The Boss of You

We’re in the final stretch of our book edits, and one of the many items on this month’s to-do list was to fin­ish off our resource guide. Typ­i­cally we would do most of research for addi­tional resources online and at our beloved local library, but there’s a munic­i­pal strike in Van­cou­ver this sum­mer which has meant library clo­sures. And so, I found myself instead camped out in the Busi­ness sec­tion of a Chap­ters thumb­ing through texts I’d ref­er­enced in the past and books I’d heard lots about but wanted to check out with mine own eye­balls before rec­om­mend­ing them. I spent far to many hours in the Lead­er­ship, Finances, Mar­ket­ing and Busi­ness shelves with an every grow­ing stack of books next to me and my notepad. After about three hours, as I was just get­ting up to leave I noticed that tucked away down at hob­bit height below the “Per­sonal Suc­cess Sto­ries” sec­tion there was a women’s busi­ness shelf.

At first I was excited to see it there; I think it’s safe to say that I feel pretty pas­sion­ately about women’s busi­ness. I was also excited to see copies of Michelle’s awe­some book (which I not so sub­tly turned to face out from the shelf instead of leav­ing them spines out) and with some exhaus­tion, but great inter­est I sat back down with my note­book to go through some of the oth­ers that I thought could make good resources. Then it struck me. Were the women’s busi­ness books in their own kinda pink ghetto (for the record, I believe that every book except Michelle’s fea­tured pink on the cover)? Why hadn’t I found any of these books in the lead­er­ship, mar­ket­ing or HR sec­tions ear­lier? Surely Michelle’s book belongs in the careers sec­tion. It’s not to say there weren’t any female authors in those sec­tions, but any book that stated that it was specif­i­cally for women was housed here.

Now this is a bit of a sticky sub­ject for me, as I truly do believe that as women we deserve our own busi­ness books. That we need them not only because I believe that many of us do busi­ness dif­fer­ently than our male coun­ter­parts, but because the tra­di­tional busi­ness book cat­e­gory also hasn’t really caught onto our exis­tence in a lot of cases. There are few (or often no) case stud­ies of women owned busi­nesses in tra­di­tional busi­ness books for starters, and I could go on at length about the other ways those books make under­ly­ing assump­tions that their read­ers are male. And, hon­estly I was thrilled to see a sec­tion of women’s busi­ness books grow­ing. That shows me that we’re not the only ones notic­ing how many busi­ness gals there are out there, and I’m quite cer­tain our book won’ t appeal to every­one, so I’m glad there are women tak­ing other approaches. That said, I’m a bit bummed that we’re not con­sid­ered wor­thy enough to also be shelves among the big boys. If I hadn’t spot­ted the shelf of pink cov­ers as I left, even I — who was there to research busi­ness books — could have missed the entire section.

At this point, as we start to move past our first big hump in the edit­ing process (full draft handed in this week!) it kind of makes me sad to think of my baby sit­ting down at hob­bit height away from the rest of the kids you know? What do you think?