According to a new biography of Lee Atwater, the late GOP wunderkind strategist, one of his favorite metaphors was the nine-dot puzzle: without lifting the pen, how do you connect a square of nine dots with four straight lines? The answer requires thinking outside the box; going outside the lines instead of limiting oneself to the scope of the square.

The same lesson would be useful to the reporters assigned to the "women's issue" beat. A front-page piece in The Wall Street Journal of February 10th profiled the ever-swelling ranks of top female executives. The piece showcased a "breakthrough generation" of women executives: a group of women who share a business school background, almost twenty years of corporate experience, and a willingness to work hard and make tough personal choices. The headline, though, reads like most any other article on women's economic progress: "Women Executives Reach Top, But Ranks Are Still Lopsided." In other words, we're doing better, but not well enough and certainly not fast enough.

This is the nine-dot box of the feminist advocates.

The Journal piece toes the feminist advocacy line; in reporting on the accomplishments of these various women, it refers to an unlevel playing field, "years of male domination," and men "monopolizing" senior corporate positions. These are the buzz words of the victim hunters--codes for unfairness and inequality. "Progress is being made," Rene Redwood, former executive director of the Federal Glass Ceiling Commission, told the reporter, "But it's painfully slow."

Taking gender out of the equation, or thinking outside the feminist box of victimhood, the story loses its drama. The typical senior corporate executive in a Fortune 500 company has a business degree and 25 years of experience. Thebreakthrough generation that the Journal article describes is just beginning to reach those time markers. This in no way undermines the genuine achievement of these women, but remove the prism of gender politics and the story is simply that hard work pays.

The article describes how Connie Duckworth, now a managing director for Goldman Sachs & Co., commuted every weekend for one year from Chicago to Los Angeles to see her husband and their son. That was her choice and it paid off for her professionally, but I don't think it's one that every woman would have made in her position. This is the beauty of the market system: that it allows every person to make their own choices, based on their own preferences and lifestyle.

The breakthrough generation described in the Journal article came of age at a time when divorce was on the rise, people got married later, and had fewer children. Economic independence became a necessity, not a luxury, and women responded to that necessity in droves. The number of women in corporate America will continue to surge as those who have chosen corporate careers make their way down the pipeline.

Lazy reporting is not entirely to blame. The culture of victimhood has so permeated the workplace that the glass ceiling is considered the rule, not the exception. But time will correct this perception, as women like Connie Duckworth continue to show that corporate success is there for those willing to make the necessary sacrifices. That's the story outside the narrow square of the glass ceiling.

-by Katherine Post, Public Policy Fellow

For copies of the briefing mentioned above, please call (415)989-0833 or visit our web site: http:// www.ideas.org.