Reflections on Stanford's Women and Work Retreat

Watch Your Priorities

Photo by Robert Gareth on Unsplash

This post is sponsored BrightStory, a boutique college admissions consulting company that that teaches teens life skills so they find success no matter where they go to college. It’s owned by Stanford graduate, professional journalist and “coach of admission coaches” Alice Chen, who also created Happy Asian Woman.

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“Don’t be at the end of you life, sitting in the rocking chair on the back porch, thinking about your regrets.”

That was my key takeaway from a day spent in San Francisco hearing from three panels of female Stanford alums, talking about work and life.

The first panel discussed people’s early careers - how they got where they are, challenges, and victories. Speakers talked about the unpredictability of career paths, making the same mistakes over and over again (and eventually learning from them!), and the importance of relationships for hiring (a.k.a. when people change jobs, they recruit their friends to join them. Invest in friendships.)

The second panel talked about balancing work with caregiving. Notable insights - one woman’s perspective on career completely changed after having her child and losing her father — now work is not the most important thing.

Other women said “having it all” at the same time is a myth - priorities will constantly shift. They emphasized the oxygen mask idea - self care is crucial to survival of yourself and everyone around you - and one thing I wanted to learn more about was from the woman who had a personal chef (!) (How did she find one?!)

The bottom line from that workshop was Take Care of Yourself, and Ask for What You Want (If you don’t ask, the default is “no”. Also, employers invest a lot in their employees and they don’t want to lose their institutional knowledge, so you as the employee have the upper hand if you’re good at what you do.)

Notably, 75% of the women on the balancing career with kids panel were either divorced or separated, and that was not a topic that was touched on. I wish we could’ve learned more about how to keep marriages strong in this busy time.

Personally, I think when kids come into the picture, for most people, energy goes into work (to maintain the job) and kids (who else will raise them?) The leftovers go to marriage, which seems easier to coast in, but I personally am witnessing several divorces going on in friends who are in their 40s with moderately young kids. And an older alum observed there’s another big wave of divorce when people are in their 50s, and their kids are more self sufficient.

Since I’m beyond the parenting super young kids stage, the most interesting panel for me was from the women who were in their 70s - ish. The name of that panel was “When Retirement becomes Rewirement.”

This panel featured 4 extremely accomplished former Stanford professors - two from the School of Medicine, one from the Graduate School of Business, and one from the School of Engineering.

I *loved* hearing these women talk and could’ve listened to them all day.

Not only did they have very accomplished careers, one had 5(!) sons, one had a husband who was very supportive of her and loved to cook, one was the first female professor at the Graduate School of Business when there were only 5 female students and just wrote a book 2 years ago, the list goes on.

They enjoyed retirement because they finally had control of their time, and they lit up when they talked about using retirement to do what they loved, whether that was helping people by “seeing patients” (the doctor) or writing books, writing musicals, performing in musical theatre and the like.

They told us it was hard to make 10-year plans because you never know where your life will be in 10 years, and what your energy levels will be like.

Live each day in the now.

These women maintained their sense of humor and gusto in life, even though they had dealt with taking care of sick spouses and lost loved ones.

I want to be like them when I’m at that age.

What have you learned about integrating work and life? What advice do you have for marriage preservation? What do you wish you knew when you were younger?

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