Women of all ages face many challenges in the workplace; equal pay, sexism, lack of flexibility and sponsorship and opportunity for advancement. Recent graduates beginning their careers, work hard to gain credibility and visibility in a competitive environment. Working mothers struggle to keep their careers on track and maintain their ambition with the demands of raising a family. And women of the baby boomer generation who started working in the 1970’s; the trailblazers who succeeded in male-dominated companies, also face new challenges. They are now asking themselves what does retirement look like? How can I continue to contribute to society?
These women aren’t about to disappear into the shadows of irrelevance. They made their mark and succeeded despite the obstacles. They laid the groundwork for changes in the workplace for future generations regarding gender bias and stereotypes and fought hard to make it to the top.
The big question for these women is: What now?
To better understand these issues, I reached out to two trailblazing women, Erica Baird and Karen Wagner, retired attorneys who founded the online forum, Lustre.Net. Together, Baird and Wagner are on a mission to redefine retirement for modern career women by confronting outdated concepts, defying stereotypes and raising our collective voices to ensure that retirement for all of us is shaped by women, for women.
Bonnie Marcus: What are the major challenges facing women regarding retirement?
Erica Baird and Karen Wagner: The first unexpected challenge is overcoming the outdated assumptions and stereotypes about retirement and older women. “Retired” assumes you are done, lacking in brainpower and value. Older, especially for women, means gray, lacking in color and style, irrelevant and invisible, no longer sexy. These older images, though out of date and inauthentic, can gobsmack you. They are everywhere. If you start internalizing them, and believing they are true, they can paralyze you.
They are not true. We have to challenge them and become visible as the women we are now.
The second challenge involves loss of identity. Without your work, who are you? For us, responding “I am retired” to the constant “what do you do” was disconcerting and unsatisfying. We were uncomfortable referring to our past accomplishments. That was the past. We are about the future. But at first, we had not figured out who we wanted to be going forward.
Third, how do you live in a world with no structure? We led very structured lives. Many of us were tethered to large institutions. Our work required things we had to do, places we had to go, people we had to see. Now all of that is gone. Do we need structure? How do we create a new one?
Finally, it is a challenge to get your head around the notion that our retirement is going to be different because we, unlike prior generations, have a long runway ahead of us. We are healthy in mind and body. If we reach the age of 65, it is more likely than not we will live to be 90. We have to start thinking about retirement as the next third of our lives.
We are the first large cohort of women who worked for decades and reached retirement. We have no role models to show us how to navigate this new world, to help us figure out how to overcome these challenges and do retirement well.
That’s what Lustre is about—trailblazing again to create a new picture of what retirement can be for women like us.
Marcus: How can trailblazing women at this stage of their careers help other women succeed?
Baird and Wagner: We can help by sharing what we did, how we did it, what we learned, what we know. One of our favorite sayings is “the younger are faster but the older know the shortcuts.”
Working women are dealing with many of the same issues we dealt with as we navigated the workplace and rose through the ranks. How do you get noticed, get ahead? How do you own your career and have a strategy for success? How should you present yourself? How do you find a sponsor, a mentor? How do you deal with a difficult boss? Are you working too hard and networking too little—-and how do you do that remotely? How do you have a demanding career and a family? What do you do when a client sexually harasses you? Or a coworker says something racist?
As a group, we’ve dealt with all of this and more. We are an untapped resource. We can help women navigate and find their own successes. Corporate American should set up structures to enable younger women to connect with older, more experienced ones. Structures are needed to encourage working and retired women to talk freely about issues they confront. Retired women want to pay it forward. We want the next generation to be even more successful than we were.
And we also want to make sure that younger women understand something we think is critical: even though it is hard to have a demanding career and a family and a life, it is worth it. Not only is it incredibly rewarding, it gives you financial security and the ability to make your own choices. It gives you the experience, knowledge and skills that form the foundation for your next stage in life.
Finally, we know that, as white women, we are privileged and have had advantages that Black women do not. We would be happy if Black women could benefit from some of the resources we have to offer.
Marcus: Why did you start Lustre?
Baird and Wagner: We started Lustre when we began to understand that old notions about retirement, age and older women were getting in our way of creating the active and engaged retirement we wanted. We were being pigeonholed and typecast by the assumption that, having worked hard for many years, we now just wanted to smell the roses. Nothing could have been further from the truth. But we also knew that if we wanted the world to see us differently, we had to take control and do something about it. Lustre was born in defiance of outdated images and in service of creating new ones.
Lustre shows all of us—and everyone else—who we are, what we want, and what we have to offer. Diversity and inclusion enrich everyone.
Marcus: What are you hoping to achieve?
Baird and Wagner: We want retired women to have a place in the wider world. We want us to come together, as we came together in the 70’s, to demonstrate that we continue to have a role to play. We want to help solve the many problems that our society faces. We want to make the world better for the next generation. We want to put all our hard-earned experience, tested judgment and skills to good use. We want to be seen, respected and valued. We want to be visible.
We should be seen as assets. We can solve problems and help people work more effectively and efficiently. We are fun to be around. We add dimension and experience. We buy things. We are every marketer’s dream target—or at least we should be.
When we started working in the 1970’s, we were expected to wear a lot of gray and navy, do good work and fade into the woodwork. We quickly got tired of that. We wanted something different, but we had no role models. We had to figure it out for ourselves. And we did. We began to come out as women, with colorful heels, totes instead of briefcases, dresses instead of suits. We became visible as the women we were, and we became appreciated for the work we did.
Now, we are coming out again. Once again, we have to show our authentic selves and demonstrate what we can do. This time, though, we are not starting as novices and we no longer want to work the same grueling hours that we used to. We do not need to climb a ladder or compete with anyone else. And we don’t want to take anyone’s job. We want to use the assets that only people with experience have to make sure those who don’t yet have it can get ahead faster.
Lustre is about our cohort becoming a valued part of the wider world. When that happens, we will have accomplished our goal!
