Hello, everybody! Hope your 2008 is off to an amazing start, and despite all appearances to the contrary, I have not in fact fled to a foreign country in an effort to shirk my Gig duties. Actually, I got a nasty flu and decided to spare you guys the NyQuil-induced ramblings. (And hey, I did say I’d be back in January, and technically, it is still January, right? )

But it was lovely to come back to your sweet letters, and Gig reader Juan gets a special shout-out for threatening to seek therapy if I didn’t get back to work. So in the interest of Juan’s mental health — and let’s be honest, my own; I missed you guys! — let’s get to it. We’ve got some new stuff in store that I’ll be excited to get your thoughts on, but in the New Year’s tradition, I thought we’d start with a bit of reflection. By that I mean, it’s been a few weeks since last we spoke, and in my acetaminophen haze, I had a lot of time to think. So today, friends, I’m going to torture you with…

WHAT I LEARNED OVER THE BREAK

(or “5 maudlin semi-epiphanies that are sure to infuriate Yadgyu, which only further motivates me to share them”)

Be forewarned, I really have missed you guys, and it shows in the treatise that follows. So apologies in advance. And in case you don’t make it to the end, we’d love to hear about your recent semi-epiphanies, so comment away.

1. We’re too old to spend two straight weeks at Mom’s.

Remember when you used to come home on a break and, as annoyed as you might’ve been at your parents, you kind of loved vegging at home? Well, I think those days might need to be over, at least for me and all of the other should-be independent twentysomething people we know and love.

Regular readers have probably by now ascertained that my family’s pretty tight (i.e. if we were any closer, we’d be sardines). And yet, when the kids decided that this holiday, we’d kick it old school and spend all our time off at Mom’s, we didn’t really know what we were in for.

Our hearts were in the right place; this was her first Christmas in a new house and we wanted to give her as many opportunities to cook ginormous meals as possible. But seriously, by about Dec. 28, we’d each gained 10 pounds and reverted to our worst, whiniest, most awfully teenage incarnation.

So while it’s true what we’ve often said here — that while for many Yers, there’s often nothing our moms would like better than to have us home — it’s time to have our own homes! And maybe even host our own holiday parties! The kind our parents can come to, with, like, real wine and no passing out. Sheesh.

2. We’re not too old to play Wii till 4 a.m.

The preceding tirade notwithstanding, it turns out that one good thing about regressing to childhood at home is remembering that there are some seemingly childish things that are pretty darn awesome — including, but not limited to, the Wii, hot chocolate, Legos and Animal Planet.

And incredibly, when you indulge (a bit) in these extravagances, you often come to the realization that this stuff is at least as cool as standing around at a cocktail party trying to sound smart and wishing you were home watching Adult Swim. Which is what I for one often found myself doing when I got my first real gig and suddenly started worrying about being taken seriously by my legitimately grown-up colleagues.

But as I get legitimately older myself (officially identified a wrinkle, FYI) and vaguely more secure, I’m finding that my favorite Gen Y “characteristics,” to the extent that those exist, are all our little paradoxes. Love the environment/drive an SUV. Most educated people ever/obsessed with MTV. Grew up too fast/can’t get out of our parents’ houses to save our lives. (And before you letter-writers get going, I am speaking very generally here, folks.)

So yes, sure we want to be — and should want to be — adults, but a little Wii never hurt anyone. At least not if you keep your Wii jacket on, take breaks, and clear all the furniture out of your living room. And more importantly, it does keep you from turning into into Holden Caulfield’s long-lost angstier twin, even if you do spend an eternity at your Mom’s.

3. We’re finally just old enough to learn the good stuff.

There was an upside to the aforementioned eternity, though. When we were small, our mom worked a full day; cooked dinner every evening; sewed, papier-mâché’d, and otherwise “project”ed with us every night; and still found time to be best friends with our teachers and know all our business.

As a kid, you take that good stuff for granted and ask yourself why, oh, why, you’ve been cursed with a mom who won’t just take you to McDonald’s. By the time you go away to school, you appreciate it enough to miss the nourishment, but not quite enough to understand the labor. But once you’re out in the world with a real job and bills to pay, well, then you start to get it. (Forget kids; my fish would file a petition of neglect if they could.)

