Women, identity, and valuing ourselves

October 28, 2013

Britain's new ten pound note, featuring Jane Austen

The other week I wrote a post I called When Women Work For Free. It was inspired by Tess Vigeland's post Me, Work For Free At This Point In My Career? and today I was alerted to this New York Times piece by Tim Kreider (for which he was actually paid), Slaves of the Internet, Unite! I'm going off on a slight tangent here, especially as Kreider, obviously, is male, and yet has himself agreed to work for nothing on what sounds like multiple occasions. But the way women value themselves - and how their sense of identity messes with their ability to get more money - played into a talk I attended last week at a conference put on by Working Mother Media. Columbia Business School professor Michael Morris talked about his, and former student, Emily Amanatullah's, research into women and negotiating. I'm slightly obsessed with this topic, as some of you may know. I've reported two stories on negotiating for Marketplace in the past, and episode 13 of The Broad Experience was about what happens when women ask women for a raise. I'm always banging on about the bookAsk For It, which I recommend to any woman who'll listen.

Morris presented us with a graph showing that when women in the Columbia experiment had to negotiate for themselves, they lowballed themselves. As a result, they ended up with a far lower salary offer than the men in the experiment, who, after receiving a relatively low offer, countered with a much higher one, and got something in the middle. He said the women were notably "much less assertive" and that this is because "they anticipate a backlash" from the interviewer. They're trying to manage society's expectations for their behavior, he said. We all know what he's talking about: that idea that you have to be nice at all times and if you're not, you'll suffer for it. Sadly, other experiments have borne this out. Both male and female interviewers do view women with distaste when they negotiate aggressively. When men do so, neither sex bats an eyelid (read Ask For It to find out more).

(I should say here that I approached Morris after the talk and he doesn't seem to agree with me that part of the issue for women when negotiating for ourselves is that many women just don't think we deserve things, period. Maybe it would take a different experiment to prove that theory.)

But women aren't hampered by some innate inability to negotiate. Morris and Amanatullah found that when women are charged with negotiating on behalf of someone else, there's no difference in what they manage to get. Men and women, in other words, when negotiating for another person, aim high and get the same amount. What stymies women is juggling their sense of self and society's view of them with securing more money for themselves. These elements are at odds with one another. Morris went on to talk about women's sense of identity, and how that plays out in the workplace. I'll quote him: "People whose 'woman' identity was well integrated...they were more likely to negotiate better and be warm." Basically, it all comes down to your company culture, which, as we know, tends to default to 'male'. Morris says if you're a woman who feels comfortable in your corporate setting, you're more likely to be yourself, and thus do a better job of negotiating for yourself, than if you're having to put on a mask every day to go to work. 

"Shape an organizational culture so your employees don't feel they have to check their identity at the door," said Morris. "They can then negotiate better. Life is more comfortable when you have an integrated identity." 

Quite.

"I'm too crazed" (or managing your time)

October 25, 2013

Last month I tweeted this Harvard Business Review blog post, Please Stop Complaining About How Busy You Are. It was a fun read and rang true for me - a lot of what the author writes about in the piece is what we all hear coming out of our own mouths and those of friends and colleagues. I thought about it again earlier this week when I was at the Work Life Congress 2013, put on by Working Mother Media in midtown Manhattan.

The first speaker was Cali Williams Yost - maybe some of you know her. She's a big name in the work/life balance arena, although she hates using that phrase. She's pioneered the phrase work/life fit. Which brings me back to over-busyness. During her talk, Yost pointed out that today, we live in a 24/7 working world, communicating about work around the clock. So, she argues, there really is no 'work' (which you used to do within certain hours) and then 'life' (after work), like there used to be. There's a combo - work + life. And that means making some adjustments about the way you spend your time, and how you prioritize.

