Friday, August 3, 2007

Why don't women negotiate for higher salary?

Salary, Gender, and the Social Cost of Haggling, from the Washington Post.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's interesting, but you don't get all and nothing just from slight differences in who's more likely to be a negotiator.

There have to be mentoring issues in there somewhere -- someone told those men "you should teach a class", or even "you should tell the dean you want to teach a class", and nobody told those women. I'm not going to buy that each and every man in the department separately had the idea to go ask without being somehow informed that it was acceptable and proper to ask.

Anonymous said...

The mentoring point is completely true.

Also towards the end of the article, the latest study done shows that if women negotiate they are much less likely to be hired, men don't prefer to work with *pushy* women but absolutely looove a pushy guy -> he will be good for the company.

One of the study's author's came to our dept to give this talk and she was quite clear that this is largely a situation of damned if you and damned if you don't. Of course she suggested some tips on negotiating 'sweetly' (I understand that this is hard for you, ok, what do you suggest as a compromise?" kinda stuff) would be more likely to work. Awareness of the problem though may go further if men took the time to think about their biases.

Urmila (another astrophysicist)