Confusing the goal of being more productive and effective with the goal of simply being better rewarded, regardless of contributions

A provocative piece in the Wall Street Journal the other day. Women at Work: A Guide for Men by Joanne Lipman. Her thesis:

I am convinced that women don’t need more advice. Men do.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love men. I’ve spent my career as a journalist at publications read primarily by men. All my mentors were men. And most professional men I’ve encountered truly believe that they are unbiased.

That said, they are often clueless about the myriad ways in which they misread women in the workplace every day. Not intentionally. But wow. They misunderstand us, they unwittingly belittle us, they do something that they think is nice that instead just makes us mad. And those are the good ones.

I love men, but they sure are stupid. Got it.

Then follows a long piece of cognitive pollution. It looks like a real argument with quotes and all but it is basically speculation based on prejudices. Don Surber initially focuses on the data aspect of the article.

Frankly, it read like a parody of a feminist piece. Its worst offense was its use of the long-discredited 77-cents-for-every-dollar-a-man-made nonsense. It was one of several faux statistics in the piece.

The point of her piece was that men have to understand the rules of women in the workplace, and not that women have to understand the rules of business. She uses a wifely logic:

I’ve been at countless meetings at various news organizations where a male editor, suggesting a story idea, loudly declares something like: “We need a piece on the drop in gas prices!” A woman, making the same point, might ask hesitantly: “Has anyone noticed that gas prices are falling? Do we know why?”

Both are saying exactly the same thing: Get me the damn story on gas prices, and get it now.

It's the old if-you-really-love-me-you'd-know-what-I-mean routine.

But actually they are not saying the same thing. One is giving an order (“We need a piece on the drop in gas prices!”), the other is asking pointless questions (“Has anyone noticed that gas prices are falling? Do we know why?”). The problem is the second speaker is not saying what she means, which means she is a poor communicator, which makes her a bad boss. The whole piece is that kind of passive-aggressive nonsense.

Helen Smith is even more direct.

Women have no idea what men in the workplace are dealing with when they work with women. And men, despite what the author thinks, are not there to babysit women by telling them to ask for raises, brushing away tears and “twisting” a woman’s arms to ask for her own promotion. If the author of the piece wants women to be respected, stop guiding men to do their work for them. If women want respect in the workplace, give them real tips on how to get it, don’t expect their bosses and co-workers to take time away from their own jobs to teach a woman how to do hers. And isn’t it sexist that the author thinks that all women need such babysitting? Most, I hope, are more capable than this author gives them credit for.

I focus on the communication aspect and the intersection between opinions and reality.

Complex enterprises are heavily dependent on effective communication. That can be accomplished by everyone sharing a common culture or by creating a common culture or by fostering direct communication or by fostering critical thinking. I posted three years ago about the efficiency of communication when you have a common culture at It contained the three words “but if not … ”

There is a place for politeness and consideration but ultimately a complex system depends on clarity and transparency. If any class of employee is more timorous than required (and it is a revealing assumption on the part of Lipman that she assumes women are so), then the action is not to accommodate temerity but to foster clarity.

Lipman has fallen into the same uncomfortable position as Anne Marie Slaughter (Why Women Still Can’t Have It All by Anne-Marie Slaughter) and Claudia Goldin (A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter by Claudia Goldin) who both have come to the conclusion that companies and professional men are doing everything they need to do in terms of being fair and yet women are still not able to have families and achieve everything that professionals without family obligations achieve. Goldin and Slaughter and now Lipman want businesses to shift their focus from serving customers with maximum efficiency and effectiveness and instead focus on making professional women as successful (regardless of their behaviors and productivity) as men by changing the business in a fashion that is less efficient and effective.

I have argued that this is not a gender issue, it is a family structure issue.

Slaughter and Goldin and Lipman are focused on how to make upper class, educated women more successful in the workplace. I think that it is unfortunate that they have ended up not focusing on how women can become more successful, but rather have ended up focusing on how businesses and others can change themselves in order to reward those women better. The first goal I believe to be valuable and admirable. I think the second goal is destructive and devaluing of women.