Part 1 (1/2)

PLAY LIKE A MAN, WIN LIKE A WOMAN.

by Gail Evans.

For Julianna, Jason, and Jeffrey.

PREFACE.

WHEN IT COMES TO ROLE MODELS, I WAS LUCKY. I grew up believing a woman could do anything-a conviction inherited from my mother. On the surface, my mother seemed like a conventional woman, a suburban housewife who tended to her home and husband's career. But all the while she was sending me the message that a woman is responsible for her own life, and that she should live it to the fullest.

My mother certainly did. Even while taking excellent care of her own family, she helped care for an ”adopted” younger brother and sister from a local inst.i.tution for juvenile delinquents, she taught at the Jewish Guild for the Blind, and as a volunteer Red Cross ambulance driver, she drove physically and mentally disabled veterans to picnics and ball games.

The manager of a chain of millinery stores in the 1920s, my mother gave up her career for marriage. But she never surrendered her drive or her belief in herself. Throughout my life, she gave me two sets of instructions: I must be a good and proper woman and I could be anyone I wished.

I took that advice to heart. After leaving college in 1963, I began a successful career in politics, working on Capitol Hill and at the White House. But when I married, like my mother and most women of the time, I abandoned my career for my husband's. We moved to Atlanta and then to the Soviet Union. After returning to Georgia, where I raised my three children, I began doing freelance research and public relations for international corporations. In 1980, I joined CNN, which was beginning operations.

Eventually I got the opportunity to create the first central booking department for a network (booking means finding the experts who appear on television). When CNN International was created, my responsibilities were extended to that network as well. In 1987, I was made a vice president; two years later I created CNN&Co, the first television talk show to feature women discussing the major issues of the day rather than simply ”women's issues.” After a promotion to senior vice president, I co-developed TalkBackLive, the first interactive television news program, and in 1996 I was instrumental in creating Burden of Proof, the first daily legal talk show on network television.

Along the way, like my mother, I have tried to give my time to others. In 1997, the same year I was made executive vice president of CNN, President Clinton appointed me to the Commission on White House Fellows. I'm a member of the Committee of 200, the International Women's Forum, the Citizens Review Panel of the Juvenile Court of Atlanta, and have taught a seminar on gender issues in business at Atlanta's Emory University Business School. And I serve on the board of several universities and not-for-profit organizations.

I also have a daughter and two daughters-in-law, as well as a granddaughter, all of whom I hope will feel as optimistic about being a woman as my mother and I have felt.

If they do, they are lucky. Over the last two decades I have met thousands of women who have told me they feel lost in a workplace where the men generally rule and the women generally follow. I have always tried to give these women my best advice, and I've always hoped that somewhere I would encounter a group that didn't need what I had to say.

Then I was invited to address the female students and alumnae at Harvard Business School. I thought here, if anywhere, is the place where women have conquered the workplace.

I was wrong. The Harvard women had learned their academic lessons well and risen to high positions, but they felt isolated. They still complained that they often felt lost in the male-oriented workplace, and weren't sure how to cope.

So I decided to write down the gist of all the talks my mother had given me, and all I have pa.s.sed along to my own daughter and daughters-in-law, as well as all the hundreds of speeches I have made to groups of women around the country. Although television is the great medium of the day, I feel the best way to pa.s.s along history is through the printed word. Personally, I believe that I'm only as good as what I have taken away from the last book I've read.

What I want you to take away from this book is the ability to work in an office atmosphere where you don't say, ”I didn't get what I deserved today because, as a woman, I didn't know how to play the game.”

My greatest desire is that someday we will eliminate the conversation about inequality between women and men at work, so that when we come to the workplace as peers, how we do our jobs will be all that matters.

INTRODUCTION.

NOT LONG AGO, I SPOKE AT A SMALL CONFERENCE of successful businesswomen. Afterwards came the deluge, as one woman after another came up to me and asked for advice.

It always happens at these events. I speak, I listen, I hear the same words over and over-”baffled,” ”angry,” ”lost,” ”trapped,” ”stuck,” ”overwhelmed” - as each woman tells me she feels that she's gotten only so far in business and can't get any further.

One of the women at the conference told me she's a vice president at the Fortune 500 company where she's been working for two decades. In the last four years she has been given two new lofty-sounding t.i.tles, but no more power. She thinks she has. .h.i.t a wall.

”Have you made it clear what you want?” I asked. ”Have you taken any action?”

”No,” she said.

