Early in the piece, called "The Mismeasure of Woman," Lipman (that's her in the white, lofting her National Magazine Award) writes,

The truth is, women haven't come nearly as far as we would have predicted 25 years ago. Somewhere along the line, especially in recent years, progress for women has stalled. And attitudes have taken a giant leap backward.

Kinda vague, but a worthwhile topic nonetheless. And Lipman does provide some sobering stats, like the fact that, "according to the American Bar Association, women in 2008 made up almost half of all associates, but only 18.3 percent of partners." After that, her essay pretty quickly goes off the rails. Both the NYTPicker and Gawker's Foster Kamer handily detail the ways Lipman's piece makes no sense. Kamer's right that the connection she draws between 9/11, the purported "end of irony" and boobs on the Internet is just bizarre, and the NYTPicker deserves props for pointing out that at least one of her allegations of sexism actually never happened — nobody called her career "leggy." But I'm not particularly interested in picking apart her arguments that sexism still exists — it does, there's better proof of it than appears in Lipman's piece, and there's no need to go into that here. What does bear some critiquing is her prescription for "chang(ing) the conversation," a vague phrase that appears to mean ending not just discrimination in the workplace but also misogyny in media and pop culture. Let's take Lipman's advice point by point (all bold is mine):

1.

First, we can begin by telling girls to have confidence in themselves, to not always feel the need to be the passive "good girl." In my time as an editor, many, many men have come through my door asking for a raise or demanding a promotion. Guess how many women have ever asked me for a promotion?

I'll tell you. Exactly ... zero.

Yes, women could use workplace assertiveness training. And yes, teachers and parents should be raising girls to be active rather than passive, and not to expect "unrealistic perfection in every sphere, from beauty to housekeeping." But why does the conversation about women and career advancement always have to be framed in terms of women asking for raises and promotions? I get that in today's world this is a necessary career skill, but a common critique of America's educational system is that it values obedience and docility, qualities that supposedly come easier to girls than to boys. Parents and other advocates use this as evidence that the school system needs to be changed to be more male-friendly — but women are still expected to change to be more workplace-friendly. I don't believe that boys are naturally less obedient, or women naturally less assertive. But we are still socialized differently, and the culture of many American workplaces is dominated by values developed and perpetuated by men — including self-promotion and aggressiveness. Again, plenty of women have these qualities in spades. But for those who don't, why can't workplace culture change to, say, reward hard work instead of repeated demands? Why do women always have to be the ones to budge?

2.

[H]ave a sense of humor. Believe me, it's needed.

Case in point: My favorite Christmas card ever came from Martha Stewart - while she was in prison in West Virginia. It was beautiful, on heavy paper stock, and showed a gorgeous wreath. And on the inside, homey as could be, it was engraved with holiday wishes from "Martha Stewart, Alderson, West Virginia."

This one is kind of mystifying. I'm not really sure what the Martha Stewart anecdote is supposed to teach us, especially since it's not even that funny. And anyway, can we stop talking about how women need to get a sense of humor? Umpteen discussions of humorless feminazis have led me to believe that the female sense of humor is like the clit — other people may not know how to find it, but we know where the fuck ours is.

And 3.

One final suggestion: don't be afraid to be a girl.

Women do have a different culture from men. And that can give us some tremendous advantages. Women are built to withstand hardship and pain. (Anyone who has given birth knows what I'm talking about.) That's a big benefit at a time like this, with the unemployment rate at 9.8 percent and rising.

Where to even start with this? How about with the fact that Lipman just got finished telling women that they had to learn to operate like men in male workplace culture — but wait, don't forget hold on to a culture of your own! The idea that women need to work "like men" but think/look/act/dress/talk/fuck "like a girl" continues to be a huge obstacle to women's equality, and is part of the demand for "unrealistic perfection" that Lipman decries earlier in the essay. Even leaving this aside, if women's culture means "withstanding hardship and pain," I'm not sure I want it. I don't buy that women are any better at this than men, and this particular type of exceptionalism crosses over pretty quickly into obligation — when women are perceived as "better" at something (i.e. childrearing), it becomes their exclusive duty to take care of it. And I'd rather men share some of the pain of the recession, thanks very much.

