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 âsurprise ballsâ my parents used to put in my stocking at Christmas. Iâd unravel the layers and little gifts would appear. Thatâs 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 knowâtrying 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 parentsâ earnings. I heard from more than one: âI make more money in a year than my father did in his whole life.â 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. âI guess I didnât really think anything about it, because itâs sort of the norm when you graduate from business school,â 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. âSo many women make six figures, it doesnât even sound like financial success,â she said. But after a brief pause, she recanted. âActually, I remember the first time I hit that mark, and when people on my staff doâitâs like, Wow!â
And still others I spoke to never ever expected to be in this league. âI was absolutely amazed,â exclaimed Lucy Tomassi, a bank senior vice president. âI grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, and the idea that anybody would pay me this much money was incredible to me.â 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 didnât 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. Hereâs what I found.
SIX-FIGURE FEMALESâNOT AN EXCLUSIVE CLUB
As one would expect, there are certain fields where youâre 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 wouldnât ordinarily equate with high pay. And surprisingly, there were quite a few of them, from artists to actors, from writers to teachers, from musicians toâget thisâa 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. âThe fact I had Harvard on my rĂ©sumĂ© got me this job. Definitely,â an executive stated emphatically. âThat educationâs been good for my self-esteem. Itâs 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.â
But for all the M.B.A.âs and Ph.D.âs I spoke to, I also talked to scores of women whose only credential was a bachelor of arts or a two-year associateâs degree. And, surprisingly, there were a number who had no college degree at all, some of whom were high school dropouts. Whatâs more, the lack of credentials didnât seem to hurt them one bit.
âCredentials? You can hire credentials!â exclaimed a financial executive who has an undergraduate degree in classical civilizations. âI didnât want an M.B.A. I was scared it would homogenize me in some way. But almost everyone Iâve worked with told me, âFrances, youâve got to get credentials.â You know something? Iâve surpassed most of them.â
Entrepreneur Kitty Stuart, a seventh-grade dropout, actually sees an advantage in her lack of education. âBecause I didnât know any better, I went out and tried things people said I could never do.â
Not having a degree didnât stop Karen Sheridan, either. She went from being a full-time, middle-aged housewife to a six-figure earner in four yearsâwithout any college. âI couldnât go to school. I was supporting a family. So I had to learn on the job.â 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.
âHow did you get all those jobs without a college degree?â I asked in amazement.
âI never brought it up and they never brought it up, either,â she said, laughing.
Women like Frances, Karen, and Kitty share a well kept six-figure secret:
Financial Success Is Possible in Almost Any Field, and
Lack of Education Doesnât Have to Hold You Back.
Admittedly, there are a number of careers, say kindergarten teacher or Christian missionary, where youâre 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 arenât normally high-paying to know this: We may not all make six figures, but thereâs no reason why any ordinary woman canât be making an above-average salary if thatâs 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. âI have no secrets,â she chortled. âIâm no genius. I just work really, really hard.â
If thereâs one hallmark for high earners, itâs that theyâre exceptionally hard workers. I wasnât 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.
âI donât work hard,â Nicole Young, a senior vice president of Charles Schwab, told me. âWorking hard has a negative connotation. Iâm not making any sacrifice. I get to do the best work of my life. I love what I do. I work passionately, not hard.â 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.
âA lot of people think itâs extremely glamorous because I can make my own hours,â events planner Stephanie Astic said. âBut 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 Iâm working. When Iâm on a project, I sleep it, I breathe it, I eat it.â
I suddenly flashed back to a recent interview Iâd had with another business owner who was in tears the entire time. âIâve been crying for two days straight,â this woman told me between sobs. âIâm sick of this business. Iâm working way too hard, making less money, and having no fun.â Was Stephanie following in her footsteps?
âAre you ever afraid youâll burn out?â I asked, knowing sheâd been at it more than eight years.
âIâm very careful of that. Whenever I have downtime, I really shut down,â she responded thoughtfully. âI 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.â
Hereâs 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 hadnât 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 theyâll slow down, and even then, theyâll 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.
âWhy donât you quit?â I asked one thirty-year-old woman who admitted she was sick and tired, literally, of her high-pressured job.
âThe money makes it hard to leave,â she confessed. âItâs like heroin. You get addicted. Itâs not just the compensation. Itâs the lifestyle, the opportunities, the experiences, and the people youâre exposed to. You get used to a certain way of life you donât want to give up.â
But money isnât the only reason some high earners have lopsided lives. Overwork has become an occupational hazard for ambitious women trying to make it in a manâs world. As The St. Louis Post-Dispatch succinctly summed it up, âWomen have to make disproportionate sacrifices to compete equally in the work world.â Many weary women told me they have to work twice as hard as the men just to keep up. Itâs an easy, perhaps inevitable, trap to fall into, but the SHEs get out before itâs too late.
Jenna Graham, who was employed by one of the largest technology companies in the world, is one who didnât. âI was one of the very few women executives,â she told me. âI worked eighteen hours a day. Iâd come home at midnight and work until two a.m. I couldnât just be equal, I had to stay ahead of the men. When I did have relationships, they didnât last because work got in the way.â Eventually, overwork took its toll.
âI went home one day, and didnât go back. I sat in my house for a month, and one day my sister came and said, âSomething is really wrong with you.â 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.â
Jennaâs 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. Theyâll 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:
Working Hard Doesnât Mean Working All the Time.
Lisbeth (Beth) Wiley Chapman learned this the hard way. âBreast cancer was the excuse I needed to say no,â she told me. âYou make a lot of different decisions if you have a life-threatening illness.â
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.
âI work very hard from nine to noon,â she said. âThen 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 Iâll work two more hours. I discovered, if Iâm efficient and focused, I donât really need to put in all those hours.â
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.
âI put in eighteen years and horrendously long hours at Dupont,â Linda Giering, now vice president of a medical education firm, told me. âIt never paid off. I didnât get the salary or responsibility I wanted.â So Linda switched companies, cut her hours to no more than forty-five a week, and negotiated a much higher salary. âOverwork is a self-inflicted punishment. I donât do that anymore.â
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.
âI consciously made a decision not to let work overtake my life,â consultant Carol Anderson told me, which, for her, meant forty hours, four days a week. âIâve increased my income by seventy thousand dollars so far this year by doing less work and getting paid more. I donât have to work sixty hours a week unless I tell myself a story.â She had also taken two months off to travel to Nepal, and when she returned, business began pouring in âlike I was never gone.â
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 womenâs financial success.
What drove them to work so hard? Ironically, it was seldom the money.
WHAT DRIVES SIX-FIGURE WOMEN
âI was never after the big bucks,â Jenna said. âI wanted the recognition and the reward of doing a good job.â
Her response reflected another recurring theme among Successful High Earners. With rare exceptions, every woman vowed it wasnât the money per se that motivated her success. It was some...