Talk about your self-esteem killers. My poor sister and I will so never be as anything as our mom. Which is why this break, what with the eternity we spent at home, we actually got the chance to ask some questions and learn some things. And not the encyclopedia factoids and oft-repeated lectures we groaned at in our argumentative youth, either. But some things that are actually worth knowing, like recipes for the West Indian dishes we grew up eating, the patterns for our favorite sundresses, and the full-length versions of family ghost stories we’ve been hearing in snippets for years.

It shouldn’t be all that long before we (gasp) have our own children, and if we want to be even decent approximations of the good older people in our lives, we’d better start asking the right questions now. There isn’t much of a precedent for that in our country, and goodness knows we Yers are sometimes considered the worst offenders when it comes to valuing our elders, but I do know that we value expertise, and more often than not, the people who raised us have some that’s worth sharing.

4. Sometimes, you just have to say, “Look how amazing I am.”

As little as we know, there is something to be said for a little self-affirmation in spite of it all. Consider my brother Kamran, the RIT freshman. We’re all sitting at the dinner table over the holiday, chatting away, and our mom gets a call from one of the engineers at her office, who was dealing with a problem. She hangs up, shares some (general and totally over my head) details with us, and Kam says, “Oh, so he has to replace the filament.” Mom says something along the lines of, “Yes, precisely, exactly, quite right,” our collective eyes glaze over, and somewhere in the ensuing self-absorbed silence, Kam says to himself, and I kid you not: “Look at how amazing I am.”

Laughter, of course, erupts. But he’s so far off in his own world that he seems a tad confused about the reaction, still smiling to himself over his little triumph. Obviously, he suffered merciless derision the rest of the holiday (for this and his sheepish admission that, until this Christmas, he thought Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas” was in fact called “Hullabaloo Christmas” — classic).

But my mom rightly pointed out that for a kid who, after getting his first 80-something on an elementary school spelling test, spent the entire afternoon with a sheet over his face, emerging only to cry, “I’m the only one who gets B’s in the family,” some quiet self-regard was a big deal, as it should be. So regard yourself quietly, and remember how amazing you are. Just don’t tell your siblings, if they’re the sort that, you know, live to mock you.

5. A good job is like a good boyfriend.

And that, dear readers, is why I’ve been gone so long. Because, if I’m being honest, I’d tried to open my apartment door with my office key just one too many times. And had even answered my cell phone, “Fortune,” on more than one occasion. Never mind the sad realization that, as far as my brain was concerned, I’d used and abused every word I had to give, and might in fact have had nothing left to say. My work boundaries were so fluid that I was drowning on and off the job, and that does not a good life — or good Gig writing — make.

But as the proverbial “they” say, absence makes the heart grow fonder. And with a few weeks away from you and the real-life boyfriend, I’ve returned excited to see you both, with new and (I hope) interesting things to talk about, and a fair amount of starry-eyed optimism about what this year might hold. If you’ve read this far, you’re feeling pretty optimistic, too (certainly about the outside possibility that this’ll end up being worthwhile reading ). And you can probably also tell that, whatever I might say, as monstrously long as this post has been, I obviously missed writing to and for you. And that’s just the kind of re-discovery I’m hoping is in store for all of us. So here’s to making our work work for us in 2008. It’s going to be fun.

Allrighty then. Guess I did miss pontificating with you guys. But now that we’re done with that, on to the 56 million new posts I’ve been planning. And in the meantime, if my musings got you to thinking, let us know what you learned — or un-learned — since last we blogged…

Hello, everybody! Hope your 2008 is off to an amazing start, and despite all appearances to the contrary, I have not in fact fled to a foreign country in an effort to shirk my Gig duties. Actually, I got a nasty flu and decided to spare you guys the NyQuil-induced ramblings. (And hey, I did say I’d be back in January, and technically, it is still January, right? )

But it was lovely to come back to your sweet letters, and Gig reader Juan gets a special shout-out for threatening to seek therapy if I didn’t get back to work. So in the interest of Juan’s mental health — and let’s be honest, my own; I missed you guys! — let’s get to it. We’ve got some new stuff in store that I’ll be excited to get your thoughts on, but in the New Year’s tradition, I thought we’d start with a bit of reflection. By that I mean, it’s been a few weeks since last we spoke, and in my acetaminophen haze, I had a lot of time to think. So today, friends, I’m going to torture you with…

WHAT I LEARNED OVER THE BREAK

(or “5 maudlin semi-epiphanies that are sure to infuriate Yadgyu, which only further motivates me to share them”)

Be forewarned, I really have missed you guys, and it shows in the treatise that follows. So apologies in advance. And in case you don’t make it to the end, we’d love to hear about your recent semi-epiphanies, so comment away.

