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Womenomics: Write Your Own Rules for Success
By Claire Shipman and Katty Kay
Harper Collins, June 2009

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Once upon a time, television reporters Claire Shipman and Katty Kay were both zooming ahead on the media fast track. Then they became moms and, like many women, worried whether they were shortchanging their kids and their pioneering careers. They had plenty of ambition. But they wanted to be present in their children's lives, too. So they plotted their work-life strategies in secret: turning down problematic promotions, coaching themselves to handle supervisor outbursts or disappointment.

Then something funny happened. They'd say "no" to an assignment and the earth would not crash into the sun. They'd negotiate for reduced hours, and their bosses would say "fine." It seemed that they were valuable enough to their employers to get what they wanted. As they looked around as journalists (Shipman for Good Morning America, Kay with the BBC News), they found that they weren't the only talented women experiencing this phenomenon. Their new book, Womenomics: Write Your Own Rules for Success documents exactly how women like them are at the vanguard of a "brewing workplace revolution" where "major companies are starting to adapt to our lifestyle demands."

First, for all the talk about opting out, "most educated women don't want to quit work altogether, even if they could," Shipman and Kay write. "We want to use our brains and be productive professionally." On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence that many women don't want to adopt the more traditional 9-5 male model of work either. While these two desires may have been in conflict in the past, these days, "women top every company's most wanted list." Companies with a high proportion of women executives tend to post better results, and as women earn a higher proportion of college and professional degrees, any company that wants to tap women's talents will have to change how it does business. Shipman and Kay call this new power "Womenomics," and their book documents what it means on a corporate level, and for individual women who wish to negotiate new working arrangements.

Womenomics has landed on the best-seller list for a reason. Unlike many tomes in the "mommy war" or "work-life balance" genre, it is unremittingly upbeat. Guilt, the authors note, is a useless emotion. They tell the stories of male managers who've seen the light, and they're very careful not to indulge in any bashing of men's sub-par performance on the domestic front, or political calls for subsidized child care. "We know the solution isn't longer hours at day care or hiring more babysitters or asking our husbands to stay home," they write. "Because we're the ones who want more time - for our children, our parents, our communities, ourselves." And so they talk women through the psychological work of asking for what they want, and making it work - just as they have done.

Shipman and Kay certainly have inspiring stories. Where they flounder, however, is in their assumption that their experiences are particularly universal. The vast majority of companies profiled in Womenomics are large (Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc), and the executives profiled do the kind of nebulous white-collar work that probably can be done more efficiently or at different hours without any effect on the bottom line. But this corporate world of cubicles, reports, and managers who aren't actually responsible for meeting a payroll is a fairly thin slice of the workforce. Many millions of Americans work for small businesses where it may not be economically feasible to negotiate a reduced schedule and keep your family's benefits, a possibility Shipman and Kay never really address. The sample sacrifices they mention in a chapter on "Redefining Success" include foreign travel and children's violin lessons - ignoring the fact that in this recession, a growing proportion of working women are actually paying their families' mortgages. Some work - teaching, policing - also really needs to be done at a certain time in a certain way. I found myself chuckling, picturing the authors' nannies using the logic Shipman and Kay invoke: I'll be leaving at 4PM from now on, but I expect you to pay me the same amount because I'll be working smarter, not harder.

In their zeal to validate their own life choices, Shipman and Kay also don't stop to question whether the widespread perception of overwork or a time crunch has any basis in reality. "We have had enough of the fifty- or sixty-hour workweeks," they write, but there's a fair amount of evidence that most people claiming to work 60 hours per week are lying. The average workweek in the US is now down to 33 hours. There are 168 hours in a week. Even if you do work 60 hours, and sleep 8 hours per night (56 hours), that leaves 52 hours for other things. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey, the average stay-at-home mom of pre-school aged kids spends less than 23 hours per week on childcare, which includes less than 6 hours playing with them and about 50 minutes reading to them. Just because women tell pollsters that they don't think there are enough hours in the week to work full-time and invest adequately in their personal lives doesn't mean it's true.

Still, Shipman and Kay make a useful contribution to the growing literature about the changing workforce by pointing out that widespread assumptions about "mommy tracking" don't necessarily apply anymore. "There are accountants who get home at 3PM every day but who stay firmly on the company fast track," they write, and part-time law partners who get big cases. Major corporations "finally understand we're not looking for a better company cafeteria, a free dinner after working late, or a fancy gym." What women - and men - generally want is control and freedom. If the widespread entry of women into the workforce has caused that, then it's hard to do anything but cheer.