Womenomics in your own life begins by taking all of the groundbreaking information from chapters 1 and 2—our business clout and our mass frustration at being boxed in—and using it to redefine success. We want to show you how to see your value through a whole different lens. We want you to work less but achieve more and live better. And, no, it’s not a pipe dream. It’s remarkably possible. We want to make sure that you go through such a profound mental shift that once you put down this book you will never again see achievement as hours in the seat, rungs on the ladder, and a fancy business title. It’s all too easy to be influenced by other people’s perceptions of what you should do. We’re going to teach you to carve out a whole new, more satisfying path and write your own rules for success.

Stephanie Hampton was the public face of the hotel franchise giant Marriott International. As spokesperson, her job involved managing the public image of a megacorporation through a nonstop flow of communication with news outlets and industry journalists covering the company. For years Stephanie was basically on call, working ten-or even twelve-hour days and not stopping when the weekend finally arrived. Stephanie’s talents and unceasing dedication didn’t go unnoticed. After more than a decade of intense work, Marriott executives came to value her as an important part of the company. The corporate ladder that she’d been eyeing for years now seemed more like a cushy executive elevator that Marriott management was politely holding open for her. But one day something happened that fundamentally changed Stephanie’s attitude to work.

“I had my annual performance review. I had spent the last year working very long hours, trying to do it all. But for the first time in my career I didn’t get the top rating. I was doing well, but not perfect! And somehow it led to my “ah-ha” moment, as Oprah says. And I thought, ‘Why am I killing myself?’ I just had this moment and I thought, ‘There’s more to life than work.’”

For Stephanie, that mental reevaluation produced a very practical change in her life.

“I thought, ‘You know what, I want to have children. I don’t want to be fifty or sixty and look back and think all I did was work.’ And that’s when, for the first time, I actually put some parameters around the hours that I worked. And then once I really did that, I was able to get pregnant because I had been trying to conceive for a while but I was too stressed-out.”

Stephanie chilled out at work, conceived, had her first child, and then got pregnant with her second. It was at the retirement party for Stephanie’s boss—the executive vice president for communications—that Stephanie was reminded that a few years earlier she’d said that one day she’d have the top job. “Do you still want it?” she was asked. Stephanie didn’t need to think twice. She wouldn’t rule it out forever, but right now it was definitely not on her radar. “Ohhh, no.” She almost shuddered.

With young children in the house, the demands of her current position were already enough. “Your priorities in life change, and I’m so glad that they did.”

In the political minefield that is the female career track, Stephanie’s realization is sometimes seen as controversial. “How can she possibly admit to not wanting the very top?” some feminists cry in horror. But we suspect that Stephanie is simply voicing what so many millions of career women are feeling: We actually don’t want to make it to the very top of the ladder if it costs us so much else in our lives. We realize the price of not aiming for the very top may well be not getting to the very top. Or that it might take a lot longer. But that’s fine with most of us.

It can be a frightening personal confrontation with your ego, but once it’s done, new vistas open up. Like Stephanie, you too probably realize that what you have isn’t what you really want: a job that doesn’t leave you so stressed-out that you have no life, a job that doesn’t demand so much you find yourself drawn inevitably to the brink of that agonizing choice of career or kids, where kids usually win. So here’s where we get to the nitty-gritty and explain how you can actually get this sane fit. Watch as all that business theory, all those numbers and surveys, get put into practice to transform your day-to-day life.

There are two parts to this process. The first is mental. The second is practical. And no, sorry, you can’t skip straight to chapters 5, 6, and 7 and get the quick fix. You really do have to go through the mental adjustment. Without it, you won’t be able to take the practical steps necessary to change your life.

How critical is it? Run through a situation that will feel familiar. We’ve all been there.

Pre-Womenomics Workplace Scenario

Post-Womenomics Workplace Victory

If you’d had a real handle on your mental game, you wouldn’t have even hesitated to go home in the first place. You would have known that the confidence—in yourself and in your work—that you would show by approaching your boss, giving a quick rundown of where everything stands, and saying good-bye would outshine almost every other consideration. You don’t want your boss to think you’re not a hard worker, but think about it, you spent plenty of time already proving you are one. By going home, resting, spending some time with your family, and relaxing, you’ll be able to come back tomorrow and show your boss the same thing again.

The outlasting-the-boss game is just one example of what happens when our priorities get muddied by our perception of someone else’s priorities. But escaping that trap takes a major mental adjustment that involves really knowing what you want from life and work. It’s about defining your goals, and pruning other people’s. For well-educated, ambitious, committed women this mental process can be harder than anything else we’re going to ask you to do in this book. But once you have it, you will have slain the ego dragon and be on your way to a saner, more integrated, more satisfying existence. Ready?

