Women who are not my role models

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Newsweek ran a piece titled Leading the Way to focus on women who will, supposedly, lead in the 21st century. The list includes a bunch of women who either didn’t adjust their careers for kids or have jobs that are incompatible with family. Here are some examples:

Sarah Chang: “I travel all year long. And every week is a new city.”
Renee Reijo Pera: “At 47, I am going to become a mother soon.”
Marissa Mayer: “Google is a very comfortable environment for me because…a great late-night conversation really inspires me.”

The women of Newsweek are not the heroes of my generation. On the whole, my generation is not interested in this sort of achievement. Not even the men.

Wharton just published a study titled, Plateauing, Redefining Success at Work. The study finds that “rather than subscribing to the onward and upward motto, men and women in middle management are more interested in plateauing, unhooking from the pressure to follow and uphill path that someone else has set. (Thanks, Wendy)

The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland published a study that found that senior executives have a lower quality of life than the terminally ill. (via Slow Leadership)

These women in Newsweek have given up everything for their careers. This is not what my generation views as success. This is what baby boomers view as success.

Newsweek does not reference to the fact that Gen Xers typically put family before career, and there is no acknowledgment that fertility takes a nose-dive at age 35. In fact, this article about women who have careers that leave no room for families is paired with photos of women with twins and triplets: As if IVF works all the time. Which it doesn’t.

Everyone worries about the media using women who are too thin as role models. I worry about the media using women who give up everything for their job as role models. Both are outdated and serve to limit women in senseless ways.

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Why I like seeing women at war with each other

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Jenn Satterwhite has been ranting in my comments section, which has made me very happy. She is bringing up difficult issues and she is making me nervous about posting responses. This seems good.

One thing Jenn brought up is that she wishes women would stop arguing among each other about the stay-at-home vs. career issues. I think Jenn imagines a very supportive environment where everyone makes a decision that is best for them.

I imagine an environment where it’s okay to rip each other to shreds.

Here’s why: Back in 1994 when I was writing about myself online before everyone else started, American Book Review asked me to review online writing. In my review I stated that most of the writing sucked. The editor told me that you can’t trash people who are on the forefront. “They are trying something new,” he said. “Be kind.” So I found nice things to say about generally tiresome writing.

Today, everyone is an online writer and criticism runs rampant. Similarly, in the 1970s it would have been completely uncalled for to throw stones at a female CEO. and today, throwing stones at Carly Fiorina is progress.

We will have more progress when we can throw stones at moms who make decisions we don’t agree with. For example, there is some point at which a high-powered, dual-career, nanny-run family is treading on neglect. Let’s mark that point and start throwing stones. Who is protecting the kids? Who is protecting society? Stone throwers. So take a stand.

I will be happy when the war is not between stay-at-home moms and working moms but between parents who refuse to put up with neglect and those who convince themselves it’s okay. In a world where men and women are sharing care and creating careers that accommodate family, this will be a genderless discussion with bombs exploding. That’s what I want to see.

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Ten questions with Gloria Steinem

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I interviewed Gloria Steinem. She’s promoting her new undertaking, GreenStone Media, a radio station founded by women for women. There were nine bloggers on the call with me and we each got to ask a question.

During the interview I was routinely sidetracked by:

a) Gloria Steinem is the revolutionary we talk about when we talk about feminism. She is huge. I felt incredibly honored to be talking to her.

b) The other nine bloggers are huge. Not huge like Gloria Steinem, but huge like smart writing and big audience and I was dying to know what they were thinking about the call.

c) Emily Rice put the call together, and she identified ten top bloggers across blogging genres — tricky to do. Rice will generate publicity for GreenStone Media in an area that would have been hard to reach. I think she is a publicity genius and I got sidetracked thinking about ways to become her friend.

Here’s what happened on the call. The women asked very interesting questions, and Gloria gave very interesting answers. But the two were not particularly related.

Here are examples. (I am paraphrasing in places. If you need to hear the whole interview, here it is) :

Q: (From Catherine Connors) In your keynote speech you say that women want less conflict on radio. One of the criticisms of the mommy bloggers is there’s too much camaraderie. It’s too rah rah and we don’t disagree nearly enough.

