How Gen X women waved goodbye to the 'dream job'
Or how we perhaps need to invest less of ourselves into our jobs if we want to survive
(Some of this writing originally appeared in my book ‘How to be A Boss at Ageing’ but I’ve added in some refreshed bits (it’s still very relevant to life right now).
I wish someone had told me early on that not everyone finds their ultimate, amazing, most fabulous, #BESTJOBEVER – the thing that they jump out of bed in the morning and shout ‘HALLELUJAH!’ into the clouds because they’re so excited to be doing it.
There are of course exceptions but many of us are still unsure exactly what we want and are disillusioned. Some women are bitter. They have been burned one too many times. Throwing themselves 100% into roles that never loved them back. Putting in the hours, coming up with the ideas, innovating, contributing so much and exhausting themselves like an angry fly flinging itself against a window on a summer’s day until it finally drops to the floor in surrender.
I grew up watching movies that seemed to always focus on the same narrative- a woman was on the wrong path (romantically, career-wise, life in general) and she learnt a lesson, a tough lesson, and then she got her reward which was a deep level of satisfaction that she was finally on the right track. She put the hours in and she got the reward.
That was what happened at work too right?
Of late I have sometimes felt like work is more like that game you played when you were a kid -Buckaroo. So I'm tentatively trying to balance a bucket, lasso, shovel, and saddle onto the horse’s back, trying to tow the line, to keep the difficult personalities happy, to smile and be positive, to be creative but not so creative that you’re an oddball, to be a team player but able work productively with zero input from anyone, to be self aware but not selfish, to be energetic but not dominate, to bring humour but not silliness and then BOOM the horse kicks its back legs into the air and all these things come crashing down.
It is time to load up the horse again.
I have worked a long time and I have a lot of different skills, the kind of skills arguably that you only get only from experience. You can’t learn it in a week and (at the moment) AI can’t do it either. The knowing when to send a client an email saying that the timeline can’t change yet again. Knowing when your colleague is close to breaking point and needs support (ideally before this point comes so you can do something about it before it happens). Knowing how to introduce levity into proceedings because things are feeling heavy. How to deliver feedback in a way that doesn’t leave the person feeling like they’ve been hit by a bus. The business acumen to know what’s a dead end versus an opportunity. I’m not showing off here. This is just what happens when you work hard for many years. Like how an acrobat can swing high in the sky on a trapeze- they don’t just get on and do it, they practice, they fail, they practice, they fail…again and again and then one day they fly.
I love telling stories. I love seeing clients absorbed in the stories I tell and not falling asleep because I’ve killed them with too many graphs and slides. I also enjoy talking to people. I love mentoring. Seeing people develop and do things they didn’t think they could. I love finding out weird things about human behaviour. I love learning cool things too.
I was also raised to believe that work should be a big thing. That it should be the main thing. Gen X women were raised on a diet of Dynasty and Dallas. Women in shoulder pads who were monsters. We were taught to be ambitious and want to have it all. Work was important- heck work was the most important thing! This was what both my parents taught me. They worked hard their entire lives and sometimes this was at the expense of other things. They had that ingrained work ethic. The ethic also meant that you never gave up and you kept on striving for better. It relied on the fact that your employer felt the same way too.
Recently I’ve realised that I can be great and still a role can not work out. I’m becoming an expert in seeing how not to do things. Too top heavy. Too much process that gets in the way of doing great work. Too many meetings that are about individuals showboating versus arriving at solutions. A focus on growth over people that never rarely delivers in the end. I hear the same stories. I see the same fall out. I feel sad seeing great people defeated by incompetent management practices.
I have seen that a lot. It’s hard not to feel jaded. I see Gen Z and I salute the fact that they wear their disappointment on their sleeve when it comes to work. I think it’s courageous. I hope they can see a different world of work and part of that is moving away from the dream job idea altogether.
Sometimes when I look on social media, I get the impression that everyone is doing something vastly more interesting than me, but this isn’t the whole truth. Yes, there are some people who make a decent living from being influencers and writing, but many others have regular jobs – jobs that provide the stability they need to live normal lives and not sit up at night worrying about finances.
As women reach their late forties and then get into their fifties I see so many of them throw their hands in the air and give up. They have had enough of the politics, the inequality, the incompetence of others and they leave. This leaving has in fact started when they had children (if they did). It happened when they returned and were invisible. Realised they weren’t paid the same as their male counterparts. The dream started to dissolve in front of their eyes when they realised that childcare was so expensive that they couldn’t actually afford to work anymore.
The idea of a ‘dream job’ has been eroded. As women age they often make their ambitions smaller. They make themselves smaller. They forget who they are and the skills that they have, that only they have. They ask for too little.
The challenge is not to get smaller. The challenge is to maintain a level of optimism that perhaps this time it will be different.
Not a dream job perhaps. But close.
I am 56, and relate 100%. Growing up in NYC, my mom was part of the women's movement in the 1970's. They were breaking barriers at work and taught their daughters (me and my friends) that now we could be ANYTHING we wanted. They encouraged us to be lawyers and doctors and bosses, but never understood that we would still be expected to do most of the heavy lifting at home.
I'm not sure what they thought, or maybe they didn't plan that far ahead, but either married or divorced, the woman is boss at home, and now outside the home too. It was never really a fair game because we could never win - unless you can hire someone to play the role of a 1950s housewife to care for the family, or maybe an Alice from the Brady Bunch, those responsibilities were still the woman.
The pandemic really shone a light on the inequality of the division of labor at home, even in households where the husbands did a fair share of the work. It's the unseen labor, the mental load that most women carry: staying on top of everyone's medical appointments, planning birthday parties, knowing the other parents and teachers in their kids school, etc., making sure homework gets done, etc.
Gen X women still face sexism and harassment in the workplace, explicit and/or implicit and unequal pay and status within companies. An even larger issue is ageism as women who are passed childbearing years are seen a superfluous, invisible and unimportant. This is by design because in reality, older women are wiser, and generally give less fucks about what men think of them. We can't get pregnant and the constant vigilance against sexual violence eases up a bit.
We also get screwed over in menopause because there is no doctor dedicated to our specific needs at this stage of our life. We are sent to OBGYNs who have zero training in anything but looking after pregnant women , babies, routine cancer screenings, std testing. It's maddening really, and no surprise that many Gen X women are burnt out and pissed off.