THE universal mark of the successful career woman a mobile phone or suit or serious hair.
Kathleen Kelley Reardon, who's a shrewd observer of these things, says it's fingernails. The woman at the top invariably keeps hers beautifully manicured, thus telling the working world she's on top of every detail of her high powered life.
Or just telling her male colleagues? The women in the office suspect she's lashing out a tenner every Friday to a skilled technician (female, underpaid) who pastes 10 pretty plastic ovals over the raw gnawed stumps she earned on the upward climb. Good for her. This shows she's geared to "working smart". If she passes on the technician's name, she's committed to the gender issue and a rare heroine indeed.
Most women intent on scrambling up the beanstalk of success fear the gender issue like halitosis. One sniff of a networking feminist, and the giants are at their bone grinders. These days, the giants know they'll have to take women up there, but they only want the few who behave like men. By and large that's what they get, and that is bad for everyone.
Ms Reardon is in a position to know what makes some firms thrive and others dive. She is an associate professor of management and organisation at the University of Southern California Business School, and in the widely researched book, They Don't Get It, Do They? Communication in The Workplace Closing the Gap, she has pulled together expertise in three areas new models of management, equality in the workplace and studies in communication and concluded that the workplace must change, and women must be the agents of that change.
First, however, they have to get to the places where such decisions are made, and that still isn't happening in anything like the numbers we might have expected. Ms Reardon believes the communication gap between men and women is a much bigger factor than we have realised.
It's not that we don't know that socialisation bedevils us all boys growing up in the brawling scrum of the schoolyard while girls stand in circles relating to each other and so on. What we underestimate is how insidiously such early learning dictates what happens at the competitive levels where promotions are clinched.
Most women think it's all about proving themselves competent. The lads in charge agree, of course. But what the lads see, consciously or otherwise, are aliens whose entire style of language manner, and presentation marks them as subordinates, discountable wimps. In their eyes, women are those colleagues who are conscientiously included in conferences and then constantly interrupted when they speak.
Most men can't take a woman seriously unless she conforms to the style they are comfortable with. But women have conditioning problems, too. As a matter of good form they tend to speak tentatively, apologise without cause and avoid confrontations even when they're necessary. They don't understand male bonding patterns is the real reason why urinals are designed the way they are to allow men to spend time every day standing shoulder to shoulder?
What Ms Reardon offers is a compendium of advice on challenging wisely. Women will have to learn to interpret male language, decode hidden messages, filter out guff, analyse power. Holding a position of power and having power are not the same thing, she writes. Often people have titles but lack decision making authority. Some have authority but cannot access necessary resources. Still others lack nothing but expertise, and some have little more than power tactics delaying replies, catching minions off guard.
Women will have to learn when and how to dodge, but they won't serve anyone's long term interests by adopting a male disguise and technique wholesale. To save the workplace of the future, they'll have to learn when and how to counter attack effectively and with finesse.
MS Reardon is particularly astute about the sore subject of emotions. The single stereotype that most undermines women is still that we are unstable creatures, likely at any moment to vent something shamefully personal and vulnerable, when everyone knows the only emotion allowed in offices is rage from senior executives.
Sometimes, in Ms Reardon's opinion, emotions aren't advisable. You may feel hurt or upset or rattled by some incident, but telling a good old boy that is wasting energy. He hears irrational, neurotic, hysterical, menopausal. Telling him off, coolly, may be the better option.
But in the end it is emotions that are the kernel of the book's serious message. The old hero leader" model of leadership, the wolf pack hierarchy that bends to the will of the alpha wolf, has had its day. It stifles creativity and alienates the great pack of workers whose fate it is to trot along behind the leader until he stumbles and one of his acolytes succeeds him, usually by sinking fangs into his flank.
In this whirling new age of global markets and world competition, feelings or to be emphatic about it passions are the essential ingredients of success. The new model is based on teamwork, co-operation, participatory decision making, and above all on encouraging and directing the ardent conflict of minds and hearts.
Women, traditionally nurtured to be supportive, relational and at ease expressing feelings, should finally come into their own, sharing a new style of leadership on an equal basis with men. The trouble is, Ms Reardon says, that most organisations have adopted the new model in word only because they are too locked into their own patterns to make the vital transformation.
Women are going to have to show the way. File your fake fingernails, sister, the gender issue is back on the top of the agenda.