It is still Women’s Month, although, if you know me, every month is Women’s Month.
So here I am again, thinking out loud. And perhaps I may be slightly ahead of the curve, but mark my words: women are uniquely positioned to champion the rise of portfolio careers.
For decades, society has repeated the familiar claim that women are natural multitaskers. Research tells us this is largely a myth. There is little scientific evidence that women are biologically better at multitasking than men. What is true, however, is that women’s lived experiences have required them to constantly navigate multiple roles from professional to domestic, emotional, social and economic roles, often simultaneously.
Multitasking, then, is not biology, but can be reframed as adaptation, and therefore becomes opportunity. Perhaps it is time we stop describing this reality as burden and begin to recognise it as economic architecture.
From Multidimensional Lives to Portfolio Careers
Have you ever heard the term portfolio career?
A few years ago, while supporting a client with brand positioning for her women-focused non-profit, I proposed to describe her audience as women building portfolio careers. The phrase resonated deeply, yet she hesitated, because it sounded unfamiliar, almost too novel, even though the experience it described was everywhere.
That moment stayed with me, because across Nigeria, countless women are already living portfolio careers without naming them as such.
Think about the corporate executive who consults on side projects; The lawyer who teaches, advises startups, and runs a social initiative; The public servant or 9-5er building a passion enterprise. These women are often described as distracted or unfocused.
In reality, they are diversifying capability and income in response to economic but also social realities.
The Myth of the Linear Career vs the Opportunity of Portfolio Careers
Research from the Portfolio Collective shows that portfolio careers are no longer professional experiments but an expanding global workforce model. Their recent findings indicate a more balanced gender representation, with women accounting for approximately 52 per cent of new entrants in 2023 — suggesting that increasing numbers of women are deliberately moving toward career structures that offer flexibility, autonomy, and protection from traditional 9-to-5 burnout.
This shift challenges one of the most enduring assumptions about professional success: the linear career path. Modern career systems were built around conditions that historically favoured men — uninterrupted progression, geographic mobility, and near-unlimited availability to work. Implicitly, it presumed that someone else was managing caregiving, household responsibilities, and the emotional labour of daily life.
For many women, that assumption never existed. Instead, women learned early to navigate professional ambition alongside competing responsibilities, pauses, transitions, and reinvention. Careers were rarely linear; they were adaptive. My mum’s teaching job, for example, closed by noon many years ago, affording her the flexibility to resume her caregiving responsibilities.
Today, that adaptation is revealing itself as an advantage. What began as a necessity is increasingly evolving into a deliberate career strategy. Portfolio careers allow women to redefine progression not as upward movement within a single institution, but as the expansion of influence, capability, and economic resilience across multiple platforms. In this sense, portfolio careers do not represent a departure from professional growth. Rather, they expand the very definition of career progression itself.
What Does Building a Portfolio Career Actually Look Like?
If portfolio careers are to move beyond buzzwords, the question becomes practical: what does shaping one actually look like across a woman’s professional life?
The truth is that women do not enter portfolio careers from a single starting point. They arrive through lived experience — through transitions, reinvention, caregiving cycles, economic shifts, and accumulated competence. Portfolio careers are less a sudden decision and more an evolution.
Forbes contributor Alli Kushner wrote, “I used to think a ‘portfolio career’ was something you built after you’d already ‘made it.’ In my head, you’d sell a company, write a book, start advising founders and then suddenly you’re on a panel wearing a blazer that quietly screams, ‘This is what success looks like’.”
Across generations, distinct patterns are already emerging.
1. The Exploration Stage: Multipotentiality at Entry Level
For younger women entering the workforce Today, careers are rarely defined by a single calling. Many begin as what psychologists describe as multipotentialites — individuals with diverse interests and transferable skills.
A graduate may combine formal employment with digital skills, creative work, advocacy, or freelance assignments. What older systems might interpret as lack of focus is increasingly strategic experimentation; testing competencies, industries, and income pathways early. At this stage, portfolio building looks like skill accumulation rather than job loyalty.
2. The Expansion Stage: Competence into Opportunity
Mid-career women often enter portfolio careers unintentionally. After years of professional experience, opportunities begin to emerge outside formal roles — consulting requests, project advisory work, training engagements, or entrepreneurial ventures built on accumulated expertise.
Here, the portfolio career becomes a mechanism for leverage. Capabilities developed within institutions begin to travel beyond them. Professional identity expands from employee to expert, from role holder to problem solver.
Many Nigerian women already operate here by balancing leadership roles while quietly building parallel professional platforms that provide both income diversification and autonomy.
3. The Transition Stage: Experience into Influence
Later in career, another shift occurs which is rarely discussed openly. As women approach leadership maturity or life transitions such as children leaving home or menopause, professional ambition often evolves from operational execution to knowledge transfer. Experience accumulated over decades begins to translate into board advisory and corporate governance roles, mentoring, speaking, policy advisory,, and institutional consulting.
What might previously have been framed as career winding down becomes, instead, portfolio elevation — moving from doing the work to shaping systems and influencing outcomes. In this model, experience does not expire, it compounds.
4. The Reinvention Stage: Career After Interruption
Perhaps most uniquely, portfolio careers create re-entry pathways for women whose careers paused due to caregiving, relocation, or personal transitions.
Rather than restarting from scratch within rigid employment systems, women can reassemble careers through modular engagement including projects, advisory roles, entrepreneurship, or flexible leadership positions. Portfolio careers therefore recognise something traditional models ignored: careers can pause without ending.
A Different Definition of Career Progress
Seen this way, portfolio careers are not merely flexible work arrangements. They are lifecycle-responsive career architectures.
They allow women to move between exploration, expansion, influence, and reinvention without losing professional legitimacy.
And perhaps this is the deeper opportunity: women are no longer required to fit their lives into careers designed for another era. They can design careers that evolve alongside their lives.
