Knowing Your Value (20 page)

My frustration with my employer did not subside. I was emboldened by the fact that I knew I deserved the money. The investment that Joe made—and that’s what it was, not a donation but an investment—made me realize something about myself that apparently I hadn’t known even then. And that is, I was worth more. I mean absolutely, positively, unequivocally worth more. Why should I let Joe make up for MSNBC’s shortfall? That was not going to continue; I was done. I finally knew my value and could not stay unless my employer recognized
it, too. This problem was MSNBC’s creation, but it was up to me to fix it.

I walked back into Phil’s office, sat down, and spoke. My voice was low and sounded different, but it was me talking. Really talking. Not acting. Not venting. Not whining. Just talking in my own words: “You are a bad boyfriend. Do you know what that is, Phil?”

I didn’t wait for a response.

“You take and take and take, but never give. Start giving,” I said.

I went into great detail on the definition of a bad boyfriend. It was a little weird, and I probably wasn’t saying just the right things, but it was calm and completely from the heart. Even better, I was ready to walk out the door with nothing and leave MSNBC for good. And the company knew it.

Phil actually took a moment, and then said, “You’re right. We will fix this. I will fix this.”

Time had also passed since our “crazy” talk, and we had had a chance to get to know each other, so he could truly find out that I was indeed crazy—but in a good way.

Within months, I had a new contract. It wasn’t perfect. I am still paid considerably less than Joe, but at least I’m moving in the right direction. I got a good deal at a tough economic time for the network. They came through, but more important, I came through for myself. What Joe did, his conviction and follow-through, emboldened me. He gave me the confidence and drive to make MSNBC compensate me directly. The bottom line was, this time I really was ready to walk. You
get paid your value when you’re ready to walk. And by the way, if you’re worth nothing, you’ll be walking anyway. So you have to know your worth,
then
be ready to walk out the door.

Still, I could not get over the fact that it took a man to turn the tide. I was angry, mostly at myself, that it had come to that. A man giving a woman money in the workplace just didn’t feel right to me. Joe set me straight: “You are taking yourself way too seriously. This isn’t about you. This is about me making more money. Because if you stay, our ratings will go up. And that will mean more money for my family. Stop thinking that I am being generous to you. This is really a selfish business decision about
me.
”

Joe had morphed from cohost to business partner.

As he fought to keep me on
Morning Joe
, he pored over my contract and salary and then guaranteed me that between TV, radio, and books, I would equal the salary I earned at CBS News. I was skeptical, but he laughed me off.

“You don’t know your value!” he would say. “You will be laughing all the way to the bank.”

By the end of the year, he had made good on all his guarantees and more. I got a book deal, a radio show, and other business opportunities. Looking back, it occurred to me that Joe knew my value even better than I did, and he became offended and aggressive when others did not.

While I greatly appreciate what Joe did for me, I wish I could have achieved the salary I deserved without having
him step in like he did. But I realize after talking to many successful women that it’s not unusual for them to succeed only after forging strategic alliances with men.

This experience has taught me the importance of having allies. Why not accept help from people who value you? Men do it all the time. And by allies, I don’t mean agents. Agents were helpless to get me the money I deserved. The fact is, no one,
no one
can negotiate for you. I may use an agent to handle paperwork and money and details and mechanics, absolutely. But when it comes to speaking for me, I have to do that.

Several women I interviewed mentioned having mentors who offered valuable assistance in their careers. Sheila Bair speaks both of mentors and of other influential men who helped clear a path for her.

For seven years, Bair worked as counsel to Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole and credits him with paving the way for her. “He was a big supporter of women, and he had a lot of senior women on the staff,” Bair says. “Women with real power, not just symbols; they were true advisers to him. Especially back when I was starting my career, there weren’t that many women to mentor you, because there just weren’t that many [to begin with]. Sandra Day O’Connor, Elizabeth
Dole. I can count prominent women on my fingers and toes, so we did rely on men ... Throughout my career, I’ve been mentored by men.”

Bair tells me that during the financial crisis, it was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke who helped her get her message across: “He was the one who first started really listening, especially on some of the bailout issues ... Of course, that helped because Ben had a lot of credibility with the guys.”

But what Joe had done for me was more than endorse my ideas. I had started thinking of him as a business partner, someone whose help I could accept without giving up control. But he’d done more than even an ordinary business partner. He had actually used his own paycheck, in addition to his personal influence, to advance my interests.

People who study gender and negotiation would call him a sponsor: someone who is willing to use their own social capital to help pull another up the corporate ladder.

Harvard’s Hannah Riley Bowles says, “We do need men to sponsor women very badly; they’re in positions of power. When men in a position of power decide to clear that path for you—make sure you get the right exposure, make sure you get to the right meetings—that means a great deal. And there are not that many women to do that for you, frankly. A lot of the women at the top reach back, but there’s just not enough of them.”

