Menopause Barbie in Corporate America
A Word to the Unwise
Attention, Dilbertian managers and Machiavellian princes! Somewhere in your organization lurks the archetype of Xena the Warrior Princess, exercising her powers. Relax! She’s on the same team as you, and she shares your goals. Even if she’s on the opposing team, you should be glad she’s there because she’ll make sure that negotiations result in a mutual win.
She has read Princessa, and said to herself, “Oh, so that’s why my own ‘secret strategies’ have always worked for me although I found them in no previous directions on how to swim with the sharks, win at the art of war, or be a highly effective person.” She has relaxed and allowed the laws of interpersonal power physics to work for her. A war between enemies is a no-win situation that consumes much fuel but produces too little light. Opponents who can be shown a more beneficial goal than the one they originally held become collaborators in a process that produces great amounts of light compared to the fuel invested. Thus, she achieves much with little (apparent) effort. You rely upon her. You fear her. You may resent her. She knows all that. Don’t worry. She’s too busy to destroy you. She'll make everyone rich if you stay out of her way - and richer if you join with her.
Rosie the Riveter Now Has More Powerful Tools
We embody (and en-soul) corporate America’s best hope and worst nightmare - women old enough to possess wisdom and young enough to have the energy to act on it. Feminist? Women’s rights? The gender-specific causes, the labels each of us may choose matter not. In the workplace, only human rights provide a broad enough canvas for the true picture - the rights of men and women to the dignity of their work and to the rewards for their creative ideas as well as their labor.
Dilbert illustrates a daily example of human rights violations in the work place, regardless of gender. The humor strikes us from the exaggeration, the archetypal characters. Men and women alike, we know that every day’s Dilbert shows us the truth of our life at work in the vast majority of companies. Our laughter buffers the pain of that truth. Our sense of humor saves us from many types of devastating pain. In the workplace, the daily persistent battering at our dignity, at our sense of self-esteem, builds up calluses on our sensitivity, as writing daily with a pen builds a callus on the middle finger’s first joint. (A metaphor you can pursue for yourself.)
You Can Be a Team Player Only If You're Allowed in the Locker Room
Flaunt your callused fingers as you may (or as you may fantasize), you still show up on time for the daily grind. You attend meetings, and arrive on time. You act as a team player. You practice the seven habits of highly effective people. You are a responsible member of the corporate family. Still, you recognize the dysfunctional nature of this family. You work for personally abusive managers, or under systemically abusive policies. As a salaried (exempt) employee, you donate as much as twenty hours a week beyond the standard forty – more if you count the hours of commuting from the neighborhood in which you can afford to live, to the office (near which you cannot afford to live). You make this contribution to corporate well-being in the blind faith that the corporation is contributing equally to your well-being through the benefits it provides. By now, probably, personal experience has forced you to think again.
Take health insurance – please. Most companies provide access to some form of health maintenance organization; some provide a cafeteria of health insurance options from which you can choose, but only the HMOs fall within your budget. And the HMOs decreasingly provide full coverage for the very kind of care whose support formed their original charter: health maintenance, disease prevention.
Take mammograms – please, really. Personal story: Many years ago, my then-employer’s HMO that required the least employee contribution for premiums and lowest co-pays for treatment and prescriptions fully covered the cost of annual mammograms for women forty years old and up. This coverage included several of the area’s most respected hospital-related MRI services providing the annual, non-critical mammogram. Suddenly, one year, only a more limited list of MRI providers were covered at all for the annual health maintenance mammo – and those had old, poorly maintained equipment. (Their own employees were upset with the state of the equipment.) The better providers remained on the list for critical care only.
That meant that if old equipment whose output was read by over-worked, underpaid radiologists (whose competence levels did not permit them to practice at the best hospitals) failed to reveal a tumor early on, when shorter-term less expensive care could affect a cure, you could then receive coverage at one of the higher quality institutions for critical care – when it would cost more, take longer, and deprive the company of more of your productivity. Oh, and you have a lower chance of survival because of the later detection. Does this approach really save the HMO or the company money? No. Does it put your life at greater risk? Yes. A lose-lose situation, and still they do it.
