Secrets of Six-Figure Women

Barbara Stanny

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061843006
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

According to the Department of Labor, the average woman in 1998 was bringing home less than $25, 000 a year. For every dollar that a man makes, a woman makes between 50 and 75 cents, and that is hardly news.

But what you may not know is that, quietly and steadily, the number of women making six figures or more is rapidly increasing. Currently, over fifteen million women make $100, 000 or more, and the number continues to rise at a rate faster then for men. And these women come from every industry - psychologists, dot com founders, consultants, freelance writers, and even part-timers.

What makes these particular women able to do so well in the workplace? Fueled by curiosity, Barbara Stanny, author of Price Charming Isn't Coming: How Women Get Smart About Money (Viking Penguin), set out to research this phenomenon. What she discovered was that, though the high-earning women she interviewed came from different backgrounds and had had greatly different work experiences, they all had certain characteristics in common.

Secrets of Six Figure Woman: Surprising Strategies of the Successful High Earners will be a ground breaking book for high earners who want to ensure their wealth, enhance their success, and learn from others who are in the same boat. It will also offer inspiration, guidance, and motivation to those who aspire to make more.

1

THE QUEENS IN THE COUNTINGHOUSE

I believe the power to make money is a gift from God.

—JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER

Money is congealed energy, and releasing it releases life’s possibilities.

—JOSEPH CAMPBELL

I began my interviews with two broad questions in mind. What were six-figure women really like? And what did it take to make that much money? Our conversations were fascinating and, in many ways, eye-opening. I was reminded of the “surprise balls” my parents used to put in my stocking at Christmas. I’d unravel the layers and little gifts would appear. That’s precisely what happened during my interviews. As I began peeling back emotional layers, I discovered all sorts of surprising revelations. For starters, I realized those off-putting images I held of highfliers were nowhere near the actual truth. These women were not intimidating at all. They were personable, likable, and actually pretty much like all the other workingwomen I know—trying to make a living, trying to get ahead in their careers, and trying to squeeze in a life outside of work. Some were doing it better than others.

What set them apart from the rest of us, of course, is that they made more money. A lot more. Their combined average income was close to $500,000. Individually, their annual earnings ranged from $100,000 to $7 million. The majority, however, hovered somewhere between $200,000 and $800,000 a year. Most of them had far surpassed their parents’ earnings. I heard from more than one: “I make more money in a year than my father did in his whole life.” And if they were married (85 percent of the women I interviewed were), the vast majority outearned their husbands. (This is actually above average for dual-career couples. According to the Department of Labor, one in every three working wives makes more than her spouse.)

For some of these women, making six figures was a nonevent. “I guess I didn’t really think anything about it, because it’s sort of the norm when you graduate from business school,” explained Celeste Chang, an investment banker. For others, those extra zeros became a validating, and often exhilarating, milestone. Corporate executive Stephanie French at first dismissed her high salary as no big deal. “So many women make six figures, it doesn’t even sound like financial success,” she said. But after a brief pause, she recanted. “Actually, I remember the first time I hit that mark, and when people on my staff do—it’s like, Wow!”

And still others I spoke to never ever expected to be in this league. “I was absolutely amazed,” exclaimed Lucy Tomassi, a bank senior vice president. “I grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, and the idea that anybody would pay me this much money was incredible to me.” Lucy, now forty-five, was in her thirties when she crossed into six-figure territory, the average age for most of these women to start pulling in that amount. But I also interviewed women who didn’t begin making six figures until they were well into their forties, fifties, even sixties.

During my interviews, I got to see firsthand what the feminine face of financial success actually looks like. Here’s what I found.

SIX-FIGURE FEMALES—NOT AN EXCLUSIVE CLUB

As one would expect, there are certain fields where you’re more likely to come across six-figure women than others. I had no trouble finding investment bankers, financial advisers, doctors, and lawyers who were making big money. But what fascinated me most were those women working in occupations you wouldn’t ordinarily equate with high pay. And surprisingly, there were quite a few of them, from artists to actors, from writers to teachers, from musicians to—get this—a matchmaker, and even a psychic.

Among the high earners with impressive credentials and advanced degrees, everyone swore her education was responsible for her financial success. “The fact I had Harvard on my résumé got me this job. Definitely,” an executive stated emphatically. “That education’s been good for my self-esteem. It’s opened a lot of doors. I know people in ways that I never would have otherwise. When I advise people now, I tell them to go for the best education they can get.”

