Downshifting the Mount Holyoke way rarely involves less effort—just a change in how and where the effort is used. Cori Ashworth, the Alumnae Association’s alumnae career and professional consultant, says that in her experience counseling Mount Holyoke women, downshifting has negative connotations, and she’d rather call it refocusing or re-energizing. Both Kossek and Ashworth assert that such a shift can be made in almost any field with careful planning and negotiation.
managers are ready for downshifters, she days. Since work life lasts longer for baby boomers than for earlier generations, we now have more time for “second acts,” as columnist Ellen Goodman calls them. Our working life is “not a sprint but a marathon,” says Kossek, and employers and employees need to work together to craft a course that keeps passion and endurance alive.
The term downshifting has been around at least fifteen years, since Amy Saltzman published Downshifting: Reinventing Success on a Slower Track. But what was once a marginal movement is becoming mainstream. Kossek, whose doctorate is in organizational behavior, says American companies are realizing that to retain their high-talent individuals they have to start using “underutilized tools”—such as reduced hours or flexible schedules—in managing these individuals. And, she emphasizes, research shows that these arrangements serve employers and employees equally well. “The benefits of employing downshifters need more PR based on the sound research,” Kossek notes.
Mount Holyoke alumnae have taken this trend in their own remarkable directions, for a variety of reasons. Whether composing a life around changes and crises or following a dream, these alumnae were ahead of the curve as they downshifted into self-crafted work lives.
Increasingly, says Ashworth, these high-talent individuals are women, many of whom seek flexibility and work/ life balance. While flexible jobs were once seen as a mommy-track aberration, now, Kossek says, businesses are realizing “flex life is work life.” It is significant that the Wharton School of business published her book, since not all
Mount Holyoke Women Downshift
“In 2000, I had a heart attack from stress and very nearly died,” says Chris Bryce Sass ’77. As a highly paid corporate software saleswoman, Sass had been needing pep talks from her husband to stay with her job despite the pressure. After the heart attack, she had to reduce stress, and this led her to create her own business, a now thriving online and brick-andmortar quilt fabric store (quiltfabric.com). A different physical crisis, infertility, led Stephanie Ward Chiari ’95 to redesign her career while staying in her chosen profession of teaching. To accommodate the rigorous regimen of infertility treatments, she downshifted to teaching assistant, giving her more time and less stress—and twins in 2004! Sometimes the spur to
downshift is a company’s downsizing. Job loss put Elizabeth B. McDermott ’80 in a position to choose what came next, a situation she now describes as “not a crisis but an opportunity.” She moved from a career in the software industry into library science, and is pursuing a degree in that field. McDermott notes, “leaving the salaried job is difficult—until you get pushed.” Sometimes a change starts a chain reaction. For Sue Fitzgerald ’84, divorce and a move to a small town inspired her to give up the practice of law to teach part-time at two community colleges. “I’d rather be able to go for a walk in the afternoon or volunteer at the community center than worry about billable hours,” she says. Marcia Weed Heath ’74 left a marketing job with an “obscene salary for someone with a B.A. in English” after her divorce, to make “a relative pittance” at her own agency. “I learned how much I enjoyed having no boss,” she says. Kossek cites the birth of a second child as another frequent motivator for career rewiring. For many, neither crisis nor change prompts their downshift. It’s a personal choice, one at which they arrive many different ways. Penny Fillios Billings ’77 turned fifty and realized, “if I did not take the plunge then, I probably never would.” She dove into a professional career as a fulltime artist after twenty-five years as a trial attorney, including fifteen as a federal prosecutor, and particularly values the ability to control her own schedule.
Edana A. Kleinhans ’03 left New York publishing to teach in Germany. She reconnected with an experience she had really enjoyed—mentoring at MHC’s Speaking, Arguing, and Writing Program—and, with help from the Career Development Center’s Katya King, got a Fulbright scholarship to teach in Germany. She’s now in her second year as a teaching assistant there, and is working toward her master’s in education. Finding she needed to see more than a blur of traders’ faces at the New York Stock Exchange, Jennifer Whyman ’84 switched the trading bell for the school bell to teach at a public school in Harlem where she meets “chess champions, musicians, writers, scientists, and mathematicians,” and finds herself “ecstatic” at her good fortune. A Rigorous Process Feeling fortunate can be one result of downshifting, but it’s not easy. Elizabeth McDermott cites lack of health insurance as a major negative. Penny Billings remarks on the solitude of the artist’s life, the lack of collegial interaction. And a change in schedule can bring conflict with a spouse in trying to reconfigure family time, says Chris Sass. Some alumnae encountered incredulity and even resistance from family and colleagues. These difficulties make it important to do some hard thinking and planning before making the change. It’s not always easy to figure out why a particular job or career isn’t making one happy. “You need some data about yourself,” says
Mou n t Ho lyo k e Al u m na e Qua r t e r ly
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