by Hanna Rosin
IN 2008, at a time when Citigroup was becoming a model of big bank failure and corruption, its top executives held their regular Monday morning meeting. Vikram Pandit, the bank’s new CEO, was about to roll out a controversial new management structure that would shift around control over various geographical territories. Sallie Krawcheck, who was in charge of global wealth management, was suspicious of the new arrangement. She and Pandit had disagreed about many things, and this time she decided to bring up her objections in the meeting. Unlike the many white-shoe financial institutions, Citigroup was a “let it all hang out kind of place,” Krawcheck told me. A meeting that involved yelling and screaming was just another Monday morning meeting. Krawcheck questioned how the new lines of authority would work. “What if I say ‘zig’ and the guy who runs Asia says ‘zag’ and we can’t agree? Now what happens?” she asked. She hinted that the new system might cause “paralysis.”
Until then, Krawcheck, the “Queen of Wall Street,” had been a favorite with the business media. For several years she made Forbes’s list of the top ten most powerful women in the world. Fortune used her as the lead in a 2002 story called “In Search of the Last Honest Analyst”—the ultimate public compliment in an industry second only to Congress in public loathing and distrust. Krawcheck was tall, with blond preppy good looks and a Southern accent, but mostly the media liked her for the same reason I did when I first met her: She was honest and blunt. Krawcheck once joked in an interview, “How do you know when management is lying? Their lips are moving”—a quote that trailed her in nearly every profile. At a Forbes executive forum, she once told a crowd from the podium that her first husband had an affair because she worked too much and he was jealous of her career. But while she was blunt, she wasn’t a diva or a screamer. She knew how to put her Southern charm to work, and she was known for her relentless efforts to win over colleagues at the various banks where she worked. She had manners, and she treated people well. “If she cursed, it was only at herself,” said one of her former colleagues.
But the following day, the media turned on Krawcheck. The Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page Web story that Krawcheck wasn’t supportive of Pandit’s micromanaging and that she was challenging him publicly. The word “paralysis” got picked up in blogs and news stories. Krawcheck was chided for being disloyal and out of control. “Son of a bitch,” she remembers thinking. “I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t scream.” The whole incident seemed to her in fact “pretty fricking mild” by Monday-morning standards, particularly given that there was a genuine, substantive disagreement. She was baffled that it had ended up on the front-page of The Wall Street Journal.
And then she remembered something that had happened at a Monday morning meeting a few weeks earlier. One of the other female executives had been yelling about something, “and I remember, clear as a bell, the thought forming in my head: B-I-T-C-H.” What had happened in her head, she realized, must have been the same as what happened in everyone else’s head when she had challenged Pandit. The men could challenge one another at any Monday morning meeting—hell, they could even scream and throw glasses across the room “and I never think, ‘jerk’ or ‘bastard.’” In fact, the tantrum would be forgotten by lunchtime. But if a woman did the same thing, it became front-page news. Not because Wall Street was sexist or biased, exactly, or stuck in the Mad Men “pretty little gal” school of women, says Krawcheck, but because of what she came to think of as The Twitch, the instinctive wince we do when a woman unsheathes her sword.
Most working women have probably at some point been victims of The Twitch. In my case, it happened early in my career. As a young writer at The Washington Post, I found out one day that a male reporter hired around the same time as me and who had far less experience was making more money. He was actually bragging on the phone to a friend about how much he made, and across the cubicles I heard him. Naturally, I was annoyed. I wrote a reasonably cordial and lighthearted note to my supervisor, asking for a raise, but my sourness crept into it—I may have even used the word “unfair.” My supervisor, who was male, responded with outsized horror and disappointment. “I thought we had a good working relationship,” his e-mail began, and it went downhill from there. I was so mortified and humiliated that I apologized. Apologized! And because I am not a savvy businesswoman like Sallie Krawcheck, I am ashamed to admit that I never once asked for a raise again.
I now know that this whole incident is fairly standard in the annals of gender workplace fiascos. My victimized whiny note, his shock, my apology, and my career-long reticence are all examples of exactly how women should not conduct themselves in the workplace if they want to speed up that inevitable march to the top.
At the start of the millennium, researchers began to puzzle over why women’s earnings seemed to be leveling off. Women were still graduating from college at greater rates than men, and still flooding lucrative jobs in the creative class, but their earnings, especially at the top, had stopped soaring. Economist Linda Babcock hit upon a fairly simple explanation when she was directing the PhD program at Carnegie Mellon University. A group of female graduate students came in to complain that they were stuck teaching for other faculty while the men got to teach their own classes. Babcock tracked down the dean in charge to ask him about it. The women, he told her, “just don’t ask,” so they don’t get assigned their own classes.
Babcock wondered if this might be true in other areas of their lives, so she ran an experiment. She surveyed Carnegie Mellon alumni who had recently graduated with their master’s degrees about their starting salaries in their new jobs. It turned out that 57 percent of the men had negotiated their starting salaries, while only 7 percent of the women had, even though the school’s career services department strongly advised students to negotiate. As a result, men had starting salaries that averaged 7.6 percent higher than women’s.
