This post shares some career advice for women from female CEOs. Women are underrepresented in leadership positions. Therefore, I think it's great to support more women in climbing up the corporate ranks.
You might be surprised to know that Financial Samurai's CEO is a woman. My wife! She's been the CEO since I started this site in 2009. I had to give the reigns to her because I was still working at the time.
Career Advice For Women
I discuss a lot about women's issues because I love women and desire to understand half the population as much as possible. I love my mother, I want my sister to flourish in her career, and I want my future daughter to have as equal a playing field as possible for succeeding. Although you might tilt your head in bewilderment when I write some of my relationship posts, I can assure you that my main intent is to make people question why things are the way they are for a better future.
Here's a nice infographic I found that shares information on gender wages, family, which countries employ the most female CEOs, and advice from women in leadership positions. One of the interesting takeaways from my “Median Net Worth Has Gone Nowhere” post is that one of the ways modern families maintain their standard of living despite facing great cost inflation is by having fewer kids than previous generations.
The reason why I entitled this post, “Advice from Female CEOs” is because advice is timeless. Please spend time listening to people who've been there before in order to minimize disappointment and maximize luck. The one underlying message I see from the infographic is that it's important for women to BELIEVE they have every right to be a leader as well. If you don't believe in yourself, others won't believe in you either.
Hopefully you appreciate this career advice for women from other women. My daughter was born in 2019 and I'm hopeful she will grow up to do great things!
Related: The Secret To Your Success: 10 Years Of Unwavering Commitment
Recommendation For Leaving A Job
If you want to leave a job you no longer enjoy, I negotiating a severance instead of quitting. If you negotiate a severance like I did back in 2012, you not only get a severance check, but potentially subsidized healthcare, deferred compensation, and worker training. Since you got laid off, you're also eligible for up to 27 weeks of unemployment benefits. Having a financial runway is huge during your transition period.
Conversely, if you quit your job you get nothing. Check out, How To Engineer Your Layoff: Make A Small Fortune By Saying Goodbye, on how to negotiate a severance.
I first published the book in 2012 and have since expanded it to 200 pages from 100 pages in the latest edition thanks to tremendous reader feedback and successful case studies. There is no other book out there in the world.
Both my wife and I negotiated six-figure severance packages so we could leave our finance jobs behind and be free!
Business Recommendation
Start your own business/website: If you feel you're not getting paid what you're worth and want to boost your income, start your own business online on the side! It used to cost a fortune and a lot of employees to start your business. Now you can start it for next to nothing with a hosting company like Bluehost for under $4/month and they'll give you a free domain for a year to boot.
Brand yourself online, connect with like-minded people, find new consulting gigs, and potentially make a good amount of income online one day by selling your product or recommending other great products. Not a day goes by where I'm not thankful for starting Financial Samurai in 2009. Here's my step-by-step guide to for how to start your own website like mine in under 30 minutes.
I take issue with myth #1… not the myth itself, but the supporting data.
If 6% of CEOs are women, then comparing 94% of male CEO pay to 6% of female CEO pay is a very poor comparison. The female CEO sample size is way too small to come to a definitive conclusion, especially saying they make 33 cents.
Certain sectors pay their CEOs much more than others. If there are fewer female CEOs in those high paying sectors than the other sectors, of course the data will be skewed downward.
Again, I’m not debating whether or not it’s a myth, but I’m not a fan of sweeping statements like “female CEOs make 33 cents to the dollar”, when they aren’t comparing apples to apples.
In fact, if you started comparing apples to apples, sector to sector, company to company, you may find that the current state of pay for female CEOs is far worse than 33 cents, maybe it’s 10 cents.
I love infographics, because they can make data easier to visualize. I hate infographics, because they can make data easier to visualize.
Men or women, I think once you get to the top it will be hard to spend time with families. From what I’ve observed, work-life balance doesn’t really happen once you get to the top. If you decide to pick career, your family life will most likely suffer. So many of the execs I know have went through multiple marriages…
I disagree that women don’t have to choose between career and kids. Anyone in a CEO type job, male or female, is going to have to let someone else do the lion’s share of child rearing. That usually means having a stay at home spouse. Since men typically don’t want to do that it puts women at a disadvantage. I think this is partly cultural, and partly biology. If you don’t have a stay at home spouse, then you hire someone else to raise your kids. There really is no other way around it. I don’t think the life of a CEO is one I would ever want, personally, and I think that’s probably true for most people. So I don’t know why such a big deal is made of it in the mainstream media.
Ideally, if both spouses have a high earning potential, a great solution is to have a nanny. It costs a lot. However, it can really make life more manageable at an otherwise chaotic time. I’m a single mom of a 3-year-old (married the “bad boy” and the bad acts eventually became too much). I have a pretty serious job and investments on the side that require some time, but my life is manageable – I am able to pursue things that I love (skiing, biking, skating), and spending time with my 3-year-old (who can now ski and skate with me). This is possible because my nanny lives with me in our third bedroom. She takes care of him (getting preschool lunches together, picking up him up from school when I can’t be there on time, etc.), and she takes care of me – laundry, cleaning, running errands, cooking. I also think I have a great relationship with my son because the time we spend together is quality time – reading, skiing, etc. Of course, every parent feels guilty at times that they aren’t doing enough for their kids, but I think that is not unique to parents who have demanding jobs.
I see that the wife and I need to move to Australia or SE Asia so that she can ascend the corporate ladder! I wonder if I’ll need to update my language skills…
As for your content, I do like that you’re constantly expanding it. It helps that you know how to write, so you could probably make baked ham into an interesting personal finance article.
The statement about women being paid 78 cents on every dollar a man makes, is a myth that has been busted. Not sure why this keeps being pushed all over the net, I kind of expected better from this blog…
I mean think about this logically, if companies could get away with legally paying women less for the same role, why would they bother to employ men at all?
Thank you for this. It is very encouraging to me as a woman trying to make something of herself in the corporate world.
Myth #2 seems a bit ambiguous. It implies that “family” means having kids. If that’s the case I agree that you don’t have to choose between family and success. If, however, “family” means raising kids, that might changes things a little.
The one underlying comment I took from the info graphic is the track record for female CEO’s is not good. Of all the female leaders listed above, I do not associate one positive outlook with their company.
I’m all for equality and hope that there is equal pay one day (my dream job is to be a stay-at-home-dad, and I need that equal pay for it to happen). But if I’m a board director looking for a new CEO to lead the company, I have to look at past results and eliminate 50% of the candidate with one simple criteria. I hope to be proven wrong and 20 years from now we talk about some “Susan Smith” in the same sentence as John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Jack Welch.
Lots of neat things I didn’t know in that infographic like North America being lower on the percentage than other places like Asia and Europe. It definitely is encouraging to see more women in CEO roles as a woman myself. It’s true that you have to believe you’re capable of doing great things. I also didn’t realize that the percentage of female CEOs with kids is the same as the general population. Women shouldn’t have to choose career or family and neither should men. Thanks for sharing these cool stats.