A Beautiful Thank-You to Hillary Clinton

My daughter, of whom I am always proud, but never more so than today, penned and posted the following gorgeous tribute/call to action on Facebook this morning:

Hillary Clinton,

Thank you. We, as women, as a country, and as a global citizenry, owe you an enormous debt of gratitude. You fought unyieldingly for what you believed was good and fair and right. You shared this vision with all of us and took the returned mountain of abuse gracefully, as perhaps only you could.

I am so, so proud of you. I'm proud to share a vision, a country, and a gender with you. I am proud of the campaign you ran and the voices you surfaced. May they never be silent again. I'm sorry we couldn't finish this for you, and for all of us. I'm sorry that everything we had wasn't enough. I believe that someday it will be. Though I wanted more than anything for you to prevail, I am glad you will be spared the frustration and indignity of a weak mandate and an obstructionist Congress. You deserve better. I hope you will be able to take solace in your friends and family, in the support you've coalesced, and in the lasting effect I hope you'll have. I hope you'll rest, but I know you won't. You will move tirelessly forward, as you always have, knowing that it is darkest before the dawn. I will be thinking over the next days and weeks about how to honor your vision and find that dawn, how to make this a birth rather than a death.

Please join this discussion. Discuss it with your friends, neighbors, and coworkers. With those who agree with you and those you don't. And let's come together and fight, once more unto the breach.

When a Necktie isn't just a Necktie

Florida has a new business slogan designed to promote job growth in the state.  The slogan, "Florida: The Perfect Climate for Business," features a necktie in place of the "I" in the word "Florida."  I am baffled as to why there is any dispute over whether this slogan is sexist.  How is it NOT sexist?  Is a necktie an article of clothing worn by anyone but men?

This necktie flap may seem like a small point, but I would argue that it is not.  It is utterly tone deaf to the realities of the business world (eerily, in exactly the same way so much of the Republican Party's rhetoric was tone deaf to the realities of the electorate in the 2012 election).  The state of Florida could not have said more clearly that it considers business to be a male-only club.  The likely fact that this was entirely unintentional makes it worse, not better.

According to the article, Florida is home to more than 587,000 female-owned businesses, which ranks it 4th of 50 in the country.  Yet the slogan-creators, apparently unaware or uninterested in that truth, chose as their logo a male-only article of clothing.  Let's look at it the other way: what if they'd chosen a business suit with a skirt instead of pants to stand in for the "I"?  That would be sexist, wouldn't it?  It would also strike everyone as weird.  "Why exclude men from the equation?" and "Why pander to PC feminism?" and "What the hell could they be thinking?" would echo loud and clear from every corner of the rafters.  And the detractors would be right - logos should not exclude huge swaths of the population unless they are designed to do so for some legitimate business reason.  (Tampons don't need to be marketed to men; testosterone-replacement therapies don't need to be marketed to women.)

Why wasn't Florida's logo gender-neutral?  One of the commenters in the article suggests a briefcase or a smartphone.  I'll suggest an office building, maybe an iconic Miami or Tampa or Jacksonville office building.  To anyone inclined to object, "But lots of businesses aren't in office buildings," I'll reply, "Really?  Does using an office building suggest big business in a way using a necktie doesn't suggest men?"

This kind of casual, throwaway, in-all-likelihood-unintended sexism drives me nuts.  It bespeaks a mindset about how and what the world is that relegates women - in this case, women in business - to an inferior position.  It's not merely tone-deaf.  It forces women into an inaccurate political and economic box.  It diminishes opportunity.  It intimidates, it succors discrimination and limiting definitions, and it perpetuates antiquated negatives.  For men as well as for women.

Casual sexism of this ilk is particularly infuriating because there is arguably no realistic recourse once it occurs.  Anyone who points out and attempts to address every instance looks like a tiresome, obsessed crackpot with no sense of humor or perspective whatsoever.  You can't be a vocal, hard-nosed activist on every little thing if you want to be able to influence some real change.  But being a good sport is equally wrong.  Sexism is like any other prejudice.  Letting it go lends it an acceptability, even a validity.  It amounts to tacit approval and inures people to the harm.  When we keep quiet, we have to cope not only with outrage and frustration, but also with the discomfort that comes from knowing that our silence effectively constitutes consent and makes us collaborators.

So, Florida, unless you intended to demean women in business, change your slogan.  And next time, think harder about what and whom you're trying to attract.

A Little Help?

Thanks to the bookshelf review I undertook for this post, I'm now rereading Mary Renault's The King Must Die. It's the story of the mythical hero Theseus, King of Athens. One of Theseus' early adventures (before he gets to Crete and deals with the Minotaur, the book's centerpiece) takes place in Eleusis, a kingdom ruled by women. The women are like despotic rulers throughout time: contemptuous and dismissive of those not like them. In Eleusis, men are considered childish, weak-minded, and utterly unfit for the worlds of business, government, religion and everything else the society deems important.

Women rule in Eleusis because the society is an antiquated one, still wedded to cultural dictates developed in response to the ancient notion that women and the gods create life. Although the Eleusians in Theseus' time know the role earthly men play in conception, Eleusian culture has not evolved to take that into account and elevate men above second-class status. Everyone seems OK with this except, of course, our hero.

As events spin out, Theseus ultimately finds himself in position to modernize (it's killing me, but I'm not going to put that word in quotation marks) Eleusis. The following passage made my hair stand on end:

Later that day, I appointed my chief men, from those who had been resolute in defying the women. Some of these would have had me put down women from every office in the land. Though I tended myself to extremes as young men do, yet I did not like this; it would bring them all together to work women's magic in the dark. One or two, who had pleased my eye, I should have been glad to see about me. Only I had not forgotten Medea, who had fooled a man as wise as my father was. And there were the old grandmothers, who had run a household for fifty years, and had more sense than many a warrior with his mind only on his standing; but besides their magic, they had too many kindred and would have managed the men. So I thought again about what I had seen in Eleusis of women's rule, and chose from those sour ones who took their pleasure in putting the others down. And these did more than the men to keep their sisters from rising up again. A few years later, the women of Eleusis came begging me to appoint men in their stead. Thus I was able to make a favor of it.

I recognize that Mary Renault wrote those words in the 20th century, but they haunt me anyway. There were written records in the times the book depicts; I presume she relied on them for political and cultural realities just as she did to paint the book's remarkable depiction of the time's religious rites and its architectural, scenic and other physical realities.

Obviously, the passage says a great deal about the nature of power and how and why institutions as well as individuals promote on the bases of sexism, opportunism, tokenism, protectionism and atavistic fear, rather than solely on the basis of merit. But does it also illustrate something fundamental in the nature of women? Or does the passage simply confirm that in times of oppression and discrimination, when power is scarce for one gender or the other, some of those with power will do anything to hang onto it?

