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if i spoke to you in french it would be very short
and valerie would not get his nap
so I have to speak to you in english
i will speak slowly
if i'm speaking too fast
just waive your arms
do something
don't throw anything
but do something to tell me to slow down and i'm happy to
i would love to hear your question
would love to hear your comments
i would love for you to disagree with me
so please feel welcome to do that
we'll talk about
you know negotiations
why i think it's so important
why i think it's important to you
and and why
you know it's become a little bit of religion for me
especially for women because i think it's
something we need to be able to do well
but for men you need to do it well too
so you're not off the hook
all right so can everyone here me
so let me share with you first my journey
how i got
to this stage talking to you
about negotiations
and that may help you understand
why is something that i hold so dear
and something i believe in so much
and mister camera person if i move out of range you can let me know
i am trained as a lawyer
and as a lawyer i was a prosecutor
in california
which meant that it was my job i was employed by the state government and it
was my job to present evidence against people accused of crimes
and sometimes i would be the person deciding which crimes they should be
charged with
but most of the time i was the person in the courtroom
who was talking to twelve jurors
about
the case
and trying to persuade them that somebody has committed a crime
so when you start out of the prosecutor's office
you prosecuted
uh... what we call petty thefts
that's when people steal little things
and then you prosecute people who are driving when it had too much alcohol
and you prosecute people who punch each other
but don't really hurt each other very much
and then you work up to the bigger things
and the bigger things i worked up to were that i
on prosecuted people who murdered children
and it was very interesting
because
there were two kinds of evidence
that were important
in both cases
one was the medical evidence
what happened
and the other was
psychological evidence that often the defense was the person accused would say
you can hold me responsible because i didn't know what i was doing
so
he or she
would hire our psychiatrist or a psychologist to examine them
and then get on the stand
and say that the person do know what they were doing
and i've got to cross-examine that person
which was the most fun you could ever have
basically they have no idea what they're talking
and so i got to question the psychologist and the psychiatrist who
said
the person would know what they were doing
and so i did first cases
until the end of my career where i did what we call
fraud case
and so that's where people would
steel
other people's money
but not by
helping them over the head and taking their first
but through
complicated schemes
whine to them about what means more words sometimes people would sell
houses
that they didn't own
which is a really good deal if you can get away with it
uh...
one of the cases that i tried
that made me realize how important
gender was
was i'd tried a case against two clergy
and they were accused of stealing millions of
dollars
from very old people
so what they would do is they would have been able to abuse the fact that they were
clergy
as a way to get people to trust
and then they would say hey if you need to make some more money i know that
you're retired
and i know you have little money save
but if you give me back on the i can invest it for you
and make you more money
and they did that to lots of people
who gave them their entire life savings
and big surprise
the people didn't get it back
i was prosecuting them which i was delighted to do
and
there were two very fancy lawyers on the other side
and dressed up in fancy suits states and
uh... and i just didn't get the visual picture
I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with my son
so i was looked like a whale right and
so here it is too fancy lawyers on the other side of me
with my very large stomach
and so
on the other side
made a really big mistake
and it had to do with gender
what they did
if they've left you know you can you have a system in the united states where
you can
select jurors and you're allowed to challenge a certain number of jurors
so what they did
they challenged all the men
so they were left with mostly women
you know why they did that
two reasons
both wrong
reason number one
the women would be softer
more sympathetic
they would look at these two clergy people handsome young guys
and say all is they did something wrong they didn't mean to
that women would have they decided that women would have a bigger heart
and
not be as interested in sending these nice young man to jail
number two
they thought
that this was a very complicated case
i had to show
where money went
from here to here to here
you know i was very complicated because when you do this kind of cases
he'll send the money to a lot of
places in hopes that the authorities
can't follow the trail
and they thought
that these women were not smart enough
to be able to figure out this very complicated case
and they were so wrong about that
because even though
these women
many of them were not highly educated
guess what they did
they control the finances in their own households
they paid the bills
they
you know they control the flow of money
and some of them
even control the finances in their family owned businesses
and thos businesses were not so big
but they still control the finances
and they paid oll the bills, they
bought the supply they pay all the things you have to do with money when you're
taking care of the bookkeeping
I knew
so long as they could do that
that's all i needed
and that it was up to me to explain it to them clearly enough by couldn't
explain it clearly enough it was my fault
not only did these women convict these guys
in a very short period of time
but some of them are ready to drive them to prison themselves
I mean they were so mad talk about not having any sympathy
these women were ready to just shoot these guys of forever are programmer
they had no sympathy
they were angry
they were very angry that these people had taken advantage of elderly
vulnerable people
and they voted that they spent
a lot of time in jail, and they did
i'm happy to report
interesting now because what happened
there
is that gender stereotype gone bad
a story that somebody was banking on somebody who was assuming
that they understood women
because
women are soft hearted right, and forgiving
they understood women because
we might be cute but we're not that smart
all right
and they did not understand women at all
right they made two very serious mistakes
that was to my benefit
so
I thought it was very interesting
i began to pay more and more attention when
gender matter
either way that gender mattered in the courtroom
is the way in which people tell the story
so witnesses
or on the witness stand
tell about what they saw what happened whenever they're there to testify about
right
but you know if you notice and you may have noticed this too
that women speak differently than men
men speak more powerfully
not all men and and not all women but the linguist and that studies on this are
pretty convincing
so men speak
more directly
more powerfully
they don't put
phrases like i think and maybe
and women no matter what their education level
speak more equivokely i'm not sure about this but i think the answer is
I'am not an expert in this thought what i think is
right have you noticed
women don't speak as powerfully and so there was a jury study
and they look the transcripts uh... three months where the jury trials in
north carolina
state in the south
and they asked jurors
based on these transcripts
how
it affected like
who would which one of the witnesses that they believe
and it turns out
that witnesses that spoke
more powerfully
were consider more believable
and more competent
and the witnesses
many of them women
who spoke less powerfully
we're not considered to be as believable and as knowledgeable
the fact and the matter is
it was all a perception
because it didn't
really have to do with how much they knew
or how much they saw
or how sure they were
about what they saw
it was all in the manner of delivery
and so what we notice in what the linguists have noticed is that
men and women talk differently
and Debra Tenant who's a linguist out at georgetown
Did this very interesting study
of women in meetings
she would have women
you know she tape record women in meetings at all levels of their
careers
she'd listen to this at the same thing
happen over and over again
what it was
women would come up with ideas
and then a man say the same idea
and then he would get credit for it
and the reason
it happened
is because when the women
came up with their ideas
they came up with them
in a very timid way
so they 'd say well i'm not sure about this
thinking maybe what we should do is X
and the man would say
what we should do is X
right now bith of them probably had the same amout of confidence
in the answer
but the men were able to state it more powerfully
and then what happens when you ask people in the meeting
who had the idea everybody thinks the man had the idea
because
he set it more powerfully