Rule Every Businesswoman Needs to Know, Part 2

She Wins, You Win: The Most Important Rule Every Businesswoman Needs to Know
by Gail Evans

(Page 2 of 3)

These questions and stories all have different scenarios and outcomes, but they represent something that I hadn't considered when I wrote my first book, which presents the rules of business as written by the men. The more I thought about it, the more I decided that women needed rules of their own, rules that apply only to women.

But when I sat down to write these rules, I came to realize that there's only one rule that will help eliminate women's confusion and unhappiness. There's only one rule that matters, one rule that I have not seen written about in any book, article, or Web site.

That one rule is: Every woman must always play on the women's team. Why?

Because every time any woman succeeds in business, your chances of succeeding in business increase. And every time a woman fails in business, your chances of failure increase.

Women aren't playing on the same team with each other right now. We don't talk to each other. We don't support each other. We don't rainmake for each other. We act as though we were a minority at work (which is barely true) with no hope of ever changing that situation (which isn't true at all).

Like it or not, women are indeed treated like a minority in the world of business. But are we really? Women currently constitute a healthy (and growing) 47 percent of the work force. But we make up only 12 percent of the upper executive ranks. And female enrollment in business schools has plummeted over 15 percent in the past five years-in part because women are being given the message that while a business school education can help for the first ten or so years of a career, after that the playing field stops being level.

There's more. Women comprise only 12.5 percent of corporate officers, and only 12.4 percent of the board seats, in five hundred of America's largest companies. We represent only 4 percent of the top earners, and only 6.2 percent of the clout titles (chairman, chief executive officer, chief operating officer, vice chairman, president, senior executive vice president, and executive vice president). There are just four women CEOs in the entire Fortune 500.

Comparatively, we don't make enough money, either. Women who worked full-time, year-round in 2000 earned only 73 percent of what men who also worked full-time, year-round earned, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The wage gap has narrowed by about ten percentage points during the last seventeen years, with only slight improvements in the most recent years.

A recently released Congressional study shows that the difference in managerial salaries for men and women actually increased from 1995 to 2000, despite the fact that the country was experiencing an economic boom. In certain key industries where women are supposedly making great strides (entertainment, communications, finance, insurance, and retailing), the gap increased by as much as twenty-one cents for every dollar.

There is a widely held perception that in the not-for-profit world women do much better than men, but the reverse is true. A new study from GuideStar, a national database on not-for-profit organizations, shows that over three quarters of the larger organizations are run by men. Alarmingly, even when women hold top positions, they earn, on average, significantly less money than their male counterparts-$170,180 compared to the men's $264,602.

Some of this lack of financial parity occurs because, as I said, women don't band together in ways that create power.

But it's also because women have been reluctant to admit that by banding together, we are more likely to succeed.

As a result, we are constantly being forced to second-guess ourselves, even when we decide to follow all the male rules. We are always expected to jump through hoops without understanding why. That's because our own way isn't the accepted way. The female's psyche is not the role model for the business psyche; the male's is-and if you don't believe me now, read Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman and see just how men have written all the rules of business, and why the rest of us need to learn them. Because women think we have to succeed in the way men want us to, we have spent too much time looking in the wrong places: We keep trying to improve ourselves, we keep trying to reinvent ourselves, we keep learning more; we keep thinking if we try harder, somehow things will change.

Unfortunately, change hasn't happened. We do need to know the male rules of business. But we must also create and play by our own rules. We should be talking to each other; we should be planning with each other; we should be working to improve the situation for every one of us, not for just one of us. We should launch a new strategy to advance our careers as a whole, rather than advance our own careers at the expense of other women.

Few experts in the career-counseling area concern themselves with these ideas. In fact, they run contrary to what other businesswomen are currently telling their audiences-these people are still trying to solve our problems by recommending we play the boys' game better than the boys. Instead, it's time to make the case for creating a girls' game, for advancing as a group rather than as individuals. Because the truth is, women are a definable group, just like any other minority. And because we are, whether we are working for a company with a strong team environment or a weak one, women are always simultaneously working on another team, and that's the women's team.

This team cuts across the boundaries of business, ethnicity, age, and nationality. It's a reality for which there is no exception.

There's nothing wrong with tending your own desires. Women struggle so hard to figure out what we want. We know what our kids, our parents, and our husbands want; we even know what our dog wants, but we seldom have time to know what we want. We don't think it's right to be out there trying to fulfill our needs. We want to help others get theirs.

In the meantime, we hope that if we do all this, someone will notice us, and reward us. But the truth is: That isn't going to happen. The only way we win is to take care of ourselves. And that means taking care of other women too, because that's how we will all succeed-when we take care of each other.

Men like to say that there's no "us versus them" issue at the office. Then, too often, they go ahead and treat us as if we were a "them." We've all been in those situations where the work team suddenly seems to have left us out, or where we seem to get only so far before we feel frozen out by the men, or where we feel we must compete not just against our competitors at other companies, but against the few women at our level at our own company.

While we all recognize these predicaments, what we don't do is help each other deal with them.

I say: The more we help each other, the more we all move toward greater success. Even more than that: When we don't help each other, we all take a step backward. Our mantra has long been "I can do it." But this notion that we can accomplish our goals individually is antithetical to who we truly are. Our real mantra should be "We can do it."

Women will only make it if we make it together. One isolated success here or there won't do the trick. Only when we achieve a critical mass at the highest levels can we fully realize our potential at the office.

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Copyright © 2003 by Gail Evans, Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher.

About the Author

Gail Evans is the author of Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman, a phenomenal bestseller that has quickly become a classic in its field. CNN's first female executive vice president, Ms. Evans was responsible for creating many of CNN's most successful shows. She is the recipient of numerous awards and appointments. Ms. Evans has appeared on many major national television shows including the Today show, Larry King Live, and shows on CNBC. She currently lectures around the country, mentoring and teaching women of all ages and business backgrounds on how to get ahead in today's corporate world.