I can offer anecdotal confirmation of Babcock’s findings from my own experience. For the past three years, I have been editing the women’s section of Slate. About 10 percent of my writers are men. Web magazines do not pay all that much for individual stories anymore, and there isn’t much wiggle room in the budget, but sometimes, in certain circumstances, there is a tiny bit. The women, however, would never discover that. In all those years, only four of the dozens of women I work with have asked me for more money. And only two of the men have failed to.
Babcock is an economist, so she played out the math to its logical conclusion: Even if a man never asked for a raise again and he and his female counterpart both got 3 percent raises for the rest of their careers, the man’s 7.4 percent higher starting salary would make him half a million dollars richer than her by the time they reached retirement age—the difference between a tiny apartment in a Miami suburb and a luxury condo in Sarasota.
The finding seemed especially urgent given the current nature of the economy. Hardly anyone went to one job and stayed there anymore. In fact, as Babcock pointed out, a quarter of workers in 2000 had been with their current employer less than a year. People moved from job to job, and each time, money and perks were up for grabs. Employers might offer employees different stock options or particular benefits, or special arrangements: working at home, working flexibly, working on contract. The workplace was turning into a big Turkish bazaar, and women might be missing all the deals! Women weren’t bad at negotiating in general—on behalf of the company, say, or for their children or friends. But they were reluctant to negotiate for themselves. As a result, they tended to be blind to their opportunities. They seemed to assume that if they worked hard, the proper rewards would come their way.
Babcock’s research helped spawn an industry of advice books intended to toughen women up: Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office; Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman; and Stop Sabotaging Your Career. Babcock and Sara Laschever wrote their own version, Ask For It, in which they explain “how women can use the power of negotiation to get what they really want.” The gist of these advice boo
ks is obvious from the titles: If you “worry about offending others” and “back down too easily” and otherwise insist on workplace displays of “girlish behavior,” chides Lois Frankel, author of the Nice Girls series, then you are “sabotaging your career!”
But as the advice books got churned out, the academic research was taking a curious turn. Study after study was finding that women who did not conform to female stereotypes—who bluntly asked for a raise, self-promoted, demanded credit for work they’d done, or failed to pitch in and help other colleagues—paid a high price in the workplace. People judged them as harsh or unpleasant, did not want to work with them, did not want them as a boss, and—worse—failed to grant their requests for a raise or judge them successful. Here was the evil Twitch, getting in the way of a sisters-take-up-arms plan of attack. The world, it seemed, was not ready for mean girls at the office.
Researchers all over the country lab-tested different workplace scenarios, and they always came up with the same result: Women who speak aggressively get lower marks than women who speak tentatively. Women who self-promote are judged to lack social skills. Ditto for women who express any kind of anger in the workplace. In one scenario, some colleagues were about to go to an office party when a fellow employee showed up in a last-minute panic over a broken Xerox machine. He needed help manually stapling five hundred sets of the pages he had copied. The women who said no and went off to the party were docked mercilessly by the research subjects. Men who did the same in that situation were not judged at all. For men, behaving in a friendly, communal way was optional. For women, it was mandatory.
Perhaps the most dispiriting experiment was conducted in 2004 by Madeline Heilman, a psychologist at New York University. Heilman handed out a packet giving background information about a certain employee who was an assistant vice president in an aircraft company. In some cases, the employee was described as not yet having received a performance review. In other cases, the employee had gone through the review and been deemed a “stellar performer” or a “rising star.” The only other difference was that in some cases, the employee described in the packets was “Andrea” and in others, “James.” Among those who believed the employee had not yet received a review, Andrea and James were judged equally. But among those to whom the employee had been described as a “rising star,” there were vast differences in response.
You’d think that a woman who managed the impressive feat of rising to the top at an aircraft company would get gold stars. Not at all. People judged rising star Andrea as far less likable and far more hostile than James; in fact, the Andreas were judged to be “downright uncivil,” explains Heilman, even though there was no information provided to support that view. Subjects merely assumed that “Andrea” must have done some nasty things along the way in order to break through in such a male-dominated field. The implications were depressing. All women had to do was be stellar performers in what was considered a male arena in order to bring on The Twitch. Clearly it was time to workshop a new strategy.
A few years later, Heilman came up with one. She calls it “a little bit of sugar.” Heilman reran the Andrea/James experiment, only this time she added some extra descriptions. Andrea/James “demands a lot from her/his employees” but is also “caring and sensitive to their needs” or “fair-minded” or encourages “cooperation and helpful behavior.” Any of these three descriptions did the trick for Andrea, making subjects like her as much, be happy to have her as a boss, and consider her competent. Heilman even tried the mother card. She mentioned that Andrea was a mother, and that had the same effect. Surely a mother couldn’t be mean, goes the thinking. A little bit of sugar seemed to go a long way.
So what were women supposed to do, bake brownies for their colleagues, give noontime massages, and generally spread sunshine around the office? It still seemed like they were caught in a trap. How could a woman be nice enough not to trigger The Twitch, but not so insipid that she would never get a promotion?