But for all the M.B.A.’s and Ph.D.’s I spoke to, I also talked to scores of women whose only credential was a bachelor of arts or a two-year associate’s degree. And, surprisingly, there were a number who had no college degree at all, some of whom were high school dropouts. What’s more, the lack of credentials didn’t seem to hurt them one bit.

“Credentials? You can hire credentials!” exclaimed a financial executive who has an undergraduate degree in classical civilizations. “I didn’t want an M.B.A. I was scared it would homogenize me in some way. But almost everyone I’ve worked with told me, ‘Frances, you’ve got to get credentials.’ You know something? I’ve surpassed most of them.”

Entrepreneur Kitty Stuart, a seventh-grade dropout, actually sees an advantage in her lack of education. “Because I didn’t know any better, I went out and tried things people said I could never do.”

Not having a degree didn’t stop Karen Sheridan, either. She went from being a full-time, middle-aged housewife to a six-figure earner in four years—without any college. “I couldn’t go to school. I was supporting a family. So I had to learn on the job.” Those jobs included stints at Touche Ross, one of the big-five accounting firms; at Capital Trust, selling money management services to pension funds; and at Bank of New York in a senior executive position. She finally enrolled in college and earned a degree in her fifties, long after she had entered six-figure country.

“How did you get all those jobs without a college degree?” I asked in amazement.

“I never brought it up and they never brought it up, either,” she said, laughing.

Women like Frances, Karen, and Kitty share a well kept six-figure secret:

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Financial Success Is Possible in Almost Any Field, and

Lack of Education Doesn’t Have to Hold You Back.

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Admittedly, there are a number of careers, say kindergarten teacher or Christian missionary, where you’re not going to make six figures or anywhere close to it, no matter how hard you try. Still, I found enough highly paid women who were once in low-paying jobs or worked in fields that aren’t normally high-paying to know this: We may not all make six figures, but there’s no reason why any ordinary woman can’t be making an above-average salary if that’s what she wants. And doing so is much more in our control than most of us realize.

WOMEN AT WORK

When I told New York real estate tycoon Leslie Wohlman Himmel the title of this book, she burst out laughing. “I have no secrets,” she chortled. “I’m no genius. I just work really, really hard.”

If there’s one hallmark for high earners, it’s that they’re exceptionally hard workers. I wasn’t surprised. I expected these six-figure women to be slaves to their jobs. But hard work has many faces and, like success itself, means different things to different people. As I came to see, the critical factor is not the number of hours as much as the intensity of focus.

“I don’t work hard,” Nicole Young, a senior vice president of Charles Schwab, told me. “Working hard has a negative connotation. I’m not making any sacrifice. I get to do the best work of my life. I love what I do. I work passionately, not hard.” But others fit my stereotype to a T, flat out admitting they worked way too much. In many cases, I had difficulty telling where their work stopped and their personal life began. And so did they.

“A lot of people think it’s extremely glamorous because I can make my own hours,” events planner Stephanie Astic said. “But everything I do is related to my work. Everything. From the moment I wake up until I go to sleep at night, every day, every weekend I’m working. When I’m on a project, I sleep it, I breathe it, I eat it.”

I suddenly flashed back to a recent interview I’d had with another business owner who was in tears the entire time. “I’ve been crying for two days straight,” this woman told me between sobs. “I’m sick of this business. I’m working way too hard, making less money, and having no fun.” Was Stephanie following in her footsteps?

“Are you ever afraid you’ll burn out?” I asked, knowing she’d been at it more than eight years.

“I’m very careful of that. Whenever I have downtime, I really shut down,” she responded thoughtfully. “I try to go away three or four times a year, Florida for a few days, Puerto Rico, or someplace where I can turn off, sit in the sun, and do nothing.”

Here’s where I began to notice that the women I was interviewing were falling into two groups. One group, the Successful High Earners (SHEs), like Stephanie, loved what they did, worked passionately but sensibly, consciously striving for (though not always perfectly achieving) some semblance of balance.

The other, smaller group were what I called the Hard-Driven High Earners (HHEs). These were superwomen on steroids, examples of ambition spun out of control. They often hadn’t a clue how many hours they worked; they just knew how few hours they slept. Like the woman who cried throughout the interview, these hard chargers will break down before they’ll slow down, and even then, they’ll often force themselves to keep plugging away. They may have once loved their job, but by the time I caught up with them, their passion had turned to obsession, their work had become an addiction, their long hours felt more like hard labor, and their generous salaries were but golden shackles.

