The Other (Gen. Y) Woman
According to headlines of late, “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood.” In that hotly debated New York Times article, the lead paragraph lauded Cynthia Liu for her high school academic achievements that landed her coveted spot at Yale —1510 SAT; 4.0 grade point average—and a host of other accomplishments, and then delivered the now predictable punch line that she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, albeit a very accomplished one.
The other storyline that’s percolating is some variety of the Gen. Y woman as 'slacker, entitled, and coddled.' When Jeff Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal reporter, tackled the subject of how four different generations of women are trying to coexist in the workplace, Nina McLemore, founder of Liz Claiborne Accessories, weighed in, contributing to this viewpoint: “Twentysomethings were coddled as girls—chauffeured from play date to play date—and now want to be coddled on the job.”
Hypothesizing on the source of Gen. Y-er's reluctance to put in those eighty-hour weeks, McLemore said, “"Some are less interested in putting in long hours because they've seen their mothers do it, and they don't want that stress. I've heard this from women in all industries again and again."
So now that we’ve gotten that off our chests—that there are some Gen. Y women who want a lot of fancy degrees and not a career and expect the workplace to indulge them like their Boomer parents who clapped when they got out of bed in the morning—we can move on to talk about the other Gen. Y woman.
I’ve met her. Or rather over a hundred of her while I was writing my book, New Girl on the Job: Advice from the Trenches. And yes, many young women did express frustration over “paying their dues,” but it was just that—frustration—not an unwillingness to work hard and put in the hours. More importantly, their career calculus was not “engagement ring equals life of leisure.”
My growing pile of business cards from young women who are making one of the fastest and unprecedented career ladder ascents in history is a testament to that. The 25-year-old producer at Oprah & Friends, the 24-year-old art dealer, the 27-year-old licensed therapist, the 26-year-old public relations director, not to mention the legions of soon-to-be lawyers and doctors.
So why doesn’t a national headline ever read, “Many determined young women set early and very successful career paths?” That’s a headline that wouldn’t pan out as conjecture. While it’s too early to tell what Gen. Y women will do when they get married and have children, the early data is very promising.
According to the 2006 Lifetime Women’s Pulse Poll—a survey of three generations of American women—Gen Y-ers were the least likely to say they’d leave their careers behind if they didn’t need a paycheck.
In fact, as I’ve seen my peers take the next step up from their underpaid entry-level jobs (full disclosure: I’m one month shy of my 25 birthday), I’ve heard a chorus of, “This is pretty great.” Not an echo of, “This is great. I’m going to give it all up when I get married and have children.”
The workplace is at a watershed point for women. If Barron’s predictions are correct, by 2010 a woman has a one-in-seven chance of having a powerful position.
So meet the other Gen. Y woman (there are 35 million of us) someone you’ll probably encounter as your financial planner, newspaper editor, doctor, or CEO in the not-so-distant future.