Women Don't Ask
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for your family.”54 One of our society’s strongest gender norms for
women, in contrast, is that they will be modest and selfless. As a result,
many people don’t consider being preoccupied by money or attaching
a dollar value to their work and time to be proper or attractive for a
woman.55
Linda Evangelista, one of the first models to be identified as a “su-
permodel,” earned an avalanche of derision in the summer of 1990
when she admitted to a reporter that she and Christy Turlington, an-
other “supermodel,” had an expression they liked to use: “We don’t
wake up for less than $10,000 a day.” Loudly denounced at the time,
she has been dogged by the remark ever since. As recently as the Sep-
tember 2001 edition of Vogue, an interviewer pressed her again to ex-
plain her remark. Evangelista said, “I feel like those words are going to
be engraved on my tombstone. . . . I apologized for it. I acknowledged
it. . . . Would I hope that I would never say something like that ever
again? Yes.” Keep in mind that Evangelista made this remark in 1990,
after a decade (the 1980s) in which everyone from Donald Trump to
Michael Milken boasted of his huge income on television talk shows,
in the society pages, and in the financial news—a decade in which accu-
mulating wealth and flaunting it amounted to a national obsession. But
Evangelista’s story tells us that what is good for the gander is not good for the goose. When a woman knows what she’s worth—and feels
proud of her abilities and of what she can earn—she sets herself up to
be scorned and chastised.
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Caring more about relationships than about personal gain represents
another powerful gender norm for women. The media’s treatment of an
episode at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City provided an
object lesson for women on the dangers of violating this norm. Jean
Racine, considered the top female bobsled driver in the world and the
Olympic front-runner for the American women’s bobsledding team,
spent most of her career partnered with a friend (many media sources
said her “best friend”), Jen Davidson. Racine and Davidson competed
in the two-person version of the sport, in which one athlete, the driver,
sits in front and steers while the other, the brakewoman, pushes from
behind to get the sled started down the course and then stops the sled
at the bottom. Brakewomen need to be very strong. Racine was the
driver and Davidson the brakewoman until two months before the
games. Then, feeling that Davidson was not as strong as another player,
Racine switched partners—or, as the media reported it, “dumped” Da-
vidson. Shortly before the games, Racine’s new partner, Gea Johnson,
suffered a hamstring injury, and Racine tried switching partners again,
this time asking a relative newcomer, Vonetta Flowers, to join her.
Flowers turned Racine down and with her partner, Jill Bakken, eventu-
ally won the gold medal. Racine and the injured Gea Johnson did not
perform well and failed to win a medal.
This story was widely covered, with everyone from the New York
Times to USA Today to the supermarket tabloids and both network and cable news programs weighing in with their judgments. The reporting,
for the most part, reduced this story of personal struggle, hard choices,
and disappointment to the realm of soap opera, a trivial squabble
among women, with even such august news bodies as NBC dubbing
the episode “As the Sled Turns.” No one claimed that Jen Davidson was
faster than the other brakewomen who made the U.S. team, and a few
news sources even conceded that switching partners is extremely com-
mon in the sport, among male bobsledders as well as female. Nonethe-
less, press reports described Racine as “ruthless” and “without remorse,”
referred to her behavior as “scandalous” and “appalling,” and implied
that she deserved to lose because she had put her own interests above
the claims of friendship. Flowers, on the other hand, deserved to win
because she’d been loyal. “Perhaps warmth and sweetness have their
place in the cutthroat world of Olympic bobsledding. Loyalty does, at
least,” wrote the New York Times’s reporter.56
The thing is: Jean Racine was an Olympic-caliber athlete. Like any
athlete, her chances to compete in the Olympics were limited, and she
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wanted to win. That’s what the Olympics are about, after all. And she
put her personal ambition and desire—she put what she wanted—
ahead of relationship concerns, a major taboo for a woman. For this,
she was publicly lambasted. The message to women: If trying to get
what you want means violating gender norms for women, don’t do it.
You may not get what you want, and on top of that disappointment
you’ll be roundly criticized and publicly shamed.
