Ann Marlowe

When you make $750,000 a year, you don’t sweat the domestic details. But the latest hit novel about a miserable working mom is too ignorant and dishonest about money to deal with that.

By Ann Marlowe

That women have broken through the glass ceiling is one of the best-kept secrets in America — even better kept than their success in combining executive life with motherhood. You wouldn’t know about either if all you had to go by was the defeatist tone of most chick lit, including the widely hyped new British import “I Don’t Know How She Does It” by Allison Pearson. In this faux diary’s alternate reality, sexist comments and attitudes dominate business culture, working life with children is a nightmarish struggle, and women are wise to throw in the towel for full-time motherhood or scaled-down ambitions.

I say “alternate reality,” because Fortune recently published its annual roundup of the 50 most powerful women in American business, and the roster of powerful corporations with female CEOs includes Kraft Foods, eBay, PepsiCo, Avon, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, Hearst Magazines, Lucent, Sanford C. Bernstein, MTV Networks Music Group, Time and Xerox.

Pseudofeminists like Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the author of “Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children,” insist that these women have paid the price for their success with childlessness. But while Hewlett claims that 49 percent of women earning more than $100,000 per year are childless after 40, 71 percent of the 187 high achievers who attended Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Business Summit earlier this year have kids — an average of 2.2 per woman. According to Fortune, “Lehman Brothers’ Barbara Byrne notes that eight of 10 female managing directors in her investment-banking division have kids — ‘and most more than one.’ Byrne herself has four.” (more…)