Women in Careers

The old saying, "Success is getting what you want and happiness is wanting what you get" might well sum up the dilemma of many professional women. Certainly, many gladly make the sacrifices and adjustments necessary to get what they want. Maybe that's working until midnight in order to catch their son's afternoon soccer game. Or, hiring a nanny to help take care of the kids, or maybe it's not having kids at all.

Even though their lives may not be perfect, they're pleased with what their compromises have achieved.

Surveys tend to confirm a connection between success on the job and happiness. There's the recent study presented at a meeting of the American Sociological Association, which noted that mothers who go back to work within weeks of giving birth reported feeling more energetic and less depressed than those who spent months or years at home. Or the Gallup study released in May that found stay-at-home moms were more likely to experience stress, worry, anger, and sadness than those who worked paying jobs.

 

 

Other surveys, meanwhile, refute the notion that working moms are happier moms, like the one conducted by ForbesWoman and TheBump.com, which found that a growing number of women view staying home to be the ideal circumstance of motherhood. These examples, however, prove only that happiness surveys may be second only to infidelity surveys on the scale of unreliability. There are simply too many factors involved -- maybe just a bad week at the office, or a bad week at home -- to form certainty that a trend is a foot.

There are some hard statistics, however, that seem to indicate the needle is swinging farther in one direction than the other. A 2011 report by McKinsey Research pointed out that women are claiming 53 percent of entry-level management jobs. After that, the numbers drop: to 37 percent for mid-managers, and even lower, to 26 percent, for vice presidents and up. These shrinking numbers either mean that the glass ceiling is thicker and lower than we imagined, or that younger women on the way up are finding a way out -- or, quite possibly, both.

Now that more women than ever before are tasting professional success, there's no longer a question of whether a woman can succeed in "a man's world." Of course she can, and does. Instead, the question being asked, most usually by women, is this: What does success really mean? The reason more women ask is because the answer is likely more complex for them than it is for men. Gender intelligence expert Barbara Annis believes the definition of success for men is simple. It's winning. Success might come in the form of more money or a better job or a better parking space or a hotter wife. But success is about besting the competition, in any number of contests, period.