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In case you missed this amazing advice

July 26, 2012

Marissa Mayer, new CEO of Yahoo. Photo Credit: Fortune Mag & CNN Money

I am so slow with getting this post written because of my lack of internet access at home…oh…and being lost in boxes and cans of paint. You know it’s insane when it’s been days since I’ve last blogged. Unfortunately my guess is that my chance to write will be spotty for the next few weeks so please…bear with me! With that aside, you might have missed what I thought was the best article in the Sunday papers. In a rare moment, I found myself buried deep in the Sunday Wash Post business section (a far cry from my usual Sunday NYT Style section obsession, c’est vrai). Way back in the Technology & Innovation page was a piece on who else – Marissa Mayer. It was not about her pregnancy. And let’s talk about that for a minute. To me, her pregnancy is relevant because a Fortune 500 Company Board hired a her as CEO despite being pregnant. This strikes moi as a huge step forward. The news is not about how LONG she will take her maternity leave for. Her maternity leave is her maternity leave, not mine or yours or all woman kind’s maternity leave. Not to mention, to be a Fortune 500 CEO at the age of 37 means you aren’t just ‘Superhuman’ as Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote about wildly successful professional woman. It means you are addicted to working. How could it mean otherwise? Your drive and ambition is unlike most others hence being a CEO. So OF COURSE her maternity leave will be brief and she will work the entire time. This shouldn’t be a point of discussion, in my view, instead we should just hope that other companies take note that women can and should be hired while pregnant. Is anyone else with me here?

Now to the point. Farhad Manjoo’s piece in the Post, which after an annoyingly long Google search, I realized first appeared in Slate, was about Mayer professionally. Majoo describes how Mayer interviewed with Google as she was finishing graduate school, back when Google only had a few employees, how she was offered a few different jobs and as she weighed her options, she explained how she made a decision. It was how she approached making a difficult decision that really stopped me dead in my tracks. Here’s what she says:

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“I had to think really hard about how to choose between job offers,” she said. Mayer approached the choice analytically. Over spring break, she studied the most successful choices in her life to figure out what they had in common. “I looked across very diverse decisions—everything from deciding where to go to school, what to major in, how to spend your summers—and I realized that there were two things that were true about all of them,” she said. “One was, in each case, I’d chosen the scenario where I got to work with the smartest people I could find. … And the other thing was I always did something that I was a little not ready to do. In each of those cases, I felt a little overwhelmed by the option. I’d gotten myself in a little over my head.”

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I thought her advice was remarkable. Admittedly, it’s never once occurred to me to study the most successful choices in my life to look for what they have in common. Has this occurred to you? And while working with the smartest people isn’t the most revealing advice, it’s part two of her advice that I think is good for everyone to hear – this idea of taking a chance, putting yourself in a position where you are maybe not quite ready, out of your comfort zone – and on some level – probably being willing to open yourself up to failure by taking that risk. I think this is really common advice from very successful people all the time but personally I find it easy to lose sight of that because we are hearing from them only when they are already successful – not in the middle of their failure.

Anyhow – pack to unpacking…but if you’ve ever studied all your past choices to look for commonalities – I’d love to know. What an analytical and smart, non-emotional way, to approach a decision. Quite un-Wired Momma like…..heh heh.

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Work, Work-Life Balance

Is the new Yahoo CEO the new poster-woman for working moms?

July 17, 2012

Marissa Mayer, new CEO of Yahoo. Photo Credit: Fortune Mag & CNN Money

The big move starts tomorrow – so I REALLY don’t have time for the kind of post that is running through my head and crowding my thoughts – but I had to throw something up. Last night, I heard the news that Marissa Mayer was named newly appointed CEO of Yahoo. I thought it was cool and just didn’t focus. Tomorrow’s move on the brain, I guess.

This morning I heard a news blurb that she is 37. Wow – that shocked me. She could join our Forever 39 wine and yoga pants club.

Then the news followed up with this – she is pregnant with her first child and due in October.

If that didn’t stop every one of us dead in our tracks, I don’t know what will.

Forget the Anne-Marie Slaughter piece, forget everything else – here we have actual action. We have a youngish business WOMAN appointed CEO of a large company….and she is pregnant – not just newly pregnant but very pregnant – and taking her maternity leave.

