After the Facebook IPO, Sheryl Sandberg will become number two on the list of richest self-made women. She is the COO of Facebook.  For those of you not familiar with her career, there’s a nice summary in the New York Times. But the bottom line is that she is really smart (Harvard), a really hard worker (startups, Google, Facebook), a great speaker (here’s a commencement speech) ,and she’s married to a guy who is also making tons of money in startups.

There is nothing, really, that is bad to say about Sandberg. And she works very hard to encourage other women to go as far as she has gone.

The problem is, very few women want to be Sandberg, but there is very little discussion of this.

Sandberg has two young kids. She runs a company that is very public about having “lock-ins” to move fast enough to compete with Google, and they have open hours for kids to come to Facebook offices to say goodnight to their parents, who are working very long hours.

She encourages women to have ambition and “never take their foot off the gas pedal,” but very, very few women would choose to do this after they have kids. Pew Research shows that the majority of women would like to work part-time after they have kids. So it’s hard to tell that demographic that they should work 100-hour weeks at startups instead.

It’s revealing that the New York Times profile of Sandberg shows her surrounded by men who are only marginally involved in raising their kids.

Obama, for instance, is shown kissing her on the cheek. At that moment, presumably, Michelle Obama was with his kids. Because Michelle has been very clear that he is almost never with their kids, and she’s pissed, and she has confessed to screaming at him that she didn’t sign up to be a single mother. In fact, she quit her job so she could manage the family while her husband’s career took off.

Sandberg is also pictured with Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE. I was so struck by his lack of involvement with his kids that I wrote a whole post about it, here. He has a wife at home taking care of his kids.

Sandberg is pictured with Mayor Bloomberg, who is divorced and single, and left raising his daughters largely to his ex-wife.

Sandberg’s husband is not a stay-at-home husband. He has a big career of his own. Meg Whitman also had a husband with a big career, but when she became the very high-profile CEO of eBay, he stepped down to take care of their sons. Sandberg’s husband doesn’t appear to be doing that.

I have a friend who was a direct report to Sandberg. He had nothing but good things to say about her, but when I pressed for how she could possibly be getting this done with young kids, he said there are multiple nannies.

This makes sense. When I had a big job—nothing compared to Sandberg’s—I had two nannies. Because if you travel you have to have around-the-clock coverage.

Sandberg wants to be a role model for women who want big, exciting careers. But here’s the problem: women don't want to be Sandberg. It’s no coincidence that the number-one woman on the list of self-made millionaires is Oprah. She has no kids and no husband. She’s fascinating, nice, and smart. But few of us would really enjoy her life.

Sandberg and Oprah represent extreme choices in life. The things they give up are not things that most women would want to give up in exchange for the wild career success they could have.

Sandberg’s right when she says that the thing holding women back is women’s ambition. But I don’t see that changing any time soon. Even after the Facebook IPO. I’m afraid that what the Facebook IPO means for women is nothing. Sandberg is not a role model. She’s an aberration.

You can't have small kids and a startup if you want to see your kids. I wrote about this on TechCrunch and I got skewered for being bad for women and being a downer in general.

But this week Jeff Atwood wrote in Tech Crunch that he’s leaving his startup because it’s impossible to see his kids if he stays. And I don’t see anyone complaining about his declaration.

So probably Sheryl Sandberg is not doing much for women, but I'm pretty sure Jeff Atwood is, because it’s not as hard to say “The startup is too hard on my kids” when men are saying it, too.

It's been four days since I documented my own domestic violence, in almost real-time, between me and the Farmer. The most common response I've heard is some variation of: "Zero tolerance for domestic abuse!"

And you know what? I have zero tolerance for things I am not prone to tolerate as well. That’s easy, isn’t it?

It’s much harder to see the issue from the person’s perspective who has the issue.

I've spent days reading the 500 comments on my blog and the comments about my situation on other blogs, and I'm absolutely shocked by the collective hatred and disdain for women who are in violent relationships.

Here’s what someone said on my blog: "Victims of domestic abuse suck at pressing charges."

Yes. It’s true. Women don’t like to press charges. Because they love the guy. You, maybe, are unable to fall in love with a guy who is violent. Good for you. But do you have to hate women who aren’t like you?

For some reason, people feel it is honorable to rip a woman to shreds if she is living with domestic violence. Here’s an example from the comments section on James Altucher’s blog:

"[Penelope Trunk is] out of her mind to think that her children are not being abused. She, in fact, is as guilty of that abuse as the farmer that beats her."

The high-and-mightiness that emanates from the public discussion of domestic violence is breathtaking. Everyone is an expert. Everyone knows what’s right.

Here’s an example from the comments section on Jezebel, a supposedly feminist community that is full of anger towards women who live in violent households.

"No one gets another chance to hit me. I don't care that I have the training to fight back.

"One incident, and YOU LEAVE. Violent people don't get better without a lot of work, and it's not *your* problem. Once someone raises a hand to you, you owe that person *nothing.* It's likely that the violent behavior will escalate. Sometimes it is deliberate. Either way, YOU LEAVE."

