Not to bring down everything to sexuality, but a sexually pushy woman would be typically labeled a "slut." Which is why a woman will almost never ask a man out.
The standard advice for a single woman is not to ask men out on dates, but to "get yourself out there." What would the analogous behavior look like from a potential employee? Conferences? Blogging? Fine-tuning of resume?
[1] http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2010/02/20/scale-8x-slides-post... The audio is a bit long, but it's worth listening to over the slides.
Just like affirmative action got called racial discrimination... Not really. I guess that's along the lines of how one would spin it.
The women we place in high regard are women who know how to get what they want. If you ask a young girl today what she wants to be when she grows up, she will most often tell you she wants to be a celebrity – the most recognized group of women who fit that description. No one goes anywhere in that business by being passive.
Obviously it is a problem that exists. It is just a strange dichotomy where we, as a society, promote girls to be "sluts," while women still feel negative towards themselves to live up to those expectations. What can be done to fix the problem?
Most people seem to prefer atavism when it comes to dating and bedroom activities. Those are some really deep patterns, and I doubt that they are solely the result of social conditioning.
A sexually pushy woman might be labelled a slut, but a sexually unpushy man will be labelled a beta male. Because, in the end, we are just chimps.
True point: women pay closer attention to men's pecking order than vice versa. But then again, the reason women do this is likely because for men, pecking order is more closely linked to high salary / reproductive fitness than it is for women, which comes back to the point in the original article -- if women don't get promoted or given higher salary, then there is no major salary inequality among them (at least compared to men), so we are back to square one.
The situation gives men an enormous advantage. And the vast majority of the 90%+ of Fortune 500 CEOs and tech startups and VCs who are guys don't seem to have any interest in changing it. Why do you think that's the case?
My hypothesis is that the society unconsciously believes that aggressive "pushy" women would make bad mothers or would be otherwise somehow bad at raising children. But would they really? What if strong women give birth to natural leaders, to put it figuratively? Human societies have a tendency to place higher value on things like complacency and moral propriety, even if those things could be detrimental at the individual level, and a related tendency to ostracize those with high social intelligence or manipulative traits even though those traits could be beneficial at the individual level. What if the "bitch" stereotype is due to a similar effect?
EDIT: if you disagree with me enough to downvote this, I would love to hear your opinion on why precisely you disagree, so please comment.
It's more that the people at the top have gotten there in the current situation. So emotionally they tend not to want to acknowledge what a huge advantage they and their peers have had getting there ... and they don't have any incentive to change things in a way that reduces that advantage.
I'm female. I have found it's really tough to try to initiate a relationship with a man because the default is to treat me like a "slut" if I do so and then get really threatened/angry/hostile when it turns out I am not throwing myself at him sexually, I am actually looking for a relationship. I've concluded that what "slut" means is really "someone who indiscriminately serves the needs of men/others". "Women looking to serve their own needs" is something society doesn't seem to really have a term for.
(Anyone know of such a term? I would be happy to be proven wrong and enlightened that it's just my whacked life that lacks this concept. Men who sleep around tend to get called "Players" and the assumption is they are taking advantage/doing the using. "Slut" is generally a term we use to indicate the party being used/in the subservient position.)