Nine women trade high-powered careers for retirement with a difference. Elaine Edwards writes
Fear is not a word one usually associates with powerful women - or men for that matter. (Unless one is afraid of them, of course.) But nine American women who have embarked on an unusual adventure in their retirement admit that "fear" featured in many ways in their high-powered corporate careers.
There was the fear of being "found out"; fear that they got where they were by accident, through some weird twist of fate; fear that someone would one day wake them from a dream or take away the trappings of corporate power, the corner office and the executive title.
For the most part, the nine have a common background with communications and technology giants AT&T, Bell Labs and their spin-offs, Lucent Technologies and Avaya. Most started in relatively junior positions, in areas such as computer programming, in a hi-tech environment when large, mainframe computers serving thousands of customers had "less processing power than the average Palm Pilot does today".
In Ireland last week, eight of the nine explained how what they call the NineWomen project has enriched their lives and has become "an end in itself". Initially, their common link was Yvonne Shepard, who brought them together in January 2002. But through developing a painstaking questionnaire on their lives, their work and their life experience, they became firm friends.
All of them had retired early (most of them still in their 50s or not yet 50) at the top of their game: one was president and chief operating officer of AT&T in Puerto Rico, another was an expert in voice processing and telecommunications, one is an entrepreneur and another led a team in the successful spin-off of Avaya from Lucent in 2001. The youngest, Pam Hufnagel, has since returned to work.
The nine in this leaderless project had come to the end of what they describe as "Act I" of their lives, but they weren't sure they had the script for "Act II". There was a sense, it seems, of work not done, of other lives not lived, or of mountains not yet climbed. Or perhaps it's just that for such high achievers, climbing mountains of either the real or the metaphorical sort is a buzz they can't live without.
"We had just retired and we were just passing time," Shepard explains. "It's like we were just in a mode of waiting to see what we were going to do next. On the other hand, in the US at that time it was just after 9/11 and it was kind of staring us in the face that we had a need for talent and for talent to be focused [in some way\]. There was a third ingredient from my perspective, which is that I like to make money."
Making money, however, doesn't appear to be the be-all, end-all aim. The group, along with the women's joint and individual achievements in new creative ventures, has become an end in itself. But they may still seek to develop projects that will allow them to "broker" their retired talent, through for example, building security systems or advising older women on retirement or financial planning. Their book, Beyond the Corner Office - Essays by NineWomen, will be a break-even project, they believe.
Through various other schemes, whether of a creative, a practical or an adventurous nature, the women have enriched their lives and have freed up or discovered talents they've never before used.
Other early projects included drawing classes and learning ways to leave the "left brain" of logic, management and delegation at home in favour of nurturing the creative "right brain". Fran Henig has since sold her botanical artwork to a company that makes dinnerware for top stores such as Bloomingdale's and Macy's.
Between them, the nine share a mind-boggling list of achievements, academic qualifications and life experience. They were the women in the vanguard of the hi-tech industry in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, pushing boundaries and breaking glass ceilings. They are mathematicians, software engineers, analysts, marketing specialists, tacticians, leaders. They were, as they say themselves, "footsoldiers in the feminist revolution".
Henig, a former division manager at Bell Labs, says: "I think our generation reinvented a little bit of what women could do and reinvented the roles of women in the work environment and now we are kind of reinventing retirement a little bit. If you think of the previous generation, we saw lots of people in retirement just closing down and the world becoming narrower and narrower.
"And I think one of the things the group has done for us is just opening up possibilities and making us look at possibilities in a different way from how we would have without the other women here."
It's fair to say, and they don't deny it, that these women are luckier than most (and certainly luckier than most Irish women of the same generation) because they have great financial freedom to pursue their goals. Most of them are still youthful 50-somethings and they have, hopefully, many years of happy, fulfilling retirement ahead.
They believe their model may prove effective for women in Ireland who are looking to push their own boundaries in retirement. "The classic model of retirement is just not going to work, at least for women like us, who have worked really hard in a corporate environment," says Margaret Ann Chappell.
"We want to do something and to redefine the paradigm, not just for ourselves but for a lot of women who are facing that and who are realising the other models just don't work anymore."
"[It's true that] we all had great drawing on a need to be successful, especially financially and especially to be independent women," says Kathy Meier. "But as we look back, there was a price to be paid for that - a fairly limited environment and a fairly male-dominated environment. And one of the things we all discovered is that what we lost was the artistic side of ourselves. I think all of us want to be successful in the next stage of our lives. But in a different context."
Beyond the Corner Office - Essays by NineWomen is available on amazon.com - NineWomen can be contacted by email at NineWomen@att.net