In 2011 researcher Hannah Riley Bowles at the Harvard Kennedy School took up the challenge. Bowles was a protégé of Linda Babcock, but she started with a premise opposite that of her mentor, that “it does hurt to ask.” Working with Babcock, she picked the simple scenario of an employee receiving a job offer and then asking for a higher salary. Each subject saw a video of different employees, played by hired actors, asking for a raise using a different script. Her working hypothesis was that in order to be successful, the performance had to fulfill two different criteria: It had to be girlish enough not to trigger a backlash (The Twitch), but it had to be aggressive enough to convince the research subjects that the woman should be given a raise.
“I think I should be paid at the top of that range. And I would also like to be eligible for an end-of-the-year bonus.”
Nope. Too aggressive.
“I hope it’s okay to ask you about this. I’d feel terrible if I offended you in doing so.”
No again. Too girlish.
“I don’t know how typical it is for people at my level to negotiate, but I’m hopeful that you’ll see my skill at negotiating as something important that I bring to the job.”
Bingo.
When the actress used this script, research subjects were both willing to work with the woman and to give her a raise. The key, it turned out, was to meet the stereotype halfway. The woman was polite, but firm. More important, they accepted her advocating for herself when she portrayed her needs as aligned with the needs of the company. She had to be a self-starter and a team player. She could negotiate for herself in order to prove she could negotiate for the company later. The one thing she could not be was aggrieved, as I was in my note to the Washington Post editor. “You want to get past the initial outrage phase,” counsels Bowles. “As a persuasion strategy it might have worked twenty-five years ago, but it doesn’t work today. Not only is it not effective, it will accomplish the exact opposite of what you want. If you are intent on showing that you’ve been treated wrongly, that you have been treated like a lower-status person, then too often you just end up persuading them that you are in fact a lower-status person.”
The formula is maddening in its tightrope specificity and insulting in the capitulation it requires, Bowles admits. “If we could change the results of our experiments,” she writes in the study, “we would choose a more liberating message.” But it is also extremely pragmatic and, in its own way, liberating. When women negotiate, emotions tend to get in the way: excess humility, shame, resentment, outrage. Those feelings are not so helpful in building a reasonable case. The Bowles strategy gives women something else to focus on, something that may even fall more in their comfort zone: creating a convincing narrative that explains why her own needs match up with the company’s.
A senior executive Bowles once counseled found out that one of the male subordinates on her team was paid more than her. Her instinct was to march into the CEO’s office and tell him how unfair and outrageous that was—because it was unfair and outrageous. But with Bowles’s help, they mapped out a different script, one that would convey “unfair” without screaming it, and would refer to general standards rather than personal fury: “I know this is not the kind of company that wants to set up a structure where subordinates are paid more than their superiors.” She practiced the script several times, keeping her voice even. She got the raise.
Another woman Bowles was advising was asked to run her law firm’s diversity initiative. She suspected that this was merely a way to sidetrack her off a successful career path. She wanted to go to her boss and tell him that the new assignment would damage her career. Bowles suggested she should try a different tack: “If I’m hearing you right and you want the position to have the authority you describe, I think it should be paid at ____ level and require a new title.” She didn’t complain, she got the promotion, and the diversity initiative was elevated to a new level of importance and authority.
In her book Knowing Your Value, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski, who has consul
ted with Bowles, describes her own inept attempts at asking for a raise. In her first attempt, she apologized over and over to Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC. “I’m sorry.” “I don’t want to be a problem.” “I really don’t want to be a diva.” Nothing. In her second attempt, she tried a combination of outrage and swagger, channeling her coanchor Joe Scarborough. “This is ridiculous, and I’m not going to put up with it anymore!” she said, jabbing Phil in the shoulder the way she’d seen Joe do. Griffin just looked at her like she was bonkers and jabbed back. Finally she got it right, by “not venting. Not whining. Just talking in my own words: ‘You are a bad boyfriend. Do you know what that is, Phil? You take and take and take, but never give. Start giving.’”
As I interviewed women executives, I learned that many of them had picked up some version of this advice along the way, and most of them gritted their teeth and followed it. Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, recalled an executive meeting she attended when she first came to the company. Someone was presenting a dubious three-year plan. Most people objected, along the lines of, “That’s very interesting, but you might want to look at it differently.” Nooyi said in the meeting, “That’s crap. It’s never going to happen.” Afterward, one of the male executives called her aside and explained that if she wanted to get along at the company she might tone it down a bit. “He was helping edge me along to a different place,” she said. “The whole organization is not going to meet you. That’s just not realistic.” It was her first lesson, she recalls, in learning how to survive in a male-dominated environment.
Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg has always advised women to negotiate with nearly the exact same language that Bowles settled on in her study. Sandberg’s version of the script goes something like: “You realize you are hiring me to run the business development team, so you want me to be a good negotiator. Well, here goes. I am about to negotiate.” Sandberg understands that some women might consider this more pragmatic approach a cop-out, or a missed opening for change. “But I say, you have to put your ego aside and play by the rules so you can get to the top and change things. Look, here I am at Facebook, at a company that gives four months of paid maternity and paternity leave. Isn’t that worth it?”