Let’s start with that age-old question:

What do you really want from life?

Warning! Do not put down this book and mutter disapprovingly about the uselessness of New Age psychobabble. We get very practical very fast. Trust us.

When you are seventy years old, looking back at your many productive years, what will make you feel good about the life you’ve led? What do you need to do now to maximize satisfaction and minimize regrets?

OK—are you starting to see our thinking?

Chances are that if you’ve picked up this book, your feelings about work are complicated, just as they are for hundreds of well-educated women we know. You saw those numbers in chapter 2. You, like most of us, want a job that satisfies you intellectually but leaves you enough time to lead a fulfilling personal life as well. That’s your long-buried need. And it should be your clear definition of success. But the truth is that for most of us it’s not that easy. We rebel against it because it’s not the “traditional” way of doing things.

But have you ever stopped to wonder why most of us are so inherently uncomfortable with the “work till you drop to make it to the top” model? Even as we feel we should be pursuing it? Let us suggest the following: we are uncomfortable with it because it doesn’t fit who we are. It never has. Because it’s not success as defined by women, for women. It’s somebody else’s version of a successful life. Somebody of a different gender. It’s not what we want.

Don’t panic. If a less hierarchical concept of success sounds appealing to you, it doesn’t mean you aren’t ambitious, smart, professional, or committed. Far from it. You want to remain engaged in your professional life. You don’t really want to sit in a playroom and sing nursery rhymes all day, but you do want more time for your life. It is nothing to be ashamed of.

Saying I want some life with my work—or even, I want some work with my life—is not renouncing your ideals; it’s understanding, accepting, and embracing your fundamental desires.

And don’t be hard on yourself if you’re already finding this exercise in honesty exhausting and troubling. Don’t stop now, even if you feel that such thoughts are heretical, maybe even disloyal. We know, because we’ve been through it, that it is surprisingly hard to turn down the noise of social and professional expectations and tune in to a clear, confident, and personal definition of success.

We have a list of questions we’ve put together over the years that has helped us find our right track. It’s a list we still run through every time we face a career change or feel we’re off course or risk going off course. If someone offers us a new job, or our boss asks us to take on a new challenge, we go back to this list. It’s our “Womenomics gut check.”

So here we go. You may need to put aside a quiet afternoon to think about this, or mull it over for a few days or even weeks. And remember, it only works if you answer with absolute honesty.

Once you’ve wrestled with these questions as honestly and clearly as you can, you should have made a pretty good start at unearthing your core preferences. You may, in fact, see the pattern. Success, for most of us, is not necessarily earning top dollar or amassing top status; it’s a complex, nuanced web of personal and professional goals. Finally coming to terms with that can feel like the moment when Dorothy lands in Oz—shades of gray dissolve to reveal a vibrant world of possibility. We can define our own success. And that—let us tell you—is real power.

You may well find that the answers to these questions change at different stages of your life, but the point of the exercise doesn’t. These gut-check questions will provide you with a definition of what you want and, just as importantly, will keep you on the right track. Every time you make a professional decision, run through the survey. See how the job or career change you are contemplating stacks up against your answers. Does it fit them? If not it probably isn’t the right move for you. It may be, later on, but not now. And go back to these questions whenever you feel anxious about keeping your life sane. You will find they act as a reassuring guide.

Of course simply knowing what we really want doesn’t get us to the finish line. Many women may understand they are not working according to their own true goals, but they still don’t take action—because that would mean pushing through a thicket of ego, financial, and even feminist barricades. But keep reading. You’ll see that most of these walls will topple with just a tap.

Face Your Fears

Linda Brooks is a true pioneer. She’s a super-brainiac, an honors graduate of an elite law school, and a partner at a top New York law firm. But she’s a new kind of partner—an “80 percent” partner. After years of slogging through her work-to-the-max schedule, Linda now has every Friday off. It might not sound so radical, but in the hard-driven New York legal profession, hers is a remarkable situation. And her demand for change had nothing to do with children or family.

“I was in my early thirties and had no marriage, no boyfriend because I was married to my job; I didn’t even have a plant that’s alive. And so you start going to therapy and they’re telling you, ‘You’re identifying too much with your work’ and you kind of see the problem, but you just can’t escape it. So I start slowly thinking, ‘Well, I don’t see anything changing here. I don’t see anything getting any better if I don’t make a big change.’”

