Dear Coquette,
I’m in a serious relationship with a man with whom I want to spend the rest of my life, but I’ve just been offered my dream job with an amazing team on the opposite side of the country. My boyfriend is in a good place at work, and it’d be unfair to ask him to uproot himself from…
Oh hey this is actually a tumblr I can reblog it. I just re-shared this on the Google Reader with this comment:
“I had a conversation on Friday about how we, as ladies with jobs, need to be better about supporting other ladies with jobs - and make investing in our career lives a completely normal and justifiable choice instead of a “Choice” and judging each other for sacrificing things we actually didn’t really want anyways. This reminded me of that. I wish I could high five this girl for creating and landing her dream gig.”
We were mostly discussing this in the context of having an awesome job when you’re roughly 30 or so (the same holds true in academia, for sure) - which is exactly the moment where your job starts getting kind of awesome and you’re supposed to invest in it.
But it’s exactly the same moment when you’re like, no longer a woman, in our society if you don’t DROP EVERYTHING GET MARRIED MAKE A BABY.
My friend was at some Women in Tech Panel that was entirely women in their 40s that have had awesome careers and are doing awesome shit - and someone asked the “Work Life Balance” question that someone always asks because every “Women In Blah” is now a parody of whatever it means to be a “Woman In Blah”.
Every single one of the women dodged the question, because the truth is, to be a corporate VP when you’re 40, you have to work your ass off when you’re 30-39. All of these women were on the panel, because we’re in awe of them - and not one of them would admit that they got there by making a conscious choice to invest in their career when the whole world told them they should be investing in a family.
No one would say “I made this choice and it was great!”
I hope the girl in this advice column takes the advice because It Will Be Great. And I hope she has the balls to say it to someone else someday.
(Source: apps.facebook.com)
