One of my favorite twitter feeds is GSElevator. It’s stuff people overhear in the Goldman Sachs elevator, and most of it features bad behavior that confirms it was better for me to marry a farmer than the bankers I dated before him. But sometimes there is a gem like this one:  “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence because it’s fertilized with bullshit.”

That is how I feel about women watching other women run their lives.

I am constantly wondering about other peoples’ lives. I’m fascinated by how we don’t tell each other what sucks about our life. We don’t tell our partners why we hate ourselves. We don’t tell our friends why our marriage or our job sucks. Read more

One of the earliest pieces of advice I got when I started getting paid to write was to not write about women. So I have spent a good part of my career trying to figure out how much of myself to put in the picture.

My first monthly column was in Business 2.0 magazine, and every time I wrote about women my editor deleted the section. When I insisted on writing about what it’s like to be pregnant  he fired me and suggested that I try to write for Yahoo’s women section.

I didn’t, of course. I wrote for their finance section, because that’s where you get paid the most. And they fired me because the stuff I wrote geared toward women was off-topic.

When I negotiated my first book deal, I had to present a ton of metrics to show that my audience was half men.

And when I was just writing for myself on my own blog, and I could write about whatever I want, I realized that if I wrote about women and sex, men would stick with me through the women stuff. (Here’s a link to women and sex for men who are about to give up on this post.) Read more

Every once in a while a high-profile woman will divulge the dirty underbelly of trying to be a woman in the work world. I remember the first time I saw it. It was when Brenda Barnes stepped down from a huge career at Pepsi to be with her kids. And she announced that she felt like a bad parent spending so much time away from them. Thereby implying that the other moms with huge jobs like hers were also ignoring their kids.

This week, there is another ground-breaking example of a woman stepping down from a very high place: Anne-Marie Slaughter (pictured above). She is a dean at Princeton and she was director of policy planning in the State Department. She wrote a breathtaking article in the Atlantic titled, Why Women Still Can’t Have it All, about stepping down from her State Department job to take care of her two teenaged boys. She says, in the article, that she is taking much better care of them when she is not away from them. Read more