The Confession: The Good Girl Tax I Paid Myself

Episode 378 | Good Girls Get Rich Podcast

Host: Karen Yankovich 

[00:00] Meet Diane – The Good Girl Who Did Everything Right

Karen: I want to tell you about a woman named Diane. Except Diane isn’t one woman – Diane is about 100 women I’ve worked with over the years, and I’ve stitched them into one person, because their stories are so identical it’s almost spooky. Same arc, same ending, every single time.

Karen: And I’ll be honest with you – I can’t stop thinking about her. It’s why I do what I do. Because Diane did everything right. Everything. She’s brilliant, she’s beloved, and she’s hands down the hardest worker in any room she’s ever walked into. And she’s also the one who keeps getting passed over – for the raise, for the role, for the client, for the contract, for the money she’s earned ten times over.

Karen: And for the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why. Because when you look at Diane on paper, nothing’s wrong. There’s no mistake to point to, no bad calls. She’s good. She is the good girl. And good girls get rich in every sense of that word – and it just keeps costing her.

Karen: So last week I told you something that I think rattled a few of you. I said visibility was never really about being seen – it’s about being booked. Likes are vanity. Calls on your calendar – that’s the scoreboard. That’s where we build wealth. And a few of you wrote back and said, ‘Okay, Karen, okay, good, fine – so what do I do?’ We’re going to get there, I promise. Maybe not all the way there today.

Karen: Because today I want to walk you all the way through Diane’s story – the whole thing. And I’ll warn you up front: I’m not going to tie this up with a neat little bow and hand you three action steps. Not this week. This week, we’re just going to sit in it. Because here’s the truth: you can’t fix something you can’t yet see. And once you see what happened to Diane, I think you’re going to see it everywhere – including maybe in the mirror.

[01:30] Diane the Teacher – 18 Years of Showing Up

Karen: So let me tell you about Diane properly, because you need to love her – the same way everybody in her life loves her, which is to say completely and freely.

Karen: Diane was a teacher. She’d been a teacher for 18 years – the kind of teacher kids come back to visit when they’re 26. The kind who got a card on the last day of school that made her cry, right there in the parking lot.

Karen: Here’s Diane’s actual week: she was at school before the building was even warm. She stayed late for the kid who needed extra help. She didn’t count the hours, because teachers don’t count that hour. She ran the club nobody got paid to run. And every October, when a brand-new teacher started quietly falling apart – because a new teacher always falls apart in October – Diane was the one who took her to lunch and put her back together. On her own time, for free. She probably even bought lunch.

Karen: You know what we call that when a man does it, on an org chart? Mentoring. He gets promoted for it. When Diane did it, we called her sweetheart.

Karen: And every single August, Diane went to Target with her own debit card and bought supplies for her own classroom – pencils, tissues, the good markers, snacks for the kids who showed up hungry. Because you’re not going to teach a hungry child, and Diane was never going to be the reason a kid couldn’t learn.

Karen: And here’s the part that gets me – she’d tell you it was worth every penny. And she’s not wrong. That’s what makes this so hard. Nobody’s going to stand up and say Diane shouldn’t have fed a hungry kid. That’s the whole trap. That’s what I call the good girl tax. It doesn’t get charged on your mistakes. It gets charged on your best qualities. It finds the most generous, the most responsible, the most…

[04:02] The Good Girl Tax – Most Loved, Least Paid

Karen: …giving part of you, and it quietly sets up a tollbooth right there. Most loved, least paid. Hang onto that phrase, because we’re going to come back to it.

Karen: So where did it go wrong for Diane? Because from the outside, she looked fine for 20 years. I’m going to walk you through this in two parts – and the second part is probably the room you’re standing in right now.

Karen: Let’s first look at the classroom. Diane picked a profession we’ve all quietly agreed to underpay on purpose, and then we gave the underpayment a beautiful name so nobody would ever fight it. We called it a calling. We say teaching is its own reward. Have you noticed we only say that about jobs we don’t want to pay for? Nobody ever told a hedge fund manager the work was its own reward.

