June 13, 2018 • 28 mins
So far, the pay gap has proved pretty impossible to solve. But most of us aren’t just going to sit here and accept that we’ll be paid less than men for our entire careers. In the last episode of The Pay Check, host Rebecca Greenfield talks to Gaby Dunn, who hosts her own podcast called Bad With Money, about what she's learned from the many people she's sought advice from on her series. Jordyn Holman also travels to Seattle for the Get Money, Get Paid conference, hosted by a group called Ladies Get Paid, and learns some important lessons about negotiation—and collaboration.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Back in the first episode of our series, I told
you a story about my mom and her fight for
pay equality. She was a surgeon who sued her employers,
the State University of New York and the hospital where
she worked, for pay discrimination. After almost ten years, she
won a settlement, but her story didn't end there. After
(00:31):
the lawsuit ended. As a condition of the settlement, my
mom had to stop teaching at the university. She still
kept up a busy career as a practicing doctor, but
she also dedicated a lot of her time to telling
other women about her experiences so that they wouldn't have
to go through what she did. My experience has taught
me that legal solutions are not solutions at all. What
(00:53):
I lost and what I won were not equal, not fungible,
not interchangeable. I thought I was going to make and
change their ways, and I'm sorry to say that didn't occur.
She was talking to a seminar of other women physicians
who came to learn about gender equity in medicine. Even
though getting a settlement is a win, she was telling
them not to do what she did. Legal action is
(01:16):
the court of last resort. If you litigate, be prepared
to leave You may recover money, it will never be
enough to cover your legal fees. You may keep your
job if you really want it. You may get some
workplace change that's not likely, and you can sometimes recover
emotional damages, but to do that you have to be
seen by a psychiatrist who says that you've been so
(01:38):
damaged by this that probably they're going to say you're
too damaged to continue as a doctor. Inn she started
a consulting firm to help other women in medicine. She
explains her mission in this YouTube video, which warning has
some cheesy clip art noises in the background. If you
want to be a woman doctor, know that you're going
to face unique challenges male colleagues will not face. You
(02:02):
may not get recognized for your worth. I don't think
that's fair. I've been where you are, and I've learned
a few things I really didn't want to know. It's
my mission to make sure that you don't have these
same struggles and you don't have to go it alone.
She wanted to advocate for other women, but more than that,
she wanted to help other women advocate for themselves. She thought,
(02:27):
if she could just teach people to be confident, and
strong at work, they could avoid what she had to
go through. Despite everything she experienced at work, my mom
really believed there were things women could do to change
their careers and their lives. There are solutions. You, a
woman physician, can learn to use your gifts as a
(02:49):
woman to have the confidence, the knowledge and the skills
to love you work, to live your life fully and
be the doctor you want to be and be the
doctor your patients deserve. And you can do this by
owning your medical career, being comfortable in the medical workplace,
and being able to when you look at the world,
(03:12):
you know what the population like, Where is our place like?
Where is our value? Will and deserve people who people work?
And Mason one meaning salary for Mandy is greater than
women in the six percent of major occupations women. What
do I want? We want to end gender inequality and
(03:35):
to do this we need everyone involved. When women are
financially stronger, it's good for their families, it's put money
into the economy, in the markets, it's good for everybody.
If I was a woman, I'm not sure I would
want to write on my show anyway. Yeah, we do
want to write out of them. We cannot do succeed
when half of us a head bay. Welcome back to
(04:00):
the Paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield. For the last five weeks,
we've deconstructed a big, expensive, global problem, the pay gap.
We've interviewed people like Christina chen Austar, who has been
fighting a pay discrimination case for thirteen years and counting.
We looked at Iceland, which has done more than just
(04:22):
about any country to fix its pay gap, but still
hasn't been able to and we investigated how all of
this is pretty much banked into the way we think
about women and men and work. If you're a little
depressed after all of this, well so are we. So far,
the pay gap has proved pretty impossible to solve, but
(04:45):
most of us aren't just going to sit here and
accept that will be paid less than men for our
entire careers. This desire to do something on a personal level.
It's partly why books like lean In by Cheryl Sandberg
are so popular. Back into uny thirteen when the book
came out, her advice that women should just lean into
their careers and advocate for themselves if they want to succeed,
(05:08):
it made sense to a lot of women. She was
speaking the truth, and she got people fired up. The
very blunt truth is that men still round the world.
But what about the women's revolution? I think we're stalled.
I think we're stalled, and I think we need to
acknowledge that we're stalled so that we can change it.
(05:28):
Are you trying to reignite the revolution? I think so.
But in the five years since Lenin came out, the
gender pay gap hasn't really budged. Women are still less
likely to get promoted than men and more likely to
be seen as aggressive when they try to ask for raises.
So does anything work? Is there any way for an
(05:50):
individual to ensure she gets the money she deserves? For
most of my life, I kept all of my financial
foibles to myself. Not having money was my secret. Gabby
Done started her podcast Bad with Money three years ago
as a way to confront her personal finance struggles head on.
She says the show is about finances and feelings and
(06:13):
has interviewed dozens of people, including financial experts, her family,
and even a financial therapist. Well, it's perfectly acceptable for
people in their twenties to cry over relationship problems or
friendships dissolving. There's an added shame to discussing finances. I
spoke with her about what she's learned and how we
can take action in our own lives even when we
(06:35):
know the pay gap is bigger than us. Hi, Gabby,
thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, thank you
for having me. So why did you start bad with money?
It started out being about like finances and feelings essentially,
which is what Season one was basically talking to people
(06:58):
about the taboo of talking about money. Why is it
a thing we don't want to talk about? Why is
it so isolating? What does everyone know that we don't know? Essentially,
and just sort of like spilled my own guts about
my family and um inability to figure out retirement or
savings or or any medical bill or anything. So our
show is also about money, but in a different sense.
