There Is Nothing for You Here, page 17
In one incident at Brookings very early in my tenure, when I and the only other young women fellows in the Foreign Policy Program, Meghan O’Sullivan and Suzanne Maloney, found ourselves excluded from an on-site high-level conference, two of our more senior male colleagues told us that we “weren’t part of the D.C. policy game.” They already had experience in government. We hadn’t made our mark on anything yet, so we weren’t relevant enough to be invited. We of course noted that similarly junior male think-tank counterparts from across Washington, D.C., were at the meeting. When we asked again why that was, we were told that they had been included for “career advancement purposes.” Unsurprisingly, there were no women at all at the meeting, but no one seemed to have noticed the omission. At that point I was the only full-time young female fellow in the Foreign Policy Program. Meghan and Suzanne had doctoral fellowships. There were two senior women, Roberta Cohen and Catharin Dalpino, but it took several years for more women to come on board.
At external conferences where I was invited as a speaker, I was frequently mistaken for the staff. There seemed to be no other explanation for my presence than that I must be on the organizational support team. Sometimes this may have been the result of my relatively young age—in my late thirties and forties, which was of course fairly mature when it came to men—but mostly it was because of my gender. In February 2005, I was invited by the CEO of General Electric, Jeff Immelt, to speak at a Russia-focused session of a meeting of the Business Council in Boca Raton. I was paired with Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the chairman and chief executive officer of American International Group (AIG). It was, admittedly, quite a step up and a different audience from my usual gig. Immelt had seen me give a presentation at a Brookings event and invited me practically on the spot.
The panel was in the morning, right after a coffee break. I had not met Hank Greenberg before, although his reputation preceded him. A few women were on the Business Council speaking roster, but they were corporate executives and clearly polished and proficient in this environment. In the break before the meeting, I decided to get myself a cup of tea. As I was standing by the hot water urn looking through the array of tea bags, an older man came up to me. We were wearing name tags. I had perused the pictures and bios in the conference materials, so I immediately saw that it was Hank Greenberg. I presumed he was coming over to introduce himself. How gracious . . . But no, he thought I was part of the catering staff. He too was looking for tea. Apparently the container he had just tried to use at the other side of the room had no hot water. Could I do something, please? I was sure he would see my name tag and realize his mistake. Apparently not.
Having been a waitress for all those years back in the UK, my hospitality instincts kicked in. “There’s hot water here, Mr. Greenberg, as well as tea bags. What would you like? I’d be happy to pour for you. I am having Earl Grey myself.” Still no flicker, no sign that I might be someone other than the tea lady. I guess I looked the part—I made a mental note to no longer wear black suits with a white blouse. This had originally seemed the safest option for the event but was obviously not the right look. The handful of women CEOs wore bold, commanding colors—red, blue, purple—and fancy scarves. Yet again I needed a new wardrobe. I handed Mr. Greenberg his tea and was about to introduce myself as his fellow panelist when he wandered off to greet another CEO. I made my way over to the stage area to get miked up for the session. Jeff Immelt finally came over with Greenberg to introduce us. Greenberg looked slightly embarrassed but more amused than anything else. He probably did this all the time. I smiled and said we had already met in passing over tea and left it at that.
A Decorative Prop
In Russia in the early 2000s, things improved somewhat. In comparison with the 1990s, women became more prevalent in Russian politics, especially in technocratic roles in the Central Bank, financial sector, and research institutes. These were women of my generation who had done advanced economics studies in the West or in new post-Soviet economic institutions. I knew several personally, like Ksenia Yudaeva, the first deputy governor of the Bank of Russia, who received her PhD from MIT. Ksenia crossed over with me while I was in graduate school and was then a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, next door to Brookings. Despite their prominence, however, Ksenia and her colleagues at the Central Bank were essentially still in traditional Russian “women’s professions.” They were taking charge of the “national household” and its resources and budget, carefully holding the purse strings in case the men went on an ill-advised spending spree and upended Russia’s hard-fought economic recovery since its collapse in the 1990s. There were frequent stories in the press about Ksenia’s boss, the Central Bank head, Elvira Nabiullina, taking a firm stand against cabinet members and prominent business figures who were trying to push the bank into lending more money or bailing out key industrial sectors during economic downturns.
Beyond the financial sector, women were prominent in the Russian media and in the government’s press departments, including Maria Zakharova, the Foreign Ministry press spokeswoman, and several deputy press spokeswomen for Kremlin officials. One of my contemporaries, Svetlana Mironyuk, was in charge of RIA Novosti, Russia’s leading international press agency, for several years, until its abolition in 2013. I had plenty of firsthand interactions with these women in Moscow and considerable opportunity to reach judgments about how they were regarded and treated. Like me, they were appreciated for their technical skills and their ability to interact with global counterparts, but they were also “the staff” and not part of the boys’ club.
