Power Failure

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This shrill guidebook for female executives maintains that a major reason for the paucity of women in top jobs is not lack of opportunities, but derives from subconscious, contradictory impulses that scuttle a career at the point when a woman is offered the kind of corporate job she has striven for. Bools, who heads her own executive recruiting firmfrequently vaunted in the bookand Swan, an executive-search consultant, blame parental influences and psychologically and historically sanctified feminine roles for women's concept that power is to be achieved by association rather than by generating it for themselves. Citing six women successful in advertising and marketing, they report that although some women surmount a ``power failure'' crisis, most are apt to refuse an opportunity to advance on a personal pretext, cling to a subordinate, less competitive job, or perhaps seek the security of a wealthy marriage, thus, charge the authors, jeopardizing women's hard-won equality of opportunity. Author tour. (Mar.)

Library Journal

This book poses the question, ``Are women to blame when they don't succeed?''; then it replies in the affirmative. Executive recruiters Bools and Swan present six cases in which clients inexplicably declined top management posts; they trace the common cause as ``relationism,'' a desire to please the father, defer to the husband, or avoid surpassing the mentor. The authors fail to adequately consider external factors in business failure even when they cite works such as Jean B. Miller's Toward a New Psychology of Women (Beacon, 1986) that present patriarchal oppression as key to understanding women. The accounts themselves provide sobering reading, and there is no reason to doubt their veracity. But six cases do not an epidemic make. Although this book may be in high demand, it is not recommended.-- Kathryn Hammell Carpenter, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago