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Beast , where I realized I had overlooked a woman who had been doing a fantastic job. We had brought a man in to do the job, and he failed, horribly. And then we hired another person, who came in and failed. Finally the woman came to see someone at the company and said, ‘Look, I’ve sat here, and I’ve seen two guys fail at this job. What about me?’ ”
    Brown was astonished that she’d overlooked this person once, let alone twice: “I said to my executive editor, ‘You know, this is terrible. The first time someone failed, we should have gone to her ... She’s clearly so much better.’ ” Brown says that she was ashamed she hadn’t recognized the
female employee’s value in the first place. But that said, the employee hadn’t stepped up and asked for the work.
    Brown wasn’t the only female manager who admitted making that same mistake. Women employees just don’t seem to have the confidence to raise their hand, to put it out there, to say “Hey! I’m worth this!” So they’re overlooked by female bosses and male bosses alike.

    “We women think that we will work very very hard ... and then money will come.”
    —CAROL SMITH

    After an extensive career at Time Warner and nearly a decade as the chief brand officer at Elle , Carol Smith has employed thousands of women during her years of overseeing women’s magazines. She admits she sees women like me all the time: “We women think we will work very, very hard—we will work harder than anybody in the office—we will get the gold star, and then the money will come. When the money doesn’t come, instead of walking into the boss’s office and saying, ‘I’ve done this, I’ve done this, I’ve done this, and now I need this,’ we sit around and earn one fifteenth of what the man next door earns.
    “I think what we have to do is recognize that if we don’t ask, it’s not coming our way. Men ask all the time; it’s not that [the money] just comes to them. I swear it doesn’t,” Smith says.
    Why don’t we ask? That’s a good question.

    Linda Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University and researcher on the subject of women and negotiation, cowrote a fascinating book called Women Don’t Ask. Babcock says women ask for raises and promotions eighty-five percent less often than their male counterparts. And when women do ask, on average they ask for thirty percent less.
    One of the reasons women don’t ask, she argues, is that they don’t realize that opportunities exist. Babcock writes, “One of the major barriers preventing women from asking for what they need more of the time is their perception that their circumstances are more fixed and absolute—less negotiable—than they really are.”

    “I just felt lucky to have the opportunity.”
    —SHERYL SANDBERG

    At the age of forty-one, Sheryl Sandberg has achieved extraordinary success. When she agreed to talk to me for this book, I actually got nervous. Surely her experiences must be very different. What if she debunked all my theories?
    Sandberg served as chief of staff for the United States Department of the Treasury before leaving government to become vice president of global online sales and operations at Google. She’s now the chief operating officer of the social
networking giant Facebook. Sandberg clearly knows her stuff about gender dynamics as well as social media.
    When I ask whether she believes my struggle to be fairly compensated is a common problem, she immediately agrees: “The data clearly show men own their success more than women do. Men are more likely to overestimate and women are more likely to underestimate performance on objective criteria. So if you look at something like grade point average and you survey men and women on what their GPAs were, men get it wrong slightly high and women get it wrong slightly low.”
    So men are more likely to think of themselves as more successful and women are more likely to think of themselves as less