I’ve taught many classes on conquering underearning. And one common belief that comes up for women time and again is the assumption that if you made better money, you would have to work harder and have less personal time.
Our time is precious to us. I get it! We want time for our ourselves, time for our families, time for our lives. Work has to fit into our life and not lead to burnout. But is this assumption true that earning more money means we must work more hours?
I was musing this question when the Sunday Seattle Times showed up in my inbox. In it was Parade Magazine, a newspaper magazine carried by many U.S. newspapers. They were doing their popular annual report called “What People Earn in 2020”, where they survey people across the United States, and ask them what they do and how much they make.
The range is pretty astonishing, and fascinating. But what struck me when I was reading through it was the different amounts people earned for doing pretty much the same amount of work. For example, there was a 58-year-old school nurse who earned $44,000 a year, a 57-year-old social worker who earned $67,000 a year and a 57-year-old meteorologist who earned $83,840 a year. All worked full time. All women. All in the Midwest.
Does the woman who is the school district nurse work hard? Absolutely! That is a difficult, and sometimes under appreciated job. What about the social worker or the meteorologist? They work hard too. All women spend their days working with people and are engaged in many different activities. All put in their hours. But one makes $43,840 more than the other. If you are going to work 40 hours a week, why not choose something you like that also makes great money?
The dilemma is that many women assume that if they earn a higher salary, it would mean they had to work more and hence have less personal time.
Barbara Stanny, in her classic book Secrets of Six Figure Women, commented on this belief that more money equaled less personal time. She assumed that women who made really good money must all be workaholics. But what she found was quite different. In fact, a majority of women who earned over $100,000 a year worked forty hours a week or LESS. “It was the intensity of focus on their work, not the number of hours they spend doing it, that factored so heavily into these women’s financial success.”
In other words, if you work hard during your “work” time, you will free yourself up during your non work time. I find this to be very true in my own work life. When I am working, I do nothing else. Being self-employed, this can be challenging. But I silence alerts on my phone, turn off my email, and focus intensely on my work for a certain period of time. I believe this compartmentalizing of work and personal time is a key to maintaining balance and a sense of “having a life” outside of work.
But the women in the Parade article were not self-employed. They were all salaried and they all worked full-time.
I find that the answer to this riddle often goes all the way to college when most of us did not ask the question, “How much money could I make if I studied this?” We often choose our career without thought of our future earning potential.
Again, if you are going to work 40 hours a week, why not pick a career that pays well? Also, how high- pressured of a career are you considering? Will the career you choose demand more than full time hours? All of these are important considerations for something as important as the career you choose. The intersection of time and money is always worthy of deep reflection.
For most of us, college was a long time ago. So now we need to examine our assumptions and see how they impact us.
When we assume something (more money will mean more work) it robs us of looking thoughtfully at many possibilities. Unexamined assumptions kill our creativity.
Many years ago when I was married, my husband was offered a job that paid more with a different company. But after investigating the time demands and work culture of this other company, he turned it down. He decided the extra money was not worth the extra time they would demand of him. And he never regretted it.
Knowing how much he needed to earn, (and not earn) allowed him to make a thoughtful decision. And he did not assume more money always had to mean more hours. And in fact, the following month he asked for a raise at his current job and received it.
If we assume we can make good money and have enough personal time, we may look at career options with a different eye. We may negotiate for schedules that work better for us. We may think carefully about our next job change. (The average American changes jobs 12 times as an adult.) We may say no to intrusive demands. And we may negotiate with our domestic partners for more equitable sharing in household chores, to free up more time.
Examining our assumptions is key to earning more money in a way that leads to a balanced life. So what do YOU believe?
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