Complexity,Thy Name is Woman

" The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless.  I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple."  Alice Munroe


"I do not wish for women to have power over men; but over themselves."  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

"God gave women intuition and femininity.  Used properly, the combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I've ever met."  Farrah Fawcett

"Women have always been the strong ones of the world.  The men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on.  They are always longing for the mother who held them as infants."  Coco Channel

"I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children and a career.  I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing."  Gloria Steinem

"After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'"  Anna Quindlen

With all due respect to Shakespeare's Hamlet, I feel that somehow in today's culture, complexity rather than fraility describes better the condition of woman.  I have been dancing around this topic ever since I saw Sheryl Sandberg resplendent in a red dress on the cover of the March 12, 2013 issue of Time Magazine with the caption, "Don't Hate Her Because She is Successful."  Maybe as an older woman, I should hate her because she looks so good in that dress??  Or maybe as an older woman who witnessed first hand the heyday of the feminist movement of the 60s/early 70s, I should have more sense than to wade into these roiled waters and mind my own business. The complexity of trying to define women is evidenced in the above quotes.  And the festering emotions are reflected in the opprobrium that highly visible successful women draw like Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, when she returned to work just two weeks after having a baby.  My squeamishness at even attempting to get a handle on this is apparent as I have gladly seized on any excuse not to write this blog.  It was started before the one on International Pi Day.  Even plumbing the depths of math and science was not as terrifying as trying to get a handle on this feminine stew that is brewing these days.   

So, what is going on?  We have the "mommy wars" - women squabbling about working vs. staying home with children - we have an article in the The Wall Street Journal, about "Queen Bees acting mean at the office" by Peggy Dexler - where 40% of the office bullies are women who direct most of their ill will towards other women 80% of the time.  So Girls, if I may use that term, what is the burr under our saddle?  We have come a very long way since women were jailed and force fed because they wanted to vote or a married woman wasn't permitted to own property or even since women didn't occupy corner offices or sit on boards of corporations.  Admittedly, those numbers are still quite small, only 4% of Fortune 500 companies are led by women and only 17% of board seats are held by women and these numbers are growing at a snail pace. But honestly, we do have more options than my mother's generation did back in the 40s/50s and my daughter has more than I did back in the 60s/70s.  Where is the missing piece of the puzzle?  Why all of the ill will?  Could it be that one size does not fit all and now that we have at least cracked open the door to the outside world that was denied to us for so long, we have found that it is not all that we thought it was going to be?  Perhaps it is time, we grow up, define for ourselves what would really work for us and find our own power as the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley said instead of trying to stuff ourselves into the hand me down clothes of men.

There is so much buried detritus in our collective psyche, what Quindlen referred to as "not...enough," that to expect women to embrace these new opportunities without the weight of the past is an almost impossible dream.  What we see happening on the public stage is the burning off of the dross of centuries of the cultural overlay of what it meant to be a woman.  I have often wondered what a woman's true clear voice would sound like if she had been permitted to sing solo without the accompaniment of so strong a male dominated chorus.  Who are we really and what would a world that we set up to meet our deep needs look like?  I dare say that its landscape would be much different from what our world view is today.  This is not to deify women.  Because as we all have witnessed - hell, hath no fury like a woman scorned* or even one who thinks that just maybe she might be scorned.  We can be vicious.

I do not wish to give much space to a recitation of the past and its defining of the four virtues of womanhood - piety, purity, submission and domesticity - or of the sacredness of the home that women were to lovingly preserve or to the fact that it was considered unseemly for a woman to work for money especially if she were married.  What I do wish to emphasize is that since the burden of virtue was the woman's to bear, that left her male counterpart free to unleash all the unsavory beasts of the human spirit in the workplace.  To protect his open hearth furnaces at the Homestead Works, industrialist Henry Clay Frick felt no restraint in calling in the Pinkerton guards to break up the 1892 steel strike  because his hearth at home was guarded by his wife and children whom he called his angels at home.  How much of what passes today for  business as usual is predicated on this Victorian schism between the public face of society that men dominated and the sanctity of the home that was women's domain?  I think we continue to live in the fallout from the fact that women were excluded from the public dialogue for so long and muted as agents for social change.  All social change came from the men who were already in charge of the culture.  Now, isn't that a cosy little picture?  Because history is retold ad nauseum from the male perspective and women are virtually invisible in that story, each generation of women has been left to start from scratch in attempting to get a grip on the outside world without benefit of role models from the past.  

While this is not as true today as it has been in the past, I do feel this is a salient point especially as women make their way in the business world.  All we have as models for the most part are what men have done and been.  And quite frankly, that model is more reflective of bottom line than human values.  According to the Economic Policy Institute between 1978 - 2011 CEO pay increased 725% while workers only went up by 5.7% and the minimum wage actually declined by over 20%.  William Falk in the March 15, 2013 issue of The Week, reports that "Corporate profits are soaring, and companies have piled up a record $1.4 trillion in available cash."  He goes on to write that workers' "raises have become.... unnecessary.  Since 2008, corporate earnings have risen 20% a year while worker salaries have been flat."  Downsizing is still the corporate motto, expecting those who still have jobs to be grateful and to be productive, meaning working 11 hour days and weekends, and by the way - a good team member skips vacations as well.  According to the American Psychological Association, "more than half the U.S workforce feels underpaid and unappreciated, and a third suffers symptoms of chronic, work-induced stress" with women reporting higher levels of work stress than their male counterparts.  Feeling a little cranky??  Perhaps, it really isn't the woman in the next cubicle who is the culprit.  It just could be the whole sordid conditions of business as usual.

