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

I'm Ashley Milntight.

This time, the second of two shows about women in their 20s, a decade when not everything goes well.

We should be looking at failure as, okay, this did not work.

I need to try something different. Not that this did not work and I'm a

failure. And to men in their 20s pick certain careers because they have to. Men are expected to be

successful. They're expected to be able to support a family and, you know, to kind of do it all, you know, in terms of work.

And for women, it still, I think, feels like a choice.

Stay tuned.

Last week we heard from two young women, one on the cusp of a career and the other several years into hers.

They talked about communication problems they had at work, fear of not doing well, lack of confidence, and how much competition they're up against.

This time, I wanted to talk to two women whose 20s, like mine, are in the past.

Dawn Edmiston is a broad experience listener and professor of marketing at the College of William

and Mary in Virginia. She spends a lot of time around people in their early 20s, and she firmly

believes you don't have to have your whole life sorted out by the time you're 30.

And typically the first thing that I tell students in their 20s is that there is not simply one right path to success. There tends to be pressure from parents or peers to follow the right path

when there are actually a multitude of past and a multitude

of opportunities for each of us. And one of the wonderful things about being in your 20s is that

if you think that you have made a wrong move in your professional or personal life, you still have

plenty of time to make a different move and take a different path.

I tend to agree with that, although my next guest has a different take, but Dawn says we live in an

era where we have a lot of options.

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