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Updated: Oct 19, 2022 58 Comments · by

Coffee Break – Rouge Peep-toe

Coffee Break

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I don't think I've featured Isolá on the blog before, but this is a brand to watch if you're a fan of comfortable but stylish shoes — it's the new big sister to comfort brands like Born and Sofft.

Love the look of this mocha/chocolate peep-toe heel — the black shiny buckle, the animal printed leather — and there's even a “metallic leather interior lining” that “wicks away moisture to keep feet cool and dry.”

The shoe was $169, but is available for $91.50 at Zappos (mocha only: Isola – Rouge (Mocha/Chocolate) – Footwear), as well as in a leopard print and black “zebrino” print at 6pm for $73.15 each. Nice!

(L-4)

N.B.: Peep-toes are not appropriate for every office — know your office!

Sales of note for 9.16.24

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Kat Griffin is the founder, publisher, and editor-in-chief of Corporette. You can read more about her here.

Comments

  1. ATC

    Those are cute, but dang that’s a high heel! I wish the heel heights would come back down to the 3″ range – it seems like 4″ is becoming the norm with fashionable brands.

  2. GRA

    Those are great shoes! I could definitely wear those where I work as long as I paired them with a more traditional suit/shirt. A nice item to jazz up boring.

  3. Eponine

    Was anyone else super annoyed by the op-ed on women doctors that Kat linked to on her facebook thingy? I just… sigh. Two steps forward, one step back, I guess.

    • EC MD

      THANK YOU! It is so frustrating. I can hardly speak. My fellow physician friends, both male and female were appalled at the op-ed.

      Like lawyers, the average physician works 60-70 hours a week. So “part time” physicians often work 40-45. Also, that particular physician who wrote the op-ed is in a specialty (anesthesia) that is very well-remunerated, as well as being a field that has led the pack with flexible hours, etc. So it feels particularly nasty coming from her.

      I know I shouldn’t feel “let down” by other women when they have that kind of attitude, but I really really do. It’s so frustrating to imply that there’s only one way to do things, and that doing things the old way is the best way. Things change, careers evolve, and for the most part I think this evolution has been necessary with the increasing complexity and regulation of medicine.

      Thanks for your support. It means a lot.

      • Eponine

        The op-ed was just so disappointing. The message was that women who also want families can’t cut it in a certain field and so they should either stay out of the field or give up on being involved with their families. First, the attack on women is a particularly galling trope; men also want to be involved with their families, but you never read an op-ed attacking men who want work-life balance, and all work-life balance options are perceived to be a special privilege requested by women. Second, the idea that in order to be a true professional one must neglect one’s family is appalling. If a field isn’t suitable for an entire class of persons (i.e. parents), then change the way the field works, don’t exclude the entire class of persons. Third, a lot of people leave work or cut back not because they want to make babies and sit at home like a pampered princess, but because working 60 hours a week for 40 years gets f-ing exhausting and causes mere mortals to experience this little thing called burnout.

        The op-ed was straight out of the 1960s. Appalling.

        • Anon

          At my first job as an intern in a governmental agency, one of the attorneys left his biglaw job before he got married and had kids because he was tired of working so much and wanted time to go hiking, skiing, travel, etc. He said that it isn’t only mothers who strive for work/life balance, but single, childless men too.

    • Monday

      Yeah, this is hard to read. It also seems to be blaming the women who DO go into primary care for the fact that there aren’t enough PC doctors. They took the lower pay and lower prestige, and as a reward they are supposed to sacrifice any flexibility in their schedules? (My mom is a PC doctor and talked about this often while trying to balance it with raising us.)

      Also, for every op-ed like this, there’s another one lamenting those terrible absentee professional moms, who allegedly expect their kids to raise themselves. No, women may not be able to have it all, all the time, but neither can the society as a whole. We don’t want neglected patients OR neglected families. Seems pretty unfair to make any blanket judgment about women’s decisions.

