Dr Grump
Platinum Member
- Apr 4, 2006
- 31,625
- 6,434
When this kind of disparity happens even with high caliber professionals, that gives a hint of why women find it best not to rock the boat with wages.
If they are offered better pay, then they should take it. Pretty simple. If they started following the money, then they'd actually get the money. But because they settle, they get what they've settled for.
Women have reason to believe that if they press as hard as a man might they will be wished well and sent off to look for a different job.
Well, this is part of the problem. Seems women are looking at this all wrong. In my experience, most men negotiate better pay for themselves. It's not about rocking the boat or being forceful. It's about finding win-win solutions. Typically, when I see a men successfully negotiate better pay they emphasize their high degree of competence, their successes and accomplishments that have benefited the company, the expanded roles and responsibilities that they may have taken on, etc. But most women tend resort to a demanding and/or manipulative behavior to try to get better pay. They deserve it, they need it, someone else is getting paid more.....That's not an effective approach.
One of the things with negotiating is that you don't always get what you want, or exactly what you were hoping for. When negotiating pay and work requirements sometimes you have to accept trade offs. Nowadays it's increasingly common for people to want things like the ability to work from home, to be given flexibility in determining their own working hours, etc. And it seems that women push for these things more often than men. Especially if she's a mother. But it's not reasonable for anyone to expect that they be given everything. Sally gets one set of concessions, Mark get's another set, neither gets the whole package. Any person, male or female, who is constantly pushing to have it all should not expect their boss to put forth alot of effort toward retaining them, unless they are the best of the best of the best at what they do.
You make some valid points, but there is definitely data out there showing that women - especially at the executive level - get less money than men. That is across the board. I think half the problem is that women will take what they can get and be grateful, especially those with smarts. If they start asking for this, that and the other they think they might be taken as trouble makers and set women back. It's a bit like the double standard of men sleeping around are studs, when women do it they're sluts.
Almost finished reading Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, and Isaacson noticed that the Apple board was made up of white, middle-aged males. And Jobs was reasonably enlightened.