I’m with Sissy.
I’m looking for a woman running because she knows foreign policy, economics and how to run a bureaucracy, not because she wants to be the first woman president or because she has a grudge toward society and wants to re-engineer it to suit herself and other feminists.
The idea that the unfairness of the past can be erased by reverse unfairness will only make for more unhappiness and more grudges.
Women are in a difficult position trying to compete in most professional careers, but wanting to have families, as well. It’s really a failure of our country that so many families have to have two incomes to survive. I know that I wouldn’t go very far in a law firm, or company that based my advancement on the time I could commit to the firm, because I consider that an excessive demand.
I don’t know much about the over all differences in earnings, but I have noticed that many of the women lawyers I’ve known were single, usually divorced several times, hard to work with and not particularly happy. They tried to out-man the men, and it hasn’t seemed to be very fulfilling for them.
For better or worse, the business world was built primarily by men who compete in the same way they compete in war and sports. Women could change that paradigm by competing the way women do rather than with the testosterone-laced attitudes and behavior that seems to apply everywhere, but I don’t know how effective that would be.
The best way for women to work out their grudges, I think, would be through starting their own businesses, and putting truly feminine principles to work. For all the criticism of Martha Stewart, she has done very well for herself, and I feel that she really enjoys what she does.
