Can You Get Ahead and Still Have a Life? Younger Women Are Trying to Find Out
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Can You Get Ahead and Still Have a Life? Younger Women Are Trying to Find Out

Women assessing their careers say they’re determined to advance while keeping work-life boundaries intact

By RACHEL FEINTZEIG
Thu, Nov 3, 2022 8:40amGrey Clock 4 min

Deijha Martin, 26 years old, works as a data analyst from her Bronx, N.Y., apartment. On workdays, she’ll chip away at a task until 5:10 p.m. or 5:20 p.m., but never 6 p.m. She loves travel, and earlier this year tapped her company’s unlimited vacation policy to jet to Greece and France.

Having boundaries is a priority, but make no mistake: She’s plenty ambitious.

“I definitely do want to make money,” she says, so that she can fund the things she loves to do. “It’s just, not really fighting with anyone to get to the top.”

The pandemic’s shake-up of work and life has had lasting effects on ambition for a lot of women. For some, the last years have prompted a reassessment of how much they’re willing to give to their careers at the expense of family time or outside interests. For others, many of them younger professionals, seeing the ways other leaders have allowed work to subsume their lives is a turnoff. And after a spell of workplace flexibility few would have imagined before 2020, many women are now asking the question: Can you get ahead and still have a life?

“The company’s not hinging on your ability to answer an email at 11 o’clock p.m.,” says Alexis Koeppen, a 31-year-old technology worker in New Orleans. “The work will always be there for you.”

She quit an intense consulting job in Washington, D.C., moved to New Orleans to be with her boyfriend and switched to a remote role that gives her time to walk her dog, a pandemic addition, and exercise. Instead of taking on extra work, she’s leaning into trips with friends, weddings, parties. “We didn’t get to for so long,” she says.

Plenty of men are rethinking their relationship with work, too. Women face a particular combination of pressures and penalties at home and on the job. They shoulder far more housework and child care, according to government data, and research shows colleagues perceive them as less committed to their jobs when they become pregnant.

Getting ahead without being always-on might be a hard ask.

“The workplace is still designed for people where work is the number-one priority all the time,” says Ellen Ernst Kossek, a management professor at Purdue University who studies gender and work.

Workers who make themselves constantly available receive better performance evaluations, more promotions and faster earnings growth, adds Youngjoo Cha, a professor of sociology at Indiana University Bloomington. The current economic moment, marked by inflation and the threat of recession, makes the idea of pulling back at work risky yet enticing.

“You think, ‘Are they going to think I’m not a team player?’ Or not come back to me with opportunities, or think I’m ungrateful?” says Kim Kaupe, the Austin, Texas-based co-founder of a marketing agency. She has constructed an email template, which she fires off at least once a month, declining new work opportunities to preserve time for her personal life. Still, she worries.

“I hope they know that I’m still ambitious,” Ms. Kaupe, 37, says of her clients and people reaching out with new opportunities. “But I don’t know.”

Ms. Koeppen says she once aspired to reach the C-suite, but seeing top management up close changed her mind. “I don’t want to be those people,” she says. “They don’t seem happy to me.”

Almost two-thirds of women under 30 surveyed by McKinsey & Co. and LeanIn.Org, the nonprofit founded by Sheryl Sandberg, say they would be more eager to advance if they saw senior leaders who had the work-life balance they desire. A good number of senior women leaders themselves aren’t happy either. About 43% of female leaders say they are burned out, the survey data show, as compared with 31% of male leaders.

While some younger women seek a finite workday, baby boomers and Gen Xers wonder whether they could have done things differently and still gotten ahead.

“I don’t know that I did it the right way,” says Jory Des Jardins, a 50-year-old marketing executive, who describes dropping everything for her career and delaying a family until her late 30s.

A co-founder of BlogHer, an online community for women, she spent years travelling frequently for work, transporting her breastmilk home to the San Francisco Bay Area after she had two daughters at age 38 and 40. Her husband paused his career to stay home.