“Why don’t you quit?” I asked one thirty-year-old woman who admitted she was sick and tired, literally, of her high-pressured job.

“The money makes it hard to leave,” she confessed. “It’s like heroin. You get addicted. It’s not just the compensation. It’s the lifestyle, the opportunities, the experiences, and the people you’re exposed to. You get used to a certain way of life you don’t want to give up.”

But money isn’t the only reason some high earners have lopsided lives. Overwork has become an occupational hazard for ambitious women trying to make it in a man’s world. As The St. Louis Post-Dispatch succinctly summed it up, “Women have to make disproportionate sacrifices to compete equally in the work world.” Many weary women told me they have to work twice as hard as the men just to keep up. It’s an easy, perhaps inevitable, trap to fall into, but the SHEs get out before it’s too late.

Jenna Graham, who was employed by one of the largest technology companies in the world, is one who didn’t. “I was one of the very few women executives,” she told me. “I worked eighteen hours a day. I’d come home at midnight and work until two a.m. I couldn’t just be equal, I had to stay ahead of the men. When I did have relationships, they didn’t last because work got in the way.” Eventually, overwork took its toll.

“I went home one day, and didn’t go back. I sat in my house for a month, and one day my sister came and said, ‘Something is really wrong with you.’ And the next thing I knew I was in a hospital. And you know what? The company sent me a six-figure bonus check, but I never got a card.”

Jenna’s story is an example of what can happen when a woman becomes too single-minded and obsessed with her job. The good news is, if my interviews are any indication, a growing number of HHEs are wising up (or wearing out) and choosing to work smarter, not longer. They watch for signs of strain and consciously reduce their speed before they crash and burn, doing whatever it takes to find a rhythm of working that fits their temperament, their values, and their preferred way of life. They’ll make changes in their current job, switch companies, or start their own. These women have discovered an important secret for achieving success and staying sane:

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Working Hard Doesn’t Mean Working All the Time.

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Lisbeth (Beth) Wiley Chapman learned this the hard way. “Breast cancer was the excuse I needed to say no,” she told me. “You make a lot of different decisions if you have a life-threatening illness.”

For this energetic fifty-eight-year-old entrepreneur, a public relations consultant for financial firms, cutting back included moving from downtown Boston to the more serene shores of Cape Cod. She bought a cottage near the beach, slashed her hours from seventy to thirty a week, and, amazingly, her income soared.

“I work very hard from nine to noon,” she said. “Then I have lunch on my deck, look at the birds, and from one to two, I watch a soap opera while I read my mail. Then maybe I’ll work two more hours. I discovered, if I’m efficient and focused, I don’t really need to put in all those hours.”

I was genuinely surprised at how many women, like Beth, were actually able to make more money working fewer hours. They were living proof that it is possible to pare down your hours and at the same time actually pump up your income.

“I put in eighteen years and horrendously long hours at Dupont,” Linda Giering, now vice president of a medical education firm, told me. “It never paid off. I didn’t get the salary or responsibility I wanted.” So Linda switched companies, cut her hours to no more than forty-five a week, and negotiated a much higher salary. “Overwork is a self-inflicted punishment. I don’t do that anymore.”

This theme of working less and making more was especially true among the entrepreneurs. Not so much in their early years of doing business, but eventually many of them came to the same conclusion.

“I consciously made a decision not to let work overtake my life,” consultant Carol Anderson told me, which, for her, meant forty hours, four days a week. “I’ve increased my income by seventy thousand dollars so far this year by doing less work and getting paid more. I don’t have to work sixty hours a week unless I tell myself a story.” She had also taken two months off to travel to Nepal, and when she returned, business began pouring in “like I was never gone.”

With each interview, my preconceived notions of frazzled workaholics began to evaporate. It was the intensity of focus on their work, not the number of hours they spent doing it, that factored so heavily into these women’s financial success.

What drove them to work so hard? Ironically, it was seldom the money.

WHAT DRIVES SIX-FIGURE WOMEN

“I was never after the big bucks,” Jenna said. “I wanted the recognition and the reward of doing a good job.”

Her response reflected another recurring theme among Successful High Earners. With rare exceptions, every woman vowed it wasn’t the money per se that motivated her success. It was some...