A friend of mine — we're longtime former co-workers who both now work from home — reached out to me this week for an impromptu career advice session. Back when we worked on the same floor, we'd pop into each others' offices at a moment's notice or walk together to get coffee and plot out our next big moves, but these days, untethered from the traditional workplace, with all the freedom that's supposed to offer, we were lucky to have to plan this meet-up only 24 hours in advance.
We're both writers and have always bonded over our shared determination to set big goals for ourselves and go after them. She's a full-time freelancer — with a time-consuming side hustle even — and now she's contemplating an offer that would give her more stability but less freedom to pursue bigger projects. For the fourth time this month, I found myself recommending she read the new book "Ambition Decisions: What Women Know About Work, Family, and the Path to Building a Life," which chronicles the life and career paths of a few dozen Generation X women, Northwestern University graduates who were all members of the same high-achieving sorority in the mid-'90s. Authors and Northwestern alums Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace got the idea to interview their sorority sisters — all brimming with ambition and big dreams as undergrads — when they were both trying to resolve, as Schank told me on a recent phone interview, "separate midlife crises."
"We were both in places where we were trying to figure out how we had ended up in the spots where we were," said Schank, a Public Interest Fellow at New America, Anne-Marie Slaughter's think tank. "Neither one of us had, I think at that point, a career where we felt like that was where we were going to end up. We were also trying to be these hands-on parents at the same time, and that was very hard. We wanted to understand if this was just us — was there something wrong with us that we couldn’t manage all the basics? — or if this was something that other women were feeling too."
They started by talking to a few friends from college, but found the exchanges so eye-opening that they wanted to know more, and hear from more women as well. The results are a series of compelling profiles of women in their 40s whose lives do and don't look like they thought they would when they were in college.
"Hana reached out to me because she remembered having this conversation in our sorority in college, when we would talk about our ambitions, how we dreamt of being in a future Cabinet someday," said Wallace, now a freelance writer after building a career in magazine publishing, including positions at Vogue and Lucky, told me on the same call. "We started by talking to other women who were in that conversation with us. We were returning to a specific moment and conversation about ambition, and seeing where that had led us."
During those conversations, which yielded a wildly popular series of articles in the Atlantic before expanding into "Ambition Decisions," Wallace and Schank learned what each woman had done professionally and personally since leaving college, and some common themes emerged.
They noticed that even seemingly small decisions could have a lasting impact on a woman's career, and that it wasn't uncommon for women to talk themselves out of reaching for the big opportunity — nor was it uncommon for women to have to fight to be taken seriously for such opportunities, especially after having kids. They saw the ways that housework and childcare could still be unevenly distributed in supposedly egalitarian heterosexual marriages — a section header that made me laugh out loud was a direct quote from one woman: "All the Bullshit Things I Do that He Would Not Even Think to Do" — and also that Type A management at home can keep women from achieving their Type A goals at work. They found that many professional, highly educated women are still socialized to prioritize passion over money, which doesn't always work in their favor career-wise.
Their subjects sorted into roughly three categories. There are the High Achievers — the C-suite executives, the directors of nonprofits, the law partners, and other high-powered careers — and the Opt-Outers, who left the traditional workforce to care for kids (and for some, their ambitious drive was channeled into volunteer and community positions instead). Then there's an intriguing third set, which gets very little attention in the broader discussions about women in the workplace: the Flex Lifers, who are in the workforce but deliberately choose jobs that aren't all-consuming so they can leave room in their lives for other priorities and parts of their identity.
I found the book to be insightful and clarifying in a way that traditional career-focused books for women rarely are. Rather than lay out a prescriptive path, they really listened to women talk about their lives and challenges — how novel! — and illuminated areas of overlap, surfaced and clarified themes, and pointed out commonalities that extend beyond the borders of their graduating class. As it turns out — and this was helpful in that conversation about my friend's upcoming career decision — those three paths are not fixed identities necessarily. The same woman can find herself switching tracks — from High Achiever to Flex Lifer, from High Achiever to Opt Outer back to High Achiever, even — depending on her priorities in a given period of her life.
