About Us

Victoria Pynchon

I mediate and arbitrate complex commercial disputes, the former with ADR Services, Inc. in Century City and the latter with...

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ADR Services, Inc.

She Negotiates

She Negotiates

The 33 cent wage and income gap is unacceptable and unnecessary. So is the cliché glass ceiling. Bottom line, our...

What Are Your Super Powers And What Are You Waiting For?

I just spent the weekend with a group of incredibly engaged, brilliant and successful women lawyers at the Vail Sebastian Hotel where I keynoted the annual Conference of the Colorado Womens Bar Association.

Four questions stirred the greatest interest.

  1. What are your super powers to get things done?
  2. Do you have (or need) the authority to use them?
  3. What can you use them to accomplish to further your own career?
  4. If you're not using them, why not?

Last night at the cocktail party after my presentation (slideshow below) dozens of women approached me to tell me what their "super powers" were.

  • Institutional Knowledge.
  • Ability to assign work.
  • Persuasiveness.
  • Influence over firm power brokers.
  • Willingness to study for and take foreign bar exams (a recurring nightmare in my book, but hey! "how is the firm recompensing you to study for and take it?")
  • Ability to promote younger lawyers.
  • Ability to form relationships with the firm's clients.
  • Speaking ability.
  • Writing ability.
  • Ability to: take a great deposition, write jury instructions, try a case.
  • A large social-professional network that can be tapped for favors and referrals.

And on and on and on.

If you have not made a list of your "super powers" please do so now. Ask yourself how they can benefit your career. Then ask yourself whether you're using them effectively to do so and if not, why not. 

Then go and prosper!

 

Gotham Gal Goes All In For National Girlfriends' Networking Day

First off I just love the name.  

National Girlfriends Networking Day is a nationwide celebration of making connections.  Events take place around the country on June 4th [live streaming] three amazing women; Lesley Jane Seyour the editor of MORE magazine, Taj Williams-Franklin a WNBA coach, player and community activist and Soledad O'Brien Emmy award winning journalist.  [They] will be taking questions through social media from nationwide participants. 

Read on here and sign up today!

The live-streaming events are free!

Breaking News! There's Nothing Wrong With Women

drowning

Join me, Lisa Gates and Katie Donovan, along with co-host Jana Hlistova and Gloria Feldt for Take The Lead's monthly Smart Women Take The Lead webcast. Register here now. The live webcast will be Tuesday May 14th at 7pm BST, 2pm EDT. You can send questions via twitter using the hashtag #swttl – we’d love to hear from you! And if you miss the live program, you can always click the same link and see it on YouTube.  

Women in the age of of AnneMarieSlaughterSherylSandbergMarissaMayer are drowning in a sea of unsolicited adviceIn recent days, it’s been suggested to me (the generic woman) that I find a way to strengthen my voice (Executive Presence); jettison my womanly emotions in the workplace (don’t cry!); eliminate question marks and exclamation points from my email communications (??!!???); act more like a guy; act less like a guy (in the same article); get the best seat at the conference tableimprove my handshake; ask for more money but to do so with a smile on my face andthe pretense that it’s for someone other than myself;  pay more attention to my family than to social networking; devote more time to online social networking;  learn to golfseek sponsorsseek mentorsbrag about my accomplishments, but modestlyconform my behavior to feminine stereotypes while covertly using man-rules; and, for heaven’s sake never, ever to curse in publicOver at Princeton, it’s even been suggested that young women do what their grandmothers did –find a man who is likely to be a “good provider” while the getting is good (before graduation). My generic woman’s head is about to explode. The solution? Start by understanding there's nothing wrong with you over at the Take the Lead blog here.

WorkLife Seamlessly Arranged By Scandal's Show Runner

This is what feminist heaven looks like.

Do we have to be this successful to rearrange the world to fit one woman's life? Or could we simply realize that this is what WorkLife looks like on the day it stops being a man's world.

Scandal's show-runner Sonda Rhimes' executive-Mommy day.

As part of her Shondaland production company, Rhimes oversees some 550 actors, writers, crew members and producers, and her days are optimized to do so. In the morning, she gets her older daughter, Harper, who is 10, off to school and then contends with whatever is most urgent: writing, giving notes on a script and watching casting videos. The televisions in her office and home are connected to a system that allows her to watch real-time editing by her editors. Both of her daughters have rooms across the hall from her office at work. The younger, a perfectly chubby-cheeked 1-year-old named Emerson, comes in every day, clambering onto Rhimes’s lap during meetings.

