Knowing Your Value (5 page)

In the first of many conversations with successful women, I sat down with Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and shared my story. She listened and nodded all too knowingly.

“We are our own worst enemy,” Jarrett says, understanding exactly how I had been tripped up. “Somehow it’s unseemly for women to promote themselves. We think that there’s a meritocracy that’s hierarchical, and the people at the top make the decisions about what promotions are based on.”

As a female and an African-American, Jarrett says she always expected to face obstacles in the workplace: “My parents raised me to think because I was a girl and because I was black I was going to have to work twice as hard. They did it with no chip on their shoulder—it was just a fact of life, get used to it. Don’t try to change what is, just work twice as hard.”

So she says that’s what she did. She worked hard and kept her head down. But Jarrett didn’t expect that working hard would not automatically lead to advancement and better pay.

“I kept doing more and more work,” Jarrett tells me. She describes an experience she had when she worked in the real estate division of the City of Chicago’s Department of Law early in her career. Jarrett felt fortunate to have the job, but she wasn’t advancing. She says she was lucky to have a female mentor, Lucille Dobbins, who instructed her: “Lucille said to me, ‘You are doing more work than your supervisor and your supervisor’s supervisor . . . you should be a deputy.’ I said, ‘Well my boss knows I’m working hard, and he values what I’m doing.’ She said, ‘You can’t sit around waiting for people to recognize your work, you have to ask for it. You need to go in there and tell him you should be a deputy. And you should tell him you want to be in the front suite of offices, because he doesn’t have a woman in the front suite.’ ”

“Did that seem weird to you?” I ask.

“It seemed like absolutely horrible advice,” Jarrett answers. “I thought [my boss] would humiliate me and tell me to get out of his office.”

Still, Jarrett gathered her courage and went for it. “I said, ‘This is the work I’m doing, this is the level of complexity, and I really think I should be a deputy,’” she tells me. “He looked at me and said, ‘Okay.’ ”

Jarrett was shocked. She got the promotion and the front office. “I felt that if I was deserving, then my boss should recognize that I was deserving,” she reasons. “That’s what bosses do.”

Jarrett says her mentor taught her an important lesson: “What Lucille brought to my attention was that I was not valuing my own work and that I needed to be my own best advocate. And that is something that women seldom do and men do intuitively. Men ask for it all the time. Women never do. Women expect that if you do really well, someone will recognize your performance and will reward you accordingly.”

While this seems obvious, for many women—even a top presidential adviser—simply asking can be difficult. Jarrett says that asking for that promotion “was one of the most uncomfortable conversations that I have ever had.”

Jarrett says that while we women sit around waiting, men are busy charging the hill. “If you’re number four, five or six, and there’s a guy who’s four, five or six he’s going to
ask to be number one,” she points out. “If you’re not asking for a promotion and you’re waiting for your merit to be recognized, men are going to hire you to be close, but you’re not going to get the gold ring.”

Tina Brown—journalist; author; cofounder of
The Daily Beast
; regular on
Morning Joe
; and the recently-appointed editor-in-chief of
Newsweek
, the first woman to hold the position in the magazine’s 78-year history—told me a similar story, but from the perspective of a boss.

Brown is a friend and mentor, and a regular on the show. Our lives are a constant swirl, and in order to get a few moments to talk about the subject of women and compensation, we had to seize the moment. I ended up sitting down with her in a cold dressing room in between segments on
Morning Joe
. She had her coat on, ready to run to the airport and catch a flight, but she took the time to think aloud on this issue and share her valuable perspective.

“I was in a situation recently, within
The Daily Beast
, where I realized I had overlooked a woman who had been doing a fantastic job. We had brought a man in to do the job, and he failed, horribly. And then we hired another person, who came in and failed. Finally the woman came to see someone at the company and said, ‘Look, I’ve sat here, and I’ve seen two guys fail at this job. What about me?’ ”

Brown was astonished that she’d overlooked this person once, let alone twice: “I said to my executive editor, ‘You know, this is terrible. The first time someone failed, we should have gone to her ... She’s clearly so much better.’ ” Brown says that she was ashamed she hadn’t recognized the
female employee’s value in the first place. But that said, the employee hadn’t stepped up and asked for the work.

Brown wasn’t the only female manager who admitted making that same mistake. Women employees just don’t seem to have the confidence to raise their hand, to put it out there, to say “Hey! I’m worth this!” So they’re overlooked by female bosses and male bosses alike.