Women Don't Ask Read online

C H A P T E R 1

  saying what they need and responds badly when they do. Nonetheless,

  until now the average man has approached life both inside and outside

  the workplace with a powerful advantage over the average woman sim-

  ply because he suspected that life holds more possibilities than those

  publicly announced and widely available. What Judi’s story reveals (and

  the experiences of Susannah and Christine and many more women con-

  firm) is that women possess a wonderful capacity to learn this lesson,

  a lesson that can change their lives in ways both large and small.

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  A Price Higher than Rubies

  OneofLinda’sgraduatestudents—ayoungwomanwhohadtaken

  her negotiation class—visited Linda in her office to share some

  good news. The student had just accepted a job offer from a great com-

  pany and couldn’t wait to begin her new career. When Linda asked

  how the negotiations had gone, the student seemed surprised. Her new

  employer had offered her so much more than she’d expected, it hadn’t

  occurred to her to negotiate. She simply accepted what she was offered.

  This story points out an obvious truth: Before we decide to negotiate

  for something we must first be dissatisfied with what we have. We need

  to believe that something else—more money, a better title, or a different

  division of household chores—would make us happier or more satis-

  fied. But if we’re already satisfied with what we have or with what we’ve

  been offered, asking for something else might not occur to us. Ironi-

  cally, this turns out to be a big problem for women: being satisfied

  with less.

  Expecting Less

  In 1978, psychologists discovered that women’s pay satisfaction tends

  to be equal to or higher than that of men in similar positions, even

  though women typically earn less than men doing the same work.1 Four

  years later, a broader study looked at many different types of organiza-

  tions and reached a similar conclusion, which the author of that study,

  the social psychologist Faye Crosby, called “the paradox of the con-

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  tented female worker.”2 Seventeen years later, in 1999, a study by two

  management researchers confirmed this finding again.3 Even at the turn

  of the twenty-first century, in other words, with all of the gains made

  by women during the previous four decades, women still feel at least

  as satisfied as men with their salaries, even though they continue to

  earn less for the same work.

  How to explain this strange phenomenon? Why would women be

  just as satisfied as men while earning less? Many scholars believe that

  women are satisfied with less because they expect less: They go into the

  work force expecting to be paid less than men, so they’re not disap-

  pointed when those expectations are met.4 To test this theory, the psy-

  chologist Beth Martin surveyed a group of undergraduate business stu-

  dents. After presenting them with information about salary ranges for

  the different types of jobs they would be qualified to take after graduat-

  ing, she asked them to identify which job they expected to obtain and

  what they thought their starting salary would be. Working from the

  same information, women reported salary expectations between 3 and

  32 percent lower than those reported by men for the same jobs. There

  was no evidence that the men were more qualified for the jobs they

  chose—just that women expected to earn less for doing the same work.5

  In another study, two social psychologists, Brenda Major and Ellen

  Konar, conducted a mail survey of students in management programs

  at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In this survey, students

  were asked to indicate their salary expectations upon graduation as well

  as at their “career peak”—how much they expected to earn the year

  they earned the most. They found that the men expected to earn about

  13 percent more than the women during their first year of working full-

  time and expected to earn 32 percent more at their career peaks. Major and Konar ruled out several potential explanations for these differences,

  such as gender differences in the importance of pay or in the importance

  of doing interesting work, gender differences in the students’ percep-

  tions of their skills or qualifications, and gender differences in their

  supervisors’ assessments of the students’ skills or qualifications.6

  Another study also found similar gender differences in ideas about

  how much money was “fair pay” for particular jobs. Using college se-

  niors at Michigan State University, researchers discovered that women’s

  estimates of “fair pay” averaged 4 percent less than men’s estimates for

  their first jobs and 23 percent less than men’s for fair career-peak pay.7

  These three studies suggest that women as a rule expect to be paid less

  than men expect to be paid for the same work.