    • Lyssa

      Hmm, I’m going to have to disagree. I thought that she made some good points- physicians are able to train to become physicians, a very important job which we don’t have enough of, because of a lot of public support, and there are a very limited number of spots available. Of course, every career is a personal decision, but I think that her advice* was pretty clear that the decision of whether you want to meet the demands of the job needs to be made before you take the spot in school, not after. I know that circumstances and minds change, but I don’t think that it’s too much to ask that an adult who is intelligent enough to get into medical school carefully consider whether he or she really wants to commit to such a demanding profession.

      That was definitely a consideration that I made before going to law school (and if I had different family goals, I would not have gone), but at least any decision I make about being a lawyer really only impacts me and my family (as there is a surplus of lawyers, and law school is open to a large number of people, while our country is in desparate need of more doctors). (Obviously, we need more medical schools as well, but we can only work with what we have.)

      I don’t see it as a male/female thing at all; it would apply equally to either sex (but for the fact that women, for what are obviously a whole host of reasons, just tend to look for work/life balance more often). Honestly, EC MD, and I mean this in the politest way possible, I didn’t see any nastiness, and I feel like we were reading completely different articles.

      * Her advice was: “Students who aspire to go to medical school should think about the consequences if they decide to work part time or leave clinical medicine. It’s fair to ask them — women especially — to consider the conflicting demands that medicine and parenthood make before they accept (and deny to others) sought-after positions in medical school and residency. They must understand that medical education is a privilege, not an entitlement, and it confers a real moral obligation to serve. “

      • Anon

        I think it’s a dangerous thing to say only people who are not going to be parents and seek some sort of work-personal life balance should be doctors. I love my primary care doctor BECAUSE she is a mom and understands my needs better than many male doctors I’ve seen. I also accept the fact that sometimes she’ not available so she can go to her kids’ school. I would never presume to tell her she shouldn’t be my doctor because she simply wants the same things I have.

        • E

          I don’t think Lyssa (or anyone else) is saying that people with wonderful work/life balance don’t make fantastic doctors. I think there’s probably a case to be made that they in fact make some of the best doctors because they’re not overworked and, as you pointed out, can be so relatable! The point instead is that, taking the number of medical school seats/residency positions as a given, there’s a shortage of care – and the way to combat this shortage is to encourage doctors and would-be doctors to take on a full workload.

          Personally, I think doing what we can to increase the number of doctors (e.g., by offering unsubsidized additional slots, or just coming up with additional funding for more doctor training) and shifting certain types of care to providers who don’t require as much training should be focus areas. However, I don’t think the author’s point was so completely outrageous – especially if you don’t read it as saying there’s something wrong with any one individual doctor who’s working a reduced schedule.

      • Lyssa

        OK, I read some more of the comments, and here’s my thing (I’m reasponding to myself because it’s a general response): Apparently, men did the job (served as doctors) for years, they handled the “work-life balance”, apparently fine, didn’t “neglect their families”, worked the 60 (70, 80)+ hours a week, and didn’t burnout (obviously, I’m speaking in BROAD generalizations, here- my point is, though, that people understood that that was what being a doctor entailed- being part of a demanding profession which impacted other aspects of your life. (Did you ever watch The Donna Reed Show? Mr. Reed was a doctor, and I recall this issue coming up a lot!) (My parents were strict about television content, so we watched a lot of Nick at Nite when I was a kid.)

        Now, that women are involved in the field, people are concerned with parenting duties, work-life balance, burnout, having to work too many hours, etc. Why were men able to handle it for so many years, but now women somehow can’t? I simply do not believe that women can’t handle it; it’s simply that some people (men and women) choose not to. I do believe that they (we) need to make choices about whether or not we want to take on those roles, and that it is unfair to take advantage of the very limited resources available if we don’t want to do so. Making it into a woman’s issue makes women look weak and less capable.

        Medicine is a stressful field because it’s a stressful field; maybe it can be changed in some ways, but it will always be an extremely stressful and demanding field. If you don’t want to deal with it, great, don’t be a doctor. It doesn’t matter whether you’re male or female, it just matters whether you want to put the work in that it’s going to require, or whether you want to take the training that could have gone to someone who would have put that work in. That’s what the op-ed said, and I don’t see any reason to have problems with that.

