Why Aren't There More Women at the Top?

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.)

Hired by CNN in 1980, after she had worked in politics and then had taken several years off to raise her three children, Evans is part of that pioneering generation of women who "made it" at a time when few women were even working in middle management. And she did so, it seems, by aping the guys. She recommends, for instance, that young women learn to "keep score" as men do, which means jockeying for the big offices. "You can't win if you don't know who's ahead," she writes. Her advice on how to counter female stereotypes: Make sure to laugh a lot at the guys' jokes ("The guys at the office think women are too driven, too serious, to have a sense of humor") , and never be late for an interview, because men think women are chronically tardy.

But nowhere does she talk about having a company vision, or about using her power to transform the apparently backward organization that she works in. She does at one point advocate being true to oneself; unfortunately, that advice comes on page 179, eight pages before the book ends.

Book wraps her argument in new-economy speak, but it's a relic just the same. She argues that the CEOs and entrepreneurs she profiles represent a "new leadership paradigm," which makes them particularly well suited to succeed in the Internet age. In fact, many of them are old-economy success stories, such as Ellen Gordon, 68, of Tootsie Roll, who inherited the company from her father back in the 1970s.