Meet Victoria Pynchon of She Negotiates Consulting and Training in Beverly Grove

When attorney Victoria Pynchon met adult learning specialist and personal coach Lisa Gates something magic happened. Lisa, who had launched an online leadership platform for professional, business and creative women, asked Victoria to co-lead an online negotiation workshop for her clients. They expected the women to learn how to use powerful negotiation tools to advance their careers but didn’t expect their clients and trainees to have a transformative experience.

“It was like we’d brought fire from the gods down to earth,” said Victoria. “Before the training, the women had been inventively preparing a host of nutritious raw food at work and at home. After the training, the women not only prepared banquets, but were able to praise their own work in doing so. Since that first training session, She Negotiates has become a brand name in business and professional circles. We’ve written for or been written about by NPR’s All Things Considered, PRI’s Marketplace, Forbes Magazine online, Newsweek, Time, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the New York Times, Parade, Glamour and dozens of other business and women’s hard copy and digital journals.”

Today, she Negotiates operates not only out of Los Angeles but also in Santa Barbara, Lisa Gates hometown and New York City where our newest associate, the tireless and dynamic Jamie Lee lives and works. The digital age knows no state or national boundaries. We have trained business and professional men and women as well as the creatives for whom Lisa – an actor – has a passionate mission in more than a dozen states here in the U.S. as well as in Geneva, London, New Zealand, Australia, Germany and Paris.

Last year, Victoria was appointed to the Pay Equity Task Force convened by the State of California’s Commission on Women and Girls. The Task Force is responsible for rolling out the 2016 amendments to California’s Fair Pay Act to employees and employers statewide.

As Lisa is fond of saying, “we are crushing the pay gap one woman at a time.”

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Optimism is a great quality in people and in business. We did, however, get ahead of ourselves in 2011, only a year after we launched our first online course, by hosting a She Negotiates conference in Santa Barbara. Attendance was dramatically less than we envisioned, putting us in the red for at least a year. We didn’t let that lesson go wasted, deciding that we would provide speaking and training services to organizations that already had healthy mailing lists and legacy sponsors. We’ve been operating in the black ever since our 2012 recovery.

Please tell us about She Negotiates Consulting and Training.
It’s been more than a decade since two women professors wrote the women’s negotiation bible, “Women Don’t Ask: Gender and the Negotiation Divide.” There was some good news in that book but a lot of bad news as well, most particularly that the gender wage gap was strongly related to women’s failure to negotiate compensation. There are dozens of negotiations training and consulting businesses but very few who nest their training in women’s gendered workplace experience.

As one-woman negotiation professional learned, women trained by “gender-blind” organizations tended not to use the skills they’d been taught because they considered them “manipulative and un-principled.” And that wasn’t the only barrier to women’s success. It turned out that women were often punished when asking for raises, promotions, and greater opportunities.

“It’s outside a woman’s cultural role to be self-seeking,” says Victoria. “We’re supposed to be serving the needs of others. Which is not a bad thing in our homes and communities. In the workplace, however, it can cost women hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars over their working lives. Our consulting and training services take this conundrum into account, releasing women from the double-bind that has held down their wages for far too long.”

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
This will make me sound like a total nerd, but my favorite childhood memory is learning how to read. I recall racing home from the first grade, throwing open the front door and shouting, “I can spell ‘red’ R-E-D red!!” I read everything I could get my hands on – the backs of cereal boxes, billboards and my mother’s Readers’ Digest where I tested my vocabulary against that magazine’s feature “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” every month. I thrilled to the adventures of Buck, the Siberian husky in Jack London’s “Call of the Wild,” learned to investigate my surroundings in thrall to Nancy Drew mysteries and sought wisdom in books of quotes as soon as I could sneak into the “Adult” section of my local library. There were answers in words, guidance for my future and inspiration for my present. Most Southern California kids might note their first visit to Disneyland (where the Peter Pan flight scared the bejesus out of me). For me it was, and will always will be, the written word.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://shenegotiates.com
• Phone: 213-220-3865
• Email: info@shenegotiates.com
• Facebook: http://facebook.com/shenegotiates
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/shenegotiates

 

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