1. We’re too old to spend two straight weeks at Mom’s.

Remember when you used to come home on a break and, as annoyed as you might’ve been at your parents, you kind of loved vegging at home? Well, I think those days might need to be over, at least for me and all of the other should-be independent twentysomething people we know and love.

Regular readers have probably by now ascertained that my family’s pretty tight (i.e. if we were any closer, we’d be sardines). And yet, when the kids decided that this holiday, we’d kick it old school and spend all our time off at Mom’s, we didn’t really know what we were in for.

Our hearts were in the right place; this was her first Christmas in a new house and we wanted to give her as many opportunities to cook ginormous meals as possible. But seriously, by about Dec. 28, we’d each gained 10 pounds and reverted to our worst, whiniest, most awfully teenage incarnation.

So while it’s true what we’ve often said here — that while for many Yers, there’s often nothing our moms would like better than to have us home — it’s time to have our own homes! And maybe even host our own holiday parties! The kind our parents can come to, with, like, real wine and no passing out. Sheesh.

2. We’re not too old to play Wii till 4 a.m.

The preceding tirade notwithstanding, it turns out that one good thing about regressing to childhood at home is remembering that there are some seemingly childish things that are pretty darn awesome — including, but not limited to, the Wii, hot chocolate, Legos and Animal Planet.

And incredibly, when you indulge (a bit) in these extravagances, you often come to the realization that this stuff is at least as cool as standing around at a cocktail party trying to sound smart and wishing you were home watching Adult Swim. Which is what I for one often found myself doing when I got my first real gig and suddenly started worrying about being taken seriously by my legitimately grown-up colleagues.

But as I get legitimately older myself (officially identified a wrinkle, FYI) and vaguely more secure, I’m finding that my favorite Gen Y “characteristics,” to the extent that those exist, are all our little paradoxes. Love the environment/drive an SUV. Most educated people ever/obsessed with MTV. Grew up too fast/can’t get out of our parents’ houses to save our lives. (And before you letter-writers get going, I am speaking very generally here, folks.)

So yes, sure we want to be — and should want to be — adults, but a little Wii never hurt anyone. At least not if you keep your Wii jacket on, take breaks, and clear all the furniture out of your living room. And more importantly, it does keep you from turning into into Holden Caulfield’s long-lost angstier twin, even if you do spend an eternity at your Mom’s.

3. We’re finally just old enough to learn the good stuff.

There was an upside to the aforementioned eternity, though. When we were small, our mom worked a full day; cooked dinner every evening; sewed, papier-mâché’d, and otherwise “project”ed with us every night; and still found time to be best friends with our teachers and know all our business.

As a kid, you take that good stuff for granted and ask yourself why, oh, why, you’ve been cursed with a mom who won’t just take you to McDonald’s. By the time you go away to school, you appreciate it enough to miss the nourishment, but not quite enough to understand the labor. But once you’re out in the world with a real job and bills to pay, well, then you start to get it. (Forget kids; my fish would file a petition of neglect if they could.)

Talk about your self-esteem killers. My poor sister and I will so never be as anything as our mom. Which is why this break, what with the eternity we spent at home, we actually got the chance to ask some questions and learn some things. And not the encyclopedia factoids and oft-repeated lectures we groaned at in our argumentative youth, either. But some things that are actually worth knowing, like recipes for the West Indian dishes we grew up eating, the patterns for our favorite sundresses, and the full-length versions of family ghost stories we’ve been hearing in snippets for years.

It shouldn’t be all that long before we (gasp) have our own children, and if we want to be even decent approximations of the good older people in our lives, we’d better start asking the right questions now. There isn’t much of a precedent for that in our country, and goodness knows we Yers are sometimes considered the worst offenders when it comes to valuing our elders, but I do know that we value expertise, and more often than not, the people who raised us have some that’s worth sharing.

