With many women hitting their professional stride much later than their male counterparts, it’s time to redefine the career-success timeline

Who decided the official retirement age in the United States?? I’ll give you one guess.?

Now, without disclosing my age, I will say that I am more than a decade from this milestone number. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think about it. Mainly, I think about why there is so much emphasis on early retirement, especially in the tech world of Silicon Valley where I live. It seems to be a badge of honor to make enough money by age 45 that work is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. Yet for many women, 45 is when they are just getting started. This isn’t a new phenomenon.?

At a dinner with two girlfriends last week, the subject of retirement came up as we compared notes on how our parents were faring. We dug into what life looks like for our moms and dads, and in-laws—who range in age from the mid-70s to the mid-80s—and compared notes on their health and activity levels. Several of them are still working full-time, some are fully retired, and some are working part-time while also deeply engaged in volunteer work.?

The conversation got interesting when we focused on the women, all of whose professional lives kicked into high gear only after their kids were old enough to be trusted with a key to the front door.??

Today’s grandmothers, these fierce females we know and love, came of age with the women’s liberation movement. Their generation broke barriers and blazed the trail for future generations of women—for US. For better or worse, they weren’t raised with the internal expectation and societal pressure that they should be able to grow their families and careers at the same time. But their daughters, now in their late 40s and early 50s, were. Nevertheless, for all of the progress our society has made, many women still find their professional stride later than their male peers.?

?As Avivah Wittenberg-Cox explains in “Women’s Career Trajectories Can Be a Model for an Aging Workforce” ( Harvard Business Review , 2020), “Women are (still) socialized to spend the first half of their lives taking care of everyone else. Even the most liberated, educated and ambitious women often find themselves caught in care roles they can’t avoid because political systems and priorities and corporate career management weren’t designed with them in mind...

"The age-old problem of 'who’s going to take care of the kids,' has not yet been adequately resolved in most countries, despite the heartening trend towards shared parental leave and increasingly involved fathers. Younger women juggle all this with pressure in the workplace itself: pleasing their bosses, dressing to impress (a mega motor of the billions raked in by cosmetics and hair color companies), and being leaders while bringing their authentic selves to work.”

But, Wittenberg-Cox tells us, there is light at the end of the tunnel. “Around 50, some women are able to begin to prioritize their own voices and ambitions. These women are done with menstrual cycle variations, their kids have flown the nest, and work can be their focus — which feels like a liberation.”

In other words, a woman's professional timeline can—and often does—look very different from that of a male peer.?This can have a lot of upside for a country with an increasingly aging population, thanks to the Baby Boomers.?

So, maybe we need to think less about how we women can fit into the male-defined model of success and retirement and make a new set of rules that speak to our shared values of equality, functional families, and vibrant longevity.

What would it look like for the workforce if we could adjust expectations of when people should be accomplishing what in their lives? What if people were judged for their talents and contributions, rather than by the last two digits on their birth certificate?

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