Knowing Your Value (22 page)

“There had never been a woman elected to that office, and so I was trying to convince people. My commercials were all about the fact that the police had endorsed me and never mentioned the fact that I had three small children.” McCaskill won the election.

Years later, McCaskill ran for governor, but she was defeated. During the campaign her emphasis was to show people “that I was smart and that I was confident, that I could do this job.” After McCaskill lost, a journalist told her, “[she] couldn’t decide whether I was more the model of the obnoxious teacher’s pet or the really obnoxious contestant on
Jeopardy
. I had all the answers, but the feedback we seemed to get from the voters was that tough was not the problem, competence was no longer a problem, it was whether or not they wanted to spend any time with me. You know—whether there was that likeability. It was just incredibly shocking to me that after spending my entire career worrying about showing everyone that I was up to the job . . . now all of a sudden I had to make sure they knew that I truly like to cook and I truly adore and worship my children.”

Fast-forward a few more years. McCaskill ran for the Senate, and she once again struggled for that balance, making midcourse corrections. “When I was running, I watched one focus group on me, and one woman called me Cruella de Vil.
So that’s when I realized people need to understand that I’ve got a family, and I’ve got the same fears and hopes and dreams for my kids that they have. And so at that point in the Senate campaign, my daughter was in one of the commercials—my daughter and my mom.

“How do you walk the line between the b-word and ambition? It’s a very narrow tightrope at times, and how you walk that tightrope is a challenge in and of itself,” McCaskill tells me.

The real estate mogul and television personality Donald Trump hires a lot of women. I ask him, “So are we at the point where women employees who are mothers aren’t as valuable, because we have kids and we balance other things? Or does having children actually increase our value?”

“I think the most important thing is the children, and frankly [caring for them means taking] time away, and an employer could say she’s not giving me one hundred percent, she’s giving me eighty-four percent, and sixteen percent is going towards taking care of children. So maybe you can also understand the employer’s point of view.”

“From my point of view,” I tell Trump, “I give two hundred
percent, and then I give another sixty percent to my kids at home every day.”

Trump replies, “There is a mathematical equation to it. No matter how much time you give, there are men who give one hundred percent of one hundred percent. You give one hundred percent of seventy-five percent. You can understand the employer’s perspective.”

I tell him that is a cruel bottom line. “It is,” he responds, “except you have the advantage of having kids. That’s also the bottom line, and that’s more important than the other twenty-five percent.”

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magazine’s Lesley Jane Seymour agrees that some women don’t pull their equal weight at work. “There are people who can’t do both,” she says. “I’ve seen that on staff, people who just can’t manage to do both, and you know, they’re never here, they’re out, or they’re making excuses.”

Seymour believes those examples reinforce the stereotype. “[Employers] have one bad employee who falls apart when they are trying to handle a family, so they assume no one can do it. And they don’t know about all the other incredible women who you don’t even know have children, because they manage it so well.”

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says she sees women struggling to balance family and work even
before
they have children. “It’s very hard to watch,” she tells me. “I’ve hired all these men and women, and then eight years later the men are largely ahead of the women. And the women were just as talented.” She notices that it isn’t necessarily that women
aren’t raising their hands and asking for promotions or new opportunities in general; it’s that they’re not pushing forward specifically during their child-bearing years.

“The pattern is the following: a woman starts thinking about having a kid. Now maybe she’s just thinking about it right as she gets engaged, maybe she starts thinking about it right as they start trying, but even if they’re trying to get pregnant that minute, it’s nine months to have the baby, three months of maternity leave, three months to catch your breath, that’s already a year and a half. More likely they start thinking about this a year and a half before that, even two or three years, and at the moment they start making room for a kid, they stop looking for new opportunities. They think, ‘Oh my god, I want to have a child, there’s no way I can fit anything more.’ So the men around them are busy—solving problems, looking for new opportunities, saying, ‘I want the promotion, I want the transfer, I want the raise, I want the new job’—and the women start leaning backward.” Sandberg argues that by the time women turn their full attention back to work, they’ve been passed over.

“So what’s the solution?” I ask. “Don’t have kids?”

Sandberg replies, “Keep your foot on the gas. My advice is, when you have a child you’ll want to slow down, but don’t slow down in advance of the child.”

There’s so much anecdotal evidence that having children impairs your ability to do well at work, but I sincerely believe that having children has made me a more valuable employee. The fact is, women like me overcompensate at work, to prove that having kids does not make us less effective. But
we demand less in return for being so lucky to have kids and a job, as if someone gave us a gift when they doubled our workload and made sleep a thing of the past. This is something I have done throughout my career. I think the problem is that women buy into the idea that they can’t contribute significantly both at work and at home, and as a consequence, they undervalue themselves.

Chief Washington correspondent for MSNBC Norah O’Donnell, a colleague and a good friend, tells me, “I guess the truly honest answer is that I probably would ask for more if I did not have kids, and that’s a tough thing to say ... I’m worried that I’ll look like an ungrateful employee, that I’ll seem ungrateful for the great job that I have.

“I think that it’s a common problem that mothers underestimate their worth and their value. Mothers ask for less, demand less from their employers, because they already think that they are struggling with this balance of work and family ... that guilt can then inhibit them from asking for more, because any free moment that they may have at work gives them an opportunity to make a doctor’s appointment or a dentist’s appointment or to order diapers online—but that is a false sense of guilt.

“I know that I’m there at work just as much as others, I work just as many long hours,” O’Donnell continues. “I’m there before most people stroll into work, and I stay later. Mothers work hard and sometimes doubly hard, and are even more productive in some ways because they know they have only so much time to do that.”

The truth is, in many cases having children adds to our value. We may not be more organized, but we use time far more wisely. We have babies to protect, so our decisionmaking skills revolve around real-life issues. We develop another dimension to our lives that make O’Donnell and me better reporters and storytellers. But with that also comes guilt. And it cuts both ways. We feel guilty that we can’t give our kids more time—that goes without saying—but I believe working mothers also feel guilty about having great jobs. We feel that we’re so blessed to have it all, and that feeling of luck undermines our ability to negotiate effectively, and gives managers the sense that we can be taken advantage of. We tend to work harder to prove that our kids won’t be an impediment to our productivity. Take what the amazingly honest Carol Smith told me, which says it all: