Turns out female cadets at West Point were being secretly filmed when they were naked in the shower.

Some sick men want to leer at young women but when women get to a certain age, not so much.

Take Madonna. For some reason people are surprised that at age 54 she’s still wearing sexy outfits.

This from a male reporter in the Style section of the Wall Street Journal today:

“The look can come off as desperate, embarrassing, a little sad. Madonna may be doing what she feels she must to remain relevant and compete with the likes of Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Britney Spears and Rihanna.”

No, Madonna is doing what she’s always done. Dressing sexy and pushing the envelope. Why people think she should suddenly get her muumuu on is perplexing.

I never heard anyone question why Liberace was still wearing his ridiculously flamboyant outfits well into his sixties.

Clearly women are seen as objects by many men in a male-dominated society — whether they’re leering at young women naked or judging older women naked. Maybe you think this is a minor annoyance, but I argue this type of attitude undermines all women in many aspects of their lives.

If we’re objects then whatever we do will be judged because objects are meant to be objectified not respected.

Don’t be surprised when you read stories like this article in Health24.com titled “Work by female scientists gets judged more harshly.”

This from the piece:

Researchers at Ohio State University found that scientific studies written by men were viewed as higher quality than identical studies listing female authors. This gender bias, they noted, is significant and will have important implications over the course of a woman’s career in science.

“There’s still a stereotype in our society that science is a more appropriate career for men than it is for women,” said study lead author Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, associate professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

Yes gals, science isn’t appropriate for women scientists, and fishnets aren’t appropriate for women entertainers.

Only when jobs involved making ethical compromises did women report less interest in the jobs than men.

That’s one finding from a series of recently released studies titled: “Who Is Willing to Sacrifice Ethical Values for Money and Social Status? Gender Differences in Reactions to Ethical Compromises.”

More from the studies conducted by Jessica Kennedy of Wharton and Laura Kray of Berkeley:

* Study 1, when reading decisions that compromised ethical values for social status and monetary gains, women reported feeling more moral outrage and perceived less business sense in the decisions than men.

* In Study 2, we established a causal relationship between aversion to ethical compromises and disinterest in business careers by manipulating the presence of ethical compromises in job descriptions. As hypothesized, an interaction between gender and presence of ethical compromises emerged.

The research points to the very good possibility that women may have more integrity than men.

What does this mean? (more…)

A while back I tweeted this to my nearly 16,000 followers on Twitter and I got an avalanche of responses and retweets:

#1 issue facing women in the workforce today: How we topple the 1950s-company-man sustained model, where women have no say.

Why did it get so much attention? Because women are sick and tired of trying to fit their lives into an out-dated workplace model that no longer fits for today’s realities. Women are juggling children and careers, caring for aging family members, and all the while penalized for it with less pay and little to no representation the nation’s leadership ranks, in everything from Corporate America to the halls of Congress.

That’s why I’m calling for a working-woman revolution. And I don’t mean only waging war against the male-dominated management model, but battling our own fears and baggage when it comes to fighting for what we want and need. Working gals are finally poised to launch an offensive because we are at “the tipping point” of a female revolution. Women now make up the majority of the workforce in America, and many working gals are starting to think the out-dated career template based on the 1950s “Company Man” needs an overhaul.

For too long women have had to accept token work-life changes bestowed by male-dominated workplaces. And moms have become too obsessed with battling the mommy wars, working moms against stay-at-home moms. But now women are realizing they need the keys to the executive bathrooms, not just the lactations rooms; and all that mommy infighting has meant women took their eyes off the prize – a workplace, a world, with women leaders who truly understand family responsibilities.

Family and love trumps egos!

Christine Lagarde, the first woman to head the powerful International Monetary Fund, gets the realities of life.

She understands the global economy and what needs to be done, but her most moving words come when she discusses the egos she confronts in her job, mainly the egos of men who control money and power around the globe.

“When my father passed away and then when later on I gave birth, those are sort of ground-breaking experiences that put everything else into perspective. You know, when I sit in meetings and things are very tense and people take things extremely seriously and they invest a lot of their ego, I sometimes think to myself, ‘Come on, you know, there’s life and there’s death and there is love.’ And all of that ego business is nonsense compared to that.”

Only women can carry this torch.

We need to focus on what we women can bring to the table, and what we need to do, and what many working women pioneers are already doing, to make the nation’s offices, factories, congressional halls, etc., work for us. It’s not shoehorning your way into the existing anti-family, anti-woman workplace structure. It’s about how to go about changing the workplace to better fit the lives of today’s woman.

It’s about the two co-engineers at Ford who share a job so they can spend more time raising their kids, and even so, they’re credited with being the brains behind the success of the auto giant’s Explorer SUV. It’s about the lawyer who left a high-powered law firm for academia because she wanted flexibility for her family, and is now the head of a renowned women’s leadership institute. It’s about the applications engineer at Intel who went part time when her kids were young, and is now a high level manager at the computer chip giant. It’s about a Congresswoman from Illinois who missed votes on the House because she wanted to attend her daughter’s concert and is serving her third term.

