Sell Your Experience

Which sounds better? 

“I’m a 51-year-old media consultant” or “I’m a media consultant with more than 25 years of experience in the business.”

What does being a 51-year-old media consultant mean?  I could be a novice in the field who knows less than a 30-something professional.  Banking on your age alone in the business world may be more of a deterrent these days than you think.  Don’t get me wrong, age does have its advantages but in the business world, it’s more about what you know. 

Therefore, as an older professional business woman you’ve got to SELL YOUR EXPERIENCE!

• You Know People: You have worked long enough and SMART enough to have developed business contacts of tremendous value.  No 25-year-old executive will ever match the number and depth of contacts a veteran business woman brings to the table.
• You Bring Wisdom and Sage Leadership: After more than 25 years in the workforce, you’ve taken your knocks, you’ve learned the hard lessons, and you’ve demonstrated your ability to lead, achieve and succeed.
• You Represent Credibility: You give your company instant credibility, simply by your level of maturity.  The fact that you have learned how to wheel and deal over the years with some of the best men and women makes you a force to be reckoned with. 
• You have real-life experience:  Today, employers want workers who can hit the ground running and older workers have more real-world experience with less drama.  Also, customers want to deal with business owners who know how to treat them as a person and not as a “sale.”
• Your Network is Bigger:  All those years of Chamber of Commerce Meetings, along with other business, church and social networking clubs haven’t been for nothing.  These are invaluable contacts that not only help you generate sales but also help you expand your networking base even wider.

Abigail Van Buren, the Dear Abby columnist, was once quoted as saying: If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us we’d be millionaires.”  So what kind of deposit are you prepared to make?

Gender Gap Widens in Science and Technology Jobs

Although women make up almost half of today’s workforce, they hold just a fraction of the jobs in certain high-earning, high-qualification fields. They constitute 20 percent of the nation’s engineers, fewer than one-third of chemists, and only about a quarter of computer and math professionals.

Over the past decade and more, scores of conferences, studies, and government hearings have been directed at understanding the gap. It has stayed in the media spotlight thanks in part to the high-profile misstep of then-Harvard president Larry Summers, whose loose comment at a Harvard conference on the topic in 2005 ultimately cost him his job.

Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women – highly qualified for the work – stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.

One study of information-technology workers found that women’s own preferences are the single most important factor in that field’s dramatic gender imbalance. Another study followed 5,000 mathematically gifted students and found that qualified women are significantly more likely to avoid physics and the other “hard” sciences in favor of work in medicine and biosciences.

It’s important to note that these findings involve averages and do not apply to all women or men; indeed, there is wide variety within each gender. The researchers are not suggesting that sexism and cultural pressures on women don’t play a role, and they don’t yet know why women choose the way they do. One forthcoming paper in the Harvard Business Review, for instance, found that women often leave technical jobs because of rampant sexism in the workplace.