Negotiating Equal Pay
Awhile back I wrote about the Ginther and Kahn paper that compared men's and women's rates of hiring to tenure-track positions and promotion to tenure. The paper found that the differences between men and women could be entirely explained by marriage and children: having young children penalizes women but not men. The paper did not explore salary differences, but noted several other studies that found unexplained differences in men's and women's salaries (of on the order of 12%) that persisted even after controlling for similar factors as well as for productivity.
One hypothesized explanation for these differences comes from the work of Linda Babcock:
In one study, eight times as many men as women graduating with master's degrees from Carnegie Mellon negotiated their salaries. The men who negotiated were able to increase their starting salaries by an average of 7.4 percent, or about $4,000. In the same study, men's starting salaries were about $4,000 higher than the women's on average, suggesting that the gender gap between men and women might have been closed if more of the women had negotiated their starting salaries.
This suggests that a remedy for the salary gap might be to encourage women to negotiate for their salaries. But some new work by Babcock and collaborators suggests that things might not be so simple.
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".
Interesting (but frustrating) work.
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on Mon, Jul 30, 10:07PM
Interesting. But I wonder who the non-negotiating women are. This group did an experiment where they told volunteers that they'd be paid $3-10 to play a game of boggle. When offered $3 once the game was done, far more women than men took the low offer rather than asking for more. Maybe they've accidentally selected for women who have outside situations that decrease their money drive.
Negotiation stories are interesting. But I've also heard anecdotal stories about newly hired assistant professors pushing hard for better offers and then getting low-balled on raises for a few years until they're more on par with their peers. Have you ever seen any data on whether playing hardball with starting salary really gets people to substantially higher salaries 5 or 10 years in?
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on Tue, Jul 31, 01:07PM
Interesting idea about the outside situations. Having a spouse/partner who earns more might make money less of an issue, and I'd imagine that women would be in that situation more often than men. That particular asymmetry is probably shrinking, so maybe this is one of those differences that will become less important.
One interesting thing to note: the gender difference in propensity to negotiate was huge in the first Boggle experiment (a factor of 8) and went down to a factor of about 1.3 when people were told explicitly that the payment was negotiable. If indifference to money were the explanation, it seems unlikely to me that you'd have so big a change in behavior from such a small change in the setup. The author's explanation of gender differences in cultural norms/rewards or some testosterone-fueled jockeying for higher relative wealth sounds like a better fit to me.
I haven't heard anything about initially high wage levels leading to lower raises over time. Even if it did eventually lead to the same salary as your peers, you'd still be ahead overall.
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