A growing number of working women are defining success on their own terms, and while they’re career trajectory seems atypical and they’ve made job decisions based on their family — something which would have doomed most corporate climbers in the past — it works for them.

Almost every story about working mothers lately has focused on how they just haven’t been able to accomplish as much as their male counterparts in the workplace. I’ve just started reading “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, and she’s right, we desperately need more women leaders and we as women have to stop being afraid to stand up and speak up.

But I don’t think the lives women live today are that dire, especially when women go after what they want, just like Sandberg has done. Women who know what they want and go after it don’t feel like they’re getting the shaft.

That’s the biggest lesson women need to learn. Being bossy and demanding what you want isn’t bad gals, as Sandberg points out. My own daughter Circe was given a book by a good female friend of mine when she was around 2 years old titled “Little Miss Bossy.” Hopefully Circe will some day be proud of that!

Indeed, there are many proud and happy working women out there. A survey by Kenexa Research Institute looked at whether women thought their futures looked promising, and 62 percent said: “I can meet my career goals and still devote sufficient attention to my family/personal life.” That compares to 59 percent among men who feel that way.

For women, said Brenda Kowske, a former research manager and at Kenexa, “having a fulfilled or satisfied personal life is an aspect of achieving a promising future at an organization for women in the U.S.”

Women are in a keen position to reshape the linear ladder upward. For the first time, women represent 51 percent of the total U.S. workforce; and the number of working moms as sole family breadwinners hit a record high last year. Many women are realizing they just can’t shoe horn their family lives into an arcane work model.

But one big question remains: “Are we being pioneers, or simply giving in?” asked Pamela Stone, associate professor of sociology at Hunter College and author of “Opting Out: Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home.”

If women are just changing their idea of success because they’ve given up fighting a society that deprives working moms of opportunities to advance, then it’s not a good thing, said Stone. But, if working moms are essentially transforming the work dynamic to meet their needs, then it’s a great thing.

The growing power of working moms may alter the landscape once and for all. “When you get a critical mass of women in any professions you do get changes,” said William Doherty, professor 
and director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Program in the Department of Family Social Science, College of Education and Human Development, at the University of Minnesota.

“Women are reshaping the workforce, and I think a cultural change is underway,” he continued, pointed to the healthcare industry. “You have 50 percent or more of the young doctors today are women and as a result there is much more part time work available. You don’t have the expectation of 90-hour weeks anymore.”

Rewriting the rules, however, has not been easy because so much of meshing child rearing and career rearing is unknown.

“We have no clue what it’s going to be like when we become a working mother,” stressed Susan Wenner Jackson, one of the founders of the website, Working Moms Against Guilt, because few women do any preplanning. “It completely blows your mind and you have to put the pieces back together.”

We need to build a template for how many working women were able to put the pieces back together and climb their definition of the ladder of success. It would be like a “Fast Food Nation” for working women everywhere. No more being force-fed the metaphorical career chicken McNuggets by “Da Corporate Man,” who says women need to be penalized for being mothers, daughters, and wives. We are going to rethink how we live and breath at work and in our careers. It’s time for women to demand a new, emotionally healthier workplace and a road to the top that takes into account a more organic approach to success and a balanced life.

Here’s the plan I propose we think about: (more…)

Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, to few to mention.

You’ve got to love Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”

Frank Sinatra, My Way (Live at the Royal… by waytoblue

The guy didn’t regret a lot, and why should he? You live your life, make mistakes along the way, but in the end, you’ve got to leave regrets behind, right?

Not if you’re a woman!

Regrets, we have a lot.

It seems we can’t do anything right, and at every turn, especially lately, we’re told we’re either screwing up because we’re letting our desire for a good family life stand in the way of our career success, or we’re delusional to think we can have it all.

No matter what line we decide to accept, in the end, we could end up regretting it all.

One former top female executive shared her regrets in an opinion piece in the New York Times this past weekend.

“Sometimes young women tell me they admire what I’ve done. As they see it, I worked hard for 20 years and can now spend the next 20 focused on other things. But that is not balance. I do not wish that for anyone,” wrote Erin Callan, the former CFO of now defunct Lehman Brothers.

Women are so consumed with regretting their work-life choices, or making other women regret their work-life choices, that they spend little time on regretting other important things, like making stupid business decisions while you were an executive at a company that ended up crashing and burning, and contributing to the biggest economic meltdown this country has ever seen. (Callan didn’t mention that in her regret oped, as the astute reporter Matthew Cooper pointed out in his must-read National Journal piece today.)

On the flip side, my mother recently told me she had regrets that she focused so much on children and family and very little on herself and her career.

Women can’t get a break in this country, or anywhere else in the world, my mother said when I asked her about why women on both sides of the spectrum have regrets.

Women, she said, “have a lot of responsibilities and we’re responsible people. Men don’t think about all these things, they just think about their koukou.” (This means penis if you couldn’t figure that out.)

OK, she added, not all men are like that, but women just put the weight of the world on their shoulders. Men tend not to, she stressed.

So I suppose in the end we can’t win this work-life game. If we accept that we may have fewer regrets and just say “I did it my way.”

The CEO of Bank of America is a man.

The CEO of Yahoo is a woman.

