One doesn’t get to be a queen at too young an age these days (except for the exquisite Rania of Jordan, who is the beautiful exception that proves this august rule).
So, as your eyes and ears in London’s Square Mile, I find my regal self clocking up my working decades and wondering just why the world is so damnably ageist about us females of stature. There are no female TV anchors on any prime time channel much over the age of forty, and I’ve cudgelled my brains trying to find any female wielding power in the professions who hasn’t had to sacrifice what passes for ‘normal’ life to get to where she is.
If you do have a ‘career break’ and dare to pop out a baby or two, it’s quite likely that you will be able to on-ramp afterwards, and that’s encouraging, given that in the past maternity was a death knell. Today, however, you can work your proverbial butt off when you get back in to work, but it will likely not be a long-haul journey. This is where sexism loses traction to ageism: It’s as though business thinks you’re past it when you’ve only just got back on track.
Naturally I got to thinking about my own regal experience of, erm, what’s politely called ‘middle age’:
- Since I turned forty (and even I started counting backwards from then) I have done the following:
- Run a marathon (New York. Doesn’t get any better than that);
- Climbed a mountain (Kilimanjaro. Ditto).
- Launched four teenagers into secondary/tertiary education without having managed to murder a single one of them, in spite of massive provocation;
- Carried on running a smallholding in the countryside/being a mom/wife/chief cook/laundress/nanny/chauffeuse/bank of last resort for small, impecunious people;
- Fought a household bank name through the High Courts for flouting its Data Protection obligations. In person. Without legal representation;
And much, much more.
Gee. Just writing all that makes me think I wouldn’t mind a quiet life. Unsure if I’d know what to do with it, but I wouldn’t mind a bit of a try. Perhaps in the form of a nice, full-time, fulfilling, paying job? I’ve been multi-tasking for decades now, and it’s become second nature. Now I’m not being woken every night by howling offspring, I’m calmer, more energetic, and, dare I say it, wiser.
So the point is: Age shall not wither us. I am far more organised and time-efficient now than I could ever have been in my twenties and thirties. This is because I have been there and done manic work/life imbalance, usually with a small person clinging to me at the time. It teaches you phenomenal focus.
Businesses are missing a trick when they dismiss (or fail to hire) mature talent. Look at the banks, as an example. If they’d had more mature workers who’d experienced more than one business cycle, d’you think they’d have piled all those eggs into the sub-prime basket? No. They wouldn’t. But if you look at the demographics of all the big research departments at bulge-bracket banks, I reckon the median age is thirty. Or under. Thirty-somethings are definitely spring chickens in a world where the older population is growing faster than its replacement.
This is a sexist remark: I believe women really are better at multitasking. My Consort is a brilliant analyst with a brain the size of the planet. But he can’t do more than one thing at a time without getting terribly stressed. Give him a scenario where he has to produce a report at the same time as feeding four under fives and emptying the dishwasher while de-flea-ing the dog (washing his hands included) is a recipe for meltdown.
Women just do it. Even if it means cleaning your teeth with the babe in a papoose while you sloosh out the shower and compose an article about Personal Injury Litigation all at the same time (I have done it, I promise). It teaches you to get priorities 100% ordered, and to make use of every nanosecond in every day. I know plenty managers who can’t do that…who are not hiring women ‘of a certain age’ in the numbers that you’d think they should.
So, when we multitaskers reach our post-baby years, where are we headed? We are so not ready for a rocking chair and the knitting that loomed over our grandmothers when they hit forty.
Employers should be beating a frenzied path to our doors. We aren’t going to go off and have kids all of a sudden. We’re reliable and unlikely to take sudden time off for chicken pox or the like. We’re uber-organised and hyper-efficient, and most of us have a good 20 years of decent work service still in us.
So why aren’t they clamouring for us? I must say it puzzles me massively.
Queen of the City: Burning the Career Candle at Both Ends
Queen of the CityThe resulting heartbreak for her young family, and consternation and sadness among colleagues at her law firm has been widely covered in the UK press.
Ms. Bailey was a partner dealing with banking and regulatory disputes, including Financial Services Authority investigations. The current economic crisis put her skills as a financial litigator to the forefront with a significantly increased workload. Returning to work six months after the birth of her third daughter into an environment where partners regularly worked 60+ hours a week, Ms. Bailey would probably also have had to take home work in the evenings and over weekends to keep up. Read more
NAFE Names Top Companies for Executive Women
Industry Leaders, Leadershipby Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)
The National Association for Female Executives has once again released their list of the top corporations for executive women-or as the site puts it, their “annual scrutiny of America’s corporations.” The 2009 list, which takes into account succession plans, metrics for managers, and commitment to bringing women into P&L posts, was expanded to include 50 companies instead of its usual ten. According to the organization, the pool of applicants increased so drastically over the past year that the expansion was necessary.
