Jenice Armstrong's unhelpful anti-bitch advice for women in business

Here is the opening of Jenice Armstrong's column in today's Daily News: "IF PROFESSIONAL women really want to get ahead, then they have to stop acting like bitches."

No really. It gets better from there.

To be fair, this isn't Armstrong speaking for herself. Instead, she's quoting Susan Tose Spencer, former vice president of the Eagles—her father owned the team—who has a new book full of advice for business women. Like: Use your "feminine wiles" to your advantage. But don't complain about sexual harassment! That's whining! The best thing to do is just ... add more sexiness to be harassed. At least that seems to be the lesson here:

In her book, she shares an anecdote about the time she ran into a problem with her biggest customer's male buyer. He was the touchy-feely type and kept reaching for her leg under the restaurant table. (If it had been me, I would have had that loser's hand twisted up behind his back and slammed his face up against the tables. But then again, I'm just a wage slave, and Spencer couldn't afford to alienate the guy.)

So, she writes, the next time she met him for dinner, Spencer brought a beautiful female colleague with her. She and the other woman made a point of sitting on either side of the buyer, so he had to turn his head and look from one to the other. The distraction kept him from playing grab-a-leg, enabling Spencer to keep his business and her own virtue.

"You can't embarrass the male ego. Once you embarrass them, you make an enemy," Spencer warned.

Ick. You notice the burden here isn't on the man to avoid getting handsy because he might make an enemy of a well-connected businesswoman. Just: Ick.

But get back to the whole "bitch" thing. Spencer's contention is that women get the label because they deserve it: "You know they're always called bitches. Well, why? Because they act like them. Think about it. They kind of try to sabotage a guy. Or they'll talk behind his back."

Here's the problem: A successful woman will always—always—have the bitch label affixed to her at somewhere along the way. We all know this. I bet Spencer has been called it a time or two. Or three. My workplace experience is that women are no more or less likely to do the sometimes-ugly work of getting ahead. But when they do, it's the b-word for them. And men aren't held to the same standard: Steve Jobs was famously hurtful to his employees at times, yet the last week of hagiography-eulogizing has somehow mitigated that quality—or turned it into an advantage: He was just trying to make the product better! And maybe that's so. But is there any doubt that a Susan Jobs would've been seen much, much differently?

Spencer's journey, too, is shaped by the fact that she had access to the top rungs of the corporate ladder by virtue of her lineage. Would she have been vice president for the Eagles in the 1980s if her father hadn't owned the operation? Maybe ... but doubtful. It's pretty easy to dispense advice on taking third base if you were born there—and easy to be all sugar and charm if you didn't have to fight your way to the top. I'm not sure Spencer's advice is all that helpful to real women—or that Armstrong's amplification of it is all that helpful to Philadelphia.

Philadelphia Needs to be More Business-Friendly

It's become apparent to me in two years of living in Philly that starting a new business is a regulatory nightmare: I spent this year watching an acquaintance delay the opening of a new coffee shop from the beginning of the summer to the end largely because of the runaround he got from the Licenses & Inspection Department. There's also the oppressive tax situation: When bloggers get hit with a hefty business tax because they earned a few dollars in Google AdSense revenues, you know the situation's out of whack.

So Robert McNamara's op-ed in today's Inky rings true to me: This city really is strangling entrepreneurship:

All too often, city rules and regulations boil down to the whim of the inspector or official an entrepreneur is dealing with. All too often, their whim is simply to say "no." Instead of giving new businesses the time and space they need to grow, the city immediately hits them with an array of taxes, fees, and demands that are simply implausible, like requiring a start-up business to waste precious and often limited financial capital renting commercial office space instead of operating out of an entrepreneur's home.

The city's rampant overregulation, tremendous burdens placed on would-be entrepreneurs, and, above all, the pervasive culture of "no" are putting a stranglehold on entrepreneurial activity. Wracked by a budget crisis, the city inexplicably continues to expend extraordinary resources making it more difficult to start businesses, which could be expanding the city's tax base.

There are some solutions out there! Council members Bill Green and Maria Quinones-Sanchez have introduced a bill that, among other things, would exempt a new business' first $100,000 in sales from the city's business tax. I don't know all the fiscal implications of this -- Philadelphia, like other cities, has had its share of budget problems in recent years -- and I'm generally not a believer that reducing taxes results in increased tax revenues. But I suspect that making it easier for entrepreneurs to get started in Philadelphia can only help the city's tax base over time. What we're doing right now isn't working.