That’s the only reason I can find for why the media went crazy this week over Yahoo’s top dog Marissa Mayer deciding to cut telecommuting for her employees; but barely covered Bank of America’s CEO Brian T. Moynihan doing something similar.

Yes, you didn’t hear that in the mass media this week. There actually was another company — Bank of America — that did this and made it public, and that company has way more employees than Yahoo, about 300,000, compared to Yahoo’s 11,000 or so.

I wrote about it for Families and Work Institute late last year, and I was sort of surprised back then that few reporters, beyond local media in North Carolina where the mega bank is based, gave it any ink.

This from the Winston-Salem Journal in December:

Bank of America is preparing to add more restrictions to its popular work-from-home program, meaning more employees across the company will be sent back to the office more often.

The program, known as “My Work,” had grown significantly since it was introduced in 2005 and was widely touted as a cost-saver. It also has proved popular with employees who say it saves on commuting costs and helps them balance work and family.

In addition to scaling back telecommuting, Bank of America also announced they were shuttering their child care centers. Where was all the outrage hurled at Bank of America’s CEO?

I know, people expect a female leader to get the whole work-life thing. But maybe it’s time we accepted that women won’t lead a certain way just because they’re women.

That’s probably what’s held women back from leadership.

During the State of the Union address last night, President Obama made some key statements that could impact many employees, and future employees, across the country.

* “I propose a Fix-It-First program to put people to work soon as possible on our most urgent repairs, like the 70,000 deficient bridges.”

* “Let’s declare no one who works full time should have to live in poverty and raise minimum wage to $9 an hour.”

* “I ask this Congress to declare women should earn a living equal to their efforts & pass Paycheck Fairness Act.”

* “Create H.S. classes focused on science, technology engineering and math, the skills today’s employer are looking for.”

* “Now is not the time to gut investments in science and innovation, we need to make those investments.”

* “I will direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions to reduce pollution and prepare for climate change” and speed to development of alternative energy such as wind and solar.

Jobs created as investments are made in the nation’s ailing infrastructure. Wages finally boosted so that workers who work full time aren’t among the ranks of the poor. Equal pay for women. Training for employees and kids in STEM careers so the United States can compete globally for jobs. And employment opportunities spurred by investments in alternative energies.

These proposals seem to all make sense, no? The question is, how much of these ambitious proposals will become a reality?

The Career Diva posts that got the most people reading in 2012 were all about the stupid things employers do.

Here are the top ten posts of the year:

Turns out many of you are upset about performance reviews, and you have good reason to be. The experts say such reviews are arbitrary and utterly useless.

And quite a few of you agreed some human resource departments can be clueless, especially when it comes to employee benefits such as family and medical leave.

Another workplace problem that gets under everyone’s skin is the rise in employers trying to get under your skin and find out how healthy, or unhealthy workers are.

A disturbing trend during 2012 was the growing number of employees holding multiple jobs.

It turns out if you’re a tough white woman or tough black man you can’t get a break.

What got job seekers angry this past year was the endless amount of interviews hiring managers think they need to decide on a candidate.

And women are still facing the perpetual problem of not supporting each other. Who cares how much Kelly Clarkson weighs? Quite a few of us, it turns out.

Employers are still asking job candidates how old they are, and they’re not always breaking the law when they do it.

My standing desk is still my back’s savoir, and a popular topic for many of you.

And finally, the Diva post that got the most readers reading was actually about a story I didn’t write. Lesson for 2013, don’t believe everything you read, especially work-at-home success stories.

Happy New Years everyone!! Looking forward to hearing from you all in the new year with your job/career questions. (careerdiva@verizon.net)

Finally someone said it!

At a time when the unemployment rate for returning veterans has been showing signs of hope, a growing number of companies are breaking the laws that protect the employment of returning veterans.

Vets, including National Guard and Reserve soldiers, have faced numerous deployments and calls to duty during the years of war over the past decade, and many have returned to find they no longer had jobs they expected to return to. Some contend they have faced discrimination on their return, or retaliation for their military service.

Such actions are illegal under the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act, or USERRA, which is supposed to help protect veterans when they return to the workforce.

But some employers either don’t care about the law or are ignorant of it.

“The number of new USERRA cases handled by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Veteran Employment and Training Service (DOL VETS) and the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) rose 10 percent from 1,438 to 1,576,” according to Department of Labor data provided by employment law firm Tully Rinckey, one of the top firms in the country focused on veteran workplace rights. (more…)

I love that Waylon Jennings song, “Mama Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys.”

Here’s one part of the song I found poignant today:

Them that don’t know him won’t like him and them that do,
Sometimes won’t know how to take him.

Unfortunately, cowboys aren’t the only ones with this problem. It’s also the case for female scientists. No one knows how to take them either.

A Yale study released Monday found there are a whole lot of people in science who just won’t give women a break when it comes to pay and career opportunities. They just don’t get or respect gals who pursue science as a profession.

The researchers at Yale asked “127 scientists to review a job application of identically qualified male and female students and found that the faculty members – both men and women – consistently scored a male candidate higher on a number of criteria such as competency and were more likely to hire the male.” (more…)