This is a Man's World

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The Leading Women Edition of CNN

For Women Entrepreneurs in Philadelphia...

By Chris Herbert in The Daily Muse on March 22, 2012

Ever wondered what goes on in the heads of the guys you work with? We asked one man what he thought, and we got a surprising answer: He doesn’t like going to happy hour with us—or even lunch.

Read on for a fascinating glimpse inside a man’s perspective, then tell us below: Is this what you expected? What do you think of his rationale, and his proposed solution?

I ran into two co-workers in the elevator on my way out of the building after a long day. A man and a woman.

I knew the man well. Late 30s, married with young children, and starting to lose his hair. I had never spoken to the woman, but I had seen her around the office. She was hard to miss—early 20s, blond hair, blue eyes. When she walked into a room, she turned heads.

They were headed to the bar and they asked me if I wanted to join them.

I smiled at the married man like I had just caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. I couldn’t stop smiling. Neither of them said anything for a moment. The moment lingered, and then the elevator doors opened. He hastily added that another colleague was also going to join them, and that I should definitely come.

I abruptly wiped the smile off my face, declined politely, and headed to Grand Central. I felt so foolish. Can’t two work colleagues go out for a drink after work? Why had I stood there smiling like some lecherous old man?

It got me thinking about my own behavior with women in the workplace. The fact is, I rarely go out to lunch or drinks with an attractive woman, unless there is a large group of us. I’m not proud of this, but it’s the truth.

The politically correct way to explain this is to say that I don’t want to put myself in situations that could lead to unfaithfulness. That’s partially true, but it’s also ridiculous. It’s not like I’m Brad Pitt and women are falling all over themselves to take me home.

The real answer is that I’m intimidated by attractive women. I can think of one point in my career where I would go to great lengths to avoid speaking face-to-face with an executive assistant who looked like a supermodel. She scared me, and I was more effective communicating with her in email or over the phone. I couldn’t even imagine going out to drinks with this woman. Just thinking about it felt like cheating on my wife.

But, of course, developing real relationships at work and outside the office is important. So what’s a beautiful woman to do?

There’s lots of practical advice out there: Dress conservatively, drink responsibly, leave the office door open when having a private meeting with a male superior. That all sounds like reasonable advice.

But the thing that helps me develop solid working relationships with women is, ironically, to get to know them personally. To learn about their interests, to share a few details about my family, to talk about my hobbies, to learn about theirs. It’s important that it goes beyond work, even just a little. I need information that will help my brain relate to an attractive woman, personally, as a human being, and not just as an airbrushed cover model.

The goal shouldn’t be to remove gender from our work relationships. That’s impossible. The goal is to add some humanity to them, some personal connection.

I wish I could apologize to the woman in the elevator and connect on a personal level, but she’d probably just assume I was hitting on her. Ugh.

By JV Chiu in Flying Kite on November 29, 2011

On a warm summer evening, around 6:30 PM, a group of 14 women and girls gathered in the loaned space of a dance studio in South Philadelphia. They had gathered to learn HTML and CSS coding, the first class in a four-lesson session. Most of the women had brought their own laptop computers so they could work along with the instructor, co-founder Susan Buck's, demonstrations. A few of the students recognized each other from past classes and struck up conversations while waiting for class to begin. This was the first official class for, "Wrangling HTML & CSS," hosted by the Philadelphia-based organization Web Start Women. "Please download the file shown," Buck told those waiting, "while we wait for everyone to get here." A projector was hooked up to Buck's own laptop and instructions were already up for class use.

"How did you get on the internet?" someone asked the woman next to her. Everyone seemed friendly, laid back. Not a male was in sight. "Web Start Women," Buck explains, "is meant to act as a platform and to create community." The group originated in Philadelphia, the brainchild of Susan Buck, a professional computer coder, and Nicole Noll, a social psychologist interested in the tech industry. For a small fee, classes are offered to self proclaimed 'girl geeks.' Web Start Women also hosts social events, called 'Startlucks,' which are free. Startlucks are social forums intended to energize participants into tackling their own tech projects.  Yet it is the classes that are key to Web Start Women's goal: to increase the number of women taking on the hard technical skills indispensable to the tech industry. "Most of the people who come," Buck explained, "think, 'I have an idea,' or they want to leave their current job and start something new." Rachael Meehan, the first student to arrive to the night's class, agreed that the classes help expand her professional skill set. Meehan is an administrative employee working at Glaxo Smith Kline. In her 30s, she wants to "branch out" and feels that knowing how to build a website can only help her professional future. She's far from alone. As the women introduced themselves at the start of the class, it became clear that the vast majority of students were attending out of choice. Two of the students had yet to reach junior year in high school. Two of the students were recently laid off and looking to add another line to their resume. Several women were there to gain the skills they needed for independent projects and freelance careers. Some already had programming skills but wanted to learn CSS. "The events have had a really diverse reach," Buck said later. "Some have been in computer science or information technology. Some people have never touched it." As Buck began the lesson, students often raised their hands to interject questions, to ask her to slow down, or to express confusion over why their screens were showing different than what was projected. No one batted an eye at the interruptions and Buck never turned a question down. Soon, the women had created their first webpage. "Hello world," a row of computer screens read.

