CHAPTER 1

Strategies for Advancing in Your Career

As I was growing up in the 1950s, my parents often assured me that I could be anything I wanted to be. In that era, women’s rights and women’s equality were still largely unknown concepts. In most cases, men were the breadwinners; women were expected to become wives and mothers. Those who did enter the workforce typically became secretaries, teachers or nurses. But my parents instilled in me a belief that I not only would go to college, but that I should expect to go to one of the world’s most prestigious business schools, the almost exclusively all-male Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. And I did, entering the school in the fall of 1960. When I got there, though, I quickly noticed I was the only woman in nearly all of my classes (other than only a few women in large lectures).

My First Dose of Reality

Early on, I received a sad dose of reality. In the fall of my freshman year, the sociology graduate assistant was prone to making sexist comments. He was so unsubtle that eventually even the guys in my class called him out and made nasty comments to him when he went “over the top.” To their credit, my male classmates were protective, and I was grateful.

Many of the professors and instructors were not ready for women in the classroom. For example, in my senior year at Wharton, there was a protestant minister who taught a course called “Marriage and the Family.” It was considered a “gut” course, that everyone should easily pass. Looking back, it was clear the degree of bias the minister brought to that class. His demeanor and reaction when he saw me in the class were a dead giveaway. He had an arrogance about him that was upsetting to me. All the men received an A or B grade, but I received a C grade. So much for a “gut” class. Despite the fact I had straight As in all my other classes that year, I received the lower “C” grade in “Marriage and the Family.” (By the way, I have been married for 44 years now, so I suppose I have overcome whatever deficiencies this minister perceived in me!)

After my sophomore year at Wharton, I was required to choose a major. I wanted this major to be in corporate finance. Most corporate finance majors later went on to work on Wall Street and made a lot of money. But I soon learned that I would not be allowed to major in corporate finance. The chairman of the department declared, “No woman will ever receive a degree in corporate finance as long as I’m in charge.” I had to settle for my second choice—marketing. This major was still in the Wharton School, where I ultimately received my bachelor of science degree in economics.

Opportunities Today

Today, of course, women can do whatever they have the skills for and desire to be—like an airline pilot or a ship captain, an information technology professional, a lawyer, a doctor, or even a corporate finance professional on Wall Street. The opportunities today are so plentiful and varied that they often cause confusion.

At this stage of my life, I am often asked by young women to give them advice on choosing a career. For those who ask, I walk them through the following exercise I developed. There is nothing mystical about this process; it is the same type of decision analysis you might use to determine what kind of vacation you would like to take.

Deciding on Your Career

One of the ways to start is by making a list of your personality characteristics. Do you enjoy working alone or with others? What other personality characteristics do you have? Make a list of what you are truly like as a person. Then, do a web search for “women and careers” to see which of the many available career choices intrigue you. Here is one website that I think is very helpful: www.CareerGirls.org/explore-careers/careers. Then, compare your personality characteristics with those of the careers. Be honest with yourself, because you can be choosing a life-long career.

Are you a competitive person? For example, if you play basketball or softball or tennis or some other sport (whether a team or individual sport), how important is it for you to win? Or are you not the competitive type? If you like winning, then you might enjoy working on a team that is challenged to develop new products or services. If not, you might prefer a job where you work mostly on your own or where your team is expected to be productive but not necessarily innovative.

Then, ask yourself the same questions about careers you think you’d like to pursue. Is the career path one that allows you to work alone? Or does the career involve your interaction with others? How often would you have to interact with others?

If there is no major difference in what you think you’d like to do (consider your personality traits) and the career path you have chosen, then you should pursue that choice. If there is a major difference in your personality traits and the career path you have chosen, then you probably should rethink this career path.

If you are an engineer, why would you want to pursue a career in art? There is a disconnect here…. If you are so creative, then maybe you need to get a master’s degree in art, and combine the two majors to pursue your career. Maybe you can design a new system to discover art forgeries. Or just be an engineer whose passion is art.

In addition to an assessment of your personality and your potential career, here is another technique that will help you evaluate the pros and cons of the job. Use the effort/impact grid. This analysis will tell you if you can invest the time required to be an attorney or a physician, or if you should work for your PhD. If you can invest the time, what type of return will your investment bring to you in the future?

Search the “Want Ads”

One of my friends told me she would try to determine what the latest “hot” careers were by looking in the New York Times’ help-wanted ads or, today, online at such sites as LinkedIn, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter, and a host of others. Then she chose a career that would fit with her personality characteristics. She took courses in college—math and statistics—so that she could build her career. She also took courses that made her happy (liberal arts) and were in line with her personality. (My friend’s mother wanted her to be a teacher; she didn’t like teaching, so she pursued her degree as a sociology major, began as an employment counselor, then moved on to business.)