Linda (we had to change her name because her arrangement is so unusual that she’s still worried about rocking the boat) is thrilled now with her Fridays-off change, one that she says is giving her time for yoga, dancing lessons, and to work on a book.

But by far the most difficult part of the process was taming her fear that reduced hours would inevitably mean reduced status. “The things we tell ourselves—it’s like compounding the negative talk when you’re trying to work less. It’s an amplifier. Every single little mistake you make, you say ‘Oh my God! My career is over! What have I done, this is the most ridiculous thing, I’m going to lose all my clients. If I were a client, why would I ever pick someone that may be out on a Friday when I need them.’”

You, like Linda, have probably come to the realization that something needs to change. The next psychological step is to understand that a change in status won’t spike your career. In fact, it may not affect it much at all.

“I really enjoy my job now when I’m doing it, but it’s not everything anymore. I just have other aspects of my personality that are starting to develop. I’m learning what I like to do!” she exclaims.

Maria Souder has always been competitive, with her school-mates, her friends, even herself. She flew through Georgia Tech with honors. And she was always planning. “After five years I’ll do this, and after two more years I’ll do this. I had always been structured at school. I wanted to graduate with high honors or I wanted to be a part of this organization and I wanted to be successful in this and be known on campus for that.” She smiles. Maria became an engineer and got her MBA while working at Georgia Power. One of the few women climbing up the ladder in a male-dominated field, she relished the pace, the crises, the twelve-hour days, until she had baby Xavier. “I actually started to break out in spots,” she remembers, “just dealing with the stress I was putting on myself to succeed and do everything to perfection.” The thirty-two-year-old decided a few years ago to make a dramatic change. She’d give up her almost certain shot at becoming plant manager and move into environmental affairs—still challenging, but off the main macho track of power generation.

“I was very scared, because I was stepping out from a structure that I knew,” she explains. “You have expertise and achievement and then all of a sudden you put the brakes on and change directions. And I think that probably was a shock—maybe to some other people as well.”

Yes, it can be frightening. And again, we are hard-core realists. You will give something up. Eventually it won’t seem like a sacrifice, and it won’t seem like the psychic earthquake Maria describes, but it will take some time to get to that point. One of the greatest challenges is simply overcoming your own demons about what scaling back might mean. Almost all of our Womenomics women have put themselves through some sort of drill to help face down their fears. Ours is called the Womenomics “what if” exercise. The point? Not necessarily to uncover clear answers to our “what ifs” but rather to embrace that long-held psychological view that simply confronting fears takes away most of the scare.

Pour yourself a drink. This exercise is tough—a grisly, grown-up version of a haunted house ride. We’re going to zip through all of those bone-chilling, worst-case scenario consequences that pop up in the dark corners of your mind when you consider kicking down the ladder. With the lights on, you’ll usually see your fears are nothing more than dime-store skeletons with good sound effects.

Strap in, and let’s get started.

You get the picture. Put your own spin on this line of questioning and interrogate yourself until you reach Geneva Convention Limits or you run out of alcohol. And no, this isn’t gratuitous torture. By working through exactly what might happen, or rather what you fear might happen, you will come to see the very worst is not at all likely. And that is a critical realization. If you don’t confront the fears that lurk in your head and ruthlessly unmask them, these nebulous dark feelings can balloon completely out of proportion and paralyze you. Irrational fear may be the worst enemy of Womenomics.

By doing this exercise you’ll have a better grasp of what might actually happen, and be prepared for it. But you’ll likely see that the consequences aren’t such a big deal.

Oh, sure, your boss might not immediately give you the ideal schedule (not to mention absolute freedom). We’ve both faced considerable detours on our journeys. And what we’ve found is that the very worst thing that can happen when you ask for more time is that they say no. No broken bones, no firings. All the rest can be handled. But a practice run-through of the gauntlet of judgment you might face is essential survival training.

Bottom line: once you really feel comfortable with what you want, these “worst-case scenarios” actually don’t bother you so much. You tune out the raised eyebrows and the hallway commentary. And then, guess what, something else happens: people get back to their own career concerns and the gossip about you stops.

Even a super high achiever like eBay’s former CEO, Meg Whitman, has gone through the process of bucking the corporate culture and setting her own parameters. Whitman was working as a young, ambitious management consultant at Bain & Company when she had her first child. (She didn’t even dare tell her boss until she was seven months pregnant—you see, times are changing!) After her son was born she made an executive decision that was almost unheard of in that high-octane business world: she would leave every day at a reasonable hour. “I said, short of crisis, I am going to actually walk out of here at five-thirty,” she told us. “I did not want to hang around as so many of the guys were.” Still, she was concerned. “It was very social, it was very young, not too many of the guys had kids and I was worried about that.”