"We are responsible for our careers in ways we were not before," she said (certainly true for me and anyone else doing their own thing). But "now the boundaries [between work and life] are down people have no idea what to do," said Yost, citing examples of people who claim they're so crazed they "can't even walk the dog". She urges us to try to think of all our responsibilities - at work and at home - as one big platter that must be picked at. "We have to re-frame all these to-dos and think of it as a buffet of possibilities." You can't eat every dish on the buffet, but you have to see all those responsibilities as deserving of attention regardless of whether they're home related (dog-walking, dentist-appointment-planning) or work-related (getting that spreadsheet done). She says attacking your to-do list this way isn't hard - it just requires making small tweaks to your everyday thinking and actions. 

Here are a few traits of people she called "naturals" at managing their work and life:

• They keep work and personal together (see above).
• The regularly reflect, and when they see a gap, something they're not doing, they take regular small steps to close it.
• They collaborate, communicate, and coordinate (for instance, to a colleague, "I'd like to take Friday off - can you cover for me? I'll do the same for you another day.") 
• They celebrate success - i.e. they focus on the stuff they do get done, rather than beating themselves up for the things that remain on their list.

Each attendee got a copy of Yost's book Tweak It: Make What Matters to You Happen Every Day. I haven't had time to delve into it yet.

Which probably means I should make it a priority.

Working remotely and The Year Without Pants

October 18, 2013

Earlier this week I headed uptown to CUNY Journalism School, which was hosting a lunchtime talk by author Scott Berkun. I loved his book The Myths of Innovation, which I read last year while studying on CUNY's entrepreneurial journalism program, where I launched The Broad Experience. I'm currently reading his Confessions of a Public Speaker, which I'd recommend to anyone, who, like me, has fairly limited experience of speaking in front of a crowd but intends to do more and wants to get better at it. What I like about Berkun's writing is that it's a bit like good radio - it feels like he's talking to you in a friendly, upfront, informal way. His talk was about his latest book The Year Without Pants. I'll explain in a minute, but I should say here that this post doesn't pertain particularly to women, as most of my stuff does on this site, but to the workplace in general.

Berkun, a former Microsoft employee, makes a good living these days as a writer, consultant and speaker. But after consulting for quite a while he felt like a bit of a fake. How could he advise companies on how to do things when he hadn't worked in one for so long himself? So when a consulting gig at WordPress.com came up, he turned it permanent - for a year, anyway. That year of working for one of the world's most popular blogging platforms (20% of all sites are built on WordPress) is what he describes in The Year Without Pants. After all, when you work remotely, as everyone at WordPress does, who needs pants? (My UK friends will snicker here because over there, the land of my birth, pants constitute underwear, rather than trousers, as they do in North America. I presume Berkun did not spend a year without underwear, but you never know). 

He was working in an environment where no one worked together. Everyone was scattered throughout the country and the world. Everyone at WordPress was genuinely excited to be there, he said, not part of the whopping 70% of Americans who are said to be un-engaged at work. If people love being there, who needs to be told what to do, right? No one, he said, used email (viewed as an archaic form of communication, at least for internal stuff), there were few rules, little structure, an open vacation policy, and people were treated like adults. Sounds like bliss, especially the part about being treated like a grown-up. That's the problem with so much work culture - that feeling you have of being corraled and talked down to like so many recalcitrant children.

But it wasn't perfect. He said something I've heard said by my Generation X friends about Generation Y workers - that they don't like conflict. He described WordPress as a conflict-averse culture, where ideas were all seemingly taken on board and no one dared criticize openly. Also, the fact that people are all working in different locations meant a lot of interactions were happening in chat-room-like settings. He pointed out that it takes a bit of forwardness to jump into a discussion that way. He also said at one point that given so many of us spend our days in offices, surrounded by colleagues, yet mostly communicate with them via computer, is this remote working type of situation really so different? Last month I met with an old friend and colleague in London who talked about how annoyed she gets by co-workers who sit two desks away, emailing her about something when they could have a face-to-face conversation. She thinks it's absurd, and often pops up by their desks, urging them to talk instead. But the reality is most of us are doing this now - writing rather than speaking, in part because it does make disagreement easier to avoid, or at least postpone, and we're all getting used to this rather more polite way of working. I still remember the slanging matches that used to occur in our small office at the London publishing house where I worked with the aforementioned friend (in the distant mid-'90s) - voices were raised, tempers were hot, doors were occasionally slammed. How, though, ultimately, do problems manifest themselves today, if not in email or face-to-face discussion? I suspect I'll have to read the book to find out what Berkun's final take is on WordPress and whether they way they do things might actually end up being the future of work.

