Liz Funk is the author of Supergirls Speak Out: Inside the Secret Crisis of Overachieving Girls. Her book deals with the pressures many women and girls face to be ‘perfect’ at everything, often to their own personal detriment. She very kindly agreed to answer some questions from me about how this concept applies to the workplace.
STA: Do you think that, despite many laws and other concentrated efforts for gender equality, women are treated differently in the workplace?
LF: Absolutely. At each and every level, there are different standards and expectations for women. The most frequently echoed frustration that I heard from young women working on the job search and starting in their career track is not knowing what to do with their femininity, and trying to strike a balance between being cute and pretty and being competent. There is also a tendency to view women supervisors as mother figures, and we hold women in the office to a certain standard of niceness, and there’s a real trickle-down effect that compels many women at work to sugar-coat things.
STA: What particular goals, pressures, and ideas do women bring into the office?
LF: I personally feel that femininity is a great tool. As a whole, women are very intuitive and they’re natural negotiators. Powerful women aren’t always bulls the way powerful men frequently are, and I think women are better at meeting people where they’re at and finding common ground. Also, something that I’ve overwhelmingly noticed is that girls are much better at impressing others in workplace and having career common-sense, and I think they’re much less overentitled than guys (which is something that is scarcely brought-up in this “Gen Y overentitlement” media brouhaha).
STA: Where do you think this notion of “women must be perfect” come from?
Continue reading ‘the sta interview: liz funk’
With a few exceptions – like The Naked Cowboy or Peaches Geldof – most people who have personal assistants have them because they are busy people with way too much to do. However, “branding” “expert” Peter Arnell has an assistant and still managed to fall way behind on a book project. How far behind? The book won’t be coming out at all, and Arnell has been ordered to return part of the hefty advance he got. Here’s my favorite line from the article on BNET:
Arnell failed to deliver the book despite having the assistance of two ghostwriters, a personal assistant, his wife and an editor at HarperCollins. He only turned in 25,000 words of a promised 80,000 manuscript — and HarperCollins sued to get its money back.
Wow. For a rich executive type like him, he sure seems to be a bonehead. Although, I’d be really curious to know what the assistant was doing all day – was he/she just busy with Arnell’s other business, or do they do nothing all day and have the greatest job ever?
I love a good workplace novel, and I’m happy to report that I found a great one recently: E, by Matt Beaumont. It follows in the proud tradition of epistolary novels – but instead of letters, this one’s entirely in email. More specifically, the novel tells the story of a crazy, eclectic, and sometimes coked-up London ad agency trying to win their biggest client ever. I was worried that the email concept would be a gimmick, but it totally worked because Beaumont does a great job using minimal language to effectively capture different personalities for all the characters in the office. Almost all the office cliches are there – the frenemies, the executive who goes through assistants like Kleenex, the coworker hookup, the assistant who is so blindly loyal to her boss you wonder if she’s in love with him, and the like. Plus, I really love British slang. Anyway, the book is absolutely worth a read – I was reading it on the plane, and was actually disappointed when the plane landed. If that’s not an endorsement, I don’t know what is.
When I quit my job from hell, a coworker friend (who was halfway out the door herself) gave me a copy of a book she thought I’d like: Fear and Trembling, by Amelie Nothomb. Nothomb, who is Belgian but spent a large part of her childhood in Japan, wrote the novel based loosely on her experiences in the Japanese workforce. The heroine starts out as a professional at the company and slowly works her way down through the ranks until she finds herself cleaning toilets. It’s well-written, and although the story seems absurd it’s actually heartbreakingly realistic. It’s a book about why work sucks, but it’s also a book about how to find yourself without losing yourself in your job. You can probably find a used copy at the bookstore, as the English-language translation of Fear and Trembling was first published in 2002, and there’s a movie version (but I have not seen it and can’t attest to whether it’s any good).