Point 3 segues into the assertion that women are better at weathering economic downturn because they define themselves less by their jobs. This may be true in the aggregate — things are changing, but men are still told to identify with their jobs more closely than women are. Of course, women are told that their worth depends on the love of a man, and it's hard to say which cultural message is more damaging. As the recession has shown, jobs can be as fickle as love, and failure at either doesn't make you a bad person. It's worth remembering that strong relationships with friends and family — and also, I'd argue, a connection to a cause outside yourself — can help you weather crises both in love and at work. But framing this as feminine wisdom just keeps the genders firmly in their little work/life boxes, which is exactly the opposite of what the recession should teach us, if it teaches us anything.

I feel a little dirty taking Lipman to task for all this, given that she is genuinely trying to address the problems women face. But we're not going to solve those problems by falling back on the same old stereotypes that created them in the first place. Lipman deserves credit for drawing attention to a pressing issue in a national forum. Maybe now other people will come up with better ways to address it.

The Mismeasure Of Woman [NYT]
Fallen Portfolio Editor Joanne Lipman's Self-Serving Feminism Screed: 9/11, Sissies, Etc. [Gawker]
Whoops! Leggy Former Portfolio Editor Joanne Lipman Makes Mulitple Mistakes In Today's Op-Ed Whine About Women. [The NYTPicker]

Today's women may be unhappy (at least, that's the claim), but Buckingham must be pretty psyched — in addition to his Huffington Post column, he's got a book excerpt, a panel discussion, a top ten list, and a video clip up on Business Week's website. Here's the video:

Buckingham may be a leeetle smarmy, but he's not horrible — he doesn't think women belong in the home, nor is he one of those people who think feminism causes unhappiness (a position Judith Warner handily attacks on her NY Times blog today). He does think women are kinda miserable — as evidence he cites not just the popular Stevenson and Wolfers study, but also the nifty-sounding "Eurobarometer analysis." But the solution isn't a return to some notional age of pregnancy and pie-baking — we just have to work smarter!

According to the video, the happiest women are those who don't multitask or "juggle," because "if your entire life is spent as a juggler, you never really get to hold onto any moment long enough to feel it." I decided to multitask a little by actually juggling during the video, and I think it made me a little bit happier, but then "spending your entire life as a juggler" actually sounds pretty sweet to me, so maybe I'm not Buckingham's target audience (note to the at-home juggler: I like to use balled-up socks). If I really want to be happy, says Buckingham, I need to stop doing so many things at once.

It's a message echoed over and over again in his writing, and in his interviews with professional women. Over at HuffPo, Buckingham quotes Billie Williamson, senior partner at Ernst & Young, who proudly admits that she doesn't arrange photos of her daughter in scrapbooks. She's also "the queen of outsourcing." Buckingham writes,

House cleaning, grocery shopping, kid's birthday parties, all outsourced. You can't do everything, so don't fall into the trap of trying. Instead, find the moments in each aspect of your life that invigorate you, and imbalance your life toward those.

So one key to happiness is having servants. Another is not letting your digressive ladybrain get in the way. At BusinessWeek, Susan Peters, chief learning officer at General Electric, says to Buckingham,

I know you've all done this, where you're writing the list of what you have to get done for Thanksgiving dinner while the colleague next to you is making the big presentation. You have to discipline your mind to stay where you are and stay in the moment. I would argue that our male colleagues are in the moment, and if we're not, that's a huge disadvantage.

Men don't think about dinner when they're busy with affairs of state, and neither should you. Just outsource it. Of course, some things, like pregnancy, are harder to outsource. So just put off thinking about them for as long as possible. At HuffPo, Buckingham paraphrases Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg:

Time and again she has seen highly talented women turn down challenging career assignments because they are thinking about having a baby. Not that they actually have a baby. They aren't even pregnant. It's merely that they are thinking about it. And this thinking turns to planning, and the planning leads them to the conclusion that now isn't a good time to take on anything new. Sheryl's advice: Enough with your planning. You are on a fast career track right now, doing as much and earning as much and wanting as much as your colleagues, so stay on this track for as long as you can, and wait to see what unfolds.

Buckingham's basic thesis seems to be that women sabotage themselves by thinking about too much stuff, and if they could just think about less — perhaps by paying other people to do it for them — they'd be happier. His advice isn't stupid — if you're a successful middle-class woman. There is something empowering about refusing to manage a whole bunch of household crap, especially if you can afford to get someone else to take care of it. And it's probably true that women with the luxury of maintaining laserlike focus enjoy their jobs more. But not all women have what Buckingham calls "an excess of choice" of things to pay attention to. Plenty of women have lots of obligations and little help or money, and "quit juggling" isn't particularly good advice for them.

