On feminism, advancement of women, Portfolio, and Joanne Lipman...

I can't remember if I've ever written in my journal the thoughts on feminism. (For all the world we know, why wouldn't Google provide search in blogger, is quite beyond me.) In any case, I recently read in New York Times about an article on the stalling of advancement of women and feminism which stirs up some thoughts. I meant to write about this, but I was so busy this month that I haven't got round to putting down the thoughts in this journal, until now.

The article begins and ends well, with common sense. What goes on in between, which is 95% of the writing, isn't though. Where should we begin...

First off, I didn't realize that the author, Joanne Lipman, was the editor of the now defunct online magazine, Portfolio. I can't recall exactly now when this might be, but when Portfolio first went live, I checked it out on its articles and reporting online. As I've always been a avid fan of Fortune magazine, and Portfolio has the ambition to rival Fortune, I thought it could be interested. Lo and behold, the headline story in Portfolio, a supposedly investigative piece on one hedge fund manager and his rise of star, was the exact same subject matter as another detailed investigative piece that Fortune published around the same time. Like wine tasting, when you put things alongside each other for sampling, you'll be amazed by how striking the differences are. In this case, we have Portfolio's piece that basically covers everything that was hand-fed to Portfolio by the subject matter (this fund manager and her beautiful European wife), what with all the arts collection, wedding arrangement, and all. On the other hand, you have Fortune's piece that used some of the materials from interviewing this fund manager, but a large part (probably more than 85% of the content) covered the interviews around this guy (employees, ex-employees, competitors, old friends, etc), plus other juicy details on how business deals and performance have evolved around this guy and his hedge fund. Fortune provide a much more comprehensive and multi-layered view that it could easily blow Portfolio away and leave it in the dust.

In any case, that's quite a digression from what I have wanted to write about. Point is, I wasn't too impressed by Portfolio and the quality of its work...(and I didn't even know what the gender mix was among its staff, but that's beside the point). Portfolio bashing aside, the reason why the article brought me back to those articles I read in Fortune and Portfolio so long ago was that, I wasn't impressed by what was written in this article either.

Given the ambivalence to feminism by alot of people of both genders and by different generations, the headline of the article and its premise did easily catch one's eyes. At least Lipman did that right, by making big claims. Her justification, though, for what are seemingly her justifications for the claims are so lame and weak that I could almost laugh.

She began by laying out the claims that her own gender did make big strides in career advancement, and she's not one of them (post-feminists). She excelled in her profession, as she noted, but her gender has not kept up, followed by some simple statistics. But her a-ha moment came, when she claimed that everyone has been measuring up the wrong thing!!! And that, while the sliding of dollar salary earned by females does indicate stalling of advancement of women, she turned around and told us that we were wrong - that we should have been measuring and monitoring attitude, rather than the dollar earned, or number of women making partners or Fortune 500 C-suites.

Sure, we all know the bias reporting of main media. But, as Lipman told us, on why women have stalled out..."part of the reason can be traced to the aftermath of 9/11."

I'm, like, what!?! Apparently, 9/11 was such a big thing for Lipman (which I don't doubt the life-changing impact of such trauma to be at the World Trade Center when the disaster happened), that Lipman has to make some justification, in whatever shape and form, to insert her first-hand experience of 9/11 into her article and writing, that everything must flow out of 9/11, because 9/11 has become so freaking important to her. Beat me, on what strong link Lipman finds between 9/11 and post-feminism, but I don't see any.

Lipman's writing, and all its twists and turns, are so puzzling to me, that I have no doubts now, as to why I never revisited Portfolio's website, whose meat in its reporting was lesser than the shorter pieces of BusinessWeek. It's easy to blame one's failure on external forces that are beyond control; in Lipman's case, she easily blamed the demise of Portfolio on larger trend that traditional media has been on steady decline, burning through $100 million in a few short years. But if the quality of her magazine and website had been better, she would certainly have had me as an additional subscriber. (I still subscribe to both Fortune and BusinessWeek.) For a business magazine to die, it has to be because the magazine never connects to its core audience (who has money). No doubt, Portfolio never connected to me.

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On a different note, since Lipman was talking about the stalling of female advancement, I would chip in a few words from my corner.

I work in software development, a predominantly male environment. Sure, proportion of female staff on board is low (probably lingers between 7-10%) in the technical side, but there's never any issue of discrimination. As one of the measurement metrics that Lipman used in the article, the female bathroom is actually bigger than the men's bathroom. So, the female bathroom is obviously much lightly used.

I don't doubt though, that different industries have their entrenched culture. The IT industry, being a new-age industry that brings in big dollars, that relies on its man-power and intellect, is all meritocracy. Perhaps, I have been lucky that I've chosen this industry, and I'm measured by my work rather than my look (or what I wear to work, which is just jeans). A large part of it, on how others perceive and treat you, is how you project yourself, which is true for both men and women. And this is the ending part of Lipman's article that I concur with, when it comes to common sense, which is that, girls have to be confident in themselves.

Then again, isn't that true for men and women alike (!?!), which makes Lipman's claim to have found the receipe for curing the stalling of female advancement must less mute.

All in all, I find Lipman's article a waste of my time.