Knowing Your Value (12 page)

I’m sure we both would have been better off had I spoken up. We still might not have agreed on the hair clip, but I would have earned her respect, and I would have had the satisfaction of explaining that she’d missed the point: the important thing here was that we’d gotten a key interview on
the most exciting night of the election season thus far. This was the stuff of great television.

In the weeks that followed, my exchange with the manager about the damn hair clip stayed with me. Would it have been such a big deal if I’d pushed back? Was I afraid of sounding like a bitch? The answer was probably yes. I realized that wanting to be liked was really getting in my way. But when I took a more aggressive tack and decided that raising my voice and poking Phil Griffin in the shoulder would get me somewhere—well, we know how well that worked out. So where was the middle ground? How was I ever going to be both likeable and fairly compensated?

“How women can do both, get what they want materially and also make a positive social image” is a tricky thing to pull off, says Professor Hannah Riley Bowles. “I think it’s flawed to say that women need to be trained to negotiate more assertively or that they need more confidence to close the gender gap in negotiation performance.” Because clearly, women who are assertive suffer a backlash, so it’s entirely reasonable for them to be reticent about asking for what they want.

Bowles tells me that there’s no easy solution. Women have to be strategic and come up with their own way of asking for higher pay. “One strategy that we have found to be effective is what we call using a ‘relational account.’ This involves explaining why the negotiating request is legitimate in terms that inherently communicate concern for organizational relationships.” They have to find a feminine way of getting what they deserve, because negotiating for something
like higher compensation in its essence “contradicts what you’re supposed to be like as a woman. Giving, not taking; generous, not materialistic ... it contradicts a lot of expectations we hold for women consciously or unconsciously.”

Walking that tightrope of acceptable behavior leaves women in a quandary.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg agrees that there’s a very good reason why women don’t own their success: because success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. Says Sandberg: “It makes sense that women behave as they do in the workplace. It’s not irrational behavior; it’s rational behavior not to own our success. That’s the point. It would be easier if the answer were to tell everyone just to start negotiating more. But it’s not so easy, because it’s not necessarily going to work. Just like what happened to you, it backfires.”

Sandberg has two young children, and when I ask her how she handles the dual roles of motherhood and executive, she says, “I’ll tell you what I always say: I do everything badly. No man ever says that, by the way, that’s what
we
say.” (In fact, as Sandberg and I talk further about work-life balance, I exclaim, “You’re amazing!” Her automatic response: “I’m really not.” She’s nothing if not consistent.)

Sandberg’s guiding principle for successful women: “Downplay, downplay, downplay.”

But then the question is, if women have to continually downplay their success, if they aren’t aggressive about getting paid what they’re worth, how do they get anywhere? Obviously there have to be times when you don’t soft-pedal your success, when you need to step up and be heard. Again, we have to find our own path.

That’s exactly the advice Donny Deutsch gives me when I bemoan the fact that women are punished both for being too aggressive and for not being aggressive enough: “I think there’s a middle ground,” he says. “I think it’s about being smart. The answer is understanding those two sides of the coin. Saying I’m going to be firm, I’m going to be direct, I’m still managing up to a weaker sex, women managing men, in order to get what I want. I’m not going to challenge them to a duel, but I’m not going to be passive and I’m not going to use ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and all that stuff. It’s doing it with a softer touch, but with that same level of firepower and that’s the difference.”

The experiences of women in male-dominated industries illustrate on a larger scale the hurdles women face every day. When I met Sheila Bair, chair of the FDIC, for a sit-down interview for this book, my stomach was in knots. In 2009,
Forbes
named Bair the second most powerful woman in the
world for the role she played in handling the financial crisis. I wondered if a woman who was dealing with the momentous problems facing our economy on a regular basis would be able to relate at all to my career issues. I was stunned at how much we had common. Soon we were chuckling together over the similarities of our struggles, despite the difference in our fields.

I ask Bair to give examples of the strategies she uses to make her way through the male bastion of finance.

“Emotionalism doesn’t work,” Bair tells me. “Don’t ever get emotional. Sometimes that’s hard. You get so frustrated and you care deeply. I’m the kind of person who cares deeply, but emotionalism never works. It always has the opposite effect.”

