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

I'm Ashley Milne Tite.

This week on the show, perhaps one reason so few women are in positions of power is that

we're too busy trying to live up to a stereotype.

Women were making career-limiting decisions consistently based on this ideal woman.

And the ideal woman does it all.

She looks really good.

And she is very nice.

Coming up on the broad experience.

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Jody Dechon thought her career as a consultant was still going pretty well after her first child was born, but then she had her second son.

He had colic and she was exhausted, overwhelmed and depressed. Then her husband started travelling a lot for his job.

Suddenly she was doing everything house and child related and working less. Still, she told herself being the perfect mother was more important.

But she spent five years feeling miserable as home responsibilities took over,

competitive parenting practices set in, and her career dwindled.

I had kept putting it away, sacrificing my career for my children, using that mantra, and it was painful.

And it hurt me a lot.

And it wasn't until I really got out of there and realized what it was I was doing to myself that I started to find the freedom and then started to figure out what my career look like and make it what it is today.

What she realized, she says,

is that for her, career was vital. She couldn't be happy without it. She's now a professor

of management at Suffolk University near Boston. She's also the co-author of a book called The Orange

...