This person sees everything very clearly. If there’s abuse, you leave. Even if it’s small. Because all small abuse gets huge.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that if the guy hits you twice, the kids are better off living in a single-parent home and hearing their dad called an abuser. What people do say is that the odds are it won’t stop. The odds are it will get worse. The odds are, the kids will be worse off, in the end, having lived with the dad.

But the truth is that we do not believe that men who leave two, visible marks on their wife should lose their kids.

You know how I know we don’t believe this? Because if Child Protective Services sees two bruises on a kid at two different times, the kid is not removed from the home. Think about it: Is that kid better off with parents who might be able to stop, or in the Foster Care System for the rest of their life?

So we are making bets, right? Is it better to leave, because it is likely to get worse? Or is it better to stay because the benefits from things improving, although unlikely, are huge?

I’m in the startup community. It’s the world of high risk. You bet big on yourself, you kill your family’s credit, you put your house on the line, and maybe, just maybe, your company will make it.

So why wouldn’t I bet big on myself now? I am not the whole problem in my family, but I am half. And over the last year I have described multiple situations where I was half the problem.

I can improve my own half and see what happens. Have you been to couple’s therapy? There’s a saying that a marriage is a gear system. If one gear changes, all the gears change.

Blog commenters will argue against this idea by telling me not to change because It's not my fault.

But really, how do they know? We know that I grew up in a home where there was lots of violence. So it's likely that I will be in that kind of house when I'm an adult. And surely it's possible that I am contributing to the mix since I am statistically likely to create a violent household. Here's another thing: You don't know what I did leading up to the bruise in the photo.

I'll tell you what my mom used to do leading up to my dad hitting her:

One night they were wallpapering. They had been wallpapering the living room after work for a week. My mom got mad at my dad and threw red paint all over the wallpaper. Ruined all their work. He didn't respond. He was stunned. Then she knocked over the table with the wallpaper and the glue. It ruined the newly varnished floors. He held her arms so she couldn't do anything else. He held tighter and tighter. She kicked him to get loose. She left no mark. He hit her in the face.

If she blogged about it, and showed the hand print on her face, she might get 500 commenters telling her it's not her fault.

Should she leave with me and my brother because our dad is violent and we should not live with him? Or should she work on her own behavior to see if she can single-handedly stop the violence?

I think the most grown-up, good parenting thing for her to do would be to understand her own behavior and stop it so that me and my brother could grow up in a home with both our parents. She didn't do that, of course. She had little insight into her own behavior and she and my dad ended up taking most of their anger out on me.

My mom had good choices she could have made because, in fact, part of the domestic violence was her fault.

"It's not your fault" completely limits a woman's choices, because you are saying that she is powerless to control the situation. And if you tell every woman "it's not your fault" then they can't improve. How do women get better at not creating a violent household? Probably by changing their behavior. This doesn't mean "always tiptoe around your spouse and become a mouse". But it can mean a wide range of positive changes.

We are all growing personally. It's not your fault is almost always a path to no growth. It's what Oprah founded her show on, right? Personal responsibility. Why don't we go there, first, before we go to "it's not your fault". The truth is that if we take responsibility for the problems in our lives, we can solve the problem. If we blame other people, we are always running. People who blame other people can't get along with siblings, can't get along at work, lose friends quickly. People who facilitate that behavior say, "It's not your fault."

Most of the success of my blog comes from my reliance on the idea of personal responsibility. There are no bad bosses–it's only you. If you can't get a job it's not because of the job market, it's because you are unemployable. And you can fix that.  Your heavy workload is not because someone gave it to you — you gave it to yourself. People like what I say because I show them how they can fix anything when they take responsibility for fixing it. That's what I truly believe.

And that's why I'm staying with the Farmer.

This post is cross-posted at TechCrunch.

We need to get more guys who are running tech startups to decide instead to be stay-at-home dads.

What do you think of that? Stupid, right? That’s what it sounds like when anyone suggests that we need to get more women doing startups.

If you are worried that women don’t feel capable of doing whatever they want, you can stop worrying. Women outperform men in school at such a huge rate that it’s easier to get into college as a male than a female. And women take that to the bank by earning more than men in their 20s. Women would probably continue out-earning men except that when men and women have kids, women choose to downshift way more often than men do.

Clearly, women have a choice. There are plenty of opportunities out there for women if the women would just continue working in their 30s the same way they did in their 20s. So clearly, women don’t want to. Women are choosing children over startups.

So it seems that women are making decisions for themselves just fine. It’s just that they are not the decisions that men make. This should not surprise anyone. Men and women are different. So what?

On top of that there is evidence that the members of the VC community go out of their way to attract women. Of course, this makes sense. VCs look for underserved markets. Women are likely to address different markets than men, and since there are so few women founders compared to men founders, it’s likely that women are addressing an underserved market. So VCs want to talk to women.

So VCs are definitely giving women a fair shake, it’s just that women don’t pitch. And women are definitely feeling that they can do whatever they want, it’s just that women aren’t choosing to create tech startups.

So what?

