I met Florian when I was 31.

At 31, I had a plan. I'd grown my marketing agency to be one of the top agencies in Australia. I'd been working as a singer/songwriter for 15 years and had a couple of hit singles and toured Japan. I'd been married at 22 and divorced at 30. Everybody thought I was crazy when we broke up, but I think the partner you're with should think you're the best thing in the world. He didn't. And I didn't want to settle any more.

My plan was to wait until I was 35 and then become a single mother. My best friend and I had looked up sperm donors on the internet. It wasn't that I didn't want to get married again, it was just that I didn't want to compromise. And growing up in a mining town, I had certain perceptions about what marriage was: it seemed like everyone I went to school with got married, got pregnant, and had no inspiration to leave town. So I'd made a different plan for my life.

Florian wasn't in the plan.

I was 31, and I'd decided to retire from the music industry. My last gig was in Morocco, at a festival in Essaouira. Then I was due to fly to Japan, but there was a typhoon in Japan so I got stuck in London for a night. I really didn't care for London (mainly due to the weather), but I was put up in this beautiful hotel. Florian was working at the front desk.

Florian's a real romantic. He'd just gotten back from his grandparents' 60th-anniversary party and he was working behind the desk at this hotel. He saw me walk in and thought “holy shit” and basically pushed people out of the way so he could serve me.

I handed my passport across the desk and he saw that our birthdays were one week apart. He took it as a sign.

I said to my travel companion, “I am going to give him my number because he's cute and we're having ‘butterfly’ moments,” and she said, “he's gay! Man, you can't even pick it any more!”

I gladly proved her wrong.

We started talking every day. He'd fly over and meet me and we'd rendezvous in wineries. I was scared to show him my businesses and my block of units, my real life. I had this stupid theory that successful women scare men away, so I tried to downplay it all.

When I met him, I didn't know he'd been raised by a working mother and a stay-at-home dad. I didn't know he had two sisters and admired strong women.

I didn't know that he'd see raising children as a job, not an afterthought, and it was a job he really wanted to do.

I didn't know that eight years later he'd be living with me and our two kids in our home in Australia. That I'd be taking him to business functions and getting used to men talking to him and ignoring me, assuming he was the entrepreneur and I was the trophy wife.

I didn't know he was perfect for me. I just gave him my email address and ran away.

****

So we did get married, and I didn't have to compromise. Instead, our family joined the ranks of statistics like these:

• A 2013 study found that in 40% percent of American households with children under 18, the primary breadwinner was a woman. Of these, 37% were households where the woman was married and earned more than her husband.¹
• In Australia in 2017, 52% of all women, and 57% of those who lived with a partner and no kids, identified themselves as the main earner. In couples with kids, 25% of them were supported by a female breadwinner.²

There's been a huge shift in female earning, and it's happened really quickly. In the 1960s, for example, only 6% of US households had female breadwinners, as opposed to roughly 40% now.³ In Australia, women's real annual earnings have risen by 82% in the past 30 years, compared to only 16% for men, because women started from a much lower baseline.⁴ Women are not only earning more in general, but some of us are starting to earn more than our male partners. A lot more.

And those stats keep rising.

All of which is incredible for women. Yes, we have a long way to go with closing the pay gap. Yes, in general, there are still far fewer women than men in executive and board positions, across any country or sector you take a look at. But it's a changing game, and it's changing quickly. Female earning is on the rise. Rates of female breadwinners are on the rise. Females are rising through company ranks and taking on more responsibility, more prestigious titles, and more lucrative salaries.

This is not only incredible for women, individually and globally—it's really fucking good for business.

As more women have started showing up on boards around the world, people have started questioning the impact—for better or worse—of higher female involvement on the performance of the companies. And study after study has found that companies with more women among their C-level staff outperform companies that have few or no women in similar positions.

• A Catalyst study examined 353 companies that remained on the Fortune 500 list for four out of five years from 1996 to 2000. It found that “companies with a higher representation of women in senior management positions financially outperform companies with proportionally fewer women at the top.”⁵
• CreditSuisse's 2014 CS Gender 3000 study, which mapped over 28,000 senior managers at over 3,000 companies worldwide, demonstrated that “companies with higher female representation at the board level or in top management exhibit higher returns on equity, higher valuations and also higher payout ratios.”⁶
• A 2017 report by McKinsey assimilated 10 years of research into female participation in the workforce and concluded that “closing—or even narrowing—the global gender gap in work would not only be equitable in the broadest sense but could have significant economic impact … as much as $12 trillion could be added to annual global GDP growth in 2025, or 11% to global 2025 GDP.”⁷

These are just a few examples. I'm sure emerging data will continue to show that female participation is good for business, both at the level of individual companies and at the level of global economic development.

It's not really clear whether more women in a business make the company run “better,” or whether “better” corporations tend to employ and appoint more women. It probably goes both ways and it doesn't really matter: the point is that gender diversity and good business go hand in hand. It's good for the world and good for us ambitious women. But all this goodness is giving rise to a problem that's really hard to talk about.

Across working households, women are working more outside the home, but they're not really working less inside the home.

In studies of couples where both the man and woman work full-time, the overwhelming finding is that the women do more housework on average than the men. Men are definitely doing more at home than they used to, but women still have a tendency to burden themselves with most of the household management.

This is before you factor in taking care of kids, which women also expect themselves to handle even when they're working full-time outside the home. What mother hasn't felt guilty when she has to go to work and leave her babies? That “mommy, don't go”—it breaks your heart. (This is twice as hard for single moms, who feel 100% responsible for their kids' emotional needs.)

And women always put their personal stuff last—self care, friendships, personal goals, fun—because nobody is hassling us or complaining if we don't get those things done.

We're lifting our expectations of ourselves in our careers, but we're not adjusting our expectations around our partnerships, parenting, and everything else we've got going on in our personal lives. We're compromising like crazy to try to “have it all” but we don't have all the things we really want.

We're all in pursuit of the elusive “work-life balance” and feeling guilty because it's impossible to get there. I'm here to tell you that the concept is faulty, not you. Balance is bullshit. There is a better way.

My dream is that this book will help you do these things:

• Shut down the myth that work-life balance is possible, or even something you want to pursue.
• Let go of guilt and blend your work and personal life in a way that doesn't burn you out.
• Stop being disappointed by plans and live according to your values instead.
• Learn how to have important conversations with key people in your life so that everyone's expectations are the same.
• Get your shit together and write a strategy for doing the things you actually want to do.

That's the journey we're going to go on together in this book.

It's important to get this right, because those stats are going to keep rising.

So let's rise with them. Let's call bullshit on the myths that keep us down, and create a community of women committed to rising without compromising.