I'm not blaming the guys when I say that the historic accident of the modern workplace wouldn't have required men to choose between work and family. They would long ago have figured out how to have both.

Oh, wait a minute. They did. It was called "wives."

In today's economy, few men have the luxury of "wives" and even fewer working mothers have the luxury of the services wives and mothers of an earlier era provided - 24-hour child, husband and extended-family care.

According the government statistics, fifty-nine percent of all married mothers work and 67% of all single women (including those widowed and divorced) work.

Let's celebrate Mothers Day by reimagining the future of WorkLife for everyone's benefit, shall we?

 

Are Women's Initiatives Meant To Fail?

Nearly every law student in the country from the oldest grad to the youngest aspirant, learns the meaning of "intent" in civil law from the case of Garratt v. Dailey.

You may not want to hurt Bill, but if you put an apple on his head, raise your shotgun and pull the trigger, the law will say you intended to kill him in the highly likely event that your William Tell act causes Bill's death.

The rule that Garratt applies to a five-year old's decision to pull out the chair out an adult woman is about to sit in is this - if the defendant knows with a substantial certainty that his act will result in harm, he must be presumed to have intended it.

Which takes us directly to law firm women's initatives. As the National Association of Women Lawyers' 2012 survey of BigLaw women's initiatives concluded, the programing offered by BigLaw to retain and promote women does not achieve its goals. Not only that, but these women's initiatives rarely have measurable promotional goals.

As the Survey reports, even though women’s initiatives have been in effect for at least a decade, "what such initiatives actually do, and the impact they have on women in firms, is all too often not clear and at worst, open to criticism bordering on cynicism." More particularly,

fewer than half of all women’s initiatives are evaluated annually by management. Similarly, fewer than half of all women’ initiatives submit written evaluations. Moreover, it is not clear that the reporting and evaluation functions focus on specific goals. Some 40% of firms report no specific criteria at all for their evaluation. Of those who report goal-related evaluation criteria, there is often no connection to concrete advancement criteria. Thus, descriptions of evaluation criteria were often along the lines of “accomplishment of goals and activities identified at the start of each year” or “number of events, quality of events, participation level.”

 

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What Are Women Missing? National Girlfriends Networking Day!

This is your invitation to join The New Agenda, Ms. JD, She Negotiates, and the Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles at Proskauer Rose in Century City on June 4, 2013, at 9 a.m. for National Girlfriends' Networking Day. We'll be networking, of course, as well as live streaming a stellar panel of successful women including Emmy Award winning journalist Soledad O'Brien, Editor-in-Chief of More Magazine Leslie Jane Seymour, angel investor and advisor of Women Entrepreneurs, Joanne Wilson, and WNBA player and coach, Taj McWilliams Franklin

This is also your invitation to attend the LIVE event in New York City and a half-dozen other live streaming events in San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Rochester and Short Hills.

Why should you attend the Second Annual National Girlfriends' Networking Day?

 Because

  • The women in your firm may mentor you (teach you the ropes) but not sponsor you (put their skin in your game).
  • Or the women in your firm may do nothing for you.
  • Or, worse, the women in your firm may sabotage you. (Men will too so don’t think this is about "cat fights" or "Queen Bees" or any other women hating tropes).

This is about the accumulation of wealth and power and no gender owns avarice or generosity. Speaking of which, a huge round of applause to Proskauer in Century City and Arnold & Porter in San Francisco for lending their offices and catering support to the live streaming events in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

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Are Men Bad Negotiators?

We've been talking about women's negotiation deficits for so long that we've completely neglected the men. This post is an attempt to cure that omission. Listen guys! We care about you. And we'd like to help you with your negotiation problem. 

But let's start where we've been for the past ten years ever since Linda Babcock of the Heinz Negotiation Academy for Women published Women Don't Ask

In Speaking Out About Women And Power, U.C. Berkeley Psychology Professor Tania Lombrozo describes a study in which women experienced gender blow back when they voiced their opinions “too ardently.” The social scientists conducting that study asked a group of men and women to evaluate a hypothetical CEO who was described as offering opinions as much as possible or as withholding opinions.