Let’s look at all the women writing articles saying that we need women to do startups. Here’s an article by Jean Bittingham. She says the world needs women entrepreneurs now more than ever. But what has she done? She’s an author and an academic. Of course. She has no idea what life is like running a startup, so she thinks it’s a good idea to tell other women to do that while she writes books. I’ve done both startups and book writing, and book writing is like a vacation compared to a startup.

Here’s a post by Tara Brown wondering why women don’t comment on VC blogs. Here’s the answer: Because women don’t care. Is that okay? I actually wonder why Tara cares, because she’s a web site producer. I don’t think she has ever raised money for a startup. But I can tell that all three times I’ve done it, raising money for a startup has been hell, so I think we should really be asking why anyone would want to try to convince someone to do it.

TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis has taken on the cause of women in tech. She writes about it a lot:  here’s a piece where she rips on how mainstream America identifies with women in tech. But the problem is Tsotsis has never said why women are personally suffering from not being involved in the tech startup life. Really, how is it making any woman’s life better to say that women should be doing startups? And hey, if startup life is so great then how about trading in the writer’s life for a founder’s life? It’s really different. Try that for a few years, and then tell all the other women you know, who are outearning the men they know, or taking care of kids, to trade their life for startup life.

The people trying to give solutions are as lame as the people pointing to a problem.

Whoever started the TED Women’s conference is pathetic. Which would you rather say you spoke at? TED? Or the TED Ghetto?

Fred Wilson says there aren’t enough women running startups. What does this mean, exactly? He acknowledges that women don’t want to do startups in their 30s. And he himself points out that by the time women are 40 and they want to go back to work full-time, these women are not going to relocate to Silicon Valley.  But the truth is that if there were really a problem with there not being enough women running startups, then people like Fred would fund startups in suburbia. He’d fund startups that run at half-speed to accommodate carpools. He’d fund startups that have part-time ambitions. He’s not doing that, though. So clearly there is not THAT big a problem that women are not running startups: The market for funding has spoken, and it is still funding mostly men.

Peter Thiel recommends that women start companies from age 20-25 so they have one under their belt before they have kids.  But why? Is he noticing that women who are 20- 25 are sad about where their life is going? Peter, here’s some news for you: Women are most happy, in their whole lives, at age 28. So I don’t think you are identifying a problem here. I don’t think women are lamenting at age 28 that they did not found a startup at age 20-25. (Something to think about: Men are most unhappy at age 28. Maybe it is because they are so obsessed with launching a startup.)

Sheryl Sandberg says that women need to “lean into their careers.” Sandberg runs Facebook. She’s doing a great job. She also has two young kids, and a husband who works at a startup. I think you’d be really hard-pressed to find a mom with two young kids who wants Sandberg’s life. Which is why women are not “leaning into their careers” like Sandberg says they need to in order to get to the top.

Pew Research shows that most women who have kids would rather have a part-time job than either work full time or stay at home with kids full time. This sheds a lot of light on why there are so few female founders, doesn’t it?

But now I have an idea: How about giving some respect to women who grew up in the 1970s, with feminist revolution baby boomer moms, and are still brave enough to say “I don’t want to work full time. I can work full time. But I don’t want to. “

Here is a Blueprint for a Woman’s Life which I published. It is full of recommendations for how to make choices based on what we know women really want for themselves. It does not involve getting VC funding.

Because women are earning more money than men in their 20s and underrepresented in the startup world in their 30s and 40s.  And I don’t hear a clamoring of women in the US who are saying “I want to do a startup and no one is letting me!” In fact, women are starting small businesses without VC help, at a very high rate.

For the most part, women are not complaining about the lack of VC funding in the world. They are complaining about the lack of jobs with flexible hours. And I don’t see anyone on TechCrunch addressing that when they address women.

Men could change the world by staying home with their kids and parenting them. Men would provide a totally different perspective as the lunchroom parent. They would ask for totally different after-school programming. Men would hire different babysitters and different SAT tutors. Because men are different than women.

This is the same argument people use for why more women should do startups: They will have a different perspective, think of different models, lend a different sensibility to the industry.

The problem is that people do not need to be told what they should choose. People are pretty good at making choices for themselves. Men can stay home. Women can do startups. The thing is, most don’t want to. And that’s okay.

When I drive, I have arguments with people in my head. I think of someone who does not realize how smart I am about what I am smart about, and I go on tirades to show them how misguided they are.

And I realized one day, while I had a particularly long car ride, that I am actually feeling like I know what women should be doing with their adult life.

Most people would be too humble to say this. But I'm the woman who, after ten years in the workforce, built a career on telling people how to manage their career. So, it makes sense that after getting to age 45 I am ready to tell all women how to live their adult life.

To be clear, I have made lots of mistakes. But I like to think I would not have made those mistakes if I had had a blueprint for adult life like the one I'm giving you, right here. The blueprint starts at age 18 and goes to 45.

1. Do less homework.
Women do better in school than men, but school is not a harbinger of doing well in life. Other stuff is. Other stuff that men do all the time. For example, involvement in sports is a foreshadow of a great career. And video games are, too, because they are both collaborative and competitive–two essential skills. So do stuff guys do, and get grades that are as bad as theirs–after all, you should not be the hardest worker, ever.

