Knowing Your Value (14 page)

I can think of countless lousy shifts that I’ve volunteered to work in my life. Time away from my husband and my kids, time that I needed to take care of myself, that I gave up in order to work. To be the cooperator, the person with the mop. I know for a fact those lost hours made no difference to my employers, but it is the lost time with my family that I’ll never get back. I often pushed my self to extremes to get nothing in return except bad health, and at one point, a baby with a broken leg. Warren’s description of herself when she was starting out made me cringe, because that was me. Always trying to run faster, to please everyone, and very seldom getting anything in return.

Personal-finance expert and force of nature Suze Orman argues that for their own sake, women have to resist the urge to always pick up the mop. When you know what you’re worth, you’ll have an easier time asking to be compensated for what you’re bringing to the job. And if you’re not getting paid for it, take a lesson from men and don’t do it.

“I know my own worth and I’m not going to settle for less,” Orman says. “It’s really just that simple. When I’m giving my speaking lectures, I get exactly what I want for my speaking lectures, and if you can’t pay me, then I’m not going to speak for you. I get exactly what I want from CNBC, and I’m very happy. I don’t have to demand; you either give it to me or you don’t. If you don’t, then it’s not my problem.”

Of course, at this point in her career, it’s easy for Suze Orman to say no. She acknowledges that in the current recession, most people don’t have that luxury. Most people do what they have to do, and sometimes, that does include picking up the mop and even working for free. “When you’re first working for someone, your goal is to make those people whom you are dependent on dependent on you,” Orman advises. “So when you first start working, you do not demand anything, you do not ask for anything. That’s when you do everything you can, even if you’re not asked to do it. You make them totally dependent on you—and then you’ve reversed the power.” When you really need the money, or the opportunity, sometimes you do have to get your foot in the door and take the lousy shift. But once you’ve made yourself
essential, that’s when you have leverage. It’s up to you to make sure your boss sees your contribution and knows you expect to be paid for it.

Orman says she sometimes worked for free as she worked her way up. She worked unpaid the entire first year of her show, because she and her managers weren’t able to settle on contract terms. But at the end of the first year she had proven herself and was in an excellent negotiating position. At this writing, her show is in its tenth year.

FDIC chair Sheila Bair told me that while she hasn’t haggled over the issue of compensation, she has certainly felt at times that her opinions have not been valued: “Traditionally women’s work or opinions or both have not been valued as much as they should. The societal notion that women’s work or opinions are less valuable can seep into our own thinking. Perhaps on a subconscious level, but I think it does seep in. We can be accepting of what we get and not ask for more and not think that we deserve more. I think that goes from compensation, office space, titles, to getting credit for saying something and making it your idea. Somehow it’s a bad thing to stand up for yourself or promote yourself . . . to speak up and say, ‘I deserve to be paid X,’ and we feel embarrassed or ashamed or bashful about that, and we shouldn’t.”

Bair told me she thinks women need to be more assertive. She says we need to educate our managers about our worth: “When there is unequal treatment, learn how to promote yourself in a way that is constructive. You don’t have to be obnoxious about it; you can be factual about it. You say, ‘This is my idea,’ and don’t back down. Say it, and don’t be embarrassed by saying it.”

Advertising exec Donny Deutsch says that for men, keeping track of accomplishments is as natural as breathing. “Men grow up playing games and keeping score from the time they’re four years old, and that continues in the workplace. Keeping score by tracking how much money you make, how big your office is, what are the perks, what do other people think, how does it look.”

Deutsch says all that scorekeeping makes male employees high maintenance. “I’ve found without exception that for every alpha male who has worked for me, I’ve had to spend a lot more time negotiating literally and figuratively ... the size of everything. For them it’s, ‘I want more; what’s in it for me?’ ”

Women may not need or want to keep calling attention
to themselves, but as Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett put it, “If you’re not negotiating the size of everything, odds are, you’re not going to become the boss.” Because as I pointed out, even if we don’t care about nice offices or elevated titles, the rest of the world does recognize those symbolic stature-oriented achievements.

News of Carol Bartz’s compensation was splashed across the front pages of newspapers across the country when she got the job as Yahoo CEO in 2009. Bartz says she found it “absolutely fascinating” how reports exaggerated her pay, calling her ‘the highest-paid
whatever
,’ which is such bullshit because if they really read the fine print, they’d see the stock price has to go up, the moon has to be full and cats have to howl and so forth,” before she’d get her full compensation package.

But what bothered her most was “the sheer embarrassment of the scrutiny.” Everyone was coming up to my husband and saying, ‘Well, I guess you can afford a new set of
clubs,’ and, you know, razzing him. People were putting copies of articles in his locker. It was just bizarre. First I got mad, and then I got embarrassed, and then I said, ‘You know what? Not my problem.’ I’m proud of this, and if some young woman thinks she can be ‘the highest-paid whatever,’ then good!”

Why are we afraid to be called self-promoting, and why wouldn’t we feel great about being “the highest-paid whatever”? Maybe we feel as if we’re being set up to be knocked down or that people think we’re only in it for the money. Or maybe the fact that people notice that we’re highlighting our accomplishments distracts from the accomplishments themselves?

In her experience as a law professor and in her government positions as chairwoman of TARP and now the chief advisor in charge of setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Elizabeth Warren knows that to be labeled self-promoting may not be a bad thing for a man, but it is for a woman: “It’s like having something sort of deeply wrong about you. You sense this is a really bad thing.”

Warren has spent years advocating for consumer protections in the financial-services industry, and she was often interviewed by reporters covering the financial crisis. She has taken a lot of flak from those who don’t like her views, and
she told me she understood that that came with the territory. But when the
Wall Street Journal
called her “self-promoting,” she says that she felt transported back to her childhood in Oklahoma, suddenly feeling like an odd girl out. She remembers thinking, “‘Oh my god, I do so much less press than I’m asked to do, and when I do it I always try to do it in the service of trying to teach something, trying to advance an idea’ . . . it really stung.”

Warren continues: “You know, when someone says, ‘Oh, she’s just plain stupid,’ it doesn’t cut to the quick. It doesn’t undermine me in the same way. It doesn’t even throw me off. But the notion that I’m self-promoting somehow makes me gasp.” She says that finally, after two years of working in a much more public position, she’s developed thicker skin and the ability to stop and think, “ ‘Wait a minute. Why does that one cut to the quick?’ I think more than once I’ve wondered, ‘Would you say that if I were a man?’ ”