When U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama was offered her first job after law school, it didn’t even occur to her to negotiate for a higher salary, she said in a recent interview in Parade magazine.

“Now I realize that that’s one of the challenges that we have as women: We don’t negotiate for ourselves,” she said. “We don’t negotiate hard.”

After the birth of her first child, Obama says she negotiated with her then-employer, the University of Chicago, to scale back to a part-time position. She now views that decision as a mistake because she ended up working just as much as she had before, but for less pay. The experience made her decide that part-time employment was a “bad deal” for women.