It’s time we baby boomers stop worrying about the next generation of women in the workforce. They’re going to be fine—as long as they play by the new rules. And yes ... showing some flesh is one of them.
From the moment baby boomers joined the workforce, women made it their mission to create a fair playing field for everyone. But after decades of feminists plowing down the boys’ club, today’s women enter a totally different kind of workplace and need totally different advice for succeeding.
What should the new rules be? This list is long, but here are five points to get the conversation going:
1. Date coworkers.
I can see how forty years ago, when it was still legal to ask a woman what her husband thought of her career, it would’ve been bad to date coworkers. Back then, women felt powerless in the workplace.
But today, young women feel they have equal power to men. And they aren’t deluding themselves—women and men receive equal pay in business until they have children (after which woman are penalized for having kids more than men are). So men and women approach dating at work as equals.
The bigger issue here is that if you’re working forty hours a week, you’re more likely to meet the people you want to date when you’re at the office. If you tell yourself that all men at work are off-limits, you put yourself at a huge disadvantage.
And if you want to have children, you need to make getting married a higher priority than your career. This isn’t some radical statement—it’s backed by a lot of research, not the least of which is that you can’t tell your biological clock to wait while you refuse to date all the men you come in contact with.
So the adage to not date men you work with is totally antiquated. It assumes that women aren’t equal to men, can push back childbearing indefinitely, and should put their career ahead of getting married. All of these are bad assumptions.
