Knowing Your Value (11 page)

“Because it was a side Phil wasn’t used to seeing. He was threatened, and he didn’t know how to handle it,” Deutsch answers. “If a women punches you, you don’t know what to do. You can’t hit a woman back. If she punches you, you think, ‘What’s wrong with her?’ ”

Harvard professor Hannah Riley Bowles says another reason my tack did not work is simply that I didn’t have the same relationship with Phil that Joe has. “It’s generally the case that people tend to know better and hang around with and be closer to people who are like them. Right?” she reasons. “So the implication of that in a male-dominated industry
is that guys will tend to be very well connected with guys. Their social network and their work network will tend to be overwhelmingly male.” Research done by Herminia Ibarra at INSEAD Business School found that men are more likely to be connected to more senior male executives by virtue of the fact that they’re both male. By contrast, women tend to have both male and female colleagues in their work networks, but their networks of close friends are likely to be mostly women and friends from outside of work. “So if you have someone who is a friend and a colleague, you can speak to them and relate to them in ways that you cannot with someone with whom you have a more distant, or just really collegial, relationship,” Bowles tells me. She says the difference is that in a male-dominated industry, men typically develop both work ties and friendship ties at work, and “You can communicate differently with someone with whom you have work and friendship ties than with whom you just have work ties.”

I decide to ask former CEO of General Electric, business guru Jack Welch why he thinks my approach backfired so badly. He argues that women make a mistake when they try to mimic what they see men do. “Authenticity is a huge deal,” he said, for both women and men. “Men are jerks
when they’re not themselves ... I mean authenticity is a killer, and women sometimes don’t behave as themselves,” he says.

For most women, an aggressive verbal style is just out of character. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz may be the exception. Known for her fearless leadership style as well as her willingness to use foul language, she says, “Well, I mean, listen, this business that goes on about my ‘salty language’ ... come on, there are men who could run my language into the ground and nobody cares. Yes, I am an outspoken person; I have been probably for the last twenty years. As I earned the right, I got more outspoken. I just developed a style that works for me, and I think it’s authentic. I just met with a lot of the interns, and I said you can’t copy me because a) you haven’t earned the right, and b) if it’s not comfortable, everybody can see that.”

For the rest of us who aren’t comfortable with it, strong language only backfires. A lot of people I consulted with agree that the problem wasn’t really what I said, it was my delivery. I just wasn’t being authentic with Phil. But what about the fact that I was
authentically
angry? Hannah Riley Bowles comments, “Even if you were genuinely pissed, if you were acting like a guy, it probably wouldn’t work. There is a lot of evidence, our research included, that adopting the guys’ style of doing this is likely to be risky for women. When women just act like the guys, then they pay really important social costs.”

Bowles and other researchers have various names for this problem. They call it the double bind, or the backlash effect. Research shows that assertiveness is an important
quality for leadership. But when women are assertive, it can hurt them, because being assertive is not an appealing trait in women.

Professors Frank Flynn, Cameron Anderson, and Sebastien Brion tested this effect on a group of business students at New York University. MBA students were asked to read a Harvard Business School case about a very successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur by the name of Heidi Roizen.

The case is often used to teach students networking skills, but the researchers decided to use the case for a study on gender and bias. They gave half their students the case under the real name of Heidi Roizen and the other half a case about “Howard Roizen.” The cases were exactly the same, except for a couple of descriptive words: Heidi’s “husband” was changed to Howard’s “wife,” and Heidi the “cheerleader” became Howard the “football player.” Both Heidi and Howard were described in assertive terms as take-charge executives, captains of industry.

After reading over the case, the students went online to answer questions about their impressions of Heidi/Howard. They were asked to rate him or her on characteristics such as kindness, generosity, ambition, manipulativeness, concern for others, and a variety of other typically gender-associated traits.

The results were shocking. The students were looking at exactly the same information, but they rated Heidi less kind and less generous than Howard and more power hungry, manipulative, and assertive than Howard. Clearly the students responded negatively to Heidi’s aggressiveness.

When the students were asked whether they would want to work with Howard and whether they’d hire Heidi, the researchers discovered that both men and women thought Heidi was competent, but less likeable. Heidi may have been a little full of herself, but Howard was the kind of guy they’d go have a beer with.

The double bind is this: in order to be a competent leader you need to be assertive—but if you’re a woman, you’re judged harshly for displaying the traits that make you an effective leader.

I wasn’t surprised to hear that the data showed men were more critical of women than of other men. But I
was
surprised that women were equally critical of both genders. Women are as hard on each other as they are on themselves.

Flynn’s students insisted that they didn’t judge Heidi any differently. After the test was completed, however, Flynn shared the results with them, and they, too, were shocked. Flynn says that confronting this group with their own subconscious bias was a powerful lesson for them all. When Flynn relayed the results to the real Heidi Roizen, she responded, “Well, I guess that’s understandable, with a group of grizzled executives.” She was as surprised as anyone to learn the test subjects were twenty-six-year-old MBA students.

