CHAPTER 7
ALLIES AND ENEMIES
A New Appreciation of Men in the Workplace, and a Warning About Women
MY STORY, WITH SHEILA BAIR, HANNAH RILEY BOWLES, MARIE C. WILSON, SUSIE ESSMAN, TINA BROWN, ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, AND BROOKSLEY BORN
JOE AND THE MONEY
When I got back to New York after the 2008 presidential primary season, I was demoralized and exhausted. After some soul-searching, I realized I could not go on being undervalued. I could not allow any managers, male or female, to exploit my insecurities. I could not back down any more. After years of letting myself be pushed around in an unforgiving profession, I was finally mature enough to know that when it came to being rewarded for my value, I was my own worst enemy.
Now was the time to make it right.
That is what brought me to the meeting with Joe at the Rock Center Café. I felt Joe deserved an explanation. He had, after all, believed in me when no one else did. He had revitalized my career, and now I had to walk away.
I was transparent with Joe about the mistakes I had made. I also made it clear that whatever my own failings in getting my worth, the current pay structure between us was wrong. I had allowed it to persist for too long. I felt nauseated when I told him I would be leaving this job and a show that we both fought so hard to create.
“I’ve been working on something,” he said. “Please wait another week. I have an idea. I see this as my business, and I see you as important to the success of that business. I need a chance to find a way to make you stay and feel whole. I won’t ask for too much time. Just a few days.”
A week later I went online to my checking account thinking I had run through my funds. I was expecting once again to be overdrawn and at least $2,000 in the red. Instead, I was shocked to find that I had more money in my bank account than I ever had had in my life.
I had not received the raise that I was looking for and was still not being paid what I deserved, but NBC had direct deposited a large amount of money into my account. Questions started racing through my mind.
Where did this money come from? (Had I won the lottery?) Would NBC give me a huge bonus without telling me first? (Not on your life.) Did the crack GE accountants accidentally add a few extra zeros to my paycheck? (A remote possibility.)
I soon learned, to my horror, that Joe had demanded that MSNBC transfer his ratings bonuses to my account. These were payments Joe had negotiated in his contract. They were bonuses he received if Morning Joe ratings topped that of the Imus show, which we had replaced. While management never expected we could do that so quickly, Joe had banked on our success and soon tripled his salary.
So the money NBC had added to my account was actually subtracted from Joe’s compensation.
I was furious. Raging. Humiliated. How could I accept this money? How weak and dependent would this make me look? How could NBC allow this?
Joe and I had ridiculous, loud arguments over whether I could accept his bonus pay. Although his public persona is quite different, when it comes to negotiations, Joe is introspective and calculating. Sensing that he was about to lose the cohost who would help him earn even more money down the line, Joe had sat down with his wife, Susan, to talk through their options for keeping me on Morning Joe. Soon they realized there was only one course of action. Joe would sign over parts of his ratings bonuses or lose me forever.
To Joe’s agent and NBC, it seemed like a supremely generous gift to a cohost. To the Scarboroughs, it had less to do with charity than it did with the bottom line: I was a good investment.
While I understood their argument intellectually, I was still not emotionally prepared to accept a handout from a professional partner whom I considered to be my equal. So I did what I often do when confronted with a professional or personal crisis: I called my dad.
After I spent way too long explaining the situation, my father was ready to render a speedy verdict.
“Mika, it sounds like a shrewd business strategy on Joe’s part. He is worth much more with you as his partner on the show than he is by himself. CEOs reward top performers with bonuses all the time. What makes this any different?”
That was a good question, and I had no good answer. My father was right. I would take the bonuses, not because I needed them but because I deserved them.
Joe’s move had been generous, but as both my father and Joe pointed out, it was also a shrewd business move. We had a show that was on the upswing, whether MSNBC management could see it or not. He didn’t want me to leave, he knew I was important to the show, and he knew that what was happening within the walls of 30 Rock was not right. He actually said that to the management: “You can be part of a New York Times article about our salary discrepancy, but I’m not.” As is his habit, Joe Scarborough once again took matters into his own hands.
My frustration with my employer did not subside. I was emboldened by the fact that I knew I deserved the money. The investment that Joe made—and that’s what it was, not a donation but an investment—made me realize something about myself that apparently I hadn’t known even then. And that is, I was worth more. I mean absolutely, positively, unequivocally worth more. Why should I let Joe make up for MSNBC’s shortfall? That was not going to continue; I was done. I finally knew my value and could not stay unless my employer recognized it, too. This problem was MSNBC’s creation, but it was up to me to fix it.
