Knowing Your Value (13 page)

There really are different expectations for behavior. Does Wilson envision a time when women won’t have to negotiate differently than men? Yes. Wilson believes all of that will
change when the numbers shift, and women outnumber men in the workplace—or at least surpass that magic one-third.

“But until that happens, women walk a fine line,” Wilson says. “Because, as my friend Anna Quindlen says, women ‘have to be tough as nails
and
warm as toast.’ ... You get penalized when you take either one of those positions separately. If you go in and you’re apologetic, you know, you’re toast. If you go in and you do it in a way that’s tough as nails, then you’re hammered. You have to go in and do it in a way that is relentlessly pleasant.”

Many of the people I spoke with believe that more women are in positions of power, and if more people (both men and women) are made aware of their own unconscious biases, that women will be able to be assertive in the workplace with fewer repercussions. Until then, we figure it out as we go.

Journalist and
Huffington Post
cofounder Arianna Huffington knows very well the potential social risk of being a powerful woman. “The most important thing for women is not to internalize the attacks on them, and to realize that any time they speak out they are going to have attacks leveled at them,” she advises. “Let’s face it: our culture still isn’t comfortable with outspoken women. As Marlo Thomas famously put it, ‘A man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless. All a woman has to do is put you on hold.’ ” Huffington says that she finds the best way to neutralize this kind of attitude is through humor and perspective.

“Too often in our culture, strong women get stereotyped as ball-busters, which is as insulting as it is ludicrous,”
Huffington tells me. “In my experience, the strongest, most fearless women I know are also the most creative and productive—and the ones who most want to support other women. And, honestly, wouldn’t any healthy man really prefer to be involved with a woman—either personally or professionally—who is driven by her true thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires instead of her fears?”

The fact is, there just aren’t enough female role models. As Hannah Riley Bowles points out, “The high-powered female executive is really a new phenomenon, and these women are creating what that person is as they’re doing it.” Men have plenty of role models when they’re looking for examples of people in the highest leadership positions. “Women do have to come up with their own ways of doing these things,” she says.

So if acting like a man didn’t get me anywhere, what strategies should I have used instead?

MY STORY, WITH CHRYSTIA FREELAND, ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, KATE WHITE, ELIZABETH WARREN, SUZE ORMAN, SHEILA BAIR, DONNY DEUTSCH, VALERIE JARRETT, CAROL BARTZ, BROOKSLEY BORN, AND JACK WELCH

M
y own experience, and now the experiences shared by so many other women in these pages, convinces me that women can’t act like men and expect to be liked, to be able to lead, and to be paid what they’re worth. But we still need to accomplish all of those goals. Reuters’ global editor-at-large Chrystia Freeland notes, “We as women are still immigrants; we don’t speak the native language very well. It might not be that these male ways of behaving are, absent other factors, better, but they are the dominant cultural mode, and like all immigrants we have to conform to the dominant cultural mode. We can learn a lot from the men around us.”

Surely our demeanor and delivery have to be different,
and that’s our main challenge.
Huffington Post
cofounder Arianna Huffington describes the situation succinctly: “In order to conquer the workplace as women, we need to approach it in our own unique way, not as carbon copies of men: briefcase-carrying, pinstripe-wearing career machines who just happen to have vaginas.” The way to get ahead? Huffington answers, “By learning how to play the men’s office ‘game,’ but tailoring it to our own style.”

In addition to a career as the author of bestselling mysteries and thrillers such as
Hush
as well as nonfiction books such as
Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead but Gutsy Girls Do
, Kate White is the editor-in-chief of
Cosmopolitan
magazine. She has many stories to tell about what women in the workplace could learn from men.

