“I know just how it will work,” my boyfriend gamely replied. He grabbed a pad and sketched out our future. He drew stick figures of himself, me and two hypothetical children. In the center of his diagram, he penciled in Mary, our housekeeper, who came in a few hours a week to save us from dust bunnies. “We’ll do just what we do now,” my boyfriend told me, “and Mary will take care of us.” I laughed. I was no expert on running a family, but I had a feeling it was going to take more effort.

To keep reading our Washington Post “On Leadership” column, click here.

This week on KZSU’s talk show—“What Would Your Mother Say” a show that talks candidly about campus life at Stanford with young adults and mothers – we talked to two different authors (former Stanford grads) with conflicting opinions on how to pick your life partner.

Lori Gottlieb, author of Marry Him, The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, explained to the panel that women need to get real about finding Mr. Right. Women have unrealistic expectations of their perfect partner and these crazy idealizations (i.e. over 5’10’’ but under 6’0’’ with a head of wavy but not curly hair) often keep many great guys out of the gate from the get-go.

“Deal-breakers” and lists of what their dream guy should be like should be dumped—not the guy. Heck, as Gottlieb so kindly points out, “(we all become) Older, Overweight, and Bald anyways”. What we should do, Gottlieb recommends, is broaden our perspective and start looking for men with important qualities and similar shared values.

Conversely, Amalia McGibbon co-author of The Choice Effect: Love and Commitment in an Age of Too Many Options took a more circuitous approach to picking one’s partner—embracing the endless pool of choices. McGibbon noted the modern phenomenon that in this day in age, women have infinite possibilities as to how their life and life partner could be—“the world is our oyster”.

This choice effect has allowed women to “sidestep traditional time lines”, which McGibbon argued is not a bad thing. In fact, McGibbon commented, women should not feel like “ticking bombs” but rather should enjoy the wide array of choices that earlier generations of women did not have the pleasure of doing.

While it is fun to romanticize about finding Mr. Right and wonder if there are more than one Mr. Right’s out there, when does this analysis become paralysis? When do you wake and realize your lack of ability to decide–was in fact a decision?

Do we meet Mr. Right by:
a) Dumping our former dating criterion, making a new one and settling for Mr. Good Enough
b) Exercising our right to choose, explore and second guess our dating life because we can in this day in age?

My view—a combination of A & B (sorry not on the menu)–these options should not be mutually exclusive. Doing a little homework and reflecting on what you and your ideal partner’s values and key qualities should share is the first step (hopefully this is where you dump the romantic comedy movie requirements).

Once this is done, absolutely take the time to “Shop till you drop” as we ladies know how to do so well. Enjoy the process with no sense of urgency. The best consumer is one with a lot of options!

Since then, Spain and the Netherlands have passed similar laws. Now Belgium, Britain, Germany, France and Sweden are considering legislative measures involving female quotas. And although Germany is also debating such a law, Deutsche Telekom, which is based in Bonn, announced last week that it would voluntarily introduce a quota aiming to fill 30 percent of upper and middle management jobs with women by the end of 2015.

Do quotas work? Would they work in the U.S.? Does the U.S. need them?

Marit Hoel, Center for Corporate Diversity, Oslo
Amy Dittmar, University of Michigan
Peter Baldwin, author, “The Narcissism of Minor Differences”
Linda Hirshman, author, “Get to Work”
Sharon Meers, former managing director at Goldman Sachs. Read full opinion below.

Throw Out Old Assumptions- Sharon Meers

Quotas are one way to allocate positions of power — but they come with a lot of risk and resentment. Instead, we should put good process in the place of bad assumptions.
Employers can do a much better job holding social myths in check in the workplace.

Weeding out sex-role attitudes and assumptions is difficult. And it’s especially hard to get started when many leaders don’t think that there’s a problem, that nothing needs to change, that the low presence of women at the top is natural — the result of female preferences, family roles and the demands of the 24/7 workplace.

But research paints a different picture: 80 percent of mothers who leave the work force would prefer to stay on the job; children do at least as well when mothers work outside the home and men are fully engaged parents; divorce risks drops 50 percent when women and men more evenly share earnings and housework.

Unfortunately, popular chatter, from the boardroom to the PTA, does not reflect these facts. We persist in our Mad Men belief that children and marriage benefit if mothers lower their sights and stop shooting for the top.

Employers can do a much better job holding social myths in check in the workplace. At one big company, senior managers met to identify the firm’s future leaders. Everyone agreed that a foreign posting was key. But as they went down the list of prospects, female names were quickly crossed out. “Oh, Anne won’t move. Her husband has a good job.” Then, “I don’t think Sarah would go to China, her kids are in grade school.” When it was about to happen a third time, a senior woman asked: “How about we call Anne and Sarah and let them tell us if they’d really never move?”

