Our Turn Read online

  My years spent partnering with broadcasters, distributors, production companies and studios of all sorts and sizes convinced me that success is built on mutual respect and a commitment to strive to meet each other’s goals. Good relationships start with a thorough understanding of what it is your partner values the most. At Paragon, my first sales job involved selling programming to the Middle East. One of our most popular and profitable programs at the time was The Raccoons, a children’s cartoon series we’d sold into the UK, Australia, Germany and France. Broadcasters in the Middle East wanted it, too, and were ready to buy the hit show sight unseen, even though it didn’t come cheaply, given there were sixty-five episodes, at a cost to them of tens of thousands of dollars each. But I had to tell them right off the top that the show was not for them because the foils to the friendly raccoons were dastardly pig characters. And in the Middle East, pigs—good or bad—are censored on TV out of respect for the Islamic religions of the region. I could have made the deal and made my commissions. But it likely would have been the last thing I sold them. Instead I said no, and my grateful partners thanked me profusely and bought three other series that suited their schedules. Asides from those revenues, I gained their trust.

  In the case of the NHL and Gary Bettman, we needed to assess what was in it for them to stay with the CBC as we got closer to the looming hockey licence expiry. We’d gotten back the Olympics, but the NHL rights in Canada are the holy grail for broadcasters. Bell and Rogers could offer integrated options with access to their cable and cellular assets. And they had much deeper pockets. Our chance to stay in the game was to show the NHL how we valued their partnership and their brand, and to show the benefit to them of our assets: a venerable brand in HNIC; access through our local stations to communities across the country to build the relevance of hockey; the talented production staff and on-air personalities who had produced an amazing show for years; our ability to feed content out on radio and online. This was not the kind of direct benefit cash would bring, though we did have some of that to spend too.

  Then, all too suddenly, we didn’t. After the budget cuts, we were hard pressed even to be at the bargaining table, let alone be a significant player. I left my job soon after rolling out the leading edge of the major cuts, hoping that the goodwill we had built meant the NHL wasn’t going to take their puck and go home. Sure enough Rogers came with an offer the NHL couldn’t refuse. But the CBC sports production team got to play an important role in the new HNIC, which also stayed on the network, though in a different form. And the friendship and collegiality I’d developed with Gary Bettman carried through to my job at Twitter; he vouched for me in my new role and our teams now work together, bringing Twitter’s video platform and other innovations to the NHL.

  I think too often women underestimate the value of their currency, its power to influence opinion, reshape a relationship or pave the way for new opportunities. Like information, we can be hesitant to use it, reluctant to call any attention to our professional successes; it’s just not what “good girls” do. And there’s probably nowhere that’s more obvious than in the stubborn gap that still exists between the wages of men and women.

  It’s in You to Ask

  LAST FALL, IN PHOENIX, ARIZONA, where more than seven thousand female engineers had gathered for an international conference for women in computing, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stepped in it big time in an onstage interview with Maria Klawe, a board member of Microsoft. When she asked him what advice he would give to women who are “uncomfortable asking for a raise,” he responded: “It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along. And that, I think, might be one of the additional superpowers that, quite frankly, women who don’t ask for a raise have, because that’s good karma. It’ll come back.”

  Unfortunately, you can’t take karma to the bank and faith has been a lousy provider. According to 2014 figures from the US Census Bureau, the system currently pays American working women about 78 percent of what men make. In Canada the gap is slightly narrower, with 2015 data from Statistics Canada showing that women earn 82 cents for each dollar a man earns. But when you include the weekly wages of part-time workers in 2014, the wage gap widens: Canadian women make about 75 cents for every dollar a man makes. And this disparity persists even in fields like nursing, where women outnumber men by ten to one. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found male nurses outearn their female colleagues by more than $7,000 per year in outpatient settings and close to $4,000 in hospitals.

  Nearly everywhere I’ve worked, I’ve inevitably tripped over the gender wage gap, with women earning less than their male peers and men earning more than female colleagues with more responsibility—myself included. More than once I have been promoted only to discover that the men who reported to me made more money than I did. The notion that pay raises will simply come to those who wait has all the credibility of the Tooth Fairy. It’s no wonder Nadella’s comments sparked an instant backlash online. Nadella, to his credit, backtracked immediately and apologized for his answer, admitting he was “completely wrong.” In an internal memo he wrote, “I believe men and women should get equal pay for equal work … If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask.”

  But there’s the rub. Not enough women do ask. Granted, the gender wage gap is a complicated problem. Women are more likely than men to interrupt careers to care for children and never quite catch up on the pay scale if and when they jump back into the workforce. Women are also more likely to turn down higher-paying promotions, due, at least in part, to family demands. And, of course, the ugly vestiges of sexism are still at work, even in the West, where we’d like to believe gender discrimination is dying. Even after you take into account that women often work in different fields than men, or that they have different work experience, education and union status, 41 percent of the gender wage gap is still unexplained, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. In an essay called “Gender Discrimination is at the Heart of the Wage Gap” published in Time last May, the center’s director, Anthony P. Carnevale and his co-author Nicole Smith, a professor at the center, argued that when social scientists control for every employment factor that could possibly explain the disparity, women still earn only 91 percent of what men earn for doing the same job. But just as there are still patriarchal perspectives to be toppled, women also have a role to play in closing the wage gap. The very fact that Maria Klawe’s question pointed out that women can be uncomfortable asking for a raise is evidence of that. We have to ask ourselves, why are we uncomfortable?