All eyes are on her amongst the working mom set, whether she likes it or not. Did she suddenly just become the new poster-woman for breaking new ground, actually breaking some barriers and setting an example that pregnant women should still be interviewing for all kinds of jobs – even competitive intense jobs – and that pregnancy should not be considered as a barrier to strong candidates?

And will it be the edgier, newer businesses that will walk-the-walk about work-life balance and adapt to helping families manage careers and family – in a way that the older, more established businesses just can’t seem to be able to do?

I hope business people, HR departments, hiring managers everywhere are taking notice. This decision on the part of Yahoo isn’t just another philosophical piece published by a privileged woman – this is a stop-you-dead in your tracks decision that sends a loud message.

Last year, I interviewed a friend who is also an attorney with the EEOC. She sees work discrimination cases every single day. She has a very realistic perspective and she provided some excellent advice to women who are pregnant and interviewing or considering a job search. Since posting that interview, I consistently see traffic to my blog where someone entered the search terms “should I interview while pregnant?”

Ladies – I don’t think anything just changed over night but hopefully this empowers you. What do you think? Is the hiring of Marissa Mayer significant for working women everywhere? I will resume the WM Working Moms Hero series, probably next week. Until then, for more on working moms, “Like” the WM Facebook page.

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Work, Work-Life Balance

On Mothers “Having It All”

June 25, 2012

Anne-Marie Slaughter’s piece in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” has a provocative title when in the end, after I read it through three times, I concluded that she actually goes about suggesting how we can have it all. I don’t know about you but I went through a range of emotions while reading her piece. Here’s the progression of my reaction:

First, I thought, what can she possibly say that is new on this topic – when are we going to start seeing some ACTION on work-place flexibility instead of just more talk talk talk;
Then I went through a period of finding her totally obnoxious while also commending her brutal honesty in revealing just how horribly judgmental she was of women who made choices she viewed to be less ambitious than they were capable of (read: slowing down a career to tend for…gasp…children);
As she highlighted the reality of working in a demanding successful career in Washington, DC, I recoiled. I spent a dozen years working along or near K Street and don’t need to preach to this group how un-family friendly and how incredibly intense and stressful managing a career in Washington, DC is – whether you have kids or not. Remember what a joke that Parenting award was last year that nominated DC as a family-friendly town for working parents? I’m still laughing.
Then I progressed into cheering out loud. I highlighted some quotes. I re-read them. I realized that we all like to read articles about managing work and kids because we like to know we aren’t alone in the chaos, the confusion and the difficulty of it all.
Then I wanted her to run for Senate or Congress or start a lobbying shop and hire me – so we could start to make some of her ideas actually happen.

Does she "have it all"?

Was I alone in this roller coaster of emotions?

Frankly, her piece is so long and extensive, just working through how to write about it feels like a daunting task. I’ve decided to focus on the few areas that resonated the most with moi. In the end, I think that the core of what Slaughter advises and discovers in her own experience, is similar to what we’ve talked about on my blog through endless posts on work-life choices and what we’ve all read elsewhere countless times and that is this: Having It All is about you. It’s about having confidence in your decisions regarding work and family, having the confidence to ask for what you want and have earned in the work place, it’s about suspending judgment of other mothers and it’s about being realistic. How so, you ask? Here’s how.

Judgement. Instead of a litany of reasons why working moms have it so hard, a notion that many in the media particularly like to stoke in terms of the mommy wars, and which Slaughter flirted with until she left the comforts of Princeton for the brutal reality of intense Washington, she nails it with this quote: “Many people in power seem to place a low value on child care in comparison with other outside activities. The discipline, organization and sheer endurance it takes to succeed at top levels with young children at home is easily comparable to running 20 to 40 miles a week.” Let’s delete her inclusion of “at top levels” and just make this a broader statement and then stand up and cheer. AMEN SISTER. A the hell MEN. I absolutely loved her comparison to how a boss might consider someone training for a marathon to be highly disciplined and respectful that this worker gets up early and runs, or leaves work promptly to train but a woman up at o’dark thirty to tend to her children or leaving “on time” – isn’t viewed as disciplined or revered like the marathon trainer.

