Don’t get me wrong.  I love Sandberg.  We all do.  A graduate of the Harvard Business School (and protege of Larry Summers), she’s emerged as one of the country’s most impressive female power brokers, not to mention role model to women and girls everywhere. And rightly so. As the Chronicle story points out, she’s a “passionate advocate for women to claim a far greater share of the top corporate leadership positions”:

But she says the sharing of leadership starts in the home.

“A world where men ran half our homes and women ran half our institutions would be just a much better world,” Sandberg said during a May commencement address at Barnard College in New York City.

“To solve this generation’s central moral problem, which is gender equality, we need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored,” she said.

Deborah Gruenfeld, a leadership and organizational behavior professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, said Sandberg has become “a symbol for a new wave of feminism, where women can own their power by just being women, where you don’t have to see that as totally incompatible. You can be feminine and be a totally powerful person.”

And hooray for that, right?  But where the story threw me sideways was a throw-away line in the preceding paragraph.  After writer Benny Evangelista noted that last year Forbes named Sandberg the fifth most powerful woman in the world, and Fortune named her the 12th most powerful woman in business, he wrote:

Yet she still managed to balance her professional life with raising two young children, making her the ultimate role model for women who want to have it all.

Have it all? Get real.  She’s got two young kids, a killer career and is married to the CEO of another Silicon Valley company, who presumably is pretty darn busy himself.  Clearly, she might have it all, but she surely can’t be doing it all.  At least not without lots of hired help.  (Sandberg, by the way, declines to be interviewed about anything but the company, according to Evangelista.)

And that’s the issue, isn’t it? As women who have come of age in the second half of the twentieth century, we’ve been raised with the mantra that we can have it all.  We can do anything.  We can do everything.  And yet.  Despite the progress we women have made in scarcely more than a generation, the world has not caught up.  Workplace structures, public policy — even the social culture — is still more reflective of the days of Don Draper, where there was always a Betty at home to take care of business.  But who lives like that anymore?  In this economy, who could?  And the 40-hour workweek?  A pipedream, especially once you leap upon the corporate ladder.  Or even if you don’t. Nonetheless, in most households, women own the second shift.  (Even Nobel Prize winners:  Biologist Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University was doing the laundry when she got the call that she had won the Nobel Prize in medicine.)

So, this notion of “having it all.”  It’s great, and all that. But there’s a problem of holding up superstars like Sandberg (or Angelina Jolie: we can all birth/adopt a bunch of kids and still find the time to make movies, right?) to convince us that we can run a company and raise family, all while wearing a big fat smile and some killer high heels. Cue the iconic sex-kitten ad from Enjolie perfume.

And that’s what makes me crazy. First, as we explore in Undecided, when we find our own sense of balance entirely off-kilter, which I suspect is most of the time for most of us, we feel as if we’re the ones who have blown it.  We’ve chosen wrong.  We’ve done it wrong.  Which leaves us lusting after that greener grass: we’ll have what she’s having, thank you very much.  We end up making the political the personal.

And that’s just wrong.  Because what I find most insidious about perpetrating the have-it-all myth is the fact that when we buy into it, we’re lulled into a false state of complacency that keeps us from pushing for the kind of change that would help us all, male and female alike, no matter where we sit on the food chain.  But it’s going to take work.  And conversation.

Not to put more words in Sandberg’s mouth, but I suspect she would approve.

According to Columbia Professor Ernesto Reuben, one of the study’s authors, “men may have a much easier time ‘faking it’ due to natural overconfidence in their performance”:

Part of the persistent gender gap in leadership at firms can be attributed to discrimination. However, most investigations in this area focus on clear-cut instances of discrimination, in which a woman might not be selected for a position or promotion in a male-dominated firm where men either don’t like working with women, feel threatened by women, or believe that women are not as good in a given role or industry. But Reuben suggests that the underlying causes of such selection issues may go beyond simple conscious discrimination.

“We know that there are differences in the way men and women think of themselves and react to incentives,” Reuben says. “That led us to ask what other forces could be creating gender differences than bald out-and-out discrimination.”

What they found was that those other forces had to do with “honest” exaggeration.  In one experiment, MBA students were asked to complete some math problems, then a year later, were asked to recall how well they did.  Both the men and the women inflated their scores — but to a different degree.  Then men rated themselves about 30 percent higher.  The women, only about 15 percent.  Next, the researchers upped the ante by dividing participants into groups, and asking them to choose a leader to represent them in a math contest, based on how the participants thought they’d do.  In groups where the leader was given a cash incentive, both men and women exaggerated how well they thought they’d do.  But those who exaggerated the most, were usually rewarded for it:

When participants had an incentive to lie, they lied more, and the incidence of lying increased as the monetary award for being chosen as leader increased. But while women kept pace with men on how frequently they lied, women did not exaggerate their performance to the same degree, and it cost them: women were selected 1/3 less often than their abilities would otherwise indicate. In other words, while there is no gender differential when it comes to lying, there is a significant gender differential when it comes to “honest” overconfidence: the main difference in women not being selected as leaders appears to be attributable to men’s overconfidence in their abilities.

