skirt! Rules for the Workplace (1 of 2 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
skirt! Rules for the Workplace by Kelly Love Johnson. Copyright 2008 by Kelly Love Johnson.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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SKIRT! RULES FOR THE WORKPLACE
An Irreverent Guide to Advancing Your Career

Kelly Love Johnson

This book is dedicated to all of the bosses I've ever had in my life, good and bad, because they made me what I am today ~

especially my first boss, the one who taught me I CAN have it all, my mother, Ginger Johnson.


INTRODUCTION

skirt! Rules for the Workplace is a real-life perspective on feminism in the workplace, with a humorous approach, for young (or not-so-young) women who want to know what they can do to close their own wage gap and break through the glass ceiling.

Because of the women who came before me, particularly my own mother and grandmother, there was never a question in my own life about having to choose between work and family. My single-parent grandmother worked all of her life. My mother, also a single parent, has worked since I was very young--while raising four daughters--and now, in her early sixties, has no concrete plans to retire. I invest in a retirement plan, but also plan to keep writing until I am no longer able to do so (which hopefully will be when I'm in my late nineties living in my villa on the Italian Riviera). Most women today--with and without children, married or unmarried--work because they have to.

Unlike my mother and grandmother, I have not had to face societal reproach for my decision to work full-time and not have children. Before my parents' divorce, when my mother (probably sensing trouble brewing ahead) decided to enter the workforce, she remembers suddenly not being part of the "mommy club" anymore. Some of the friends she had when she was a stay-at-home mom with two teenagers and two preschoolers wondered how she could choose not to spend 24/7 with her children. She felt like she had to leave one club to join another.

There's still somewhat of a dogmatic attitude toward women with children who choose to work full-time. Why aren't we putting our children first? In my grandmother's case, she was. She was the single parent of a three-year-old and had no choice but to work to feed them both. In my mother's case, entering the job market might have had more to do with a lack of fulfillment she felt being a sole caregiver (even before the divorce, my father was often absent), but after the divorce, her working was a necessity, not a choice. I have three sisters who have children, one still married, and not working for indefinite periods of time--even holding out long enough for preschool--was not an option for any of them. They all returned to full-time jobs after maternity leave.

My point here is that we're lucky--not because we have to work, but because the working world is no longer the often hostile place it once was for women. The women's movement, activists like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, and hundreds of thousands of "regular" women just like you and me, fought the good fight for years so that we don't have to suffer insufferable misogynist male bosses, tolerate harassment, or be forced to do "women's work," as it was called in the 1950s. These women paved the way so that the women of our generation can be anything we want to be--glass ceilings and "male-dominated professions" be damned.

So why are we still making less than our male counterparts? The wage gap seems to be the last bastion of gender discrimination in the workplace, but it's a big one. Yes, we can be doctors, lawyers, engineers, firefighters . . . even (cross your fingers) President of the United States, but chances are good that our wages will fall short of what men in those same professions bring home. Is it because we're unreliable and might end up leaving the workforce to stay home with our children? Most studies (and the ones I've cited in this book) exclude women who leave the workforce to raise their children. Is it because we're not as good at our jobs as men are? Because we're too fragile? Because we have ovaries? Because we might have PMS when a project is due? Because men don't want us to work? The answer to all of the above is an absolute, unequivocal "No."

This book was in my head for a long time before I wrote anything down. It appeared here and there in small ways--in an essay I wrote following the death of Betty Friedan in 2006, in occasional rants among friends or coworkers when the subject of the wage gap came up, in what my boss once called "Kelly Charisma's Rules for Work," and in numerous short lists of "Never Do This at Work." I spouted off information randomly depending on the given situation--but my passion about closing the wage gap typically focused on my efforts to climb the corporate ladder and put more money in my own checking account.

In 2006, the director of The Center for Women in Charleston, Jennet Robinson Alterman, asked me to speak to a group of girls on the topic of women and achieving success in the corporate world. The young women were mostly from a mentoring organization that worked with at-risk girls who were raised in foster homes. During the session, I looked around the room at the faces of these girls, who were eager and inquisitive and seemed to be waiting for the one answer that would assure them success as they entered the working world. And I didn't have an answer for them. I only had answers for myself.

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