Karen: Here’s what that calling actually cost Diane in real money: teachers in this country earn about 73 cents on the dollar compared to people with the same degree who went into other fields – and that gap, right now, is the widest it’s ever been measured. Diane’s college roommate – same school, same grades – went into pharmaceutical sales. Diane watched her buy a lake house recently. They started at the exact same starting line.

Karen: And on top of earning less, Diane paid in. That Target run every August? Teachers spend on average almost $1,000 a year of their own money on their classrooms, and the school hands them a budget of about 200 bucks. Run that out over Diane’s 18 years, and that’s the better part of $20,000 she paid out of her own pocket – for the privilege of being underpaid.

[06:45] The Real Robbery – What 18 Years in the Classroom Taught Diane About Herself

Karen: But hang with me here, because this is where it really gets real. The classroom is not actually where Diane got robbed. The classroom is where she got taught. Because underneath every lesson plan, 18 years in that building taught her the same things about herself: that wanting more money was a little unseemly. That good work should speak for itself. That asking for a raise was selfish – there were kids who needed snacks. That being needed was the same thing as being valued. And that if she was good enough for long enough, somebody would eventually notice and fix it for her.

Karen: Nobody ever fixed it for her. Does anybody ever fix it for you?

Karen: So at 47, Diane did the brave thing – the thing a lot of you listening have done, or maybe are about to do. She left. She took 20 years of standing in front of a tough audience and holding their attention – which, by the way, is one of the hardest skills on earth, and most executives flat-out can’t do it. She reinvented herself: corporate trainer, consultant. She hung out her shingle. She logged onto LinkedIn.

Karen: And she got underpaid all over again – by the exact same thing. Because the thing that was robbing her was never the school district. Watch how it follows her out the door.

[08:12] The Free Sample, The Half-Price Quote – How the Tax Followed Diane to LinkedIn

Karen: A company calls Diane to build their whole onboarding program. Real money on the table. And before she’ll even get on the call, she spends two weeks building them a free sample – because she has to be sure she’s qualified. She has to over-prepare. She can’t just walk in 60% ready and confident, the way her competitors do.

Karen: And by the way – you’ve probably heard that line: men apply when they’re 60% qualified, women wait until they’re 100% qualified. Be careful with that one. I’ve said it too. But when I did the research for this episode, I realized that’s actually not from a real study. It’s something somebody said once that everybody repeated.

Karen: But here’s the deal – you don’t need that statistic. You’ve got Diane. And Diane built her own free sample. Maybe you did too. So then she quotes the job, and the number that comes out of her mouth is half of what it’s worth – because the real number felt like too much to ask. It felt greedy. It felt like, ‘I really need the expensive marker, so I should ask for less.’

Karen: So she discounted herself before the client even got a chance to complain about her price. And then she did the most Diane thing of all – she let the work speak for itself. No champion, no loud client saying her name in rooms she wasn’t in. She just did beautiful work quietly and waited to be noticed. The exact strategy that already failed her for 18 years. She was – to use last week’s word – helpful instead of powerful. Again. In a brand-new building.

Karen: Diane didn’t escape the underpaid job. She rebuilt it around herself from scratch. She packed the whole way of thinking into the box with her markers and her desk plant, and carried it right out the door. It was never about talent. If Diane had talent for days, it was that she’d been trained – and then spent years training other people – to believe that being good was enough.

[10:30] The Numbers – The Broken Rung and the Sponsorship Gap

Karen: Let’s add this up, because I want you to feel these numbers. So I’m going to say them nice and slow.

Karen: In corporate America, for every 100 men who get that first promotion to manager, only 93 women make it to that same step. For Black women, it’s only 60. They call it the broken rung – and it might be the most important number in this whole conversation, because it’s the first one.

Karen: Here’s what a missed first step does: every raise after that gets calculated off that lower number. Every renewal, every ‘let’s bump you by 10%’ – 10% of not enough is still not enough, forever.