I walked back into Phil’s office, sat down, and spoke. My voice was low and sounded different, but it was me talking. Really talking. Not acting. Not venting. Not whining. Just talking in my own words: “You are a bad boyfriend. Do you know what that is, Phil?”
I didn’t wait for a response.
“You take and take and take, but never give. Start giving,” I said.
I went into great detail on the definition of a bad boyfriend. It was a little weird, and I probably wasn’t saying just the right things, but it was calm and completely from the heart. Even better, I was ready to walk out the door with nothing and leave MSNBC for good. And the company knew it.
Phil actually took a moment, and then said, “You’re right. We will fix this. I will fix this.”
Time had also passed since our “crazy” talk, and we had had a chance to get to know each other, so he could truly find out that I was indeed crazy—but in a good way.
Within months, I had a new contract. It wasn’t perfect. I am still paid considerably less than Joe, but at least I’m moving in the right direction. I got a good deal at a tough economic time for the network. They came through, but more important, I came through for myself. What Joe did, his conviction and follow-through, emboldened me. He gave me the confidence and drive to make MSNBC compensate me directly. The bottom line was, this time I really was ready to walk. You get paid your value when you’re ready to walk. And by the way, if you’re worth nothing, you’ll be walking anyway. So you have to know your worth, then be ready to walk out the door.
THE VALUE OF STRATEGIC ALLIANCES
Still, I could not get over the fact that it took a man to turn the tide. I was angry, mostly at myself, that it had come to that. A man giving a woman money in the workplace just didn’t feel right to me. Joe set me straight: “You are taking yourself way too seriously. This isn’t about you. This is about me making more money. Because if you stay, our ratings will go up. And that will mean more money for my family. Stop thinking that I am being generous to you. This is really a selfish business decision about me.”
Joe had morphed from cohost to business partner.
As he fought to keep me on Morning Joe, he pored over my contract and salary and then guaranteed me that between TV, radio, and books, I would equal the salary I earned at CBS News. I was skeptical, but he laughed me off.
“You don’t know your value!” he would say. “You will be laughing all the way to the bank.”
By the end of the year, he had made good on all his guarantees and more. I got a book deal, a radio show, and other business opportunities. Looking back, it occurred to me that Joe knew my value even better than I did, and he became offended and aggressive when others did not.
While I greatly appreciate what Joe did for me, I wish I could have achieved the salary I deserved without having him step in like he did. But I realize after talking to many successful women that it’s not unusual for them to succeed only after forging strategic alliances with men.
This experience has taught me the importance of having allies. Why not accept help from people who value you? Men do it all the time. And by allies, I don’t mean agents. Agents were helpless to get me the money I deserved. The fact is, no one, no one can negotiate for you. I may use an agent to handle paperwork and money and details and mechanics, absolutely. But when it comes to speaking for me, I have to do that.
Several women I interviewed mentioned having mentors who offered valuable assistance in their careers. Sheila Bair speaks both of mentors and of other influential men who helped clear a path for her.
“Throughout my career, I’ve been mentored by men.”
—SHEILA BAIR
For seven years, Bair worked as counsel to Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole and credits him with paving the way for her. “He was a big supporter of women, and he had a lot of senior women on the staff,” Bair says. “Women with real power, not just symbols; they were true advisers to him. Especially back when I was starting my career, there weren’t that many women to mentor you, because there just weren’t that many [to begin with]. Sandra Day O’Connor, Elizabeth Dole. I can count prominent women on my fingers and toes, so we did rely on men ... Throughout my career, I’ve been mentored by men.”
Bair tells me that during the financial crisis, it was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke who helped her get her message across: “He was the one who first started really listening, especially on some of the bailout issues ... Of course, that helped because Ben had a lot of credibility with the guys.”
But what Joe had done for me was more than endorse my ideas. I had started thinking of him as a business partner, someone whose help I could accept without giving up control. But he’d done more than even an ordinary business partner. He had actually used his own paycheck, in addition to his personal influence, to advance my interests.
People who study gender and negotiation would call him a sponsor: someone who is willing to use their own social capital to help pull another up the corporate ladder.
Harvard’s Hannah Riley Bowles says, “We do need men to sponsor women very badly; they’re in positions of power. When men in a position of power decide to clear that path for you—make sure you get the right exposure, make sure you get to the right meetings—that means a great deal. And there are not that many women to do that for you, frankly. A lot of the women at the top reach back, but there’s just not enough of them.”