Most career women have at some point in their careers run across a successful woman who's reached an elevated position and acts as if she believes there's some honor and glory in remaining alone there. Instead of trying to help other women succeed, she revels in her exclusive status. This sort of queen-bee behavior does as much to mask opportunity and hold women back as do sexist men or the pressures of the status quo. It horrifies me to think it might have been going on since ancient times.

Either way, I'm feeling galvanized. I'm determined to do something right this minute to help another woman succeed. I hope you will, too.

Sunday Night Outrage

Most on-air football commentary is bubble-headed. Lowering the volume so you don't really have to listen to it usually suffices; in extreme cases, there's always the mute button.

The Sunday night announcing team (formerly the Monday night team, but times change) was about as good as it gets. This isn't saying much. In fact, it isn't saying anything other than that the commentary did not customarily have to be reduced to gentle white noise or muted altogether. Al Michaels, while utterly dorky, knows the game pretty well and has some ability to watch the proceedings as opposed to blathering inarticulately about unrelated matters (a distressing habit shared by too many of his colleagues). John Madden was enthusiastic and, if occasionally incoherent, also incredibly knowledgeable and never mean-spirited. Cris Collinsworth, who has taken Madden's place, has been bland so far, but he may settle in and be as good as he was in his previous broadcasting gig.

Tonight, however, both Al and Cris achieved new lows. In a blast of vulgarity, Cris crowed, carefully enunciating each word, "The Pittsburgh Steelers are kicking their stinkin' butts!" Nice. Really elegant commentary.

Worse - far worse, if you ask me - was Al's casual, gratuitous and highly offensive sexism. As he went into raptures like a teenager with a crush over Mike Tomlin (the Steelers' coach, for you readers who aren't football fanatics), Al gushed that the day before the opener against Tennessee, Tomlin had spent four hours attending his kids' teacher conferences. "Of course," Al enthused, "it's easy to tell the wife to go do that. But [Tomlin] was there."

My husband and I turned to each other, aghast. "Tell the wife to go do that??" The wife?? Leaving aside the dismissive nomenclature, let's count the offensive implications of Al's statement: (1) wives are subordinates who exist to be ordered about; (2) attending school conferences is women's work; (3) fathers who choose to attend their own children's conferences are doing something exceptional, noteworthy; (4) there's no way Mrs. Tomlin might have a career that would preclude her being dispatched to handle this child-related matter; and (5) it's perfectly OK to express sexist sentiments such as these to the Sunday night football audience because, of course, we're all guys and all guys are sexist pigs, right?

I think Al owes the actual Sunday night football audience an apology. I think NBC does, too. This kind of throwaway sexism is outrageous. Its time has long been past. Even dorky football guys in their 60s should know it no longer flies, whatever their personal opinions may be. It's indisputably harmful - to the women, the men and the children it presumptively shackles in stupid, confining, restrictive, gender-limited boxes. For shame!

A Word is a Word is a Word. Or Not

Apparently, "balance" is now a dirty word. As in "Balance is a myth."

At first, I was inclined to dismiss this as so much sound and fury signifying nothing, but I can't seem to let go of it. The dirtying of the word seems to me to contribute to the repulsive notion that women are something other than full-fledged human beings with the ability and the right to manage their own lives - not to mention to focus on what actually matters.

I was informed this morning that in the context of work-life balance the word has come to mean 50/50, as in "I must spend the exact same amount of time and expend the exact same effort on my family as on my career in order to be balanced."

Obviously, this is ridiculous. A balanced life is just like a balanced story, a balanced diet, a balanced argument. The point of the word is that the thing in question works, it's pleasing, it has the right relative placement of the important and the less important. It does the trick. The 50/50 concept must be read into the word; it is not there as a matter of definition. Moreover, why 50/50? People have more than two things to balance; they have friends, lovers, hobbies, pets, causes and all manner of other activities in addition to career and family.

If the word has come to have this 50/50 connotation, the reason ties directly to the work-life balance conundrum faced by women. Whether adopted by women ourselves with the result that we feel bad about our own balance choices or batted at us at all times by a society intent on insinuating that it is not possible to have both a good career and a good family simultaneously, the whole "balance is a myth" phenomenon is misogynistic and limiting.

Does anyone hear the phrase "balance is a myth" and think first:

--Maybe I better reconsider taking a sabbatical to work on a political campaign?

--How am I ever going to incorporate care of my elderly parents into my life?

--Will it be possible to combine my career goals with being a dad?

I doubt it. I think most people hear the phrase and think either "Good grief! How am I ever going to make this career/being a mom thing work?" or "Women don't have what it takes to do both." The likely impact of this is concern bordering on despair for women contemplating taking on both, and narrowing of opportunities for women in work environments that demand dedication and commitment from their workers.

Neither impact helps women construct and lead full lives. The bottom line is that the dirtying of the word "balance" has a disproportionately negative impact on women and is inherently sexist.

Maybe I should just relax. One of the tried-and-true tactics for re-selling a tried-and-true concept is to make it seem fresh instead of old-hat. If we call balance a dirty word, we can spin a new one that, with any luck, will strike people as perky, appealing, and innovative. A bit sleazy perhaps, but OK. I can live with it.

Also, unintended meanings have been attaching themselves to words, like so many barnacles clinging to the hull of a boat, from time immemorial. The word "choice" comes immediately to mind. So does "working mother," which carries far more meaning than the usual adjective/noun combo. (It continues to annoy me no end that "working mother" is a loaded phrase and "working father" is not a phrase at all.) New nuances and meanings are how language evolves, and the evolution is not necessarily political. Evolution is OK with me, too.

But here's my problem. First of all, this wordplay is silly, in the same way the 60s talk about changing the word "history" to "herstory" was silly. Easily scorned silliness like this doesn't help the cause, both because it lends itself to being mocked and because it distracts our eyes from the ball. The word isn't what's in need of redefinition. Whether you call it balance or something else, the point is that each person has the right and the responsibility to define and then construct for herself a life that works.

Second, the world we live in does not need any help marginalizing women. It does not need any help insinuating that there's somehow a right way to be a woman and that all other choices fall short. Examples abound, be they discussions - in 2009! - of gender as a potentially negative issue when filling a Supreme Court seat, or the pregnancy of a 66-year-old woman (who is almost without exception referred to as a "career woman" instead of, more appropriately, as an example of selfishness and medical freakery), or a list of great 20th century books that manages to include only 7 books written by women (and to include among the exclusions, if you will, not only Edith Wharton and Flannery O'Connor and Alice Walker, but also the Great American Novel, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird). (Don't like these examples, which, by the way, are all from just this morning? Here are plenty more.)