But Whitman found an unexpected psychological benefit to her new baby-enforced hours—she felt liberated. “In my mind I had a little excuse for not making partner. I sort of said, ‘OK if I don’t make partner it is because I have made this family tradeoff.’ And it had a really interesting effect. I got 20 percent more efficient and actually gained confidence because I had let myself off the hook in a funny way.”

Solving the Status Trap

There is one little hitch in this process of redefining success on our own terms. Or for some of us, one stubborn, out-size hitch. Our egos. Even if you feel the satisfaction and clarity of knowing what you really want, and you understand it won’t mean the end of your professional life, your ego, well nurtured as a successful professional woman, will keep popping up to undermine your evolution.

Ego can, of course, be a powerful and positive force in life. But the status trap forms when we start to measure ourselves by standards not truly our own. Evaluating your life by someone else’s goals provides just enough drive to keep going—to seek the next promotion, the bigger bonus, the nicer car, or the better job title—but it doesn’t provide enough satisfaction to make you happy. You’ve probably experienced the feeling of getting a raise, a promotion, or a nice bonus, and instead of being elated, as you expected, you feel a bit let down. The shiny new thing that you earned seems, in hindsight, more like bait than a reward. And what you now face is more hours, more meetings, more stress—and less of what you truly enjoy.

The status trap is like a pool of professional quicksand that, the farther into it you get, the more it pulls. The force that sucks you in is a mental one that springs from your sense of responsibility, your desire to do “more and better,” your personal connections at work, and, simply, your misguided ego. Getting out of the professional quicksand requires that you first become aware that you’re in it. And then you can employ a set of concrete defenses that will let you defeat the status trap altogether.

When we first met her, Christine Heenan was being asked to interview for a top job running Harvard University’s communications and public affairs departments. Christine had spent the last seven years running her own communications company in Rhode Island. She was also teaching at Brown, where she used to be a senior administrator, and before that had worked in the Clinton White House. Up in Rhode Island, she had been feeling left out of that alpha loop.

“I remember being at a wedding in Quebec with former colleagues from the White House. There were lots of women my age I reconnected with at this wedding who were doing fascinating things. There was one who’d just finished law school and was now working on human trafficking issues. There was another who was head of communications for NBC and did all sorts of incredible things, and I sort of felt, ‘Oh, let me tell you about my boys Alex and Colin.’ Don’t get me wrong, I am so proud of my kids and proud of what I’ve done professionally with my company, but without question, in my field, there is just this professional corridor from New York to D.C. that I was outside of.”

So when that interest came from Harvard, Christine was flattered. It was an ego-boosting call from her previous top-tier life. It was also, ego aside, a very appealing job. But Christine had spent years in Rhode Island building a career that gave her a perfect fit between her office life and her home life; she had made workplace flexibility a real cornerstone of her company, and she was very reluctant to give up that freedom. The Harvard job would mean working for someone else again, with someone else’s hours. It would mean good-bye to control, and hello to corporate restraints. She was torn.

“One of my reactions was relief.” She says, “I’m glad I’m still thought of for a job like that. I’m glad I haven’t taken myself out of sight for those kinds of professional opportunities.”

But as Christine looked her ego solidly in the eye, she realized she didn’t need the Harvard job. She told the recruiters it was a dream job for her, but a dream that would be best to pursue once her children were older.

Sarah Slusser is a divorced and remarried forty-five-year-old mother of two boys and a senior vice president at AES, an energy company in Virginia, where she puts together deals to build power plants all over the world. She is smart, effective, and would be a big catch for any high-powered financial firm. Sarah works in a world of multimillion-dollar business transactions. She is very good at what she does and could make significantly more than her current salary if she switched to any number of financial firms. She should know, because she’s in the habit of having to turn down well-paying job offers—and every time she does, she finds it’s hard on her ego.

“The ego issue, it’s very difficult,” Sarah acknowledges. “When I’m having lunch with friends, it’s fine. It’s when I’m at work that it’s harder to reconcile. I used to lead a team, but I scaled back, and now I don’t. You sit in these meetings with people who are executive vice presidents and you know you could do the job just as well but you’ve chosen not to, in order to have time for the kids. It is hard.”

