Knowing Your Value by Mika Brzezinski Page B

buzzing about the interview we had worked so hard to get. Joe and I had scrambled across the country by car and by plane and had to be on the air the next morning for another grueling six hours ... But we didn’t care how tired we were. We had the story and a great show to tell it on.
    The next day, after the interview aired, my phone rang. I saw it was an NBC line, and I assumed I was going to be given kudos for the Hillary get—maybe I would be closer to getting that raise. They must have heard how hard we worked, how I didn’t give up until we got that interview. How we hadn’t slept in days but still found a way to nail the story. The interview was aired over and over again on MSNBC and then again on NBC Nightly News . So this must be one of our bosses calling with a pat on the back.
    Uh, not quite.
    I picked up the phone and heard, “Hello, Mika? What was with that clip in your hair last night? Do not wear that clip again. You looked awful, don’t ever wear that clip in your hair again. Seriously, you looked like a cancer survivor. That
clip is awful. I am trying to help you here. You can’t do it again. I want people to like you.”
    It’s true that when we had caught up with Hillary the night before, Joe and I were both in jeans and winter boots and ragged from days on the road and spending six hours straight on-air each day. I had thrown my hair up in a plastic hair clip that I’d gotten at a drugstore, and my makeup had pretty much worn off. I was beginning to be comfortable traveling with the guys. Just like them, I let the “real me” hang out. When we were under the gun, I simply couldn’t look camera-ready at all times. The guys were great and told me not to bother with makeup. That it shouldn’t matter so much. That it would be better to show my real side anyway. That is what our show was about. I could be me.
    NBC obviously disagreed.
    How did I respond to the call?
    I apologized.
    Again, this is a story of what not to do. Why didn’t I simply hang up? That’s what Joe would have done. Surely that’s what Hillary Clinton would’ve done! I should have been crystal clear and defiant. I had scored a major victory—that’s what the manager should’ve taken away from that piece. I felt powerful; I was powerful. But I didn’t take the opportunity to set her straight.
    I’m sure we both would have been better off had I spoken up. We still might not have agreed on the hair clip, but I would have earned her respect, and I would have had the satisfaction of explaining that she’d missed the point: the important thing here was that we’d gotten a key interview on
the most exciting night of the election season thus far. This was the stuff of great television.
    In the weeks that followed, my exchange with the manager about the damn hair clip stayed with me. Would it have been such a big deal if I’d pushed back? Was I afraid of sounding like a bitch? The answer was probably yes. I realized that wanting to be liked was really getting in my way. But when I took a more aggressive tack and decided that raising my voice and poking Phil Griffin in the shoulder would get me somewhere—well, we know how well that worked out. So where was the middle ground? How was I ever going to be both likeable and fairly compensated?
    “How women can do both, get what they want materially and also make a positive social image” is a tricky thing to pull off, says Professor Hannah Riley Bowles. “I think it’s flawed to say that women need to be trained to negotiate more assertively or that they need more confidence to close the gender gap in negotiation performance.” Because clearly, women who are assertive suffer a backlash, so it’s entirely reasonable for them to be reticent about asking for what they want.
    Bowles tells me that there’s no easy solution. Women have to be strategic and come up with their own way of asking for higher pay. “One strategy that we have found to be effective is what we call using