Even if it means you have to come in early or stay late, offer to help colleagues who are swamped. 

You’re right about the need for women leaders, Lois. Absolutely! And keep wearing that cap! Most women want a woman to be president someday and Hillary is as close as we’ll come for a very long time. Even if people don’t like her or prefer Obama, the attacks on her by the media are familiar to women. Young, nonthreatening women experience these less. But their day will come. As we’ve seen in the Democratic nomination process, it’s considered acceptable to berate women for what they wear, a hairstyle, their body size, body shape, and so on. I used to teach with Betty Friedan. She’d be up in arms right now with how far back women have been slapped by the current Democratic race. And what has Howard Dean had to say about it. Nothing! How about the other supposedly admirable Democrats? Quiet as church mice. Why? Because it’s working for them.

I’ve written in my books that we’re all at least 75% responsible for how people treat us. If we let ourselves be overlooked, patronized, dismissed, interrupted, and so on, we’re telling people it’s fine to keep doing so.

Is it fine for men to interrupt and talk over women, as Tim Russert and Brian Williams did repeatedly to Hillary Clinton the other night during the “debate”? In fact, research indicates that women are interrupted far more often. If women don’t decry such actions, we’ll all be seeing a lot more of them.

Barack Obama is an impressive man. But he is getting a free ride compared to Hillary Clinton. And many of us have seen that far too often to not recognize it. We won’t have enough women leaders until women as a group insist that we be criticized on substantive issues — the same ones used when judging men. When smirking and laughing together as Obama, Williams and Russert did when Hillary refused to be silenced wasn’t met with the same reactions when Barack went on and on, there’s a double standard. The longer that continues, the fewer women we’ll see in high places. Men will take these affronts as green lights to do the same at work. And of this I’m sure: Insults that come around and go unchallenged, come around again.

TAGS: Barack Obama, Betty Friedan, debate, Hillary Clinton, Tim Russert, women leaders

Join a motivational group such as LEADS or the Breakfast Club.  Better yet — start your own with like-minded colleagues. 

TAGS: motivational groups, Networking

An author’s blog, www.basilandspice.com asked me to write a posting related to women and leadership.  Of course I couldn’t resist the opportunity to get the word out that I believe we live in a time when women’s leadership is not just needed, it’s essential if we want to save the world from war, famine, random acts of violence, corporate greed, etc.  But an interesting thing happened as I was writing it.  I found myself becoming angrier and angrier at just how hard it really is to get women’s voices to the leadership table.  Polls conducted last year indicated that America was more ready for an African American president than a woman.  If you take a look at the polls today it seems they were right.  Only 33% of men voted for Hillary in the primaries.  Then I thought about the Supreme Court, founded in 1790.  That’s 218 years and we can’t do better than one woman and one person of color on a court that decides which laws apply to a mult-cultural society? I won’t even quote the numbers of women on corporate boards and in CEO positions — we all know how lousy those figures are.  What’s a woman to do?  She’s to make her voice heard by courageously challenging the status quo.  If we aren’t part of the solution, we’re part of the problem.  I’m not suggesting that we make better leaders than men, but I do know we make different leaders.  For too long we’ve bought into the nonsense that what makes us different makes us less effectual in leadership roles.  Oh yeah?  Tell that to Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Meg Whitman, Indira Gandhi, Wilma Mankiller, and Rosa Parks.  Just remember this — every time you back down because someone suggests you’re being too emotional, too aggressive, not aggressive enough, or not qualified because you’re a woman you collude with a system that wants to maintain status quo (that’s what a system is — something that perpetuates itself).  The only possible reason why people would want to hold you back or keep you quiet is because you’re right — and baby, that means you’re powerful.  It’s like I told the guy on line behind me in Trader Joe’s the other day who was making nasty remarks about my Hillary for President cap (it was a bad hair day):  I don’t care if Hillary or Obama wins the election — anyone but another old white man. 

