The entire time I was reading Kirstine Stewart's Our Turn, I kept waiting to feel empowered. I assumed that I was her target audience – someone who has struggled through gender discrimination in past workplaces, and who is eager to find ways of shifting the status quo. As I've built my own career, I've dealt with not being taken seriously, been denied the opportunities and pay grades of my male peers, and even faced egregious sexual harassment. Given women in Canada hold just 18 per cent of senior officer jobs, and 36 per cent of management positions, and make about 74 cents on the male dollar, I was eager to see if and how change was possible.
Stewart's memoir-slash-career-advice-manual is certainly optimistic, suggesting that women are currently best suited for a new, necessary style of business leadership. "I think this is the moment for women to see themselves for the leaders they can be," Stewart writes. "The digital world has made traits associated with interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence into business assets."
In terms of being qualified to dole out such advice, Stewart is definitely the culturally lauded version of success in a "man's world." She's a high-powered media executive, formerly the first female head of English language services at the CBC, and currently the VP of media at Twitter. She's worked at Alliance Atlantis, and the Hallmark Channel, has shown up on 40 under 40 most influential lists, and has been named Playback magazine's Person of the Year.
Stewart has also achieved all of these incredible career milestones while balancing family demands, and while she thankfully rails against this impossible notion of "having it all," she certainly seems to have managed it to the best of her ability. (She recounts taking a red-eye flight to make it to her daughter's class visit to the pumpkin patch.) Beyond that, her role as the first managing director of Twitter Canada means she has an intelligent understanding of the digital revolution, something that she claims women are uniquely qualified to take advantage of.
Sadly, the empowerment I was enthusiastically hoping for never really arrived. While Stewart does thoughtfully and thoroughly explore a number of challenges facing women who yearn for career advancement – motherhood, division of domestic labour, pay inequity – the book misunderstands the day-to-day realities of those on the lower rungs of the career ladder. The lesson imparted seems to be that change is possible only for someone like Kirstine Stewart.
The book is rife with misguided personal anecdotes, all coming together to undermine her larger message of anything being possible for women in the modern digital age. While Stewart repeatedly emphasizes she came from "the bottom," struggled, and worked her way to the top, she largely ignores the myriad privileges that made such an ascent possible. A university education. An internship at a publishing house. A great, supportive female boss early on. The ability to afford a nanny. (There's even an out-of-place passage where she laments the fact that her employees didn't feel like they could come to her during the CBC's much publicized Jian Ghomeshi scandal; she assures the reader that she would have done something if only she'd known.)
By the time Stewart is praising telecommuting and claiming that her smartphone gave her the miraculous freedom to work wherever and whenever she wanted, I'd abandoned hope of her lessons being for me. "Now you can be home with a sick child and Skype a meeting, offer feedback from a taxi, review a document while making dinner, or help your daughter with homework while en route from L.A. to Toronto." (No, thanks.) Her personal story reads more like an unachievable fairy tale than a guide to actual workplace success and happiness for the average woman. Admittedly, any book celebrating the fact that workers can now always be available is one that I'm wary of, and more importantly, I'm suspicious of the onus being on women to shift workplace dynamics for their benefit.
It's all well and good to live by a risk-taking mantra of "owning yourself," speaking your mind, demanding what you want, and working yourself to exhaustion, but none of those personal philosophies change the fact that the system is built for you to fail and will punish you accordingly. When Stewart recommends women "get over themselves" and set their great ideas free, I flashbacked to work meetings where I've been ignored, or worse, treated like I was stupid or aggressive.
Not speaking up and/or not making demands are often methods used by women to maintain job security and protect themselves, and Stewart's directives often walk a dangerous line of blaming women for their own lack of advancement. The author falls victim to the false idea that if she could do it, anyone can, though it's impossible to identify with Stewart's successes because the story rarely touches on her failures. She seems like an out-of-reach superhuman instead of an identifiable everywoman.
I, like so many women, have long been frustrated and demoralized by an employment system that feels built to exclude us and keep us lagging behind. Our Turn's ambitious promise that things are changing, that there is a new burgeoning female-friendly climate to take advantage of, is certainly one I wanted to believe in. Stewart, though wholly and admirably successful, simply reads as too out of touch with those who struggle at the bottom, and her well-meaning advice only comes off as patronizing as a result.
Stacey May Fowles is the author of three novels, the most recent of which is Infidelity. She is a regular contributor to these pages.