(07:20):
Was there a time in your life when you realize
that the gender pay gap or other pay gaps were
affecting you? Yeah, definitely. I Mean there was a media
company that I worked for where a guy had the
same job as me, but he was getting paid dollars
more a year simply because he had asked Basically, like,
(07:40):
there was a day where we all were drinking or something,
and we shared our salaries and this one guy, and
I do not think he was doing a better or
more efficient job than me or or another woman that
I worked with. And um, he was like, well, I
had worked on a TV show prior to working here,
and so I knew the type of salary that you
should ask for in a mediate setting. So I asked
for that. They made the match my prior salary, and
(08:02):
I was like, you can do that, Like I had
no idea. That was like really alarming, But I think
that had to do more with the blind confidence of asking.
Like a lot of marginalized people, so I'm also queer
and a lot of marginalized people. It's like a similar
thing where you you're sort of so happy to be
there and so happy to be like even in the
interview that like, in my mind, I would just think
(08:23):
they're gonna pull this opportunity away as soon as they can,
Whereas like I think a lot of guys go in
and they're like, yeah, of course I should be here obviously. Um.
And there's also this other thing that I talked about
a lot, which is the uncompensated emotional labor of being
a minority at a job, Like hey are you doing
your job, but are you also doing the job of
(08:44):
like checking other people's work to make sure it isn't
homophobic or racist, and also like doing like outreach or
activities or pasting you know, nights for for other groups
and like advocacy or whatever, and all that stuff is uncompensated.
As women, we're often getting advice about how to be
better at work. We should lean in or advocate for
(09:06):
ourselves more. As someone with a show in this genre,
I'm wondering what you think about advice like that that
prescribes all these ways for women to act at work. Well,
it is. It's a double edged story because you're essentially
then saying be like the boys so that you can
treat other people poorly. Is what I've always kind of
taken from that, Like instead of being like, Okay, let's
(09:28):
all figure this out and maybe dismantle this, and like
I struggle with that on the show a lot. It's
like I get a lot of feedback from people that
are like super happy that it's kind of a show
about dismantling stuff, but then also people who are like, yeah,
but we gotta work within the system, and so I
try to talk to both sides. I try to talk
to people that I feel both ways about it, because
I don't really still don't know exactly how I feel
(09:49):
about it. There's part of me that's like, yeah, I
get in there, be just like the boys and do
the thing and blah blah blah. But then it's like, well,
why are we valuing this type of behavior and this
type of cut throughout situation where you have to behave
a certain way in order to succeed? Why are why
are we mirroring this thing that isn't good and it
and it is also only a certain type of woman
(10:10):
who even can do that. If you're like, hey, ladies,
go in and be brassy and take charge, and then
it's like, okay, that's cool, but like can a black
lady do that? Is like a disabled woman going to
be taken seriously doing that. Um, it's it's advice that
might work for some people, but it also leaves a
lot of people in the dust. Yeah, I want to
(10:32):
get into that more, like how do you tell women
to help themselves when, like you said, you know that
so much of this as kind of structural. Yeah, it's tough.
A big part of the show is eliminating the shame
in the isolation. So I took a lot of this
stuff to be personal. Right, I'm bad. This is a
rejection of me. I'm bad with money because I'm worthless.
(10:53):
I'm I'm a stupid person and I have a deficiency
and I'm maybe even like more only inferior. Right, So
once you eliminate that aspect of it, then you can
kind of start to go from there, because you just
need to be aware you can do things to help
yourself obviously, like I still have coupons, I still work
(11:15):
with a budgeting app. Like I'm not like, you know,
throwing bricks through Bank of America windows. Um, I'm still
trying to like do these little things. But you have
to be aware that it's stressful enough without the already
without adding on the whole thing of like I'm this
is this is in no part structural, and this is
all an individual failing. I want to talk a little
(11:36):
bit about your career outside of the podcast, because that's
far from the only thing that you do. Um, you know,
you're in the entertainment industry. And we did an episode
a couple of weeks ago where we talked to Monique
about her negotiation with Netflix, and that she said she
got offered five thousand dollars and that was much lower
than the rates other comedians were getting, and she didn't
(11:57):
end up taking the deal. And she told us how
the Negotia Asian went, and it was interesting because she
was like, it's really hard to make the case for
your value in these situations and to to say like
this is what I'm worth. Has anything like that ever
happened to you? Or like, how do you know that
you're negotiating a fair rate in a situation like that.
(12:18):
I try to think long term about things. If I'm
working on something that is for a lower pay, in
my mind, I go okay, but then I can what
can I turn that into? Can I turn that into
a TV show? Can I expand it into a film?
But then other projects, I'm like, okay, it needs to
be this amount of money. I I you know, I
think it's very interesting when a woman like Monique actually
(12:40):
says like no, there's a power and no. Right, So
now she says no, and hopefully that leads them to
rethink the amount that they offered the next black woman.
I hope that's what happens. That's very idealistic, but maybe.
So your show started out as more of a personal journey,
but it's changed since then. What would you say the
mission of the show is now. I think the point
(13:01):
of the show is two teach people something, to broaden
this out from, because it's such an isolating topic and
you think that every problem that you have is is
your own. This is like a weird example, but my
dad's an alcoholic, and I thought everything that I was
(13:21):
in my personality and all the effects from it were
just my problem, Like, oh man, this is what I'm like.
I got messed up in this very particular way. Um.
And then I went to alan On and everyone there
had the same the words had been coming out of
my mouth. They had the same exact problems, and I
was like, oh my god, I'm not even special. Um.