  On one hand, I think we’re often so grateful—thanking our lucky stars—that we nabbed the job, we forget that wishing on a star didn’t get it for us: we earned it. If you’re feeling grateful, the last thing you’re inclined to do is ask for more. Good girls get what they deserve and they don’t make a fuss or challenge authority. Too often, women fear that they will be seen as pushy or ungrateful, or worse, unlikeable, if they do, and plenty of research backs them up. All this might explain why so many women who know they should negotiate simply don’t. The Levo League, for instance, a social network that helps Gen Y women advance their careers, surveyed 10,000 of its members and found that 95 percent of these women had never asked for anything in their careers: no responsibility, no mentorship, no raise. As well, in research conducted for her book Women Don’t Ask, Carnegie Mellon economist Linda Babcock found that in a study of MBA graduates, 57 percent of men negotiated the job offer they received, but only 7 percent of women did. Not negotiating when you believe you deserve more is not only a personal loss for you, as an individual, but for wage equality across the organization.

  Still, even when we do suspect we should ask for more, we’re often unsure of what “more” means: we don’t have an accurate sense of our value. Studies consistently find that even before launching a career, men see themselves mak
ing more money than women expect to earn. A recent feature in The Atlantic, for example, included the view of Marilyn Davidson, a professor at Manchester Business School in England, who each year for seven years has asked her students what they expect to earn, and what they deserve to earn, five years after graduation. Every year she finds “massive differences” between the male and female responses: On average, men think they deserve $80,000 a year and the women $64,000—20 percent less. A 2014 Columbia University study featured in Business Insider found that high-ability women in college expect to earn 31 percent less than men expect to earn at age 30, and 39 percent less at age 45. It’s a disparity that can be partly explained by the fact that men are 82 percent more likely to major in business and seek jobs in the higher-paying fields of finance and economics, while women are 62 percent more likely to major in the humanities, which typically pay less. But the study found that even within those fields the gap persists, which can be attributed in part to the fact that men were twice as likely as women to overestimate their true ability level. Call it the expectation gap, but it seems to be one only made wider by the gender gap in confidence. Even in Hollywood, an industry of multi-million-dollar paycheques negotiated by lawyers and agents, it seems to be alive and kicking.

  Last fall’s infamous hacking of documents and emails at Sony Pictures revealed that male actors were paid significantly more than female actors working in the same movie, most notably, in American Hustle. Actors Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper and Jeremy Renner all received a significantly larger share of the profits for their roles in the Oscar-nominated film than their female co-stars Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence. When asked to explain the pay gap, departing Sony executive Amy Pascal said during an interview at the Women in the World conference in February 2015 that the women, or their agents, didn’t ask for more. “I run a business. People want to work for less money, I’ll pay them less money. I don’t call them up and go, ‘Can I give you some more?’ … What women have to do is not work for less money. They have to walk away. People shouldn’t be so grateful for jobs … People should know what they’re worth and say no.”

  And that answer is likely not much different than what would come from any boss minding the purse strings. When women don’t ask to be compensated at the same level as men as they start out in their careers, they aren’t, and then it’s tough to ever catch up. I know this. As a boss, I’ve seen the disparities, but I also know that trying to correct them is no simple feat. When women and men get the same percentage pay bump for years in a row, the woman never pulls even because she started way behind. As a boss I’ve never been authorized to spend the money necessary to close the gap once and for all. When raises across the board are limited to a range of 2 to 5 percent a year, there’s little room to close that gap. And it is unfair to rob hard-working Peter to pay hard-working Meg.

  So how do women close the gap? First of all, we have to ask for that raise. But we have to be smart in how we ask. Too often women have come to me as their boss and tried to justify a raise based on the expenses they face at home: daycare costs, commuting costs, rent, the extra challenges of being a single parent. The trouble with this approach is that your living expenses are your problem, not your boss’s. A raise needs to be framed as a recognition of your contributions at work. Salary conversations need to express the idea that compensation-for-work is a value exchange. If you feel you are worth more to your company than you’re being paid, or what’s been offered, you need to make a business case for why I should spend more on you. So make your request about what you do, about how you make the organization better, about your personal capital and your plans to spend it in order to benefit the firm overall. Keep in mind that a wide range of attributes add to your value as an employee. Do you have a proven ability to form constructive relationships? Do you have the trust of the people you work with? Do they regard your opinion highly? What about your digital presence and profile—do you know how to leverage online interactions in ways that could help the business? All of these are sought-after skills, at all levels, and such skills have never mattered as much as they do now. If you make a strong business case to increase your compensation, not only does it convince the boss that you deserve more, it allows the boss to make the case to her higher-ups that it’s in their interest to pay you your market value or they will lose you to the market. It won’t always work, but if you never ask, you’ll never succeed. Make it difficult for me to tell you that you don’t deserve the pay you think you’re worth. And if your boss does deliver that message, isn’t it better to know and make plans to move on to someplace where you are valued?

