C H A P T E R 1
saying what they need and responds badly when they do. Nonetheless,
until now the average man has approached life both inside and outside
the workplace with a powerful advantage over the average woman sim-
ply because he suspected that life holds more possibilities than those
publicly announced and widely available. What Judi’s story reveals (and
the experiences of Susannah and Christine and many more women con-
firm) is that women possess a wonderful capacity to learn this lesson,
a lesson that can change their lives in ways both large and small.
40
2
A Price Higher than Rubies
OneofLinda’sgraduatestudents—ayoungwomanwhohadtaken
her negotiation class—visited Linda in her office to share some
good news. The student had just accepted a job offer from a great com-
pany and couldn’t wait to begin her new career. When Linda asked
how the negotiations had gone, the student seemed surprised. Her new
employer had offered her so much more than she’d expected, it hadn’t
occurred to her to negotiate. She simply accepted what she was offered.
This story points out an obvious truth: Before we decide to negotiate
for something we must first be dissatisfied with what we have. We need
to believe that something else—more money, a better title, or a different
division of household chores—would make us happier or more satis-
fied. But if we’re already satisfied with what we have or with what we’ve
been offered, asking for something else might not occur to us. Ironi-
cally, this turns out to be a big problem for women: being satisfied
with less.
Expecting Less
In 1978, psychologists discovered that women’s pay satisfaction tends
to be equal to or higher than that of men in similar positions, even
though women typically earn less than men doing the same work.1 Four
years later, a broader study looked at many different types of organiza-
tions and reached a similar conclusion, which the author of that study,
the social psychologist Faye Crosby, called “the paradox of the con-
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C H A P T E R 2
tented female worker.”2 Seventeen years later, in 1999, a study by two
management researchers confirmed this finding again.3 Even at the turn
of the twenty-first century, in other words, with all of the gains made
by women during the previous four decades, women still feel at least
as satisfied as men with their salaries, even though they continue to
earn less for the same work.
How to explain this strange phenomenon? Why would women be
just as satisfied as men while earning less? Many scholars believe that
women are satisfied with less because they expect less: They go into the
work force expecting to be paid less than men, so they’re not disap-
pointed when those expectations are met.4 To test this theory, the psy-
chologist Beth Martin surveyed a group of undergraduate business stu-
dents. After presenting them with information about salary ranges for
the different types of jobs they would be qualified to take after graduat-
ing, she asked them to identify which job they expected to obtain and
what they thought their starting salary would be. Working from the
same information, women reported salary expectations between 3 and
32 percent lower than those reported by men for the same jobs. There
was no evidence that the men were more qualified for the jobs they
chose—just that women expected to earn less for doing the same work.5
In another study, two social psychologists, Brenda Major and Ellen
Konar, conducted a mail survey of students in management programs
at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In this survey, students
were asked to indicate their salary expectations upon graduation as well
as at their “career peak”—how much they expected to earn the year
they earned the most. They found that the men expected to earn about
13 percent more than the women during their first year of working full-
time and expected to earn 32 percent more at their career peaks. Major and Konar ruled out several potential explanations for these differences,
such as gender differences in the importance of pay or in the importance
of doing interesting work, gender differences in the students’ percep-
tions of their skills or qualifications, and gender differences in their
supervisors’ assessments of the students’ skills or qualifications.6
Another study also found similar gender differences in ideas about
how much money was “fair pay” for particular jobs. Using college se-
niors at Michigan State University, researchers discovered that women’s
estimates of “fair pay” averaged 4 percent less than men’s estimates for
their first jobs and 23 percent less than men’s for fair career-peak pay.7
These three studies suggest that women as a rule expect to be paid less
than men expect to be paid for the same work.
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Our interviews bore out these findings. One standard question we
asked was “Are you usually successful in getting what you want?” To
our initial surprise, almost every woman we talked to said yes. When
we probed further, however, it turned out that many of the women we
talked to felt as though they were successful at getting what they wanted
in part because they didn’t want very much. Angela, 28, the marketing
director of a community development bank, said she’s usually success-
ful at getting what she wants because “I don’t think I ever want some-
thing that’s that far out of my reach.” Julianne, 36, a graphic designer
who is now a full-time mother, said she usually gets what she wants
because “I have pretty realistic expectations in my life, both profession-
ally and personally.” Cheryl, 45, the owner of a small toy store, said
she’s good at getting what she wants because she’s not very demanding
and “readily pleased.” These women, like so many others, hold modest
expectations for what will constitute appropriate rewards for their work
and time. Since lower expectations are more likely to be filled than
higher ones, the odds are better that these women—and most women—
will be satisfied with the rewards that life sends their way.
But this doesn’t make sense, you may say. Why would a woman who
is poorly paid be satisfied with her salary under any circumstances?
Surprisingly, extensive research has documented that pay satisfaction
correlates with pay expectations, and not with how much may be possi-
ble or with what the market will bear. In other words, satisfaction de-
pends not on whether your salary is comparable to what others like
you are paid, but on whether it falls in line with your expectations.
People are dissatisfied with their pay only when it falls short of what
they expected to get, not when it falls short of what they could have
gotten.8 And most women don’t expect to get paid very much, so when
they don’t get much—as so often happens—they are less likely to be
disappointed.
No Value to Women’s Work
What leads women to undervalue the work they do and set their expec-
tations so low? The Old Testament says that a good woman is worth
“a price higher than rubies.”9 But because most women until recently
devoted much of their lives to unpaid labor in the home they’re unac-
customed to thinking of their work in terms of its dollar value. Many
factors play into this problem, with perhaps the most obvious being
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C H A P T E R 2
our historical predisposition against recognizing the economic value of
what society deems to be women’s work. The economics journalist Ann
Crittenden, in her book The Price of Motherhood, explains: “Two-thirds of all wealth is created by human skills, creativity, and enterprise—
what is known as ‘human capital.’ And that means parents who are
conscientiously and effectively rearing children are literally, in the
words of economist Shirley Burggraf, ‘the major wealth producers in
our economy.’”10
A society’s education system also makes a huge contribution to the
creation of “human capital,” of course—by training children, guiding
their creativity, and helping them direct their skills toward productive
caregivers in safe, stable homes tend to derive far less benefit from their
education system and only rarely grow up to become “major wealth
producers.” Schools can only do so much to compensate for deprivation
or neglect at home.
Despite the demonstrated economic importance of child rearing,
however, women who devote themselves either full- or part-time to
raising their children are not only thought by many people to be doing
nothing (“not working”), they suffer a loss of income that, Crittenden
reports, “produces a bigger wage gap between mothers and childless
women than the wage gap between young men and women. This for-
gone income, the equivalent of a huge ‘mommy tax,’ is typically more
than $1 million for a college-educated American woman.”11 Looked at
this way, doing “women’s work” not only means working at an occupa-
tion with no recognized monetary value, but working at one that is
perceived to have negative value. Rather than being paid to do this terribly demanding and important work, in other words, women must
pay—with lost earnings, missed opportunities, and, in many cases, rad-
ically diminished financial security.
Lest we think that all this has changed since the women’s movement
propelled so many women into the work force, and that these statistics
refer to what is now a relatively small group of women, Crittenden
reports that “homemaking . . . is still the largest single occupation in
the United States. . . . Even among women in their thirties, by far the
most common occupation is full-time housekeeping and caregiving.”12
Even the most advantaged and best-educated women fall into this cate-
gory: “The persistence of traditional family patterns cuts across eco-
nomic, class, and racial lines. . . . The United States also has one of the
lowest labor force participation rates for college-educated women in
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A P R I C E H I G H E R T H A N R U B I E S
the developed world; only in Turkey, Ireland, Switzerland, and the
Netherlands does a smaller proportion of female college graduates work
for pay.”13
The cumulative impact of these realities on women cannot be exag-
gerated. Accustomed to laboring without pay at work that is devalued
by every objective financial measure, and to seeing most other women
devote a huge proportion of their adult lives to unpaid work, women
enter the traditional work force unaccustomed to evaluating their time
and abilities in economic terms.