I spoke to Schank and Wallace last week by phone about the project and their findings. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
When I first picked up the book I will confess I was a tiny bit skeptical — I thought surely this will be interesting, but how much can this narrow slice of women, from one sorority at one university, and their life trajectories, tell me about my own midlife crisis?
But as I kept reading I saw so much that I identified with. I'm underlining every other sentence. Were you ever concerned that the scope was maybe not broad enough, though? At what point did you realize that this was a conversation that could have a certain wider resonance?
Elizabeth Wallace: When we first started the conversation we hadn't thought we were going to be doing a narrow or a broad study. We thought we were going to talk to some other people and be like, “What do you guys think?” Maybe this will help illuminate some answers for us and resolve some life crises.
Then we pursued this same group, because we had started with this group and we thought, here's a group of 40-ish women that we can find again today. It wasn’t until about halfway through that we started hearing things where we thought, “This is interesting, we should keep interviewing them and find out what emerges from this.”
Basically once we were about 30 people in, we started to see so many common themes that we thought there’s something here that might be interesting to share with other people.
We never set out to, and we were not aiming to, bring out themes that would speak for all women in any way.
We didn’t have the bandwidth or the resources to do something that was broad, a book that would think about ambition for all women. We never intended to do that. We knew what the scope was going to be once we were about halfway through. We knew there would be limitations there.
Hana Schank: I’ll just add that I think that at some point we did look and say, how broad is this in terms of how much diversity do we have? There was a fair amount of socioeconomic diversity. We had people who were the first person in their family to graduate from college. We really liked that the women were not only all over the country — so that it wasn’t just women in New York — but all over the world, and that they were also in a whole range of different situations, being C-suite people in finance to being screenwriters to staying home with their kids.
I think to echo Liz's points, we knew that this wouldn't be for all women everywhere but we felt like it spoke for an important group of women and that it was broad enough that what we were hearing was relatable for a good chunk of women.
The three models that you identified emerged from when you started plotting out the life trajectories of the women you talked to and found them sorting into the three categories: High Achievers, Opt-Outers and Flex Lifers. I found this so helpful because it seems often that the conversation around women and ambition and career and family only sorts into a binary: you're ambitious or you're not. The Flex Lifer designation adds a much-needed complexity to the conversation that we have around how women arrange their lives as adults. Can you talk a little bit about how you ended up identifying these groups, and maybe what surprises emerged from that?
Schank: We also came to this with [the binary of] either you're a High Achiever or you're an Opt-Outer. My background is as a user experience designer, and I use a lot of Post-It Notes to organize information. We pulled all of the quotes that we thought were really interesting, or comments that people had had, and stuck them on the wall and started to organize them. When we did that, we had certain themes emerge, and then we started mapping different people's trajectories. As we did that, we had the women who were clearly the High Achievers, we had the women who had been at work and then chose to stay home [the Opt-Outers]. Then there was this messy other group that we didn’t really know what to do with.
The more that we thought about it, the more we realized that that was actually a group unto itself. That they didn’t have a name didn't mean that it wasn't a valid life choice. In fact, it was also a group that the two of us fell into.
In the Atlantic series we referred to that group as "Scale Backers." But the more that we dug into it for the book, the more we felt like that had some negative connotations and wasn’t really an accurate reflection of the fact that these women had chosen this path; it wasn’t like it accidentally happened to them. It wasn’t like they were like, oh I can’t hack it at work so therefore I’m not going to push myself. They had agency and were making decisions around [the idea of] I don’t want to be spending all of my time at work because I have these other interests and other things that I want to pursue and so I'm going to configure my life accordingly. Which was how we hit on the term Flex Lifer, because they really were looking for flexibility.
We thought it was really fascinating that nobody else had identified this, even though it is such a large group of people. The more people that we speak to, so many identify themselves as Flex Lifers. I think it was an aha moment for us: [it's not that] we can't do it all, it's that we actually have chosen to do a little bit less here and a little bit more there. It's so validating to feel like you're not alone in that choice — you didn't just make up this crazy lifestyle, lots of other people have it too.