Susan Buck

"We have to have girl power" Nerdettes. Girl geeks/Geekas. Perhaps once considered pejorative, these titles have been reclaimed tongue-in-cheek. Since April of 2011, several groups have emerged on the Philadelphia tech scene with the express goal of encouraging women and girls to participate in Philadelphia's tech industry. In February of this year, the Philadelphia chapter of Girl Geek Dinners, a networking group for female tech-enthusiasts, had its first informal meeting. In May, Web Start Women established itself and had its first meeting. Also in May 2011, GirlDevelopIt, which provides lessons to women/ "nerdettes" (and men) interested in coding, established its Philadelphia chapter and hosted its first coding class. Does this mean that Philadelphia is experiencing a sudden boom in female participation in its tech industry? "I think there's been a recent blossoming of groups interested in women and tech," Noll said, "because lots of people have already put a lot of time in over the years. There's been a steady effort (in Philadelphia)." Noll may have been thinking about TechGirlz, a group based out of Philadelphia that encourages young girls to consider jobs in the tech industry. TechGirlz has been in operation since 2010. The sudden proliferation of activity focused on women and tech may be due to the near simultaneous emergence of several new groups. Noll and Buck said that now that they are paying attention, female-focused tech events seem to be everywhere. At a recent happy hour hosted by Girl Geek Dinner, co-founders of the Philadelphia chapter Tristin Highwater and Nicole Kline noted the proliferation of groups encouraging women to participate in the tech community. "Lots of people are building friendships," Highwater said. Kline added, "Philadelphia has a strong girl tech community. Other groups like Pi Star and Girl Development IT have recently established. It's not a competitive environment. It's a supportive environment." Girl Geek Dinners may be the most inclusive of these new groups. The organization was first founded in London and the Philadelphia chapter welcomes girls of all backgrounds. "Ours is a more general Girl Geek Dinner," Kline said. "We welcome all kinds of geekiness, including baking enthusiasts and music geeks, but we keep our talks focused on tech. At the moment, we just want to be supportive of other women." Twenty-five women had showed up for the Girl Geek Dinner happy hour event. Their backgrounds were diverse. Some had ambitions to work in the tech industry, some already worked in the tech industry, and some were working on their own tech projects. Yet, all were there because they wanted to meet like-minded women. "I don't know other girls in tech," Christina Eater, a web-designer and first-time Girl Geek Dinners participant, explained. "Most of the people I work with are men. It seems that I have geeky friends or female friends and sometimes I feel like no one knows exactly what I'm talking about," she said. "This is refreshing," Joanna Simon said of the crowd. Simon had just launched a social media and marketing company, Skout Media, with Vanessa Braxton-Veloski and Tara Gordon (also in attendance). "The tech industry is so male-dominated. Girl Geeks are cool and it's nice to promote the visibility of girls in tech." She laughed. "We have to have girl power, right?" Why Girl Power? Why Philadelphia? Popular perception of a male-dominated tech industry is supported by national numbers. In the tech industry, 75 percent  of the labor force is said to be men. A gender analysis within the tech industry may reveal further disparity. "In design and tech," Buck said, "there's a good mix of gender. But not in coding. It's frustrating because of the candidates that come in, 5 percent are women while 95 percent are men." Buck admits that those numbers are based on her perceptions of the field but she attributes a clear gender gap to experiences in the classroom. Web Start Women aims to change provide a different learning environment. A gender gap in math and science is not new news. Historically, women were less likely to enter professions requiring math and science. According to a 2007 National Science Foundation report, male science and engineering tenured faculty outnumber their female counterparts at universities and four year colleges by more than 3 to 1. Many agree that a gender gap in math and science is due to environmental cues that discourage girls from math and science curricula or from pursuing careers in science and technology. Changing these cues, including in promoting the visibility of women in tech, is a critical component of what these groups aim to do. Philadelphia may be a unique test case. Recent numbers show that the gender breakdown in Philadelphia's IT industry are nearly equal (51.1% males, 48.9% females). While some women may perceive being in the minority in Philadelphia's tech industry, one cause may be the lack of visibility of women in tech. Kimberly Blessing, a computer science instructor at Bryn Mawr College who attended Girl Geek Dinner's happy hour said, "two to three years ago, I discovered that more women on the East Coast work in tech than anywhere else but it's a little known fact because of the way we look at ourselves." Philadelphia offers certain advantages. As Noll explained, the tech community in Philadelphia is special. "The tech industry in Philadelphia is much more scalable than San Francisco or New York.  It's important that women are part of that group and grow with everyone else." Philadelphia's tech community is relatively small in comparison to Washington, D.C. and New York City. In February of this year, Technically Philly noted that there are 12,510 IT jobs throughout Philadelphia -- one-tenth the number of IT jobs available in New York City in 2009.  Scalability has its advantages. Buck notes that, "(w)e're interested in creating community and that kind of boot-strapping, self-funded venture, is something the city is supportive of." Two women attending the Girl Geek Dinners event also noted the city tech community's inclusiveness.  Lauren Ancona works by day as the Manager of Marketing Technology for the city's opera company. By night, she can be found at Indie Hall where she started her own business, using skills she learned from Web Start Women. "Indy Hall is an incredibly supportive environment," she says. "People are always willing to help you." Blessing was standing nearby. She added, "the Philadelphia tech community is one big family. I've never felt unwelcome. It's a different way of socializing here compared to other cities. It's not cliquish." Blessing went on to note the increased numbers of girls in her classes in recent years. She paused and we surveyed the room together. "It's definitely changing," she said.

http://www.flyingkitemedia.com/features/philadelphiawomenintechnology1129.aspx

By Mallory Ortberg on December 27, 2011 in ecosalon news and culture

With beliefs like these floating around, we have to remind ourselves that it’s 2011.

It’s hard to believe that this many years after Stieg Larsson ended sexism it’s still possible for public figures to issue dismissive, crude, and derogatory statements about women, but it would appear not everyone has gotten to Girl With a Dragon Tattoo in their book club yet. Until that day comes, here are the worst, most insulting, and simply bizarre quotes about women we heard this year outside of a YouTube comment thread.

10. Trinidadian author V.S. Naipaul started the year out strong by claiming that “women writers are different, they are quite different. I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me…My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don’t mean this in any unkind way.” Sorry, ladies – he’s taken.

9. Referring the concern of some evangelical voters that Republican candidate/performance artist Michele Bachmann had usurped her husband’s biblically-mandated authority by running for president, Iowan pastor Brad Sherman had this to say: “She’s in a proper relationship with her husband spiritually. That’s a key point. And she’s asking people for permission to lead the country. That’s not usurping at all.” There’s no word yet on whether or not Michele has a signed permission slip or simply a verbal agreement from Mr. Bachmann, but that’s really a matter for the courts.

8. Tim Gunn on Hillary Clinton: “I think she’s confused about her gender – all these big, baggy, menswear tailored pantsuits…I have a great respect for her intellect and her tenacity and for what she does for our country in her governmental role. I just wish she could send a stronger message about American fashion.”

7. President Obama defended Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ decision to restrict sales of Plan B to girls under the age of 18 with this well-researched, grounded-in-scientific-evidence statement: “I will say this, as the father of two young daughters: I think it is important for us to make sure that, you know, we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine.” Glass-half-empty point of view, President Obama thinks that women can’t be trusted to make their own reproductive decisions (never mind that condoms are available without a prescription). Glass-half-full point of view – Barack Obama wants to be our dad!

