standard doesn’t mean as much as the complexity of the job, the infor-
mation it uses and generates, and the different kinds of relationships
needed to do the work.”21 In another Harvard Business Review article, in 1997, the MIT management professor Peter Senge wrote, “Almost
everyone agrees that the command-and-control corporate model will
not carry us into the twenty-first century. In a world of increasing inter-
dependence and rapid change, it is no longer possible to figure it out
from the top.”22
Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford University goes even further. In The Human
Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First, he argues that “success comes from successfully implementing strategy, not just from having
one,” and “this implementation capability derives, in large measure,
from the organization’s people, how they are treated, their skills and
competencies, and their efforts on behalf of the organization.”23 The
overarching theme of Pfeffer’s argument is that in the new global econ-
omy, businesses will only thrive by “putting people first.” This creates
a pressing need for organizations to focus on the ways in which they
manage their people: creating high worker morale and building a shared
sense of commitment to the organization’s success. Doing this requires
the use of management practices that promote mutual trust and reduce
status distinctions among workers. It also requires practices that instill
a sense of “ownership” among employees, such as sharing information
concerning the financial health and performance of the organization
and emphasizing that everyone in the organization is working toward
common goals.
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Research by the psychologists Richard Wagner and Robert Sternberg
reinforces the value of this approach to management. Noting the lack
of any demonstrated link between IQ and job performance, they con-
clude that mere intelligence and the types of achievement taught and
measured in schools have little bearing on whether or not someone
makes a good manager. More important, Wagner and Sternberg con-
tend, is something they call “tacit knowledge”—the practical intelli-
gence that enables people to work well with others and motivate them
to do what they want.24 In an article in the New Yorker, Wagner said
that “in the real world, everything you do involves working with other
people. . . . What I.Q. doesn’t pick up is effectiveness at common-sense
sorts of things, especially working with people.”25
Research suggests that women may possess more of this type of
“common sense.” Studies show that men typically adopt more auto-
cratic (directive, command-and-control) leadership styles while women
employ more democratic leadership styles that allow subordinates to
participate in decision making.26 Women’s more inclusive, consensus-
building leadership styles fit nicely with the ability to manage different
kinds of relationships emphasized by Drucker, the more collaborative
management style Senge believes will be necessary in the future, Pfef-
fer’s emphasis on “putting people first,” and Wagner and Sternberg’s
belief in the importance of “tacit knowledge.” Research has also found
that women leaders are more interpersonally oriented than men—more
concerned with the welfare of the people they work with and with main-
taining good professional relationships.27 These differences even color
how women leaders think about their place in their organizations: Where
a male leader is more likely to see himself at the top of his organization,
a woman leader is more likely to see herself in the center of hers.28
Marcela, the nuclear engineer, described her way of asking the people
she supervises to do what she needs: “I talk about working with people, that people work with me, not for me. . . . I tend to couch things in
those terms—asking for help, asking for input. . . . ‘I’m in the same boat
with everybody else; we need to get this done.’ ”
Cynthia, the chief executive of a large electronics manufacturer, de-
scribed an early job at which she inherited an administrative office full
of women who were used to an autocratic management approach.
(Their previous boss had been male.) Finding this an inefficient, even
counterproductive, system, Cynthia took a much more collaborative,
democratic, and facilitative approach—a much more “feminine” ap-
proach—to managing the office. She pushed her employees to work
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out problems for themselves and take responsibility for finding solu-
tions. The office rapidly became much more productive, and these
gains helped her land an even better job. She has since moved up from
position to position and is now the top corporate officer of a Fortune
1000 company.
As more and more organizations change from the pyramid structures
of old to flat, more flexible organizations in which power is more dif-
fuse, control is looser, and there is more interdependence,29 both busi-
ness scholars and business leaders are starting to recognize the corre-
spondence between the skills of women like Marcela and Cynthia and
the new needs of organizations.30 Pulitzer Prize and National Book
Award winner James MacGregor Burns, in his influential book Leader-
ship, noted that effective leaders energize and inspire their followers and understand their needs and desires. “The male bias is reflected in the
false conception of leadership as mere command or control,” he wrote.
