Knowing Your Value (10 page)

There’s also the feeling that women, especially when they’re in the minority, offer fresh perspective. As I interviewed highly successful women in finance and government, I began to wonder if being in the minority might sometimes work to their advantage.

That’s often the case on
Morning Joe
. On days when I’m outnumbered by men, when, for example, Donny Deutsch, Dylan Ratigan, and Lawrence O’Donnell get on a testosterone-fueled roll, I’m the one to say, “Hold on, big boys.”

The absence of women in the top spots on Wall Street was blatantly obvious at the height of the financial crisis. If you turned on the television news in the middle of it all, you’ll probably recall that iconic scene of the seven heads of the biggest banks hauled before Congress. One couldn’t help but notice the total lack of diversity in that line-up.

Some behavioral economists believe there are biological reasons men make crazy bets. Joe Herbert, a neuroscientist
at Cambridge University who studied the effects of testosterone on stock traders, told
New York
magazine, “The banking crisis was caused by doing what no society ever allows, permitting young males to behave in an unregulated way. Anyone who studied neurobiology would have predicted disaster.”

Headlines such as
New York
magazine’s “What If Women Ran Wall Street?” and the
Washington Post
’s “In Banking Crisis, Guys Get the Blame, More Women Needed in Top Jobs, Critics Say” promoted the idea that we all might benefit from having more women in positions of power on Wall Street.

Would Wall Street have crumbled in 2008 if women were running the show? I ask both Brooksley Born, former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Sheila Bair, current head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Both are rarities in the world of government: they’ve held powerful positions overseeing the banking industry, they famously clashed with Wall Street during their tenure as financial regulators, and both are well-known for displaying political bravery in their (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to warn the country of looming threats to the American economy. As head of the CFTC during the Clinton administration, Born was among the first to call for greater disclosure and regulation of the rapidly growing market in financial derivatives. As head of the FDIC, the government agency which regulates banks and insures depositors, Sheila Bair has been a prominent figure in the current economic
meltdown and was also recognized for her early attempt to get the second Bush administration to address the imminent subprime mortgage crisis.

Neither is willing to categorize women as less likely to be risk takers. Both point to the fact that women in the finance world are outsiders, however, and to some degree that fact helped them bring a new perspective to bear on the industry’s problems.

Born says, “You know, I’ve read these studies about risk taking, but I don’t have the expertise to evaluate them. I do think that if you are a bit of an outsider, which certainly a woman in that position [as a government banking regulator] was then, and to some extent is now, you may not be blinded by the conventional wisdom, or the group-think, that is the views held by your peers. You obviously aren’t part of the club and therefore don’t have pressure to remain in everybody’s good graces in quite the same way. Maybe you can analyze things a little independently, and if you come to a different conclusion than the others, maybe you have the courage to express that conclusion.”

But the flip side of that coin is, if you’re an outsider, nobody’s taking you seriously. Born was trained as a lawyer, not a banker, and she acknowledges that that played a role in her inability to force change: “I was not from Wall Street, which many of them were. And in fact, many of them were from the very highest ranks of Wall Street. And that, in and of itself, was a bit of a club, to which I did not belong ... I also think that they all knew each other to some extent from their previous
lives. They didn’t know me. I was in a small agency, much smaller than any of the other financial regulatory agencies. It had traditionally been a rather weak agency, a backwater if you will, that happened to oversee derivatives. And in fact, I think [the fact that the agency was a backwater] may have been the reason why, in that era, some women had been head of the CFTC, but no women had been chair of the SEC or of the Fed.”

The FDIC’s Sheila Bair echoes Born’s sentiments. “I do think that to the extent you let outsiders into the financial sector, that’s good, and it really is a club world ... to the extent women have been outsiders, getting them in to take fresh looks and offer fresh perspectives is very helpful.” Did being the rare female working in finance put her at a disadvantage when she was calling for reform in the subprime mortgage market? “The media and others have focused on my gender,” she explains, “but I think just as relevant is that I am a Midwesterner, and I graduated from a public university, so I was never part of the East Coast, New York financial establishment. I think my frankness was unusual as was my outspokenness, particularly coming from the FDIC, which has historically taken a back seat among financial regulators. While some may have focused on my gender, I think my views may have been too much, too soon for others to adopt them.”

I argue that as outsiders in the world of high finance, women like Born and Bair can think more clearly and offer new insights. But in practice, if you’re an outsider and nobody’s
taking your perspective seriously, your insights have no effect because nobody hears you. When I give her my reasoning, Born says, “Exactly. That’s the problem!”

Professor Hannah Riley Bowles studies gender in negotiation and leadership at Harvard University. She describes diversity as a double-edged sword: “Diverse teams often perform better than teams that are less diverse,” but only if people in the workplace actually value diversity and want to benefit from the fact that dissimilar people will bring alternate experiences and viewpoints to bear on their input. “If you’re in a context where people say things like ‘diversity doesn’t matter, we’re really all the same around here, we’re color blind, gender blind, or whatever,’ then people feel self-conscious about their differences. Then those differences become suppressed, and the potential for communication failures increase,” she says, citing research done by Robin Ely and David Thomas at Harvard Business School.

