Women and Business

Last Thursday night I attended the speaker Dayna Kleinman on a presentation about success and how to achieve it, etc. She only briefly discussed women and business but the couple of minutes she talked about it she raised some incredibly valid points which I had never thought of before. First she said that she still thinks it's a man's world, meaning that men still dominate in most of the business world. She had watched many people get promoted, mostly men, forcing more and more women out of the higher position jobs. She also raised the issue that women have different pressures and life decisions to make than men do, something that they just don;t have to consider or take into account ever. She said she once received an offer to move to Seattle for two years for business because the two people asked before her had families or obligations making their lives much less flexible. The most important thing she brought to our attention, in my opinion, was that women just don't ask for the same things or negotiate in the same way as men do. For example, when taking another job they couldn't pay her as much as she made at Merrill Lynch so she asked for things like more vacation time and a predetermined bonus for the next two years. Many women aren't as bold to make demands or negotiate deals in a way that men might, something interesting to think about. I'm not sure if I agreed with everything she said, but I hadn't ever questioned it either.