Sandals are a can of worms. Hands down, it is the shoe with most problems attached to it.
You think I'm exaggerating?
Ha.
Let me count the ways:
* because you wear them on your bare feet, with no buffering sock to offer succor, they need to be pain-free.
* because their construction needs to allow for ventilation they hold on to your skin with straps, multiplying potentially painful points of contact: they can hurt in the back of your heel / on your insole / / on the big bone before your toes begin / on the tender skin of your baby toe... And this is discounting for cullouses, warts, and other feet ailments.
* because all feet are different and sandals have - what else? - open toes - your feet need to be held firmly within the boundaries of the shoe, not sliding out if too narrow, not stuffed if too wide.
* because all of us look better with some elevation, a heel is highly desireable, but a heel that needs to be walkable and pain free (see reasons above).
* because all of us look better with longer legs, an ankle strap that visually cuts off your leg is better avoided.
Ah - and this is where we run into problems.
Even a cursory glance over store offerings will reveal that the overwhelming majority of designs feature a high ankle strap. Here, if you don't believe me, is the shape that rules most stores (this one happens to be from ASOS):
Nothing can be worse if you have anything but model-perfect stems. This, ladies, is a leg killer for those of us who have short/er legs. If this is an affliction you don't suffer from - stop reading now. You are in luck and will look good in anything.
But for the rest of us a holy grail of a summer sandal needs to have the cute look and heel of the specimen above but without the offending strap. We want a sporty sandal (sporty is the look of the moment) with a manageable block heel, in good color, with a padded footbed, comfortable and soft straps (because the sandal of the moment is all about one or two thick straps) but without that ankle-cutting-band. We want a smart look but without the pain.
Does that wonderbeast exist?
I've looked and looked and here is what I found. Just for you ladies.
All who were "Little Women" fanatics as kids will recall the scene where Jo singes the back of her one good dress and then has to stand with her back firmly pressed against the wall so as not to embarrass herself by showing her backside. I always thought that the scene was designed by the author to highlight the bourgeois values of Civil War America, its materialism and rigid propriety. It never occurred to me that there was a historic fact lurking in the background - Jo's singed dress was a sign of its times when women burnt. Burnt - because the expanse of their crinolines made them unaware of their circumference and they came too close to the fire.
That and more I learned from the following story announcing a new exhibition at Toronto's Bata Shoe Museum entitled: Fashion Victims: The Pleasures and Perils of Dress in the 19th Century.
Fashion history makes for a fascinating read, and I am dying, pardon the pun, to see the exhibit itself. Canadians, you are lucky!:
Deadly Victorian fashions
The Victorians suffered for their brilliant arsenic gowns and flammable crinolines. We’re not much better.
The “arsenic” ball gown sits on a headless dressmaker’s form in the basement archives of Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum as senior curator Elizabeth Semmelhack, wearing cotton conservators’ gloves, expounds upon its vintage (late 1860s), its provenance (Australia), its exquisite construction—and, most relevantly, its ability to kill.
The green of the shimmering silk, now slightly faded, was one of the Victorian era’s most fashionable hues; people, mostly women, wore it even after it was widely known that the arsenic-based dye responsible for the colour could lead to horrible physical suffering and early death. When asked if the dress poses any danger still, Semmelhack pauses. “We’ve been counselled not to lick it,” she says, laughing.
The prime risk, Semmelhack explains, was for the wearer who would sweat and absorb it. But the dangers of the dye didn’t end there: They extended to a long chain of people, from factory workers to seamstresses to fellow ball-goers.
The once-deadly gown is one of more than 90 artifacts—clothing, shoes, hair accessories, advertisements, cartoons, staged tableaux—being readied for the museum’s upcoming exhibit, Fashion Victims: The Pleasures and Perils of Dress in the 19th Century. The show, which opens June 18 and runs through 2016, is co-curated by Semmelhack and Alison Matthew David, a professor at Ryerson University’s School of Fashion whose decade-long investigation into the relationship between clothing and health inspired it; her book on the topic will be published next year.
The exhibit’s title was carefully chosen, says Semmelhack: “There’s almost a Victorian excess of pleasures and perils to be explored.” Among the pleasures is how industrialization and the creation of department stores lead to a democratization of fashion, allowing more people to participate in the acquisition of luxury and exclusivity, if only peripherally: “Today, you may be able to afford Prada perfume but not a Prada ensemble,” says Semmelhack. “Then, you could buy your shoelaces at [Paris department store] Le Bon Marché.”
