Darling, You Can't Do Both

Janet Kestin, Nancy Vonk

• Publisher: Collins
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781554685813
• eBook ISBN: 9781443424448
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

From the award-winning advertising team, a creative, fresh and brutally honest guide to taking on the working world on your own terms

Janet Kestin and Nancy Vonk have built their careers on unconventional creative thinking. As two of the leaders behind Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty, they famously championed stripping away photoshopping, lighting and makeup to sell real beauty. After years of rethinking brands, they decided that they wanted to focus on rethinking the way we work—or, in many cases and places, the way our work doesn't work for us—especially for women. They've tackled the problem in their hallmark style: by turning expectations upside down and shaking them. Soundly.

Darling, You Can't Do Both is a smart, relatable guide for all of the women who embraced the spirit of Lean In but were left wondering where to start—how could they, in all industries and at all levels, really begin to change their realities and maybe even their companies, from the ground up? Janet Kestin and Nancy Vonk's answer is that women need to start breaking the largely unspoken rules of business they've always tacitly accepted. Darling will spark a new thread of conversation about women in the workplace—one that's about new strategies for every woman with ambition who is moving (and looking) forward—with motherhood not a roadblock but an unfair advantage.

RULE TO BE BROKEN:

Because you’re not worth it.

In my second ad agency job, after my three-month hiccup writing “women’s striped cotton top with pale blue piping and 3-button placket” for the Sears catalogue, my boss would occasionally swing by my office to let me know I’d see “a little extra” on my paycheck. This went on for two years. I found the idea of asking for money terrifying, so I was giddy with relief when that sensitive man spared me all the awkwardness and humiliation. When you’re earning fourteen thousand dollars a year, even a few hundred dollars feels like a fortune, so it never occurred to me that his generosity added up to less than twenty dollars a week. In my world, it was always Christmas. Then my slightly older writer friend, who lived by the motto, “when you’re a small, young woman, you need to be a big bitch to be taken seriously,” dragged me into her office for a “big talk.” The subject? My salary. She wanted to know how much I earned. My back went up. Everyone knows you don’t talk about money.

“What’s it to you?” I asked her. Gracious.

“Well, you spend an awful lot of time whining about how broke you are,” she said. “Maybe I can give you some perspective.” She had a point. I whispered my sad little number.

She shook her head at me. “You do know you’re getting hosed, right? By letting him come to you, you’re taking the smallest amount he can get away with. Not only that, you’re grateful. How dumb can you be?” She pulled a little book out of her drawer. It was a log of her accomplishments, her bargaining chips.

Our agency had had a jackpot year. She wanted to know what role I’d played in that. I’d played a role? Not as far as I could tell. But lo and behold, when we went through it all, my regular contributions began to leap out. “Write it down, then go tell him what you want and why you should get it.” I thanked her for her advice. Then, as we parted ways, she left me with this: “Grow up, little girl.”

I booked a meeting, and knocked on the boss’s door, clutching my notes, feeling as guilty as a kid with a bad report card. Somehow, I got the ask out. He seemed surprised. Hadn’t he just given me a raise? Hadn’t he always been good to me? Considerate?

I could hear my mother’s voice saying, “Don’t brag,” but I mumbled out my list before I lost my nerve. “I helped on three pitches and we won them all; I got a radio award and sold four campaigns, not by myself, of course.” I spoke while looking down at my paper. Silence. I looked up. I could see the light going on. He didn’t really know what I did, which ideas were mine, which tough clients I had good relationships with. On a regular day, I’d rather have died than told him, but I was eight months pregnant, living on a shoestring, and very motivated. He agreed that I should earn more.

Woo-hoo! I’d be coming back from maternity leave to a five-thousand-dollar raise. Whew. The raise-to-be was quickly converted into a crib, a stroller, a bassinet, a tower of diapers, drawers full of onesies. So what if we went into debt buying all that stuff? The money was on its way, and babies go through a lot of diapers.