Our interviews produced many examples of this handicap. Angela,
the marketing director for the community development bank, had a
college degree from Princeton, five years’ experience as a successful lob-
byist on Capitol Hill, and a year of working on a presidential campaign.
When her candidate lost, she began looking for another job and quickly
identified two that she found attractive. But neither job matched exactly
the work she had been doing before, making her fear that she wasn’t
qualified for either. As a result, when one of the firms made her an offer,
she was so surprised and grateful that she just accepted it. When she
called the other company to withdraw her name, she learned to her
surprise that they had been planning to make her an offer as well. If
she had waited before accepting the first offer, the existence of the sec-
ond offer would have put her in a better negotiating position. But be-
cause she undervalued her skills and her appeal, she accepted the first
offer she received—and a salary that was less than she had been making
before and less than she almost certainly could have gotten.
Similarly, Joan, 41, a magazine editor, described being sought after
to serve as the editor of a new magazine targeted at working women.
At one point during the hiring discussions, her future boss asked what
she wanted to be paid. “In hindsight,” she said, “I was so naı¨ve and
clueless, and I just had never really made a lot of money in my life, and
I didn’t need a lot of money, so what I asked for seemed like a lot of
money. And it was just not a lot of money.” After she was hired and
spoke to other people in similar positions, she discovered how “pa-
“hadn’t been in the work force for a lot of years of her working life” and
was “very young in the world of business”—an explanation that might
accurately describe the lives of many, if not most, women.
Like many of their female peers, Angela and Joan were suffering from
a limited understanding of their market power. That is, they didn’t real-
ize that a market existed for their particular skills and talent and experi-
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ence—and that this market could help them establish what they were
worth to prospective employers. Evidence from our interviews suggests
that this is a common problem among women. Kim, the radio news
anchor, admits with embarrassment that at one job her immediate boss
(who did not control salary decisions) laughed when she discovered
what Kim was paid, it was so little. The station’s most prominent “on-
air” talent, Kim hosted the morning “drive-time” news program at the
leading station in an intensely competitive radio market. Although she
was widely admired by her colleagues and audience, she later discov-
ered that her peers and even many people who were junior to her in
both rank and public prominence—most of them male—were paid far
more. She probably could have drummed up an offer from a competing
station in short order and might even have been able to double her
salary, but at the time she had no idea what her work was worth—or
that she could use the market to her advantage in this way.
Even when they recognize their
market power, many women feel
uncomfortable about using it as leverage in a negotiation. Stephanie,
the administrative assistant, didn’t ask for an increase in her salary even
when she had another job offer and her boss asked what it would take
to keep her. “I thought it would be taking advantage of an opportunity
but an unfair advantage,” she explained. Stephanie understood that she
had some market power, but she didn’t think it was right to use that
power.
The Stanford linguist Penelope Eckert traces women’s lack of aware-
ness about their market value to traditional labor divisions between
men and women. A man’s personal worth, she notes, has long been
based on his “accumulation of goods, status, and power in the market-
place,” while a woman’s worth was until recently based largely on “her
ability to maintain order in, and control over, her domestic realm.”14
Because this historical legacy makes men more accustomed to evaluat-
ing their worth in the marketplace, they also seem more comfortable
using their market power to get what they want—by researching aver-
age salaries for comparable work, bringing in competing offers, and
emphasizing that they have objective value outside their organizations.
For Love, Not Money
In her review of research on children’s household chores, Jacqueline
Goodnow observed that, in addition to being given chores that empha-
size their dependence, girls are also assigned chores that must be
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performed on a more routine basis, such as cooking and cleaning. Boys’
chores, while encouraging their independence, also tend to involve less
frequent tasks such as washing the car, shoveling snow, and taking
out the garbage.15 Goodnow surmises that girls rarely earn money by
performing the housekeeping chores they shoulder at home (such as
cleaning, cooking, and washing dishes) for their neighbors, because
those jobs are identified as female responsibilities and are typically
performed by the woman in each house. In contrast, more infrequent
tasks, such as lawn-mowing and shoveling snow, tend to be identified
as male responsibilities, but the man in each house, instead of per-
forming them himself, often pays a neighborhood child—usually a
boy—to fill in for him.16