Millennial Women Supposedly Don't Care About Success, Won't Lean In

Guys, I just flew back from my weekly Millennial Women Decide What To Do Meeting, and I’ve got an important announcement about how we’re all going to behave, as a cliquey monolith: stop trying to succeed at work. It’s a pain in the ass! New plan: lean out. Now let’s all get matching nail art and Snapchat it to each other.

Sorry; just had to draw you in with a headline and a compellingly misleading lede paragraph riddled with Today Show-level trendy references. What this post is actually about is research that finds that women in MY GENERATION don’t want to lead giant corporations. Which is a lot different than the headline MILLENNIAL WOMEN DON’T WANT TOP JOBS, SAYS STUDY.

The study in question was conducted by a PR firm and reported on in BusinessNewsDaily, and it found that only 15% of The Young Ladies want to lead a “large or prominent corporation” because we’ve witnessed the general levels of sexist fuckery encountered by previous generations of women who futilely aspired to “have it all” and ended up “having it up to here.” According to survey respondents, young female ladder climbers are expected to give up way more than young male ladder climbers, and rather than give everything up in exchange for front row seats in the Church of Capitalism, young women would rather just lead fulfilling lives that make them happy.

So it’s not that women in their early 30’s or younger don’t want “top jobs;” it’s that they don’t want a very specific, narrowly defined sort of “top job” that has historically been hostile to work-life balance, especially for women. And if you can’t beat ’em, fuck ’em.

But there are other ways women are pursuing happiness by opting out of the guilt juggling competition that engulfed the lives of Millennials’ mothers — putting off having kids. In 2012, for the first time since we started tracking this kind of thing, the fertility rate for American women in their early 20’s dropped below that of their counterparts in their early 30’s. This is because having kids and having a job is way fucking harder than not having kids and having a job. And if you have neither kids nor a job, then you’re legally required to appear on a cable show about nutty women acting nutty. It’s your patriotic duty to amuse the rest of us!

Does this mean Millennial women are complacent because 85% of them don’t want to be the CEO of a major corporation? Hell no. It just means that the kind of achievement that defines success for one segment of the population doesn’t mean the same thing to another part of the population.

Besides, what kind of jobs are there to want if not “top” jobs? Power bottom jobs?