Get Yourself Paid

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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

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 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 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 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.

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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.

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 part soul cycle, part Susie Orman, supposedly affirmative channing helps

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

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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.