Knowing Your Value (24 page)

“I was this hard-charging correspondent who’s been all around the world,” O’Donnell tells me, “who is always gone on call 24/7 and gung ho.” In her mid-thirties, she decided she wanted to have kids, so she took a new position as chief Washington correspondent. It was as demanding a job as any other, but it involved less travel. She soon gave birth to twins and felt that she was just getting her momentum back at work when she found out she was pregnant again. She was so embarrassed to tell her boss, NBC News’ Washington bureau chief Tim Russert, that she put it off until there was no way to hide the evidence.

When O’Donnell finally did break the news, she realized she was lucky to be working for someone who valued family, and who also valued her as an employee. “I was so silly to have been embarrassed to tell him, because Tim was more than thrilled,” she says. “He was so excited, in fact, that he suggested the name Riley, which is what I ended up naming my daughter.”

I had a similar experience years ago, when I discovered I was pregnant with my first child, Emilie. I pained over how to tell my news director at WFSB Channel 3 in Hartford, Connecticut. But like Tim Russert, my boss, Mark Effron, was ecstatic for me, and even suggested my pregnancy would be great for ratings. My daughter was due in January, but he joked, “Any way you could hold out till the May ratings book?”

Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett tells a story about the moment she realized she was working for the right boss. She was working for Chicago Mayor Richard Daley as the Commissioner of Planning and Development. She and Susan Sher, who was the corporation counsel, had just taken their jobs and were in one of their first meetings with the mayor. “I don’t even know what we were talking about,” Jarrett says, “but Susan and I were sitting across from each other, and the Mayor was at the head of the table. He could be a little intimidating. We keep looking at our watches, then looking at him, and he’s talking and not paying much attention. Suddenly it dawns on him that we’re not really ‘in’ the meeting—we’re somewhere else. He pauses and says, ‘What’s going on? Clearly you guys have somewhere else you’d rather be, what’s going on?’ And in a moment of truth, Susan and I look at each other and make eye contact. I said to him, ‘The Halloween parade starts in twenty minutes. Our kids are in the same class, and we’ve never missed a Halloween parade.’ He pauses and says, ‘Then why are you still sitting here?’ It was like the weight of the world was lifted from our shoulders.
We go racing down Lakeshore Drive and we get to our children’s school literally as these two little darlings are coming out of school in their costumes, and of course the first thing our kids do is look for us. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve said to each other, ‘What were we doing sitting there when all we had to do was ask?’ ”

Jarrett says part of the life lesson there is you’ve got to stick up for what you need and what’s important to you: “If he had said, ‘Well, I’m sorry but I need you to stay here,’ then we were working for the wrong person,” she tells me. “You shouldn’t be afraid to find that out. The First Lady often tells the story about taking Sasha to a job interview because she couldn’t find a babysitter, and she learned a lot about Mike Riordan, her boss, because it was fine with him. If it hadn’t been fine with him . . . isn’t it good to know that early?”

Those experiences have taught Jarrett to be a better boss: “I think as a manager I try to encourage women and men to feel empowered to ask for what they need. Everybody here has children and I’m always saying to them, ‘Don’t miss the Halloween parade.’ ” She says hard-working employees who are able to take a few hours off for personal issues are going to come back feeling terrific about their jobs, and they’re going to continue giving their all.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz echoes those sentiments. “One of the things I say to people who work for me is, ‘Your child only has one Christmas pageant, only has one concert, and there will be a staff meeting until the end of eternity, so you know, don’t miss that stuff.’”

Cosmopolitan
’s Kate White tells the story of leaving her job when she realized she was working for the wrong boss. She was in the number-two position at
Mademoiselle
when she had her first child. Her boss, a woman without kids, called her into her office a week after White had returned from maternity leave and told her she didn’t want her leaving at five o’clock every day. White didn’t feel comfortable pointing out that the boss herself left at 5:30 every day, and that White was putting in extra hours every day after the baby went to sleep. At that moment, she says, “I stepped back and thought, ‘What’s going to give me more control?’ I realized being an editor-in-chief would do that. Working at a different type of magazines such as a parenting magazine, would do that. When I heard about the job at
Child
opening up, I figured they don’t want a bad mommy in that job. When I got to the third interview and they said, ‘Do you have any other questions?’ I leaned forward and I said, ‘I’d just like to conclude by saying how much I’d love this job and I think I would be terrific at it, blah blah blah.’ The publisher, who was a woman, later said that she loved that I asked for the job. I remember saying to my son Hunter later—even though he was a baby—lying on the bed with him, saying, ‘You helped Mommy get a great job because you made me ferocious.’ ”

She adds, “I have to say, Mika, I think I did gravitate toward bosses who one, liked to give a long leash to their editors-in-chief, and two, understood being a working parent. So it was a combination. I was also lucky enough to be in a field where there’s a lot of flexibility.”

