cover image Power Failure: Why Women Said ""No"" to Top Management Positions--Six Inside Stories to Help Others to Say ""Yes""

Power Failure: Why Women Said ""No"" to Top Management Positions--Six Inside Stories to Help Others to Say ""Yes""

Barbara Bools. St. Martin's Press, $16.95 (234pp) ISBN 978-0-312-02632-5

This shrill guidebook for female executives maintains that a major reason for the paucity of women in top jobs is not lack of opportunities, but derives from subconscious, contradictory impulses that scuttle a career at the point when a woman is offered the kind of corporate job she has striven for. Bools, who heads her own executive recruiting firmfrequently vaunted in the bookand Swan, an executive-search consultant, blame parental influences and psychologically and historically sanctified feminine roles for women's concept that power is to be achieved by association rather than by generating it for themselves. Citing six women successful in advertising and marketing, they report that although some women surmount a ``power failure'' crisis, most are apt to refuse an opportunity to advance on a personal pretext, cling to a subordinate, less competitive job, or perhaps seek the security of a wealthy marriage, thus, charge the authors, jeopardizing women's hard-won equality of opportunity. Author tour. (Mar.)