        • Monday

          I was assuming that most men handled work-life balance in that traditional era by having their wives do the great majority of housekeeping and child-rearing. The problem comes when a woman doesn’t have a husband/partner who can provide that. I don’t think it shows women to be any weaker, it just points up that we’re often now dealing with two-professional couples rather than one breadwinner and one parent at home.

          • TaxGeek

            THIS. It’s one thing for one person in a household to work 60-70 hours a week. It’s something else entirely for two people in a household to work 50-70 hours a week, but that’s the norm for many, many families now.

          • Barrister in the Bayou

            THIS. Even now it is not uncommon to see a male doctor with a stay at home wife. I think this applies in the legal field as well, at least with male partners.

        • Eponine

          Because those men had wives at home who managed their households and raised their children.

          Lyssa, I like you, but you sound naive. Have you ever read this classic, early feminist essay? http://www.cwluherstory.org/why-i-want-a-wife.html

          Who was it who posted here a while back that post-feminism is beginning to look a lot like pre-feminism?

          • Monday

            Ha, that was me. Not trying to pile on in any way, but just glad that something I said struck home for someone else!

          • CfM

            But how do they continue to handle it? Do they still all have stay at home wives? And if so, should a woman doctor get a stay at home husband? I think it’s an interesting question to think about whether the job of the doctor should change because men don’t want to or are less often stay at home parents, rather than changing because of an actual change with the requirements of being a doctor.

          • Eponine

            @CFM – Either they have stay at home wives or wives who work part time, they and their wives both work and reduce their hours so they can take an equal role in housework and childcare, they are single/divorced and only have the kids part time, or they have a wife with a full-time job and a nanny and housekeeper.

            Most parents find the second of those four options to be most appealing.

          • Chihiro

            This. I was infuriated by the op-ed when I read it. I wish the author had included the statistics showing that working mothers still do several more hours per week in household chores than their working husbands. And she notes that female pediatricians take five times more extended leave than their male counterparts without delving into the likely reason (maternity leave). The reality is that working women today do more and have less support at home than working men.

            I am married to a doctor who works extremely long hours (80-120 hours a week) (yes, his hospital, like many, is in massive violation of the resident work hours limit). He has no work-life balance, he regularly neglects his family, and he often feels exhausted and burned out. This will be true for almost anyone who works 70 to 80 plus hours a week for years, not only women. (And most of his fellow male residents are bitter, tired, losing their hair, and have unhealthy eating habits.) It is naive to think that men were simply able to handle it all back in ye olden days. I am sure there were a lot of bitter men (and bitter wives and kids) back then, too.

            How does he make it work? Because I pick up all the slack. I work a BigLaw job, but I do all the grocery shopping, laundry, finances, chores, getting kid ready for school, school drop-offs, bedtime, bathtime, cooking, etc. We also hire a lot of help and eat a lot of takeout. But it’s exhausting and has affected my own productivity at work.

            The real issue is not that women doctors want more humane hours. All doctors (and their families) deserve humane hours. The real issue is a severely broken health care system with too few medical schools, too few residency spots, too much paperwork, an insane patchwork of insurance companies and hospitals, and too few support staff that relies too heavily on residents and doctors to sacrifice it all in the name of medicine. No, you cannot have it all, all the time. But being able to get a decent night’s sleep and see your family (mostly) every day (which is often what all that is meant by “part-time” in the medical and legal world) should not be too much to ask.

            Sorry for the long post, but the op-ed struck a nerve with me.

          • Mir

            My dad is a doctor. My mom was a stay-at-home wife… until they divorced. I can’t help but think the fact that my dad was working long, odd, not family-friendly hours in the ER had something to do with that.

            I think it might be important to note the stay-at-home wives of these men doctors working 60 hour weeks now also pressure their husbands to have a better work life balance as well. Maybe the bigger issue is that work-life balance is a concept that has been unevenly embraced across different professions and generations that make up today’s workforce?

