Editorial Team
For generations, success came with a fairly familiar set of instructions. Get a good job, earn a respectable salary, climb the career ladder, buy the house and become increasingly busy until your calendar looks impressive enough to justify the exhaustion. For women, there has often been another expectation running quietly alongside all of this: succeed professionally while continuing to be responsible for the people and responsibilities waiting at home.
It is hardly surprising that many women are beginning to question the arrangement. The conversation around women and work has changed considerably, but perhaps the most interesting shift is not simply that more women are becoming entrepreneurs or working remotely. It is that women are increasingly questioning the definition of success itself, and whether the version they inherited is actually one they want. That being the classic definition, an alternative version, or what everyone else is doing.
Who Decided What Success Looks Like?
Consider the language we tend to associate with successful people. They are ambitious, driven, hardworking and constantly growing, while being busy has somehow become evidence that we are doing something right.
For women, this can be particularly complicated because professional ambition has historically existed alongside expectations around caring, family and domestic responsibilities. Research has found that cultural norms and gender role expectations continue to influence women’s entrepreneurial experiences, from their access to resources to the way they perceive their own opportunities.
We have become remarkably good at celebrating women who can carry everything. Perhaps the more useful question is whether success should require us to carry everything in the first place.
The Problem With One Definition
There is nothing wrong with wanting the traditional version of success. If your ambition is to build a large company, lead a team and earn a substantial income, you should absolutely be able to pursue it.
The problem begins when that becomes the only version that receives recognition. A woman who deliberately builds a small business that gives her financial independence and time with her family has not achieved less simply because she has no interest in becoming a CEO with 200 employees.
The same applies to travel. Spending part of the year exploring Southeast Asia might be somebody’s idea of success, while another woman might prefer to stay in the same town and have every evening free. One may want an international business, another may want four days of work a week, and someone else may simply want enough control over her schedule to attend a school play without negotiating with three managers.
“Success becomes much more meaningful when it reflects an actual life rather than an imaginary audience”
When Work Becomes Part of Identity
Modern working culture has also blurred the distinction between doing well and looking as though we are doing well. We announce promotions, launches, awards and new ventures, while social media gives us a front-row seat to everyone else’s professional highlights and very little of the reality behind them.
The result can be a peculiar form of comparison in which somebody else’s ambition quietly becomes the benchmark for our own. It is remarkably easy to start wondering whether we should be scaling faster, earning more, travelling further or working harder simply because somebody else appears to be doing so.
Yet some of the most significant measures of success are difficult to photograph. Being financially independent, having time for the people you love, being able to leave a workplace that no longer suits you, or creating work that gives you a sense of purpose can all be meaningful achievements without producing a particularly exciting professional update.
Entrepreneurship Does Not Automatically Equal Freedom
Entrepreneurship is often presented as the great escape from conventional employment, particularly for women seeking greater control over their working lives. There is some basis for that idea, as research involving more than 5,000 women entrepreneurs across 37 countries found that greater job autonomy was associated with greater satisfaction with work and personal life.
But starting a business does not magically remove the expectations that follow women into the workplace. Women entrepreneurs can continue to carry significant domestic and family responsibilities alongside the demands of running a business, meaning that becoming your own boss does not necessarily mean becoming free from the pressures that shaped your working life in the first place.
That is why entrepreneurship should not be romanticised as the solution to every problem. Its real value can be the possibility of making different choices, provided we use that autonomy deliberately rather than simply recreating the same culture of overwork with our own name on the paperwork.
Making Work Fit the Life
This is where the practical side matters, but perhaps not in the way business culture usually presents it. Systems, technology, outsourcing and remote working are useful because they can give us greater control over how we spend our time, rather than because they allow us to squeeze another six hours of work into the day.
A woman running an online business might use fulfilment services so that she does not spend her evenings packing boxes. A consultant might structure her diary around the hours she wants to work, while someone working remotely might build a career that allows her to spend part of the year abroad.
Technology, then, is simply one of the tools that can give us greater control over our working lives. Its value lies less in allowing us to work from anywhere than in giving us more choice over where, when and how work fits into the rest of our lives.
A business owner’s guide can help with the mechanics of creating a sustainable company, but no business manual can tell you what success should mean in the context of your own life. That is a decision we have to make ourselves.
The Cultural Shift Is Bigger Than Business
Perhaps what is happening now is less about women rejecting ambition and more about refusing to accept somebody else’s terms for it. Studies of women entrepreneurs continue to show how deeply cultural expectations, family structures and social norms influence the choices available to women, meaning that professional decisions cannot always be separated neatly from the societies in which we live.
That makes the conversation about success surprisingly social, even when we are simply talking about someone’s working week. Who has the right to decide how many hours constitute ambition, and why is choosing family time sometimes interpreted as a lack of drive while working until midnight is treated as commitment?
There is also the question of who benefits from the traditional definition of success. If a career rewards constant availability, geographical mobility and long working hours, it naturally favours people who have fewer responsibilities outside work, or who have the resources to have somebody else take care of them.
Success Can Change With Us
Perhaps the most important thing about redefining success is accepting that our definition does not have to remain fixed. What matters at 25 may feel completely irrelevant at 40, while the career achievement you once desperately wanted might eventually become less appealing than having time, stability or the freedom to travel.
That does not mean giving up ambition. It means allowing ambition to evolve alongside the rest of your life, rather than expecting your life to remain unchanged so that your original definition of success can survive.
For one woman, success might mean building an international company. For another, it might mean running a small creative business from home, travelling several times a year or earning enough to have genuine financial independence. Someone else might choose a demanding career for a decade before deliberately slowing down, while another might decide that a slower life was the goal all along.
Those different choices are a reminder that success does not need to follow a single model. What constitutes a successful working life can change considerably from one woman to another, and can change again as her circumstances and priorities evolve.
The more interesting question is whether the life we are building actually belongs to us. Perhaps success is not simply about how closely our careers resemble somebody else’s idea of achievement, but whether our work gives us the means, agency and confidence to create a life we genuinely recognise as our own.
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