On a couple of occasions, at meetings of Russia’s premier international affairs discussion forum, the Valdai Discussion Club, I sat next to Vladimir Putin—including when I was the national intelligence officer at the National Intelligence Council. Beginning in September 2004, the Valdai meetings were part of an overt Kremlin effort to influence the opinions of Western academics and commentators about Putin’s Russia. The Kremlin’s press office worked closely with the organizers to shape the meetings and ensure that a set of key messages were transmitted by all the Russian participants to their Western counterparts. They hoped that those of us who attended to be wined and dined and offered access to Russia’s top political figures would feel obliged (if not naturally moved) to write positive articles about Russian developments. At one point during a meeting in 2007, Putin himself explicitly stated that he wanted the Western participants to pass on the information and views from the meeting to “combat the strong stereotypes [of Russia] that exist in the West.”
My experiences at those meetings highlighted the prevailing attitudes toward all women in Russia, even the most prominent at the top of their game. The last time I sat next to Putin was in November 2011, when I was back at Brookings as director of the Center on the U.S. and Europe. I of course took full advantage of the opportunity to observe Putin at very close quarters. I made careful notes on every aspect of the context and situation to analyze and write up later—what he was wearing, how he conducted himself, what he ate and drank, what was on his notecards, what the key messages they wanted us to take away were and why.
Thanks to being right there beside him, I was able to see, for example, that like the rest of us, President Putin suffered from some of the minor aggravations of older age, like presbyopia. He never wore reading glasses—a sign of weakness. I was so close to him that I could see he was not wearing contact lenses, but the super-large font on his notecards was a clear indication. All of this was useful for my subsequent work on the book I wrote about Putin in 2013, but of course I wondered why I was sitting next to him, in a spot that would normally seem significant. Was it, I mused, a Kremlin effort to make a political point, or compromise me in some way because I was or had been the U.S. national intelligence officer covering Russia? Could it be because the Russian security forces had profiled me and decided I was the least likely person to attack Putin with a fork or knife during dinner? All kinds of ideas popped into my head. Naturally, it turned out that it was nothing of the sort.
I was one of the few women in the group, but the Russians did not see me as a real-life version of the celebrated British actress Judi Dench playing the part of M, the first top female spy chief in a James Bond movie. No, I had been selected because of something far more prosaic. Who I was professionally was immaterial. I was a mere decorative prop for the great man. I was a woman who was neither too ugly nor too attractive, neither too young nor too old. I had the elusive Goldilocks factor. No one, apart from the very few people in Russian foreign policy circles who might know who I was, would pay any attention to me. All eyes would be on him. Svetlana Mironyuk from RIA Novosti was sitting on Putin’s other side. She enlightened me after the fact, stripping away my fantasies. If a man from the foreign delegation had been sitting there, TV audiences would wonder who this man was. Why was he sitting next to Putin? The man would be a diversion. Similarly, if I was a beautiful or glamorous woman with a plunging neckline, or “too old and overdressed,” Svetlana noted, I would draw unwanted attention. So there I was, a nondescript woman, as innocuous as a flower arrangement or potted plant, some tableware framing Mr. Putin. Nothing to look at here.
7
Women’s Work
After a while I factored in the indignities of being a woman in Russia as part of the package—another endurance test, but also a source of illuminating experience. It certainly gave me and other women studying the country, like Angela Stent, a different set of insights and perspectives from those of our male counterparts. Sometimes we would glean surprising nuggets of information when the Russian men around us would chat candidly among themselves, entirely forgetting we were there. One issue that I had not factored in at all on the United States’ side of the equation, however, was that I would be subjected to another indignity as a woman—gender-based wage discrepancy. This became an additional lesson in the ways that women and disadvantaged groups find themselves locked out of opportunity.
My job at the Kennedy School played a pivotal role in launching my academic career. It also provided a means of earning an income and paying my way through my Harvard graduate education. Ken and I got married in 1995, as he was starting out in his career in the private sector. Neither of us had any savings; I was still an impecunious grad student, and now he was simply impecunious. Because of funding difficulties once I had used up my initial Knox Fellowship, I frequently had to take breaks from pursuing the PhD to work and save money to cover the next phase. Margot Gill, who had recruited me to Harvard, and the university’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences staff helped me identify ways of making ends meet. This included being a resident tutor in Cabot House, an undergraduate dorm, applying for hardship bursaries to cover some of the tuition and other fees, and working for Graham Allison. I did my dissertation research on the side of work trips to Russia for the Kennedy School projects. Harvard provided an infrastructure of opportunity—the mechanisms and support that made things possible.