(13:43):
And so part of what I want is to teach
people with the show, but I also want people to go, oh, like,
I'm hiding this thing, and I'm hiding you know the
ways that this and this and this are affecting me.
And I didn't even realize that there was like this
huge umbrella where all of us are are being affected
by this. Yeah, and I think that's something that we're
(14:05):
trying to get at with this show too, where it's
like that it can feel very personal to you something
that happened in your career or at work or to
someone you know, and actually it's it's something that's happening
to lots of women and we just don't talk about it. Yeah,
so hopefully talking about it on this episode will solve
the whole problem. God, I hope, so really down to
solve things. So a lot of this is very depressing.
(14:28):
Um in like a lot of our episodes feel depressing.
How do you not get depressed doing this show and
talking about this all the time. I don't know. I
guess because I meet so many people on the podcast
who are doing all these things I've never heard of.
I'm constantly uplifted by, like the individual people that I
talked to you on Bad with Money. Like, obviously the
(14:49):
topics are depressing, and like the general outlook and like
the world in the government and everything is depressing. But
then like there will be people that come on that
are just like even like journe List, that are doing
amazing work and like deep dives into these things that
then you know, you go, oh, well, nobody reads long
reads anymore. But their their work is amazing, and it's
stuff that you don't necessarily hear about um. But the
(15:11):
individual people that I talked to have just been you know,
there's a guy running for president that we had on
the show that is committed to universal basic income and
and I don't know that he'll even get on a ticket.
But there's like UM, stuff that is small and and uplifting,
and that comes from like the individuals that I talked to.
(15:36):
Gabby is still not entirely sure what works and what doesn't,
but hearing from other people and sharing information is helping
her figure it out. And she's not alone. Women's empowerment
seminars and workshops and conferences have become wildly popular. Women
want to come together to talk and learn about how
(15:57):
to solve their own individual pay gaps. We should be
cynical about anything that promises a magic bullet solution to sexism,
and most of these workshops probably aren't worth your money. Still,
there can be real value in meeting other people who
are having the same problems as you are. Jordan Holman
(16:17):
flew out to Seattle in March to attend the Get Money,
Get Paid conference hosted by the group Ladies Get Paid
to see if she could get empowered? So what do
you do when you're just one person trying to fight
the gender pay gap? When you're Claire Washerman, you hold
a conference. So a lot of us feel very overwhelmed
(16:41):
because we think, well, what can I possibly do? So
that's a big goal of the conference is getting people
to walk out with you know, the bravery to do
something and also what actually am I doing at work
on Monday? Ladies Get Paid is dedicated to, as his
website puts it, helping women embrace their ambition and take
control of their careers. Conferences like Get Money, Get Paid
(17:02):
are part of a lucrative industry claiming to teach women
how to be strong, confident professionals. These conferences traffic and
good feelings in women's empowerment, but usually come at a
high cost. Get Money, Get Paid was no exception. Tickets
cost two hundred and seventy nine dollars originally, but organizers
(17:25):
quickly figured out that was more than women were willing
to pay. They marked them down, but only if you
brought a friend. I arrived at the conference around nine am.
The morning started with the usual depressing statistics, so I
(17:49):
think one of the more statistics that I read that
relaying st kick my button. Starting this from the fact
that black women in this country it makes forty four
billion dollars a year in revenue, but less getting DC
funding at an average, Ladies Get Paid puts a distinctly
millennial spin on its events. The vibe in Seattle was
(18:10):
part soul cycle, part Susie Orman, supposedly affirmative channing helps
(18:30):
you get rich. It was kind of weird, but a
lot of people seem to feel good just talking about
money out loud. A lot of what we're doing is
stripping away taboos of not only money, but even just
women declaring to each other that, wow, I am having anxiety.
Nowt work, I'm struggling, right, that's a taboo to say
that maybe the ultimate thing women feel anxiety about is
(18:53):
how to advocate for themselves in the workplace. A lot
of women think if they can just figure out how
to negotiate better, they'll finally get the money they deserve.
Ladies Get Paid knows this audience and the speakers had
a lot to say on the subject. If they don't
get into a place where you feel good thinking about
(19:15):
so when you think about your no text number. A
lot of way you want to do here. So if
you get a really good email from a client or
someone internally in the company, say it. But it's somewhere
where you have mayload all you If you know you've
done your research for what you should be making, that's
when you have a decision to make. But salary negotiation
is a pretty fraught subject for women. We're told that
(19:36):
we're bad at it, but we're also punished when we
do it well. We don't speak up for ourselves or
we're too aggressive. It's one of the reasons why the
Advice and Lean In was ultimately disappointing for a lot
of people. Claire says, the conference focuses so much on
salary negotiation because that's what women want, so we had
(19:59):
I mean, at this point, eight women have written in
to us. When they sign up, they say what they're
most interested in, and the reason we've done so much
salary negotiation curriculum is because they've told us overwhelmingly that
they just need help. You also want to be careful
of not giving women bad advice in terms of just
go in there and ask for the biggest number and
you know it's like, there's a lot of nuances to this.
(20:20):
You have to be very strategic and aware of your
the context of your relationship if you're a woman of color,
even more so. Uh So, it's certainly not a one
size fits all even among women. What qualifies is actionable
for one person might not work for someone else. Can
money get paid? Actually seemed to get this. The speakers
(20:40):
were black, Indian, divorced gay. Still, the realist lessons happened
out in the audience, with people swapping tips based on
their own life experiences. For instance, I talked to Maria Popolio,
are freelance user experience designer in Seattle, when she learned
that the agencies she worked for was billing clients almost
(21:04):
seven times more than what they were paying her. She
came back with one of the most effective negotiating tactics
in the book. I took census data, like the U.
S Census, and I printed it out, and I was like,
this is what I'm going for, And through all of that,
that's where I developed my tactic of the weirdly specific number.
(21:25):
When Maria goes into a job interview, instead of saying
she wants, say sixty an hour, she'll go in with
something like fifty seven. It plays into a concept called anchoring,
which basically says that whoever throws out the first number
in a negotiation automatically gets the upper hand. In general,
(21:45):
people like round numbers, so if you throw out a
weirdly specific number to start with, whoever you're negotiating with
is likely to counter with another weird number, say fifty
dollars an hour instead of fifty. Because it's also helpful
to go into a negotiation with research to back you up,
(22:06):
Maria looked at the senses to figure out what other
people in the same industry we're making, because census data
is just a aggregate of all of the numbers rolled
up into one and they rounded up to the nearest dollar.
But you get non traditional numbers, you get numbers and
ends and three or seventh, and so I've kind of
taken that going forward. I'm like, every time I present
a salary, it's going to end in the three or
(22:28):
seven anchoring. The conversation may not help you seem less
aggressive when you try to negotiate your salary, but it
might just help you get closer to the number you
want to hit. And when you've been shut down over
and over again in your career, that little bit of
success can be huge. Even though the conference spent a
(22:50):
lot of time focusing on actionable advice. When I asked
Comisha Turner, an artist in Seattle who has a day
job as an account manager in the tech industry, what
she most got out of it, she said that you're
not alone. I think it's sometimes, especially when you're in
a corporate environment, you do feel alone. Even though it
(23:11):
can be expensive, and even if the advice isn't necessarily
fool proof, that little bit of community can make a
big difference. I feel like, um, sometimes there's a lot
of competition between women when you don't have an event
like this where you can come together and then be
epathetic towards each other and learn from each other and
share each other's stories. Because it can be cut throat
(23:32):
in the environment and it is a man, you know,
in the environment, Um, you kind of feel alone. You
feel like the women that kind of get it there,
you know, kind of leaving you and alert. Whereas if
you really kind of put yourself and start start thinking like, oh, well,
wait a minute, these women also have gone through the
same thing, same thoughts, the same insecurities all of that,
(23:53):
then maybe I should talk to them instead of being,
you know, feeling like I have to compete with them,
you know, and just understanding that we're all kind of
going through the same thing, maybe at different levels. Not
everyone finds Ladies get Paid as inspiring as Comische does.
Last year, the group was sued for gender discrimination by
(24:13):
several men for opening their events only to women, trans
and gender nonconforming individuals. The terms of their settlement haven't
been disclosed, but in May Claire admit it in the
weekly Ladies Get Paid newsletter that the group was close
to bankruptcy. She started a crowdfunding campaign to try to
(24:34):
raise a hundred thousand dollars, and three weeks later they
met their goal. Claire says that as part of the settlement,
she changed the Ladies Get Paid by laws to allow
men to attend the events. But when I talked to
her again on the phone after the conference, she was worried,
they're not going to be the same when we have
(24:55):
our events. It is to provide a space for women
to se feel comfortable to share really vulnerable things they've
been really like disturbing things. Sometimes the people that they've
gone through, especially around a sexual harassment, um or toxic
work environments discrimination. And I'm very concerned that if there
are men in the room, these women are not going
(25:17):
to feel, you know, that level of comfort that they
did before, and then they're not going to share, and
then it's not going to be this environment of catharsis
and you know support that I wanted it to be.
Since the policy change, a small number of men have
attended events, and it's been okay so far as long
as women are still into it, she says, she'll be
(25:39):
happy by the work that we were doing. You know,
it wasn't just about making more money for the sake
of making more money, but it was about power and
value and self worth and that the conference gave it
to them. So we're doing it again and we'll keep
going as long as people buy tickets. The amount we
(26:00):
have in our bank accounts or what we get paid
for our work can feel like a reflection of our
value as a person, and when it comes to the
pay gap, our individual experiences like not getting a raise,
or being interrupted during a meeting, or just not making
very much money can feel like a result of our
own shortcomings and entirely too big to solve on our own.
(26:23):
But Gabby said something that I think we can all
learn from by talking to other people. She realized that
she wasn't alone, that other people had similar problems because
they had similar life experiences, and knowing that helped her
begin to overcome her issues with money because she could
stop blaming herself and start seeing the problems for what
(26:46):
they really are. If you get one thing out of
the show, I hope it's that we're all experiencing the
pay gap collectively. We can't solve it by ourselves, but
individuals coming together and sharing knowledge is powerful. Like just
think about me too. Our individual experiences of sexual harassment
(27:07):
are intimate and isolating, but once every woman spoke out
at the exact same time, a bigger picture emerged, and
only then did we start seeing potential change. Not only
does sharing information make us feel less alone, but it
helps us find solutions. Thank you so much for listening
(27:45):
to The Paycheck. This is the last episode in our series.
If you like the show, please head on over to
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to rate, review, and subscribe.
It really helps if you listen to all six episod
so thank you so much. If you haven't, go back
and listen, and please tell us what you think. We'll
(28:06):
continue covering the gender pay gap and are working on
more amazing stuff. Visit bloomberg dot com Slash the Paycheck
to sign up to be the first to hear about
our new projects and stories. This episode was reported by
Jordan Holman and hosted and reported by me Rebecca Greenfield.
It was edited by Jillian Goodman and produced by Magnus Hendrickson.
