For years we've lamented about how few women there were at the top, how the glass-ceiling seemed insurmountable. There's still a ways to go, but the Sheryl Sandbergs and Melissa Mayers are at least, hopefully, examples of change.

The interesting thing, as the glass-ceiling is shattered, is how American women have been reacting. The response has been a very begrudging, dripping with envy, "Well, okay, congrats to her, but... she's from Harvard, she was mentored by Larry Summers, she's worth a billion dollars, etc etc etc." 

A similar phenomenon occurred when the first blacks broke the racial glass-ceiling a couple of decades ago and rose to the top of Amerian society. The reaction among blacks? "Well, that's great for him, but he's no longer in the 'hood, with us."

The real problem is not the envy-generating success, but rather seeing through the inherent falsity of these success stories as being any way representative for the rest of us. Women like Vennochi recognize that Sandberg's book, as in some way drawing up the guidelines for other women to follow, is ridiculously wrong and misguided. Sandberg's Potemkin Village is really just Ayn Rand's Reaganomics in disguise: "Hey, if you do all the right things, just as I did to deliberately and effectiely climb the corporate ladder, you too can make a billion dollars, have children, and look beautiful!" What the Sandbergs and Mayers are doing is just recreating the female version of the Larry Ellisons and Koch Brothers: the powerful hyper-rich behind the guise of "Yes, you too can be just like me in America if you do exactly as I did!"

She never plagiarized a column from a Todd Domke blogpost but Joan did.