But here’s the rub, women are guilty of this. In my experience, female bosses can be harder on working moms than male bosses. I fought that battle day in and day out in one of Washington’s largest, most influential trade association for years. It’s a hard battle. And the way I handled it was this: sneaking in the side door at 9:30ish hoping no one would catch me, displaying pictures of my kids but avoiding discussion of the at-home realities of the late nanny, the sick nanny, the sick child, the parent teacher conferences – things that all happened – gasp – during the WORK DAY. It’s an inconvenient truth in Washington that personal life happens during business hours, even though business hours happen at all hours. I was practically being eaten from the inside out because of the stress. It was like motherhood was a personal disappointment to my boss. If there had been a chart on the annual evaluation form and she could have gotten away with it legally, she would have given me lower points simply for gestating.

I agree with Slaughter that it’s time to speak openly and honestly in the work place about the challenges raising children – challenges that are shared by all parents no matter their level of professional success and the number of hours they work per week – because again, many parenting challenges happen between 9AM and 6PM. Slaughter correctly states “Changing these policies requires more than speeches. It means fighting the mundane battles – every day, every year – in individual workplaces, in legislatures, and in the media.” She is exactly right, we can’t sit around and complain about these challenges unless we personally are also attempting to DO something about them in our own lives, push the boundaries, push for the flexibility. And part of that is in not perpetuating the idea that child care warrants a low value – which again – women do to each other.

Confidence. Slaughter quotes Lisa Jackson, head of the EPA, as saying “To be a strong woman, you don’t have to give up on the things that define you as a woman.” Here is where feminism/professional success and motherhood collide for so many women. Frankly, I have never understood it – and as I’ve mentioned countless times before – I even minored in Women’s Studies.

Why did Slaughter spend so many working years assuming that she shouldn’t admit that she ENJOYED being home with her children, that she wanted to leave a powerful position to see them or that women were somehow letting down future generations by stepping off a high powered career track to spend more time at home? Why can’t you enjoy being a mother, why can’t you enjoy raising your children and still be a feminist? Who says you can’t work less, opt out of becoming a CEO or a tenured professor or a Vice President, and still have strong, independent values that make you a powerful woman and positive role model for your own children and future generations of girls? Who makes these rules? And why are so many of us buying into it? Slaughter’s overall points on confidence and judgement are wrapped up together like my kids knotty post- swim hair but they are equally important points. I firmly believe that if a woman believes that stepping off a career path to tend to children, or to admit publicly that you have children at home that you want to leave work to go see, makes you seem weak, less committed to your career or too dependent on your spouse – then it means that woman herself places a low value on child care, even if she also has children. And it also tells me she lacks the confidence in her own choices about her own career and how it impacts her family. I think that being unafraid to admit just how important your family is to you, how much you value time home, and having the confidence to push for the working arrangements you need – is the key to combining professional success with a commitment to family. It’s a different model for every single one of us – but it takes confidence to be honest and to ask for what you’ve earned. In my experience, I was guilty of sneaking in side doors and trying to be discreet in the reality of childcare at work, but I pushed where I felt I could – which was in terms of not working late in the office and resisting work travel as much as possible. It didn’t end well for me and my female boss – but it definitely sparked internal conversations about working mothers and flexibility – so hopefully I helped push for change for future working moms in that office. Who knows.

Do they "have it all?"

Being Realistic. Just the phrase “Having It All” sets any one of us up for disappointment. Who has it all? Let’s forget about work and family and apply this concept to other facets of life. Who can eat as much as they want and still have the perfect body? Wouldn’t that be “having it all?” Who can never spend a minute working out but still have muscle tone, a flat stomach and a strong heart? Certainly that would be “having it all” for many of us. Who can drink as much alcohol as they want and not become an alcoholic? Others, maybe even moi after a particularly horrible day, might consider that “having it all.” But no one has these things. Sometimes it seems like they do, particularly after the Victoria’s Secret Angels Fashion Show airs right around the time you are stuffing your face with Thanksgiving Dinner. But my point is – we all know moderation is the key to life – so why are we even worrying about “Having it all?” in terms of work and family life. What is it all, anyway? How is thinking you can rise to the top of your chosen career while simultaneously being super mom who raises perfect Ivy-League bound children who eat only home-made (by you) organic food – any different than thinking you can drink as much as you want and not become an alcoholic? It’s the same thing. It’s absurdity.

