Style at Work

In a WSJ column on workplace dress and professionalism, we read about a double standard of sorts.

I detect a double standard, or at least a mixed agenda.

Both Jim Holt and Tom Mills got taken to the woodshed for public comments about how they view workplace attire. Yet the same women in the workplace who criticized them so viciously, are complaining that they aren't getting good feedback on what to wear to look professional.

Nobody gets good, candid feedback for long if they regularly shoot their messengers.

The reality is, the opinions of senior (often male) managers matters. You can seek to learn and understand those opinions, or you can seek to shape them. You will have a hard time pursuing both goals at once - listening and browbeating being mutually incompatible activities. And those opinions are opinions - not fact, not solid, very much a product of society and of social and cultural norms, very subject to change over time.

My advice to women is, if you want candid advice, create a safe space for that conversation to happen. Otherwise you'll silence the voices you need to hear.

At the same time, don't stop agitating outside of that safe space for equality, respect, and non-sexism at work. That struggle may be eternal - it's certainly worthy.

Of course, I'm just a guy, so what do I know?
-Tom

Thomas Frank: Sad Little Progressive on WSJ

I'm trying to enjoy Thomas Frank's leftist columns in the otherwise right-libertarian Wall Street Journal. This latest one just makes it harder.

Frank starts off with a wonderfully useful premise, that Conservatives really blew it while in power in the Congress over the period 1994-2006, and are now busy failing to learn from it. His quotes of the architect of the Republican sell-out to power, Tom DeLay, are hilarious. (DeLay tries to paint himself a pure conservative who is pained by the Republican fall into corruption, rather than as one of the leaders of the plunge.)

And he's right to skewer those who define "conservatism" as being inherently incorruptible, meaning that all "those" corrupt Republicans are of course "not conservatives" - the sort of cute verbal trick I usually attribute to the Left. Conservatives who so embraced DeLay so long and so strongly need to answer, why they didn't reject him before he got caught.

Unfortunately, Frank's column quickly falls apart.

He tries to tie Republican corruption in Congress to the basis of conservative ideas. He wants us to believe that conservative ideas are "bad ideas" that naturally and inevitably led to "disastrous consequences."

Here he offers nothing but 'proof by blatant assertion' - no analysis, no explanation. He doesn't even bother to list what ideas he means, other than 'true conservatism is opposed to "big government."'

Had Frank offered some real (or imagined) link between corruption and the values of limited government, personal responsibility, individual liberty, and free markets, then he would have done us a favor. Instead he merely asserts that conservatism is somehow inherently bad - a logical fallacy also known as assuming your conclusions.

Here's hoping we get a better column from him next week.