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The Pushy Woman Payoff

The one thing I hear over and over again from women struggling to climb the ladder of success is they have trouble tooting their own horns.

Well gals, if you don’t toot or get someone to toot for you no one will hear you.

There are two great examples of women who’ve unabashedly taken out big trumpets recently and it may be a good idea to follow their playbook a bit: Christine Lagarde, the French foreign minister, and Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor.

Lagarde just got the job of head honcho at the International Monetary Fund, the first woman to hold that position, after lobbying for it like a relentless heavy weight in the ring; and Warren is vying to become the head honcho of the nation’s new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She’s gotten consumer groups and Democratic political heavy weights to lobby for her.

You can call these women pushy, but that’s a good thing.

Lagarde launched a very public campaign for herself, including Twitter, and she faced strong opposition because many had hoped the new IMF head would be from an emerging nation. Clearly she risked being humiliated if the mainly male leaders of the world sent her packing. But she didn’t seem to care.

This from the Guardian:

Trying to overcome opposition from emerging economies, Lagarde admitted there had been complaints about the lack of senior management from developing countries.

“If that was the case, which it very well might be … I would certainly apply the principles that in my previous roles I applied to gender,” she told the Financial Times, referring to her long-standing practice of choosing a woman over a man in appointments if they are equally qualified.

“I would want to remedy the situation,” she said. “We need appropriate representation of high-level staff based on merit from various nationalities and academic backgrounds.”

And Warren is just brushing aside Republican and business attacks against her possible appointment and forging ahead with building up the agency.

This from the New York Times today:

Ms. Warren, who pushed for the creation of the bureau, has waged a tireless campaign on its behalf. In doing so, she may have helped her own prospects for getting the job.

In nine months overseeing the bureau’s start-up, she has talked with community bankers in every state, conferred with about 70 members of Congress, conducted dozens of media interviews and met with more than 1,000 banking, business and consumer representatives. Preparing for the agency’s July 21 opening, she supervised the hiring of more than 300 people.

Time will tell if Warren’s approach pays off. But the key here is both women are self-assured and assertive in the face of tough odds. I know what some of you are thinking, the dreaded ‘B’ word couldn’t be far behind when women act in this way. And yes, it’s already happened to one of these gals.

It didn’t take me but 10 seconds to find this on Facebook:

Elizabeth Warren is a lousy bitch that will get a job at Goldman Sachs when her stint at US Treasury is done, screwing Main St for Wall St.

But branding is for livestock. Women have to rise above the mooing-herd mentality in order to be heard and push for what they want, right?

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