Lexski's Rules of Professional Corporate Ambition for Mums of Young Kids in Male-Structured Professions

So you took maternity leave and watched the grads you trained go past you. You suspect your boss or company is taking advantage of you but you don't necessarily know who to confront, what to say, how to negotiate the raise you deserve. And then you pick up the kids at daycare where tireless, brilliant women being substitute mums are being paid less than half your hourly wage, and that your mother or grandmothers never got to go back to work after marriage, or only after 10 or 15 years looking after you and your siblings, or threw away their university training and professional ambition to support their man, and ran the school council.

Here are my working theories about how to get ahead despite it all, achieving professional success during this really tough period.

1) Get your head straight. 

Own your professional territory. Be clear on what you are good at. If you're the expert on writing project bids for wastewater treatment plant upgrades (hi K), or a very slick MRI radiographry team leader (hi D) or the senior associate who specialises in medical malpractice suits (hi B), then that's your turf. Defend your turf. Don't let some uppity manager who is actually in a position to show up 5 days a week, and routinely operates on 8 hours sleep, and has time to regularly go to the gym, swan in and pretend to be an expert in your territory if it is your territory in the organisation.

Don't let the little voice in your head tell you that you're a fake, that you don't deserve to work, that you can't do it. I keep a couple of my best project outputs floating around my desk, and when I hear that little voice, I pick up a particularly fabulous track layout and remind myself that I am indeed very good, and this is something I did when I was really good. Everyone has bad days, even aforesaid well-rested gym-going uppity manager. Own your talents and your outputs and don't lose heart.

2) Always be well groomed, but pitch it to your context.

• Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. 
• Always have nice hair. 
• Take care of your shape and complexion. 
• If you decide to wear makeup, don't overstate it - no tacky blue fake eyelashes, no bright eyeshadow, strong lipstick only if it matches your clothes.
• Don't dress sexy. It not only distracts the 90% male employees from hearing what you are actually saying, it can create the impression that you are too lightweight to deserve a more important position, and you may have to peel off the admirers later on. 

Having said that, cultural standards are important. In Australia, a very talented part-time woman can be promoted - a bit - despite being very scruffy and somewhat rude. In France, she can be occasionally rude but she must be impeccably groomed. In Germany, she can be plainly dressed but must always conduct herself properly. In South East Asia, she must cover her upper legs and wear a modest neckline, but sleeveless tops are fine, upper arms can show. In West Coast USA, legs - good legs - are a promotion advantage.
And having said that too, dressing just a little sexy in a marketing or client-facing role can help subconsciously persuade clients to choose you or your product over someone else. But if you're applying for a technical managerial role, sexy will mostly backfire.

3) Make it look easy. Don't tell them how hard it really is.

Firstly, accept that this is the biggest injustice of all. You're hiking up a mountain in lead-lined boots while your male colleagues are taking a stroll along a tropical beach in the sunset. And you can't let them see it.

Never ever complain about lack of sleep, child waste or bodily fluid emissions, all the things you had to organise, all the picking up of objects, cleaning, laundry, mum's taxi driving that you do all day, every day that you're not in at work. Never ever complain about how you haven't been out to dinner since your second child was born, and that it has been so long since you went to a cinema that you suspect they've all turned into crumbled Parthenon-like ruins. Never ever let them know your childcare woes. Talk about your kids, but only charming, funny, nice stories. Never puke stories or sibling-inflicted injury stories. and never ever ever let your colleagues know how you lost the plot and yelled at your kids, or retreated to the toilet for a cry.

Men can stand around telling stories about their young kids' digestive tracts and bad behaviour, and how they couldn't cope. For some reason, it's a monstrous career-limiting move for mothers. If you want to be in charge, you don't want your colleagues to have enough information to imagine you doing your mum-work.

Be super-organised, to avoid family or professional catastrophe. Use all the backups you have, because you will need them. Find corners to cut, and rest in the tiny spaces in between. 

And re-frame. Remind yourself that you are good, you are ambitious, and you are among the first generations of women to have the opportunity to have kids and a career. Don't look at the injustice. Relish the opportunity to sit in one spot and have a hot cup of tea, uninterrupted. And then think how nice it is to go to the toilet by yourself.

4) Career progression is nonlinear. Being a mother now will make you a rocket-propelled professional woman later on.

You are not missing out. You are not being passed over. You are laying the foundation for a career which will take off when your kids are finishing primary school. Just remember to:

Develop a reputation in your territory. 

