Getting ahead in the working world can be a tricky tightrope for women. All too often, female competence is not as well-received as male confidence in our corporate culture today. Author and comedian Sarah Cooper channeled those frustrations into her new book, “How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings,” a humorous how-to guide for women looking to get ahead.

Cooper learned the lessons that fill her illustration-heavy book — and her successful blog, The Cooper Review — while working in the tech trenches as a designer for Google. “This book is all of the things that I did that I absolutely hated that I did,” she tells Yahoo Finance. “The way that I would change my tone or be less direct or put a bunch of smiley faces and emojis in my emails — all of those things, I did them all. I still do a lot of them.”

Some memories from the office like particularly stand out. “When I first started at Google, I had a strong opinion about the color of one of the default shapes in Google Slides,” Cooper says. “I just went up to the engineer and I just said, ‘This is ugly, can we just change this?’ And he wouldn’t look directly at me. And then in my performance review later that year, I was told I needed to be more sensitive about people’s feelings about colors.”

The experience of writing the advice in the book was therapeutic for Cooper. “A lot of these topics are so depressing, and it’s like, how do you laugh when it’s so sad that women have to deal with this stuff?” she says.

“The way that I found into the humor was just to create a book that just is overwhelmingly rule after rule after rule after rule, to the point where you realize, ‘Oh this is ridiculous. This is insane, this is impossible. It’s impossible to follow any of these rules.’ So that’s what I tried to do, just reflect back this lose-lose situation that women are in.’”

Crafted as career advice for women, Cooper’s work grapples with the concept of male fragility.

“I don’t like to generalize. I love men. My husband’s a man, and he’s great. I married him, so he must be great,” she says. “I just want them to see another perspective, you know? I’m not trying to create a war of the sexes or anything like that. I really just want them to appreciate that as a woman working in a male-dominated industry, this is a unique experience.”

Cooper’s book is full of tongue-in-cheek advice gleaned from frustratingly real work situations. But since even the best jokes can sometimes be taken too seriously, Cooper gave us her real thoughts on some of the workplace scenarios presented.