6. An anonymous Egyptian general spoke to CNN about why female protestors arrested during anti-Mubarak demonstrations were strip-searched and forced to submit to virginity tests. “The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine. These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and [drugs]…We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place. None of them were.”

5. At a conference on atheism in Dublin earlier this year, skeptic writer Rebecca Watson registered discomfort at being propositioned by a stranger at 4 a.m. in an elevator after delivering her speech. Richard Dawkins’ response: “Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade…For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.” A thicker skin would probably help protect against genital discomfort, so the advice was doubly helpful.

4. “So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.” Dr. Lazar Springfield, in an op-ed piece for the American College of Surgeons referring to a study that suggested semen had a possible anti-depressive effect. This Valentine’s day, say it with semen.

3. “The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.” Scott Adams (you know, that guy who draws the cartoons about working in an office your HR manager has tacked up all over the door).

2. Fox News Vice President Joe Chillemi, on the merits of hiring a man versus a woman, says “Of course I’d pick the man. The woman would most likely get pregnant and leave.” I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t let even imminent childbirth tear me from his side.

1. Silvio Berlusconi, in response to allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct: “When asked if they would like to have sex with me, 30% of women said, ‘Yes’, while the other 70% replied, ‘What, again?’” Truly, he was the Prime Minister who got away.

By Nick Hopkins in The Guardian on November 29, 2011

Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones always chooses her words with care. It is a trait of hers, and one that became a hallmark in a career that has taken her to the highest levels of the diplomatic service, overseeing MI5 and MI6, and as a security minister in government.

Looking back on this time in the highest echelons of Whitehall, she can speak a little more bluntly than perhaps she used to about the hurdles she faced as a woman making her way in what was – and to a certain extent remains – a man's world.

"We were second-class citizens, really," she says. "There were quite a lot of things that women were considered unsuitable for."

Neville-Jones is referring specifically to her early days in the Foreign Office and the rules, both institutional and otherwise, that were designed to make life difficult for women seeking a career as a diplomat. She can laugh about them now, but at the time … "There was the bar on marriage. That lasted until the mid-1970s. The situation was that you had to resign if you got engaged, if you were a woman that is."

She recalls that official uniforms, or rather the lack of them, was another divisive issue.

"Women diplomats didn't have them. This was said to raise serious problems in certain countries with monarchies because it was thought that women couldn't possibly go to formal ceremonies without one. The men had them, though they were not often worn, but not the women.

"There was some talk about creating an official evening dress with oak leaves. That came to nothing, luckily. It was a sign of the times, part of a forgotten world. Some heads of ministry wouldn't even have women on their staff."

That era has passed, though Neville-Jones may be reliving some of these moments this week, when she appears as one of the main speakers at a conference starting tomorrow at the Royal United Services Institute thinktank in London.

The two-day event is the first of its kind to bring together women from across the world who have forged careers in defence and security; sharing the platform will be an admiral from the US Navy, a brigadier from the Israeli Defence Force, and the secretary general of the Spanish Intelligence Agency.

In all, more than 30 women will discuss the jobs they do, the difficulties they have had to overcome, and offer advice to others embarking on similar journeys. Neville-Jones may have come further than any of them during her 50-year career.

A grammar-school girl from Leeds, she read history at Oxford University before deciding to test the thickness of the glass ceiling within the civil service.

It was 1961, and it had been impenetrable. "There were two women in my year out of a class of 20, but in other years there were none at all. So we were in a minority, there were very few of us around."

For obvious reasons, it seems. The decade may have been swinging for some women, but the winds of change hadn't blown very far into Whitehall when Neville-Jones started. Was there sexism in the service at the time?

"I do think that, yes. I think that climbing the tree was harder. Women were examined and criticised for things that men were not criticised for. The women certainly believed that to make average progress, they had to be rather better than average.

"I think some women believed that they would not be able to overcome this. They underrated their potential, and if you do that, then the system will underrate you too."

Some decisions appear to grate even now. "I had been in Singapore for a period and wanted to know if I could learn Chinese. I got a very short note saying 'no'. I was convinced this was because I was a woman. I think they thought there was no point putting in that investment, particularly with languages. The attitude was, 'We are not going to train women who are going to leave.' And they would never think of putting a woman in the Middle East."

A thick skin has been one of the secrets of her longevity, and it is something she believes all women have to develop if they are to challenge the status quo.

"I am sure that there were [incidents of sexism]. But I am not one to dwell on difficulties or be thrown by slights. I can recall swallowing hard sometimes. One thing I do remember is the way some men would stand in front of you, and be talking to each other about you, as if you weren't there."

The Equal Opportunities Act in 1976, she says, "changed the game", and she believes she was fortunate with the jobs she was appointed to. She also excelled in them.

They included a senior post at the British embassy in Washington, and then a move to Brussels where she was Chef de Cabinet to the Budget Commissioner, Christopher Tugendhat.

This was obviously a nightmare of a job; it was during the period when Mrs Thatcher was handbagging other European leaders, thumping tables and demanding her money back. Neville-Jones was caught in the middle – for five long years. "That was quite hard to navigate," she says. "We were constantly under pressure."

Understatement may be her preferred way of describing events, but there are certain issues about which she is more robust. One is that she never used gender as a weapon to get her own way, nor did she turn alpha male to survive.

"I was certainly never conscious of 'playing the woman'. I would not have approved of that. It is not a winning tactic. I operated in the world as I found it, and it was a man's world."

That world increasingly included working with the armed forces, and then the intelligence services – she was chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee in 1993 and 1994.

Dame Stella Rimington was head of MI5 at the time, the first woman to head the security service, and the two got on well.

And she didn't find the generals as difficult as she might. "The thing about the military," she says, "is that they are always very courteous."

Neville-Jones has remained friends with Rimington, though they never had a chance to share their experiences properly back then.

She also knows Eliza Manningham-Buller, who became the second woman to run MI5. All three were pioneers in their own way, but Neville-Jones accepts that their success has, perhaps, masked the difficulties other women have had underneath them.

She believes the latest generation of women entering Whitehall are "pretty level pegging" with the men, but in the intermediate generation some women are struggling to push through. "It will happen. The process is under way but because of the nature of these things, it will not change overnight."

