On women in business

Warning: this post is ranty. However, it's less bogus than usual, I think. Stay with me.

A few weeks ago, I was reading BusinessWeek when I came across a piece where 3 female senior executives were interviewed about being in business, being a wife and mother, and the cross-sections of the two. There was a nice little sidebar called "Myths about the lives of women," which stated some myths and then addressed them. A few of these myths were nice to read, such as, "Women are relegated to lower-level roles at work." Lots of women are managers these days, so hip hip hooray for the fairer sex!

Some of these myths, however, made me want to punch a wall.

Myth 1: "Children want to spend more time with their working mothers."
Truth 1: "1,000 kids were asked what they wanted from their working moms. 10% said 'more time.' More than a third wanted mom 'less stressed and tired.'"

I'm sorry...what? Let's pick this apart here, shall we? Okay.

First of all, you polled 1,000 kids? Well whoopdeef'ingdo. Who are they? How old are they? What kinds of positions do their mothers hold at their workplaces? Do you realize how small a percentage this is of all children (presumably in the U.S., but that wasn't stated) who have working moms?

Second, what did the other 55+ish percent want from their working moms? Ponies? Lucky Charms for dinner? This goes back to my last point. If you don't tell me what kids you're polling, I'm not just going to assume your data comes from credible sources (sorry, small children, but your opinions are not always valid and/or relevant. Suck it up).

Finally, do you, dear author, really expect me to be stupid enough to read these statistics and legitimately believe that the 90% who didn't say "more time" really DON'T want more time? That if I were to go up to those 900 children and ask if they wanted to hang out with their moms more, they'd say no? Because I don't buy it. The possible answers, at least from the 2 given, don't seem mutually exclusive.

Myth 2: "Flexible work options like paid leave allow women to feel happier at work."
Truth 2: "Studies show a negative correlation between taking advantage of such options and a woman's self-reported daily happiness."

WHAT STUDIES? Don't I deserve a link or a researcher's name or a year or SOMETHING? How many women? And what exactly did the study look at? Women who take paid maternity leave vs. women who didn't take the full amount that they could have, or vs. women who didn't take leave because they didn't have a child, or vs. women who don't work because they married rich and are thus just supremely happy because they have no daily obligations? Or..none of the above? Are we not even talking about maternity leave? What. The. F. Details, I need them. Pronto.

And you know what? I used to work in HR. I dealt with maternity leaves all the time. And from my (admittedly limited) experience, women love maternity leave. Why? Because it allows you to get paid! For staying at home and taking care of a tiny baby! Thinking logically about this, do we really want to say that taking paid time off is going to make a woman LESS happy? Because let me tell you, despite my company's relatively generous 12 week maternity leave policy, almost every single new mom that I dealt with (I supported 2000 employees for 3 years = lots of babies) used her paid vacation days as a way of extending her maternity leave because CLEARLY it made her SO VERY UNHAPPY. Mhmm.

Here's why reading these "myths" made me so angry. I hate, HATE, the dichotomy of the woman as mother and the woman as high-power business bitch but NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET.

The myths listed here are clearly trying to push people into the businesswoman camp and away from the mom camp. Aside from the fact that this is a case in point of how you can take any set of data and manipulate it in a way that supports whatever you want to say, this is obscene because we don't need that kind of pushing anymore, damnit.

Yes, I realize that there are still some inequalities in the workplace and that sometimes women are paid less for doing the same job and this, that and the other. But the fact of the matter is, women who want to be in business are out there proving themselves and proving US (sorry men, you are not included in this sentiment). Female CEOs are all over the place! (I'm looking at you, PepsiCo, Yahoo, NY Times, Kraft, Xerox, and so on). What we need now is not the encouragement to get into the business world, but the encouragement to do it ALL.

This is why I hate Suze Orman (I've been meaning to post about that for probably 2 years now). I read an article awhile back where Suze Orman talks proudly about being a 55 year-old virgin who has never been in any semblance of a relationship. Let's assume she's now closer to 60 and still in the same boat. Look, you make whatever life choices you want to make, and I'm not going to judge you for not doin' the dirty. But I don't want Suze, or anyone else for that matter, trying to pass herself off as someone I or anyone else should consider a role model. Yes, she's very successful, financially-savvy and has some kind of ridiculous net worth. But I can't look up to a woman who feels as though she needed to make a choice. Because it doesn't have to be a matter of having a family OR being successful in business. Why not both?

I'm hardly ever one to go on a femi-crazy rampage, but this idea is so ludicrous to me it almost seems backward. We pride ourselves on being a progressive society and the fact that more and more women are getting themselves into those top C-level spots only helps to bolster this train of thought. But true equality means that women and men have the same opportunities and can do the same things and let me tell you something, friends. Having families while being successful in business is something that men have been doing for YEARS.

So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, BusinessWeek.