently I read an article by Lisa Belkin in The New York Times Magazine about women with advanced degrees who had left the rat race permanently to raise their families. My first instinct was to feel envious of them. They had obviously married high-earning partners and could afford to live on only one income. And they had, politely, given it to the man by bowing out of his race.

At the end of the article one of the women answers the rhetorical question, “Why don’t women run the world?”

“In a way,” she said, “we do.”

I wouldn’t disagree, but what about the rest of us working women who are single and childless? We don’t have the contingency plan of raising a family and living our passions rent-free. Even those of us who are open to investing in our careers question whether we want to climb long, steep, career ladders—with noticeable rungs missing for time taken off—that promise nothing except the straight and narrow. Just look at a March, 2004, Business Week cover story on newly appointed Young & Rubicam CEO Ann Fudge. The story is almost entirely devoted to whether or not she will succeed at her post. She has the background and expertise, but she took two years off for personal reasons for Chrissakes! And the corporate world wonders, can she cut it? Is she stable enough to hold down such a position if she can take valuable career-building time for such soft pursuits as personal development?

Of course, Fudge is now more ready than ever to handle the rigors of being CEO, but the story suggests that, to the Corporate Powers that Be, career ladders become wobbly if we don’t continue to climb unquestionably.

Paralyzed: The Life of the Mid-Level Career Woman (Part I in a Five Part Series, or until I feel like stopping)

My sister Julie called me today. She didn’t have much to say; I think she just wanted to hear my voice. The voice of someone less encumbered and who doesn’t have it all.

“How’s it going out there?” I asked her. I live on the opposite coast.

“Fine,” she said, unconvincingly. “Making it work.”

“That’s great. I knew you would.”

“We can always find a way to make everything work,” Julie said, trailing off. She’s exhausted and I can hear the apprehension in her voice. “I guess I just never expected this.”

“Expected what?”

“My situation.”

What was she talking about? My sister’s life has been on a tremendous uptick. After years of graduate school and living like a pauper in pursuit of a Ph.D. in history, and after years of low-paying adjunct positions and interviewing at universities in towns you can’t find on a map, she’s found a position with a respectable degree of prestige, pay, and, yes, tenure.

Granted, her husband is firmly entrenched at his law firm in Boston, and her new job is in New York, but she understands the need to sacrifice, at least a little while longer, and endure the long commute. Granted, they’d just bought a house outside of Boston the week before my sister was offered the position, but family has offered to help out by providing my sister with a place to stay in New York three nights a week so they won’t have to sell the house.

There’s just that other niggling detail, the real sticking point—her one year old.