Knowing Your Value (8 page)

Looking back at the Paris Hilton incident and the events that followed, I realize it is just one of many cautionary tales I have to share. I would like my story to speak to any and all younger or newly employed women who feel they are “just lucky to be there.” Get over being so grateful for the opportunity. If you’re good, you should know it and own it, and always be ready to walk. Always be aware of your ability to walk. Depend on no one to notice your worth. Being liked should not be your first priority. I am one hundred percent sure, looking back now, that had I reacted differently when I received my admonition/promotion, my fate would have been different, too. That manager probably would have had more respect for me if I hadn’t apologized for ripping up the script. I should have said that I respectfully disagreed with her assessment of the incident, and I should have seized the opportunity to ask for more money. Instead, I did what was asked of me.

WITH MARIE C. WILSON, ILENE H. LANG, BRIAN NOSEK, TINA BROWN, JACK WELCH, DONALD TRUMP, DONNY DEUTSCH, SUSIE ESSMAN, SENATOR CLAIRE MCCASKILL, BROOKSLEY BORN, SHEILA BAIR, AND HANNAH RILEY BOWLES

O
ne could easily argue that women have made impressive gains over the past fifty years. Yes, women now make up more than half the workforce. Yes, we are governors of states and running for president. Yes, there are three women on the Supreme Court, women are commanding space shuttles and serving on Navy submarines. Women in the United States are better educated than men: they receive three college degrees for every two that men earn, they earn more master’s degrees than men do, and about forty-three percent of all MBAs. But despite all these impressive gains, we still sell ourselves way too short. On average, women make only seventy-seven cents for every dollar earned by a man. According to
a Government Accountability Office study released in September 2010, professional women still make only eighty-one cents for every dollar a man makes in a similar job.

Women are not just lagging in wages; they are far behind when it comes to leadership. Women make up only seventeen percent of the United States Congress. The United States ranks seventy-second of 189 countries in terms of the proportion of women in their national legislatures—behind France and even Afghanistan and Pakistan. Across such industries as business, law, academia, journalism, and politics, on average, women hold fewer than twenty percent of the top positions. Only three percent of Fortune 500 companies have female CEOs. Researchers say that the percentage of women in the executive suites has been growing for decades, but in the past five years that growth has stalled.

So if women are now fifty percent of the workforce, why aren’t more women in charge?

The truth is that the general populace thinks women are already leading across all sectors of the economy. “That’s what Deborah Rhode, a scholar at Stanford, wrote of this phenomenon about a decade ago, and it’s still true,” says women’s advocate Marie C. Wilson.

Wilson is a co-creator of Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day® and founder and president of the White House Project, a national nonpartisan nonprofit that aims to advance women’s leadership in all communities and sectors. The
problem, she explained, is that if people think women have already reached parity, the political will doesn’t exist to continue fighting for change. “Even though the majority of Americans are comfortable with women leading in all sectors, women’s leadership numbers are static at an average of eighteen percent across all ten examined sectors,” Wilson says. “When we have actually gotten small groups of CEOs together and interviewed them about why there are not more women leading, they will say, ‘I’m not comfortable—I’m just not comfortable.’ Some of that is because there are so few women, they think they’re going to say the wrong thing.” She suggests that men may be hesitant to give women direct feedback for fear of retaliatory lawsuits. And there just aren’t enough women leading to fundamentally change the dynamic.

Wilson says that “the magic number seems to be thirty-three percent. If you have one-third women, like you now have on the Supreme Court, it starts to not be about gender, it starts to be about what each of us is talking about. Until you have one-third you are still looked at through a gender lens.”

None of this comes as a surprise to women themselves. As columnist Lisa Belkin noted in a recent
New York Times Magazine
article, “Telling women they have reached parity is like telling an unemployed worker the recession is over. It isn’t true until it
feels
true.” Most women can tell you from personal experience that they’ve been paid less than men for the same work.

Researchers agree that a lot of the gender wage gap is explainable. Women take time off to have children, so their careers
are interrupted and they’re not putting in the same number of hours. Women are the caregivers—they’re more likely to be the ones taking care of the kids, their aging parents, and their extended family. They also do the majority of housework even when they’re the primary breadwinners. Men will choose higher-paying occupations and women will choose more portable (and lower-paying) occupations that allow them to move with a higher-earning spouse. So conventional wisdom says women don’t commit as strongly to the labor market, and as a result, they don’t earn as much over the course of a lifetime.

But women’s choices don’t explain everything. “What you find is that when you pull out all of those factors, you still have about forty percent of the wage gap—9.2 cents—unexplained,” says Ariane Hegewisch, a study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

The sad fact is that both men and women are more likely to consider men to be valuable employees. Researchers referred to one experiment in particular that’s been repeated in many different places. Ilene H. Lang, a former tech CEO now at the helm of Catalyst, a leading research organization that studies women in the workforce, summed up the findings this way: “Basically, if you take resumes and strip them of names and all gender information, then take the exact same resumes and put a man’s name on some with links to a man, and put a woman’s name on others with links to a woman, and send
them out, hiring managers say that the women are unqualified and the men are terrific candidates. Men get the promotion or job and the women do not. Once you attach a gender link or a gender label, it gets devalued if it’s female. This happens over and over again, and it is not because people are intentionally biased or intentionally sexist, but they do not see potential and leadership in women, particularly nonwhite women.”