The High Achievers and the Opt-Outers get the most attention in our culture because it’s a great binary, and you can put women in either camp in opposition to each other — you can idolize them for their life or you can demonize them for it, depending on your perspective. But it strikes me that for Flex Lifers, also, there can be similar stigmas attached. If you're working while you have kids, shouldn't you be pursuing the highest level of your career, and if you're not, is it “worth it”? Or if you are scaling back your professional ambitions because you do want some balance in your life for whatever reason, are you giving up?
It seems there’s a lot of cultural ambivalence around the Flex Life approach, too. Do you think that that’s maybe what contributed to people overlooking this reality before now? Because I imagine it accounts for a pretty sizable swath of professional women.
Schank: I think it’s a sizable swath and probably growing as more and more people are freelancers or have jobs where they work from home. I think that people have been very much stuck in this binary way of thinking, so that if you're not killing it at work, or you're not staying at home, then what could you possibly be doing?
Wallace: I was a magazine editor and writer, and I left my last full-time job and I've had a permalance job since then, but I've worked at mostly big publishing companies. And you know how that world has shifted and really revolutionized — you might say evaporated. Hana's shifted careers too, for different reasons. I was forced to recreate my career as a freelancer, and find new ways of being.
I would initially be thinking, “I want to look for a full-time job.” Then, as months passed, I [realized] actually, I don’t really want that again right now. I still want to work, but I want to work on lots of different projects, and I want to work on lots of interesting things. I want to try new things besides just journalism. Before we started this project that kind of iterated into this freelance life, which I think that a lot of people, both people that we spoke to for this project and beyond, are experiencing, with different industries changing so much: TV, radio, [even] medicine, a subject that we talked about with a pediatrician, [who told us] "I kind of hate my job now because I do a lot of medical online reporting stuff and less seeing patients."
So many industries have changed that have forced or pushed women — and men too — into creating this new reality of what work looks like, plus remote working and all the different options of a flexible workplace. You're not just at an office but you're not just sitting at your home office. A lot of people are somewhere in between that.
A lot of that has been by people’s choice, plus some circumstance. And it does seem like that lifestyle has resonated more and more for the women we talked to, especially after we published the Atlantic series. Also, with us becoming parents and the way that parenting has become this fetishized, sort of industrialized experience, where most mothers — not all, but most mothers I know and talk to — want to be there with their kids, they want to be present with their kids. They would like to be able to pick them up from school one day a week if they could.
I feel like a lot of time the conversation around topics like this — wanting to meet the kids at the school bus stop, for example — ends up blaming women for the things that they want. You're putting excessively high expectations on yourself, you're demanding perfection in everything, including motherhood. I felt that your book got to the heart of what's behind that drive to achieve at home in a better way than I have ever seen — that in some cases, the homemade sandwich packed in the kid's lunch is how someone shows love, right?
It refutes the idea that women are simply going by some checklist of what they have to be and do to be seen by the world as a good mom, by getting to the heart why some of those things feel like non-negotiables to some women, and it’s not necessarily because they are just following a script that they’ve been given and are harshly holding themselves up to a standard that they maybe don’t really want to meet.
Was that an epiphany moment: what does the homemade lunch mean?
Wallace: One of our Flex Lifers, when she talks about what her day is like, [she says], "We start on the kids' school lunches. Lunches, lunches, lunches." When Hana and I heard that, when we transcribed and wrote it down in our Post-It Note and our spreadsheet, we’ve been talking it about ever since. Not a month goes by — and that was two years ago that we did that interview — when we're not [saying] lunches, lunches, lunches.
I remember the moment when we were editing that chapter and thinking about this, and we had wanted to go in and analyze it like, this is the binary moment when women feel guilt about leaving their kids and going to work, so what they do to assuage that feeling is make homemade lunches. Then we dug into it a little bit more and we [realized] you know what, that’s actually not that. It’s a lot more complicated than that.
