If you have a few minutes, you should check out the 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce from the Families and Work Institute. It has some pretty awesome and interesting statistics about the roles men and women play at work and in their families and how their various perceptions of traditional gender roles have shifted (and in some cases, changed dramatically) in the past decade.

First the good news: There is decreasing disparity between what men and women get paid for doing the same work. Many fewer men and women than ten years ago think that the best way for a family to function is for the woman to stay home. Fathers are spending more time with their children (and so are mothers, although the difference is less dramatic) and they are taking more responsibility for the care of their children (according to them and their wives).

This all pretty much rocks.
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I’ll never forget my first business trip. I was right out of college and working for McKinsey, this big consulting company in New York City. Our team’s client was a company with a division in France and there came a point during the project when one of us had to go and interview some of their employees. Since I speak some French (it was much better 10 years ago, unfortunately) our manager chose me to go.

I was in a rush getting to the airport and didn’t read my itinerary careful. So you can imagine my 24-year old surprise when I got on the plane and they ushered me into the business class section. WHOA! My seat was bigger than my apartment at the time. And the flight attendant wanted to know what I wanted to drink and she took my coat to hang it up and offered me a menu to choose from for dinner which looked like a menu from a fancy New York restaurant.

I knew I should get some sleep on the flight but I couldn’t calm my excitement for a second so I just ate a lot of food, drank a lot of wine, watched a few movies and just overall felt completely awesome being there. When I got to my ultra-plush hotel in Paris I realized that the luxury was going to continue and I was determined to eat it up. I was in Paris! In a fancy hotel! Flying business class! For free!

Of course, if you’ve traveled for work, you know where this story is headed. My trip was all meetings and meetings and not very much luxury. Sure, I slept in an amazing bed bigger than any I’d seen before, but I was so exhausted every night collapsing into it that I almost didn’t notice. Thankfully I’d been to Paris before because the only Paris I saw then was out of a window of a cab that I took between the hotel and the client’s office.
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I just watched this video over at Jezebel where the self-help author Marcus Buckingham shares his ideas about how professional women can be happier and succeed in their careers. (You might have seen his writings over at the Huffington Post, where he pontificates on this topic quite a bit.)

One of his basic points — which the blog post at Jezebel also points out — is that working women need to juggle less, outsource more, and learn how to focus on the moment vs always having several tracks running in their heads. (As in, making a shopping list during a work meeting.) At first look, it makes a lot of sense. A lot of my stress comes from the fact that I have too many things I feel I need to do on a daily basis — from getting work done to buying my daughter’s winter coat, organizing my dad’s 60th birthday party, sending a birthday gift to a friend’s newly born son, cooking dinner for the week, and so on. If had less things to juggle I would absolutely positively be less stressed and probably happier.

But here’s the deal: While it would be great to have an assistant do a bunch of these things for me, how many of us can really afford that kind of help? When we lived in New York City and I worked at an insane finance job, we had an amazing full-time nanny. In addition to taking care of our kiddo, she also frequently cooked dinner and cleaned up around the house, although we never asked her to do it. It was an enormous help and a huge, huge stress reducer, but we paid a lot of money for that kind of help and we couldn’t do this for more than a few years. Even more so, I realize how lucky we are to have the jobs that we have and know that a significant percentage of families out there simply can’t afford this kind of help.
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When I lived in New York and worked in finance the question of whether or not to dress up for work wasn’t a question: Yes, looking business sharp was a must. I still have a full collection of suits — well, to be honest, I hate suits, so I only have three — blazers (now those I love), shirts and numerous black pants hanging in my closet from those days. The company where I worked didn’t require us to be fully decked out in suits but you wouldn’t see jeans or t-shirts in the office unless it was the middle of the summer and the bosses were definitely out golfing networking.

Since those days we moved to Boston — a much more casual city, I find — and I now work for a software company where the office uniform is jeans with a t-shirt. (For some reason our group, myself included, are also into funky sneakers, which make our workplace uniform even more relaxed andunformal ). For the first few months after I started this job I was happy to work in such a casual environment. Getting dressed for work required a lot less planning and effort than what I was used to and I was really comfortable during the day.
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On this blog I often share the struggles and challenges I face as a working mom. It’s not easy, we all know that. But today I had one of those amazing days when everything seemed to work and as I sit here and type these words, I am experiencing an extremely rare emotion:

I feel like I rocked this day, as a mom, as a professional, as a daughter, and even as a wife.

