Career
You Don't Have to Be Ready for Every Opportunity
Most of us can name an opportunity we read once, felt a flicker of interest in, and then closed. The page stayed open in a tab for a day or two while a qui...
Zoe Matthews
Published stories
Stories by Zoe Matthews
Career
Career
The Broken Rung in the Path to Leadership
Most of us were handed the same picture of how women get stuck at work. A ladder stretches upward, and near the top there is a pane of glass that lets you...
Career
The Experience You Don't Think Counts
A woman runs the school fundraiser, and it raises more money than it did the year before. She keeps the household budget balanced through a stretch when tw...
Career
The Hidden Cost of Being the Reliable Employee
Every workplace has one person who never drops a thing. She remembers whose birthday falls on Thursday, rewrites the client deck at nine at night, and know...
Career
Not Every Woman Wants to Be a Boss
Most workplaces have a woman everyone relies on. She knows the clients, solves the problem before anyone notices it, and trains the new hires without being...
Career
The Follow-up that Keeps A Good Introduction moving
Most good introductions end the same way. Two people talk for thirty minutes, the conversation is warm, someone says "Let's keep in touch,"...
Career
When Did Being Good at Your Job Become Managing Everyone's Feelings?
The planning meeting ends at 3:30, and you have ninety minutes to finish the budget summary due tomorrow morning. You are halfway back to your desk when Da...
Career
Reinventing Yourself Without Starting From Zero
The sentence that stops most reinventions is some version of I would have to start over. A woman says it about a field she has been curious about for six y...
Career
10 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Career Before 2027
Most year-end career reflection is really goal setting wearing a disguise. You look back briefly, decide what you want next, write it down, and the looking...
Career
The September Reset: 9 Things to Leave Behind Before the Year Ends
September does something to women that January does not. January arrives with a clean page and a culture that wants you to fill it, and most of us know by...
Career
What Women Actually Need to Hear at Work That No One Is Saying
Here is the honest problem with the feedback most women receive at work. It is not that the feedback is unkind, though sometimes it is. It is not that the...
Career
What to Do When You Are Tired of Being the Only Woman in the Room
There is a particular fatigue that arrives, often somewhere in the second decade of a woman's career, that has nothing to do with the work itself. The...