There's a lot of desire and there’s a lot of satisfaction for these women in doing these tasks, even though they may say, or they may actually feel, somewhat tied down by them, every morning doing these [same] things — but yet they continue doing it. And I think it's more than just that they are conditioned to do it socially or because they’re [rationalizing it] like, "I feel like I want to make lunch for my kids; it’s just healthier than buying school lunch.” But because there is something satisfying about it — they like baking the banana bread, they like feeling like they're doing this thing for their kids, and that feels good.
We came to this moment together, of thinking there’s something really interesting here, that these women are choosing these things. We did notice a lot of our subjects chose a lot of things that they didn’t care about necessarily, and that’s where we talked about, if you like making banana bread or the homemade bread for the sandwiches, keep doing that, and if you're not interested in shopping for shoes, give that to somebody else: the taking and choosing of non-negotiables.
Schank: We joked that an alternate title, as we were writing the book, should be "Everything You're Doing Is Just Fine."
Right. You can pick what tasks in your life you want to do an A job on, and what's OK to you to do the B job on.
A lot of books that are written for women on very similar themes to yours are about how you can live better. Here’s how you can have it all, or here’s how you can pick three things to have today, or here is how you lean in at work and become successful, to use some high-profile examples. What I appreciated about "Ambition Decisions" is that this book isn't a how-to manual, but rather it looks at these common themes that come up in women’s lives and attempts to name and clarify them without judgment.
One of the clarifying moments for me was in the chapter on obstacles to ambition. I thought it was very interesting how you noted that often the women you spoke to didn’t see the obstacles to achievement that were in front of them. Do you think that that’s a phenomenon that affects a lot of women, especially ambitious women?
Schank: It's always easier to see other people's lives. It's so hard to see your own. As we looked at those stories, and this came up time and again, there were so many of our friends who really in the course of a single interview seemed to go back and forth between I think I could go for the big job but I don’t think I really want it and It would be really destructive to my life but I think I would be really good at it. We had to pause and say, what is this all about?
This is why we didn’t want to write something that [laid out] here is the way forward. Because there’s so much of that. Women get so much of that: here's what your life should look like and here's what you're doing wrong. And we didn’t want to pile on to that. In this particular case, it does seem like a lot of the time women, especially ambitious women who want to do, as you said, an A job on everything, they are struggling to figure out how to make that happen and they throw out a lot of [reasons] why this can’t possibly happen for me: because I’m needed here, because I’m needed there. Because we are needed in so many places.
The more challenging thing is to have the conversation with your spouse or to think about what do I really want, what would I really look like for my family? We are pleased to see in the last chapter that a lot of the things that women felt they couldn’t do, they ended up being able to do. We had people who said, “I can’t possibly direct, because that would just be so hard on my family.” Who then had the opportunity to direct, figured out how to make it work, and actually everybody survived and it was fine.
"Everybody Survived and It Was Fine" would be great alternative title too.
Schank: I think it’s hard because we also get so many stories that are so hard and so impossible, and everybody says it's just going to destroy your children's lives. But then you you do it, and actually it's fine and you make it work for yourself, or you can say that didn’t work and actually not do that again. Women should be encouraged to at least to try it, instead of taking in all of the “oh but I also need to be here, and I need to be at [school] pick-up and I need to be doing these 87 things.” If you do all the things that we are also talking about around non-negotiables, and figuring out what you actually can discard and assign to other people, that also frees a whole lot of space for [realizing] maybe actually I can direct, or can take the big job in New York, to use some of the examples from the book.
Wallace: To hearken back to talking to our friends about these issues, a friend of mine told me she wants to exercise more, and she doesn’t have the time to exercise unless she gets up at five in the morning and goes swimming. I said, “Why don’t you at least go one day a week?” Because she has to get the kids ready for school, even though her husband — she has a full-time job — her husband is a freelancer, and has the time every day. I said, “You could at least once a week have your husband get the children ready for school” — they go to the same school, it's one drop-off — “and you could go swimming and go straight from swimming to work.” She said, “No I couldn't do that; we get the kids ready every day together, it’s like a team thing, it’s what we do.” I said, “Well then, you might not get to exercise.”
