Knowing Your Value (7 page)

Bartz tells me that in the early 1990s, she was competing with two men to be CEO of Autodesk, a multinational design software company. She got the job and ended up with what she thought was a generous compensation package. But she later found out that the men she was up against had been asking for millions more. Says Bartz: “What they were negotiating for was way over—
way
over what they had negotiated with me ... you know, I was too naïve, too stupid, and they got me on the cheap ... when I found out what the guys were asking, I thought, ‘You dummy.’ ”

Bartz says that early on in her career, she had difficulty promoting herself. “When I was younger, I was just happy to have the professional position,” she tells me. “Then I think you naïvely put your head in the sand, and think they will notice your worth.”

I was struck by the fact that both Bartz and Sandberg were telling me stories about not knowing their value, and feeling lucky to get the offers they did. I had assumed their psychology would be different, and that they had handled themselves very differently. Hearing these women talk about luck struck a chord with me. My feeling lucky to have a job had cost me dearly over the years. Feeling lucky and fearing rejection. Women who run women’s magazines are extremely in tune with those sentiments that drive us or get in our way. On this issue, they let it rip.

Lesley Jane Seymour, the editor-in-chief of
More
magazine, the leading lifestyle magazine for women of substance and style, is a great promoter of women. She is a wife and mom, and she is also a friend and mentor.

She tells me, “If you talk to a lot of women as you’re doing this, you’re going to hear a lot of women use the word
luck
. I hear executives all the time say, ‘I’m lucky to have gotten here, I’m lucky’ ... I can’t even tell you how many successful females, CEOs of companies, will say ‘I just got lucky.’ But if you think it’s just luck that made you successful, then if you ask for too much, the luck might just run out.”

“Emotion can trip women up,” Seymour says when she hears my story. “We are willing to take those substitutes because we have been brought up on emotion.” Seymour, who
has run several magazines in the thirty-some years she’s been in publishing, said it took her years to realize that feeling “loved” by her bosses did not mean she was being valued. “I definitely made the mistake in my career of looking for an emotional connection instead of just money. I used to tell my boss that I would do the job ‘even if you didn’t pay me,’ ” Seymour says, laughing. “I guess they decided to take me at my word.” She would later discover that colleagues with the same responsibilities had larger salaries.

“I ran each magazine basically with the idea I was going to run it as if it were my own product, my own business, with my own money . . . I’m going to make the best choices because I’m running it as if it’s mine, I’m putting in 120 hours a week, and I’m saving them money, they’re going to love me so much . . . And guess what. They didn’t care!”

Seymour says her bosses quickly figured out that she’d accept approval instead of money. “I had one boss who was very good. For instance, once when I had a really good year, she took me out to lunch and she gave me a pair of earrings. Jeweled earrings. She told me how much the company loved me. That was very smart. That’s something that women are susceptible to. No man is going to take another man out to
lunch, give him a pair of earrings and say how much the company loves him. The guy would say ‘What’s wrong with this company?’ I mean, my husband would laugh hysterically and walk out. His response would be, ‘What kind of company is this? Give me a raise!’ Instead, my first reaction was, ‘Oh my god, thank you, you love me so much!’ ”

Bottom line, says Seymour: “The men’s way of doing business is without emotion. It’s just money. It’s just business. Emotions play absolutely no hand in business in America in general. You have to bring as little emotion as you can to it.”

Movie director, producer, screenwriter, author, and playwright Nora Ephron tells me, “I think several things are more true about women than they are about men in terms of knowing your value. One is that women have a constitutional resistance to quitting. We like to be good. We like to be loyal. We like to be good girls. One of the ways you make more money in the work place is by quitting and going someplace else. It’s always been my feeling that women just don’t get that, they don’t learn that lesson that men constantly teach, which is you have to keep moving in order to get raises.”

Ephron says this was true of her early career, when she was working at
Esquire
magazine. She was thrilled to be working there, even though she was being paid something like a thousand dollars per month. “I was married at the time, and I didn’t have to make a lot of money because there were two incomes,” she says. “Then my marriage broke up, and the editor of
New York Magazine
called and offered me three times as much as I was making at
Esquire
. First of all I needed the money, but second of all I was so stunned by it. I went to the editor of
Esquire
and I said, ‘I’ve had this offer from
New York Magazine.
’ And he said, ‘We’ll match it.’ Then I got really irritated, because I thought, ‘Why did I have to ask for this?’ And then after I got done thinking that, I thought, ‘Well it’s my fault—I should have asked for it!’ ”

In hindsight, Ephron says she just wasn’t taking herself as seriously as she should have. She didn’t know her value, and to some degree she didn’t care, because she was so happy to be working at that particular magazine. Ultimately she went to
New York Magazine
simply because she was so annoyed that she’d been underpaid and had worked for so long without realizing it.

Ephron doesn’t blame women, but tells me the problem is that “We don’t take ourselves seriously. We can’t expect men to take us seriously if we don’t take ourselves seriously. That is just the truth. It would be sweet if they did and we didn’t have to do anything. But that’s what we want; we don’t want to have to do anything. We don’t want people thinking that we’re pushy or masculine.”

Arianna Huffington—high-profile columnist, author, and
cofounder and editor-in-chief of
The Huffington Post
—has been a friend and a supporter of mine since
Morning Joe
began. She agrees that asking for a raise is an area fraught with anxiety for many women. “One reason is that most women have a very different relationship to money than men do,” she tells me. “For us, money represents love, power, security, control, self-worth, independence. After all, if money were just money, everyone would always make rational decisions about it. And we know women certainly don’t always do that. But why? One reason is that women have been raised to think of money in terms of security—and not just financial security. Even today, a surprising number of us still think that it’s the man’s job to make and understand money. Far too often we delegate this responsibility and don’t learn enough about money—so of course we fear it.”

After she hears my story, financial guru, talk-show host, author, and motivational speaker Suze Orman puts it succinctly: “The problem is, a woman is socialized to accept that which she is given. So if somebody tells you that you can’t, you believe it. If somebody says you’re not worth it, you believe it. You get angry, but you can’t say anything because women don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they feel.”

Wanting to be liked, taking things personally, feeling lucky to have the job, fearing unknown consequences: these are filters through which a lot of women view their work, and that influences the way they react. But the truth is, the filters blur our focus and keep us from our goals.