Once you have gotten an idea of the available career options, make a list of those options that appeal to you.

Then ask yourself a series of questions:

In other words, would your ideal career involve high stress (and, ideally, commensurate high pay) or are you willing to sacrifice some of your earning potential for a career that is more easy-going and less stressful? Would you be happy in a job that requires 60 to 80 hours a week, or will you be satisfied to be a nine-to-five-er? Or perhaps something in between?

Changing Your Career Path

By the way, if you are just starting out, don’t think the career path you choose now has to be for all time. If you think you will be happy in one career and then discover you really dislike that career choice, change it. After being a volunteer for many years and married to a doctor, a friend returned to college for a master’s degree. After many different jobs getting back into the work force, my friend found an opportunity to work with a college chancellor. Several of my college classmates took advantage of opportunities to switch their careers. One finished her degree in architecture because she decided she wanted to head an architecture department, and not be a draftsman all her life.

Another classmate took advantage of her English degree, pursued a master’s degree and taught an English language course in Asia.

Many people change not only their jobs but also their careers; some do it several times in their lifetime. This is where your adaptability comes into play. Even if your education is fairly narrow in its subject scope, there are still a number of different paths you can take. For example, if you are a biology major, you could become a physician or a microbiologist or a researcher or any of a number of different career paths that include biology as a starting point. If you have a broader, less specific education, your career choice is that much broader. It can include almost anything for which you have (or can learn) the basics. One woman, who eventually became a doctor, majored in French; another doctor loved art and took many classes in the subject. Another classmate of mine, at the urging of a friend, took a class in electrical engineering and wound up working for General Electric, in the space program. She was a chemistry major!

Can you survive by taking STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) courses? Take a look at the women portrayed in the movie and the book Hidden Figures. Yes, you need courage like those women, who had to be the best at what they did in a traditional, white-maledominated environment.

Turning Your Volunteer Efforts Into A Career Path

What you do and when you do it are questions you will face when you want to enter the work force. If you’ve spent any amount of time volunteering during your days at home as a mom or a nonworking wife, you can use that experience as a fill-in for industry experience. Make sure you keep track of your volunteer work: the responsibilities you were given, the budgets you were responsible for, the personnel you managed, the goals you accomplished, and your experience as a leader.

You can then relate that experience to the job you are seeking. You probably won’t have to return to college unless you find you want to enter a completely different field from the one where you were a volunteer.

If the hiring person doesn’t value your volunteerism, you should re-evaluate the company where you are applying for the job, especially if the company is involved in the field where you volunteered. Consider alternatives, like community relations or philanthropy for a university or a different corporation.

A Man’s Job?

It is no longer unusual for women to work in what used to be “men’s jobs.” Nor is there any stigma attached to whether you choose a white-collar or a blue-collar career. In fact, careers as an electrician or plumber are in great demand. If you don’t want an intellectual career, where you will be continually challenged, maybe you would be happier with other careers that don’t require you to be independently creative all the time, but will challenge you in other ways. Choose whatever path you want to take. No matter what your career, you may have to invest in continuing education along the way. The world is changing quickly, and knowledge in virtually every career is constantly evolving.

If you’re not ready to build a career but feel that you must work either to support yourself now or in the future, or to make your parents happy, you will have to keep that in mind too. I wrote a book about 19 of my classmates who graduated from Penn in 1964. While most of these women eventually moved on to other careers that made them happier, many of them got their teaching certificates—most at the urging of their mothers—so they would always have something to fall back on. Teachers back then (in the 1960s) usually received a steady paycheck, and the idea of a regular paycheck was a much sought-after goal for parents in guiding their daughters. Parents of that era were not accustomed to thinking about women in “unorthodox” careers, like being a doctor, an attorney, or an entrepreneur.

Near Home or Far Away?

Mothers in the 1960s did not want their daughters to live too far away from their home—a hundred miles generally was the outer limit. Ask yourself if you are you a homebody? Are you tied to your hometown? I realized I didn’t want to be too far from my parents or cousins. So after college, I stayed in Philadelphia, about an hour’s drive away from home. It took me four months to get my first job. It was, in fact, the only job that opened up for me, but I had to get started somewhere, even though I didn’t know much about the company that eventually hired me. Looking back, not finding out about the company was not the smartest move I could have made, but I needed to get started in my career.

Would you mind living in a different place? Do you enjoy meeting new people? Do you have the urge to travel and see the world? Do you easily make new friends? Perhaps you could look for a job outside of your home market where there is a need for your services or a need for the skills you have to offer. Whatever your chosen career, there are numerous career options for you in many places in the country or even outside the United States.

The career path you choose will have to be YOU—this career path will reflect your personality and you have to be comfortable with this decision.

