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A colleague and associate of Debora Spar, the President of Barnard College (the all-women’s liberal arts college in NY) contacted me recently, after reading some of my recent blog on Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead (2013). This associate promoted another more recently released book, in a similar vein to Sandberg’s—Debora L. Spar’s Wonder Women: Sex, Power and the Quest for Perfection (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). As Spar’s title suggests, the study addresses issues that include the psychology of the professions, including business and academia and the complex role that gender and maternity play in it.

I was impressed by several of the arguments in Spar’s book. So my next two blogs will give a précis of Spar’s study, focusing not on her autobiographical exploration of gender inequality at work (which much of the book discusses) so much as on her analysis of the complex ways that the “glass ceiling” still exists for women in the higher echelons of our culture’s professions. While these blog postings will be academic in tone, Spar makes arguments that are relevant to creative artists (including writers and designers) and to the people who hire them. (In the near future, I’ll discuss some of the writing of the highly successful US copywriter, Dianna Huff, and also of the journalist Mika Brzezinksi, on the question of gender and professional success.) Debora Spar focuses on corporate and academic America; but many of the same arguments bear relevance to those sectors in Canada, as well.

I’m particularly interested in Spar’s writing on “perfectionism,” the noose that threatens professional people in every industry, and women, in particular (cf my blog on Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In). I’m ultimately arguing that the only way to deal with the demanding creative work of writing, editing and design is to cut oneself free from that perfectionist “noose”—more particularly, from the fear-mongering and unrealistic expectations (whether internally or externally directed) that compose it.

But first: who is Debora Spar? Earlier in her career, she was one of the youngest female professors to receive tenure at Harvard Business School. Raised after the “tumult” of the first wave of feminism (e.g. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem), Spar, like Sheryl Sandberg (CEO of Facebook), thought that “the gender wars were over” and that “we thought we could just glide into the new era of equality, with babies, board seats and husbands in tow.” But it didn’t work.

Spar does not dispute that the “first wave” of feminism in the 1960’s enabled women to enter into the labour force more than any other cultural movement. She cites that in 2008 in the US, 47% of the labour force was women. 34% of lawyers that year were women and 30% of doctors. 61% of accountants and auditors were women, and some 25% of architects (174). This is hard-won gender participation. But fifty years after Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Spar argues, women are still underrepresented at the “top of the pyramid,” where they glass ceiling persists. We are, as she puts it, still “stuck” below it. Continue reading “Gender in the Workplace and Beyond: Re-Writing Perfectionist Narratives for Women’s Inclusion (w. Debora Spar), Part One”

The rising psychologist and educator Dr. Angela Lee Duckworth (Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania) gave a TEDtalk recently that appealed to my interest in the emotions and psychology behind creative work, whatever work that may be (from business and marketing, to the arts and academia and so on). Whether you’re a client receiving copywriting or editing services, or a service-provider, we can all benefit from thinking about the psychology of creativity.

Duckworth spoke about “Grit,” which she defined as having the passion and perseverance one needs to attain long-term goals. To have “grit,” one has to have stamina enough to keep working (or studying) for years at something: she says that it means working hard to make the future a reality.

She makes a strong case that in the West we have done very little scientific (or pedagogical) study about grit. Having talent does not give you grit, she argues, since the concepts are “unrelated or inversely related.”

She defines the “grit mindset” as having an ability to learn that is not fixed to any topic; being able to change one’s response to address a challenge; and having the strength to persevere through failure, because one does not view failure as a permanent state. Continue reading “We Need “Grit,” not Intelligence, to Succeed Creatively”

“The only solution is to start today, to start now, and to ship” (Seth Godin)

“What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” (Sheryl Sandberg)

In this blog posting, and in my writing business, I’m exploring the necessity of acting or working despite one’s own fears. I’m not talking about a high-pitched fear that lasts for ages—that would be a red flag that something is seriously wrong. But I am thinking about the anxiety or discomfort that one feels when taking on “yet another” contract in an already busy schedule. (You could want to take the work, because this new client recognizes your value, and so pays better or  takes particular interest in your work.) Or the fear associated with interviewing for an ongoing freelance (or retainer) contract, when you can find excuses to “make do” with the list of clients you’ve already got. And on and on it goes . . . .

The ability to act in the face of this kind of (daily) fear is absolutely necessary, if a writer is to grow. It’s perfectly normal and understandable to feel fear when reaching to fulfill a more demanding assignment than you’ve done before. And it’s natural to be nervous when you  agree to a due date that falls sooner than feels comfortable, as the condition of a new contract. In a much earlier blog, I reviewed Jonathan Fields’ book on the subject, Uncertainty (Portfolio Penguin, 2011). Fields discusses how to turn fear and doubt into fuel for the kind of risk-taking that yields “brilliance” or success.

I’ve found even more purposeful Seth Godin’s brilliant insights, in Linchpin: Are you Indispensable (Portfolio Penguin, 2010). Godin writes extensively on the “lizard brain.” That archaic part of the brain always seeks out comfort, safety and avoids any kind of risk. Continue reading “Just in Time for Hallowe’en: On Fear in Doing Creative Work . . .”

In my last blog posting, I reviewed and critiqued Sheryl Sandberg’s insightful and sensible arguments on women’s need for greater equality (at work and at home), as she argues in Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead  (New York: Knopf, 2013). Today, I’m concluding that assessment.