“We wanted to show women it could be done and that we could run a business,” she says of the BlogHer leadership. “We didn’t want to disappoint.”

Ms. Des Jardins eventually sold her company, and tried to dial back professionally. But she had set a precedent as an all-in worker. The opportunities that came her way required flying to New York every week and prioritising an investor meeting over all else.

The pandemic gave her a chance to derive comfort from her family instead of achievements, to unapologetically embrace her whole life, she says. Now she’s wondering, what next?

“If you’re not integrating your life along the way, you kind of have an identity crisis later,” says Ms. Des Jardins, who now works for a startup. “Would it have been that awful if we had taken a little time? Would we have completely taken a step back? I don’t think so. But that was a bet that we weren’t going to take.”

Loria Yeadon, a lawyer who rose to be chief executive of the YMCA of Greater Seattle, still remembers the moment 15 years ago when, rushing to her child’s kindergarten-graduation ceremony, her company’s general counsel rang. Ms. Yeadon said she had 10 minutes to talk. The conversation stretched for an hour.

She didn’t hang up the phone. “I didn’t feel the freedom to do it,” she says.

She made it to her daughter’s ceremony, but spent the beginning still on the call in the back of the room. Looking back, she wishes she had hung up the phone.

“I think today I would just throw it to the wind and trust that there would be another job, or that I’d be fine where I am,” she says. “That I could still have the career I longed for.”



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The Super Rich Have Turned the Tiny Florida Town of Manalapan Into the Next Palm Beach

Can its real-estate market continue to rise amid stock-market turmoil?

By Katherine Clarke
Thu, Apr 24, 2025 7 min

MANALAPAN, FLA.— The Deal-Closer. That’s what real-estate agent Jack Elkins jokingly calls the Hinckley picnic boat he docks on the Intracoastal Waterway in the Florida community of Manalapan.

From the road, many of Manalapan’s mansions are shrouded by plantings and foliage, but they are clearly visible from the water, Elkins explained. A boat ride is often the best way to show properties to the wealthy buyers now flocking to the tiny town.

On a recent afternoon, Elkins cruised down the Intracoastal in the The Deal-Closer, passing mansion after mansion, most with their own docks. “When I was a little kid, almost all of this was jungle,” said Elkins, 46, who spent much of his childhood in the area. “There were foxes and parrots and all these wild animals.”

Manalapan, a roughly 2.4-square-mile town with a population of about 400, is just south of glitzier Palm Beach.

While Manalapan has long drawn moneyed residents such as the singer Billy Joel, it has historically lacked the prestige—and price tags—of Palm Beach. That has changed dramatically over the past five years, however, thanks to a series of major home sales.

In 2022, for example, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison paid $173 million for a historic Manalapan estate. And David MacNeil, the founder of the automotive-accessories manufacturer WeatherTech, has spent a combined $94 million over the past year on a pair of neighboring sites, with plans to build a megamansion there.

“People like Larry Ellison and David MacNeil, these individuals can afford to buy real estate anywhere in the world,” said local real-estate agent Nick Malinosky of Douglas Elliman . “Manalapan is not a second choice for them. It’s their first choice.”

On South Ocean Boulevard, Manalapan’s most affluent corridor, about 21 homes have traded for more than $20 million each since 2020. At least six have sold for $40 million or more, up from only one in that price range during the previous five years.

In 2021, eBay billionaire Jeffrey Skoll bought an ocean-to-Intracoastal estate for $89.93 million, while Joel’s longtime home sold last year for $42.6 million.

Now, however, it is unclear whether Manalapan’s hot streak can continue. Like luxury markets across the country, the town is contending with stock-market turmoil and the fallout from President Trump’s tariffs.

Like many Manalapan residents, local developer Stewart Satter, who is listing a yet-to-be-built spec home for $285 million, is a Trump supporter. During the 2024 election, Satter flew a giant Trump flag above the site.

