Thursday, April 26, 2007

Freshly Blogrolled

I've recently gotten into Penelope Trunk's "Brazen Careerist" columns on Yahoo! Finance and posts on her blog. I like her fresh angle: providing career-slash-life advice to younger workers. Her columns always make me think of subjects in a new way, regardless of whether I agree with her 100 percent or not. Plus, she always seems like she's having fun writing and disseminating her ideas, and that makes me enjoy her work even more. (Ramit also had a nice post featuring a review of Trunk's new book the other day.)

We women need more good career role models such as Trunk, especially with the depressing news about gender roles that seems to be popping up more and more often lately. (Read this story from the Times about the lack of women in Hollywood power roles and this one about young girls and their attitudes about career and money for a couple of examples.) On a related note, am I the only one who feels like the interest in and defense of feminism has taken on a bell-curve shape recently, with the head count of women concerned with preserving our rights taking a nosedive? Seems like we're falling back on old stereotypes more and more each day.

Take The Dangerous Book for Boys, for example. I realize what the author is trying to sell and what demographic he's trying to reach, but apparently it's okay for him to say this: "I think we've come through the period when we said boys and girls were exactly the same, because they're not. Boys and girls have different interests, different ways of learning, and there's no real problem in writing a book that plays to that, and says, let's celebrate it. Let's go for a book that will appeal to boys." Well, in that case, let's reinstate the old ideas about men and women. In fact, why don't we separate out the girls and boys in first-grade classrooms and teach the girls baking and the boys mathematics, because the sexes are different and each set wants to learn different things.

Do any of you also feel we're backsliding? Let me know in the comments if you think I'm off my rocker.

And, Ms. Trunk, consider yourself blogrolled.

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