Even if the intent of throwing a nice word like "balance" under the bus is to empower women, the very separation of women from men in this regard suggests we are somehow not in the same position as men with respect to making our own choices, setting our own priorities, and doing what each of us, in her own wisdom and circumstances, deems the right things to do with her life. Backhanded sexism is still sexism.

Frontiers, Crossed and Crossing

My Twitter and Facebook friend Raul Ramos y Sanchez is the author of AMERICA LIBRE, a novel coming out this summer that is already an International Latino Book Award winner and one of USA Today's 2009 Summer Reads. Raul is thoughtful (in both senses of the word), and his passion for exploring issues of ethnicity in American life, culture and politics mirrors mine for exploring issues of gender. He is always posting provocative questions along these lines, and we have enjoyed stimulating conversations on Twitter, on Facebook, and here on my blog.

(In fact, Raul is the reason I now brave Facebook once or twice a week. The nicest thing I can say about Facebook is that I don't get it. The interface makes little sense to me, I have better ways to stay in touch with people I already know, and all those sophomoric quizzes and applications may well, it seems to me, put the final nails in the coffin of Western civilization (and, for all I know, Eastern civilization too). But Raul's thoughtful conversational prompts are great, and I can't stand the idea of missing one, so into Facebook's shallow, silty waters I now wade. I should also acknowledge, before I close the parentheses on this paragraph, that I recognize I'm standing in a glass house throwing stones when I diss Facebook. Twitter can certainly be sophomoric too, but I've found it much easier to tailor my own experience there. To each his or her own.)

Anyhoo, Raul asked today whether President Obama will name a Hispanic to the Supreme Court and whether achieving ethnic balance on the Court should even be a factor. I answered that it should indeed be a factor given our current circumstances, which are that there are eminently qualified Hispanic (and female) candidates for Justice Souter's seat. It is not necessary to relax standards to appoint a replacement who is not a white man. Given that, and in light of US demographics, I think achieving ethnic and gender balance on the Court is a completely appropriate goal.

In answering Raul's question, I lifted some ideas and paraphrased some sentences from A MERGER OF EQUALS. I concluded long ago, somewhat shakily, that quoting myself without attribution is not plagiarism. I feel...I don't know, derivative, I guess...whenever I do it, but I do it all the time anyway, secure in the knowledge that no one but I has read, let alone committed to memory, virtually every sentence I've ever written.

Today, however, my character Charlie keeps interrupting the writing I've been trying to do (on another book altogether) with a strong message to the effect that I didn't do justice to the point I lifted from him. So here it is (redacted to delete spoilers, for those of you who haven't yet read the book):

That created the first vacancy on the Executive Committee since the coup, and I felt strongly that we should fill it with a woman.

At the time of the coup, I had regretted that our slate didn’t include any women. But there were none of sufficient seniority at the Firm and we’d decided we had enough to manage without adding the effort of identifying and recruiting someone from outside, then selling her to the rest of the Firm. One step at a time, we’d told ourselves.

There was something about [recent events] that made me feel our “one step at a time” approach, however practical, had been essentially a rationalization. Women seemed to me to be able to handle just about anything, and it started to strike me as shabby that we hadn’t yet managed to handle getting even one into the Firm’s management.

The Firm still had no women positioned for appointment to the EC, although we had made good progress in the last year. I had no doubt that in another year or two several women would be good candidates for the EC.

We considered naming one of them to fill the EC vacancy even if it was premature. A couple were probably strong enough to make their voices heard even without a more established power base. But we weren’t looking to put a woman on the EC just so we could say we had one. The goal was to realize the actual benefits, financial and otherwise, of inclusivity and diversity – and to demonstrate that it wasn’t necessary to relax standards in order to include women.

Putting a token woman on the Committee satisfied neither of these goals. We needed someone with proven leadership skills and either a client base or some other equally credible value to bring to the Firm. All the EC members had strong client relationships; most were (or had once been) group heads and also chaired important Firm committees or held other administrative leadership positions. Naming a woman without these qualifications to the EC would undercut both the purpose behind our stated diversity goals and her ability to feel and act like a full-fledged member.

Because we’d have to look outside to fill the immediate vacancy with a woman, there was a fair amount of discussion at the EC about waiting for the next opening or seeking a woman for the open spot but filling it with the best candidate we found, irrespective of gender. As far as I was concerned, this was just so much bullshit designed to put off diversifying the Committee. I argued hotly that there was no reason we couldn’t find a qualified woman unless we failed to look seriously for one and that we shouldn’t settle for filling the vacancy with another man.

As I said to Raul, I applaud President Obama for taking into account the goal of achieving ethnic and gender balance and developing his Supreme Court candidate list accordingly. As Charlie reminded me, there is no reason we can't find a qualified and diverse candidate unless we fail to look seriously for one.

Sexism Hurts. So Does Rudeness

Yesterday, I was unpleasantly surprised by an unexpected and ugly instance of demeaning sexism in an email. Not an email just to me, but an email sent to a large distribution list. The offending two paragraphs were written in a joke-y, "of course we all think this way" tone, and they reinforced demeaning stereotypes about relationships between men and women that were already outdated in the 1960s.

Anyone attuned to these things has no trouble finding them everywhere. From the clods on the campaign trail who yelled "Iron my shirts!" at Hillary Clinton to the ignoramuses who write magazine articles insinuating that men are incapable of being nurturing parents (the kind of sexism, like the two offending paragraphs in my email yesterday, that manages both to degrade men and to define women in a limiting way), there is no shortage of prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination on the basis of gender in our everyday lives.

I hate having to be a good sport about sexism, knowing that my silence amounts to tacit approval and makes me a collaborator. Still, I understand that you have to pick your battles unless you want to be battling all the time. I also recognize the need for a sense of humor. Sexism is unfortunately so embedded in our society, our lingo, and our consciousness that even people who do not promote it sometimes find themselves contributing to its continued existence.

As strongly as I feel about this issue, I want to battle it effectively, and I've concluded that taking on every casual instance I run across is not the way to do that. I tend to nod and smile pleasantly and change the subject when people assume my husband's income was what funded our early retirement or ask me who's going to take care of him when I travel on business, or even when someone tells one of those ubiquitous jokes that portray women as for sex only and men as lumbering buffoons.

But yesterday's email came from someone who is widely known and admired. Whether he intends to be or not, he is a role model. I stewed over his sexist paragraphs for a while, then decided that because of his reach, I didn't want to let this one go. I wrote a polite 3-sentence response that gently objected to the sexism. The last of the 3 sentences read: "I seriously doubt you really think this, and hope you won't mind a friendly reminder that stereotypes don't help anyone."

Once my email was written, I thought it over, bounced it off a couple people whose opinions I trust to rein in my more knee-jerk reactions, and then sent it. It's now 24 hours later and he has not seen fit to respond. This rudeness further offends me. We're dealing with someone who is always hooked in, who never lets his cell phone out of his sight, who communicates frequently and well. I have the ability to call him out publicly. Shall I?

