Megyn Kelly Shows Us How You Can Have a Big Career and a Life
Megyn Kelly chose NBC over Fox News, in part, for work/life balance reasons. NBC offered her a daytime slot which would allow her to have dinner with her family more regularly.
What's interesting is that Claire Zillman reports in Fortune that this isn't the first time Kelly has made a career move for the sake of her family. She quit a lucrative legal career, with its crushing hours, for a $17,000 entry-level job on television news, because she perceived a journalism career to offer more flexibility.
Two points I feel compelled to make. First, journalism is actually not famous for being a family-friendly endeavor. The hours can be just as crushing, without the upside of big salaries, and can often require big moves to find the next great opportunity. Second, while law is famous for chasing out smart, talented women, there are certainly ways to make a law career work for your life. I know women who go into private practice, for example, so they can have more control over their life and work.
What I like about the Kelly story, though, is that it advances the idea that you can make a career "sacrifice" for the sake of your family that still allows you to have a big and fulfilling career. She left the law, in part, because she didn't find it very "interesting." The fact that it also made it impossible for her to be the kind of mother she may have been a big factor in her move, but I bet she would have quit law anyway. By moving into journalism she found a career she liked more, was better at, and got herself into a position where she can could negotiate the kinds of jobs that also allow her to have the kind of life she wants.
So often the media narrative around career sacrifice for the sake of family -- a sacrifice almost exclusively made by women, of course -- posits the idea that our heroine must pare back her ambitions. Ideally she quits, because that's really the only response we can imagine when a woman is working crushing hours and not seeing her children and has had enough. If she doesn't quit then she takes a job that is somehow "less" -- has less responsibility and power, requires fewer hours and less energy.
There's nothing wrong, of course, with paring back on career in favor of family. It's a choice many women, and some men, make and it works for them. There are all kinds of ways to build a life and many definitions of success.
But I think what Kelly's story illustrates, for me, is that when you decide that BOTH your family and your career are important it opens up a lot more possibility. Yes, there are still a lot of systemic problems that make it unnecessarily difficult for working parents to balance their home obligations with their professional ones. But it's even harder when you are told by the culture, over and over, how very hard it is. So hard that you probably can't do it and shouldn't even try.
I don't make tens of millions of dollars a year as a television journalist. But I do have a big, interesting career. I'm building a nonprofit from scratch. I work hard. I travel pretty frequently -- I logged more than 50,000 air miles in 2016. But I also have dinner with my children most nights of the week. I spend weekends seeing movies, taking them to the zoo and doing other fun stuff. My husband is also home most nights and takes on many tasks that aren't typical. For example, he is 100% in charge of setting up our daughter's summer camp. He also has a big and demanding career. We have a rich, full life. It's not always easy but it isn't miserable either. On the contrary, it's filled with a lot of joy -- both personally and professionally.