But tariffs have “created a tremendous amount of uncertainty at the minimum, and that is not good for business,” Satter said. “It’s not good for real estate. People say, ‘Let’s wait. We’re not going to buy a house, we’re not going to build a house.’”

Hitting the big time

Elkins’ cuddly Native American Indian Dog, Bear, lounged on The Deal-Closer’s blue-and-white-striped seats as the boat zipped along the Intracoastal, passing glassy modern mansions and traditional Mediterranean estates.

To catch a glimpse of Ellison’s roughly 16-acre oceanfront estate, Elkins guided the Hinckley through the Boynton Inlet into the choppy Atlantic, where the sandy beach in front of Ellison’s property was visible.

Known as Gemini, the gargantuan mansion was once owned by the late publishing magnate William B. Ziff Jr., who brought in large plantings and trees from South America for the landscaping.

“When I was a little kid, barges were going by our house with these huge trees,” Elkins recalled.

Ellison has approved plans to add more homes to the estate. He also paid about $277 million last year for Manalapan’s Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa, home to the members-only La Coquille Club, and talk is rife about how Ellison might upgrade the property. Ellison didn’t respond to requests for comment.

It’s a strange feeling, Elkins said, to see Manalapan hit the big time.

Before Covid, the town was often confused with its namesake: Manalapan, N.J. Tiny compared with Palm Beach, Manalapan developed much more slowly than its famous neighbour. It lacks the commercial infrastructure of Palm Beach, and its low-density zoning has kept it largely free of major condos or resorts.

When Satter, the developer, bought four empty lots in Manalapan in 2005, parts of the town looked like “just a mess of woods,” said his wife, Susan Satter. “I said, ‘Is this really how we want to invest our money?’”

Over the next decade, her husband built spec homes on three of the lots and sold them for a significant profit. He kept one, building a mansion there for himself and his wife.

“I thought I’d discovered a really special place,” said Stewart, who tested products for Walmart before turning to spec-home development. “If I had known what was going to happen, obviously, in the rear view mirror, I would have bought the whole town.”

The buyers of Satter’s projects include Ron and Cindy McMackin, who paid roughly $39 million in 2020 for a roughly 15,500-square-foot waterfront house with six bedrooms, then expanded it.

The couple, founders of the mechanical subcontracting company Pan-Pacific Mechanical, had relocated from Hawaii to South Florida during COVID.

“We knew nothing about Manalapan when we moved here,” said Ron, 78. He and Cindy were in the process of moving into a Palm Beach property they owned when their real-estate agent, Lawrence Moens , called. The actor Sylvester Stallone was searching for a home amid the Covid-induced real-estate frenzy, and wanted to see their house.

Before they knew it, they had agreed to sell to the “Rocky” star for $35.375 million, 33% more than the $26.65 million they had paid two years earlier.

This left them without a house. It was slim pickings in Palm Beach, and with five children, they needed plenty of space. Moens suggested Manalapan. At the time, the less-flashy choice was surprising to some of their Palm Beach friends. “I did hear a couple of times from people after that, ‘Why would Lawrence take the McMackins to Manalapan?’” said Ron.

But the McMackins love that it is quieter than Palm Beach, with less traffic. The couple have Sunday dinners with their neighbours, and Cindy has a small group of girlfriends who call themselves the “Manalapan mafia.” The McMackins like it so much that they are building a new, larger home along the same stretch.

Food-service entrepreneur Bob Carlucci and his wife, Aileen Carlucci, paid $11.63 million in 2020 for a roughly 13,000-square-foot Manalapan mansion on the Intracoastal, with a small beach house on the ocean. They are happy to have “discovered Manalapan early, ” Bob said.

Many buyers are tearing down older homes to build new mansions, Malinosky said. Before COVID, Manalapan was seen as more of a vacation destination, so buyers weren’t as choosy. Now that many are seeking full-time homes, however, “they want to make sure that it has the spa, it’s got the 12-car garage, it’s got the fitness centre, it’s got the wellness centre.”