Or you can rethink what you do as a foregone conclusion, and shake it up a little bit. That's in a micro way and also, on a bigger level, it’s like Hana getting offered a job at the White House [with the United States Digital Service] and initially imagining, “I can’t move to D.C. for a year and leave my family in Brooklyn.” [Instead] actually I'm going to think about if there’s a way that that could work.
The idea of shaking up the default of I have to be there, I have to take my kid to karate every single day — actually maybe I don’t have to do that. But just considering other options can feel very freeing. It can also feel very chaotic. These conversations sometimes do lead to chaos, but also to some great things, in Hana's case. I don’t know about my swimming friend.
This book isn’t telling women here’s how you can have it all, but I feel like there’s a shadow book behind it for businesses, how maybe they can start thinking seriously about all of the ways that women have adapted and strategized their lives — so much mental and emotional work that goes into trying to figure out how to live a life and have a job at the same time — and have a conversation about that on a more macro, institutional, work-culture level. What do you think is the main thing that American corporate culture could change that could relieve some of the burden of this calculus that women have to perform?
Schank: First of all thank you for giving us our next book idea. The shadow book, that's a good idea. Thank you.
We talk in the book about how the work world continues to function as though there is some hidden silent person at home doing all of the other stuff. I think the work world would benefit from just acknowledging that for most people, that’s not actually the case. At the very least allowing people to talk about the fact that this is hard, and that there are competing interests, and that the sole thing that you're doing in your life is not working.
It's funny — as the workers become flexible, it also becomes more ever-present and it’s become more essential to people’s lives. You are more and more defined by what you do, and it's more and more supposed to be all-consuming.
There was a Twitter thing yesterday, with people in my field: Stop talking about passion, you don’t have to be passionate [about work], you just have to want to do what you're doing, it doesn’t have to be absolutely everything. I can’t tell you how many times I get looped in to Twitter conversations on a Sunday. I'm thinking, “stop tweeting about work; it’s Sunday.”
I don’t know that we have a policy recommendation for what businesses should do, and we did talk a little bit about — this isn’t in the book, but it’s in the Atlantic essays — about how it’s not about maternity leave, it's about everything that comes after maternity leave. Maternity leave — yes, OK, people need paid maternity leave, but the issue is the next 18 years when you don’t have that additional support.
The more that people are just honest and frank about where they are and what they’re doing — I couldn’t be at this meeting at 10:00 because I had to go to Parents As Learning Partners at 9:00 at the school — and frankly, the more that men do it, the more accepted it will be.
Right. One thing that I thought was interesting is in the original article series there was one all about sexism. It didn’t get its own chapter in the book, but I feel like that's one of the underlying reasons why women feel like if you complain about, or if you just talk even about these things, you're taken less seriously. I think a lot of women have experienced being positioned then as "the mom" in the office and they’re given fewer opportunities to advance because the assumption is they won’t want to do that, they won’t want to move up to the next level, they’ve got kids now.
Schank: That’s such a double-edged sword, because the only way to get past it is to talk about it and to say this is really hard and this is what it took for me to be here today. For example, if you're a two-career family where both people travel, saying I can’t travel this day because my wife's book is launching — oh, I don't know, this is a random example. [Laughs.] The more that you talk about what’s hard and what the mechanics are that are going on behind the scenes — but at the same time the more that you talk about it, especially if you're talking about it as a woman, you get the other side of that, which is, "Oh, she can’t do it because she’s a mom.” I don’t know that we have a solution for that other than we need to have more men talk about it.
Wallace: It's funny that you mention that, Hana, because, my wife, my partner, a week ago said to me, “I'm supposed to go to Chicago on the 19th," and I was like, “Nope, that’s our book launch." So she went back to her bosses and said, “Liz has her book launch, I can't take the trip that day." That's not a gendered issue. That's a whole other aspect we didn't get too into in this book, but I would like to write more about.
Men [need to be] talking in the workplace about men who want to be more present parents, and men who don't want to be more present parents talking about maybe why did they don't.
All these requests to be in schools and to be there and present with your kids, that’s not only women’s work. But until men start saying that's not just women’s work, that’s my job too, I have to leave early today to go make a school drop-off, or I have to take the kids to the pediatrician, until that becomes part of the conversation it is going to continue to be the default of women’s work.