Something to think about, right?  To be sure, there are a number of reasons why women keep bumping up against the glass ceiling — from overt discrimination in the workplace to the so-called maternal wall.  As we point out in Undecided, studies show that a female employee who wears her mom-hood on her sleeve is likely to be perceived as a flight risk.  We also tend to lose the confidence game, sometimes because we fear we won’t fit in.

But the ways in which we’ve learned to communicate plays a part as well.  When it comes to salary, we are less likely to negotiate. We’re more likely to give credit to others than ourselves. We tend to downplay our achievements, even to the point of deflecting compliments.  We’ve learned early on that “nice” girls don’t brag.  Or speak up. And where do es that get us?  As we noted before,

It’s a classic double bind — cue Miranda Priestly once again: Women who are assertive score low on the likability scale.  We’re seen as arrogant, or worse yet, ambitious. But if we don’t speak up, we get paid less.  All of which is infuriating, [communication scholar Laura] Ellingson tells us. “They tell women not to ‘toot their own horns’ from infancy on, leading us to try hard NOT to stand out, and then they ask why we don’t advocate better for ourselves.”

But back to that Columbia study.  In a riff in a recent special section of the Sun Times, writer Vickie Milazzo, author of Wicked Success Is Inside Every Woman, says that women need “to act (and) think more like men.  Her advice?

“Don’t let anyone-including yourself-forget just how much you’re bringing to the table,” says Milazzo. “The men certainly won’t. Practice talking about your achievements. Be proud of your strengths and abilities and learn to compellingly express them to others. When you position yourself in an appealing way, you’ll unleash success.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.  Wait a minute…  Yes, dammit, I could!

I got to thinking about these questions after reading the cover story in Sunday’s New York Times Styles section: The Power Stylists of Hollywood. The piece is a well-timed tease–especially for me, an admitted and unrepentant stylephile–whetting the appetite for red carpet season, which kicked off Sunday night with the Golden Globes. The only thing was, rather than talking about trends, or even really about the stylists themselves, the piece is about the business of styling. And a bit of it gave me pause:

“Dressing for a major red carpet isn’t simply getting ready for a big party and looking pretty,” said George Kotsiopoulos, a stylist and a former editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine who is now a host on “Fashion Police” on the E! network. In recent years, he said, “it’s been about selling yourself as a brand.”

…

As insiders see it, that investment is worthwhile: the right red-carpet turnout can help a performer change lanes. “If your client plays nefarious characters,” said the stylist Jeanne Yang, you might dress them, say, in tulle, to demonstrate “that she’s really a fresh ingénue.”

Others strive for sartorial consistency. Indeed, a case could be made that [Hailee] Steinfeld’s reliably chic but youthful red-carpet looks inspired the fashion executives at Miu Miu to cast her in its advertising campaigns. Mila Kunis’s transformation, at the hands of Ms. Flannery, from ill-kempt hipster to regal sexpot doubtless helped secure her latest role, as the new “face” of Dior. A fashion or fragrance contract can earn an actress in the tens of millions.

Such potent stylist-star alliances were spawned well over a decade ago, when celebrity Web sites and supermarket tabloids competed to serve up candid shots of stars exiting Starbucks or the gym in a state of sorry dishevelment. Hoping to shore up their images, some were quick to enlist a fashion consultant.

Stylists at the time catered to stars’ insecurities. “The stylist is an outgrowth of the mean-girls culture,” Ms. Press observed. “Their very existence says of an actress, ‘I don’t trust my own instincts, or I have no instincts, or I can’t bear to read all the mean things people are going to say if my dress doesn’t deliver.’ ”

Sure, for most of us, no matter what we wear, our outfits will likely not be netting us a gig as the new face of Dior anytime soon, but I think there’s something in here that’s pretty universal. The need to (pause for barf-in-my-mouth) brand ourselves.

Gross, right? And yet. We all do it: Whether putting together the outfit that will convey precisely the image we want to project on any given occasion (competent yet creative for the job interview; smart yet sexy for the date; pulled together without trying to hard for the errands…), or editing the reality of our lives in order to present a carefully curated–some might say contrived–image for our imagined audiences to admire on Facebook, we’re all in the business of personal branding. And, as Barry Schwartz tells us in Undecided, it’s little wonder:

Nowadays, everything counts as a marker of who you are in a way that wasn’t true when there were fewer options. So just to give you one example: When all you could buy were Lee’s or Levi’s, then your jeans didn’t tell the world anything about who you were, because there was a huge variation in people, but there were only two kinds of jeans, you know? When there are two thousand kinds of jeans, now all of a sudden, you are what you wear… What this means is that [with] every decision, the stakes have gone up. It’s not just about jeans that fit; it’s about jeans that convey a certain image to the world of what kind of person you are. And if you see it that way, it’s not so shocking that people put so much time and effort into what seems like trivial decisions. Because they’re not trivial anymore.