There are those who say that if the MRI was for testicular cancer, no such limitation would occur. Be that as it may, this HMO policy demonstrated that the HMO knew that women care enough about their own health care to go pay full price themselves at reliable MRI providers. And those women who simply could not afford that, well, how important a member of society can they be? I changed HMOs instead – but the search for adequate coverage within my budget delayed my MRI six months until my company’s next annual insurance selection period, and the new HMO had higher co-pays. Them that have, get. I had what I had, and I got what I could. This constitutes a wealth and class issue, where perception clouds the bottom line reality. A false corporate economy based on a false assumption.
Menopause Barbie sees the law of gravity inexorably apply to her body – breasts, face, upper arms, lower tush. Looks blur, but the mind sharpens. So does the tongue and the wit. Sure, we know that old saw that you attract more flies with honey. I ask you, who wants to attract flies? Besides, vinegar is not the only alternative to sugar. Truth works. Examples work. Proposing solutions works. Numbers of workers armed with truth and examples and solutions proposals work best. Size does count in these matters. If you want to make a change in corporate policy, or at least in the corporate insurance policy, organize an e-mail campaign to the Benefits executive. A high enough volume on the same subject will get the attention of the administrator who screens the exec’s e-mails, so that the exec gets at least a report on the topic and number of emails – and he or she may get the greater message, too, after reading a few of the individual messages.
. . . So Let's Redecorate That Locker Room
Gravity works on us – a law of physics we can’t repeal. Laws of economics and power work, too. We can make those work for us – and all the habitual misconceptions in the world can’t repeal them, either. Let's re-invent those laws, repeal the laws that don't work, enact new laws that do. Got any ideas? Talk to me!
© 2006 Kate Diamond
Collared
Police call an arrest a collar. Being arrested limits your options, affects the way you think – particularly if you’re innocent. Or if you had no idea that your behavior was in any way destructive or self-destructive. What if the workplace “collar” we identify with has been arresting our development all these years?
The collar you’ve been wearing and identifying with can, metaphorically, arrest you. It can limit your options, affect the way you think (in ways you never thought of). Your collar can choke you … with the very tie or necklace that was part of your work uniform if you identify yourself as a white-collar professional.
Feeling a tad insecure? Survived several rounds of layoffs? Been ripped by a RIF (reduction in force) and restructured your career and your life? Tried viewing yourself as “Me, Inc.” in the workplace – marketing yourself to outshine the competition of your professional brethren? Tried literally forming your own company or sole proprietorship as some kind of freelance service provider, expert consultant, contract knowledge-worker? Worked one shift four days a week at WalMart and another shift three days a week at Seven-Eleven?
Shed that collar, yet? Who are you now?
No need, really. You can keep the collar. All you really want to shed are all the lies you’ve been brainwashed into believing that collar represents. Eventually, you may even earn enough again to get those collars dry-cleaned every week. Meanwhile, break out the iron and the Magic Sizing. Your collar is entirely in your hands.
What does it mean to be a white-collar, exempt, professional in today’s corporation? It no longer means you are a valued employee, part of the family. It means you work a 60-hour week with no overtime wages. You’re a college-educated salaried professional. Your employer is entitled to your intellect and intellectual property developed on its time. But it’s sucking up more of your time and leaving you less energy to be so smart for yourself.
Employers expect white-collar professionals to be smart for the company but stupid for themselves. Sadly, the companies often get exactly what they expect. And the employees? They don’t get much at all. No defined-benefit pensions, and very little matching funds in the 401-K. Higher contributions to the health insurance for lower benefit levels. Longer hours in buildings less carefully maintained for the employees’ health and comfort. Fewer familiar faces around the water cooler in the break room, more foreign accents around the speaker phone in the conference room.
And still we believe that the path to success is individual contribution, in competition against all our peers. We have been brainwashed. We have drunk the Kool-Aid. We are brilliant fools.
Remember the mantra of teamwork in its heyday? “None of us is as smart as all of us.”
That’s still true. We just have to redefine the game the team is playing and the nature of the goal. The team is still “all of us,” but in the broadest sense. Not our business unit against their business unit. Now, it’s all professional-level employees against our corporate masters. You know what masters own, right? We’re not that, right? Not exactly … not yet … or are we closer than we like to admit?
But there’s hope and it’s a hope we know is true and that we know how to work. None of us is as smart as all of us – I mean, ALL of us. None of us is as loud as all of us. None of us can afford as many lawyers and lobbyists as all of us. None of us can muster as much media attention as all of us. None of us possess the power of all of us. The power of numbers. Numbers high enough for negotiating purchasing power. Numbers high enough to attract marketing attention … journalistic attention … political attention … the attention of the same societal forces that have clamored for our attention all our lives.
What “target market” group or groups are you part of? Female over fifty – you control the lioness’s share of the disposable income in the United States. Baby Boomer – you’re part of the largest consumer demographic the world has ever known, and you’re just entering your years of highest levels of disposable income, now that the kids are grown and earning their own way. (Unless, of course, your pension was eviscerated, forcing you to work until you drop and your kids have moved back home because they can’t find those lucrative jobs you were sure college would prepare them for.)
Whatever target group you were or are part of, surely you’ve grown weary of the bombardment of advertising blasting us from every form of entertainment, transportation and just plain wall surface (public restroom stalls, for heaven’s sake) – and we’re not even going to think about the male portion of the target market’s target area at the bottom of urinals. Oh, wait … we did just think about it. Well, I warned you in the first posting, we’ll think unthinkable thoughts here. And, really, haven’t you always wanted to piss on the advertisers?
Now we can achieve more than the “piddle on the ad” pyrrhic victory. We can use those targeting us to target the bulls…, um, I mean bulls-eye we really want to hit: employers who have shifted the risk part of the “risk-reward” equation onto the shoulders of their employees. And they have been doing exactly that, you know. Follow the money like this – corporate profits are enriching the executives disproportionately more than the shareholders (who aren’t realizing fair rewards for their investment risk) and the employees (whose salaries have not kept pace with rising costs of petroleum products, products whose transportation to retail destinations relies upon petroleum products, real estate taxes tied to madly inflated house prices, and insurance on those houses and on our own health. (See “Real wages fail to match a rise in productivity” by Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt in The New York Times, August 28, 2006, Section A; Column 6; National Desk; Pg. 1. Many local newspapers’ business sections in August and September carried the same statistical information with related local corporations’ profit and local workers’ wage stats.)
The rich are getting way richer, the poor are still poor, and they’re being joined by former middle-class workers turned out of the workplace into the soup kitchen, and by the middle-class workers hanging onto jobs with double or triple the responsibility and longer hours in return for a salary falling ever farther behind the cost of living. Ugly picture.
Now picture these fragmented white-collar professionals, uniting. All of us. The same “all of us” that’s smarter than any one of us. All of us professionals, united. United Professionals. Here ya go! See you there. All of us. Let’s get smart together. And take smart action – in the interest of the social contract at the core of our nation.
© 2006 Kate Diamond
Election Year Issues: Interns and Pages and …
What was that third thing? Oh, right … wars! Oh, my! Also, the economy, although that doesn’t fit the “Wizard of Oz” chant’s rhythm.
We are coming up on an election, and of all the factors that might inform voters about the integrity and trustworthiness of either party, what are we hearing most about from the media and the water-cooler crowd and the Starbucks sippers? Representative Mark Foley’s horrific and hypocritical behavior. It speaks ill of him. It speaks ill of Hastert and the rest who knew early on and— not having learned the fate of cover-ups from Watergate—covered it up. To quote the original Reagan Republican, “There you go again …!”
Yes, my liberal-inclined self cannot help enjoying the sweet irony of the fact that this Republican sex scandal is near-perfect payback for the Lewinsky onslaught upon the Clinton presidency. Poetic justice and all that. But any abuse of power over employees is outrageous and illegal, regardless of the presence of sexual content and regardless of the less-powerful participant’s willingness. We cannot assume willing participation by the far less powerful person, even if the subordinate believes (at the time) that he or she invited or welcomes the superior’s attentions. In any workplace, these issues must be reported and followed by legal action. Psychological issues of the perpetrator and subsequent rehab therapy notwithstanding, if you do the crime, you should do the time.
But I’m just as concerned about the media’s perception of what we care about, what they can sell advertising space and time for at the highest rate. I mean, sure, hypocrisy and power-abuse is important for us to know about in an election season. And the evidence of those instant messages is straightforward enough for even the simplest voter to understand, and it’s unarguable. Like DNA on a blue dress. Still, I have to think that the media, in all their cynical phrase-making, know this truth about us: “Sex sells” trumps “if it bleeds, it leads.” Bleeds, as in war.
Condi Rice isn’t going to appear on a Sunday morning talk show insisting that the executive and legislative branches of government acted as they thought necessary based on the best intelligence they had about Mr. Foley. Sex is easier to understand than war –for some of us, at least. But the same issues of hidden agendas, when decision-makers really knew what, and how long and strenuously they resisted informing the public about it all – those apply more significantly to the war in Iraq than they do to anybody’s sexual compulsions. Wars, however, and the decisions to wage them are more complex and involve more subtle and more unimaginable (by most of us) compulsions. Now that North Korea’s bomb-blast has exceeded its bombast, and the U.S. executive branch is huffing and puffing about “provocative” behavior by nations instead of congressmen, it’s clear that if we hadn’t deployed troops to Iraq in response to its trumped-up provocation, the availability of those troops to respond to real provocations would have likely prevented North Korea from daring to actually, you know, provoke. Whoever said, “It’s better to have and not need than to need and not have” was right.
The Foley folly hasn’t cost us thousands of deaths and billions of dollars wasted on a military fraud perpetrated upon us (and our allies and the citizens of Iraq) to achieve the objective of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, recorded in meetings of the current inhabitants of executive branch long before the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred. When the Iraq-WMD intelligence came to their attention fortuitously after 9/11, maybe they lied to us only insofar as they lied to themselves. But we elect people to that level of responsibility to be more objective than that, more honest with themselves than that. Does anybody still expect them to also be more honest with us than that?
The executive branch and the military leadership knew about North Korea’s volatility and intentions before terrorists blew holes in our worldview. But they gambled on a short-handed military’s quick success in unprecedented and unpredictable circumstances on one side of the world while ignoring the more certain outcome of Korea’s opportunistic nuclear ambitions on the other side of the world. Now our worldview is split in two directions, we have insufficient military resources to succeed in either direction, and we have disgraced ourselves and our most stalwart allies through criminal (I mean that literally.) mishandling of the public trust in the interest of private agendas.
So although Foley’s high eeeyewwww-factor instant messages bespeak outrageous behavior, other behaviors should outrage us far more. I have to wonder … to what standard are we going to hold our elected officials from now on? How quickly will murky decisions, redacted to inscrutability, be scrutinized in the light of day? When will we put new batteries in our bullshit detectors and shout out that the king has no clothes?
© 2006 Kate Diamond
Come in From the Cold: Who is this uppity woman?
I'm a 1947 vintage, uncorked to reveal a spicy bouquet. I'll talk about a variety of things here - some issues about which I feel strongly, some observations on newsworthy events, mostly observations on the life of a 2X-er. No, not somebody who wears size 2X
. Somebody with two X chromosomes. Someone blessed with a higher number of neurons across the corpus callosum between the right and left halves of the brain. Someone who, for several years, has had none of her eggs in any basket - but all her marbles well in hand, and a diversified stock portfolio, thank you.
Uppity women, unite!
I speak to those who are older and have better insurance. (How many times have you watched Fried Green Tomatoes?) There exist unthinkable thoughts, and sometimes I will think them out loud here. I heartily invite you to share yours, as well. No taboo subjects. No more Ms Nice Girl. No old "should" tapes running in our heads from our 1950's mothers or our 1960's support groups. We have lived long enough to know the real deal, and yes, we will talk about it. I'll start today, with the fact of all our lives that gave birth to the banner of this column.
‘Pause this film
Come in out of the cold about the joys of menopause. Yes, joys. You know them. Talk about freedom!
Do not whine about menopause being the turning point from which we know we are growing old. The first 30-something who called you "ma'am" told you that. Your daughter growing new breasts as your own began to sag told you that. The first crow’s foot at your eye told you that until it was joined by other laugh-lines. Menopause is just a bit less convenient for awhile. Hot flashes exist. So does hormone replacement. So do exercise and black cohosh. So do female doctors who will help you find the right coping mechanisms for your own body. And, just in time, you’re resourceful enough and persistent enough to find what’s right for you..
Film this ‘pause
Changes in Latitude. Some measures of health rise; others fall. My own menopause was no picnic, starting with the hot flashes. Talk about mood-swings! Menopausal women get crabby because we are sleep-deprived from nighttime hot flashes. Hated it! My family and personal medical history allowed hormone replacement to work for me. Yours may not - try something else. Do not go gentle - you' re too irritable from sleep deprivation to go gentle, anyway. Get help. My boyfriend worried that hormone replacement would make me "lose my edge." I told him not to worry. Estrogen isn't Prozac.
On top of the expected hormonal dry-up, my thyroid went south with the rest of the girls. A male doctor told me that my thyroid count was normal when it was at the very bottom of the normal range, and let me suffer another six months wondering why I felt tired all the time and was gaining weight. Then his female nurse practitioner told me exactly how "normal" my thyroid count had been. I found another doctor, had another test, and soon thereafter started taking Synthroid. Bingo!
Changes in Attitude. I think, in some ways, the irritability of menopause-induced sleep-deprivation is a survival mechanism. It makes us far less tolerant of others' supposed authority if its dictates benefit us naught. Sort of like the founding mothers’ attitude toward England. It's good to return to fundamentals sometimes. If it doesn't work, fix it or replace it. That applies to hormones and doctors, alike. Doctors and women, that's a-whole-nother article. Let me know what you think about doctors' interactions with female patients "of a certain age."
There is a Zen view of a bowl. Look at a bowl. You see the physical bowl. What is important about the bowl? What about the bowl benefits you, nourishes you? Not the bowl itself, but what is in the bowl. Now look at menopause. All your eggs were in one basket. The eggs are gone. What benefits you is whatever is in the basket. I say, refill your basket with the valuables you truly value!
Mine-opause
Now, I know that women have taken to calling hot flashes "power surges," and they certainly can be, but no euphemism will make up for their drain on your energy. Still, I've heard many women mention the same surge of creative power I experienced. Look for your own creative bursts. Fill your bowl with those.
I used this new energy to re-focus on my life's mission and directed that energy following my dreams. I started by throwing a Menopause Party for my female friends and all their mothers and daughters that they could bring. We played with our dreams, we wrote ourselves positive messages to tuck into pockets and under telephones for later when we'd need them, we affirmed our lives, our values and our missions. We continue to support each other. After a steep and winding path, climbing new hills and enjoying new vistas, here I am finding new mountaintops . . . and still climbing.
Pause to share
One lesson menopause validated for me: I am not a body that has spirit; I am a spirit that has a body for awhile. When my body began visibly aging, needing more conscious effort from me (the spirit) to maintain it as a serviceable vehicle, at the same time that I (the spirit) felt my highest-volume, most mature creativity blossom, then I knew who and what "I" am. I am the spirit; I have the body. Yes, I know I just said that. I say it with every breath. Now, I know why I'm breathing. I know the nature of my power.
What is your power? Talk to me. Come on. Send me a signal from your own mountain top, or from wherever along your path you happen to be, on any topic that is your passion. Send the signal to, at least, yourself.
© 2006 Kate Diamond
