Mogul, Mom, & Maid

September 23, 2013
Married mother of two O’Donnell is her family’s sole breadwinner. The founder of the blog Hello Ladies and a journalist, O’Donnell is one of several authors who have registered the popularity of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” 2012 article in the Atlantic and jumped on the bandwagon. The result is a warning and a call to action against an unsustainable world in which women are “caught in a perfect storm of male-dominated culture at work, traditional social norms at home, and outdated schedules in the school system.” While many women stay at home because it makes sense financially, at the other end of the spectrum, more women today are their family’s greater, or only, wage earner. Nonetheless, they still earn an average of 72.5% of what men earn, and do 30% more housework and child care than their spouses. O’Donnell includes numerous personal stories: tales of maternal guilt, missed deadlines, and marital struggles. These stories are backed up with discussions about how women are redefining success, wrestling with the “mommy penalty” and the media influences that shape us, among many other topics. While O’Donnell addresses how businesses can and should support women, such points are mostly relegated to end-of-chapter “Lessons from the Ladies.” The book unfortunately provides little in the way of new ideas.