Unsurprisingly, female CEOs who offered opinions frequently were judged less competent and less suited to leadership than their sister CEOs who withheld their opinions. Equally unsurprising was the way in which the study judged the men – as more competent and better suited to leadership if they spoke up often and less so if they didn’t.

Too many people have concluded from studies like these that women are stuck between a gender rock and leadership hard place but men are not.

As Lombrozo is quick to note, however, men faced a complementary danger: of being perceived as poor leaders if they didn’t voice their opinions. Members of both sexes were penalized for failing to conform to traditional gender stereotypes.

Listen. We are all judged according to the culture’s expectation for our behavior. Women are expected to be kind, patient, tolerant, loving, giving and self-effacing. Men are expected to be judgmental, tough, self-seeking and self-promoting. We all suffer social sanctions – from harsh judgments to electoral defeats – when we step outside of society’s expectations.

Those who would caution us to “act our role” or suffer the consequences, however, are missing the bigger picture, as are those who urge us to ape the style of the opposite gender. Let’s take negotiation as our example.

In a recent article at Huffington Post, Joan Williams writes that women don’t negotiate because they’re not idiots, citing yet another study confirming the imposition of social sanctions on women who negotiate outside their gender role. Sara Laschever, co-author, with Linda Babcock, of Women Don’t Ask and Ask for It, immediately dropped by to assert that Williams’ article mischaracterized Babcock’s findings, explaining that the "study used only used one negotiation script, in which both the male and female negotiators asked for higher pay in a fairly aggressive way.

~~~~~~~~~

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Change Women Lawyers' Working World Today!

I'd like to take a little bit of your time to talk to you about sponsoring the Annual South Carolina Women Lawyers Conference scheduled for October 21, 2011

Why South Carolina? 

Because for the past 19 years the same group of women has been hosting an "I Believe Anita Hill Party." 

This year is the 20th anniversary of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings which legitimized women's complaints of sexual harassment in the workplace. This is a particularly timely year in women's professional history to revisit the Hill-Thomas hearings in light of the DSK, Schwarzgenegger and Weiner scandals. 

Professor Hill will be the keynote speaker at the South Carolina Women Lawyers' Leadership Summit the day after the Anita Hill "party." Professor Hill will kick off the morning of the Summit on October 21 with the keynote speech.

That same afternoon, I will be leading a panel discussing the intersection of sexual harassment and implicit gender bias with Gloria Steinem (founder of Ms. Magazine and the Martin Luther King, Jr. of the second wave women's movement); Gloria Feldt, feminist activist and author of No Excuses, Nine Ways Women Can Change the Way We Think About Power; Shelby Knox, "star" of the Sundance documentary "The Education of Shelby Knox," now working for change.org, and, Jamia Wilson, Vice-President of Programs at the Women's Media Center in New York City, which trains and promotes women in media, an organization co-founded by Steinem and Jane Fonda.

This panel of two of the most noted leaders of the Second Wave Women's Movement and two Gen-Y feminist activists will talk about solutions to a problem to which no one yet has an answer.

My small start-up company, She Negotiates Consulting and Training, is working to promote women to positions of leadership through their own efforts within a supportive community of women in business and the professions.

She Negotiates is a Diamond Patron Sponsor of the South Carolina Women Lawyers' Conference and we invite you to sponsor this historic event too.

As a former attorney (and current mediator and AAA arbitrator) I am all too familiar with BigLaw's failure to retain and promote their women. We at She Negotiates believe that only by encouraging women to support other women will we finally close the wage, income and leadership gap that seems so intractable. 

The next firm to become a Diamond Sponsor can introduce the Feldt-Steinem, et al. panel and receive four tickets to the event. Here's the Sponsor Form. Please donate today. No donation is too small!

The Week at ForbesWoman

Negotiating for Something You Think You Can’t Get? Show Up in Drag posted by LISA GATES

Jane, like her male counterparts, has a big truck with her company logo plastered on the doors, lots of specialized tools and ladders, a crew of talented helpers, 20 years in the business and several pairs of Carhartt jeans and Timberland boots (NYSE:TBL).

When she shows up to meet potential clients, she dresses like a woman and makes sure there’s no dirt under her fingernails. It’s a “presentation” thing she says. According to Jane, if she clomps into prospective clients’ gardens wearing muck boots, it’s as much of a turn-off to her prospective clients as it is being gay.