In the museum’s shoe archive, a footwear candy store, Semmelhack shows a pair of extravagantly hand-embroidered Jean-Louis François Pinet women’s boots next to a far more modestly embellished pair—akin to a pair of Roger Viviers next to Steve Maddens. “It’s an attempt at ornamentation but not as glorious,” she says. Economics mattered, with the introduction of cheaper materials often coming at a high cost, seen when celluloid hair combs replaced tortoise shell, Semmelhack says: “They were so explosive when exposed to fire that houses burned.”
Victorian women also routinely burned, a fact showcased by a dressmaker’s form displaying a boned corset cinching a tiny waist above a metal hoop crinoline form. “Crinoline fires” killed 3,000 women between the late 1850s and late 1860s in England. Women would lose sense of their circumference, step too close to a fire grate, then flames would be fanned by oxygen circulating under their skirts. Until electricity, ballerinas also routinely perished when the muslin of their tutus met gas lamps; the deaths were referred to at the time as the “holocaust of ballet girls.” (The remedy, flame-retardant fabrics, was seen by many as too ugly to wear.)
In her office, Semmelhack runs through the exhibit’s floor plan, modelled after Paris’s famed shopping arcades. “My hope is visitors will be seduced by this beautiful space and beautiful colours and beautiful things; it’s only if you pause and read the text that what is embedded in the objects themselves becomes revealed.” At the outset of the four-year planning process, Semmelhack and Matthew David focused on obvious perils: constriction, sock poisonings, fire. They then observed the extent to which 19th-century dress was about gloss: “Women’s silk and satin dresses just glowed, as did men’s shiny top hats and shiny boots,” she says. “Then you’d think: How does a man navigate an urban 19th-century landscape and stay shiny? In part it’s through the little boys littering the landscape who shine shoes for a pittance.” They became intrigued with the invisible “fashion victims” who supported the fashionable image: the factory workers who grew in numbers (and the artisans whose ranks declined), child labourers, “mad hatters” exposed to mercury poisoning, slaves picking cotton, even silkworms sacrificed harvesting silk threads. This raises “modern age” questions, Semmelhack says: “Is the march of progress to the benefit of mankind? Is it to the benefit of the few? And how do the masses fit into this?”
The resulting show is layered with meaning as it explores the ways in which what we wear is driven by economic, political and social forces, not personal taste as we like to believe. Mania for arsenic green (also used in artificial flowers, wallpaper, paint, even medicine for morning sickness) offers the perfect example. Its popularity was abetted by ready supply as a mining by-product (William Morris’s family owned the biggest arsenic mine in England), as well as by the arrival of the electric light bulb, which shifted colour preferences. “It retained a luminous quality in daylight or evening,” says Semmelhack, who notes that it wasn’t until the light bulb that diamonds became important in fashion “because they really sparkled.”
Similarly, the fashionability of extremely narrow women’s shoes derived in part from industrial edict, Semmelhack says: “If shoemakers could make straights—no left or right foot—they only needed one last per size.” The return of women’s high heels in the late 1850s and early ’60s served a different social purpose: a form of censure for women at a time the sex was becoming outspoken in the abolitionist movement. The heel had been banned for most of the century due to its association with debauched French aristocracy. Its revival was intended to summon similar negative associations, says Semmelhack: “It was called the ‘Louis heel’ to make sure everyone knew it was a reclamation of the 18th century. It was intended to be highly destabilizing.”
Also telling is the gender divide in the way rich and poor dressed. In the shoe archive, Semmelhack compares a pair of high, narrow-toed, shiny men’s boots to rough-hewn round-toe men’s leather work boots. Variation in women’s footwear, on the other hand, is observable only in the quality of fabrication and construction. Thus, to the untrained eye, there is less distinction between the worth of a rich woman and that of a middle-class one.
The arrival of vivid, even garish, colours created by aniline dyes in the 1850s furthered the gender divide, Semmelhack notes: “Women and children were wearing these new colours created by industrialization, but upper-class men almost rigidly wore the colours of the factories that made them so wealthy.” A particularly tragic irony is seen in the popularity of bright red, associated with vigour, for children’s clothing: The dye used to create it caused rashes and ill health.