“As leadership comes properly to be seen as a process of leaders engag-
ing and mobilizing the human needs and aspirations of followers,
women will be more readily recognized as leaders and men will change
their own leadership styles.”31 Similarly, Judith Rosener observed that
“there is a convergence between the need to reinvent today’s organiza-
tions and the interactive leadership styles of women.”32
Many women in high management positions are also recognizing the
need to reinvent today’s organizations—and they feel up to the chal-
lenge. “Women’s goals used to be to get into management, to get onto
the boards of Fortune 500 companies, to become CEO,” says Margaret
Heffernan. “There is a new goal. The aim now is more radical and more
ambitious: It is to change the game entirely.”33
All of this suggests that women’s greater participation in the business
world will not just provide more opportunities for women and greater
gender equality—it may actually produce a strengthening of business
culture. By focusing their efforts on cooperating rather than competing,
women may be able to teach men to negotiate and manage—and lead—
more effectively. By sharing information rather than hoarding it, women
may demonstrate the power of a more collaborative approach and
model ways in which both men and women can make the best decisions
for themselves and their organizations. By involving others in decision
making rather than decreeing solutions, women may set a new standard
for motivating workers to
take pride in their work. And, as Judith Ro-
sener puts it, by approaching management as a process of linking peo-
ple rather than ranking them, women may lead the way in designing
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new organizational structures that achieve far higher levels of efficiency
and profitability.34
Rather than being a threat to either the power of men or the power
of our business culture, as men have sometimes feared, and rather than
weakening business culture by introducing an inappropriate emotional
dimension or focusing on the wrong things (such as relationships rather
than outcomes), “Women can transform the workplace by expressing,
not giving up, their personal values,” contend business writers John
Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene in Reinventing the Corporation.35 The psychologist Jean Baker Miller envisions it this way: “I am not suggesting
that women should soften or ameliorate power—but instead that, by
their participation, women can strengthen its appropriate operation.
Women can bring more power to power by using it when needed and
not using it as a poor substitute for other things—like cooperation.”36
This is not merely an idealistic goal. It’s a practical one as well. Being
hampered by the “mythical fixed-pie bias” is like “burning money”—
the lesser agreements reached instead are often inefficient and, in dollars
and cents, costly. By leading the way in showing us how to reach better
velop new forms of leadership for the new times in which we live,
women will be contributing to more stable and sophisticated business
relationships—relationships based on mutual advantage rather than on
cruder, more competitively defined measures of success. And strong
business relationships are the hallmark of a healthy economy. By dem-
onstrating the benefits of approaching power differently, women may
not only be improving their own position within the larger business
world, but—as befits an approach that proceeds from a communal im-
pulse—they may be helping us all.
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Negotiating at Home
Formuchofthisbook,we’vetalkedaboutnegotiatingintermsofthe
workplace—how women can get to do the work they want to do,
see that their work is fairly evaluated, make sure they’re paid what
they’re worth, and proceed as high into the upper levels of their profes-
sions as their talent and ambition will take them. We’ve focused on
workplace negotiations not because they’re inherently more important
than negotiations in other realms, but because most of the existing re-
search about negotiation looks at workplace situations. We just don’t
know very much about how the factors that constrain women from
negotiating for themselves play out in the private sphere. We know that
the gender gap in asking widens in ambiguous situations without clear
guidelines,1 and ideas about proper male and female roles have changed
enough in recent years to suggest that many private situations now lack
clear guidelines for behavior and feel more ambiguous to women.
We do have plenty of evidence, however, that learning to negotiate
more in their private lives, particularly with their spouses or partners,
may improve women’s lives and their health. Numerous studies, for
example, have shown that women do far more housework than men,
take more responsibility for caring for their children, and have far less
leisure time than their spouses.2 This is true whether they work full-
time, part-time, or work entirely in the home. Virginia Valian reports:
“Almost all employed women in heterosexual relationships live in
households where the division of labor is grossly and visibly inequita-
ble. . . . The imbalance exists among all groups of women who live with
men, including professional women. Married women who work for pay
average about thirty-three hours of housework per week—about two-
thirds of the total household work. Married men who are employed do
fourteen to eighteen hours of housework a week.”3
The impact of this unequal division of household labor is substantial
and measurable. Research has shown that women with families who
work full-time experience far higher levels of stress than their male
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counterparts, and that their excessive stress is due not to the demands
of their employment but to the weight of their responsibilities at home.