Understand Your Future: What Can You Do For My Company?

At the request of a family member, I once interviewed a young woman who told me she was majoring in “popular culture.” When I asked her what that entailed, she couldn’t explain it to me. I really wanted to learn about this major, but I got nowhere in the interview. I learned from this interview that a student has to understand her major. She will be asked more than once about her major. When I asked her what type of job she would be interested in, she could not tell me in words I could understand. Then, I asked her how she planned to use the major in her future. Maybe it was my failing, but I could not understand what she described.

Therefore, be sure you understand your major, especially if you are applying for a position that might be the focus of your life. And most of all, you have to be aware of the interviewer’s understanding of what your focus in life is. Pop culture was a “hot” career in the early 2000s, but ask yourself, what can you do with this major in the future? Will you be limited by the timeframe of the courses you took? Be prepared to respond to a question, “What can you do for me (or my company) with your major?” If you can easily explain your major to a prospective employer, you will be fine with your choice. I simply could not understand what this young woman was majoring in and what she planned to do with this major.

You should be careful about majoring in what is “hot.” Do not allow the vagaries of current trends to determine your lifetime career choice. And try to make sure the subject you study in college is one that has jobs available after you graduate. Majoring in Medieval English Literature may be something you really enjoy, but there are precious few jobs available. One Eastern European country has forbidden colleges to offer a women’s studies major, since there aren’t any jobs available. Even in the United States, there are few jobs available for women’s studies majors, unless you want to join a university or counsel women. If there are limitations to your career choice, then take classes that give you a broader choice of options.

One of the “hot” careers in the 2020s is entrepreneurship. If you think you want to begin your own business with a great idea, then you will need to take courses in finance, accounting and marketing, which are skills you will need to run a business. Other important skills you will need in starting a business are management and psychology classes, especially if you need to hire employees. When I started my business, I had to learn management and psychology “on the job” because I didn’t have any training in these areas. Like me, you may not have the luxury of hiring a human resources person at first.

The Career That Makes You Happy

Then, there is the consideration about how much you want to work. If you are pursuing a career until you meet Mr. Right, or to make your parents happy, consider a career that makes YOU happy. You don’t know when Mr. Right will come along or how many years you will need or want to work. Think about spending your lifetime in a career. How much money can you make for retirement? Will you have to depend on your family to help you out? This is an important decision for you to make, because you want to support yourself for life or through a divorce or as a widow, if you have to.

Select the classes in college that will help prepare you for your future endeavors. If you want to major in a foreign language or humanities, be sure what your future career might be. If you don’t understand information technology, then the world might pass you by. With the Covid-19 virus, for example, you might have to work from home, and teachers will have to know how to teach classes online and understand technology. My experience has taught me this fact about technology as the new reality. That technology class that you intensely disliked in school might be your savior. There are so many webinars online, using Zoom or Skype or other platforms. An understanding of these technologies is invaluable. Even parents who find themselves home-schooling their children have to understand the computer and its offerings.

If you decide to start your own business, be sure you have a product or service that you are confident the world needs. Don’t look at Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos as role models. Not every business will be a blockbuster that makes you a billionaire. Take a look at all the work that goes into building a business. Take it from someone who ran a business for 35 years: you work early in the morning until late at night. When the business hits a downturn, you will be the person who takes the hit on income. (My husband and I went without any salary for a year in the recession of 2009 in order to pay our staff. Even our senior vice president took a 50 percent pay cut. We suggested he choose the morning or the afternoon to work. Maybe I should have laid off some staff, but I did not let them go out of a sense of responsibility. The next year, we did all right.) Don’t expect that you will make a lot of money without working very hard and making some sacrifices early on.

A college friend started working as a secretary (yes, she did) in a large company that had great benefits. She got married just out of college, and when baby number two came along, she could not stay at that company, even with the excellent benefits. Baby number two needed her attention. But she had other skills she could call upon and she started a retail business in her home; then she moved to a larger office when she had an idea for the fashion industry. After doing her research, she found she could sell her idea, and it was an idea that required extensive travel. (As she aged and couldn’t travel as much, she sold her business to her business partner.) She advised women to marry a husband who shares your interests and supports you. She said that she could not have been a success without her husband’s support. She also said she would have been a terrible mother if she had not worked for herself. She reports her children turned out just fine.