In addition to keeping your foot on the gas and doing what you can to work for the right people, another key factor my interviewees acknowledged was getting help at home. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says, “I think if we got to parity in the home, we’d get to parity in the workforce really quickly.” When she’s asked what the most important thing to do to get your career right is, she says, “Marry the right guy ... the data is very clear that if a man and woman work full time, the woman does twice as much housework and 3.5 times the amount of child care. So she drops out because she’s got two jobs. He’s got one job, and he stays in his. So more important than any career decision you make, I think, is who you marry.”

There’s been a lot of discussion in the press recent years about the term “opt-out revolution.” Are women just tired of being on the fast track? Do those who have the luxury of not working do so because they’re just less ambitious? Or is it that working two jobs (the one you do at work and the other at home) really just break them? Women’s advocate Marie C. Wilson says, “Women who are coming up [the leadership] pipeline have to make really tough decisions about children and work, because as you and I know, those jobs are 24/7, so you really have to decide, is that the way you want to live? Sometimes women don’t want to make those choices. I used to not believe this, but I think increasingly women are saying, ‘Why would I want to live like that?’ And more men are too, as a matter of fact.”

Wilson believes that the problem is the sociocultural ideal of women in America has never changed. While many women work as executives, society still thinks of them as primarily wives and mothers. The result, Wilson tells me, is that “while there’ve been more companies that offer flexibility, which helps, there’s not a real commitment to making sure that there’s a national child-care policy, that there are ways that women can enter and re-enter the workforce at the same level if they leave to have children, that there’s complete support for paternity leave,” which would allow men to share family responsibilities equally.

Wilson agrees that one of the things that keeps women out of positions of power is that “they’re not just having to negotiate at work; women have to negotiate at home if they are in a two-career household, which they usually are.” How do they get enough support at home to be able to do a 24/7 job? “I’ve often said, ‘Show me a woman without guilt and I’ll show you a man,’ ” she says. “Because frankly, women end up feeling guilty at work because they are not doing enough at home and feeling guilty at home because they’re not doing enough at work.”

My husband, Jim, is the son of a single mother who had to work and also struggled with mental-health issues. He had
no blueprint for “who does what” in the home. We negotiate our own path as a couple, and while it might not be perfect, it is not weighed down with traditional stereotypes. Except for my year of unemployment, ours has always been a two-career household. When the girls were babies, there were several years where it could be argued that I carried a heavier load at home, but my husband and I never counted. Whoever was there did what needed to be done: we handled the household duties and childcare in an equal partnership. But these days, it’s arguable that he contributes more than I do. It just happened that way, without discussion. Family, to us, is a collaboration, not an accounting of who’s done what. I feel so lucky that our marriage is based on mutual support; the only thing we count is our blessings.

O
ver the past two decades, I’ve learned a great deal about what
not
to do when negotiating a raise, a job offer, or simply trying to push my career forward. I’ve benefited from my own experience, and the wealth of experience that the amazing women in this book were generous enough to share with me. I’m confident that I won’t let myself down again. I am optimistic that it will be easier for generations to come, as it was easier for me than the generations that came before—just as long as we’re able to transcend our fears and limitations, and be authentic and in the moment when it comes to negotiating for ourselves. Right now, our inability to do that is costing us money. We owe it to ourselves to do better.

Everyone I spoke with is optimistic about the future of women in the workforce. Even those who believe that men
are holding us back also believe that at some point they will also lift us up. “I think we’re making progress, and I think the best way to make progress is when more and more men have daughters,” Valerie Jarrett tells me. She flourished in her career when she worked for Mayor Daley, whom she describes as a supportive father and a husband to a strong wife. She also points to President Obama, the son of a single mom, husband to a woman who has always had a demanding career, and concerned father of two girls. He surrounds himself with strong women, values them, and “lifts them up.”

Many others felt the key was to have more women working in traditionally male fields. Not just traditional areas such as finance, but emerging fields like technology, which is increasingly a center of power.

“What’s astonishing and quite disturbing is at the top of the capitalist pyramid there are almost no women,” Chrystia Freeland says. “The areas where the real money and power reside are still occupied almost exclusively by men.”

Freeland has covered the global economy for several decades as a reporter and editor of the
Financial Times
. Today she is the global editor-at-large for Reuters, and she often is on
Morning Joe
to talk about the world economy, business, and politics. While sitting with Freeland on our studio set one day, I mention my plans to write this book. She is instantly supportive: “Mika, women need to hear the truth.”

That truth, says Freeland, is that when a job is highstatus, society still defines it as male. “How many would picture a Wall Street titan in a skirt?” she asks. She sees the same
thing developing in American science and technology industries right now.

“Most of the gain in income and productivity for the whole economy over the past decade, even the past couple of decades, is in the top one percent, and that’s where the women aren’t penetrating,” Freeland says. “I want to see women coming up with something and creating it and building it. I want a female Sergey Brin, I want a female John Paulson. I think there are lots of women out there. We need to create a culture that encourages that more. Think about the great tech start-ups—think Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook. Where are the girls coming up with these great ideas in their Harvard dorm rooms?”