A different message for daughters

Nation's Business, May, 1997 by Sharon Nelton

Achieving compensation equity; avoiding "one pocket" practices; establishing an identity.

I was shocked to read a "Fresh Voices" column by Lynn Minton in Parade magazine recently She had asked four New Jersey 18-year-olds--all high-school students whose parents owned businesses--this question: "Should you get paid when you work for your parents?"

The two young men among the four said yes, but the two young women said no.

"What's going on here?" I wondered, and I put in a call to Cindy Iannarelli, a family-business adviser in Woodbridge, Pa., who is also the founder of Business Cents, a company that teaches children about business.

I was even more shocked when Iannarelli told me it's not unusual for parents not to pay their girls in a family business, even though they may pay the girls' brothers. Often, she says, parents are setting up the socialization stereotype in which women and girls in family businesses "help out." As a result, girls don't see the work as a job or an opportunity, says Iannarelli. "They perceive it as helping the family."

In fact, that's exactly what one of the young women in the Parade story said: "When my father asked me last summer if I would help him in his office, I thought of it more as helping him out rather than as being hired for a job."

When parents don't pay girls, says Iannarelli, they're relegating them to a "helping out" role. "They're not letting them feel that their skills are worth anything." That attitude, she warns, can plague a woman throughout her life, even affecting her personal relationships.

And parents who pay sons but not daughters, she adds, are setting up the children for potential conflict. By the time these sisters reach their late 30s, they no longer want to support their brothers in the "helping" role, says Iannarelli, and "the feuds begin."

Iannarelli finds that parents--particularly fathers--give their sons a taste of family business from an early age, but they don't do the same for their daughters. She advises parents to involve sons and daughters equally, beginning as early as age 3, letting them spend a half-hour or so a day or two a week doing little chores.

When they get to be teenagers, and especially when they are of legal working age, they should be paid for their work in the family business just as nonfamily employees are. This doesn't mean that parents can't make rules about where some of those earnings go--perhaps into a savings account or a college fund, she says.

I asked Iannarelli what she'd tell the young women in the Parade article if she had the chance. She said she'd ask them to look at the situation and determine whether the parents could afford to pay them or if they felt adequately compensated because money was being set aside for college. But if they felt they should be paid, she said, "then I would try to empower them to go back to the parents and negotiate pay that they would feel is equitable."

Central to her message: "You certainly want to give the same opportunities to the daughters as the sons." Part of opportunity is seeing work as worthy of compensation and not just "helping out."