Sarah has a tip for reconciling her professional ambition and shaken ego with her decision not to take those promotions. “I deal with it by frequently reminding myself of why I’ve made these choices—of all the reasons for not being at the position I was before. I keep telling myself it’s worth it, so that I can pick my son up from school or whatever. But I do have to remind myself.”

The very fact that our energy star entertains these offers is testament to her ambition. And maybe the offers themselves, even if they’re not accepted, serve as a useful psychological boost. “I think that’s why I like getting these job offers,” Sarah says. “Maybe it’s part of why I entertain them. It feels good to be wanted. I’ve just been appointed director of the board of a New York hedge fund I worked with—when they sent me the press release, it felt good. I hadn’t realized they were going to send out a press release. And it was nice.”

But Sarah is clear: while her two boys are still young, she won’t move, even for a job that recently offered her multiples of her current salary.

“You earn flexibility by staying at one organization and rising up and that then becomes really hard to trade in. Really hard,” she says. “Anyway, you only need so much money, right?”

The important part of this mind adjustment is not just knowing what you want and what you don’t want, but it is also living that realization day to day.

 

KATTY Ego is a big, big problem in television. Our careers feed off being seen. The more recognized we are, the more wellknown we become, the more our organizations value us and the more they pay us. It is a seductive and very slippery slope. Because once you’ve tasted a little fame, you tend to want more, and as with all addictive confections, there can never be enough. Soon you are trading far too much to get your pixilated features on a TV screen. As my television career began to expand I discovered the pitfalls of this status seduction. People began to recognize me. Not Katie Couric recognize of course, but just occasionally someone in the local Safeway or someone in the airport check-in line would say, “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?” or, even, “Wow, I’m such a fan. I just love your British accent/pink jacket/new hairdo, or (rarely) your views on politics.” I have to admit, though I’m embarrassed to do so, I liked it. It made me feel somehow important, and I stupidly started to fall for the dumb idea that if more people recognized me, I wouldn’t just feel more important I would actually be more important. This made me susceptible to job offers that clearly fell way outside my personal goal posts. Sure, I’d muse, I can work sixty-hour weeks, fifty-two weeks a year, be on call round the clock if it just gets me more of those pixels and the prospect of my face on the back of that bus. Believe me, I understand the draw of ego. And even now, when I’m offered more airtime or more blog time I still have to deal with the internal battle between the demon voice of my ego and the sensible voice of my life-balance. I can still be seduced by the flattery of my boss saying how great it is that his boss wants more of me on air. And I still have to go back to our gut check and assess whether this new offer really suits my life. Fortunately the voice of life-balance usually wins over the voice of ego and ends up shouting, “Are you CRAZY? You have too much on your plate already, just get a grip!” I try to listen to that voice.

The Ego Reboot

Whenever you have one of those inevitable ego moments, thinking to yourself what you could have achieved, how much you might be earning, whose former office and job title you could be brandishing, you should stop yourself and hit the ego REBOOT button.

Ego is a natural and healthy thing, but to make sure the influence of your ego stays positive, you need to focus it correctly. This is what the Ego Reboot is all about.

The process of getting back on track begins with pausing to recognize that you’re starting to fall down the rabbit hole of an egotistical fantasy—otherwise known as an ego trip.

Then think honestly about the day-to-day nitty-gritty that you would have to endure to even have a shot of achieving whatever accolade or position your ego is driving you to think about. Think about the hours, the bosses, the meetings, the exhaustion, and all the other things we already know too well.

Finally, visualize one (or more) of the positive, tangible things that taking a different approach to your life makes possible. It might be a morning run, dinner with your kids, or simply having time to read a book. The trick is to actually picture these things in your mind.

So, the three steps of the Ego Reboot:

1. Pause and Recognize that you’re going on an ego trip.
2. Realize the Day-to-Day Reality of what you’re fantasizing about.
3. Visualize the Positives of newfound free time and a more balanced life.

As with anything else, if you practice this three-step process a few times it will start to become natural, and in time, your ego’s yearning for the things it previously valued will be transformed into a feeling of satisfaction with the new positives that you’ve earned.

Confronting the Feminist Ideal

Here’s another and rather unexpected piece in the mental challenge—how to handle our debt to our pioneering feminist forebears. It’s a complicated relationship—part gratitude, part admiration, part guilt, part rejection. We know that women thirty years ago fought hard to get all of us a seat at the table. They fought so hard that they couldn’t let up. They built a model of women as equal to men, pulling sixty-hour weeks without a murmur of complaint. They’ve brought women to the forefront of fields as diverse as business, academics, politics, and journalism. We are all in their debt for taking those early difficult steps and demanding the right and opportunity to take them.