Sponsorship is more than mentorship. A mentor will advise an employee, give him or her feedback, offer career strategy, and explain the company culture. Companies invest considerable resources in mentoring programs, but research shows that mentoring doesn’t necessarily translate into better jobs for women. Women can be mentored so much that it wastes their time. Sponsors, on the other hand, will do more by using their connections and their influence to advocate for an employee. Catalyst’s research finds that “high-potential women are overmentored and undersponsored relative to their male peers—and that they are not advancing in their organizations.” Without sponsorship, women are not only less likely than men to move up, but they’re also more hesitant to pursue top roles.
Lack of sponsorship, mentors, and networks: this was a recurring theme in almost all my conversations on the subject of women and compensation. Women’s advocate Marie C. Wilson says women just don’t have the same useful connections that men do, and the effects can be profound: “In the finance industry and some of the more masculine legal industries, women are not part of those networks that men are a part of, whether it’s golf or the clubs that they take people to at night. . . . And who gets seen, who gets promoted, are people who are a part of those networks.” She also says that we have to find ways to make men more comfortable with sponsoring the opposite sex. “If you are a man, taking on a young man as a sponsor is much easier than taking on a young woman because there is a certain kind of tension about that relationship, people look at it differently.”
Like me, many of the highly successful women I interviewed had also received significant help from men in their industry. Susie Essman tells the story of trying to join the Friars Club, a century-old private club for entertainment-industry types, notably comedians, that’s really a tale about sponsorship. Traditionally all male, the Friars Club didn’t allow women members until 1988, and women weren’t invited to their famed Celebrity Roasts. Essman says, “When they first asked me to do roasts, they didn’t allow women to even sit on the dais ... [the men’s jokes] were all filthy, dirty, blue blue blue, and they didn’t think our delicate ears could handle it. So when I first had to do a roast, I had to prove that I could be as dirty as them and yet not be vulgar. I had to keep that balance.” Naturally, Essman proved herself, managing to be both feminine and filthy dirty, and also stay on point and deliver a punch line.
Years later, “There was a roast that Comedy Central was recording for Jerry Stiller,” Essman says. “The Friars Club had put my name in because I had proven myself with all these old guys—Alan King and all these great old comics—who did not think women were funny at all. Comedy Central turned me down. They didn’t want me on, and I do believe it was because I was a woman of a certain age and they wanted guys that were in their early twenties. The Friars Club, to their credit, fought for me to be on because I had proven myself over and over again. They put me on the show and I killed, and Larry David saw me on that show and called me up and gave me the part in Curb.”
As Essman points out, “In show business, it takes one person to say, ‘you know what, you’re really good.’ ” It took Larry David, creator of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, “who was a very powerful person in the comedy world, to say, ‘I think this person is really talented and I’m going to give her a part on my show.’ ”
When I ask Essman whether she thinks a woman would have been able to do the same for her, she tells me, “I do think there are women in the business who would have been able to do that for me; there have been powerful women in the business. I don’t think there are many. People say comedy is a man’s world, but the world is a man’s world.”
Clearly, the more people you know—the more people who are willing to support your efforts—the more likely you are to succeed, and the more likely you are to be paid well. Research has shown that success really does depend on who you know. A study published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 2000 looked at the effects of different personal attributes on compensation and found that in terms of salary, candidates who knew just one person in the organization negotiated salaries that were 4.7 percent higher than those without social ties.
Professor Hannah Riley Bowles points out, “In general, we could certainly say, the better you know people, the more information they’re likely to share, the more helpful they’re likely to be to you. They can vouch for you, they can help you negotiate, they can lend social capital. They can say, ‘This person is really . . . ,’ they can present you in a very favorable light. There are a variety of things they can do in terms of quality of information that you get, the way you present yourself, knowing whom to talk to, knowing how to present yourself. You have to be authentic to yourself, but you also have to negotiate the way that fits the norms of the organization.”
The Daily Beast’s Tina Brown notes a difference in the quality of men’s networks and women’s networks. She points out that women just don’t have the long history in the workplace that amounts to a female-networking tradition. “I think that networking background for women is just not there. When men get fired from these jobs, these big jobs, they have other men who step forward to look after them and get them jobs as presidents of this, or think tanks, or some big nonprofit. I mean, you see men being taken care of when they’re fired. When I see women getting fired, there’s no cushion of networking waiting to deploy them into other jobs. I just don’t see it. I see men all the time being fired from their jobs and being looked after by their networks. . . . Women just don’t have the deep bench of network.”
But as I listen to women’s stories and tell my own, I wonder whether part of the reason that women’s networks aren’t as powerful is because women aren’t trying very hard to support one another.
SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL . . . ISN’T IT?
Many of my interviewees cite evidence that other women not only weren’t there to lend a hand, but they were actively undermining their efforts to get ahead.
