woman who surely would be horrified by all the mistakes I’ve made along the way in my career, or so I thought.
As a longtime advocate for consumers, Warren has gone up against some of the biggest names on Wall Street, and she has famously locked horns with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Warren, who has been on Time magazine’s list of the World’s Most Influential People for two years running and often appears on our show to talk about the economy and financial reform, impresses me as a sharp, gutsy, no-nonsense woman. But she admits to me that when it comes to her personal value in the workplace, she still struggles.
Warren remembers how surprised she was when she realized her male colleagues had that sense of entitlement that she lacked. It happened when she first started teaching at the University of Houston. Before the semester began, she heard from the associate dean, who was scheduling courses. “I got the call asking, ‘Would you teach the lousy course at the lousy hour on the lousy day in the lousy room?’ ” she says. She didn’t want to teach that particular class, but she didn’t see any way around it: “I thought, I’m sure someone needs to teach at the lousy hour on the lousy day in the lousy room, so I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ ”
A couple of years later, Warren was promoted to associate dean, and it was now her job to assign courses, classrooms, and time slots. “So I took the map from the year before and started laying it out, and I sent all these notes out on what and when I needed people to teach,” she remembers. “But every single man on the faculty who didn’t like their schedule sent me back an e-mail saying, ‘You know, you don’t understand, I only teach at ten o’clock on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.’ ”
And the women?
Warren says, “Every single woman could be leveraged into teaching the lousy course at the lousy time in the lousy room. Men would just say, ‘No. That’s not convenient for me.’ I thought, ‘This is astonishing!’ ”
I ask Warren, “It never crossed your mind to say no?”
“Never,” Warren says.
“Why?”
“Partly I felt lucky to be there; partly, I’m the cooperator, you know, let’s get the job done. Someone needs to do this. Someone needs to mop the floor. Okay, hand me the mop. I really see this as the difference between putting ourselves, if not first, at least putting equivalent value on ourselves ... we don’t see our own worth. We see how we can be helpful to the team or to the group. We see what we can add without stopping to ask, ‘Wait a minute, this is a valuable contribution—why am I making this, and what am I getting in return for it?’
“You’re always careful about generalizations here, but for me it doesn’t even cross my mind until later, when I’m committed to do something and I suddenly look around and
realize, ‘So how come the three people who agreed to do the hard, invisible labor here are all women?’ ”
Warren points out that while the low-profile jobs may be both necessary and important, they just don’t garner the accolades or the money and promotions. For that reason, men simply never pick up the mop. She sees this at her faculty meetings at Harvard. “Someone will say, ‘Well, you know we should hire X because he . . .’ and they will name three very visible accomplishments. And I know for a fact, and every woman in the room knows for a fact, that X is a real pain in the rear: X won’t cooperate, won’t help out, won’t be a team player. X will not help move the whole institution forward, and that’s regarded as irrelevant. You know, it’s the difference between the big valuable things that people do, and all that stuff that women do—that’s all that crap stuff. That’s the stuff no one notices, no one cares. No one values.”
I can think of countless lousy shifts that I’ve volunteered to work in my life. Time away from my husband and my kids, time that I needed to take
As a longtime advocate for consumers, Warren has gone up against some of the biggest names on Wall Street, and she has famously locked horns with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Warren, who has been on Time magazine’s list of the World’s Most Influential People for two years running and often appears on our show to talk about the economy and financial reform, impresses me as a sharp, gutsy, no-nonsense woman. But she admits to me that when it comes to her personal value in the workplace, she still struggles.
Warren remembers how surprised she was when she realized her male colleagues had that sense of entitlement that she lacked. It happened when she first started teaching at the University of Houston. Before the semester began, she heard from the associate dean, who was scheduling courses. “I got the call asking, ‘Would you teach the lousy course at the lousy hour on the lousy day in the lousy room?’ ” she says. She didn’t want to teach that particular class, but she didn’t see any way around it: “I thought, I’m sure someone needs to teach at the lousy hour on the lousy day in the lousy room, so I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ ”
A couple of years later, Warren was promoted to associate dean, and it was now her job to assign courses, classrooms, and time slots. “So I took the map from the year before and started laying it out, and I sent all these notes out on what and when I needed people to teach,” she remembers. “But every single man on the faculty who didn’t like their schedule sent me back an e-mail saying, ‘You know, you don’t understand, I only teach at ten o’clock on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.’ ”
And the women?
Warren says, “Every single woman could be leveraged into teaching the lousy course at the lousy time in the lousy room. Men would just say, ‘No. That’s not convenient for me.’ I thought, ‘This is astonishing!’ ”
I ask Warren, “It never crossed your mind to say no?”
“Never,” Warren says.
“Why?”
“Partly I felt lucky to be there; partly, I’m the cooperator, you know, let’s get the job done. Someone needs to do this. Someone needs to mop the floor. Okay, hand me the mop. I really see this as the difference between putting ourselves, if not first, at least putting equivalent value on ourselves ... we don’t see our own worth. We see how we can be helpful to the team or to the group. We see what we can add without stopping to ask, ‘Wait a minute, this is a valuable contribution—why am I making this, and what am I getting in return for it?’
“You’re always careful about generalizations here, but for me it doesn’t even cross my mind until later, when I’m committed to do something and I suddenly look around and
realize, ‘So how come the three people who agreed to do the hard, invisible labor here are all women?’ ”
Warren points out that while the low-profile jobs may be both necessary and important, they just don’t garner the accolades or the money and promotions. For that reason, men simply never pick up the mop. She sees this at her faculty meetings at Harvard. “Someone will say, ‘Well, you know we should hire X because he . . .’ and they will name three very visible accomplishments. And I know for a fact, and every woman in the room knows for a fact, that X is a real pain in the rear: X won’t cooperate, won’t help out, won’t be a team player. X will not help move the whole institution forward, and that’s regarded as irrelevant. You know, it’s the difference between the big valuable things that people do, and all that stuff that women do—that’s all that crap stuff. That’s the stuff no one notices, no one cares. No one values.”
I can think of countless lousy shifts that I’ve volunteered to work in my life. Time away from my husband and my kids, time that I needed to take
Similar Books
