Office Depot’s Success Strategies for Businesswomen Conference

• In the Reagan Bush ’84 re-elect campaign, head of women’s issues Sonia Landau printed a bumper sticker, “Women’s Issues are Economic Issues.”  So great was the male outrage that the prints never distributed, just destroyed. 

• While at the Women’s Bureau, former Secretary of Labor and Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg told me that he asked President Kennedy if he could close down the Women’s Bureau, because it seemed to get in the way of women being treated equally.  Kennedy agreed, but said he could never weather the political storm.

• A few years later, FOX Network kept our revolutionary pilot TV show – the first talking heads format to include women among the pundits, brainchild of Kathy Wilson, former head of the National Women’s Political Caucus – on its potential show top ten list for several years, not sure whether it would be accepted among the political public or not.

Well, women’s issues still are economic issues, and we women still put obstacles in the way of our own equality, and just because women have token political pundits on every television show now, does not mean we have been accepted.  Take my latest infuriating piece of “women’s” mail:  Office Depot’s Success Strategies for Businesswomen Conference. 

Which of these featured speakers has run a business? Senator Hillary Clinton?  TV entertainment-barely-news host Katie Couric? Former Director of the Women’s Bureau under Carter, former Clinton Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman? Or the second tier of advertised greats, Former Clinton White House Political Liaison now Counsel to the US Chamber of Commerce, i.e. lawyer working for a nonprofit, Rejita Lewis? Or any of the other speakers?

In other words, Office Depot’s idea of women in business is to choose a few women who have made names for themselves in politics or entertainment -- who have managed nothing but their own fame or infamy – and to assert that they are experts on the needs of real businesswomen.

There are even a few token conservatives in the group: Mary Matalin, Chief of Staff to my friend Lee Atwater at the Republican National Committee and a nice person in person, or Wilma Goldstein, now Assistant Administrator of Women’s Business Ownership at the US Small Business Administration.  This is not to say we don’t respect the likes of these women, but the likelihood that many of us will marry James Carville, become a political pundit, and follow Mary’s life as a role model is remote.  Wilma taught a great campaign school, but I make it a habit to avoid government offices, to avoid any office with the word “Women” in it, and having worked at the Small Business Administration, I know first hand that it’s ability to assist me in my business only applies if I want to sell to the government.

Truth be told, I don’t think women in business are all that more interested in politics or government grants and loans, or government assistance, or are any more worried about making it in a capitalist world than men are.  A veteran of business conferences and women’s conferences on both sides of the podium, I need to justify my presence: sitting through “what can I get because I am weaker than a male” conferences are a waste of time.  Karen Gibbs (Co-anchor of Wall $treet Week with FORTUNE on PBS) may be very interesting, but most businesses don’t hire journalists and they don’t hire us, and watching television is not billable hours so we seldom stare at the tube.

What I need, and what many male or female businesses need, are things like a few conferences that teach me how to create a bank-acceptable clearer financial statement, how to read a large cap balance sheet, how to find and hire a part-time secretary that wants to learn to be a good assistant (male or female), how to assess a franchise opportunity, how to amend my consultant contract to include payment in stock, and a reliable construction company that actually meets deadlines.  I need my December 23 JP Morgan Chase refinance to actually disburse and I need to know where to complain if they don’t make me whole.  Like you, I need more mentors and more time. 

A few years ago, several friends and I were asked to volunteer time for a prestigious elected officials women’s group with an aging population who wondered why they were not appealing to women of my generation.  One of the sessions was “How to Decorate Your Office.”  Really.  Really, we are our own best enemies. 

Office Depot partnered with the American Business Women’s Association, the Business Women’s Network, the National Association of Women Business Owners, the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council, and other organizations that were the first listed in a book I helped prepare a few years ago, America’s Top 400 Women’s Business Organizations.  These organizations should be ashamed to talk down to us.  Or maybe a conference in Boca Raton in February will sell out anyway.  And that, my female friends, may be the only point.   

Donna Wiesner is CEO of BrainTrain LLC©, a business specializing in marketing and communicating political ideas and projects.  After appointments in the Reagan then Bush Administrations, she founded The Job Pods©, which helps politicals find jobs after term limits and campaigns.  

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