But that doesn’t mean that the way they worked, and had to work, is right for most of us now. The work pace that enabled them to break down those boardroom doors was necessary at the time, but today we have other choices. We both still think of ourselves as feminists, but it’s a new brand of feminism we adhere to. It is a feminism that finally allows us to build our own work-life model, one that permits us to be who we really want to be.

So here’s your challenge. As you attempt to make positive changes in your life, you may encounter skepticism or criticism from some of your elders, those who’ve been in the trenches.

Or you may simply feel such an immense sense of understandable loyalty to these women that you don’t want to “let them down.” Or you may feel committed to the “we must be exactly equal” school of feminist thinking, and you may struggle with what seems to be inequality.

When you find yourself in the middle of this feminist tangle, real or imagined, remember the following:

• Plenty of new research, as you saw in chapter 2, supports the conclusion that women are wired to enjoy a different version of success.
• Women are now in a position where we are able not only to participate in the working world but also to influence it and change it. What could possibly be more empowering as a woman than not just to sit at the table but also to change the way it looks, based on our own perspectives as women? Isn’t that a feminist breakthrough as well?
• Finally, it is natural to focus on the women before us—the ones who paved the way, and who are often our bosses! But you need to think about another group just as important: the young women who come after us. Having the boldness to choose a life that you want for yourself is not a selfish move. In fact, like the feminists before us, confronting and surmounting our new challenges as women gives the next generation of women another level of choices and another layer of freedom so that they can live exactly the kind of life they want to live.

Turning Costs into Benefits

By now, you’ve realized that there are enormous benefits to re-shaping your life to suit your real wants and needs. Of course, where there’s a benefit there’s also a cost. Quantifying these costs and benefits is a difficult and highly personal task. While we can’t crunch the individual numbers for you, we can definitely help you look at the problem through the right lens. And that is critical, because the heart of Womenomics is really about seeing the world in a new way.

For starters, the notion of what a cost or a benefit is depends on your values. If you’re on a nonstop money hunt, then a 10 percent raise is a definite benefit, even if the cost is more hours of work every week.

If, however, you’re seeking a well-rounded life that embraces your family, your passions, and the simple joy of a small amount of free time each week, then things begin to look different.

It’s this difference that’s most important when you think of cost-benefit analysis, Womenomics style. What we’ve been trying to show you in this chapter is that the mental game is about getting past some of the most serious obstacles—the internal, personal ones—and finding real success. Now, we want you to start putting the ideas of the mental game into practice.

Time Versus Money

According to the traditional way of thinking, losing time as you earn more money isn’t seen as a cost at all. But looking through a Womenomics lens, additional time is increasingly more valuable than more money. Indeed, time is the currency of Womenomics.

It’s remarkable how much money most professional women would be prepared to give up to earn themselves a few more free hours every week. It’s a bit like high-stakes financial trading, where we sell short on one commodity to hold another that’s even more valuable.

But it is worth reminding ourselves that we are the lucky ones. We are in the very fortunate position of being able to choose to give up some income in order to earn some time. If you are poor in New York or New Delhi, you don’t have that option. This choice is a luxury, and we as professional women should appreciate how incredibly fortunate we are.

How much time you need and how much money you will forfeit to get that time are questions only you can answer. Everyone’s definition of what it means to have enough time is different.

Similarly, everyone’s definition of what it means to have enough money is different. You’ll need to look honestly at that side of the equation too. If you are miserable without a regular splurge at your favorite clothing store, if life without foreign travel seems unbearable, or if you need every penny for your son’s violin lessons, you may have to compromise on your time or simply work on the efficiency side of the equation. (We’ll tell you later in the book how to save time without making major career changes.)

When Jennifer Dickey chose to trade money for time, it was worth it, but it wasn’t easy. The thirty-one-year-old is a mechanical engineer at the architectural firm Kahn Associates in Detroit. On Jennifer’s floor of a hundred employees there are only seven women in total. She is a woman in a man’s world who has struggled with the financial costs of dialing back her work hours.

Jennifer has two young daughters. After her second child was born, she realized she didn’t want to work a forty-hour week anymore. Her firm was known for allowing employees to work flexibly, so there was no problem getting the agreement. The problem came in financing it. Jennifer could take the pay cut in her hourly salary without too much hardship. Her husband works in sales, so they had a second income.

What she hadn’t factored in was that all her company benefits would be cut proportionately as well. For every hour she wanted to take off from her traditional forty-hour week, Jennifer would pay a benefits price. Her company’s Social Security contributions would go down. She would get less paid vacation. Meanwhile she would have to pay out more for her share of the company’s health insurance program.