Semmelhack refuses to see fashion extremes and the risks people took to remain in vogue as ridiculous. Not following fashion was equally perilous, she says: “If idealized femininity is about women’s participation in fashion, and if femininity or beauty is the major thing you are judged and valued by, then, if you reject it, trust me, all hell breaks loose.”
It’s impossible to look at the exhibit and not draw contemporary analogies—narrow footwear replaced by vertiginous heels, corsets by sausage-casing Spanx, Dickensian factories by offshore sweatshops. Our forebears were willing to burn for fashion. We’re too evolved for that: We let others burn for us.
The social and health costs of fashion is a growing field of curatorial interest, also evident in the 2009 exhibit Eco Fashion: Going Green, at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, examining “fast fashion.” It revealed the United States consumes some 84 lb. of textiles per person per year, that the average garment purchased in the U.S. is worn only six times before being discarded, and that textile making uses more than 8,000 chemicals, many of them irreversibly damaging to people and the planet. We may look askance at British parliament ignoring demands to outlaw manufacture of arsenical products until the end of the 19th century, despite known toxicity, but we’re not that further advanced.
A more comic reminder of this was seen this year at Cannes, where director Atom Egoyan told the story of the actress Blake Lively not being able to fit in the car going to his film’s premiere because the skirt of her ball gown was too voluminous. We may think the narrative of fashion’s perils is historical, but as this provocative, important exhibit reminds us, it’s still being written.
No, this has nothing to do with cheese or lofty moral dilemmas. It has to do with one thing, and one thing only - nostalgia. Nostalgia is a funny thing. It occurs when we miss something that is no longer there, and potentially never was. Nostos means homecoming - but it is not any home you have or had, but rather the mythical, perfect home of your dreams. Our memory tends naturally towards exaggeration, the good is ever better, the bad that much worse, when sifted through the neurons that comprise memory. We long not so much for that which no longer exists as for that which we imagine existed. Nostalgia, then, is akin to utopia, which could mean either the perfect place or, depending on the intention of the man who coined the term, no place. Duality and disappointment are wired into the linguistic makeup of both words.
So why a semantic exegesis on your Friday read, you may ask? Well, a friend posted the link below on his Facebook page. It is about a song - Africa by Toto - that I personally heard in 1991 when I was in the army. I was on a brief brake in Eilat with a few army-met girlfriends. We were all super nerds, fresh out of our little nerdy parental homes, pretending unsuccessfully to be more worldly and wild than we were. Africa was playing in a beach-side bar, lights danced on the rippled surface of the dark water, and I still remember how I felt when I heard it for the first time, what aspirational fantasies coursed through my head at the age of 18. No, I never wanted to bless the rains down in Africa, I never even wanted to go there, but the easy sentimentality of the song resonated with the actual sentiments of an 18 year old. That's what cheese songs do - and why they work.
It is also why the following thorough take-down of the song is so damn great. Enjoy ladies. You can thank me later:
I am not into posting and picking apart every celeb appearance, but when you have lady stars who are known fashionistas, whose very celebrity is often wrapped up in their wrappings, I think that dissecting their sartorial choices is a Vestments mandate. As it happens this week was a busy one, with plenty of material to go through.
First, this appearance from Sarah Jessica Parker:
SJP is wearing a dress by Schiaparelli - an Italian haute-couture label recently resuscitated. The original iteration was known for the surrealist designs of its founder, Elsa Schiaparelli. The new iteration attempts to revive the surrealist whimsy, but to my view, with limited success. This dress on SJP is a case in point - aside for the fact that it is utterly age-inappropriate and unflattering on an almost 50 year old - the nightgown-ish design and print are unfortunate, as it the super low neckline that creates an odd proportion even on a leggy model. BAH.
A much more successful look by the same label appeared on the enviable frame of the fantastic Tilda Swinton, who, by dint of genetics and personal quirkiness, manages to pull off even the most complex outfits on a routine basis. Granted, she usually has the sense to chose items that are flattering and smart. This, with the print offset by a much better color, and a much stronger cut, is no exception:
Our next example comes from Kerry Washington, who wore Sportmax:
What can I say? The runway is better styled (the white belt is really needed here); the proportions are wrong on Washington (skirt should be shorter - this is an awkward length). Could be much cuter than how it ended up.
