I earn a 6 figure salary...

[herehearher]

Just reading another thread and pretty much every post is going on about "6 figure salary" - as if this is some sort of meaningful marker.

But obviously there's a massive difference between someone on £100k and someone on £900k. So by "6 figure salary" are they just essentially saying they earn around £100k? If they earned £250k, how is it acceptable to describe that?

I started a thread for women to share how they got there. Hopefully it's helpful to someone reading and wants to make a change.

I think I know what my work turned up.

You stick to your books as that is relevant to every situation to every type of criminal in the world according to you.

No life experience of these things but so much to say - bit embarrassing for you.

That’s ok - I’m finding you very entertaining 😂

So privilege is now someone who doesn’t need a carer, has to work three jobs, and doesn’t have poor mental health.

Have I read that right? That is considered privileged?

@Walkaround Very well said. Carers need empathy, strength, integrity, listening skills, interpersonal skills, the ability to evaluate situations, and respond well in a crisis - the list goes on. The work of caring for the sick and dying should have so much more value, in terms of pay, training, working conditions and societal recognition. I never realised why society treats these people so badly, but I think you have put it very well. It's usually women who do the work, fulfilling the caring stereotypes. Society seems to have equal contempt for the carers who work under terrible pressures, and the vulnerable who need their care.

Successful people are often self-centred, ruthless, aggressive and competitive. Then they sell it as a virtue and tell us society would be a better place if more of us were like this. Women in particular are frequently advised to squash the more inconvenient empathetic traits out of themselves, which might lead them to query whether they really are so much more valuable than others around them doing different roles, or they will never get their pay rises or compete with the men for the “best” careers, or might suffer the truly horrendous fate of being left holding the baby, but none of the cash.

A high number of successful business leaders are sociopaths and psychopaths.

We have worked with a couple of very senior female leaders and have not found them to be any more or less hardnosed than the men. The best from both sexes are incredibly clever people, very driven with a certain charisma that inspires and demands from everyone around them. They are very interesting to spend time with.
We have worked with a shit CEO too (no shit women yet) - where everything was about them, their big ideas(which no one tells them are shit), their ego, no one told them the truth for fear of getting a bollocking and losing their job - their company was falling to bits around them, horrible place to work - always amazed by how long they can hold onto good staff, people are surprisingly loyal.

It tends just to be in places women post that other women come up with negatives - eg if everyone were on £100k there would be no one to be a carer or to be rich you must be a sociopath etc etc. Instead men would be saying to other men - well done - I can do that too.

Well done to GlassDoorb and her mother for encouraging her and her siblings to get out of poverty on to £100k+.

I don't agree successful people are self centred. I have a sibling who is a successful doctor as was my fatrher - decades devoted to the NHS - hard to say those people and head teachers are self centred surely even if some people htink every successful women lawyer on MN must be awful and put themselves first (not that the latter is necessarily wrong anyway - men earn a lot sometimes because they put themselves above a colleague and that can be a way of caring for your own children to whom in my view you owe a higher duty than to the children of your work colleagues).

eg if everyone were on £100k there would be no one to be a carer

Are you saying that isn’t true @Xenia?

No, men don't say 'well done I could do that too' or if they do, it's not what they mean. What they mean is 'I can't believe he got that job when I'm so much better than him.'
And ime men are far more likely to attribute their own lack of success to external factors than women. Generally to a world that's too stupid to see how marvellous they are.
It would be great if more women had the confidence of men, but other than that I don't think we should be looking at them as models of positive attitudes to success, as the culture can be very toxic.

@Xenia - would your sibling have chosen medicine if it were not considered prestigious and well remunerated? Or might they have gone down another path? There are positives and negatives to all careers, but you end up with shit if you advertise some roles as shit. To argue, for example, as I have seen you do before, that anyone capable of being a doctor should aim for that and not “sell themselves short” by becoming a nurse is to buy into the notion that a doctor is superior to a nurse in all ways, when actually, the focus of the roles is very different and many doctors would make atrociously bad nurses and vice versa. Claiming one role is for the less bright than another, and completely ignoring the majority of a person’s personal characteristics, can result in people simply making the wrong choices both from their own perspective in terms of job satisfaction, and from their patients’ in terms of genuine quality of care, because they have used prestige and pay as the deciding factors in their decision-making process, rather than actual interests and real abilities.

It would be interesting to find out what choices people might have made in their careers if money had not been a major factor in their decision making process. Would the legal profession be in less trouble if there wasn’t such a massive gap between the pay of City lawyers and the rest? The criminal bar and Legal Aid are certainly in a complete mess - what bright lawyer these days, after all, would want to try to live off the earnings they could obtain from that? And all these brilliant people choosing to go into the City nevertheless spectacularly failed to spot industrial scale money laundering and corruption - or maybe deliberately facilitated it - so it seems a bit of a waste of good talent, both from the perspective of society as a whole, and from the individual perspective, if clever people did not follow their real intellectual interests, but instead followed the money.

