A little less conversation, a little more action, please

October 30, 2009 | Benefits, Books, Corporate Voices for Working Families, Economics, Ethics, Leslie Bennetts, MSM, Maria Shriver, Media, PR, Politics, Working Mother

Maria Shriver declares the United States “a woman’s nation” in The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything. Why? Because women now make up half the workforce. That, she says, “changes everything.”

Does Maria Shriver live in the same nation as the rest of us?

The same nation …

… that dropped from 27th to 31st place on the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report.

… where boys and men who “weren’t raised to respect girls” gang rape a 15-year-old girl on school grounds after a homecoming dance.

… where The New York Times glorifies on its front page the life of a robed and slippered senior citizen who amassed great wealth and notoriety literally on the backs of thousands of women.

… where people actually debate whether an adult who rapes a child should be brought to justice.

It’s not clear to me what The Shriver Report’s point is, except it doesn’t seem to be a call to action. It does, however, declare the battle of the sexes over. It’s all rather retro to dredge up a “battle” that saw Billie Jean King defeat Bobby Riggs in a tennis match, which was dubbed “The Battle of the Sexes.” That “battle” was essentially a publicity stunt.

Is that what this is? A publicity stunt? If so, to what end?

Established in 1961, the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women was a compromise by John F. Kennedy, who didn’t want to alienate his supporters who were against the Equal Rights Amendment. Maybe The Shriver Report is a compromise to its sponsors, advisers and the rest of corporate America, which is adamantly opposed to legislation that requires equality and/or benefits of any kind.

As pointed out before:

• At least 139 countries provide paid sick leave to employees, but this “woman’s nation” does not.
• Almost 100 countries require employers to provide paid annual leave, but this “woman’s nation” does not.
• Women in this “woman’s nation” get the same amount of paid maternity leave as women do in Lesotho, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland: zero.
• Men in this “woman’s nation” get the same amount of paid paternity leave: zero.
• It is legal in most states of this “woman’s nation” for employers to discriminate against mothers.
• While illegal, women in this “woman’s nation” deal with pregnancy discrimination every day.
• At least 84 countries have a maximum length workweek, but this “woman’s nation” — whose workweek length was second only to Japan’s hours among industrialized countries — does not.
• At least 34 countries guarantee discretionary leave from work — Greece and Switzerland offer paid leave specifically for children’s educational needs — but this “woman’s nation” does not.
• Women in this “woman’s nation” still earn less than men do, and mothers earn less than anyone.

Knowing all that, it’s confusing to see Shriver on national television talking about flex time as if that were the most pressing issue American women faced every day. Imagine my surprise when I read the report and saw things like equal pay mentioned.

Even so, what does it mean that American women comprise half the workforce? Nothing. Especially if women have no power (or very limited power) to implement change or write policy. It means nothing until women make up half of Congress, half the boards of directors and half the executive teams that run American businesses.

How do some of The Shriver Report sponsors and advisory-committee members measure up in terms of women in positions of power? Let’s see.

Sponsors

• Goldman Sachs has 13 members on its board of directors. Two are women. It has nine executive officers. One is a woman. It has 30 members on its management committee. Four are women.
• Hewlett-Packard has 11 members on its board of directors. One is a woman. It has 12 members on its executive team. Three are women.
• NBC Universal has 18 executive officers. Three are women.
• Pacific Gas and Electric Company has 11 members on its board of directors. Two are women. It has 41 executive officers. Nine are women.
• Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati has 12 members on its board of directors. One is a woman.
• Telemundo is owned by NBC Universal and MSN. MSN has 10 members on its board of directors. Two are women. It has 18 senior leaders. Two are women.
• TimeInc. has 12 executive officers. Six are women. However, Time Warner has 12 members on its board of directors. Two are women.
• VISA has 17 members on its board of directors. Three are women. It has 21 members on its management team. Three are women.

Advisory committee

• Christie Hefner is former president and CEO of Playboy Industries, which has seven members on its board of directors. All men. It has 10 executive officers. Three are women.
• Cisco has 13 members on its board of directors. Two are women. It has seven executive officers. One is a woman.

So what’s the point?

Last year, I reviewed Carolyn B. Maloney’s book, Rumors of our Progress have been Greatly Exaggerated: Why Women’s Lives Aren’t Getting any Easier and How We Can Make Real Progress for Ourselves and Our Daughters. While I took issue with a few things and especially how she publicized the book, I said it was a comprehensive look at women’s issues. For those who regularly keep up on these issues, however, not much of the information was new.

