LISTEN UP What working women would tell younger selves
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I recently tweeted the following: “To my working women friends: If you could give your younger working self any advice, what would you say?”
I was in search of inspiration before afternoon meetings and also, let’s be honest, looking for a Twitter distraction from the never-ending saga of the 2020 presidential election.
An hour later, I refreshed my feed and was blown away: The tweet had hundreds of comments and likes. The next morning, the number was well into the thousands, and it’s still climbing.
A multitude of women — the vast majority of whom I’ve never met — had retweeted, tagged their friends to join the conversation and offered up sheer brilliance.
Here are a few replies that stood out to me:
“Don’t worry so damn much” women to negotiate their salaries and to not say yes to the first offer. There are also dozens of messages urging women to apply for jobs even if unsure of their qualifications (reminding me of the oft-quoted statistic that men apply for a job when they meet 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them).
Then there was note after note reassuring women that they can and will find a way to make it all work between their careers and future families.
My very favorite tweet reads, “Girl, have your babies.” I agree. (Oh, the hours I spent pondering this in my 20s.)
Working women have so many of the same questions and fears and hopes, no matter how young or old, where we are in our career or the country, or the number of babies we’ve had or hope to have. The simple truth is that over the course of our lifetimes, we live many shared experiences at work. And we walk away with many of the same lessons.
I turned 40 this month. In the past decade, I’ve gotten married, welcomed four little girls and pivoted away from a decade-long career as an attorney to start a company that now employs 75 people across 10 states. I still take away so much from the wisdom and advice generously offered on this simple Twitter thread.
So, I have to wonder: What if all of us told our stories more often? What if working women shared the lessons of our work and our choices with one another, our colleagues, our friends, our families? What if our voices reached women we’ve never met before who needed our support?
What if we used the power of our experience to do more than just survive the workplace, but instead to transform it?
I think we can do this. And I think that in doing so, we can change the world.