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  particular artist. She loved it so much that she took it home and hung

  it in her house to see how it looked. She loved it even more, but she

  couldn’t afford it and with great regret she returned it to the dealer.

  Shortly afterward, the artist who painted the picture died. Realizing that

  the work’s value would skyrocket, Renata rushed back to the dealer,

  only to find that the piece had already been sold. “If you loved it that

  much, you should have asked me to work out a payment plan,” the

  dealer said. “I would have figured out a way for you to have it.” This

  had never occurred to Renata. She assumed that the price was the price,

  she either had the money or she didn’t, and there was no flexibility in

  the situation.

  In stark contrast, the men we interviewed recounted numerous tales

  of assuming that opportunity abounds—and reaping big rewards. Here

  are a few of their stories.

  Steven, 36, a college administrator, is married to a professor at the

  school where he works. Shortly after the birth of their first child, Ste-

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  ven’s wife was invited to spend a year as a visiting professor at a presti-

  gious university in another city. Steven’s job involved managing a staff

  of almost 100 people, which is hard to do from another city, but there

  was no question about his wife’s accepting the invitation—it was a great

  opportunity. His wife assumed they were in for a year apart, but Steven

  was unwilling to accept this. Instead, he devised a plan whereby he

  could do part of his job from out of town and hand off some of his

  responsibilities to a colleague who would be on-site. In return, he took

  over several of her duties that didn’t need to be done on-site. And he

  went further: He persuaded this colleague to take on some extra duties so that he could reduce the number of hours he worked and spend

  more time with his newborn daughter. Steven presented the plan to his

  boss, who was happy to accommodate the needs of a valued employee.

  Steven and his family enjoyed a wonderful year together, he and his

  colleague each acquired new skills from trading responsibilities, and

  Steven’s job was waiting for him when he returned.

  Hal, 41, owns a small chain of athletic clubs in northern California.

  For several years, he’d owned two adjacent lofts in San Francisco, living

  in one and renting out the other. After his girlfriend moved in with

  him, he wanted to enlarge his living space by expanding into the loft

  he’d been renting, but he didn’t want to pay the exorbitant prices

  charged in San Francisco for design and renovation services. Hal had

  recently joined the board of directors of an Italian furniture and design

  company, and after a little thought he approached the company’s presi-

  dent with the following proposal: “I will pay you to renovate my apart-

  ment at cost,” he said, “but I will pay you up-front for the work. This

  will help your cash flow, and it will give work to the employees of your

  San Francisco store, which has just opened and is not yet busy. You’ll

  also get a local reference and a local project to showcase.” The president

  of the firm agreed, the store’s staff took particular care with the project

  because they wanted to show the San Francisco market what they could

  do, and for far less than he could have paid any other way, Hal got

  himself a gorgeously renovated apartment.

  Mike, 63, an entrepreneur, attended a New England private school

  as a boy. After an injury forced him to give up football, he became head

  cheerleader in order to continue supporting his team. As a big game

  with a major rival approached, Mike overheard a lot of boys expressing

  regret that they wouldn’t be able to see the game because it would be

  played at the other school. Looking for a solution, Mike approached

  the local train company and asked if it would be possible to rent a train!

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  To his surprise, the railway was happy to oblige for a reasonable price,

  and the entire school was able to ride in style to the football game.

  At the time, Mike’s school sent close to 100 boys a year to Yale. The

  administrators and college counselors at Mike’s school were so im-

  pressed by his initiative that they made sure his name was on the Yale

  list, even though his grades made him a borderline candidate. Going to

  Yale not only gave him a wonderful education, it provided him with

  contacts and opportunities that he relies on to this day.

  Who’s in Control?

  Why do men and women differ so much in their propensity to recognize

  opportunities in their circumstances? Why are men more likely than

  women to take the chance of asking for something they want, even

  when there’s no obvious evidence that the change they want is possible?

