The Female CEO ca. 2002

"You can be a mistress, a daughter, a wife, a mother -- or a guy," a high-ranking female property executive told me. Offered such an impoverished range of roles, it's not surprising that women choose the company of other women, creating our own jobs and job descriptions inside organizations that allow us a wider degree of personal expression.

3. You can't have it all.

If men and women were truly equal at work, then both genders would hold roughly equal expectations of what is possible -- and what isn't. But the truth is, they don't. When it comes to MBAs, fewer women than men get married. And fewer women MBAs have families. On Wall Street, 66% of men with MBAs have families, while 55% of women with MBAs do. The message here is simple: Men and women have very different views of what is manageable -- because they have very different management roles.

Women who do have families ultimately find that they have to make other trade-offs, such as giving up private time, friends, hobbies -- or ambition. I found that as I gave myself over to my job, I inevitably put my health at risk. It was a choice I had to make: either take time to exercise or give that time to my children.

Women have to give up something, because in dual-income families, women still do most of the child care and the housework. All too often, women collude in their own oppression. They let their mates off easy, holding steadfastly to the sense of power and self-esteem that comes from doing it all -- and doing it well. "I like choosing what to cook for everyone," one British woman executive told me. "I like making the lunches and organizing the birthday parties. Does doing it all de-skill my husband? Well, yes. I guess it does."

The most stubbornly optimistic of us still maintain that we can have it all -- just not all of it at once. As every woman in the world will tell you, "We all need a wife." But even more than a wife, what every woman I've spoken with yearns for is a life -- a whole life, one in which women can be the same people at work that they are at home, with different tasks but with consistent values and styles.

4. Women's new mission: Change the game.

Women's goals used to be to get into management, to get onto the boards of Fortune 500 companies, to become CEO. There's a new goal. The aim now is more radical and more ambitious: It is to change the game entirely. Young women pursue a different model, play by different rules. "I love my career, but there are other things in life," one up-and-coming businesswoman told me. "I don't want to be CEO," another said. "I want a whole and healthy life -- and even a recession isn't going to scare me into accepting something that isn't me."

When I think back to my career as a CEO, I have to ask: Why did I stay at a place where I was underpaid and subjected to absurd, sexist stereotypes? And when I had a baby, why was I only willing to give myself 10 days of maternity leave? Why would I choose to live like that? The answer I keep coming back to is this: I did those things because I had enough autonomy to create a different kind of culture for all of the people who worked for me. Much more than men, women are painfully aware of the antihuman -- and certainly antiwoman -- realities that define the contemporary workplace. We feel the harsh conditions, suffer the belittling indignities, battle the sexist innuendos. And we genuinely long for the opportunity to create different structures and different cultures where people can thrive, places where men and women alike can stop faking it and instead unleash their hearts and minds on businesses that respect their capabilities, their commonalities, and their differences.

The truth is, I've heard from plenty of men who talk about having to deal with the idiotic legacy of old-fashioned male stereotypes. Men may not suffer financially and politically the way women do. But the cultural artifacts of a workplace that still operates like a 1950s old-boy network is as frustrating for men as it is for women.

Changing the game starts with honesty. One of my employees at CMGI came to me after a planning meeting at which the refrain was, "Don't tell Margaret." When she had the temerity to ask why I should be kept in the dark, she was told that I was "too honest." The men in the meeting who were advising her were afraid of what might happen if employees really knew what was going on. And they assumed that once I knew, I would share the information with others. What I learned from the story was this: Those men knew, at least intuitively, just how powerful the truth can be. Which is what I told my employee. I said, "There's no more powerful weapon for change than honesty." What she told me in response was, "Now I realize why I love working here. I've always been trusted with the truth, I always knew that I'd get straight answers. This is the first time that I've ever felt really respected at work."