A: (From Gloria, of course) People complain about the Oprafication of media. I think, if only the media were as good as Oprah we’d be in a different world. There is such a premium on agreement that we forget to tell the truth. There really can’t be community if it doesn’t include the freedom to say what we feel.

See what I mean? Catherine brings up an interesting topic that is very this-moment. And Gloria says some inspiring stuff that would have been an equally good answer to fifty questions people asked twenty years ago.

Q: (From me) In your keynote speech you say women are reading more than men and getting more college degrees than men. You say it like that’s a positive. But right now girls are working much harder than boys in high school and in college and it seems to me like a trickle down from women doing more work than men everywhere else. Do you see this as a problem?

A: Women need to ask themselves the revolutionary question, Is this really what I want to do?.. When mediocre women do as well as mediocre men, then I’ll know we’re getting somewhere.

Again, I bring up a topic that is very current, and Gloria gives an answer that spans decades. So this is one reason why Gloria is an amazing figure in history; the answers she’s been giving to the media for the last twenty years still resonate. But I couldn’t help feeling like I was in a press conference with some political figure who is sticking to talking points.

So for a minute, let me move past Gloria Steinem and GreenStone Media.

I want to tell you about the women on the call. I love their blogs because they are so honest and well written. I loved that each of us was so nervous and excited about talking to Gloria, and each of us was so eager to hear what the others would ask.

But, when you get a group of women together, the stay-at-home moms separate from the career moms. So it’s no surprise that the moms divided here, too.

Jenn Satterwhite, said, “If you are a mommy blogger you’re written off.” This is true. Many women dread working in an all-women space. And I personally have lost a job giving career advice right after I wrote about being pregnant. (“You should write for a working mom magazine,” my editor told me.)

So it did not surprise me that when Pamela Slim spoke she made sure to tell Gloria that her blog focuses on entrepreneurship, not parenting. And when I got on the phone, I said I write about work and parenting only as it relates to work. I said this because I would never, ever want to be called a mommy blogger. I’d lose half my readers.

But let me tell you something. While I was distancing myself from the mommy bloggers, I did something only a mom would do: built a fortress in my bedroom so that my kids wouldn’t bug me on the call; I had a mattress against the door to muffle screams and a dresser against the mattress to keep the door shut.

So in the end, we have a snapshot of women’s media in the new millennium: There is a group of bloggers asking contentious questions from the media’s edge. And there is Gloria Steinem, representing the establishment, and giving seasoned and wise but measured answers in an effort to promote her burgeoning radio empire. And while Gloria is marketing her conflict-free radio station, the bloggers are doing what they do best, celebrating conflict, even within ourselves.

Here’s the list of bloggers:
Catherine Connors, Her Bad Mother
Ingrid Wiese, Three New York Women
Jenn Satterwhite, Mommy Needs Coffee
K Smith, Almost Literally
Kristen Chase, Motherhood Uncensored
Leah Peterson, Leah Peah
Liz Gumbinner, Mom 101
Pam Slim, Escape from Cubicle Nation
Sarah Brown, Que Sera Sera

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Japanese heir is born; Japanese women’s movement miscarried

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Now that there is a baby boy in the Japanese royal family of little girls, the movement to allow a girl become queen will end.

It’s a good time to tell the story of Crown Princess Masako, wife of the Crown Prince Naruhito, who struggled unsuccessfully to have this male heir. (Her sister-in-law delivered the baby boy today.)

Masako is Harvard educated and had a successful career as a diplomat before marrying the man-who-would-be-king. She thought she’d buck tradition and continue to be involved in aspects of her career even after she got married. However strict government oversight of Japan’s royal family made that impossible.

Masako capitulated: Abandoned her career, had a daughter, and then a nervous breakdown. She is a reminder that while women struggle with the wide range of choices we have, without the opportunity to craft our own lives, most of us also would have nervous breakdowns.