Women, she says, have to learn some of the tricks that have given men such an advantage. "We are not the greatest networkers, and particular networks begin at school. Women tend to break the network of friends they make, but it is a habit that men have learned. It is an approach to life that involves planning almost without thinking about it. And men sustain this. I came from a northern grammar school. I had a good education, but I didn't have a good network."

Careers where there are formal systems of assessment also help women, she believes. That is why, for all the difficulties she encountered, Neville-Jones says the public sector is now a better bet than the private sector for the ambitious.

"When I first left university, I thought about going into the private sector. But I discovered when I went to interview that I could only have a career in the back office, or doing HR. The attitude was, "My dear lady, you cannot possibly think about going on the board."

"I believe women profit from merit and performance assessments which exist in the public sector. But this culture is much less strong in the commercial world. I think there is a huge waste of talent in the private sector."

Inevitably, there have been sacrifices along the way. Neville-Jones doesn't speak with rancour or bitterness about any of her experiences, but there is, I sense, just a hint of regret when she talks about her private life.

She says she never made a conscious decision not to marry, it just happened that way. She admits there were circumstances in which she would have liked to have someone alongside her, if only to have helped out at the merry-go-round of drinks and dinner parties she hosted on her own.

"Some people say that I didn't make it easy on myself. There are prices one pays, but I was not going to give up something that I enjoyed doing. I suppose that official entertaining was harder without a partner to shoulder the burden. As a man, it would have been easier for me to get married. But I had demanding jobs. I undoubtedly made it difficult for myself."

She adds: "And I hope I have never held back other women. I hope I have not been guilty of that because I have always tried to protect them. I was aware of their situations. I know some women did manage to pull off the very difficult trick of having a successful career and a family. It can be done."

Neville-Jones doesn't like to generalise, but she believes women have innate skills that make them good at the kind of intelligence jobs she has done well in. "I do think that women are good at detail. The average woman is better than the average man in this respect, and detail is important in security – it is primordial.

"You cannot do it properly unless you are capable of recognising everything that is relevant. You have to get right down in there. "Women are better at getting in among the weeds, maybe partly because women accept that weeds are part of life. Men try to get away from them."

And her advice to women starting out? Learn to deal with the mess, work hard, and come up with the occasional big idea. "Do what you want to do. Follow your instincts. Even if you have difficulties, don't accept second best. Ever."

'I denied my female traits': life in the US Navy in the 1970s

Vice Admiral Carol Pottenger hesitates before telling a story about her rise through the US Navy. In 1977, she was one of the first women selected for sea duty. This involved joining the crew of the USS Yosemite for deployment in the Mediterranean. She had prepared for the reaction of the other sailors, but not of their families, some of whom took a dim view of the women's presence on board.

That unhappiness became all too clear when the crew returned to port months later to see banners: "Welcome Home Yosemite – Men."

Pottenger has been pushing back the boundaries ever since, and is now one of the US Navy's senior officers, who has served in Iraq and won the distinguished service medal.

Pottenger says the US Navy has come a long way since the days when women were only assigned to ships "that were welded to port or in decay".

She admits that during most of her early career, she "was careful to ... deny my female traits". "This was the way to prosper in a male-dominated organisation. You don't want to stand out, you don't want to be someone who brings tension to the mission. You want to adapt, to fit in smoothly."

Now, she feels she can be more herself. "Being a woman is part of who you are. I might have denied that early on, but now I have the confidence not to care whether this is an issue."

Pottenger now mentors other women. "It is really important for women to look up and see other women being successful. When I was in that position, all I wanted to do was blend in and be one of the guys."

"Service should be colour-blind, and gender-blind," she says.

Wives are increasingly outearning their husbands, but their new financial muscle is causing havoc in the home.

By Ralph Gardner Jr. in New York Magazine on November 17, 2003

After dropping off their children at their East Side private school one morning, Betsy and another mother shared a secret. “It was one of those things where you circle around each other,” Betsy remembers. “I assumed they had a pretty conventional marriage.”

By that she means, as with most of the other families at the school, the other woman’s husband was a chest-beating breadwinner who set off for Wall Street each morning in his Town Car to bring home the six- or seven-figure bacon. Or, alternatively, both husband and wife slaved away at medium-to-high-powered jobs, neglecting their children, to pay for the August rental in the Hamptons and their $25,000-per-kid tuition bills.

The embarrassing truth the other mother confided to Betsy was that she was her family’s sole support. She worked in advertising while her spouse, an “artist”—predominantly in his own imagination, since he had not a single gallery show nor even a commission to show for his talent—puttered around the house. “She kind of indicated they were living on her money, and I was surprised,” Betsy says.

And perhaps a little relieved. Betsy thought she was the only mother in their grade supporting a stay-at-home husband—especially one who refused to polish the surfaces. “It’s like one of those things,” she says, “where you realize you’re married to people who drink.”

Well into feminism’s second generation, there are finally a significant number of women reaching parity with the men in their fields—not to mention surpassing them—and winning the salary, bonuses, and perks that signify their arrival. (The Town Cars idling in front of their children’s schools these days at morning drop-off are almost as likely to be Mom’s as Dad’s.) In 2001, for example, wives earned more than their spouses in almost a third of married households where the wife worked. Yet this proud professional achievement often seems to have unhappy consequences at home.

From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Alias to Kill Bill, the culture has for some time been awash in fantasies of powerful women. Fetching as these female superheroes may be—and however potent at the box office and in the Nielsens—are these really the same chicks the average, or even above-average, guy wants to curl up next to in bed in real life? Perhaps not. As the wives grow more powerful and confident, their husbands often seem to diminish in direct proportion to their success.

Indeed, there’s little evidence to show that as women acquire financial muscle, relations between the sexes have evolved successfully to accommodate the new balance of power. Neither the newly liberated alpha women nor their shell-shocked beta spouses seem comfortable with the role reversal.

For women, the shift in economic power gives them new choices, not least among them the ability to reappraise their partner. And husbands, for their part, may find to their chagrin that being financially dependent isn’t exactly a turn-on. According to psychologists (and divorce lawyers) who see couples struggling with such changes, many relationships follow the same pattern. First, the wife starts to lose respect for her husband, then he begins to feel emasculated, and then sex dwindles to a full stop.

