Over the past few years, as my career has, in turn, progressed, stalled, and evolved, I’ve felt an acute sense that the clock is ticking. As a college-educated 34-year-old woman, I’ve reached the age when wage growth tends to start slowing. By 40, it peaks.

Well, that’s the case for 40-year-old women, anyway. College-educated men tend to see their wages continue to grow for a whole additional decade, apexing in their early 50s.

Of course, the normal caveats apply: Not everyone hits their peak in their 40s, and it’s always possible you’ll continue to earn a good salary much longer into your life.

But for the average woman, it will follow a depressingly familiar trajectory, where the substantial wage growth of her early career stalls out, and her “earnings essentially stop growing” by her late 30s, before she hits her pay peak 10 years before her male partner, coworkers, and acquaintances do.

College-educated women’s aggregate wage growth tends to slow at 34 in part because of children and other caregiving responsibilities. Workplace bias and job choice also play roles.

“Even when women intensively re-enter the workforce, they cannot make up for the lost time,” reads Glassdoor’s Beyond the Gap 2026 report. “And women who never had children and remained fully active in the workforce still tend to earn significantly less than men in their 50s.”

Male-dominated roles—engineer and software developer, for example—have longer wage-growth cycles than female-dominated ones, like teacher and social worker, according to Glassdoor’s report.

And as you get older and more experienced, the pay spread—or the difference between the highest- and lowest-paid workers in a cohort—broadens.

No one likes to feel like a statistic, like their life is following a script they can’t rewrite (or at least give notes on). Reporting on these trends for the past 12-plus years, I’ve thought I would learn how to avoid the traps and rise above the pay plateau.

But lately I’ve been considering all of the other ways I am basically the quintessential millennial—I married later, don’t own a home yet, eat avocado toast, etc. And I realized that many contours of my actual life fit the stereotypes.

The pay plateau feels inevitable, too, once I have children. But is it?

A second peak

As I read through the Glassdoor report, I found myself getting more and more depressed. In 2026, plenty of women must be finding a way around the inevitable pay plateau. And sure enough, the report posits that women who are “thriving after 35” are reframing what peak really looks like.

“One woman made a breakthrough: She stopped comparing herself to other women in their 30s.” Fair enough, but not exactly what I’m looking for.

“Another realized her job isn’t her personality—she decoupled her worth from her job title and paycheck.” I mean, I try to do that. But I would also really like to make more money.

“A journalist at 35 earning less than before found happiness by escaping the 9-to-5 for work she loves in a city she loves.” Okay, this one hits a little too close to home!

Depending on how you look at these examples, they could be read as empowering alternatives to the corporate machine, tacit acknowledgements that we exist inside a broken system, or attempts to zhuzh up the fact that we are still settling for the status quo. None are particularly satisfying.

I called up the economist Corinne Low this week to talk through how I’m feeling. Low’s research focuses on the economics of gender and discrimination, and she recently published the book Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women's Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours.

Low didn’t sugarcoat things for me—yeah, having kids changes things; that’s life. But she did provide some food for thought on how to carry on during this middle part of my career.

She told me to think of my job as technology that turns time into money. What’s important is to keep upgrading the tech to stay current with the times. If I take a break from the labor force or switch to a more flexible, less time-consuming job when I have kids, can I also take online classes or keep meaningfully engaged with my network?

“Women will say, ‘Oh, well, I can’t really afford to pay for day care, so I might as well stay home,’” says Low. “And if you want to stay home with your kids, and that’s what’s going to bring you joy, I’m all about maximizing utility. But paying for day care is not about the spot price right now versus your wages right now, because what you’re really getting from this period of your career is investing in the technology that you’re going to have access to in the future.”

Or, in other words, paying for day care might be expensive, but we should reframe it as an investment in our careers that will pay off in the future.

The pay plateau coincides with what Low has termed “the squeeze”: a point in your life when household and work responsibilities peak concurrently.

But the squeeze is temporary. Low tells the story of her own time in the thick of things: She considered giving up her professorial job at the Wharton School of Business for a less prestigious job in New York in order to better manage motherhood when her firstborn was young.

But she didn’t, and now she is earning more money, has more flexibility, and does more meaningful work than she would have if she had made the switch for more ease back then.

“It is easy in periods that feel really hard and really imbalanced to make short-term decisions,” she says. “But it’s important for us to think about utility across our lifecycle. What you’re giving up in this period is career growth that might increase your work-life balance later.”

She suggests looking for temporary trade-offs you can make when you’re in the squeeze that will pay off in the long run. That could be hiring a cleaner to free up some of your time or paying for day care even if it looks like the cost doesn’t make financial sense at that moment.

“What I wish I had done was just give myself permission to make life easier for myself,” she says. “It’s actually okay if I’m spending money out of savings right now to get through this period because it’s not going to last.”

Our conversation made me think of a recent edition of Home Economics, in which a 32-year-old breadwinning mom said the family isn’t contributing to a retirement account right now, as they are living off of one income and have another baby on the way.

While that writer said the decision made her feel anxious, to me it seemed like an understandable trade-off. If you want to avoid the pay plateau that typically comes with a growing family, a little pain now can yield greater utility long-term. You need to keep your technology finely tuned.

“When we look at the graph, women’s earnings do tend to level off in their mid-30s,” says Low. “That’s the pattern, that’s the average, but that’s not destiny.”

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