Book: Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman: What Men Know About Success That Women Need to Learn
Author: Gail Evans
Publisher: Broadway Books
Price: $23.95

Book: Why the Best Man for the Job Is a Woman: The Unique Female Qualities of Leadership
Author: Esther Wachs Book
Publisher: HarperBusiness
Price: $24

Book: Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love, and Life in a Half-Changed World
Author: Peggy Orenstein
Publisher: Doubleday
Price: $25

Why aren't more women leading U.S. companies? That question has been asked ever since women began flooding the workforce in the 1970s. Unfortunately, it remains just as relevant today: Women make up 3% of the top corporate officers in the companies that comprise the Fortune 500. And only 6% of the CEO slots in Internet companies that are financed by major venture-capital firms are held by women.

Sometime during the 1980s, the book-publishing industry caught on to this trend, and a cottage industry of career books was born -- each one cheerily promising women that they could beat those dismal statistics, if only they would follow 10 simple steps.

Now come three new books that purport to be cutting-edge treatments of the issue. But only Peggy Orenstein's Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love, and Life in a Half-Changed World offers a fresh analysis. The other two -- Gail Evans's Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman and Esther Wachs Book's Why the Best Man for the Job Is a Woman -- serve up the same tired advice that was being peddled to women 20 years ago.

Evans, 58, an executive vice president at CNN, makes the incredibly retro argument that women need only learn how to "play the game" -- that is, how to outmacho the men. Book, 34, a journalist who seems to have gotten her inspiration from reading old (make that very old) issues of Working Woman magazine, focuses on the notion that women can get ahead if only they would use their natural "feminine" skills -- empathy and collaboration. Basing their books on the careers of successful female executives (Evans uses herself as her model, while Book focuses on 14 high-profile types) , both authors try to force complex stories into pat, simple lessons.

Only Orenstein's Flux manages to offer smart insights. Not surprisingly, Orenstein, 38, a veteran journalist who interviewed some 200 women for her book, comes up with no easy solutions. But at least she is asking new, provocative questions: What are young women's fears -- and fantasies -- about work and family today? Could their ideas be at least partly responsible for their inability to advance in the workplace?

Evans says that she decided to write Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman after speaking at Harvard Business School and hearing a group of women complain that they "felt lost in the male-oriented workplace." Remarkably, her response was to write a business equivalent of The Rules. "The business world is male dominated," she writes. "This is not a criticism nor a condemnation. This is the reality." (Exactly why she won't criticize or condemn this is unclear.)