Assuming (without admitting) that we need to expend $680 billion annually on military hardware and personnel to defend ourselves against invaders from foreign shores, the only meaningful reductions in spending will have to come from delayed or diminished social security and medicare/medicaid benefits.

We’re not talking about funding for the arts (parsley); Planned Parenthood (capers); or, education (tiny corncobs). We’re talking about monies devoted to the most needy among us. And most of the most needy among us are women.

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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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Women lawyers - this is a great networking opportunity.

Meet your future in Orlando.

Edwin turned around two highly professional videos in less than a week after he conducted them. His company is in start-up mode and he's actively seeking both capital partners and clients. I highly recommend his work, and not just because he gave me two free videos. We'll be hiring his company to provide us with publicity before the month is over . . . we just have to negotiate the terms!

Without further ado, Edwin and She Negotiates.

Go to npr here.

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

Five Reasons Your Boss Wants to Give You a Raise This Year (Gender Neutral)

Negotiating with Mattie Ross of True Grit (Gender Neutral)

Sponsorship, Not Mentorship, Can Greatly Narrow the Wage Gap

Kucinich and the Olive Pit in a World of Injustice (gender neutral)

First You Wake Up, Then You Negotiate (gender neutral)

Jealousy's Underhanded Contribution to the Wage Gap by our Gen-Y blogger Katie Phillips.

Provocative Posts and Articles

Bad Career Advice:Nice Guys (and Girls) Finish Last by Christine Scivicque

Study says Dads Should be Less Involved in Parenting by Forbes Staff Writer Meghan Casserly as well as her terrific article on Sexy News Anchors' Distracting Effect on Viewers who can't seem to recall the news disseminated by these attractive women!

There's lots more over at ForbesWoman but those are the articles and blog posts that caught my own attention this week. Put ForbesWoman on your newsreader whether you're male or female, because it's pretty clear that women's economic power is growing and attention must be paid. 

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.

For a short review of Feldt's book, click here for post at ForbesWoman.

In a recent effort to remedy the persistent problem of women performing poorly on math tests, researchers at the University of Chicago asked women to write about their test-anxiety or about their personal values. It didn’t matter whether the women wrote about their values or about their fears, having journaled in preparation for their math tests, their scores improved one full grade. See The Write Way to Reduce Test Anxiety at U.S. World and News Report.

[Researcher] Sian Beilock [said] that “[o]ne small snippet of writing can be enough to boost performance. Writing for eight or 10 minutes before the test put anxious students on a par with students who didn’t worry.”

Here’s the most important finding for women who continue to resist negotiating on their own behalves.

“Women who tended to believe that men were better than women at physics showed the greatest improvement” in test scores when they wrote about their values or fears in preparation for their examinations.

Journal your values and journal your fear

I’m particularly pleased to learn of this research because the She Negotiates training is conducted on an online journaling-learning platform. My business partner and I have long wondered why the women who take this course nearly always report a transformative result that impacts all areas of their lives.

“It’s because of the word journal,” I’ve said to my partner. “It allows women to go deep.”

We cannot simply give women negotiation strategies and tactics, expecting them to go out into the commercial world and use them.

We need to provide women with a community learning experience in which they’re able to connect their fear of negotiation to the culture in which that fear developed like the old consciousness raising sessions of the Second Wave Women’s Movement. We need not only negotiation skills, but the confidence and sense of entitlement to use them.

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! 

I have to tell you that I believe every one of our She Negotiates graduates understands and knows how to use the bullet point takeaways from Extreme Negotiations below.  Let me also say it's not enough to read about these techniques ~ you must practice practice practice practice.

Get the Big Picture

• avoid assuming you have all the facts
• avoid assuming the other side is biased but you're not
• avoid assuming the other side's motivations and intentions are obvious and nefarious
• instead, be curious ("help me understand"); humble ("what do I do wrong?") and open-minded ("is there another way to explain this?")

Uncover and Collaborate

• avoid making open-ended offers ("what do you want")
• avoid making unilateral offers ("I'd be willing to . . . "
• avoid simply agreeing to or refusing the other side's demands
• instead ask "why is that important to you?"
• proposed solutions for critique ("here's a possibility - what might be wrong with it?")

Elicit Genuine Buy-in

• avoid threats ("you'd better agree, or else . . . "
• avoid arbitrariness ("I want it because I want it."
• avoid close-mindedness ("under no circumstances will I agree to - or even consider - that proposal"
• instead appeal to fairness ("what should we do?")
• appeal to logic and legitimacy ("I think this makes sense because . . . ")
• consider constituent perspectives ("how can each of us explain this agreement to colleagues?"

Build Trust

• avoid trying to "buy" a good relationship
• avoid offering concessions to repair actual or perceived breaches of trust
• instead explore how a breakdown in trust may have occurred and how to remedy it
• make concessions only if they are a legitimate way to compensate for losses owing to your nonperformance or broken commitments
• treat counterparts with respect, and act in ways that will command theirs.