The bottom line: No one ever said having kids makes life less complicated. Part of ascribing to the famous WM “Moi Loves Moi” mantra is just being realistic. Which was why I loved Slaughter’s “The Arc of a Successful Career” section – a topic again, we’ve discussed here, multiple times. Her metaphor of the lattice that we are climbing, not the ladder, because we often take side steps, steps down or steps up – but recognizing this and being comfortable with this non-linear path takes confidence. Not to mention a realistic perspective on your family’s needs and your own personal career goals. And I will insist until I am blue in my face that career side-steps or career steps down DO NOT fly in the face of feminism or disappointing future generations of women.

Finally, Slaughter references some research that reveals that measuring the gender gap by well-being rather than wages is a more current, modern way to assess the gender gap. This was the first I’d heard of that concept but it makes practical sense to me. And while I agree that closing the leadership gap and having more women reach the top echelons of business and government will help with the gender gap, I also think our perceptions and the realistic lens we view the world, helps with our own well being and perspective on “Having It All.”

So where does this leave us? Hopefully not in the tired old place we always are. Hopefully women will keep speaking up, asking for more work-life boundaries and find confidence in themselves for the choices they make. I have always believed balance is in the eye of the beholder, and in this case, so is “having it all,” so long as your lens isn’t warped and distorted.

What do you think? OH, and be sure to “Like” the Wired Momma Facebook page, because there, we “have it all.”

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Work, Work-Life Balance

WM Working Mom Hero Awards: The Series Continues

June 18, 2012

A few weeks ago, I kicked off my new award series, the WM Working Mom Hero Awards. The first award went to Meryl Streep, who I think we can all agree is pretty much amazing and fantastic, having raised four children, had a stay-at-home husband long before anyone did that, is the most nominated actress despite her many failed projects, and she always plays strong females. If you’re not familiar with this new series, you might be wondering, what’s the point?

The point is this: mommy guilt is a drain of precious energy yet we all struggle with it in some form or another. I’ve noticed a trend that traffic to my site peaks when I write about certain topics – and one of them is the challenges facing working moms. You all know by now that I think work-life balance doesn’t exist but instead life ebbs and flows, we make choices, and our priorities shift: sometimes we’re more work focused, sometimes we’re more home-focused, but having both balance out at the same time is just not realistic. I think the reason traffic peaks when I write about work-life choices or work-life ebb and flow, is because sometimes we each feel like we’re drowning on an island, so having a reminder that faking it until we make it – is pretty well universal – is comforting. My goal with this series is to highlight women I’ve read about who are successful but who also speak candidly about the struggle to manage work and home – and who never pretend like it’s sunshine and roses all the time. After my last post, another blogger commented that she didn’t care for the title of “working mom hero awards” because she felt it isolates stay-at-home moms. Of course, this isn’t my intention. You all know I straddle between being home with my kids and working quite a bit from home – so I’m never sure which category I fall into because there isn’t a neat and tidy definition for me. Right now I’m blogging in my hours old, dried sweaty gym clothes, and it doesn’t matter because I don’t have anywhere to be. But yet I still work plenty – both paid and unpaid. So I guess I hope that the women I select as esteemed winners of the award are relatable to all of us – no matter how much you do or do not get paid. Frankly I’m sort of beyond that easy definition because I think there are a ton of women like me – who aren’t neatly categorized as working moms, stay-at-home moms, soccer moms, Wal-Mart moms (never call me that one – or really any of them) – we bleed over into many categories – and yet we live in a world where categories and labels make sense to others and help provide a quick snapshot of who is standing next to them. This is partly why I think we’re all Digital Moms – because thanks to technology – we’re all working and connecting and raising our kids – with our phones and laptops as a critical part of our lives. Anyhow, I’ve now gotten way off the topic of today’s award winner – but wanted to address some of the feedback I received the last time. In the end, my purpose in creating this award series is because I think we still appreciate hearing how other successful women are coping, no matter how your role is defined by yourself or others.