Anna, a public-relations executive, saw her relationship with her Web-designer husband collapse as she became more and more successful and he floundered. In the last year of their marriage, she earned $270,000 while he brought in $16,000.

“He never spent money that wasn’t his in an extravagant way,” she says while taking therapeutic sips of a Sea Breeze at Tribeca Grill on a recent evening. “But by not helping, he was freeloading.”

She felt unable to confront him. “We were really dysfunctional,” she admits. “We acted as if we were a two-income family. He was in denial, and I was sort of protecting him. He’d pay for groceries. He was running up credit-card debt to make it appear he had more money.”

While they may have been able to avoid the truth while she was off at work during the day, it came back to haunt them at night. “Sexuality is based on respect and admiration and desire,” says Anna. “If you’ve lost respect for somebody, it’s very hard to have it work. And our relationship initially had been very sexual, at the expense of other things.

“Sex was not a problem for him,” she goes on. “It was a problem for me. When someone seems like a child, it’s not that attractive. In the end, it felt like I had three children.”

“The minute it becomes parental, it becomes asexual,” agrees Betsy. “A friend of mine who works and makes money and whose husband doesn’t told me one day that he was taking $100-an-hour tennis lessons,” she recalls. “She said to him, ‘You are not in the $100-an-hour category.’ She had to spell it out for him. It was totally parental.”

There are, of course, happy exceptions: couples evolved enough to feel perfectly comfortable acknowledging that the wife is more driven to be the breadwinner, so it makes sense for everyone if he’s giving junior his first feeding while she’s off covering the presidential campaign.

“Kurt has never been someone who defines himself by his job,” says Jami Floyd, a correspondent with ABC’s 20/20, of her stay-at-home husband, Kurt Flehinger. “Nor does he care much what people think about him. He’s not a Master of the Universe type. I am much more testosteronic. I’m much more driven, much more traditionally male.”

But in many cases the role reversal is the work of market forces as much as force of personality; the husband’s career is expected to take precedence, and initially it does, but it’s overtaken by his wife’s. Neither of them saw it coming—nor do they welcome it.

“Maybe the guy’s industry changed and he lost his job,” says Ken Neumann, a psychologist and divorce mediator who has seen his share of depressed dads lately. “Or the wife steps into the right place—something she couldn’t fully have anticipated. The question is, how secure does the guy feel? When the woman earns more, we can’t assume in our culture it’s a nonevent. We’re a long way off from a world where it doesn’t affect the relationship.”

“I think women earning more than men can be devastating to relationships unless the guy is doing something the wife regards as having cachet, such as academia,” says Betsy, even though she still speaks fondly of her ex-husband and sends him the occasional check.

It’s not as if these women ever expected their husbands to support them completely—at least a lot of them didn’t. It’s just that it never occurred to them that they might be the ones doing all the heavy lifting. And as hip and open-minded as they like to think they are, they were, after all, raised on the same fairy tale as the rest of us—the one where Prince Charming comes to the rescue of Sleeping Beauty.

“I didn’t really give a damn where the money came from,” says Betsy, an attorney. “That’s not the gift I expected a husband to give me. I wanted a romantic figure.” That was until she found him taking money from her wallet and leaving an IOU. “I just didn’t want to be giving him spending money.”

At first, her spouse, a composer, satisfied that fantasy. “It was about his artistic vision,” she says. To this day, despite the fact that he’s refused to make any of the compromises necessary to get ahead—and blamed Betsy for contributing to his failure by being too controlling—she continues to believe in his talent. “I think Tom’s smarter than I am,” she says. “He really gets excited by ideas.”

‘It’s not a matter of how good you are,” says Anna, still trying to fathom why she’s successful and her former husband is not. “It’s a matter of how you get work in this town. It’s about connections and attitude and how you market yourself, and it’s about confidence.”

Among the reasons these women were originally attracted to their husbands—sex appeal, sense of humor, charisma—earning power may not have been high on the list. But that could be because it was a given. Unfortunately, the other qualities start to fade over time if the husband isn’t adding something tangible to the equation.

“It was the artist thing I thought I was getting,” says Anna, who met her husband when she hired him to design her company’s Website. “Sexy was part of it. There was a huge physical thing. I’m not the kind of person to be attracted to a lawyer—maybe next time I will be.

“If he’d really been a starving artist, I’d have been fine with that,” she adds. “But he wasn’t a starving artist in the end. He wasn’t driven to do his art.”

The problem with living in a meritocratic culture such as New York’s—and to the misfortune of those who consider moving the family car on alternate-side-of-the-street mornings a prolific day’s work—is that there are objective ways to measure success, even in fields as traditionally unprofitable as literature and the arts. There are bylines and advances and gallery shows and paid commissions.

“The successful artist makes money,” Neumann observes. “You’re better off being an academic. People see through the artist shit.

“An academic person might get a ‘waiver,’ ” he adds. “Or a serious, published writer. A primary-school teacher wouldn’t get a waiver. We may think, What a great thing we have men teaching! However, we’re not giving waivers yet for men teaching primary school.”

When it works, it tends to be when the wife’s respect for her husband remains intact. “Women need to admire their partner,” says psychologist Harriette Podhoretz. “They need to find something that doesn’t interfere with their passionate glue, that keeps the marriage charged up and alive.”

One such relationship where the adhesive seems to be holding, against the considerable social stresses of Upper East Side living, involves Laura, an investment banker for a top Wall Street firm. Her husband, Jeff, is an actor, though one you haven’t heard of. He has yet to land a role in anything, even a toothpaste ad.

But the relationship works well, they report, because Laura’s admiration for Jeff, whom she met when they both worked in finance for a giant West Coast media conglomerate, seems complete. “Jeff was never laid off,” his wife explains. “There’s not that feeling that my husband is a loser. We made a conscious decision—he’s got the creative talent—to play to each other’s strengths.

“I know my husband could do my job with his eyes closed,” she says. “He’s really good at math. He’s twice as smart as I am.”

Sometimes it’s the Alpha woman who needs reassurance that she’s still feminine.

“When you’re a big money earner and your husband isn’t, it makes you question how feminine you are,” says Barbara Corcoran, the ubiquitous real-estate broker. “I felt I was less feminine than if I was a supporting wife, or a second fiddle, or ‘Mrs. Higgins.’ The struggle was as much mine as Bill’s.”