2/9/09 Update: Sincere thanks to all who've commented on this post, either below, on Facebook or via email. There was nothing private about the email with the paragraphs that offended me. It went to a distribution list that I understand exceeds 50,000 people. There is also nothing private about my reply to the sender. So here they both are.

The paragraphs I objected to opened the 2/3/09 afternoon HARO email. HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out, an innovative free subscription service that connects reporters with sources. HARO emails go out three times per day on weekdays, and each edition is sponsored. As far as I know, Peter Shankman, whose brainchild HARO is, writes the opening paragraphs. In any event, he is the "I" referred to in them.

The edition in question opened as follows:

This HARO is thanks to those words no guy wants to hear: "Why hasn't he proposed yet?!" Well, celebrity relationship experts, TV personalities and husband/wife Matt Titus and Tamsen Fadal have the answer for women who can't get their man to pop the question in their latest book, "Why Hasn't He Proposed?" Go From The First Date To Setting The Date. A real married couple, they have the answer to how you can land the ring on your finger with their fool-proof six week plan to get him to commit without saying a word! This book comes on the heels of their first book, "Why Hasn't He Called? and their Lifetime show, "Matched In Manhattan," a reality show based on their lives as married relationships experts and a real life couple. Plus, Matt and Tamsen are giving away the chance to win a free diamond ring with the launch of their new book!
[Links & contact info deleted].

The above book, which virtually every female on HARO is now buying, is enough to scare me into having absolutely nothing to say in my opening monologue. :)

Here's the text of the email I wrote in response:

Hey, whoa, ease up on the sexism, OK? This female would not only not buy this book if it were the last book on earth, but is disappointed to see someone so evolved playing into outdated notions that women are all about trapping men and men are all about eluding women. I seriously doubt you really think this, and hope you won't mind a friendly reminder that stereotypes don't help anyone.

I should also note than I'd previously emailed him to inquire how one went about becoming a HARO sponsor, and he responded to that email immediately.

Doing It All: Reality and Myth

I started thinking about balance, priorities and time management because I am frequently asked how I "did it all." I know the question is intended to be flattering and to refer to my particular combination of successful business career, happy marriage, and cheerful, interesting, grown children, but I don't like the underlying assumption. As flattering as the question is meant to be, "doing it all" is an illusion, and a bad one at that. What we need to do is "our" all. Every working mom needs to articulate her priorities and then spend her time and energy - scarce resources both - doing what matters most to her.

Getting your priorities clear isn't impossible, but getting comfortable with the notion that you get to set your own priorities - and then setting them - is evidently close to impossible for many of us. If you can discern between, on one hand, what you really care about, your spin on what's really important to you and, on the other, what's traditionally done and believed, then you can clarify your priorities and allocate your time so as to spend it on what matters most to you.

You also have to shed any all-or-none mentality you might have. It's not necessary to devote yourself 100% to your kids to be a good mother, and it's not necessary to devote yourself 100% to your career to be good at that. (Most men, by the way, understand this instinctively. They have balance issues, too, but as my character Jane says in A Merger of Equals, men don't worry that they're somehow doing the wrong thing by working when they have kids. Whether for traditional reasons or because they're just wired differently, men expect to work and be parents simultaneously. And everyone else expects that of them, too.)

Throughout all but the first few years of my intense and time-consuming career (which I loved), I also had two kids. There was never a shred of doubt in my mind about what was more important, my kids or my career. My kids won hands-down. That didn't mean, though, that everything about having children took precedence over everything else.

When my kids were babies, I found them boring and needy. Somewhat to my surprise, I learned that adoring them didn’t stop their need for constant care from making me want to jump out of my skin, their non-verbal demands from making me long for words. Who knew? Now, I could have seen this as evidence that I was a terrible mother and should never have had kids, but whose rule would that have been?

Because I had clearly articulated my priorities – and because my self-confidence gives me courage and makes me largely impervious to worrying about things like what some magazine defines as appropriate motherly feelings – I didn’t doubt my fitness for motherhood.

Instead, I tried to figure out which parts of traditional mothering were important to me as a mother and to my kids in their development toward becoming independent, happy, productive members of society. Whenever a time allocation issue arose, it was this frame of reference I fit it into and measured it against. With my priority firmly in mind and a clear framework against which to measure tasks and decide which ones were the important ones, I allocated my time as wisely as I could.

I didn’t need to see my kids' first steps or hear their first words to take – and demonstrate – great pride in their development as walkers and talkers. So for me, putting them in daycare as infants was easy and guilt-free. School plays? I’d rather be working. Teacher conferences? After a memorable conference with an elementary school teacher who evidently had our son confused with someone else (the teacher referred to him as a “quiet, reserved boy” and I politely asked her if she had ever met him), my husband and I decided that he would handle this aspect of parenting. (He was also a busy professional, but one whose competencies include bedside manner.)

It also wasn't necessary to define success at work the same way others did. Like many women, I took a far from linear path. My all-encompassing job as a young lawyer was great when I was learning my craft. But after my daughter was born, I wanted to be able to spend more than 30 minutes a day with her. So I left a law firm in the city for an in-house legal position closer to home in the suburbs. Everyone told me I was closing doors; a few people even told me I was throwing away my career. At the time, I figured I was willing to pay the price of a few closed doors (the principal one being law firm partnership) for the prize of a job I could enjoy and do well in fewer than 16 hours a day.

As it turned out, seven years later I became a partner at a different law firm (where I worked part-time for 4 of the 6 years I was there) and that led me to a senior executive position at a $20 billion company. No doors closed as a result of my non-traditional decisions. Even better, other, arguably superior, doors opened.

The point is not the particular choices I made, but rather that I made choices that used my strengths (and compensated for my weaknesses) in the context of my priorities – and then I lived by those choices. I suited myself. And my kids, my career, my husband and I all flourished.

Success and contentment come from knowing and articulating what matters most to you, then living your life achieving those priorities. The balance is not going to be perfect at every individual moment, but it doesn't have to be. It’s the long-term balance over the course of the journey that counts.

(I write about balance-related issues often. Click here, here, and here for other posts you might find useful. You might also enjoy my Suit Yourself Essays.)

Oh, Boo-Hoo

Articles about the so-called "empty nest syndrome" drive me crazy. Conversely, I love that I received this one from my own 26-year-old daughter, who sent it along with a note that read "Here...this will get you all riled up. :)"

The linked article isn't as bad as some. It includes a melancholy dad in with the weepy moms, a rarity for empty-nest commentary, as well as some women who are more exuberant than misty-eyed about their new "childless" status. Still, even leaving the deeply anti-feminist subtext of articles like these aside, all this moaning and wailing over the growth, development and departure of one's children mystifies me. Isn't their maturity the point? Why would it make anyone "sick with sorrow?"

