Knowing Your Value (21 page)

Many of my interviewees cite evidence that other women not only weren’t there to lend a hand, but they were actively undermining their efforts to get ahead.

Are women harder on other women? It may just be that women managers are more effective with women because they know which buttons to push. Who better to exploit the weaknesses that hold women back than a woman? I’m reminded of Lesley Jane Seymour’s story about the female manager who discouraged her friends from having their contracts reviewed by a lawyer.

Women need to learn how to respond to these tactics.

What follows is an example of what I’ve done, and it is a textbook case of what
not
to do. I repeat: women managers know all too well what strategies to use to keep us cheap.

Ironically, the only time I was brought to tears at MSNBC over my pay problems was in a conversation with a middle manager who happened to be a woman.

She called a meeting to discuss my salary dispute, and the mood quickly turned sour. This manager insisted that I back off my request for a pay raise and told me that my demands were badly timed. Then she really dug in: “Mika, people won’t like you. You are going to get a bad reputation. You need to stop.” This woman knew Joe’s salary was fourteen times mine—a huge disparity. But she was skilled at getting me to change my focus.

She kept me in her office for thirty minutes, arguing that I would ruin my reputation and that my request for more equitable pay would cost me in popularity. She said this with a
clear warning in her voice, even a threat. “People will see you as a problem,” she said. She told me I should be focused less on earning my value and more on winning MSNBC’s Miss Congeniality prize. Was she serious? Sadly, she was—and her strategy worked.

Looking back on that day three years later, I cannot believe how naïve I was. I was shocked to tears that a woman would push another woman to accept such a degrading situation. I am even more pained to admit that I actually started worrying about whether my coworkers would stop liking me if I pressed for the raise that I so clearly deserved. It was obvious to this female manager that while I was used to being liked in newsrooms, I had no idea what it was like to be paid a salary that matched my worth. So she did what any effective manager would do. She went in for the kill.

When it comes to gender politics, how women treat other women in the workplace is a sensitive and fraught topic. I’ve had wonderful female bosses and not-so-wonderful ones. I’ve spoken with women who loved their female bosses and those who described relationships with female bosses that were complicated by generational experience and by differences in life choices. And several times since
Morning Joe
began, a female manager played into my feminine fears and tendencies with the sole intent of holding me back. The Paris Hilton incident, the red hair clip reprimand, this dressing down when I asked for a raise: the most painful and least constructive confrontations I’ve had in my career have been with
women. Ladies, we should be ashamed of ourselves. In the highest levels of business, we are our own worst enemies. Before we can fix this problem, we first have to admit to it.

Arianna Huffington believes it’s vitally important for women to be truly supportive of one another: “Indeed, I talk about building our ‘fearlessness tribe,’ surrounding ourselves with women—and men, of course!—who will always be in our corner, always there for us, whether we succeed or fail.

“It’s very important for older women, those who have gone before, to give a hand up and to mentor younger women in a consistent, sustained way—which is ultimately sponsoring them. Finding a sponsor is very similar to asking for a raise: if you don’t ask for help, no one is going to just give it to you.

“I think women need to do what men have always done: reach out and connect. In some ways, social media have made this easier. And there are more and more conferences for women, places to meet and learn from women who have done the things you are interested in doing.” Huffington recently cohosted the WIE [Women: Inspiration & Enterprise] Symposium, with Sarah Brown and Donna Karan, bringing together women from all walks of life for inspiration and empowerment, and to take action for the betterment of all women.

I ask former CFTC chairman Brooksley Born about the impediments women still face, and how she thinks we could overcome them. She, too, argues that women should be helping one another out. “It’s really important for women to try to work together to change things in the workplace, to open opportunities, and I think it needs to be talked about. I think women need to support each other and cooperate with one another. They need to seek out male allies in the workplace, and they need to work as a group to change workplace policies to make them more amenable for women to be treated equally.”

I ask her, “Do you think that women aren’t helping other women? Or not helping them as much as they should?”

