How to Be Successful without Hurting Men's Feelings

August 6, 2018
With chapters on “How to Ace Your Job Interview Without Over-acing It” to “How to Bring Your True Self to Work and Then Hide It Completely,” this relentlessly tongue-in-cheek guide offers a playful look at the paradoxes and double standards with which many working women are intimately familiar. Cooper (100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings) transforms all-too-common workplace experiences into charts, graphs, and worksheets to mercilessly satirize double standards, and though some advice is groan inducing (“When collaborating with a man, type using only one finger. Skill and speed are very off-putting,” or “When all else fails, wear a mustache so everyone sees you as more man-like”), other recommendations nod at sharper, sometimes depressing, truths: “Pepper your emails with exclamation marks and emojis.... Your lack of efficient communication will make you seem more approachable.” In light of #MeToo and #TimesUp, the chapter on “How to Be Harassed Without Hurting His Career” is especially prickly: “Sexual harassment in the workplace is a serious offense and will not be tolerated, except in cases where the harasser was clearly joking and you need to relax.” Filled with sarcastic one-liners, Cooper’s pseudomanual is likely to illicit sad chuckles and knowing nods from women in white-collar professions, but while it outlines common workplace issues, it doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions to them. Color illus.