2. Get plastic surgery.
This is the must-have career tool for the workforce of the new millennium. You will earn more money and you will have more opportunities for mentoring. Also, you will have a wider choice of men, which, of course, is another way to earn more money.

3. Go to business school right out of the gate.
Everyone has always wanted to go to business school right after college, but good MBA programs didn't allow it. Now there is an unwritten rule that women can get in earlier because it's so clear that women who want to have kids don't really benefit from going to an MBA program later. If you get your MBA early, you accomplish a few key things. Not only do you set yourself up for skipping entry-level jobs, but you also make re-entry after kids an easier process because you have higher level experience before you leave.

On top of that, you are more likely to marry well. Men like women who are smart but not making more than they are. (I do not have a link for this. I have instinct.) Business school is a way to show you are smart, but you don't make any money in business school. Side benefit: You will be surrounded by men equally as smart as you are but a little older, which is a good hunting ground. (Note: I still think business school is stupid if you are using it to actually become qualified to do something.)

4. Start early looking for a husband seriously.
If you want to have kids, you should aim to be done by the time you are 35, when your eggs start going bad fast. This means you need to get started when you are 30, which means you need to get the guy you want to have kids with by the time you're 28. People who marry too early are very likely to get divorced. But by age 25, you are safe from those statistical trends. So why not marry early? In any case, start looking very seriously for a husband by the time you are 24. Here is a blog post that summarizes this argument and links to the research to back it up.

5. Milk maternity leave for all it's worth.
Maternity leave  is a complicated political issue, but whatever: For now, it's your right, so just take what's yours. Use all your maternity leave, and then make it very difficult to fire you when you return. Start a year before you want to get pregnant, by getting a job at a company that legally must give you maternity leave. I'm not saying you HAVE to take maternity leave, but if you don't have any, you can't decide to take it. Position yourself at that company in a job you can do with your eyes closed, in case you want to go back after maternity leave and work. Because if you are taking care of a newborn baby and working full-time, you'll be doing everything with your eyes closed.

There is an incredible amount of research to show that there should be a single, primary caregiver for the first year. I know that's not good for feminism. But none of this post is. So look, unless your husband is taking a year off, you're better off spending most of your time on your kid and not your job. The way to do that is to take all the maternity leave you can and then keep pushing for people to let you keep your job even if you're not really doing it. Make them fire you. It'll take their legal department a long time to give permission for that, and you can be collecting a paycheck the whole time. The extra cash can fund the rest of your transition.

6. Guard your marriage obsessively.
Educated women divorce at less than a quarter of the rate of everyone else. Divorce is not socially acceptable for most women reading this blog. We have decades of great data (read Judith Wallerstein) to show that divorce permanently ruins the kids. Yes, it's true, divorce makes life better for the parents. But kids don't care. They don't notice. Kids notice if two parents are paying attention to them, and that is one of the first things to go in a divorce. If you love your kids, you stay married to their parent.

This means that the wife needs to just bite the bullet and maintain the marriage. Stay-at-home spouses keep marriages together more effectively . I know: this is not popular, and not fair, but you do not need to make a crusade out of your family by showing that you can get a divorce and not fuck up your kids. So just bite the bullet and make sure you are keeping your husband happy so your kids can grow up with two parents.

7. Practice austerity.
Austerity is not fun. But you can call it something trendy, like minimalism or slow food.Your ability to manage your life will be nil if you are ruled by financial problems. So that means no big house, no expensive car, no huge vacations. You need control over your life more than you need that stuff. You have more career flexibility, more time flexibility, and more personal flexibility if you can keep your expenses way below what you earn. In this scenario, you do not have to fight with your husband about money. (You can fight about sex and in-laws, which are the other two of the three most popular fight topics.) Also, you can stay home with kids if you want to. And if you don't want to, you can just be you and admit it. Don't say you are not with your kids all day because you need the money. That would be a lie.

8. Do a startup with a guy.
Having your own company will give you tons of control over your life. It's nice to have a funded company because then the investors are taking the financial risk and you are drawing a nice salary even when you are not really earning any revenue. The problem is that VC funded startups require 100+ hour weeks, every week. You should only do one of these types of companies with a guy.

Smart women in their 20s are looking for husbands and cannot be 100% focused on some pie-in-the-sky startup. Women in their 30s are having kids and trying to figure out how to work less. Men are more easily focused solely on work. That's why there is a salary gap between men and women: Because women focus on work and family, and men focus only on work. Don't judge. Just get a male business partner. The problem is that men don't like doing startups with women—it's bad for them. But still, you can try.

9. If you can't get men to do a startup with you, do a lifestyle business.
A lifestyle business is one where the revenue is yours to keep. This is good since you will need to earn money, but it's a little more risky for you personally than a startup because you're not in it with deep-pocketed investors. Still, a lifestyle business is attractive enough to a woman with kids and a hankering for something interesting in the business world. Also, given the choice between no work, full-time work, or part-time work, Pew Research reports that 80% of women with children would choose part-time work. And we all know that the part-time work opportunities in corporate America suck. So a lifestyle business is the best path to that goal.

