Knowing Your Value (18 page)

And men?

Men will say “ ‘I believe I’m undervalued here,’ ” Bartz tells me. “And that’s always code for ‘I’m going someplace where they value me, and it’s for these reasons.’ ”

“When men ask for raises there’s always some cost,” ad exec Donny Deutsch says. “It’s always ‘because I did this’
and ‘if I don’t get the raise . . .’ There’s always [an imaginary] gun to the head, some gamesmanship. First of all, women don’t ask as much. And when they do ask, it’s not ‘Give it to me or else.’ ”

When you combine my experience with what I heard from the bosses above, I have to say we women stink at this. Just look at our best opening lines:

I think I’ve managed to use every one of those phrases in my attempts to get a raise. Of course, I used an additional strategy, too—what
More
editor Lesley Jane Seymour calls “playing the victim card.” Seymour says women “present their personal challenges, saying things like, ‘Well, I have this situation’ or ‘I have that burden’ or ‘My mother is ill and I have to support her’ or whatever. Women present their cause, and you have to realize it’s not a manager’s job to support your causes, whatever they might be . . . The companies can’t say, ‘Oh, I feel sorry for you.’ ”

Professor Hannah Riley Bowles has done research that supports the idea that playing the victim card is unlikely to work, because it’s an explanation that’s all about you; a more effective argument is one that taps into the organization’s interests. You have to explain why a raise would make sense to the person you’re talking with and to the company as a whole. She says the less effective route is “going in and laying down your credit card and saying, ‘I can’t buy the shoes I want to buy.’ ”

Bowles says the smarter approach if, for instance, my request for a raise had been denied but I still wanted MSNBC to cover my hair/makeup/wardrobe costs, might have been to say something like, “I think it makes sense for this job to have an expense account.” I could have tried enlisting Phil’s support in my efforts to project a professional image because my personal presentation has a direct impact on the show.

Bowles offers another tactic: “[One executive woman] told me she found out that a couple subordinates of hers were being paid more than she was. She tried going in and basically referring to it as an error that she knew the company would want to correct. Obviously the company is not going to want subordinates paid more than superiors, right?” Bowles’s latest research shows that women are more successful when they explain the appropriateness of their request in a way that communicates their desire to maintain good relationships at work. “The trick is trying to do both of these
things at the same time and in a way that feels authentic and fits within the norms of the company,” she says.

Suze Orman says the way to get what you want is to offer your boss a choice. “You should never, ever, ever ask a yes or no question. If you ask for a ten percent raise and the boss says no, what are you going to say?” Instead, she suggests giving your boss two options: slightly more than what you want and then a lower number that you actually expect to get. “So you would say, ‘I really think I deserve a ten percent or twelve percent raise. Which one would you like to give me?’ At that point the boss really doesn’t know what to say, because that’s not a yes or no question, and the power has shifted into your court. It’s very difficult for anyone to come back and say ‘Neither.’ ”

Long-time
Elle
publisher Carol Smith tells me that the way men do it is to take the emotion out and simply say, “I’ve earned this. I’m coming in because here’s what I’ve done over the last year, and now I’ve earned this raise.” But she’s always taken a softer approach: “I’ve often said that I don’t want to be paid more, but I never want to be paid less. I want to be paid equal to the man sitting next to me who’s bringing in the same amount of revenue.”

Nora Ephron echoes those sentiments. “The words
favored nations
—that’s an expression all women should know,” she says. “In other words, you always want to be paid no less than what anyone else is being paid. If you’re at all a wussy about valuing yourself, you can’t be a wussy about the words
favored nations
. All you’re asking for is what everyone else is making.”

Valerie Jarrett uses the same favored-nations argument, but with a different delivery. “I don’t like to negotiate salary at all, and one way I’ve compensated for that is by saying to someone, ‘I expect that you’ll be fair to me,’ and then when they’re not, I talk back. I say, ‘I know you’ll treat me fairly so you decide.’ Then I come back and tell them they can do better.”

Of course, saying “I expect you’ll be fair to me” implies that both employer and employee share an understanding of what “fair” means. If you’ve done your homework, you know what both women
and
men with comparable experience and skill sets are making at your level.

Kate White urges women to push the envelope. “You cannot be afraid to ask for more. But you have to do it in a way that is not emotional . . . What you really have to do is make it about what your value is,” she says. “Stay very neutral and say, “I’m very happy to have the offer. It sounds like a great job. I was looking for $90,000 based on my experience and skills.” They always, almost always, have more. As a boss I know that if you really want somebody, except in a recession where sometimes your hands are tied, you can go back and get more.”

White says that after years of working in women’s magazines and publishing articles about women’s issues, she learned not to apologize and not to overexplain. But it takes practice. She says when you try to negotiate an offer, management
might very well be shocked by your audacity. In which case, “You’ve got to learn to be very careful and keep it neutral and light, like a game,” White tells me. You have to walk a line between being too deferential and too aggressive, but practice makes perfect.