Corcoran harks back to her husband Bill Higgins’s glory days. Bill’s career included a stint as an FBI agent—“He had more arrests than anybody ever,” his wife boasts—and a top post in the Naval Reserve during the first Persian Gulf war. His last job was running his family’s New Jersey real-estate company, which he sold in 1997. A teaching fellowship in the Bronx followed, but now he answers to “spouse,” the title on his business card.

“My husband had a very strong identity and was successful in his life,” Corcoran explains. “Thank God for that. There’s no way I can control him. I wouldn’t stay married to him if I felt I could. I can readily take my business personality into the home. But he forces me to be a partner rather than the boss. It’s what keeps our marriage healthy. He won’t give me an inch of satisfaction. He won’t acknowledge my superiority.”

But it took them a long time and a lot of counseling to reach that place.

The first year her income exceeded her husband’s—he was still in the real-estate business at that point—Barbara pretended it was an accounting error. “I explained it away as one good year,” she remembers. “On some level, I was happy it was one good year. I explained away the second good year, too. By the time the third year hit and I was earning five times more than him, it was obvious we had to adjust to the reality.”

Making things worse was the fact that Bill sold his company during that period and found himself adrift. “My mistake was I didn’t have a plan,” he says. “I’d sleep in. Resentment starts to build.” “The real issue became social events,” Corcoran says. “How do you introduce your husband and answer the New York question, ‘What do you do?’ I remember the day he said, ‘I’m retired,’ and I realized we were okay with it.”

Corcoran also reports feeling less pressure among her fellow alpha earners after attending Fortune’s annual “Most Powerful Women in Business Summit,” where she said house husbands were the rule. “I don’t think any of them are married to really successful men,” she says of her peers. “All these men wrap themselves around their wives’ schedules much like a trophy wife would.”

Emily, a senior sales executive, admits she enjoys the control she has over Mark, a struggling photographer. But sex has become an issue.

“I can’t give up the position of empress,” she says. “Everything is in my name. When I’ve gotten really bratty, I’ve said, ‘Well fine, leave,’ knowing he can’t leave. I’ve never had such security in a relationship. There’s no risk of flight. But it’s only giving me a short-term gain. Ultimately, it’s emasculating for him.

“Mark,” she adds, “was the best sex I ever had.” But that was long ago. “We fight instead,” she says. “We’re embroiled in some weird combat. It’s like Lysistrata. I tell him, ‘Your business is going to have to get better faster.’ Until then, I’m withholding.”

When Emily comes home, she doesn’t always want to be the boss. But she says her husband no longer has the authority to take over. “I want somebody to take that power role away from me,” she explains. “Ultimately, it gets down to pretty basic stuff. It’s hard to be the power broker every day and then be the femme fatale. I’m not going to pay the bills—I feel like his mother—and then come home and suck his dick.”

Among the more tantalizing facts scientists at the Center for Research on Families at the University of Washington have uncovered is that the more money the wife makes, the more housework she does in proportion to her husband, and it’s not nearly as equitable as when both partners are working. “There’s an association with housework being woman’s work,” says the center’s associate director, Julie Brines. “They’re not going to compound the difficulty by the husband doing more housework.”

Or making them cook dinner. Betsy recalls the first and last time her husband did. “Tom made dinner one night,” she says. “I came to the table and there was spaghetti, in the pot, right on the table. No salad, no bread, no napkin folded at your place. Why didn’t he know about the rest of it? He does know about the rest of it. He’s been eating all his life!”

Once Anna sought a divorce—“You know what my lawyer called him? A parasite”—she, like many other women in her position, was in for a shock. Divorce lawyer Harriet Newman Cohen explains, “The law is supposed to be gender-blind. Therefore, when a marriage is breaking up at the insistence of either the breadwinning wife or the supported husband, the lawyer has to apprise the client that when a big-earner wife comes in, the court bends over backward to be gender-neutral, and it is possible the bum is going to be rewarded for sitting on his hands. You do a flip-flop and make believe she is a guy.”

More often than not, this doesn’t involve alimony. “A lot of men, I’ve noticed, feel embarrassed to ask for alimony,” says Ken Neumann, since they already know their partner’s reaction. “The wife’s idea is, ‘You’re not going to ask for alimony, are you? It’s bad enough I was making more than you.’ ”

The wife’s sense of being the victim of a scam can intensify when children are involved. Even though some freeloaders are excellent fathers, responsibilities for arranging playdates, setting the table for dinner, and soothing children with nightmares inevitably falls to the mother, whether she has a PowerPoint presentation to deliver at eight the next morning or not. “Once you add a child into the equation, the likelihood of resentment is much higher,” observes Barbara Corcoran.

“I wouldn’t mind as much if he’d really been ‘Mommy’ and I’d really been ‘Daddy,’ ” says Anna, referring to the fact that she was forced to cut her husband a check for $100,000 when they divorced—half the amount of the appreciation over the course of their marriage of a house she owned. “But he wasn’t really Mommy. We had full-time babysitting.”

What she remembers with special bitterness was having to return to work two weeks after the arrival of their second child because she was freelancing. As the family’s sole earner, she couldn’t afford to take maternity leave.

Yet even in the best of marriages, where the husbands stay home while the wives go off to work, the women seem unable to avoid doubt over their decision.

“Every day, I ask myself, ‘Will I regret it when I’m lying in my grave?’ ” Jami Floyd admits. The question is exacerbated in the Disneyland atmosphere of Manhattan, where legions of wealthy mothers seem to have carved out quasi-idyllic existences (at least it looks that way from the outside) centered on the rhythms of child-rearing, wraparound babysitting, and frequent lunches and dinners with friends.

“In our circle, there are so many mothers who either work part-time or don’t work,” says Jeff. “When Laura was on maternity leave, I could see her eyes opening.

“She can be a little envious of the relationship I have with our son,” he adds. “There were times he’d say, ‘I don’t want Mommy, I want Daddy to tuck me in.’ It was difficult for her. She felt she was not being a good mother.

