The End of Men and the Rise of Women (29 page)

“I think I should be paid at the top of that range. And I would also like to be eligible for an end-of-the-year bonus.”

Nope. Too aggressive.

“I hope it’s okay to ask you about this. I’d feel terrible if I offended you in doing so.”

No again. Too girlish.

“I don’t know how typical it is for people at my level to negotiate, but I’m hopeful that you’ll see my skill at negotiating as something important that I bring to the job.”

Bingo.

When the actress used this script, research subjects were both willing to work with the woman and to give her a raise. The key, it turned out, was to meet the stereotype halfway. The woman was polite, but firm. More important, they accepted her advocating for herself when she portrayed her needs as aligned with the needs of the company. She had to be a self-starter
and
a team player. She could negotiate for herself in order to prove she could negotiate for the company later. The one thing she could not be was aggrieved, as I was in my note to the
Washington Post
editor. “You want to get past the initial outrage phase,” counsels Bowles. “As a persuasion strategy it might have worked twenty-five years ago, but it doesn’t
work today. Not only is it not effective, it will accomplish the exact opposite of what you want. If you are intent on showing that you’ve been treated wrongly, that you have been treated like a lower-status person, then too often you just end up persuading them that you are in fact a lower-status person.”

The formula is maddening in its tightrope specificity and insulting in the capitulation it requires, Bowles admits. “If we could change the results of our experiments,” she writes in the study, “we would choose a more liberating message.” But it is also extremely pragmatic and, in its own way, liberating. When women negotiate, emotions tend to get in the way: excess humility, shame, resentment, outrage. Those feelings are not so helpful in building a reasonable case. The Bowles strategy gives women something else to focus on, something that may even fall more in their comfort zone: creating a convincing narrative that explains why her own needs match up with the company’s.

A senior executive Bowles once counseled found out that one of the male subordinates on her team was paid more than her. Her instinct was to march into the CEO’s office and tell him how unfair and outrageous that was—because it was unfair and outrageous. But with Bowles’s help, they mapped out a different script, one that would convey “unfair” without screaming it, and would refer to general standards rather than personal fury: “I know this is not the kind of company that wants to set up a structure where subordinates are paid more than their superiors.” She practiced the script several times, keeping her voice even. She got the raise.

Another woman Bowles was advising was asked to run her law firm’s diversity initiative. She suspected that this was merely a way to sidetrack her off a successful career path. She wanted to go to her
boss and tell him that the new assignment would damage her career. Bowles suggested she should try a different tack: “If I’m hearing you right and you want the position to have the authority you describe, I think it should be paid at ____ level and require a new title.” She didn’t complain, she got the promotion, and the diversity initiative was elevated to a new level of importance and authority.

In her book
Knowing Your Value
, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski, who has consulted with Bowles, describes her own inept attempts at asking for a raise. In her first attempt, she apologized over and over to Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC. “I’m sorry.” “I don’t want to be a problem.” “I really don’t want to be a diva.” Nothing. In her second attempt, she tried a combination of outrage and swagger, channeling her coanchor Joe Scarborough. “This is ridiculous, and I’m not going to put up with it anymore!” she said, jabbing Phil in the shoulder the way she’d seen Joe do. Griffin just looked at her like she was bonkers and jabbed back. Finally she got it right, by “not venting. Not whining. Just talking in my own words: ‘You are a bad boyfriend. Do you know what that is, Phil? You take and take and take, but never give. Start giving.’”

As I interviewed women executives, I learned that many of them had picked up some version of this advice along the way, and most of them gritted their teeth and followed it. Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, recalled an executive meeting she attended when she first came to the company. Someone was presenting a dubious three-year plan. Most people objected, along the lines of, “That’s very interesting, but you might want to look at it differently.” Nooyi said in the meeting, “That’s crap. It’s never going to happen.” Afterward, one of the male executives called her aside and explained that if she wanted to get along at the company she might tone it down a bit.
“He was helping edge me along to a different place,” she said. “The whole organization is not going to meet you. That’s just not realistic.” It was her first lesson, she recalls, in learning how to survive in a male-dominated environment.

Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg has always advised women to negotiate with nearly the exact same language that Bowles settled on in her study. Sandberg’s version of the script goes something like: “You realize you are hiring me to run the business development team, so you want me to be a good negotiator. Well, here goes. I am about to negotiate.” Sandberg understands that some women might consider this more pragmatic approach a cop-out, or a missed opening for change. “But I say, you have to put your ego aside and play by the rules so you can get to the top and change things. Look, here I am at Facebook, at a company that gives four months of paid maternity and paternity leave. Isn’t that worth it?”

Emily White is one of Sandberg’s young protégés, and she has reluctantly adopted Sandberg’s mandate that she play by the rules as well. “I am a really aggressive person. I have really strong views and I’m very competitive, and I expect people around me to be the same way,” White explains. “But I’ve definitely tried to change my style and hold my tongue a lot more. I always actively ask for other people’s opinions even when I don’t care about their opinions. And I hedge a lot more and use softer language.” Then she adds, “It drives me nuts. I’m not sure how long I can keep it up.” From White’s resentful attitude about the forced makeover, you get the hopeful feeling that this painful transition phase won’t last forever, that we are closer to the tipping point than we realize, and one day soon there will be enough Emily Whites in power that they won’t have to tread so lightly anymore.

W
OMEN MAY IN TIME
learn to walk this line perfectly. In their limitless capacity for morphing and adjusting, they may strike just the right balance between feminine and aggressive to move ahead without triggering any suspicion. But even if they get past these external barriers, there are still other, and in some ways deeper, ones holding them back.

