SP: English Study Group

"You know you shouldn't cry at work, but there are times when it feels you just can't help it!" proclaims the ad. "Tears in the workplace are seen as inappropriate and have adverse effects on your professional image, making you seem inept, overemotional, unable to think logically and generally incompetent." Fortunately, for $12.95, there is a solution, which even comes with a money-back guarantee: a self-hypnosis lesson for working women. A relic of the 1970s and '80s, like those goofy navy blue suits that female managers wore then? No, it's an ad currently running online.

You might suppose that since women now make up nearly 50% of the workforce, there would be less of a market for such career aids. Shouldn't we be the ones making the rules now? Some things haven't changed, as Wharton Business School management professor Nancy Rothbard explains: "The distribution of those women in the workforce is not even. There are still many fewer women at the top of organizations." Experts say women continue to face special issues in the office, such as wage discrimination, sexual harassment and penalties for pregnancy and family leave. It remains a steep climb for them to move up in the corporate world. So the advice industry for the distaff half is still going strong.

That is particularly true of the publishing world, which pumps out dozens of self-help books for female professionals each year, from Motherhood Is the New MBA to Women, Work & the Art of Savoir Faire. What kind of advice are they dispensing to the 2010 working woman? Some of it has a distinctly retro sound, as if little has changed in the decades since Betty Friedan. "A woman attempting to succeed in a company where men have always occupied key positions may reach a certain level and then be turned down for promotions for which she's qualified," warns Roxanne Rivera, the author of There's No Crying in Business: How Women Can Succeed in Male-Dominated Industries (Palgrave Macmillan). "But she may find it impossible to stay at a higher-level job because there's no other woman she can talk to at work to get the support she needs."

Rivera, the co-founder of a large construction firm in New Mexico, is not afraid to espouse traditional notions of femininity. Her "nine standards of ladylike behavior," she reassures readers, "aren't designed to turn you into a prissy, ultrafeminine type of person." Among those rules: speak articulately, intelligently and cleanly ("women who curse are cursed in male-dominated businesses"), dress appropriately ("wearing high-quality clothes that mark you as a professional woman, as opposed to a member of the oldest profession"), and project an aura of authority and confidence ("too many women rise to speak in a room filled with men and their voices are tiny and hesitant").