10. Homeschool. Your kids will be screwed if you don't.
The world will not look kindly on people who put their kids into public school. We all know that learning is best when it's customized to the child and we all know that public schools are not able to do that effectively. And the truly game-changing private schools cost $40,000 a year.

It's clear is that homeschooled kids will rule the world when Generation Z enters the workplace. So figure out a way to alleviate mommy guilt by homeschooling your kids to get them on that path. You don't have to do the teaching yourself. You can pay someone. But you need to get your kids out of a system that everyone knows does not work. (Note: I just realized this. This month. And last week, I decided: I'm taking my kids out of school.)

11. Spend money on household help and Botox to keep more doors open longer.
Look, it's really hard to be a parent and still have an interesting life. Not for men. We have seen enough of feminism to be certain that men are not derailed personally by kids. (In fact, Catalyst reports that having kids increases a man's earning power. Probably because he is then more likely to have a wife at home inadvertently performing the role of pseudo personal secretary. ) So the more money to spend to get people to help you with your kids, the more time and energy you'll have to help yourself.

Also, as women age they become more invisible. I know, this is not nice to say. And we are told it's only true in Hollywood. But since when has something that catches on in Hollywood not been relevant to the rest of us? Even pre-nups went mainstream. So the longer you can look younger than 45 the longer runway time you will have to figure out how to raise kids, hold a marriage together and still keep things vibrant and interesting intellectually. It's no small feat, but Botox and Restylane will be your best teammates in this part of the adventure.

12. Break the mold in your 40s.
Women get more unhappy as they age. So you can say you don't like the advice I'm giving. But look, in order to change the trajectory of women's happiness, we are going to have to drastically change the advice we give to women about how to run their lives. Most of the news about women in their 40s is pretty bad, to be honest. But the good news is that you can change that, by living differently in your 20s and 30s than women did before you. And, if you are in your 40s and reading this, take solace in the fact that by the time women are in their 40s they are great in bed, so if you do nothing else, figure out how to have a lot of sex to leverage your hard-earned talent.

It's reframing: When you feel like you're in the right place, you can reframe the bad stuff to feel like good stuff. I learned this from all the counseling I went through after being at the World Trade Center when it fell. Now that it's almost the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I field a phone call each week from a reporter writing a story about how 9/11 affected the survivors, and I always talk about reframing.

I'm starting to think where I fit, in terms of my career, is saying what none of us wants to hear, and then reframing it so it feels good.

I used to get upset about people thinking I'm an idiot. For example, when I was writing on Yahoo Finance, I wrote along side Suze Orman. And people would write such hateful stuff about me and Suze (imagine the most offensive gay slurs you can think of) that it was part of someone's daily tasks to delete awful comments. I used to think I got those comments because I was writing for the wrong audience, or not connecting with people, or something that signaled I was not in my right place.

But I'm thinking that the job of annoying people is actually a good fit for me.

Last week I wrote a post for BNET about how diversity is bad at the beginning of a startup. I did not think this was particularly controversial topic because I am talking, in this article, about a very short period in a very specific type of company: the time between the seed round and the A round of a startup.  Those companies are mostly founded by men, and men would increase their company's chances of survival by not partnering with a women.

Really, this is not news: Diversity is bad for small companies. I published this research four years ago, with not much fanfare. But now, when I apply the research to a specific type of company, I get killed in feminist diatribes on blogs like Jezebel and Built in Chicago.

But so what? I think I'm right. And I think I'm right that most women don't even want to be a part of the founding team of those startups because those companies are high-risk ventures that ruin your personal life. (I blogged about that — originally for Tech Crunch– here.) And guess what? Tons of men and women told me I was wrong. But I did not get one criticism from one woman who is CEO of a venture-funded startup while she has young kids at home.

I got tons of complaints from women who are pregnant and say their passion for startups will be undaunted by having kids. But really, this is what they wish. These women wish they fit in everywhere. Women wish they were being pushed out instead of just stepping to the side. Women want to feel they can do everything, but we can't.

Look, we know the baby boomers failed at work-life balance. We know it doesn't exist. So let's just start talking about things that are real. You can have a rip-roaring career in a great big city or you can have a goat on your driveway climbing on your car. You can't have both. You can have kid-centered days or you can have  career-centered days. You can't have both. Let's just stop lying to ourselves because it's not helping anyone.

All we can do is reframe. We can say that we are so lucky to have all these choices. We can choose what we want, we just can't choose everything.

It is real that twentysomething women need to worry more about having kids than a career if they want kids. It's not pleasant or nice or encouraging to say, but it's true. It's true that reporting sexual harassment is old-school and stupid. It would be great if we could take down every lecherous boss, but we simply cannot.  It's true that  everyone would rather have a miscarriage than an abortion. Someone has to talk about this, and I like that it's me.

I think I fit where people want to hear the truth.

I am settling into my role of the bearer of bad news. I have found, in my personal life, that if I face everything, even if it's bad, then at least I have a chance at making it better. This is true for women at work, too. So let's get going.

