Knowing Your Value: Women, Money, and Getting What You're Worth Paperback – April 3, 2012

The lessons in this book are priceless for women! We tend to doubt ourselves, have imposter syndrome, undervalue our skills. This book explains why that is a mistake and how men do the opposite. It is a guide to knowing your value and asking for what you are worth. Highly recommend for all ages of female professionals.

After reading the bashing reviews, I expected to find a lot more self-promotion in this book but it wasn't like that at all, in my opinion. She talked about her own experiences a lot simply because those experiences led her to the path to write this book and it makes it more relatable. I found myself cringing as I identified with her or the women who contributed to her book because of my own similar missteps in my career. Although there was a lot of her sort of sharing her own introspective views, she did tie in a number of studies, etc., which I found interesting. I also liked that there was somewhat of a balance, that she didn't take the "women are victims" viewpoint, there is much we can do to advance our careers and often why we are held back is because of our own choices and lack of assertiveness compared to our male counterparts (don't hate me for saying it, the evidence shows this, we need to be honest with ourselves if it's going to get better.) But she didn't let the good ol' boys club completely off the hook either. I found it to be an authentic and balanced perspective based on both personal anecdotes and empirical research.This was helpful to me as I prepare for negotiations for a promotion. It was like getting a pep talk from a girlfriend who has given me that extra push to be fact-based and to not undervalue myself, both internally, and externally as these very important career decisions are being made.I've been studying this issue of equality in the workplace for a while now and found this to be another piece of the puzzle that brings the bigger picture into focus.I've seen other reviews that zero in on Mika's annoying traits/comments/decisions and I will admit that I don't particularly like her, but that's really beside the point. What this book does best is either make women aware of the common traps we fall into or bring the awareness we already had to our consciousness again. I think we all can benefit from reinforcement of these messages so we don't lose sight of them and so we remember to stay continuously vigilant in our careers.BTW, relatively short book, about 185 pages. Quick read.

Women want to be liked but men want to be paid, and those desires drive their decision-making style in salary negotiations. This is the underlying message of Mika Brzezinski's new book, Knowing Your Value: Women, Money, and Getting What You're Worth.It's not just money, though. We women stay too long in one-way relationships. We give when we should take. We sacrifice ourselves for some external "greater good" (admirable, but not if it's an all-the-time thing). Mika asks us to question that knee-jerk tendency to settle for less, and encourages us not to feel guilty for doing so. Men don't, so why should we? It's just a negotiation, nothing personal. I found that freeing.Mika writes in a down-to-earth style, with refreshing candor. She didn't smarten up until her forties, spending so much of her own money on job-required travel, wardrobe and other expenses that she was actually in the red working for MSNBC. Her co-anchor, Joe Scarborough, was pulling in fourteen times Mika's salary! Although Joe went to bat for her, big-time, even giving her his bonuses for the show's high ratings, management was downright piggish. The worst was a woman manager who drove Mika to tears when she asked for a raise. Some of her anecdotes about being humiliated by top management are cringe-inducing, making her evolution as a negotiator even more believable.Although any salary negotiation will be affected by this terrible economy, the lessons of "Knowing Your Value" are applicable to more than just money-based relationships. It's an empowering read, and I recommend it.

I have to say that I love this book and I have been sharing the lessions from it with just about everyone I know.The incredibility of the book, is not that what Mika, Valerie Jarrett, Arianna Huffington, Claire McCaskill or any of these other women share is unique, but rather that it isn't and that no matter how successful you are in your career, there are still areas that you can work on to perfect and even powerful, smart women can be taken advantage of.As someone who works long hours in corporate America, I recognized a lot of myself in Mika, the "not wanting to toot your own horn," "not wanting to rock the boat," that happens a lot in the real world and we take it for granted that it is the status quo.But there is strength in numbers, and hearing someone as articulate, learned and succesful as Mika share her personal experiences as well as that of very important and powerful women in this country, is like having a pep talk with my girls, who not just say "that's not fair" but also provides examples of how to do better.I do not often write reviews for the many books that I read, but this one inspired me to share my thoughts.For what it's worth, although I own the Kindle version, its the kind of book that I want to own a hard copy of and I am ordering copies as well for my female cousins.