“You know I can handle losing a few hours a week of salary, but it’s all of the costs that go along with it that are also prorated, and that adds up,” she says.

At the same time that Jennifer was working out this time/money equation, her eldest daughter turned three, and they enrolled her in preschool. That cost was $100 per week, and because they had family living nearby who’d looked after the girls until then, it was the first time Jennifer had paid for child care. The preschool payouts and salary cut came as a double whammy.

“My second daughter was born in December, I came back to work in March, and I don’t think I made the decision to cut hours until it was the end of the summer because I was very nervous about it,” says Jennifer. “I was nervous about making the move because it was a big financial difference for us.”

For Jennifer those “hidden” costs meant she could only cut her hours from forty to thirty-six. It seems small, but even those extra four hours have helped. If she and her husband can make it work financially she would like to cut back to a thirty-hour week. Her ideal would be to work three ten-hour days.

For Jennifer, this was a fairly straightforward value trade. But it takes practice to see this, to get to the point where a financial sacrifice is “worth it.”

 

the womenomics

Balance Sheet

To help you get your head in the game, we’ve made a list of some of the other important “costs” we all worry about as we try to get to the New All. What will quickly become clear, we hope, is that what initially appears a cost might not be costly at all and may yield significant “hidden benefits.”

COST 1“Isn’t a pay cut of any sort a big step backward?”

 

HIDDEN BENEFIT 1

 

Don’t think hourly rate—think value, as Jennifer discovered. Even if you have to make financial cutbacks, the value to your life of gaining a few extra hours each week is potentially huge. It can make the difference between sanity and chaos.

And remember: every minute is not created equal. If you can be home between four and six to pick up the kids, or have a Friday afternoon to go for your beloved run, or a regular day to meet with a group of friends, it can add a level of satisfaction to your life that money literally cannot buy. So before you brand taking a pay cut as an indulgence, let your imagination explore the idea of taking that pay cut so you can have a few hours to do all the small but intensely meaningful things that seemed unachievable from the perspective of your office desk.

 

KATTY If only I did have a dollar for every time I am asked “How do you do it?” I really would be a moderately wealthy woman. But that might be my only chance at big wealth because the truth is I don’t work that hard, not if your measure is hours. I have a mental clock running in my head. If it ticks over thirty hours a week, I am doing too much and need to cut something out. My ideal workweek has me away from home no more than twenty-five hours. Of course, there are times when I have to put in a lot more—try an election year to test your short work week resolve! But then I make sure I take time off afterward. My first question for any new project: how much time will it take? My first thought about any new job: can I do it and still have time? If not, I know it’s not worth it. I have turned down better paying jobs to keep control of my hours. The afternoons I have free to surprise my eight-year-old with a school pickup or the (relatively) quiet Monday mornings with my youngest planting herbs in the yard—nobody could buy those back from me, at any price.

COST 2“But money, and the symbolic power of money, defines who I am.”

 

HIDDEN BENEFIT 2

 

It doesn’t actually, and it certainly shouldn’t. Taking your ego out of your income is a surprisingly liberating move. If you are trading money for time, in addition to literally gaining more hours to raise responsible children or contribute in other ways to society or a saner life, you also remove a false mental measuring stick that saps positive energy. When you measure yourself on something as f limsy as salary, it drains your ability to feel satisfied with your actual work or other accomplishments.

COST 3“I don’t want to confront my boss about this. She’ll think I’m lazy and unmotivated and she’ll stop assigning me the best projects.”

 

HIDDEN BENEFIT 3

 

Confronting your boss can actually make you look good.

You’ll find that having the courage and confidence to define what you will and won’t do shows strength. Bosses admire people who have limits and who are willing to defend themselves. In fact, rather than showing that you’re unmotivated, explaining what you want and need shows that you are active and ready to think outside the box in order to create change.

Believe us, it may seem impossible, but it’s truly a “positive” in disguise. And if you do good work, nobody thinks you’re lazy these days. We’ll tell you more about these negotiations in chapter 6.

COST 4“My coworkers may not like it and may think less of me.”

 

HIDDEN BENEFIT 4

 

Maybe…but do you really care? Does it really matter? In general, people think what they’re going to think, since their reactions are their own choice and responsibility. In reality, however, your coworkers will probably be envious of what you managed to pull off. And those who don’t simply forget about it after a few weeks will probably approach you to gain pointers. Indeed, some will likely start to see you as a role model or mentor and may be emboldened to take a similar path

 

HIDDEN BENEFIT 5

 

Remember, time does not have the same value for everybody. And especially at home, this is not a zero sum game.