At the University of Michigan, with National Science Foundation backing, tenured male professors teach their peers about the data on implicit bias, the tendency we all have to choose John’s resume over Jane’s even when their credentials are identical. Michigan’s hiring committees, bathed in facts about how social attitudes blur vision, now have a more informed process. For the medical and science faculties, it has doubled the percentage of female hires form 15 percent to 30 percent.

Assumptions about work hours also limit women but new studies are starting to unravel them. Harvard Business Review recently published this finding from work at Boston Consulting Group: consultant teams that were forced to work fewer hours had measurably better client results. Better communication, clearer minds and a more disciplined process produced superior results. This supports what other research says: that working parents can excel at work and still eat dinner with their children.

A favorite male boss once joked with me “I’ve no idea how this dual-career thing works – someday, you’ll have to tell me.” His life was different from mine but he had a sense of humor and an open mind. When leaders are willing to educate themselves, to ask and not assume, women advance at the same rate as their male peers.

So how do we embolden more leaders to do the hard work and put good process in place? Let’s turn up the volume on what the studies say is true: That co-ed leadership is good for everyone and results in better profits and no talk of quotas.

For full article check out New York Times opinion blog re European quotas for women at the top – and a better choice for the US.

Paterson’s right about one thing: relationship abuse is ubiquitous — and so are bystanders who, like the governor, don’t do enough to stop it. My grandmother, a teen-age single mom, fell into the arms of a pathologically violent man. The results were so dire that my dad ran away as a 9^th grader. I’m lucky my father found a useful outlet for most of his trauma – he put himself in therapy, became a mental health worker and devoted his career to the many patients whose ills start with abuse. But pain still lives in my dad’s eyes. And I ask myself how many bystanders had the power to step in, to protect my grandmother and her children — but did not.

I know the urge to look away, the feeling of “I can’t deal with this now, how could I help anyway?” I saw it in myself, in how long it took me to read, Crazy Love, a riveting book by my college classmate Leslie Morgan-Steiner, about her marriage to a charming, intelligent man whose rage almost killed her. It was also hard to face the fact that we Gen X’ers aren’t that much better than our parents. As a group, we still don’t acknowledge this violence for the horror that it is. Knowing what Morgan-Steiner’s ex-husband haddone, people still invited him to parties and into their homes, as if saying “well, these things happen.”

In the book, a psychologist explains that abusers often come by their disease honestly — as victims of cruelty themselves. Because of this, predators often live in extreme denial, believing that their brutality is justified or just plain normal. And how much are we each doing to disabuse them of that notion?

“Domestic violence is a brutal crime that shatters millions of lives every year, transcending race, ethnicity, social class and even gender,” said Rudy Giuliani ten years ago. While Rudy’s politics differ from mine, I admire his words and wonder what it takes for more of us to speak — and act on — them. How many bosses want law-breakers on the payroll? What if more abusers knew that violence could cost them their job? Imagine if Paterson had handed his aid a note: “I care about you. Call this number – get professional help. If it happens again, you’re fired.”

When is a vacation really a vacation? As a working mom, I truly treasure spending a full week with my kids. I want to give them 100% of my attention. But that nagging red blinking light never stops. Am I a bad worker if I don’t constantly check in while out of town? It seems like everyone else does. But I feel like a bad mother when I am distracted by work even when we are across the country inside a beautiful cave learning about stalagtites and stalagmites.

Perhaps RIM (the company that makes the Blackberry) could create a blinking blue light that folks could activate when there really is an email that needs to be answered on vacation, an issue that no one else can address. Those do occur one in a while, but not often. Usually we check in on vacation because we want to feel important and our voice heard, even when we are not around. For my next trip I am going to try much harder not to pay attention to that blinking red light and really detatch. I am wishing myself luck.

Joanna Strober

I’ve always been grateful that my broadminded coach took weak raw material and turned me into a passable runner. But, I had not fully considered all the positive knock-on effects. According to the New York Times, a new Wharton study says Title IX (which stimulated a six-fold jump in girls sports participation) can also be thanked for 40% of the rise in female employment. Looking at state-by-state data, the Wharton study says encouraging female athletics is associated with dramatic leaps in female achievement.

So when work is tough and I feel like throwing up my hands, maybe it’s the experience of prevailing over shin-splints and aching muscles and dehydration that helps me hang in there. Maybe part of leveling the playing field for women is realizing that competitive athletics are no more optional for girls than for boys. Some of us may not “like” sports (due to both nature and nurture – for people like me), but then how many kids “like” vegetables? All girls need the same push into the fray, into glory and the grit of physical competition, that boys get.