Focus on process

• avoid acting without gauging how your actions will be perceived and what the response will be
• ignoring the consequences of a given action for future as well as current negotiations
• instead talk about the process ("we seem to be at an impasse; perhaps we should send some more time exploring our respective objectives and constraints."_
• slow down the pace:  ("I'm not ready to agree, but I'd prefer not to walk away either.  I think this warrants further exploration.")
• issue warnings without making threats:  ("unless you're willing to work with me toward a mutually acceptable outcome, I can't afford to spend more time negotiating")

I'll be blogging on each one of these steps in the negotiation process for the next two weeks so stay tuned.

Cross posted at She Negotiates and the ABCs of Conflict Resolution.

• THE ASK - name your price first and to make your first number aggressive but not outlandish
  • you need at least three numbers to negotiate with - high, medium and bottom line
  • start with your high number
  • consider linking your high number to performance contingencies, i.e., if I do X and Y as I've promised, then my total compensation for 2011 will be Q; these performance contingencies can also be tied to the company's performance in 2011.
  • don't give all your reasons for your raise at the same time; you need a good reason for each of your high, medium and bottom line numbers - each round of negotiation requires "a number and a reason"
  • when making concessions, consider trading items of high value to you and low value to your employer, i.e., it doesn't cost your employer anything to let you work from home one or two days a week but it may well save you significant monies over the course of the year in transportation and incidental costs (this is called "log rolling")
  • go to your medium number reluctantly and stress that you are making a concession and expect reciprocity
  • go to your bottom line number only when you've completely run out of options

• PRETEND YOU ARE NEGOTIATING FOR SOMEONE ELSE
  • we women have a particular challenge in negotiating for ourselves because asking for ourselves contravenes gender norms
  • the research shows that we negotiate as effectively as men when we're negotiating for another but not when doing so for ourselves - so make yourself your own client and go out there and get the best deal for her

What does this man have that you don't?

A year-end 2009 salary of $21,340,547 during one of the worst year's in the history of his industry ~ banking.

Listen!  The recession is just another excuse for not paying you what you're worth.

How do we know?

Because the most effective negotiators on the planet ~ corporate CEO's ~ are finding the downturn to be the best time to squeeze every last living dollar out of their employers.

If they can do it, so can you!

 Here's the evidence:

	Bank of America Corp. Thomas Montag 2009 Total Compensation: $29,930,431		JPMorgan Chase & Co. James Dimon 2009 Total Compensation: $9,274,494
	Citigroup Inc. John Havens 2009 Total Compensation: $11,276,454		Morgan Stanley Walid Chammah 2009 Total Compensation: $10,021,969
	The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Lloyd Blankfein 2009 Total Compensation: $9,862,657		Wells Fargo John Stumpf 2009 Total Compensation: $21,340,547

 Whhaaaaaatttttt? do these men have that you don't have?

• Social networks with rich and powerful people who sit on their Boards of Directors and influence policy makers and Wall Street power brokers
• The self-created illusion that they are "too big to fail" /1
• The persuasive argument that only they, with their unique combination of experience, education, knowledge, savvy, can-do-spirit, and leadership qualities can pull these banks out of the sinkhole of the recession.
• Friends in very high places.
• Chutzpah and shamelessness (not that we'd want to encourage this second character flaw in our readers).
• Self-satisfaction.
• Entitlement.
• An employment history of asking for and receiving increasing levels of compensation based upon their salary negotiations at every career point possible (and every career point impossible)
• the demonstrated ability to produce results (our readers do possess this strength but haven't used it to their greatest advantage yet)
• the tendency to measure their market value by their value in the hands of their employer, not by what they "need" or what they are "worth" according to some internal metric that depends upon how they feel about thier accomplishments.

__________________

1/  This is where collective action comes in.  When we aggregate together America's employees, small business owners and homeowners, we get a non-corporate "entity" that is waaaayyyyyy bigger than some little piss-ant bank and it is we who are too big to fail.

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

Can we afford not to learn and teach these skills?  Cross-posted at She Negotiates.

If negotiation is a conversation with agreement as its goal, we should not be wasting our time arguing with one another about whose point of view is the best. We should be talking to one another about how we can both achieve as many of the goals we both want to achieve as a result of our conversation.

You do not have to change anyone's mind to give them what they want to get. And you don't have to grudgingly accept half a loaf (a portion of the pie) if, unbeknownst to one another, you possess five items of value your bargaining partner wants or needs, and your bargaining partner possesses a dozen items of value you want or need. In a really effective negotiation, you may find that together you and your bargaining partner can whip up a dozen pies and end up with more than either of you had imagined.

Wouldn't you like to be learning how to do this instead of working on that sanctions motion for your adversary's bad faith refusal to answer interrogatories?

The next game-changing She Negotiates month-long coached course begins on September 16.  Stop trying to change people's minds and start changing the world!

And gentlemen, tell your women friends.  Husbands and significant others benefit from this course as well!  My own happily came back from the gym the other day saying "I did what you taught me; I got two extra months of gym membership free."

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)