Karen: And part of why she missed it? Almost nobody was in the room for her. Only about 31% of women at that level have a sponsor – someone senior saying their name when they’re not there to say it themselves. For men, it’s 45%. And people with a sponsor are nearly twice as likely to get promoted. Diane had 100 people who loved her. But she had nobody selling her. Most loved, least paid.

[12:00] The Total – What the Good Girl Tax Really Costs

Karen: Now let’s zoom all the way out. Over a full career, the average woman loses more than half a million dollars to this gap. For a college-educated woman, it’s closer to $800,000. And if she’s a mom, it’s even worse – mothers earn about 74 cents for every dollar a father earns.

Karen: So when you total up Diane’s life – 18 years at 73 cents on the dollar, 20 grand of her own money into a classroom, a second career priced at half, a first number set too low and carried for a decade – you’re not looking at one missed raise. One missed promotion at 38 isn’t one missed promotion. It’s the salary every future raise gets measured from. It’s the retirement match on money she never made. It’s the compounding she can never get back, because compounding only runs forward.

Karen: And if you run it all the way out, what the good girl tax cost Diane isn’t really a number. It’s a house. It’s the house she could have bought right next to her roommate’s lake house. She just paid into a currency that nobody ever put on a receipt.

[13:15] Nothing She Did Was Wrong – It Just Never Got Priced

Karen: So here’s where you probably want me to tell you what Diane did wrong, so you can promise yourself you won’t do it. She didn’t do anything wrong. I really need you to hear that, because it’s the whole point of this.

Karen: Diane wasn’t passed over even though she did everything right. She was passed over because the rules she followed so beautifully were written for a different game than the one she was actually in. Everything right was everything right for staying – for being beloved and indispensable and broke. So nothing she did was wrong. It just never got priced.

Karen: She gave away for free – with a smile, and a card that made her cry in the parking lot – the exact same things the people around her were charging full price for: the mentoring, the expertise, the 20 years of holding a room full of people who didn’t want to be there.

Karen: The classroom didn’t do this to her. The classroom just gave it the most respectable name we’ve got. We call it a vocation. And Diane carried that name into every room she ever walked into after – and she handed it to every person who was about to pay her, and without ever saying it out loud, she told them, ‘This is what I’m worth.’ And they believed her. Because the world always will pay you at the rate you hand it. That’s the part nobody told Diane. It was never that she wasn’t good enough. It was that being good was the most expensive thing she ever did.

[14:20] Sit With It – Your Anger Is the First Receipt

Karen: I know that was a lot. Maybe you stopped walking the dog somewhere in the middle, because Diane stopped being a made-up person and started being you. Maybe your classroom was a cubicle, or a hospital, or a law firm, or your own business that you priced like an apology. It doesn’t matter – it’s the same story with the same ending.

Karen: I told you I wasn’t going to fix it today, and I’m going to keep my word, even though every bone in my body wants to jump in right now and tell you what to do. But here’s why I’m holding back: you need to sit with this. You cannot stop paying a tax you don’t even know you’re being charged. You can’t just keep paying it beautifully forever.

Karen: So today, the work is just for you to see it – and maybe, like me, get a little angry about it. And that anger is not unladylike. The anger is your first receipt.

Karen: If hearing Diane’s story made your stomach drop because it’s just a little too familiar – that’s not a coincidence. And it’s not me trying to sell you something. It’s just that the women who are done paying this tax tend to end up in the same room. We call it our Visibility Salon. It’s where you learn to actually price the expertise you already have, instead of handing it out with the good markers. It’s so inexpensive, honestly – less than the cost of dinner. Your first week’s on me. The link is in the show notes, or just go to VisibilitySalon.com. We want you to test it out – that’s why we give you a week for free. I’d love to see you there, because it’s time for you to learn how to stop paying the good girl tax.

Karen: And next week, I’m finally going to give you the first move – the thing Diane has to do to stop the bleeding. But before I can give you that, I want to tell you something I’ve never said on the show before – about a number I once put on my own work, and how wrong it was. So next week isn’t a strategy. Next week is a confession.

Karen: I’m Karen Yankovich. Most loved, least paid is not a personality trait – it’s a tax, and you can stop paying it. I’ll see you next week.