Next up is Cate Blanchett in Chloe:
Even she can't pull all these ruffles off. The styling is good (love the earrings and sandals); the white is a good white; but the whole thing looks like a toilet paper commercial. It is super absorbent!
Finally, we have an actress who is merely a wanna be in every way (the chick Johnny Depp left Vanessa Paradis for) - and she is making an appearance here only to illustrate my hatered for Stella McCartney's design aesthetic:
This, ladies, is a dress of ridicule and ridiculousness. I rest my case.
Yes, I am fully aware that this is a fashion-centric blog. But sometimes a person must take a stand on matters that exceed the sartorial. On matters of grave importance. On matters of personal taste and therefore personal freedom.
So - coagulated, acidified milk is a delicious thing.
Sure, its high fat content isn't particularly good for one's mid section, but it is healthier than baked goods, and - at least as far as I am concerned - much harder to resist. Granted, it is not for the faint of stomachs as this cute scene from a silly but adorable movie I similarly can never resist when it comes up in the gym:
My personal favorite is a French, semi-soft cheese known for the village that began producing it and easily recognizable for the thin black line that runs down its middle - Morbier. For most of this year, however, Morbier was nowhere to be found Stateside. Apparently the FDA (regulatory authority responsible for food and drug) found something to be wrong with a batch). Devotees - moi! - were left bereft and orphaned, their treats a scarcity.
Apparently this deficit was just an opening shot in a larger campaign by the FDA - there are now - wait for it - ALLEGATIONS!! NYMag reports:
Reasons You Should Be Troubled by the FDA’s Cheese-Aging Regulations
It's been a weird few days for people who love good cheese, particularly wheels of American farmstead cheese aged on wooden boards: Last week, it seemed as if the FDA had moved to ban aging cheese on wood, a practice almost as old as coagulated dairy itself and the production aspect that turns Comté into, well, Comté. New York's Department of Agriculture got curious as to why the agency had all of a sudden cited several producers for doing something New York and practically every other state permit, so the FDA replied it was simply enforcing long-standing policy, not doing anything new: Wood, being porous, "cannot be adequately cleaned and sanitized," which sounds bad, and besides, Listeria outbreaks have plagued the cheese industry as recently as March.
[...] While the agency's position on aging cheese on wooden boards seems to be more clear, it's uncertain whether this will become an eventual focus of industrywide enforcement[...] If the rules were eventually enforced, here are.. reasons why it would be a huge deal.
1. The rule-tightening could apply to imported cheeses. Bid adieu to"the great majority" of foreign fromage, says Cornell's Rob Ralyea. Rob Kaufelt, owner of Murray's Cheese, tells Grub, "Comté, Beaufort, and others like that would effectively disappear."
4. There's not much science backing the FDA up.This fight revolves around its contention that wood grows bad bacteria like Listeria, but critics — who have centuries of tradition on their side — counter thatgoodbacteria, like what live in yogurt, are the point of wood aging. They're ready with studies showing the process isneutralat worst,beneficialat best. Says Saxelby: "There's more listeriosis from pasteurized cheese and deli meat than from wood-aged cheese."
5. Cheese aged on anything else tastes weird, comparatively speaking. "The thing about wood," Saxelby explains, "is it breathes. If you put something on a plastic or metal shelf versus a wood shelf, the stuff that sits on the plastic or metal shelf isn't going to be able to breath and isn't going to ripen properly."
6. The move would favor Big Cheese, where wood-aging is impracticable. "I'm not given to speculation about these kinds of theories, mind you, but some are saying it's maybe because the large producers have been losing market share against what we call 'the good stuff' these days," Kaufelt says, before clarifying: "Though I suspect it's more bureaucratic."
7. Finally, cheesemakers aren't dairy's Appalachian moonshiners."We use strict testing and sanitary procedures," Kaufelt says. "It's been that way since the beginning, since we first worked with [the Department of Agriculture]. They're strict, and have to be."
* * *
As a former Soviet citizen I dislike scarcity, especially one caused by inane governmental incursions into the market. Think about it - the very same FDA that found an innocuous cheese guilty just recently approved an incredibly powerful narcotic painkiller - and that in a smack of a resurgent heroin epidemic in the country, caused - by and large - by painkillers that act as potent gateways. Hence, pardon me for questioning the wisdom of said governmental agency as it attempts to regulate MY CHEESE!