Are women harder on other women? It may just be that women managers are more effective with women because they know which buttons to push. Who better to exploit the weaknesses that hold women back than a woman? I’m reminded of Lesley Jane Seymour’s story about the female manager who discouraged her friends from having their contracts reviewed by a lawyer.
Women need to learn how to respond to these tactics.
What follows is an example of what I’ve done, and it is a textbook case of what not to do. I repeat: women managers know all too well what strategies to use to keep us cheap.
THE MIDDLE MANAGER, A WOMAN, TELLS ME NOT TO GET THAT RAISE
Ironically, the only time I was brought to tears at MSNBC over my pay problems was in a conversation with a middle manager who happened to be a woman.
She called a meeting to discuss my salary dispute, and the mood quickly turned sour. This manager insisted that I back off my request for a pay raise and told me that my demands were badly timed. Then she really dug in: “Mika, people won’t like you. You are going to get a bad reputation. You need to stop.” This woman knew Joe’s salary was fourteen times mine—a huge disparity. But she was skilled at getting me to change my focus.
She kept me in her office for thirty minutes, arguing that I would ruin my reputation and that my request for more equitable pay would cost me in popularity. She said this with a clear warning in her voice, even a threat. “People will see you as a problem,” she said. She told me I should be focused less on earning my value and more on winning MSNBC’s Miss Congeniality prize. Was she serious? Sadly, she was—and her strategy worked.
Looking back on that day three years later, I cannot believe how naïve I was. I was shocked to tears that a woman would push another woman to accept such a degrading situation. I am even more pained to admit that I actually started worrying about whether my coworkers would stop liking me if I pressed for the raise that I so clearly deserved. It was obvious to this female manager that while I was used to being liked in newsrooms, I had no idea what it was like to be paid a salary that matched my worth. So she did what any effective manager would do. She went in for the kill.
When it comes to gender politics, how women treat other women in the workplace is a sensitive and fraught topic. I’ve had wonderful female bosses and not-so-wonderful ones. I’ve spoken with women who loved their female bosses and those who described relationships with female bosses that were complicated by generational experience and by differences in life choices. And several times since Morning Joe began, a female manager played into my feminine fears and tendencies with the sole intent of holding me back. The Paris Hilton incident, the red hair clip reprimand, this dressing down when I asked for a raise: the most painful and least constructive confrontations I’ve had in my career have been with women. Ladies, we should be ashamed of ourselves. In the highest levels of business, we are our own worst enemies. Before we can fix this problem, we first have to admit to it.
Arianna Huffington believes it’s vitally important for women to be truly supportive of one another: “Indeed, I talk about building our ‘fearlessness tribe,’ surrounding ourselves with women—and men, of course!—who will always be in our corner, always there for us, whether we succeed or fail.
“It’s very important for older women, those who have gone before, to give a hand up and to mentor younger women in a consistent, sustained way—which is ultimately sponsoring them. Finding a sponsor is very similar to asking for a raise: if you don’t ask for help, no one is going to just give it to you.
“I think women need to do what men have always done: reach out and connect. In some ways, social media have made this easier. And there are more and more conferences for women, places to meet and learn from women who have done the things you are interested in doing.” Huffington recently cohosted the WIE [Women: Inspiration & Enterprise] Symposium, with Sarah Brown and Donna Karan, bringing together women from all walks of life for inspiration and empowerment, and to take action for the betterment of all women.
Our survey found more than half of all men and women agree that women are harder on other women in the workplace than they are on men.
I ask former CFTC chairman Brooksley Born about the impediments women still face, and how she thinks we could overcome them. She, too, argues that women should be helping one another out. “It’s really important for women to try to work together to change things in the workplace, to open opportunities, and I think it needs to be talked about. I think women need to support each other and cooperate with one another. They need to seek out male allies in the workplace, and they need to work as a group to change workplace policies to make them more amenable for women to be treated equally.”
I ask her, “Do you think that women aren’t helping other women? Or not helping them as much as they should?”
“Well, I think there’s a need for more. I do think there’s a lot of mutual support—not universal, obviously. But when there was a lot of discrimination, in the 1970s for example, it was easier to get people activated. Women consciously got together to network and work together and support each other in many big cities around the country. And I don’t know the extent to which that is going on with the younger age groups today. Luckily there are a lot more venues where they can do it. There are wonderful Women’s Bar Associations, and associations of women journalists, and associations that aren’t gender specific, for people who are like-minded to get together and work on these issues.”
Born’s last piece of advice for women coming up in the ranks today is exactly that—stick together and help each other. She encourages younger women “to make sure they are continuing to work together for more equal treatment and economic opportunities.”