Like so many women, she doesn't understand that when you have an ongoing serious complaint, you don't simply, meekly, live with it. You try to change it.

I told her that she needed to take action.

”What kind of action?” she asked.

”Anything,” I said. ”One action will lead to another. Talk to the CEO. Job hunt. Anything. Just do something!”

She sighed. ”I don't understand. They know what a good job I am doing. Why don't they just reward me for it?”

With that att.i.tude, she is losing the game.

If you don't read the directions manual when you start a game, you won't know how to proceed. You open the box, and in front of you are the board, markers, and dice, but you don't have a clue. If you're playing by yourself, you can improvise, but you may get it wrong. If you're playing with others, you can always follow their lead. But while they're focused on winning, you have to keep asking yourself if you're getting it right.

Whether that game is croquet, Monopoly, field hockey, or football, you have to understand the directions first. So why play the game of business any differently? Business is as much a game as any other board, individual, or team sports game. Consider all the metaphors like teamwork, making the right moves, playing your cards close to your chest, picking the best players for your team, rolling the dice, making a preemptive bid, raising the ante, finding the right captain, getting the team into position, hitting a home run.

The bottom line: When it comes to business, most women are at a disadvantage. We're forced to guess, to improvise, to bluff (which is not something we're always good at-see Chapter 5: Toot Your Own Horn). This is why so few of us play the game well, and even fewer find it fulfilling.

And what about men? They don't read directions manuals, you say. True. They don't need to. The male mind invented the concept of directions. It wasn't that they deliberately ignored women, or disliked what women had to say. Rather, as business culture developed, few women were around to help. Men wrote all the rules because they wrote alone.

Women have made great strides in the last century. But that progress hasn't always been smooth, nor has it been straight ahead. Sometimes it's even retrogressed. During the labor shortage in World War II, for example, women were called in to perform men's jobs, and they did well. But when the war was over, Rosie the Riveter was sent home, and women had to wait decades for another chance.

The best you can say is that we've seen a kind of creeping incrementalism. Large numbers of women dot the current workplace, but like trees on a mountain, you'll see fewer and fewer of them as you climb higher in the executive landscape, until you reach a kind of timber line where you'll find about as many women as you'll find magnolias.

Fortune magazine recently ran a cover story on the 50 most powerful women in America. Nothing wrong with that. What I found worrisome was that the positions these women occupied-group presidents, vice presidents, founders of their own businesses-were not comparable to what a similar group of men would have held. All the men would have been CEO of large companies.

Women now account for over 46 percent of the total U.S. labor force, up from 29.6 percent in 1950. But as of 1999, only 11.9 of the 11,681 corporate officers in America's top 500 companies were women. In 1998 it was 11.2. If this pace continues, the number of women on top corporate boards won't equal the number of men until the year 2064.

Last year only 3.3 percent of these companies' top earners were women, with 98 women holding positions of the highest rank in corporate America, versus 1,202 men. And 496 out of 500 Fortune companies had male CEOs. Many of America's favorite companies-General Electric, Exxon, Compaq-have no women officers at all.

And even when women do make it to the top, we don't make as much money: Compensation for the top-paid female officers ranges from $210,001 to $4.96 million, whereas men earn from $220,660 to $31.29 million. All in all, top female executives earn on average 68 cents for every dollar a male executive earns.

The reality in today's business landscape: A woman is most likely to occupy a position of power when she started, or inherited, her own business. We're not going through the ranks and making it to the boss's office, and that's where the power lies in corporate America.

What can-and should-a woman do? The answer would be easy if men and women were born with similar instincts and were similarly socialized. But that isn't the case. In fact, the general thinking among biogeneticists is that the social skills of males and females are inherently different. After that, according to the sociologists, they're raised in ways that accentuate that difference.

Let me tell you about my three children, two boys and a girl, whom I was committed to raising in a thoroughly nons.e.xist environment. Starting from day one, I could spot gender-based disparities among them. For instance, the way in which my sons and daughters nursed: My two boys behaved alike. They sucked until their stomachs were full, they burped, filled their diapers, and promptly went to sleep. It was a quick, effortless transaction. End of story.

My daughter gave a different performance. She sucked a little, she closed her eyes, then she'd touch, reach out, feel, suck, rest, try to open her eyes, burble, suck, touch, and so on. It was clear from the earliest moment that she was interested in some kind of social relations.h.i.+p with me. She wanted to know who I was and where she was. The boys just wanted to get their fill.