(28:28):
We also had help from Francesca Levi, Janet Paskin, and
Liz Smith. Our original music is by Leo Sidra. Carrie
vander Yott did the illustrations on our show page, which
you can find at Bloomberg dot com Slash the Paycheck
Special Thanks to tofor foreheads Laura Zelenko, Jackie Simmons and
all of our guests. Francesca Levy is head of Bloomberg Podcasts.
Back in the first episode of our series, I told
you a story about my mom and her fight for
pay equality. She was a surgeon who sued her employers,
the State University of New York and the hospital where
she worked, for pay discrimination. After almost ten years, she
won a settlement, but her story didn't end there. After
(00:31):
the lawsuit ended. As a condition of the settlement, my
mom had to stop teaching at the university. She still
kept up a busy career as a practicing doctor, but
she also dedicated a lot of her time to telling
other women about her experiences so that they wouldn't have
to go through what she did. My experience has taught
me that legal solutions are not solutions at all. What
(00:53):
I lost and what I won were not equal, not fungible,
not interchangeable. I thought I was going to make and
change their ways, and I'm sorry to say that didn't occur.
She was talking to a seminar of other women physicians
who came to learn about gender equity in medicine. Even
though getting a settlement is a win, she was telling
them not to do what she did. Legal action is
(01:16):
the court of last resort. If you litigate, be prepared
to leave You may recover money, it will never be
enough to cover your legal fees. You may keep your
job if you really want it. You may get some
workplace change that's not likely, and you can sometimes recover
emotional damages, but to do that you have to be
seen by a psychiatrist who says that you've been so
(01:38):
damaged by this that probably they're going to say you're
too damaged to continue as a doctor. Inn she started
a consulting firm to help other women in medicine. She
explains her mission in this YouTube video, which warning has
some cheesy clip art noises in the background. If you
want to be a woman doctor, know that you're going
to face unique challenges male colleagues will not face. You
(02:02):
may not get recognized for your worth. I don't think
that's fair. I've been where you are, and I've learned
a few things I really didn't want to know. It's
my mission to make sure that you don't have these
same struggles and you don't have to go it alone.
She wanted to advocate for other women, but more than that,
she wanted to help other women advocate for themselves. She thought,
(02:27):
if she could just teach people to be confident, and
strong at work, they could avoid what she had to
go through. Despite everything she experienced at work, my mom
really believed there were things women could do to change
their careers and their lives. There are solutions. You, a
woman physician, can learn to use your gifts as a
(02:49):
woman to have the confidence, the knowledge and the skills
to love you work, to live your life fully and
be the doctor you want to be and be the
doctor your patients deserve. And you can do this by
owning your medical career, being comfortable in the medical workplace,
and being able to when you look at the world,
(03:12):
you know what the population like, Where is our place like?
Where is our value? Will and deserve people who people work?
And Mason one meaning salary for Mandy is greater than
women in the six percent of major occupations women. What
do I want? We want to end gender inequality and
(03:35):
to do this we need everyone involved. When women are
financially stronger, it's good for their families, it's put money
into the economy, in the markets, it's good for everybody.
If I was a woman, I'm not sure I would
want to write on my show anyway. Yeah, we do
want to write out of them. We cannot do succeed
when half of us a head bay. Welcome back to
(04:00):
the Paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield. For the last five weeks,
we've deconstructed a big, expensive, global problem, the pay gap.
We've interviewed people like Christina chen Austar, who has been
fighting a pay discrimination case for thirteen years and counting.
We looked at Iceland, which has done more than just
(04:22):
about any country to fix its pay gap, but still
hasn't been able to and we investigated how all of
this is pretty much banked into the way we think
about women and men and work. If you're a little
depressed after all of this, well so are we. So far,
the pay gap has proved pretty impossible to solve, but
(04:45):
most of us aren't just going to sit here and
accept that will be paid less than men for our
entire careers. This desire to do something on a personal level.
It's partly why books like lean In by Cheryl Sandberg
are so popular. Back into uny thirteen when the book
came out, her advice that women should just lean into
their careers and advocate for themselves if they want to succeed,
(05:08):
it made sense to a lot of women. She was
speaking the truth, and she got people fired up. The
very blunt truth is that men still round the world.
But what about the women's revolution? I think we're stalled.
I think we're stalled, and I think we need to
acknowledge that we're stalled so that we can change it.
(05:28):
Are you trying to reignite the revolution? I think so.
But in the five years since Lenin came out, the
gender pay gap hasn't really budged. Women are still less
likely to get promoted than men and more likely to
be seen as aggressive when they try to ask for raises.
So does anything work? Is there any way for an
(05:50):
individual to ensure she gets the money she deserves? For
most of my life, I kept all of my financial
foibles to myself. Not having money was my secret. Gabby
Done started her podcast Bad with Money three years ago
as a way to confront her personal finance struggles head on.
She says the show is about finances and feelings and
(06:13):
has interviewed dozens of people, including financial experts, her family,
and even a financial therapist. Well, it's perfectly acceptable for
people in their twenties to cry over relationship problems or
friendships dissolving. There's an added shame to discussing finances. I
spoke with her about what she's learned and how we
can take action in our own lives even when we
(06:35):
know the pay gap is bigger than us. Hi, Gabby,
thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, thank you
for having me. So why did you start bad with money?
It started out being about like finances and feelings essentially,
which is what Season one was basically talking to people
(06:58):
about the taboo of talking about money. Why is it
a thing we don't want to talk about? Why is
it so isolating? What does everyone know that we don't know? Essentially,
and just sort of like spilled my own guts about
my family and um inability to figure out retirement or
savings or or any medical bill or anything. So our
show is also about money, but in a different sense.