Faludi believes that men, and many women, combat their fear that
masculinity is threatened by women’s success by trying to shift the “cul-
tural gears” into reverse. They do this by promoting the idea that the
movement of women into the workplace is responsible for many of
society’s problems, especially those involving families and children.57
So the media publishes stories with titles like “Feminism Is Bad for
Women’s Health Care” (from the Wall Street Journal)58 and conservative thinkers produce books such as A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost
Virtue, by Wendy Shalit59; Domestic Tranquility: A Brief against Feminism, by F. Carolyn Graglia60; and The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, by Christina Hoff Sommers.61
In demonizing feminists and telling women that they’re responsible
for society’s problems, these reactionary forces teach businesses that it’s
permissible to penalize women for asking to do jobs typically performed
by men—or simply for pursuing their own professional goals rather
than deferring to the needs and ambitions of others. They can also make
women feel less sure that it’s okay for them to want what they want,
especially if what they want involves professional success. This can per-
suade them to scale back their ambitions and to hope for—and ask
for—fewer of life’s rewards.
Women Have Learned Their Lessons Well
The oppressive but inescapable message—that women will be punished
for exceeding the bounds of acceptable behavior—has come through
loud and clear, and women have adapted their behavior accordingly.62
Ariadne, 33, is an MBA who enjoyed a successful career in public rela-
tions before becoming a full-time mother. Ariadne has a very direct
manner. Although she believes that a similarly direct man would be
perceived as a “straight-shooter” or a “no-nonsense guy,” her style has
prompted people to call her a bitch or complain that she is too aggres-
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sive. As a result, Ariadne learned in the course of her career to tone
down her personal style and adopt a less straightforward manner. She
would even avoid claimi
ng credit for her own ideas (and asking for
appropriate recognition) because she found that letting other people
think her good ideas were their own helped get those ideas imple-
mented, and backfired less on her.
An extensive body of research confirms that Ariadne’s is not an iso-
lated case: Women consistently adjust their behavior between private
and public settings—revealing their clear understanding that they may
pay a penalty for behaving freely when observed by others. Of course,
both men and women behave differently in public than they do at
home, but research shows that women adjust their behavior more. In
one of the “pay allocation” experiments mentioned in chapter 2, for
example, men and women were instructed to work on a task until they
had “earned” four dollars. Although women worked longer and harder
than men in the “private,” unobserved condition (22 percent longer),
they worked even longer if the amount of time they worked was moni-
tored by the experimenter (52 percent longer than men). Men did not
work longer when they were observed.63 This tells us that women have
learned that they must pay more attention than men to the impressions
they make on others, presumably because they fear the penalties for
counterstereotypical behavior.
Other research confirms that women conform more to gender roles
in public than in private. In one study, researchers asked college stu-
dents to estimate their grade-point averages (GPAs) for the upcoming
semester either privately, on paper, or out loud to a peer. Although
there were no gender differences between the male and female students’
predictions in the private condition, the female students’ estimates were
lower in the presence of a peer (the males’ estimates did not change).64
A review of the research in this area concludes that unlike men, women
“often limit their displays of achievement-oriented behavior to situa-
tions in which autonomy and privacy are assured.”65
Women have learned, in other words, that asking through their ac-
tions to be recognized for their abilities and accomplishments can be a
mistake. This self-consciousness about being observed extends to nego-
tiation contexts, in which women request lower salaries when another
person is present than they request when they assume no one else is
watching. Men’s requests, on the other hand, increase in the presence of another person.66
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Do Not Compete
Women don’t just modify their behavior in public settings, one study
suggests, they may also shy away from competition, especially competi-
tion with men. For this study, three economists, Uri Gneezy, Muriel
Niederle, and Aldo Rustichini, asked female and male engineering stu-
dents to work through mazes on a computer. At first, the students
worked on their own and were paid a flat rate for each maze they com-
pleted (the “piece-rate” condition). In this situation, men and women
completed the same number of mazes on average. Then the researchers
asked the same students to participate in a “tournament,” in which three
female students and three male students would compete to see who
could complete the most mazes in a set amount of time. The winner
would be paid six times as much for each maze solved as he or she had
earned in the piece-rate condition, while the rest of the students would
earn no money for their work.67
Traditional economic theory would expect every participant to com-
plete more mazes in the tournament condition than in the piece-rate
condition because the reward for winning would give everyone an in-
centive to work harder. But Gneezy, Niederle, and Rustichini found
that this was true only of the men. Whereas men completed 34 percent
more mazes during the tournaments than they’d solved in the piece-
rate condition, the number of mazes the women solved did not increase.
