A month ago, my friend Buzz got his walking papers from QuidComp, a prominent Silicon Valley company. His manager called him on the phone from an East-Coast office to give him the news. "I tried very hard to find a position for you in the new organization," she said, "but there was no suitable opening. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry." Buzz knew he was dismissed because he had a very good salary, being over forty years old and successful in his job. He also knew that no effort at all had been made to find a slot for him in the new organization. His varied experience qualified him for a good half-dozen positions yet to be filled. He just had to go so that someone, probably not as competent, could be hired in his place at lower pay. But that is an employer's prerogative, and there is no good argument against it.

The next day, while Buzz was packing, his manager called again. "I just wanted to know how you feel," she said. "What do you mean?" Buzz asked. "I mean, uh, are you OK? How do you feel?" Buzz was puzzled. "OK, you want to know how I feel. About what?" he asked. "Uh, ... about my call of yesterday, and your ... situation," she said. Buzz just replied that he felt like packing, which makes good sense. After a moment, the response came as a meek "I just wanted to know if you are OK. Let me know if I can help." Buzz was a little miffed by the strange call, which he expressed to me in rather blunt terms later that day. The next morning, a young clerk from the Personnel Department showed up in his cubicle. "Hi," she said, "my name is Malishia, and I am a Human Resources Specialist. I'm here to help you through the company employee separation process. Are you OK? How do you feel?" Buzz again wondered about this fascination with his feelings, but left it at that. He just grumbled "OK, let's do the paperwork."

"Welcome to the era of the WWAC, the Woman With A Career," I said to Buzz when he told me of these intriguing events at a local pub.

During my long employment with Advanced Sinapistic Systems (Inc.), I had closely followed nearly three decades of corporate feminine evolution now represented by the WWAC. In the beginning, people aspiring to an executive career were mostly men, and the thriving ones went by nicknames like Spike, Truck, or Brick. Success came to those who were taller, had hair, ate raw beef, drank Martinis, and had served in the Marine Corps or the Infantry. Feminists disparagingly call this era the "Neanderthal Age," because they did not know that Neanderthal man had a sizably bigger brain than modern man, had bigger bones and bigger muscles, and could kill large animals with his fists. It is even probable that football, a sophisticated game of strategy, is rooted in Neanderthal man's clever hunting methods. But feminists, who are adverse to football, do not study prehistory, let alone history. They just rewrite it.

Unfortunately, such an environment did not present women with proper executive "role models," which they seemed to need very badly. Most of them had to be looking to lackluster occupations like scientist, which required only a capacity to think, to publish, to get patents, and to create ideas for new products. A few of them who had not served in the Marine Corps but had seen John Wayne war movies thought that they had figured out the sure way to executive careers. They just had to look tougher than Brick or Spike by practising verbal assault in company meetings, being adept at cussing, and letting it be known that they kicked back in their hotel room with a quart of Wild Turkey while on business trips. That did not work too well, because no one wanted to be around obnoxious people. Besides, nicknames like "Brickette" did not really do, and it is foolish to pretend that you are one of the guys if you are not a guy, unless you are an East-German Olympic athlete of the Iron Curtain period.

This crisis clearly called for a deus ex machina. Someone deep in the entrails of the federal government got the idea of promoting women to the enviable station of "oppressed minority," which, as everyone knows, is even better than "endangered species." You may not have to hire a spotted owl as president of your company's product development division, but you'd better hire a woman. It did not matter at all that women never were a minority, as the Feds move in a mysterious way their wonders to perform.

All of a sudden, women could be themselves, which feminists redefined from indistinguishable from men to compassionate, sensitive, cooperative, and, above all, not competitive. They said that competition---a guy thing---was terrible, because it made the losers feel bad and therefore had to be replaced with something else. Never short of bright ideas, they came up with "assertiveness." Under the assertiveness principle, you get a promotion just by saying that you deserve it and that anti-discrimination laws are on your side. No competition there, no losers, just assertiveness, which is only fair. Another new concept, "empowerment," bubbled out of the same kettle shortly thereafter. You empower yourself by claiming that any ordinary deed of yours is an exploit far beyond the call of duty. For example, in a stroke of genius, you would empower yourself to use the phone of a neighboring office when yours is out of order, all that without being told. The magic of assertiveness and empowerment suddenly could turn any job into a Career. Thus was born the WWAC model.

Employers, who had to satisfy the federal demands in hiring and promoting women, soon realized that the WWAC had the makings of the ideal mid-level manager. Her cooperative trait had an interesting flip side, that is, an eagerness to be a yes-man (oops?) who does everything by the book and follows orders without question. Here was a great opportunity to replace that second-line manager named Buck, who dared tell the inept vice president for marketing that his product strategy would fail just as it had failed in years past. Intensive campaigns orchestrated by the highest corporate levels then set out to educate the unwashed about the unique qualities that WWACs could contribute to company intendance.

In no time, WWACs took over the lower ranks of management, and, with the full support of executives too happy to be rid of Buck, endeavoured to refashion corporate life to suit their exquisite sensitivities.

One of the most noticeable results of this remodelling is a peculiar alteration of the English language that encourages solecisms. Because WWACs find the genderless but grammatically correct "he" or "his" particularly offensive, they made the use of "they" or "their" with singular antecedent practically mandatory. They also declared that some instances of speech called for the replacement of the words "woman" and "man" with "person," just in case one could not be the other. These complicated rules would make the movie character Dirty Harry say "A person has got to know their limitations," which sounds rather lame. All this, which is very confusing, explains why so many electrical engineers cannot speak good English anymore.

The self-absorbed WWAC thinks that she is everybody's focus of attention. This is why she is keen on "sharing" her feelings in public. At a company function that I attended a few years ago, a WWAC who had made it to the executive ranks started a speech on creativity by "sharing" with the audience that she was fifty years old and getting deaf. Of course, this personal disclosure had nothing to do with the subject of the speech, and it was not so special as to deserve that much attention. Actually, people in the audience did not care at all about it, as many of them were deaf from having listened to too much punk rock-and-roll in their youth. I thought that the Bricks of yore would have died before telling a company assembly that they were going deaf. They would have quietly stuck a discreet hearing aid in one ear and carried on as if nothing had happened.

QuidComp, like many companies that indulge in spirited political correctness, sports Intranet sites dedicated to favored groups of employees. There are sites for all sorts of ethnic cliques, a site for people of various sexual proclivities, and two sites for women. One is for "Women Engineers" and the other for "Women Issues," where women can gush detailed narratives about themselves, their feelings, more of their feelings, their jobs, how they got their jobs, their "role models," their careers, and so on and so forth. Most complain that they have to be far better than men to get as much recognition, that life is much harder for them on the job, that they have to work too much, and that people around them are not sensitive to their feelings. All that bilge is posted under the category "Networking." The whining is not, however, entirely disinterested. QuidComp has been "alarmed" for some time by the "gender gap" that keeps showing up in its analyses of the population of employees in top technical positions, those where the pay is better. QuidComp, which is not to tolerate such a state of affairs, has decided to apply its energies to the promotion of WWACs to important technical posts until employee surveys show that women are satisfied.

One cannot help but think that this sort of policy simply ensure that women will keep complaining, because it is in their interest to do so. As too many incompetent women are now put in charge of projects that they do not understand and do not care to understand, an appropriate management scheme had to be found to keep shops humming. Predictably, a dusty issue of the Harvard Business Review provided a solution in the form of the deservedly forgotten "matrix management" system. In its implementation, the WWAC who has a management title takes care of administrative chores, while a highly-qualified project leader---often a man---deals with the important technical questions and advises on employee performance. Evidently, this contrivance is awkward and more costly than necessary, but it is a way to fill quotas and to placate the WWACs' longing for the entitlement of an unrealistic Career. Men caught in such arrangements do not complain. If they are so unhappy, they look elsewhere for a better deal and quit.

The self-preoccupation and sensitivity displayed in the "Networking" web page are not just benign quirks. They unfortunately intrude into the job. Well-founded disagreements over technical issues are quite common in the workplace, and their free expression is widely considered beneficial to research and product development. Men often think nothing of hours of heated discussions and challenges, after which they go to the corner bar for beers, happy to have skins thick enough to do their jobs well. WWACs take such things very differently. They too often see opposing viewpoints as personal affronts difficult to forget and even more difficult to forgive. Suggesting to a WWAC that she may be wrong without turning her into a forever foe requires unusual skills and gobs of luck. It is also dangerous, as she can easily claim that some innocuous comment should be interpreted as an underhanded form of harassment, the corporate bête noire, with its potential lawsuits, fat settlements, and the obligatory dismissal of a scapegoat.

This makes for an interesting work environment. Relations are guarded, and conversations around the coffee maker or the water cooler just stop when a WWAC or a potential WWAC comes near. Management tries to remedy this situation by orchestrating silly "get-togethers" with pizza, beer, Evian, and Ben & Jerry ice-cream, but these more often than not turn into nerdy sessions of loud shop talk---too loud because of the beer.

Since compassion is supposed to rank high in the WWAC's arsenal of managerial skills, she has to make a big show of it. So, she thinks that she must tell Buzz that he would not be axed if she had a choice, and inquire about his feelings in the same breath. This is not as effective as helping him find another job---which Brick would have done---but it is much easier and, much more important, makes her feel good.

Buzz is now working for a small start-up company. He got a raise and shares of the business. He is pretty happy, but still gets hot under the collar about the WWAC's "how-do-you-feel b---s---."