particular artist. She loved it so much that she took it home and hung
it in her house to see how it looked. She loved it even more, but she
couldn’t afford it and with great regret she returned it to the dealer.
Shortly afterward, the artist who painted the picture died. Realizing that
the work’s value would skyrocket, Renata rushed back to the dealer,
only to find that the piece had already been sold. “If you loved it that
much, you should have asked me to work out a payment plan,” the
dealer said. “I would have figured out a way for you to have it.” This
had never occurred to Renata. She assumed that the price was the price,
she either had the money or she didn’t, and there was no flexibility in
the situation.
In stark contrast, the men we interviewed recounted numerous tales
of assuming that opportunity abounds—and reaping big rewards. Here
are a few of their stories.
Steven, 36, a college administrator, is married to a professor at the
school where he works. Shortly after the birth of their first child, Ste-
21
C H A P T E R 1
ven’s wife was invited to spend a year as a visiting professor at a presti-
gious university in another city. Steven’s job involved managing a staff
of almost 100 people, which is hard to do from another city, but there
was no question about his wife’s accepting the invitation—it was a great
opportunity. His wife assumed they were in for a year apart, but Steven
was unwilling to accept this. Instead, he devised a plan whereby he
could do part of his job from out of town and hand off some of his
responsibilities to a colleague who would be on-site. In return, he took
over several of her duties that didn’t need to be done on-site. And he
went further: He persuaded this colleague to take on some extra duties so that he could reduce the number of hours he worked and spend
more time with his newborn daughter. Steven presented the plan to his
boss, who was happy to accommodate the needs of a valued employee.
Steven and his family enjoyed a wonderful year together, he and his
colleague each acquired new skills from trading responsibilities, and
Steven’s job was waiting for him when he returned.
Hal, 41, owns a small chain of athletic clubs in northern California.
For several years, he’d owned two adjacent lofts in San Francisco, living
in one and renting out the other. After his girlfriend moved in with
him, he wanted to enlarge his living space by expanding into the loft
he’d been renting, but he didn’t want to pay the exorbitant prices
charged in San Francisco for design and renovation services. Hal had
recently joined the board of directors of an Italian furniture and design
company, and after a little thought he approached the company’s presi-
dent with the following proposal: “I will pay you to renovate my apart-
ment at cost,” he said, “but I will pay you up-front for the work. This
will help your cash flow, and it will give work to the employees of your
San Francisco store, which has just opened and is not yet busy. You’ll
also get a local reference and a local project to showcase.” The president
of the firm agreed, the store’s staff took particular care with the project
because they wanted to show the San Francisco market what they could
do, and for far less than he could have paid any other way, Hal got
himself a gorgeously renovated apartment.
Mike, 63, an entrepreneur, attended a New England private school
as a boy. After an injury forced him to give up football, he became head
cheerleader in order to continue supporting his team. As a big game
with a major rival approached, Mike overheard a lot of boys expressing
regret that they wouldn’t be able to see the game because it would be
played at the other school. Looking for a solution, Mike approached
the local train company and asked if it would be possible to rent a train!
22
O P P O R T U N I T Y D O E S N ’ T A L W A Y S K N O C K
To his surprise, the railway was happy to oblige for a reasonable price,
and the entire school was able to ride in style to the football game.
At the time, Mike’s school sent close to 100 boys a year to Yale. The
pressed by his initiative that they made sure his name was on the Yale
list, even though his grades made him a borderline candidate. Going to
Yale not only gave him a wonderful education, it provided him with
contacts and opportunities that he relies on to this day.
Who’s in Control?
Why do men and women differ so much in their propensity to recognize
opportunities in their circumstances? Why are men more likely than
women to take the chance of asking for something they want, even
when there’s no obvious evidence that the change they want is possible?