TAGS: Hillary Clinton, Supreme Court, women and power, women leaders

List five adjectives you would like people to use to describe you when you leave a room.  Then develop a strategy to make it happen.

TAGS: personal branding

Let others know you’ve heard the message they intended by using your own words to repeat back what they say. 

TAGS: active listening, paraphrasing

Penelope Trunk advised last week that you should never answer the question, “What’s your salary range?” 

I disagree; it depends on when the question comes and who asks it. In fact, there is a lot of research that suggests “anchoring” is an effective way to begin a negotiation.

If you have already convinced the questioner that you have the skills and experience for the position, there is no harm at all in being clear about what you expect vis a vis compensation. Remember, you can’t get what you are worth if you aren’t willing to ask for it.

But you won’t know what the right range is if you haven’t done your homework.  What is the fair market value for the job?  Consider the industry, the geography and the company. 

There is a wealth of information on salaries available on the Internet (check out sites like www.thevault.com; you can learn even more through social networking sites (see www.linkedin.com, for example).

In fact, one of the best ways to assess whether the position is a good fit for you is to talk about the salary range early.  If what they are paying is too low, the job is probably not what you think it is.

TAGS: career goals, disconnects, negotiating pay

Consciously plan your financial future.  A budget is not designed to deprive, it’s meant to tell you how much you have left over to spend guilt-free after you’ve paid your bills and funded your retirement account. 

TAGS: budgeting, finance

Let’s take another lesson from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It is beginning to remind me of when I used to think that fairness counts to everyone. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve frequently heard women, including myself when I was younger, arguing that an action taken in hiring, firing, denying a promotion or promoting someone wasn’t fair. After all, another individual was more experienced or had worked harder. Having studied persuasion at length, even back then, I should have known that just because fairness matters in many walks of life, doesn’t mean it matters at work to people making the decisions. They may care more about how well a person “fits” or whether he or she is likely to facilitate their goals.

Hillary Clinton has been emphasizing her experience because it should matter. But clearly it doesn’t matter to a lot of people right now. They just want a change. And to them experience is too closely allied to doing things the old way. Like it or not, this is what has happened. And it has taken her by surprise.

An important lesson for everyone is here, but especially for women who tend to think that arguments about fundamental values should win out over less substantial ones. What matters varies across organizations and over time. We’ve seen in George W. Bush’s administration an overriding emphasis on loyalty. Perhaps that is the case where you work.

The lesson: Never assume that just because a standard of evaluating worth should matter where you work that it actually does. Find out what matters. Then perhaps you’ll be able to argue in their language and link what you do to what they care about. Otherwise, they’ll simply tune you out.

TAGS: Fairness at work, Hillary Clinton's experience lesson, loyalty at work, speaking their language

Consider this:

“Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households.”

“Long-term problems [for the U.S. economy] include inadequate investment in economic infrastructure, rapidly rising medical and pension costs of an aging population, sizable trade and budget deficits, and stagnation of family income in the lower economic groups.”

“Real median earnings of both men and women who worked full-time, year-round declined between 2005 and 2006 (1.1 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively). This is the third consecutive year that men and women experienced a decline in earnings.”

These quotes may sound like propaganda to some, but the sources are pretty sound. The first two statistics are quoted verbatim from the CIA World Factbook (yes, CIA as in Central Intelligence Agency). The third is from the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage Report.” I added the italics.

I would add another statistic that is alluded to but not quite spelled out in that report: That median income, which was $48,201 in 2006, still hadn’t returned to its 1999 peak.

Plenty of people today are feeling the economic headwinds. It’s not their imagination, or necessarily their failure. More and more of the financial pie has been going to those at the top. Although pay disparity is of particular interest to women, income disparity should be of concern to everybody.

As individuals, we should do everything we can to succeed, including saving, investing and getting the best education we can for ourselves and our children. But we also should be mindful that wide income disparities are a destabilizing force in society. Real progress means gains for all groups, not just those already at the economic pinnacle.

TAGS: Economy, income, income disparity, income stagnation