The simple fact is that even the most successful women among us just want to be liked. Joy Behar is not comfortable being a bitch. Yes, I said that. Like Susie Essman, Behar rose
up the ranks in the world of stand-up comedy. Currently she’s on television two hours each day, hosting her own talk show as well as
The View
. She is both unfailingly funny and searingly blunt. During the 2008 campaign, Behar famously asked John McCain some of the toughest questions he faced. He arrived on set of
The View
, no doubt expecting light conversation, when Behar confronted him on his campaign commercials: “We know that those two ads are untrue, they are lies. And yet, you at the end of it say you approve these messages. Do you really approve them?”

This is a woman who doesn’t have a hard time speaking her mind, so it might surprise you to learn that she doesn’t speak up when it comes to asking for money and perks. “I’m just a big mouth,” Behar tells me, “[but] I’m not demanding, and I don’t say I have to get special privileges or anything like that.” It’s not that she doesn’t want the big money and the big perks; it’s just that, like most women, being demanding makes her uncomfortable. “You want people to feel that you’re a team player,” she says. “I’ve always been the good girl, in a certain way. I have always been the good team player.”

Plus, there’s the risk that she’ll be called a bitch. But don’t bitches often get what they want? “The squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say,” Behar says. “They don’t really give a f—k that you think that they’re a bitch. You and I, we don’t like to be thought of as bitches ... if you don’t care that people think you’re a bitch, you can run the networks and the country. I don’t have that; I’m not comfortable with being a bitch.”

Behar is right. I didn’t want to be thought of as the b-word. And that was the crux of my problem: I really wanted to be liked.

My desire to be liked outweighed my wish to be valued. When my bosses would compliment me for being “a jack-ofall-trades,” a warm feeling rushed over me. I felt ...liked. But I have learned the hard way that compliments don’t pay the bills. Which brings me back to my story, and one of the best and worst moments of my career, all at the same time.

New Hampshire was pivotal in the run-up to Super Tuesday. This primary would decide whether Hillary Clinton, whose candidacy was on the rocks, would drop her bid for the presidency. Instead it turned out to be the place she “found her voice.” But before she did, we found her at 9:30 at night on a high school stage in Nashua. We had been trying to get some time with her all day. My phone did not leave my ear and we did not get out of the car until we nailed down the interview.

Everyone was predicting a crushing loss for Hillary. But the Hillary we saw that night was a winner. As usual, she had been up earlier than everyone and she stayed up later, fighting both the odds and her critics. She was unflappable. Determined. Confident. Hair perfect. Makeup intact.

We walked away from our interview in awe of her physical might and resilience. How was she still going? This is when Joe Scarborough’s adoration for “his girlfriend” Hillary Rodham Clinton began. He started to say it every day on the air:
“I can’t deny it. My girlfriend is tougher than any man I’ve met on the campaign trail.”

She is a force of nature, and clearly when the chips are down, Hillary Clinton is at her very best. To this day, both Joe and I think she was by far the strongest candidate in terms of steel will and political agility. When she won the next day, her surprise victory made for an incredible narrative.

Late into the night, we discussed how impressed we were and what it would mean for the race if she didn’t drop out. We were still buzzing about the interview we had worked so hard to get. Joe and I had scrambled across the country by car and by plane and had to be on the air the next morning for another grueling six hours ... But we didn’t care how tired we were. We had the story and a great show to tell it on.

The next day, after the interview aired, my phone rang. I saw it was an NBC line, and I assumed I was going to be given kudos for the Hillary get—maybe I would be closer to getting that raise. They must have heard how hard we worked, how I didn’t give up until we got that interview. How we hadn’t slept in days but still found a way to nail the story. The interview was aired over and over again on MSNBC and then again on
NBC Nightly News
. So this must be one of our bosses calling with a pat on the back.

Uh, not quite.

I picked up the phone and heard, “Hello, Mika? What was with that clip in your hair last night? Do not wear that clip again. You looked awful, don’t ever wear that clip in your hair again. Seriously, you looked like a cancer survivor. That
clip is awful. I am trying to help you here. You can’t do it again. I want people to like you.”

It’s true that when we had caught up with Hillary the night before, Joe and I were both in jeans and winter boots and ragged from days on the road and spending six hours straight on-air each day. I had thrown my hair up in a plastic hair clip that I’d gotten at a drugstore, and my makeup had pretty much worn off. I was beginning to be comfortable traveling with the guys. Just like them, I let the “real me” hang out. When we were under the gun, I simply couldn’t look camera-ready at all times. The guys were great and told me not to bother with makeup. That it shouldn’t matter so much. That it would be better to show my real side anyway. That is what our show was about. I could be me.

NBC obviously disagreed.

How did I respond to the call?

I apologized.

Again, this is a story of what
not
to do. Why didn’t I simply hang up? That’s what Joe would have done. Surely that’s what Hillary Clinton would’ve done! I should have been crystal clear and defiant. I had scored a major victory—that’s what the manager should’ve taken away from that piece. I felt powerful; I
was
powerful. But I didn’t take the opportunity to set her straight.