The all-too-female cluelessness of "I Don't Know How She Does It"

When you make $750,000 a year, you don't sweat the domestic details. But the lastest hit novel about a miserable working mom is too ignorant and dishonest about money to deal with that.

By Ann Marlowe

Oct 23, 2002 | That women have broken through the glass ceiling is one of the best-kept secrets in America -- even better kept than their success in combining executive life with motherhood. You wouldn't know about either if all you had to go by was the defeatist tone of most chick lit, including the widely hyped new British import "I Don't Know How She Does It" by Allison Pearson. In this faux diary's alternate reality, sexist comments and attitudes dominate business culture, working life with children is a nightmarish struggle, and women are wise to throw in the towel for full-time motherhood or scaled-down ambitions.

I say "alternate reality," because Fortune recently published its annual roundup of the 50 most powerful women in American business, and the roster of powerful corporations with female CEOs includes Kraft Foods, eBay, PepsiCo, Avon, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, Hearst Magazines, Lucent, Sanford C. Bernstein, MTV Networks Music Group, Time and Xerox.

Pseudofeminists like Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the author of "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," insist that these women have paid the price for their success with childlessness. But while Hewlett claims that 49 percent of women earning more than $100,000 per year are childless after 40, 71 percent of the 187 high achievers who attended Fortune's Most Powerful Women in Business Summit earlier this year have kids -- an average of 2.2 per woman. According to Fortune, "Lehman Brothers' Barbara Byrne notes that eight of 10 female managing directors in her investment-banking division have kids -- 'and most more than one.' Byrne herself has four."

Yes, girls, you can have it all -- or as much of it as the supermotivated, bright and lucky boys can have. And the key is a word you don't see very much in "feminist" novels or tirades: money. Lots of money. Hewlett's numbers don't match Fortune's because there's a huge difference between life on $100,000 a year and the $500,000 to $1,000,000 or more per year that the Fortune women make. Nannies and home staff start to be affordable long before you get to the middle number and are easy to manage at the highest. So is a nonworking spouse, and 30 percent of the Fortune Top 50 have househusbands.

"I Don't Know How She Does It" is all about money and the trade-offs we make between money and time, pleasure and family life, but you won't find much about the M-word between its covers. The book's meticulous realism about unimportant details -- where else can you read about the struggle to put the rain hood on a baby carriage? -- masks Pearson's lack of realism about the social landscape. "I Don't Know How She Does It" is fundamentally dishonest about the relationship between money and gender. Instead, it offers masochistic clichés of the "You can't have it all" variety. That's probably why it has been a bestseller in Britain and has been sold to the movies.

Money should play a leading role in "I Don't Know How She Does It" because Pearson has made her heroine, Kate Reddy, a hedge-fund manager at EMF, a prestigious investment bank in the City (London's financial district). That was probably a bad choice; it's hard to fake a knowledge of other people's jobs, and that of the financial industry may be the hardest to fake of all. Some of the details of Kate's life do ring true. She and her gentle architect husband, Richard, live in a townhouse and have a nanny who comes in daily. Kate buys four pairs of shoes at a time, takes a car service rather than mass transit to work when she's late, and wears Armani.

But the diary entries Kate writes tell a story of desperation and domestic chaos that doesn't match up. They're all about losing sleep to make store-bought pies look home baked for school events, finding rats and rot in her house and lice in her kids' hair, and living in an atmosphere she calls "medieval squalor." Kate's afraid of antagonizing her demanding, insubordinate nanny Paula, whom she sends on vacation to Morocco, and even of annoying her incompetent cleaner.

Nor are we told how much Kate makes; a minor character, a cabdriver, speculates "Fifty? A hundred?" Ridiculous, especially in London. The real Kate Reddys make 500,000 pounds a year -- around $750,000. The real Kate Reddys don't fake homemade pies at 2 in the morning -- they pay someone else to bake them.

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