I saw my daughter off to college and through graduation with delight and pride. Ditto with her younger brother, whose departure created the much-ballyhooed empty nest at our house. I can honestly say my pride and delight were wholly undiluted by either grief or relief. (A little smugness maybe, over everything having turned out so nicely.) And I never once wondered who I was or what I might do with myself once I was no longer a resident parent - just as I never considered being a resident parent my raison-d'être or my justification for the space I take up on the planet.

Any parent who believes, as I do, that a parent's duty is to guide his or her kids on their way to happy, productive, independent adulthood ought to be thrilled to see them go off to college and then on into life. Of course, there are nostalgic moments - and in hindsight it's amazing how fast the years seem to have gone by, especially when you remember those interminable afternoons of nonstop infant fussing or the four years of siblings at each other's throats or the terrifying (and blessedly rare) hours of waiting for medical situations to resolve safely. But what's with the "I need them to pace my work life," "I'm so lonely and cranky" and "My life is too far on its way to over" baloney described in the article?

And it's not like this "it's all about me" attitude toward child-raising does kids any good either. Anyone looking forward to hiring or managing the college student in the article who thinks the best way to find Pilates studios, dentists and the meaning of words is to call her working mother in another state?

Sex and Parenting

Two articles, both of which struck me as very silly when I read them, apparently took root in my head and germinated because here I am writing about them weeks later. One was a story about two different couples, each of which decided to save their marriage by having sex every day for, in one case, a year, and in the other, 110 days. (Don't recall how they came up with that weird number.)

The other story was about something called "shared parenting." Could that phrase be any dumber? Given the definition of the word "shared," it seems to me that parenting by two people qualifies as such from the moment a child appears on the scene, regardless of who changes more diapers or goes to more school conferences. Actually, "parenting" is a stupid word, too, and its use is a great indicator of a sorry shift in cultural focus. Previous generations didn't "parent." They raised children. With the emphasis on the children, not the parent or the act of being a parent.

Anyway, according to this second story, couples are hiring consultants and establishing detailed time-and-responsibility models and assigning drudgery levels to tasks and entering into contracts, all in order to divvy up parental responsibilities so that neither parent feels exploited or overburdened.

What the hell? Why on earth would anyone want to turn either sex or parenting into a to-do list item?

I'm not sure what to say about the sex marathoners, other than it seems really rather pitiful to be either so unsure of your partner or so uninterested that you think the best way to recover and maintain intimacy is to calendar a long-term series of daily sexual appointments with him or her. How is transforming sex into yet another task to accomplish before you sleep supposed to help anything? And really: call me romantic or perhaps old-fashioned, but I prefer to think of sex as something one does out of desire and because it's fun, not as a means to recapture a lost feeling by simulating it.

Or maybe, in a culture that includes this shared parenting silliness, sex is merely another of the tasks that has to be allocated. The shared parenting article was about highly educated, dual-income couples seeking to assure that having children wouldn't ruin their lives or their relationships with one another. The level of worry they claimed to feel on this front was staggering (as well as selfish), and I wondered why they were having kids at all if they were so sure the results would be catastrophic. Wouldn't it make more sense to embark on starting and raising a family with joy, optimism and a plan to cross problematic bridges together as partners if and when they appeared?

But the folks in the shared parenting article were much too apprehensive and determined to rely on anything so fluffy as trust and open communication (or, evidently, any sort of continuing ability to work things out as a couple). Instead, they undertook a scientific process, using spreadsheets and everything, to apportion time, tasks and responsibilities.

A great deal of what fell into the category of "parenting tasks" seemed to be household responsibilities, raising two interesting questions (in addition to the obvious conclusion that these couples have more money than sense). First, what did they do before they had kids? Live in filth? Buy new clothes when the old ones needed washing or dry-cleaning? Starve? And second, why are they hiring parenting consultants instead of cleaning services? Wasting precious spare time on household tasks they can easily hire others to do, not to mention wasting time on drawing up spreadsheets to apportion such tasks, is the last thing busy, two-career couples should be doing. (Is anyone else noticing that the children - the purported point of all these machinations - are nowhere in this picture?)

I think good parenting is primarily about children, not parents. The point is to love your children and guide them along the road to maturity and independence. It's not about how many diapers you change or meals you cook or carpools you drive, how much laundry you do or homework you help with. And it's certainly not about making sure you don't do more of those things than your parenting partner, if you're lucky enough to have one. Parenting isn't a competition between the parents. People have different strengths and weaknesses, different likes and dislikes, different efficiency levels. "Equal" is measured more by how it feels and works than by metrics like hours spent or level of drudgery handled.

Anyone who's read my Suit Yourself essays knows that there are few things I enjoyed less than teacher conferences and elementary school talent productions (if I may use so grandiose a term for such excruciating events). My husband manned the bulk of those. But I was nearly always our family's cook and, most of the time, I loved that responsibility. (When I didn't, we went out to eat.) My husband liked the solitude of cleaning up the kitchen after meals, but he developed a complete inability to fold clothes during the brief period he was responsible for laundry. He consulted on science and math homework; I consulted on English and history. I guess we shared planning birthday parties, hauling the kids from place to place, and that sort of thing. I really don't remember, but it all got done and we all, kids included, had a great time. Of course, things periodically fell out of balance; when that happened, we talked to each other, sometimes loudly, and then cooperated to right the ship.

Isn't that what it comes down to under any circumstances? Even after the shared-parenting couples angrily wave their spreadsheets at each other and the sex marathoners cross their finish line, the imbalances must still get resolved, if at all, via straight talk, mutual regard and trust. And that brings me to the questions germinating in my brain. What kind of well-intentioned people, which the ones in these articles clearly were, want or need to transform parenting and sex into chores? What kind of relationships must they have with each other? Where is the straight talk, mutual regard and trust? What happened to being actually (rather than contractually) in it together?

All the spreadsheets and sex marathons in the world can't give you what being partners who care about making each other happy can. Lack of that is the problem, and the fixes discussed in the two articles are the relationship equivalent of taking an aspirin for a tumor.

DPG

I met a wonderful woman two years after I started practicing law. She was also a corporate lawyer, fresh out of law school, who joined the firm I was with. I thought she was terrific from the instant we met. She had the sharpest, wittiest, most ironic sense of humor, a quick intelligence, and more than the usual allotment of plain good sense. She was tall and lanky (to this day, I have never met a woman who looked better in a pair of jeans), and she had twinkly blue eyes and a shock of smooth blond hair cut perfectly to compliment her delicate, high-cheekboned face. We soon became friends outside of work as well. We liked each other's husbands (not always a given) and they liked each other, too. In fact, they developed a close friendship quite independent of us and it flourishes to this day, 27 years later.