Actually, it reminds me of a story of my own:

Last year, I was in New York for a book reading–an anthology to which I’d contributed an essay. And off I went, sporting an Outfit-with-a-capital-O. After all, I like clothes. And I spend more than enough time at home, alone save for my trusty laptop, ensconced in clothes that can most kindly be described as scrubs. And if people were going to be looking at me, I wanted to look good, dammit (and, you know, be comfortable–except for my baby toes). I was staying with the (wildly intelligent–and beautiful) woman who’d edited the book, and, while we were walking to the train, she–dressed decidedly down–told me how she feels like she has to dress that way in order to be perceived as a Serious Writer. You know, the kind who’s so busy being a Serious Writer she doesn’t have time for silly fashion. She said she even has a pair of fake glasses. (Even a Serious Writer has to accessorize!) The irony, of course, being that she loves clothes as much as I do. She was laughing about it, but I have to say, it kind of made me take note of what each of the other contributors wore that night, and what my choice of duds communicated about me. Fabulous and fashionable? Or literary lightweight?

It all makes you wonder: is all this “personal branding” we’re doing serving yet another purpose? As with the actresses who employ professional stylists, is our brand–or, as we like to call it, our “iconic self“–a buffer in some way? The armor that protects us from those we fear will judge us? After all, in a world of endless options, of jeans for every political affiliation and body shape, sometimes, isn’t it easier to slap on a costume, play the role, be the brand, rather than hanging out our sloppy, indefinable self out there for all to see? Or doing the work of figuring out who she is in the first place?

But all of it surely comes at a cost. After all, what about the parts of ourselves that don’t fit neatly into our brand? Maybe a willingness to own our complex, dualistic, not always delightful but utterly human nature can make our choices a little bit clearer. If we let go of the need to fit ourselves into the brand, the image, the iconic self, maybe we’d have an easier time figuring out who we really are. Which in turn, might just make our decisions easier, not to mention more authentic. All of which might just make us happier. Think of it as You, 2.0.

Your magazine is cutting edge, informative, and entertaining without being superficial.  However, when the December issue arrived, I was disgusted.  Washington is full of beautiful, powerful, educated, intelligent women of all shapes, sizes, and ages, and this cover does nothing but degrade us to a naked – and I’m sure Photoshopped – figure with some lines about cosmetic procedures floating around her head…

Hilary said she was heartened by the fact that the magazine not only published her letter, but acknowledged the extensive blowback the cover had gotten from other readers.  She also wrote that she was inspired by the documentary, Miss Representation, and since seeing it has been quick to “attack any and all forms of the continued objectification of women, especially powerful women, in our society.”

You go, Hilary.

The cover story in question focused on the dreaded F-word, as in: Don’t like what you see in the mirror?  Fix it!  You can guess the fix: pages of features on everything from going redhead or trying new workout routines to a guide to 12 plastic surgery procedures, complete with prices.  (You can expect to pay anywhere from $2000 to $8000 to lift your eyelids.) All of which got me to thinking.

A while back we wrote about those two fall TV shows, “The Playboy Club” and “Pan Am”, where we castigated the male producers for pitching women in bunny costumes and girdles as examples of  “empowered women.”  (Apparently, the viewing public agreed. We’re happy to report that the first show met its timely demise while the second is on well-deserved hiatus.)  But as I clicked through that issue of Washingtonian Magazine, an ugly little thought crept in: It’s not just men who are responsible for our objectification.  You have to wonder if we’re sometimes complicit ourselves: The December cover of   Washingtonian was shot by a women.  All those features to “help you feel your best in the New Year” were written by women, for women.

Are we sometimes responsible for our own misrepresentation?

I found more food for thought over there on salon, where Mary Elizabeth Williams, writing about the new Chelsea Handler TV show, wondered why we consider shows about girls behaving badly to be ground-breaking:

But what really sets [the Chelsea-Whitney NBC Happy Hour] it apart is the whiff of voyeuristic creepiness about building a prime-time block around willowy females who dress up sexy and get their drink on. Is this really the same network that figured out how to give us the complicated, hilarious – and very different – characters of Reagan Brinkley, Leslie Knope and Liz Lemon?

Worse, though, Happy Hour reinforces the stereotype of ladies as inherently less funny than dudes. Chelsea’s humor, after all, hinges upon her being like a guy — someone who sleeps around and gets “lady wood” — but has conveniently appealing blond hair and boobs.