  Closing Gaps While the Windows Are Open

  THERE’S BEEN A LOT SAID—and I’ve already said a lot—about the different ways women and men tend to view success. Often, for women, the perception is that women are less interested in promotions and higher income levels than in personal growth or meaningful work. But I think, in these changing times, there’s a growing recognition that these aims are not mutually exclusive and that for women and men the ingredients of success are quite similar. Last summer, for instance, Forbes delved into this issue and then carried the results of a survey of four thousand people from the management consulting firm Accenture, which found that both men and women ranked the qualities of career success as work–life balance first, money second, then recognition and autonomy. And a 2010 study in the Journal of Behavioural Studies in Business that asked people to define success found that it was men who said “personal growth,” while women were more likely to say “career goals.”

  What’s important about this research is that it’s a timely reminder that women should not buy into the stereotypical idea that somehow we naturally default to playing supporting roles in the workplace. We have enough barriers to surpass without mistakenly believing that we are all happy with the current scarcity of women in leadership positions.

  There’s an oft-quoted statistic from an internal Hewlett-Packard study, for instance, that was conducted to figure out how to get more women into management. It reviewed personnel records of employees and discovered that women only applied for promotions when they believed they met 100 percent of the qualifications listed for the job. Men, on the other hand, threw their hat into the ring when they thought they met 60 percent of the criteria. The take-away message has been that men overestimate their potential while women underestimate it, as many other studies have found. But a follow-up study by Tara Sophia Mohr, an author and founder of an international leadership program for women, which was published in August 2014 in the Harvard Business Review, found that the application gap really isn’t about confidence at all.

  Based on a survey of a thousand professional men and women, the study found that the most common reason men and women didn’t apply for a certain job was because they assumed the required qualifications were actually required, as in: “I didn’t think they would hire me since I didn’t meet the qualifications, and I didn’t want to waste my time and energy.” Women were much more likely than men (about 22 percent vs. 13 percent) to say “I didn’t want to put myself out there if I was likely to fail.” As well, 15 percent of women, versus only 8 percent of men, said they held back simply because “I was following the guidelines about who should apply.”

  The conclusion is not that women lack the confidence to apply for new positions or promotions, so much as an understanding of how hiring processes actually work, and that how you sell yourself can trump the hiring criteria. Or as the study put it, “advocacy, relationships, or a creative approach to framing one’s expertise could overcome not having the skills and experiences outlined in the job qualifications.” In other words, we women are still newcomers to the game and rookies tend to play by the rules. It’s no surprise that women would be more inclined to take the job criteria as gospel: girls are raised to follow the rules. Again, in school this wins us awards and degrees, but in the work world it may well limit our careers. But it’s not all on female shoulders. As that McKinsey
report found, where men are often hired for their potential, women are tapped for their track record. The HBR report suggests that this is historical baggage too. Through the twentieth century, at least, women’s past on-paper accomplishments, our certificates, diplomas and degrees, were our tickets in, proof that we had the credentials to operate in a man’s world. But when the world now belongs to us all, when managing out is the new model and influence is the new power, when women increasingly bring the right stuff to drive innovation and success, there’s good reason for everyone to fight biases in hiring. All of us need to bring a little more moxie to advocate for ourselves and our ideas—and we need to bring it now.

  There’s a window opening here and now, and if organizations don’t adapt, and women don’t act, it can close quickly. The new economy is not without its growing pains. When things are new, they can be confusing and scary, tempting companies old and new to fall back into familiar patterns of hierarchy. Institutions that are struggling to stay in control can be short-sighted. Even young, start-up firms, blossoming with progressive cultures and diverse teams of employees, can be vulnerable to old ways of doing business: the bigger these firms become the more alluring it seems to slip back into old top-down management styles and focus too closely on quarterly results and profit margins. If that happens, organizations can quickly lose sight of the people they serve and the people serving with them.

  Pressures from technology and business have combined to make way for a new way of leading, but that will be crushed if we don’t move before old biases and habits take hold. And they’re never very far away. In March 2015, for example, the Harvard Business Review ran a report examining the infamous under-representation of women in science, technology, engineering and math. Other research has suggested the problem is the pipeline, with too few women interested in these territories, or that women in these demanding fields opt out to care for their families. But this report, which involved in-depth interviews with 60 women in science, along with 556 surveys of women in these areas, discovered, once again, that assumptions are dangerous. Women aren’t opting out: bad treatment and stereotypical old biases are driving them out. Women in the study said they had to provide more evidence of their competence than their male colleagues, and provide it again and again—especially if they’d had children. They reported that they were expected to fit into stereotypical roles as either office mother or dutiful daughter, at the same time as they had to walk a tightrope between being seen to be too feminine to do the job or too masculine to be liked. Half the respondents reported experiencing a backlash for speaking their minds directly or being decisive.