My Intuition

Oprah Winfrey believes women are more intuitive than men. I learned this from reading this week's Newsweek cover story, in which a vast number of powerful women are quoted on the subject of how they became powerful. I had hoped to find out something in this article about one of the pressing mysteries of powerful women -- which is why so many of them tend to scream at their assistants -- but even before reading the piece I intuited that the subject would not be mentioned, or that if it was, it would be passed off as one of the things people say unfairly about women and not about men.

Anyway, today in New York there's a conference on Women and Leadership promoting this cover story, and although my intuition is that it will be remarkably like other conferences I've been to on this subject, I'm going to attend, partly because I love all panels indiscriminately and partly because there will be a lot of New York women there and I will find out what I'm supposed to be wearing this year. Boots to the knee? Black? Or what women sometimes wear to events of this sort, which is the dreaded skirt with some sort of brightly-colored jacket, an ensemble that I plan to own in my next life, when I will stay at home and devote myself entirely to my husband and children, as all young women currently in college allegedly plan to do, and good luck to them. My shrink used to say that it's as easy to marry a rich man as to marry a poor man, but my experience (as opposed to my intuition) is that this isn't true.

Speaking of powerful women who did not stay home to tend the hearth, one thing I want to say about Harriet Miers (whom we were not speaking of) is that my intuition about her is that she does not scream at her assistants. That's probably the only thing Miers won't be accused of on her way to the Supreme Court. In this week's Globe, for example, which I read at the beauty parlor, there's a story that says flat-out that Miers is gay; the evidence for this is that she cuts brush with the president on his so-called ranch, and he calls her Harry. Calling people named Harriet "Harry" seems to me the sort of misguided joke the President often makes, but what do I know?

By the way, I'm going to watch the Harriet Miers' confirmation hearings in the hopes that I will 1) be able to avoid meaningful work for as long as they last and 2) become marginally less obsessed with Plamegate, which I am currently so blogged-up-to-the-eyeballs about that I barely have room in my brain for the grocery list. I plan to decide for myself during the hearings whether Miers is gay, even though my conclusion on this question will merely be "something known or believed instinctively, without actual evidence," which is one of the dictionary definitions of intuition.

Karen Hughes is also interviewed in the Newsweek piece on women. It turns out that although she famously quit her job in the White House to take her family back to Texas for her son's senior year in high school, she lasted there only until January, when she conned her son into giving her permission to take her current job, which as you know consists of traveling around the world in a pants suit in order to get people who hate us to like her. In fact, only today Hughes flew off to Asia with Condoleezza Rice and has therefore cancelled out of the Newsweek conference; this is a huge disappointment to me, as I had hoped to glare at her the entire time.

Anyway, the conference. At least 150 powerful women are there, almost all of them in brown or black in case you were wondering. The panels -- there are two -- are like all panels on women and power. Is it 1975 or 2005? There's no way to know. The first panel is asked whether you can have it all. Everyone thinks you can, except for the youngest panelist, who isn't sure. Someone on the panel reminds everyone that many women have no choice in the matter and that the entire premise of the conference is elitist. There is wild applause. There's an attack on technology, in this case a hilarious one from former Texas Governor Ann Richards, who trashes women who peck away at their Blackberries all day long. "The problem," she says, "is that you think you're doing something when you're on that Blackberry." The moderator, Katie Couric, reminds the group that fifty per cent of all marriages end in divorce. This is not exactly true, but never mind. Lunch is served.

Another panel takes place, this one on styles of leadership. Most of the women on this panel resent the topic and insist that there's no difference between male and female leaders. Everyone agrees that you must love your job; what's more, in answer to a question from Couric, they all claim they have never cried in the workplace for work-related reasons. This is a lie. Tote bags containing an assortment of gifts are passed out and everyone takes them home and gives them to their housekeepers, who are (as we were told by Gov. Richards) precisely the people who have no choice about whether to work or stay home with their children.

Incidentally, among the gifts in the tote bag is a copy of a cookbook written by Oprah's chef. This reminds me that no one on any of the panels seems to have been as struck by Oprah's remarks on intuition as I was. I'm sorry I didn't ask any of the panelists whether they believe women are more intuitive than men, but my intuition tells me that the only reason I want to know the answer to this question is that I need to wrap this piece up somehow. Oh well.