Real Chick Lit: 'The Girl's Guide to Business'

"THE GIRL'S GUIDE TO BUSINESS" series can best be described as "The One Minute Manager" meets "Sex and the City."

It's not for the power-suit-and-sensible-shoes type, but for a new breed of career chicks.

"We would never call ourselves 'women' because that sounds like something our mothers were," says Kimberly Yorio, series co-author with Caitlin Friedman. "We are the girls. We have always identified as girls, all of our friends have identified as girls: 'the girls at the gym,' 'the girls I ski with' and so on. All 'the girls' are successful."

Yorio and Friedman will appear at Olsson's Crystal City on Tuesday for a book signing and career workshop based on their third and most recent "Girl's Guide" book, "The Girl's Guide to Kicking Your Career Into Gear."

Women fear "the ask," according to Friedman and Yorio's research.

"They don't ask to be promoted, they don't ask to learn a new skill," Yorio says. "[Women think] that if you are a good girl and put your head down you will be rewarded."

Unfortunately, in today's workplace, that doesn't happen — that's the message of "Kicking Your Career Into Gear."

But as the book's cover — liberally splashed with pink — implies, taking control of your career means something different than it meant in the past.

"We only became successful when we were confident enough to become ourselves and not some vision of what a PR professional would sound like in a meeting," Yorio says.

Yorio and Friedman based their books on interviews with hundreds of successful women as well as personal experience — from its own New York City-based YC Media, a PR firm that counts celeb chef Jamie Oliver among its clients.

Now all of YC media gets involved in the books: "The Girl's Guides" aren't "required reading" for the firm's employees because everyone pitches in to help put them together.

"They read [the books] in many versions," Yorio says. "Poor Gabriela [Holdt], our junior publicist, has to go through every page."

The upcoming workshop will be "really interactive. We're not reading and we're not talking; we're trying to get everyone engaged," Yorio says. "It is serious, but it doesn't have to be boring."

And, in the true spirit of girlishness, there will be goodie bags.

» Olsson's, 2200 Crystal Drive, Arlington; Tue., 6 p.m., free, 703-413-8121. (Crystal City)

Written by Express contributor Rachel Kaufman
Photo by Luca Pioltelli