Born’s and Bair’s unheeded warnings about potentially cataclysmic banking practices could be considered communication failures of the greatest degree.

Obviously there are still major obstacles that keep women from achieving parity in the workplace. But were my own problems caused by gender bias? Have I been discriminated against in my career? Probably, somewhere along the line. But being angry and blaming men (and even high-level women) for holding me back isn’t constructive. I take full responsibility, and therefore full credit, for my career. My feeling is, I can only control what I can control. Instead of just being frustrated
about the wage disparities that exist in my field, I’d rather think about what I can do within the parameters of my situation. When it came time to take drastic action to resolve my salary problem, I wanted to find ways to take matters into my own hands.

MY STORY, WITH DONNY DEUTSCH, HANNAH RILEY BOWLES, JACK WELCH, CAROL BARTZ, JOY BEHAR, SHERYL SANDBERG, SHEILA BAIR, SUSIE ESSMAN, MARIE C. WILSON, AND ARIANNA HUFFINGTON

F
or months I had watched Joe cut his own deals and get what he needed for the show. Getting what he wanted meant engaging in loud battles with Phil Griffin on a regular basis. Phil was extremely close to Joe; they had worked together for years.

Often I’d be sitting between them as it began. They’d lean past me and get in each other’s face. Invariably the exchange started like this: Joe wants to hire a certain producer or writer or analyst. Phil says no, there is no money. The volume goes up. Then they stand. Then fingers start pointing. There’s shouting. Growling. Even threatening. Joe threatening to quit; Phil threatening to fire him. Neither of them
meaning it. I watch spit splatter on the coffee table in front of me—I can actually hear it hit the table.
Splat!
As I study the drops, more come raining down.

Soon they get up and stand face-to-face, me sitting awkwardly between them on the couch. They lean in over me, poking each other in the chest, with their faces red and inches apart. Then, as my own stress level escalates to its highest point, there’s a miraculous pivot.

One of Joe’s talents: diffusing a moment within a blink of an eye.

Joe offers to hug Phil and then fires one last question at him.

“Phil, how the hell can the Mets win the World Series when their pitching is so spotty?”

Phil responds as if the two had been calmly talking sports the whole time. As the spit dries on the table, they sit down and continue with a calm and friendly conversation.

That would never happen with a woman. Never in a million years. No woman could survive a scene like that with her boss. Yet whenever Phil and Joe are negotiating, the drill is the same: they yell, spit, scream, and slam phones down. They each walk away with what they want, and their relationship remains intact. In fact it’s better. They’ll have something to laugh about later over a beer.

I remember once Phil was screaming, and Joe hung up on him. Phil didn’t realize that Joe had hung up so he continued to scream until his assistant knocked on the door and told him that Joe had hung up four minutes ago. Phil was so amused by that that he called Joe back to laugh about it: “F—cker, you
wouldn’t believe what just happened, I was screaming and you hung up and I didn’t know that for four minutes! That’s hysterical ... so what were we talking about? Oh right, yeah sure. I’ll give you the extra producer.”

After months of watching how Joe’s aggressive, in-your-face method seemed to get him what he needed, I decided I’d give it a try.

I went into Phil’s office and sat down on his couch and proceeded to tell him in no uncertain terms that my salary was a joke and that he’d better change it.

“I’m really, really tired of not being paid my worth,” I said angrily. “You keep saying you will deal with it. When Phil,
when
? This is ridiculous, and I am not going to put up with it anymore.” I raised my voice and tossed in a few F-bombs.

The approach was very Joe. Except I am not Joe, and this was not me: my eyes were open a bit too wide; my heart was beating fast, my body shook. My voice rose into the upper register. Higher pitched. Pushing it.

Somehow we ended up standing next to his door, and I was six inches from his face saying something like, “How could you let me be in this position? Seriously Phil, seriously! You need to fix this!” I jabbed him below his left shoulder. Phil jabbed me right back.

I thought, “
Whoa! This is just plain weird.
” Phil looked truly alarmed. Our jabs were like awkward pokes.

I wish I could erase this entire scene from my memory, and his. The whole thing was a bad idea. Needless to say, I didn’t walk out with a raise. While Joe and many other men could pull this off, I wasn’t believable in any way.

Instead, after I left his office, Phil picked up the phone, called Joe and Chris Licht, and asked each of them the same thing: “Motherf—cker, is she crazy?”

That might have been a fair question.

A
New York Magazine
profile on Donny Deutsch and life at his ad agency described an argument between Deutsch and one of his male employees: “We were screaming. Our noses were touching. Then we started laughing.”

I ask Deutsch about that episode, and he explains to me, “We ‘bro,’ it gets out, and that’s it.”

So why, I ask incredulously, didn’t that work for me?