It doesn't pay to be a woman

It's been another long day ... I'm really tired ... but I have to comment on a recent report in the Wapo.

Have you heard the old saying, "damned if you do, damned if you don't?" That seems to apply to women who do (or don't) ask to be paid what they are worth. Staff writer Shankar Vedantam's report on "Salary, Gender and the Social Cost of Haggling" tells a story some of us have known for a very long time.

It's acceptable for a man to ask for what he wants -- a better position in the company, a raise, etc. -- but when women ask, if they even do, they are viewed in a negative light.

The traditional explanation for the gender differences that Babcock found is that men are simply more aggressive than women, perhaps because of a combination of genetics and upbringing. The solution to gender disparities, this school of thought suggests, is to train women to be more assertive and to ask for more. However, a new set of experiments by Babcock and Hannah Riley Bowles, who studies the psychology of organizations at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, offers an entirely different explanation.

Their study, which was coauthored by Carnegie Mellon researcher Lei Lai, found that men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations. Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women's reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more -- the perception was that women who asked for more were "less nice".

My thoughts on this are "no more Ms. Nice" women. It's time for men, and some women, to realize that women pay the same amount at the grocery store, our electric bills are just the same, and we don't get a discount on our rent or mortgage because women -- traditionally -- earn less than men.

Men need to wake up and realize that it's in THEIR best interest to advocate for pay equity for women. When they do, the overall income for their households will go up!

Although differences in starting salaries are usually modest, small differences can have big effects down the road. If a 22-year-old man and a 22-year-old woman are offered $25,000 for their first job, for example, and one of them negotiates the amount up to $30,000, then over the next 28 years, the negotiator would make $361,171 more, assuming they both got 3 percent raises each year. And this is without taking into account the fact that the negotiators don't just get better starting pay; they also win bigger raises over the course of their careers.

Women working full time earn about 77 percent of the salaries of men who hold full time jobs. It is past time for this to change.