“Well, I think there’s a need for more. I do think there’s a lot of mutual support—not universal, obviously. But when there was a lot of discrimination, in the 1970s for example, it was easier to get people activated. Women consciously got together to network and work together and support each other in many big cities around the country. And I don’t know the extent to which that is going on with the younger age groups today. Luckily there are a lot more venues where they can do it. There are wonderful Women’s Bar Associations, and associations of women journalists, and associations that aren’t gender specific, for people who are like-minded to get together and work on these issues.”

Born’s last piece of advice for women coming up in the ranks today is exactly that—stick together and help each other. She encourages younger women “to make sure they are continuing to work together for more equal treatment and economic opportunities.”

MY STORY, WITH SHEILA BAIR, SENATOR CLAIRE MCCASKILL, DONALD TRUMP, LESLEY JANE SEYMOUR, SHERYL SANDBERG, NORAH O’DONNELL, CAROL SMITH, BROOKSLEY BORN, VALERIE JARRETT, TINA BROWN, CAROL BARTZ, KATE WHITE, AND MARIE C. WILSON

T
hroughout my weeks on the road covering the primaries in 2008, I never mentioned my two girls. A woman talking about her family seemed out of place at work. Joe freely talked to his wife and children on the phone and talked about flying them to our various locations as we traveled state to state. But I never felt that I could. I suspected the men I worked for might think less of me if I did. This was in my mind, not theirs.

I would call my family and tell them how much I missed them, and at times I deeply yearned for their presence. But you never saw it on my face when I was working. After all those years in the business, I still didn’t feel comfortable “raising
issues” about needing to be with my family. I suffered alone, as did they. I wish I had felt more comfortable, and I wish I could have afforded to bring them along and expose them to the story. Joe’s ability to do that made me envious.

When it comes to wages and advancement, the gender gap is widest for working mothers. Research shows that women’s earnings go down for each child they have. Part of the gap in wages and advancement for mothers is because they take time out of the workforce or cut back on hours. But studies also indicate that even if they don’t cut back, mothers still earn less.

In a study titled “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?” researchers Shelley Correll, Stephen Benard, and In Paik at Cornell University asked participants to evaluate resumes for two equally qualified job candidates: one was a mother, the other was not. Mothers were consistently ranked as less competent and less committed than non-moms. They were also offered, on average, $11,000 a year less pay.

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and the chairwoman of the Joint Economic Committee, recently commissioned a report based on an analysis of census data. “When working women have kids, they know it will change their lives, but they are stunned at how much it changes their paycheck,” Maloney said. The data shows that across the workforce, the pay gap is slightly wider for managers who have children. Managers who are mothers typically earn seventy-nine cents of every dollar paid to managers who are fathers, and that gap has stayed the same for at least a decade. Could the difference be explained by discrimination?

Most mothers I spoke to were well aware of the way they are perceived. Sheila Bair is the mother of two children. “Talking about family can be viewed negatively by men, like you’re more focused on that than your work. Or that those are soft issues and you’re not serious,” she tells me. “I always come to work with a purpose, but I do think I generally do not talk a lot about my family in front of my male colleagues unless they initiate it. But some men love talking about their kids.”

“Men look great when they’re talking about their families,” I say.

Bair agrees. “That’s right, but women can be perceived as being diverted from our careers if we talk about our families.”

Missouri senator Claire McCaskill’s career illustrates the mine-laden path to success that women must follow. McCaskill has spent the past three decades running for political office. Her first bid was for the job of Kansas City prosecutor, which she describes as “a very male-dominated world.” At the time, McCaskill had just given birth. “I had just had my third child,” she says, “and all my children were very young, and the traditional thing is to show your children to humanize you and so forth. When I ran for prosecutor, there was never a mention of my children, and I did that because
I worried first that people would think, ‘She has young children, she shouldn’t have that job’ . . . I was worried that people would think I wasn’t tough enough to do the job, that I somehow wouldn’t be able to come down hard on violent criminals.