Divided We Fall

Once upon a time, not long ago, I went on two job interviews. Both were with powerhouse magazine editors.

The first was with a woman roughly my age. She kept me waiting for 20 minutes while noisily chatting with a colleague about a party in the Hamptons. My subsequent interview with her lasted five minutes and came to naught.

The second interview was with a woman probably 25 years my senior. She spent half an hour with me and gave me a long list of contacts. I was grateful to the point of tears.

"Don't be silly," she told me, when my effusive thank-yous reached a crescendo. "When a girl in my generation needed a job, we all banded together and got her one. We all helped each other, and we all got ahead."

When I told her about my first interview, the editor winced. "She was probably just threatened, since you're around the same age. You girls have a lot to learn."

Ever since that two-pronged experience, I've been wondering if the latter editor genuinely had pinpointed an unfortunate generational gap.

Are women my age in the rat race together, or in it only for themselves?

I recently asked about 20 of my female friends if they think that women in our generation are overly competitive amongst themselves. While some of them believed that "in this post-Sex and the City world, we're more banded together than ever," the majority of them felt that their peers were divisive, often bitchily so.

"I find women to be much more competitive with other women than with men," said one. "I can't imagine a generation in which women were not cut-throat," said another. "It is only natural. Survival of the fittest!"

A third responded: "Not only is it still about who snags the best man and keeps the nicest home and has the most successful children, it's about all those things PLUS who has the better career."

There were, of course, many nuances to the responses: "They probably are, but I don't participate in that sort of competition"; or "It totally depends on the circumstances"; or "I compete equally with women and men at the office."

Okay, this was all well and good. But then I asked them: Do women have a responsibility to help each other out?

Only two of the 20 said yes.

And therein lies the difference between the vague solidarity of my generation and the 'we're all in this together' feminist generation of our mothers.

The feminist generation understood the value of togetherness; we, on the other hand, get insufferable doses of the hateful "Mommy Wars."

The feminist generation knew that one woman's success paved the way for the successes of other women, and they made a conscious effort to raise the pool together.

What we seem to lack these days is that mutual, conscious pledge among women to help one another advance, accompanied by a disturbing lack of gratitude to the previous generation for paving the way for us. Or even an acknowledgment that we still need help breaking glass ceilings and walls.

My generation, after all, is the backlash generation. We grew up with affirmative action, but most girls my age were loathe to call themselves feminists.

Even those who eventually applied to Ivy League schools and went to work on Wall Street.

Hell, my own college didn't even accept women until 1970, a mere five years before I was born. And I'm sure that this door-opening wasn't a benevolently chivalrous gesture on behalf of the college. It was the result of fierce pressure applied by a generation of women who convinced universities that they, like men, had brains.

What a difference female solidarity made, in that case.

These days, we greedily reap the benefits of those efforts, but are far less inclined to spread the spoils around.

Now, I'm not advocating that we say grace to our forerunners every time we sit down to feast on our newly-gained opportunities. Nor am I asking that women give other women unfair advantages in hiring processes and that sort of thing.

What I am calling for: perspective, a little bit of gratitude, and the acknowledgment that while we all make different decisions on our lives -- that we're all in this together. And we do need to help each other: through mentorship, through advice, through networking, and the sheer willingness to commit to the cause of women's advancement.

Like it or not, women still have major fights on their hands: to make the same amount of money as their male counterparts, to be able to work and raise a family at the same time without driving themselves crazy, to reach higher levels of government and industry -- even to be perceived as being as competent and reliable and credible as men.

We have all of these battles and more, even though American women are supposedly in an opt-out-of-work revolution. In fact, opt-out women may well need a vast female network most of all, should they ever attempt to opt back in.

As one enlightened friend of mine pithily stated,

"In the 80s we were learning to compete with men and now we know what they have known for centuries -- you need to club together to get things done."