He gave us this URL for those who'd like access to a free first chapter of the book: bitly.com/nopants. 

How to be a successful rainmaker

October 11, 2013

Last night I found myself sitting in a grand, high-ceilinged room at the New York City Bar Association, attending a panel for female lawyers called Women Who Ask: How Successful Women Rainmakers Ask for and Bring in Business. As I reported in my piece about female lawyers that aired on Marketplace this summer, the number of women lawyers, particularly at big firms, dwindles sharply as the years go by. Only about 15 percent of equity partners at firms are female. My interviewee Marla Perksy told me a major reason women's status tends to stall is that they rarely bring in business for their firms - they're not rainmakers. Last night's panel featured two top lawyers who have made plenty of rain on a regular basis, Sheila Birnbaum and Nina Gussack. The panel was moderated by Vivia Chen of The Careerist and The American Lawyer.

Vivia Chen, Sheila Birnbaum and Nina Gussack at the NY Bar Association

Here are a few takeaways I think are just as relevant to everyone else as they are to lawyers.

• Landing business is not easy or straightforward, and it doesn't generally come from a single interaction. "The first bit of significant business is like getting the first pickle out of the jar," said Nina Gussack. "A wide swath of people" needs to find you impressive and admire your work in order to want to trust you with their business. "The entire fabric of [your] effort leads to opportunities," said Gussack. Each woman emphasised that the business of landing business comes from building relationships, listening hard to clients and being incredibly responsive to their needs.

• On the subject of listening, they said some stereotypes are true: women are better at listening to clients, in general, than men are. Gussack said men tend to respond to a client's problem with a valedictory tale of some case they won last month or last week, whereas women are better at actually paying heed to what the client is saying, taking in what their needs are, and responding appropriately.

• Gussack made the point that "fear of rejection is women's biggest impediment...it's the biggest reason they don't put themselves out there" and don't attempt to bring in business in the first place. But when you do get rejected, only allow yourself a brief wallow - no more than a week. Both Birnbaum and Gussack said it was important to try to find out why you didn't land the business (also true for writers/journalists sending pitches and getting rejected) so you can plug any gaps and be closer to getting it next time. They talked about 'needling' the firm that hadn't awarded you the business every three months or so, just to check in and find out how well (or not) the firm that did win is handling the case.

• Sheila Birnbaum made an important point I don't think we hear enough: being friendly and decent to people further down the ladder than you is good business. "People want to give business to people they like. Be nice to people lower down in the company – they’ll remember that." You never know who's going to be a decision-maker in five years when you may be somewhere else. 

• Neither woman pretended it had been easy to get where they both are. Birnbaum said she'd never had kids because she knew she couldn't have had the career she'd had if she'd opted to become a mother. But she was very happy with the choices she'd made. Gussack does have kids, a professor husband with a more flexible schedule, and has had the same nanny/housekeeper for 22 years. She emphasised the collosal importance of having a good support network. Both loved their careers and found what they did incredibly worthwile. "There is nothing more energizing and motivating than doing hard work for someone," said Gussack. "It's really important to be powerful in your space," particularly, she said, when you have teenagers at home who are unlikely to thank you for anything you do. There is something highly rewarding and empowering, both women emphasized, about doing complicated, problem-solving work and getting paid for it.

• As for how not to become one of the many women who drop out of the profession during the childbearing and rearing years, Birnbaum and Gussack said women should try to stay focused on the long haul. "It's not a short race," to success, "it's a marathon, and you need to pace yourself," Gussack said. She was sorry so many women quit before they'd "had a chance to taste the success Sheila and I have". Her advice was to "get in the game and stay in the game as long as you find it satisfying." If you genuinely love what you do, they advised that you keep focused on the bigger picture and "power through the hard times" knowing they will not last forever.

My next show will focus on women lawyers and will be out on October 21st.