Life on Mars

June 4, 2005

Years of self-help books later, women are still being told by "experts" how to succeed in the "men's club" of corporate life. Julie Szego weighs up the advice.

I approached my first real job like a secret agent; desperate to crack the code, fearful of blowing my cover. Dressed for success in a navy pinstripe suit, I anticipated spectacular failure. Surely it was only a matter of time before I would be "discovered" as an incompetent fraud who had bluffed her way through a university degree and job interview? A tricky question from a superior, a stunning error in a report, a fumbling encounter with a client - each day threatened devastating humiliation. Sitting silently in my office, the cheerful banter of the secretaries outside, discussing hot dates and funky outfits, seemed to mock my intensity, the tap of their fingers on keyboards like a ticking bomb.

My fellow female graduates tended to share this anxiety, but the men were different. Meeting up for morale-boosting lunches, we often marvelled at how our male peers took to the corporate challenge without a quiver of self-doubt. Or so it seemed. And then one day, a girlfriend gave me a self-help book she claimed finally made sense of this bewildering new universe: How Men Think: The Seven Essential Rules for Making it in a Man's World by psychologist Adrienne Mendell.

The underlying premise of this book, one of an ever-expanding self-help sub-genre, is that women languish on the lower rungs of the corporate ladder largely because of their naivety about workplace culture.

It is standard men-are-from-Mars-type pop-psychology applied to work instead of love, but, I confess with deep embarrassment that the book's message came as a revelation.

Reading these sort of books 12 years later evokes nervous ambivalence. Do I understand the rules now, am I "winning" yet and do I want to bad enough? The books sketch a conformist and cut-throat work environment in which women aren't the only ones playing with a handicap. They aim to motivate, but read enough of them and you're likely to opt for a life of dedicated underachievement.

Men at work, says the blurb on the back of Mendell's book, "brag, cover up their mistakes, pretend to know what they don't, start fights. But they still get ahead! Why?"

In short, they understand that business is simply a game and you play to win, following the rules of team sports learnt as a child. But because little girls were off with their best friend, playing with dolls and keeping themselves nice, they skipped these vital lessons and pay the price later.

While men Just Do It and then go home, women meander, starry-eyed, around the photocopier believing they're on some existential journey of self-actualisation. "Since men are still in power positions," says Mendell," if you don't play it their way, you don't play at all."

I flick through some of the books and reluctantly self-evaluate. There's commonsense advice I've learnt to heed over the intervening years ("feeling the fear and doing it anyway"), others I still struggle to master (not viewing mistakes as career-ending catastrophes ... unless, of course, they really are) and some too downright absurd to even consider, such as developing a mission statement to "define my brand" - a suggestion appearing in one recent offering, Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office: Unconscious Mistakes Women Make that Sabotage their Careers.

The "rules" are essentially the same in all these books. In Why Good Girls * (rule followers, people pleasers, paper pushers) Don't Get Ahead but Gutsy Girls Do, Kate White reveals "nine secrets every girl must know". A "gutsy girl" breaks the rules, has one clear goal for the future, does only what's essential, doesn't worry about whether people like her, walks and talks "like a winner", asks for what she wants, faces trouble head-on, trusts her instincts and takes smart risks.

As a pampered late child of migrant parents who always found team sports pointless and brutal, this stuff was news. My parents, both doctors, had set up a medical practice in St Kilda, in which expatriate Hungarians such as themselves accounted for the bulk of patients. Their subtle messages about work reflected a quaint, old-world simplicity, with a pinch of Stalinist-era contempt for the grubby "con men" of business. Pick a solid profession, they said, study hard, work hard, act decent and the rewards will come.

But in today's ubiquitous office, showmanship can trump craftsmanship and decency isn't necessarily an asset. And women, in particular, struggle to get this. Melbourne University's Centre for Organisational Learning and Leadership ran a course last month honing the "emotional intelligence" of women aspiring to be CEOs. The course aimed to teach women how to make tough decisions and resist the need for approval, citing research that emotional factors such as these often block their path to the top.

There's heaps of savvy advice in these books. In Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office, Lois P. Frankel lists 101 career-damaging mistakes women make. Working too hard is chief among them - and the one I strive hardest to avoid. She writes: "Whereas women see it as 'wasting the company's money' to do anything other than focus on the task at hand between 8am and 5pm, men know that whether it's talking about football or last weekend's golf scores, they're building relationships that will later work for them."