Double binds and deep and abiding biases cause many women to make extreme choices.

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What is the SAT’s ‘Jersey Shore’ Essay Question Really Asking? posted by KATIE PHILLIPS

Last Saturday, the College Board served up a mega-curveball for high school students across America: it asked them to write an essay about reality television. The question, one out of three possible essay topics distributed at random, described reality television as programs “which feature real people engaged in real activities rather than professional actors performing scripted scenes” and then asked whether “people benefit from forms of entertainment that show so-called reality, or are such forms of entertainment harmful?”

Definitely not what kids who have spent countless hours brushing up on their Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dickens had expected.

These are the kids that are too busy studying, playing soccer, or taking piano lessons in the hopes of receiving an acceptance letter to a great college — they don’t have the time to watch or interest in the comings-and-goings of Jersey Shore’s Snooki and The Situation. These are, not surprisingly, the same kids who are complaining of the question’s ‘unfairness’ – many of whom have lamented on online forums such as College Confidential that they don’t watch any television, let alone reality shows.

The College Board, in response, has defended its prompt; saying that it was an attempt to “engage students”, and that “everything a student needs to write a successful essay is included in the prompt itself.” Meaning, they’re not grading students on how well they can opine about the Kardashians, but rather how well they can structure an essay.

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Money, Power, and Self-Determination Make Women Unhappy posted by VICTORIA PYNCHON

That’s what author Suzanne Venker’s saying in her new book The Flipside of Feminism.

Forty years have passed since the so-called women’s movement claimed to liberate women from preconceived notions of what it means to be female – and the results are in. The latest statistics from the National Bureau of Economic Research show that “as women have gained more freedom, more education, and more power, they have become less happy.”

Over at Washington Whispers, Paul Bedard has pulled from Venker’s book, Five Ways That Feminism Has Ruined America

It hurt marriage. Women want to wait so that they can keep their identities longer and men are finding easy sex, taking away a big reason for marriage.

Emasculates men. It’s better to be a wuss than speak up or mouth off and face charges of harassment or chauvinism.

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The Internet, Freedom of Speech and the Anti-Gay App posted by VICTORIA PYNCHON

Pressure is mounting on Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) to rid its store of an Anti-Gay App. Over at the Huffington Post, Wayne Bessen writes that Exodus International, the largest Christian organization offering a “cure” for homosexuality, is bragging that Apple gave it a 4+ rating, signifying the absence of “offensive content.”

I downloaded the Exodus App today to see whether it contained something akin to hate speech which has been variously defined as any communication which disparages a person or a group on the basis of some characteristic such as race or sexual orientation; or attacks or disparages a person or group of people based on their social or ethnic group.

At the risk of putting myself at the center of a firestorm of disapproval, I have to say that what I viewed and read on the Exodus app was not hate speech but simply the expression of religious beliefs with which I, and many other people, disagree.

Exodus International appears to be a non-denominational religious organization that believes homosexuality is a sin. It also promotes the idea that this sin can be relieved by establishing a spiritual relationship with Jesus.

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She Negotiates on NPR with Jennifer Ludden

gesture.jpg

 

Go to npr here.

The Week at ForbesWoman

We've had a busy week over at ForbesWoman in articles and blog posts covering:

The Davos World Economic Forum

The paucity of women at the Davos Economic Forum despite how rich the ones who attended are as described in this post by Forbes staff writer Louisa Kroll, The Richest Women at Davos.

Women's Davos Wardrobe Dilemmas covered by Moira Forbes as an unfortunate but still critical factor for the display of power necessary to be a player at the World Economic Forum.

A photo gallery of the executive conferences women CEOs love best.

The Continued Assault on the Glass Ceiling

Aman Singh's post on Why So Many Top Women Don't Make it to Executive Leadership.

Jenna Goudreau's Jobs Outlook:Careers Headed for the Trash Pile


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Yes, You Should Ask for a Raise or Increase Your Rates This Year

