Whereas for years we've been in a dress-code limbo forcing us to balance "professional" with "creative" with "young" with "mature" now - except in the most creative of industries - a suit no longer feels stuffy. Says one headhunter, in these competitive times, “We are back to a time when every company expected both women and men to wear suits and we didn’t have a Casual Friday..They are looking for a sharper style. I recommend a strong suit that says you are collected and ready to work.” (Here's hoping Mad Men's smart suits are a contributing factor.) Sure there are those stalwarts who bought a suit straight out of high school and dutifully dressed up like a mini exec whenever they wanted to be taken seriously, some of us - especially those who are prone to looking young anyhow - always felt uncomfortably like we were dressed in business costumes.

I remember the agony of dressing for interviews, and the discomfort of feeling overdressed in a room full of jeans, like I had "Interview" written across my forehead. As such, any dictate like this, however arbitrary, is a boon. Of course, there's still the issue of skirt or trouser; color; underpinning (in fact in my opinion the article goes on to list so many variables that it's more confusing than ever) - but really the expectation of conformity is comforting. For my own part, I can't wear a suit and not look like an ass, and so swear by a good jacket and an A-line (I do have a couple of vintage suits, suitable for church etc.) And whatever you wear, remember, this is key:
T-tailored to fit you
L-lint-free
C-clean.

The rest is all gravy. And yes I just invented that. Believe me, we're going to be covering all this in my Arbitrary Guide to Style Mostly Inspired by Vintage Career Romances, coming soon. "Shrimp-colored knits" figure prominently, I do assure you.

The Return Of The Interview Suit [New York Times]

I mean, really, Anna never lets me write anything I want to. It's all, write about Sarah Palin! Blog about women in the workplace! Don't be so ranty! What if I want to write about shoes? Or sex? She's all, whatever, our readers want to hear about things that will affect their lives and not just your clitoris again.

She's, like, this horrible, censoring taskmaster who never lets us say what we really want to say because it's totally her blog and she's, like, really really mean. I thought when I came here after getting shitcanned from my last blogging job by an asshole guy that Anna would be so much better, but noooooo. She's always, like, changing my headlines to make them funnier or correcting my typos or telling me to take time off to deal with problems in my family or because I am so sick I'm blogging from the bathroom floor in between bouts of vomiting. I expected her to, like, hold my hand and braid my hair and post every single thing I write as soon as I write it without editing it and blow rainbows and sunshine up my ass because I'm a girl and I demand positive feedback and and maternal care.

Anyway, so I can totally relate to the authors' hypothesis that the reason that women have problems with women supervisors more often than male ones is because female employees have difference expectations of their female supervisors than their male ones. Like, I am totally expecting Anna to buy me a drink tonight whereas my last boss (a dude) only ever talked to me on the phone once (in order to fire me) and is probably too cheap a bastard to buy me a proper drink anyway.

Anyway, I'll stop now since I know Anna's going to completely rewrite the shit out of this anyway... and probably won't even fucking post it. Everyone knows I long for the halcyon days of the 2 weeks I worked for Ken Layne before he unceremoniously fired me for not being funny enough!

*Oh, and I am also totally sure that the fact that this is a 2005 phone survey that doesn't control for occupational types (and thus stress levels within professions) has nothing to do with the results, and neither does using a one-night, one-call, perceptional basis for the stress level indication. I mean, I'm completely sure they called everyone on the same night of the week and at the same time, since they controlled for occupation and all and a person's stress levels on one night when asked about their boss would be totally the same the next night.

Boss' Gender Can Affect Workers' Stress [Live Science]