They will want challenge and a chance to develop in their professional fields, as well as money, and they will move to wherever they can find these opportunities. And in a sense this new class is being made by women, for women, and of women. This is not surprising. Women have also, perforce, had to live extraordinarily flexible lives, juggling portfolios of work, family, and community. What looks to me like a certainty is that we will all need our portfolios one day, men and women, insiders and outsiders.
Life lasts longer now.
We are as healthy at 70 as our mothers and fathers were at 50. At the same time, whatever the forecasters say, organizational employment will be ending sooner rather than later for all of us. In the organizations of the next century, as they strip down to the barest essentials, retirement will come at 55, or sooner. At that age, of course, retirement is ludicrously the wrong word. Most of us will have 20 more years of active life.