And, because when we talked earlier about women’s non-negotiables and the things that they feel loved and needed for, and essentially [like] mothers, I think women fall into the default of Oh, I'll just do that, I’ll be the class parent because nobody else wants to be it — we’ve never had a male class parent, by the way, in six years of elementary school, for my children.
I volunteered for this anti-bullying workshop, and there are maybe 25 people in the room. It was a district-wide thing, and I said to my co-teacher who was there with me, "If a man walks into this room in the next hour, I’ll give you $1,000."
I had to leave early. She told me later, “You don't owe me $1,000. No man walked into that room." And I said, “Yeah, I’m sure as hell they didn't.”
That’s not a hard-and-fast rule, I know, but it’s something that I feel, you can probably tell, very passionately about, as a member of a two-mom family that didn’t instill that as an expectation. For people generally, across America, that’s a huge micro-factor I think. And I think it’s all about micro-factors.
Another aha moment that jumped out at me in this conversation and in the book was the idea that women prioritize passion in their career and if they can't or aren't following their passion, or if they’re not hugely passionate about their work and if their work doesn’t align with their passions, that somehow that’s a failure. Can you just talk a little bit about the role passion plays in women's career choices?
Schank: This is something that we had a hunch disproportionally affects women, and it's connected to, we talk about in the chapter on economics, that women are not raised to talk about money, and therefore might not prioritize money, although some of them do. The inverse of that is this idea that you should do what you love — and it’s somewhat connected to the idea that if you're not going to be spending time with your kids, then the thing that you're doing should be of magical value, beyond economic value. It needs to not only pay the bills, but it also needs to be something that you feel so strongly about that it is the reason that you are not there at school pick-up at 3 o’clock. That is a tremendous, tremendous burden to put on work.
Work is about feeding your family, and having a roof over your head, and it's great if it’s also about being intellectually challenged, and it's great if it also ticks a lot of other boxes around something that you feel really strongly about and you want to get up and do in the morning.
More and more and more in our culture, especially now that everybody has an app idea, everybody wants to launch a business, everybody is going to disrupt everything, you get all these profiles of people who work constantly because they’re so passionate about what they do. That’s an unfair burden to put on people, especially when, if you are potentially not the primary wage-earner but a wage-earner, to every day do this calculus of Do I love my job enough to be away from my kids? Which is really an unfair equation.
And especially early on when you might not be earning as much and you have kids who are really, really needy and cry every time you leave the house, to sit there and think, they're crying every time I leave the house so how much do I love my job?
We didn’t interview men but we don’t get the sense that that's a question that men are asking themselves as they walk out the door. But it really disproportionately affects women.
In the book we talk a lot about pulling back from this idea that it has to be all about passion and that some years you could be doing something that you're passionate about, some years you could be doing something for pure economic reasons and that is 100 percent OK. You may never have a job that is your passion, but for a lot of the people that we talk to, the economic benefits were what drove them, and being able to be economically independent or just give a good life to their family was more valuable than having something that they felt passionate about.
I feel like this is something that affects women without kids too, because we’ve tied identity so closely these days to career. I think about, say, Pinterest memes that say if you love what you do you’ll never work a day of your life. That sounds really wonderful, but it puts a lot of pressure on us to feel like we shouldn't just embrace a job that we're good at and that we receive validation for, if it doesn’t hook into that thing that we're known for doing.
I really appreciate that the book showed some models for doing that. If you started off thinking you're going to be, to use an example from the book, an opera singer and that was what you were known for and it was your great passion, but you were able to forge a life that looks different and be happy, and it's not a failure, honestly.
Wallace: The "do what you love" motto is elitist. Because what if what you love is crocheting, and you can't figure out how to make that work and you need to make money because you need to pay rent, or support your children or buy groceries? This is important and actually being a part of the economic workforce and making money as a woman is also just important symbolically and logistically necessary for a lot of people. To say, “I don’t feel passionate about it therefore I should stop doing it,” disrupts a lot of women’s careers and then disproportionately affects women being represented in the economy.
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