Speaking Salary

In her recent New York Times article, Girl Power at School, but Not at the Office, Hannah Seligson discusses the "new arsenal of skills" that women need to succeed in the workforce. She suggests that letting go of perfectionist tendancies and creating professional networks are two critical skills to success. Additionally, to keep up with the old-boy's club, women need to start "speaking salary."

Gen Y and the Blame Game

The New York Times’ Lisa Belkin—she who graced us with the oversimplifying phrase “opt-out”—is a good writer, and she frequently touches on subjects that I find personally compelling. This is largely because she’s one of the few mainstream media writers writing about the working life struggles that I face or will face, and which I spend a lot of time thinking about. (Why she has been cosigned to the Styles Section, rather than, say, the Business Section, and what message that sends about the valuation of issues relating to working women and men vis-à-vis their personal lives, is worth a whole other post.) Still, while I appreciate that she is talking about various issues that I think are extremely important, I always feel as though her articles leave me feeling unhappy or unsatisfied because she has left out important points or only presented a narrow side of the story.

Today’s column, Prepping Children for the 9 to 5, is no exception. In it, she talks about the effect that parents can have on their children’s attitudes and expectations about work. For the record: this is a great topic, and one that is probably deserving of much more study and discussion. I’m sure that if you scratched the surface a little, most people will reveal that their thoughts, expectations, and aspirations about work are heavily influenced by their parents’ experiences, and their interpretation of their parents’ experiences. I, for example, realized very early how frustrating it was for my mother to give up her career to stay home with me and my two brothers, even though she made this choice willingly and wanted, at some level, to be a SAHM.

But where Belkin lost me is when the article took a turn and indicted an entire generation—my generation, Generation Y—for being self-absorbed, unwilling to work hard, and easily dissuaded. The anecdotes used are particularly telling: one is about consultant running into a friend who quit his job because it interfered with his social life and he had to work weekends. The other is a quote from another consultant, who said “This generation has been spoon-fed self-esteem cereal for the past 22 years. They’ve been told it’s all about them—what they want, what they are passionate about, what they find fulfilling.” And while Belkin does allow that the “sharply different attitude toward work” of Gen Y is “probably their parents’ doing,” there is not much else to counter this image of Gen Y-ers as fragile, self-centered creatures who will quit or give up at the slightest sign of difficulty.

[More after the jump]

Is opting back in really a trend?

What would we do without the New York Times’s Lisa Belkin?  I know that I’ve acknowledged that every now and then, the Times gets it right, but I’m returning to my default position, which can be summed up like this: oh, come on.

No Pressure - Just Be Perfect

I was having a great weekend (given that Ms. JD had its national launch at Yale Law School on Saturday) when I opened up my Sunday Times. Great, I thought: just as was noted in Ms. JD’s presentation at the start of Legally Female, The New York Times has gone six months without some earth-shattering revelation about women, so another pronouncement was due.