Four months later, I went back to work expecting a shiny, bigger paycheck to plug the hole in my bank account, only to find that my boss had left for another agency without putting through my raise. Cue the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. Duh, duh, duh, daaa. The agency refused to honor the commitment with only my word to go on. Duh, duh, duh, daaa. So there I was with a colicky new baby, an equally broke young husband, and a mortgage that kept us in the poorhouse. I was stunned. Furious, resentful and hurt, I stuck around, afraid to quit, hoping something would change. I nervously scanned the job scene.

“I hear you’re looking for work.” My ex-boss was on the phone. You’ll betray me again, I thought. Does “betray” seem like a strong word to you? Maybe it was just that he was careless, but I didn’t want to work for him again. Good girl to the last, I agreed to meet. I was up to a whopping sixteen thousand a year and figured I’d really raise the stakes if it looked as if he wanted to bring me in.

“Twenty-five thousand,” I said, all tough.

He looked surprised. “Then I must give you five thousand more than that.”

Was he crazy? Did I say, “Why, thank you. That’s very generous. Let me sleep on it and get back to you”? Did I say, “Yahoo!” and fling my hat in the air? I did not. I said, “… but I’m not worth that.” I actually said those words.

“You should always be worth more to me than you are to you,” he replied. I took the job on the spot.

Who’s the worthiest of them all?

When you go from fourteen thousand to sixteen thousand dollars over two years, and suddenly to thirty thousand over the course of half an hour, it doesn’t compute. I simply couldn’t believe I deserved twice as much tomorrow for doing the same job as I did today but in a different company. I didn’t have any clear idea of what the job was worth, but I was sure it wasn’t that high—which is a typical way to think even now for young women. Branding firm Universum does an annual survey of undergrads and MBA students, asking them to anticipate what their starting salaries will be. As recently as 2012, women students guessed roughly seven thousand dollars less than the guys did.³⁷ Even when we’re guessing, when the sky is still the limit, we under-reach.

When I was a teenager, you got your after-school or summer job through the help-wanted ads in the local newspaper. The listings were laid out in columns with “Help Wanted: Male” and “Help Wanted: Female” across the top. I never looked at the male column for obvious reasons, but if I’d been on the job hunt ten years earlier, I might have noticed that some of the very same jobs appeared in both columns, with a lower salary for women.³⁸

A few decades later, things haven’t changed as much as you’d expect. The latest figures from the U.S. government show that women now earn about three-quarters of what men earn—seventy-seven cents for every dollar pocketed by men. It’s true in law, teaching, engineering. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research has predicted that the wage gap between men and women won’t close until 2056. Others say it may be ninety-eight years before women’s pay catches up to men’s.

I’m not keen on waiting an entire century for wage parity, and I fear the continuing snail’s pace when I read studies like the one from the National Academy of Sciences that shows the identical made-up résumé gets different results if a woman’s name is at the top, rather than a man’s. Corinne Moss-Racusin and other Yale researchers found that chemistry and physics profs saw John as more competent and worthy of a job and mentoring and deserving of a higher salary than Jennifer.³⁹ Similar studies have been conducted with students at Stanford Graduate School of Business, based on the Harvard Business School case cited by Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In: half the students were asked to go online and rate the entrepreneur Heidi (Heidi Roizen is a real person), and the other half to rate Howard (Howard is not a real person) based on the same résumé, and qualifications. Once again, the woman, Heidi, took a huge hit in comparison to Howard. Students didn’t like her, used words like “power-hungry” and “self-promoting,” and didn’t want to work with her.⁴⁰ Bias starts young and it means that in business, Keith is the guy they want to hang out with, who’ll get the job done and who deserves the glittering paycheck. As for Kate? She really doesn’t seem as qualified, does she? She probably won’t be a great employee, so she should earn less than Keith, especially if she’s a mom. What did Kate ever do to them?