And another thing, I am no longer buying the old adage that in order to make a profit that this is the way business needs to operate.  There have been way too many studies that prove otherwise.  Plus from first hand experience, the business opportunity that I am involved with is blowing the competition away with a collaborative, cooperative model that puts people at the head of the business equation.  It is time to move beyond 19th century values. There really are win, win solutions out there if we choose to look beyond the status quo.  Isn't that what extraordinary is all about? 

Sandberg wants women to "lean in."  So do I.  I think it is now time since women comprise almost half of the workforce, 49% to 51% and in the 25 to 34 age group, more women than men have college degrees that we lean into our hearts and figure out just what kind of workplace we want to work in.  When we were new to the game, we had to fit in but we are way past that stage at this point.  And anyways, where we are at this point is not sustainable so what have we got to loose?  Not only are these conditions not good for us, they are not good for any living being.  No wonder there is such ambivalence on the parts of women as to how much of their lives they really want to commit to such a poor quality of life.  Surely to goodness there has to be more to life than these statistics suggest.  And that doesn't even begin to address the larger question if this is even the best environment for women to use their intelligence and talents.  This is a question Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, who runs 20-first, a global management consultancy, raised in the Time article on Sandberg: "Are we going to spend another 20 years trying to make women adapt to a system that doesn't fit them?"  She takes exception to Sandberg's theory that women have to step up and be more assertive, "It is insulting to women to say they need to become more like men to succeed." 

Because, we have had to survive on the fringes of the culture and because we are wired differently, women have always pioneered new ways of doing things.  The Winter, 2013 issue of Pitt Magazine, cites new University of Pittsburgh Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor, Patricia Beeson's "keen ability to transform challenges into opportunities" while crediting her leadership style - "listening, gathering opinions, questioning, and then taking decisive action" - to making "the best decisions for the institution."   In the same issue, Edna Beatrice Chappell McKenzie, pioneering journalist, activist and educator is quoted as saying that "African American women were the 'keepers of the culture' and she was one of them."  In its "10 Questions" section of the March 25, 2013 issue, Time Magazine interviewed Nobel Peace Prize winner and activist, Jody Williams on how she thought that female activists differed from male activists.  She said, "Shirin Ebadi, who received the Peace Prize in 2003, said there are seven women alive who have received the Peace Prize; shouldn't we try to think about a project we can do together?  And the Nobel Women's Initiative was born."  Williams continues, "Male Peace Prize winners have never come together to use their access and influence to support building sustainable peace.  Get a critical mass of women and it was the first thing we thought of." 

The world needs to hear mature women voices, not just in business - although data from McKinsey shows that companies with more women on their boards are more profitable - but in every aspect of contemporary life.  Women need to lean in to our true voices and become culture changers.  We are reaching critical mass and we need to speak up not just for our good but for the larger good as well.

The times they are a changing.  Former Venezuelan cabinet member, now part of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Moises Naim, writes in "The End of Power" that hierarchies of power are breaking down.  He believes that companies are more fragile, people with power are more vulnerable citing the fluctuation in the top 1% as the reigns are constantly changing.  He credits the anti-power revolution evidenced in Occupy Wall Street and Tea Partiers for helping to change the power landscape.  People in power are more visible than ever before; they are only a Google search away from exposure.  Ordinary people have access to the same data bank of knowledge and that is the new currency to opportunity. 

So what do you think, women?  Has the time come for us to put aside our cattiness (come on you all know what I am talking about) and our self-serving antics for petty power and start pulling together and empowering ourselves and each other?  Instead of taking the lemons that occur during the day and squirting the acid all over each other, use it instead to make the Immune Support Tea recipe at the bottom of the blog.  (I know you were wondering how I was going to work in the lemon thing.)  If anyone is going to change the corporate culture and in turn the larger culture into a place that at least meets some of our human needs, it is going to have to be the women because the men are being even more damaged by it than we.  By working together, we can create an environment that fulfills Sofia Vergara quote, "I guess at the end of the day, all women like to be treated with respect and kindness."  Isn't that the way that we all, male and female, like to be treated?  Phew, I do feel better having said all that but I do have to admit, I am still having a hard time with how good Sandberg looks in that dress.  Meow.


Immune Support Tea

This diaphoretic tea is recommended by MediHerb speaker Berris Burgoyne, BHSc, ND, Dip Herb.  She is a renowned herbal clinician with more than 20 years of experience and runs a highly successful clinic in Brisbane, Australia.  Give yourself a break and a boost with this tea.  One of the side benefits is it will raise your body temperature slightly and may cause you to sweat out some toxins.

Juice one lemon
1-2 cloves garlic crushed
1 teaspoon finely chopped or grated ginger or 1/4 teaspoon dried ginger
pinch of chili powder
1-2 teaspoons of honey

Place all ingredients in a mug.  Add boiling water.  Cover and let steep for 10 minutes.

Enjoy 


* William Congreve, The Mourning Bride


When all else fails, nothing beats a good laugh. So go ahead and laugh at the folly of men and women and how our brains work. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKveOsIieHg