Why aren’t things getting better for women? Stacey Vanek Smith couldn’t stop asking that question as she looked over the grim statistics: Eighty percent of CEOs are still men, corporate boards are more than 80% male, two-thirds of federal judges are male and 98% of venture capital goes to men. Some of these numbers haven’t improved in a decade.
“We’re just stuck in this hamster wheel,” said Smith, an economics journalist and co-host of The Indicator from Planet Money on NPR.
Many of the theories for the inequities Smith came across, including that women shy away from leadership positions or gravitate less toward lucrative fields, seemed to have seeds of truth, but they didn’t suggest a way forward. When she wanted a raise or promotion in her own career, she’d turn to popular books on negotiating, but the advice rang false. “It was a lot of girl-boss stuff,” Smith said. “I tried it, but my soul died a little and it didn’t work.”
Then in 2018, Smith read “The Prince,” by Niccolò Machiavelli. It was a revelation. The 16th-century Italian philosopher’s controversial and pragmatic approach to accruing and maintaining power was what could finally help women, she thought, improve those depressing figures. “I did not love giving a lot of the advice,” she told me during an interview this month. “But I at least wanted women to have the tools to get unstuck.”
My conversation with Smith, whose book Machiavelli for Women: Defend Your Worth, Grow Your Ambition, and Win the Workplace was published on Sept. 7, has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Annie Nova: You write that today Machiavelli is best-known as “a ruthless power monger, devoid of ethics and compassion.” What do we get wrong about him there?
Stacey Vanek Smith: I think almost everything. He was completely vulnerable at the moment that he wrote “The Prince.” His life had been wrecked. He had been working for the Florentine Republic — he was basically the secretary of state — but Florence got taken over by the Medici family and he was kicked out. They took all his money, they jailed and tortured him, and then ran him out of town. He was in his 40s and had nothing. He wrote “The Prince” as a plea to the Medici family, and this was his best advice. He was never the person in the room with the most power, and that’s what made him such a good negotiator.
AN: I assume not many women were reading Machiavelli in the 1500s.
SVS: It was definitely mostly men. A lot of women couldn’t even read at the time. And while there were some women in politics, it was very rare. It was a man’s world.
AN: Why do you think his ideas can help solve their issues in the workplace today?
SVS: I tend to get very emotional about this stuff. It feels personal and unfair. What I love about Machiavelli is he’s like, ‘OK, but how do you fix it?’ He takes emotions, morality and ethics totally out of the situation. So it’s like a chessboard. It was an approach I thought would be useful.
AN: You said some of the conclusions you come to are troubling, but that you wanted to be as honest as possible. Why did this feel important?
SVS: Because it’s a lot more troubling to me that women often retire with a third of the savings of men, and that women are way more likely to live in poverty. And so if smiling or not talking about your new baby, if that could possibly help, I at least want women to know that.