Working long hours without a break also makes you look "flustered and inefficient", warns Frankel. She relates how one executive confessed to feeling "uncomfortable" around a female vice-president because she always looked overworked and "harried", a word, Frankel astutely observes, is rarely used to describe a man.

I'm sure we all know a harried office martyr, or a woman who pinches company pennies (and, in doing so, is "more likely to be viewed as someone who isn't ready for the big league"), or holds her tongue, protects jerks, constantly apologises, plays down her success and volunteers to perform miracles. I'm sure we also know the odd man who fits the bill.

I also wish I had a dollar for every time I spring a woman sobbing in the company toilets after an unpleasant encounter with (usually) a male superior. Not surprisingly, most books canvass this issue, advocating the swift removal of one's bawling self from the room (and thus to the dunny). "Don't be seduced by seemingly humanistic organisations (hospitals, non-profits and the like) into thinking crying is OK", says Frankel. "Crying gives people the impression you're not in control, not competent, and weak."

The don't-piss-in-your-pay-packet advice, such as not sleeping with co-workers and especially bosses, or, if you are, at least refraining from talking dirty around the water cooler, is usually honoured in the breach. Other pointers demand an exhausting balancing act - where, for example, is the line between sharing too little personal information in the office (which makes you look "secretive and dishonest") and sharing too much, which can come back to bite you?

And then come the dictates on style; chapters of meticulous, patronising advice that reveal less about patriarchy and more about the soulless, homogenising character of the global corporation. Reaching the top isn't simply about wearing a smart suit, it's about developing a power-point personality. And that's much, much harder than it sounds.

Women, Frankel says, should cultivate the authority-laden pregnant pause - "practice counting to three before replying to a question, even when the answer is on the tip of your tongue". They should also make a conscious effort to take up more space; "when standing in front of a group, stand with your feet about as far apart as your shoulders are wide."

They shouldn't, however, decorate their office like it's their bedroom, have a desk stacked with food ("We don't ascribe a sense of impact or import to people who feed others"), tilt their heads too often or smile inappropriately.

Wearing reading glasses around the neck, meanwhile, suggests an older woman and "unlike men, it's the rare woman who finds her credibility increasing with age. If you're concerned about being able to read your notes during a presentation, type them in a font large enough to see without glasses."

And finally, beware of overcarbonation. This describes a person, unaffected by drugs, who nevertheless appears highly animated: "They look and sound as if they were a can of soda that was shaken before being opened." Frankel suggests striking a balance between over and under carbonation: "One way to do this is to observe yourself on a videotape with the sound off. If you were standing outside the meeting, looking through a glass partition, how would you describe the person you see?"

Interestingly, most of the books deny that turning women into men is the answer. Indeed, "acting like a man" is one of Frankel's cardinal sins: "You must play the role that's expected - while also widening the boundaries." The idea is to successfully navigate the male-dominated workplace by minimising the more harmful "feminine" traits. Leave the testosterone shots at home, but, says Mendell, be prepared to "find your opponents Achilles heel and go for it!"

Actually, back in the heady days of New Economy euphoria, a parallel school of corporate psychology was furiously rewriting the manual, warning clever companies to embrace their feminine side or perish. Suddenly, "the web of inclusion" became the preferred managerial model and gurus such as Sally Helgesen began celebrating "the end of the warrior age". It's time to stop telling women what they must learn from business, writes Helgesen in her influential 1990 book The Female Advantage: Women's Ways of Leadership, and start telling business to "reaffirm values women recognise as a source of their strength - values too long dismissed as a source of weakness".

The phallic managerial pyramid will render companies impotent in the new, globalised world, says Helgesen. Women, bring valuable traits, including "a disposition to draw on personal, private-sphere experience when dealing in the public realm, an appreciation of diversity" and disdain for "the rituals and symbols of status that divide people who work together and reinforce hierarchies".

Well, I don't know how many companies now boast womb-shaped managerial structures, but you need only consider the gap between the average CEO's yearly pay and that of the office tea lady to know that hierarchy lives on. A weekend spent squatting next to the boss singing Kumbaya does not a revolution make. But it is a relief, of sorts, to think that women can finally act soft and mushy, tilting their understanding little heads as often as they like, while clawing their way to the top with ample cunning.

Prominent sociologist Don Edgar argues in The War Over Work, an exhaustive account of the conflict-ridden Australian workplace: "The nonsense perpetrated in books such as John Gray's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus is really just a cheap play on the surface differences ... It's the image men wish to convey, not their lack of empathic ability or accuracy, that makes a difference. In tomorrow's workplace, however, no one, including men, will survive without such interpersonal skills."

