WORK LIKE A WOMAN

WORK LIKE A WOMAN A manifesto for change
By Mary Portas

No one messes with Mary Portas. If you’ve seen her on TV you will know that she is an outspoken force to be reckoned with and extremely successful. But she’s also a bit scary. And clearly this is something that has come to bother her – that in order to be successful in a man’s world, she has to behave like one.

In this book Portas explores her long and illustrious career, commenting on women’s struggle to succeed in the workplace. Like the fact that we may aspire to leadership but don’t actually want it because of who we have to become (and she should know). The drip drip drip of unconscious bias in the workplace. The way we are constantly navigating home life and professional ambitions, and how carrying the ‘mental load’ of running a household effectively means having two jobs.

So far so annoying. The real shock is when Portas talks about the realisation that she needed to change – because her alpha work persona and her softer personality in the rest of her life were at odds.

On Audible this book is incredibly compelling, because Mary Portas doesn’t waste a breath on anything that isn’t worth saying – and she says it really well. I’m still a bit scared of her. But she talks a great deal of sense about how the world of work is changing – and how we can harness the best of it.

Marina Gask

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