See the series of articles on the topic over at ForbesWomanWhy Every Woman Should Ask for a Raise this Year; and, Why We Women Fail to Ask for Raises and What Happens When We Do, most of which is also applicable to men.  Excerpt from the first article below:

You deserve a raise this year because you are working harder, longer and faster than you were before the recession. And as msnbc reported in 2009, you are doing so for less, not more, money.

 That means you are not only doing your own job, you’re also doing the jobs your laid off colleagues were doing. You’ll be difficult to replace because of that. Not only because John and Mary’s jobs are not in your historic employment description, but because fewer people will want to take on the work you’re doing now for the salary you’re now being paid.

 Your employer may need to hire two people to replace you. He or she will also have to incur the expense of hiring one or more new employees.

 You are more valuable than you believe yourself to be. You therefore have more bargaining strength than you believe yourself to have.

How to ask for a raise over at She Negotiates tomorrow.

The Week at ForbesWoman's "She Negotiates" Blog

We kicked off the new year over at ForbesWoman this past Sunday with my short think-post on gay marriage and the razor's edge on which we women negotiate for ourselves - both of which I tied to our fear of losing the benefits and the restraining influences of traditional gender roles.  See Negotiating Sex and Gender here. There's also a bit of instructive back-and-forth in the comments on the question whether the income gap is a systemic problem or simply the result of women being . . . well . . . lazy bitches. Those who know me well can marvel at my admirable restraint.

On Monday, The Daily Asker, Roxana Popescu, penned the most popular She Negotiates post of the week - Six Things Every Woman Should Ask for in 2011. Roxana is a black-belt "asker," taking the opportunity to negotiate literally everything. She'll be adding six more categories of "asks" over at our ForbesWoman blog today so keep an eye peeled for it.

And though Roxana doesn't know it yet, we're planning on having her lead day-long bargaining expeditions in 2011 for those who don't notice the dozens of opportunities that present themselves to us every day for a little haggling. Stay tuned for that announcement over at our home She Negotiates site. For more information on Roxana's "asking" quest, see Day One:  Can I Ask for Something Every Day for a Year.

On Tuesday, She Negotiates rested so that Wednesday could bring you Forget Resolutions: Disrupt and Execute in 2011, by She Negotiates co-founder Lisa Gates. I'd just been telling a book publicist how I'd been dying the death of a thousand book promotion cuts. A couple of hundred here, a thousand there, went out to consultants in 2010 who simply threw me back on my own promotional resources with a little advice about working different or harder. That's what I hired you for! If you're suffering from a similar consultant-overload dis-ease, go no further than consulting with Lisa Gates where the focus is implement and execute. She changed my life. Let her change yours for the better in 2011.

Yesterday, our Gen-Y blogger Katie Phillips, recently graduated from the Tisch School of Arts at NYU, wrote in despair and celebration of entering the unknown in Negotiating Uncertainty: Gen-Y Women are Busy Being Born. Our boomer readers will see themselves in the same circumstances thirty or forty years ago, but this post is not for us. It's Gen-Y to Gen-Y and one of the finest pieces of writing you're likely to see anywhere on ForbesWoman. Really. Check it out.

With part 2 of Roxana's six tips for 2011 today, we'll close the week in asking, haggling, bargaining, negotiating, trading, and bartering for the first week of the new year. Please let us know which topics would be most useful to you for us to cover as we make 2011 not just the Year of Recovery, but the Year of Abundance! 

Closing the Wage Gap by Negotiating for Ourselves

the nice things some people say about she negotiates

"Victoria Pynchon's negotiation skills crush cultural bias, gender barriers and even fears about the tumultuous economy. She taught me to conquer my fears with courage and navigate contentious negotiation, while demanding my market value.  Her one-on-one supportive coaching techniques trump transformation. Working with her has triggered a personal evolutionary spiral into a new way of doing business with confidence, the fruits of which have knocked down walls in every part of my life. I felt supported through the entire process and experienced immediate results."

Judy Martin, Business Journalist & Founder WorkLifeNation.com

"Lisa Gates reached into the very core of my being in order to bring me back into the reality of my dreams. Her talk is real and her methods concise. I no longer doubt what I'm doing...instead I speak, write, and live, knowing exactly why I do what I do and I realize that the goals I have set for myself are entirely up to me and attainable." 

