It has been ten days since my grandmother’s funeral and I have been, if not enjoying this past week, definitely enjoying telling stories about her life and her influence on her grandchildren.  She died at age 99, laying down to take a rest because she did not feel well — the Torah writes that those who die in their sleep are Tzadek, truly righteous, and I know she belongs in that category.  I popped in last week to talk to my dean briefly and proceeded to tell him the following:  I made it all the way through law school before I believed at all that perhaps, perhaps, women were not quite as assertive as men in negotiations when I found, in the year that I taught negotiation at Stanford, more of the women needed some work on being more assertive and more of the men needed some work on listening.   Now, that has not been the case in every class that I have taught over the years and it was a pretty simplistic view of each student’s skill sets at the time but . . . the point was that it did not even occur to me that there were gender differences in levels of assertiveness because I never saw any in my family. (Just ask my brother, husband, or brothers-in-law!)   I had read about these so-called gender differences in my negotiation class.   I just did not buy it — no one I knew would ever have been subject to that description.  And, with Mama’s passing, I realize how indebted I am to her for my understanding of negotiation. 

Over the past 15 years in particular, as I have led an “adult” life — marriage, kids, career — I also started to view my grandmother as a three-dimensional adult and not just the relatively limited view that grandchildren tend to have of their grandparents, particularly when we are children.