Here's a tip for working mothers, especially those who work in high-octane and still male-centred corporate cultures. When you're running late for work because of a domestic mishap -- a child has thrown up on his jacket and your shoes -- try arriving with a man's excuse, such as "You had to see the traffic." Do not, under any circumstances, mention the child, the vomit, or even the shoes. Even in this so-called enlightened age, it will draw attention to your vulnerability.
Your daughter's final soccer game? Assume there is a double standard -- a man leaving early for a child's soccer game is anointed as a poster boy for great dads, but a woman doing the same thing is letting her family interfere with her job.
These acid-etched observations come from Kate Reddy, successful hedge fund manager for a leading British financial firm and frazzled working mother of two young children. Kate Reddy is making women laugh, roll their eyes or murmur "yes" on both sides of the Atlantic, and she's not even a real person. She's the creation of London author Allison Pearson in her novel I Don't Know How She Does It, The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother. Ms. Pearson's book has climbed the bestseller charts, its success fuelled by brisk, clever writing, painfully truthful observations about the challenges of combining a tough, demanding job with being a mother, and sardonic insights into business in general. The true test of whether you're going to make it at her firm, muses Reddy, is not that you've grasped the ins and outs of investing but that you manage to "keep a straight face the first time you hear the firm's mission statement."
Reddy is no male wannabe. The idea of networking the old boys' club -- "seeking out some dandruffed drone to flatter him at a wine bar after work" -- does not appeal to her. And she doesn't feel sorry for herself. It's just that there's a certain phase of being a working mother -- when your children are very young -- that is so demanding that the only way to get through it is to make your life into a heroic narrative.
Ms. Pearson has done this with a subversiveness that has connected with a lot of women. Kate Reddy loves her job. She flies off on glamorous business trips. But then, jet-lagged, she stands in her kitchen "distressing" store-bought mince pies -- beating them up with a rolling pin -- so they'll look homemade when she takes them to her daughter's school.
There are scenes that every working mother would recognize, but torqued just enough to make them hilarious. (Of course the very term "working mother" is a tautology -- all mothers work, and in fact the majority work both inside and outside the home.) This is not the world of Carly Fiorina or Eleanor Clitheroe -- women who have the money and/or the power to make their lives run on time. This is the world of middle-class, middle-management women who cut corners to make it through the day and then feel guilty about it.
Still, Reddy is so good at her job -- "money doesn't care what sex you are," she tells an admiring female subordinate -- it doesn't quite make sense why she feels unable to say no to her oblivious boss who asks her to fly to New York at a moment's notice, to her tryannical nanny, and to her inner "real woman" who is demanding that she bake her own pie.
Some might consider the end of the book a cop-out. Her marriage in tatters, her family in disarray, Reddy takes time off to live in the country and be with her young kids. The unenlightened will argue that it's not business's fault that the Kate Reddys of the world want to be both a professional success and a good mother, and that they have to pay a price to do so.
But it's emblematic that author Ms. Pearson, an award-winning journalist and critic, began her research for the novel at a work-life-balance conference. If women hadn't entered the corporate world and been faced with the staggering working hours of corporate life along with their domestic duties, there wouldn't be a work-life-balance movement at all.
Women have also discovered what men knew all along -- jetting from London to New York to dine out with a client is only about 100 times easier than spending a long rainy afternoon with a querulous four-year-old.
When outsiders -- women, visible minorities, gays -- enter worlds previously barred to them, they at first try their best to fit in. And when they don't, they either retreat or change the environment itself. Sometimes they do both. Reddy departs the world of high finance but the author leaves no doubt she'll be back. Judging by the success of this book, there is a massive constituency out there saying "me too, me too." judithtimson@hotmail.com