Cicily R. Janus, Writing Away Retreats

diversity in the amlaw100? who are we kidding?

Most law firms state their commitment to diversity and inclusivity, prominently featuring on their diversity pages the pathetically few women and minorities in positions of genuine economic power in the firm.  Are they walking the talk?  Let me count the ways.

O'Melveny & Myers ~ We attract, retain, and promote people of all backgrounds, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, age, religion, disability, or any other group characteristics.

201 male partners and 21 women ~ 10%.  In the legal realm, you win awards for this.

O’Melveny & Myers LLP has been named to The American Lawyer’s 2010 A-List, which recognizes the nation’s most elite law firms for stellar performance in the areas of revenue generation, pro bono commitment, associate satisfaction, and diversity representation.  This is the Firm’s third consecutive year on the list of 20 firms judged best at balancing the practice of law with their obligations to the profession.

I don't mean to pick on O'Melveny.  It's representative of the whole.  Any AmLaw100 law firm that would like to crow about its great track record in retaining and promoting women and minorities, please do drop by with your results and suggestions to your peers for improvements in these figures that the smartest guys in the room just can't seem to be capable of figuring out.  

Today, Forbes Corporate Social Responsibility Blog is commencing a series on how a serious commitment to diversity results in improved bottom line performance.  I commend that series to the attention of the real powers that be inside AmLaw 100 law firms and they cannot be found in the Diversity Programs, of that I can assure you.  Here's the intro to the McDonald's diversity program series:

How does a company that serves 56 million customers a day across 118 countries become a leader in diversity hiring and retention? According to the inclusion and diversity team at McDonald’s, it takes a combination of knowing how to leverage a multicultural customer base, a C-suite-led commitment to talent management, and academic-style learning labs.

If you're a woman, like me, we have our own garden to tend.  We leave the Fortune 50 and the AmLaw100 out of discouragement.  But part of that discouragement is born of our own diminished expectations and failures to build serious rain-making activities into our daily practices along with our failures to demand assignments to the types of cases where partners are made.

If your law firm or corporation does not have a serious diversity program, click your ruby slippers three times, say "there's no place like the board room," take the She Negotiates signature course, and kick a little butt. 

Remember, as Gloria Steinem said, "the truth shall set you free, but first, it will piss you off."

Cross-posted at She Negotiates.

She Negotiates the End of the Glass Ceiling



How do we "sell" the nation on the idea that women's work is as valuable as men's? Despite the fact that 90 years have passed since women were given the vote and 40 since an entire generation of women raised their voices against unequal treatment under the law, we continue to make a third of what our men do.

What's up with that? and why the Coke ad?

What's up with that is this: we're not negotiating our true market value because we believe it is worth one-third less than men believe their true market value to be. That's what the research shows. Instead of getting angry, let's finally "get even" by learning our true market value; gathering the tools to ask for it; and, then just go get it.

That's what Lisa Gates and I are up to over at She Negotiates ~ our four-week online coached negotiation class for women. First, we give you the tools to re-calibrate your market value. Then we teach you how to get it. It's a simple as that.

Why the Coke ad?

Coca-Cola, one of the most successful products ever to grace our planet, wasn't always a world-wide beauty pageant winner. It once had to sell itself. It's SODA POP for goodness sakes. But it didn't sell itself as soda pop. It sold itself as the staff of life ~ bread. It wasn't a luxury ~ something our then-post-depression post-war parents were not keen on buying. It was a necessity.

So how do we sell ourselves as necessary to the economy and as valuable as bread and butter? Come on over to She Negotiates and we'll teach you how.

Our next course begins on September 13 and you can take it in your jammies! A warning: this is no ordinary e-class. It's a lot of hard work.

If you're ready to upset the apple cart and apply a little elbow grease to the gears and levers of a society that still fails to recognize our value, come on by!

Our best for yet another new beginning,

Vickie Pynchon and Lisa Gates
She Negotiates Consulting and Training

yes we can! negotiate our jobs back! at ForbesWoman

Please don't buy me retail

My friend's Women's Bar Association is looking for a speaker. 