          • Desperate Housewife

            Amen @Chihiro – absolutely. My husband is not a doctor but keeps very similar hours. And he makes significantly less than me. But anything outside of work is considered “my” job (we have 2 kids). I’ve had to change jobs twice in the last 5 years just so I could take time off in between (about 6 months each time) because I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And I hate to say it out loud, but I know that our situation is hugely emasculating to my husband, and I believe that he relegates all the “house” work to me because (1) it takes away some of the sting of our earning disparity and (2) he honestly thinks that if he just plugs away hard enough, he’ll make up some of the earning ground he’s lost to me over the last few years.

            On some level, I have a hard time blaming him – he is very much a product of the culture he was brought up in, where men were providers and women were home makers. And he has the kind of personality that is unable to adjust to the new, modern reality.

      • anon for this

        But MEN go through med school/residency and don’t practice medicine either. I have worked with (male and female) JD/MDs who thought it was just fine to take one of those subsidized spots and then decide “it wasn’t for them” so they became lawyers. I also know of several (male) “entrepreneurs” with MDs who never want to see a patient for the rest of their life.

        What about their “spots” in residency going to waste? Why should they be allowed to completely quit medicine after residency? Why are we villainizing women who actually WANT to stay in medicine and see patients but with sane hours?

        /end vent.

        • Okay...

          The article definitely acknowledged that there are men who scale back/exit the field, and lumped them in with the women. The author did not say “they [should] be allowed to completely quit medicine after residency” – not by a long shot. Have you read the piece?

      • Anonymous

        It is a fact that women are more likely to scale back and work less hours no matter the field. When I started as a public defender, the male-female ratio was even. By the time I was promoted to a felony division, there were precious few women with children. The women with children left for jobs that did not involve long hours in trial and jail trips at night. When I had my child, I stayed in a division with a judge who did not like to go to trial, and my pay suffered as a result. This is not the author’s fault, it continues to be reality. Men need to demand work/life balance, too!

    • TX Attny

      I’m not a mom, but this made me laugh out loud at my desk. Thanks for sharing, Ru.

    • Lucy

      That is so funny. :) I read it not as SAH vs. WOH mom, though, but about the differing experiences between spouses in the same family. An important distinction for context – having been both a SAHM and (currently) a WOH mom, I’m leery of exaggerating the alleged social conflict between mothers.

    • MaggieLizer

      Late to the party on this one, but wow what a great way to start the day. Thanks!

  5. mamabear

    KILLER shoes. I love the leopard pattern at 6pm, and such a great deal!

    Unfortunately, on my clumsy ankles they really would be killer shoes. :)

    Sad!!!!

    I hope somebody buys those and tells us so that I can have shoe envy and a vicarious thrill.

  6. JLR

    Okay ladies, so I need some advice, or maybe just a pep talk. I’m a 2010 law grad and I have not found a job. My background is in public interest and that’s what I would like to do but I’ve been looking for anything really.

    I’ve been volunteering at two different places for several months now, Place A is only once a week (that’s their schedule, their choice), but I’m learning a lot and it’s a good opportunity to meet other attorneys in the public interest community in my city.

    I’m at Place B for 2-4 days each week depending on their workload (Place B is a legal clinic that accepts on a walk-in basis so it varies a lot). Place B has two staff attorneys who do basically what I do as a volunteer attorney.

    It was going very well at Place B. I get along with everyone, the Director frequently tells me how competent I am, how glad they are to have me, etc. There was recently a bunch of workplace drama and, long story short, both staff attorney positions opened up within days of each other. I applied.

    I got neither position. Director says I don’t have enough litigation experience. I have been offered an hourly, part-time staff attorney position instead. Last week I was told it would hopefully be full-time, just an entirely new role, but today she told me the funding isn’t there.

    I am disappointed, to put it mildly. I have worked at this place, for free, for four months. Most days I arrive before the staff attorneys. I do my work quickly and competently. I was so excited about the prospect of a full-time job, with…a salary, and health insurance. Y’know, stuff like that.

    I guess my question is…what am I doing wrong? Should I do something differently? I’m not limiting myself to public interest, although that is where my experience/interest lie. I’m volunteering at two public interest groups that do quite different things to maximize my experience. I’m meeting people and networking. I’m trying to build my resume with my work at Place B especially, given that I do clinic screening plus client representation. I’m just at a loss. I have no idea what to do.

