Hannah Discusses Her Book

Workplace Buzz on June 1, 2007 6:47 AM

Blogging from the Huffington Post, Hannah Seligson asks, Should I Have Written a Career Guide Called "New Kid on the Job: Advice from the Trenches?"

The number of women in my graduating class outnumbered the men. And if my class was anything reflective of what the national statistics bear out, the women graduated with higher grade point averages.

So why, with all these doors swinging open, would I write a book, (published today) called New Girl on the Job: Advice from the Trenches?

Because, distressingly, young women's academic success is not translating into workplace parity. Last month, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) found that women one year out of college make 80 percent of what their male peers do. And this month, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) found that white males from the class of 2007 are out-pacing their female counterparts when it comes to having a full-time job upon graduation.

Tory Johnson, the CEO of Women for Hire and one of the career experts I interviewed for New Girl on the Job puts it like this: "It's very easy for young women to get stuck in support roles...After a year or so you become pegged and it's more difficult for your employer to see you in a different light."

Ilene H. Lange, president of Catalyst, the leading research and advisory organization working with businesses to expand opportunities for women at work, attributes the glaring absence of women at the top to the fact that women are two and half times more likely to be channeled into staff jobs like Human Resources and communication than into operating roles where they would be generating revenue and managing profit and loss. The revised career calculus should be to use an assistant position as a springboard to bigger opportunities, not as a place to incubate.

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