They wanted that other woman who speaks on the topic of women negotiating.  You know the one . . . what's her name.  Yes, that's her.  The annual meeting committee gave her a ring and she quoted them $10,000 for an hour keynote.  To be fair, an hour keynote takes all day.  First, you've got to travel, then stay over night, then, if you're really serious about being of service to women lawyers, you get up early and listen to the morning speaker, talk to your table mates, find out what their challenges are, and, then alter, ever so slightly, your noon keynote to deliver exactly what this particular unique group of women need to hear.  You stay after, of course, to answer questions and sell copies of your book, which is, after all, your time, the time you'd be spending anyway spreading the good news that women can negotiate away the glass ceiling and the pay gap and their kids' private school tuitions.  Because that's just how you roll.  So it's never just an hour.

Still.

$10,000. 

"Did you negotiate with her?" I asked.

"The search committee didn't even try," said my friend.  "They figured her price was retail."

I don't mind being second choice.  That other woman, well, shoot, she pretty much started the whole women-negotiating-revolution.  I get it.  So I gave my quote and added, "but I'm not a suit on a hanger at Bloomies.  You don't have to buy me retail.  Remember some of what I taught you about money and value."

"Uhhhhh, make an aggressive first offer?"

"Well, yes.  But that's not what I'm talking about here.  I'm talking about the money is meaningless lesson.  You remember.  You can't eat or drink it.  It won't actually do the surgery nor build an addition to your house.  Remember how it just evaporated overnight right before George Bush left office?  Remember how your house was worth $500,000 on Monday and two fifty on Tuesday?

'Money has a value only because we give it value.  It's only worth what we say it's worth.

"Uhhhh . . . . "

"O.K.  I know.  I talk too much and too vaguely."

Here's the deal.  My price is X + expenses.  That's negotiable.  I don't tell you it's negotiable because as soon as I do you'll start negotiating!  And since it was me who taught you to negotiate, I'm not wild about bargaining with you.  The desire to teach is way to strong in me.

"I'm negotiable.  So is that other woman, the one whose book title is Ask for It!  And money isn't the only measure of value.  It would also be of value to me for your women's bar association to sell my book.  Of course I'll bring it with me to autograph and the like.  But you could also include it on your invitations.  If someone in your Bar Association blogs, they could give it a review.  If you haven't already pledged that you wouldn't give away anyone's email address, you could give me your mailing list so I can stay in touch with your members.  Each of your members also has her own network.  We could brainstorm about ways that you could give me the benefit of my pre-speech networking acumen to get more women to your convention.  It's hard to sell seats these days.  How many people are you expecting?  What if we double that?  Could you pay me my full fee then?

"None of us is a suit on a rack.  And what we can do for one another is so much greater than opening our wallets and shelling out a few dollars that money sometimes seems just laughable.  So let me say this again.  I know you've heard it before but I want to highlight it here again.

"I am a store of value and you are too.  My network, my social capital is a store of the store of value of each member in it.  And in that, you and I are both rich.

"Got it?"

My friend, my student, is smiling, even though I can't see that over the telephone.

"I got it."

"Now what was that offer again?"

 The next game changing She Negotiates workshop is still open for a few last-minute members.  We start on Monday.  Don't be a suit on a rack.  Join us!

(cross posted at She Negotiates)

Negotiating Women's Leadership with the PLUS Foundations

Happy Lawyers is Not an Oxymoron Redux

Pictured:  Chere Estrin, Chairperson, Board of Directors, The OLP;  Editor-in-Chief, SUE for Women Litigators; Editor-in-Chief, KNOW the Magazine for Paralegals; CEO, Estrin Education, Inc.

I've written about happy and unhappy lawyers before - here and here but I've rarely framed the issue as succinctly or as well as Chere Estrin at the Organization of Legal Professionals.  In the sidebar to her article The Secrets to a Stress Free Career, Estrin says work does not give you stress. Feeling bad about work gives you stress. 

What does Estrin know? 

Quite a lot. 

"I used to be the most stressed-put person I knew," says Estrin.

I averaged 90 hour weeks in the legal field as an executive in a $5 billion corporation, traveled three weeks out of four, answered to some big shots who thought they owned the planet, and managed hundreds of people.  It wasn’t much different when I was a paralegal manager.  There were critical deadlines to meet, difficult attorneys to juggle, anxious clients to handle and something called a “minimum billable hours” requirement, now referred to as “suggested” hours in a more politically correct and less actionable environment.  I recently looked at a picture of myself during that era.  I was holding my new-born niece, Cristina, a joy to behold and I looked like I just escaped from a train wreck and stopped by to say howdy.