Meet people, make contacts, and try to maintain them a bit. It's hard. Don't worry too much - most men aren't that much driven by contacts, and frequently let them lapse for a decade or more.

Keep your professional development current. Work out how to take refresher courses where you can. Consider part-time higher degrees.

Remember that you are kung-fu training in stamina and all kinds of management skills, Every time you have a meeting with clients on 3 hours sleep, with a trail of spew down the back of your shirt, you are training yourself to accomplish magnificent things in those lead-lined boots. When you take the weights off - when your slightly older kids sleep every night, make their own lunches, and organise a lift with James's mum to tennis practice - your extra capacity will give you an edge.

I am not making this up. I have been reading some biographies of extremely accomplished professional mothers, and this is a common theme. Many felt like they were struggling to tread professional water, and then their kids got to secondary school, and their own careers dramatically - and often unexpectedly - exploded.

5) Surprise, Fear, and Ruthless Efficiency.

Being a woman in a male-dominated area means you are often a surprise. The first time I showed up on a construction site, the very surprised men very politely tore down some girly posters before they invited me into the depot. You can use the surprise to your advantage, to gain exposure or boost your reputation or just stand out from the crowd. Another time on that same worksite, I had pink bows in my pigtails when I borrowed an angle grinder from some civil contractors, and I rapidly got a reputation of 'don't mess with her, she works like a man, she can use an angle grinder'. Even these days, when I introduce myself, sometimes a man asks "Hey, did you really once borrow an angle grinder?"

I know you are sometimes scared. You are scared for some very good reasons, including quite simly post-pregnancy prolactin making you more vulnerable to anxiety and fear for some years after a birth. But the men - particularly the real misogynists - are often more scared of you than you are of them.
You know your stuff really well. Determined female professionals almost always do.
You have all these strange powers, like asking people how they are, and listening to the answer.
You have not been put off your career after years, maybe decades, of other men trying to put you off. Not even having kids can put you off. You're like a doberman.
You don't even want their job. You want their boss's job, at a minimum. And you know you can do it, because after running a successful client meeting now with a vomit trail down your jacket, you will be able to do their boss's job better than they could.

There is no option but ruthless efficiency, because you don't have time to faff about discussing redundant design options when you know you have 12 hours to finish the project requirements analysis and system architecture, buy a badminton racket, sew a dance costume, do last year's tax return, find an appropriate present for a cousin's 6th birthday, and take someone to a medical appointment in some hard-to-get-to outer suburb.
Many of my male colleagues find this in and of itself, quite surprising and quite scary.

6) Know the limits of your body, mind, and spirit, and look after yourself.

• Watch carefully for signs of vitamin and mineral deficiency (D, calcium etc), have your blood tested, and take supplements if the doctor says. Watch for things with a family history (eg. thyroid problems, heart disease, skin/breast cancer etc.) and have regular checkups.
• Watch carefully for the early stages of a viral illness, and find a way to back off a bit, have a large one-off dose of Vitamin B & C, eat lots of turmeric and garlic (both antivirals), get more sleep until you feel better.
• Watch your mental health. Depression, anxiety, panic attacks can creep up on a person. If you're doing it tough, ask your loved ones to keep an eye on you and to help you seek help if they think you're floundering.
• Bearing children is brutal on the pelvic floor. Do your exercises, wear liners, and take a change of undies in your handbag if you might need it.
• Take care of your feet, back, wrists, knees, neck. You might schedule regular physio or massage.
• Eat well. Plan meals ahead of time, and consider bringing a packed lunch rather than getting takeaway. Stop eating leftovers off your kids' plates. Avoid foods that you notice make you less alert at work (eg. a sugary soft drink at 3PM is generally a bad plan). Snack on apples, carrots, boiled eggs - not chips, donuts, chocolate brownies. It will help your shape, your self-image, your professional abilities, and your mood. And it will help how your male colleagues see you too. It's weird and very unfair - they might not notice Darren drinking four liters of Coke a day and getting a pot belly, but they can be scathing of Lynne's second chocolate biscuit and drop comments about her fat arse. 
• Try to find a way to get exercise in. Go for a brisk walk around the office every lunchtime (bring sneakers). Or wake up earlier than the kids (haha!) and go for a run, go to a morning yoga session (helps the pelvic floor too), or set up your bike on the trainer and get a precious half hour in before real life kicks in. You might set yourself a fitness challenge, like training for an ocean swim or a long ride. 
• Do stuff that makes you happy. I knit and garden and read and type things like this, it makes me happy.
• Notice when you're tired, switch the computer or TV off, and get enough sleep.

