Someone tell me why Amazon was out of the Deluxe Charlie Sheen mask on Friday?

Something happens to us when we graduate from school. We lose our understanding of what’s appropriate in certain settings.

Take Halloween. My 4th-grader son decided to dress as Brody, the cursing cop from Jaws, because he loves the movies so much. Well, when he realized there was going to be a Halloween parade at school he quickly changed his plan. It was OK to be Brody when he was going around the neighborhood, but being Brody around his school chums and the girls he likes (but doesn’t admit to) was another matter.

“Only old people will know who Brody is,” he proclaimed when he came home from school last week with a note about the school parade.

OK, I said, “what do you want to be instead?”

“Boba Fett,” he said. You know, the character from Star Wars.

Seemed easy enough. I’m big on going to thrift stores every year to get costumes for the whole family, and usually it works out great. Well, my son was not keen on this because cobbling together a Boba Fett costume from old clothing seemed crazy to him. “What about the mask?” he asked. I looked at the character online and decided I could make him a mask out of cardboard.

He did something he rarely does in response to my idea, he cried. (more…)

I know women have energy and strength to fight real sexism in this world. How do I know this? If you say a sexist word about women; or suggest a douche will make women more confident; or create an exploitive TV series about Playboy Bunnies; gals come out fighting like Visigoths.

Case in point:

The editor of a well-respected IT journal, IEEE Spectrum, felt that it was necessary to send out an email apology to thousands of readers over a headline on a story.

The article was about an easy to use computer circuit board called Arduino, and the headline of a tech alert that went out about the story said: “With the Arduino, Now Even Your Mom Can Program.”

Well, I guess people, probably women, got riled up and the editors at IEEE Spectrum got a cyber earful. This was the email the Editor sent out this morning to calm the storm: (more…)

My intern Christina and I have been pondering lately whether women will ever get a break when it comes to their appearance.

An endless stream of articles on why women have to wear makeup, or look a certain way, got us both fuming. So I asked Christina to write her first post for CareerDiva about the topic.

By Christina Pingaro

Women may find themselves jobless if they don’t spice up their appearance—at least that’s what some would have you believe.

Over the past two weeks there has been an onslaught of news articles related specifically to women’s attire, makeup, hair and emotions in the workplace. Why this sudden media influx of concern for how women look and feel at work? (more…)

Women think mentors are important when it comes to their career advancement but many don’t have one.

That according to a LinkedIn survey released today. The study found that nearly one in five women have never had a mentor, even tough 82 percent say they believe having a mentor is a career boon. And Baby Boomers are dropping the mentor ball more often than Gen Y.

Many women polled said they couldn’t find an appropriate mentor. But when women were asked why they don’t mentor women they said, “no one ever asked.”

“Half of getting a mentor is asking,” said Betsy Myers, founding director for the Center of Women & Business at Bentley University, during her talk at the Pennsylvania Women’s Conference today.

It may be a dumb career move, for both men and women, not to find a mentor, especially if you’re trying to climb the corporate ladder.

A well-placed, successful, encouraging mentor can be your champion if you want to get noticed by the higher-ups but don’t have the stomach to let everyone know how great you are. And a mentor can also help you navigate the ins and outs of what is still a good-ol’-boys network in the upper echelon of the business world, which includes less than 20 percent women in executive officer positions or corporate board seats.

Sharon Allen, the former chair of Deloitte’s board, once told me: “I can’t stress enough how important mentoring is to achieving success in one’s career.” She credited the mentors she’s had in her career with helping her enter the small club of high-ranking women executives.

Here are some details from the LinkedIn study: (more…)

I’ve attended and have been a speaker at quite a few women’s conferences across the country, and I’m pondering today why women need such events.

Right now, I’m sitting in grand Hall A of the Pennsylvania Convention Center ready to hear the first keynote speaker of the Eighth Annual Pennsylvania Conference for Women.

The line up this morning:

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter
Pennsylvania Governor’s First Lady Susan Corbett
Helene Gayle, president and CEO, Care USA
Irene Chang Britt, chief strategy officer, Campbell Soup
Gretchen Rubin, author, “The Happiness Project”
Martha Beck, a life coach and columnist for The Oprah Magazine

I’ll be live blogging throughout the day, sharing some of what I hear.

