As a women's magazine journalist, and now Editor of More Magazine I've spent my entire career championing, celebrating, highlighting, supporting, and raising money for any and all women trying to shatter the glass ceiling. What surprises me, however, is how the passion for shards has gotten even smart women thinking with their hearts instead of their heads. First older women castigated younger women for being infidels if they didn't support Hillary Clinton. Now another group of women wants us to ignore Palin's flyweight credentials for a heavyweight job. My question is: Would any of these corporate success stories hire a similarly thin-resumed job candidate (male or female) to be their number two? To run their multi-billion dollar banking division? To launch their satellite into space? We've all interviewed the candidates who've been pushed too rapidly up the ladder, who can talk the talk but can't really walk the walk.Yeah right! We all know the world is full of female top-executive success stories who are running their multi-billion dollar banking division and launching satellites into space while being interviewed by ultra-smart female sycophant journalists with a penchant for intensely painful clichés:
...Palin's underdog status, a place women in business know well ... back to a time when she herself might have had to best a man ... These are scenarios any working woman is all too familiar with ... Sexism still exists. It's alive and well ... In one way or another, we're all in the bunker with Sarah Palin.Yes, outch!
So WHY are female executives giving Palin's thin credentials really a pass?
Maybe out of the same reason women gave Princess Diana's EXTREMELY thin credentials as a wife and mother a pass. I have yet to meet the woman whose decisions and preferences are based on matter-of fact reasons. That a woman can become "executive" of a company (other than one she's inherited) is bound to be based on the fact that men make extracerebral decisions as well, and if one gets at the bottom of female success stories, there is almost invariably a man who kicked it off, as there is in Mrs. Palin's case.
