Welcome to the Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success.

I'm Ashley Milne Tight. This time, so much of the literature for professional women

urges us to strive for the top job. But what if you have no interest in leaning in?

The majority of women want to capitalize on their educations,

want to do something meaningful and interesting and lucrative,

but they are not willing to sell their soul for their professional life.

Coming up, we talk about leaning back, opting out, and asking for flexibility.

So last month I came across an article in the Atlantic.

In fact, it was a beginning of a series they ran on women's ambitions over time.

And as with so many of these pieces about highly educated, high-achieving women,

about a quarter of the women they focused on had dropped out of the workforce completely to look after their kids. Reading it, I thought about Catherine Solomon.

Catherine runs the website Nine Lives for Women. She's also an executive coach. She's done a lot of

different things in her career. She started off running training programs and events in the

corporate world, but she switched to running her own business when she was still in her 20s.

After 9-11, her business hit a major downturn, and she started to ponder what she should do next.

At the same time, she'd be out and about at her kids' school or at the supermarket near her home in

Connecticut,

and she'd get talking to other women.

And they would say to me, oh, God, it's so great that you work,

and I really would like to work again, but I've been out so long,

and I don't know who would want me. And I would keep talking to them.

And then, you know, in the next few sentences, I'd find out that they went to Princeton.

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