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Lifehacker

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Working Girls: Dressing For Success When Your Success Starts At Home

For the past few years, I've had what I refer to as a 'business costume.' This is the outfit I don when required to assume a professional appearance — usually a cocktail party where I know everybody else will be coming from an office, but also meetings with parents, lunches at nice places, and trips to business districts. My business costume consists of a tweed sheath dress and a pair of brown pumps, horn-rimmed spectacles and, needless to say, a chignon. It's very Smitty from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and I've always felt that it is a very convincing disguise, and certainly beats the loungewear that serves as my actual work uniform. Of course, my perspective might be skewed: because I come from a long line of creative types who are less than gainfully employed, business costumes are a family necessity. My dad has a mouldering tweed jacket he throws over everything and calls it a day. My mother's costume is particularly pathetic; what she refers to as her "dress sweats" but which are in fact not discernibly different from her everyday fleeces and yoga pants. More »

Minding the (wage) gap

Woman To Woman: How To Get The Money You Want And Deserve

The world is not a fair place, I think we all know that. And in this not-fair world, on the average, American women earn 80 percent of what American men earn. When UK Equality Minister Harriet Harman recently called for employers to disclose wage disparities, plenty of people were willing to say that women choose to make less then men in order to spend more time with their kids or to seek less professional, more personal fulfillments. But even beyond the issue of supposed choice, studies by and large show that women don't negotiate on salary as successfully as men for a variety of reasons, which might also contribute to the wage gap. Wondering how to take that particular bull by the horns? As someone who always got hired to break heads instead of be diplomatic, I have some tips. More »

self-help

25 Things All Women Should Learn To Do Already

In honor of its 75th anniversary the May Esquire has a big pullout feature called "75 Skills Every Man Should Master." The premise — Magazines! Lists! — is not exactly revolutionary, and the "skills," such as practicing "brand loyalty to at least one product" and "making three different bets at a craps table" are not exactly universally vital, but I'm writing about the feature precisely because it's so classically Esquire. Esquire is a magazine about "how to be a better man" or some John Wayne shit like that. Esquire doesn't try and tell its readers they are fine just the way they are. Esquire likes rules, definites, moral "absolutes" to substitute for the old moral absolutes in which modern society is so woefully deficient. Glamour would, for whatever reason, never tell its readers they needed to know how to deliver a eulogy or install a thermostat without asking for help, because they are too busy telling their readers to not feel guilty about being too emotional to deliver the eulogy without breaking down, or ask a dude for help installing the thermostat. Thank the nonexistent moral authorities that I don't get paid Glamour rates to write this stuff, right? More »

opportunity cost cutting

5 Ways For Ladies To Make The Most Of All That Time They Waste Applying Makeup

Today the UK is issuing a lofty challenge to female citizens: Go A Day Without Makeup! Horrors! Thankfully, famous pundit Michael Kinsley knows this is not possible in American society. He knows because he goes on TV and has to wear makeup himself, which explains why men on TV are so much more empathetic with the feminist cause than other men, and ha ha ha that is a serious statement is what is sad about that. Kinsley says this with regards to Hillary Clinton, and how the fact that she is a woman means she gets at least forty minutes less sleep per night than Barack Obama, and wow, it is so simple that men are finally getting a grasp of this. There is nothing I regret more than the opportunity cost of putting on makeup and looking perfect all the time; no seriously, there was a time in my life during which I actually did that: adolescence. Adolescence! When the brain is at its most agile and capable of absorbing information, my brain was preoccupied absorbing ... stray droplets of T-Zone oil. But I have a solution, womenfolk of the land! More »

attention deficit crisis

Is The Internet Making You Live Life Like A Drunk Driver? Take O's Quiz!