4. Sometimes, you just have to say, “Look how amazing I am.”

As little as we know, there is something to be said for a little self-affirmation in spite of it all. Consider my brother Kamran, the RIT freshman. We’re all sitting at the dinner table over the holiday, chatting away, and our mom gets a call from one of the engineers at her office, who was dealing with a problem. She hangs up, shares some (general and totally over my head) details with us, and Kam says, “Oh, so he has to replace the filament.” Mom says something along the lines of, “Yes, precisely, exactly, quite right,” our collective eyes glaze over, and somewhere in the ensuing self-absorbed silence, Kam says to himself, and I kid you not: “Look at how amazing I am.”

Laughter, of course, erupts. But he’s so far off in his own world that he seems a tad confused about the reaction, still smiling to himself over his little triumph. Obviously, he suffered merciless derision the rest of the holiday (for this and his sheepish admission that, until this Christmas, he thought Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas” was in fact called “Hullabaloo Christmas” — classic).

But my mom rightly pointed out that for a kid who, after getting his first 80-something on an elementary school spelling test, spent the entire afternoon with a sheet over his face, emerging only to cry, “I’m the only one who gets B’s in the family,” some quiet self-regard was a big deal, as it should be. So regard yourself quietly, and remember how amazing you are. Just don’t tell your siblings, if they’re the sort that, you know, live to mock you.

5. A good job is like a good boyfriend.

And that, dear readers, is why I’ve been gone so long. Because, if I’m being honest, I’d tried to open my apartment door with my office key just one too many times. And had even answered my cell phone, “Fortune,” on more than one occasion. Never mind the sad realization that, as far as my brain was concerned, I’d used and abused every word I had to give, and might in fact have had nothing left to say. My work boundaries were so fluid that I was drowning on and off the job, and that does not a good life — or good Gig writing — make.

But as the proverbial “they” say, absence makes the heart grow fonder. And with a few weeks away from you and the real-life boyfriend, I’ve returned excited to see you both, with new and (I hope) interesting things to talk about, and a fair amount of starry-eyed optimism about what this year might hold. If you’ve read this far, you’re feeling pretty optimistic, too (certainly about the outside possibility that this’ll end up being worthwhile reading ). And you can probably also tell that, whatever I might say, as monstrously long as this post has been, I obviously missed writing to and for you. And that’s just the kind of re-discovery I’m hoping is in store for all of us. So here’s to making our work work for us in 2008. It’s going to be fun.

Allrighty then. Guess I did miss pontificating with you guys. But now that we’re done with that, on to the 56 million new posts I’ve been planning. And in the meantime, if my musings got you to thinking, let us know what you learned — or un-learned — since last we blogged…

On the way back from a biz trip to Miami last week, I picked up a copy of Details, enticed by the “Ultimate Guide to Office Etiquette” coverline. Leaving aside for the moment how much of a dork this makes me — after all, I do it for you guys — turns out I probably should have paid more attention to the ones that asked, “Are You Dating a ‘Tweenager’?” and “Are Your Parents Squandering Your Inheritance?”

Before you click off in disgust, a bit of explanation: I’ve been struck recently not so much by how Yers have been acting, but how parents are behaving.

Consider the aforementioned Details stories. “Tweenager” decries the 35-going-on-12 woman, the center of a “Big Girl Epidemic” that has grown women wearing babydolls, “OMG”ing all over the place, and shrieking over The Hills. And the inheritance story sports the somewhat alarming headline, “It’s Time To Cut Your Parents Off: Mom and Dad are living it up well into their sixties. Guess who’ll pay for it?” According to the story, a Fidelity Investments survey in March not only found that the average Boomer has saved “a paltry $45,000,” but also that “one in five households led by 25-to-42-year-olds has either begun providing financial support to their parents or expect to soon.”

And if you weren’t frightened enough, just flip a few more pages to “Totally Blonde,” where the Girls Next Door are joined by 40-something Real Housewives of Orange County Lauri Waring and Tamra Barney in an, um, swimsuit photo essay the cover calls, “The California Blondes Taking Over Your Sexual Fantasies.” (Notably absent were either of the housewives’ grown children. I’ll let you Google this one on your own.)

Yikes. Admittedly, on the right day, I too might be called a Big Girl. I love The Hills, have long favored the empire waist, and abbreviate with the best of them — and you know my feelings about emoticons. But that sort of thing is generally reserved for indulgent conversations with my girlfriends, not the general public, and I think many of my peers would say the same. And even then, at 27 — despite a melding of pop culture and youth culture that to some extent legitimizes this hair-twirling act — I can actually feel myself aging out of this demo.