“Every time you have one of those conversations, you get better at it. I had a situation once where I was using a lawyer, and they were giving the lawyer a terrible time. Basically they were indicating that they were getting frustrated with me because they felt I was asking for too much. I went in myself at that point and had a conversation, and in that conversation I realized okay, I’ve got to back off a little. I said some things like, ‘I sense I’ve really frustrated the hell out of you. I’m sorry about that.’ ”

Is White really recommending that women apologize for putting a number on their worth? “I wasn’t apologizing for what I was asking. I was apologizing that the lawyer’s situation had frustrated them,” she explains. “I corrected the situation in fifteen minutes and I remember the lawyer later said to me, ‘You’re better at this than you’re giving yourself credit for.’ I think that the more you do, the more you step back and learn from the previous experiences. I try to pay attention to body language, and of course to whether I get what I want in the end, so that the next time I can take all of that into consideration.”

Stanford Professor Frank Flynn says that when women negotiate, they aren’t as persistent as men are. “It’s not that
they don’t ask, they don’t ask ten times. And that’s often the difference I see between women and men in business. Women assume no means no in a negotiation, and the negotiation is over.” Flynn says men hear no as a signal “to take a different tack.”

Suze Orman insists that if you’re discussing a raise with your boss and you’re not getting anywhere, “No matter how uncomfortable your boss tries to make you feel, I want you to stay right in your seat and keep the conversation going. If you know the company is on shaky financial ground, then of course you have to take that into consideration. But if the company is profitable and you are in fact a contributor to that profit, then you are not to walk out empty-handed.” She suggests asking for another review in six months, and asking (and getting in writing) what raise to expect at that time. Meanwhile, ask for more vacation time or flexibility or whatever will be valuable to you. Orman says, “You must get something of value, for you are not on sale.”

I can tell you from personal experience that all is not lost if you don’t get what you deserve the first time around. Look at me: I had to go back a half dozen times! You may very well encounter resistance, even bullying, but there’s much to be gained by holding your ground when you’re presented with an offer that doesn’t benefit you.

More
editor-in-chief Lesley Jane Seymour tells me a story about two female friends who recently got new jobs at the same company. They were negotiating with a senior woman at the firm. Seymour says, “When they got the job offer, they each said ‘Let me have my lawyer look at this,’ and they were told ‘Oh, that would mean starting out on the wrong foot, let’s not go down that road ... so why don’t you just sign right here.’ ” Seymour says she was appalled when her friends—two “very savvy women”—ended up signing without having their deals reviewed by an attorney.

“When I found out these two friends of mine did that, I said to them, ‘Do you mean to tell me that you signed this thing without a lawyer looking at it?’ I said, ‘Do you think the woman who did this to you would ever sign her contract without a lawyer looking at it?’ And the answer is no. . . . To me that was something that only a woman would do to a woman. Women know women respond to that. No woman would say that to a man, because a man sitting across the table would say, ‘This has nothing to do with starting out on the wrong foot, this is business . . . I’m taking it to my lawyer,’ and that would have been the end of the discussion.”

Cosmopolitan
’s Kate White has a similar story about being pressured when accepting an offer. Years ago she was being pursued by
Working Woman
magazine. She went to talk to the owner, but at the time she wasn’t really looking for a job. But the owner made her an offer almost immediately. White was caught off guard and wanted some time to think about making a move, but her prospective employer was giving her the full-court press. He wanted to make a fast hire, so he offered
to sweeten the deal by giving her some equity in the company and kept calling her the next day.

She says she found herself dodging the owner’s calls, still trying to weigh the offer’s pros and cons. “Finally I called him back and said, ‘Look, I don’t think this is right for me,’ but he really just pressured me. He was a fabulous sales guy on the phone. And I felt so guilty because I had stalled, and I couldn’t really think of the right reason I couldn’t go, so I buckled and said yes. . . . Later I wondered, ‘How did I let myself get into this?’ But I kept telling myself at least I’ve got the equity.”

Looking back, White says, she just wasn’t sufficiently comfortable in her own skin to say, “I don’t care if he’s pressuring me; I need to do what’s right for me. I should have said to him, ‘Look, you caught me off guard, offering me the job; I’m going to need a couple of days to really think this through.’ ”

Valerie Jarrett says her best advice comes from the lesson her parents taught her, “which is a hard lesson to learn, and that’s not to be afraid of rejection. It’s okay. Men aren’t afraid of rejection. They’re taught both personally and professionally that it’s a part of the game. It’s why men ask women on dates; they ask ten women out and if one says yes, that’s great. Women would have a very hard time with nine rejections out of ten. You wear it on your sleeve. My parents always said to
me, ‘If you don’t try, you’re certainly not going to get what you want, so it’s okay to fail and learn from your failure.’ You should have enough self-confidence to pick yourself back up and get back on your feet. You have to reach high. I think women are willing to settle for a much smaller promotion. What’s wrong with asking for the bigger promotion? You think people will think less of you if you do, but they actually think more of you.”