(07:20):
Was there a time in your life when you realize
that the gender pay gap or other pay gaps were
affecting you? Yeah, definitely. I Mean there was a media
company that I worked for where a guy had the
same job as me, but he was getting paid dollars
more a year simply because he had asked Basically, like,
(07:40):
there was a day where we all were drinking or something,
and we shared our salaries and this one guy, and
I do not think he was doing a better or
more efficient job than me or or another woman that
I worked with. And um, he was like, well, I
had worked on a TV show prior to working here,
and so I knew the type of salary that you
should ask for in a mediate setting. So I asked
for that. They made the match my prior salary, and
(08:02):
I was like, you can do that, Like I had
no idea. That was like really alarming, But I think
that had to do more with the blind confidence of asking.
Like a lot of marginalized people, so I'm also queer
and a lot of marginalized people. It's like a similar
thing where you you're sort of so happy to be
there and so happy to be like even in the
interview that like, in my mind, I would just think
(08:23):
they're gonna pull this opportunity away as soon as they can,
Whereas like I think a lot of guys go in
and they're like, yeah, of course I should be here obviously. Um.
And there's also this other thing that I talked about
a lot, which is the uncompensated emotional labor of being
a minority at a job, Like hey are you doing
your job, but are you also doing the job of
(08:44):
like checking other people's work to make sure it isn't
homophobic or racist, and also like doing like outreach or
activities or pasting you know, nights for for other groups
and like advocacy or whatever, and all that stuff is uncompensated.
As women, we're often getting advice about how to be
better at work. We should lean in or advocate for
(09:06):
ourselves more. As someone with a show in this genre,
I'm wondering what you think about advice like that that
prescribes all these ways for women to act at work. Well,
it is. It's a double edged story because you're essentially
then saying be like the boys so that you can
treat other people poorly. Is what I've always kind of
taken from that, Like instead of being like, Okay, let's
(09:28):
all figure this out and maybe dismantle this, and like
I struggle with that on the show a lot. It's
like I get a lot of feedback from people that
are like super happy that it's kind of a show
about dismantling stuff, but then also people who are like, yeah,
but we gotta work within the system, and so I
try to talk to both sides. I try to talk
to people that I feel both ways about it, because
I don't really still don't know exactly how I feel
(09:49):
about it. There's part of me that's like, yeah, I
get in there, be just like the boys and do
the thing and blah blah blah. But then it's like, well,
why are we valuing this type of behavior and this
type of cut throughout situation where you have to behave
a certain way in order to succeed? Why are why
are we mirroring this thing that isn't good and it
and it is also only a certain type of woman
(10:10):
who even can do that. If you're like, hey, ladies,
go in and be brassy and take charge, and then
it's like, okay, that's cool, but like can a black
lady do that? Is like a disabled woman going to
be taken seriously doing that. Um, it's it's advice that
might work for some people, but it also leaves a
lot of people in the dust. Yeah, I want to
(10:32):
get into that more, like how do you tell women
to help themselves when, like you said, you know that
so much of this as kind of structural. Yeah, it's tough.
A big part of the show is eliminating the shame
in the isolation. So I took a lot of this
stuff to be personal. Right, I'm bad. This is a
rejection of me. I'm bad with money because I'm worthless.
(10:53):
I'm I'm a stupid person and I have a deficiency
and I'm maybe even like more only inferior. Right, So
once you eliminate that aspect of it, then you can
kind of start to go from there, because you just
need to be aware you can do things to help
yourself obviously, like I still have coupons, I still work
(11:15):
with a budgeting app. Like I'm not like, you know,
throwing bricks through Bank of America windows. Um, I'm still
trying to like do these little things. But you have
to be aware that it's stressful enough without the already
without adding on the whole thing of like I'm this
is this is in no part structural, and this is
all an individual failing. I want to talk a little
(11:36):
bit about your career outside of the podcast, because that's
far from the only thing that you do. Um, you know,
you're in the entertainment industry. And we did an episode
a couple of weeks ago where we talked to Monique
about her negotiation with Netflix, and that she said she
got offered five thousand dollars and that was much lower
than the rates other comedians were getting, and she didn't
(11:57):
end up taking the deal. And she told us how
the Negotia Asian went, and it was interesting because she
was like, it's really hard to make the case for
your value in these situations and to to say like
this is what I'm worth. Has anything like that ever
happened to you? Or like, how do you know that
you're negotiating a fair rate in a situation like that.
(12:18):
I try to think long term about things. If I'm
working on something that is for a lower pay, in
my mind, I go okay, but then I can what
can I turn that into? Can I turn that into
a TV show? Can I expand it into a film?
But then other projects, I'm like, okay, it needs to
be this amount of money. I I you know, I
think it's very interesting when a woman like Monique actually
(12:40):
says like no, there's a power and no. Right, So
now she says no, and hopefully that leads them to
rethink the amount that they offered the next black woman.
I hope that's what happens. That's very idealistic, but maybe.
So your show started out as more of a personal journey,
but it's changed since then. What would you say the
mission of the show is now. I think the point
(13:01):
of the show is two teach people something, to broaden
this out from, because it's such an isolating topic and
you think that every problem that you have is is
your own. This is like a weird example, but my
dad's an alcoholic, and I thought everything that I was
(13:21):
in my personality and all the effects from it were
just my problem, Like, oh man, this is what I'm like.
I got messed up in this very particular way. Um.
And then I went to alan On and everyone there
had the same the words had been coming out of
my mouth. They had the same exact problems, and I
was like, oh my god, I'm not even special. Um.
(13:43):
And so part of what I want is to teach
people with the show, but I also want people to go, oh, like,
I'm hiding this thing, and I'm hiding you know the
ways that this and this and this are affecting me.