Why, then, are people our moms’ age trying so hard to be twentysomethings again? And if they were, was it judgmental to begrudge them that? It’s not as if it hurts us. If Housewife Waring wants to look her kids’ age — as she told Details, “I will never look a day older than 32″ — and she can, well, good for her. Maybe.

Even as I was pondering these pressing questions, what should come on but Keeping Up With the Kardashians, featuring another mom gone wild, Kris Jenner, whose necklines, hemlines, naughty mouth, inability to tell the truth, and, oh, everything else often drive even her less than demure daughters to comment. As my friend Jon Caramanica wrote in the LA Times this weekend, “This is a family with severe boundary issues — it is Kris who encourages Kim to pose for Playboy and who cheerily does crisis management about Kim’s sex tape. She seems more interested in the cameras than Kim is.”

And therein lies the problem, right? It does hurt us. Sure, Kim might not have been destined for a Nobel, but with her mom’s expert parenting, she bypassed all the other options and went straight to reality TV caricature and sex object. And the saddest part is, whatever Kim’s feelings about her “career,” she’s obviously living out her mom’s dream. It takes stage-mothering to a whole different place, moving it from behind the scenes to an embarrassing front-and-center.

It isn’t so much that I want our moms to become decrepit hags, rocking away their twilight years over embroidery and weak tea. I appreciate the desire to stay youthful, and the need to build friendships with one’s children — based in part on shared interests and tastes — but surely succumbing to these pressures at the expense of good parenting isn’t the answer. Rather, it’d be awesome if our parents would both take care of themselves and act like adults, so as to, you know, set an example. (Maybe forgo that tanning session for an episode of What Not to Wear; Stacy London would set ‘em straight.) And it’s not to suggest that these parents don’t love their children; in fact, I’d bet that if they really knew how their actions would affect their children in the long-term, they’d be horrified and repentant.

But obviously, they don’t know. And the children (we) do end up paying for it. It’s something we first mentioned on The Gig in our “Gen Y on ‘60 Minutes’” post — the idea that if we’re not acting our age, it might just be because our parents aren’t either. Perhaps our helicoptering parents put too much of their own lives on hold for us, and now, finally able to do their own thing, they’re overdoing it. Clearly, I’m not sure exactly how I feel yet, but I bet some of you are. What do you think? Is this a case of out-of-control parents, or uptight kids? Or is it just a matter of our parents trying to live their best — albeit somewhat irresponsible — lives, which in the end, is exactly what we want, too?

*****

Friend of The Gig Christine Hassler is looking for a few good stories:

The co-authors of “Chicken Soup for the Twenty-Something Soul” are putting together a collection of inspiring, moving, and funny stories to warm the hearts and soothe the souls of twenty-somethings. And they want YOUR story! This is your shot to inspire others AND be published. (And, we pay!) Deadline to submit your Twenty-Something Story is January 1st. For more details, click here.

Since we’re getting ready to go dark for the holiday, thought it might be a good time for a silly story. And this one might not normally be the best candidate — you’ll see why in a moment — except that I already shared it with the guys in charge, and they basically laughed at us Gen Y-types and called us nerds.

Some people, surprising as it may be, see Fortune and think “stodgy.” And I’d have paid to see their faces this issue, as they picked it up —with huge letters proclaiming, “What were they SMOKING?” on the cover — and realized this was not in fact a copy of Vice, but Fortune.

Though the PTBs no doubt went back and forth on whether such a Jon Stewart-esque question would be too flip for the cover of 75-year-old Fortune magazine, they decided to go with it. (Especially because, of course, this wasn’t just a snarky coverline, but sass specifically directed at cover subject and Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne’s alleged Half Baked extracurricular activities, reported in a Wall Street Journal story earlier this month.)

Based on the reaction when we saw it in the office, our bosses’ fellow Boomers agreed with the choice. But it’s the young people that got all stressed out. As a fellow Yer in the Fortune family told me: It’s cool, but I don’t know, it just seems a little “inappropriate.” Of course, that person made the comment somewhat sheepishly, and the minute s/he said it, we both laughed. How funny that, with all the talk about Yers’ irreverence and hipness, we’re actually the stodgy ones. (Can’t you just see the indie movie version: A bunch of us sitting around some neighborhood coffee shop, the ringleader saying, “I’m all for selling magazines, but at what cost?!”)

