Does Success Have a Gender?

The tricky thing about success is that it is so dynamic. The definition of the word changes from person to person, and even from day to day. Success might look firmly one way to you today, and completely different tomorrow. That is close to describing what happened to me. I had a baby in 2018 and – POOF – almost overnight, how I defined success for myself completely changed. It was a catalyst I did not expect, but one I actively decided to embrace rather than resist.

Recently, a dear friend referenced this change in me while we were having a conversation about many things, including priorities and career. She touted me as her “example of motherhood changing someone’s career focus,” and added that she is trying to mentally prepare for this for when she becomes a mother in the future.

It seemed to me that she perceived all of my career ambitions to have simply evaporated once I became a mother.

While her observation was intended as a compliment, it still somehow hurt my feelings, made me question my choices and, once again, my very sense of self. I have never seen becoming the CEO of a company as a “step back.” But I have realized through several interactions over the past year that others are perceiving it this way, and I have started to seriously wonder why.

It is true that there are many things that were attractive about entrepreneurship to me as a new mother. The flexibility meant that in those newborn months I was not expected to be available 7:30 AM-6 PM every day. I could work from my home office when I needed or wanted, making it much easier to pump and breastfeed (as opposed to pumping in my car while driving from meeting to meeting, which was just torture for me). It meant I had control over my travel schedule which became unexpectedly important to me in the first year of my daughter’s life.

It is equally true that my career change required me to work nights and weekends to make up for the flexibility in my schedule. Before we put Millie in daycare at fourteen months, I was working 40-hour weeks (admittedly down from the 60-70 hour weeks I was working pre-motherhood), but now, many of these hours were between 8 PM and 1 AM. This was hard on me physically – still struggling with the exhaustion of recovery from labor and delivery, and a baby’s erratic sleep schedule paired with breastfeeding. It was also hard on my marriage, because Matt and I had a lot less time together during this season of our lives.

I certainly wasn’t working any less hard as an entrepreneur than I was in my previous corporate job. If anything, I was forced to get more creative and more efficient to squeeze much more work into a smaller and less predictable schedule. I was also taking on a whole range of new job responsibilities as an entrepreneur and attempting to solve problems and implement strategies that I hadn’t explored since college (or ever).

There is nothing “easy” or “part-time” about running a tech start-up. It is all consuming.

Being a parent to an infant/toddler is another full-time job itself, which I could not fully appreciate until I lived it. Contrary to my previous belief, you cannot just put your child in a pack-and-play or a play-gym and expect them to entertain themselves – they require constant supervision, attention, and engagement (oh, how I treasure the precious naiveite of my former childless self). This has become national news over the past several months while most parents are struggling to juggle career and kids during the pandemic, but this truth has been known and accepted by generations of working mothers (and, in many cases, fathers too).

Parenthood, especially to the really little ones, is also all consuming.

I recognized very quickly once this little human entered my life how much time and energy was going to be required of me to be the type of mother that I wanted to be – far more than I felt capable of giving in the context of my current career dynamic. I was very good at that type of job for that type of company – I had spent almost an entire decade perfecting the art of sacrificing myself for my team and my clients. I even enjoyed it for that time in my life. But that just was not going to fly anymore. I needed work that supported my new priorities and fulfilled me in a way that justified leaving my daughter in someone else’s care every day.

Even so, my decision to leave GE and run my own business was never a “step back” in my mind. It was never a question of whether to work or not work. I was not seeking an opportunity to “work less” so I “could” be a mom. What really changed for me was my perspective and my approach to the role that work and career should play in my life. My new career energizes me rather than robbing me of all my energy. Doing work that I love and believe in makes me a better mom and gives me a sense of purpose that I am making this world better for my own kids and for future generations.

Now that Millie is almost two, I work probably the same amount of hours as I did when I was at GE. But it means so much more to me. It is a gift rather than a sacrifice. And that feels like success.

But it has become glaringly obvious to me that others don’t necessarily see it that way.

At a (socially-distanced) tailgate a few weeks ago, I found myself in a discussion about the exciting success of some mutual (male) friends who had taken a similar entrepreneurship journey as I am taking, leaving their comfortable corporate jobs to start something unique on their own. “Part of me is so jealous of what they’re doing,” one person said. “It really takes some balls to put yourself out there and run your own business like that. But they’re really killing it. Can you imagine having the courage to take on something so huge? I don’t think any of the rest of us could do it.” I just blinked a few times in response.

I had single-handedly closed an additional $1M round of capital for my business that very week. The previous day I had signed contracts to finalize a tech partnership that I had been negotiating for months. I was in the middle of commercializing the business transformation that I had been building and implementing from scratch for the last year.

Was I really doing such a bad job at sharing any of this with my friends? The male friends that we were discussing have not gone above and beyond to promote their work in any way. For the most part, they’ve kept their noses down and focused on the daily grind, the non-impressive grunt work that it takes to run a small business. Just like me.

So that left me wondering: is the subconscious assumption that because I am a mom, my entrepreneurial efforts are less legitimate than that of my male colleagues? I am not a chain in a multi-level-marketing scheme. I am not selling diet shakes or make-up from my garage. I wanted to scream: “Hello friends and world! I am running an investor-backed healthtech company over here!”

Running a start-up in the first months and years is far from glamorous, and most of the work happens very much behind the scenes. So I thought that my friends’ general lack of interest or awareness of the business side of my life was “normal” at this stage. After all, I’m not posting screenshots of endless financial planning spreadsheets, pipeline tracking, investor updates, and legal reviews to social media. I’m sharing cute videos of my daughter learning her ABC’s.

But that doesn’t make my progress with my company any less real. That doesn’t make my work less worthy of sharing.

Still, these conversations have sent my head spinning. Is being a mom more important to me than being an entrepreneur? Clearly, that’s how people are perceiving my career choices. Does motherhood preclude me from being recognized as a “badass CEO”? Which of my identities defines me more? For me, it’s not an either-or scenario. Both are me. Both motherhood and my career contribute to my identity in a very real and important way.

I am ambitious as a mom and as a career woman. I can be both. I am both. And being a woman does not make my business any less legitimate than my male friends on a similar path, just like being an entrepreneur doesn’t make me any less of a caring, capable mom. I get to choose each and every day what deserves my time.

I am prioritizing motherhood vs. career the same way I prioritize working on financial projections vs. building a corporate culture. Both are ESSENTIALLY important to me and to my success. Some days will be heavier one way, some will be heavier the other. Some days I will plan to prioritize one and yet the other will takeover because of something unplanned. This is life. This is success, not failure. We always have the power to change our plans as our priorities in life ebb and flow, and that is a beautiful thing.

I am so grateful that success has become dynamic for me rather than static. I am so glad that for me, today, there is no differentiation between career success and personal success. Today, success for me just means finding happiness and fulfillment through meaningful work, both at home and at the office. This means that one minute I am singing a silly song from my daughter’s bedroom floor and the next minute I am discussing the next steps of technology implementation for the new platform we are launching at Soul Being.

Neither is more important than the other. Both are meaningful work. Both fulfill me. And both define me equally.

Now as my family prepares to welcome Baby #2, we are slightly more confident in navigating another transition. We know that we can make big decisions and take big risks with both our individual and our family needs at the center of it all. We know that we have a certain level of control over the outcomes of our decisions, and that there is a certain level of control that we will continue to surrender.

We know that one day of tantrums or unpleasant business meetings does not make us a failure, because as long as we are committed to doing work we love, and are together and happy and healthy, there is no greater success we could ever hope for.

This type of success transcends gender, and requires no external validation.

Cheers to your continued success, however you may define it.

CJK