Marry rich is still the best career advice. Here’s how it works.
TIME magazine celebrated the 100 Most Influential Women with TIME’s Wealth Leadership Forum, where the message was clear: you’re incompetent at managing your money.
On stage, three unimpressive women scolded The Most Influential about risk-taking, wealth accumulation, and the dangers of not thinking ahead. Each of three panelists used trumped-up titles to hide the same formula: marry rich first, glossy career second.
Malak Santini, Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase: “In order to have the opportunity to create wealth, women must develop their future financial plans and portfolios as early as possible. The future creeps up on us quite quickly.”
Reality: Santini got married right before she and her husband attended the Royal Wedding of the Prince of Denmark. She took three years off for their children and then went to JP Morgan in “wealth preservation,” where she monetized her new friendships by showing them how to decrease their risk.
Jennifer Openshaw, CEO of Girls with Impact: “This is not the time to shrink away from your work, but to lean into it. Women are woefully unprepared to enter the business world.”
Reality: Openshaw was a finance columnist until she married an investment banker and had kids. Now she keeps starting nonprofits that other people lead. Her most recent one encourages girls to lead instead of marrying investment bankers and having kids.
Sukhinder Cassidy, CEO of Xero: “Risk is not betting it all on black. You need to build a smart portfolio. Wealth gives you more opportunity. My daughter is a saver, and my son is an investor. There’s a problem with that. He’s accumulating wealth and opportunity.”
Reality: Cassidy worked at mid-level jobs in tech companies, always leaving before her stock options vested. She married an investment banker and founded a startup, which she quickly dumped to have children. Her husband installed her on corporate boards. Her next idea was a company that installs women on corporate boards. It failed, because it ignored the key factor: marrying an investment banker.
Today Cassidy mysteriously runs a mid-sized company, despite having no operational success. Her idea for increasing revenue is to shame women for being bad investors and then get them to buy her company’s accounting software for small businesses. Meanwhile, she’s not afraid to throw her daughter under the bus to close a few sales.
We know the truth: growing a career and growing a family are both very time intensive. Most of us who keep working while we raise children watch our career deflate year after year. But women with serious wealth can build a career by skipping steps. This is a great plan, as long as those women don’t hold themselves up as workplace experts. Because really, those women are dating experts.
The “women in leadership” industry is predatory — built on the lie that women need special help to succeed. The real issue is simple: women are more educated and higher-earning than men until they stop working to care for kids. Women without children climb the career ladder as successfully as men. There’s no leadership gap—there’s a husband’s-income gap for women who want prestigious titles while focusing on family.
Every “women in leadership” event I see features a woman lifting herself up by stepping on other women. TIME lured successful women into a room with awards, then sold them to the highest bidder. The highest bidder told them that they’re failing because they’re women. This won’t stop until we call out these individual women for what they’re doing to other women.
The panel’s final advice: “Be authentic, believe in yourself, and take risks.” That’s useless if you want careers like these panelists. But it’s perfect advice if you want to marry rich. And to that end, I leave you with the guest list from the Prince of Denmark’s wedding.
Please never stop making posts like this!
I once went to a “Investing for professional women” presentation in San Francisco. It was publicized as an evening to help young, professional women make smart financial decisions and featured a panel discussion of successful women.
I still remember when one of the presenters told us what a hard time she had making a decision where to put the $87,000 her parents gave her when she first started taking investing seriously. The mood of the room immediately shifted. Seat neighbors started muttering to each other about trust fund kids. During Q&A, it was clear the crowd was no longer with the panelists.
Every audience question was a variation of “and what if we don’t have family money?”
The story sort of warms my heart — I mean the women stuck around to ask hard questions. Calling out people who mistake their family money for a sign of their own brilliance! In person! I love that.
Another shining example of why some very intelligent and experienced women are not feminists.
Daaaaaaaaaaamn. Sick burn.
yeah but the best marraige advice for straight women who want children IMO is to find someone who cooks!
My university chaplain and I, anticipating that our offspring would have a university level I.Q., decided we would want our child to get a trade first, before entering university.
Last weekend I saw my niece, as she passed through town. She has just finished her (five?) years apprenticing, earned her red seal, and now she can do tin heating ducts and furnaces.
To me, having a trade instead of a career means a regular shift end, and never bringing work home in a brief case, and a less stressful life for raising children.