“We’ve always made a rule: If we argue, we don’t do it in front of the kids. We had more arguments this year where we have not been able to stop raising our voices in front of them. There were times when I said, ‘I really hope we can make it through this year.’ ”

“It’s hard,” Laura acknowledges from her cab on the way to the airport for a Sunday-afternoon flight to Dallas. “I’d like to spend more time with the kids, but I’m in this crazy, nutso, high-paid job and I’d better go for it. There’s no job security anymore. It’s a struggle with two kids—you can’t take your foot off the gas.”

The combat resulted in an epiphany of sorts for Jeff. “It was a great eye-opener for me to think, Damn! Why doesn’t my wife come home and tell me she appreciates the way I’m unpacking the moving boxes? I probably don’t praise her in a way that she needs it—to say, ‘I really appreciate what you’re doing for the family.’ ”

After four years, the stay-at-home experience is starting to wear thin for Kurt Flehinger, too. “He’s a highly intellectual person, and at the park, people want to talk about poop consistency and the shape of the pacifier,” Jami explains. “I think he’s ready to move on from that.”

She also balks each time someone tells her how lucky she is to be married to “a saint.” “While I applaud Kurt’s forward-thinking and out-of-the-box approach to his life, no one ever comes up to a woman who has two children and says, ‘You’re a saint.’ She’s just a mom doing what’s expected of her.”

“It can be mind-numbing,” admits Kurt, who’s thinking of going back to work, much to his wife’s regret. “I love my children, but in terms of stimulating my intellect, it doesn’t do it for me.”

Ken Neumann recently conducted a divorce mediation in which one of the sticking points involved the stay-at-home husband’s wish to have his wealthy real-estate-professional wife continue to rent him an office even though he doesn’t work. “He left his house in the morning with his kid pretending to go to work,” Neumann recalls.“The wife said, ‘You don’t need the office,’ and he said, ‘I really want our daughter to see me as going to work.’ So she said, ‘Why don’t you just get a job like everybody else?’ Children do pick up when the father is a freeloader.”

Anna says that after she and her spouse split and sold their apartment, her 8-year-old asked her why her new apartment was larger and more luxurious than her dad’s. “I said, ‘Because I pay the rent here,’ ” she recalls. “And she said, ‘You do work harder than Daddy, don’t you?’ Kids are not stupid. I work way harder than Daddy.”

Betsy isn’t sure how being the child of a marriage where the mother is all-powerful will affect her college-age son. “I’m curious myself how it will play out,” she says. “He says to me, ‘I’m 70 percent my father, and the 30 percent that’s you is working real hard.’ ”

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December 2011 Issue of Men's Health

By Judith Warner in Time Ideas on October 28, 2011

“What About the Men?” was the title of a Congressional briefing last week timed to commemorate National Work and Family Month. “What about them?” you may be tempted to snarl.

When Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, first went out on the road to talk about her organization’s research into men’s work-family conflict, she received many such snappish responses – and worse. Work-life experts laughed at her. Men are privileged, they said. They don’t have the right to complain. In New Orleans, when she spoke about generational differences and gender role change, she was swarmed by “angry men,” she said in the Capitol last week. “They were defensive. They were saying, ‘We played by the rules and now you’re telling us it’s not good enough.’”

That was in 2008, before the full force of the Great Recession had hit. This year, when Galinsky went out on the road again to talk about the results of a new study on male work-life conflict, published this summer as “The New Male Mystique,” she got a very different response. Some men were in tears. “Two men became emotional because they had wives at home. They felt they didn’t have permission to feel stressed about work and home, but they worried: were they good enough fathers?” she said. ”‘This is what I think about each and every day,’” she recalled another man telling her. “‘I didn’t realize that anyone else did,’” he said. “He thought he was alone,” Galinsky told me. “He asked himself, ‘Am I being the father I want to be? Am I being the employer I want to be?’ Other men were less emotional, but they were agreeing.”

That men are experiencing work-family conflict isn’t new. Indeed, it’s been some time now that they – and younger men in particular – have been complaining of feeling the squeeze in even greater numbers of women. What appears to be new is that they’re starting to talk about it – just a bit. Which means that maybe they’re starting to realize that they’re not unique or alone in feeling they’re failing at the impossible task of “doing it all.”

In other words, men just might be poised to have a collective “click” moment. “My experience,” said Galinsky, “is that, when they have permission to speak, they have a lot to say and it’s very profound and real for them.” Failure, instability, uncertainty, the self-doubt that comes from a spending a lifetime playing one game only to find, mid-way through, that the rules have suddenly changed, seem to have shaken up the old categories of self, work and meaning for many men.

Is this a bad thing? Another nail in the coffin of the Beached White Male? I’d rather see it as a moment ripe with possibility. “A new beginning,” as Brad Harrington, executive director of the Center for Work and Family at Boston College put it at the briefing. After all, what men are starting to say sounds an awful lot like the conversational stirrings that paved the way for the modern women’s movement. The vague sort of dissatisfaction. The sense that life wasn’t adding up to be all that it was supposed to be. Even the anger from those who’d lived their lives according to the old rules then found that a new generation – or even their own spouses – didn’t value their choices, accomplishments, and sacrifices.

For some years now, sociologists have been tracking the patterns of what they call convergence in men and women’s lives. Mostly, when we think of this, we tend to focus on how they live, what they do, spend their time, whether they do or do not empty the dishwasher or care for their children. But what about how they feel? Now that this final frontier is being breached, I wonder if we aren’t poised to see more meaningful change in men’s — and women’s and families’ — lives than ever before. That is: if we own the change and act upon it with courage, not fear.

By Gerald Traufetter in Spiegel Online on February 16, 2011

Behind her back, they call Eli Saetersmoen a "golden skirt." But the Norwegian executive is actually dressed in tight gray wool pants and black patent leather boots as she emerges briskly from the door of the Oslo airport.

She smiles and looks satisfied, even though she has every reason to be exhausted.

Saetersmoen, 46, has just come from Bergen in western Norway, where she attended a meeting of the board of directors of the Bergen Group. "We discussed the business figures for the fourth quarter," she says.

For several hours, she asked questions and searched for potential trouble spots in the balance sheet of the company, which specializes in the maritime industry. "You have to be analytical," she explains, "even if it means stepping on people's toes."

New Approaches to an Old Problem

It's shortly before 8 p.m., but her workday isn't over yet. In the train from the airport to downtown Oslo, she'll work on the presentation she is scheduled to give at a conference the next day. "They want to know how a successful board of directors needs to operate."