Strauss-Kahn is accused of raping a maid at his hotel. Which is sad. But there are some notable things about the case: First, he forced her to give him a blow job, and now it seems that there is widespread recognition that a forced blow job is rape. This is a big deal in legal history. For a long time, blow jobs didn't count.

Another notable thing is that a woman who is a maid took legal action against a man who was staying in a hotel room that costs $3000 a night.

Typically, men harass women who they felt were beneath them. For most of history, this has meant all women – as all women had little power. In the last few decades, though, women have gained more power, and men have paid heed to that in their harassment targets.

For example, it's nearly unheard of for a guy to harass his boss's boss, and it's almost routine for an high-up executive to hit on the hot assistant. Men think that is safe behavior. Men think they can take advantage of women who have little power in their world.

But I think we're going to find a reversal in the next few years: Sexual harassment will creep up the corporate ladder as men try to protect themselves by harassing only women who have careers they need to protect.

Here's why:

It has been clear for at least a decade that women who want to have a high-flying career should not report sexual harassment. I have written about this a zillion times, and before you argue with me, read the quotes from all the labor lawyers (representing plaintiffs) who agree.

The bottom line is that just about every woman who has entered the workplace has experienced sexual harassment, but the women who report it face retribution. Almost always. The Guardian reported on a French woman who was harassed by Strauss-Kahn who did not come forward because she feared retribution.

In the US, retribution is illegal, but there are not good laws for proving and prosecuting retribution. ProPublica explains that the sexual harassment laws in the US are so murky that it's nearly impossible to use them to prosecute unwanted advances. So women who complain about harassment generally lose their jobs in some convoluted but ultimately predictable way.

Therefore it has become common practice for women to handle harassment themselves—either by confronting the guy, ignoring him, or changing jobs. Women, even young women, understand that it's not worth derailing their career to take down some lascivious guy they don't care about. You can't reform a jerk. So why bother taking the time to report him? Just get away from him.

At this point, women generally understand that the legal system should handle sexual harassment at work. And just because the legal system lacks proper teeth doesn't mean that individual women, trying to earn a living, should pick up the slack.

But, what about women who don't care if they get fired? Those women hold a lot of power in this equation.

It used to be that women with low-level jobs did not have the socioeconomic backing to stand up for themselves in the face of harassment. Today, women feel more empowered—even women in a low pay-grade. And women across the economic spectrum can identify what crosses the line.

These women have nothing to lose when they report men who cross the line sexually. So the maid reported. And then, it turns out, all sorts of women in higher up positions spoke up against Strauss-Kahn. The women wouldn't report the harassment on their own. They don't want to suffer retribution. But now there will be no retribution, so it's safe to come forward.

This is why men are going to focus harassment at the higher ranks of the corporate ladder. These are the women who have to keep their mouths shut if they want to keep climbing the ladder.

But God help the guy who harasses a women with nothing to lose.

It's a great moment in history. Poor women are empowered to fight against lecherous men, and rich women can finally come out of the sexual harassment closet because of it.

So I built a career in tech. All men. And I started doing venture-backed startups. All men. And when I have been in departments that were all women, I either quit or switched to another department.

So I clicked over the BNET to investigate the situation and I stumbled on Kimberly Weisul’s post titled, Why Mentoring Helps Men More than Women. I read the post, mostly because I am always worried about not having the right mentors.

It turns out, I probably don’t have the right mentors, because women connect with people lower on the food chain than men do. I panic. I need to connect with business writers who are not writing work life stuff. No. Wait. I need to connect with Eric Schurenberg, who is editor-in-chief of BNET. I need to go out to lunch with him and make him love me, and then he’ll think of me first when he creates the power-writer’s group that lives on the home page of BNET and pops up in everyone’s browser with the urgency of a subscribe-now button on a porn site.

The thing is that Kimberly concludes, in her post, that women are getting ripped off. It kills me. I don’t want to be writing next to women who are whiners because then I sound like a whiner. So, to be clear, I am not whining about Kimberly, I am dissing her.

There is not a salary gap between women and men. There is a competition gap between women and men. Women choose collaborative, feel-good jobs, like writing in the how-can-we-all-get-along-better section of BNET and men choose the competitive, dog-eat-dog jobs like managing all the feel-good writers on BNET. That link is to Paul Sloan. My editor.

Will he even let me run this piece? I don’t know. You know what? I can’t stop writing about him. I have a little crush on him even though he won’t answer his phone when I call and he always returns my calls at 6pm central when he knows I won’t pick up the phone because I’m having dinner with my family.

Women: It is very bad to write stuff about dinner with family if you are trying to get ahead. Do not do this. People assume that if you have kids you will do less work. This may or may not be true – I mean, doing less work. But what is true is that you should not talk about family at work if you want to be in the all-boys departments.

However it is okay to talk about crushes at work because it is more of a single person thing to do. I mean, everyone has crushes, but only single people talk about it. So I think it makes me have a better chance of getting out of the girl ghetto at BNET if I tell you that Paul is a little shorter than I am, and not as good-looking as I am, but still, he is fun and cute.

