Knowing Your Value (23 page)

Former
Elle
publisher Carol Smith sees mothers undercutting their value. “I will say, as a person who has hired a lot of women who want to continue to work but also have their family, this whole idea of job shares and part time ... they will do anything to have a four day week. Anything. They will work in the bathroom. They will work twenty-four hours during the four days they work to be able to get that fifth day at home.

“The women who are striving to work part time, whether it’s three or four days a week, will sacrifice everything. And let’s start with money. So if they’re working four days a week, they don’t say, ‘I now want eighty percent.’ They will accept sixty percent of their salary to be able to say, ‘I can be at home with my family, and I can still keep my career.’ They are so grateful for anything that they devalue their worth.

“I’ll tell you something,” Smith continues. “I once said, ‘I love hiring women four days a week because they actually will produce at least five days’ worth of work for four days’ worth of pay.’ And I have done that. I used to say four days was so much better than three. Three becomes a part-time job. Four is a full-time job done in four days!”

During our conversation, Smith becomes aware of exactly what she was admitting to. “It’s only now that I’m sitting here and talking to you that I realize the implications,” she says. “I will say, in the end, that however grateful we are for the work, going in there we women have to value ourselves higher.”

Former CFTC Chairman Brooksley Born agrees that being a mother made her more efficient at work because she used her time more wisely and because working part-time kept her mind fresh: “I think that I certainly changed from being an employee without any responsibilities for children, who had the luxury of not being terribly efficient, to a mother who knew that every minute counted and I darn well better be concentrating. I think I became much more efficient, and it’s helped me ever since.”

Did Born overcompensate and work harder than she did as a full-time employee? “I don’t think that [as a part-time worker I was contributing] one hundred percent,” she says, “but I do think that I was doing more than fifty percent of my full-time work.” Born does feel, however, that being a mother helped her be more productive. “I, myself, felt that
working three days a week, I could contribute something more in three days than I could when I was working five and a-half or six days a week. Partly because I had a lot more stamina, partly because when I was in the office, I wasn’t making personal phone calls or going out to lunch, or you know, any of the frills. I was really working. I also found that there was an advantage, to me at least, when solving complex strategy issues or complex legal questions, in getting away from the office, being with the children. I would work Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and so I had days off in between days of work. I would often come back to the office, and somehow or other my subconscious had gone a long way toward solving the problems. The most difficult strategy problems had been worked out while I was at the playground.”

Valerie Jarrett agrees that being a mother taught her new skills. “Having children teaches you a certain conscientiousness and discipline and responsibility,” she says. “I think what women have to do, that we don’t often do, is recognize those broader life experiences add value, they don’t subtract.”

Did the fact that she was a single mom, trying to balance everything, affect her perception of herself and what she had to offer?

Jarrett answers, “Yes, very much so. Part of what gave me the strength to leave [an early job at a] law firm, quite frankly, was that I was not doing a very good job because I had no passion for what I was doing. I wanted my daughter to be proud of me, and I thought if I stayed on that track she wouldn’t be. It wasn’t just knowing that she was solely relying
on me financially; she was solely relying on me as a parent. I remember looking at her and saying, ‘You’re all I have, and I’ve got to really do right by you.’ So I think my daughter made me more ambitious and much more able to push myself, because I was pushing myself for her.”

The Daily Beast
cofounder Tina Brown agrees that women will handicap themselves by always taking family into consideration. “There’s no doubt having children makes you do a kind of instant review of any problem that comes up, or any challenge or any opportunity with regard to the children,” she says. “Immediately you think, ‘Will this job mean that I have to travel more? I can’t.’ ‘Will this job mean I have to work so late at night that I miss evening dinner with the kids? No, I can’t.’ You’re tortured about how you’re going to confront it. And to be honest, a lot of men, most men I think, even now, won’t even [take the family picture] into the consideration of their job. They’ll simply say, ‘That’s a great opportunity. Yes!’ ”

Brown and I also talk about the fact that women don’t feel they can put family concerns on the table without immediately losing value. Especially at the executive level, we “immediately downgrade ourselves” if we raise those issues at work.

And as a result, we’re less likely to take the time we need to recover physically from having a child. Brown remembers, “I had just given birth to my second child, my daughter, Isabel, in 1990. It was exactly that time that Condé Nast decided they were going to launch
Vanity Fair
in the U.K., which meant, I realized, that I was going to have
to go to London.” She was nursing at the time, so did she take the baby with her? Leave her home? She says she was also “enormously overweight. I had just had a child, I did not want to be starting on the promotion circuit having just had a child. I did not want to be posing for glamour shots instead of being at home quietly.” Ultimately Brown decided she couldn’t say no, and she couldn’t take the baby on this incredibly demanding trip, so she went alone, and “was secretly distraught the whole time.”

Brown didn’t feel that she could tell her bosses that she needed to accommodate her postpregnancy body. “I knew that that date was going to collide but I didn’t have the confidence to say, ‘I will do this better in September, not in March, when my body’s ready.’ It would not have occurred to me to bring up that question early in the planning. And I just don’t know if anyone would have heard me anyway,” she says.

Brown’s story resonated deeply with me, because I rushed back to work after my second child, and I should not have. One day I had a horrific accident with her. Working overnights and running on two hours’ sleep, I had her in my arms when I fell down a flight of stairs, and she broke her thigh bone. I lived through hell knowing that my baby suffered so much pain because I wasn’t managing my time and my sleep well. The fact is we’ve got to listen to our bodies and have the confidence to say, “You know what? I’ll be there when I’m ready.”

That said, how many companies are really willing to wait? For many women, saying “I’ll be there when I’m ready” is the
same as saying “I quit.” Companies don’t always have the money or patience to accommodate us, and we know that.

We can only control what we control, but one choice we can make is whether or not we work for family-friendly companies.

MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell notes that, “If you work for a good company, they’re usually pretty understanding about it ... [it’s possible to find] male and female bosses who completely understand and are completely willing to work with you.”

O’Donnell says that when she first started working in the Washington, D.C., bureau she was working seven days a week, filling in for whoever couldn’t show up. “I was taking everybody’s shift ... anything to get on the air because I was a network correspondent at twenty-five, and I was lucky to be there. After a year or so I asked if I could have one day off. It was a weekend day, and I just wanted to get things done. I was told by the deputy bureau chief at that time, who was a woman, an unmarried woman without children, that if I ever asked for a day off again, I probably wouldn’t get these assignments. What’s fascinating is that it wasn’t from a male boss. That was from a female boss, who I believe had been forced in a different era to make those concessions in order to get into a position of power, and she was just passing what she’d learned on to younger women.”

O’Donnell also tells the story of how she felt tremendous guilt when she got pregnant with her third child, Riley, four and a half months after giving birth to twins, Henry and
Grace. O’Donnell’s babies were born a decade after mine, yet we felt the same stress about telling our bosses the news. We both worried it would diminish our value or even disappoint our bosses. In both cases we were wrong.