I’ve been wondering why it is so difficult to hold a serious (as in cerebral) discussion with many of my female friends. Not all of them, she declaimed (like the tiny legal provisos printed on the product brochure or the rapid speak of legal exclusions on TV car ads), but certainly many of them. Another part of the conundrum is the “I Quit Phenomenon” (also called euphemistically, “opting out.”) Perhaps the two trends are linked somehow?

Female friends, some younger and some older than I, have retired to isolated communities in Arizona or New Mexico after impressive careers in finance, technology or law in metropolitan New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. They’re coffee klatching or joining quilting circles.

Female friends who still work do not want to discuss, debate or deliberate on topics related to their business. One prefers conversation limited to her grandson or granddaughter. Another wants only to talk about the Cheese Shop she will open when she retires in 10 years.

Another female friend, who just recently graduated from a top business school, talks and writes only about her recent vacation trips or her prospective travel plans, and next to nothing about the job that subsidizes her adventures, including the 3 month delay in her work start date so she could tool around Europe.

One woman with a small business at a crucial juncture in its growth and development just closed the place down. “Why not do a buy-out? There’s real value in your business idea,” I suggested. “Oh, it’s just too much bother,” was her reply. Instead, she wanted to tell me about her new “Boyfriend Criteria,” so I could be on the lookout for a husband for her.

While discussing plans for me to give a presentation on how women could prepare themselves for governance roles at corporate boards of directors, I’m told to squeeze my proposal in and among the women’s group planning for a “nip, tuck and mud bath spa trip.”

These women friends claim that I am too serious. I should “lighten up.” A little shopping trip should help make me feel “better,” they suggest.

Is it really me who needs the therapy or are some women missing out on real opportunities? You know what I mean: those economic things you once heard about in business school decades ago. Is it just me who is concerned that the share of women in business schools like UCLA’s Anderson has dropped to 28% from the low to mid-30s just a few years ago? Even the guys there are concerned – but obviously for different reasons.

Professor Nan Langowitz of Babson College also expressed her concern that women do not appear to see or value the benefits generated by business: tax revenues, employment, earnings, investment in R&D, and a whole host of tertiary social positives. She argues that women need to be educated to look at business “through a different frame” than they currently do: presuming all businesses to be evil, all profits to be sinful, and all economic gain to be socially destructive.

Some say women are not being paid enough or in their preferred currency by business. Perhaps something else is going on here.

Perhaps these women are wearing two masks: one is the comedy mask, while the other is the dramatic mask. Both masks hide real feelings from the audience because it is too scary for many women to reveal their true self and emotions.

In the now dated book, The Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships,
Dr. Eric Berne demonstrated the people create performance roles to present characterizations of themselves to a world with which they have difficulty dealing as their real selves.

Research about dysfunctional families, especially those with alcohol or substance abuse, shows that people create personas in response to the world that they see as thrust upon them. These “constructed selves” both are defined by their perceived circumstances and also are created to cope with those circumstances.

In these instances, people create masks for dealing with their view of the world on a scale and in dimensions that they believe they can manage. Otherwise, they perceive they could not cope with the environment which they encounter.

We hear similar stories from therapists who deal with women in abusive domestic circumstances either in the workplace or at home. The women repeatedly describe themselves as “helpless” and believe they are unable to alter or manage the exterior world. So they retreat into an invented world where they believe they are in control.

The treatment advocated by therapists includes trying to get the woman to see if she truly is comfortable sustaining dual “realities:” the one reality which is real and the other reality which she is staging in her own mind for her own benefit.

As exhausting as life is on its own merits, there is nothing quite so exacting as an attempt to sustain two life concepts. That would explain the extra-ordinary sense of relief patients experience once they begin to drop one life role and dedicate themselves to just one, more genuine, self-perception. It also explains why women say they feel they are struggling with family-work life stress and imbalance: because they have constructed a view of life where such perfect balance might exist and then they must struggle to play their part in that make-believe world.

The comedy mask is for the party-girl, the perpetual sophomore, the cutie cupie doll, dressed up and ready to do something FUN, because she perceives no such enjoyment elsewhere in her life. Comedy mask is worn by the world traveler, the girls who coffee klatch, quilt, or do anything that diverts their attention from what they perceive they “have to do” to earn a living.

Work is work is work is not joy nor does work have anything to do with her “real passion.” Comedy girl is doing someone else’s work because she has not yet found The Thing that inspires her to wake up each day and pulsate blood through her veins. It is only work, like cleaning house (office) or shopping (investment) or laundry (tedium). Comedy girl puts on the mask everyday to hide the fact that she believes she has become everyone’s wife and servant.

The drama mask is the role of guilt. Either laugh and be merry or bear all of the world’s ills upon her shoulders. Volunteer and sacrifice to purge one’s soul of impurities associated with profits, income, earning, or other measures of that male world of greed: business.

Darfur! New Orleans! Tsunamis! Save the Children! Save the Planet! Thank God for role models like Mother Theresa! Little Pink Ribbons! Little Yellow Ribbons! Socially Responsible Investment even if it means throwing money after unproven causes!

Oh, the drama of it all. Let’s all come together, because it takes a village to raise a child. We all have to be part of this movement. This is a great united force: a great family effort. It all translates into “Save Me! Help ME! I can’t do it myself. I can’t do it alone. You all have to help ME do MY thing.”

Drama girl cannot envision standing alone on this stage, speaking her own private personal part in the play of life. And drama girl cannot abide any other woman who does show a willingness or ability to speak her own peace.

“My name is Teresa Kerry, and I have something to say.” Oh, how the drama girls excoriated her for standing up and speaking her part on the stage. Not unlike the treatment afforded both Eleanor Roosevelt and Eleanor McGovern when they dared to speak and campaign, unaccompanied by their husbands.

“It’s my party too!” Christine Todd Whitman was boo-ed to stage left by the female throng, even while trying to reconstitute the center of the Republican part.

Carly Fiorina and Patricia Dunn had the audacity to speak their minds about corporate board dealings. How dare these women think?

The drama mask presents to the world the “Oh, the poor little girl” image with the intent of evoking pity, sympathy, sufferance and perhaps some money to go shopping and make the hurt go away. The women who violate that image best beware.

“It is crucial to have someone up your sleeve who will save your,” said one female academic at a Rice University conference on women in science and math. Mentors are saviors, not educators.

When women “trouble talk” behind the drama mask, they seek to evoke the pity and sympathy of someone, anyone who will bail them out. Someone ELSE needs to save them rather than that they aspire to create a world where they might prevail economically. The victim mentality hides behind the drama mask. The world is evil and prejudiced and dirty. Women are treated so poorly, Dear Audience, that you must pity me and compensate me for the unjust treatment that is out there in the marketplace. Mother me, world.

One mother of a Girl Scout is more typical than we’d like to believe. The Girl Scouts eliminated all but trace amounts of trans fats in their cookies. The mother stated that “she would accompany her daughter on her rounds to sell the cookies in order “to educate’ the buyers about the product.” That’s great training for a young girl getting ready to enter the business world: “Mom, will you come with me on my sales route?”

It was such a pleasure at the last New Year’s Eve party to meet a talented woman who talked about her interest in leading literary and book discussions.

“Do you do it for a fee or for free?” I asked, dreading what I expected to be the inevitable answer. “Definitely for a FEE. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I know my time has value. I know my experience and expertise are worth something in the marketplace.”