That’s how I feel about The Shriver Report, only worse. Yes, the Rockefeller Foundation/TIME survey of 3,400 people provided new data, as highlighted in a special report in TIME, The State of the American Woman, What Women Want Now by Nancy Gibbs, Oct. 26, 2009. But the rest of the essays feel so out of date and certainly undeserving of a breathless media blitz. Maybe it’s “news” to someone who hasn’t read a thing on the subject in 30 years. But for others it might feel as stale and out of place as the term “battle of the sexes.”

Oprah Winfrey says in the epilogue that the report’s intent is to start a conversation. Hello? When she and Shriver weren’t listening, the conversation had already begun.

…

Simon & Schuster published The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything edited by Heather Boushey and Ann O’Leary, with Karen Skelton, Ed Paisley, Leslie Miller, and Laura Nicholson Oct. 20, 2009. The eBook includes an introductory chapter by Maria Shriver. It lists for $20, but I got my copy for $16 with a $4 discount code.

…
 
Others weigh in

• It’s Not a Man’s World or a Woman’s Nation by Gloria Steinem, Oct. 15, 2009, The Women’s Media Center.
• Maria Shriver Says It’s a Woman’s Nation. Do You?by Joanne Bamberger, Oct. 20, 2009, on PunditMom.
• Media: It’s a Woman’s Nation While Dad’s on His Knees by Wendy Norris, Oct. 23, 2009, RH Reality Check.
• Maria Shriver Misses the Point by Mona Charen, Oct. 23, 2009, Jewish World Review.
• The Shriver Report - “A Woman’s Nation” Still Has Far to Go by Linda Lowen, Oct. 21, 2009, About.com.
• When We’re Equal, We’ll Be Happy by Judith Warner, Oct. 22, 2009, Domestic Disturbances blog, The New York Times.

Related posts

• Books: The Feminine Mistake by Leslie Bennetts
• Books: Rumors of our Progress have been Greatly Exaggerated by Carolyn B. Maloney
• Working Mother works for … you?
• What Working Mother magazine won’t tell you: Global gender gap
• What Working Mother magazine won’t tell you: Work/life balance not so important to companies
• What Working Mother magazine won’t tell you: Employers offer ’soft’ benefits

Dude, where’s my $700 billion?

December 17, 2008 | Banks, Economics, Ethics, Leslie Bennetts, Movies, No clothes!, Politics, SLBTM, U.S. government

Headline of the day. But, then, I’m partial to the whole Dude headline theme. Maybe I should see the movie, eh?

Bennetts: Men shirk chores because women let them

April 19, 2008 | Daddy bloggers, Family, Leslie Bennetts, Work

Hey, guys, fathers, dads, daddybloggers… Leslie Bennetts writes about you this time in “Chores for two: Why men don’t pitch in.”

Ask your typical American dad what size shoes his children wear, and you will likely draw a blank stare. He has no idea. Guess who makes sure the kids’ toes aren’t poking through their sneakers?

OK, Typical American Dads: Do you know what size shoes your children wear?

(If you do, you’re one up on me. I have to dig around in the closet and look at the shoes to find out what size my children wear.)

Here’s another question: Are you a lot like children?

And while I recognize that gender stereotypes are risky, in my experience husbands are a lot like children. They will get away with whatever they can get away with. When you put your foot down and make it clear that you won’t take no for an answer, somehow the kids’ rooms get cleaned, the groceries bought, the laundry folded. It really does work, I promise.

(My husband already has a mother.)

In case you haven’t seen me cite this quote enough already, here it is. Again.

So why aren’t women demanding something closer to parity? While many are resigned to seething in silence, the stakes are far higher than they seem to realize. When wives permit their husbands to shirk a fair share of the homemaking and parenting, not only do they themselves suffer, but chances are good that they’re also sentencing their children to a similar fate. When you have kids, everything you do teaches them how to live their own lives when they grow up. Unfortunately, all too many women are still teaching their children that “woman is the nigger of the world,” as John Lennon and Yoko Ono put it so memorably in a song lyric years ago. And what too many fathers teach their sons and daughters is that men can get away with dumping the scut work on their wives, and that women will grit their teeth and put up with it.

Leslie Bennetts stars in ‘Dude, Where’s My Car?’

April 18, 2008 | 2008 campaign, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Journalism, Katie Couric, Leslie Bennetts, Media, Politics, Stop the presses!

Leslie Bennetts should activate the Photon Accelerator Annihilation Beam on the Continuum Transfunctioner, save the universe and deliver Breast Enhancement Necklaces to the world.

Because, Dude. Reading the opinion piece she wrote for the New York Post, “Hillary & Katie, Two Women Pioneers … Driven off a Cliff,” is like waking up with a stoner’s hangover and a house full of pudding.

What’s her point? When she writes about everyday, ordinary American women for whom things go wrong, they’re stupid — willfully obtuse parasites who demonstrate for their children that woman is the n***** of the world.

