Women’s Career Shapes As Model for Ageing Workforces

Recognising The Power & Potential of the New Q3

Changing The World, Again

From the Archive. This article was first published in Harvard Business Review. It’s reproduced here for paid subscribers.

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Careers are often depicted as having two phases: a steady climb upward towards commercial success, fame and power, which is then capped by a period of continuing effort dedicated to service to others. Case in point: David Brooks wrote a book about later life, called The Second Mountain, in which he describes the turn toward others and giving back that comes after the ego-driven, me-focused phase of first adulthood. Especially as life spans and careers get longer, this shape is codified in prestigious programs like Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative, or Stanford’s Distinguished Careers Institute, which offer 60-year-olds a year to pivot from profit to purpose. We now accept this pattern as the norm.

Still-Gendered Career Shapes

But for many women, the reality is exactly the reverse. It’s the first half of their lives that is spent balancing professional growth with serving and caring for a variety of others — children, parents, communities — and the second half that affords them the possibility of prioritising their own voices and ambitions. Many younger women feel trapped while in the first stage; for them, the existence of the second is welcome news. And as men’s career paths begin to look more like women’s, businesses and policy makers will need to take this alternative pattern into account for all their employees.

The conflicting demands on younger professional women are well documented but worth reiterating. Women are (still) socialised to spend the first half of their lives taking care of everyone else. Even the most liberated, educated and ambitious women often find themselves caught in care roles they can’t avoid because political systems, priorities and corporate career management weren’t designed with them in mind.

Old Question: Who’s Gonna Take Care of The Kids?