Feeling like this is rare for me because I get through most days with this nagging feeling of not being adequate in any of the many roles that I play. You know the drill, I am sure: Not feeling like you did enough at work, or spent enough time with your kids, or managed to have a real conversation with your husband. Read any member article or blog or comment on Work It, Mom! and it seems many of us feel this way. And that’s why I wanted to share my small little victory of having one day when I don’t feel like that. It’s totally cheesy, but life is so full of difficult stuff that I feel we need to play up the good parts more.

So, about my day. I am sure you don’t want to hear all of the details, but here’s the gist:
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I’ve never watched Dr. Phil and to be honest, the small bits of the show that I’ve caught here and there, while flipping through channels at the gym, didn’t exactly draw me in. I find him blunt, but in a bad way, intrusive, but in less-than-helpful way, and just overall not a kind of guy whose opinion will sway me. So when I read about the show he did recently about stay-at-home moms vs. working moms, I didn’t rush to YouTube to check it out.

It turns out it was a very good thing. According to the many, many blog posts about it — most filled with the kind of sharp emotion only the mommy wars can bring on — the show would have made my blood boil. One of the guests was Jessica Gottlieb, who is a stay-at-home mom and who often blogs about the wonderfullness of moms who stay at home and the terribleness of moms who choose to work. Apparently she said things like working moms who choose to work (vs those who have to work) are selfish and “I wouldn’t outsource loving my husband, why would I outsource loving my kids?”
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I was completely blown away when I read recently about a ruling by an Ohio court that the state’s law that protects pregnant women from workplace discrimination does not protect them from being punished for breastfeeding at work during unauthorized times. At the center of the case was a woman who was fired by her company for pumping at work during an unauthorized break. Her son was 5-month old at the time.

(Many other moms and bloggers are reacting to this — check out Leah’s awesome post over at Working (on) Motherhood.)

I am not a lawyer and won’t go into dissecting the actual case. I am sure the core of the case revolved around the fact that this woman took an unauthorized break and what she did during it has nothing to do with it — she broke the rules and there were implications. But I can’t help but think that in this case, the employer should have shown some more flexibility. After all, it’s not like she went shopping during the break.

The issue that this raises in my mind is the fact that while the government strongly promotes the benefits of breastfeeding and advocates for women to breastfeed as long as possible, we don’t have federal regulation that sets standards that companies have to follow when it comes to new moms. For example, new moms could be allotted more regular breaks during the day, so that if they are choosing to pump at work they have plenty of opportunities to do it. Or perhaps new moms can be allowed to take several unplanned breaks during the day so they could pump. Whatever it is, I am fairly certain that the government can do more to actually help moms who want to pump at work do it and the fact that it’s not the case makes me really angry.
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Image from LA Times

I’m a fan of Diane Sawyer — she is smart, seems to treat her show guests with respect and just stunningly gorgeous — so I was happy to learn that she is taking over the nightly news anchor spot at ABC. Not all, but part of my happiness had to do with the fact that yes, here goes another woman into a highly visible position not often occupied by women. Katie Couric paved the way as the nightly news anchor for CBS and to have another woman in a coveted position is just cool. (If you want to have an “I can’t believe this moment”, consider this: Women occupy only 3% of the “clout” positions in media.)

But then I started to wonder whether we (read, we = women) should be celebrating Diane Sawyer’s new gig, as some women’s organizations are doing.
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After my daughter was born I took a 12-week maternity leave. I didn’t fully appreciate at the time how lucky I was to have a fully-paid three-month leave, but it felt nothing but too short and not enough the day I went back to work.

Going back was brutal. I did a bit of work while I was at home but from the first moment I was back at the office I was expected to be on and at 100%. If you’ve had kids, you know it’s entirely impossible to do that so soon after having your life change completely. Eventually I managed to get back into a work routine, but it took a while.

Which is why I was sitting there with my jaw wide open when I read about Rachita Dati, the justice minister of France, who returned to work five days after giving birth. No, not a type, five as in 5 days after giving birth.
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Another title for this post could be: What the f* is wrong with us, women!

I read in an article over the weekend that according to the Workplace Bullying Institute (is there an institute for everything?) when women bully others at work they target other women 70% of the time, while men tend to target women and men equally. Workplace bully-like behavior is an ugly thing on its own, but the fact that women undermine each other and are nasty to each other more often just plain sucks. (I was going to write something more eloquent, but this topic doesn’t deserve it.)

This isn’t the first article written about how terrible women can be to each other in the workplace and it’s not the first time I write about it here — my post about being tired of dealing with bitchy women at work is one of the most popular on this blog. Every time I think about this topic I go through the list of reasons/theories for why women have such a hard time supporting each other in the workplace: (the author of the article I mentioned has a similar list):
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