When she writes about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Katie Couric, for whom things — according to Bennetts — have gone wrong, they’re victims. Well-paid, well-heeled victims of the patriarchy that calls for Couric to display her “denuded gams” for her $15 million annual paycheck.

Bennetts says male pundits gleefully deconstruct the “twin debacles” of Clinton and Couric’s “front-page flame-outs,” and she knows exactly who’s at fault.

But there’s plenty of blame to go around, much of which belongs to the male advisors whose catastrophic advice helped steer both women to defeat.

Dude. Because prominent women are, like, totally incapable of making their own decisions.

Bennetts says Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid is a failure.

Dude.

[Looking around nervously ... whispering ... ]

::::::Don’t tell Clinton!::::::

She will kick your ass. Or, as the Post would have you believe, she will shoot off your face, à la Susan Sarandon’s Louise Sawyer. Yeah, the Post bobble-headed (yeah, that’s a verb … shut up) Clinton and Katie Couric on a Thelma & Louise publicity photo.

But who knows? Maybe Clinton will step down tomorrow, and I’ll eat my words.

Psych! That’s never gonna happen.

Bennetts says Couric is “one of the toughest interviewers in television.”

At CBS, Couric was the $60 million talent, but the suits who run the network were the geniuses who decided that one of the toughest interviewers in television should be reduced to a nauseating female caricature whose main contribution to her new role was girlish fatuousness, despite the excruciatingly obvious fact that the primary job requirement was gravitas.

Dude. Did you see this interview with Clinton — the one where she asked, “Someone told me your nickname in school was Miss Frigidaire. Is that true?” Yeah. Whew! Tough as nails.

Bennetts says Couric was girly and leggy at the behest of the CBS guys writing her paycheck.

Dude. Because she was never, ever girly or leggy before joining CBS.

Bennetts talks about Manolo Blahnik shoes, an essential element of the Victim Uniform of American Female Failure.

Dude. Does a celebrity writer get a pair of Manolo Blahniks in the mail every time she mentions them?

When the ousted Dan Rather complained that his former broadcast had been “dumbed down and tarted up,” he wasn’t wrong, but nobody ever instructed him to insert cutesy comments about his kids between devastating news segments on the Iraq War, let alone to flash his shapely legs and a titillating glimpse of thigh for the cameras. America remains blessedly unfamiliar with the sight of Rather’s hairy pins — one shudders to think what they’d look like in Manolo Blahniks – but Couric’s denuded gams were accorded such prominence that the male honchos masterminding her show seemed to believe that sexy legs in stilettoes were all that viewers cared about.

Dude. Because Dan Rather’s opinion still counts. And Rush Limbaugh’s. And Nora Ephron’s.

Bennetts says Clinton and Couric are “two of America’s most prominent women.”

Dude. I guess that’s all there is. The rest? Posers. Not prominent at all. You know … like these.

• Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-N.C.
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
• U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
• Karen Elliott House
• Karen Hughes
• Wilma Pearl Mankiller
• Indra Nooyi
• Michelle Obama — (here’s a feature by Bennetts)
• Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice and current Chancellor of the College of William and Mary Sandra Day O’Connor
• U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. (Ooh. She wears Manolo Blahniks!)
• U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. (She wears Manolo Blahniks too!)
• Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine
• Cynthia Tucker
• Jody Williams

Dude. Victims. Or … maybe they have better male advisers, eh?

And if blaming the patriarchy doesn’t work, Bennetts pulls out the “who’s the worst victim” card.

Lest anyone forget the proper role of women, there were helpful reminders from morons like the heckler shouting “Iron my shirts!” during a Clinton campaign appearance. No white males have yet been recorded yelling “Shine my shoes!” at an Obama event, but of course racism is offensive, whereas we’re supposed to laugh off even the most virulent sexism.

Dude. Because that’s how to eradicate sexism — by saying it’s worse than the racism a black presidential candidate (and an entire population of Americans) deals with every day. Because, you know, sexism can’t stand as an issue on its own. It has to climb on the back of racism to be seen and heard.

With friends like these, famous women scarcely need enemies. But there are more than enough of both to get the job done. And so the glass ceiling cracks a couple more well-coiffed heads, as effortlessly as if they were eggs.

Dude. With “journalists” like Bennetts, putting “prominent” women like Clinton and Couric in the “victim” sandbox, who needs a reason to get out of bed up in the morning? Quick. Someone get me a cosmopolitan and some pills. It’s women’s own fault. Because, as Bennetts said in her book, American women today have the most choices of women at any time in the history of the world. According to this article? Here are those choices.

1) Be stupid.
2) Be a victim.

So, Dude. Click your ruby-red high heels together and make a choice. If you pick the wrong one? Blame your male adviser.

*Click click.*