  A group of psychologists has identified an interesting gender difference

  that helps answer this question. Using something called a “locus of con-

  trol” scale, these researchers measure the extent to which individuals

  believe that their behavior influences their circumstances.2 The lower

  people score on the scale, the more they perceive their fate to be influ-

  enced by internal rather than external factors. That is, those who have

  an “internal locus of control” (the low scorers) feel that they “make life

  happen” whereas those with an “external locus of control” (the high

  scorers) feel that life happens to them. Research has found that people

  with an internal locus of control spontaneously undertake activities to

  advance their own interests more than people with an external locus of

  control. They’re more likely to seek out information in their environ-

  ment that will help advance their goals and more likely to be assertive

  toward others. People with an internal locus of control may also be less

  vulnerable to negative feedback.3 As it turns out, the average scores for

  women are significantly higher on locus of control scales than those

  for men. This tells us that women are more likely to believe that their

  circumstances are controlled by others while men are more likely to

  believe that they can influence their circumstances and opportunities

  through their own actions.4

  This is not just true of American women. In an unusually far-reaching

  study, this finding was replicated in 14 countries, including Britain,

  Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden in Western Europe; Bulgaria,

  Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Rumania in Eastern Europe; the

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  former U.S.S.R., India, China, Mexico, and Brazil.5 The study also

  controlled for occupational status, meaning that even among senior

  managers, who might be expected to perceive themselves as having

  more control over their lives than lower-level, unskilled workers,

  women still scored higher than men. This indicates that even women

  who exercise a great deal of control in their jobs still believe that external forces influence their lives more than men in the same jobs believe.

  Locus of control issues also help expl
ain the discomfort women feel

  about negotiations involving money. Martha, 43, a career counselor,

  described being offered a job and gratefully accepting what her new

  employer offered to pay her. After she was hired, she learned that

  she was the only employee who hadn’t negotiated her starting salary.

  But it hadn’t occurred to her that she had any control over what she

  was paid, she said. She assumed the salary for the job was “like a price

  on an item in a store.” Many women, like Martha, go through life think-

  ing that money is something that is controlled by other people, not by

  themselves.

  That women feel as though their lives are controlled by others should

  not surprise us, perhaps. As the psychiatrist Linda Austin notes in her

  book What’s Holding You Back? “the lives of women have been largely

  controlled by men until quite recently.”6 A few facts explain what she

  means. Although women were given the right to vote in Wyoming in

  1869 and in Utah in 1870, no nation-state gave them national voting

  rights until New Zealand in 1893, little more than a hundred years ago.

  The United States followed in 1920 and Britain in 1924. Switzerland

  didn’t give women this essential form of control over their lives until

  the astonishingly late date of 1971. No woman was allowed to earn a

  Bachelor of Science degree anywhere in the British Empire until 1875;

  the first Bachelor of Arts degree awarded to a woman followed two

  years later. Battling for other forms of control—such as the right to own

  property, make free and informed choices about procreation and birth

  control, and work in any profession of their choosing—occupied

  women in Western culture for much of the twentieth century.

  Even today, men control both the economic and political environ-

  ments in which women live and work. In 2001 in the United States,

  only 10.9 percent of the board of directors’ seats at Fortune 1000 com-

  panies were held by women.7 Although women now own about 40

  percent of all businesses in the United States, they receive only 2.3

  percent of the available equity capital needed for growth—male-owned

  companies receive the other 97.7 percent8 (a statistic that helps explain

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  Martha’s widely shared feeling that “other people” besides women con-

  trol the money in the world). In politics, no woman has ever been

  elected president or vice president of the United States; only 14 out of

  100 U.S. senators are women; and only 13.5 percent (59 out of 435)

  U.S. representatives are women. There have been only two female Su-

  preme Court justices since the United States was founded in 1776 (and

  both were appointed in the past 25 years), despite the fact that women

  represent more than 50 percent of the population. (Women are not the

  only group with good reason to feel as though their lives are controlled

  by others, of course. Many cultural and ethnic minorities suffer a similar

  “outsider effect,” seeing themselves closed out of most positions of polit-

  ical and economic power.)