In one extraordinarily revealing study, researchers periodically mea-
sured the blood pressure and norepinephrine levels of managers during
the day. (They chose norepinephrine because this hormone responds
rapidly to changes in stress.) They found that the male managers’ blood
pressure and stress-hormone levels dropped dramatically at five P.M.
but the women managers’ levels actually jacked up as they turned their
attention from their “first-shift” jobs to their “second-shift” responsibili-
ties as wives and mothers. Another researcher, who looked at the levels
of stress hormones in employed mothers and childless women, found
that the women with children at home excreted higher levels of the
stress hormone cortisol and reported more stress around home respon-
sibilities. The amount of stress they experienced around their work re-
sponsibilities did not differ from the stress experienced by childless
women.4
genuine threat to women’s health. As Linda Austin reports in What’s
Holding You Back, “Chronic elevation of blood pressure caused by nor-
epinephrine secretion . . . is a significant risk factor for heart disease,
the number one killer of women.”5 Dr. Bruce S. McEwen, director of
the neuroendocrinology laboratory at Rockefeller University, confirms
that “prolonged or severe stress has been shown to weaken the immune
system, strain the heart, damage memory cells in the brain and deposit
fat at the waist rather than the hips or buttocks (a risk factor for heart
disease, cancer, and other illnesses).”6 In addition to these threats, stress
can contribute to aging, depression, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and
other illnesses.7
Women pay for shouldering more than their share of household
work with diminished professional success as well. Numerous studies
have noted the fact that, as Linda Austin writes, “high achievement and
heavy domestic responsibilities do not mix.”8 This is not because getting
married and having children automatically saps a woman’s ambition
and makes her want to aim less high professionally, but because the
burden of her responsibilities at home make it impossible for her to
devote the attention, energy, and time to her career that single or
childless women can commit. In many cases, this is a choice that
women happily make. Nonetheless, research has consistently shown
that working mothers experience more stress and depression than
working fath
ers do. And, as Linda Austin writes, “the cause of the stress
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is frequently misattributed. It is often implied that employment is caus-
ing women stress and depression and that the remedy is staying home.”
In fact the opposite is the case: “A study of 3,800 men and women
concluded that paid employment is associated with reduced depression
among both husbands and wives, while time spent in housework is
associated with increased depression for both genders, regardless of
other roles.”9
This tells us that working outside the home can be good for a wom-
an’s mental health, but if she also has children she will find herself
desperately in need of the skills necessary to make that balancing act
work. One of the most important skills she will need is the ability to
negotiate with her spouse or partner. Of course, if her circumstances
permit it, a woman can choose to work part-time, choose a less aggres-
sive career track, or decide to put some of her ambitions on hold until
her children are older. If she is sufficiently affluent, a woman can hire
people to do some of the household labor she doesn’t have time to do
(housecleaners, nannies, gardeners—even cooks and personal assis-
tants). Any of these are fine choices for a woman to make if she can.
And none of them change the fact that caring for children and running
a household take a lot of work, and it makes sense for both adult part-
ners in a relationship to do a fair proportion of that work. Negotiation
can be a useful strategy for establishing a more equitable distribution
of this workload.
Thinking about It Differently
Shortly before her first child was born, Emma, the social science re-
searcher, said to her husband, “How are you going to care for your child
while you are at work?” Her husband was taken aback—he had not
considered that this was a problem he needed to solve. He’d assumed
that Emma would make whatever adjustments needed to be made to
see that their child was properly cared for. Emma told Sara that she
frequently repeats this story to groups of women, and they always re-
spond with a kind of shocked delight, applauding her for her daring.
Their response reveals the assumptions made by most women: Since
they have always done the lion’s share of the childcare and housework,