I’d love to know your thoughts, and also, if there’s someone at the conference you want me to ask of question of, or listen to speak, let me know. Here’s a link to the conference.

Corbett is talking about Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer who led a failed voyage. “Shackleton is remembered as a great leader,” she said, because through hardships, he brought the 28 men under his command home.

“There is risk involved in making changes, or trying something new. If you take risks there is a chance you’ll encounter failure.” She said she suspects it’s that fear of failure that’s the hardest for women to overcome.

Is she right? Are women more fearful of failure, more so than men? (more…)

Isn’t it ironic that there are millions of people desperate to get health insurance coverage, yet many workers who have coverage don’t seem to care enough about it?

I got some surprising numbers this week about open enrollment season. You know, the time you’re supposed to go over the health insurance options your employer offers and decide what’s right for you.

Many of you don’t even know the season is upon us or when your company’s open enrollment begins. That’s according to a new survey by eHealthInsurance and Kelton Research.

The study found that:

* 45 percent of those surveyed do NOT KNOW when their company’s open enrollment period takes place.
* Over half (53 percent) said they will simply stick with the plan they currently have, going on auto-pilot at a time when they should be exploring options.
* Less than 47 percent know what they actually contribute from their salary to their premiums.
* One quarter (25%) of those with employer-based coverage report that the longest period of time they’ve ever spent reviewing their options during open enrollment was less than thirty minutes.

This is disturbing because this year employees are going to get an unhappy surprise when they finally decide to pay attention to health insurance coverage: what’s covered and what it costs. (more…)

I was taking a train back from New York yesterday after finishing the Avon Breast Cancer walk (thanks everyone for your contributions) and I met a savvy young woman who made me think a bit differently about job searching.

There’s so much job-hunt advice out there today that we forget about how luck plays a pivotal role in the process. That’s not going to make many of you feel great. It’s easier to think that if I do everything right I’ll end up with the gig I want. Alas, sometimes the stars have to align just right before you get your big break.

That’s just what happened to 24 year old Vivian N. Duru. (more…)

You would think a Google employee would know how to use Google+, the search engine giant’s social networking site and its answer to Facebook.

Alas, this week a Google engineer named Steve Yegge posted a manifesto ranting about everything that’s wrong with Google on Google+ for all the world to see.

The rant is now gone from his Google+ page but thanks to the never-ceasing Internet, a host of publications have posted it yet again for all the world to see. Here’s a particularly bad part where he dogs Google’s head honchos:

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo).

We all don’t get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call.

He is now claiming he didn’t mean to post it for public view but thought he was posting it internally.

I posted a long opinionated rant tonight about how I think Google could be doing a much better job of thinking from the ground up in terms of services rather than products. Sadly, it was intended to be an internal post, visible to everybody at Google, but not externally. But as it was midnight and I am not what you might call an experienced Google+ user, by the time I figured out how to actually post something I had somehow switched accounts.

So, should this guy, who toils into the wee hours of the night for his employer, get fired? (more…)

My son got an interesting fortune cookie message the other day.

“If you want to get to the top get off your bottom.”

He and his sister laughed out loud. I thought they went right past the meaning of the sage Chinese cookie communiqué right to the potty humor — your bottom, but it turns out my nine-year old saw beyond the wisdom offered on the surface.

I asked him what it meant and he said: “If you want to get to the top you have to go there. You can’t be scared.”

Getting off your bottom, which means doing the work you need to do in order to reach a goal, is also about overcoming fear. I’m always struck by how hard people work when it comes to things they know, but often times getting to the top requires us to get outside of our comfort zone.

If you want a promotion, you need to know people can smell fear. (more…)

Those of you who have read this blog over the years, might be familiar with a constant commentator and part time sage, HikingStick.

Well, HikingStick is actually Andrew James Riemer and he lost his job last month because the company decided to outsource the IT department where he worked.

I was devastated when I heard the news, but HikingStick was a rock.

Here’s the email he sent after he joined the ranks of the jobless titled: “Well, I got the axe…”: (more…)