Choice of broke and dull or rich and powerful

Ground Floor: I chose two businessmen as potential role models last week and then wondered why I hadn't picked a woman, writes Sheila O'Flanagan.

The problem, of course, is that when I was at the role model stage there weren't very many high-profile women in business to follow. My female role models would have been in the literary rather than the business world.

After a trip to the cinema, however, I've found someone who straddles both. Unfortunately she's universally loathed. She's Miranda Priestly, the fictional fashion magazine editor from Lauren Weisberger's best-selling novel turned movie, The Devil Wears Prada.

Priestly's character is based on Anna Wintour, editor-in- chief of Vogue magazine in the US. Weisberger wrote the book after a stint as her assistant.

For male readers who neither know nor care about the world of fashion, Anna Wintour is both feared and admired among the cognoscenti. One of her nicknames is Nuclear Wintour and she has been described as a "kitchen scissors at work".

She is a notoriously difficult perfectionist and can make or break a designer's career with a nod or a shake of the head. Vogue had been languishing before her arrival but it is now considered indispensable for US fashionistas.

Meryl Streep is wonderful in the she-devil Priestly role, yet I couldn't help wondering what Hollywood was trying to say about ambitious women.

The Weisberger character, Andy, wants to be a "serious" journalist and she takes an assistant's job at the fashion magazine because she hopes that it will get her noticed by editors of "serious" newspapers, thus furthering her ambition to become a great journalist.

She reckons she can put up with Priestly's outrageous demands because they would help her to achieve her goals.

Naturally, as she is more and more at Priestly's beck and call, her life is no longer her own and her friends complain that she has gone over to the dark side.

Those friends aren't above accepting her freebie gifts of designer gear but continuously berate her for working in fashion which they decry as shallow and vapid.

(Look, everyone knows that fashion it utterly shallow but it's a business employing thousands of people with a massive turnover so you have to get over the shallowness and focus!)

Meanwhile, her dreary boyfriend gets into a snit with her because she misses his birthday dinner even though she rushed home - having passed on a possible meeting with an editor who could further her career.

The Priestly character is an unforgiving boss without any of the redeeming qualities that role models should possess (especially Richard Branson's sense of fun). It's easy to dislike her and to sympathise with Andy's friends who complain that she's an inconsiderate bitch. But the point is that the woman demands perfection and is used to getting it.

Being nice has its drawbacks, including the fact that presenting a tolerant facade to the world often means that people set their own standards which may just not be high enough. Demand more and you get more, which is Priestly's apparent code.

Is it such a bad thing? In some ways the movie is about work-life balance which Miranda doesn't appear to have and which Andy has yet to reconcile. But Andy is young, free and single so why is this movie portraying her as some kind of saddo for wanting to do a good job even if it's not her ultimate career choice?

And she does a good job, despite her whining friends. In the end, Andy splits up with the boyfriend but resigns from the magazine after Miranda tells her that she "sees a little of herself" in her - Andy having had to shaft a colleague to make progress within the company, something which Miranda has also had to do. Andy then takes a job as a reporter with a worthy New York newspaper.

(So much for the plan of stepping up her career; it looked hopelessly dull and so did its editor.) The boyfriend gets the job he always wanted and heads off to pursue his dream.

I think I'm supposed to feel that Andy has changed her job and regained her soul and that Miranda is a sad career- obsessed woman going through a divorce. But, you know, Miranda is extremely good in her position of power even if she does go over the top.

In the brief glimpse of her home life, we get the impression that her husband doesn't like taking second place to her success, but why should she dumb down for him?

And although her behaviour can be insufferable, she's no more demanding than some of the businessmen I've met over the years.

In real life, Wintour also likes what she's doing and she's extremely good at it.

Weisberger, who went to Departures magazine after Vogue and wrote articles about luxury spa breaks and fashion shoots before hitting the big-time with the book, clearly didn't go down the worthy newspaper route herself.

So why would the movie industry want to end this film with the message that it's better to be broke and working on a dull newspaper than have freebie designer gear and immense power in a multi- billion dollar industry?

And why, oh why, are successful women so often portrayed as sad old bats, even if they are wearing Prada. Mind you, it's rare to see them deal with a divorce like Priestly did, by compartmentalising, usually a male trait.

I think Andy should have stuck it out and not resigned because of the fear of what she might have become. Instead she should have written the best-selling book. Just like Weisberger, who is clearly a lot smarter than her fictional character will ever be.

• www.sheilaoflanagan.net