This is an excerpt from the full post at BNET.

Caitlin wrote a thoughtful post about turning 30, which reminded me that I have a lot to say about turning 30. So this post is my birthday present to Caitlin. If you can call unsolicited advice a gift.

1. Don’t look to men for turning-30 camaraderie.
Turning 30 is different for men and women. Take a look at OKCupid, which is a dating site, yes, but it is also one of the most intoxicating data centers online. Their official blogger, Christian Rudder, does an incredible job of parsing the data from millions of people who use the site to figure out surprising answers to intriguing questions.

Rudder parses OKCupid data to find that, women are most desirable to men when women are in their 20s, and men are least desirable to women when they are in their 20s. Makes sense—men select for looks and women select for money. This is not some sexist social artifact—this is just how the world works and you cannot change it by forcing a generation of girls to play soccer.

What is also true is that women in their 20s earn more than men. So women feel relatively confident at work. But this switches in their 30s, when men start earning more. Sure, this is a result of a string of career-limiting decisions women make (like, they don’t want to be at the Consumer Electronics Show delivering a baby), but the bottom line is that the security women had in their earning power will go down and the men’s security will go up.

What this means for the turning-30 crowd is that men feel great and women feel trepidation.

2. Approach your biological clock head on.
First, for most women, the biological clock starts ticking like an earthquake when you turn 30 and have no kids. I know it is not scientifically proven, but most women will tell you that even if you thought you didn’t want kids, if you are ever going to change your mind, it’ll be when you turn 30. Something weird happens. And don’t tell me it’s society, because the Baby Boomer moms of Gen Xers were vehement that there is no rush to have kids, and thirty year old daughters should focus on careers, and still, Gen Xers felt the crush of the clock at age 30.

It is logical that you would panic about your clock because your clock is about to explode. Have you looked at data for mothers who are over 35? Here's a chart from Classhelp.com, and while this is just Down's Syndrome, most pregnancy risk-factor slopes look like this one:

But it’s not like you can’t control your dating life. It’s all you. If you want to find a husband, you’ll find one. Just make it a priority. First, you get rid of all the things you know are bringing you down. Junky eating. Junky friends. No exercise. No passion about work or anything outside of work. Fix all that. There are 1000 self-help books to tell you how, but really, you just need one thing—a will to change.

You will attract who you deserve. If you don’t like who you are getting, change yourself. If you can’t change yourself, get a reality check.

Then just choose the guy. Here are two things to consider:  1. There is no good time to have a baby. It'll always mess up your career, so just do it if want one. 2. There is no best way to choose a mate. Men will change careers, eventually have health problems, make parenting promises they won’t keep—it’s astounding how much marriage turns out to be a bait-and-switch. You can control so little, so don’t waste a lot of time trying to control for stuff you can’t—ultimately—control.

3. Relish the upcoming decade: it will probably be your best.
You know why? Because for women, their 30s decade is the best one of their sexual life. OK Cupid has outstanding data about women and sex. Women overwhelmingly report that they had no idea how bad they were in bed during their 20s, but they got much better in their 30s. By the time women are in their 40s, their sex drive is at its highest and their competence in bed is at its highest. When asked why, women report that their self-confidence and self-knowledge is at an all-time high.

The problem is that while women in their 40s are great in bed, they are increasingly unhappy in life. Women in their 40s report the most anxiety, sleeplessness, and pressure than any other demographic, and women, after 40, grow more and more unhappy as time goes on.

I, of course, have scoured research to find ways to overcome this statistical nightmare. But, in the meantime, women turning thirty can console yourselves: You are gaining self-confidence in leaps and bounds during your 30s, and your bedroom skills have the same slope as the graph above—but in a good way.

So really, Caitlin, and all you other women entering your 30s, you’re entering the decade that is best for women. Honestly, I’m hoping I’m in my best decade too. But I’ll tell you something: My 30s were hard to beat. And I’m saying that even though I turned 30 with no job, no boyfriend and no money. So I know you'll have a great time as well.

Time magazine reports that young, childless women are earning more than men. You'd be hard-pressed to find evidence of widespread discrimination against childless women in the workplace. But equally solid data confirms working mothers' suspicions that working moms do in fact get paid less than childless women. Here's another article on it from BusinessWeek.

Before you get up in arms about gap in pay between childless women and mothers, consider that maybe gap is fair.

Maybe moms get paid less because they work less. The majority of mothers work part time. Fully two-thirds of mothers work less than 40 hours per week, and most mothers prefer part-time over full-time. Employers pay part time workers less, whether parents or not, and offer fewer benefits because part-time workers aren't as cost-effective for companies to employ as full-time workers. Childless women are also significantly more likely to work overtime. The vast majority of mothers, 92 percent, work less than 50 hours a week.

As a result of working less, working mothers are also less qualified than childless women. You don't get the same amount of experience and expertise working 20 hours a week that you do working 40. Should a woman who worked full time for 2 years and then part time for 3 get the same promotion as a woman who worked full time for 5 years? A 1999 study by Klerman and Liebowitz puts it this way: "The motherhood penalty is partially explained by differences in human capital. Women with (more) children may have less experience and seniority due to the employment breaks taken to accommodate childcare."