For some reason I forgot long ago, my friend and I took to walking home together after work. Well, not home exactly. We'd leave our offices at Dearborn and Madison in Chicago's Loop and walk up Michigan Avenue to Water Tower Place, where she would head east to her Streeterville apartment and I would jump on the 135 bus up to Belmont Harbor.

On those walks, we talked about anything and everything, and the conversations were so engaging that I never even noticed the actual walking. (Anyone who knows me knows that I rarely walk even a block without complaining, and that was only slightly less true 27 years ago. Trudging, especially for over a mile through heat, humidity and Chicago's pedestrian traffic, has never been a favorite activity of mine. Add to that the more formal work clothes and shoes we wore in the 80s and you'll get an idea of how truly great our conversations were.) We cut the more pompous of our colleagues down to size, we solved legal problems, we griped about the illogicalities of our work environment, and we plotted strategies for our careers and our lives.

I'm convinced that those conversations were a big part of what set us on the road to career success. Having similarly-situated girlfriends is necessary to flourishing in settings where we are not the norm, where the rules were not written by or for us, and where we have to question our instincts because, however solid they may be in other arenas, they are not usually hardwired for naturally understanding how to succeed in male-dominated work environments. During the early years of my career, I felt like an impostor most of the time and, occasionally, like an unwelcome interloper. In addition to being incredibly supportive and reassuring, my daily conversations with my friend as we walked up Michigan Avenue kept me sane, grounded and focused. They helped me be happy at work. And they were the inspiration for the "girls club" scenes, which I loved writing, in A Merger of Equals.

After a few years, I had a baby and left the firm for a more workable schedule at a company in the suburbs. Not too long after, my friend did the same. She and her family moved west of the city; I had moved north with mine. We saw each other frequently at first, then less frequently, then rarely, although we always stayed in touch through our husbands, if not directly. I have never forgotten or stopped being grateful for our years of working together and walking together.

My husband and I have just flown home from my friend's heartbreaking funeral. Heartbreaking because she was a superb, intelligent, humorous person the world shouldn't be without. Heartbreaking because she was much too young and she spent the last two and a half years in a nasty battle with cancer. Heartbreaking because she leaves behind three amazing daughters and an exceptionally wonderful husband, as well as siblings, a parent, nieces, nephews, and countless friends, all of whom will miss her terribly. I feel incredibly lucky to have had her as a close friend and colleague when I needed her most.

Requiescat in pace.

Opening Our Eyes

I have written before (here and here, e.g.) about how distressing and shocking I find it that many younger women appear to believe that we live in a postfeminist world. We most certainly do not, and this superb article from last weekend's New York Times Week in Review suggests persuasively that current events might have crystallized this reality for younger women who mistakenly thought otherwise.

It's fascinating to consider that what it's taken to accomplish this revolution in thought - if indeed such a revolution is occurring - was the introduction of the Eliot Spitzer mess, which is about not just sex trafficking but also the deeply sexist and evidently obligatory eyes-downcast stoicism of the betrayed political wife standing by her fallen husband, into the already boiling cauldron of "sulfurous emanations" about Hillary Clinton's candidacy, those being the criticisms that are based entirely on deeply rooted and widely tolerated gender bias.

The article quotes Katha Pollitt, who wrote:

"The hysterical insults flung at Hillary Clinton are just a franker, crazier version of the everyday insults - shrill, strident, angry, ranting, unattractive - that are flung at any vaguely liberal mildly feminist woman who shows a bit of spirit and independence, who puts herself out in the public realm, who doesn't fumble and look up coyly from underneath her hair and give her declarative sentences the cadence of a question."

Well said, Ms. Pollitt - and what a great paragraph!

The article also crystallized for me why, despite my admiration for Barack Obama, I continue to feel a deep pull to support Clinton. All the sexist crap we've seen in connection with this campaign, and - not insignificantly - the media's amused tolerance of that crap, make me certain that this decision is about more than whom one would choose for president on policy grounds in a perfect world. The media is a powerful tool for creating cultural reality, but it also reflects the prevailing winds of that reality. For me, the fact that the media and a sizable chunk of the populace remain either blind to, or willing to tolerate, misogyny and gender stereotyping demands action.

Regardless of which Democrat wins the nomination, I hope with all my heart that the article is right in suggesting that younger women are getting radicalized by the reception to Hillary Clinton's campaign. We will not live in a postfeminist society - let alone one characterized by equal opportunity - until they do.

A Rose is a Rose is a Rose

The flap over Geraldine Ferraro's comments about Barack Obama has me mystified. Why is it inappropriate to say that he wouldn't be in the position he's in were he not a black man? It's actually rather wonderful that his race has offered him this opportunity after the disgraceful history in the United States of people being denied opportunities by virtue of race. Are we now not allowed to state either opinion or fact if the statement will hint that race is an issue? Is there anyone who sincerely thinks race is not an issue relative to opportunity?

This whole business of pretending we're all one happy family where race is concerned is political correctness taken to an absurd and dangerous extreme. Problems don't get solved when we sweep them under the rug and pretend they don't exist. And any disparity between what we say and what we do is at best wishful thinking and at worst a slimy lack of integrity. (Think about this week's other big news story: New York's crusading Mr. Clean toppled by an $80,000 involvement with hookers.)

Geraldine Ferraro included in her comments that she was on the 1984 ticket as VP because she was a woman, and she's right about that, too. Obama's comeback that her comments are "divisive" is ridiculous. There is undeniably a racial divide where opportunity is concerned in this country, and it wasn't created by Geraldine Ferraro. Much as he downplays his race, Obama is indeed benefiting from it - and that's a good thing. I don't know personally what it's like to be black in America, but I do know what it's like to be female, and I loved having Ferraro on the ticket in 1984, just as I love Clinton's run for the presidency this go-round. I think it says an incredibly positive thing about the United States that our two serious Democratic contenders are a black man and a woman. We need to build on that cultural progress, not let it get missed or ignored in a flurry of politically correct silence.

Mini-Blog

I'm fascinated by how differently men and women experience and are shaped by forces like ambition, brains, beauty, work, sex, love, marriage, etc. It's one of the central themes of my novel, and I'm consistently intrigued by how it's both reflected in - and prompted by - the media. There's no shortage of illustrative articles, and I collect and comment on the ones that strike me. If you enjoy reading my blog, check out the collection on my website for more fun, thought-provoking and frequently updated commentary - mine and others. You can get to my Relevant Articles page by clicking here or by clicking on the Commentary button that's on every page of my site.

