On Thursday I was in Orlando, speaking to a gathering of female senior executives of Accenture, the management and consulting firm, and hearing their amazing stories about the many different ways they have found to juggle high-powered careers and families. There was, for example, a much higher percentage than the national average of women married to stay-at-home dads in the group. And one executive had brought her one-month old baby -- her third -- with her to the conference.
Thursday was also the fourth annual Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. This posed a bit of a problem for me, since 1) I was in Orlando and 2) I work at home. "Guess what, girls -- Mom's taking you into the den!" doesn't exactly score with teenage girls -- especially since they bounce in and out of my office as often as they like. It goes without saying that I feel incredibly lucky to be able to work at home and expose my children to my work on a regular basis -- not just one day a year.
The next day, I was reminded how lucky I really am -- and of the kinds of difficulties far too many women still face in the workplace -- when I read this jaw-dropping story about a woman in Fresno, California who was spanked at work for speaking out of turn and being late. We may have come a long way baby, but we've sure got a long way to go!
This was made crystal clear on Tuesday, which was Equal Pay Day, marking how far into this year the average woman must work to earn as much as an average man earned by the end of last year. That's right, ladies, that extra X chromosome cost you an additional 115 days playing catch up to the guy in the cubicle next to you.
Given all that, this seems like a perfect week to offer up a few excerpts from the chapter in my new book dealing with fearlessness in work.
----
Work has been a central fact of my life, just as it is for almost all women, including the 58 percent who are currently in the U.S. labor force. Today, more than 70 percent of mothers work outside the home. I may never have worked in an office or been part of a corporate structure, but when I started looking at all the issues and fears facing women at work, I discovered that they were no different from the fundamental issues I've faced on my own career path. This was a light bulb moment for me: our work-related fears have little to do with whether we work in a forty-five-story office building or in our own homes. But they're intense and they're real, and I've seen them mirrored in the working lives of hundreds of women.
For most of us, work is a fundamental part of how we express ourselves in the world. It provides both identity and purpose. And thanks to the activism of generations of women (and men) in the last century, women have broken through into many traditionally male fields.
That's all going in the right direction, but women are still not even close to parity, especially in pay. The compensation-package-half-empty view looks like this: According to Catalyst, a nonprofit women's research group, women still account for just under 15 percent of Fortune 500 board members. And for the past ten years, the rate has been increasing only 0.5 percent a year. This means we won't hit the 50 percent mark until 2076 -- a nice tri-centennial present for the country, but still, should it take 300 years?
* * *
Another fear I've found that I share with most working women is born from a tendency to take criticism personally. In my work this fear manifests in getting editorial feedback. When I started writing in my twenties, it was as if every red mark and changed word was a personal rejection. Editorial sessions became battlegrounds: "I bandage your wounds and you keep cutting your veins," my editor on Maria Callas told me.
The most terrifying editing experience I've had was when my column was syndicated in the Los Angeles Times. Bob Berger was the editorial page editor. Our relationship immediately got off to a rocky start when I walked into his office for the first time to meet him and he greeted me with his signature gruff voice: "You're not at all what I thought you'd be like."
"What did you think I would be like?" I asked.
"I thought you would be like Melina Mercouri in 'Topkapi.'"
Given that even on my best days I'm no Melina Mercouri, my relationship with my new editor began badly. A man of little small talk, he would always answer the phone with a simple declarative "Bob," a greeting I found it hard to respond to since I was never able to comfortably bark back, "Arianna!" And, invariably, I always ended up feeling that whatever question I had was completely trivial compared to whatever big issues he seemed to be grappling with at the time. It got to the point where I would sometimes deliberately call when I knew he would be at lunch so that I wouldn't have to deal with all the childlike fears he evoked in me. Nine times out of ten, however, even this would fail because Bob, being Bob, would seldom spend more than ten minutes at lunch.
One day, we found ourselves talking about our kids, and somewhere between his talking about his son Luke and my talking about my daughter Isabella, I connected with him on a completely different level, and I stopped taking his critical feedback and his tone so personally. Bob, I discovered, had a crusty exterior, but with a marshmallow filling -- like a Mallomar. I even got to the point where I welcomed that it was given bluntly and with no sugar-coating: "Too many rubber duckies in the first paragraph." I would go back and rewrite and simplify. Bob's guiding maxim was one all writers, of whatever stripe, can never hear often enough: get to the point.
My relationship with Bob has taught me how to reframe the editing process, to no longer think of it as personal criticism, but rather what it really is: improvement. Now anyone who has edited me will tell you that I've grown to totally love the editing process. In fact, knowing that there will be someone to catch me when I go too far has helped me take more risks as a writer.
* * *
Fear creates insecurity. And insecurity creates another costly byproduct: workaholism. When we are afraid of failing, when we feel we constantly have to prove ourselves, we give priority to our jobs over everything and everyone else. This depletes our souls and our health and keeps us in a state of constant tension.
When workaholism sets in, we sacrifice the important on the altar of the urgent. Our lives lose their balance and we lose our centers. The problem often stems from a massive -- and wrong-headed -- redefinition of the urgent. It's no longer a matter of the fear of how we will deal with a blazing fire; instead it's being constantly afraid that a fire might actually start.
Part of this fear comes from a very sane place. As women, we know intuitively and from experience that we still don't "belong" in the male clubs that thrive at work. We also know that we can't play the game the same way men do or we will pay another kind of price. So what is left to us? Our own hard work. It's the one thing for which we are regularly applauded and recognized. Hard work helps us fit in and gain a measure of security. And because it works, we do more and more and more of it until we can't stop.
This workaholism robs us of many things. In order to put in the hours it requires, we sacrifice time with our families, our friends, and ourselves. We lose perspective about what is truly important to us and about what ultimately is of enduring value.
Workaholism also deprives us of sleep. Getting enough sleep signifies to some people that you must be less than passionate about your work and your life. It means, well, you're lazy. And what's this attitude gotten us? Sixty-three percent of us are sleep-deprived according to a recent survey by the National Sleep Foundation. Either we can't sleep, because our workaholism keeps us overly stimulated, or we don't want to sleep, because we've bought into the workaholic mentality that says sleep time is unproductive time.
Our parents and grandparents fought to get rid of the sixty and seventy hour work week, and now we're fighting to get it back.
Yet what has all this workaholism and sleep loss bought us? Almost a third of working adults report having missed work or made errors at work in the last three months because of sleep deprivation. And the cost to U.S. businesses from accidents and decreased productivity due to sleep deprivation is estimated at $150 billion annually.
Just listen to the words of someone who is perhaps more identified than anybody on the planet with tirelessness and the lack of need for sleep. "Every important mistake I've made in my life," Bill Clinton once said, "I've made because I was too tired."
In my own life, I've found that it's clearly much harder to be fearless when I'm sleep deprived. I get moody, anxious, more reactive, more confused. Not exactly traits conducive to success.
How ironic that the fear that underlies workaholic lack of sleep ends up creating the very failures that that most concern us. Fears of assertiveness, fears of failure and workaholism all conspire with and contribute to each other, creating a vicious cycle. We don't have all the opportunities men have, we're nervous about what opportunities we do have, we fear failure so we create situations that make it inevitable, we fear success so we either don't take risks or sabotage ourselves, we internalize what we perceive the criticisms might be were we to actually succeed, and those of us trying to be Superwomen are sleepy, cranky, and afraid. There has to be a better way!