When she was the editor of
Working Woman
magazine, White hired a guy—let’s call him Jack—as a senior editor. There were three other senior editors, all women. When Jack was first hired, all the editors had their own offices, but soon, for economic reasons, the magazine moved into a new
building with less space. “It turned out that all four senior editors were going to have to work out of this big room that had once been the company library,” she says. White knew this would not go over well. “I went down to see what was happening, and discovered that Jack had slipped some money to the movers when all the furniture was being delivered,” she tells me. “He arranged for them to give him a big old bookcase, which he used to divide off his area, and then he got them to bring up a little couch from the basement. Brilliant. Suddenly he had an office. If you had walked in you would have thought he was the boss and the three women were in the typing pool. He just said to himself, ‘Okay, this isn’t the best situation. What do I have to do to fix it to my advantage?’ ”

White says many women think, “ ‘Hey, we’re following orders here, we’re doing what we’re supposed to do,’ whereas a lot of guys in the workplace make up the rules as they go along. Men scam the situation . . . Jack had an air of entitlement that said, ‘I deserve this, and I’m going to get it.’ I just laughed and thought, ‘What can I learn from this guy?’ ”

She’s right; a woman’s tendency is to fall in line and accept the status quo, even if it doesn’t benefit her. Women seem more willing to be accommodating than to insist on being accommodated.

Morning Joe
regular guest Elizabeth Warren is a Harvard law professor. In September 2010 she was appointed Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a position in which she will build the new agency that will oversee the rules on financial products such as mortgages and credit cards. She’s a woman who surely would be horrified by all the mistakes I’ve made along the way in my career, or so I thought.

As a longtime advocate for consumers, Warren has gone up against some of the biggest names on Wall Street, and she has famously locked horns with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Warren, who has been on
Time
magazine’s list of the World’s Most Influential People for two years running and often appears on our show to talk about the economy and financial reform, impresses me as a sharp, gutsy, no-nonsense woman. But she admits to me that when it comes to her personal value in the workplace, she still struggles.

Warren remembers how surprised she was when she realized her male colleagues had that sense of entitlement that she lacked. It happened when she first started teaching at the University of Houston. Before the semester began, she heard from the associate dean, who was scheduling courses. “I got the call asking, ‘Would you teach the lousy course at the lousy hour on the lousy day in the lousy room?’ ” she says. She didn’t want to teach that particular class, but she didn’t see any way around it: “I thought, I’m sure someone needs to teach at the lousy hour on the lousy day in the lousy room, so I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ ”

A couple of years later, Warren was promoted to associate dean, and it was now her job to assign courses, classrooms, and time slots. “So I took the map from the year before and started laying it out, and I sent all these notes out on what and when I needed people to teach,” she remembers. “But every single man on the faculty who didn’t like their schedule sent me back an e-mail saying, ‘You know, you don’t understand, I only teach at ten o’clock on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.’ ”

And the women?

Warren says, “Every single woman could be leveraged into teaching the lousy course at the lousy time in the lousy room. Men would just say, ‘No. That’s not convenient for me.’ I thought, ‘This is astonishing!’ ”

I ask Warren, “It never crossed your mind to say no?”

“Never,” Warren says.

“Why?”

“Partly I felt lucky to be there; partly, I’m the cooperator, you know, let’s get the job done. Someone needs to do this. Someone needs to mop the floor. Okay, hand me the mop. I really see this as the difference between putting ourselves, if not first, at least putting equivalent value on ourselves ... we don’t see our own worth. We see how we can be helpful to the team or to the group. We see what we can add without stopping to ask, ‘Wait a minute, this is a valuable contribution—why am I making this, and what am I getting in return for it?’

“You’re always careful about generalizations here, but for me it doesn’t even cross my mind until later, when I’m committed to do something and I suddenly look around and
realize, ‘So how come the three people who agreed to do the hard, invisible labor here are all women?’ ”

Warren points out that while the low-profile jobs may be both necessary and important, they just don’t garner the accolades or the money and promotions. For that reason, men simply never pick up the mop. She sees this at her faculty meetings at Harvard. “Someone will say, ‘Well, you know we should hire X because he . . .’ and they will name three very visible accomplishments. And I know for a fact, and every woman in the room knows for a fact, that X is a real pain in the rear: X won’t cooperate, won’t help out, won’t be a team player. X will not help move the whole institution forward, and that’s regarded as irrelevant. You know, it’s the difference between the big valuable things that people do, and all that stuff that women do—that’s all that crap stuff. That’s the stuff no one notices, no one cares. No one values.”