It must be hard to have a world-famous multimillionaire singer as your sister…I mean, look how little Jamie Lynn turned out. Some celebrity siblings handle it better than others. Until recently, it seemed like Material Brother Christopher Ciccone was one of those well adjusted celebrity siblings who skated that line between “normal person who stayed out of the spotlight despite well-known relative” and “total famewhore attempting to capitalize on sibling’s fame.” But not anymore. Although his career is entirely due to Madonna (he has worked as her interior designer, an artistic director for some of her tours, and her personal assistant), he’s now stabbing her in the back by publishing a memoir about–what else?–Madonna. It’s hard to ignore the fact that even now, as a ‘writer,’ the only thing people want to read about is not Christopher Ciccone, but the sister who has always overshadowed him.
Continue reading ‘madonna’s brother/ex-assistant writes tell-all’
Today’s Publisher’s Lunch (a newsletter for people in the book industry) announces the upcoming publication of a book by Chuy Bravo, who is comedienne Chelsea Handler’s personal assistant.
Chuy Bravo’s LITTLE NUGGETS OF WISDOM, containing approximately 90 “nuggets” (pitched as a cross between fortune cookie sayings and Jack Handy’s Deep Thoughts) and photos of the lovable nugget [Editor's Note: Chuy is a 'little person'] himself, to Jennifer Bergstrom at Simon Spotlight Entertainment.
Sadly, this post cannot count as a Former Assistant Done Good, as Chuy remains an assistant. That said, it’s pretty cool that Chelsea helped him get a book deal (Chuy’s announcement was part of a bigger post about Chelsea’s new book, so it’s obvious what’s going on).
Fans of REM should be happy to hear that there’s a new band-related book coming out this summer. REM: Hello is a collection of candid photographs of the band rehearsing and hanging out. The pictures were taken by David Belisle, who spent seven years as the entire band’s PA. (It’s not weird for one person to assist a whole band– the Arcade Fire is one example.) Stipe provides handwritten photo captions and the book’s introduction.
Stipe is rumored to be appearing at Belisle’s book signings in LA and New York, so REM fans in those cities should take note.
It’s called A$$hole: How I Got Rich and Happy by Not Giving a Damn About Anyone and How You Can Too. Surprisingly, it is not written by your boss, but by some dude named Martin Kihn. Also, it is a satire, meaning there’s still a market out there for your boss’ book about how to be a douchebag who no one likes.
We were heartbroken when the trainwreck that was Bobby and Whitney (or BOBBBAY! and whitty, for those of you who, like us, watched their brilliant but short lived reality show) split last year. However, the ink is barely dry on Bobby’s upcoming autobiography. From the excerpts we’ve seen so far, it looks like Bobby’s claiming he was a virginal altar boy before he met big bad evil Whitney. Here’s a sample:
The media was accusing her of having a bisexual relationship with her assistant, Robin Crawford. Since she was the American Sweetheart and all, that didn’t go too well with her image . . . In Whitney’s situation, the only solution was to get married and have kids. That would kill all speculation, whether it was true or not. In the short, I think I got caught up in the politics and ended up marrying one of the biggest stars in the world.
We think you’re hilarious, Bobbbay!, but one thing: if two women are having an affair, it’s not called “bisexual.” It’s called “lesbian.” You may have intended to say that rumors of a lesbian affair would have meant that Whitney was interested in both men and women and was therefore a bisexual, but woman plus woman plus sex equals “lesbian affair.” Mmm, wake up and smell the gender politics. Also, in that last sentence it should be “in short,” not “in the short.”
Oh, and while we’re at it, no one believes that you never touched any drugs but pot before hooking up with Whitney. In case you were wondering.
I spent a large part of this weekend reading Joshua Kendall’s The Man Who Made Lists, a biography of Peter Mark Roget. He’s the man who first wrote the eponymous Roget’s Thesaurus and thus helped generations of writers, college students, and crossword puzzle fanatics (Sylvia Plath even referred to herself once as “Roget’s strumpet”). And, because I am able to find a connection to assistantdom in just about everything, one interesting fact from the book stood out to me: Roget didn’t have an assistant. That’s right…all the initial work for the thesaurus was his and his alone. Compare that to dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson, who had no fewer than six assistants. You could make the argument that a dictionary is a much more intensive undertaking than a thesaurus, but I think the coolness (hipness, awesomeness, chicness, badassitude) of Roget is without question.