The new French President, Hollande, and his partner Valerie Trierweiler. Photo Credit: Charles Platiau / Reuters

Drumroll…..and frankly for those of you on my WM FB page – none of you will be surprised by today’s winner or the future winners I’m planning to write about because I’ve posted articles about them all on the FB page…today’s winner is classy, successful, has teenage sons, is out-spoken and happens to be the new First Lady of France: Valerie Trierweiler. If you don’t know much about her, this article from Jezebel tipped me off quickly to why I adore her. First of all, I like her because she’s unconventional and this particularly appeals to me because she now is in such an esteemed role. Despite all the ridiculous talk about how French parent so much better than us Americans through the winter, what I think we can agree on with regards to the French is they tolerate more from their politicians’ personal lives than we do here in the United States. Should a sitting president be carrying on with an intern in the Oval Office? No, of course not. But could we tolerate a first family here in the United States where the first couple isn’t even married, like the new French president and his partner? No, I definitely don’t think so. Yet why not? Haven’t we learned yet that much of the time, it’s all a shaky house of cards, so at least in these circumstances, they aren’t forcing fake labels? Truth be told – I would be devastated if Obama was found cheating on Michelle, so I suppose I am very American in how I view things – but the very fact that France’s new first lady is just the president’s girlfriend – and she is totally comfortable with that and has no intention of trying to change it – makes me like her even more. I like women who defy rules, obviously.

I get that from my own mother.

C’est vrai.

So, she defies rules. What else makes her a WM Working Mom Hero?

Umm…she was a working mom while her three sons were young but she took Wednesdays off to make crepes with them and spend the day with them. So right there, here is a woman who has risen to the top of her field, which is journalism, has coped with two divorces, raised her kids as a single mom while rising in a very competitive field, yet we learned she still took off one day a week. Again – she is defying the odds. Here’s the excerpts from the original interview in the New York Times:

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Ms. Trierweiler, who has three teenage sons and tries to keep them out of the public eye, described herself in the interview as an ordinary woman who struggled to make her professional and private lives compatible.

“I’ve shared the fate of many working mothers, I felt guilty like them,” Ms. Trierweiler said. “I took Wednesdays off to see my children and make them crepes.” She said she turned down a posting as a foreign correspondent for Paris Match because “I wanted to stay with them.”

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In America, do many of us believe you can take one day off a week and still rise to the top of your profession? Ms. Trierweiler is showing us that you can do this…..and still become successful. And really….to make crepes. J’adore the French. The other thing I found noteworthy is that she revealed this unapologetically – with no disclaimers – nothing like she appreciated the other people around her that gave her this flexibility or any of that bullshit. She took a day off a week to be with her sons. Period. Sometimes, I think that if working moms owned it – not acted like it was something to be ashamed of or a gift – but make the case – I want X, I deliver X, Y, Z – let’s make this happen – then maybe we’d see more flexibility. The real kind of flexibility – not the fake kind for generic surveys about family friendly companies where employers can claim they offer shorter days or flexible arrangements but no one takes them because it’s a kiss of death for your career. Working moms out there – I hope she will inspire the confidence in you to own it, to set the schedule that you need because you deserve it, not because you are mommy tracking yourself.

Why else to adore France’s first lady? Because she boldly stands up for women’s rights. Here’s the 9th reason from the Jezebel list:

9. She’s already influencing the president for the better: On Friday, she confirmed to Le Figaro that she had asked Julien Dray, a controversial Socialist leader, to leave the victory celebration for Mr. Hollande and his team last Sunday. Between the two rounds of the presidential vote, Mr. Dray drew criticism for inviting Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the disgraced former Socialist front-runner, to his birthday party at an unsavory bar.

That’s right – do not tolerate scum like DSK or those associated with him – and she didn’t. In a very public way that clearly sent a message about what she, and by association her husband, will tolerate.

And finally, she’s unabashedly outspoken – which again speaks to her underlying confidence – a trait moi adores in others – especially women. In her most recent interview now that she is a few weeks into being the First Lady, she speaks openly for her dislike of this term, finding it outdated and in response to public criticism that she is too outspoken and unconventional, she said “Ooh-la-la, a woman with a little bit of character — she’s scary!’ It’s always the same old criticisms.”

J’adore Valerie. She had me at crepes but then she really had moi at the “Ooh-la-la” sarcasm.

Go forth, WM fans, with your “Ooh-la-la” confidence and while you’re at it, enjoy some crepes.

“Like” the WM FB page to keep up with the “Ooh-la-la” fun and of course, if you’ve read about someone who deserves to be nominated, let moi know. Until then, will write more on this series probably next week. Be patient with moi, with summer here, it’s more difficult to carve out time to blog and moi doesn’t enjoy blogging at night. Moi enjoys wine and sleeping at night.

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Work-Life Balance