Perceptions of Success Are Different for Gen X and Gen Y Women

Two years ago, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg dazzled the Gen Y world when she directed the graduating class of women at Barnard College in New York City to “put your foot on that gas pedal and keep it there.” Barely one year later, Anne-Marie Slaughter, former director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department and former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton in New Jersey, sent feminist blogs into pitched battles with a controversial cover story published in the Atlantic in which she declared that women can’t “have it all.”