What Women Are Worth

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In my thirties, I horrified a group of about 1,300 women — the better part of an audience of 2,000 designers who had come to the annual conference of the national design organization, hosted that year in Chicago. As a female designer, I was invited there to talk about why women make less money than men. I’m still not sure how the organizers matched that topic with me, since it was not something I thought much about, but I took the job seriously and did my homework on it for the better part of a year. It’s where the title of this essay originally came from.

What I learned, and what I said on that stage, was that the issue of inequality in pay is a cultural norm, that women are raised, and conditioned (and condition themselves) to reflect that norm. We internalize role expectations.

Nora Ephron said it in Crazy Salad:

“I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly, incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought to be too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself...I discovered that even now, men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative, and certainly less self-centered than they are themselves; so I generally obliged them...I did not particularly want to be good at reversing cars, and did not in the least mind being patronized by illiterate garage men.”

The point I tried to make to my fellow female designers was the one Norah made so much better. Not only do we allow ourselves to be stereotyped (in this wording was the poison dart I blindly threw), we adjust our behavior to fit those stereotypes, and the cultural and financial standards they dictate.

Facts corroborated. Women paid women less than they paid men (no longer true in 2026), and women entrepreneurs paid themselves less than male entrepreneurs paid themselves (still the case).

I ended with what I thought was a hopeful, upbeat note: that since no policy could change these cultural dynamics, we could change them ourselves.

I measured the full depth of the outrage my talk caused by the article it inspired fifteen years later. The author began:

“I was in the Chicago audience, watching as Heller’s talk infuriated many of my fellow female attendees. She took a very firm position and said women made less money primarily because they asked for less. While her speech cited a number of socio-psychological reasons this took place, many women felt betrayed by one of the most successful members of their tribe. She blamed the victim.”

My female colleagues wanted me to rail against the injustice of the system. I didn’t then because I thought I had it beat, and stood in front of them as evidence that others could do the same. I don’t do it now because I don’t think it works against the deeply embedded and newly emboldened misogyny we are experiencing. And because I see now that to focus on money is to accept a man-made premise about its importance as a measure of our worth. The question I was asked back then, and was gullible enough to answer, was the wrong one.

*****

Once, not long before my father died, my elder brother (an athlete) and I made one of our many visits to my parents’ home to care for them. I drove my car from New York City, and stopped in Hershey, PA to pick up my brother. The moment he got into the passenger seat, his feet started twitching. Understanding his discomfort, as it was a woman’s job to do, I said, “You can’t bear being a passenger while I’m driving, right?” I never got behind my steering wheel again until I dropped him back in Hershey three days later. As we were leaving Pittsburgh at the end of our visit, my father said, in an old person’s loud whisper as he eyed the many dials and lights on the dashboard, “Bob, make sure you drive, this car is too complicated for her.”

Gender wasn’t an issue where I grew up. Not because it was a level playing field (there are excellent reasons to use a sports cliche here), but because the vastly unequal roles and expectations for men and women were so deeply engrained in the culture they were invisible, even to those most affected. Rarely did anyone question the underlying assumptions about the hierarchy that ordered our lives.

Not that we didn’t distinguish (and judge) the other gender on a regular basis. For example, “woman” and “driver” were the only two words needed to convey nervousness, incompetence, slowness, lack of awareness of other (better, male) drivers on the road, inability to parallel park, to move out of the passing lane in a timely fashion, helplessness in a roadside breakdown, ignorance of where, or even what, a tire jack was, a dangerous inability to concentrate on driving due to an inability to stop talking (or to see over the steering wheel), the assumed instigation of every highway accident and a general tentativeness that was exceedingly annoying.

Conversely, “athlete,” applied only to men in football-crazy Western Pennsylvania, conveyed an encyclopedic richness of attributes, all desirable and, in the right context, worthy of getting someone laid. Athletes “played hurt,” meaning they were stoic, putting the greater good ahead of their own pain. They were team players, ethical, principled, responsible, reliable, true to a higher order system of beliefs that represented the way the world should work, members of a brotherhood, a respecter of rules but a risk-taker nevertheless, always ready to “step up to the bat and take his swing.” Beyond high school, the epithet of “athlete” carried weight (and generally put on weight, since the label stuck with them no matter how inactive they became) well into a career. “He played center for… he’s a stellar company man.”

These assumptions ruled my early life, but I didn’t see them.

***

Across the more than human world, gender, in the way humans define it, does not exist. But there is plenty of sex-based discrimination. Among primates, males monopolize food, mates, grooming partners and community support. Elephants and some deer are biased toward females who produce more male offspring. Male dolphins form alliances to control females and orca mothers preferentially feed and mentor their sons. It goes both ways. Female spotted hyenas harass and displace males, male honeybees are tossed out or killed after mating. In the avian world, females are often the gatekeepers of who gets to mate and who is left out, judging males for their looks, their abilities to sing, dance or build houses.

I have often wondered, given what we now know about the intelligence and will of other beings (like an octopus who takes a light out with a well-placed jet of water because it annoys her) whether any but our own species pushes back, questioning the “natural” order of males and females. There is evidence that fish have a sense of justice. Do any of them think their treatment as a male or female is unjust? What makes us think we’re so special as to be alone in that? Or maybe, like the water, or my own upbringing, it’s invisible to them.

Silvia Federici has done research on gender oppression as it’s shaped by language. In “How the Demonization of ‘Gossip’ Is Used to Break Women’s Solidarity,” she traces the use of that word back to the Middle Ages, when, it seems, women had far more social power than they do today. In a nutshell, women’s groups (midwives, friends, co-workers), called gossips, were prevalent and powerful. This bothered men. At what Federici calls “the dawn of modern England,” a denigrating meaning was attached to “gossip.” Trade guilds were forming, and members of the guild could sponsor “Mystery Plays” which served the dual purpose of boosting the sponsor’s social standing, and criticizing strong, independent women who did not obey their husbands. As the accusation went, women preferred their friends. The word “gossip” evolved from its original meaning of “godparent,” as in relation to a child, to companions in childbirth beyond just the midwife, to groups of women who gathered in taverns to drink and amuse themselves” Then subsequently, to its current interpretation as women’s idle, unimportant and often vicious talk. These changes also tracked the transition from a time when women had significant social power to its deterioration. Gossip was always the territory of women, but it became a label that diluted female social power and autonomy. What’s interesting to me about this historical context isn’t that language was used to limit women’s social power, but that women ever had categorical power in the first place.

****

Equity isn’t mysterious. It is always about power and insecurity on one side or the other; rarely stable for long. But the question I was asked then—and tried to answer—still troubles me.

Worth, measured against what? Set by whom? Counted how?

I stood on that stage and tried to answer it in the only language I thought was available. I see now that the language itself was part of the problem. The scale was already built.

Some questions don’t need better answers. They need to be left behind.