As some of you know I've been thinking a lot about the fallacy of the feminist myth that you can have it all - the 'all' in this case is the holy grail of a stellar career and great motherhood. I'm thinking about it so much I might be actually motivated to put down my thoughts on paper, but meanwhile a New Yorker writer composed a piece on the dangers of acting 'tough' in negotiations. I am not certain that the example they use as an opener is that great, though - having been in that situation myself, such negotiations should never take place over email and some of the items should have been left off the list completely - there is a difference between forceful and stupid.
This spring, an aspiring professor—W, as she’s chosen to call herself in a blog post about the experience—attempted to negotiate her tenure-track job offer with the Nazareth College philosophy department. She wanted a slightly higher salary than the starting offer, paid maternity leave for one semester, a pre-tenure sabbatical, a cap on the number of new classes that she would teach each semester, and a deferred starting date. “I know that some of these might be easier to grant than others,” she acknowledged in her e-mail. “Let me know what you think.”
Nazareth didn’t hesitate to do just that: W wrote that the college promptly let her know that she was no longer welcome. “The institution has decided to withdraw its offer of employment to you,” the terse reply concluded. “We wish you the best in finding a suitable position.”
What had W done wrong? Perhaps nothing, at least according to the advice to “lean in” that women have become accustomed to hearing. “This is how I thought negotiating worked,” W wrote. “I just thought there was no harm in asking.” (It’s entirely possible that there were factors at play not covered in the leaked correspondence—a Nazareth representative told me that the college was unable to comment on a personnel issue.)
In a survey of graduating professional students, Linda Babcock, of Carnegie Mellon University, found that only seven per cent of women attempted to negotiate their initial offers, while fifty-seven per cent of the men did so. We see those dire statistics and think that women are, in a sense, self-sabotaging. They don’t ask for the same compensation and benefits as men, so they can’t rightly be expected to receive them. But is it really the case that the disadvantage stems from not asking? Sheryl Sandberg, the author of “Lean In” and the chief operating officer of Facebook, acknowledges the difficulties of negotiation, but nonetheless urges women to push forward (“I negotiated hard,” she writes) and to do what they would do if they weren’t afraid. But, had W spoken to psychologists who study the role of gender in negotiation alongside more popularly rendered edicts from women at the top of their fields, she might have been less surprised at the outcome.
Hannah Riley Bowles, a senior lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the director of the Women and Power program, has been studying gender effects on negotiation through laboratory studies, case studies, and extensive interviews with executives and employees in diverse fields. She’s repeatedly found evidence that our implicit gender perceptions mean that the advice that women stand up for themselves and assert their position strongly in negotiations may not have the intended effect. It may even backfire.
In four studies, Bowles and collaborators from Carnegie Mellon found that people penalized women who initiated negotiations for higher compensation more than they did men. The effect held whether they saw the negotiation on video or read about it on paper, whether they viewed it from a disinterested third-party perspective or imagined themselves as senior managers in a corporation evaluating an internal candidate. Even women penalized the women who initiated the conversation, though they also penalized the men who did so. They just didn’t seem to like seeing someone ask for more money.
In a follow-up study, Bowles asked participants whether they themselves would negotiate in the given scenario—that is, they were now the job candidate and not the evaluating manager. The women, for the most part, said no. They were nervous that the conversation would turn against them. “Women are more reticent to negotiate than men, for good reason,” Bowles says.
It’s not that men are immune from being seen as tough or unlikeable when they make aggressive demands. Attempting to negotiate can make anyone seem less nice, Bowles repeatedly found. But it’s only women who subsequently suffer a penalty: people report that they would be less inclined to work with them, be it as coworkers, subordinates, or bosses. The effect is especially strong, Bowles has found, when people observe women who engage in salary negotiations. “Money in particular seems to be a hot one,” she says.
One reason for the bias may be that the person hiring—or giving a raise—values different qualities in male and female colleagues. Women are potentially being evaluated according to different criteria, even if the person doing the evaluation doesn’t realize it. Julie Phelan and her colleagues at Rutgers have found that, when women are already in the hiring or promotion process—that is, when their credentials have already been screened and they are in the interview phase—the focus shifts away from their competence and toward their social skills. That effect is absent for male candidates.