What was really shocking to me was the fact that women were as likely as men to ascribe leadership qualities to men, and dismiss equally qualified women.

Brian Nosek is the director of Project Implicit, a collaboration of scientists at Harvard, the University of Washington, and the University of Virginia. The project uses an online word association test to gauge subconscious bias. For instance, the test measures how quickly you pair words such as
male
and
career
. (The test is on the Web, and anyone can take it:
https://implicit.harvard.edu
.) When I took it I found that—even though I was writing this book—I, too, subconsciously associate males with career and females with family.

Nosek says these subconscious beliefs could manifest themselves in a variety of ways. For example, “[a manager] may be less likely to ask a female staff member to take a job that requires travel, whereas the same thought might not occur to a manager with a male staffer.” And, Nosek points out, this can happen whether the manager is a man or a woman.

When I ask how this might have an impact on my quest for a raise, Nosek says, “The way in which this implicit stereotype might manifest is just a general feeling of not belonging,
an uncertainty that this is something I am, or can do ... whether it’s appropriate to even ask, whereas it may not occur to a man in the same situation to even
think
about whether it’s appropriate or not. He might think, ‘I’ve been working here three years—time for a raise, damn it!’ ”

I ask Catalyst President and CEO Ilene H. Lang why women just aren’t seen as leaders. One of the reasons, she says, is that bias is perpetuated by the workplace itself. Her organization has studied how employees are chosen in companies that have leadership-development programs. “Most companies have competency-based models ... They start out by saying, ‘Who’s successful in our company? What do those successful leaders in our company look like?’ ” Lang tells me. The companies then design their program for screening high-potential individuals around those key attributes. But because subconscious bias plays its part, the companies end up institutionalizing a preference for men. “The performance-management system will say ‘this is how we spot the up-and-coming talent; these are the things you have to be good at,’ and, well, when you look at most of those characteristics what you find is that of the top ten, six or seven reflect characteristics of the current leadership, which is most often male,” she says.

Like many of us, Tina Brown sees the institutionalized preference for men in action all the time. “You discover with a sort of incredulity that men don’t even picture a woman in a job.” She offers a recent example in which she was talking to a television executive about staffing changes at his organization: “I asked, ‘Who are you thinking of bringing
in to be the overall boss of the situation?’ And he looked around the room, and he said, ‘Well, I was thinking about maybe somebody like—’ and he named a guy who was a complete mid-level player, in my judgment. I was incredulous. I’m thinking, ‘Wait a minute. Within this organization that we’re discussing, I could think of three brilliant women who could easily do that job. They’re not even on the drawing board. He’s thinking about going outside to a mid-level man who’s had a lot of corporate buzz and he’s ignoring the three women in the company who I know for a fact are far superior.’ ”

What surprised me most was the news that most women, even if they get their well-deserved raise, won’t ever close the wage gap. Even if women get promotions and raises at the same rate as men, if in their first job they were placed at a lower position and salary than their male colleagues, the same promotion and compensation increase rates will not close the gap. Ilene H. Lang points to a recent Catalyst study of female and male MBA graduates. “Women are pegged at a lower level and lower salary from the very first job out of their MBA program if they start at entry-level. If they are hired at a mid-career level, women and men fare pretty much the same, and they track the same afterward. But somehow, at that entry level, men are seen as much more promising and much more valuable, just because they’re men. More women take a hit, just because they’re women.” So that’s hidden bias
in action, and where the gender wage gap begins to grow. Says Lang: “The metaphor I use is, imagine that there’s a big race and your daughter or your granddaughter or your sister—whoever it is—is really good at track and field and she’s training, and she trains with the best of them. She goes to the start line, and you look up and she’s not on the start line. She’s 100 feet back. Would you accept this? So that’s the challenge: women are starting out behind the start line. And they don’t catch up.”

These gender disparities exist despite studies that suggest having more women in the top spots boosts the bottom line. That’s why the European telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom mandates that one-third of its top jobs be filled by women. The company’s CEO said in a statement, “Taking on more women in management positions is not about the enforcement of misconstrued egalitarianism; having more women at the top will simply help us operate better.”

A study by the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business found that female CEOs and female company directors tend to pay less in corporate takeovers, creating less debt and saving their shareholders money. Research shows that when more women are on the board of directors, companies are less likely to pay those outrageous compensations we’ve heard so much about on the news. That’s why Norway put a law on the books requiring that at least forty percent of the boards of directors of public companies be female.

Much of the research about gender and performance, however, is still under debate. Academics who challenge the current findings ask, “If companies that hire more women do better, how do we really know what role women play in that success? Are companies that seek out divergent perspectives simply more innovative and therefore make more money?”

Curiously, two men I interviewed—both of them tremendously successful captains of industry—argued that there’s no substantial difference between male and female executives at the very top. Both Jack Welch and Donald Trump argue that the best corporate leaders are gender-neutral.