Guess the experts aren’t joking when they say our values are more like those of the WWII-era Traditionalists than those held by our free-wheeling Boomer parents. Maybe we just need to chill out. Or maybe this attitude is what’ll get us through despite our devil-may-care outlook. Are you often more uptight than your bosses when it comes to judgment calls like this one, or do the “adults” sometimes need to button up a bit?

And while you ponder that turnaround, have an amazing Thanksgiving. See you next week!

And we’re back. After two weeks out of the office — at the Most Powerful Women Summit, on a quick birthday vacation to Playa del Carmen, and at my fifth reunion at Stanford — I’m probably more tired than when I left, but glad to be back. Reunion spurred some unexpected reflection (i.e., beyond the standard reminiscing), much of it surprisingly closely related to the conversations we’ve been having on The Gig. But I may need another day or two to process that and turn it into some vaguely coherent copy.

In the meantime, though, I wanted to make sure that you’d all read Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column last week, about us, the group he calls Generation Q (or the Quiet Americans). It’s a laudatory label, meant at least in part to underscore our commitment to service and the greater good at home and abroad, but it’s not without criticism.

“America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q,” Friedman writes. “That’s what twentysomethings are for — to light a fire under the country. But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them.”

When I read this, I couldn’t help but nod in agreement, having signed a few less than effective online petitions in my day. But when, a few days later, I saw Friedman speak on a panel at Reunion, titled “Courting Disaster: The Fight for Oil, Water and a Healthy Planet,” that also included General John Abizaid and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, I understood better.

Whatever one thinks of his views, Friedman’s passion is inspiring. And not just because that’s what he does for a living; he’s representative of a whole group of people whose passion we ought to have inherited.

Have we? I’m not sure. In small ways, maybe. Or perhaps it’s that we have got that passion and simply haven’t figured out how to express it in big ways. Regardless, I think he’s right — there are some big things that need doing, and they aren’t going to happen with a Facebook invite. (And I’m as guilty as the next person. It’s telling, don’t you think, that in five months of doing this blog, today was the first day I tagged a post “activism”?) Thoughts?

It’s my birthday today (officially a grown-up at 27!), so I’ll be heading out on a little vacation. Look for The Gig to return October 16, and look forward to hearing all your thoughts on the summit and Yer women…

*****

Much is made of Gen Yers’ gender-blindness, our unwillingness or inability to see and conform to gender stereotypes. And yet it’d be naive to say that Gen Y women are exactly the same as their male counterparts or as previous generations of women, so yesterday, exploring some of those differences became the focus of the Gen Y panel at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit here in Dana Point, Calif.

Gen Y women surprised Deborah Korb Maizner, who heads graduate marketing for JPMorgan, in their response to an ad campaign that played on the idea that investment banking was a career for men only. For older women, the ad’s acknowledgement of the unique challenges women can face in banking and its clever presentation — highlighting the word “men” in investment — and made it a hit. For Gen Y women, though, it was just the opposite. “They were insulted,”  Maizner told the audience, pointing out that many of these young women have never been told they couldn’t do anything.

And so perhaps the girl power approach mightn’t be ideal for companies trying to recruit Yer women. Not because those young women don’t value their girl power, but because they don’t think their gender should be of any consequence when it comes to choosing a career.

In her work as a professor of management at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, fellow panelist Catherine Tinsley says she’s been struck not just by Gen Yers’ apparent sophistication, but by the fact that, upon closer inspection, it all falls apart. “There’s still a vulnerability,” she says, and any prodding reveals it quickly. Which is precisely where mentoring comes in. Katie Connolly, an associate attorney at Halleland Lewis Nilan & Johnson (whom you may remember as one of the Yer profiles in our Gen Y story), stressed the need for feedback. And not just validation, but all constructive criticism. While this isn’t unique to young women, it does speak to the immense need for strong networks. Traditionally, not only are women’s networks more sparse, they don’t necessarily focus on building relationships with men. And since men are often in positions of power — not to mention a significant portion of most staffs — having them as mentors can only help women to succeed.

There’s only so much four women can fit into a 20-minute panel (no matter how fast we talked!), and the conversation about Yer women is only just beginning. Will we struggle with trying to do it all? Probably. Will we approach it the same way our mothers did? Almost certainly not. And studying the way it all goes down may turn out to be something of a researcher’s dream. They’re questions that’re dear to Tamara Erickson, the Workforce Crisis co-author who talked to us about Xer bosses last week. Erickson couldn’t make it out to the summit, but she’ll have a chance to add to the discussion in the coming months as the Concours Institute launches a new research project, “Solving the Workforce Crisis — Innovative Strategies for Recruiting and Retaining Talented Women.” Erickson has a few ideas of what they’ll find, especially when it comes to Yer women and some of the network issues we’ve already brought up, but for now, we’ll have to wait till the data’s in.

And in the meantime, I’d bet there’s a lot you guys — both men and women — could tell us about what it’s like for Yer women entering the workforce and navigating their careers. Do some of the gender issues of past generations persist in subtler forms, or are we really going to be the gender-blind generation?

Here’s a question I’ve heard a lot more than I might’ve expected in my reporting on Gen Y. Let us know what you think, and thanks for all the well wishes. Have a great weekend!

*****

My boss is in her 30s, and I thought, since we’re close in age, that we’d get along well. Instead, she’s harder on me than my older bosses have been. What’s up with that?

When Boomer bosses complain about their Gen Y charges, says researcher Tamara Erickson, she just asks if they have any kids. “I see the difference immediately,” says the co-author of 2006’s Workforce Crisis. “But I haven’t found anything that effective for Gen Xers. When I try, I often run into a fairly grumpy reaction: ‘Well, I had to do it, and they ought to do it.’ They’re much more rigid about what they went through and not being sympathetic to Yers.”

It seems counterintuitive. These Xers are our big brothers and sisters, they taught us all our best bad behavior, we idolized them. While that appears to be true in retrospect, speaking as a big sister myself, I never miss an opportunity to remind my sibs how much they got away with because I’d paved the way. “When I was little…” has started many a bitter conversation. And we’re only talking about curfews and phone privileges.

So imagine how Xers in the workplace, where the stakes are so much higher, must feel. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 48 million Xers to the almost 80 million of us and over 78 million Boomers. “People are paying attention to Yers to a degree that they didn’t necessarily pay to Xers, who are basically sandwiched between these huge globs of people in a very frustrating situation,” says Erickson. “They have annoying people like Tammy Erickson saying we have to retire retirement, so they’re not going to get rid of Boomers when they thought they would. And they’re already thinking that by the time Boomers actually leave, Yers will be perfectly positioned for those jobs. They’re very threatened by Yers.”

Which may help explain their sometimes less than loving attitude toward us in the office. But they needn’t depend on your empathy alone. For the Xers struggling to manage Yers — and their own emotions — more effectively, Erickson has a few thoughts. (That, incidentally, might be quite useful if e-mailed anonymously.)

Realize, she says, that Yers are very good at seeking out expertise, and they’re much more attuned to that than hierarchy, so Xers shouldn’t get offended if the Yers in their charge choose Boomers for mentors. “There’s great evidence of relationships forming between Boomers and Yers,” Erickson says. “Yers are sussing out who really knows how to do the job, and often it’s these old Boomers. But Xers can’t get caught up in that. They have to have the confidence to encourage Yers to team up with Boomers and make that an accepted part of the culture.”

And speaking of confidence, Xers also need to build some when it comes to technology. They’re very concerned about Yers’ greater technological sophistication, says Erickson, who points out that while Xers are perceived as very tech-savvy, some don’t feel as comfortable with technology as the perception indicates. Erickson recommends addressing that insecurity directly: “The Xers do really have to make sure that they’re experiencing the technology. A lot of what Yers know is not about them using the technology better, but about using it differently. Xers need to use the technology enough to develop some of that experiential knowledge.”

As an “older” Yer, even I didn’t quite understand what Facebook meant to my recent-grad sister and her friends until I finally started using it semi-regularly. Understanding how Yers use sites like this — that they aren’t just for e-mail or networking, but practically for conducting life — could go a long way to ease Xers’ technology anxiety. And insofar as that helps Xers to be more open and flexible in the way that they think about work, Erickson’s a fan: “It’d be great for Xer bosses to sit down with Yers and say, ‘Let’s think about all the time we spend scheduling meetings or doing conference calls. How much of that could we do with text messages or an internal Facebook site?’ Thinking like that will help Xers stay a step ahead.”

But whether your Xer boss is forward-thinking or as backward as Kris Kross, chances are that s/he’ll have a loopy episode sooner or later, so when it happens, don’t despair. Just remember where it’s coming from and try a little tenderness.