Chairman of Transfield Services Diane Smith-Gander still remembers being called into the office of her new Westpac boss John Morschel to talk about pay.

Smith-Gander had resigned herself to the fact that Morschel was on a cost cutting mission and her long promised pay rise would have to wait.

Instead, Morschel wanted to know why Smith-Gander was being paid over $20,000 less than her male counterparts and offered her an immediate raise.

Smith-Gander’s epiphany that she needed to speak up for promotions, salary and bonuses, helps explains why she cheered on controversial comments made by Male Champions of Change, ANZ’s Mike Smith, CBA’s Ian Narev and Goldman Sachs Australia chief Simon Rothery this week.

Smith-Gander tweeted that she had “been saying this for years”, in response to Australia’s top bankers urging women to get more assertive in asking for pay rises. Fair Work Ombudsman Natalie James was another to tweet, “love the ANZ CEO’s comment re women’s approach to asking about pay, job flex”.

But Rothery’s revelation that there is a conga line of men outside his office at bonus time and Mike Smith’s assessment that “men bullshit their way through things”, caused a meltdown on Twitter. Dozens of prominent women claimed that old male bankers urging women to be more like men in pay negotiations was misguided.

“Important women are authentic – not pretending to be like the men if that is not their natural style,” Oil Search director Fiona Harris tweeted, in one of the more moderate rebukes.

BRW’s Work Space editor Fiona Smith urged women on Thursday not to take “Mike Smith’s advice and act like men in pay rise negotiations”, instead urging an examination of organisational culture.

Yet Smith-Gander and Chancellor of the University of Sydney and AGL director Belinda Hutchinson, who penned the foreword for the local edition of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, caution women against being left behind in the meantime.

The reality is a 28.4 per cent pay gap in base pay for women in financial services which increases to a 36 per cent pay gap when you include bonuses, according to comprehensive research by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency in November.

Hutchinson says she may not have reached such career heights had she not spoken up. It is a skill to be learned, she says, citing her experience of asking for nothing in a salary review as she thought her boss would simply recognise her contribution and offer it.

Its a common mistake according to American author Lois Frankel whose 2004 bestseller Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office was updated last year.

Frankel argues women need to overcome the “nice girl syndrome” but contrary to the straw man argument usually used to criticise Frankel’s book and Lean In, that doesn’t mean acting like a man or becoming “mean and nasty”.

Smith-Gander says women need to adopt “different tactics” to win pay rises.

“Ask for transparency,” is her advice.

“Ask how the salary system really works, ask for some guidance and work out where you are positioned and how progress will occur,” Smith-Gander told ABC’s Radio National on Thursday.

And one lesson women can learn from men is to seek out supporters, not mentors, she says.

“Women tend to like mentors. They want people to tell them how they can prepare themselves and how they can be better and ready for a job. Men on the other hand like supporters,” Smith-Gander says.

“Men understand that promotion decisions are risky because if you promote someone and they don’t succeed that can definitely have a back-firing effect on your career, so you want to de-risk that,” she says. “You want someone to say, ‘oh no, Fred is fantastic, he can do this job, you want to hear that support as a hiring manager. So men seem to innately know to ask for support, more often than they ask for mentorship.”

Learning to speak up has obviously worked for Smith-Gander. The new president of Chief Executive Women remembers reversing the tables on the boys club when she called head hunters Egon Zehnder to seek a board seat on the NBN board, where she was appointed and rose to deputy chair.

“I picked up the phone to Egon Zehnder and said `I have read in the paper that the board is looking for directors, so why haven’t you rung me?’.”

This article was originally published on Financial Review 5th February. Read the original article here.