Over on twitter, a trending topic is #thingsaslutmightsay.  Many of the tweets are from men. But not all. Yuck. Jezebel reports on a bathroom sign in a D.C. coffee shop that shows a creepy stickfigure gent peering over the stall at the stickfigure gal.  This is funny? Who knows who came up with that bright idea — but what I wonder is why the sign is still up? Oh, it’s Saxby’s Coffee at K Street and Vermont Ave.  Don’t go there.

And over at The Guardian, Dominic Rushe wonders why, in 2012, the Detroit car show is still using “female eye candy” to sell cars — when roughly half its customers are women?  [Note: the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas is likewise using "booth babes" to accessorize its products.]

Rushe asks a good question.  But I’ve got another.  What’s our own role in all this nonsense? Whether or not we’re directly responsible for any of the sexism that continues to objectify our gender, we do have one responsibility — and that’s to call when we see it.  Just like Hilary.

5. She’s ambitious. And she owns it. She wasn’t content to wrap up her time as first lady and demurely step aside. In a ballsy move, she ran for NY Senator. In a ballsier one, she ran for president–and nearly nabbed the nom. When so many of us feel our ambition is something shameful, something we should apologize for or even deny, Hillary puts it front and center. She’s taken her lumps for it, but ultimately, she’s proven that a woman can be both ambitious and liked. Which brings me to number 4.

4. We like her. I mean, we really like her. According to Gallup (by way of Keller):

Hillary is the most admired woman in America for the 10th year in a row, laps ahead of, in order, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin and Condeleezza Rice; her approval rating of 64 percent is the highest of any political figure in the country.

An ambitious woman is something to be admired?! I mean, the whole George Washington/cherry tree thing is cute and everything, but how’s that–ambition and likability are not mutually exclusive–for a lesson in the history books?

3. She’s strong enough to cry. Almost four years ago exactly, during a campaign stop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Clinton became emotional when answering a question from an audience member about how she’s able to deal with the madness of a presidential campaign–and it was in her answer, when speaking of how much she cares about the country, that she got choked up. Again, she took flak for it, but there’s another, monstrously important message in this for the rest of us: tears are not a sign of weakness. They’re often, as Elizabeth Lesser has told us, a sign that our heart is truly engaged. I personally know that to be the case for me, and I love to imagine what the world–not to mention the freaking workplace!–would be like if everyone understood that. Being emotionally invested is a strength; Clinton understands that. And yet…

2. She’s not afraid to laugh at herself. At one of the most humbling moments in her career–when she bowed out of the race and gave her support to Obama–the type of moment when some, um, lesser people might be reduced to temper tantrum (You’re not gonna have Richard Nixon to kick around no more! anyone?), she was strong enough to crack a joke–and not just any joke–one that poked fun at herself: thanking her supporters, whom she referred to collectively as the sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits.

1. She is the total package. She has the skills and the experience, the–as Keller puts it–E.Q. as well as the I.Q. She’s already made enough of a mark that when someone describes something as Clintonian, it’s as likely they’re referring to her as it is her husband, who is, you know, a former president. She handled herself impossibly well during one of the most impossible (and public!) humiliations imaginable–and, rather than opt for obscurity, held her head high and soldiered on, right into one of the most visible positions in the world. And what a tenure: as Secretary of State, she’s smoothly handled her share of dramatic world events. As Keller writes:

She would bring to this year’s campaign a missing warmth and some of the voltage that has dissipated as Obama moved from campaigning to governing. What excites is not just the prospect of having a woman a heartbeat–and four years–away from the presidency, although she certainly embodies the aspirations of many women. It’s the possibility that the first woman at the top would have qualifications so manifest that her first-ness was a secondary consideration.

And what a first that would be.

Family. Values.

I can’t help but cringe every time I hear that catchphrase.  Not because I dislike families – I have a terrific one of my own, thank you very much – but because I have to wonder WHOSE families those wingnuts are talking about.  Why did they get to appropriate the phrase?

What I also wonder is this: Why is the word “family” code for a lot of social conservative dogma that is not only irrelevant to what raising a real family is all about, but more importantly, leaves women – who do the bulk of that raising – out in the cold?

In the interests of real family values, I vote that we reclaim the term for ourselves.

But back to Santorum, whose message apparently resonated so well in Iowa:  Let’s start with reproductive rights, wherein Mr. Santorum goes way beyond the pro-life position by suggesting that contraception itself is a dangerous practice — whether you’re married or, God forbid, single.  As reported on ThinkProgress, Santorum told CaffeinatedThoughts editor Shane Vander Hart,“[contraception] is not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”  How things are supposed to be, he said, is for the purpose of procreation.  Here’s the video.

