Who says being First Lady isn’t working?

November 24, 2008 · Filed Under Uncategorized · Comment

Today’s New York Times quotes former British first lady Cherie Blair (whose juicy tell-all I cannot wait to read):

“It is something of an irony that in these days of pushing for equality those of us married to our political leaders have to put their own ambitions on hold while their spouses are in office and keep their views to themselves,” Mrs. Blair continued. “I, at least, had my career. That is not an option for Michelle Obama.”

All the debate about whether Michelle Obama is giving up her career to become “First Mom” really misses the point. First, what about being First Lady is not “work”? I doubt any First Lady sleeps in and relaxes much (although I was wistfully stunned to read that FDR awoke each day at 8:00 am, can you imagine?). How is being one of the most visible and influential Americans on the planet not “work”? Why was her time at U Chicago Hospital more important than being first lady of the US? Because she’s not earning her own paycheck as First Lady? That is temporary, and she is indeed doing important work right now.

From the Times piece, “‘I miss my colleagues, I miss my work, I enjoyed what I was doing,’” Mrs. Obama said on CNN in February. “’But this is really pretty significant. My view of career is that I can always have whatever career I want. That’s why I, I don’t question that I can go back to that job or go back to something else interesting.’”

Second, what I love about Michelle Obama’s approach is her dual-centrism: work and family life are important to her. If we stop framing her choices for her and start taking cues from her behavior, maybe more Americans will be less stressed over whether they’re “working” enough and start thinking differently about priorities. Work can be many things, and if you don’t need the paycheck for a while, or you’re making a pretty strong investment in your future (as Obama certainly is) why not shift gears for a bit? Why not emphasize your role as mother for a bit, if you can? Lord knows, every day I’m told “It’s the most important work you could ever do.”

Are we really so rigid and stuck, both as feminists and as Americans?

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Turns out, my husband doesn’t care about names

November 23, 2008 · Filed Under Uncategorized · Comment

I wrote this piece on the Huffington Post about my struggle with my hyphenated, post-marriage last name. I always assumed my husband had strong feelings about the name thing. Turns out, when he said he didn’t mind, he meant it.

A name is forever, once it’s been indexed in Google. There’s been much buzz about how to juice your Google presence by making your name more unusual, but what is a woman to do when she gets married? A quest for search engine optimization tips about how to preserve your Google rankings when you change your name came up short, so I’m open to suggestions. It’s a feminist 2.0 dilemma.

I’m reduced, like my friend Hillary, to confusion at introductions. Hillary said,

“I have that moment when I introduce myself and literally pause. So I’ve become just Hillary– a Madonna like thing.”

Oh, we cackled over that one. I feel exactly the same way. I’m constantly emphasizing my first name and garbling, or even omitting my last name upon introduction, as if I were introducing myself to a five year old instead of a business associate.

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Yeah! What she said…

November 14, 2008 · Filed Under Uncategorized · Comment

Allyson Kapin has a heroic piece today on the Huffington Post:

More and more women are starting their own companies (including tech and web 2.0 ventures). Women make up at least 50% of the Web 2.0 market from a user and consumer perspective. According to TechCrunch, 60% of US Facebook users are women. And 61% of Open Social users are women according to Rapleaf. In major cities like DC and Philadelphia women account for approximately 30% of the IT workforce, cites the US Census Bureau.

Just last week Tech Evangelist Robert Scobel wrote a column about his favorite tech experts on Friend Feed. He featured everyone from Michael Arrington founder of TechCrunch to Steve Rubel, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital. Great choices, but sadly not a single woman made Scobel’s list.

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Michelle Obama’s “momification” is positive too

November 13, 2008 · Filed Under Uncategorized · Comment

Rebecca Traister on Salon has a thought-provoking article called “The Momification of Michelle Obama.” Traister’s thesis is that while it’s tempting and wonderful to get excited about “Bamalot” and our new, very now first fanily, it’s also an essentially regressive and anti-feminist focus. Traister writes, “But with progress comes inevitable regress, and in our stouthearted dash to fit this family into a comfortably familiar tableau, we have fallen back into other, far too familiar, cultural traps: you know, like forgetting everything we’ve learned in recent decades about female achievement and identity.”