An extra hour a day of time with our children may be worth ten times to us what it is to somebody else—even our spouses. Part of our confidence to fight for time to be home more came from understanding that we’re the ones who want to be with our children. It’s sometimes easy in those frantic, two-working-parent households to slip into the “Well, if you only came home earlier I wouldn’t need to” argument. We know. We’ve both done it—given our husbands a hard time for not being home enough. But this is really about our time with our kids. We’re the lucky ones to get that extra time with them.

(By the way, just as you don’t want to be judged on how much time you need, you will find this work/life math a whole lot easier if you don’t try to judge other people’s time or priorities either. As we were researching this book we came across the story of a man who went to his boss to ask for shorter hours at work. “Well,” said the boss, “we can probably work something out, but what do you want it for?” “To spend more time with my dog,” the man replied! Who are we to say that this choice isn’t valuable.)

Success Redefined

As you’ve seen, winning the mental game is key to overcoming the obstacles to the New All. We face a whole array of challenges in this area, from basic considerations, like earning enough money, to worrying about how we’ll be perceived by people around us for taking a different approach to work and life, to even feeling a sense of guilt for “giving up” what so many hardworking women struggled to have the opportunity to achieve.

The important thing to remember is that, first, all these fears and worries are natural. After all, how significant could a life change be if it wasn’t accompanied by some worries and fears?

The second thing to remember is that each of these fears or worries has a real-life, workable solution. You don’t need to climb Everest or check in to a Buddhist monastery to gain this new perspective. You only need to acknowledge the fears, confront them, and, most importantly, stay focused on your real desires and goals.

You are well on you way now. You have readjusted your definition of success and decided you don’t need to put in those long hours to prove your worth. You can give yourself permission to jump off the ladder, carve your own path, and have a better life. There’s just one more thing you need to do: change your mind-set so that you are proud of not being tied to the office for hours.

This is success—you shouldn’t feel sheepish about it. Rather, shout it from the rooftops that you want to have an interesting job, time for your family, and a life.

We know that the chances of your boss actually congratulating you on your new attitude as you leave the office at 3 P.M., or better still, when you don’t come in at all, are pretty minimal. But how about giving yourself a pat on the back? How about going a step further by rejecting the myth that you can only be proud of logging megalong hours? How about turning the whole work/time/success equation upside down and thinking that if you can have an interesting job and not kill yourself in the process—that is a REAL success story?

Maria Souder of Georgia Power has come to realize just that. Remember how terrified she felt about the change she was about to make? Well, her bosses actually reacted very well to her career switch and have made it clear she can move back over to the power-generation side of the business at any time. Many days now, Maria has the time to watch her son for a while in his class before she picks him up. She chats with his teacher and then takes him swimming. She’s thrilled with her new position and her new time. “I brought things back into perspective, back into balance, and I just think it’s amazing,” she says, shaking her head. “I look back and I just can’t figure out why this revelation didn’t come sooner, as to how we should live our lives and how we should balance things.”

We’ve both spent years pretending more time at work is our life’s ambition. We, like many women we know, have even succumbed to boasting about how late we have to work—as if that’s really some kind of achievement. We’ve nodded earnestly when colleagues talked about how they couldn’t possibly take more than two weeks vacation a year.

Why do we buy into that outdated, macho construct of hours on the job being the definition of success?

Well, mostly because it makes us feel SOOO important. If we have to work round the clock it somehow gives the impression that our companies really depend on us, so much so that they couldn’t possibly survive if we headed home at 5 P.M. or disappeared on vacation. Oh no, we are indispensable! We can’t be away: the corporate edifice would crumble!

Companies increasingly realize that what’s important is what you produce, not how, where, and when you do it. The measure of success in this new business environment is changing.

We think that if you can set a professional goal, achieve it, and have time left over, then you really are a superstar. Let’s face it, many of us could easily run the world if we spent fifteen hours a day at our desk. Most competent, professional women could—and some do. But isn’t it just as impressive, perhaps even more so, to have achieved a new, freer, more integrated all? That’s our new balance sheet, and we believe it is the real definition of a successful woman.

news you can use

1. Define what YOU really want—not what others say you should want.
2. Sidestep the status trap—it’s a false ego rush.
3. Face your fears and do the math: the costs of making changes turn quickly into benefits when you use a Womenomics eyeshade.