Saetersmoen says this as nonchalantly as possible, and yet she knows all too well that only a few years ago, hardly anyone would have come up with the idea of asking a woman for advice on such matters.

But something has changed in Norway. "The country," she says, "has taken a big step forward." She is referring to a legal quota introduced in 2006, which requires that women must make up at least 40 percent of the boards of publicly traded companies. Companies that fail to comply face a draconian penalty: They can be dissolved.

Since then, economists and feminists worldwide have viewed the Scandinavian country as a testing ground for new methods to solve an old problem: the lack of women in positions of power.

Exporting Feminism

Saetersmoen is a poster child of successful gender policy. She has already been a member of 12 boards, including that of the state-owned energy company Statoil. She is currently the chairwoman of the board of directors of the risk management company Scandpower, and she has been the managing director of the Norwegian branch of the Falck Nutec conglomerate for the last year and a half.

Proponents of Norway's gender equality act, the only law of its kind worldwide, tout Saetersmoen as a role model for a new generation of self-confident women in senior management. But critics claim that her many positions of responsibility are evidence of the excesses of state-sponsored feminism. They refer to women who are members of the boards of multiple companies as "gullskjørtene," or "golden skirts."

The Norwegians proudly point out that their pioneering law is being imitated in various countries, including the Netherlands, France and Spain. The Norwegian media has also reported extensively on the gender equality debate in Germany. Will Norway become an exporter of women's rights, in addition to oil and salmon?

The country already ranks at the top of the United Nations gender equality index. Norway introduced full women's suffrage as long ago as 1913. For close to two decades now, the Norwegian government has paid women 80 percent of their salaries for an entire year during maternity leave. The percentage of women in the work place is also higher than average.

Nevertheless, the Norwegian statistics resemble those of other countries in many respects. The majority of women work in the public sector, as teachers, nurses or kindergarten teachers. Many women return to part-time jobs after paid maternity leave, which is an important reason why they earn less than men. And the so-called glass ceiling that prevents women from rising to the top levels of corporations also exists in the land of fjords.

Not Driven to Ruin

Now, about five years after the introduction of the quota, Norwegian academics are taking stock for the first time. "Neither the worst fears of opponents nor the greatest hopes of proponents have come true," says Marit Hoel, director of the Oslo-based Center for Corporate Diversity. She has just presented her findings to German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger in Berlin.

Hoel's conclusions suggest that the restructuring of corporate boards has not driven companies to chaos or ruin. The balance sheets of successful companies suffered a little in the short term but recovered quickly, says Hoel. "By contrast, companies that weren't doing so well tended to benefit from having women on their boards."

Norwegian companies clearly succeeded in finding sufficient numbers of competent women to serve on their boards. "The people who were replaced were mainly older board members," says Hoel, adding that their positions were taken by women with substantially better education levels. According to surveys of corporate CEOs, women have hardly changed the working style on boards. "Only a few report that the culture of discussion has become more open," says the social scientist.

A different study made headlines last fall when it revealed that more than 100 companies had transformed themselves from publicly held corporations (ASAs) to privately held companies (ASs), precisely at the time when the threat of punishment under the new law took effect. (The law only covers state-owned and publicly listed firms.) "We were all quite surprised," says Hoel.

Upon closer examination, however, it became clear that the key reason for the change in most of the cases was a different law that took effect at the same time, and which no longer required financial firms to be registered as publicly held corporations.

Dominated by Men

The "golden skirts" phenomenon, on the other hand, is real. "Before the quota was introduced, no one had more than four board positions. Now the maximum number is eight to nine," says Cathrine Seierstad, an economist who teaches at Queen Mary University in London.

Seierstad believes, however, that the accumulation of positions is a temporary phenomenon. "At first, it was simply difficult to find suitable female candidates quickly." The problem, says Seierstad, will resolve itself once more women pursue careers in business.

Unlike the boards of directors, however, management remains dominated by men for now. "The key issue will be whether the female board members are self-confident enough and instruct management to deliberately keep an eye out for suitable women," says Seierstad.

'Many Women Simply Lack the Necessary Courage'

Many experts in Norway already feel that the gender quota is not the decisive weapon against male dominance. Take Kristin Skogen Lund, for example. The 44-year-old is the president of the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise (NHO), a senior executive with the telephone company Telenor and one of the most influential women in the Norwegian business world.

As a believer in the free market, she was fundamentally opposed to the new law. But she and her organization, which has a membership of over 20,000 companies, have made peace with the quota. "In the end, hardly any companies were adversely affected by it," she says. Unfortunately, she adds, it hasn't done much good, either.

One reason, says Lund, can be found in families. "The responsibilities in the household and in raising children still aren't fairly distributed," she says. There are two consequences, according to Lund: "Women fall behind in their careers and do not manage to make the big step up the ladder, and for business owners it is still advantageous to give preference to men over women as top managers."

For this reason, she was able to convince the NHO membership to support another state-sponsored measure, one which runs counter to the corporate culture of conservative executives: The NHO is officially demanding that mothers and fathers should each take on one-third of the parental leave period. The two parents would be permitted to divide up the remaining time as they see fit.

'He Encouraged Me to Believe that I Have What It Takes'

Her own career is the best argument in favor of such a policy, says Lund, especially since she has two sets of twins. Her husband, a self-employed lawyer, took a few months of paternity leave for the children. "The most important thing, however, was that he encouraged me to believe that I have what it takes to be a senior executive," says the NHO president.

Lund feels that executives should also do more to motivate women to pursue careers in management. "Many women simply lack the necessary courage and self-confidence," she says. According to Lund, these women wouldn't even think of being capable of assuming responsibility in the company. "And these are all things that can't be regulated with a quota," Lund concludes.

But how can the business world be adapted to meet the needs of family life, and vice versa? In one respect at least, Lund admits, she has a clear advantage as a Norwegian woman.

There is one basic rule that still applies in her country: no meetings after 4 p.m. That's because most employees, men and women, are already on their way to the kindergarten by then. "Those kinds of working hours are only possible when you have productive work, flat hierarchies and the corresponding fast decision-making structures," she says.

"In Frankfurt or London," the manager adds, "I would certainly not be home before nine in a job like mine."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

BoardAgender.org