I shall take my own very good piece of advice. I am tired. I'm going to sleep.

What truths can't we can't handle?

"You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives...You don't want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.
 
We use words like honor, code, loyalty...we use these words as the backbone to a life spent defending something. You use 'em as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it! I'd rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to!"

 I'm reading a very good book at the moment and everyone who knows me in real life is copping an earful of the stories from it: "Written on the Skin, an Australian forensic casebook", by Liz Porter. But it is full of truths that I can't really handle, and it's written in a way that tells me that the various forensic scientists (pathologists, crime scene investigators, entomologists, fire and bomb specialists) can't really handle it either. So they just handle their small part. A doctor writes a clinical and relatively emotionless report about the injuries on the murdered child, trying hard not to think about the person they used to be and the terrible circumstances of their life and death, and working really hard to go home to their own families without thinking about the surviving siblings, parents, grandparents. A bomb specialist spends three months matching can opener impressions to fragments of bomb pieces using a microscope, trying not to think about the mad and nasty supsect in custody and the threats he has made. Two scientists started obsessing over a hit-and-run and tracked down and photographed the bullbar of every red truck they saw for six months following their initial involvement in the case, but it paid off: the culpable driver was arrested and charged and imprisoned. Two days before he had booked the bullbar in for complete replacement.
See, it's haunting me too. And all I've done is read the book, 15 years after the man was convicted. The driver might actually be getting out of prison this year or next year.

The wonderful thing about language is that it lets us trigger each others' mirror neurons, and share the feelings associated with someone else's experience without ever going through that experience. And by not mentioning things, language also lets us pretend that certain experiences never existed, certain things never happened. It lets us live happily with a partial truth of experience.
As a child, I was frequently frustrated that I would have to learn things all for myself, and I wished I could just plug into grownups' brains and download (not my word at the time but a perfect word today) their knowledge, experience, kinetic abilities, TIMES TABLES, everything. Then I figured I could pick and choose what I needed.
When I was about 8 I changed my mind. I decided downloading others' experiences was not a good plan. I remember the moment. It went like this.
My godmother had a tattoo on her arm from Birkenau concentration camp (she was an extraordinary woman!), and every so often she would start telling a story and then stop mid-sentence. One particular day she started a story about when she was freed from the camp. After she had recovered a bit, she discovered that she'd caught the SS operative who had sent her and her family to the camp. She had been very angry for a very long time and without quite knowing why, she went to visit the man in prison. A Czech policeman handed her a loaded pistol, told her that accidents happen sometimes, and then he walked out of the room. So there she was with this man who had been so powerful three years earlier, now cowering half-dressed in a cell and looking at her holding the gun.... she took a step towards the man....
and stopped telling me the story mid-sentence!!!
I decided it was just fine that she'd stopped talking. Not a memory she wanted to share? I was good with that.
 It was a decade later, when I was finishing high school, that she told me that she hadn't pulled the trigger, and that had haunted her all her life. The opportunity for vengeance, and she didn't have the stomach for a cold-blood revenge killing. Given the other things she did in the war, she took this as a point of personal failing.

Some may be asking how it could be appropriate for a woman to tell an 8 year old girl grizzly war stories like that. After reading "Written on the Skin", I realise there are three and four year olds who live and die in stories much more grizzly than this. And things that weren't acceptable to talk about back then - homosexuality, postnatal depression, sexual abuse in the various Churches - a lot of good has come to a lot of people as it has become acceptable to talk about these things, language was invented, and they have been finding their voice. And a number of very powerful people have come undone as the acceptability changed.
So there are experiential truths that we all get to the point of "I don't want to know." They are highly contextual: contextual to the experience of the speaker and the listener, contextual to the available language, contextual to the social standards of the time and place.

Right now, there are many truths that the collective "we" can't or won't handle.

• Multi-generational abuse and neglect. We sit on the sidelines, reading dole scandals in newspapers, and tut-tut. The turnover of social workers and case workers is huge - the good-hearted people who go in to help have a high incidence of breakdown and stress related illness. 
• Human trafficking and slavery 
• What goes on in prisons
• Meat animal farming, killing, and processing. A very few workers carry the brunt of what we don't want to know. Look it up on YouTube - or don't. 
• Infectious disease models and mitigation. Not fun, I tell you.
• 3rd world poverty in general and what the 1st world is not doing about it
• One hundred and sixty missing women following gender-selective abortion, and what that means for women in general, both from Asia and worldwide.
• Pacific and Atlantic Gyre pollution. It's our plastic use that drives it. Look it up on Youtube - or don't.
• Garbage and landfill and the destruction it causes. Once again, a few workers, a few machines,nobody else has to think about what happens to the bin full of loaded nappies after the garbage truck drives away. This one I will give a link for: the Christchurch City Council funky recycling video. Plus the accent always makes me smile.
• Like Jack Nicholson so famously said, peaceful populations do still need military protection, we need men on walls with guns, although this is such a fraught contention that I am hoping someone reads this and POSTS A COMMENT, maybe even starts a brisk discussion!

Just about every one of our businesses and professions have truths that the broader population can't or won't handle. Food wastage in production, distribution and retail is mind-blowing for those not working in it. Suicides facing train drivers, or discovered by road and rail maintainers, are traumatic, heartbreaking, and completely excluded from the TAC and rail safety body stats. Where large sums of money are involved, the neglect of morality can make you feel ill, or anaesthatise with drugs or alcohol (as many executives and financial workers do). The pollution necessitated by mining, bulk goods processing is hideous - even the production of the Diptheria/Polio/Tetanus vaccine requires the disposal of 3 million fertilised chicken eggs per day.

But by removing these kinds of issues from the public consciousness, by collectively saying "You don't want to talk about it? That's fine with me", we also let them get away without scrutiny.
The effect of scrutiny will have to be another blog post later. (Actually I would love to do a PhD on something to do with the effect of scrutiny. But with three young kids and a 0.5 job which I'm trying to let simmer into a solid professional career, I'm not going to enrol in a PhD this year at least.)

The keepers of the public consciousness are many. The laws or code of conduct relating to the profession of journalism in the country, and the way individual journalists (as bringers-to-the-public-consciousness) handle their work, include or exclude certain topics has a big impact. Powerful individuals and organisations can be very good at covering distaseful things up (eg. the Catholic Church hiding and moving their pedophile priests). And as a distasteful truth comes into the open, many high-profile people have come undone. But maybe, maybe my 8 year old idea was a good one - maybe it's a good thing for a person not to know a bunch of this stuff - and not to even have any idea of the amount that she doesn't know.


So come on, somebody post something! What are the truths you come across that the collective "we" can't handle? How do you personally handle indigestible truths? Do you go and seek them, and then regret it a bit - like me reading the forensic casebook?
Do you care - do you think you ought to care - where your meat comes from, where your garbage goes, whether the company that you've invested your superannuation funds unethical drug experiments on Burmese poor people or ships appalling quantities of coal to China or Korea, what kinds of heavy metal poisoning happens to the people who disassemble your old CRT TV when you buy a new flat screen? Is it even your guilt to feel? Or should the experience die with the people who can't or won't talk about it? Does the truth matter? Should we learn to handle it? How should "we" decide what to keep secret?

(Sheesh, maybe I should talk about the small issues once in a while.)



This link is just a nice paper about embodied cognition which was going to go above but will have to find another home later.

How to actually reduce your carbon footprint 8: Reforestation and carbon sequestration in vegetation

Trees Are Really Very Nice. We Should Have More Of Them Around.

Back in January, I posted 10 ways to actually reduce your carbon footprint. My ongoing reading is starting to indicate that these were more clever than not.

Disclaimer: I am a gardener and I really like trees. In terms of carbon sequestration, I truly don't understand why anyone would want to try to pump it into old natural gas mines when there are perfectly lovely, renewable, growing forests to be planted.

I have just developed a crush on the work of the STRI, and Allan Savory,

STRI have been trying to measure how trees and forests will respond to higher-CO2 atmospheres, how to measure sequestered CO2 in a forest on a micro and macro scale, how to maximise CO2 sequestration in replacement forests, different species in different types of forests, and other fabulously important primary research.

My other favourite at the moment is Alan Savory, seen here on a TED talk.  His thing is reversing desertification of marginal grasslands by changing domesticated ruminant grazing habits to be more like large herds of wildebeest (or some equiv.). Looked at from a 20th century ag science perspective, his ideas seemed like a pile of cow dung, and were treated as such. But this century, pieces of a story have started to emerge that have made him seem revolutionary. Combined with research that says the biggest opportunity for sequestering carbon is apparently in the first 1m of soil, reversal of desertification suddenly seems much more important than reforestation. Also, research is proposing that the deserts started when early humans made megafauna extinct, because large migrating herds of megafauna were the most fabulous conduits of nutrient into marginal land. When they died, it all gradually turned to desert.