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  Our interviews bore out these findings. One standard question we

  asked was “Are you usually successful in getting what you want?” To

  our initial surprise, almost every woman we talked to said yes. When

  we probed further, however, it turned out that many of the women we

  talked to felt as though they were successful at getting what they wanted

  in part because they didn’t want very much. Angela, 28, the marketing

  director of a community development bank, said she’s usually success-

  ful at getting what she wants because “I don’t think I ever want some-

  thing that’s that far out of my reach.” Julianne, 36, a graphic designer

  who is now a full-time mother, said she usually gets what she wants

  because “I have pretty realistic expectations in my life, both profession-

  ally and personally.” Cheryl, 45, the owner of a small toy store, said

  she’s good at getting what she wants because she’s not very demanding

  and “readily pleased.” These women, like so many others, hold modest

  expectations for what will constitute appropriate rewards for their work

  and time. Since lower expectations are more likely to be filled than

  higher ones, the odds are better that these women—and most women—

  will be satisfied with the rewards that life sends their way.

  But this doesn’t make sense, you may say. Why would a woman who

  is poorly paid be satisfied with her salary under any circumstances?

  Surprisingly, extensive research has documented that pay satisfaction

  correlates with pay expectations, and not with how much may be possi-

  ble or with what the market will bear. In other words, satisfaction de-

  pends not on whether your salary is comparable to what others like

  you are paid, but on whether it falls in line with your expectations.

  People are dissatisfied with their pay only when it falls short of what

  they expected to get, not when it falls short of what they could have

  gotten.8 And most women don’t expect to get paid very much, so when

  they don’t get much—as so often happens—they are less likely to be

  disappointed.

  No Value to Women’s Workr />
  What leads women to undervalue the work they do and set their expec-

  tations so low? The Old Testament says that a good woman is worth

  “a price higher than rubies.”9 But because most women until recently

  devoted much of their lives to unpaid labor in the home they’re unac-

  customed to thinking of their work in terms of its dollar value. Many

  factors play into this problem, with perhaps the most obvious being

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  our historical predisposition against recognizing the economic value of

  what society deems to be women’s work. The economics journalist Ann

  Crittenden, in her book The Price of Motherhood, explains: “Two-thirds of all wealth is created by human skills, creativity, and enterprise—

  what is known as ‘human capital.’ And that means parents who are

  conscientiously and effectively rearing children are literally, in the

  words of economist Shirley Burggraf, ‘the major wealth producers in

  our economy.’”10

  A society’s education system also makes a huge contribution to the

  creation of “human capital,” of course—by training children, guiding

  their creativity, and helping them direct their skills toward productive

  forms of enterprise. But children who do not grow up with attentive

  caregivers in safe, stable homes tend to derive far less benefit from their

  education system and only rarely grow up to become “major wealth

  producers.” Schools can only do so much to compensate for deprivation

  or neglect at home.

  Despite the demonstrated economic importance of child rearing,

  however, women who devote themselves either full- or part-time to

  raising their children are not only thought by many people to be doing

  nothing (“not working”), they suffer a loss of income that, Crittenden

  reports, “produces a bigger wage gap between mothers and childless

  women than the wage gap between young men and women. This for-

  gone income, the equivalent of a huge ‘mommy tax,’ is typically more

  than $1 million for a college-educated American woman.”11 Looked at

  this way, doing “women’s work” not only means working at an occupa-

  tion with no recognized monetary value, but working at one that is

  perceived to have negative value. Rather than being paid to do this terribly demanding and important work, in other words, women must

  pay—with lost earnings, missed opportunities, and, in many cases, rad-

  ically diminished financial security.

  Lest we think that all this has changed since the women’s movement

  propelled so many women into the work force, and that these statistics

  refer to what is now a relatively small group of women, Crittenden

  reports that “homemaking . . . is still the largest single occupation in

  the United States. . . . Even among women in their thirties, by far the

  most common occupation is full-time housekeeping and caregiving.”12

  Even the most advantaged and best-educated women fall into this cate-

  gory: “The persistence of traditional family patterns cuts across eco-

  nomic, class, and racial lines. . . . The United States also has one of the

  lowest labor force participation rates for college-educated women in

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  the developed world; only in Turkey, Ireland, Switzerland, and the

  Netherlands does a smaller proportion of female college graduates work

  for pay.”13

  The cumulative impact of these realities on women cannot be exag-

  gerated. Accustomed to laboring without pay at work that is devalued

  by every objective financial measure, and to seeing most other women

  devote a huge proportion of their adult lives to unpaid work, women

  enter the traditional work force unaccustomed to evaluating their time

  and abilities in economic terms.

  Our interviews produced many examples of this handicap. Angela,

  the marketing director for the community development bank, had a

  college degree from Princeton, five years’ experience as a successful lob-

  byist on Capitol Hill, and a year of working on a presidential campaign.

