Read Online Knowing Your Value by Mika Brzezinski - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Mika Brzezinski
Ads: Link
woman every single time,” he says.
Why? He tells me to take a look at advertising: “If you watch little girls in a Saturday morning TV commercial for a Barbie, game, or anything, it’s always the same: it’s three or four girls sitting around a kitchen table playing together collaboratively—that’s the commercial. If you watch a commercial for a little boys’ game or toy, at the end one boy always raises his fists: ‘ I won! ’ I think in many ways senior women executives are superior in that for them it’s not a zero-sum game. They want to work collaboratively, they want to support, they want to be part of the team. It’s not as much how big is my paycheck, how big is my office ...”
His is a mixed message: on one hand, Deutsch says, yes women may want to be liked, and yes, they do the invisible jobs; that’s why he likes women, that’s why they are valuable employees. But it is the next words out of his mouth that explain why women so often end up with much of the work and little of the glory: “What I have also found is that—once again, this is not a rule either, there are exceptions to it—but for that very reason sometimes men have made better CEOs because that charge-the-hill aggression, that ‘what’s in it for me,’ the very thing that makes it harder to manage them is what makes them better in the top spot.”
I tell Deutsch that there are feminists who are not going to like what he says.
“I’m the ultimate feminist,” he fires back. “Eight out of my ten senior partners are women. This is a company I built; the CEO is a woman, the CFO is a woman ... I’m just saying that some of the time the things that make women more
successful in the most senior positions can also work against them.”
Although I don’t like hearing it, I appreciate Deutsch’s honesty. And he’s certainly right: women need to get better at charging the hill. I hear essentially the same message from everyone I speak with. Deutsch is simply being generous enough to tell the truth: either we own our value and get to the top, or we can work hard and let the men take the credit.
Most everyone also agreed that women just work harder. Certainly I was working as hard as my cohost, and harder than all the other men around me, though I was getting nowhere.
“It’s the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers thing,” Ilene H. Lang says after I recount my story. “Women do the same steps as men, but they do them backwards and in high heels. That’s what women have to go through to show that they’re as good as men. They have to work harder, they take much longer to be promoted, and they have to prove themselves over and over again.”
“I always felt like I had to be so much better, and in a way that did me a favor.”
—SUSIE ESSMAN
My friend and frequent Morning Joe guest Susie Essman may be better known as Susie Green, the foul-mouthed ballbreaking character she plays on the critically acclaimed HBO
series Curb Your Enthusiasm . But Essman isn’t anything like her alter ego Green, who tells her husband to go F himself if she doesn’t get what she wants; the real Essman says that despite her success, she is nagged by the feeling that she has to keep proving herself.
Essman has spent most of her career as a stand-up comic. “Talk about a boys’ club!” she says of the 1980s New York City comedy circuit. Essman says because the clubs hired mostly men, women had a hard time getting on stage at all, let alone at a decent hour. Women, she says, were often relegated to performing in the wee hours of the morning.
“I always felt like I had to be so much better, and in a way that did me a favor,” Essman tells me. “Instead of saying, ‘Oh, they’re not going to give me a good spot in the clubs because I’m a female,’ I was going to be so good they couldn’t deny me.
“Was it fair? No. But life isn’t fair,” Essman says. “I remember that my dad, who was a physician, told me, ‘Whenever you go to the
Why? He tells me to take a look at advertising: “If you watch little girls in a Saturday morning TV commercial for a Barbie, game, or anything, it’s always the same: it’s three or four girls sitting around a kitchen table playing together collaboratively—that’s the commercial. If you watch a commercial for a little boys’ game or toy, at the end one boy always raises his fists: ‘ I won! ’ I think in many ways senior women executives are superior in that for them it’s not a zero-sum game. They want to work collaboratively, they want to support, they want to be part of the team. It’s not as much how big is my paycheck, how big is my office ...”
His is a mixed message: on one hand, Deutsch says, yes women may want to be liked, and yes, they do the invisible jobs; that’s why he likes women, that’s why they are valuable employees. But it is the next words out of his mouth that explain why women so often end up with much of the work and little of the glory: “What I have also found is that—once again, this is not a rule either, there are exceptions to it—but for that very reason sometimes men have made better CEOs because that charge-the-hill aggression, that ‘what’s in it for me,’ the very thing that makes it harder to manage them is what makes them better in the top spot.”
I tell Deutsch that there are feminists who are not going to like what he says.
“I’m the ultimate feminist,” he fires back. “Eight out of my ten senior partners are women. This is a company I built; the CEO is a woman, the CFO is a woman ... I’m just saying that some of the time the things that make women more
successful in the most senior positions can also work against them.”
Although I don’t like hearing it, I appreciate Deutsch’s honesty. And he’s certainly right: women need to get better at charging the hill. I hear essentially the same message from everyone I speak with. Deutsch is simply being generous enough to tell the truth: either we own our value and get to the top, or we can work hard and let the men take the credit.
Most everyone also agreed that women just work harder. Certainly I was working as hard as my cohost, and harder than all the other men around me, though I was getting nowhere.
“It’s the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers thing,” Ilene H. Lang says after I recount my story. “Women do the same steps as men, but they do them backwards and in high heels. That’s what women have to go through to show that they’re as good as men. They have to work harder, they take much longer to be promoted, and they have to prove themselves over and over again.”
“I always felt like I had to be so much better, and in a way that did me a favor.”
—SUSIE ESSMAN
My friend and frequent Morning Joe guest Susie Essman may be better known as Susie Green, the foul-mouthed ballbreaking character she plays on the critically acclaimed HBO
series Curb Your Enthusiasm . But Essman isn’t anything like her alter ego Green, who tells her husband to go F himself if she doesn’t get what she wants; the real Essman says that despite her success, she is nagged by the feeling that she has to keep proving herself.
Essman has spent most of her career as a stand-up comic. “Talk about a boys’ club!” she says of the 1980s New York City comedy circuit. Essman says because the clubs hired mostly men, women had a hard time getting on stage at all, let alone at a decent hour. Women, she says, were often relegated to performing in the wee hours of the morning.
“I always felt like I had to be so much better, and in a way that did me a favor,” Essman tells me. “Instead of saying, ‘Oh, they’re not going to give me a good spot in the clubs because I’m a female,’ I was going to be so good they couldn’t deny me.
“Was it fair? No. But life isn’t fair,” Essman says. “I remember that my dad, who was a physician, told me, ‘Whenever you go to the
Similar Books
