Knowing Your Value (6 page)

After an extensive career at Time Warner and nearly a decade as the chief brand officer at
Elle
, Carol Smith has employed thousands of women during her years of overseeing women’s magazines. She admits she sees women like me all the time: “We women think we will work very, very hard—we will work harder than anybody in the office—we will get the gold star, and then the money will come. When the money doesn’t come, instead of walking into the boss’s office and saying, ‘I’ve done this, I’ve done this, I’ve done this, and now I need this,’ we sit around and earn one fifteenth of what the man next door earns.

“I think what we have to do is recognize that if we don’t ask, it’s not coming our way. Men ask all the time; it’s not that [the money] just comes to them. I swear it doesn’t,” Smith says.

Why don’t we ask? That’s a good question.

Linda Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University and researcher on the subject of women and negotiation, cowrote a fascinating book called
Women Don’t Ask.
Babcock says women ask for raises and promotions eighty-five percent less often than their male counterparts. And when women do ask, on average they ask for thirty percent less.

One of the reasons women don’t ask, she argues, is that they don’t realize that opportunities exist. Babcock writes, “One of the major barriers preventing women from asking for what they need more of the time is their perception that their circumstances are more fixed and absolute—less negotiable—than they really are.”

At the age of forty-one, Sheryl Sandberg has achieved extraordinary success. When she agreed to talk to me for this book, I actually got nervous. Surely her experiences must be very different. What if she debunked all my theories?

Sandberg served as chief of staff for the United States Department of the Treasury before leaving government to become vice president of global online sales and operations at Google. She’s now the chief operating officer of the social
networking giant Facebook. Sandberg clearly knows her stuff about gender dynamics as well as social media.

When I ask whether she believes my struggle to be fairly compensated is a common problem, she immediately agrees: “The data clearly show men own their success more than women do. Men are more likely to overestimate and women are more likely to underestimate performance on objective criteria. So if you look at something like grade point average and you survey men and women on what their GPAs were, men get it wrong slightly high and women get it wrong slightly low.”

So men are more likely to think of themselves as more successful and women are more likely to think of themselves as less successful, even if their achievements are the same. Sandberg also points out that men ascribe their success to their own skills, whereas women ascribe their success to outside sources.

“So if you ask a man, ‘Why were you successful?’ the man will say, ‘You know, because of myself,’ ” Sandberg says. “And the women will say, ‘Because I got lucky and these great people I work with helped me.’ So think of the situation in which men are getting it wrong slightly high, and women slightly low. Men think it’s them; women don’t. So why does that matter? It matters because I think a lot of getting ahead in the workplace has to do with being willing to raise your hand and say I want that job, I’ll take on that challenge—or better yet, I see that problem and I’m going to fix it. That comes back to self-confidence. So when men feel more confident they raise their hand; when women feel less confident they take their hand down.”

Knowing your value means owning your success. Owning your success means acknowledging your achievements. By acknowledging achievements you build confidence.

Sandberg gives me a striking example from her own experience. She was giving a talk about owning one’s success to 150 or so Facebook employees, and she mentioned the GPA experiment. At the end of the talk Sandberg told the audience she had time for two more questions. She answered them, but hands were waving so she continued to call on people.

Afterward she went back to her desk and found a young woman waiting for her. Sandberg asked if she’d learned anything from the talk, and the young woman said, “I learned to keep my hand up.” Sandberg asked what she meant, and the woman told her, “After you took those two final questions, I put my hand down and all the other women put their hands down. A bunch of men kept their hands up and then you took more questions.”

The men ignored the question limit and went for it, keeping their hands in the air. What did they have to lose? Nothing. Sandberg saw more waving hands and took their questions.

Sandberg admits she didn’t notice that only women had taken their hands down, because after all, why would she have noticed what wasn’t there? She says that proved her point right there: “If we as women don’t raise our hands in the workplace, we’re not going to get the same opportunities men do. Because men keep their hands up.”

Despite her many achievements, Sandberg tells me a story of how she herself failed to raise her hand and how it almost cost her a lot of money.

“I was getting a new position. I got an offer to do the job, and I thought the offer was really great, and I was going to take it,” Sandberg says. “My brother-in-law kept saying, ‘You gotta negotiate. They want you to take on all this responsibility—ask for more compensation.’ My response was, ‘This is such a great opportunity. I’m so lucky to get it, and it’s such a generous offer, I’m not going to negotiate.’ ” But Sandberg says her brother-in-law kept pushing: “He said, ‘Goddamn it, Sheryl, why are you agreeing to make half of what any man would make to do this?’ ”

Finally, that motivated her. Sandberg says that after her brother-in-law convinced her to ask for more, “I went in and asked, and they moved up considerably. Had I not asked, they wouldn’t have. But the reason I wouldn’t have asked is because I just felt lucky to have the opportunity.” Her story sounded all too familiar to me. I’ve always been in awe of Sandberg, and the idea that she and I shared a common failing was cracking the superhero image I had of her. I appreciate her honesty. And I realize now that women must get over feeling lucky. The time has come to turn the page.

Sandberg sent my daughters and me some Facebook T-shirts. I wear mine feeling a kinship with this powerful woman, who didn’t know her “face” value, even as she reached the top of the ladder.

My experience with the CEO of Yahoo, Carol Bartz, was also an eye-opener. To borrow the famous line from the movie
When Harry Met Sally
, “I’ll have what she’s having!”

Bartz is a rarity in today’s corporate world: she’s among the select women heading three percent of Fortune 500 companies and one of only a handful heading a technology firm. When I ask her whether she has ever had trouble getting paid what she’s worth, her reply is immediate: “Oh, honest to god, I think every step of the way. There’s no question about that.”