Women carry psychological baggage with them into the workplace: a lingering ambivalence about their ambition, a queasiness about self-promotion, a duty to family that they can’t or won’t offload onto their husbands, a catholic notion of satisfaction that encompasses much more than climbing the corporate ladder, and a general feeling of vulnerability they seem to drag with them up the ranks no matter how powerful they get. It’s all understandable, given that most workplaces are structured in such a rigid, unaccommodating way that women are always made to feel as if they are asking for special favors. Still, these are the reasons women end up leaving behind $10,000 every year on the table, as Claudia Goldin puts it. They are not, as the women’s magazines like to say, “bad habits” women have to conquer; more like biases women should be aware of before they decide what to do about their careers.

We know, from a long-term study of Chicago business school graduates, the basic trajectory of the elite professional woman, in this case the average female MBA. Straight out of business school, she earns slightly less than her male counterparts, $115,000 compared to $130,000. Five years out, the men and women start to diverge. The women start to work fewer hours, and some stop working altogether. Nearly a decade out, the women are earning $250,000 and the men are earning $400,000.

Why? What happens? How does a giant gap get created out of a small one?

The first clue is that there is hardly any earning gap between women who don’t have children and men. Mostly what happens is obvious: Women with children start cutting back hours or seeking out situations that are more family-friendly. This is a perfectly reasonable response to an American workplace that barely acknowledges that the same adults showing up at the office every day also raise children at home.

But children are not the whole story, or maybe children are a proxy for the general drift and disaffection that often starts to weaken women’s resolve to fight somewhere in their late twenties and takes full hold of them in their thirties and forties.

Do women lack ambition? psychologist Anna Fels asked in a 2004
Harvard Business Review
article. She opens with a poignant vignette of a woman who confesses a dirty secret from her childhood: She’d once had a diary littered with the letters “IWBF”—for “I will be famous.” This was a dirty secret because it now caused this forty-year-old great shame to think about that. What kind of woman walks around saying she wants to be famous?

Fels concludes that women have this bravado beaten out of them over the years. They retain their early girlish pride in their own mastery of skills, but they lose the drive to demand recognition for that mastery: They lose ambition itself. “In fact the women I interviewed hated the very word,” she writes. “For them ‘ambition’ necessarily implied egotism, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, or the manipulative use of others for one’s own end. None of them would admit to being ambitious. Instead, the constant refrain was, ‘It’s not me. It’s the work.’”

Imagine a video game called Ambition Killer. A girl would start
out life with a certain amount of ambition points and then run into various obstacles that would knock some out of her—husband, children, a pig-leaded boss, an inflexible workplace, the lure of a lazy weekday afternoon. There are multiple ways that women tread old feminine ground and lose the will to fight for what they want. Sometimes women end up marrying into a situation that sets them up as the traditional wife, whether they planned to become that or not. Sometimes women feel the pressure of parenting culture that defines their desires for success as selfish, and against the interests of their children. Sometimes—and this is the hardest one—women can see no greater appeal in spending their middle years climbing a corporate ladder rather than, say, being a mother, or even reading a book in a café.

The study of University of Chicago MBA students showed a very curious split. The women set out earning their average of $115,000, and subsequently many of them married, some to men who earned more or less what they did, others to men who earned a lot more. Those who married a “high” earner, defined in the study as making more than $200,000 a year, and then had children were much more likely to stop working as women with a spouse who earned less. They also described themselves as responsible for a much greater percentage of the child care—52 percent, versus 32 percent for women with lower-earning spouses.

The underlying tragedy of such a dynamic was perfectly articulated in a column by Michael Lewis, “How to Put Your Wife Out of Business,” which ran in the
Los Angeles Times
in 2005. It was almost satire, but not quite. “There was a brief time, from about 1985 to 1991, when high-powered males demonstrated their status by marrying equally high-powered females with high-paying jobs. That time has passed. The surest way for a man to exhibit his social status—the
finest bourgeois bling—is to find the most highly paid woman you can, working in the most high-profile job, and shut her down.”

A long time ago, the high earner would not have married an MBA in the first place. He’d have married a flight attendant or a secretary or the high school girlfriend who had worked to put him through business school. But these days people of equal education tend to pair up. For the pashas of Wall Street, it’s not enough to marry a model; you have to marry the most impressive woman in business school—and then, as Lewis says, put her out of business. To feminists this should be an outrage: countless potential future female CEOs sacrificed to their husbands’ greed and selfish demands. Women who would be king would do well to heed this advice: If you meet a man in business school and suspect he might strike gold, don’t marry him. Go for the middle manager instead.

Or at least she might go for someone who will understand that her career counts as much as his. One would expect that a powerful woman would downplay her husband’s role in her success, that she would insist that she’d made it
despite
the man in her life. But in a new twist on an old trope, the powerful women I spoke to all admitted being utterly dependent on their husbands. All described this as the first rule of success: “Choose your spouse or partner carefully. I often say this as a joke, but there is almost no other choice that you can make that will have as much of an impact—positive or negative—on your career,” says Sallie Krawcheck. Sheryl Sandberg tells women at every speech she gives that “your most important career decision is who you marry.” And then sometimes she adds, depending on the crowd, “If you can be a lesbian, definitely do it.” Many of the most successful women—former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, Indra Nooyi,
The Daily Beast
and
Newsweek
editor in chief Tina Brown—credit their husbands with making their success possible. “I lucked out at
home,” says Nooyi, who was born into a traditional Indian family and married an Indian man, Rajkantilal Nooyi. “He supported me massively. I don’t think I could have worked the way I did if I hadn’t had that kind of support at home.”