Enough Already

I have a habit of reading headlines on CNN, Yahoo and AOL, but not clicking on the stories unless I'm really interested, which doesn't happen often. I'm not a news junkie, and most of the stories I do end up reading irritate or infuriate me for one reason or another. Sexism, obvious political bias or social agenda, poor grammar and diction - there are lots of reasons to dislike news stories. And I kind of like the impressions I form of what's going on by reading only headlines. It's like reading a poem; a great deal of what I get out of it has to do with my own personal filters, perspectives and ideas, as opposed to what some spin-meister is trying to shove down my throat.

So when I read a headline along the lines of "Is Angelina Jolie addicted to motherhood?" I marveled as I have before over how determined the media is to define women negatively or, at best, restrictively. And notwithstanding a cultural reverence for motherhood as a concept, newspapers, magazines, TV outlets and the like love to find fault with mothers. Not parents, but mothers. The headline did not read "Is Brad Pitt addicted to fatherhood?" now did it? And I seem to recall that the original Mrs. Pitt got slammed for not wanting to have kids. So I guess the deal is that no kids is not enough, but more than 4 raises questions about possible addiction.

How stupid. It's arbitrary and unwarranted to insist that women have to do any particular thing or make any particular choice. If Angelina Jolie wants to use her personal fortune to take care of a zillion kids, adopted and biological, why shouldn't she? There is no one right way to be a woman or a mother. Just like men, we are who we are. And no apologies or justifications are necessary.

...The Harder They Fall

Why is it that once we've built someone up into a hero, we have to knock him down, preferably as quickly and sleazily as possible? I've written about this before in the context of the once luminous New England Patriots, and the phenomenon is raising its ugly head again in the context of Barack Obama. Even as the press continues to polish his halo, it's also starting to sour on him. I expect to see more and more articles like this one as he inches ever closer to the nomination.

Why does our cult of heroism carry within it the seeds of heroism's destruction? Are we so sure disappointment is inevitable that we seek to create it preemptively, so as to diminish its sting at least a little by asserting some measure of control? That's so perverse. If you believe, as I do, that a tremendous amount of what you get flows from what you give, and that you tend to see and experience what you expect to see and experience, then this assumption that nothing is as good as it seems creates far more disappointment than it forestalls.

Or maybe we're just perverse in general. In sharp contrast to the press turnaround on the once high-flying Pats and senator from Illinois, we have the surprising delicacy of the media coverage of Heath Ledger's death. Leaving aside the sexism inherent in this delicacy - can you imagine similar restraint had it been Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan who overdosed? (If you can, read this story; it'll set you straight) - I was surprised by the respectful judiciousness. And I'll admit to some possibly perverse cynicism myself: when I read that the medical examiner had declared Ledger's overdose accidental, I wondered if there were now a way to poke around in brain tissue with a scalpel and reveal evidence of intent. Since I'm sure there is not, I'm left wondering why our inclination is to fit out our heroes with feet of clay as quickly as we can, but to erase those feet of clay, equally quickly, when someone beats our assumptions to the punch and falls on his own.

Out of the Mainstream

One of the joys of my current lifestyle is that my interactions with other people are limited almost exclusively to people of my choosing. None of that biting of the tongue that is part and parcel of working day-to-day with other people. No smiling politely while enduring the unpleasant, sometimes ugly, pronouncements of the envious, the disdainful, the insecure (you know, all that offensive crap people preface with "Don't take this personally, but..."). No deciding whether to keep still or take on someone who spouts sexist or racist or other bigoted bullshit. The only offensive or dopey interaction I really have to contend with is on TV or in the news and, thanks to TiVo and the ability to skim, I can effectively limit my exposure to that.

But there's a downside to living in this lovely bubble, and that's a narrowing of perspective. Annoying or inflammatory as other people's opinions and attitudes may be, they're very useful as perspective-broadeners. Now that I'm detached from the necessity of engaging with them, I keep finding myself astonished by things. The popularity of reality TV, the bargain-basement levels of customer service that pass as acceptable virtually across the board, the fact that people are actually seriously considering John McCain as a legitimate presidential candidate, the cult of celebrity that catapults no-talent faux Lolitas into lucrative renown (if not prestige), the revived acceptability even among women of sexist prejudices and behavior - it all shocks me.

Attractive as the idea sometimes seems, I've decided against withdrawing altogether and completing a transformation into curmudgeonly disengagement. Instead, I'm learning to ask myself "What if I'm totally wrong?" every time something strikes me as insane or not even remotely possible. It's a very interesting process. Although I don't change my opinion very often - I may be out of the thought mainstream now, but I operated within it for decades and I still trust my instincts - the notion that I could be holding the wrong end of the stick, reaction-wise, is an eye-opening starting point. Maybe normal people find reality TV entertaining. Maybe Jessica Simpson really is hot. Maybe she really is talented. Maybe McCain isn't just old and weird. Maybe people don't care enough about quality customer service to make it worthwhile for companies to offer it. Maybe women - no, that's an angle I'll never concede.

Decline and Fall

The following paragraph was in an email I received inviting me to something called Amazing Woman's Day:

"The day long program will empower through an active discovery and exchange designed to identify each woman's unique calling of greatness while expanding a web of personal relationships and setting free new possibilities for a brighter future."

Huh? As my daughter said, the sentence reads like it was created with Mad Libs. Honestly, it makes me wonder about the decline of the English language into complete gibberish. I guess I can figure out what the words are trying to convey. The queasy feeling they give me about the likely New-Age-y content of the program (and about the opening they give anyone inclined to disdain women to conclude that we really can be feeble-minded, at least as a group) is unmistakable. It's also pretty easy to see that the sentence was drafted by a committee, each member armed with her favorite buzzwords and determined to fire away. But yikes! What a mess! Can you even imagine trying to translate the thing into another language?

Epithets

As I walked to my flight in the Houston airport last Saturday, I happened to notice a bookstore display prominently featuring a book called Why Men Marry Bitches. I've been thinking about this ugly title and the word "bitch" and how it's used ever since. I don't know anything about the book itself (nor do I think I want to), but once the B word was the 5-letter equivalent of a 4-letter word not used in polite company. Not only would it not appear on the cover of a book prominently displayed in an airport bookstore, it also wouldn't describe a woman that any other than the most un-self-respecting of men would marry. It meant a pushy, harsh, nasty, cutting, self-centered, mean, critical and never satisfied woman who was horrible in a particularly female kind of way - an altogether awful human being.

I’m guessing the book uses the word "bitch" in a more 21st century way to describe a woman who thinks for herself, doesn't cut people much slack, and insists - probably vocally and in no uncertain terms - on high standards from herself and the people around her. All of this, of course, would make her "difficult" in the minds of the traditionally, conservatively inclined and anyone else who thinks women should be seen and not heard.

This pisses me off. A woman who refuses to be a doormat or even predominantly a subservient listener (as opposed to an active participant) should not necessarily be labeled difficult. A woman with a mind of her own who is willing to express her opinions and insist on high standards is not necessarily a bitch. A man with the same characteristics wouldn't be slammed with a similarly derogatory term. I understand the classic need for the weak or intimidated to denigrate the strong and the threatening, but come on....

