Woman on Top: How to Get Ahead at Work By Seema Goswami, Random House, Rs 200

It’s the Big Sister speaking. In a no-nonsense voice, and superciliously trendy English, Seema Goswami tells her sisters at work when to let their hair down, when not to show the cleavage or fall in love, how to humour the boss, keep the husband happy, and how to reach out for the moon.

Her reason for taking on the responsibility is the apparent absence of “sisterhood” at the workplace which, she seems to be sure, would have given some amount of support to the befuddled creatures women obviously are, and taught them the ways of the big bad professional world. One wonders if the existence of a similar brotherhood (now perhaps extinct) had once furthered the cause of men in the workplace. Anyway, since women are new entrants into the arena, and have little to learn from housebound mothers, sermons from experienced big sisters are their only chance of survival.

Women have to be women most of the time at the workplace. Goswami believes there is nothing wrong if they wish to, and manage to, turn on their charm to steal the show at presentations, flirt a little with senior colleagues to land prize assignments, and use their feminine virtues to diffuse tension and ride the crest as bosses. But when they aim to reach the top, they have to “pretend to be one of the boys” in order to worst men at their games.

This is how she strategizes for them. Apart from working long hours and networking, women have to brace themselves for those usually-avoided informal settings of interaction. They have to laugh at those “tasteless jokes”, even crack a few of them themselves, join the “babe-watch expedition” as spectators, drink the men under the table to prove camaraderie. And then, when the men sleep off their hang-over, women ought to “move in, get a move on, and leave them far behind”. That sounds disarmingly simple.

“Getting ahead” is, in fact, all about choosing the right strategy in the workplace. Women, one feels while reading Goswami, are never bereft of choice. And there is a lot to choose from. One can choose to dress sexily or frumpily if one wants to (and suffer its perils), fall in love with the boss (and risk being ridiculed for sleeping one’s way to the top), reach home in time to read stories to children (and miss the bus), or be Goswami’s perfect little sister. To be the last, one has to do a lot of things besides performing well at work. One would have to dress well, sleep well, eat well, exercise well, manage the home well, assess oneself, the boss and colleagues real well and, well, aim real high. Ambition, after all, is not a dirty word.

That is something Goswami would like to tell her listeners, staring right into their eyes. There is no reason to believe one is a bitch or a harridan or be apologetic if one nurses an ambition. Well-said, but one wonders why Goswami believes women are consumed by self-hate when they discover they have ambitions. Mayavati obviously hadn’t happened when she wrote this book.

Goswami does a lot of straight-talking here, sometimes with verve and humour. Some of it will definitely be of use, like her golden rules on how to ward off sexual harassment, how to keep maids and mothers-in-law happy, how to overcome the bad case of a colleague’s body odour or how to be careful about the lipstick so that there is no ugly smear on the teeth during a presentation. But she would have done her sisters a world of good had she left them to their instincts to decide what they want for themselves and how to get it.