I have to disagree. I think the media and popular focus on Michelle as Mom (and she has self-identified her role now as “Mommy in Chief) is a reflection of our deep desire to be dual-centric, or even family-centric, in our lives. Especially because work is so tenuous now. We choose to focus on family.

Traister questions “In one of the smartest pieces that has been written about the next first lady, Geraldine Brooks’ profile of her in the October issue of More magazine, Brooks writes that while you can see Michelle’s life as the quintessential modern woman’s success story, the trajectory can also be read as a “depressingly retrograde narrative of stifling gender roles and frustrating trade-offs.” In serious ways, Brooks writes, “it is her husband’s career, his choices — choices she has not always applauded — that have shaped her life in the last decade.”

It’s true. This is nothing new for Mrs. Obama however, and after all, her husband is president of the United States. As compromises go, perhaps hers was not so painful in the end.

I choose to draw hope from her example. A growing portion of the American workforce is “dual-centric,” as researchers Ellen Galinsky and Ellen Kossek have found: seeing work and home as complementary activities, and feeling they can be successful in both. In research, at least, workaholism is losing its appeal. Gen X and Gen Y are more “dual centric” than the Boomers: younger generations care more about integrating work and family and will prioritize their lives to strike the right balance. Gen Y and millenials are even more family-centric than Gen X-ers.

And this is a good thing: a study from Boston College, the Sloan Foundation, and the Families and Work Institute found Employees who are “dual-centric or family-centric exhibit significantly better mental health, greater satisfaction with their lives, and higher levels of job satisfaction than employees who are work-centric.”

I hope that Michelle’s time as Mommy in Chief, during which she will no doubt work very hard, inspires us all- even hard-working feminists- to value both work and home. It’s ok.

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Cathy Benko’s column in New York Times

November 9, 2008 · Filed Under Uncategorized · Comment

I read all of Cathleen Benko and Ann Weisberg’s Mass Career Customization and, along with Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life, I (perhaps weirdly) keep its message close to my heart. The central thesis of Benko’s work is that a career is not a ladder; it’s a lattice. Sometimes you ramp upwards, sometimes you move across. Sometimes, you stay put. Careers are nonlinear. Bateson, a cultural anthropologist, wrote of women’s lives as quilts. I draw on this wonderful image whenever I get impatient or feel as if I’m stalled on the highway of my life (which is often, these days). You never know where the next piece of the pathwork will come from. Sometimes, it’s a scrap you already have. Benko has a nice column in today’s Business section:

Examples of nonlinear careers are everywhere: women who step out of the work force and then step back in a few years later, Generation X-ers and Y-ers who show less loyalty to a single company, executive men who have climbed the ladder for decades and now insist on carving out more family time as they continue to work.

Still, we often walk to the future backward, viewing our direction through the lens of the past.

A dinner I had with a friend (who is also a colleague and mentor), along with his wife, exemplifies this tendency on the career front. Among the many topics we discussed that evening was a new model of career development, called the “Corporate Lattice,” that was fashioned and put into effect at Deloitte L.L.P.

“Why a lattice metaphor?” he asked. I answered that it was a much more fitting visual. Lattices allow movement in many directions. Like the literal lattices you see in gardens, these are living platforms for growth with upward momentum visible along many paths — a much closer depiction than a ladder of how today’s careers are built and talent is developed.

With a long and lustrous traditional career under his belt, my friend had an unequivocal response: If people aren’t continuously climbing the ladder, they won’t be successful, he said. Hmm, I thought, perhaps he hadn’t gotten the memo that today’s careers aren’t nearly as one-size-fits-all as they used to be.

Sometimes it’s hard for managers to comprehend this notion of career building. For some, a career that isn’t going steadily upward is a career going nowhere. How, they wonder, can one effectively evaluate, compensate and promote employees who aren’t consumed with the idea of steady advancement?

Sometimes it’s hard for anyone to comprehend this notion of career building. Especially in its more radical forms, when the 401K isn’t earning and the salary is uncertain. Change takes discipline, not only for those approving the change and signing its paychecks, but for the changers. I’ll soon be traveling for work quite a bit, at nearly eight months pregnant. It might be too much change for me, but it feels more like a ladder step than a lattice step, and that in itself feels good right now.

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