Today, like every day, I began by washing down ten milligrams of Adderall with a bottle of Kombucha and about 24 ounces of Arabian Mocha Sanani. Just getting all this shit together — today for some reason my pills were underneath the couch and my coffee grinder was above the fridge — is enough of a challenge; then came the thirteen-hour struggle to find the Firefox tab I was looking at before I clicked on that other tab before my little iChat icon started jumping up and down and oh shit what was I doing again... It's enough to make anyone ADD, right??? Why yes, says a story in the latest issue of O Magazine, only instead of using the term "ADD" they go with the less blatantly pharmaceutical advertiser-fellating "overwhelm." Quaint! So, not to overwhelm, but want to know if you're overwhelmed? Stop everything right now and watch this video, paying careful attention to count how many times the team in the white shirts pass the ball. More »

polls

Housework: Are You More Like A Fifties Wife Or A Fifties Husband About It?

It's apparently unofficial International Housework Week, because like literally every media outlet has run stories on housework — it's liberating! it leads to respiratory diseases! It's a college major! it's a dying art! — so Anna's making me do a post on it. Which, well... to quote my roommate: "You? Housework? What do you know about housework??" And you know, I like to to think of myself as a cluttered-but-clean person, so I ran into my room (the only place in the apartment untouched by her tendencies to "VirGo Crazy" as they put it) and wiped as much crap off the floors — including under the bed! — and other dust-inclined surfaces and yielded, I'm slightly ashamed to say, a clump of nastiness Anna made me put after the jump. More »

working girls

Skinny, Single Girls Are Always Less Productive

A reader points us to an excerpt from the July 1943 issue of Transportation magazine: Tips on "getting more efficiency" out of female employees, who were being hired in droves due to the manpower shortage during World War II. Some of the gems include:
[Young married women] usually have more of a sense of responsibility than their unmarried sisters, they are less likely to be flirtatious.
And!
When you have to use older women, try to get ones who have worked outside the home at some time in their lives. Older women who have never contacted the public have a hard time adapting themselves and are inclined to be cantankerous and fussy.
More »

a warm gun

Women Less Happy Than Men About Performing Every Single One Of Those Multi Tasks

Guess what? At any given time, during any given moment, you're probably not as happy as most dudes you know. And you're less happy than girls in the seventies!
Think it's society's sharpening emphasis on your superficialest qualities? Or your dumb minimum wage job's? Could it be PMS and the related phenomenon that is bleeding smelly coagulated blood from the same vaginas you are now supposed to wax bald once a month, or your relative difficulty getting off? Or is it the fact you make less money, or the fact that even when you make more money your tits are the whole reason, status handbags and the related fact that we meet so many fucking women who confirm all our deepest fears about women by paying stupid money for them, crap emails, the rising cost of health care, the rising cost of toilet paper, our undiagnosed cases of ADD, and getting our college gray rapist completely outdouched by our preposterously chauvinist bosses, and above and beyond all this, the absurd imperative that is multitasking all these factors at once? We were so busy doing that last part we forgot to read the article, so we did.. More »

one of those posts that undermines our whole existence

Women: Fuck. Multitasking. Already.

Hey! What are you doing right now? Nothing? Everything? Writing an email? Running your tongue over your teeth and wondering if your gums are receding? You should probably call a dentist! But remember the last time you were at the dentist? When they just said you'd have to return to the dentist? Shit! Maybe you should call your mother! She certainly thinks that should be more of a priority! And she's right! But maybe you should finish that post you were just writing first! Maybe you should finish writing that email you were writing on your Blackberry, only on your laptop this time? Maybe you should call your bank and see about getting those overdraft fees waived, and call a doctor about the weird patch of burst blood vessels on your thigh — did the laptop do that? Should you buy your dad a Father's Day present, or oh shit that wedding present, but WHY does your little IM icon keep bouncing I WONDER WHO IT IS (NOT)... And you volunteered to see about movie times, even though movies are just an excuse to aimlessly click through old emails in a cool, quiet place.. but wait a second here's another article on multitasking, and how women are sooooo good at it, and how they think it's SUCH an asset in their ability to handle the demanding modern workplace, and to that we would just like to say, excuse me but NO IT IS NOT!!! "Multitasking" is actually more like being called "curvy." More »