Everything a Woman Needs to Know to Get Paid What She's Worth

by Caroline Bird

Caroline Bird offers a pragmatic, sensible guide for women longing to escape from that low-pay, dead-end job in the secretarial ghetto—but she assumes a certain amount of liberation up front. The quickest, surest way to make money and move up is to get "a man's job." If you're snickering -- don't. Laughing at sexism signifies tacit acceptance of the kind of thinking that still prevails in banks, insurance companies, advertising, Wall Street and just about everywhere despite the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act. There is sound advice on how best to parlay your resources, and discussions on the various discriminatory tricks and traps used to keep women down or out: setting "qualifications" higher for her than for him, bestowing fancy titles but small paychecks, bypassing women for promotions -- and ways to get around such ploys. The format is efficiently question-and-answer but there's nothing slapdash about the canny tactics and suggestions.