An extreme position?  Not completely.  You may recall that many conservatives in Congress recently voted to defund Planned Parenthood even though abortions only make up 10 percent of the services it provides to women without other means of health care, and that abortion services receive no federal funding.  And here’s the irony:  As the Guttmacher Institute points out:

Publicly funded family planning services help women to avoid pregnancies they do not want and to plan pregnancies they do. In 2006, these services helped women avoid 1.94 million unintended pregnancies, which would likely have resulted in about 860,000 unintended births and 810,000 abortions

Access to contraception is also an issue of women’s health. Here in the U.S., the Institute of Medicine recently came out with guidelines that urge health insurance under President Obama’s health care overhaul to include FDA approved contraception as preventative care.  Why? Proper spacing of pregnancies can prevent a host of serious health risks for both mother and child.

And while we’re at it, here’s another case in point: the Affordable Care Act, which Santorum and the rest of those family values folks want to repeal. Let’s review. Who suffered most under our health care system of old? Women. And when women suffer, it’s often the kids who pay the price. So much for those family values.  Lest you forget how our old health care system affected women: pregnancy was a pre-existing condition.  Women, especially when they have kids, are statistically more likely to work part time jobs that do not provide health benefits — which is fine so long as they can depend on a well-employed husband for job-related health insurance.  But what if he loses his job?  Or what happens to the kids if mom happens to be single?  (Oh, that’s right.  Family values don’t apply to single mothers.)

There’s even something more basic when it comes to so-called family values: putting food on the table, and for the majority of the 99 percenters, this has become an ever-more difficult proposition. While it would be ever so Norman Rockwell for every family to have a mom (or, hello, a dad) at home with the kids, where in this economy is that even feasible (that is, if mom and dad are lucky enough to have jobs)?  As HuffPost blogger Dan Bimrose notes over there on the politics page:

A Rick Santorum candidacy would be a family values candidacy. The family unit is extremely important to working class America. It is to these working class voters he was addressing and referring to when he said:

“They share our values about faith and family. They understand that when the family breaks down, the economy struggles. They understand when families aren’t there to instill values into their children and into their neighbors as Little League coaches, as good neighbors, of fathers and mothers being part of a community, that the neighborhood is not safe and they are not free…”

The implication is that the Democrats are responsible for broken families. If the breaking up of American families is truly the cause of our economic failures, which is an incredibly weak argument, he may want to point his finger at Republicans like himself.

What he fails to mention is that the reason that the parents are not there to instill values into their children and coach their baseball teams is because those mothers and fathers are working their ass off. While Republican governors such as the likely former candidate for President Rick Perry seek praise for their ability to create minimum wage jobs, the people working those jobs realize they simply do not pay the bills. They need two of these jobs and their wives need one and none of them provide adequate health care.

And how about the fact that women still make 77 cents to a man’s buck? Or the fact that for many women — the ones working to help put that food on the table — affordable child care is nothing but a pipe dream because as a society, we’ve never made it a priority? And what happens to the kids when neither mom nor dad can find a job, or if they do find one, it only pays minimum wage?  And yet: the same folks who hold up the sanctity of the family are often the ones who vote to dismantle social welfare programs like Medicaid or food stamps.  Or vote against extending unemployment benefits.

The so-called family values folks would also have us believe that gay marriage threatens not only the social fabric of our nation, but our own marriages as well. Really? Exactly how does that work?

The list goes on, mainly arguments of privilege. But then, if you’ve ever been part of a family, you probably get it.  Maybe prayer in school, opposition to gay marriage, and blowing up the safety net are the kinds of values that made your family strong.  But I seriously doubt it.  If the health of the American family is what we’re after, the values that matter most are more along the lines of equal opportunity, access to good health care and quality education, and above all, an abiding sense of compassion.

On the other hand, I do agree with Santorum et al. on one thing.  The American family is indeed under attack.  The question is: by whom?

…So, why was I apologizing?

Habit, I guess. I mean, I apologized to my dog this morning when I accidentally stepped on her paw, a gesture which was likely wasted, as the only words my she seems to register are “walk” and “kibble.” I say I’m sorry when I mean “excuse me.” I say I’m sorry when I mean “What? I didn’t catch that.” I say I’m sorry when someone bumps into me. I even, on occasion, say I’m sorry when what I really mean is “Screw you.“

I suspect I am not alone. Women, after all, are notorious “hedgers.” And I wonder: when “I’m sorry” is as reflexive a verbal tic as “um,” what kind of toll does it take? Why are we so quick to cast ourselves the villains? To label ourselves “wrong?” To discount our own perspective? As though this were the proper thing to do? Sometimes an apology is warranted, of course, but when we offer one up without reason, what are we really saying? And what are we really apologizing for? Are we sorry for taking up too much space? For inconveniencing someone else? For being too something, or not something else enough? Or for being, at all?

What are we saying to the world about ourselves, and what are we saying to ourselves about ourselves? And why does it matter?

Interestingly, I got to thinking about the subject not because of the NYE non-incident, but because I was reading yet another item about the lack of women in the C-suite and the corporate inertia around making the changes that would get–and keep–us there, all despite the very real benefits gender balance in the highest ranks has been shown to offer. Caroline Turner writes in the VentureBeat piece:

Both Catalyst and the Center for Work Life Policy divide the causes of women leaving the business world into “pull factors” (like family care) and “push factors,” negative elements about the work environment or job. Two major push factors involve:

• Acceptance: Women not feeling fully valued or accepted, and
• Advancement: Women feeling they can’t advance or succeed.

There are two drivers of these feelings:

• The “comfort principle” and
• An unconscious preference for how leadership and excellence look.

…The builders of American business were primarily men. They got there first. It is natural that ideas of leadership and excellence have a more masculine than feminine flavor.

Studies show that “leadership” is associated with words that are characteristic of men more often than women. In fact, when women exhibit some of these traits, they are not favorably received. In evaluating a woman, men may find her approach unfamiliar and may judge her style rather than focus on the results she delivers.

Leaders can stop and notice whether previously unconscious preferences are influencing how they evaluate a woman. They can take the time to understand differences in masculine and feminine approaches, and the strengths and limitations of each. Then they can appreciate and value both.

Too reiterate–but not to put too fine a point on it, well, you know, as Turner writes and as we’ve been known to mention from time to time, the corporate world as it exists today was largely conceived and constructed by men. Once women got in the door, we quickly learned that we’d best play along with the boys in charge, do things their way. But that time’s come and gone–women make up half the workforce, and the world has changed. It’s our world, too, and it’s high time we stopped apologizing for our place in it and the way we see it.

Yes, the world is littered with structural inequities, biases, chauvinists and misogyny, but it’s our responsibility to speak up. When we keep quiet to keep the peace, when we apologize for who we are, we discount who we are, our perspective, our needs–all while our power to change things evaporates. And we deprive ourselves, our family, our companies and our world the perspective that is uniquely ours to offer. When instead of asking for what we want or saying that we see things a little differently, we question ourselves or keep quiet–or worse, apologize–what we’re really saying is that we don’t matter.

Does this seem like a stretch? Maybe it does. Maybe it is. But it’s my perspective, and I’m not sorry for sharing it.

But I do still feel kinda bad about the smoked salmon wontons. The fried oysters. The shrimp remoulade… Oh, who am I kidding? No I don’t.

Sigh. Can’t you just hear the backlash? The ugly comparisons to the odious Miranda Priestly of “The Devil Wears Prada” fame?  The rousing chorus of “I told you so”?

Sorry, folks, but we don’t buy it. What we think this report speaks to is not what women may be doing wrong — but to the roadblocks,  both culturally and structurally, that still stand in our way.

The study, from the Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation (IFAU) and the Uppsala Center for Labor Studies (UCLS) at Uppsala University, suggests that women managers are no more likely to eradicate the wage gap as their male counterparts, nor are they likely to hire more women.  According to Science Daily:

…economist Lena Hensvik found no support for the claim that female managers entail any benefit for women in connection with wage setting. The study encompassed all of the public sector workplaces and a representative selection of private sector workplaces in Sweden during the years 1996-2008.

“At the first stage, I found that women with female managers receive higher salaries,” she says. “But when I went further and considered individuals who had had both male and female managers and how salary varies with manager gender, I found no significant difference between working for a woman and working for a man. Any differences appear to be tied to the individuals, not their managers.”

… But do women employ more women? Lena Hensvik asserts that there is no evidence that they do.

Let us be the first to say that we don’t buy the conclusion that the study necessarily shows that women in high places don’t benefit the rest of us.  Or that we can’t count on women leaders to mentor us in the way that, well, Larry Summers mentored Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Or that a woman boss is no more than a man in a skirt. (or, ahem, shoulder pads)  It’s a complicated issue that has much more nuance than the numbers might show: we’ve come a long way in a relatively short period of time, and the world has yet to catch up.  All of us — men included — are still stuck in a working world designed by and for men, and though women now make up close to half the workforce, structures, society, and policies have not made the shift. All of which leaves us in something of a pickle that goes beyond a series of stats.

To help figure it out, we talked to communication scholar Laura Ellingson, director of Women & Gender Studies at Santa Clara University.  She says it’s all about the questions that are not asked as opposed to the ones that are.  Bingo. That’s a conclusion we will buy.

When it comes to the wage gap, Ellingson points out, it’s been well-documented that men and women negotiate differently when it comes to salary.  “That is, men tend to negotiate once they receive an offer, while women tend to accept what they are offered. Hence, even when made identical offers for the same job, men tend to begin at a somewhat higher salary, a gap which widens over time. One might say that women should simply negotiate, but this is a very problematic piece of advice, since women who do negotiate are perceived quite negatively by managers if they use the same type of tactics that men use.”