NAFE’s top ten list features some familiar faces, as well as a number of newcomers who made their presence and dedication to hiring and retaining female talent known this year. Here are the top ten companies for women, according to NAFE:
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Voice of Experience: Pam Flaherty, President, Citi Foundation
Featured, Voices of Experienceby Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)
At the age of 21, Pam Flaherty, President of Citi Foundation, was well on her way to achieving her childhood dream of becoming an ambassador. While waiting to get called up into a Foreign Service Officer class, she was accepted into the M.A. program in International Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. It was there that she learned more about the realities of life in the Foreign Service and decided, for a variety of reasons, that “it was not the way [she] wanted to go.”
Fluent in Arabic and French and still enamored with all things international, she obtained a position as an assistant to a very senior international monetary advisor at Citi in New York. She explained, “Citi [was a good fit because it] is a global company and was very receptive to people with odd kinds of backgrounds. I started out by doing economic research, which I knew a fair amount about [because economics was a heavy part of the requirements at John Hopkins]. But, from the moment I got here, I realized I was more intrigued by the business environment and solving business problems than by the research I was doing.”
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Ask-A-Career-Coach: How Do You Track Down Lost References?
Ask A Career CoachContributed by Caroline Ceniza-Levine of SixFigureStart
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Helping Female Leaders Succeed: Seven Best Practices
NewsWomen may be less likely to encounter blatant sexism on the job than in prior years, but a recent study suggests “modern sexism” is still keeping women from achieving the highest level of success in corporate America. Modern sexism is often defined as a more subtle form of discrimination that is deeply ingrained in a corporate culture and can be as, if not more, damaging than overt acts of gender bias. Authored by chief scientist Ann Howard and senior vice president Richard Wellins of Development Dimensions International, a consulting firm, the study is titled “Holding Women Back: Troubling Discoveries and Best Practices for Helping Female Leaders Succeed.”
Howard and Wellins’ work points out that despite the fact women represent more than half of all employees in the U.S. and the fact that women are graduating from high schools and colleges at a higher rate than men, they are not being promoted to high-level positions at the same rate as men. In fact, as women advance in their careers from early management to senior management, the number of women leaders drop off significantly.
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Voice of Experience: Janice Chaffin, President of the Consumer Business Unit, Symantec
Voices of ExperienceJanice Chaffin, Consumer Business Unit President at security giant Symantec, knows a little something about hard work. She got her first job at the very young age of fourteen, working her way up over time from cleaning person to receptionist in a doctor’s office.
Once in college at the University of California, San Diego, Chaffin took any job that came her way, including dishwashing, bookkeeping, acting as a Spanish-speaking tour guide at Disney World, and working as a medical school admissions office staffer, just to name a few. “Whatever I wound up becoming, I always knew I would work hard to achieve what I wanted, no matter what,” Chaffin said.
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In Case You Missed It: Business News Round-up
NewsIn case you were too busy to have kept up with all the news, contributor Martin Mitchell has gathered some important market events from last week to help you start this week well informed:
Economic Backdrop
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Passions: One Female Executive’s Double Life as a Monarch Maniac
PassionsMuch like the Monarch butterflies she loves so dearly, Monika Maeckle, vice president of new media at a large media company, has a personal journey spans many different regions. Her parents are German immigrants, who, like so many others, came to this country in search of a better life. The butterfly enthusiast grew up in suburban Dallas, where she loved the outdoors. “As a kid I spent a lot of time by a creek we called ‘the crashed up car.’ We’d have big, wild adventures. I’ve always been like this; I’ve always preferred the outdoors to anything else. I think it’s just a personality thing … well, that and the fact that mosquitoes don’t like me,” Maeckle said.
A career in communications hasn’t really proven to be the ideal profession for a self-described “Monarch maniac” who loves the outdoors, as a majority of Maeckle’s time as vice president of new media is spent in an office working at a computer. It actually may be a blessing in disguise that Maeckle discovered her passion for Monarchs so late in life; making this discovery any sooner may have derailed the illustrious media and marketing career that took her far from “the crashed up car” in her Dallas neighborhood. After her first job as a reporter, she moved to New York for a copy editing position, which eventually led to a long stint in Costa Rica where she worked as a freelance writer while her husband was employed by Newsweek Magazine. Upon returning to the States, the couple wanted to get back in touch with nature and be more “outdoorsy,” which was impossible in New York City.
