The End of Men and the Rise of Women (28 page)

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8, at a time when Citigroup was becoming a model of big bank failure and corruption, its top executives held their regular Monday morning meeting. Vikram Pandit, the bank’s new CEO, was about to roll out a controversial new management structure that would shift around control over various geographical territories. Sallie Krawcheck, who was in charge of global wealth management, was suspicious of the new arrangement. She and Pandit had disagreed about many things, and this time she decided to bring up her objections in the meeting. Unlike the many white-shoe financial institutions, Citigroup was a “let it all hang out kind of place,” Krawcheck told me. A meeting that involved yelling and screaming was just another Monday morning meeting. Krawcheck questioned how the new lines of authority would work. “What if I say ‘zig’ and the guy who runs Asia says ‘zag’ and we can’t agree? Now what happens?” she asked. She hinted that the new system might cause “paralysis.”

Until then, Krawcheck, the “Queen of Wall Street,” had been a favorite with the business media. For several years she made
Forbes
’s list of the top ten most powerful women in the world.
Fortune
used her as the lead in a 2002 story called “In Search of the Last Honest Analyst”—the ultimate public compliment in an industry second only to Congress in public loathing and distrust. Krawcheck was tall, with blond preppy good looks and a Southern accent, but mostly the media liked her for the same reason I did when I first met her: She was honest and blunt. Krawcheck once joked in an interview, “How do you know when management is lying? Their lips are moving”—a quote that trailed her in nearly every profile. At a Forbes executive forum, she once told a crowd from the podium that her
first husband had an affair because she worked too much and he was jealous of her career. But while she was blunt, she wasn’t a diva or a screamer. She knew how to put her Southern charm to work, and she was known for her relentless efforts to win over colleagues at the various banks where she worked. She had manners, and she treated people well. “If she cursed, it was only at herself,” said one of her former colleagues.

But the following day, the media turned on Krawcheck.
The Wall Street Journal
reported in a front-page Web story that Krawcheck wasn’t supportive of Pandit’s micromanaging and that she was challenging him publicly. The word “paralysis” got picked up in blogs and news stories. Krawcheck was chided for being disloyal and out of control. “Son of a bitch,” she remembers thinking. “I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t scream.” The whole incident seemed to her in fact “pretty fricking mild” by Monday-morning standards, particularly given that there was a genuine, substantive disagreement. She was baffled that it had ended up on the front-page of
The Wall Street Journal
.

And then she remembered something that had happened at a Monday morning meeting a few weeks earlier. One of the other female executives had been yelling about something, “and I remember, clear as a bell, the thought forming in my head: B-I-T-C-H.” What had happened in her head, she realized, must have been the same as what happened in everyone else’s head when she had challenged Pandit. The men could challenge one another at any Monday morning meeting—hell, they could even scream and throw glasses across the room “and I never think, ‘jerk’ or ‘bastard.’” In fact, the tantrum would be forgotten by lunchtime. But if a woman did the same thing, it became front-page news. Not because Wall Street was sexist or biased, exactly, or stuck in the
Mad Men
“pretty little gal”
school of women, says Krawcheck, but because of what she came to think of as The Twitch, the instinctive wince we do when a woman unsheathes her sword.

Most working women have probably at some point been victims of The Twitch. In my case, it happened early in my career. As a young writer at
The Washington Post
, I found out one day that a male reporter hired around the same time as me and who had far less experience was making more money. He was actually bragging on the phone to a friend about how much he made, and across the cubicles I heard him. Naturally, I was annoyed. I wrote a reasonably cordial and lighthearted note to my supervisor, asking for a raise, but my sourness crept into it—I may have even used the word “unfair.” My supervisor, who was male, responded with outsized horror and disappointment. “I thought we had a good working relationship,” his e-mail began, and it went downhill from there. I was so mortified and humiliated that I apologized. Apologized! And because I am not a savvy businesswoman like Sallie Krawcheck, I am ashamed to admit that I never once asked for a raise again.

I now know that this whole incident is fairly standard in the annals of gender workplace fiascos. My victimized whiny note, his shock, my apology, and my career-long reticence are all examples of exactly how women should not conduct themselves in the workplace if they want to speed up that inevitable march to the top.

At the start of the millennium, researchers began to puzzle over why women’s earnings seemed to be leveling off. Women were still graduating from college at greater rates than men, and still flooding lucrative jobs in the creative class, but their earnings, especially at the top, had stopped soaring. Economist Linda Babcock hit upon a fairly simple explanation when she was directing the PhD program at Carnegie Mellon University. A group of female graduate students
came in to complain that they were stuck teaching for other faculty while the men got to teach their own classes. Babcock tracked down the dean in charge to ask him about it. The women, he told her, “just don’t ask,” so they don’t get assigned their own classes.

Babcock wondered if this might be true in other areas of their lives, so she ran an experiment. She surveyed Carnegie Mellon alumni who had recently graduated with their master’s degrees about their starting salaries in their new jobs. It turned out that 57 percent of the men had negotiated their starting salaries, while only 7 percent of the women had, even though the school’s career services department strongly advised students to negotiate. As a result, men had starting salaries that averaged 7.6 percent higher than women’s.

I can offer anecdotal confirmation of Babcock’s findings from my own experience. For the past three years, I have been editing the women’s section of
Slate
. About 10 percent of my writers are men. Web magazines do not pay all that much for individual stories anymore, and there isn’t much wiggle room in the budget, but sometimes, in certain circumstances, there is a tiny bit. The women, however, would never discover that. In all those years, only four of the dozens of women I work with have asked me for more money. And only two of the men have failed to.

