In no particular order, here’s some of the stuff I’ve done over the last 48 or so hours when I should have been writing this review of Dee Dee Myers’s new book:
- Sifted through and cleared out ten years worth of old files that had been happily sitting in their drawers, not bothering anybody for all that time;
- Baked a cake (a good one; you’re welcome to the recipe, but I was clearly stalling);
- Googled for over 90 minutes to find the lyrics and then watched the YouTube video of Jack Johnson’s singing Ben Harper’s “With My Own Two Hands,” a charming song you should sing to your kids, that turned out to have been part of the Curious George soundtrack.
- Read the entire Sunday NY Times (OK, not the sports section, but still, almost every word of all the rest of it);
- After going out for Chinese food, watched several reruns of Law and Order and two installments of a cool Canadian police procedural set in Vancouver that no one else seems to have heard of;
- Zigzagged between Meet the Press and This Week with George Stephanopoulos – Stephanopoulos had two women on the panel of commentators. Tom Brokaw interviewed three guy governors;
- Transferred leftovers and other stored food from plastic to glass containers. (I’ve become unreasonably neurotic about the potential poisonous properties of clear plastic);
- Read a hundred pages of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s harrowing and important memoir, Infidel, which I’m not reviewing for Mommy Track’d or anyplace else, but which you should definitely read;
Clearly, there was some serious procrastination going on and I think I’ve figured out why. Myers has written a book titled Why Women Should Rule the World. I ask you: do we need still another book trumpeting that the world would be a better place if women had a greater hand in running it? Don’t we know this? Isn’t it preaching to the choir? And don’t we already have a bigger part in running the world? Haven’t we put those millions of cracks in the glass ceiling and shouldn’t we just go on doing it, splinter by splinter? In short, haven’t we heard all this before? Dee Dee Myers doesn’t think so. Nor does she think we’ve come far enough.
At thirty one the first woman to serve as White House Press Secretary and the public face of the Clinton administration, Myers learned first hand the difference between having responsibility and wielding real authority. Her experiences being overlooked at crucial moments and denied information she needed to confront the press inform her argument that despite the enormous progress women have made, they still hold the minority of leadership positions in most of the fields that “count.” Women make the majority of consumer decisions in this country, yet we still account for only 2% of all CEOs. Women make up half the country’s law school graduates, yet still only 15% of the partners in law firms or judges on the federal bench are women; only 10% of law school deans or general counsels at Fortune 500 companies are women. Women make up nearly half of medical school graduates, yet still only 10% of medical school deans are women. The statistics for women in engineering are even worse. Read More.
Jo Keroes received her PhD from Stanford University and was a Professor of English at San Francisco State University for more than 25 years. She writes the Mommy Track'd book review column Books: Viewed & Reviewed and is the author of Tales Out of School, Images of Teachers in Film and Fiction.