After more than a decade of marriage, another friend was divorced at an early age. She had married a week after she graduated from college. At the time, she worked as a teacher but she had to leave when she became pregnant. This was the 1970s and women often were not allowed to be obviously pregnant on the job. My friend was creative and I guess you could say she was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. She developed an idea where she did not have to physically appear in classes, thereby keeping her out of sight of students. Her idea was quite successful. She gave the students community projects they could manage on their own. Then, she moved on and enjoyed working for a not-for-profit agency. When she was asked to write a book and was given no credit or extra money for it, she was downhearted and decided to do something about it. (Although she sought to be recognized for her work with a promotion or with extra money, the company refused to provide either; so she left.) She discovered she enjoyed the “fitness” aspect of her career and became a consultant to large companies. She taught marketing departments of companies how to develop their fitness programs to help the employees deal with their stress levels. She then followed her passion of fitness and outdoors, and went mountain climbing and hiking all over the world. She fell in love with another country and became an American columnist for a foreign publication based in the United States. After she reached 70 years of age, she developed a plan to continue her teaching of foreign students who enrolled in the university of that foreign country she loved.

Even though both women were limited early on in their careers, they were not afraid to shift gears and find another career.

Both of these women served their former university as board members, until the unthinkable happened: Women over 70 were no longer welcome to serve on the board as active members—they became “emeritus” members—even though they had opened up the university to more women. They helped women professors who were caught up in the “publish or perish” syndrome at just the time when these women professors should be having children. The publish syndrome was delayed for these women.

Be sure when you choose you career path that you can work beyond 70 years of age (women do work longer these days). Some careers are geared toward younger women; others have no age limits. Take a look at the career path you have chosen: does this career path allow you to work indefinitely? Can you shift careers?

If you are “older,” and are applying for a new position, remember that GenXers and Millennials are different from Boomers and require different ways of communicating. Boomers prefer a telephone call. GenXers and Millennials are much more in tune with emails or texts. Adjust your follow-ups accordingly.

And you will not find so much “gender” bias, as you will find “age” bias. This is a major change in the attitudes of hiring managers, who tend to be Millennials. Adjust your approach accordingly. Many of the Millennials could not find jobs after they graduated in the early 2000s, so they are unlikely to “feel sorry” for you finding yourself out of work. Millennials do not stay in their careers for their lifetime, as you might be inclined to do. Millennials move around more; you should get accustomed to this scenario.

Board Memberships

When you are looking at the next phase of your career, consider a board membership. This might be the step you take before deciding to start your own business or retire.

There are some industries and boards of directors with age limitations; others have no age requirement. Take this factor into consideration when you are choosing a career path—can you use your skills, even after you retire or look at the next phase of your career? Many not-for-profit boards will welcome you, despite your age. From what I have seen, for-profit corporate boards often have an age or experience requirement and usually seem to require board members have a financial background or an area of in-depth expertise.

Several of my friends found board memberships they loved. But it took them some time to find the perfect spot they were looking for. One of my friends was an executive vice president and chief operating officer of a security firm that was sold. She chose not to go with the new company. She joined the National Association of Corporate Directors, took some courses in cyber security, became a board member of the NASD and also became a board member of the Union League of Philadelphia. Later she found other boards that were perfect for her and that provided payment for her time and experience. Another friend had been the chief executive officer of a health system. She also took time to find her “perfect board membership.” One of the women had her MBA, the other a PhD. Both were experts in their chosen careers.

Another woman had been in the government; she was asked to become a board member of several corporate boards because of her government experience. When this woman became a board member (in the 90s), it was quite an honor to become a board member without business experience. She reported that she was the only woman on each of the corporate boards. She was listened to, especially when the discussions were about the government; then, her experience was valued. Now, more women are board members and their experience is valued and listened to, and the women are paid for their expertise.

The Forum of Executive Women, based in Philadelphia, helps advertise board membership opportunities (See Exhibit 1.1). Most of the opportunities I have seen require bottom-line responsibility. If you want to climb the corporate ladder, look for a career with this experience. Use your economics, accounting, or finance degree to gain your bottom-line experience. Or if you are in a technical industry, become an expert at the technology your industry depends on.

If you are committed to your career, get an advanced degree, like an MBA or a master’s degree. An advanced degree is a good path to making more money (but you have to make sure you negotiate the higher salary; it won’t automatically be given to you). If you want to move into a position that will give you a bottom-line experience, major in economics, accounting, or finance. Don’t be afraid of mathematics; keep your eye on an MBA or a master’s degree. If you cannot handle math, then major in marketing or management. If you can find a mentor or coach in your organization, you will get the chance to manage profit and loss. That can become the route to the top, as this is a skill that most successful CEOs possess.

Remember that some aspects of careers never change. Check out a career path you would like to pursue; then look at the companies that offer entry level jobs in your chosen career. What are the chances that you can advance in your career? Does the company offer the jobs to promote women in those careers? Do you need continuing education to stay relevant in your chosen career? You don’t want to have to leave a company when you hit the glass ceiling because women are blocked off from promotions to top levels. What would you do? What would you be facing? Maybe you should consider leaving that company. If you are content with the glass ceiling, you could stay. Be happy with the choice you make.

Exhibit 1.1