Every time I read something about the Japanese royal family I get sad about Masako. In an attempt to find something to do with her intellect that would be acceptable to the powerful organization that manages the royal family, Masako translated Japanese poetry for children into English. Here is one of the poems:

Zebra

In a cage
Of his
Own making

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Your family would be better off with a housewife (so would mine)

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Men should not marry women who have careers, according to an opinion piece at Forbes.com. The statistics are clear:

“Marrying these women is asking for trouble. If they quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003). They will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Social Forces, 2006). You will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2001). You will be more likely to fall ill (American Journal of Sociology). Even your house will be dirtier (Institute for Social Research).”

There is a response from a woman, who, big surprise, has a big career. But to me, she just sounds like she’s whining. And she’s definitely missing the point.

The point is that marriage and family work best when one person is taking care of them full time. Duh. Everything in the world is best off when it is cared for very carefully. I wish everyone would stop trying to deny this. It’s barking up the wrong tree.

There is little evidence that the role of housewife is any more frustrating than the role of housewife and careerist rolled into one. (I have done both roles and both are very difficult and not totally satisfying.)

The conclusion, that marriages and families work better with a full-time housewife, is hard to swallow but hard to deny. It’s just that not every woman wants to take care of a family and marriage full time, and even fewer men do. And increasingly few people want to give up almost all child-rearing responsibilities in order to be a single breadwinner. So this is a piece of advice that’s useful to only the small percentage of households in the world. But still, the advice is good.

Many people will say they’d rather face the challenges of a dual-career marriage than the challenge of a stay-at-home-spousedom. Fine. Just know the statistics are not in your favor.

Before I get accused of throwing stones from a glass house, let me come clean with the fact that my husband and I are constantly restructuring our work life in response to these statistics. Also, I believe that the woman being the primary caretaker of both family and marriage is BS, but I don’t see many marriages working any other way, even with two, powerhouse careers.

Please, do not send me emails about your perfect marriage because I don’t believe it. In my marriage we have tried everything, and everything is hard in its own way.

Meanwhile, it’s good advice to men to pick a woman who will be a full-time housewife, but I have some advice for women who are shopping for husbands: To find a partner who will support your choices both financially and emotionally and who will be around enough to participate as an equal parent, marry someone with a very large trust fund.

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Devil Wears Prada is a hit, but that doesn’t mean it’s career news

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I swore that I would not write about the Devil Wears Prada because the bad boss topic has gotten so much play lately.

But now respectable news outlets like CBS News and the Chicago Sun-Times have crossed the line for me: As an excuse to run a trailer for the Devil Wears Prada, they are going on about how women want male bosses.

News agencies are citing a poll released by Lifetime media in which 800 women were asked if they prefer a man or a woman boss. Among generation Y respondents, 31% preferred women 47% preferred men and 22% didn’t have a preference.

But the margin of error is 6%, which is so high for a poll like this that you may as well not do it. In this case, with the absurd margin of error, the results could actually be 37% of women prefer women 41% of women prefer men and 22% don’t care. Is this news? No.

But now random people on the street and on the Internet are spouting off about how to explain why women are more difficult to work for.

EVERYONE PLEASE SHUT UP!!! These are not statistics that show that women are any more difficult than men, so we don’t need to dig up reasons why that might be true.

That said, you might want to take a look at the poll results yourself. There are some interesting findings that do not relate to a movie and therefore have gone unreported. For example, women who are single like working for women and women with kids like working for men.

What I really want you to do, though, is take a look at the career pundit who talked about this poll on CBS. Her suit is totally out of control. The last time I had a top that fit like that I had to safety-pin the middle so that my breasts didn’t flop out. What is she thinking?

Everyone — even the 50% of you without breasts — when you have an important thing to do, like appear on a huge television show, have someone who is qualified give you some outfit advice.

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Update on the list of best and worst professions

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There’s disconcerting news in CareerJournal today. They list the top ten professions, using generally the same criteria that Salary.com used to come up with its list of the ten best professions. And the only professions that are (only sort of) on both lists are: “analyst” and “social worker/psychologist”.

Analyst is such a broad term that it is almost useless, but it is conveniently something that requires almost the complete opposite skills as social worker/psychologist. So at least most personality types have an opportunity here.