The men didn’t suddenly get smarter—the tournament setting inspired
them to compete with each other and try harder. But the tournament
did not have the same impact on the women.
One might conclude from this study that women simply don’t like
to compete. To explore this hypothesis, the researchers organized addi-
tional tournaments in which they segregated the groups by gender.
They found that the performance of the men in the all-male tourna-
ments was identical to their performance in the mixed-gender tourna-
ments: The incentive of “winning” prompted them to increase their ef-
forts over the piece-rate condition by the same amount no matter who
they were competing against. But the most revealing data emerged from
the all-female tournaments: The women completed far more mazes in
the all-female tournament groups than in either the piece-rate condition
or in the tournaments in which they were competing against men.
One explanation for these uneven results could be that women be-
lieve that men are better at solving mazes than women. Assuming they
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won’t win in a mixed-gender tournament, they consequently don’t try.
Or stereotype threat may play a part: If women believe that men are
better at solving mazes, this could undermine their performance at a
subconscious level. Although the authors could not rule out these
hypotheses, we can find nothing to suggest that mazes, which involve
pretty basic skills, are in fact gender-defined and perceived to be the
province of men. Another possible conclusion is that women just don’t
like competing against men. Much of what we know about gender
norms supports this interpretation: Boys learn that they are expected to
compete, that being a good competitor is a defining male trait. They
also learn that they are expected to demonstrate superior ability over
girls in certain areas (intelligence, physical prowess, business success)
and that this superiority is central to our society’s definition of maleness.
Girls also learn these lessons about males. Because negotiation contains
within it a basic form of competition, both males and females in our
culture may make the connection that this consequently cannot be a
woman’s domain. To compete with a man in a negotiation and win—
to get him to give you a better raise than he wanted, or a better price
for a car, or more responsibility on a project than he intended—may
threaten his socially received idea of his own maleness. And women
learn that this is rarely a good idea, because such a destabilizing threat
will almost inevitably rebound in negative ways, punishing the woman
who posed it.
She may pay a price in her private life as well as at work. In Creating
A Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, the economist
Sylvia Ann Hewlett reports that “the more successful the woman, the
less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child.”68 Although many
men scoff at the notion that they feel threatened by smart women or
are less likely to date them, this phenomenon seems to persist. Two
f
emale Harvard MBA students interviewed on the television newsmaga-
zine 60 Minutes in 2002 confessed that they no longer admit to men that they go to Harvard, because men feel too threatened by their success to
pursue relationships with them.69
The popular cable television series Sex and the City, about the per-
sonal lives of four New York career women (one of whom quits working
to get married), illustrated this dilemma in one episode.70 Miranda, one
of the show’s four principal characters, is a successful lawyer and a
partner in her firm. Having observed that her career success frightens
off many of the men she meets, Miranda pretends that she is a flight
attendant to see if men will respond to her differently. This fiction, to
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her chagrin, turns out to be very successful: Men respond to her far
more enthusiastically than before, concisely demonstrating the pressure
women feel to downplay their accomplishments in order to protect men
from being intimidated—and to protect their own chances of establish-
ing relationships with them.
Marcela, the nuclear engineer, described how she learned this lesson.
When she was growing up, she said, “girls being smart was definitely
an issue; when you were in your dating years the whole thing was not
to let the guys know how smart you were. Because if they ever found out
that your SAT scores were a lot higher than theirs then they wouldn’t go
out with you or whatever.” She also said, “There was a point at which
. . . I was told that I shouldn’t be so obvious in my accomplishments.”
This lesson influences Marcela’s professional behavior to this day. Peri-
odically, she must write up an assessment of her abilities and accom-
plishments as part of her firm’s “rating” process for awarding raises,
bonuses, and promotions. Implicit in the process is the expectation that
she will indicate what she feels she deserves for the work she has done—
a form of asking. She hates doing this, she said, because she doesn’t
like “the kind of exercise where you have to either write about your
contributions or your accomplishments. . . . Not because I don’t think
that I’ve accomplished anything or made contributions but because I
don’t like writing it down. It just makes me uncomfortable to have to
self-promote. I’m not very comfortable being self-promoting.”