How does "tomorrow's workplace", which, according to Edgar, must recognise workers as people also shouldering responsibilities for children, ageing parents and the wider community, suddenly metamorphose from today's whatever-it-takes ethic?

A major problem with the self-help books is that while they don't deny the structural barriers to women's advancement, such as family unfriendly policies and the sexual division of labour in the home, their tone is infused with the thoroughly American belief that, with a bit of ingenuity, the individual can conquer most things. Do you want to get ahead in a company that demands long hours? Well, employ a cleaner and nanny. Can't afford to? Try getting hubby to take on a bigger share of household chores, they invariably suggest. And thus the great social drama of our time is solved in a few breezy sentences.

At the conclusion of How Men Think, Mendell muses about a better, gentler future: "Learning the rules of the game is only the beginning. The culture of the workplace of the future can, and should, be a culture that values people, cares about the quality of life, is responsive to family needs."

But how you go about changing the "rules" once you're in a position to do so is clearly the subject of another book. The one many of my socially-minded peers favoured was Joan Kirner and Moira Rayner's The Women's Power Handbook: Get It, Keep It, Use It. The two successful femo-warriors write from the perspective of women who gained power, sought to wield it for the common good, then lost it (Rayner was Victoria's Commissioner for Equal Opportunity, until her sacking by the Kennett government; Kirner, of course, was sacked by the people), then poked around trying to find it again.

Kirner and Rayner advise budding community activists, politicians and senior execs on how to forge alliances with like-minded women and discuss tactics for managing meetings and using the media. The emphasis is on attaining power in order to subvert structures from within. Humour can be a disarming weapon in the workplace, they advise, "but never put down another woman or anyone else who's on the outer- gays, indigenous people, migrants, people with disabilities". Their good-natured wisdom radiates throughout, but when I read the handbook now it seems strangely unconvincing. Perhaps the culture wars of the Howard era have erased my optimism about the possibilities of sisterhood or perhaps an extra decade of life experience has made me question aspects of the cause itself.

Men, as well as women, have helped me forge a rewarding career. And men, in no small measure, are also victims of the very power we're being urged to grab. In our fraught, insecure workplaces, parents (of both sexes), employees older than 50, the sick and the slow all struggle to compete on an uneven playing field.

Frankel visited Australia recently to promote Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office and the book has sold reasonably well here. But its simple rallying cry almost sounds like a distant echo from a march that passed by long ago. A report by a global human resources firm last year found women were fleeing the corporate world to start their own businesses because they were fed up with being told to "play the game"or adopt stereotypical male behaviours. The rebel yell of the moment appears to come from gutsy girls who made it in a man's world and now mourn all they forfeited in the process.

Some of these self-help writers are themselves running out of steam. Consider the mellowing of go-girl coach Pat Heim in the newly released revised edition of Hardball for Women: Winning at the Game of Business. She observes how the book's first edition was "angrier and more polarised'', explaining: "One of the changes in my perception over the last 10 years is that it's not easy being a guy. You live every moment of your life in a hierarchy; every interaction is an opportunity to lose position and status. Therefore you must be constantly on guard and be ready to push back. What used to look to me like mindless chest-beating now I understand is often necessary to a man living in a very male culture ... If I were to choose which gender I would come back as now, it would be as a woman. It's just a more comfortable place to be."

She sounds like a nice girl to me.

Julie Szego is an Age writer.


Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead But Gutsy Girls Do, By Kate White
Tedious and unreflective love-your-inner-bitch manual by the editor of a women's gossip mag.

Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office, By Lois P. Frankel
Mixes sound advice, such as pushing for pay rises, with ridiculous suggestions guaranteed to see you crowned Corporate Clone of the Month.

How Men Think, By Adrienne Mendell M.A.
Probably the most sensible of the bunch, offering useful advice without seeking to erase all traces of individualism and dignity.

Hardball for Women (revised edition), By Pat Heim, Ph.D. with Susan K. Golant
She was once mad as hell and wanted to be a man. Now she realises men are also doing it tough and feels sorry for them.

The Women's Power Handbook, By Joan Kirner and Moira Rayner
The self-help book for feminists wanting to change the world.

The War over Work, By Don Edgar
Sick of climbing the ladder? Then this exhaustive account of Australia's troubles at work should encourage some swift downshifting.


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