Maybe the only really actionable advice on this topic comes from what has become one of my favorite sources for career advice, New York Magazine. Here’s a quote from a funny and informed lecture on happiness by Ben Mathis-Lilley:

“Don’t go to law school. Lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to be depressed than members of other professions, and it’s not just because their jobs are more stressful. For most people, job stress has little effect on happiness unless it is accompanied by a lack of control (lawyers, of course, have clients to listen to) or involves taking something away from somebody else (a common feature of the legal system).”

That advice is not just for lawyers, it’s for everyone. Even if you can’t be an analyst or psychologist, at least get a job where you have control over your work.

What is control? For some people, it’ll mean working for yourself. But you can have control working for other people, too.

I asked David Blanchflower, professor at Dartmouth College who is known for slicing data to create happiness equations, “What does having control over one’s work really mean?”

He said that control goes beyond just workload and pace. “People don’t like to feel there’s a risk of being fired. They like control over what they wear, they want access to the heat control.”

Surprisingly, in study after study, women report more job satisfaction than men do. So maybe the biggest factor in whether or not you feel like you have control over your work is not whether you’re in a “best profession” but whether or not you’re a woman.

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The workplace favors athletes, so do your best to be one

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Here’s some career advice. Stop obsessing about how smart you are. Instead, get some exercise and you’ll perform better at work — athletes do better in the workplace than non-athletes. Even off the field. This advice is true in a wide range of scenarios — across age groups, job descriptions, and types of exercise.

Athletes make more money because their self-confidence and competitive nature makes them choose jobs that pay more money, says James Shulman, author of The Game of Life: College Sport and Educational Values. “This happens from every group of athletes from the liberal arts colleges to big-time sports. It is not affected or skewed by a few people winning million-dollar NFL contracts or anything like that.”

Another reason athletes make more money is that they fit in better in today’s workplace, which values emotional intelligence over academic intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the “soft skills” that enable smooth running interpersonal relationships at work — such as the ability to read peoples’ nonverbal cues and the ability to manage oneself within a team.

These skills are not taught in a classroom; however, someone with athletic experience is likely to have picked them up. “Sports teach workplace values like teamwork, shared commitment, decision-making under pressure, and leadership,” says Jennifer Crispen , a professor at Sweet Briar College who teaches a course in the history of culture of women’s sport.

Also, playing sports helps people succeed because it teaches skills such as, “time management, mental toughness, and focus,” says David Czesniuk, manager at the Center for the Study of Sport in Society.

This is especially true for women. Crispen told me, “Eighty-one percent of women executives played organized team sports growing up.” These women attribute their success, in a part, to the fact that they learned the values that playing these sports teaches.

Mariah Titlow, a biologist, has been involved in sports all her life. “Sports have given me better focus and discipline,” she says. “I’ve done gymnastics, swimming, dance, field hockey, track. Sports increased my confidence, made me a happier person, and taught me how to get through something tough.”

Elite colleges are aware of this connection, which explains why it is easier to get into the Ivy League if you are an athlete. And employers know that athletes have an advantage in the workplace, so hiring managers like to see candidates with athletic experience.

For athletes, this is great news. Non-athletes should stop complaining about the unfair advantage, and instead, take steps to confer some of the advantages of being an athlete on themselves. Here are some ideas for getting started:

If you’re in school, join a team and approach it with dedication, because that’s an integral part of your education. “Your body and your brain are connected,” says Titlow, “so the benefits of sports spill over into other parts of life.” The career benefits of being an athlete are not necessarily related to talent, they have to do with focus and commitment. So get some.

If you are out of school, there are still opportunities to join teams that cater to adult beginners. But if you can’t image doing that, at least go to the gym. It’s no coincidence two thirds of female business executives and 75 percent of all chief executives, exercise regularly, Crispen said. While you do not gain team-oriented benefits from individual exercise, you do cultivate business essentials such as self-discipline, goal setting, and self-confidence.

In fact exercise in the morning notably improves your workplace performance that very day, according to research from Leeds Metropolitan University.

Still feeling like a couch potato? That couch time is costing you money: The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that good-looking people make 14 percent more than ugly people. Part of this discrepancy is because, `’The perfect leader is someone who is able to control other peoples’ perceptions of him. Everyone has a secret — a weakness or a raw nerve they don’t want to be touched. For a person who is overweight, the secret is out.” says executive recruiter Mark Jaffe.

