A dear friend signed divorce papers yesterday. For many years she'd been married to a man who was a bit of a bully (hence the divorce). True to form, she hadn't stood up for her interests during the separation negotiation. She made, as they say, a bad deal. It was so poor that the mediator even commented on the inequity. "I just wanted to be done with it," sighed my friend. It was the same resigned comment I'd heard after each concession after every argument they'd had during their rocky marriage. Now, this middle-aged woman with a teen daughter has walked away with too little to live.
She's not alone.
Every day, women walk away from money. We do it out of fear. We don't want to be seen as materialistic, or pushy, or money-grubbing, or any number of even less attractive adjectives. This hurts us. One recent Carnegie-Mellon University study showed that young women were four times less likely to negotiate a first salary than men. In fact, when both sexes were shown a list of descriptors and asked to choose what the experience felt like, the majority of women chose "going to the dentist." The men? "They chose 'going to a ballgame." Where women agonize over (and thus avoid) putting a price on our own worth, men pursue wealth with gusto since they know that society still values them in large measure by the cash they haul in. The study quantified the price of this fear: Over the course of a woman's career, the failure to set a strong opening wage? More than half a million dollars.
Money is never just money -- it's our proxy for identity and love and hope and promises made and perhaps never fulfilled. It's our social sorter. It's the ticket to our dreams -- and yes, that old eighties rubric is true -- money is power. Yet, we give that power away in order to keep the peace or to avoid appearing too greedy. The whole thought of our relationship to money creates such anxiety that we don't want to even talk about it. There are few topics as guilt-inducing and taboo as this one.
When women allow emotions to create financial conditions, we lose. Our fears allow outdated moral prejudices to persist (money is filthy lucre). Our ambivalences lock in antiquated gender roles (it isn't ladylike to be materialistic). Anxiety over financial negotiations perpetuate serious social inequalities, like the fact that men and women remain unequally compensated for the same jobs. When we walk away from money for emotional reasons, we broker invisible deals that discount who we are.
My friend is no dummy. She knows she sold herself short. But the biggest price is one she hasn't even anticipated. Her daughter is watching. She will figure out sooner rather than later that her mother paid an inequitable price emotionally and financially. Let's hope she learns from this instead of imitates it.
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