W’s experience conforms to that interpretation, according to the blog post. In the short e-mail rescinding her job offer, the main rationale for the decision was based on her ability to fit in at the college and not her qualifications. (Those, presumably, were fully in order, given that she had received the offer in the first place). Referring to W’s requests, the letter said, “It was determined that on the whole these provisions indicate an interest in teaching at a research university and not at a college, like ours, that is both teaching and student centered.” In other words, your goals—as we have interpreted them—don’t seem to mesh with ours, at least now that you’ve pushed back on our offer.
Women who don’t negotiate may not be refraining because they are shy. They may, instead, be anticipating very real attitudes and very real reactions that are borne out, time and again, in the lab and in the office. Often, leaning in has an even worse effect than saying nothing. Had W voiced excitement and held onto her doubts, she would now be Nazareth-bound.
It happens, too, in situations that are removed from the negotiating table: when, despite the odds, women find themselves in leadership positions. Female leaders who try to act in ways typically associated with male leaders—assertive, authoritative, directive—are seen far more negatively than males. In the modern world, we’d like to think ourselves above such base stereotypes. But that doesn’t mean that discrimination goes away; it means that it shifts from the explicit to the implicit realm. “It’s the idea of second-generation feminism,” Bowles says. “We have these culturally ingrained ideas about what we consider attractive or appropriate, ideas of what’s O.K. for men or women. And when women violate it, people have an aversive response.” The result is that discrimination becomes more nuanced: we can’t point to overt things like women not having the right to vote. We can, it’s true, point to things like pay gaps—but, because they are inherently more ambiguous, it’s much more difficult to say that discrimination has taken place. Maybe she really didn’t push hard enough. Maybe she is a bit less qualified. Many women (and men) who ask for raises, after all, just aren’t quite good enough to get them. Maybe he did make a better case.
Bowles recalls one recent study, from the University of Pennsylvania, that observed the less obvious forms that implicit gender bias can take in the workplace. It looked at a commission-based profession—stockbrokers—where the model has long been eat-what-you-kill, and tried to see why, even in such a seemingly merit-based system, women made less than men. “They did a very careful analysis of what happened when these brokers left the firm,” Bowles says. “How were their portfolios allocated? They found that the more profitable elements of the portfolio were given to men and not to women.” The thing is, those doing the allocation may not even have done it on purpose. But they were disproportionately male, and people simply find it easier to get along with others who are more like themselves—and may reward them accordingly.
One new study even suggests that some of the discrimination effects in the workplace aren’t the result of bias against women so much as bias in favor of men. It doesn’t matter what personal characteristic we’re talking about—gender, race, social background. Like attracts like. In-groups reward their own.
The situation is infuriating in many ways, and simply bringing attention to the issues is not enough. Awareness is good, but when problems have slipped from the explicit to the implicit, from the unassailable to the ambiguous, knowing that the effect exists isn’t sufficient to change behavior. Bowles cites an ongoing collaboration between the University of Virginia and George Mason University, where psychologists are finding that telling people about implicit stereotypes may have a perverse negative effect. “They are actually more inclined to use the stereotypes in their judgments and decisions when you bring them up,” Bowles says.
One way to start solving the problem can come from the institutional side, in the form of increased transparency around hiring, promotion, and compensation decisions. “What we’ve found is that ambiguity facilitates the potential for gender effects and for stereotyping people. It leads people to preconceived notions,” Bowles says. “And transparency has the opposite effect. It’s a healthy way of changing things without having to change the world.” If a female leader is going to earn less than her male predecessor, tell her why that choice has been made.
The final piece of advice is for would-be powerful female leaders themselves: be aware that, at least until social attitudes shift radically, you are not immune from these effects. That doesn’t mean not negotiating but, rather, being strategic about it. “We’ve found that you need to offer an explanation for your demands that gives a legitimate reason that the other side finds persuasive,” Bowles says. “You need to signal concern for the broader organization: ‘It’s not just good for me; it’s good for you.’ ”
Still, in a 2012 study, Bowles and Babcock found that a team-oriented frame could indeed help—but only if used on its own. In their experiment, used in combination with a legitimate justification for the request (for instance, that you have another job offer on the table), it seemed likely to backfire for participants.
No social-science study can tell a woman what to do in any particular negotiation. The variables are too complex. And to suggest that women should be wary of asserting themselves in the workplace would be like telling Rosa Parks not to sit in the front of a bus. But, for now, any negotiation in which gender is involved remains a careful, precarious balancing act.