A cartoon from The Christian Science Monitor captures it perfectly: A woman in an office is reading a newspaper with the headline “Gender Gap in Wages.” The man beside her is looking at her and saying, “Three-quarters of a penny for your thoughts.” Nailed. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

The mountain of articles and research papers and panel discussions on why women are less financially successful than men could fill the Treasury. The arch villain here is the unconscious bias grandfathered into a system that was created by men for men at a time when most women stayed home with their kids. The research points to our long history of being “second salaries” or working for “pin money.” Our history of part-time work has cast us in supporting roles, as has our tendency to go into “helping professions” like nursing and teaching, jobs that focus on people rather than wealth creation, jobs that our society cares about less.

Explanations are good, but they don’t change a darn thing. And the system is in no hurry to change itself, which means it’s up to us. At the very least, each one of us can ask for what she wants. Sylvie, the very senior in-house counsel for a heavy machinery manufacturing company, and my seatmate on a flight to Chicago, didn’t agree. She’d given up her fancy partner-track job in a corporate law firm because it was killing her teenage son to have two “sure-I’ll-be-at-your-football-game-sorry-I-can’t-make-it” parents. She knew it meant less money, but a couple of years in, she’d become incredibly disillusioned with the workload-paycheck trade. When I suggested she build a case for more, she gave me the “you don’t get it” face. She’d completely bought into the belief that she couldn’t change things.

Good girls don’t arm-wrestle, but it’s time to learn

“I’ve never negotiated a salary in my life.” Judith Wright, the former deputy minister of Children and Youth Services for the Ontario government, a department of five thousand people, shook her head in disbelief at her own complicity in the don’t-ask-don’t-get experience of so many women. “Not as assistant deputy of health or environment. Not as the deputy of health promotion and sport, Pan Am Games or intergovernmental affairs. What was I thinking?” The public service was a calling, like the priesthood, and she believed that you should just be happy with what you got. Did men buy into that? Of course not. After she left her post, her replacement told his bosses that he was bringing them important new contacts from the private sector. He told them an impressive story. Then he took on half her old job and negotiated a salary $150,000 higher. He asked; he got.

I’m far from the only woman who has felt she wasn’t worth more money. What a club to be part of. Senior legal counsel, deputy minister, chief creative officer—we all have fancy titles, and years of accomplishment, and still, for many of us, the idea of asking for money is right up there with sticking pins in our eyes … and for the most part, we have the paychecks to prove it.

Deborah Meek of WorkHarmony, a Toronto recruiting firm, was excited about Anika’s chances of landing a terrific job at a large marketing company. The MBA grad had been interviewed several times, with ever-more influential people. Anika approached each meeting with the focus and detail orientation of a forensics expert. “You know I’m nailing this,” she said. Deb did know. It was the fifth interview, ostensibly the final one, and if bookies had been laying odds, Anika was the odds-on favorite.

“We’re agreed that you’re going to ask for $65K, right?” They’d been debating the number for weeks, Deb recommending, Anika countering with less as Deb attempted to stretch Anika’s comfort zone. Deb raising, Anika lowering.

Raising. Lowering. It was typical behavior for a woman and intensely frustrating for Deborah, who finds women easier to place than men. “They’re more confident, more poised. They speak better. They’re perceptive. They’ve got it all going on, except where money is concerned.” The problem? She can never convince women to ask for what they’re worth.

“Men are better poker players,” she said. “They insinuate they’ll walk away if they don’t get what they want. They understand the bluff: start high and come down if necessary. Women ask for less to begin with, almost never push back on an offer, and then use the fact that they’ve undersold themselves as a stick to beat themselves with. And those patterns stick.”

How sad that we’ve been stuck in molasses for the entire decade since Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever’s much-quoted 2003 study showing that 57 percent of young men negotiate their first salary, while only 7 percent of women do. Let that sink in for a minute. Fifty-seven percent of guys negotiate their first salary. Gutsy or what? I’d no more have negotiated my first salary than sprouted gold-encrusted wings. A more recent look at starting salaries for grads by Rutgers’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development confirms that young women are taking home over five thousand dollars less than young men. And in Canada, the most recent numbers are considerably worse. Young women MBAs are earning about eight thousand dollars less than men in their first post-MBA jobs.⁴¹

Professor Beatrix Dart from the Rotman School of Management agrees that young women do better in school, interview better, get hired just as often, yet come out on the low end of salary negotiation at the beginning and stall out as they gain seniority. “When I ask them why, they say that’s what they were offered. ‘Did you counter?’ The answer is always the same: ‘I was too uncomfortable.’”