As I reached the time for completing my PhD, Graham made me a deal to help me move forward. He would give me a three-month unpaid leave, keep my job open, and help me find an office in one of the Harvard libraries where I could work uninterrupted. But I had to get the entire dissertation written in that time. This was strict conditionality. And there would be oversight. He would check on me every week to see where I was. I should treat it like my job. Go into the office in the morning, write, take a short lunch break, write some more, then stop in the evening. No time for procrastination. If I failed to finish, I would not get my job back. It was quite the deal—I could not refuse, given the economic consequences. In fact Graham sent a different colleague, or sometimes a random student from one of his classes, every day to check on me in the library. One of them busted me playing hearts on the computer rather than writing and reported back. I got a harsh phone call from Graham that week, even though I tried to argue that it was technically during my lunch break. The fiscal incentive to finish and get back to work along with the frequent check-ins worked. I completed the dissertation in the allotted time.
I had assumed that with the PhD out of the way, the door would now be opened for a significant boost in my compensation. It turned out not to be the case. Instead I was offered a direct insight into the persistent gap between men’s and women’s compensation, which holds true irrespective of place, class, or race, at all income levels and across blue- and white-collar jobs in the U.S. and also internationally. This gender wage gap, combined with the central role that women play in supporting their families, would in turn help to explain some of the grim political trends that swept the world in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It was certainly emblematic that in the 2016 American presidential election, almost 40 percent of women voters would opt for Donald Trump and his promise to blow up the existing social system, despite his open and unabashed misogyny during the campaign.
In the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and every other country, the obstacles to opportunity—to accessing an education, finding a job, earning sufficient money to thrive, not just survive—no matter what form they come in, contribute to economic hardship. Over time the reality as well as the perception of being unfairly disadvantaged in some way and denied social mobility hardens into political grievance. People want their government to do something to address their difficulties. They want their political system to deliver some relief and to level the playing field. In the early 2000s, all the gaps and discrepancies that had built up in the 1980s and 1990s in advanced societies would push those who were most affected (and thus disaffected) toward politicians who promised to change the situation in some dramatic fashion—even, in the Russian case under Vladimir Putin, at the cost of curtailing their political freedoms.
“Why Do You Need to Be Paid So Much?”
Gender-based salary discrepancies have been well documented and analyzed for decades, including in multiple years of reports from the Harvard Business Review. But until I started working at the Kennedy School, I was oblivious to the fact that women spend a good portion of their careers being grossly and unfairly undercompensated. Indeed, most women, like me, have no idea this is the case until some incident shines a spotlight on the yawning gap between their income and those of their male colleagues. In my jobs back in the UK, for example when I was cleaning at Bishop Auckland General Hospital, there was a transparent fixed rate of pay for the position. Even as a temporary worker, I was paid the same rate as everyone else.
When I started working at the Kennedy School, there was no such transparency. The human resource department kept salary information private. I soon learned that wage inequality begins during the initial hiring process, and it persists, with the gap widening, as women advance through their careers. In my first job in the United States, at Harvard, like most women right out of school or university, I didn’t have enough information to know what starting salary to ask for when I accepted the job. I was offered a salary. I took it. I had no idea you were supposed to try to negotiate something. Nobody told me I should.
I was equally unaware of the general salary range for the position. I had no previous pay history in the U.S. to fall back on as a guide, and no one to ask what I should expect. Indeed, as I soon learned, employees already on the job—your future colleagues—have no incentive to share their compensation details with you at any point in the process or afterward. They have often negotiated something entirely different for themselves. Salary negotiations, even in universities and think tanks, are competitive and cutthroat—especially if a fixed budget for personnel costs is written into grant applications for research work, and when benefits like health care, life insurance, and retirement all have to be factored on top of the base salary. Academic studies have established that women, unlike men, are in any case frequently denied the salary they ask for in negotiations. And after the fact, when women finally discover that they have been hired at a lower salary than a comparable man, there is often little they can do about it. I had both of these experiences repeatedly, and realized it was the norm.
At the Kennedy School, I had no idea initially what anyone else made but naively assumed I was making the same as anyone else at my level. Senior women I encountered across my career, like Dorothy Zinberg, and later Alice Rivlin, one of the most renowned women scholars at Brookings when I arrived there in 2000, soon disabused me. They had already been there, done that. They often shared their experiences, publicly and privately, and made it clear that wage disparity was a common challenge for all women. It had not necessarily improved with the passage of time.
Dorothy and Alice both came from solidly middle-class and accomplished family backgrounds. Like most of the women I met in academia, they had been high school valedictorians, stellar students at top universities, and pioneers in their fields. But they were women, and still a minority. And, as such, often denied the positions, promotions, and pay of men. Dorothy Zinberg was famous for a quote that she did not want to be sidelined for her entire life as “some brilliant man’s bright young assistant.” She was honest with me and the other young women she mentored about how hard it was to carve out a path in public policy in the face of overt gender bias. Dorothy frequently criticized the low pay for women academics, the difficulty women had in being appointed to full professorships, and the fact that women were often asked what their husbands did during compensation discussions—as if that should make a difference in the decision. “If your husband has a good job, why do you need to be paid so much?” was the general thrust. Dorothy joined the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s first committee on women’s issues to try to tackle the discrimination and bridge some of the pay divides.