Before you hem and haw about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, just go to the gym. You know good-looking when you see it, and you know ugly when you see it, and a body that’s been exposed to regular exercise at the gym is probably not ugly. You might not get that whole 14 percent of extra pay, but your career is going to benefit one way or another if you exercise regularly.

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The Wall Street Journal tries to guilt women into giving up maternity leave

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The Wall Street Journal gives terrible advice this week on “going from maternity leave to permanent resignation.”

Columnist Sue Shellenbarger writes, “Once a mother is absolutely sure she isn’t going to return to work after maternity leave, I believe she’s obligated to reveal her intentions to her employer.”

WHY? There is no description in the column about the genesis of this obligation. Is it a moral obligation to protect corporate America from having to support families?

Listen to me: Take that leave, and don’t feel guilty. The United States is the only country in the developed world that does not provide national, paid maternity leave. So the few women in the US who can actually take maternity leave have EARNED it. The law gives these women the RIGHT to take that maternity leave regardless of what happens afterwards.

Shellenbarger also warns that you will “burn your bridges” by taking maternity leave and then quitting. She writes this as if it’s a national trend to rehire women after they take extended leave for children. In fact, it’s just the opposite: Most companies do not take you back after leave. And companies that do are notable exceptions. (Anyway, I would not even want to go back to a boss if he were the bitter-about-maternity-leave type, so why bother appeasing him?)

Here’s the advice the Wall Street Journal should have given: Don’t tell anyone at work that you’re not coming back after the baby. Collect all your maternity leave money and do not feel guilty. Call at the end of leave and say you’re not coming back. Tell your boss you’re sorry to put him in a difficult position, but everything feels different once the baby is there. That is true. It is not lying.

Please, do not feel guilty. That women take maternity leave and then quit is a result of the system being totally flawed. It is absurd to presume that women know if they want to continue working before they know what it’s like to be home all day with a baby. And it is unreasonable that the workplace cannot provide a decent number of baby-friendly jobs so that women who want to continue working can without compromising their own health (exhaustion) or their baby’s (too much separation).

In fact, quitting right after maternity leave is not so uncommon, says Laura Shelton, who has done extensive research about Gen X women at the office. She suggests that advice like the Wall Street Journal’s is a result of a generation gap — boomers like Shellenbarger just don’t get it: Boomers fought to get women into he workplace but boomers ignored maternity benefits.

Maybe your boss will take some advice from Shellenbarger’s source, Don Sutaria, who gives companies some good advice: Hire a temporary worker who could stay on as permanent if the maternity leave turns into full leave.

And while you’re pregnant, train the temp well. This will make you feel better if you decide not to return to work, and it’ll even make you feel better if you do return because someone will have kept your work in order.

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How to pick your leadership style

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I am doing research about women in sports, and one of the most memorable statistics I have come across is that nearly four out of five women executives played sports growing up. So I called Jennifer Crispen, to talk about her work in this field. She said that there has been a lot of research to show how much women’s careers benefit from exposure to sports — “in terms of teamwork, shared commitment, and leadership.”

But Crispen told me that most current research focuses on how we talk about women. The media focus on women doing “skirt sports” like ice skating and gymnastics, because, “People still want to describe women doing sports as graceful and pretty,” says Crispen. “If you define men as aggressive and competitive it’s positive. But for women, these are negative attributes.”

The double standard for men and women is true at the playing field and the office. The Hay Group did a study (reported by Paula Burkes Erickson of the Daily Oklahoman), which concluded that successful women employ a mixture of male and female leadership styles. But when women use a strictly “command-and-control” style typical of successful men, the women get feedback like “‘bitch,’ ‘disempowering,’ ‘not clear what she wants from me’ and ‘we’re not working as a team.'”

So women need to keep their leadership style a little soft in order to keep everyone on board. But what about men? Authoritarian leadership may have worked in the past, but it absolutely won’t fly with Gen Y. They will quit rather than put up with it. So the most effective leadership style for everyone is a mixture of male and female leadership styles.

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