Why has the word come to mean (as my cool new iMac Leopard dictionary widget defines it) "a woman whom one dislikes or considers to be malicious or unpleasant?" That definition covers a lot of territory. The word has evidently become an all-purpose descriptor to apply to any woman who doesn't fit one's personal definition of what a woman should be. It seems to me to have become a misogynistic social statement rather than merely a noun used to label legitimately bad behavior.

I Know You Are, But What Am I?

Warning: This is more an essay than a blog post, but I got carried away.

I like intellectual patterns and I tend to see them in very disparate occurrences and situations. Today, it's (a) the recent flap over the 2007 performance of the New England Patriots and (b) women lawyers so timid that they are still - in 2007 - waiting for permission to have rewarding, significant careers rather than grabbing the opportunities in front of them with both hands. To me, both phenomena (and I use the word in two of its senses for the Patriots' performance) are part of a pattern I don't like that says nothing is pure and everything must be measured by reference to what the least charitable someone else might think. They also seem to be part of a pattern that says something about power.

When the Pats scored 52 points against the Redskins, there was a lot of grumbling about running up the score as well as some dire predictions about how such superiority of attitude and dominance of play might well lead to, among other negative repercussions, a deliberate attempt to injure the quarterback. I'm tempted to go off on a tangent about how any such attempt would be reprehensible and possibly criminal or about how provocation does not excuse violent behavior however much it may explain it. And regardless of that 52 points, it's hard to imagine that the Patriots' exceptional play hasn't already turned them into a hunted team that everyone wants to knock off. (Nice try, Colts - and I mean that sincerely.)

But I'm on a different track today. As I watched the Patriots play in Dallas the week before the game in question, it occurred to me that their coach might well be trying to build a perfect football team. His insistent focus on what his talented team could have done better in every game, which is evidently how he coaches and also how his players look at results, seemed beautiful in light of how very good the team is. By normal standards, they were already well past good enough. When I watched the game in question with this notion in mind, it seemed to me that the Redskins were basically irrelevant. The only worthy opponent the Pats had encountered up to that point on the road of the 2007 season was the Pats themselves. They looked to be trying to beat their own previous best and the result was football played gloriously, at a giddily high level.

But to my surprise, the reaction the day after the game was an indignant chorus of how unsportsmanlike and classless it was for the Patriots to have made the Redskins look so hapless. Huh? I suppose the Redskins did look hapless, but isn't that a Redskins issue? Was it necessarily the Patriots' motivation? Their goal? Their fault? Couldn't it as easily have been an unintended byproduct of the superb performance occasioned by their pursuit of football perfection? And, if so, should that pursuit of perfection be hampered by potentially unfortunate byproducts? Frankly, I don't even see what's so unfortunate about this byproduct. If the Redskins can't handle the Patriots without looking hapless, then the Redskins should get better. (And, if they do, they are free to prove it by soundly beating the Patriots the next chance they have.)

It's ridiculous to suggest that the Patriots shouldn't play to the best of their abilities and pursue something extraordinary because their opponents aren't up to it and will look bad by comparison. Why is it unsportsmanlike to do your best in a game that is about winning and entertaining the masses? Why is it more sportsmanlike or respectful to do only what's necessary to beat the other team, then sit back and coast? Is that somehow less disheartening to the loser? And anyway, why is it even relevant in this context how the loser ends up looking or, for that matter, feeling?

I've always believed that too many people worry too much about what other people inclined to think badly about them will think of their behavior - and, as a result, they make cramped, coerced, conservative decisions instead of big, free, innovative ones. I had a boss once who asked me apropos of an interpersonal mess created by a peer's discomfort with the exceptional results generated by one of my groups, "Would it have killed you to make XYZ comfortable with what you were doing?" I was astonished by the question. It wouldn't have killed me at all, but it never occurred to me - both out of respect for XYZ (why would I do him the discourtesy of assuming he had to be managed?) and because I never dreamed that he (or anyone else) would perceive my group's success as a way I was trying to make him look bad. I was just doing my job. It wasn't about him or directed at him in any way; he was completely irrelevant to my motivations, my intent, and my group's performance. But, apparently, I should have foreseen his discomfort and found a way to make him comfortable, too. Sorry to be repetitive, but huh? Why on earth would he think my group's results had anything to do with him? Why couldn't they be purely what they were? Why did my group's success justify his attempt to blame his own feeling of inadequacy on me? Why couldn't he give me the benefit of the doubt? Do we have to correct for the upside of success by slamming the people responsible for it?

And it's not like any of this helps the weaker. A woman lawyer recently told me she wanted to get on an important committee, but “because I deserve it, not because I’m a woman.” I told her she shouldn’t care why she got on the committee. In a place like her firm, where women still don’t routinely find themselves on important committees, it’s silly to turn down a leadership opportunity because affirmative action is or might be behind the invitation. The goal is to get there and then prove via great performance that you deserve to be there, not to wait for the powers that be to recognize that you’ve earned it the “regular” way.

She looked unconvinced and added that she didn’t want “the guys down the hall to hate me because as a woman I got it instead of them.” This, too, is ridiculous. If she has a contribution to make and she’s willing to stand or fall by her performance on the committee, why should it matter to her that a few sour-grapes types may grumble or doubt her merit or think she got an unfair advantage? Does she hate men because they routinely get opportunities, advantages, mentoring that she doesn’t? Does she think they hate each other for this reason? Of course not. She might hate the system, but there’s no percentage in hating the beneficiaries – unless they intentionally work to exclude you. In her case, they weren’t doing that, but her fear that the traditionally powerful would attribute bad motives to her for not doing it their way was very effectively achieving the same result.

I'm thinking all this has to do with the one-size-fits-all relations that are assumed to exist between the strong and the weak, regardless of the particular situation. The strong are assumed to be so at the expense of the weak. The weak are assumed to be at the mercy of the strong and also to be trying to cut them down or curry favor with them at all times. None of these assumptions is inevitably true.

I agree that it is incumbent on the strong not to use their strength to harm the weak and to deploy the advantages of strength appropriately. But the weak have an obligation too, and that’s not to blame the strong for weaknesses they did not cause and are not exploiting. Whether you're strong or weak, there's still room for effort and for excellence. There's still room to pursue great performance, to innovate, to challenge yourself, to stay in the game and succeed spectacularly. If your motives are pure, you shouldn't have to give up in the face of strength or weakness. You shouldn't have to stop and rest on your laurels the instant you achieve the lowest common denominator with which the least capable or charitable of your fellow strivers feels comfortable. You should be able to give it your all, give others the benefit of the doubt, and count on being given the same in return.