I ask, “Did you ever get emotional?”

“There were probably a couple of times during the bailout discussions . . .” Bair answers.

“Are we talking about tears?” I ask.

“No, it never got that far,” she says. “I’m really talking more about anger; for me it was more anger. When you’re angry it hurts your ability to think straight. If you start to get angry, the adrenaline starts pumping in you.”

“If no one is listening to you, how do you
not
get angry?” I ask.

“Frankly, I think that just takes a lot of maturity to deal with, and I’ve gotten better at it over the years. You just have to control yourself. If you let yourself respond with anger or with emotion, it’s going to make things worse, not better, and you’ll suffer a loss of respect.”

“Can a man get angry?” I ask.

“Yes, and they even get angry with each other,” Bair says, “and it doesn’t seem to do anything at all. But if we get angry with them it doesn’t work, it backfires. I’ve witnessed men at my level go at each other on occasion, and that’s just accepted, even by the press.” If she had growled in a similar way she would’ve been labeled an emotional woman.

I ask Bair if being too assertive has backfired for her, the way it did for me when I tried to get a raise.

“With certain personalities, yes, it can,” she answers. “I think it’s unfortunate that sometimes being assertive doesn’t work, where being helpless works or being flattering works. I say that because I try to be a good person and not a disingenuous person, but I recognize that certain strategies work. I think sometimes it makes them feel they’re in control; I’m sorry—it does. It prevents them from feeling threatened by your argument if you’re coming to them for help: ‘I have this idea. Advise me how we can move this forward. Is this a good idea?’ You know, sometimes that approach works better. It does. It can be disarming in a way that produces results without being threatening.”

That’s right. The chairman of the FDIC suggests flattery. I was both surprised and amused.

And I suspect many women reading this may roll their
eyes. But I went on to hear the same advice from women as different as Carol Bartz and Susie Essman.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz agrees that the best way to get men to listen is to compliment them. She tells me about an economic summit she was invited to when Bill Clinton was running for president. She claims that she was invited “because, you know, they had to have so many skirts,” but then she was promptly ignored. “I walked in and nobody would pay any attention to me. They would shake my hand and be looking over my shoulder, obviously trying to see if there was somebody much more important behind me. I found that I finally had to start by saying, ‘Oh, I’ve always admired you so much,’ you know . . .
blah, blah, blah,
even to be able to engage with any of the men.”

Basically, Bartz tells me, “You just do what you have to, to fit in.”

Comedian and actress Susie Essman tells me that one of the advantages that women have over men is that we have better people skills. We don’t need to be aggressive, because we have methods of manipulation that are far more effective. “One of my strategies is always to play to men’s narcissism in a way that is so subtle they don’t know what hit them. I think we have to use our wiles,” she says. “When I say
feminine wiles
, I don’t mean sexual. I mean ... we’re a completely different species, men and women. I think that we have to recognize those differences. I do believe that women are—I don’t want to say smarter—but we’re more well-rounded. There are all these articles they’re writing now about how women are better CEOs than men because they’re more conciliatory.
In life it’s worked really well for me to be really conciliatory but strong at the same time. It’s a balance. We are fence menders. We build relationships and building relationships is the way to go.”

A number of women I interviewed agreed that flattery is the way to go, but not necessarily flirting. They’re not the same thing. If the person on the receiving end is a man, however, being complimentary may be interpreted as flirting. Hannah Riley Bowles warns that “The data out on flirting—research done by Laura Kray at UC Berkeley—is not that encouraging. Flirting tends to make you appealing, but not particularly persuasive.” So here again, women have to walk a very fine line.

Women’s advocate Marie C. Wilson echoed what others have said, that when women play hardball and negotiate like a man, they just don’t get the same response that a man would. She says the people who teach negotiation, like Professor Linda Babcock at Carnegie Mellon, observe that when women go in to negotiate, they have to do it by being “relentlessly pleasant.” We still carry our own stereotypes about what women are supposed to be like, and yet when you go in to negotiate for a raise, “It’s hard to remember that as a woman you have to go negotiate with a big smile on your face,” she says.