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Drifts somewhere between bullet-pointed advisory and explanatory verbiage
Women don’t just fill the ranks in the "soft" sciences, and nor do they immediately trade in their fancy qualifications for domestic bliss and baby-making. That’s why a book like Seema Goswami’s comes at the right time. She is that rare breed: the accurately acerbic and entertaining writer. Less happily, though, there isn’t much of the delightfully tart Goswami in this book. A woman doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that there are significant professional costs attached to dressing inappropriately for work or to office romances gone out of control. Self-help columns in most lifestyle magazines will tell you as much. Unfortunately, her publisher has let Woman on Top drift somewhere between bullet-pointed advisory and explanatory verbiage when it could have succeeded perfectly well at either extreme.
The scope for sound advice on gender equity in the workplace is colossal. Woman on Top is emphatically a step in the right direction. The pity is it takes merely a polite step forward when it could have taken a revolutionary leap.