It’s a classic double bind — cue Miranda Priestly once again: Women who are assertive score low on the likability scale.  We’re seen as arrogant, or worse yet, ambitious. But if we don’t speak up, we get paid less.  All of which is infuriating, Ellingson tells us. “They tell women not to ‘toot their own horns’ from infancy on, leading us to try hard NOT to stand out, and then they ask why we don’t advocate better for ourselves.”

What’s more, Ellingson says, when it comes to hiring decisions, female managers are still operating in a workplace skewed toward masculine interests, masculine styles of communication, and masculine goals, so the idea that they would naturally hire more women per se, is a ridiculous assumption. “So I guess I just don’t grant the premise of [Lena Hensvik's report] in asking that question. Here’s what I would ask instead: what types of pressures are subtly communicated to female managers — by subordinates and supervisors — that are not communicated to male managers? Change the question, change the answer.”

Something else to consider: the cultural differences between Sweden and, certainly, the U.S.  (Not to mention the pay gap itself.  It’s on average 8 percent in Sweden; 20 percent here.) For insight, we turned to intercultural communication professor Charlotta Kratz, a native Swede who has been teaching in California universities since the 1990s. She says those differences are not to be underestimated.  According to Kratz, the experience of being a woman is of public interest in her country, which has led to a number of gender-equalizing structures throughout Swedish society. When we asked her about this particular report, she told us: “I would guess that the reason that there isn’t a bigger female ‘effect’ in Sweden is that the whole system is more female oriented. Swedish society is far more sensitive to gender issues in general compared to the U.S., meaning that Swedish men make different choices than American men.”  In other words, she says, there would be less of a difference between men and women in Sweden than there would be here in the U.S.

All of which brings us back to that issue of asking the right question.  Or, as feminist icon Gloria Steinem once said: “Don’t think about making women fit the world–think about making the world fit women.”  It’s not a question of whether our lady bosses have our backs — but whether the workplace itself is receptive to change.

Blah blah blah.

Here’s an interesting question: Which is worse, coming up against one of life’s big bitch slaps only to find all of your nearest and dearest spewing some tired old cliche, or attempting to comfort a friend who has just endured an epic bitch slap of her own using the only thing you can come up with–which happens to be the very same tired old cliche? Even when you really really mean it, even when you know whoever’s saying it to you has only the best intentions, the line–”that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”–just feels kinda lame.

Interestingly enough, however, it turns out to be true.

According to the University of Buffalo’s Mark D. Seery’s paper in the December issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, small amounts of trauma may help people develop resilience. Here’s the gist:

Indeed, a lot of solid psychology research shows that having miserable life experiences is bad for you. Serious events, like the death of a child or parent, a natural disaster, being physically attacked, experiencing sexual abuse, or being forcibly separated from your family, can cause psychological problems. In fact, some research has suggested that the best way to go through life is having nothing ever happen to you. But not only is that unrealistic, it’s not necessarily healthy, Seery says.

In one study, Seery and his colleagues found that people who experienced many traumatic life events were more distressed in general–but they also found that people who had experienced no negative life events had similar problems. The people with the best outcomes were those who had experienced some negative events…

One possibility for this pattern is that people who have been through difficult experiences have had a chance to develop their ability to cope. ‘The idea is that negative life experiences can toughen people, making them better able to manage subsequent difficulties,’ Seery says. In addition, people who get through bad events may have tested out their social network, learning how to get help when they need it.

One of my clients informed me during our session last week that it was the one year anniversary of her filing for divorce. “It’s been the worst and the best year of my life,” she said. It was the worst for obvious reasons, but she’s also found that she’s stronger and more blessed than she ever thought. She recalled the day one year ago, remembering how sad, angry, and scared she was. I asked her if that her, the one from a year ago, could ever have imagined the her of today. “No way!” she said with a laugh.

A divorce is a big deal, obviously. So is illness, death, job loss, foreclosure, injury. But that doesn’t stop people from forming relationships, taking jobs, buying homes, or snowboarding. The potential for disaster is there, and yet: we’re willing to take the risks.

So maybe the question is, what are we missing out on when we refuse to take a chance? And I’m not just talking about marriage, I’m talking about everything: You don’t want to make a fool of yourself, so you never audition for the community theater. You don’t want to be rejected, so you don’t ask the guy out. You don’t know if you can handle the job, so you don’t throw your hat in the ring for the promotion. You don’t want to look ugly, so you go for decades without ever changing your hairstyle.

I guess the real question is: What are we missing out on when we let the fear of failure determine what we choose to do (or not do) with our lives–and is it worth it?

