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.

NaBloPoMo

I'm lifting this post from my old blog, because a) it's still relevant and b) no one can read my old blog anymore. It's still pretty accurate down to the very end where it talks about putting up Halloween pictures sometime in the future. Here goes.

It's been awhile since I've written a post basically hating on other bloggers so I think it's time for one of those yet again.

I'm sorry, people who are participating in this NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month, for you people who read this blog because you're my friend and want to keep up with my goings on, not because you care what the bloggy community is doing) nonsense, but I just don't understand why someone would think this is a good idea and how on earth they got people to buy into it. To me, NaBloPoMo is like the pet rock craze. One day people are going to be like "wait..people..actually..like...went for it?"

Okay, so you post every day for a month. And? Where's the part where I should be impressed? It is NOT THAT HARD to spew some words onto a page once a day for 30 days straight. There are people who do this for their jobs. I would, in fact, go as far as saying it's pretty damn easy. The only caveat here is vacations or other time constraints and not physically being in front of a computer every day. But I'm pretty sure the challenge isn't meant to be "Find time to write every day," it's "Instead of Facebook stalking, take 10 minutes to write, okay? Okay."

And now some of you are going, "Well, if you say it's so easy, why don't YOU participate and show us how easy it is? You're just trashing on everyone else because you know you couldn't do it."

To those who feel this way: you're wrong.

I could post 3 times a day if I wanted to. But I prefer to write only when I have something to say, and thus I'm not going to force myself to put a boring post together just because I signed up for some challenge where I said I would.

Don't get me wrong, I love a good challenge. That challenge where you write a novel in a month? Now THAT is legit. You know who totally admits that she could never write a novel in 30 days? This girl.

Except those of you who are doing it solely for the prizes - right on. I briefly considered it for that reason alone.

And those of you who are doing it to find other cool blogs - I support that too.

Those of you who are doing it for the "challenge" - I just don't see the big deal. Sorry.

For the record, I still love all you wonderful bloggers. I just think you're all better than this mildly sad excuse for self-fulfillment or whatever it is. If you want to really test yourself, add a theme to your NaBloPoMo-ing to see if you can come up with 30 unique posts. Or write each post as one long yet still grammatically correct sentence (we did this in a Creative Writing class in college - totally not easy).

Aaaand I'm done. Halloween pictures forthcoming.

TALK '10

I was reminded recently that I never really posted about how my speech/presentation went. So I'm finally getting around to it. Word up.

About an hour and a half before it started, an email went out saying the location was being changed. This was crappy because a) it didn't give ample notice, and b) it was moved from the business school to a different building, which means it was less likely that people would leave our lovely safe haven to venture elsewhere. Despite this, our turnout was decent.

My partner went first, and his speech was awesome. As I knew it would be since we practiced together.

Here is a pretty brief overview of what I talked about in each of my slides (total presentation was 20 minutes).

SLIDE 1

Thanks to Dan Mega for this awesome shirt. I talked about my middle name (which is a Hebrew word), what it means, and why I never use it (answer: because no one can pronounce it and because I go through enough strife having the same first name as a Disney princess).

SLIDE 2 (all the slides had pictures but I don't want to post pictures of my family here, seems weird)

My grandparents. Their time in Auschwitz, how a Nazi guard went out of his way to save my grandpa's life, and why being the descendant of Holocaust survivors makes me want to raise a Jewish family.

SLIDE 3

My family (and our awesome dog). How having 2 New Yorker parents and spending the first 8 years of my life in New York City made me think that NYC is the best place on Earth.

SLIDE 4

Jew school. Being the only non-orthodox family at an orthodox Jewish private school. Having half my classes taught in Hebrew, praying twice a day, and having all my friends and teachers tell me that going to public high school was going to ruin me.

SLIDE 5

High school. Why it was awesome and liberating compared to private school. How I ate my first non-kosher meal and had no idea.

SLIDE 6Tufts. Some stuff I did there (including bungee jumping in New Zealand, pictured above). How I managed to declare a second major in Judaic Studies a week before graduating, and how my JS education opened my eyes to exactly how conservative my private school education was.

SLIDE 7

Work. What it was like working for a company that no longer exists due to the financial industry meltdown. The time I ran into our (very well known) CEO in the elevator while looking like an asshole. Managing the layoffs of hundreds of people and why that sucked.

SLIDE 8

Business school. Why being in the minority as a Jew has been a learning experience. Why I'm always fascinated by what other religions and cultures do. Some times that I was unfamiliar with what was going on, like going to my first Catholic mass and why I thought I had to make out with everyone at the end. Conclusion.

That's it! It was a really great experience both getting to share this with my classmates, and getting to reflect upon the parts of my life that I hardly ever think about anymore. Good times indeed.