    • Eponine

      You’re not doing anything wrong. Four months as a volunteer is not enough experience for a staff attorney position at this particular clinic. You were probably competing against seasoned litigators. Accept that, and I suggest you accept the paid part-time gig, because at least it’s a paid job that you can put on your resume while you gain experience. In the meantime, network your booty off, get as many informational interviews and informal coffee chats as you can, and treat job-seeking like a second part-time job.

      I met a 2010 Big Fancy Top School grad who completed an extremely prestigious internship recently and is incredibly competent and has a great personality, and has not found paid work. The market is really bad, especially in public interest where funding has been cut. We’ve had law graduate interns who worked for free for a year or more before something entry-level opened up and we hired them or they found something else. It’s rough, but it’s not your fault.

      • kz

        As a fellow unemployed 2010 grad, I’m agreeing with Eponine on this one. It’s just really, really bad out there. It of course didn’t help that a ton of lawyers were laid off in the past few years, so there are still people with a few more years experience looking. If the part-time is paid, take it.

    • EC

      I graduated in 2008, before the big crash, and even then our career counselor would say, “Remember, you’re not looking for your perfect job – you’re looking for your first job.”

      It’s even more true now. The economy stinks, and even the public interest sector has its pick of experienced candidates. Try to find a job that will give you access to relevant experience – it sounds like you need to get litigation experience, and you can do this in lots of ways. State or local government, law firms, hanging a shingle (seriously) – they can all get you into the court room so you’re ready when the right opportunity comes along.

      FWIW, my sense is that you should focus on skill-building right now, and meanwhile keep your eyes open and your network busy for something in the field you want to be in.

    • meme

      Take the job. If they did not find you competent and did not want to work with you further they would not have offered you any job at all. So I think you can accept the explanation that you lack the requisite experience for the position you applied for as true. Take the job, continue to gain valuable experience, and keep looking for something full time. Perhaps funding for the full time position will come through sooner rather than later, or perhaps you will find something else you would like to pursue.

    • Kanye East

      I agree with Eponine: you’re not doing anything wrong. I can absolutely understand your frustration and disappointment, but you’re the victim of a bad economy and lots of competition. From what I can tell, a lot of 2010 grads (especially where I practice now) are still looking.

      It sounds like you’re doing the right things. Don’t let the disappointment get you too down.

    • Gov't attorney

      If it makes you feel any better, we just hired on two new temporary attorneys- one is a 2008 grad and one is a 2009 grad who are both in their first paid attorney positions. I am a 2009 grad myself and lots of my classmates are still in paralegal/part-time/temporary positions. I think government/public interest budgets are tight and when entry level people are willing to take volunteer/part-time positions, it’s hard to convince employers that they need to offer a full-time job with benefits.

  7. JLR

    Oh, I took the job. Definitely. It’s a title, and (some) money, so I accepted right away. I just wanted to see if anyone had any other tips. I will definitely take the advice about networking, gaining more experience, and continuing to look for full-time employment.

    Thanks everyone. I think I just needed to vent, to people who don’t know me in real life. I know it’s the economy and funding and the job market, but I’m very embarrassed by my inability to find a real, full-time job. I guess there’s nothing to do but keep trying.

    • JLR

      So this was supposed to be a reply to the above, very nice comments…fail. Thanks again everyone.

    • Gov't attorney

      Don’t be embarrassed. Your situation is extremely common these days. We just hired two new temporary attorneys this spring who are both in their first attorney jobs since graduation. One is a 2008 grad and one is a 2009 grad. I’m a 2009 grad from a top 25 school and a lot of my classmates are still in paralegal/temp/part-time positions.

    • Honey Bear

      JLR,

      Have you considered doing contract work? I know someone who is a contract attorney and it seems like a great way to make money and get experience while still looking for a permanent job.

  8. May

    Hi everyone!
    Would like to hear your advice or opinion on this – I have increasing amounts of computer-based work to bring home and have wondered whether getting a breakfast tray would allow me to comfortably do that in bed.
    I generally avoid keeping the laptop on pillows and I cant type like that anyway.
    Might anyone like to share their experiences?
    Thanks!

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