Acquiring their Lucky Boy Ranch in Texas Hill Country has been one of the greatest things that could have ever happened to Maeckle, especially after she discovered it was located on the Monarch flight path.
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Queen of the City says a large Bah! to Age Discrimination
NewsSo, as your eyes and ears in London’s Square Mile, I find my regal self clocking up my working decades and wondering just why the world is so damnably ageist about us females of stature. There are no female TV anchors on any prime time channel much over the age of forty, and I’ve cudgelled my brains trying to find any female wielding power in the professions who hasn’t had to sacrifice what passes for ‘normal’ life to get to where she is.
If you do have a ‘career break’ and dare to pop out a baby or two, it’s quite likely that you will be able to on-ramp afterwards, and that’s encouraging, given that in the past maternity was a death knell. Today, however, you can work your proverbial butt off when you get back in to work, but it will likely not be a long-haul journey. This is where sexism loses traction to ageism: It’s as though business thinks you’re past it when you’ve only just got back on track.
Naturally I got to thinking about my own regal experience of, erm, what’s politely called ‘middle age’:
And much, much more.
Gee. Just writing all that makes me think I wouldn’t mind a quiet life. Unsure if I’d know what to do with it, but I wouldn’t mind a bit of a try. Perhaps in the form of a nice, full-time, fulfilling, paying job? I’ve been multi-tasking for decades now, and it’s become second nature. Now I’m not being woken every night by howling offspring, I’m calmer, more energetic, and, dare I say it, wiser.
So the point is: Age shall not wither us. I am far more organised and time-efficient now than I could ever have been in my twenties and thirties. This is because I have been there and done manic work/life imbalance, usually with a small person clinging to me at the time. It teaches you phenomenal focus.
Businesses are missing a trick when they dismiss (or fail to hire) mature talent. Look at the banks, as an example. If they’d had more mature workers who’d experienced more than one business cycle, d’you think they’d have piled all those eggs into the sub-prime basket? No. They wouldn’t. But if you look at the demographics of all the big research departments at bulge-bracket banks, I reckon the median age is thirty. Or under. Thirty-somethings are definitely spring chickens in a world where the older population is growing faster than its replacement.
This is a sexist remark: I believe women really are better at multitasking. My Consort is a brilliant analyst with a brain the size of the planet. But he can’t do more than one thing at a time without getting terribly stressed. Give him a scenario where he has to produce a report at the same time as feeding four under fives and emptying the dishwasher while de-flea-ing the dog (washing his hands included) is a recipe for meltdown.
Women just do it. Even if it means cleaning your teeth with the babe in a papoose while you sloosh out the shower and compose an article about Personal Injury Litigation all at the same time (I have done it, I promise). It teaches you to get priorities 100% ordered, and to make use of every nanosecond in every day. I know plenty managers who can’t do that…who are not hiring women ‘of a certain age’ in the numbers that you’d think they should.
So, when we multitaskers reach our post-baby years, where are we headed? We are so not ready for a rocking chair and the knitting that loomed over our grandmothers when they hit forty.
Employers should be beating a frenzied path to our doors. We aren’t going to go off and have kids all of a sudden. We’re reliable and unlikely to take sudden time off for chicken pox or the like. We’re uber-organised and hyper-efficient, and most of us have a good 20 years of decent work service still in us.
So why aren’t they clamouring for us? I must say it puzzles me massively.
Conference Focuses Spotlight on Challenges & Successes for Multicultural Women in Corporate America
Pipeline, What's OnBy Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)
In New York City last week, Working Mother Media hosted its annual Multicultural Women’s National Conference and Gala Awards Luncheon to honor 20 companies, including PwC, Goldman Sachs, KPMG, Citi, and American Express, as being the best companies for multicultural women. The event, which took place over two jam-packed days, featured powerful speakers, including the inspiring Irshad Manji, NYU professor and director of the Moral Courage Project, as well as multiple workshop sessions designed to assist attendees in their continued development into resilient and innovative leaders.
One of the more popular sessions, however, was the lunch session entitled “What about the White Guys?” at which the mostly multicultural, 99% female audience got to be “flies on the wall” and “eavesdrop” on a conversation among several male executives. Moderator Fenimore Fisher, the vice president of diversity initiatives at Wal-Mart/Sam’s Club, lead the discussion, posing probing questions to the white male panelists about their paths to embracing diversity, the importance of diversity in today’s workplace and the challenges multicultural women may still face in Corporate America.
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