Another prized amenity is a tunnel that runs underneath Highway A1A. Portions of the town are on a barrier island, and some homes sit on the ocean, requiring residents to cross the busy road to reach their docks on the Intracoastal.

Other estates are on the Intracoastal but have small beachhouses on the ocean. A tunnel allows residents to easily go from one side to the other.

Construction of these tunnels has become a rare point of contention between residents. In January, one couple asked the town commission to stop their neighbors from digging under the highway during the tourist season, claiming it was causing traffic to back up.

Building on the coast comes with challenges. Florida building code now requires roofs, windows and doors in high-risk areas to withstand winds of up to 170 miles an hour, according to builder Robert Burrage, who is building MacNeil’s home and four others in Manalapan.

Satter said the property insurance on his personal residence in Manalapan doesn’t include coverage for hurricane damage because it was too expensive. In addition to the annual premium, which was about $150,000 a year, he would have faced a deductible on hurricane damage of about 10% of the assessed value of the house.

He isn’t concerned with rising sea-levels, however. “When I bought my first oceanfront lot, my late father-in-law said, ‘What the hell are you doing? Don’t you know about global warming?’” Satter said. “I sold it at a huge number [in 2016] and made a lot of money. It’s been sold again and again and again—and the water hasn’t done anything.”

Stock market slide

Manalapan’s proximity to Mar-a-Lago has added to its popularity since Trump’s election to a second term, Malinosky said. Many residents support Trump. In the McMackins’ home, a bedazzled MAGA purse hangs in Cindy’s closet and a photo book in the living room shows her attending a Trump event at Mar-a-Lago, where they are members.

But the trade war and stock-market volatility have injected uncertainty into the real-estate market.

Until recently, Hamptons home builder Joe Farrell was considering paying more than $30 million for a building site in Manalapan, he said. He has decided to hold off on any acquisitions for now, however, because of the tariffs and resulting stock-market fallout.

“The market seems to still be pretty good, but people are maybe a little more cautious about parting ways with liquidity,” Farrell said. “I want to see things stabilize before I commit to that kind of capital outlay.”

Elkins said one of his clients considered backing out of a $10 million deal over the last few weeks on Point Manalapan, but decided to move ahead to avoid forfeiting the deposit.

Malinosky said he still sees significant demand for big-ticket properties in Manalapan, especially since many wealthy people are taking money out of the stock market. He said he has closed more than $150 million in deals in the greater Palm Beach area over the past two weeks.

Even with the uncertainty, “there is no shortage of buyers that will spend $100 million right now in Manalapan,” he said.

Shelly Newman, an agent with the Corcoran Group, said she recently sold a piece of land to a spec-home developer for $25 million. And the McMackins are moving ahead with plans to complete their new house, though tariffs have been “the talk of the town,” Ron said.

“I do have a stock portfolio and it is down,” he said. “But I don’t let that affect what I’m doing. We’re very fortunate with resources.”

While Satter agrees with efforts to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., he said he has been blindsided by the extent of the trade war. “I’m not sure about how they’re rolling it out,” he said.

A handful of potential buyers have expressed interest in his $285 million listing, he said, but he realizes the prospective buyer pool is tiny. “There are going to be three or four people who ultimately show real interest and have the capacity to pull the trigger,” he said.

Ultimately, he said he isn’t too worried about the prospects for sale, since he can afford to sit on the property long-term.

Still, real-estate agents said Satter’s property and others may be priced too aggressively, even without tariffs.

British hedge-fund billionaire Chris Rokos is listing his 3-acre Manalapan estate for $150 million, more than triple what he paid for it in 2017. And real-estate investor Vivian Dimond recently cut the price of a Manalapan home by $14.5 million, to $64.5 million. It’s been on the market since September 2024.

For some Manalapan residents, home values are beside the point. Bob and Aileen Carlucci, for example, have no intention of moving.

“We look at each other and we say. ‘This is it,’” Bob said. “You can’t get anything better, we don’t believe—in this country, at least.”

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