The three phases of a woman's career lifecycle - Building Gender Balanced Business

Young women today,the generation that companies are currently recruiting after university, are well-educated, self-confident and very ambitious. They are born and bred to excel and their parents have been telling them all their lives that they can become anything they choose. They are one of the great success stories of the 20th century and offer a huge expansion of the educated talent pool from which companies can recruit.

These young women have long been told that they can have it all. And they believe it. They are not at all receptive to issues of gender barriers or glass ceilings, concepts that sound old and obsolete to their ears. Do not be surprised if younger women brush off gender initiatives – they firmly believe that they don’t need them. Haven’t they outperformed boys for much of their lives in school? And in this first decade of their careers, unencumbered by family issues, and free to be mobile and work-centred, there are no apparent differences in progression in most companies between men and women. The risk in this situation is that the transition into the next phase is as unexpected as it is shocking.

Very suddenly, the ambitious young women of Phase One crash unthinkingly into Phase Two. In their thirties, the dual pressures of work and family intensify for most women, as well as many young men today. When women and men are in their 30s companies typically gear up the competitive realities of evaluation, talent identification, mobility and promotion. They are on the look out to develop their future leaders.

Most companies identify their high-potential talent somewhere between the ages of 30 and 35. This is not a policy that was established to discriminate against women. It was designed long before there were many women in most companies’ management ranks. It treats men and women scrupulously in the same way. But it is typical of policies that were designed around male career patterns, and that are applied without thinking to women as well.

Could there be a worse time for women to have the professional demands on them increase? Ambitious women tend to marry later and have children later than the average. The usual period for them to be having children is in their early to mid-thirties. Many of them delay having children in order to respond to professional priorities. For many of these women, they will not make the grade for talent identification in the defined timeframe, and are often then definitively excluded from the potential pool.

Enlightened companies are working to remove the age criteria from high-potential identification and to consciously focus on women before or after the key child-bearing years. But many other companies are unconscious of this non-linearity of female careers. That is why so many of them find that they face a real brain drain of talented women, usually when the latter reach their 30s.

This is not only related to increasing family pressure. The other issue that women face in this time of their life, is the shifting (and unwritten rules) of the corporate promotion system. Where being a good and productive worker used to be enough when they were in their 20s, companies start to look for a host of other characteristics from their potential leaders once they have entered their 30s. They include communication skills, visibility, charisma, innovation, intrapreneurship, networks and political coalition building.

Many women are oblivious to this shift in their employer’s priorities at this time. Why? Because generally these new rules are communicated through informal networks of peers or mentors, often after work, on flights, or on the golf course (or national equivalent). These are times and places that are not easy for women to access – particularly if they are also new mothers…

Luckily, there is a phase called Self-affirmation which starts somewhere after women turn 40. This is a period where the most time-consuming part of the child-bearing years have passed, children are all in school, and women re-focus on their careers with renewed energy and ambition – provided that their employers are receptive to this.

Many companies wrote these women off long ago, or under-employ them if they took a career break. Yet I believe that the coming decades are when women’s careers tend to peak and where they give the best of themselves. If properly encouraged and developed, this is the phase where companies can benefit the most from these employees’ different leadership styles, skills and perspectives. Women in their 40s are much readier than their younger peers to express themselves, have the confidence to push contrarian views and the authority, credibility and networks to put their ideas into implementation.

Alternatively, this is also the time when research shows many women leave companies that refuse to develop and promote them, in order to join more enlightened employers or to start their own businesses. In countries like Canada and the US, over 50% of new businesses are created by women.