Charlene Begley, president and CEO of GE Transportation, Rail, is one of the company's top executives, overseeing a business worth $2.5 billion. The good news: According to compensation expert David Leach of ECG Advisors LLC, a person in her position typically makes between $600,000 and $1 million a year. The bad news: Her operation is based in Erie, Pennsylvania, two hours from Pittsburgh and smack in the middle of the Great Lakes' snowbelt. Not that Begley's complaining. Indeed, as she told a group of GE women executives, the remoteness of the division's headquarters is a huge plus. "Take tough jobs in distant locations," Begley advises. Those jobs often lead to bigger positions because they don't come with the huge support infrastructure of corporate headquarters, giving you a chance to learn more and lead better. And if the company's on the skids, all the better. "Anybody can go to a job with a high-growth business and do well," she says. "That's easy. Go to a really broken business and make your mark. Those are the most rewarding."
In the demanding and high-pressure world of biotech, Lisa Spirio is a pretty rare bird: a PhD in human genetics; the co-founder and R&D director of a promising startup, 3DM Inc., which creates 3-D cell cultures for medical research; and a mother of two. In grad school, Spirio says, about 50% of her peers were women. By the time she reached her postdoctoral studies in cancer biology at MIT, that share had fallen to 30%. Now, she figures, about 20% of her peers are women. It's a statistic that's replicated across many scientific and technological fields. For example, in the BLS chart of "20 Occupations That Pay the Most," 9 were various kinds of engineering jobs. Meanwhile, only 10% of engineering managers are women, although the BLS reported that the wages of women who took high-tech jobs increased more than twice as fast as for their male counterparts. In Spirio's experience, scientific and technical fields are more meritocratic too. "The bottom line is, it doesn't matter if you're male or female if you have what it takes to get the job done."
Pamela York Klainer, founder of the consulting firm Power & Money LLC, learned early the risks associated with life on the economic margins. When she was 14, her father, a salaried worker at DuPont, died suddenly of a heart attack, pitching her homemaker mother into a financial tailspin. Klainer vowed never to be so dependent on a paycheck for her well-being. With her husband, Jerry, she built a financial-services firm with 10 employees and $100 million under management. Two years ago, Jerry also died suddenly, leaving Klainer in charge. Far from being able to disengage, or even to take time to properly mourn her loss, she was in the office two days after his funeral, calming panicked employees and attending to clients. It was a terrible ordeal, but she got through it, ultimately increasing the family's net worth by 25% before selling off the firm and starting her own consulting business. Despite the pain, she wouldn't have it any other way. "Running your own venture is very high stakes," she says. "When it's good, it's great. When it's bad, it's beyond awful."
Klainer is an example of the kind of worker author Farrell refers to as a "7-Eleven" -- they never close. "When we can psychologically check out from our work, we call it a job; when we can't, we call it a career," he says. Doctors, lawyers, executives, and most knowledge workers (the folks who are what they do) are 7-Eleven. They struggle to leave the office behind, even for vacations, but their commitment generally is repaid financially.
Farrell is eager to point out the ways men and women can up their earnings, but he's quick to say he doesn't necessarily endorse the most vexatious behaviors. Ultimately, he'd like to see corporations recognize what they're asking of workers and find ways -- from job sharing to flex-time and other solutions -- to make the burden of work less crushing.
And if corporations don't embrace these changes on their own, they may find workplace reforms thrust upon them when they begin competing for young talent. In a Radcliffe-Harris poll, 70% of men in their twenties said they'd be willing to trade money for a chance to spend more time with their children. The gender wage gap may someday be solved not by legislation but by the best and brightest people simply saying, "Sorry, you can't pay me enough to take that job."
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