Sound familiar?  After debunking some stress myths (you should go right over there now to read them) Estrin suggests the following:  

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negotiation - it takes courage

(cross posted at She Negotiates)

I asked one of my consulting clients for a testimonial yesterday.

"Anything," she said, "it's genuinely changed the way I do everything.  It's not just the shift in my business relationship with [BigBiz, Inc.].  I dumped a boyfriend last week because of our conversations!  So, seriously, what would you like me to say?"

My client and I, like the few women commercial litigation clients I had during my twenty-five years as a lawyer (2%?) were quickly becoming friends.  And I was proud of her.  Truly proud.  Like a parent would be.

"I'm proud of you," I finally said, even though I'd been thinking it for weeks.  "You've shifted the power in your working relationship and that was difficult to do.  You were persistent.  You're a first class learner.  And you've been brave."

She laughed, the way we women do when we're praised, wanting the moment to pass instead of savoring it a little, particularly when we know deep down we've genuinely achieved something important in our own lives and careers but don't want to appear self-satisfied.

So I said it again.  "I'm really proud of you.  You've done great work and you never gave up.  You didn't fold to the power of BigBiz, Inc.  You stood up for yourself."

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Let the Kagan Games Begin: Whitepapers from SCOTUS Blog

(pictured:  the bread and circuses part)

Thanks to the SCOTUS Blog for the following resources on the upcoming Kagan hearings.  Follow SCOTUS Blog all week for commentary. 

Why should negotiators be interested in the composition of the Supreme Court?  Because the freedom to negotiate requires a strong rule of law culture.  And because everything we negotiate assumes the enforcement of certain agreements and non-enforcement of others, of particular interest to negotiators and ADR practitioners - arbitration agreements

SCOTUS whitepapers below:

Diversity Hiring

Abortion

Diversity on the Court

Gays in the Military

Corporate Rights (Citizen's United)

Conservatives

Executive Power

Kagan's Qualifications to Serve

 

 

 

 

Fincher on Diversity on Mid-Summer Night's Eve

No Woman, No Matter How Successful, Ever Has a Pure Business Negotiation

Yesterday at the She Negotiates blog, I posted two quotes by a woman executive (President and CEO) who is blazingly successful in one of the most male-dominated industries in the world - construction of sports arenas.

Here they are again:

After she’d been in business for 15 years, a colleague told [Alvarado] she had two problems.

[Y]ou have a Hispanic company name, so you may be stereotyped [and] when you walk into a conference room to negotiate, you look like a woman.

When her son was five and asked if he wanted to grow up and be a “contractor like your mother and build sports facilities and schools,” he said “with disdain,

“No, that’s women’s work.”

Ba ba bump! (rim shot). Or as the old feminists used to say, "click."

My partner in negotiation-for-women crime is life-balance coach, Lisa Gates

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Why Should Women Learn How to Negotiate? A Call to Action

Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, in the must-read Ask for It!, define negotiation as "a tool to help change [or preserve] the status quo when change [or preservation] requires the agreement of another person.

Why should women learn to negotiate?  Here's the succinct and powerful message Babcock and Laschever have for us:

The consequences of not negotiating in the workplace are pretty extreme.  First and foremost, women earn much less money than men over the course of their careers. We calculated that just by not negotiating her first job offer—simply accepting what she's offered rather than negotiating for more—a woman sacrifices anywhere from half a million dollars to one and a half million dollars in lost income over the course of her career. This is a massive loss for a one-time negotiation—for avoiding what is usually no more than five minutes of discomfort—and it's an unnecessary loss, because most employers expect people to negotiate and therefore offer less than they're prepared to pay. And far more men than women negotiate their first offers. Since men also negotiate more than women throughout their careers—or negotiate more aggressively—the financial losses to women can be truly staggering.

Once upon a time, several generations of women all decided at pretty much the same moment that they did not wish to be economically marginalized anymore.  They didn't want to see themselves portrayed primarily as air-heads who couldn't successfully drive a car to the market, let alone manage a hedge fund.

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