Our lack of confidence shows up in various disguises: silence, acceptance—and it shows itself in our pay. Professor Dart calls it “note-taker syndrome.” She always asks who took the notes when her students are working on a project in groups. Would you be shocked if I told you the “secretary” is usually a woman? Stand up and lead the discussion. “Start sitting back, stay sitting back” is the rule, she tells them. “So get up there. You paid just as much for your degree as the men.”

So what does this mean in the long run? According to Fast Company, it means a half million dollars that we’re throwing over our shoulders like a bride’s bouquet.⁴² The mistake is that we don’t negotiate our salaries when we’re young. We start behind and stay behind, at least in part, by our own hand. If this sounds a bit like blaming the victim, well, I am the victim, and I certainly blame myself.

I’ll say it again using a different source this time: SOME EXPERTS HAVE SUGGESTED WOMEN LOSE BETWEEN $350,000 AND $500,000 IN SALARY BECAUSE WE DON’T START TO NEGOTIATE UNTIL WE’RE TOO FAR BEHIND TO CATCH UP.⁴³ The caps are intentional; I’m shouting here. Why doesn’t anyone tell us this? Would knowing this long ago have changed the way I handled myself early in my career? Will hearing it change what you do? I hope so.

Male nurses can take in up to ten thousand dollars more a year than female nurses.⁴⁴ Male physician-researchers earn over twelve thousand dollars per year more than their women counterparts. Do the math and weep. Over a thirty-five-year career, this discrepancy can cost women $465,000 in lost earnings.⁴⁵ Even in partnership organizations like accounting or legal firms, women partners can find themselves taking home over 40 percent less than the men,⁴⁶ according to She Negotiates partner Lisa Gates. Imagine how many more years you’d have to work to make it up.

Which is why it’s heartening to hear Lisa Gates say that this isn’t the end of the story. “Women don’t have to keep losing money. While they’re not going recapture the money left on the table over the years, women can still capture the top of their current market value. If closing the gap between today’s paycheck and true market value would make your employer’s eyes spin in circles, negotiate timing for getting to parity. We should never say, ‘Oh well. Too late. I missed the parity boat,’” Lisa advises. “Getting past the gravitational pull of one’s existing salary is the hard part.” This is no time to be fine with the status quo.

Let the broad do it

“Will nothing ever change?” Claire Lamont was seething. One of Vancouver’s Top 40 Under 40 entrepreneurs by the time she was twenty-nine, Claire was in a fury as she sipped her Old Maid (gin, cucumber, mint, lime and Demerara sugar—I know you wanted to know) and told us about a women’s networking event she’d attended the previous week. The audience was glued to a conversation between two longtime journalists.

The bad old days of women in the newsroom came up. One of the speakers recalled an incident from her past where there was a human interest piece looking for someone to write it. The editor, barely looking up from his desk, said, “Let the broad do it.”

“Is this still the case?” someone in the audience wanted to know.

The other speaker told the room that journalism had changed a great deal since those days, that, in fact, it’s become a...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• RULE TO BE BROKEN: If you have a life, you’re not working hard enough.
• RULE TO BE BROKEN: Gender bias is an issue of the past. Moving on, ladies.
• RULE TO BE BROKEN: Mentoring is an act of charity.
• RULE TO BE BROKEN: Good things come to those who wait.
• Rule to be broken: Nice girls don’t get in your face.
• RULE TO BE BROKEN: Because you’re not worth it.
• RULE TO BE BROKEN: I’ll do it myself, thanks.
• RULE TO BE BROKEN: Darling, you can’t do both.
• RULE TO BE BROKEN: Stay safe.
• RULE TO BE BROKEN: Networking is for men.
• RULE TO BE BROKEN: To win, you have to play the game.
• RULE TO BE BROKEN: Ambition is a straight line to the top.
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Authors
• Copyright
• About the Publisher