I am also a big fan of urban green space. Now these guys are mostly town planners, not climate scientists. But the story goes that the closer you live to an urban green area, the higher your house value, the better your mental and respiratory health. Urban forests are a very promising idea.
So here are simplistic instructions for self-offsetting your own CO2 output:

• Go find a fast growing, high-density tree species appropriate to your area that is not particularly vulnerable to increased atmospheric CO2 concentration (it's not a simple issue, according to Google Scholar). Rainforest species vary enormously. Certain Eucalypts are pretty good. Big deciduous trees are okay too. There's no point in dwarf rootstock. You want it to grow big, heavy, fast, catch that carbon!
• Plant 3 in your garden per year and let each one grow for 30 years (assumed roughly 3 tonnes per tree). 
• When you chop it down, turn it into timber. Mulch the leaves, In particular, DO NOT burn it in your - or your neighbours' - open fire.
• Live a 10-ton-per-year carbon lifestyle and your trees will sequester it for you.

So two more simplistic instructions for actually reducing your carbon footprint:

• Spread the word on Alan Savory and holistic land management. If your husband's family happens to own, say, a large sheep farm, show them the Ted lecture. If you know someone who works in the planning department of a rural, desert-prone county, ask some of the locals if they'd be prepared to try a holistic management grazing plan.
• Push your organisation to get carbon neutral. It may involve paying a consultant to work out how many trees you need to have planted per year. 
• Have land? Would you like to be a spot where offset trees get planted? You may be able to sell the CO2 credits. 
• All the rest of us urbanites can heckle their local government for urban vegetation planning, urban reforestation. Get your friends and rellies on the job too. I've got my own grandparents insisting on replacement of verge trees cut down for a new footpath, at the ratio of 2 new trees for 1 removed tree. they don't have 3 kids and they do have the time). Im working with my parents in law to campaign for more trees in the local recreational parks. With enough persistent pressure, local governments do listen. Remember, it's an immediate physical and mental health mitigator, as well as a way to help the future of the planet.

Essays I would have liked to have written in high school

 I was cleaning up the laundry generated by 3 sick children and started thinking. Bad habit, thinking. It leads to questions and ideas and more questions and more ideas. I would have to lit search to see if anyone has answered these. I am sure somebody will have, somewhere. On a planet of 7bil, ideas must frequently strike in many different places.

Any IB student want an Extended Essay Topic? Any of these take your fancy? You can do the lit search & see if the topic is still open.

• Paying for Water - Soft-drink Companies and the Biggest Public Heist of All Time
• Hygiene and Democracy - How people who began to feel entitled to not die from infectious disease also started feeling entitled to choose their leader
• The Luck of the Gulag - What modern-day employees can learn from the stories of Polish prisoners in Sibera during WWII
  Change from unexpected places 1: How Superman comics undermined the power of the Klu Klux Klan
• Change from unexpected places 2: The impact of music recording and distribution technology on Cold War policies, specifically the period 1962 - 1989 (compact cassette tapes were first sold in 1962, and CDs started being distributed in 1983; Reagan & Gorbachev were both in power from 1985 and by then many historians argue it was all over bar the shouting from the trigger-happy military brass, I have a proposed mechanism too but not enough time or space to write here.)
• Change from unexpected places 3: the role of street lighting in the progress of the feminist movement
• Change from unexpected places 4: the internet and the dropping average age of political activists: is this ever going to drop the voting age in first-world nations?
• Micro-credit and its interaction with institutionalised corruption in developing nations - such as Bangladesh - or the USA?
• The effect of fixed-price trading (as opposed to an expectation of bargaining) on peoples' ability to evaluate object (or service) value and quality (I would love to come up with a quantitative study but am not in a position to.)
• Surviving London before the Fire and the Sewer Cleaned it Up - What did a life expectancy of 40 really mean, in the absence of child-soldier-recruiting African warlords?
• Examples of Genetic Adaptation of Humans to Specific Regional Diets, and the migrant (/invaded) population's health cost of deviating too far from those diets
• A proposal for educating members of the newspaper-writing and -reading public about the difference between correlation and causation
• A proposal for educating members of the scientific and legal communities on the importance of a timely, even if not-quite-right, statement from an educated authority

 Okay. Back to the spewy laundry. *sigh*.