Sponsorship is more than mentorship. A mentor will advise an employee, give him or her feedback, offer career strategy, and explain the company culture. Companies invest considerable resources in mentoring programs, but research
shows that mentoring doesn’t necessarily translate into better jobs for women. Women can be mentored so much that it wastes their time. Sponsors, on the other hand, will do more by using their connections and their influence to advocate for an employee. Catalyst’s research finds that “high-potential women are overmentored and undersponsored relative to their male peers—and that they are not advancing in their organizations.” Without sponsorship, women are not only less likely than men to move up, but they’re also more hesitant to pursue top roles.

Lack of sponsorship, mentors, and networks: this was a recurring theme in almost all my conversations on the subject of women and compensation. Women’s advocate Marie C. Wilson says women just don’t have the same useful connections that men do, and the effects can be profound: “In the finance industry and some of the more masculine legal industries, women are not part of those networks that men are a part of, whether it’s golf or the clubs that they take people to at night. . . . And who gets seen, who gets promoted, are people who are a part of those networks.” She also says that we have to find ways to make men more comfortable with sponsoring the opposite sex. “If you are a man, taking on a young man as a sponsor is much easier than taking on a young woman because there is a certain kind of tension about that relationship, people look at it differently.”

Like me, many of the highly successful women I interviewed had also received significant help from men in their industry. Susie Essman tells the story of trying to join the
Friars Club, a century-old private club for entertainment-industry types, notably comedians, that’s really a tale about sponsorship. Traditionally all male, the Friars Club didn’t allow women members until 1988, and women weren’t invited to their famed Celebrity Roasts. Essman says, “When they first asked me to do roasts, they didn’t allow women to even sit on the dais ... [the men’s jokes] were all filthy, dirty, blue blue blue, and they didn’t think our delicate ears could handle it. So when I first had to do a roast, I had to prove that I could be as dirty as them and yet not be vulgar. I had to keep that balance.” Naturally, Essman proved herself, managing to be both feminine and filthy dirty, and also stay on point and deliver a punch line.

Years later, “There was a roast that Comedy Central was recording for Jerry Stiller,” Essman says. “The Friars Club had put my name in because I had proven myself with all these old guys—Alan King and all these great old comics—who did not think women were funny at all. Comedy Central turned me down. They didn’t want me on, and I do believe it was because I was a woman of a certain age and they wanted guys that were in their early twenties. The Friars Club, to their credit, fought for me to be on because I had proven myself over and over again. They put me on the show and I killed, and Larry David saw me on that show and called me up and gave me the part in
Curb
.”

As Essman points out, “In show business, it takes one person to say, ‘you know what, you’re really good.’ ” It took Larry David, creator of HBO’s
Curb Your Enthusiasm
, “who
was a very powerful person in the comedy world, to say, ‘I think this person is really talented and I’m going to give her a part on my show.’ ”

When I ask Essman whether she thinks a woman would have been able to do the same for her, she tells me, “I do think there are women in the business who would have been able to do that for me; there have been powerful women in the business. I don’t think there are many. People say comedy is a man’s world, but the world is a man’s world.”

Clearly, the more people you know—the more people who are willing to support your efforts—the more likely you are to succeed, and the more likely you are to be paid well. Research has shown that success really does depend on who you know. A study published in
Administrative Science Quarterly
in 2000 looked at the effects of different personal attributes on compensation and found that in terms of salary, candidates who knew just one person in the organization negotiated salaries that were 4.7 percent higher than those without social ties.

Professor Hannah Riley Bowles points out, “In general, we could certainly say, the better you know people, the more information they’re likely to share, the more helpful they’re likely to be to you. They can vouch for you, they can help you negotiate, they can lend social capital. They can say, ‘This person is really . . . ,’ they can present you in a very favorable light. There are a variety of things they can do in terms of quality of information that you get, the way you
present yourself, knowing whom to talk to, knowing
how
to present yourself. You have to be authentic to yourself, but you also have to negotiate the way that fits the norms of the organization.”

The Daily Beast
’s Tina Brown notes a difference in the quality of men’s networks and women’s networks. She points out that women just don’t have the long history in the workplace that amounts to a female-networking tradition. “I think that networking background for women is just not there. When men get fired from these jobs, these big jobs, they have other men who step forward to look after them and get them jobs as presidents of this, or think tanks, or some big nonprofit. I mean, you see men being taken care of when they’re fired. When I see women getting fired, there’s no cushion of networking waiting to deploy them into other jobs. I just don’t see it. I see men all the time being fired from their jobs and being looked after by their networks. . . . Women just don’t have the deep bench of network.”

But as I listen to women’s stories and tell my own, I wonder whether part of the reason that women’s networks aren’t as powerful is because women aren’t trying very hard to support one another.