A group of psychologists has identified an interesting gender difference
that helps answer this question. Using something called a “locus of con-
trol” scale, these researchers measure the extent to which individuals
believe that their behavior influences their circumstances.2 The lower
people score on the scale, the more they perceive their fate to be influ-
enced by internal rather than external factors. That is, those who have
an “internal locus of control” (the low scorers) feel that they “make life
happen” whereas those with an “external locus of control” (the high
scorers) feel that life happens to them. Research has found that people
with an internal locus of control spontaneously undertake activities to
advance their own interests more than people with an external locus of
control. They’re more likely to seek out information in their environ-
ment that will help advance their goals and more likely to be assertive
toward others. People with an internal locus of control may also be less
vulnerable to negative feedback.3 As it turns out, the average scores for
women are significantly higher on locus of control scales than those
for men. This tells us that women are more likely to believe that their
circumstances are controlled by others while men are more likely to
believe that they can influence their circumstances and opportunities
through their own actions.4
This is not just true of American women. In an unusually far-reaching
study, this finding was replicated in 14 countries, including Britain,
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden in Western Europe; Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Rumania in Eastern Europe; the
23
C H A P T E R 1
former U.S.S.R., India, China, Mexico, and Brazil.5 The study also
controlled for occupational status, meaning that even among senior
managers, who might be expected to perceive themselves as having
more control over their lives than lower-level, unskilled workers,
women still scored higher than men. This indicates that even women
who exercise a great deal of control in their jobs still believe that external forces influence their lives more than men in the same jobs believe.
Locus of control issues also help expl
ain the discomfort women feel
about negotiations involving money. Martha, 43, a career counselor,
described being offered a job and gratefully accepting what her new
employer offered to pay her. After she was hired, she learned that
she was the only employee who hadn’t negotiated her starting salary.
But it hadn’t occurred to her that she had any control over what she
was paid, she said. She assumed the salary for the job was “like a price
on an item in a store.” Many women, like Martha, go through life think-
ing that money is something that is controlled by other people, not by
themselves.
That women feel as though their lives are controlled by others should
not surprise us, perhaps. As the psychiatrist Linda Austin notes in her
book What’s Holding You Back? “the lives of women have been largely
controlled by men until quite recently.”6 A few facts explain what she
means. Although women were given the right to vote in Wyoming in
1869 and in Utah in 1870, no nation-state gave them national voting
rights until New Zealand in 1893, little more than a hundred years ago.
The United States followed in 1920 and Britain in 1924. Switzerland
didn’t give women this essential form of control over their lives until
the astonishingly late date of 1971. No woman was allowed to earn a
Bachelor of Science degree anywhere in the British Empire until 1875;
the first Bachelor of Arts degree awarded to a woman followed two
years later. Battling for other forms of control—such as the right to own
property, make free and informed choices about procreation and birth
control, and work in any profession of their choosing—occupied
women in Western culture for much of the twentieth century.
Even today, men control both the economic and political environ-
ments in which women live and work. In 2001 in the United States,
only 10.9 percent of the board of directors’ seats at Fortune 1000 com-
panies were held by women.7 Although women now own about 40
percent of all businesses in the United States, they receive only 2.3
percent of the available equity capital needed for growth—male-owned
companies receive the other 97.7 percent8 (a statistic that helps explain
24
O P P O R T U N I T Y D O E S N ’ T A L W A Y S K N O C K
Martha’s widely shared feeling that “other people” besides women con-
trol the money in the world). In politics, no woman has ever been
elected president or vice president of the United States; only 14 out of
100 U.S. senators are women; and only 13.5 percent (59 out of 435)
U.S. representatives are women. There have been only two female Su-
preme Court justices since the United States was founded in 1776 (and
both were appointed in the past 25 years), despite the fact that women
represent more than 50 percent of the population. (Women are not the
only group with good reason to feel as though their lives are controlled
by others, of course. Many cultural and ethnic minorities suffer a similar
“outsider effect,” seeing themselves closed out of most positions of polit-
ical and economic power.)
