The following post was written by Amanda Pouchot, co-founder of Pretty Young Professional. I don’t care what they say about progress: women are still lagging behind. Although women make up more than half of all college graduates and PhD candidates, they only account for 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs. Today we enter a professional world filled with opportunities that were not available to generations of women before us. It is clear that women are a lasting cornerstone of the workforce, but many of us lack the support we need to succeed. In addition to new opportunities for career advancement, today’s young women also face insurmountable pressures to look perfect, to act perfectly, to do it all. We have been overscheduled all of our lives; excelling academically, involved in extracurricular activities and developing many necessary leadership skills. Yet throughout our youth we were fed media that portrayed an image of the ideal woman – and let me tell you, she wasn’t the breadwinner. Faced with this conundrum, young women today are often stuck between the excellence we seek and the societal stereotypes that tell us to play nice and put others’ needs first. What’s a young professional woman to do? We [...]