On finding a truly equal partner:

Establishing that women need to work their way to “sit at the [boardroom] table, Sandberg sensibly advocates that women need to find partners who will meet them half-way with childrearing and homemaking. Her most practical comment is that women need to become less perfectionist in raising kids and keeping house:  treat your husband as an equally capable partner and he’ll become one. If you let him learn how to diaper the baby himself, instead of insisting that there is a “right [i.e. perfect] way” to do it, he’ll learn just fine. And letting children be comforted by their fathers, even though men don’t lactate, enables children to grow up, taking comfort and consolation from their fathers, too.

Finally, no one can have/do it all:

Sandberg concludes by debunking the anti-feminist myth that women “can do it all,” or “have it all,” when in fact “done is better than perfect.” She cites Mary Curtis in The Washington Post as saying that success means that “women and men [must] drop the guilt-trip . . . . The secret is there is no secret – just doing the best you can with what you’ve got” (139).

Gender inequality certainly does persist in leadership and for the reasons that Sandberg mentions—women not sitting at the table; not working out equal relationships with their partners; and women thinking that they can and should “have it all,” when no one does or can. Continue reading “Conclusion: Sheryl Sandberg’s insights in _Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead (2013)_”

Every few years a book is released in the business world that is insightful enough to transcend the boundaries between the worlds of business and society (business/government, business/academia, business/the arts, etc.) or (in my case) between such divisions as copywriter/client or editor/writer. As I earlier discussed in my blog, Seth Godin’s Linchpin: Are You Indispensable (2010) was one such book. In the next couple of blog postings, I’ll discuss why Sheryl Sandberg’s bestseller, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, is another (New York: Knopf, 2013). It warrants a close reading from me and from the people with whom I work.  Freelancers may be negotiating an alternative pathway from the mainstream business world (on that cf. Michelle Goodman’s excellent book, My So-Called Freelance Life [Seal, 2008]). But that pathway isn’t any less subject to what women and men often experience as ongoing gender inequalities. These issues are what Sandberg exposes and discusses.

Of course, as she readily says in her “acknowledgments,” such a discussion cannot reasonably be produced, in a reasonably short amount of time, by one person–particularly one as busy as the COO of Facebook. And, she openly states that she is “not a scholar, journalist or sociologist.” But a team of minds, including co-author, journalist Nell Scovell; and the sociologist and researcher, Marianne Cooper; (and with the input of numerous other women and men) have produced a manifesto for rethinking gender issues for the 21st century. Sandberg addresses women primarily (but not solely) in the West; and  people (men as much as women) in every field, be they single, partnered, married, divorced, childless, parents or grandparents. (The research is US-based, but Sandberg’s insights are wide-reaching enough to transcend many cultural differences, without denying that those differences exist.)

30 years after the work of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, whereby women became 50 percent of the college graduates in the United States, Sandberg takes as launching point the reality that the revolution has stalled and true equality has not been reached.  Men still hold, she says, the majority of leadership positions in government, industry and academia, so that women’s voices are “still not heard in the decisions that most affect our lives.” She says that she, like most children of the 1960’s and 70’s expected the glass ceiling to shatter after she started working in the early 1990’s, only to find “with each passing year, fewer and fewer of my colleagues were women. More and more, I was the only woman in the [board]room” (6).

The inequalities are even worse, globally, as she well knows, referring to the experience of  Leymah Gbowee, who received the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for helping to lead women’s protests that ended Liberia’s dictatorship. Sandberg says that when asked what women in America can help to overcome the atrocities against women in Liberia and the East, Gbowee said: have “More women in power.”  (My one criticism of the book is the lack of space it gives to explore more globally women’s disempowerment. But that could be another book or books, or several Ph.D. dissertations.) Daily American and Canadian news shows a limited tolerance in the West for exposing such atrocities as female genital mutilation and forced childhood marriages, in the East.

But to return to Sandberg’s argument, there are a lot of “external” gender inequalities still present, in contemporary Western culture. To mention only a few, there are not enough companies with “flex-time” hours for working parents who raise young children; child care and parental leave are inadequate or outright absent. Mentors and sponsors who could assist women to advance their careers at crucial times are often hard to find. (Famously Betty Friedan refused to work with or even shake hands with Gloria Steinem. And many women like me have found ourselves similarly “shut out” of power or authority by other, sometimes older, women.) Also, women continue to do most of the housework and to provide most of the child care, in addition to the “job” or “career” that they may have.

Sandberg describes the “chicken and egg” dilemma that most professional women face today. On one hand (the chicken): women need leadership roles to tear down external barriers and Sandberg urges us to do that work. But on the other (the egg): women need to eliminate those same external barriers in order for women to get into those leadership roles in the first place. And she fully supports women who focus on the “egg,” as she has done. These are the “external” gender inequalities she refers to.

But Sandberg also speaks of the “internal” barriers that women experience as ones that too easily perpetuate our inequality: women internalize the same kind of negative messages that we heard as children, throughout our lives. So we feel it’s wrong to speak up in class, be aggressive in pursuing what we want and to be more powerful than the men near us. She writes: “We tend to discount ourselves in pursuit of career goals,” because we try to accommodate a partner and children that we “may not even yet have.” We suffer disproportionately from the imposter complex, frequently underestimating ourselves. And women cite “hard work” and “help from others,” when we do well. By contrast, men are quick to take credit for their accomplishments, without such qualification.

To “lean in,” in Sandberg’s title phrase, is to be ambitious in any pursuit. Sandberg advocates (by this term) for women’s self-confidence, in common sense ways, such as “sitting at the [boardroom] table” (and not in the symbolically peripheral chairs around the room); in finding partners to do more of the work at home, “to make your partner a real partner;” and in shedding unattainable standards, such as “the Myth of Doing it All.” Continue reading “On Women, Men and Work: Reading Sheryl Sandberg’s _Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead_ (2013)”