@Walkaround

I don't know about her brother but I can tell you about my brother - he started on a £100k job straight out of university. Quit it after a few years to train as a doctor. He isn't getting paid anywhere near that at the moment and certainly won't be getting the salaries and bonuses of his former colleagues ever.
So, no not everyone is money oriented.
Some people are just smart enough to make it in multiple fields that happen to have high salaries attached.

@Walkaround
Doctoring(?) like nursing is often a family tradition.
In both cases, decades of learning have often taken place at the family dinner table and can make some elements of front-line medicine less intimidating early on.
Where I so inclined, from a perspective of autonomy and the ability to transform lives, I would choose being a doctor over being a nurse, my mother who is no less intelligent relished the physical contact of nursing and the ability to interact with and help a larger number of people.
Having someone 'in the trade' can also help steer decision-making, my daughter was considering a particular specialism in medicine, but a GP friend of the family pointed out some good reasons why it was probably not for her and she has turned her attention elsewhere.

@Walkaround i do wonder what has happened to the teaching profession. It was never that well paid but was fairly respectable and paid ok. Who goes into the profession now. I am not saying that teachers are not bright, but am guessing it has been deskilled. Its very difficult to live on a teacher salary in London and there is a massive recruitment shortage.

I have also of senior medics bemoaning how medical graduates are joining the city rather than becoming junior doctors because the money is not there. That's new.

Who goes into the profession now.

I hate to say it but it seems the young and idealistic, most of my teacher friends have left the profession citing the usual reasons of stress, work load, lack of support, crap money and increasingly unpleasant parents and kids. Same goes for social workers.

@HopeItzNothing - choosing two high paid careers doesn’t indicate a lack of interest in money and prestige. Neither does your response.

Most people are affected to a certain extent by income, that’s for sure. Doctors and the majority of lawyers seem to feel the diminishing of their relative incomes in the last 30 years. The City has gobbled up a lot of people whose talents might have been appreciated elsewhere. The same has always applied to other sectors that were traditionally lower paid than the medical profession, but still respected as good, stable and interesting career paths.

Encouraging more women into a profession seems to be a good way of downgrading its pay and prestige in the long term, too, if law and medicine are anything to go by….

Yes, I dont know anyone who stayed but I am in my 40s. DH considered retraining but the reality is that in London you simply cant live on that money if you have a mortgage and kids. What graduate will choose to work for that little money. I wonder how long it will take before people dont become junior doctors. Yes, you can earn a 6 figure salary at some point but being a junior doctor pays rubbish in comparison to what one's friends can earn in the city. But looking around me, I think medicine (doctors) is still the only public sector job left that will give you a decent living, teaching is gone, civil service is gone, social work, charity work. Why would anyone bother if you have a decent degree even if you are not money driven. When I graduated in 2001, there was a lot more choice - you could go into quite a few jobs that would still give you a nice life. Not anymore. City, law, pharma, tech and hospital work is sort of it.

Has law been downgraded? Law is paid well if you go into a well-known London firm.
IT and consultancy and not being downgraded by women, we're crying out for more women - our clients will judge us by their absence! Our most talented team member is a woman - she blows all the men out of the water...they are all in awe of her talent - we only wish she was more ambitious but she calls the shots and works when she wants.

@Walkaround

Doctor's don't get paid as much as they did and it's a stressful job.
It's relative of course.

Anyway, he's hardly going to be a hospital porter with his education and natural intellect. Only on a volunteer basis of course.

Yes, I would say law has been somewhat downgraded. If not really interested in commercial law and large city life, it neither has the prestige nor the pay it used to attract. A lot of the old bread and butter work solicitors used to do isn’t even done by solicitors any more and legal aid is pathetically poorly rewarded, which genuinely downgrades the quality of the service lawyers can provide for huge numbers of people - and thus general opinions of the profession. Same with GPs - nowhere near the level of respect the profession used to attract. Obviously, a small proportion of lawyers and doctors can make vast sums in private practice, but the majority are working harder and harder for less and less. As for tech industries - being a novelty woman will earn you far more than being one of many, obviously. The downgrading of these previously male dominated professions has taken a long time. Tech industries haven’t gone through that process, yet. Now more women than men join the more established professions, they are looking less financially attractive, except in parts - the highest income is in the parts of those professions still dominated by men.

@HopeItzNothing - well yes, of course, because the only jobs going in hospitals are for doctors and hospital porters…

@Walkaround

If you've got what it takes to be the best, you become the best.
You don't take a low job to appease the average person.