As Ramini Durvasula, PhD (a clinical psychologist, professor of psychology, and director of the psychology clinic and clinical-training program at Cal State Los Angeles) tells us in Undecided:

I always say to my students, ‘You’ll get over a failure, but you will never recover from regret. That’s not recoverable. Go ahead and try a job you might fail at. Go ahead and take some chances.’ Because where these women often get frustrated is with the paths not taken. And what I tell them is that I want them to try a lot of things–and then report back. And that’s frightening, because they still feel very programmed: They want the marriage, the house, the kids, the job–but have absolutely no sense how to get all those things at the same time. And I just don’t think it’s gettable in a single package. Women need to live lives where they’re willing to rule things out. Like I ruled out marriage. But I had to do it to rule it out. What ends up happening is that if you don’t have the realization, you wonder.

And it’s that wondering that’s the killer, not least because it saps the joy out of the life you’re living today. So give that thing you’re wondering about a try. What’s the worst that could happen? Sure, you might fail spectacularly–and you might then be forced to endure some well-intentioned folks and their tired old cliches. But, at least, this time you’ll know they’re right.

Nope. At least, that’s what an upcoming study in Psychological Science suggests.   In a study of 200 undergrads at University of Texas, lead author Carin Perilloux found that the least attractive men were the most likely to think that the attractive women in a “speed meeting” exercise were the ones most interested in them.

The research involved 96 male 103 female undergraduates, who were put through a “speed-meeting” exercise—talking for three minutes to each of five potential opposite-sex mates. Before the conversations, the participants rated themselves on their own attractiveness and were assessed for the level of their desire for a short-term sexual encounter. After each “meeting,” they rated the partner on a number of measures, including physical attractiveness and sexual interest in the participant. The model had the advantage of testing the participants in multiple interactions.

 The results: Men looking for a quick hookup were more likely to overestimate the women’s desire for them. Men who thought they were hot also thought the women were hot for them—but men who were actually attractive, by the women’s ratings, did not make this mistake. The more attractive the woman was to the man, the more likely he was to overestimate her interest. And women tended to underestimate men’s desire.

Go figure. According to the researchers, it’s all about evolution. Or the mating opportunity, especially for all the nebushy guys who are out there trying to get laid.  Overestimate your chances, and sooner or later, you’re likely to score.  And procreate.  (In Darwinian terms, this may not necessarily be such a good thing.)

But let’s move on.  Now that the planet has hit 7 billion, one would think that the rules of attraction had evolved beyond the need to reproduce.  But the culture — and society itself — seems to tell us that a woman is only as viable as her uterus.  You can scarcely buy a loaf of bread without witnessing the parade of baby bumps blazing from the covers of the checkstand magazines.  And look no further than Hollywood, where the old, fat or bald guy (pick one) often gets the girl young enough to be his daughter, and where most women actors have a shorter shelf life than your average jar of jam.

All of which could be a buzzkill, but as counterpoint I offer my late Auntie Margie, who was deep into her 80s when she once regaled a tableful of my girlfriends with tales of her love life.  “I don’t really need the sex anymore,” she said somewhat pensively.  “But I do need a man to take me out to dinner, now and again.”  And dinner dates, she had.

Auntie Margie was always something of a mystery to me when I was growing up.  In an era when most mothers wore dresses and aprons, she wore wool suits.   She was a single mother — often “between husbands”, as she put it — who proudly worked as a bookkeeper to support herself and her daughter at a time when most women her age listed their occupation as “housewife.”  She drank Manhattans, and she told fortunes with a deck of cards, always predicting that you would meet a M-A-N within three days, three weeks or three months.

The last time I saw her, at a family party, she was sitting on a sofa when she asked me to fetch her purse.  I lugged it over to her — you know the size of those handbags — she fished out her lipstick, and without bothering with her compact, applied those red lips perfectly.  At which point I said I was amazed she could put on lipstick without a mirror.  She waved her hand at me dismissively.  “Honey, if you’d been doing this as long as I have, you wouldn’t need a mirror either.”

Even on her deathbed, well into her 90s, she was still the coquette.  She had been hospitalized for several days, the story goes, when a handsome young resident stopped by her bedside for a quick exam.  “How are you doing today?” he asked.  My aunt, who hadn’t spoken a word to her family in days, looked up at  this dashing young doc, and fluttered her lashes like a teenager.  She looked into his eyes, broke out a smile, and said, “I’m just fine. And how are you?”

She was probably my first encounter with an independent woman, though Auntie Margie never would have recognized the word “feminist,” much less ever used the term.  But she was something more.  Marge was a woman who thumbed her nose at convention.  Who didn’t cave when it came to societal expectations or, more importantly, age.

Which leads us back to that study.  Maybe, in terms of evolution, the men amongst us are looking to score.  And maybe that’s necessary.  But just maybe, we girls are into a whole lot more.