The situation is not much different in other English-speaking coun-
tries or in Europe. Britain had a woman prime minister, Margaret
Thatcher, for 11 years (1979–1990), but membership of the House of
Commons remains strongly tilted in favor of men (only 18 percent of
the 659 members are women). In the judiciary in England and Wales,
only 4 percent of the high court judges and only 6 percent of the circuit
court judges are women. Women occupy similarly low percentages of
the top jobs in government and at major corporations in Australia, New
Zealand, and the countries of Western Europe. Although parts of North-
ern Europe, particularly Scandinavia, have made significant strides in
this area over the past two decades, the representation of women in
positions of political and economic power in all of these countries re-
mains far below 50 percent.9
Long barred from access to formal education and denied the right to
vote, own property, and control their own bodies, women were in very
material ways dependent on the will and whims of others to decide
their fates. Women’s collective identity, as Austin writes, “for millennia
. . . rested on the accurate acknowledgment that our lives were indeed
controlled by external forces.”10
The impact of this legacy can be enormous, influencing women’s
actions in their private lives, at school, and in the workplace. In the
personal realm, for example, it has long been customary in matters of
the heart for women to leave the “asking” to men. Until quite recently,
women were taught that they needed to wait for men to ask them to
dance, to go out on dates, and to marry them, and the influence of this
idea persists to this day. For LaKetia, 23, a sergeant in the U.S. Army
who has a two-year-old child, this assumption produced drastic conse-
quences. Unmarried when she became pregnant, LaKetia wanted the
25
C H A P T E R 1
father of her child to marry her. But he never offered, so she assumed
he was unwilling. Only much later, after her daughter was born and
relations with the father had deteriorated, did she discover that he’d
been willing to marry her and would have if she had asked. But even
though LaKetia is extremely capable, professionally ambitious, and ac-
customed to exercising a high degree of control over both men and
women in her job, she thought control of this particular decision—
about whether or not they would marry—rested outside of her. Because
the father of her child didn’t offer, she concluded that she had no alter-
native but to raise her daughter on her own.
Another good personal example—less life-determining but still tell-
ing—comes from Emma, 36. A social science researcher with a doctor-
ate in education, Emma is extremely successful and makes more money
than her husband, a musician. She kept her own name when she mar-
ried, and pays particular attention to the different ways in which her
two children, a boy and a girl, are treated by teachers, family members,
and friends. Despite this awareness, however, she found herself taking
a “vacation from hell” a few years ago at a ranch in the Southwest. For
a week, she and her children (both under four) shared a cabin and
rudimentary bathroom facilities with 20 other guests. This happened,
she told us, because it was her husband’s turn to choose their vacation
destination. Since it was his turn, Emma had assumed that his choice
was final and nonnegotiable, although he is not an inflexible man. Only
later did she realize that she could have exerted some control over the
decision by saying “these are the things I’ll accept, these are the things
I won’t accept, and . . . No, really, if I go on vacation, I need a bathtub
for the kids.”
The belief that control over their lives rests with others can have a
big impact on women’s experiences in school as well, as Linda learned
from the female graduate students who c
omplained to her because
they weren’t teaching courses of their own. Since then, Linda has en-
countered numerous other examples of this problem. One year, a fe-
male student asked why two male students had been allowed to partici-
pate in the university’s May graduation ceremony even though they
weren’t going to complete their degree requirements until late summer.
The female student would have liked to be part of the ceremony too
but assumed she needed to finish her degree requirements first. She
never asked if she could participate (Linda would have said yes); both
the male students had asked. Another time, a woman student asked
Linda why she’d given a male student permission to use department
26
O P P O R T U N I T Y D O E S N ’ T A L W A Y S K N O C K
resources to print up business cards and had not offered the same op-
portunity to her. Once again, the answer was the same: The male stu-
dent had asked; the woman hadn’t. Once she did ask, Linda readily
approved her request.
The conclusions are obvious: The women believed that control over
what they could teach, when they could celebrate their graduations,
and which department resources they could use rested entirely with
others; the men thought they might be able to exert some control over
these issues—and tried.
Examples of women ceding control over their lives in the profes-
sional realm also abound. Susannah, a 29-year-old political strategist
for a child advocacy organization, was hired by a think tank studying
children’s rights shortly after she graduated from college. Initially, Su-
sannah willingly “paid her dues” by getting to know the organization
and working through its ground-level departments. But after eighteen
months, she had identified the particular area in which she wanted to
work and spotted an open job she thought she could do well. Although
she mentioned her interest in the area to her boss more than once, she
never named the job she wanted or asked directly to be considered for
it. As a result, she spent two more years grinding away at a low-level
job far below her capabilities. As soon as she realized that she could
exert some control over her future in the organization and asked directly
for the higher position (which had remained unfilled for two years),