Babcock is an economist, so she played out the math to its logical conclusion: Even if a man never asked for a raise again and he and his female counterpart both got 3 percent raises for the rest of their careers, the man’s 7.4 percent higher starting salary would make him half a million dollars richer than her by the time they reached retirement age—the difference between a tiny apartment in a Miami suburb and a luxury condo in Sarasota.

The finding seemed especially urgent given the current nature of the economy. Hardly anyone went to one job and stayed there
anymore. In fact, as Babcock pointed out, a quarter of workers in 2000 had been with their current employer less than a year. People moved from job to job, and each time, money and perks were up for grabs. Employers might offer employees different stock options or particular benefits, or special arrangements: working at home, working flexibly, working on contract. The workplace was turning into a big Turkish bazaar, and women might be missing all the deals! Women weren’t bad at negotiating in general—on behalf of the company, say, or for their children or friends. But they were reluctant to negotiate for themselves. As a result, they tended to be blind to their opportunities. They seemed to assume that if they worked hard, the proper rewards would come their way.

Babcock’s research helped spawn an industry of advice books intended to toughen women up:
Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office
;
Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman
; and
Stop Sabotaging Your Career
. Babcock and Sara Laschever wrote their own version,
Ask For It
, in which they explain “how women can use the power of negotiation to get what they really want.” The gist of these advice books is obvious from the titles: If you “worry about offending others” and “back down too easily” and otherwise insist on workplace displays of “girlish behavior,” chides Lois Frankel, author of the
Nice Girls
series, then you are “sabotaging your career!”

But as the advice books got churned out, the academic research was taking a curious turn. Study after study was finding that women who did not conform to female stereotypes—who bluntly asked for a raise, self-promoted, demanded credit for work they’d done, or failed to pitch in and help other colleagues—paid a high price in the workplace. People judged them as harsh or unpleasant, did not want to work with them, did not want them as a boss, and—worse—failed to grant their requests for a raise or judge them successful. Here was
the evil Twitch, getting in the way of a sisters-take-up-arms plan of attack. The world, it seemed, was not ready for mean girls at the office.

Researchers all over the country lab-tested different workplace scenarios, and they always came up with the same result: Women who speak aggressively get lower marks than women who speak tentatively. Women who self-promote are judged to lack social skills. Ditto for women who express any kind of anger in the workplace. In one scenario, some colleagues were about to go to an office party when a fellow employee showed up in a last-minute panic over a broken Xerox machine. He needed help manually stapling five hundred sets of the pages he had copied. The women who said no and went off to the party were docked mercilessly by the research subjects. Men who did the same in that situation were not judged at all. For men, behaving in a friendly, communal way was optional. For women, it was mandatory.

Perhaps the most dispiriting experiment was conducted in 2004 by Madeline Heilman, a psychologist at New York University. Heilman handed out a packet giving background information about a certain employee who was an assistant vice president in an aircraft company. In some cases, the employee was described as not yet having received a performance review. In other cases, the employee had gone through the review and been deemed a “stellar performer” or a “rising star.” The only other difference was that in some cases, the employee described in the packets was “Andrea” and in others, “James.” Among those who believed the employee had not yet received a review, Andrea and James were judged equally. But among those to whom the employee had been described as a “rising star,” there were vast differences in response.

You’d think that a woman who managed the impressive feat of
rising to the top at an aircraft company would get gold stars. Not at all. People judged rising star Andrea as far less likable and far more hostile than James; in fact, the Andreas were judged to be “downright uncivil,” explains Heilman, even though there was no information provided to support that view. Subjects merely assumed that “Andrea” must have done some nasty things along the way in order to break through in such a male-dominated field. The implications were depressing. All women had to do was be stellar performers in what was considered a male arena in order to bring on The Twitch. Clearly it was time to workshop a new strategy.

A few years later, Heilman came up with one. She calls it “a little bit of sugar.” Heilman reran the Andrea/James experiment, only this time she added some extra descriptions. Andrea/James “demands a lot from her/his employees” but is also “caring and sensitive to their needs” or “fair-minded” or encourages “cooperation and helpful behavior.” Any of these three descriptions did the trick for Andrea, making subjects like her as much, be happy to have her as a boss, and consider her competent. Heilman even tried the mother card. She mentioned that Andrea was a mother, and that had the same effect. Surely a mother couldn’t be mean, goes the thinking. A little bit of sugar seemed to go a long way.

So what were women supposed to do, bake brownies for their colleagues, give noontime massages, and generally spread sunshine around the office? It still seemed like they were caught in a trap. How could a woman be nice enough not to trigger The Twitch, but not so insipid that she would never get a promotion?

In 2011 researcher Hannah Riley Bowles at the Harvard Kennedy School took up the challenge. Bowles was a protégé of Linda Babcock, but she started with a premise opposite that of her mentor, that “it does hurt to ask.” Working with Babcock, she picked the simple
scenario of an employee receiving a job offer and then asking for a higher salary. Each subject saw a video of different employees, played by hired actors, asking for a raise using a different script. Her working hypothesis was that in order to be successful, the performance had to fulfill two different criteria: It had to be girlish enough not to trigger a backlash (The Twitch), but it had to be aggressive enough to convince the research subjects that the woman should be given a raise.