Cold Shower 10: Downside of Being a Career Woman

Cold Shower The Downside of Being a Career Woman
Volume I, Article X

This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits, and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.

Question:

Dr. Fisher, I am a career woman, 33, who has been quite successful competing with men. In fact I’ve enjoyed beating men at their own game, being the leading marketer and sales person of every company with which I have been associated. The problem is that I don’t relate well to men romantically, yet I’m told I’m attractive. My secret desire, which I’ve never told a soul, is to marry and become a mother. I love children. But the prospects as I get older seem less and less promising. Is there any hope for me?

Dr. Fisher answers:

As a businesswoman, you know about managing your time dealing with “A” priorities before “B” or “C” concerns. Obviously, you have done this so well that your performance has been outstanding. What is a priority when one is 21 is seldom a priority at 31 or 41. Close behind priorities are values. Needs serve values. Values and needs change as well over time. This is where self-deception enters. What do I value more – my career or having a family? The con in you says, “Both!” Not true. A choice must be made.
Being an excellent marketer means you have acquired skill in defining a market and translating its needs into a demand for your product. Selling completes the equation.

You have employed your masculine or left-brain. This is the seat of your objective rational cognitive brain. You are on top of things and problem solver of things. Driven by your competitive spirit and dispassionate analysis you have entered the world of men dealing with the world of things. Men are good at dealing with things.

Men don’t deal as well with people when people refuse to behave as “things.” That is why 80 percent of the sales are made by 20 percent of the people selling. I suspect you’re in this 20 percent because your feminine or right-brain creeps into the action. Your intuition listens to its affect (feelings), which tells it when to “back off,” or “press forward.” It is problem solving by synthesizing data into conceptual hunches, and going with them. It doesn’t need concrete confirmation. It knows!

It is the emotional brain that is responsive to the feelings of the client by listening, not telling. It is a learner, not a knower, and as such, understands the client has the answers. It controls the situation by not needing to be in control. It is the mother in every career woman that can be lost by her trying to be like a man only one better.

Once when I was a young executive in a taxi traveling to dinner with my vice president and an oil company client, I listened as my boss spewed the company litany of how great we were. Suddenly, this executive turned to me, and said, “Young man, I haven’t heard a peep out of you. What’s your take on all this?” All the time I was thinking with my feminine brain. Just as women have a masculine brain, men have a feminine brain as well. I was studying the man, looking at his gnarled nails, yellow stained index and third finger, sweaty brow, and the nervous habit of snapping his index finger with his thumb. I felt the man was grasping at straws and in deep trouble. I answered, “Was wondering what you needed.” He grabbed my arm and looked to the vice president. “I want this man in Ashland next week. No one else! Him!” My vice president later still had no idea what had happened. At the time, I wasn’t sure myself.

This is preamble to what you don’t want to hear – what made you successful in marketing will not make you successful finding a husband or in marriage. You probably make check lists on your dates of his pluses and minuses as if evaluating a piece of meat. So men do that, so what? It doesn’t work for women. It doesn’t work for men either, but that’s beside the point.

You’re also trying to figure a way to hold on to your great job, keep the nice income along with all of its perks, and still marry an equally successful guy who adores you and won’t mind being second banana. This is “Alice in Wonderland.” It’s not going to happen. To get one thing (marriage and family) you have to give up something else (romantic notions and a soaring career). You say, “Nobody does this anymore!” You’ve got a point. They don’t and thus the nightmares. Can you have both – a career and a family? Yes, but not if you plan on being super woman. The guy has got to pull his weight, too. An au pair is not the bridge to romantic bliss or the answer to dual careers.

In my lifetime I’ve seen women make great strides in terms of political equality, economic parity, and social-sexual freedom, but I have seen something disappear as well, the quiet strength of women. The female is the vehicle of life. The male the vehicle of society. Men soar; women keep their feet on the ground. Women symbolize affirmation; men, achievement. Nature rules women; society rules men. Women are the stronger sex, preservers of social conscience; men hide their weaknesses behind physical prowess, intellectual gymnastics, male bonding, masculine bluster and technological toys of distraction. Men refuse to grow up and women have no choice in the mater. It is the burden of nature.

So, if you want to marry and have a child, listen to your intuition and feel your prospective mate. Feelings don’t lie if you have the courage to listen to them. Courtship is all about practicing motherhood, first to your man, then to your child, then to them both, leaving little room for you. Men don’t want wives. Men want mothers; mothers that understand, forgive their misdeeds, support their foolishness, and comfort them when afraid. You are right about one thing. When your power shows too fiercely, it can scare a suitor away. You must hide your power and manage his weakness. It’s a man’s world because mothers have made it so. Only you can change it when you’re a mother.
Copyright (1996) See The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1996) discounted at $12 (shipping & handling included).