Knowing Your Value by Mika Brzezinski Read Free Book Online Page A

care!”
    Seymour says her bosses quickly figured out that she’d accept approval instead of money. “I had one boss who was very good. For instance, once when I had a really good year, she took me out to lunch and she gave me a pair of earrings. Jeweled earrings. She told me how much the company loved me. That was very smart. That’s something that women are susceptible to. No man is going to take another man out to
lunch, give him a pair of earrings and say how much the company loves him. The guy would say ‘What’s wrong with this company?’ I mean, my husband would laugh hysterically and walk out. His response would be, ‘What kind of company is this? Give me a raise!’ Instead, my first reaction was, ‘Oh my god, thank you, you love me so much!’ ”
    Bottom line, says Seymour: “The men’s way of doing business is without emotion. It’s just money. It’s just business. Emotions play absolutely no hand in business in America in general. You have to bring as little emotion as you can to it.”

    “You can’t expect men to take us seriously if we don’t take ourselves seriously. That is just the truth. It would be sweet if they did.”
    —NORA EPHRON

    Movie director, producer, screenwriter, author, and playwright Nora Ephron tells me, “I think several things are more true about women than they are about men in terms of knowing your value. One is that women have a constitutional resistance to quitting. We like to be good. We like to be loyal. We like to be good girls. One of the ways you make more money in the work place is by quitting and going someplace else. It’s always been my feeling that women just don’t get that, they don’t learn that lesson that men constantly teach, which is you have to keep moving in order to get raises.”

    Ephron says this was true of her early career, when she was working at Esquire magazine. She was thrilled to be working there, even though she was being paid something like a thousand dollars per month. “I was married at the time, and I didn’t have to make a lot of money because there were two incomes,” she says. “Then my marriage broke up, and the editor of New York Magazine called and offered me three times as much as I was making at Esquire . First of all I needed the money, but second of all I was so stunned by it. I went to the editor of Esquire and I said, ‘I’ve had this offer from New York Magazine. ’ And he said, ‘We’ll match it.’ Then I got really irritated, because I thought, ‘Why did I have to ask for this?’ And then after I got done thinking that, I thought, ‘Well it’s my fault—I should have asked for it!’ ”
    In hindsight, Ephron says she just wasn’t taking herself as seriously as she should have. She didn’t know her value, and to some degree she didn’t care, because she was so happy to be working at that particular magazine. Ultimately she went to New York Magazine simply because she was so annoyed that she’d been underpaid and had worked for so long without realizing it.
    Ephron doesn’t blame women, but tells me the problem is that “We don’t take ourselves seriously. We can’t expect men to take us seriously if we don’t take ourselves seriously. That is just the truth. It would be sweet if they did and we didn’t have to do anything. But that’s what we want; we don’t want to have to do anything. We don’t want people thinking that we’re pushy or masculine.”
    Arianna Huffington—high-profile columnist, author, and
cofounder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post —has been a friend and a supporter of mine since Morning Joe began. She agrees that asking for a raise is an area fraught with anxiety for many women. “One reason is that most women have a very different relationship to money than men do,” she tells me. “For us, money represents love, power, security, control, self-worth, independence. After all, if money were just money, everyone would always make rational decisions about