  The situation is not much different in other English-speaking coun-

  tries or in Europe. Britain had a woman prime minister, Margaret

  Thatcher, for 11 years (1979–1990), but membership of the House of

  Commons remains strongly tilted in favor of men (only 18 percent of

  the 659 members are women). In the judiciary in England and Wales,

  only 4 percent of the high court judges and only 6 percent of the circuit

  court judges are women. Women occupy similarly low percentages of

  the top jobs in government and at major corporations in Australia, New

  Zealand, and the countries of Western Europe. Although parts of North-

  ern Europe, particularly Scandinavia, have made significant strides in

  this area over the past two decades, the representation of women in

  positions of political and economic power in all of these countries re-

  mains far below 50 percent.9

  Long barred from access to formal education and denied the right to

  vote, own property, and control their own bodies, women were in very

  material ways dependent on the will and whims of others to decide

  their fates. Women’s collective identity, as Austin writes, “for millennia

  . . . rested on the accurate acknowledgment that our lives were indeed

  controlled by external forces.”10

  The impact of this legacy can be enormous, influencing women’s

  actions in their private lives, at school, and in the workplace. In the

  personal realm, for example, it has long been customary in matters of

  the heart for women to leave the “asking” to men. Until quite recently,

  women were taught that they needed to wait for men to ask them to

  dance, to go out on dates, and to marry them, and the influence of this

  idea persists to this day. For LaKetia, 23, a sergeant in the U.S. Army

  who has a two-year-old child, this assumption produced drastic conse-

  quences. Unmarried when she became pregnant, LaKetia wanted the

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  father of her child to marry her. But he never offered, so she assumed

  he was unwilling. Only much later, after her daughter was born and

  relations with the father had deteriorated, did she discover that he’d

  been willing to marry her and would have if she had asked. But even

  though LaKetia is extremely capable, professionally ambitious, and ac-

  customed to exercising a high degree of control over both men and

  women in her job, she thought control of this particular decision—

  about whether or not they would marry—rested outside of her. Because

  the father of her child didn’t offer, she concluded that she had no alter-

  native but to raise her daughter on her own.

  Another good personal example—less life-determining but still tell-

  ing—comes from Emma, 36. A social science researcher with a doctor-

  ate in education, Emma is extremely successful and makes more money

  than her husband, a musician. She kept her own name when she mar-

  ried, and pays particular attention to the different ways in which her

  two children, a boy and a girl, are treated by teachers, family members,

  and friends. Despite this awareness, however, she found herself taking

  a “vacation from hell” a few years ago at a ranch in the Southwest. For

  a week, she and her children (both under four) shared a cabin and

  rudimentary bathroom facilities with 20 other guests. This happened,

  she told us, because it was her husband’s turn to choose their vacation

  destination. Since it was his turn, Emma had assumed that his choice

  was final and nonnegotiable, although he is not an inflexible man. Only

  later did she realize that she could have exerted some control over the

  decision by saying “these are the things I’ll accept, these are the things

  I won’t accept, and . . . No, really, if I go on vacation, I need a bathtub

  for the kids.”

  The belief that control over their lives rests with others can have a

  big impact on women’s experiences in school as well, as Linda learned

  from the female graduate students who c
omplained to her because

  they weren’t teaching courses of their own. Since then, Linda has en-

  countered numerous other examples of this problem. One year, a fe-

  male student asked why two male students had been allowed to partici-

  pate in the university’s May graduation ceremony even though they

  weren’t going to complete their degree requirements until late summer.

  The female student would have liked to be part of the ceremony too

  but assumed she needed to finish her degree requirements first. She

  never asked if she could participate (Linda would have said yes); both

  the male students had asked. Another time, a woman student asked

  Linda why she’d given a male student permission to use department

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  resources to print up business cards and had not offered the same op-

  portunity to her. Once again, the answer was the same: The male stu-

  dent had asked; the woman hadn’t. Once she did ask, Linda readily

  approved her request.

  The conclusions are obvious: The women believed that control over

  what they could teach, when they could celebrate their graduations,

  and which department resources they could use rested entirely with

  others; the men thought they might be able to exert some control over

  these issues—and tried.

  Examples of women ceding control over their lives in the profes-

  sional realm also abound. Susannah, a 29-year-old political strategist

  for a child advocacy organization, was hired by a think tank studying

  children’s rights shortly after she graduated from college. Initially, Su-

  sannah willingly “paid her dues” by getting to know the organization

  and working through its ground-level departments. But after eighteen

  months, she had identified the particular area in which she wanted to

  work and spotted an open job she thought she could do well. Although

  she mentioned her interest in the area to her boss more than once, she

  never named the job she wanted or asked directly to be considered for

  it. As a result, she spent two more years grinding away at a low-level

  job far below her capabilities. As soon as she realized that she could

  exert some control over her future in the organization and asked directly

  for the higher position (which had remained unfilled for two years),