When women work for free

October 4, 2013

This piece by Tess Vigeland, 'Me, Work for Free at This Point in My Career?' really hit home when I read it the other day. Career changers or those experimenting with an additional line of work are usually expected to do a lot of work for nothing, either to prove themselves or to 'build their brand', as Tess discusses in her piece. As she says part-way through:

"I haven’t even addressed the gender behavior issues that are most certainly at play here. Without placing all blame on my womanhood, dozens of studies have shown that females are, generally speaking, terrible at asking for what they want in the working world — in my case, to get paid fairly for my services."

She is spot on. Many women have real trouble valuing themselves (genuinely thinking of themselves as having any value in the world, for one, and then putting a monetary value on their services), and a few days before reading Tess's piece I was much struck by this one on Forbes, written by Adrienne Graham, 'No, You Can't Pick my Brain. It Costs Too Much.' Graham points out that women tend to have trouble saying no and turning people down, thus they end up having a lot of coffees and phone calls with acquaintances and strangers who want to tap some of their expertise - expertise they might otherwise be charging for. This is something Financial Times columnist Mrs. Moneypenny addresses in the latest episode of my show - she has come up with a way of turning down these requests in a firm but graceful way. Women - to generalize - enjoying helping other people. It's one of the things I remember really liking about the job when I was an executive assistant. But our desire to help others can often lead us to sacrifice something we need for ourselves - like money.

I'm curious to know the extent to which men say yes to these kinds of 'pick your brain' coffee meetings, and how much work career-changing men consent to do for nothing. I'd be willing to bet they're a lot more protective of their time and earnings than women are. But say you are in the kind of situation Tess is in, or I'm in as I try to get the word out about The Broad Experience - when does it make sense to work for nothing and when doesn't it? This topic arose on a conference call I was on this morning with three other entrepreneurial women. The concensus seemed to be that you had to weigh up not just the money side of things, but how much personal pleasure/fulfillment you get out of whatever it is you're doing for nothing, and how that feeds into everything else. But where does a pleasant, sharing-your-knowledge type of interaction end and exploitation begin? At what point do you become cynical about the karma and goodwill you're assured will result from your actions? (In my case, frankly, probably far too early. I am British after all. ) I'd love to get comments below from anyone who's been in this situation and has views on where to draw the line. What has worked, and what hasn't? Has pulling back from a 'free' situation ultimately led to actual paid work? The Broad Experience wants to know.

How working women have created a less equal world

September 26, 2013

My well-thumbed copy of The XX Factor

Alison Wolf is just arriving in the US to discuss her book, with its provocative (sub) title - The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World. I met her in London recently, and she'll feature in the next episode of The Broad Experience. I tore through the book, though I didn't really expect to. Perhaps I've become too used to reading self-helpish books like Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In (which I enjoyed), but knowing Wolf was a longtime professor and expert on labor markets, I feared I might have to plow through a pretty dry tome. But, career academic though she is, Wolf thankfully doesn't write like one. 

The book talks about the extent to which modern working women's lives would be impossible without the poorly paid labor of millions of other women. People like me, and probably you, Wolf says, can have the lives we do because some other female is looking after our children, cleaning our house, doing our dry cleaning or looking after our elderly parents - all work that would have been done by women - for free - just a few decades ago. She's not saying this is a terrible thing, but she takes readers on a fascinating tour of just how much educated women's lives have changed in the past half century or so, and how, by comparison, less educated women's have not. She reminds us that, until the pill came along, sex really was the key to women's livelihoods, whether you look at that from the perspective of women 'saving themselves' for marriage - which was their livelihood in many cases - or women actually earning their living through prostitution. She also has interesting data on how many sexual partners women with degrees have compared to other women, and how much this has changed over the years - this is all part of her contention that 'elite women' live quite different lives from everyone else on the planet. In short, highly educated women, on the whole, have sex later than others (all the better to concentrate on our grades and careers). But education seems to make women more adventurous - or encourages them to take their time in finding 'the one', because these days women with degrees have a slightly higher number of sexual partners than those without.

And you know how we all think of the Scandinavian countries as beacons of equality? 

"The thing no one believes till I tell them is that Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries have the most segregated labor markets in the world in terms of men and women working separately...if you walk into the Swedish or Danish parliament you see lots of women…but the Scandinavians very early on outsourced domestic life, daycare centers, care for elderly...all the sorts of things mothers used to do in the home they turned into paid labor. So what happened was vast numbers of women who used to do female type things at home [now do] female type things in the labor market.

...So you’ve got this enormous female workforce that’s staffing the welfare state, and a professional life that is not more integrated than anywhere else." 

The book is packed with interesting data (of note: it wasn't the advent of the vacuum cleaner or dishwasher, but the invention of frozen meals that really saw women entering the workforce in numbers), and information on working women in different parts of the world. Wolf also takes her hat off to the educated women of the past who spent many hours a week volunteering. That world has pretty much gone, Wolf says, and we're worse off for it. 

That said, she has no desire to go back to the kitchen. 

The new show will be out on October 7th.

Getting ahead on your own terms - and skipping the laundry

September 10, 2013

This morning I attended a panel put on by New York Women in Communications on women in the workplace called ‘Getting Ahead on your Own Terms’. It was moderated by personal finance columnist and Today Show financial editor Jean Chatzky. The panelists (all but one wearing killer heels) were:

Cathie Black, former chairman and president of Hearst Magazines, who oversaw a slew of titles including Cosmopolitan, Jeanine Shao Collins, chief innovation officer at digital publisher Meredith 360, Dustee Tucker Jenkins, wo runs global public relations for Target, and Debra Shriver, chief communications officer at Hearst.

