- Share This Post
- submit
- 0
-
Sparkle (0)
A study was conducted by economics professor Linda Babcock at Carnegie Mellon Universtiy with recent graduates of the Tepper Business School. The study found that starting salaries of male graduates were 7.6 percent higher than the females'.
Scandal? Not really. Digging deeper, Babcock found that, of the graduates surveyed, 57 percent of the men negotiated for a higher salary, but only 7 percent of the women did. And of the graduates who did negotiate, they increased their salaries 7.4 percent--nearly an identical discrepany to the difference between men's and women's salaries.
Before we start storming the corporate tower screaming discriminiation against women in the workplace, we must take a good, hard look at ourselves and consider our individual behavior. This was the message I learned at Stanford Business School professor Margaret Neale's presentation at the Invent Your Future Conference earlier this month. The primary lesson I learned that day: To get more, women need to ask.
Last summer I wrote about a typical symptom of successful women, the underlying fear that we are selling out, asking for too much by attaching a price to our work. When we're offered to be paid for our thoughts, suggestions, or influence, we don't ask questions. Many women come from an inherent place of gratitude for getting any monetary "credit" at all.
Then there are those women who know their work is valuable and demand proper compensation, but they don't negotiate beyond immediate value. An example would be a rising film star who gets her first $5 million movie and, so excited and grateful for the huge nod by the film studio, doesn't negotiate any royalties. She thinks, it's already so much money, why nitpick over little things. Why nickel and dime people?
There's something almost noble about the way we don't try to quantify our impact, but, as Neale pointed out so powerfully, there's something quite stupid about it, too. We don't know it's stupid, though. As I like to say when I refuse to argue about money, "it all comes out in the wash." Neale showed that, over time, actually it doesn't.
She used a simple mathmatic example: A man and woman graduate from business school and take a job at the same company for the same salary, $100,000, only the man negotiates for a higher amount and starts at $107,600. The woman thinks, "Big whoop, seven grand. When I retire it won't make a difference." Both the man and the woman get five percent yearly raises, and both expect to retire at age 65.
"How much longer must the woman work to make up for the amount she didn't negotiate?" Neale asked the group. The answer: Nine years.
Suddenly my arguments about refusing to be petty about money began to dissipate.
Neale then threw out another scenario, in which the man negotiates an annual raise that is one percent higher than the woman's. How long do you think it would take the woman to recoup pay in this case? Forty seven years.
"Hope you like your job," Neale said.
Denise Brosseau, who co-founded the Invent Your Future organization, and who invited Neale to present, recently guest blogged about her own experience as a manager who realized she, herself, was paying women less:
In the mid-90s, when I was managing the product development department at a Fortune 500 company, I found that I was paying the men who worked for me more than I paid the equally qualified women. As a longtime feminist, this was a shocking moment for me, but it serves to underline an important truth. The men on my team regularly asked for more money, they expected to make more money, they came to me with all the reasons they should make more money and sometimes they threatened to leave if they didn't get it. In most cases, the women did none of those things. They were content with a title change, different work responsibilities or more time off. And, with a limited budget and a sincere desire to keep my team together and happy, I paid the men more to keep them. Not only was it clear that the women were settling for less, I was now part of paying them less. For the first time, that 77-cents statistic was no longer something I could blame on men.
Hearing this, you might feel like marching to your HR office and demanding to right the wrongs you've commited to your future financial outlook, but this is where discrimination actually does apply.
Neale, the co-author