Meanwhile, women who get pregnant, or intend to, are more likely to choose careers that pay less.

Then there's the issue of productivity. Do working mothers do less work during the hours they're at work? I haven't found any studies comparing productivity of mothers and childless women, but studies have shown female doctors are less productive than male doctors.

So if working mothers work less, are less qualified and choose lower-paying careers than childless women, should they really get paid the same? I'm thinking no.

This is a guest post from Cathy Reisenwitz, who blogs at Birmingham SEO Blog.

This is not just semantics: we are all working. It’s more than that. Here’s why.

Before I had my first child, in 2002, I had been bouncing between corporate jobs and fast-paced startups ten years, and I was earning a solid, six-figure salary. But I didn’t go back because I didn’t want to miss time with my son. By the time I had the baby we had used up all our savings (my husband, also, was not working), but I still didn’t go back to an office job because I wanted to stay home with my son.

But we needed money. So I wrote columns from our kitchen counter (I didn’t have a desk) when my son was sleeping. Sometimes I wrote columns while he was breastfeeding. I was deliriously tired, but I had to earn money.

I felt like I was a stay-at-home mom, because that was the most important thing to me: To stay home with my son, so I refused all overtures to take an office job. But I still supported the family.

I have a friend who has three kids under the age of six. She quit her teaching job to be a stay-at-home mom. Her husband has a job at a startup and he works long hours. But she has a job, too. She earns about as much money writing book reviews sporadically as I did writing my one column. But the family does not depend on her money. She does the job because it’s interesting to her. She and her husband call her a stay-at-home mom.

The difference between the two of us was not the amount of hours we worked, or the amount of time we were with our kids. It was the portion of the family’s income that each of us earned.

Here’s another example: Both parents work from home. Is the woman a stay-at-home mom? I think so. Because she’s at home. But if you ask them at a cocktail party, who they are, the dad will say what he does for a living. The mom? Who knows what she’ll say? Maybe stay at home mom, or maybe she’ll talk about her career.

I know that’s what I used to do. When I hung out with stay-at-home moms, that’s what they thought I was. When I hung out with working moms, that’s what they thought I was. I heard both sides talking about the other. And you know what? It’s insane. Women don’t even know what to label themselves, let alone each other.

To people in Darlington, WI, where I live, I'm a mom with a big career. To my friends who live in the city and work 100 hour weeks, I'm a stay-at-home mom. So much of the labeling, I think, is not about the woman and the live she leads, but what that life looks like relative to the people around her.

It's impossible to have a venture-backed startup and work less than 100 hours a week (which is why so few women do it). So, those of you who are working 40 hour weeks, I wonder—should you say you are working outside the home? Maybe not. Maybe you are stay-at-home moms. If you want to be.

Maybe the only people who are not stay-at-home moms are the ones who do not have custody of their kids. Or the ones who travel all month. But wait. What if you are gone one week of the month, but home the whole rest of the month? Stay-at-home or not? Because you are more at home than a part-time working mom.

So let’s just stop using these labels. They are not useful. What would be really productive is to get some language that helps women to convey what they are doing with their lives.

For example: What are you focusing on right now? That’s a good way to learn about someone.

Something I remember from living in Park Slope—land of overachieving and over-funded parents—is that moms would meet each other and ask, on the playground, “What did you do before you had kids?”

This is an interesting way to find out about someone without pigeonholing them.

Dad’s don't have this problem. If they’re unemployed, they are a stay-at-home dad. If they have any kind of job that is not kids, that’s what they say they do.

You know what? If fathers had any of their own confusion issues with being stay-at-homers then there wouldn’t be such a huge divide, pay-wise, between men with kids and women with kids. The pay gap speaks for itself: Men are not drawn to kids the way women are. They are more drawn to outside-the-home validation.

So. Now I’m a stay-at-home mom. I'm working about 35 hours a week, but relative to how I had been working, this is part-time work. It’s scary to tell people I’m not working full time because all the good jobs will dry up. And it’s scary to tell people when I’m not home with my kids because I only get one chance in my life to do that. The labels are most scary because they tell you what you gave up. And the scariest thing about adult life is what we give up.

What women try to do today is give up nothing. Which is impossible. Because look, we can’t even find a word for it. You know how we couldn’t prosecute for date rape until we had a word for date rape? Well, we can’t live a life where we have work and kids until we have a word for doing it.

I think I am doing it. But the only word I can think of to name it is scared.

Or lost.

Or lonely.

It’s weird. I have everything I aimed to have: All the time I want for my kids. I make my own schedule. I control how much money I make based on how much I want to work. I am doing the work I love most. How can it be that it’s hard for me? And, if it’s hard for me, it must be really hard for everyone else.

Maybe the truth is that the words we were using – stay at home mom, working mom – these were all patronizing words and what we should have used was more straightforward: adult. Because adult life is scary and lonely and we only get it feeling right in short-lived spurts.