And I didn't even realize that there was like this
huge umbrella where all of us are are being affected
by this. Yeah, and I think that's something that we're
(14:05):
trying to get at with this show too, where it's
like that it can feel very personal to you something
that happened in your career or at work or to
someone you know, and actually it's it's something that's happening
to lots of women and we just don't talk about it. Yeah,
so hopefully talking about it on this episode will solve
the whole problem. God, I hope, so really down to
solve things. So a lot of this is very depressing.
(14:28):
Um in like a lot of our episodes feel depressing.
How do you not get depressed doing this show and
talking about this all the time. I don't know. I
guess because I meet so many people on the podcast
who are doing all these things I've never heard of.
I'm constantly uplifted by, like the individual people that I
talked to you on Bad with Money. Like, obviously the
(14:49):
topics are depressing, and like the general outlook and like
the world in the government and everything is depressing. But
then like there will be people that come on that
are just like even like journe List, that are doing
amazing work and like deep dives into these things that
then you know, you go, oh, well, nobody reads long
reads anymore. But their their work is amazing, and it's
stuff that you don't necessarily hear about um. But the
(15:11):
individual people that I talked to have just been you know,
there's a guy running for president that we had on
the show that is committed to universal basic income and
and I don't know that he'll even get on a ticket.
But there's like UM, stuff that is small and and uplifting,
and that comes from like the individuals that I talked to.
(15:36):
Gabby is still not entirely sure what works and what doesn't,
but hearing from other people and sharing information is helping
her figure it out. And she's not alone. Women's empowerment
seminars and workshops and conferences have become wildly popular. Women
want to come together to talk and learn about how
(15:57):
to solve their own individual pay gaps. We should be
cynical about anything that promises a magic bullet solution to sexism,
and most of these workshops probably aren't worth your money. Still,
there can be real value in meeting other people who
are having the same problems as you are. Jordan Holman
(16:17):
flew out to Seattle in March to attend the Get Money,
Get Paid conference hosted by the group Ladies Get Paid
to see if she could get empowered? So what do
you do when you're just one person trying to fight
the gender pay gap? When you're Claire Washerman, you hold
a conference. So a lot of us feel very overwhelmed
(16:41):
because we think, well, what can I possibly do? So
that's a big goal of the conference is getting people
to walk out with you know, the bravery to do
something and also what actually am I doing at work
on Monday? Ladies Get Paid is dedicated to, as his
website puts it, helping women embrace their ambition and take
control of their careers. Conferences like Get Money, Get Paid
(17:02):
are part of a lucrative industry claiming to teach women
how to be strong, confident professionals. These conferences traffic and
good feelings in women's empowerment, but usually come at a
high cost. Get Money, Get Paid was no exception. Tickets
cost two hundred and seventy nine dollars originally, but organizers
(17:25):
quickly figured out that was more than women were willing
to pay. They marked them down, but only if you
brought a friend. I arrived at the conference around nine am.
The morning started with the usual depressing statistics, so I
(17:49):
think one of the more statistics that I read that
relaying st kick my button. Starting this from the fact
that black women in this country it makes forty four
billion dollars a year in revenue, but less getting DC
funding at an average, Ladies Get Paid puts a distinctly
millennial spin on its events. The vibe in Seattle was
(18:10):
part soul cycle, part Susie Orman, supposedly affirmative channing helps
(18:30):
you get rich. It was kind of weird, but a
lot of people seem to feel good just talking about
money out loud. A lot of what we're doing is
stripping away taboos of not only money, but even just
women declaring to each other that, wow, I am having anxiety.
Nowt work, I'm struggling, right, that's a taboo to say
that maybe the ultimate thing women feel anxiety about is
(18:53):
how to advocate for themselves in the workplace. A lot
of women think if they can just figure out how
to negotiate better, they'll finally get the money they deserve.
Ladies Get Paid knows this audience and the speakers had
a lot to say on the subject. If they don't
get into a place where you feel good thinking about
(19:15):
so when you think about your no text number. A
lot of way you want to do here. So if
you get a really good email from a client or
someone internally in the company, say it. But it's somewhere
where you have mayload all you If you know you've
done your research for what you should be making, that's
when you have a decision to make. But salary negotiation
is a pretty fraught subject for women. We're told that
(19:36):
we're bad at it, but we're also punished when we
do it well. We don't speak up for ourselves or
we're too aggressive. It's one of the reasons why the
Advice and Lean In was ultimately disappointing for a lot
of people. Claire says, the conference focuses so much on
salary negotiation because that's what women want, so we had
(19:59):
I mean, at this point, eight women have written in
to us. When they sign up, they say what they're
most interested in, and the reason we've done so much
salary negotiation curriculum is because they've told us overwhelmingly that
they just need help. You also want to be careful
of not giving women bad advice in terms of just
go in there and ask for the biggest number and
you know it's like, there's a lot of nuances to this.
(20:20):
You have to be very strategic and aware of your
the context of your relationship if you're a woman of color,
even more so. Uh So, it's certainly not a one
size fits all even among women. What qualifies is actionable
for one person might not work for someone else. Can
money get paid? Actually seemed to get this. The speakers
(20:40):
were black, Indian, divorced gay. Still, the realist lessons happened
out in the audience, with people swapping tips based on
their own life experiences. For instance, I talked to Maria Popolio,
are freelance user experience designer in Seattle, when she learned
that the agencies she worked for was billing clients almost
(21:04):
seven times more than what they were paying her. She
came back with one of the most effective negotiating tactics
in the book. I took census data, like the U.
S Census, and I printed it out, and I was like,
this is what I'm going for, And through all of that,
that's where I developed my tactic of the weirdly specific number.