There's really a bigger problem at work in Buckingham's advice, one Barbara Ehrenreich hints at in Bright-Sided. She says that making people feel artificially happy about their circumstances discourages them from trying to change them. Similarly, telling women that the way to get happy is to change their individual thought processes ignores the idea of collective action. Judith Warner is as skeptical about women's large-scale unhappiness as I am, but she does identify some major problems:

The wage gap persists, particularly for mothers, who now earn 73 cents for every man's dollar. Our workforce and education system is still sex-segregated, operating along generations-old stereotypes that steer most women into low-paid, low-status, low-security professions. Women pay more for health insurance than men, have more extensive health needs than men, and suffer unique forms of discrimination in their coverage. (Women may be denied coverage because they had a Caesarean delivery or were victims of domestic violence - both "preexisting conditions.") Regardless of the number of hours they work, they continue to do far more caretaking and housekeeping work at home than do their husbands. And discrimination against mothers (but not fathers) in the workplace is all but ubiquitous.

Women aren't going to solve any of these problems by saying "in the moment" or by putting off thinking about kids as long as possible. In fact, these techniques actually make systemic change less likely, because (again, as Ehrenreich says about positive thinking) they make it seem like any woman who isn't happy is just doing something wrong. It's revealing that Buckingham lists the wage gap as one of his top ten "myths about the lives of women:"

The oft-quoted 77¢ on the dollar figure is accurate. But almost all of the gap is caused by different levels of experience. Women interrupt their careers and that leads to being perceived as having less experience.

Buckingham may not believe in the wage gap, or in other social problems keeping women from achieving parity. But those of us who do see the large-scale social ills Warner enumerates understand that we're not going to fix them by looking inward at our own brains. We need to turn outward, and join forces with other women, women whose troubles are bigger than not having the time to scrapbook. Ehrenreich said it well: "the threats we face are real and can be vanquished only by shaking off self-absorption and taking action in the world." Even if it involves a little juggling.

How Women Handle Success [BusinessWeek]
Words Of Wisdom From Strong Women [Huffington Post]
When We're Equal, We'll Be Happy [NYT]
Ten Myths About The Lives Of Women [BusinessWeek]
Why Are Women Unhappier Than They Were 40 Years Ago? [BusinessWeek]
Marcus Buckingham On Strong Women [BusinessWeek]

Reuters says the survey, conducted by at Zürich-based human resources company, found that 53% of Americans think their bosses are dishonest. Specifically, 28% think their superiors are lying about their job security. A majority also think their bosses are unfair and disloyal. Oddly, two thirds of Americans would not change anything about their relationship with their boss, implying that we're all just used to a Kafkaesque work environment of backstabbing and deceit.

Possibly lending credence to the idea that bosses suck is another survey, showing that 22% of female executives have withheld a promotion or raise because of the way an employee dressed. In the same survey, 98% of women said their appearance affects their career, and 55% said they frequently felt like they had nothing to wear.

My current work uniform includes: sweatpants, a Snuggie (oh yeah), socks (it's cold in here), and a t-shirt with a picture of a dirt bike and the phrase "Personal Watercraft: Spend money in a royal style" (it was a gift). So I guess I'm in the lucky 2% of women for whom appearance doesn't matter. Then again, Anna H. probably just made these surveys up. What is "Reuters" anyway?

Workers Think Bosses Are Dishonest, Survey Says [Reuters]
U.S. Working Women See Appearance As Key: Survey [Reuters]

I did the quiz again and chose B), and that got me labeled "Blindly Ambitious," which, in Cosmo world, is a no no. Because showing your ambition makes you seem like an undainty "bulldozer," and nobody likes that in a lady. Just for the good of womanity, I took the quiz a third time, and chose C) and other answers that were similarly manipulative. Like for the question, what do you do when you hear that your crush is dating another girl, you're supposed to "Snoop around to find out how serious they are. If it's just a casual thing, you can still make a play for him." When I choose those sorts of passive aggressive responses, Cosmo was delighted, and called me a "savvy goal-getter" who could manage to be simultaneously "likely to succeed…and likable." Sigh. The takeaway: stabbing your coworkers and friends in the back with your fuck-me heels is a-ok by Cosmo standards as long as you have a shit-eating grin on your perfectly glossed lips.

Are You Destined For Success? [Cosmopolitan]