L to R, Deb Shriver, Dustee Tucker Jenkins, Elaine Shao Collins, Cathie Black, Jean Chatzky, NYWICI president Liz Kaplow

The panel was preceded by a quick introduction from a (female) lawyer whose name I missed, but whose firm, Davis and Gilbert, sponsored the event. Her advice? Put in the hours to succeed, network to build your career - and just accept the fact it’s exhausting - and most important, “don’t sit back and wait for your career to happen”. It won’t. That’s a mistake I made for years.

Some highlights from the panel:

Early on, the panel discussed the importance of being direct at work, something my guest and I will be talking about in the next episode of the show. They didn’t mention the fact that being direct doesn’t always go well for women, since we’re often judged on how ‘nice’ we are. I’ll get back to niceness in a minute.

Dustee Tucker Jenkins of Target mentioned the importance of encouragement. “I’ve always had people in my life who thought I could do more than I could,” she said. This is key for women, because most of us are under-confident. It’s something I wish I’d had more of myself.

Jenkins also talked about her approach when she moved from working for government to working for a huge brand, Target. She took time to learn the organization and adapt her style to theirs. She took a lot of notes during the early months because she knew she wouldn’t see the organization with ‘fresh eyes’ for that long. She said it was incredibly helpful to go back to those notes many months down the line, when she was ready to implement some changes (and not implement others she might have made at the start had she not given herself time to let everything sink in).

Cathie Black and Debra Shriver talked about how polite women tend to be and how women must make themselves heard. Black talked about how Shriver had burst into her office at Hearst one day, mad because she hadn’t been invited to a certain meeting. Black said she’d probably been left off the invite by accident and told her to go anyway. Shriver did, and, she said, ended up running the meeting. “Go where you think you should be and make a contribution,” said Black. She said too many woman sat on the corner of the table at meetings (“the dead zone”, as she put it) and didn’t say a word throughout.

“You’re not in that job to find your new best friends” became a brief topic of conversation as these senior women discussed how much pressure women are under to be nice, and how much they want to be nice at work. Chatzky admitted she suffers from this, while Cathie Black, who, after all, has run a huge company, was more pragmatic. “It’s lonely at the top,” Black said. “It’s about being respected,” rather than being loved.

“Saying no is just as important as saying yes”: this was another subject that got quite a bit of air time. As I’ve written about elsewhere, it’s something many women have a problem doing (mainly because we want to be nice), including at least one of the panelists. Jeannine Shao Collins said she’d just recently said yes to being involved in two of her kids’ schools, which, she indicated, was a crazy decision given her schedule. Again, this is something one of my next guests, Financial Times columnist Mrs. Moneypenny, will discuss on the next podcast – she’s excellent at saying no herself.

In a similar vein, Jean Chatzky said she'd recently hired a car service to shuttle her daughter around town, because trying to do that herself on top of her own work was just too time consuming. She said she’d struggled with the idea for a while before making the decision, but she doesn’t feel guilty. She feels relieved that her daughter is getting where she needs to be and she can concentrate on what she needs to get done herself.

Of course this option isn’t available to all of us, but it’s just one example of deciding when it makes financial and practical sense to outsource something you’d otherwise do yourself. Jeannine Shao Collins has three kids and a fulltime job and said she hasn’t done a load of laundry in 16 years.

Amen to that.

Ditching The Feminine Filter

September 5, 2013

"Our conclusion really was that this is why women aren’t in positions of power – they’re trying to be the ideal woman, and they’re not thinking about what they really want." - Jodi Detjen, co-author, The Orange Line

Ah, the ideal woman: she does everything perfectly at work and at home, she's a wonderful mother, she looks great, and (naturally) she's very nice. And Jodi Detjen says she's largely the reason women aren't further ahead in their careers. Detjen is co-author, along with Michelle Waters and Kelly Watson, of The Orange Line: A Woman's Guide to Integrating Career, Family and Life. I interviewed her recently for the latest episode of The Broad Experience, which will be out on Monday. The authors contend that women unwittingly hold oursevles back from achieving more at work because we're wedded (pun intended) to age-old assumptions of what we should be as women - assumptions the authors say underlie many of our waking thoughts. They call this set of assumptions The Feminine Filter, a filter through which women tend to view the world, falling back on thoughts like, 'It's my job to take primary care of the house and children' and 'I'm never good enough.'

Some readers will object to Detjen and her fellow authors' advice because, like Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, their book concentrates on what women themselves are doing to hold themselves back (and how to change that), not on what companies are and are not doing to implement more of an even playing field. I don't mind, though, because I've made a lot of work-related mistakes due to beliefs I've held that are exactly the ones the authors outline in the book. The female assumption Detjen mentioned that resonates most with me? 'If we follow the rules, good things will happen.' I thought that for years, and millions of women, and probably quite a few men, still do. But it's nonsense. Following the rules may help you receive a few positive reviews, a metaphorical pat on the head, but it won't help you get what you really want at work. For that, you need to take risks and get out of your comfort zone. But most women aren't told this early on, and it doesn't occur to them, because rule-following has always served them well at school. Yet work is an entirely different animal.

This book is nuanced, much more so than Lean In, and unlike Lean In, which focuses solely on how women can excel at work (but not in the rest of life), The Orange Line's authors all have experience of having either put work before life, and suffered, or the rest of life before work, with similar results. Detjen and co. want women to be able to flourish both at work and at home, whether that home has a spouse and/or children in it or not. 

You can read Broad Experience guest Stacy-Marie Ishmael's review of The Orange Line on Medium - she introduced me to Jodi Detjen in the first place. The new show will be posted here early on Monday afternoon.