(21:25):
When Maria goes into a job interview, instead of saying
she wants, say sixty an hour, she'll go in with
something like fifty seven. It plays into a concept called anchoring,
which basically says that whoever throws out the first number
in a negotiation automatically gets the upper hand. In general,
(21:45):
people like round numbers, so if you throw out a
weirdly specific number to start with, whoever you're negotiating with
is likely to counter with another weird number, say fifty
dollars an hour instead of fifty. Because it's also helpful
to go into a negotiation with research to back you up,
(22:06):
Maria looked at the senses to figure out what other
people in the same industry we're making, because census data
is just a aggregate of all of the numbers rolled
up into one and they rounded up to the nearest dollar.
But you get non traditional numbers, you get numbers and
ends and three or seventh, and so I've kind of
taken that going forward. I'm like, every time I present
a salary, it's going to end in the three or
(22:28):
seven anchoring. The conversation may not help you seem less
aggressive when you try to negotiate your salary, but it
might just help you get closer to the number you
want to hit. And when you've been shut down over
and over again in your career, that little bit of
success can be huge. Even though the conference spent a
(22:50):
lot of time focusing on actionable advice. When I asked
Comisha Turner, an artist in Seattle who has a day
job as an account manager in the tech industry, what
she most got out of it, she said that you're
not alone. I think it's sometimes, especially when you're in
a corporate environment, you do feel alone. Even though it
(23:11):
can be expensive, and even if the advice isn't necessarily
fool proof, that little bit of community can make a
big difference. I feel like, um, sometimes there's a lot
of competition between women when you don't have an event
like this where you can come together and then be
epathetic towards each other and learn from each other and
share each other's stories. Because it can be cut throat
(23:32):
in the environment and it is a man, you know,
in the environment, Um, you kind of feel alone. You
feel like the women that kind of get it there,
you know, kind of leaving you and alert. Whereas if
you really kind of put yourself and start start thinking like, oh, well,
wait a minute, these women also have gone through the
same thing, same thoughts, the same insecurities all of that,
(23:53):
then maybe I should talk to them instead of being,
you know, feeling like I have to compete with them,
you know, and just understanding that we're all kind of
going through the same thing, maybe at different levels. Not
everyone finds Ladies get Paid as inspiring as Comische does.
Last year, the group was sued for gender discrimination by
(24:13):
several men for opening their events only to women, trans
and gender nonconforming individuals. The terms of their settlement haven't
been disclosed, but in May Claire admit it in the
weekly Ladies Get Paid newsletter that the group was close
to bankruptcy. She started a crowdfunding campaign to try to
(24:34):
raise a hundred thousand dollars, and three weeks later they
met their goal. Claire says that as part of the settlement,
she changed the Ladies Get Paid by laws to allow
men to attend the events. But when I talked to
her again on the phone after the conference, she was worried,
they're not going to be the same when we have
(24:55):
our events. It is to provide a space for women
to se feel comfortable to share really vulnerable things they've
been really like disturbing things. Sometimes the people that they've
gone through, especially around a sexual harassment, um or toxic
work environments discrimination. And I'm very concerned that if there
are men in the room, these women are not going
(25:17):
to feel, you know, that level of comfort that they
did before, and then they're not going to share, and
then it's not going to be this environment of catharsis
and you know support that I wanted it to be.
Since the policy change, a small number of men have
attended events, and it's been okay so far as long
as women are still into it, she says, she'll be
(25:39):
happy by the work that we were doing. You know,
it wasn't just about making more money for the sake
of making more money, but it was about power and
value and self worth and that the conference gave it
to them. So we're doing it again and we'll keep
going as long as people buy tickets. The amount we
(26:00):
have in our bank accounts or what we get paid
for our work can feel like a reflection of our
value as a person, and when it comes to the
pay gap, our individual experiences like not getting a raise,
or being interrupted during a meeting, or just not making
very much money can feel like a result of our
own shortcomings and entirely too big to solve on our own.
(26:23):
But Gabby said something that I think we can all
learn from by talking to other people. She realized that
she wasn't alone, that other people had similar problems because
they had similar life experiences, and knowing that helped her
begin to overcome her issues with money because she could
stop blaming herself and start seeing the problems for what
(26:46):
they really are. If you get one thing out of
the show, I hope it's that we're all experiencing the
pay gap collectively. We can't solve it by ourselves, but
individuals coming together and sharing knowledge is powerful. Like just
think about me too. Our individual experiences of sexual harassment
(27:07):
are intimate and isolating, but once every woman spoke out
at the exact same time, a bigger picture emerged, and
only then did we start seeing potential change. Not only
does sharing information make us feel less alone, but it
helps us find solutions. Thank you so much for listening
(27:45):
to The Paycheck. This is the last episode in our series.
If you like the show, please head on over to
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to rate, review, and subscribe.
It really helps if you listen to all six episod
so thank you so much. If you haven't, go back
and listen, and please tell us what you think. We'll
(28:06):
continue covering the gender pay gap and are working on
more amazing stuff. Visit bloomberg dot com Slash the Paycheck
to sign up to be the first to hear about
our new projects and stories. This episode was reported by
Jordan Holman and hosted and reported by me Rebecca Greenfield.
It was edited by Jillian Goodman and produced by Magnus Hendrickson.
(28:28):
We also had help from Francesca Levi, Janet Paskin, and
Liz Smith. Our original music is by Leo Sidra. Carrie
vander Yott did the illustrations on our show page, which
you can find at Bloomberg dot com Slash the Paycheck
Special Thanks to tofor foreheads Laura Zelenko, Jackie Simmons and
all of our guests. Francesca Levy is head of Bloomberg Podcasts.
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