  When her candidate lost, she began looking for another job and quickly

  identified two that she found attractive. But neither job matched exactly

  the work she had been doing before, making her fear that she wasn’t

  qualified for either. As a result, when one of the firms made her an offer,

  she was so surprised and grateful that she just accepted it. When she

  called the other company to withdraw her name, she learned to her

  surprise that they had been planning to make her an offer as well. If

  she had waited before accepting the first offer, the existence of the sec-

  ond offer would have put her in a better negotiating position. But be-

  cause she undervalued her skills and her appeal, she accepted the first

  offer she received—and a salary that was less than she had been making

  before and less than she almost certainly could have gotten.

  Similarly, Joan, 41, a magazine editor, described being sought after

  to serve as the editor of a new magazine targeted at working women.

  At one point during the hiring discussions, her future boss asked what

  she wanted to be paid. “In hindsight,” she said, “I was so naı¨ve and

  clueless, and I just had never really made a lot of money in my life, and

  I didn’t need a lot of money, so what I asked for seemed like a lot of

  money. And it was just not a lot of money.” After she was hired and

  spoke to other people in similar positions, she discovered how “pa-

  thetic” her salary was. Her explanation for her naı¨vete´ was that she

  “hadn’t been in the work force for a lot of years of her working life” and

  was “very young in the world of business”—an explanation that might

  accurately describe the lives of many, if not most, women.

  Like many of their female peers, Angela and Joan were suffering from

  a limited understanding of their market power. That is, they didn’t real-

  ize that a market existed for their particular skills and talent and experi-

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  ence—and that this market could help them establish what they were

  worth to prospective employers. Evidence from our interviews suggests

  that this is a common problem among women. Kim, the radio news

  anchor, admits with embarrassment that at one job her immediate boss

  (who did not control salary decisions) laughed when she discovered

  what Kim was paid, it was so little. The station’s most prominent “on-

  air” talent, Kim hosted the morning “drive-time” news program at the

  leading station in an intensely competitive radio market. Although she

  was widely admired by her colleagues and audience, she later discov-

  ered that her peers and even many people who were junior to her in

  both rank and public prominence—most of them male—were paid far

  more. She probably could have drummed up an offer from a competing

  station in short order and might even have been able to double her

  salary, but at the time she had no idea what her work was worth—or

  that she could use the market to her advantage in this way.

  Even when they recognize their
market power, many women feel

  uncomfortable about using it as leverage in a negotiation. Stephanie,

  the administrative assistant, didn’t ask for an increase in her salary even

  when she had another job offer and her boss asked what it would take

  to keep her. “I thought it would be taking advantage of an opportunity

  but an unfair advantage,” she explained. Stephanie understood that she

  had some market power, but she didn’t think it was right to use that

  power.

  The Stanford linguist Penelope Eckert traces women’s lack of aware-

  ness about their market value to traditional labor divisions between

  men and women. A man’s personal worth, she notes, has long been

  based on his “accumulation of goods, status, and power in the market-

  place,” while a woman’s worth was until recently based largely on “her

  ability to maintain order in, and control over, her domestic realm.”14

  Because this historical legacy makes men more accustomed to evaluat-

  ing their worth in the marketplace, they also seem more comfortable

  using their market power to get what they want—by researching aver-

  age salaries for comparable work, bringing in competing offers, and

  emphasizing that they have objective value outside their organizations.

  For Love, Not Money

  In her review of research on children’s household chores, Jacqueline

  Goodnow observed that, in addition to being given chores that empha-

  size their dependence, girls are also assigned chores that must be

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  performed on a more routine basis, such as cooking and cleaning. Boys’

  chores, while encouraging their independence, also tend to involve less

  frequent tasks such as washing the car, shoveling snow, and taking

  out the garbage.15 Goodnow surmises that girls rarely earn money by

  performing the housekeeping chores they shoulder at home (such as

  cleaning, cooking, and washing dishes) for their neighbors, because

  those jobs are identified as female responsibilities and are typically

  performed by the woman in each house. In contrast, more infrequent

  tasks, such as lawn-mowing and shoveling snow, tend to be identified

  as male responsibilities, but the man in each house, instead of per-

  forming them himself, often pays a neighborhood child—usually a

  boy—to fill in for him.16